 Now, Manuel Muniz, who is a, well, young, well, less and less young, of course, year after year, but nevertheless, a young star in the world of international relations experts. I think, my dear Manuel, that you did an internship, more than that, at EFRI some years ago, and you have been very successful at the Kennedy School, at Harvard anyway, working with Carl for a number of years, and now you are back home, that is, to Spain, and we are very eager also to listen to your remarks. Thank you, Dierisa, I'll remain seated if that's okay. So I thought that the past couple days were very, very interesting, and it sort of reaffirmed something that I've been seeing in most of the debates on global issues that I attend with some very particular features that I saw here, and it's this, I think this is the backdrop to most of our discussions, which is what Carl mentioned, you know, sort of the weakening of the international liberal order produced by two forces fundamentally, one that is external or the siege of the order by the rise of the liberal powers, and China is there and I'll focus on China fundamentally in my remarks, but also I would add Russia, and I would probably add the failures of the Arab Spring and the democratic regression that we've seen in the Arab world, the only country that has undergone a revolution in the Arab world in the past few years and has come out of that event with more rights and stronger democratic institutions in fact, Tunisia, but I'm not going to go into these cases, but it's an interesting external landscape to this order that looks far less liberal and much more questioning of the order, and I'm going to focus on China, and the second force is internal and it's a real implosion of the liberal order from within, and I think Trump and Brexit and developments in Spain and in France and in other places are a manifestation of this, and this is just a growing number of citizens within liberal democratic countries that are beginning to question fundamental features of that order, whether it's porous and cosmopolitanism or free trade or free markets or in some instances democracy itself. Let me focus for a second on the external dimension and on China, because I thought it came up during our discussions, particularly there were a couple of sessions on the first day that I thought were fascinating, and as you know, people in this field are sort of wondering whether the US and China are headed for a collision, what our colleague at the Kennedy School, Graham Anderson, calls the facility strap, and I didn't buy this thesis because I bought the interdependence thesis, right? These countries are too interdependent, both in terms of their supply chains, in terms of their financial markets, in terms of their public debt markets, but there are a number of features in the relationship between these two that actually lead me to think that this outcome, growing tension and possibly conflict is far more likely than we think, and I divide them in two categories. One is developments in the realm of economics, and the other is in politics, and I'll focus on the economy for a second, and in both instances you'll see technology and innovation interwoven into the argument, into the argument because actually tech is, in my mind, completely changing features of the economy and of political dynamics that are affecting geopolitics. So I'll start on the economics, and on the economics there are three issues that I think are essential. One is, and they're odd and unexpected, one is that the digital economy is producing the clustering of knowledge, and this is something that we thought wouldn't happen. We thought that the world was going to be flat, and the digital revolution was going to make geography redundant or unimportant when it came to the distribution of economic opportunities, so people would connect to productive processes and they would unplug and they could almost be anywhere geographically. Now, counter- intuitively, the data from the last decade or so points exactly to the opposite. So the digital economy is producing these very tight clusters of know-how and knowledge. The reasons that we think this is occurring is that there's a particular type of knowledge called tacit knowledge, which is knowledge about particular industry practices or technical knowledge that is so specific that is only valuable when exchanged in very interdisciplinary tight settings, you know, in cafeterias and corridors or research centers and innovative corporations. In Spain, by the way, we've been having a big debate this year about something called the emptied Spain, which is this notion of the provinces being sucked of people that are being drawn into the larger cities, Madrid and Barcelona, sort of the periphery being left behind. If I could show you a map of the U.S. right now and of economic growth over the last few decades, that map would show you a topographic map will show these huge valleys and suddenly these spikes in very particular places in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in Silicon Valley, in the large cities and in particular places in Shenzhen. Why is it this is relevant for many reasons? For the China-U.S. collision, I think it's relevant because we're seeing these two countries beginning to compete ever more radically for these clusters and they turn the global economy into a much more zero-sum game, so that's one trend. The second is the clustering of the concentration of productivity growth and this in my mind is extremely relevant and we tend to not read into the geopolitics of this, but as you know, economists have been engaged in this very long debate about why productivity growth seems to be stalling or slowing despite technological advancement. So the OECD went back and what they did is to try to understand this process. They segregated the corporate sector in advanced economies into two groups of firms, ones which they called frontier companies. These are less than 5% of the total corporations in advanced economies and the rest, they called laggard companies. So frontier firms were the ones where productivity had grown the most. Now what they found, and I think this is really fascinating, is that that small group of corporations saw productivity growth in excess of 30% in the last 10 years. The rest saw no productivity growth. Why is this relevant? Because it reveals a monopolistic, oligopolistic if not outright monopolistic tendency in digital markets, productivity to concentrate in platforms and in companies that collect, process and use data and most of these firms, most of these frontier companies are in the US and China. So again, if I could show you a list of the largest, 20 largest technology companies in the world, they would all be Chinese and American. Not a single European company on that list, by the way. This is very significant for Europe, but it's also very significant for global geopolitics because it means, again, a much more zero sum economy where you're competing for the frontier of the tech space. And China and the US are competing for that space head on, particularly after China approved its made in China 2025 strategy and made that explicit in a document where it states that it wants to dominate the cyberspace robotics, AI, et cetera, et cetera. So by the way, I know for a fact that that particular strategy created huge concerns in the US and not only in the Treasury and the Commerce Department, but also in the State Department in the National Security Council. It's a geostrategic issue for the US. So these two countries are going head on for the dominance of that space. The third trend is that we're also seeing a concentration of transfer. So if I could show you a map of the world with the most successful startups, the unicorns and their geographic location, almost all of them will be in China and in the United States. So the centers of transfer and innovation at the sort of startup level has also been segregated geographically. Now, why are all these things significant? Because it basically draws a highly competitive world, particularly for the dominance in the tech and innovation space. But the collision between the US and China doesn't stop there because there's a whole set of issues around the politics of this. So there have been a number of articles of people saying, oh, this fear mongering about China in the West, it's like what happened with Japan in the 70s and the 80s, and then everybody will relax when they see that actually Chinese growth slows down. It actually has nothing to do with the Japanese case to a large extent because of the politics of China. And here I also want to mention three things. One is China seems to be defying the thesis. This is a very widely held thesis among political scientists that when countries reach a certain level of wealth, particularly measured in income per capita, that produces a middle class, a complex middle class, too complex to manage by a centralized authoritarian regime. And hence, you have a democratic transition. China is approaching the levels of GDP per capita where we should see that and that's not occurring, right? So the strategy in the West, I think has been convergence. We would open our markets and the WTO to China because eventually that would produce political convergence. But we're not seeing that. And I think that's what's leading to this major shift. And the second two points, and I'm going to be very brief on this, are the use of technology in China for repression. This famous Chinese surveillance state. As you know, you know, that they're registering, you know, the entire Ugyur minority in Xinjiang is now registered through facial and iris recognition tools. They've been seen, the New York Times actually just revealed that their DNA has been sequenced. And the level of aggregation of this data is fairly high up. So it's the Interior Ministry, the police. And this is not the most interesting thing. It's the third issue, which is, and this came up in a bear with me for a second. If you think of political systems as systems of information, and that's to some extent what they are, they're meant to procure information about how people feel and their concerns and feed it into the decision making bodies. That's what free press is and free association. Democracy is a particular system of information. What some Chinese colleagues are beginning to claim, and we saw a little bit of that here, is that through big data and AI, China has unlocked a system of information that is superior to democracy. So some Chinese colleagues of mine would say to me, we know what our citizens want and need without the messiness of democracy and elections. We're going to do that through data and AI. And this is what transpires in some conversations, right? It's an alternative model infused of technology and making heavy use of that. So I'll end on this note that I think that the collision with China and some people in the U.S. I think see this far more clearly, is very structural and is connected to very deep trends in how economics works in the digital era and in the capacity for technology to change the sustainability of an authoritarian regime. And I think that means that the collision is going to be fairly structural and sustained over time. And I think that's one of the backdrops to this conference. Thank you. Thank you, Manuel. So now you will all understand the name, actually, of his university chair. I didn't say beforehand because it is easier to understand afterwards. So he is Professor Raphael Del Pino of practice of global transformation. So that was a good presentation. I don't know if there are so many university chairs of global transformation. Thank you, Manuel.