 Good late afternoon, early evening, everyone. Nice to see you here. My name is Paul Lakeland. I direct the Center for Catholic Studies. Lots of you know me, but more importantly, lots of you are familiar in one way or another with our speaker this evening. So it's my job simply to introduce him. He'll talk for a while. He'll be ready to take questions and so on. I haven't asked him yet, but maybe he'll even sign your book when we're done. Let me tell you, when you get a book signed, it immediately loses 10% of its value. But it's nice to have it to carry around. So Anthony Annette is the author of this book. Many of you have seen this before called Cathenomics, How Catholic Tradition Can Create a More Just Economy. Dr. Annette has his PhD from Columbia in economics. And he is a senior advisor at the Sustainable Development Solutions Network in Washington, DC. Comes up to New York from time to time. And thanks to his generosity to us, we were able to snag him to come up here today. It's a book that's been read by some of the people, some of the students here in an honest class this semester and read by the faculty's very grand-sounding presidential seminar in the Catholic intellectual tradition. So Professor Annette knows that he's among friends, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't sharpen your questions as the time goes on and be ready to ask him. So without any more ado, please join me in welcoming Dr. Anthony Annette. Thanks so much, Paul. Thanks to all of you for coming out today. It's a great privilege and a pleasure for me to come to a Jesuit institution. I think I'm a big fan of the work that the Jesuits do throughout the world and for their support of Catholic social teaching. What I want to talk to you today is based on my book, Catholics, but in particular, I want to talk to you about what Catholic social teaching has to say about the market economy. Now, any of you who studied any economics or any business or even if you haven't, it's obviously a very live question, what sort of ethical position do we need to take about the market economy today? I think the starting point is to start with the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith, who famously said that the invisible hand of the market combined with self-interest, combined with competition, would lead to increasing wealth for everybody in for nations. That was the fundamental insight of Adam Smith in the wealth of nations written in 1776. And Adam Smith, to be fair to him, was onto something because it turns out that the market economy does not do a bad job at creating wealth. The problem is it doesn't do a very good job in apportioning and distributing that wealth among people. And that's where the Catholic social tradition really comes in. So to start off, I want to talk about, I'm going to say it sounds like a big number, 10 key points on what Catholic social teaching has to say about the market economy. We've started with Adam Smith. We know that the market is good at producing wealth. But what else can we say about the market as it pertains to social justice in particular? Well, so I want to list 10 key points that will kind of cast a moral boundary around the market economy. And in doing this, I will be referring to a bunch of key papal encyclicals written by Popes, starting with Pope Leo XIII in 1891, who wrote Rerum Navarro, ending with Pope Francis in 2020, who wrote an encyclical called Fratelli Tutti, and everything in between. I would argue that these encyclicals, all of them, taken together as a corpus of knowledge, enable us to derive a coherent and a consistent set of principles to frame our discussion of the market economy. So without further ado, let me talk about those 10 points. The first point is that the market needs to be governed by a directing principle. This comes from Pope Pius XI in 1931 in an encyclical called Quadragesimo Anno. And I think I can quote this because he's very blunt and very direct. He sometimes reminds me of how Pope Francis talks. He said, the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces. From this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualist economic teaching. Free competition clearly cannot direct economic life. Therefore, it is most necessary that economic life be again subjected to and governed by a true and effective directing principle. So the market needs something to govern it that goes beyond the atomized agents of the free market itself. And I will argue as this talk progresses that the government, that the state, needs to take a very hands-on role in terms of formulating this directing principle to guide the market economy. So that's the first point from Pius XI. The second point is that Catholic social teaching rejects the idea that economic activity must be underpinned by self-interest and competition. This goes against what Adam Smith said back in 1776. It says in contrast that all economic transactions and encounters should be guided by values such as solidarity, fraternity, reciprocity, and gratuitousness. Grituitousness means you do something to benefit another person without the expectation of getting anything in return. You do it because you want to give a gift to the person. This is most associated with Pope Benedict XVI, who wrote an encyclical in 2009 called Caritas in Veritate. And he said that authentically human relationships of friendship, solidarity, and reciprocity must be conducted within economic activity, not only outside it or after it. You often hear people claim that altruism is for your life among your family and friends. But once you step into the economic realm, then self-interest takes over, then competition takes over. But we are not bifurcated individuals like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We are one single human being with one set of motivations. And economics should not be an exception to the normal ethical rule. So that's the second point from Pope Benedict. The third point is absolutely critical. Everything hinges on this, I would argue. It's that private property is always subject to what is known as the universal destination of goods. Now, what does that mean? The universal destination of goods is the notion that the goods of the earth are destined for all people without exception and without exclusion. This goes back to a point made by Thomas Aquinas, who argued that private property is only legitimate when private ownership goes together with what he referred to as common use. And as the Second Vatican Council puts it, in using these earthly goods, man should regard the external things that he legitimately possesses not only as his own, but also as common in the sense that they should be able to benefit not only him but also others. So Pope John Paul II said that private property always comes with a social mortgage. And Pope Francis said that property rights are only secondary natural rights, not primary natural rights, secondary natural rights. And when private ownership and the universal destination of goods are out of alignment or out of balance, it's the job of the government, of the public authorities to bring them back into alignment and can most obviously do that through taxation. Now one implication of this is that Catholic social teaching rejects two extremes. It rejects on one hand kind of communist collectivism which abolishes all rights to private property and it rejects on the other hand free market libertarianism which says that property has no social role and private property rights are fairly absolute. These were called by Pope Pius XI as the twin rocks of shipwreck and we want to avoid both of these twin rocks of shipwreck. So that's point three, the universal destination of goods. Point four, when we talk about human rights in the Catholic tradition, the primary rights listed are economic rights. The first right listed, and this goes from an encyclical by Pope John XXIII called Pochamentaris, Peace on Earth, which is 60 years old this week actually, 60 years old. And he says, here are the main rights. Man has the right to live. For first right listed is the right to life. But what comes after that? Not civil rights, not political rights, but economic rights. He has the right to bodily integrity and to the means necessary for the proper development of life, particularly food, clothing, shelter, medical care, rest and the necessary social services. In consequence, he has the right to be looked after in the event of ill health, disability, widowhood, old age, or enforced unemployment. He goes on to list other economic rights, including the right to be given the opportunity to work, to just wages, and to own property. So economic rights always come first in Catholic social teaching. And they're also linked to duties, which again makes it kind of distinct from the way we normally think about human rights. So that's universal destination of goods and economic rights. So that's point number four. Point number five, relatedly, is that there are many needs that cannot be met on the market. This was a point made by Pope John Paul II. He says, there are many human needs which find no place on the market. It is a strict duty of justice and truth not to allow fundamental human needs to remain unsatisfied and not to allow those burdens by such needs to perish. Many of these goods are either not provided by the market at all or only available to those who can afford to pay for them. But Pope John Paul II says, these needs must be met. That's point number five. Point number six is there's a special duty of the government to protect the poor and to protect workers. This goes all the way back to Pope Leo XIII in 1891 in the very first social and political called Rerum Navaram. And Leo basically says, don't worry about the rich. The rich can protect themselves. The rich have enough resources to be able to look after themselves. Government doesn't need to worry about them. The government needs to be worried about the poor and the workers because they are vulnerable to economic dislocation that come with any market economy. This lies behind the principle of the preferential option for the poor, which is a core principle of Catholic social teaching. And it justifies government intervention to redistribute resources from rich to poor, from capital to labor, from employer to worker, and also to respect the bargaining rights of workers. That's point number six. Point number seven is that Catholic social teaching has no truck with neoliberalism or trickle down economics. These are explicitly condemned. Pope Francis condemns neoliberalism in his encyclical Fratelli Tutti from 2020. He said, neoliberalism simply reproduces itself by resorting to the magic theories of spillover or trickle as the only solution to societal problems. There is little appreciation of the fact that this does not resolve the inequality that gives rise to new forms of violence threatening the fabric of society. Pope John Paul II also condemned neoliberalism by name back in 1999. He condemned what he calls a system based on a purely economic conception of man, which considers profit and the law of the market as its only parameters to the detriment of the dignity and the respect due to individuals and peoples. And likewise, Pope Paul VI in 1967, condemned the system that presents profit as the chief spore to economic progress. Free competition as the guiding norm of economics and private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right. That's point number seven. Point number eight is that in Catholic social teaching, the sole goal of business is not just to maximize profits. This goes against the idea of Milton Friedman, who argued that the only social role of business is to reward shareholders. Business has no other job but to reward shareholders by maximizing profits. Shareholders own the business. Businesses are responsible to those shareholders and they must deliver a maximum return to those shareholders. That's their only job. Catholic social teaching adopts a different position. Pope Benedict XVI has endorsed not shareholder capitalism but stakeholder capitalism. He's noted that businesses are responsible to a wider array of shareholders, including workers, customers, suppliers, the environment and the community at large. He actually called for hybrid firms whereby businesses can make profits but also serve a social purpose at the same time. That's point number eight. Point number nine is Catholic social teaching emphasizes the dignity of work and the rights of workers. It emphasizes the importance of work, decent dignified work for human flourishing. As Pope Francis Putzid, work is a necessity, part of the meaning of life on this earth, a path to growth, human development and personal fulfillment. This gives rise to a moral injunction to prioritize decent dignified work as a goal of public policy. This gives rise to a robust set of workers' rights, including the right to form unions and to bargain collectively and to strike when necessary. Pope Francis Putzid, as Pope Francis said, there's no such thing as a good society without a good union. Instead of collectivization, Catholic social teaching refers to the socialization of the means of production. And here I refer to Pope John Paul II. And by socialization of the means of production, he referred to allowing workers to share in the ownership and management of enterprises. Ownership and management of enterprises, you want workers to have a share on that. That's point number nine. Point number 10 and the final point is that Catholic social teaching calls for a new form of progress that goes beyond economic growth. Pope Paul VI called for integral human development by which he meant the development of the whole person and all people ahead of economic growth. And especially in light of the environmental crisis, Pope Francis calls for a new type of progress, one that is healthier, more human, more social, more integral. He said that the idea of infinite or unlimited growth is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth's goods. And this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond limit. Pope Francis here is calling for integral and sustainable human development. They, in a nutshell, are the 10 key points of Catholic social teaching that surround the market economy. So as you can see, the market economy is legitimate. It rejects communism or state ownership of the means of production, but it sets up a rather robust moral boundary around the market economy in many different dimensions. It calls for state involvement. It calls for the protection of workers. It calls for a new type of progress. It calls for a different type of business. It calls for the respect of economic rights. In all these areas, Catholic social teaching is indeed pretty radical. And when Pope Francis talks about the market economy, he uses very strong, strident, robust, urgent terms. But what he is saying is not new. It's incomplete agreement with what his predecessors have said. Complete agreement. Let me move on to the second half of this talk now, which is what if Catholic social teaching calls for such a moral boundary to be placed around the market economy, what would that actually look like in practice? What kind of system are we talking about? Well, here we're in the tricky ground because Catholic social teaching does not offer any particular economic system as a guide. That's really now this job. That's the job of people like us who are trying to interpret Catholic social teaching in the secular world. But nonetheless, I think we can come up with some different approaches that might have been suggested by the papal and cyclicals for how this would look in practice. And I think there are three types of systems that have been put forward and different people favor different things. One system that's often put forward is called distributism. Distributism says you want to get widespread ownership of private property. You want every single person to own a small amount of private property, as opposed to our current economy where large corporations and the super rich own nearly everything. This is a summing Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum said things that could be interpreted in a distributed direction. A lot of English Catholics in the early 20th century were very favorable towards distributism. The problem with distributism is that if you want to give everybody a certain amount of property, that would mean large scale expropriation of property today. It will be a very large state involvement in the economy, probably unrealistic. So what's the second system? The second system is called corporatism. Corporatism says you want to divide society into different groups that work together cooperatively for the common good. Again, people often think in romantic terms of what medieval gills look like. You have gills of different trades and professions that govern their own membership and they all work together harmoniously. The problem with corporatism was it was discredited by Mussolini and fascism who tried to put it into practice in 1920s Italy. And there's little reason to think that it would be much more successful today. The third strand, which I think is the more promising strand, is what I call the mixture of Christian democracy and social democracy. This is the twinning of a market economy with economic rights. Remember those economic rights that are emphasized by Catholic social teaching? The use of a welfare state to protect people from the swings of fortune that comes with any market system that comes with capitalism. And I think this is by far the most successful economic system. And I want to explain why. Why are the origins of social democracy? Well, this can be traced to the 19th century. In one sense, it can be traced to a kind of a Christian socialist tradition emphasizing such forms as worker cooperatives, democracy in the workplace, and guild socialism. A very British tradition there. But there's also a more secular tradition that social democracy emerged out of the socialist Marxist tradition as a kind of a revisionism, which rejected Marxism, which rejected the class struggle, which rejected Marx's idea of dialectical materialism and focused more on the need for incremental reforms. And the idea that you could live within a market economy and live within democracy. Remember Marxism basically said, capitalism has contains the seeds of its own destruction that every form you went from agrarian society to feudalism to capitalism, which would eventually turn into socialism by a certain historical law, which was built into it. That's called the dialectical materialism, historical materialism. And that would happen through a worker revolution, a proletarian revolution. Problem is in the 19th century, that just didn't happen. The Marxists were waiting and waiting and waiting, and there was no sign of revolution. And the other hand, there are predictions that the working classes would get worse and worse off. Also never happened. Wages actually started to rise in the late 19th century. So people in the socialist tradition were looking for a different answer. And they found this answer in social democracy, which would accept the market system with temperate excesses. It would no longer call for the collective ownership of the means of production that would come with communism, but it would seek a cross-class alliance. In other words, you won't just look to workers, you also look to the middle classes and to farmers and different kinds of groups in society by offering them all different benefits within the market system to protect them from the swings and arrows of outrageous fortune that comes from capitalism. Now I would argue that somewhat counterintuitively, there was a strong conservative element to all of this because social democrat appeals to certain pre-capitalist notions of duty, obligation, reciprocity, the idea that people had obligations to each other, to look after each other, which were thrown out on the capitalism, which became very much you sink or swim in market competition. But social democracy said no, we have obligations, if we're gonna accept the market economy, we need to respect the obligations we have to protect ourselves, to protect each other, to protect the poor, to protect workers. Now, where does Catholic social teaching fit into all of this? Well, I think it influenced the development of post-war Christian and social democracy. It's stronger for Christian democracy, where I would argue that the founders of post-war Christian democracy in countries like France, Germany, and Italy were all Catholics heavily influenced by Catholic social teaching. And in this, they developed what's called a social market economy to protect families from the vagaries of capitalism, a kind of a middle way between the state and the market. I'll skip that bit there. That was Christian democracy. And Christian democracy was twinned very much similar to social democracy, which is much more based in Scandinavia, countries like Sweden, and was much more secular. But nonetheless, there was in the area of economics at least, there was a strong alignment between Christian democracy as practiced in countries like Germany and social democracy as practiced in countries like Sweden, because both supported a state role in regulating the economy in line with the common good, both provided universal social benefits funded by taxes and social security contributions, and both empowered unions as a bulwark, as a protection against excessive corporate power. And countries like Germany went even further and put in place systems like co-determination. And co-determination is a system whereby workers have a share in the governance and management of an enterprise. So workers have the right in Germany to appoint half of the members of boards of governor, boards of directors. Workers also sit on work councils which manage enterprises at the level of the firm. So this is a strong sense, and as we saw earlier, this relates to a Pope John Paul II called the socialization of the means of production. That's Europe. What about the United States? Well, it's trickier here because we don't see a very strong Christian democratic tradition or really much a social democratic tradition. But in 1919, the US Bishops published something called the Program for Social Reconstruction after the First World War. And they called for minimum wages, social insurance for illness, disability and old age, collective bargaining for workers, labor participation and management, public housing, the regulation of monopolies and public control of utilities. That document is over 100 years old but it still will be considered a radical document today. Some of this, but by no means all of it, was implemented by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s. The New Deal limited the excesses of the market. It sought just and harmonious industrial relations including by recognizing strong unions and it protected people from various kinds of market risks including by establishing social security and by providing public employment for workers who needed it. Now, it'll be going a bit too far to say this is a Catholic project but it certainly was influenced by Catholic social teaching and Franklin Roosevelt certainly consulted with Montignor John A. Ryan who was the author of that 1919 Program for Social Reconstruction. And the New Deal eventually became the United States social democratic moment. It was accepted by both political parties and set the scene for a good 30 years from the 1930s through the 1970s, 40 years. All of this gave rise on both sides of the Atlantic to what's called the 30 golden years, 1945 to 1975. This was a remarkable period. It was a period of rising prosperity, of rising wealth. It was a period of low inequality. So that wealth that was generated was shared fairly among the different social classes. And it was a period of financial stability. There were no financial or banking crisis major ones during this period. This was a, the economic growth during this period was much higher than what came afterwards in the 1980s. The average national income per adult during this period rose by 2% a year between 1945 and 1980. It only rose by 1.4% a year after 1980. And since 2000 only by 0.8% a year. So no wonder your generation is facing with unprecedented economic challenges because there's been such a remarkable slowdown and a loss of what we had during the 30 golden years after the Second World War. Now, as documented by the economist Thomas Piketty, what set this period apart is a large rise in both taxation and government spending. Between 1914 and 1980, the tax burden tripled in the United States and quadrupled in Europe. These taxes went into funding social expenditures like education, healthcare and pensions. Taxes were very high. In the United States, in this country, the average top tax rate between 1932 and 1980 was 81%. 81% was the highest tax rate up until 1980 until Reagan cut it. This also was, as I mentioned, the most economically prosperous period in history. So people who say that high taxes lead to low growth don't have the evidence on their side, I'm afraid. Um, if this period was so successful, why was there such a turn towards neoliberalism in the 1980s? Well, it's complicated. I think you saw a slowing of growth in the 1970s which made welfare states harder to maintain because redistribution when the pie isn't growing becomes more prone to conflict. Also there was stubbornly high inflation which led to a general economic malaise and caused people to lose faith in the system. But also there was a turning of the generations. The post-war generation which had seen such solidarity which they inherited from the war started to fade. They started to die off. They started to lose their memories. And instead there was a turnback to free market economics. That free market economics that had been totally discredited by the Great Depression in the 1930s. Neoliberalism was sold on the liberating power of free and open markets. It said that free trade, free capital mobility, financial liberalization and a hands-off role for government would lead to great economic gains. But these gains never materialized. We saw this already. But what did happen in the neoliberal era was inequality spiked. So what little economic wealth was created was hogged, was taken by the super rich in society and very little of it trickled down to ordinary people. This is one of the rocks of shipwreck pointed by Catholic social teaching. It plays down solidarity, the universal destination of goods, economic rights and distributive justice. It's individualistic rather than be rooted in the common good. Because the social democratic era was built on solidarity. A sense of shared purpose, reciprocal obligation and the common good. And today we are seeing the abject failures of neoliberalism, skyrocketing inequality, real wages which haven't risen in 50 years, rising economic precariousness as the only jobs people can get are jobs with very bad pay and terrible benefits. A hollowing out of the working class, increasing on happiness and loneliness, a mental health crisis and debts of despair. Not a great record I'm afraid, not a great record. All of this is leading to social strife and political dysfunction. And the environmental crisis is the great existential crisis of our age as described so profoundly and prophetically by Pope Francis in Laudato Si. This is why I wrote Kathanomics. This is why I wrote the book. Because I think that for our moment today, for the moment that we face today, for the challenges we face today, there's a need for something new. And I think that Catholic social teaching, the principles of Catholic social teaching offer a lot, offer some great wisdom, a great store of wisdom that can be used to overcome the economic challenges we face today and rebuild something better, something like we had during the social democratic era or the Christian democratic era. Because we did it before and it was heavily influenced by Catholic social teaching before. Well, we forgot those lessons. So whether you're Catholic and are informed by your faith, which is great, or whether you're not Catholic and whether you want something that can appeal to the people who want to build something better based on healthier, more integral, more social economic principles, I think Catholic social teaching has a lot to offer. That's why I wrote Kathanomics and that's what I hope to impart to you today. And with that, it's 45 minutes and I'll stop there. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Annett. So we have some time for some questions. So who would like to go first? Professor Della Valley. Thank you so much for that, Dr. Annett. I wondered, so you've been hanging around Catholic circles a little bit. Do you see any movements at the Vatican, for example, conferences they've convened or among in places in the United States or among the bishops in the various continental groups that are picking up this call and are moving things forward? What do you see when you look at the church's contribution now to this kind of thing? I see a fair amount of action at the Vatican, to be honest. So I don't know if you've ever heard of the economy of Francesco, but Pope Francis put together an initiative called the economy of Francesco. And basically, he invited the young people of the world to come join him in a sissy and to dream a new way of thinking about the economy and thinking about economics. And the idea behind the economy of Francesco was you don't appeal to old people like us. You let the young people themselves dream what this economy would look like. They are on the driver's seat. They're taking the lead. Unfortunately, this big gathering, this huge multi-continental gathering which was to take place in the sissy in March 2020. I was all set to go, events intervened. It went online, but that didn't really work. That didn't really work. You can't do these things through Zoom. You just can't. So Pope Francis did eventually convene the sissy meeting. So that is still going on. Probably at a lower level than that would have been had we not had the pandemic, but there it is. I've also been involved in other meetings at the Vatican. There's a group called Ethics in Action which I was involved with, which was bringing together religious leaders from Catholic Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, Indigenous to discuss what would an economy of the common good look like? What common ground do we have? And it turns out there's a lot of common ground between the different religious traditions. And that was a fascinating initiative and there's a book just been published a few months ago on that initiative. And by the way, the forward of that book was written by Pope Francis and Necumenical Patrick Bartholomew. There's another initiative at the Vatican I'm involved with called the fraternal economy, which again is kind of using the Vatican's convening power to try and figure out how you would do economics somewhat differently. What would that mean in very practical sense? What would it mean? So yeah. So a fair amount of action at the Vatican, I would say less so at the level of bishops conferences, at least I'm not too familiar with, maybe there is stuff going on that I'm not familiar with. Hi, as a finance major here at Fairfields, I was wondering that if in Catholics you were saying that finance itself is evil or deregulation in the market is what creates like an evil. No, finance is definitely not evil. So if I, no. Pope Francis said that business is a noble vocation if it serves the common good. Likewise, finance is a noble vocation if it serves the common good. You need finance, you need finance to solve the environmental crisis. You need investment in environmental solutions. So finance is a noble vocation, but the problem is since the 1980s it's become self-referential. It's become more focused on trading in speculation, making money for itself rather than seeking solutions in line with the common good. So it's like everything else about our economy today. If it's aligned with the common good, then we support it. If it's not, we don't. Hi, so in chapter eight of your book you wrote that the idea of debt is something like the idea of debt as something that must always be repaid makes little economic sense. So like I don't really know too much about that. I'm not in the business school here, but I see it as something that almost like it kind of looms over people's heads and holds them like morally and socially accountable for making certain financial decisions. So you use the word always. So like in what instances do you see debt as something that doesn't have to be repaid? And like where do you suggest this money comes from? I know you talked about a system between like the creditors and debtors. Can you like elaborate on that a little bit more? Yeah, in chapter eight I was talking, this is the multilateral chapter, so I was talking about global solutions. So I was specifically there talking about sovereign debt. That's debt of countries. The problem there is, you know, if a country borrows too much or if you could get a liquidity crisis in the country. Therefore, if creditors think there is some risk that you won't be repaid, they will suddenly pull back their lending and you plunge the country into a debt crisis. The problem with that is there's a number of ways out of that. One way out of that is through crippling austerity. The government basically has to cut back on social spending, spending on healthcare and education to be able to pay its foreign, it's not foreign, it could be domestic too, but it's debts. But another solution is you ask the creditors to bear some responsibility for this country. So in other words, why should school children and hospital patients and pensioners be forced to pay the price of this sovereign debt crisis while creditors who are generally richer get paid in full? So it's an issue of justice. It's an issue of sharing the burden. So that's kind of what I was getting at there. And the reason I put it in that chapter in particular is you need an institution at the global level to be able to allow creditor and debtor countries to negotiate these debt restructurings. We have this at the country level that's called bankruptcy procedures. There's no global bankruptcy procedures for governments. So that's kind of what I was getting at there. In chapter eight, you also talked about globalization and trade. And I was just wondering how likely or probable do you think reform across global trade could be considering it does require reform in multiple countries. It's not just an internal issue that we can work out ourselves. Well, I think there is some ways you can reform at the global level. I'll give you the one example that I mentioned in that section is most international trade agreements have something called investor state dispute resolution mechanisms. And that basically says private corporations have the right to sue governments if they think governments are taking some actions that reduce their profits. Corporations have sued governments over taking action to curb climate change because say a fossil fuel company will say you're reducing my profits. This is crazy. This is nothing to do with trade. This could be reformed very easily and very simply at the global level without interfering with trade flows More generally, the way tariffs and non-tariff barriers are negotiated today is generally at the global level. There has been a shift in recent years towards more bilateral, but a lot of it still goes at the global level. So there is the World Trade Organization still has some leeway, I would say, yeah. You spoke about behaviors like solidarity, fraternity, and trust and the ways in which those can powerfully modulate markets. But I'm curious, how do economists think about measuring those kinds of behaviors and modeling those kinds of behaviors? That's really hard. I have yet to see any way to properly model fraternity or solidarity. It's hard to do. You can model cooperation. That's in a, you can do this in game theory where instead of a rational, self-interested agent choosing to not cooperate, they choose to cooperate because they trust their counterparts. So if you assume that, you actually assume that people trust each other, which is a fairly reasonable way to do it. If you trust each other, which is a fairly reasonable assumption, you can get good cooperative outcomes and you can model it that way, yeah. In economics, you talk a lot about how different policies that governments should implement in order to promote the common good and preferential option for the poor. But our question was, what can we do, especially as young alumni in a few years to choose employment that's going to promote those principles? Yeah. Look, I think you can do good anywhere you go. There might be a few exceptions. I'm not sure, I don't want to get into myself into trouble here by insulting anybody, but I'm not sure how much hedge funds contribute to the common good. But most businesses, most financial institutions, they have a strong public sense of public purpose. So I would say, focus on, don't leave your principles at the front door when you enter these buildings. Focus on the common good, focus on the sense of public purpose, yeah. Always behind me. Yeah, could you talk a little bit about your feelings in terms of our institution, other institutions, as individuals with regards to ESG investing and or divestment? What do you think is the most potent strategy to help us move towards a more equitable economics? Yes. I think both of those strategies are excellent. I think ESG investment is really taking off. And you know that it's taking off that it's suddenly started to attract a lot of negative attention. If it wasn't taking off, that wouldn't be happening. And in my view, the reason it's attracting negative attention is that it's challenging the financial bottom lines of some companies that are not aligned with ESG investing, especially fossil fuel companies. There is still some greenwashing. So if you actually look at what some of these companies are doing what they're claiming to do, you know, are they really environmentally aligned? There is some of that, but it's getting a lot better. And the major financial institutions on Wall Street are now fully bought into ESG, which is good. I also, I'm a big supporter of divestment. I think Laudato Si does not mention divestment by name, but Pope Francis does talk about consumer boycotts. He recommends consumer boycotts of companies that don't treat the environment very well. So I argue that, I argue in Catholics that you can take that principle to support the fossil fuel divestment. So yes. And again, this is something I'm glad to see a lot of Catholic institutions and universities are doing more certainly more than in the past, which is a very good sign, yeah. Do we have another question? I know just in the media, Bitcoin is big. How does this, just I'm curious in terms as an economist, like what are your thoughts on Bitcoin and can that be an ethical means of supporting the common good? I don't think so. I think Bitcoin is ridiculous. It's a purely speculative asset. It has no real value. It's used, it's attractive to libertarians and criminals as far as I can see. So I don't, I don't see any value of Bitcoin and I'm open to being persuaded if it's aligned with the common good, but I certainly have seen no evidence of that. Anymore? This isn't like a super serious question, but in chapter five of your book, as you were talking about like the importance of employment in general, just to human flourishing, you like very briefly mentioned how the development of AI can like pose a threat to this. So now, like since you wrote the book, it's definitely gotten a lot more developed. So is there anything you would add to that statement or like qualified or just like, what do you think about that? Well, yes. When I wrote the book, the evidence that I had about would AI replace jobs? The most scary number was 47% of jobs. That's the number I quoted. That's from a paper that was written in 2013. With the new AI, I've seen it more like 70% of jobs. I know vulnerable. So I think there's a much more urgent situation for all jobs, including very creative jobs which we thought might be immune to being replaced because it turns out that this chat, GTPT, whatever it's called, is quite good at doing creative jobs and doing good at writing and copy editing, not copy editing, but writing and doing basic tasks. I guess if I were writing it again, I might be more open than I was to the universal basic income because I was not that supportive of universal basic income in the book for a number of reasons that we don't need to get into. But maybe now, given how AI is developing, there might be a stronger argument for universal basic income. So in chapter eight of your book, you talk a lot about globalization in people and we were just wondering, what do you think about President Biden's decision to pursue Trump's policies on the border? Oh, let's take me a little away from economics. I would quote Pope Francis on that, that we have a moral responsibility to, what's the foreword, to welcome, protect, promote and integrate migrants and refugees. And we are going to see, due to economic dislocations and climate change, we're going to see a whole huge increase in migrants and refugees in the years ahead and we need to learn how to better integrate them. So that's what I would say about that. I would support Pope Francis. Last question over here. There's been a lot of come and go over the issue of forgiving student debt. Millions or billions of dollars of student debt and it's still not happening. My question is, what's your opinion about it, especially because I hear from people who have worked hard to repay their student debt over all these years that it's being unfair to them to forgive the student debt of its burdening so many of the younger people. Do you think forgiving it would really give a boost to the economy and is it worth it? I think it's an issue of justice. I would say biblical justice because this goes all the way back to the Old Testament, very beginning, that the sabbatical every seventh year is supposed to forgive all debts and in the Jubilee every 50th year, you're supposed to not only forgive all debts but basically transfer all land that has been sold with original inhabitants in the past 50 years. So that's kind of radical. So I would argue that debt forgiveness is actually strongly biblical and there's a matter of justice. I supported President Biden's plan to forgive some student debt, mainly because this is turning out to be a crippling burden to so many students, especially students who are from low income backgrounds who would get most of the benefits, yes. So I said that was the last question but there'll be one more in its mind but it'll be quick. So one thing I did not say when I introduced to Dr. Anner was that he spent quite a number of years working for the International Monetary Fund before he made his transition, I won't say conversion. The question is, do they still talk to you? I still have friends there, yeah. They think I'm crazy but yeah, yeah. Thank you all for being here, round of applause for Dr. Anner. Thank you. And as Saint Ignatius is reputed to have said, go set the world on fire, thank you.