 Hello, and welcome to this latest Lowey Institute live event. This is part of what we're calling the Long Distance Lowey Institute, in which we communicate our content and analysis online while we're unable to do so in person. A very warm welcome to everyone joining us from Australia and to those dialing in from overseas. I'm also delighted to welcome a number of our board members to this evening's conversation, including our Chairman, Sir Frank Lowey, a warm welcome also to our Lowey Institute corporate members and supporters. My name is Michael Fully Love, and I'm the Executive Director of the Lowey Institute. And joining me this evening is one of the world's most influential editors, Zannie Minton Beddos. Zannie has been Editor-in-Chief of the Economist since 2015. Previously, she served as the Business Affairs Editor, the Economics Editor, and the Correspondent for Emerging Markets of the Economist. As Editor-in-Chief of a newspaper whose weekly readership stands at more than 1.6 million, and which covers everything from international politics to the art world, Zannie's role requires her to have a truly global view, and we'll be tapping into that this evening. Before I go to Zannie, some quick housekeeping. At the bottom of your screens, you'll see a Q&A button where you can submit questions to Zannie. We'll put as many of your questions as we can to her later in the discussion. These include the name of your organisation or any other affiliation when you send through your question. But first, I have some questions of my own. So welcome, Zannie, and thank you very much for joining us from London. Thank you. Good evening. Well, I guess good morning from here. All right. First of all, let me ask you about your origin story, Zannie, how you came to journalism. I'm interested that after you graduated from Oxford and Harvard, but before you joined the Economist, you were a practitioner, you were an advisor to the Polish government and you were an economist at the IMF. So why did you leave that arena to go into journalism? Well, when I was at the IMF, I was always the bit that I really loved was going to a country, trying to make sense of what was going on in the economy there. And I think if I'm truthful, I was probably always better at the writing of the reports than I was at the building of the models. But that was the part that I really liked. It was sort of trying to make sense of an economy and then writing that down. And after a while, I mean, the IMF is fantastic. I learned a huge amount, but I realized that probably I wasn't cut out for a sort of, you know, a kind of somewhat bureaucratic organization. And so I decided I wanted to go to journalism and it was kind of go back to journalism. I've done quite a lot of student journalism. So it's always been something I like to do. And then I thought, where can I write about economics? Where's a place that I can do what I love doing, which is trying to understand economies and write about them. And I went to the economist and, you know, quarter of a century later, here I am. So you must love the economists. What do you love about the newspaper? Oh, it's an amazing place. It's a, first of all, it's an extraordinary platform. And it is a wonderful card. You can talk to almost anybody you want. It's an amazing collection of colleagues. I have some of the smartest people in the world who could almost all be either more famous or a lot richer if they work somewhere else, but yet they choose to work at the economist and we have a wonderful collegiate spirit and we get to think about the most important issues at the moment. And I think we also have, and for me, this is really important. It's that it's an institution who's who's kind of values and who's who's the cause that we champion. The English liberal cause is one that I, you know, profoundly believe in. And right now, I think it's a particularly important time to be doing that. So for all of those counts, it's the most amazing job in the world. I love it. Well, let me ask you about liberalism and some of those issues that are surfacing at the moment. The media is in the thick of another big debate about free speech. And since its establishment in 1843, the economist has always stood for individual and economic freedom. So where do you come down on the current debate? For example, what did you make of the decision by the New York Times a month ago, first of all, to publish that op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton, but then to reverse course and conclude that they had made such a grotesque error that, in fact, they should remove the two senior editors in the op-ed department and restructure the whole department. What did you make of that discussion and all the discussion about the so-called civil war within the New York Times? Well, I found the latter part really quite troubling. I mean, I, you know, there may have been ways in which that op-ed was handled, but I like to think I might have handled it differently. But I firmly believe, firmly, firmly believe in the importance of hearing different viewpoints than I think an op-ed page is a marketplace of ideas. And I'm really troubled by an environment where increasingly, you know, certain views are deemed off limits for debate in the United States, in particular. And so I'm very much at the end of the spectrum that thinks that the only way you make progress in a polarised environment is by engaging in debate with people of different persuasion. We're not going to make progress by having a whole load of like-minded people in an echo chamber. And an op-ed page is such a marketplace of ideas. And so I think that it's, if you have an op-ed page where you aren't, you don't hear alternative opinions, and particularly, you know, Senator Tom Cotton, whatever his, you know, whatever you think of his argument, it's one that is important to hear because he is an influential senator. It's not, it's sort of extraordinary to me that one would not want to have that as part of the discussion of ideas in the United States right now. Now, you faced similar criticism, I recall, in 2018, when you invited Steve Bannon to appear at a festival the Economist was running, and you proceeded with that interview. But around the same time, David Remnick of The New Yorker withdrew the invitation to Bannon just a few hours after he made it. Now we've had the Tom Cotton affair and various other sort of tall trees falling. Do you think you're on the losing side of this argument? Well, I profoundly hope not. I mean, I really genuinely worry about a world where it is deemed not OK to engage with people of differing viewpoints and to have rational debate. I think that's one of the central tenets of liberalism. It's one of the central tenets of what will allow us to make progress. So I don't think I am. I think that there is still a profound support for the importance of free speech. But I do worry about a growing intolerance of many, particularly on the left, where the idea that it's it's it's somehow no longer OK to engage in a broad diversity of opinion. And for me, the decision to engage with Steve Bannon was actually a kind of canonical moment that the event that you're talking about was an event to celebrate our 175th anniversary. And it was a discussion. It was a whole day's debate about what 21st century liberalism should look like. And it was one where we felt it was very important to engage with people of a different worldview. Steve Bannon has a profoundly different worldview that I do than the economist does, but he was at that point, he just left the White House. He's a very eloquent and an important sort of proponent of a completely different worldview. And I think rather than, you know, having a lot of people with a similar view discussing things, it's incredibly important to engage with that different one. So I was for me, it was an absolute sort of essential testament to what we were trying to do then. All right, let me stay on the United States. You were based in the U.S. for nearly two decades. What do you make of what's happened to America over the past few years and indeed over the past few months? What's what's the balance of optimism and pessimism in your mind about the future of a country that you know rather well? Well, it's it's interesting, right? I'm kind of asking myself increasingly, how well do I know it? And you're right, I spent most of my adult life in the U.S. and all the time that I was in the U.S., it was almost a trope to talk about how polarized America was. There was talk about the polarization of America in the 1990s and the 2000s. But I genuinely think that the country is more sort of polarized and angry than I have ever known it. And not only are there two very, very different kind of camps, which with very different worldviews, they also increasingly live in different environments with sort of different fact bases almost. And I think one of the one of the consequences of this whole polarization of the media and the sort of reduction of trust in media and the demonization of the mainstream media by President Trump is that you have, you have Americans kind of living in different universes. So that really, really worries me. And I think there is, and particularly over the last, two, three years, there has an anger has developed there. And there's a sort of a sense of anger and frustration. And that's the bit that makes me worried on the positive side. I actually think that the last few weeks have made me, you know, very, in some ways, very optimistic about the power for change too. So I think there is a huge amount of energy to really make progress to change things. And the challenge in the US will be to kind of harness that positively. But at the moment, it feels like an angry, polarized and a place that's quite worrying and quite on the edge. Let me ask you about COVID because COVID is shaping up as a stress test for nations. And some are doing very poorly like the United States and I'm afraid to say, I think the United Kingdom. Other countries, smaller, more agile countries with rational politicians and bureaucracies seem to be doing a little bit better. Do you think that the virus will and the pandemic will shake up the global order in ways? Is it changing the way we look at the power and the prestige of different countries? Is it reshuffling the order in which we operate? Do you think? I think it is. But let me slightly take issue with your premise because I think there are some sort of structural reasons as well as management reasons for how this disease is developed in different countries. And countries which have global cities, countries which have high diabetic populations and all of the things that you know make it harder to deal with or make people more vulnerable to the disease, countries with different healthcare structures have had different responses. So it's not all the way, you know, the leadership evolves. But that said, you're right. I think the experience of COVID has shaped people's view, particularly of the United States. On two counts, I think firstly, that in previous pandemics, whether it's Ebola or even before that, you would have expected the United States to be sort of a global leader in this. United States had some of the best epidemiologists. It has some of the best infrastructure for dealing with this. It would ordinarily have been expected to be leading a kind of global response. And right now we have the exact opposite. We have the United States at best sort of completely absent and also handling it very badly itself. So I think that's sort of one big change. It's the lack of US leadership and hence the lack of multilateralism. More broadly, you know, people say this is going to change the perspective of China, China's global role. I'm not so sure about that. I think that there is a lot of, China's clearly handled it more effectively with an enormously sort of, you know, complete shutdown the way they've managed to do that. But I'm not sure that it necessarily will turn out to be sort of China's moment in a more broadly global role because of the sort of somewhat heavy-handed way in which they're trying to exploit that. I'm not sure to what extent you've watched Australia's approach to China in the past year or so, but our relationship has hardened very substantially. And of course, China is our most important economic partner, but the United States is our great security ally. And Australia has found itself pushing back against China in a number of areas on foreign interference, excluding Huawei from our 5G network and in fact, encouraging hawks in Britain to do the same and now taking the lead in calling for an international investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. How does that look to you from your editor's office? Does that look like a smart response by a democratic middle power? It's about time that someone is pushing back or does that look self-defeating? How does it appear to you from where you sit? I think it's more like a canary in a coal mine, actually. I look to what Australia is doing as a sort of harbinger of what many other countries, choices many other countries are facing and trade-offs many other countries are going to have to deal with. And so I'm really interested in how the Australian position has evolved. For me, the single biggest sort of determinant of the next few decades is going to be the relationship between the US and China and how China behaves and how the US behaves. And I'm very worried about where that relationship is going. I'm also increasingly clear that Europe is unlikely to play the kind of leadership role that it ought to. And so in a world where the post-war global order is fragmenting, where you have a China that is becoming more assertive, even as it is becoming more authoritarian and it's clearly changed quite substantially as you in Australia have been at the forefront of realising in the last few years. I think that's the great question of our time. And so I look to Australia, I don't, it's not so much with a judgment as it is with a kind of really sort of interested curiosity because I think the kinds of debates that you're having and the kinds of debates that lots of other countries are going to be having. The only problem with the canary in the coal mine metaphor is the canary doesn't have much agency. And in Australia's case, it has made a series of decisions that have brought down Chinese sort of censure upon us. I mean, we could have gone along with China on a lot of these things, but we've made a different decision that the government believes is in our interest. Do you think that, do you detect a hardening of views? I mean, you mentioned Europe's approach to China. Apart from the United States and Australia, do you detect a hardening of views in other democracies towards China? Do you detect a sense that scales are falling from eyes and whereas countries tended to look at China previously as a market, a commercial opportunity, they're now starting to see China in a three-dimensional way as a strategic actor and really toughening up their positions. I mean, you're seeing some changes in the UK government's approach to China, it seems, in the last month or so. Yes, I do, I do see that. And I think it's sort of about time. And I think that the way China has behaved makes it sort of important that that falling of scales from eyes, as you say, is taking place. What I think historians may look back on and think is the sort of tragedy of the past few years is that that recognition really occurred in the US over the last three, four years, very powerfully too. And it's on a bipartisan basis. The kind of shift in view of China has happened across the US foreign policy establishment, I would say. But in some sense, it's an opportunity that the Trump administration has squandered because it would have been possible to have had a much more coordinated, multilateral rethink of attitudes to China. But instead, we've had a trade war and a kind of unilateral approach and not terribly coherent unilateral approach, which has meant that all other countries are kind of making these decisions in the face of spats between the US and China. This is a huge geostrategic question and we will need to engage with China. So the option of not engaging is not there. But engaging with the West, if you will writ large, on a sort of more coordinated footing would be much more effective than what we have right now. Let me ask you, Zannie, about the international economy because of course the US-China relationship, a lot of it is about the global economy. Economists are using various alphabetic shorthand terms to describe what they think will happen to the international economy after COVID. Is it going to be Z-shaped or V-shaped or U-shaped or W-shaped or L-shaped? Do you have a favourite letter, Zannie? What do you think? Yeah, I'm trying to find some kind of hieroglyphic, which is basically like a W which where the sort of end is shorter than the beginning. So, you know, there must be some language in which that hieroglyphic exists. But I think we are in for a bumpy ride because I don't think, I think this idea that, you know, there's a second that COVID's over is definitely wrong. And I think even the notion of a second wave is misleading. I think it's going to be much more sort of whack-a-mole world where we have outbreaks that keep coming back, you know, we haven't, there is still exponential rise in cases globally. So we are far from getting this under control. And so the optimism you see in financial markets right now, which is an optimism, I think predicated on the fact that there's a belief that there will be a vaccine and we'll have some kind of V-shaped recovery relatively soon. I think that's not likely. I also think the governments are going to have to wind down the scale of stimulus somewhat. So I think we'll have a sort of, you know, a bumpy W. And the reason I think the end is somewhat lower is that I do think that the post-COVID world is not going back straight away to the pre-COVID world. And we had, if you remember a few weeks ago, we put on our cover, we called it the 90% economy. And the 90% economy, which is the short hand to be used for the post-COVID economy, is one where life goes back to almost normal but very large numbers of sectors look fundamentally different. And as that restructuring happens, as that Schumpeterian creative destruction happens, we are not suddenly going to have a traditional V-shaped back to the economy that we knew before. Let me ask you, globalization has lost a bit of its gloss. Davos Mann has coronavirus. What do you think the pandemic will do to globalization? Can it survive? How will it change in future? Well, I mean, the answer, sort of the glib answer is yes, globalization will survive in the sense that we are not going to go to a kind of complete world of autarky. But I think the sort of the zenith, the era of globalization that began kind of in the 1990s with the fall of the Berlin Wall and all countries moving toward, you know, you might call to the sort of Washington consensus and the focus on free trade, free capital flows, ever greater mobility of people, that world I think is over. That world was already hit by the financial crisis. It was hit by the trade war and it has now been hit by COVID. And I think in particular areas, we're going to see a long, a very different one. I think travel is going to be for quite some time quite different the way it was even six months ago. More importantly, I think ever more countries are equating, you know, resilience with sort of strategic autonomy or even kind of autarky in the worst case. There's a growing view that to be safe, you have to produce things at home, which I think is fundamentally misguided. But there is, you know, both here in my own country, and I don't know if this is the case in Australia too, but there's a growing sense that you can't be, you know, resilient if you rely on global supply chains. And if you put that together with the bifurcation of supply chains, that is almost certainly going to happen from this sort of new Cold War where there is a, at least in high tech industries, countries face a choice between the US or the Chinese ecosystem. Those things together are all kind of powerful, powerful hits to the globalization that we got used to. So yes, it's going to be a different world, a less globalized world in many ways, but it's not, we're not going to go back to, you know, total autarky, of course. But it is going to, I think it's going to be quite a lot different than people would have expected even a few months ago. One positive data point for you is that last week we put out the Lowy Institute poll, the 2020 version. And although Australians are feeling unsafe, they're feeling negative about the international economy, 70% of Australians still say that globalization is mostly good for Australia. So at least here, Australians remain positive about free trade and engagement with the world. Australia is a beacon of many good things right now. I mean, it is, you know, unfortunately that percentage goes down the closer you get to Europe. I mean, it's, and so under the US too, you've seen the most recent polls I saw in the US, it's not as dire as you might think. Certainly in Europe really worries me right now because there is a growing sort of sense, particularly in the European Union, of the importance of strategic autonomy. And there's a deregism that is coming back in Europe with leaps and bounds under the sort of guise that we need to, you know, prepare ourselves for safeguard Europe in a kind of, you know, new Cold War mentality. There's also a kind of post-COVID sense that things have to be done at home, but it's leading to classic European-style deregism. Well, can I say that the UK has contributed to that by deciding to exit from Brexit, from the EU. I mean... I think you're right. I think the European Union without the EU has lost one of its, you know, free market, free trade champions. It's becoming a much more collectivist kind of, you know, Colbertus kind of place. Let me ask you about Brexit and let me ask you a little bit about the UK. In January last year, the Economist wrote that Brexit was the mother of all messes. Of course, at that time, all the discussion in the UK, all the political discussion in the UK was about Brexit. Now, most of the discussion is about COVID. Do you still think that Brexit will be as bad as you thought last year? Well, I think Brexit has been a huge mess. I think it is, you know, it's easy to forget that it has completely consumed this country, you know, since 2016. And it has... I still believe that we would have been better off staying within the European Union for some of the reasons we've just talked about. We haven't yet had the consequence. We don't yet know what the future trading relationship is looking like. And it's only because we've been hit by an even more kind of catastrophic shock that Brexit has fallen away completely. You know, at the end of the year, whether we will have another shock, it won't be as big as COVID so people won't particularly notice. But it's... To say that Brexit is not a big deal relative to COVID, I don't think it's a sort of terribly, terribly kind of helpful statement because, yeah, COVID is a much, much bigger shock. But nonetheless, it still strikes me that the way Brexit was handled and, you know, underlying it, for me, the case for Brexit was a relatively weak one. But even the way it was handled meant that Britain has lost a lot of time and is worse off than it would otherwise have been. Let me ask you about the effect on Britain's reputation. First of all, of Brexit and then of COVID. I think for a long time, a lot of us have given the UK establishment the deep state credit for competence and a focus on your national interests and an ability to get the mail through. And I think the decision by David Cameron to put Brexit to a vote and then to lose the referendum and then the messiness, to say the least, of the UK response to COVID has gone a long way towards ruining that reputation. Is that... Do you think that's fair? Has something gone wrong in the UK in the last few years, has this... Is there a chance that the combination of Brexit and COVID has broken something? Well, I don't know if you saw, but a couple of weeks ago in the UK, I think we only put this on the cover in the UK, but we had a picture of the Union Jack with COVID shaped holes in it with the title Not Britain's Finest Hour. So, yeah, I completely agree with you. I think there are sort of the two things together have definitely hit Britain's reputation. I think Britain's reputation for competence was already taking a hit with the paralysis the country sank into post-referendum. Already then, every time I left the UK, I would have people say to me, I thought you guys were good at this stuff, you were competent, you were good negotiators, but now you seem to be sort of caused in this sort of ongoing political paralysis. That was then solved by Boris Johnson when he came along particularly with his resounding victory. But what we've learned, I think, in the last few months is that the qualities that caused the Conservative Party to fall in love with Boris Johnson that make him an incredibly effective campaigner are not the same qualities that you need for a leader, particularly in the pandemic. And detail, competence, all of that stuff, that's not Boris Johnson's big suit, strong suit. How do we explain, explain to us the Dominic Cummings phenomenon, if you would. I have really seen a government and a Prime Minister elected head of government take on so much water for a staff member. Usually staff members are expendable. What is it that Dominic Cummings has that means that Boris couldn't throw him over the edge as he has to a number of other people over his career? I think that's what a lot of people in this country are asking themselves. And I think the simple answer is that Dominic Cummings has a clear sort of agenda. He does get things done. And I think Boris Johnson would find it very hard to survive in Downing Street without him, or at least fears he would. Let me ask you about Kier Stammer too, if I can, because that's another note of optimism after the sort of Corbyn-esque disaster, as I would see it, to have a person of sort of professional accomplishment and a person with a bit of a hinterland in that important role of leader of the opposition is a positive step for the country, regardless of whether he succeeds in that role. But how do you assess Stammer's chances? I mean, Boris has a very strong majority, doesn't he? So he should, all things being equal, he should be very secure until the next election. Is that right? Yeah, and Bill, the size of the majority is such that people after the election were talking about 10 years of Tory government, because with an 80 plus seat majority, it's a huge turnaround to sort of boot the Tories out. That said, I think you're right. Stammer has had a very good beginning. He is calmly, competent, well-briefed, all the things that people now see Boris is not. And so he's the sort of perfect foil right now. And I think you can tell that he is rattling the Tories somewhat, because he's going up in the polls. There was one, I think, this week, which had him ahead of Johnson. He is looking relatively good, but he's also meaningfully taking steps to sort of clear out the worst bits of his party. And so he's definitely worth looking at. And he will, even if it is a tall order to unseat the Tories, but they are going to be a meaningful opposition now, Labour. And I think the Tories have their own problem right now, which is that remember they came in with the great red vote, right? The red wall that went to the Tories. But these are, as Boris Johnson himself rather astute, he said, these are votes that have been lent to the Tories, not votes that the Tories can take for granted. So the Tories have this somewhat kind of odd coalition of their own now between sort of traditionally Labour seats and their traditional Tory core. And straddling that and working out what the policy is beyond slogans of leveling up is a challenge enough. And then if you have a sort of quietly competent, well-briefed, thoughtful leader of the opposition, that's quite something to cope with. All right, Zannie, let me ask you a couple more questions on the global scene and then I'm going to go to the audience and give them an opportunity to ask you some questions. Let me ask about another global challenge that has largely fallen off the radar over the last year and that's climate change. Climate change seems less urgent than COVID, but it's probably no less important. Will coronavirus make it easier or harder for the world to meaningfully address climate change, do you think? Well, it's a really, really good question and it's one which we pondered a month ago and put on the cover, seized the moment and argued that it could be an opportunity to make real progress. And I think the sort of crass way of looking at it or the superficial way of looking at it is that people realise when everybody was locked down, how much cleaner the air was and so forth and it made people focus on the climate but the depressing statistics were that even with most of the world locked down, it was I think something like a 10% cut in emissions that is likely in 2020. And so you see also the enormity of the challenge but there are a few reasons for believing that if there was a political will to do it, actually COVID provides a sort of powerful opportunity. One is that when you've got oil prices relatively low is a perfect time to introduce a carbon tax which I know is controversial in some places but I think we've long argued is absolutely an essential part of the climate change infrastructure. The second is when you've got this enormous intervention in the economy that you've had across the advanced world and you've also got the huge restructuring that's going to come from what we've called the 90% economy but from the post COVID world. It's actually a very good time for the biggest carbon emitting industries to restructure and if you can create the right kind of incentives and frameworks you can actually put in place some of the green infrastructure some of the frameworks that you need to really make dramatic progress. So it could be a huge opportunity. Will it be taken? I think that depends a little bit on what happens a lot on what happens in the US and a bit on whether the rest of the world can galvanize around it. And right now, if I look at the lack of multilateralism on everything, it would make you feel somewhat depressed but I'm quietly optimistic that it is going to be we are going to make more progress on climate more quickly than many now think. Another reason for optimism might be that governments are listening to experts again but also that the rest of us seem to be quite happy in modifying our lives very substantially in response to that expert advice. I mean, the first few weeks were sort of touch and go but after that I was amazed at how even in countries like Italy where you don't normally expect to see populations following all the rules, people saw the threat and they responded to it and they did as they were advised to by their governments and by experts. That was true. That is true to a point now. The question is whether that will remain true and I think it will be interesting to see what countries are able to sustain public support for the kinds of lockdowns, whether they're localised lockdowns or others that will be needed in any kind of second wave or further outbreaks and there will be further outbreaks and I suspect that countries that are perceived to have handled it well will continue to have high levels of public faith in their government's competence and that will happen, countries which are not and I think particularly I look to the US right now whether there will be public support for the kinds of things that will be needed and I suspect we're gonna have a sort of a world where different countries are in different equilibria and unfortunately those which have sort of squandered this first wave to build up public support for what they're doing are gonna find it a lot tougher going forward. Now all these things require leadership action on climate change and COVID require leadership and a lot of people have observed that the quality of international leadership at the moment seems to be relatively poor. Certainly we haven't seen the same sort of multilateral response to COVID that we did to the global financial crisis. It's hard to work out where the geopolitical center of gravity is obviously we can't look to the leader of the free world because he doesn't believe in the free world, he doesn't wanna lead it but there aren't that many other leaders that people that we're all able to look to. What do you think about that? How would you assess the COVID class of international leaders and who has impressed you amongst this class? Well, like you I think I'm more disturbed by the lack of leadership than I am impressed by sort of at least as an overall global level. And I think that from a global level, really without the US there's a sort of relative limit to what can be done. I mean, it is still indispensable in that sense. So unless you have, you know, halfway sort of competent focused international leadership from the US it's relatively difficult still to get a lot of things done. That said, you know, there are several countries, you know, Taiwan, New Zealand, Germany that have handled the COVID crisis very well. And you know, you don't need me to tell you what the common denominator is there. All right, thank you, thank you, Zannie. I'm gonna go to the audience. We have lots of eager beavers who have questions to put to you. So I'm in no particular order. Let me throw some at you. First of all, we have a question from Bernice Buckmire from the Emanuel synagogue in Sydney, I assume. And she asks, what do you think are Donald Trump's chances of reelection in November? Well, if you look at our election prediction model and we launched it a few weeks ago, I think they're now the chances of Joe Biden winning above 80%. Now I look at all of these models with some very considerable criticism. I think our own is the best one, but you know, 2016 is certainly something that gives everybody pause. The polls have Biden far ahead. I do think that something has changed in the last few months and Trump is losing support amongst some of his, not just absolute hardcore, but certainly amongst the elderly, amongst people who have stuck with him thus far. So I think it's quite a hard road from him. So I think now it's probably looking a lot tougher than it was pre-COVID. All right, and what do you think a Biden presidency would look like, Danny? Well, I think that's gonna be one of the biggest questions is what does Joe Biden end up trying to do? I think Joe Biden has spent his career being at the center of the Democratic Party. And so as the Democratic Party has moved somewhat to the left, so have his policies, but he's basically a back slapping centrist establishment type. He's not a kind of an ideologically motivated person. He's much more about being a decent man who is sort of in the center. So I think, I mean, I hope that it would be, you know, closer to a sort of a centrist model than anything else. Right, we have a question from Mark McLaughlin and Mark asks, what do you think will happen when Angela Merkel steps down given that she and Germany have been so critical to the Western bloc in the recent, in the last decade? That's a really good question because she has completely dominated European politics. And, you know, in the last couple of years there was an expectation that clearly Emmanuel Macron is trying to kind of pick up that role, but the interesting thing actually for the COVID crisis has been in some ways the sort of, you know, resurgence again of the power of Merkel. And so she will leave a huge vacuum and it will obviously depend on what comes after her, but what worries me is if you look at German politics, it is very, very inwardly focused, very domestic and none of the sort of the others who would succeed her have as yet, I think, a sense of the kind of the nature and role of German leadership. And that's, you know, German leadership is integral and sort of will define in what ways Europe goes in many ways and what Europe chooses to do is incredibly important in this new Cold War that we face. So it's enormously important and I do worry about that. All right, we have a question from Karan Damajar and Karan asks about the failure of populist leaders during the crisis, no doubt thinking of Mr. Trump and Mr. Bolsonaro and others. Is this potentially a turning point away from those types of leaders? Yeah, that's a really interesting thought. I've been asking myself that, is this sort of twilight of the populists? And maybe, and you know- Sounds like an economist cover, is that any? It might be, it's sort of, you know, certainly the, you know, competence is being valued again. Experts are being, you know, valued again. We've gone beyond the, you know, we've had enough of experts' line. That said, I think this is also, COVID has also been a time when would be, autocrats have rather, you know, successfully grabbed quite a lot of power. Look at Viktor Orban, look at Erdogan. And they have, you know, they are not in nearly as much trouble as Bolsonaro. So I think it's too early to say that, but I very much hope that that would be the case. All right, I have a string of questions about the economists. People are very interested in the newspaper. So here we go. We have a question from Eileen Kwan. Does the economist have any plans to broaden the diversity of its contributors past its broad spectrum of neoliberal economists? Well, if you came to an editorial meeting, you would know that the, you and my colleagues found a spectrum that goes well beyond neoliberal economists. And we have a lot of debate internally, a lot of discussion. We always, I'm very keen to broaden the diversity of economist staff in all ways. And I think that intellectual diversity is immensely important. But if the perception is that we're a whole load of monolithic neoliberals who all believe exactly the same thing, that's already not true. But we do stand for, and I'm not at all ashamed about this, we stand for, you know, liberal values, free markets, open societies, limited government, the power of reason and the reason debate to lead to progress. And that's, those are values that I think are as important now as they ever were. And they guide us, the interesting thing, and the question is how you translate that into 21st century policies. And that's, what does that look like in concrete terms in the 21st century? And that's what we grapple with, we can, we can. You said a second ago that you're interested in diversity and increasing the diversity of the economist. And I guess the stereotype of the economist journalist is a posh public school man, perhaps. So tell us about that, what is the kind of diversity, what are the different kinds of diversity you'd like to achieve at the economist? So that may be the stereotype, it's already out of date. I'm testament to that. We've made quite a lot of progress on gender diversity, on diversity of nationality, on socioeconomic diversity. If you look, the one area we still have more progress to make on is racial diversity. And I'm, you know, I'm the first to acknowledge that. But I do think that, and we are, we have lots of efforts underway to make more progress. But I think that diversity is a complicated, multifaceted endeavor. And I'm really, for me, the reason for having a diverse group of journalists is that I think you produce better journalism if you fish from a broader pool of journalists and you produce better journalism and you have better analysis if you have a group of people with different perspectives that comes from different intellectual frameworks, different life experiences and so forth. And that, for me, is the sort of underlying rationale of trying to get a broad group of people. And we actually have that. You'd be surprised at the breadth of nationalities that are there, the breadth of viewpoints. But there are certainly areas where we have more to do. All right, we have a question from Flynn Pocock. And Flynn asks, what challenges do economists correspondence face reporting on stories from China? I guess this is in light of the decision by the PRC government to expel a number of excellent US correspondents from China in recent months. How does the economists manage these challenges? So we haven't had any expulsions of journalists. Our journalists have been able to do their work and we've actually expanded our China coverage in recent years. We created the chart one column, we increased the size of the China section and it increased the number of correspondents in China. So thus far, we've been able to do our work. Our website is blocked, the Chinese treat us, they certainly block our stuff. But our journalists have been able to continue their work. But it's an increasingly, as you know, difficult environment and worrying environment in China. And now there's a lot of questions about what will the future of journalists be in Hong Kong too? All right, we have a question from Andrew Farron who reminds us that economist writers don't have bylines. What does that do for their egos and their personal advancement? It's true, we don't have bylines in the economists. That was the norm when we were founded in 1843 and we've stuck with it. And we've stuck with it really for two reasons. One is because we are a views paper, as one of my predecessors put it rather than a newspaper. We have clear opinions and take clear positions based in sort of an authoritative analysis, fact-based analysis and a fair-minded one. But nonetheless, we do take positions. Those positions are the sort of collective positions of the economist. And having no bylines reinforces that. It means that everybody is sort of working in some sense for the paper as a whole, rather than a sort of star system where people, readers might look to one or other correspondent. That said, I think many readers who read closely know who writes what. And in an era of social media, our journalists managed to get their own personal profiles really out there. And I think that's great. I have no objection to that. They have social media handles, they have podcasts and films where it's very clear who's who and clear people's personalities come through. And that's absolutely fine. And I don't think there's a tension between the two. I think it's, we are a collection of individuals, but individuals who work together to produce this collective product called The Economist. I find it an interesting question because at the Institute, we have no house positions and every scholar writes in his or her name. So it's quite different. I mean, you mentioned social media. Do you have to have particular social media guidelines to, I mean, would you be comfortable, for example, with one of your correspondents stating on social media that she disagreed with a position, for example, that the newspaper had taken in her patch? So we do have guidelines. And the main guideline is about the mode of discourse. I think it is, I think when journalists are tweeting under their personal handles, they are still affiliated with The Economist. And so the, you know, the sort of standards that you would expect from The Economist in terms of kind of fair-mindedness, you know, thoughtful discourse are ones that we expect correspondents to maintain. I think it would be tricky to have a flat-out, we don't have, I haven't sort of written this down, but I think it would be tricky to have a correspondent who said, you know, this piece is complete nonsense written, you know, by the Economist. But I believe very firmly in free speech and I believe in, you know, people having different viewpoints. And so there was certainly, you know, you could find Economist journalists who have expressed viewpoints on their personal footer accounts that are not identical to positions that we've taken. But I think the broader point is that you don't, you know, hurt the reputation of The Economist with what you do. All right, we have a question from an anonymous attendee. What do you think are the key skills needed to work for The Economist? You may, this may be an applicant for jobs, Annie. What are you looking for when you hire Economist journalists? Curiosity and ability to kind of make sense of something complicated structure and argument and of course the ability to write. If you don't enjoy writing and communicating, then you're unlikely to succeed as a journalist. I'm a great believer in the importance of structuring your writing. I think that clarity of argument is absolutely essential for good journalism. But sort of beyond that, it's curiosity. Curiosity to understand the world. Curiosity to make sense of it. Curiosity to then impart what you've learned to discover. And a sort of, you know, a boundless enthusiasm for finding out more, for trying to make sense of things and then for explaining them. Right, we have a compliment and a question from Mahendra Patel. And Mahendra says, first of all, he says The Economist is a very readable magazine. And then he asks, who decides the cover story? Is that the editor's fiat or is that something you vote on or how does that work? No, we don't vote. It is, in the end, my decision, but it is, I hope, a kind of collaborative effort. But in the end, someone has to decide when they're competing viewpoints. And so that's part of my job. All right. We have a question from another anonymous attendee. What books are you reading at the moment, Zanni? Well, the last book I finished was a book that is on the Amazon bestseller list. And I felt I needed to read because so many people were reading it, which is the white fragility book, which if you look at the top of them, if you look at the US Amazon bestseller list, it has how to be an anti-racist and white fragility, which regardless of whether you agree with them, I think are important things to have read to understand what is going on in the US at the moment. So that's what I've just finished. All right. Now, this is another sort of job interview question from Paolo Occh. We're really putting you through your paces, Zanni. He says, where do you see the economist in 10 years' time? In 10 years' time. In extremely good hands that won't be mine. And I hope with serving an even bigger group of subscribers to help them make sense of the world in whatever medium they want and whatever timescale they want. I think the interesting shifts in the economist so practically are going to be, how you consume our analysis. And in 10 years' time, who knows, it might all be through podcasts. It might still be some people in print. It might be them. That's where there'll be innovations. But I hope we will still be looking at the future of the economy but I hope we will still be loudly championing economic and social freedom, the English-style liberalism in a world that perhaps by then will be a little more friendly to it than it is now. All right. We have a question from Ted Bergall. And he asked, what future role do you see for Japan in the world? A moderating influence on US-China tensions? A positive force for multilateralism? Or is it likely to turn Edwin and Sherk leadership in global affairs? It's a really good question. And I think I hope very much the former. I hope very much that it plays a role along with other big democracies in shaping the sort of new world order that clearly we are going to build regardless of who is the next US president, the international order that held sway since 1945, the US-dominated one is shifting, has to shift. We're in at worst this new Cold War with China. At best we'll be able to shape some new world order that has I think a much greater role played by other democracies than the United States. And I think China, Japan is sort of right up there. So I hope it would be a leader of that. That's my sort of optimistic take. And I think, you know, if you look at the role that Japan has been playing in the last few years, particularly after the, you know, when President Trump pulled the US out of TPP, you know, Japan took the lead in sort of refashioning that. So I think it's perfectly possible that Japan carries on playing that role. And that would I think be the best outcome. We're going to be in a world where others have to step up to a leadership role. Now, I said earlier on this call that I thought the US was still indispensable. And I think it is. And I think if the US is completely absent, then it is impossible to build a 21st century multilateralism. But I think even if the US returns to a more constructive role, we are in a world that is different from the one that was so heavily US dominated when we are in the sort of, you know, Fukuyama unipolar moment. We've gone beyond that. And so there is a greater responsibility for other democracies, in my view, to help build and maintain the framework that will sustain the sort of liberal world order in the 21st century. That's a long answer, but Japan is an important part of that. And on that point, we have a question from Warren Scott. Can the US recover its position of world leadership after Trump? You partly answered that by saying that we're not going back to the unipolar moment and that other countries need to stand up. But let me put the question in a different way. How much of American leadership can snap back if the Americans elect Joe Biden in November? To what extent will the world forgive and forget the Trump aberration? To what extent will they say, right, see heave aside relief, we're back to normality. Or to what extent do you think there'll be a little part in everybody's brain where we think the United States is less reliable? That's the country that elected somebody like President Trump. So how much can US leadership snap back if they go with Biden in November? So I think there would be very quickly a change in tone. But I think it would be a mistake to think that we are going back to the sort of the pre-Trump world, but actually for slightly different reasons than you think. I think actually the rest of the world will be desperate for that to happen. Whenever I talk to European diplomats, there's a sort of desperate desire to go back to the world that we had before. As you say, to kind of hope this was just a sort of four-year aberration. But for me, I don't think the US is going to go back to where it was, but the US has changed in quite fundamental ways. And I think particularly its attitude to China, that's a bipartisanship. And more broadly, the US even before Biden, even under Obama, the US was moving away from the degree to which it wanted to lead, the degree to which it was willing to intervene in everything. There had been a shift, that shift is continuing. So the United States is not, I think, going to play exactly the role that it did for much of the post-war order. And so it would be a mistake to sort of think that it will come right back to that. But you can get a lot from a change in tone. You can get an awful lot from a change that is one to an administration that believes in multilateralism. I mean, that will shift a lot, but don't conclude from that, that it's all going to go back to the world as it was. We have to build a 21st century world order. All right, we have a question from Paul Rebillard, who might be an Australian diplomat of that name, I'm not sure, but Paul says, no mention of Russia, do we forget Mr. Putin at our peril? It's interesting that you say, you know, we haven't mentioned Russia at all. Mr. Putin, we would forget Russia at our peril because Russia has an unbelievable power to play a spoiler role. And Putin has played his cards very, very successfully at an international scale in the last few years. So don't forget it. But I don't think Russia, even though it would like to be playing the sort of, you know, be right up there at the very top table, creating the 21st century world order, I'm not sure that it is. I think one thing to watch is what happens between Russia and China. That's a really interesting shift. And what, how European attitudes to Russia change. But so it's, you know, we made a mistake not having mentioned Russia thus far, but so Putin is a widely player. But even though he will, I guess tomorrow, finish the referendum that, you know, keeps him there, I think he has more trouble domestically than many realize as well. So he's not as strong as he, he's playing a weak hand remarkably well rather than someone who's playing a strong hand. All right, we're almost out of time and I'm gonna sneak in a couple more. We have a question from Martin Lynch asking you to weigh in on a big issue in Australia. And Martin says that he would appreciate your thoughts on Australia's climate change wars over the last 10 years. How has Australian climate policy looked from the economists seat? I think you probably know why I would react to that. I'm a bit perplexed by it in, and I sort of, I wish it hadn't taken the turn it had, but I draw a lesson for that for other countries, which is, you know, don't underestimate the importance. And Macron, I think, you know, learned this the hard way too with the Gilles Jean, you know, don't underestimate the difficulty of convincing your audience at home. But I think that for me, I'm confirmedly of the view that we do need to do a lot more on climate change and we need leadership from like-minded countries. And I think Australia has a sort of big role to play in that. I'm, you know, I wish it had been able to play a bigger role. We have a question from Joanna Buckingham, and this is a very economist type of question, I think. And Joanna says in the coming multipolar world, what is the future of English as the Latin of inter-country communication? And by Latin, I guess she means lingua franca rather than dead language. That's a really good question. I would predict that it stays, I think, and it's interesting to me. Interestingly, I think the language of the EU is still English, even though Britain is not in the EU. So, you know, my money would be on some form of English, still being the lingua franca around the world. All right, I'm going to ask the last question, Zannie, and then we'll let you get onto your busy day at The Economist. Let me ask you about life under lockdown. What have you liked about lockdown? What have you learned during lockdown? So, I've liked, I've actually liked being at home. I mean, it's a huge privilege that we have, those of us who can work from home have, that, you know, I get to spend more time with my family, which I'm well enjoying. I'm struck by how easy it has been to shift the entire operations of the economists online. You know, we produce everything, films, podcasts, the weekly paper, the daily service, all done online. I spent my entire life on Zoom, kind of much like this, but actually the technology works amazingly well. So that's been pretty good. What I'm sort of interested by is how we continue going forward, because I think lots of people have had the same reaction I have, which is quite, it's actually not bad. And in many ways, you're more productive working from home, but you do lose something. I think you lose the, you know, the serendipitous encounters in the office, you lose the sort of building of social capital that comes from people being together. And I think we need to work out how we can maintain that. So we are going to go back to the office, but we're going to have a new equilibrium, I think. And that equilibrium, I hope, means that I travel less than I used to and I spend a bit more time at home because I've realised that I can be productive and I really enjoy it. Well, can I say, speaking on behalf of many of the faithful readers in Australia, we hope that the lesson about less travel doesn't apply to travel down here because we'd love to see you. You've got many fans down here, many of us look forward to reading your newspaper each week. I mentioned at the beginning that as the editor-in-chief of The Economist, you have to have a truly global view and you have demonstrated that today. We've put so many questions to you and you probably feel like we've been pelting you with pebbles, but you've done a remarkable job. So thank you and thank you for speaking to us and thank you also for putting out this great newspaper, which is one of the great institutions of global media and one of the tall trees that we hope remains upright for many years. Well, thank you for having me. I've loved it and I would love to come to Australia. I hope to do fewer of the trips I do too frequently, but I haven't been to Australia for far too long and I'd love to come. Right, got you. So thank you, Zannie. Thank you everyone else for joining us for this latest Lowy Institute Live event. Our next live streamed event will be next Wednesday, the 8th of July. It will feature a conversation on the 2020 Lowy Institute poll with the Sydney Morning Herald's Peter Harcher, as well as my colleagues Natasha Kasam and Alex Oliver. Please also keep an eye open for our podcasts, COVIDcast and my own podcast, The Director's Chair, available on SoundCloud, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Recent episodes of The Director's Chair featured David Miliband and Rory Stewart, probably both favourites of The Economist. And the next episode will feature the Australian Defence Minister, Linda Reynolds. In the meantime, thank you again, Zannie. And from everyone at the Lowy Institute, thank you for joining us today and stay safe and well. Good evening.