 Okay, so I know we have Where are the chairman? Okay So yes Okay So good afternoon everyone and welcome to the second session, which is where we have invited talks and then we have discussions also and When I asked Matthew, he said I've done my job. I have the co-chairs and you're free to do whatever you want So four of us got together David Deborah and myself, but I guess we have the first two Invited talks, so I would want to welcome James Robinson to deliver his invited talk online And and then we would have the discussions. So it's a pleasure to have James and James, would you share your screen or you? Yes Yeah, and we also have J.R. Krishnakumar after this. So yeah So James would be talking about politics as the outcome of the struggle between egalitarianism and hierarchy over to you And and if you can put it in the full-screen mode, please Yeah, I'll do that. Let me do that As it I've forgotten how to do it So command-L full-screen. Yeah, okay Okay, great. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thanks very much So I yeah, I was asked to talk about inequality and I'm gonna talk about Something that Darron Ashurandu and I have been working on for a while. It may not look like it Which is about about inequality but also about the opposite of inequality. I think so I think You know, we've been writing about democracy and inclusive institutions and inequality for a long time And I think we're trying to take a more fundamental view about human society, you know whether Humans are really egalitarian and if so, where does it come from? And I think the answer that we've converged on is that actually, you know There's two contrasting ways that humans think about society and one is Maybe we're gonna call in the egalitarian ethos But another which you know, you might think of as more ancient perhaps as I'll see in it We'll see in a minute is that what we get what I'm going to call a hierarchy system You know, if you think about our closest primate ancestors, they're extremely hierarchical with alpha males and silverbacks and They sit on top of a hierarchical Structure, but opposed to that is what we're gonna call in the egalitarian Ethos and you know, and which is a kind of rejection or maybe even indignation Against hierarchies and I think like the view I'm gonna try to develop is you know, these two things are both present They're present in history. They're present in everyone's minds and you can think of a lot of things that happens In the world as a kind of the outcome of conflict between these different Visions, you know, I talk about the Bolsheviks here You know, I had an extended example on the Bolsheviks, which I decided I wouldn't have time to talk about You know, but I think the interesting thing about the Bolsheviks is that, you know, let's Lenin just take the example of Lenin You know Lenin was a genuine egalitarian But you know, he he but he also was extremely happy with hierarchy and believed that hierarchy was somehow compatible with the egalitarianism, you know, there's almost a Contradiction but there it is, you know, if you read a biography of Lenin, okay And I'm gonna sketch a little I'm gonna talk about these ideas for a bit and then I'll sketch a little Theory to help you think about like how could this be how could we think about Hierarchy and egalitarianism existing at the same time in society or even in people's heads, okay So I sort of anticipated this idea of a hierarchy system, you know It's not just chimpanzees and gorillas, of course, you know chickens have a pecking order chickens sort themselves into Into hierarchy, you know based on status and the dominance hierarchy, okay So and I think a lot I would like a lot, you know I mean we're taught you want to talk about inequality and wealth But but I think a lot of this is also about about status, you know, it's about hierarchy based on Other things perhaps that as a consequence that leads to inequality of assets or income But I think there's a lot about status Here and and you know, and I think what I want to emphasize also is that, you know Hierarchy is not just about power, you know, if you look at the chimpanzees, it seems to be about all Gorillas it seems to be about power and it is but humans of course have culture You know, we have language and culture and ideology and I think the other thing about human society That's remarkable is that humans are very good at justifying hierarchy and coming up with ways to sort of Legitimate hierarchy, you know, look at the British royal family, for example Or if you join the British Airways frequent flyer program You have to choose your title from a drop-down menu and that's a globalized hierarchy because it has shake on it now, too But but you know, so I think we're very good at legitimizing hierarchy We're very good at delegitimizing it, but we're also very good at legitimizing it and fit into it You know, I mentioned the Indian caste system here at the bottom. Okay I'm gonna give you a British example and I think this point is sort of key, you know And I just was gonna illustrate it with James excuse me We can't see your slides moving actually. Sorry Somehow are you sharing the screen? Yeah, the slides. Yeah, okay. I could try again. They're moving for me now. We see it. Yes. Yeah. Okay. I'm weird Okay, all right, so I was just gonna give you an example from Pierre Bourdieu's book distinction, you know great title distinction And you know where he points out how this acceptance of hierarchy sort of ramifies in many different dimensions particular in culture and this is just looking at So different social if people in different socioeconomic occupations their taste for music So if you take a piece like the Blue Danube, you know that famous corny what waltz or 50% of manual workers like the Blue Danube, you know and Secondary teachers or high education teachers like yourselves probably like ourselves Nobody likes the Blue Danube. Come on. Seriously. That's just so cliche and awful, you know What about the well-tempered clavier manual workers? Yuck, you know What about people like us higher educated teachers? Oh beautiful piece of music, you know So what's interesting about this, you know, what Bourdieu points out It's not just that people kind of manual workers like the Blue Danube But they actually realize that it's a bad piece of music compared to the well-tempered clavier But anyway, they like it. So they kind of recognize their own inferiority In their tastes in music So Bourdieu kind of brilliantly shows many examples of this of how people people kind of recognize their inferiority But they they embrace they kind of Accept it, okay. So so I think that's hierarchy. I'll talk more about hierarchy give some exact more empirical examples But again, you know, that's going to be counterbalanced by what we're going to call the egalitarian ethos You know, which you might think is very deep. So Christopher in society, you know, after all probably, you know What we can guess about the first ancestral human societies was they were radically more egalitarian than primates Yes, can I ask a question about what you said Previously on the previous slide. So is it is it really like recognizing the inferiority or is it more like Identifying with something that other people of my same class identify with so identifying with the people of Your same class Well, you can't see it on this slide, you know But he has other data which shows that people people Recognize that the well-tempered clavier is a superior piece of music to the blue Danube But nevertheless, they still prefer the blue Danube. You can't see it on that slide That's just to show the basic preferences. That's other data Okay, thanks Okay, so so, you know, here's Christopher Bohm who's a who's a An anthropologist my former colleague at University of Southern California You know, egalitarianism goes far beyond leveling differences of material accumulation You know egalitarian levels the power of individuals to make decisions in a number of spheres Also levels the ability of one person to physically or psychologically dominate others So he emphasizes kind of egalitarianism in a very in a very broad way And I think, you know, the way I think that Christopher thinks about it, you know, or or or Or Richard Wrangham or other people is through, you know, this this interplay between hierarchy and And egalitarianism And I think both, you know, you can think of these as being kind of multiple Equilibria in the sense that there's work by Richard Dawkins and others about how, you know, this hierarchy or the kind of alpha male System has a clear evolutionary logic. It can be evolutionarily Self-enforcing but but people who who are not alpha males or not silverbacks don't like it They just they just have to put up with it And the difference between human society and primate society is an ability to Collaborate or form coalitions to fight against hierarchy. Okay And this is what Christopher calls a reverse dominance coalition or, you know, he actually calls it reverse dominance Hierarchy, but that hierarchy doesn't seem to be the right word to use there So so let me call it a reverse dominant coalition, you know, and that's a consequence of the development of language You know, maybe the development of culture. We can come up with ideas to say, you know This is a terrible situation. Why don't we get rid of the silverback, you know, or the You know, or why don't we get rid of this this this hierarchy and replace it with something else? And this is related to a famous hypothesis of Charles Darwin the execution hypothesis where he kind of claimed he proposed a sort of evolutionary mechanism whereby alpha males people who were alpha males or want to be alpha males Were ganged up on, you know, by the rest of society and that even leads to a kind of, you know A sort of Darwinian selection mechanism because if you if you're a potential alpha male and everyone gangs up and kills you Then you don't you don't reproduce. So there's selection against alpha male alpha male type Genes and you know, if you've read our book The Narrow Corridor, we actually present a lot of kind of ethnographic examples of this This type of behavior and you know, James Woodburn, who's a famous ethnographer of the Hadza in east Africa in Tanzania Also discusses, you know the the kind of, you know, this was a sort of a cephalous society Why was that? Well, because people ganged up on others that tried to disrupt the egalitarian situation Okay, so, you know, what would be a famous example of the execution hypothesis? You know, you could think of if you know anything about Greek mythology Here's, you know, Goya's painting of Kronos devouring his children, you know in in the in as the story goes, you know According to Hesiod You know Kronos basically was was that was an alpha male And he et his children He was tricked And in the end his children get together, you know, Zeus gets together with Poseidon and Hades And and they kill him, you know, and they they throw him into Tartarus or whatever. Okay So so the brothers gang up to kill the alpha alpha male. So that's an example of a reverse dominant coalition Uh, you know, another great example would be, you know, the senators ganging up the Roman senators ganging up And murdering Julius Caesar, you know, so you build a coalition and you get rid of the alpha male. Okay So so so that's, you know, that's an example of that mechanism And I think like that. So what I'm trying to get you to think here is that I guess our perspective is that it's too simplistic to think of humans as always wanting democracy or equality political equality or economic equality or status equality because Maybe this is deep history of inequality and hierarchy and and and humans are good at adapting to that too And creating justifications for hierarchy. So there's a sort of struggle There's a kind of dialectical process, you know, in a kind of Hegelian sense Not the marxian sense because it never ends between these two forces or these two World views if you like and I'm going to talk about it as culture in a second, you know I don't know. I don't I'm not committing myself here to some kind of genetic interpretation of this In fact, you know Darwin's execution hypothesis did have a kind of genetic mechanism But I but I want to talk more about this in terms of Culture about the way we think about the world or our justifications for society or understanding of society So this is a very non end-of-history type explanation You know, there's this struggle between between this hierarchy view and this egalitarian Ethos and I think, you know, one of the reasons we've thought about this is if you've read our book the narrow corridor We talk a lot about these different steady states, you know, there's a different equilibria You know one equilibria is something like china another equilibria. Maybe it's something like the hadza You know, and then in the middle, there's some kind of balance between state and society And and so so so I guess they're quite, you know in that model In the theoretical model that underpins the book, you know, these are kind of steady states They're they're attractors, you know, there's different bases of attraction and the dynamics lead you towards the different steady states But I guess, you know, this perspective would sort of say, you know, in the chinese case you have hierarchy You have this long history of autocracy, you don't have representation or democratic Institutions you have to go back at least kind of two and a half thousand years in china if you want to see Something like that, but I guess here we want to say well, maybe the way we're trying to think about that now is that Yeah, that's okay. That's true. But but but humans all over the world share this deep history So it's not that within china, you know, you can completely adapt yourself to this hierarchy system There's always the egalitarian ethos waiting to come out and potentially Exploding if the right reverse dominance coalition can form, you know, so now we're going to call that a quasi steady state I'm not sure I'll keep the physicists in the audience happy. But that's that's what I want to say Okay, so so so that's you know, I said, okay We want to have we want to think about this in a cultural way And I'm not going to get into these definitions of culture by Clifford Geertz and things like that But what we do what I'd like to talk about a little bit is just how we'd like to portray these this culture Okay, you know, I'm we're going to do that in a particular way, which we've been working with for a few years now kind of theoretically and empirically which to sort of say There's a think of the there's a sort of a set I'm going to call it a culture set and there's distinct aspects of culture in that identified as attributes And these attributes can be kind of combined to create what we're going to call a cultural configuration All right, so so I'm going to jump to a kind of very specific example I'm going to run out of time which is talk about early modern Britain Okay, so what would be aspects of culture that we could relate to hierarchy and and inequality? Okay Well, religion was very important different aspects of religion the nuclear family So there weren't elaborate structures of kinship or anything like that in in in early modern Modern Britain there was certainly hierarchy, but you know hierarchy can mean different things hierarchy can be justified in different ways Hierarchy can be justified as coming from god, for example So one model of you know, British society was the so-called great chain of being It starts with god at the top and the angels and it comes all the way down, you know to The lords and aristocrats and the poor people, you know If you look at any of these 17th century so-called social tables They have a kind of picture of society, which is rather similar like this, you know And they talk about the different forms of address that each people should have The more important the higher up the chain of being, you know, you should be addressed in specific and differential ways And if you're down the chain of being, you know, you don't really have any kind of form of address whatsoever So there's hierarchy, but of course hierarchy can be justified in different ways But there's other things floating around too, you know, there's what the great British historian E.P. Thompson called the moral economy You know a set of kind of social norms and practices that in many ways protected poor people from exploitation There's hierarchy, but there's also neighborliness. There were notions of kind of social capital and cooperation Within a village, you know, but then there's paternalism and deference too So there's other types of hierarchical relationship Patron-client relationships poor people relied on the law to the manner For food and outdoor relief and employment and things like that So so so this is you know, this is obviously abstracted one to think of like lots of different things here It's very hard to get the level of aggregation right But but you know the idea is to sort of say these are the attributes and we can kind of connect them in different ways And you know, if we want to say, you know, if we want to talk about the great chain of being as a kind of Culture or as an aspect of culture then we can think of that as a sort of connection between different attributes between, you know, the nuclear family There's a lot of stuff about patriarchy built into the the great chain of being, you know, obviously there's hierarchy There's notions of paternalism and deference how you address people and you know your your place in the great chain And religion is very important. Remember God is at the top But particular interpretations of religion hierarchical interpretations of religion Related to the organization of the church and different types of practices and rituals and how you approach to God Okay, but that's not the only way of thinking about British society and in fact the same elements could be connected in very different ways And I'm going to call that That's, you know, I gave that's the hierarchy the great chain of being I can give you the opposite Which is, you know, what would be called, you know, the a contemporary version of this would be Practitions versus plebs, which was, you know, to keep create to quote Keith Wrightson, uh, the historian Keith Wrightson Unlike the vocabulary of degrees like the great chain of being it was a language pregnant with conflict Aligning the richer against the poorer the better against the meaner the vulgar the common the rudder or the inferior sorts The rudder sorts how about that? Okay, so this was, you know, yeah hierarchy was there but but it was interpreted in different ways religion was there But it you know, this is post Reformation, you know, there were different ways of thinking about religion much more egalitarian ways of thinking about religion About the rituals about how you approach God the moral economy, you know becomes important Norms and rights naveliness becomes important relative to paternalism and deference. Yeah, the nuclear family Was there too, but what it meant was different because it was connected to different things So so this is, you know, playing a lot with You know, the notion of like the way that Clifford Geerts talked about culture was culture is mostly about what the things mean You know, so if I look at the organization of society, what does that mean? Is it is it justified? Does it mean that things are going well or does it mean something different? Does it mean I'm being exploited or I'm being taken advantage of so the idea here is to say, you know There's Britain. There are these different aspects of the culture But they can be kind of combined in different ways The same things can be combined in different ways to create very different images of society You know this image of inequality and the great chain of being but also A much more egalitarian view of society where there were the patricians and we were the plebs But you know, that wasn't that wasn't justified by God or anything else. It's just sort of how it was And then out of that so that that's a kind of I'd say that's a fundamental That's models of hierarchy and equality Based on status probably mapping into differences in wealth and income as well And then on top of that you had political models So those fundamental models of society created political models of society, you know So those you could think of as being What was the political model of society which was related to Hierarchy or the great chain of being well, that would have been the divine right of kings in 17th century England, you know, Britain That was the idea that the king was chosen by God essentially and wasn't accountable to anybody except God and didn't Have to pay attention to representative institutions. So the stewart monics, they exactly they exactly had this model of Hierarchy paternalism, you know Hierarchy called religion the nuclear family if you read, you know, james the first or charles the first Speeches they talk all the time they compare themselves to the father You know, they start with adam in the garden of eden and they trace their Legitimacy all the way back to adam the first father, you know, who gave birth to cain and able and so so the the nuclear family And patriarchy is very closely related to hierarchy hierarchical notions of religion. They don't talk about some things They don't talk about the moral economy They don't talk about Nableness and they don't care about social capital There's an ancient constitution comes in here, but it's, you know, like the british people love their, you know Their common law and their history, but it's interpreted in a particular way Okay, and but you can counterpose that with a very with a very different model Which i'm going to call popular sovereignty So at the same time as that model of british society based on hierarchy, you know Divine right of kings was there. There was a completely different model in circulation as well called popular sovereignty Okay, and that took the same things but it wired it wired them in a different way and it emphasized different things And it interpreted, you know religion for example in different ways It interpreted the ancient constitution in different ways and it did that by bringing in other kinds of arguments and ideas Like the moral economy for example So so that that gave a totally different Model of society and i'm sort of you just using this i can't i don't have time to go into the details at all But but all the properties of this thing but the idea is just to get across this idea that There's equality and inequality going on at the same time, you know, there were these different models in britain There were these different models in people's heads in some sense sort of struggling, you know To come out and i think you know We've been studying a lot the kind of intellectual Work sort of the 17th century because a lot of that work like john's john locks for example Treatise of government treatise to treatises of government was about trying to persuade people that this was the right way to think about The british society this was the right way to think about legitimate political institutions and that's a kind of cultural what we call a cultural struggle to propose a particular Interpretation of what was going on in british society and a particular institutionalization of what we're going to call the egalitarian ethos, you know So if i was going to tell you the history of the emergence of political equality in britain, you know, which Starts after 1688 starts after this so-called glorious revolution, you know I want to say this emergence of democracy especially after 1832 and the great reformat the so-called great reformat Is really an institutionalization of this reverse dominance coalition, you know, so so That's our new way of thinking about democracy if you like Which is that there is something more fundamental? There's this egalitarian ethos It's kind of in contest with hierarchy hierarchy never goes away. That's the thing, you know, uh, but The reverse dominance coalition or this egalitarian ethos can get itself can get Institutionalized in particular ways that's most of what john locks second treatise of government is about the first treatise Is basically attacking, you know, the great chain of being and the divine right of kings And once he's got that out of the way he sort of says here's the right way to think about society And here's a set of institutions to kind of lock that in, okay But it's it's a temporary it's a temporary solution because the dialectic never never ends, okay So, you know, and I I think I want to emphasize here this idea of Incoherence and robustness, you know, it's it's kind of striking to me that most in system most intellectual systems You know, including the bible Confucianism, you know, you name it They have these very ambiguous and contradictory elements in them You know, one of the things that's fascinating if you read about if you read 70 about, you know, 17th century british politics About like how people debated and how they taught to each other is that they all quote the same passages from the bible But they give them different interpretations, you know, and within Confucianism, for example, that's another that's another of our extended example But I deleted those slides last night too because I knew there was just no way I was ever going to get to talk about them But within Confucianism, there are all these again There are these passages that, you know, can be interpreted in different ways And I guess that's a that's a key aspect of any enduring intellectual system because Because human society changes and the intellectual system has to be flexible enough to kind of adapt to that You know, that's like cultural Marxism Okay, all right, so that's just an observation So, you know, then we could think about some of the implications of this framework. One is I know have to shut up I think in two minutes One is, you know, think of democracy as a particular institutionalization of the reverse dominance coalition But but, you know, that that's not necessarily going to be consolidated to use the political scientist words You know, again, it's a very sort of non modernized. There's no modernization Here, you know, this idea that somehow Societies are kind of converging to some particular set of institutions and, you know, the data definitely doesn't support that There's no end of history And this is a way of thinking about kind of at a fundamental level Why modernization theory is wrong and, you know, and I think in political science and political economy, you know We don't really have a good model of autocracy or the success of autocracy, you know Um, uh, why is it so enduring in human history and why, you know, why is it such a Compelling thing in many ways, you know, we always think of autocracy as being driven, you know Think about, you know, in the Sudan they're fighting for their lives at the moment as we speak, you know And we think of, you know, it's the powerful guys. It's the hemetes, you know, or the, you know, general al-Burham You know fighting to control Sudan and obviously that's what's going on at the moment But I think you have to accept that people are very willing to Rationalize this system too and to justify it and come up with ways of justifying autocracy Uh as well And I think that this framework kind of points more towards that and, you know, that's something that social scientists have You know, uh, don't are too nervous to do research on typically But I think it's difficult to deny it like especially for historically Okay, and let me just finish with one thing, you know, since I I don't have time to talk more But I don't want to overstep but but you know, I think he also Thinking about economics and you know talking about economics, which haven't done much and inequality You know, I think we want to say here, you know, there's a sort of social equilibrium here And it's not really driven, you know, I guess I'm trying to emphasize quite a lot status and other things I know you're interested in in in in, you know, in inequality and economic resources and what assets and income But but but you know, I guess I would say You know, if you think about the world like this, you see how Unsatisfactory, you know, thinking of economics detached from society is, you know, I spent a lot of time You know, Darron and I I spent a lot of time trying to convince economists that thinking about economics detached from politics is a very bad idea But here you can sort of see that what fundamentally holds society together is this institutionalization of this, you know, this this conflict between hierarchy and egalitarianism, okay And that institutionalism is that institutionalization is not independent of how the economy might be organized Maybe it involves, you know, trade unions or it involves Redistribution or it involves, you know, the presence of the state in society in some way And if you attack the presence of the state in society or trade unions based on some kind of economic fundamentalism You're not getting the big picture in terms of how they contribute to this much bigger Equilibrium in society. So I guess I would say, you know, if I was going to end with one sentence I'd say, you know, what's the what is the problem, you know, with rising inequality today, you know, in the united states, you know It's because it's because market fundamentalism or Reaganomics or whatever it is or, you know That started in the 1980s late 1970s and 1980s Basically eroded some of the social prerequisites, you know, for for for for creating this this modern society that's been so successful And it's coming apart at the seams because because because you're not recognizing How it's held together Okay, so with that, let me let me shut up I think that's a good place to start. Thank you, James. I'll stand on the side here So now we're open to taking questions from the audience Yes, Matthew Thank you very much, James. So One question is there are Are there formal models about this interplay between hierarchy and egalitarianism? I mean where one can sort of See the this quasi-equilibrium models or I mean Say for example one question one would ask is How the stability of this equilibria depend on size? I mean, so we know the hierarchies in animal populations They they are stable up to a certain size and So is there any formal approach to to these ideas? Not not yet. No I mean not yet because we've been focused much more on doing empirical work because we thought that It's hard to convince economists of anything with models nowadays So so if you want to convince economists, you need data and causal identification So that's actually what we've been working on but that that's that's you know, that's on our to-do list but it's more like You know, that's just where economics is nowadays, but I I understand why you why you're on We understand the need for for that, but we just we've just been prioritizing other things. Yeah James I have one question actually so you were talking about these different models of political economy and you know hierarchy Is that any way to The inequality existing in the society with these models of political economy So if I have historical data, like what was the type of inequality? Existing at the time of a particular political system. Is that a way to Correlate the two and then I would be able to say that okay sometimes Autocracy or a hierarchical system is perhaps better for a more egalitarian society than thing with no hierarchy Uh, I don't know the I mean so what what I have done research on and what there is a lot of work on is like Looking at the impact of say democracy or democratization on inequality. So we have a big survey paper about that I don't think you find much, you know, there's not much evidence that democratize There is evidence that democratization improves public good provision and economic growth I've written on that But the impact on inequality is much Less, you know, you could think of lots of reasons for that, you know inequality tends to be very slow moving So there's not much variation. I think I think, you know, the the real problem also is that there's a lot of heterogeneity in terms of Autocracies, you know, like some will think about Cuba, you know Cuba is an autocracy But actually it has an ideology that promotes egalitarianism, you know in many ways, you know former soviet union You know or china in the 1970s before it, you know, china hasn't embraced Democracy, but under socialism it was very egalitarian at least in terms of observed asset distribution or observed income distribution So I think, you know, there's a lot of different Aspects to to dictatorship and so so I think in terms of, you know, but equality of what, you know, you could sort of say right So so of course the soviet union didn't look very of cuba doesn't look very unequal in terms of education or asset distribution But of course it's incredibly unequal in terms of power and access to authority And status and so so I think that that's difficult if we're just thinking about that's that's a situation where these other Types of hierarchies become very important and they're difficult. They're difficult to measure So I don't think anyone has really done the exercise that you're describing honestly Right. Thank you. James. Yeah, there's one question at the back Okay, I'll go there. Hi, this is Thomas from IASA in Austria speaking. Thanks for this very interesting presentation So in my research group at YASA, we are working together with anthropologist Mike Thompson with Mary Douglas's theory on plural rationality So quite familiar and similar to what you've been describing and in this theory it's really about finding clumsy solution to wicked problems so compromised solutions and Now moving a bit more into operationalization of what you've described. Have you heard about the Sociocracy principle So this is I think a very interesting way to connect The egalitarian thinking and hierarchical thinking and also how to to organize societies. So sociocracy is already practiced in some industries businesses Schools even and I was wondering if you know of any empirical research on that if you have some Evidence that this could work to to come to such a compromise clumsy solution. Thanks again I don't know anything about it actually I do know Mary. I do know Mary Douglas has worked very well because I've worked for many years in the Congo And in fact the place I started working in Congo Was it was in Kasai where Mary Douglas did her dissertation in the night the early 1960s the Lele of the Kasai You know is her first book, but I don't know the work that you're talking about I'd be I'd be very interested to know more about it. Yeah Thank you one last question. I think from Sanjay and then Um, okay. Thanks very much for this very thought-provoking presentation So you're thinking that there's something which is more fundamental which is this distinction between hierarchy and An egalitarianism is somewhat more fundamental and that's what drives Other things other organization Democracy liberal democracy being one such organization. There could be others and so on Now you mentioned these quasi steady states What is it that drives the transition from one to the other? What's the underlying force? Is it also based on On on these two things But or is it is it a feedback from something else at a different level onto that? Onto the steady states that you're talking about. What is it that drives those transitions? Yeah, I mean I want to say I think a lot of political economy when they think about You know these these different models of society You know think about in the political sphere They think about the difference between autocracy or dictatorship. They think about you know Conceptualizing people's preferences in terms of the policy outcome. Like why do I'm in a dictatorship? Why do I like democracy? Well, because the policy will be more favorable to my material interests And that just seems like very superficial way. I've done lots of research like that myself You know mere culpa, but that seems to us too superficial way at getting at this, you know Like it's too superficial and what's the dynamics think of like make america great again? Like here's something very here's a very provocative conjecture, you know, like what is merica make america great again You know make america great again. They're not people voting for don trump or whoever because it's in their material interest They're just angry at the way they think things work in the united states. What are they angry at? Well, one of the things they're angry at is this kind of east coast elite harvard princeton yale meritocratic fake phony meritocratic hierarchy, you know in in the united states there's this ideology that supports inequality talking about ideology Which is all about merit and if you get to harvard your success And if you don't you're a kind of loser and no one gets any respect, you know poor white people truck drivers Don't get any respect. You're just a failed harvard graduate. You know if you're a truck driver and that's that's a sort of You know, there's a particular Ideology of inequality and its justification in the united states and they're angry at that and I don't think they're thinking through Oh, well, if we got rid of that the policy would be more favorable to my of course. They're interested in Material things fine, but I don't think fundamentally. That's what driving it So so I think that's that may be a provocative example of a kind of, you know What drives the dynamics of these reverse dominance coalitions? You could sort of say, you know, that's we act together collect think about, you know Hades go back to Hades Poseidon and zeus, you know, that's what that's what drives the dynamics At least that's what drives the collapse of hierarchy, you know What drives the creation of hierarchy? Well, because humans can come up with models of of hierarchy and they can justify them and they can You know King Charles III my great monarch is about to be crowned. You know, look at that. What what is that? You know, uh That's the ideology of hierarchy and all the English people just love it Right, I think we started off beautifully. So I'll ask one more question Okay, so, uh, if there are no more questions, let's maybe one Just one thing, uh, James. Thank you very much for this Very interesting to get a great start. So yesterday We had an exchange because I was stuck at your 2009 paper with as a mogul on institutions being the root of Inequality and now we are showing us a more Uh, fundamental level at which so can you elaborate a little bit on What happened in in these 14 years? How did you how did you where do I? Where did I start? No, I mean, I I you know, I think I started, you know, I think what what you know What what I said to start with which is, you know, I I I think we're trying to ask ourselves You know, like what at what some deeper level, you know, what is it about humans? You know, are humans really egalitarian or, you know, can they be brainwashed into any kind of hierarchy or persuaded that, you know, that that that Hierarchy is justifiable and and how should we think about that? You know, I think this is the make america great example is a good one, you know And I think it's not that it's not that people care about they don't you know fight about if you look at our first book Economic Origins of dictatorship and democracy, you know, we developed all these mathematical models of democracy and Autocracy and the sort of we developed these dynamic theories of this transition, you know But but people's preferences, you know people's induced preferences are always determined by thinking through You know, if we had democracy, you know, what would be the policy consequences of that? And I guess we're saying You know, is that the right way to think about this? You know, yeah, people have preferences over different sorts of institutions But perhaps we haven't really grasped what it is about particular Institutions that people like, you know that that democracy is sort of fulfilling some more fundamental human You know demand for egalitarianism, you know, that that's that's not well conceptualized by thinking about the policy Consequences of a particular set of institutions So so I think it's not that I recanted on the evidence on institutions and economic success or anything else But I think we're trying to think harder about, you know Why do different societies get the institutions they do and you know, where does that come from and how is that rooted in In, you know, human history in a kind of deeper way than we've thought about Before that makes sense Okay So, uh, there are no more questions. Let's thank professor James Robinson Thank you for joining and So I hand over to out of the chair so that you can introduce the next talk