 Hello, welcome to this session, part of the World Economic Forum Jobs Reset Summit, and this is a panel on building back broader, so not just building back better, we've heard a lot about that, but building back broader, looking at those many inequalities that we have maybe talked about for a long time, but maybe are going to potentially get wider in the wake of COVID-19, and perhaps there's going to be more appetite for dealing with them. I'll just give a very brief introduction. We've got until half past the next hour, a very exciting set of panellists, but perhaps the best place to start, though, is the OECD Economic Outlook. Came out earlier this week, thumping growth forecasts for many countries around the world, the strongest in many decades, but obviously following a terrible 2020, but also big gaps, gaps in terms of the economic growth around the world, gaps in terms of the level of scarring we're going to face in different economies. So if you look at, for instance, the US, according to the OECD forecasts, potentially about 1% stronger in terms of its level of growth come 2025, whereas other countries in the G7 are a little bit weaker, but then look at places like the UK, for instance, 4% potentially weaker, partly down to Brexit, and then countries in the emerging and developing world where you're seeing a far bigger hit, a long-term growth prospects, both in the eyes of the OECD and in the eyes of the IMF. And actually, the IMF's managing director, Christina Georgieva, has said economic fortunes within countries and across countries are diverging dangerously. And that goes for, as she says, whether you look at the difference between different countries as per that OECD report, or indeed those gaps within countries, goals between different income groups, but also between different sectors, some sectors ravaged by COVID-19, others less so, others have thrived. So it is worth just looking at the kind of these different inequalities and trying to understand what happens next. And for this, we have, as I say, a fantastic panel. Most of these names, of course, will need no introduction to most of you. We have Marianna Matz-Kartu. She's a professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at the University College London. Stephanie Kelton, professor from Stony Brook University. Adam Tooze, director of the European Institute at Columbia University. I'm going to keep those introductions brief because, first of all, you probably know all these people already. And second, there's a lot to get through. And let's start with Marianna. I should say, Marianna is a co-author of a paper that's just come out and it's worth just checking it out. We'll try and put it on the comments below. And it is about precisely this issue, building back broader in all of its different prisons. And by the way, before I get to Marianna, we'll talk to all of our panellists. Each panellist will talk for maybe kind of three, four minutes at the start. We're going to have a free-ranging discussion after that. If you have any questions, please just put them into the box underneath and we'll be collecting them and putting them to the panellists potentially during that discussion. But also we'll have time for questions afterwards. But first of all, Marianna, give us a sense of this building that broader idea, in particular with lights of the kind of work that you've looked at before about innovation, about the part of government, the part of the private sector and how those two things can intertwine. Sure. So the paper you're talking about is not my paper. It's a report that's come out of a council that I've co-chaired with Raj Shah, the head of the Rockefeller Foundation for the World Economic Forum. It's a council on the new economic agenda for growth and recovery. And we really begin with the point that, you know, growth, which you were just talking about, it doesn't just diverge between countries, but we don't talk enough about the direction of growth. There's not just the rate, the direction. And that direction depends very much on the types of actors we have in the economy. So how we govern state-led institutions, how we govern the business sector, nonprofits, civil society institutions, but especially their inter-relationships. And we begin the report arguing for something that I've been ranting about for some years, that we have the wrong framework with any economics for what the state is for. If it's just about kind of fixing market failures, by definition, it will always be too little, too late. It actually has to wait for financial crises, climate crises, health pandemics to do anything or at best try to kind of, you know, pre-app something that might go wrong. And what we argue is we actually need a market shaping and a co-creation approach. And that requires, you know, using the tools that government has, whether it's grants, loans, recovery programs, bailout programs in a fundamentally different way. And this kind of comes to a second big point, which is that if you look at partnerships, this word that is often used as though it's neutral, you know, public-private partnership, well, what does that actually mean? How do you build a symbiotic, mutualistic ecosystem and partnership that actually solves the greatest problems over time? And, you know, six years ago, every country in the world signed up to the sustainable development goals. And we're simply not tackling them with any level of seriousness. So a health pandemic comes, we inject, you know, trillions into the economy. But that's the wrong way to think about it. We should actually be having something that I'm sure Stephanie will talk about, which is outcomes-based budgeting. First, ask ourselves what needs to be done? What does it mean to tackle climate change with the same level of seriousness that we tackle wars, you know, to do it because it's hard, not because it's easy. You know, Kennedy is a big point. But what does it actually mean, for example, to forge these symbiotic partnerships by, for example, creating conditionality? So instead of just having this kind of, you know, raining down of subsidies, guarantees and bailouts, what would it look like if every penny that say government gave to different types of sectors that are important in the economy came with certain types of conditions attached that really allowed us then to always build forwards better, right? Not just after a crisis. So, you know, just quickly an example for what I'm talking about is when the German steel sector, which is not a very sexy sector before the crisis, before this health pandemic, asked the German government for money because steel is asking governments all around the world for money. Germany did something that's actually not very common. It put a conditionality that steel had to lower its material content in order to access a penny of, you know, public subsidy. That means that today steel has one of the greenest, sorry, in Germany, one of the greenest, most sustainable, modern, innovative production processes in the world, not because, forgive me, Wes, they went to Davos and talked about, you know, stakeholder capitalism and purpose, but because they had to. And you know, instead of thinking of conditionality as just kind of a stick over the head, that is the build back better. You know, that's what we actually should be having with any sort of partnership. And that does require though, again, framing what we're doing in the economy is collective value creation. It's not that business creates value and government is just facilitating it. This really requires actually fundamentally thinking about how value is created and how to make sure that all the different types of institutions in both business and the state are actually governed in particular ways that is purpose oriented, but especially that the way they inter relate to each other's purpose oriented. And in the report, we just give different examples of how to do that in terms of, you know, procurement policy, intellectual property rights, which we know now with the COVID vaccine, but this is always true with health innovation really, really matters. It's not enough to have a vaccine. If then we end up, you know, hoarding most of the doses and just, you know, 10% of countries, but also if the intellectual property rights themselves continue to kind of lead to lots of value extraction and not sharing of the knowledge that's actually currently really required. If we want collective intelligence around all the different tools, therapies and vaccines around COVID. So you know, that's just one example with innovation. You can't just think of the thing you're trying to reach, but how we actually govern that process with that public-private relationship really matters. And, you know, this is something that I think COVID has woken us up to, but we've known it for a very long time. And lastly, you know, if we don't rethink these things, we're literally just going to go again from crisis to crisis, economic, climate, health, there'll be other pandemics that come about. And building back better actually means, you know, strengthening the structures on the ground, the health systems on the ground, the public institutions on the ground and those partnerships so that all this reining of, you know, recovery funds as it comes down is actually landing on a sound economic system and not one that's just constantly bandaging itself up. That's great. Thank you so much, Mariana. And you might have seen, actually, if you look at our, you're looking at our gallery view at the moment, Martin Ferns has joined us as well, President, Chief Executive of Mercer, the Asset Management and subsidiary of Marsh McLean, and we'll talk to you in a second about these issues, in particular, your view from the corporate stance. But I want to take that issue that Mariana was talking about. I mean, the question of, you know, pragmatism in terms of how you create these these relationships and these these deals, is pragmatism enough, Stephanie, or does one need to paradigm shift when it comes to our attitudes towards managing the economy? And where are we on that? You know, we've heard from, we've seen the Biden budget, we've heard a lot about many trillions of dollars. Are things actually changing? Are we in the midst of the kinds of changes we saw, for instance, after after World War Two? Does it feel like that paradigm is shifting? Well, it feels like things are changing. I don't want to, I think, overstate the significance of the shift that may or may not be underway. I think, you know, in a number of ways, early on, with the COVID rescue package, the $1.9 trillion package that was passed out of Congress in March of this year, I think to me that felt more like it had the potential for a paradigm shift, because, you know, that package came really on the heels of an $800 billion package that was passed just a few months prior. And then, of course, we had the CARES package. So what you had, in other words, was a series of fairly large fiscal interventions that provided support where Congress simply committed the funding without the hand-ringing that normally accompanies these large fiscal packages with respect to the pay-for question and so forth. So, you know, you ask, are we in the midst of a paradigm shift? And I think that, you know, the reason that I have pause is because the next round of packages, those currently under consideration, the American Jobs Plan, the American Families Plan, this is Biden's follow-on to the COVID relief. This is, you know, to many people, $4.1 trillion to have the Build Back Better agenda get in place. But, you know, where we are, and I think everybody probably understands this, is politically in the middle of a very, you know, perhaps intractable battle over getting this legislation through, because we are sort of falling back into the old paradigm where there is this effort to avoid adding even a penny to the deficit, to fully offset all of this spending. And as we're seeing play out politically, the votes are simply not there to move legislation of this magnitude that is going to address the kinds of things that, Mariana, and that you spoke about in the introduction, you know, the widespread deficiency, shortfalls, deficits in our real economy. So I'm waiting to see, I'm cautiously optimistic that we can, you know, that Congress will move forward with something as bold as has been proposed, which I will add, and I think maybe Adam will say this later, is inadequate when it comes to the scale of the crises that we face as big as the numbers sound. They really are fairly modest in terms of what we would actually need to do if we were taking very seriously climate and the other problems, our housing crisis and all the rest of it. So let's see where we come out at the end of the day. Does will Congress play such a high priority on dealing with these shortfalls that it is willing to commit the spending with or without the so-called pay-fors that are really leaving us still in a sort of austerity frame? That's interesting, and it's certainly, you know, that seems to chime with the experience in many different parts of the world, of course, with the UK is still kind of very, a lot of the conversation is very much about deficits and trying to keep the national debt down, and then in the euro zone, well, it's a kind of familiar story about whether they're going to be able to implement big spending. I want to turn now to Martín, because, you know, there is a tendency here a lot of the time, isn't there, to assume that many of these policies and initiatives have to be government-led. But to what extent can leadership actually come from the private sector, because you've been championing efforts to try and improve diversity, equity, inclusion? So can you reflect on what kind of role the corporate sector is likely to play? Yeah, absolutely, and thanks, Ed. Apologies for joining a bit late. You know, employers can certainly do quite a lot, they can contribute, they can contribute through their profits, through donating to their activities in the community. But of course, I think where they can have the largest impact is Audi conduct business on an everyday basis, because we know that this is one of the best way to actually start closing that wealth gap that is really in the way right now. So, you know, the employers today, the organizations, the leadership on the corporate side, they're pressured to do so in any case. Many of them have declared that they wanted to contribute positively that way in the way that they conduct business. But they're employees, they're consumers, they're shareholders. Many different stakeholders are pressuring them to continue to do so. And the only way to really get to move the needle in that way, to give good employment to a larger and more inclusive, more diverse portion of the population, is actually to embed that, to integrate that in everything you do as a business, so the hard warring. And what we see today is it's not happening that way in most organizations. It's not holistic. It's left with a charter to come in with programs, which absolutely is required and good. But actually until such time as you think about it through all of your business conduct, I don't think we'll be able to move quickly enough. But there's a lot of leverage there. So there's a lot that can be done. If you think about the way that you're setting goals, the way that you're measuring your metrics, the way that you're managing your hiring, where you're hiring from, are you choosing people to upskill, reskill, which is so important today, and not only reskill away the diverse population as your competitors, but build the diversity from the community. It can be also through how you select to go about your supply chain. So there are many ways that you can, that the employers are doing this today. And the one that are really doing this while I think they're reaping the benefit for business of having better alignment to their consumer base, or having the diversity of thoughts and the inclusiveness of thought. But, you know, when you think of it, you need to remove the biases in the way that you do the business. You need to look at what are the upstream condition to getting into these decision making position within a corporate entity, which will really make the corporate entity become inclusive and diverse. And therefore, you need to know in your own organization, where are the pain points, where are the bottleneck, what kind of position roles, responsibilities will lead you to be promotable. So there's a lot of upstream work in all embedded in the business, I would say. And the important aspect to look at here is that how employers, by doing all of that, can really help reduce the racial gap. Okay, that's really fascinating. And I want to come back to some of that in a moment. First of all, Adam Two's, we've had a lot of historical comparisons, obviously, or economic historian, but all these historical comparisons you must have seen a lot of over this period about the kind of biggest economic crash since, well, in this country, biggest since 1709, Joe Biden labeled the new FDR. How much do those historical parallels actually stack up? I mean, is it your sense that we are seeing something historic in inverted commas at a moment, or do you have the same reservations that Stephanie was talking about there, that for all the talk about a new deal, it doesn't quite match up to the rhetoric in practice? Well, I do think it is a fact that those historical analogies are out there. It's worth saying that there's somewhat stronger in the anglophone world than practically anywhere else. You don't have quite the same nostalgia for 1945 or the 1930s in Germany, for instance, for obvious reasons. And I think it's a problem from the point of view of thinking about the current situation, because it so easily obscures the difference. The most fundamental difference is the power balance. It isn't at the level of ideas. It's not at the level of the influence of some brilliant economists like Keynes. It's not even at the level necessarily of the attitudes of business, which go through phases of greater and lesser degrees of enlightenment. It's really fundamentally about the question of who has power in society. And what made the 1930s and 40s transformational is the balance of power had shifted. Organized labor had voice. It had leverage and situations like total war gave it even more leverage. It's not the war per se. It's not the fact that there's a big challenge or a notable enemy that creates the conditions for more egalitarian politics. It's that that happens at a time when there's a countervailing force that can say to prevailing elites, well, if you want us to be part of the bargain, then we would like these conditions. When your major ally is the Soviet Union, it changes the game in World War II for everyone. And the question, of course, is whether those kind of conditions prevail today. And as soon as you spell it out, the only places in the world where you could even suggest any kind of an analogy would be Latin America. The last moment at which that kind of power play actually was in play in the West, is everyone's fear period now. It's the 1970s. The thing that we look to when you have anxious discussions in the pages of the FT Only Justice Award about the inflation threat, it's the 1970s, is the big bogey. From the point of view of a power driven, countervailing power driven strategy of social change, that's actually the last moment in the West where you could see countervailing force. What I see now is a mixture of technocratic goodwill, reforming impulses, which are not nothing, but they should be recognized for what they are. And we can see the difference, for instance, that the new Labour government made in Britain in the 90s and the early 2000s. Major reductions in child poverty, halting the slide to ever greater inequality. And then bolted on top of that, and this is where I completely converge with Stephanie, something you have to, I think, strive as a sort of Frankenstein monster of different elements. It has hugely interventionist components, central bank balance sheets like we've never seen before. But what are they directed towards backing up out of control market-based finance to a large degree? We can then project onto that some kind of second coming of Keynesianism. It looks a little bit like war finance, but stretch any central banker and ask them what they're doing, and they'll go to their graves insisting that's not what they're doing. What they're doing is financial stability, price stability mandate. And that's it. So we're in a kind of world of Daniela Garbo has this great phrase, revolution without revolutionaries. We're in a situation which objectively forces change. This is why people like Marianna have voice in this moment, right? Because Italy desperately needs creative ideas. So in a sense, we move to the foreground, but it's very unclear to me whether the power balance is actually there to move this monster in a positive direction. I use the word monster, shall I say, in conclusion, in a sort of neutral sense. It's a ghastly Frankenstein kind of mishmash of tied together different components, some of which do, I think, have a progressive component. And there is a genuine power battle going on in Congress right now, which isn't necessarily based in organised labour, but is based in the mobilisation of the left wing of the Democratic Party and all credit and all power to them. Because if there's any positive impulse, it's coming from that side. But we shouldn't confuse it with the classic social democratic moment, or indeed simply the total war moment of the 1930s and 1940s. OK, that's really interesting. Actually, I want to come back to you, Marianna, because, well, aside from anything else, you've got to go slightly earlier than the session until you have another meeting. And that particular question of how to actually turn the kind of momentum you have in the wake of COVID-19 into something permanent. I mean, you alluded to that in your opening remarks. But I mean, a lot of people see what's happened with vaccines. They see the interaction between the state, between private sector, between the community. And they think, well, just how on earth is it you actually create that as a permanent dynamism within kind of market economies? And I mean, what's your sense about that? I mean, you've talked a bit about structures. But how does some of this how does some of this stuff become permanent? And what might that spell for? You know, we started off by talking about some of these inequalities either between countries. And yeah, we're going to see a lot of that in the coming years with vaccine coverage, but also within countries themselves. So first of all, when I talk about structures, it's not just from the kind of practical lens that you mentioned. It's actually to understand that the structures we have are not deterministic. They're outcomes of decisions, often bad decisions that were made that we can reverse even the kind of financialization that Adam talked about and that I wrote a whole book around, you know, that was made, you know, we have that level of financialization due to particular types of business behaviors that have been allowed, particular types of government policies that have allowed it. So, you know, we have four trillion dollars that have been used just to buy back shares to boost stock prices, stock options and surprise, surprise executive pay in the S&P 500 companies. That used to actually be illegal, that level of share buyback that has been allowed, that lack of reinvestment of profits into the economy. That's a huge problem. That's the problem, by the way, behind, you know, like this whole thing that robots are taking our jobs. That's not true. You know, mechanization has been labored placing for 200 years. What's recent is what's happened since the 1980s, which is this lack of reinvestments of profits that have come from mechanization or whatever, not getting reinvested back in being used for things like share buybacks. You know, Bell Labs are really innovative private sector. A lab actually came out of a period where companies were forced to reinvest their profits back in in order to have monopoly power. So, you know, AT&T, large monopoly, in order to retain it, they had to reinvest their profits back into innovation, big innovation beyond telecoms. And that's where Bell Labs came from. Finance, too, something like 80% of finance in the UK just goes back to finance, insurance, and real estate. We're, you know, allowing all these people to buy homes and make it easier to buy homes. That's creating a huge amount of private debt to disposable income that's completely unsustainable. It's back at the same level it was before the financial crisis. And no one's talking about it. These are all outcomes of particular types of policies and decisions that have been allowed. So building back better means let's learn from that, let's learn what not to do, but let's also experiment with really specific things. And that is where I get practical. I mean, the vaccine, on the one hand, it's an outcome of huge amounts of both public and private effort, $12 billion from different types of governments. The NIH every year, by the way, National Institutes of Health invests something like $40 billion in, you know, taxpayer-funded drug innovation. If you don't govern that process in the ways that I was talking about before, making sure that the prices of the drugs that come out actually reflect that public contribution. If we don't govern the IPR, the patents to make sure that they're not used just for rent-seeking, you get huge problems. And by the way, Gilead, so it's not just about the vaccine, Gilead is currently pricing Remdesivir, which is a therapy for COVID at over $3,000 per dosage. That particular drug came out of $70.5 million of NIH-funded grants. You know, and the fact that we continue to repeat these mistakes means that when we talk about structures, it really is about, again, what do we actually mean by partnership? What kind of states do we need? What does it mean to be kind of a purpose-oriented public institution instead of just putting money in and hoping for the best, which is what we did after the financial crisis where a lot of that finance again went back into the financial sector. This is what our report talks about, and I think, unless we talk about that, then just looking at these kind of big periods in history and government stepping in, stepping out, without actually getting the structures right on the ground, it's a huge wasted opportunity. That's really interesting. And as I say, that report available on the WEF website, I'd certainly recommend giving it a read. Steffi, when we're talking about this, the kind of, you know, the moment we're in, there is this concern, like Adam was saying a moment ago, you know, about the 1970s all over again, people nervous about inflation, nervous that government spending is going to ramp it up. It's the same old thing all over again. Do we face the risk of stagflation, et cetera, et cetera? What is your sense of how those two things are balanced at the moment? Both, you know, your kind of sense as an economist, but also your sense of where the politics is driving us to at the moment. Well, OK, first, as an economist, I mean, there are clearly some idiosyncratic things happening with prices in a range of things, whether it's, you know, we had oil prices up. We understand why we had a hacking. We had a semiconductor. You know, we have chips. We know what's happening to prices in a range of industries that give people the impression that prices overall are moving higher. And the reality is that if you strip out some of these very specific things that we can explain that have nothing to do with generalized increases in aggregate demand and inflationary pressures, then inflation, in fact, is quite modest right now. And I, you know, my my inclination is is a little bit, you know, anything is possible. Really, we've never been where we are today. But I think that, you know, my sense is that Chairman Powell and others have this mostly right. I think that, you know, my sense is that markets are already working through things like lumber shortages and lumber prices being hired, right? The price signals really do work and markets do respond the way that you would expect markets to respond. So I think some of the kinks will be worked out in the months ahead. I think when it comes to, you know, this narrative that's really taken hold here in the US about labor market shortages and wage increases and so forth, I think that is likely to be transitory. I don't think that what we're likely witnessing is a real strengthening of labor, maybe of the kind that Adam was alluding to, you know, where there is a real shift in the power dynamic toward workers. I think that this is temporary. And I think that by September, when a lot of the income support disappears, you're likely to see workers, you know, those that have been able to sit on the sidelines through this and take perhaps some higher compensation and not return to the workforce, they're going to be forced back in. And so I think that Powell is right. I think that most of what we're seeing is transitory. I think that, you know, when I talk with economists, I don't talk to a lot of economists who are sympathetic to the sort of Larry Summers narrative right now that what we're likely looking at or at least there's a good probability is a 1970s style, you know, stagflation sort of episode. I think that is not from where I sit, the general kind of consensus among economists at this point. So it's a message is hold your nerve to the central bankers around the world. But I mean, what kind of implication does, you know, does this monetary policy and also fiscal policy have on these questions of inequality? I mean, they've been brewing for many, many years, if not decades. You know, are we about to see a solution or indeed is that going to be held back by monitoring fiscal policy? Well, fiscal policy is clearly attempting to do something that will strengthen and shore up incomes from the bottom. If you hear President Biden talk, he's talking about bottom up and middle out. So this is a very different approach with respect to what he hopes Congress will legislate and what fiscal policy can do. But, you know, you mentioned earlier, the central bank response and to the extent that central banks do get jittery and that, you know, the Fed has laid out a new framework. And I think the likelihood is that Powell means what he has said and that the Federal Reserve is going to lay off of rate hikes and that they're gonna allow the labor market to run hotter. I think that rates will stay low for a very long time precisely as the Fed has told us. But if they didn't, your question is sort of, you know, well, what if they don't, what if they shift in light of, you know, some inflationary pressures that they maybe begin to read not as transitory and they respond by tightening up. And then I think that we know what the outcome is. It's that they will deny some employment opportunities and some wage increases to workers at the bottom. And Chairman Powell has told us that that is not what he wants to see, that in fact, he wants to see the labor market run hot. He wants to see wages increasing for those at the bottom. And he's paying attention to things like racial wealth inequality, disparities between black and white unemployment rates and all the rest of it. Well, that neatly kind of ties up. Sorry, Adam, you go on. Well, the Fed has to dual mandate and the Fed's dual mandate is a legacy of the 19th century and it's not just the legacy of technical Keynesianism. It's a legacy of the late civil rights movement and the relentless mobilizations of Coretta Scott King, Madal Kay's widow amongst others, who insisted exactly as Stephanie just laid out that full employment is not just or not simply a macroeconomic consideration but above all the social justice issue. And then the United States, given the racialization of injustice, it's a racial justice issue. And I think one of the things that's happened and this is going on over successive Fed chairmanship. So Chair L and to Powell has been an opening of the central bank to that kind of an agenda and in the light of the Black Lives Matter mobilization of last year to pay attention to this. So this is precisely the kind of dynamic that I was invoking. These are real social struggles. This is the real effort of activism and with people literally laying on their lives on the line to shift the agenda and an enlightened elite with considerable influence has, as it were, seen fit to adjust and credit to them for doing that. And clearly American society will be a better place if that agenda is pushed. I think it raises issues for the Europeans. I mean, why does the ECB not have a dual mandate? If you scratch them, they'll say, well, effectively we do but of course they can't ever admit it but it seems to me intolerable that the European central bank does not have an explicit commitment with regard to say the persistent youth unemployment in Southern Europe. And this goes back to a point that Marianna was making. These are not just structures. There are structural issues of deep inequality of various types but there are also specific decisions that are made at key moments. And if you tighten interest rates too early in the cycle it has differential impacts. And I think the very least we can say now is no one can hide behind a veil of ignorance about that anymore. If they do that, it's quite clear where the priorities were. We should just track. I mean, Bullard is quoted in the FT this morning saying he reads the labor market differently. It's at that level of technical argument that this fight is going to be engaged. When he starts saying, I read the numbers differently I think it's hotter than we think that's as it were rowing back on Powell's position. And that's where the argument needs to be engaged and where we need frankly to be willing to take risks. That's really interesting. What's interesting to me as well is it is it's quite unusual for to hear economists talking about issues that go kind of beyond that traditional equations based area of comfort. And so to be able to have eyes open to the social forces whether it's racial forces, social forces what's going on in the economy that clearly can have an economic impact and that can bear on policy I think is important. And it raises a question I've been wondering for you, Martin, about the extent to which is this unfamiliar territory for companies to start thinking about approaching is there a nervousness you sense amongst companies when it comes to kind of these diversity whether it's ethnic diversity or indeed kind of inclusion in other senses is there a nervousness here that actually needs to be confronted or do you get the sense that this is already something that your companies are grasping that metal? If there's a nervousness is to say what will be different? I think there is a clear commitment and you just made a connection the economist talking about this you look at the racial wealth gap and employment gap in the US and if you could improve it and bring it to legal for black is the same level as white for example if you generate a trillion and a half more of GDP in the US alone and I'd love for Adam and Stephanie to check me out on that one but that's definitely a huge economic issue not even speaking about the social pensions that it creates and we've seen that very vividly in the US for the last 12 months and therefore there is definitely an economic case to be made and I'm glad the economist is talking about that there is clearly a case to be made and it's been made in the business that business can make a difference that business can benefit from more inclusivity and diversity contribute to society which is more and more something that is being discussed by business leaders as well but the nervousness you're right exists because they will ask what's different what will we be doing that will really make a difference this time and can I ask actually we've got questions coming through and do keep typing in your questions to us and we'll get to as many as possible but there's an interesting question for you Martin from Daspina Anastasio when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion age seems to be getting less attention but given the aging demographic the need for evolving employment models to keep people working longer what do we offer as best in class here when it comes to that? That is a very good point and it's quite, I think it's related to the talent war that we were talking about earlier as well because you just saw this week China announcing that it'll allow a third child and family they, there is clearly that issue as well we see employers struggling to attract the talent they need at different skill sets so really what we're talking to clients about is reskilling the population they have upskilling the population they have is a easier path and that directly talks to we're aging better we're living healthier longer and therefore there's definitely as there were many, many years ago when we started to tap into the gender pool the female workforce to say that's another way to sustain the economic growth I think another, actually another battle that we need to have our eyes wide open is on productivity of people over 55, 60, 65, 70 how do you make sure that you upskill, re-skill include them and we've done some quite interesting survey around the percentage of the population above 50 in corporations that are actually being offered training compared to, and you'd say yeah, normal when you come in, you need lots of training but at the pace of change nowadays you need lots of training and retraining and re-skilling and upskilling at all levels in all jobs and therefore I think that there's a missed opportunity if we don't focus on that part of diversity as well That's very interesting Stephanie, I wanted to ask looking at the US in particular and looking at the welfare system the health system in the US what is your sense at the moment? I mean, people have been talking about the idea of a universal basic income the health care obviously has been an issue enormously discussed in recent years but do you have any sense that COVID has shifted opinion on any of that to the extent of making people slightly more open to it or is the shape of what we've seen from Biden so far about as bold as could be envisaged in the US right now? Well, that's a very different sort of two constituencies, right? Has opinion shifted? I think the public opinion is very much there when it comes to both health care and direct income support I think if you just look at the polling I think it's pretty clear even across parties that there is enormous sympathy for a transition to a single payer kind of a health care system the idea of the direct checks of income support not just in a downturn but increasingly as a systematic tool so you mentioned basic income so I think public support is pretty strong politically that's a very different thing so we heard on the campaign trail from then candidate Biden that he was going to pursue on the health care side a public option and things like that that's left out of the latest budget so you're just not seeing the same sort of appetite at the federal level as I think you see broadly among the population. Okay, now I'm devastated to say actually our time is now up I'm afraid but even within this 45 minutes it's been incredibly wide ranging and fascinating so thank you so much to the panelists for joining us of course they are mostly on Twitter so I do follow all of them to hear more of their views but really it just is left for me to say thank you very much to the panelists I'm Marianne Amatsukatu, Stephanie Kelton, Martin Ferland and Adam Tooze and I hope you enjoy the rest of the jobs reset summit so thank you very much.