 Welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs and today I'm absolutely thrilled and delighted to have Kim Stanley Robinson, the legendary, world-renowned and wonderful writer, especially science fiction writer, to have a fantastic discussion. Stan, this is a show that has featured many of the world's leading historians and but you're the first historian of the future that I've had on and I think I think it is the right way to describe your work. You are writing the history of the next two centuries, I think very accurately I might say, and I was taken with the the book cover blurb on the ministry for the future which we'll start off with another leading author Jonathan Latham is quoted as saying the best science fiction nonfiction novel I've ever read and when I read this novel and enjoyed it enormously I said this man has sat through a lot of UN meetings because I thought the book was so apt at describing the year after year UN deliberations about this critical subject of climate change when I asked you when we first had a chance to chat about all those UN meetings that you must have sat through you said no I never went to one so amazing anyway all hats off to you for that but this is the best novel of the future of UN negotiations that I ever read and by the way for anyone listening if that sounds a little strange it's an absolute joy to read so I just want to be very clear about that as well it's a fantastic book but how could you write a book like this so sharp and I thought so accurate about how things work and don't work but only learning about the UN after the fact I think or going to UN meetings after the fact well they must resemble other I've sat in on academic meetings a lot of conferences scientific conferences for sure and so it's a kind of a combination of the two I I was imagining the UN to be a kind of a space where the conferences like the scientific conferences that I have been to like the AGU meeting or the ACS American Chemical Society my wife's society the Society for Environmental Toxicologists and Chemists CTAC been to a lot of CTAC meetings and then academia I although I've not been an academic my whole for many decades I began as an instructor of freshman composition in the University of California system when I was young and got my PhD that and that requires a fair bit of meetings I don't think they were that different although having said that when I did see the UN meetings specifically COP26 in Glasgow I wished like anything that I had had that experience before I wrote ministry it would have been a little sharper on details and there was something unpredictably strange about the COP meetings I the the people who invited me were the UK hosts Nigel Topping the UK government and they gave me a red pass so I could go right into the negotiation sessions rather than being in the blue zone where it's a trade zone or the green zone so I had to have that explained to me by my UN host is Stan you can go anywhere you want I didn't know what the red pass meant and after that they told me which meetings to go to and what I found unusual there and something that I didn't couldn't imagine was the slow meticulous argument over sentences that essentially it was an editing process of what the statement that was going to come out and the Paris agreement requires each COP to make new promises to ratchet up the pressure and it was more than 50% perhaps 70% young women by which I mean women in their 30s and 40s a very serious very cheerful they were lawyers they were diplomats maybe a couple scientists and they were working over these sentences which is a process that I'm quite familiar with from my own work and I just loved it and then there would be like a maybe an old Brit who had been at Bretton Woods with a battered briefcase and kind of a limp and ancient like I was had to kind of ballast or provide some low key to ironic humor to these serious discussions of sentence making and I watched them for an hour argue about whether a data presentation should be in rows or columns and because of my wife's work I know that that can be serious that the presentation of data can provide clarity or it can obscure things so I was entertained but when I talked to my you and host afterwards about that they groaned and they said that's why we're doomed we're too slow we're too slow we're not going fast enough and they had this horrible feeling that as admirable as as the cop process might be it's going slower than the crisis is and that after all is is the theme of your works and and really powerfully so that as as our great historian of the future you are in fact describing how slow it goes compared to what's happening on the planet and and I think you introduced a concept in in another work about a decade ago 2132 if I'm correct the dithering of this long process that is arguing about sentences while the planet burns in a way and I must say my overwhelming life experience in this since I started my career as an incoming first day butting economist 50 years ago is that I've watched 50 years of discussion on this where you're wondering when do we get to the action so that negotiation over words which I thought you must have watched over and over again because it really is part of the cadence of the ministry for the future flying to meetings hoping something's going to happen well not quite yet flying to the next meetings and then real life at the same time taking its course as these seemingly endless meetings go on well to I want to reassure our listeners who maybe haven't read the book that I cleverly having written about scientific meetings in my Washington DC trilogy sometimes called science in the capital sometimes called green earth when I compressed it to one volume a lot of meetings and it began to drive me crazy and the novel kind of burst out of the doors and went out doors in this case notes for meetings could suffice I didn't have to dramatize these scenes and I was finding all kinds of literary tricks to make ministry faster and more entertaining and in the kind of play of forms so that what kind of genre will you be reading when you move from one chapter to the next over the hundred and six chapters well you don't know till you start it and if it is going to be a meeting unless it's a crucial one you just get the notes from somebody taking notes of the back it's over very quickly there's also dialogues there are riddles there are it narratives where an object talks to you about its life etc etc the and the eyewitness account I guess that's the crucial innovation for me in literary terms in ministry is that I had a lot of anonymous people who were somehow at a crux moment where we're slow violence turned into fast violence or where something decisive happened and these eyewitness accounts are not like dramatized scenes in fiction they are faster there they cut to the chase they make judgments about the actor and history itself like this is what it meant to me this is what it meant to the world I saw it myself that I found a beautiful genre very emotional but also very fast and so that sense of propulsion I think really helped this novel I mean it's long but the chapters are short and a lot of stuff is happening and I think that's crucial to the feeling that you're talking about of history I like it that you talk about this as being historical science fiction is indeed a historical fiction but the problem is if you set a novel five million years in the future anything could be happening and the historical link between now and then is disappeared on you if you set it five years in the future you're doing a kind of a realism of the present but with a trajectory to it you're pushing one aspect or another that reveals your theory of history like this this is why things are going to happen the way they are and this is why the present feels the way it does so ministry is definitely near future science fiction I mean I started essentially now and run it out three decades and try to imagine a kind of a best case scenario that you can still believe in that was well I thought that time horizon was indeed superb I of course I you mentioned even political changes say in India that relate to the current political scene but within 10 years is a very plausible switch over or making those links to what we are holding right now but far enough ahead that you're telling us something quite important of how things can unfold and I would also tell you that I first read the book as it were by listening to it on the audio book because this was the the the covid period so I was home and taking long walks in the afternoon and listening and it's a wonderful book to listen to I must say especially because there there are short quick chapters as you say lots of huge quick changes of venue and it works very well as a drama played out on an audiobook reading it also is of course wonderful but it gives a different feel to it yeah well I I I've listened to enough of the audio book to think they did a wonderful job all of the different voices the different accents of English it's it's a pleasure and I don't yeah I love the fact that the as as it were the the minister of the ministry for the future that is the the UN official who's a wonderful character Mary Murphy has her Irish accent and and has her wonderful character in this and and actually shows agency something can be done and that's pretty uplifting for those of us working in this seemingly endlessly ponderous negotiations of 196 signatories and so forth but yeah hearing hearing her voice counts because of your experiences at the UN I I wanted to ask you about this the the COP system and the Paris Agreement is a consensus model where every nation has to sign off on the annual document that's put out at the end of the COP meeting and Zehdel Rad Hussein was frustrated by this and saying that's an explanation for how slow it is that the consensus model is unusual even in the UN much less the rest of international diplomacy and he was hoping for something more like majority rules or something that might make the process be bolder and faster and since you you know with the SDGs I wonder what you thought of that you know it has cut both ways the urgency should come not necessarily through the shortcut of a majority vote but but actually through the understanding of what we're really facing more clearly the fact that there is unanimity if I think about it yes of course it made things slower but one example where it made things better was in the Paris process in 2015 the small island states which otherwise would be completely rolled over in the system absolutely held their ground in Paris and said we need the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit in there because that's us going underwater if you violate that and many people scoffed and said well we're not going to achieve 1.5 degrees it's not possible and why put it in there and the small island states said there is no agreement without it and it actually found its way in and while we're not going to hold to 1.5 degrees at least without an overshoot almost surely the fact of the matter is it's played actually perhaps the most constructive role of some clarification of what we're really doing in all of this of anything that I've seen and just in a nutshell of course the agreement says we should aim to keep well below two degrees Celsius and no one quite knows what that means only diplomats would say that because it's not really a target but they said well below two degrees and then the small island states because of this unanimity rule were able to push the 1.5 degree we should aim to stay below 1.5 degrees then the scientists came in soon after that in the intergovernmental panel and they said oh 1.5 degrees absolutely far more serious than anything else we could set and you have to decarbonize by mid-century in order to be able to have a reasonable chance to hit that and so suddenly we had at least a little bit of clarity about the what to do and so thinking about it you know the holdouts the holdouts in any rule you pick would be powerful countries first of all whether it's majority rule or not if you don't have the US and China and the European Union in there you're not going to have any kind of meaningful agreement period but maybe the unanimity rule oddly enough I never really thought about it so straightforwardly until your question enabled some of the otherwise nearly voiceless countries to have some voice but in the end in the end we come to something which I think is fundamental in in your books very accurate very clear very important stand and I think you really nail it the slowness is not actually these government negotiations or the UN it is that we have a system of economics we have real power we have big corporate power we have lots of powerful interests and the system's really a system you know it's not just there to be altered because some diplomats say so the diplomats are there because there are governments that are really enthralled to powerful interests after all and I think the books make clear to my mind beautifully that there's a deeper system at work and it is slow it is deeply locked into place it is about money it is about capitalism it is about greed that that engenders and the capacity of rich people who can easily know what's going on to not care about what's going on is a stunning feature those who are in control of the major enterprises that really could make a difference yes I I appreciate that what you're saying I am interested in trying to suggest ways that we can make the system that we are in right now work faster to confront them the mass extinction event that we're starting so we have the nation-state system you know Treaty of Westphalia all that sovereignty and we have global capitalism the kind of system of accumulation and extraction and exploitation of less powerful people by more powerful people this this system I've argued against it my whole career as an American leftist and indeed like in my Mars novels I would present a different political economy and this is what utopian novels do made up from scratch using earlier models but having that almost hypothetical moment of we're writing a new constitution here and we're making a new political economy let's make a better one that's all very well and it's interesting and fun but that's not the situation that we're in now in the world and so my own political preferences such as they are because I'm pretty labile in that regard with a except for always preferring public over private the commons over property and so on just the usual leftist values of egalitarianism etc so what the system that we're in we need to dodge a mass extinction event using it so in ministry I had to think about Keynesianism about a Piketty type tax structures that there there shouldn't perhaps rich people should be taxed out of existence perhaps there should be a floor under which no human being can fall of security and adequacy that's that's true and then the biosphere as a citizen that has to be healthy for us to be healthy using the tools that we have now and therefore the central banks fiat money quantitative easing the so-called carbon coin which is a kind of a green quantitative easing not dissimilar from this recent IRA bill but comprehensive and these these are much less radical changes innovations that I was struggling to imagine what we could do in the system that we currently have in that the you know the European Union if you're a member state of something rather than a sovereign nation that's a huge change psychologically and legally and fiscally so there were models there since we're all supposedly member states of the of the Paris Agreement for instance of the UN and and as you said the big nations think they can do what they want there's a there's a psychological set of sovereignty there that is a little bit unhelpful and exaggerated that the concept of a member state is good at making something more global which is what we need now so these were the kind of thoughts that went into the the crafting of the plot of ministry for the future a little bit um i'm you a little bit desperate i think you must know this feeling that you've got a system you need to make a fix you got to use the tools you've got and some improvisation and is required well i what i what i think is compelling about this book and and new york 2140 stan is it it's not a utopian novel that's for sure it's not a dystopian novel either it is it's a history of the future it really is and it shows how things can unfold at multiple levels and that is also both fun interesting thought-provoking and and a great read and by that i mean there are the un processes there are the central bankers there but there are also individuals on the ground coping with an extreme heat wave there are desperate young people forming a terrorist cell as as the response to the the dithering that's going on so they take desperate action there is the government of india saying we have to take this into our own hands no one cares about us we've had a massive die-off because of this we're gonna put sulfates into the atmosphere do geo engineering we don't have to ask for anybody's permission what's what's what's accurate about this is that there is a a background deep dynamic but then there's agency all over the place some of it perhaps horrendously wrong-headed or right-headed or not exactly working the way people want but people are trying to react and pushing in a variety of ways and this is why it's not dystopian because there actually are solutions sometimes in the ground from the ground up literally that's spread sometimes a top-down breakthrough occurs usually 20 years after it should have but i think that that's what makes this history which is it is an unfolding of a real complexity and we're dealing with the complexity we'd like the solution now and by the way my experiences for 15 years i was heading an institute at columbia university the earth institute with hundreds of climate scientists and damn it if they didn't tell me every week jeff it's worse than we thought it's going faster than we thought so if you're in the midst of that you know how terrifying this is and you see the contrast because i would spend days then at the un in these parsing sentences and trying to explain what i'm hearing from from the scientific crowd but you're capturing how things can unfold and it's definitely not dystopian though obviously neither is it utopian well i think of it as the utopia of our time if you think of utopia as a name for a kind of history rather than an in-state and this is hg wells is great innovation that the utopia for our time is you dodge the mass extinction event and everything else you can repair later but extinction is irrevocable and a catastrophe for future generations and for the biosphere itself our extended body so it's still a utopian novel but it was very crucial that it started in the present and it was one that you could believe in a kind of reality test that one puts to fiction at all points there is the willing suspension of disbelief there is the ability to read fantasy novels but when you're reading something like this the the reality test is could this really happen and i wanted the novel to pass that test at every point along the way even though at the end of it 30 years on they're in a much better situation than we are now um and so i notice now that for any good thing that happens in the novel something bad immediately follows in the next chapter the mess of history the chaotic nature of it the fact that there's a lot of people who don't agree with our vision of what's going on in the world don't agree that climate changes an existential threat and so on um that had to be acknowledged and become part of the story or else the story wouldn't be realistic enough and i must say the two years since this book came out have been the astonishing to me a bizarre and uh unexpected for sure and what it what it's taught me is people are desperate for a story like this any strange peccadillos of this particular novel are irrelevant or because of the hunger for a story that we could scrape through now the scientists are telling us that if we did indeed do everything right we still are right on the inside edge of these planetary boundaries so it's it's just barely possible that this is a uh a story that can come true so it's not a fantasy or um or cruel optimism i hope but but you can't say for sure because you're talking about the future and it's changing very very rapidly in front of us and we're closing in on a planetary boundaries that if we break them we can't claw back even if we wanted to even if we devoted all of human civilization's effort to it we can't bring i don't know the ocean back to health or various planetary boundaries we can't stop the permafrost from melting and dumping a huge load of methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at which point we're we're cooked even with geoengineering so the moment is super dangerous and presenting a positive story on the one hand it has the dangers of creating complacency oh we're gonna scrape through let's not worry about it on the other hand if you don't have that story then you're just caught in the world of dystopia and post-apocalyptic uh the imaginary of our time over doom so let's just party a kind of Gurdadama rung well it was yeah you know i i think well the books uh new york 2140 came first or before this one uh it chronologically it follows this book uh new this book the ministry for the future takes us to mid-century basically uh and it gives the sense that by mid-century after lots of very serious disasters and a a lot of global warming and climate change there is at least a a a budding new global civilization that is coming to grips with this challenge but one of the interesting sidebars of ministry for the future is this attempt to pump water in Antarctica from under one of the ice sheets to prevent it from creating the disaster of sea level rise uh i can tell you for the last 15 years my lead climate guru in my close colleague and a a genius and a wonderful person james hansen uh has been telling me in advance of IPCC and others by many years how dangerous the Antarctic situation is and how we are basically committed to multi-meter sea level rise but over what time span hard to know but this overshoot of carbon in the atmosphere is likely to have devastating effects unless we not only stabilize but really reduce the atmospheric concentrations of co2 yes a point that i would make even a scientific point is your modest optimism that 30 years or so of somewhat more dithering and some terrorism and upheavals and some disasters the world could get around to a new political economy isn't inconsistent with the fact that by then we could actually lose a significant piece of west Antarctic ice sheet to later in later in the century or on some timescale like that and it's notable i want to turn to new york 2140 good i i often say by the way in speeches around the world that i too live on a small island economy because i am a man had night and we are a small island economy an unusual one and this remarkable novel new york 2140 takes place after what you call the the two giant pulses that end up creating well one or two why don't you describe it well i will and it's fun because it comes out of a james hanson paper he was the first of about 18 co-authors from a variety of different scientific disciplines because it's very hard to determine where sea level was in the past because the the lithosphere itself is moving up as and down as well as the hydrosphere moving up and down and so it's highly speculative and this paper was contested by other people it's a controversial one but for me wanting manhattan to be half underwater wanting as a thought experiment to describe a world where manhattan's a kind of a venice at least lower manhattan because of a 50 foot rise in sea level by the near future and the reason it's out in 2140 is that's as near as i could make it seem plausible that hanson pacer paper was hugely encouraging to me despite its controversial nature because once in the emion he he and his colleagues claim so 130 000 years ago or so there was a sea level rise of about 30 feet in one century and this is just radically fast and they tried to explain it and that's where he came up with this phrase the an arctic explanation the ice down there there's a buttress to the buttress the under the west an arctic ice sheet is a kind of a bowl where it's shallower near the edge of the ice sheet in the ocean then it is further inland where it's actually the ground is deeper there the ice is deeper the implication is a lot of ice can come off go out into the ocean melt very quickly and raise sea level and we're very close to that so my those two novels don't describe the same future history i i never like to do that these are different futures but in the new york novel i have them failing in the in ministry for the future i have them actually attempting to cope with that because some glaciologists think that we could possibly slow the glaciers back down to their historic speed and avoid this relatively quick and certainly catastrophic sea level rise because if it does rise that much we've lost all the beaches automatically because they're at sea level but then also all the seaports all the coastal cities i've heard estimates of 10 to 20 percent of humanity um so uh and and many of the great cities of the world are right there at sea level so could we pin those glaciers back down by freezing them back to the bottom well i want to actually i want to write about this again in a nonfiction book about an arctica i've been down there twice i have stories to tell but in the new york book it hasn't worked the two big pulses have meant that lower Manhattan is underwater but also and i know you will appreciate this being a Manhattanite the intertidal zone the new york bay i think the difference between high tide and low tide is 10 or 12 feet and if sea level were 50 feet higher there would be many blocks like maybe 10 to 20 blocks of midtown or lower whatever in the 30s in terms of the avenues that would be of the streets i mean there would be underwater at high tide but exposed to the land at low tide and then you get into very weird property laws because of the old roman law that the intertidal cannot be owned so there i had my games i could make fun of finance i could make fun of the the tendency for finance to want to make money off of anything including catastrophe so i had a great game to play there and i would i mean i new york 2140 is a lot more was more fun to write i think it's more fun to read it's it's a comedy of coping it doesn't have the kind of grim edge of breakdown that ministry has to cope with it's simply a different kind of novel and i found it yes very well great great fun to read especially since i'm in the upper west side we stay above the the flood zone and i remember by the way i mean of course i remember vividly a decade ago with our superstorm sandy which was a devastation and created massive loss of life and and around 60 billion dollars of damage in one day my wife and i were walking around the upper west side feeling seems to be a little bit exaggerated but on the lower part of manhattan of course it was a utter devastation that we didn't know about until until the next morning and you you tell that story incredibly i'll and i'll never forget with superstorm sandy one of my very esteemed colleagues at the earth institute was saying for years and years and years we're going to have massive flooding here we're going to have massive flooding here the city wasn't paying any attention state wasn't paying any attention the army corps of engineers no attention and then this colleagues house was caught in the floods in disaster which i found so sad and and ironic because he was the one that had nailed even to which subway stations were going to be the ones to be buried buried by the flood yeah i i realized again this is a book that has a lot of fascinating agency to it and a lot of similar politics actually a system that is a pretty deep system like you say how do you make money off of every disaster which incidentally you know is hilarious in the way you tell it but it also struck me it reminded me of an event that i went to where a hedge fund manager very rich successful hedge fund manager into a big crowd described his past year of each event and then how he reacted to it in the market and i remember every event because i'm involved with public policy on almost everything and i realized i miss the instinct every single terrible event he thought well does that mean i should short the kroner or long the end and i never had that impression even once during the year i was saying oh my god what do we do about it geopolitical crisis how can we stop the war how are we going to save these people but the hedge funds really are trained in it in a completely crazy way yeah what is the market play from all of this yes exactly and they're they've abstracted out of the world in a way that you have not the reality that money means nothing if civilization has crashed if the biosphere has crashed you can't cash in it will be pointless so they need to be thinking differently i had great education for new york 2140 a group at uc santa cruz and at new york university randy martin the financialization of daily life these were my teachers for the finance approach to life and then the big short that's a wonderful book by michael lewis i think describing the the the mentality of of of finance of financialization as being a kind of parasite on the real economy and also on the real biosphere and so that has a kind of a a black comedy to it how can we make money off this but also my financier in the book franklin gar he learns to think differently he he's probably the character that changes the most in having a kind of a an epiphany or a satori on the hudson river up there near the cloisters and apparently i'm trying to get the girl after all yeah exactly but it changes his mind exactly yes and and real the real economy that that investment could if you went long on reality and on human welfare in the future then you would have to invest in different things and and what i'm seeing what i saw at glasco was what they're calling risk adjusted investment that means the risk adjustment is taking reality into account taking the climate change into account and now risk adjusted investment that the the group that mark carney assembled at glasco to promise to use their assets for green work and that was 130 trillion dollars worth of asset a fairly significant portion of the world's private assets that was a good sign it doesn't matter if there are some broken promises there that there's some greenwashing in it that does not matter the fact that private capital is now risk adjusting um is right well at least yeah we have to take this into account at least yeah if only to understand how future assets might respond to future events and you can see the political fight against it that the esg's the the these being risk adjusted is politically volatile and controversial because some people are committed to the gyrtodomarung in other words if we have to change or the world goes down the world is going down because we're not going to change so that political battle is is being clarified for us and it might lead to um further progress some of the things i've learned since i uh wrote ministry which was 2019 have made me more encouraged rather than less encouraged i think a better future than the one in ministry is actually possible now and this is because trump lost this is because Bolsonaro lost um and the the network for greening the financial system this consortium or or study group of the big central banks i didn't even know about it and they are working on a carbon coin equivalent um these are this is news to me and what i realized is you cannot keep up and actually even from your position you can't keep up with the present things are changing too fast there's too much to know you can't possibly know at all one individual has to have a filtering system and you accidentally filter out um sometimes excellent news that is extremely uh that can give you reasons for hope or projects to pursue um this glacier project i thought it was one glaciologist crazy idea i was willing to run with it actually it's a fairly well developed plan amongst a whole group of glaciologists and it's still highly speculative but it's you know it's worth pursuing it might work etc etc it would be a kind of military operation but we need the military doing useful things so i've i've had a mixed a couple years but quite an education i thought one interesting point in both books i think you use the same expression riot strike riot as a a little bit of the fact that things won't just sit still for big power necessarily yeah one of the events in new york 2140 without going into all the plot details is that there's a mass social reaction not surprisingly after the city basically is disappearing underwater yes that's my friend uh joshua clover that's the name of his book riot strike riot and he's my friend and teacher here in davis and i want to say he's he's part of a discussion includes andres mom how to blow up a pipeline or erica jenna oh my god well somebody knew how to blow up a pipeline yeah well let's have i have my suspicions too and i'm not too happy about it i have to say well um that book is he's really um it's not a technical manual for saboteurs it's a it's a tempting to make a distinction between sabotage and murder and what is civil resistance and so why civil resistance works by erica chenna with that's another important book on these topics what do you do and especially for the new york novel i was very involved in the idea that the public can bring down the financial system by a targeted non-payment of their debts student debt mortgages rents if you if ever on 4th of july of 2024 everybody didn't pay the banks would fold and i thought in when i wrote the new york novel which is more like i don't know 2015 2016 that if we nationalize the banks the private banks like we nationalized gm in 2008 that that would solve all problems now this was overly simplistic i learned things since then that made me think that that there is no total solution and that would be interesting but it wouldn't solve all our problems but it would be interesting and that the public could make it happen by a targeted fiscal action this was news to me and so the plot of new york 20 and 40 i was just very excited like oh my gosh there can be effective public action beyond just voting we can bring the system down and then have a government in power that would take it back over so there would be more public power over private capital well i don't know if we even need that but it's interesting to think it may go back in some way to leviticus to the jubilee which is the idea of a fresh start and and yes i think that there could be some merit in that i wanted to ask you about one of the epigraphs of the many wonderful epigraphs in new york 2140 you quote Picasso i thought a wonderful quotation art is not truth art is a lie that enables us to realize the truth i felt that was speaking about your your your books they're not lies but they are helping us to realize the truth well thank you they are long complicated lies that's what somebody told me novels were that's why they only read non-fiction and i thought well i don't know why that doesn't ring right but Picasso clarified that it's a wonderful quotation and i think it fits well and to say that i i think these are not complicated lives they really are helping us to see the truth you know we discussed it briefly and we're all going to learn about it the ministry for the future is soon to be followed by the summit of the future of the UN in 2024 i can't help thinking your book had something to do with that although i don't know that yes or no but it certainly could have and and and may have so we're going to have a world summit for the first time to talk about the future explicitly just love your love your closing thoughts on that well uh some insider friends in the UN have told me that indeed ministry for the future had had a an effect on this decision i'm very very pleased again yeah astounded and i i think i will be invited to take part in it as a kind of a court jester figure which is great and i i i'm hoping that you'll be there what i want i'm planning what i want i'm reading i've read you know the the ages of globalization and a new foreign policy or two most recent books and what i'm hungry for from you and the economists at your level is precisely some kind of neo-kainzian thomas pickettie political economy the the political economy for our time the the the set of laws mechanisms guardrails procedures regulations um coherently laid out for the world to use as tools going forward because i think it's missing i i've been looking i haven't found it i think it's hard i i looked into modern monetary theory very interesting a kind of neo-kainzianism you've got to we've got to get past the neoliberal the market rules the state it facilitates the market that's not going to cut it absolutely we need a return and i've often used the analogy of world war two where the allied governments in particular took over the economy the the british government said to the bank of england you're now just part of the treasury we're going to tell you what to do we're in an emergency and therefore the highest rate of return quarterly profit shareholder value these are terrible rubrics if you're trying to save the biosphere we need a different set of rubrics and a different and a an advanced set of rules based on what we've got now you can't just go theoretical and make up platos republic or whatever you have to actually have and and you've been doing that so you're already in the groove and but to make it um maybe i i mean that's very interesting i'll tell you last week we had a a meeting at the vatican actually of a a wide range of thinkers on the theme that we need new economic institutions which is what you're referring to and what you implicitly and explicitly write about new economic ethics as well we need to think about what we're doing in a different way actually the market system is based on an ethical system it's often not made very explicit it's a little weird it came out of out of england really it's a it's a british empiricist ethics from the 16th to the 18th centuries and it gets a lot weird and a lot wrong and we definitely need something something new and something better so as you as you write your next time i'm trying to write a principles textbook based on those themes so i'm working on on that myself right now so we have a lot we can chat about in that well i hope to come to new york for these for this summit of the future and maybe we can meet there but i'm very glad to hear you say that and this is and what you say chimes with this economics is a powerful social science but if you think about it as a kind of a geometry that has axioms and it has theorems that the axioms have to be reexamined from scratch because that's what you're talking about ethics these are not physical properties these are social properties that we make up ourselves so if that absolutely you solve for a different equation by changing the axioms okay we want no humans suffering we want the biosphere healthy solve for that as a political economy so yeah exactly exactly on point this will be our next discussion all right which i will hugely enjoy once again thank you so much for being together for this discussion the ministry of the future new york 2140 and all your wonderful writings on these and other subjects they're an absolute joy and a gift for the world so we're most grateful and so much fun to be with you thank you for joining book club with jeffrey sacks and it's been an absolute delight stand to to be together with you today thanks so much well thank you jeff and thanks for your work and i look forward to seeing more