 Well, friends, it's my honor to introduce Professor Holly Hansen to you this evening. She asked that her introduction be brief, so I've been threatening for several days to give her a lengthy and very flattering introduction. I'll keep part of that threat. Now, I met Holly about eight years ago. I had admired her by distance for quite some time through her writing and her scholarship. When I heard that she would be in Toronto helping to teach a course, I asked a friend who was participating in that course if she could arrange some way for us to meet each other. As it would happen, that meeting would take place at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where together we toured the African Arts Collection. Admiring these works of art allowed us to connect over our shared interests in African history, Holly's main area of study, and the focus of my own graduate work. Since then, we've had many occasions to serve together and I count myself fortunate to be one of her friends and collaborators. Holly Hansen, as many of you know, is a professor of history and African American studies at Mount Holyoke College. Mount Holyoke I learned just a few days ago was the recipient of her prayer revealed by Abdul Baham. The original document was just recently found in his archives and the following news item was shared on the college website. In April, Professor Holly Hansen and other members of Mount Holyoke's Baha'i community gathered to celebrate the history of this prayer and the installation of a facsimile version at Abbey Interfaith Sanctuary. After the ceremony, the original document was returned to the archive stacks to enjoy a long life with temperature and humidity controls. May we all be so fortunate. Holly has served in more capacities than I can mention, but I should note that she has devoted a significant part of her life to the people and history of Uganda. Many of the young people here tonight will also recognize her as a mentor and a facilitator during their studies with the Institute for Studies in Global Prosperity. Baha'i has been teaching and studying the history of global inequality for almost two decades and this will be the focus of her talk tonight. Please join me in welcoming Professor Holly Hansen. What Jeff didn't say is that I wanted a short introduction so that I could speak for more time. I want to begin by thanking the Association for Baha'i Studies Executive Committee for all of the work that they put into creating such a rich learning environment for all of us. Such a space for really profound thinking and it was a lot of work and especially a lot of work to make it as coherent and, you know, together and connected as the conference has been. So thank you very much and thank you everyone for coming. The topic of my talk is asking questions about income inequality and the aspirations of ordinary people and the aspirations that I'm talking about are our aspirations to follow the guidance of the House of Justice in the one March 2017 letter which we can see right here on the next slide. Yeah. Okay. So the House of Justice just this March wrote to the Baha'i world about income inequality and what we need to do about it. In that letter, they wrote that unconscionable wealth is being amassed, that inequality of income and opportunity inside of and between nations make the world unstable. But this reality doesn't have to define the future and they say that structures, rules and systems that manifestly fail to serve the interests of all people need to be let go and they call on the friends everywhere to make individual and collective contributions to economic justice and social progress. That's a really tall order. It's going to be really, really hard to do. This is how, next slide, how we're going to work on it tonight. The first thing we're going to do is think about, just put some material together to think about how do we think about structures. Then we'll look at the history of the economic structures that we now have in the second part of the talk and the third thing I'm going to do is share some thoughts about the process of learning about how these structures change. I want to start with a statistic. I do want to start with a statistic. There it is. If we took the eight wealthiest people in the world, eight, the eight wealthiest people and their wealth, 3.75 billion people, poorest people would match that amount of wealth. So eight people, 3.75 billion people, that's the inequality that we have. It might be easy for us to say, well, that's really bad, but it's not me, I'm in the middle and then other people are that extreme of wealth. Let's all try to think how much wealth do we think you would need to be in the global top 5%? How much? An annual income, I'm speaking of income, not total wealth. An annual income of $35,000 a year puts you in the top 5%. An annual income of $68,000 a year puts you in the top 1%. So it's big. It's a big problem. It's also a problem that's getting worse. What we see in this graph is average annual income in dollars in the United States since the 1960s. The blue line and the yellow line, the blue line is the 90% and yellow is the average and of course they're very similar. This is in inflation adjusted dollars and what we can see is the income of the 90% has not changed for 50 years. The income of the 10%, so the 10% with the highest income has increased a teeny bit in inflation adjusted dollars over 50 years and the red line is the income of the 1%. So we can see this problem that people are talking about which is the income of the wealthiest is growing far, far away from everyone else's. It's a big problem and really the problem is not just the money. It's not just that 90% of the population has had an income of about $45,000 for the last 60 years and the small number of people's incomes are so much higher. The problem as much or maybe even more than that is really about power. What this says about who has agency and who has power to control their lives. Because many most people don't have control over the way they work, how they work, the consequences of their work. And even being able to work without much control would be better than being a member of the structurally unemployed. So structural unemployment means there isn't a job for you now and there's not going to be a job for you in the future. In South Africa, 30 to 40% of the population experience structural unemployment. There's not a place for them. So really the worst thing about this is the inequality of power as much as the inequality of money. It's big, it's getting worse, and it's also intractable. It's not getting better. There was a period of about 40 years in the middle of the 20th century when inequality dipped a little bit. It was increasing taxation, it was social transfers, but the story is it went down a little bit, it stayed down a few decades, it's gone back up. The problem is intractable. And I want to show you now in three graphs kind of a deeper, harder way that it's intractable. So what we see here is historic gross domestic product per capita from the 14th century to the present. And the different colored lines are different nations. So the two that go up most steeply are Europe, Western Europe and North America and the US, Canada and Australia. And the lines that don't go up as much, the green one is Africa and the purple one is Asia. There's two things I want you to notice about this graph. First that the first thing I want you to notice is in 1400 they're not that different. There's not that much of a gap. And then the other thing I want you to notice, there's not that much of a gap in 1400, but there is quite a large gap between North America and Europe at the top and Africa at the bottom by the 2000s. But then the other thing I want you to pay attention to is where the slope accelerates, which is in the middle of the 19th century. So remember that change in the slope of the line there for historic GDP per capita. Look at this, which is energy consumption in the world, same line. And then this, which is a different time scale, but there's the same kind of increase in, this is US patents registered in the US patent office. So this is technological innovation, that's energy consumption, that's historic GDP. So they're very similar, right? The challenge for us thinking about inequality is it appears to be that we created this inequality. We got this inequality as we got the wonderful technological advance that we've gotten in the 19th and 20th century. So if we want the technology, which we do, does that mean we have to accept the inequality also? They seem to go together. They happen together. And implicit in this relationship or in this association of the growth of technology and the growth of inequality is that the negative social consequences are inherent in the technology. We couldn't have done it any other way, but we could have. We could have done it another way. For example, in the middle of the 19th century, when we're really setting up these patterns, the kings could have listened to Baha'u'llah. And if they had, and if they had followed his instructions about the organization of society, we wouldn't have the structures we have. We would have quite different ones. Over the past 150 years, without following Baha'u'llah's guidance, we've been compounding the mistakes that we made, the ways we sort of got off track that happened at that point in time when we had to make the choices that we had to make about new technology. This is the thing about structures. And it's what makes this challenge that the House has given us in the one March 2017 letter. This is what makes that challenge so hard. Because what they ask us to do is to change economic structures through the choices that we make. Remember about the fourth paragraph of that letter, the House of Justice says, every economic choice leaves a trace. And those traces, the traces of the choices that people make create social structures, millions and billions and gazillions of individual choices accrete together and become structures. And then people act inside of those structures with millions and billions and gazillions more choices that hold those structures in place. How can we change them? How can we even see them? Because one of the things about structure is that we don't see it. We came into this room and we didn't give a thought to how is the load of this ten-story building being held up so that the roof isn't falling down on us. We didn't, none of us thought about it, right? We just knew that the roof would be over us. And we all sent text, we didn't think about the structure. And we sent text messages today and we didn't give a thought to the structure of the packets of information. We didn't wonder, will this text message go to the person I sent it to or will it go to somebody else? We just took the structure for granted. And economic structures are the same way. We are inside of them. We don't see them. And now the House of Justice is asking us to make choices that have the consequences of the structures being different. How? How are we going to do that? I want us to look at some questions. That's not the questions. There's the questions. These are questions that I've been thinking about in relation to the structures of economies that really come for me out of the conversations and the thinking that the association for Baha'i Studies economies group is thinking about. So if the House of Justice says we have to let go of structures, systems and rules that don't serve the interests of all, we might think what kinds of structures would serve the interests of all? What are the component parts of the structure? What's the size? What's the size of the parts? How are the parts connected to each other? What's the flow of energy or resources among the parts? So we're thinking tonight about the structure of economies and let's keep these questions in mind. They're hard. We haven't been to the future. We don't know. And we're kind of used to the structures that we have. But fortunately for us, Baha'u'llah talked about this. In 1868, in his letter to Queen Victoria, he addresses the elected representatives of the peoples of the world. And he tells the elected representatives of the peoples of the world how to think about government, how to think about the structure of society, and this is what he says. Regard the world as the human body, which, though at its creation whole and perfect, have been afflicted through various causes with grave disorders and maladies, not for one day did it gain its ease, may its sickness wax more severe as it fell under the treatment of ignorant physicians who gave full reign to their personal desires and have erred grievously. So this is a sentence in the imperative to regard the world as a human body. And let's think for a minute about those questions about structures and how we see them in the structure of the human body. The units are small, or some of them are, the units are really very diverse sizes and some of the units are small, cells, organ systems. And these small units have responsibility and agency. They all matter. Think about 30 to 40 percent structural unemployment in the human body. That body would be in really bad shape. There's another really interesting thing to think about if we're thinking about the world as a human body is that the human body is self-regulating. It is always monitoring itself to make sure that all of the parts have what they need. I want to apologize to all of the biologists. I, being a social historian, talking about the human body, but you know what I mean. So then there's this other thing about human bodies, which is they can do things because of the way all these different systems relate to each other. So we couldn't look at a person and say, this is the part. This is the system that allows that human being to run. To run, you need the muscles and you need the bones and you need the brain and you need the endocrine system. You need all these different parts that are really different parts and because they're all there, capacity emerges, which is that person can run. Okay, so another thing that Bahá'u'lláh has said in this slide that we were looking at about the human body, self-interest. Self-interest is what really makes that body sick. When it's disordered, the cells, let's think about the disordered human body. Maybe the parts aren't connected, maybe it stops being self-regulating. Maybe there's no synergy among the parts that allows emergent properties. Maybe the resources aren't flowing everywhere where they're supposed to flow. So we can take this idea of the healthy body and the sick body and then apply it to society. The next paragraph after this one in the document is this. And I think in my mind, this quotation sort of belongs in another place. It's in the Bahá'u'lláh came to give us one world religion. And I don't think about this paragraph in relation to social structures. So let's read it and think about what is Bahá'u'lláh saying here about religion and the structure of society. That which God hath ordained is the sovereign remedy and mightiest instrument for the healing of the world is the union of all its people in one universal cause, one common faith. This can in no wise be achieved except through the power of a skilled and all-powerful and inspired position. Okay, so we're finished with the introduction now. And what we've got is a thought about structure. Some questions we wanna ask about structure and some thoughts about what healthy structures for society might be. So now I've got a slide about, is that the one I want? No, here's where I wanna be. We're now at part two of the talk and this is what we're gonna do. We're going to look at patterns of trade in Islam around a thousand. It sounds like a really long time ago. I promise it's gonna be interesting. And then three moments of structural change about 1600. Another structural change that happened between 1830 and the 1850. And then a structural change that really comes to an end in 1886. We're gonna start with Islam at its height. Because if we're serious about Baha'u'llah and what Baha'u'llah said. And we are serious about what Baha'u'llah said. Then the best example of functioning economic structures is gonna be the height of Islam, right? Because if we really are convinced about the idea of progressive revelation. We know that a manifestation of God comes, civilization advances. Then people get a little confused, a little bit selfish, it falls back a bit. And then another manifestation of God comes and pushes it forward. So what was the last grade we did in the school of religion? It was Islam. So we should be able to look at the economic structures of Islam. And maybe see the human body functioning a little better. And that's what we do see. At the height of Islam, the world had the most widespread and the most dynamic economy with the least inequality that it has ever experienced. It had tremendously broad distribution of wealth, broad ownership of property. And another thing that's really fascinating about it, like really different from what we know, is that most employment was self-employment. Crafts people worked for themselves, farmers worked for themselves, merchants worked for themselves, and people created partnerships. I'm gonna show you something about the kinds of partnerships. So part of the economy of the Islamic world was people interacting with each other, employing themselves, who were self-employed. I think I want another slide. These are elements of Islamic economic dynamism. And again, we're talking about the 10th to the 14th century, the height of Islam. A really important element of the economic dynamism of Islam was the law of inheritance. Because it's impossible for someone being obedient to the law of Islam to pass down their wealth consolidated. It has to be divided among a lot of people. And the categories are very clear and very strict. So it's impossible to pass consolidated wealth from one generation to another. And of course, the consequence of that is that there's a lot more owners of wealth. In other words, this comes from an essay about why Islam didn't become capitalist. The historical root of the institutional inefficiencies of the Islamic world was the law of inheritance. Because large amounts of wealth couldn't be passed down. That, of course, was part of Islam from the very beginning. But in the first centuries after, now I want my slide again, thank you. In the first centuries after Muhammad, economic institutions were innovated, which allowed people to be present in each other's lives. They allowed the kind of mutual support, collective enterprise and generosity that the House of Justice writes to us about in the one March 2017 letter. One of these institutions is Mudaraba. It moved from the world of Islam into Europe and in the Spanish world, the name for it is Commenda. What this institution is, it's a partnership where one person has labor, one person has capital, and they write a contract with each other that says, here's what we're going to do, here's the date that we'll finish doing it, and here's how we'll split the profits that we make. Mudaraba is different from a loan because the risk is shared. If it doesn't work out, the person with the capital doesn't have any capital, lost the capital, and the person with the labor lost their time. But nobody is in debt to the other. And it's not like employment because they're making the decision about what to do together, they're equal partners. I was talking with a scholar of Middle Eastern trade about Mudaraba and he said to me, well, Holly, it's not really an economic institution because it's about trust. But who says trust can't be the essence of an economic institution? What Mudaraba does is it allows people to help each other economically in this tremendously equal way. Another institution that I want to tell you about is Mudaraba, which is a way of people combining small amounts of wealth to build capital. So you can undertake an enterprise without having a tremendous amount of wealth because you get a lot of people and they aggregate small amounts of wealth together. And Waqf is an endowment that a person makes of a profit-making thing. It could be endowed land, it could be a business. And the person who makes the Waqf says, this thing of mine in perpetuity, all of the profits of it are to be dedicated to a social purpose. So it's an institution to do that kind of thing that Abdu'l-Bahá describes in the Secret of Divine Civilization where he says we should constantly be creating instrumentalities for human happiness. Let's look at the next slide. So this is the circuits of exchange in the 13th century. This is trade in the Islamic world. The person who did this research is Janet Abu-Lugod and she's a World Systems Marxist. So she wasn't doing this to prove to us the dynamism of Islamic trade. But in fact, if you look, there's nine circuits. So there's nine different distinct trading systems that overlap. And if you look at that graph with that map, what you see is that they overlap in Mecca, Baghdad, and Cairo. So they overlap in the nodes of pilgrimage. The largest, most dynamic system of trade in the world emerged from people going on pilgrimage. The pilgrimage routes were first. The trade routes followed the pilgrimage routes. And what made it work as a world that was the whole world that we knew then, a world embracing system of economic exchange was people following the law of pilgrimage. And in Islamic pilgrimage, it all happens at the same time. So pilgrimage brought people together to these centers. They exchanged knowledge. They could engage in business because they had a legal system in common. They had a language in common because of the Quran. And they trusted each other because of their shared faith. So in a way, pilgrimage and being Muslims, but of course, other people participated besides Muslim. But it's kind of like an emergent, the world trade was an emergent property of people's faith in Muhammad. And it was the most powerful system, the most encompassing and dynamic system of trade that the world had ever seen. OK, let's look at the next slide. What we can see, something that we know about this system is that it really is powered by faith. And we know this from letters from 10th to 12th century merchants that were found in Cairo, preserved in the 19th century. So this is just a few quotations from those letters. And what I chose them for is to show you how people are thinking about God as they're engaged in business. May God ordain its safe arrival. That's the goods that someone sent in. I let God choose for me the best and then I bought. And about a partnership. We let our Creator choose for us and concluded this partnership. Then this last quotation is really what set me into the path of thinking some of the ideas I'm sharing with you tonight because it was so surprising to me. This is a person who is not able to trade on his own account because he lost a lot of wealth in a shipwreck. And so he has to be an employee. And it's such a weighty emotional burden to be employed instead of to be working on his own. I eat bread in the service of others every minute of the day. I gulp the cup of death because of my degradation and that of my children. So in this Islamic economy, which really works for a lot of people, people just weren't, they weren't employees. OK, let me conclude about Islam. It was awesome. And it's a dynamic economic system that emerges out of people's faith. So now we're done with the first part of history. And I'm going to try to speed up for the second part. We used to think that, or for a long time, people tried to explain the rise of the divergence of European economies from everybody else's economy. Because Europeans were smarter, they're more willing to innovate, they're more sexually restrained. We tried a lot of different ideas. But then when people went looking for the same characteristics in China and in India, they actually found the same things. In the Yangtze River Valley, the same business practices, which people understood to be the beginning of capitalism in Europe, were happening in China. Basically, everything was there, even the sexual restraint, apparently. The one thing that Europe had that China and India didn't have was colonies. Colonies were the difference. Europe came to dominate the world economy through violent trade in Asia. They basically, the Venetians and then the Portuguese entered that 13-circuit system of world exchange. So they entered in Asia, they shoot it up with military technologies, and then they sell protection. That's how they entered Asian trade. But so violent trade in Asia, the enslavement of Africa, and they captured huge expanses of land in many parts of the world. We used to call this mercantilism, but Sven Becker, a historian of capitalism, says, really, we should call it war capitalism, because that's what it was. Let's look at the next slide. This is world exchange in the 17th century. And many of you would have learned about this in elementary school. It's one system now. And it's a system that takes commodities from Asia and the Americas to Europe, enslaved people from Africa to the Americas to grow those commodities, and manufactured goods down into those places to exchange for the people. Nine interconnected circuits of trade became one system whose purpose was profits for Europe. It's very much, it's a different structure. It's a very much simpler structure. The corporation, the corporation that we use in the present, had to be created to accommodate the financial requirements of war capitalism. The British East India Company, the Dutch East India Company, which were the first corporations, needed a lot of money, because what they were doing was going to war, and then after the war making a profit. It took a long time. It took a lot of money. They needed new instruments, the joint stock company, risk sharing mechanisms, limited liability, because the people who were investing in those companies didn't want to be responsible for the things they were doing. All of these innovations are part of war capitalism. The scale didn't have to change, but it did change. And if I hadn't gotten behind, I would tell you about alternative on the periphery systems that aren't large scale, that also use technology, but you'll just have to ask later. OK, let's get to the next one, which happens in the 19th century. I don't think I actually have a slide of this one. So between the 1830s and the 1850s is a moment where another, there's a really important structural change in the way we organize work. And that is a system that is a highly productive, large scale organization with tightly controlled labor that produces very efficiently and produces large amounts of commodities. And what was it? It was plantation slavery. We got our notion of efficiency and how to efficiently organize labor from the way plantations were organized to grow cotton in the American South. And just at the same time, innovations in water technology, steam technology, and then eventually fossil fuel technology created the possibility of factories. And we based factory labor on the labor structure of the plantation. It's hard to hear. It's hard to know. But that's the system that we live in in the present. OK, the third historic moment that I want to talk about is really the 1860s to the 1880s. So as we developed these new technologies, people recognized how people saw the possibility of turning that productivity towards the benefit of the people who were producing. And there was this tremendous flowering of worker-owned cooperatives. Starting in the 1860s, it was the early 1860s that worker cooperatives really took off in the United States. What we're looking at on this slide, let's look at it again. Oops, go back. This is the badge of the Knights of Labor. The Knights of Labor had 4% of the adult population were members of the Knights of Labor at its peak. That's 800,000 people. They were freed slaves because freed slaves were the most technologically capable people in the United States. They were the most skilled craftsmen in the US at the end of the Civil War. So the Knights of Labor were freed slaves, white workers, men and women. What they thought they were doing was creating economic democracy and a cooperative commonwealth. Their cooperatively-owned businesses included mines, foundries, mills, factories that made barrels, clothes, shoes, soap, furniture. There were cooperative laundries. There were cooperative printers. There were cooperative lumberjacks. There was cooperative everything, and it was growing. They had some problems. They were learning about leadership. Cooperation isn't that easy. But they really thought they were making a new world. What happened? What happened to the possibility of a cooperative commonwealth and economic democracy? Well, there was a war against organized labor in the United States that started in 1886. And although the high school textbook version of this leaves out the cooperatives, in fact, it was a war on cooperatives. The railroads wouldn't carry their goods. Manufacturers wouldn't sell the machines. Wholesalers wouldn't sell them raw materials and supplies. Banks wouldn't lend them money. Could a cooperative commonwealth based on economic democracy have grown from the way it started in the 1860s and 1870s? Could we have done this thing differently? We could have. What killed it? People were learning to organize themselves. But they were basically stopped by people acting in self-interest. I want to conclude the second section with this. Every step of this process, every step of this transformation in which selfishness prevailed and the structures of the economy changed, required moral thinking. It took a lot, a lot of effort for us to rationalize what we did to make selfishness a virtue. And we have to realize that our structures of thought are the product of the rationalization of what we did. In history, people talk about a time when social relations mattered as a world we'd have lost. But is it a world that we lost? Or is it a world that we just let ourselves forget about because we felt so bad that we didn't have it anymore? Or is it a world that we think that we lost because we didn't realize that religion could be renewed? So if we look at these characteristics of the pre-modern and modern, which of those parts of modernity really has to hold if we have a manifestation of God, if we have the healing mighty instrument of faith? Small scale, large scale, personal, impersonal, complexity value, deficiency value. I'm just not sure that the modernity we've got is really modern. I mean, maybe it's beta modernity, and we haven't really gotten to modernity yet. In fact, I think this is a way that we can explain the coming of Baha'u'llah, that with Baha'u'llah, we can do modernity right. We haven't gotten there yet, but we could. Let me just very quickly get into part three and show you some questions. The first thing I want to do is show you the African-American cooperative movement as an example, because the African-American cooperative movement was all about the development of capacity and learning. This is W.E. Du Bois at a conference in 1907. They had this conference every year, so people could get together, have conversations, and think about how do we make progress together? We unwittingly, I'm not going to read it because I'm just running out of time, so I hope you read it. Okay, I'll read it. We unwittingly stand at the crossroads. Should we go the way of capitalism and try to become individually-rich as capitalists, or should we go the way of cooperatives and economic cooperation where we and our whole community could be rich together? This is a cooperative grocery store in Memphis in 1919. So let me just tell you one more thing about these cooperatives. They emerge out of the African-American church. If you want to start a cooperative, you've got to have a study circle for at least a year so you really learn what you're going to need to know in order to cooperate. And then after people have developed their skills and capacities, they start the cooperatives. They lasted really until the 1950s. This is Minneapolis in the 1950s. What brought them to an end, Jessica Nempart thinks, she's the person who wrote a book about this called Collective Courage. She said that they were driven underground and collapsed really by McCarthyism because people didn't want to do something that might be seen as communist. Okay, let's now think about questions for ourselves. I think we need to think about scale. What are the opportunities for economic cooperation that exist right now that we could support? Or if there are a few thousand people in a region who share an intention of creating a dynamic community economy, what actions can they take? What collective capacity does a community need to develop so that economic mutual support and generosity can thrive? And how do communities develop those capacities? These are things we need to learn about. And let's also think about, let's look at the next slide. Questions about connecting across scales. And there's a lot of learning we have to do here because unlike the Islamic world where it took time to get someplace, our technology collapses time and space. But it doesn't have justice in it. I mean, it's just as neutral. So how do we create connections that link the part to the whole in a just way? I think there's a lot we have to learn about that. But hukukla is a really interesting example because hukukla links our most intimate inner contemplation of our wealth to the entire world. How can just equitable relationships among small firms in different regions be fostered? The Andean, the pre-Columbian economy of the Andes is a really good example of that which I don't have time to talk to you about. What should be organized on a large scale and what should be organized on a small scale? Shoghi Effendi made it very clear that the oneness of humankind implies regulation of the economy on a global scale and really nothing but global governance can fix global inequality because what we have is a tightly integrated coherent system but we're governing it pretending that it actually divides into national units. It's not gonna work and we're not gonna be able to fix the problem until we have global governance. So there's a lot to learn there too. Am I at the end of those questions? Yeah, okay. So let me come now to some concluding thoughts. How do we make our economic choices contribute to economic justice? We have to place ourselves in time. We have to place ourselves in time, see where we have come from, see what made the president, imagine what could be in the future and take logical actions that get us there. And this means that we as Baha'is need to be really careful about the statements we make about the past. We cannot think about the past as if everything in the past was a disaster, the human race never did anything right but now Baha'u'llah has come and it's gonna get better. That's not accurate and it's really disempowering. We also can't speak as though there has been steady progress from the beginning of time through us and with Baha'u'llah it's gonna get better because that also is not accurate. We've gotta look, we gotta see what we did, we gotta see where we're gonna go. Economies are about social relationships. Economic relationships are connections between people. So if we're gonna make these changes, we've gotta do it making connections with others. And finally we have to really strive to expand our understanding of religion. Abdu'l-Baha'u'llah said religion is the investigation of reality. So to me that says if you are a religious person, there's no path dependence. There's no doing what people did before you. And we got the structures we've got, path dependence, we just gotta go with them. If religion is the investigation of reality, you can't be path dependent. You gotta look at reality and base decisions on it. Okay, if we do these things, I think we'll get closer and closer to an understanding of how we can make economic choices that leave traces that create economic justice. So thank you.