 We've got a fantastic lineup here. Let me tell you who we have today. We have Dean Baker. Dean is senior economist at the Center for Economic Policy Research. He's also the author of a great book that I recommend to everyone called Rigged, How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy were Structured to Make the Rich Get Richer. Very interesting and he will bring in a perspective. We have Rob Johnson, of course, we just heard of, who's been the president, the founding president, really the driving force of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Good old friend of mine, Patrick Lawrence. It's so great to see him, an author and essayist, one of the great intellectuals of our time. He's a columnist at the nation, but he's written across. I mean, many of you may remember the Far Eastern Economic Review, no longer with us today, but his words and thoughts were in that very, very important international Herald Tribune, the New Yorker. And so, and Andrew Shung is distinguished fellow at the Asia Global Institute, also someone who's been one of the leading supporters and part of the intellectual brain trust of INIT. So everyone, it's great to be with you, but we're gonna ask each of our panelists to come and set the frame and scaffolding of this challenge about great powers and one planet, the fault lines, the key issues, and how we should think about this, not to try to kind of, you know, capture the whole picture of the China challenge, but to give us the scaffolding that matters to them. So Dean, I'm gonna ask you to go first. Dean Baker. Okay, sorry about that. Thanks for having me here, and I'm gonna quickly outline what I wanna say, and very quickly, what I'm gonna say, put this in a framework is that I think we should be thinking foremost of class, not country, because it's, I think, talking about conflict in countries really misrepresents a lot of what's going on. So three main points. First off, I wanna say that we had used, the United States used trade, largely with China, but other countries as well, to decimate the working class, and that's something that's hugely underappreciated in policy circles. Second, we are now flipping, we had had a policy of free trade, now we're flipping to a policy of protectionism. That's also to decimate the working class, or more directly, I should say, help more highly educated workers help elites. And third, I'll just say, and I'll maybe have a minute, probably less than a minute to just say, there is an alternative path looking towards open source technology research, and that's what I'll argue strongly. We should be looking to do to both advance important goals like climate and healthcare, but also to minimize conflict. So just very quickly making the point about trade having decimated the working class, these data are really not controversial that this is straight from Bureau of Labor Statistics, there's a myth that we were always losing manufacturing jobs, not true. 1970 to 2000, we lost about 200,000, so that's not zero, but that's out of over 17 million. 2000 to 2007, before the Great Recession, we lost 3.4 million manufacturing jobs, coinciding with a huge rise in the trade deficit, largely China, not just China, but largely China. Well, that was 20% of all manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing has historically been a source of relatively good paying jobs for workers without college degrees, no longer true after 2007. We saw a big decline in the manufacturing wage premium, by some measures it's actually negative, in other words, people on average get paid more in other sectors than manufacturing, and you've also seen a plunge in unionization rates. So historically, manufacturing can have been a high unionized sector, which is why you had a wage premium, that's no longer really true. The unionization rate in manufacturing is about 8.5%, the rest of the private sector economy is about 6.5%, so there's not much difference there. Furthermore, when we bring back jobs, and we did bring back jobs, if you look from the low point of the Great Recession to 2000 just before the pandemic, we brought back about 1.5 million jobs in manufacturing, the number of union jobs in manufacturing actually fell by 900,000, point being that when we talk about getting back manufacturing jobs, and I know that's been a priority for the Biden administration, as well as the Trump administration, those aren't high paying jobs, those are non union jobs, that's been the record at least. So that's a really, really big deal. So when you hear the people complaining that, oh, China killed us this and that, well, it wasn't China, this is US policy, but it was in fact the case that large segments of the working class took a really, really big hit in the first decade of the century, and really continuing into the second decade. Now I think we're flipping over to protectionist policy. Our whole policy establishment, look at the debate over permanent normal trading relations with China in 2000, pretty much across the political spectrum, leading Republicans and Democrats supported that. And the argument was very much we have to be pro free trade. Now we're seeing that flip completely saying, oh, China doesn't play fair, we have to have industrial policy to protect our tech industries, our biotech industries, this and that. Well, the arguments that economists make on free trade actually have a lot of truth to them. And if we have protectionism for our tech sector, pharmaceutical sector, higher prices, that's what that means. And who pays higher prices? Well, working people are gonna pay higher prices. So basically we're hitting, say, our less educated segment of the population coming and going, giving free trade, costing millions of jobs, getting rid of the wage premium back in the first decade of the century. Now we're flipping over and we're gonna have protection for our most highly educated workers, which is gonna mean they'll make a lot of money. Moderna created three billionaires in the last year and a half. They're gonna make a lot of money, again, at the expense of less educated workers. So they're basically getting them coming and going. It also from the standpoint of great power relations, needless to say, creates a real atmosphere of hostility. Again, this is something that very mainstream, they're no longer listening to what they were saying for years. If you have protectionist policies that creates hostility and not a good path going forward. And I'll just quickly say there is an alternative, something many of us were pushing for with the pandemic. It would have been a great time to have open research, sharing our technology, so that as soon as the vaccines were developed, they could have been produced widely throughout the world. And so far as we're developing treatments, new tests, those could be produced widely throughout the world, would have helped bring the pandemic under control much more quickly. As a path going forward, I would say it would be a really good thing to have open research in as many areas as possible, I understand that in the military sector, that might be a problem. But if you think in terms of the healthcare sector and in terms of climate, there shouldn't be an issue. Why would we care if China steals our latest technology in climate or our latest technology in fighting cancer, right? I mean, to my view, that'd be great. If they could steal it and use it and do something with it, that would be all for the good. So I think we're on a very, very bad path. Unfortunately, it's largely bipartisan within the United States. So we can't just blame the stupid Republicans or stupid Democrats. But I think there is an alternative that's both good for relations with China, but also I'll just say, very good for distribution in the United States. If we're opposed to inequality in the United States, we should want open source research, both domestically and internationally. So I'll stop with that. Well, Dean, thank you so much for that. And what I would just add to the equation in 2016, I interviewed a bunch of what I would call kind of Midwest multi-generation military families, people who felt as if they had really sacrificed for America, fought in different wars over the years. But the biggest thing that kept coming out from them was that America had fought the Cold War. America was fighting new wars, but that China had won. There was a palpable sense of China winning. So what you just described along people who were essentially the working class in America, feeling as if they had sacrificed for the nation, but their interests had been screwed. I felt it before that the Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton race, which is interesting, we can get into that later. I want to remind everyone before Rob Johnson comes on, that you can post questions throughout our conversation in the section just to the right of the panel where it says Q and A. Just post your questions there and we'll be sure to get to them during our conversation. Now let me invite Rob Johnson to share his opening thoughts. Rob. Thanks, Steve. And Dean, I want to play off of what you said, because when I think of the challenge before the Biden administration, they have the echoes of Donald Trump who ran around the country and said the system is rigged and people thought they were hearing some kind of truth for the first time. And now as we approach the midterm elections with very narrow control in the Senate and House for the Democrats in the 2024 election, when things like the new Sky News profile of the pandemic leaking COVID-19 out of laboratories in Wuhan, how much can the Biden administration afford to be what I'll call soft, constructive and collaborative? At the same time as Dean emphasized, the despair in the United States over the income and wealth distribution, the role of money in politics, in advertising, in education, and even in the arts is quite haunting. When we move to China, there is not a particularly ideal system there either. It's as if both sides are presenting a romance that is largely fiction. And in one of our later panels, Yun Yun Heng from University of Michigan, an extraordinary sociologist, will talk about the new gilded age in China and some of the structural issues there that are now in quite a bit of distress, which will require China to come up with a new strategy. When we go back, I think the United States fantasized that they would be the world leader. And as the world leader, they would watch China fold into the US system learning things technologically and so forth, but becoming a member as they joined the WTO. When the China 2025 plan was announced, when the questions of cybersecurity interfered with who owned and ran commercial platforms, the tensions started to rise in the Americans. I could sense even at the level of the Council on Foreign Relations started to talk about what's in this for us. Wall Street started to realize that a convertible currency and a deepening presence of American firms in the Chinese financial market was not a sure thing. So I think even preceding Donald Trump, which you might call the complimentary within Eve fit between US and China, at the highest levels started to chafe. And as Daniel Ellsberg has brought to our attention, the fear of something, perhaps starting over a military conflict in the Taiwan Straits could lead to a nuclear escalation, damage the upper atmosphere and bring essentially an ice age that would destroy the ability to produce food for the population on planet Earth. His book, The Doomsday Machine, emphasizes that risk and that scenario, which has been explored really going back to the 1960s, but it is codified as a danger in places like science and nature magazine. As Steve mentioned, and as the, I would say, whole theme of climate change and collaboration, the wellbeing and survival of humankind depends very, very much on a collaboration at a time when each side seems to be, which you might call shrugging its shoulders and stiffening its fists as though it's preparing for conflict. And as I mentioned at the outset, that woundedness of America feeling like it's the declining power or China not feeling like it's a dignified partner. We've got to delve into that psychology and I hope on our last panel today in addition to talking about how we could collaborate in climate. I would like to understand from our Chinese guests like Justin Lin and Andrew Sheng, who's on this panel and will also participate in closing remarks what constitutes a satisfying partnership in design for the Chinese. I also want to emphasize, going back to Dean's thoughts, the extreme concentration in wealth that's taken place in China. It is not as if we have a broad base equality in China in contrast with the United States. The genie coefficients and other measures all suggest that China has not accomplished a great deal in the realm of distribution, albeit the averages of the growth have been positive. I'll stop my remarks there and look forward to hearing from the rest of the panel and from the audience. Thank you so much, Robert, for the way you frame that. I mean, I hope that we deal with that sense of woundedness because when you talk to people on the Chinese side of this equation, their argument is they've been suffering with that woundedness for centuries and it has been a driver, the sense of lack of respect, of humiliation. And I think in some senses and particularly after Dean Baker just shared some of what's happened to working Americans, that sense of woundedness. I think it's a really key point. I just wanted to underscore that for a moment. Let's hear from Patrick Lawrence. Patrick. Thank you, Steve. Wonderful remarks, Rob. I'd like very much you brought out a point I think is often missed. There's a remarkable psychological dimension to what's going on across the Pacific these days and we need to pay very close attention to it, I think. By my definition, the AUKUS, if that's how we say it, Australia, UK, US security agreement, struck just recently, is an announcement that Cold War II is on. That's how I read that. There are many things to say about it, but that's my headline, if you will. How did we get to this point? I'm very touchy about that because Cold War I, the origins of Cold War I are very blurry in the history books. And I don't think we should let that happen again. I think we Americans, for all Americans, need to learn to speak very honestly about what's going on. Example, AUKUS, we now learn we've been training troops covertly in Taiwan. Quad, we're running fan-ups through the Taiwan Strait as if it's the Boston Post Road. And we're talking about Chinese aggression. Excuse me, I don't quite get that. What led to this? Why have we, if you accept my premise, why have we declared Cold War II? And if you don't accept my premise, then let's simply say, how did we get here? My answers are two. One, we are lost, very thoroughly lost. But we are our leadership, our national security apparatus. And so I'm in nostalgia. I remember during my years as a correspondent, first in Southeast Asia, then later in Japan. I started realizing, you know, we're not allowed as correspondents to refer to the Southeast Asians and the Japanese as our satellites. That's what you have in Eastern Europe. But these were our satellites. What we had after 1945 was not a foreign policy across the Pacific. We didn't need one. We needed a security policy to manage our satellites, right? And we're lost in this now. We still run our trans-Pacific relations by and large, of course. I'm speaking with a touch of sweep as a security policy, not a foreign policy. Why? Why are we so nostalgic by way of holding on to arrangements that simply no longer obtain? One of the great imperatives of the 21st century, I say this a lot in the columns, parity between West and non-West is an inescapable feature of this century, whether we like it or not, and you don't even have to assume I approve of it or not. It's just there. And we Americans need to learn to accept this, right? Our nostalgia leads to a great, great variety of misperceptions, and I think these are born of our insecurities and our givenness to ideological analyses of events and what drives them. Economic side, we have different economic systems to state the obvious. Does that mean these two models are in competition? I think it means that in our minds, the authoritarians and the Democrats. I don't think the Chinese think that way. And if we understood economic systems as being in part, as I put it, cultural artifacts, economic systems reflect history, traditions, social values, and so forth, right? There's no reason why two economic systems cannot coexist, and I use that word advisedly. But we have it in our minds that if their system is different than ours, then they're competing with us. I invite listeners or viewers to name one case where the Chinese are coercing often used word neighbors to adopt their economic model. One example we'll do, you know, there's a Bengali scholar named Partha Chatterjee who wrote an essay in the 90s concerning what he called governmental technologies, arguing that in our time, participatory democracy as we understand it, elections, contending parties, and so on, does not confer legitimacy for a great many people in the world. Delivery of services and security confer legitimacy. If parentheses, we're not all that far from this in our country, but what we're seeing in China, this is a big source of their legitimacy, that the leadership's legitimacy, right? We have to come to terms with that. We have to come to terms with a country that has a very strong public sector. This is apparent all over Asia from India onward. We have a weak public sector and free markets. That's not part of Asian tradition in culture, right? Right. We have to- Patrick, we're gonna have to wrap this up. Patrick, we're gonna have to get close to the end and we can come back to these in many things, but I think we're at that general level right now. We can punctuate that and come back to discussion. Okay, I had more to say on security and military side and then what we ought to be doing that we're not. Why don't I leave it there and maybe I'll have a chance to come back. Yeah, we'll come back. That'd be great. Well, thank you for that. And I think one of the really important framing element of the how did we get here? I think we've gotta ask that question because I think that's part of the question of how we undo this. And again, going back to the military, the economic side of this dimension, I remember Dean Baker in the 1990s, Rob Johnson, we were talking about this really 20 years ago and at that time looking at the manic drive at that moment to move as much production from America, move as many jobs as possible. There was a manic nature to it that made in my book, No Economic Sense, and we were leaving people behind. And so there was an empowerment of this. I do want to go back to that question you said, Patrick, of how did we get here? Because I think it's more than nostalgia. It was a moment of, I would say insanity, but we can debate that a bit later. But Andrew Shang, from your perspective, you're so close in Hong Kong to all of this, would love to kind of get your scaffolding of this challenge. And as you're looking and sharing with us the problem and the fault lines, give us some insights in where the opportunities are. Thank you. I'm really impressed by all your insights. I think Steve and Rob, the idea of woundedness, this is not a fight that or rivalry that everybody's winning. Everybody feels wounded, right? And I thought Patrick's view that August was Cold War 2.0, I would put it as the end of the great bargain. Now, why do I want to bring history into this? You mustn't forget that China was United States ally during the Second World War, okay? And then the revolution occurred because the capitalist faction, the nationalist, didn't do land reform. The communists wanted to do land reform and the communists won. And then there was a war in Korea. And then all of a sudden, in two decades of the first Cold War, the Americans suddenly woke up that the rivalry between China and the Soviet Union was as big as the rivalry with the United States. So Nixon and Chairman Mao, in their great decision, arrived at the grand bargain. What was the grand bargain? Well, America allowed China to open up to the rest of the world, right? Supply the whole of the world with goods and services. It was started by the Japanese and the Germans, creating the global supply chain. But China with 1.4 billion workers basically contributed to the prosperity of the last 40 years. And if you read the latest book by Charles Goodheart, he basically said central bankers talk about the great moderation. The great moderation, no inflation, was due to the fact of the huge supply shock of both China, India, and the former communist countries that joined global markets. And everybody benefited from this, okay? They're all prosperity. But could you blame China for the income distribution within your country? And the answer, of course not, right? Because China has its own social inequality. The Gini index of China today is as high as the United States, okay? And if you really talk about capitalism, the capitalism works very well in China. It's called communism, but even communism outside China is disappearing, as you know, right? I mean, China is a very strange country in that sense. It adopted Buddhism, which no longer exists, well, no longer exists in scale in India, right? And it adopted communism, which no longer exists in Soviet Union and Germany and the United Kingdom where Marx wrote his papers. So the issue is that basically, China basically opened up to the world. And if you look at it from a longer perspective of history, and this is why I say there is a tragedy of horizons. Now, climate change is a tragedy of horizons, right? The companies look at only the first quarter, the next quarter put it this way. The politicians look at the next election, but the climate change is coming from a distance, but becoming shorter and shorter. But the tragedy of horizons is both the future and the past. America has a history of 270, 280 years. China has a history of at least 3,000 years, right? And the Chinese look back on their history in which at the time of American independence, China and India accounted for half the world's GDP. And in a matter of a hundred over years under the British, the GDP of India went from something like about a quarter to 4% of world GDP. And China did more or less the same, okay? And it was only after 1950 that China started that crawl upwards. And by the grand bargain between the United States and the China, the Soviet Union collapsed and the world enjoyed a long period of prosperity. And now the grand bargain is now being dismantled. I mean, basically because you said the Americans are looking inward, the Chinese are realizing that if you can't rely on global markets, you have to deal circulation, you create your own domestic demand. But what is the trajectory of this capitalist growth? And the issue is that the differences are political and ideological rather than intent. Both sides want prosperity for their people and a green future. That's what I think all the people want, right? That part is very clear. That's the real opportunity. And also the greatest crisis because climate change now, I think we've finally woken up, we've lost the opportunity to have even 2% or 2 degrees Celsius, you know? The chances of the climate change from carbon emission as well as loss of biodiversity as well as loss of jobs after the pandemic will require global public goods greater than the Marshall Plan plus the BRI ever. Now, let me say this, we all think that, oh, we're recovering from the pandemic. Yes, the rich countries who got vaccines have recovered, but if you look at Africa, look at Latin America, you look at the Middle East, you look at parts of Asia, where only less than 20% of the population that has been vaccinated, they won't even get out of it until 2024. Right. A lot of companies are devastated, SMEs are devastated everywhere, okay? Everywhere. And the only reason they look good is because the governments have abandoned or postponed the Basel 3 and the non-performing loans are not surfacing. And as you know, at the minute you remove all the rent subsidies, you allow the bankruptcies, over the next few months, you will begin to see more debt-fish surfacing. Right, right. Remember this, we have had the world's biggest recession, I mean, you know, the sharpest stop with no corporate bankruptcies anywhere. It's amazing, it's impossible. The only reason it exists is the $9 trillion of monetary creation, okay? So, but that money is making the rich wealthier, but the poor are getting more and more angry. You know, they can't get the vaccines, they're not getting the help, right? And I'm sorry to say, I say this because I come from ASEAN, the Southeast Asian countries, I come from Malaysia, I've worked in Hong Kong and even America and also in China. But I'm asking, why are the alphas fighting in a burning forest? Mm-hmm. Right? Why? Why can't they cooperate to get us out of all this? And this is the real opportunity, okay? And in that sense, we will not just get the support of our voters, but also the gratitude of billions of people who are now thrown into poverty. I mean, you know, the biggest lesson if you read the IPCC report and the Dasgupta report, it says very clearly, the pandemic and climate change will damage the poorest and the underprivileged far more than the rich. Right. Okay? And that is the threat as well as the opportunity. If we don't solve the problems, you bet that the migration northwards in Europe as well as into America, as well as in Asia will be humongous. And it's something that we have not even begun to think about. Let me stop here, but let me say this, the opportunity is clearly there. Well, thank you, Andrew. I mean, I appreciate everyone's candor and to be, you know, one of my journalistic hat, listening to all of you and soaking it all in, it's a very depressing story actually, whether you go to Dean Baker and looking at class, you know, listening to Patrick on Cold War 2.0, you know, raising a lot of these framing questions that somehow something in the equation has got to be shifted or changing it. So let me just open with a question of my own, but let me remind our audience that you can post your questions. We have a couple of building right now, but post your questions in the chat section and we'll try and get through these as fast as possible. Not everyone will be able to respond to every question. We won't have enough time for that, but we'll do a good job working around our panel. Let me just start, you know, Xi Jinping in 2017 at Davos gave a speech that essentially said America was defecting from its responsibilities as a responsible global power. It was contracting, you know, from issues like climate change, it was contracting as a responsible partner, you know, in the kind of maintaining the global liberal trade order and that China was going to be the one to defend that apparatus. And it raised this question to me, not that the Chinese have actually risen to either one of those, but it's raised an interesting question about how problem solving is done in the world. And as I've looked at, you know, Chinese development and history, Andrew and Patrick and Rob, you see a lot of strategy, you see a lot of planning, you see people moving forward. You know, maybe there's some reactivity in there, I don't know, but when I look at America, I see some people that are good strategists, but they're usually not dominant in the political system. What you see is a system that reacts to crises, reacts to challenges and essentially does a lot, you know, on the wing. And I think when it comes back to asking and begin to hypothetically think about what is that condominium of potential cooperation despite all this crap below? The question is whether or not there's a particular opportunity in dealing with China's skill set on proactive strategic planning, you know, at scale that America could swim along with. I mean, part of this discussion is clearly pointed at what happens in Glasgow. Is Glasgow gonna be a zero? Some game between countries or a country's going to co-mingle their horizons, says Andrew Sheng said, but Rob, why don't I jump to you for your thoughts on that? In my sense, going back to what you were saying about the World Economic Forum relates to one of the questions that was put on the chat about defining US-China relations as competition. One of the most watched films in the history of the world is Wolf Warrior II. It's about a story of someone whose lover was assassinated, he goes to get revenge and ends up being a Chinese leader in fighting off colonial oppression from the West in emerging countries. The film finishes with a scroll reading from the Chinese passport about all of the amazing things that China can and does do. With Inet work on the development in Africa, we see a great deal of work. Justin Lin, who will speak later today and Inet held a conference on the very question of those, how I say, building of ports and facilities and so forth. And the back channel that came from China that resonates with Xi Jinping and Davos is America builds military bases. America is coercive and then talks about freedom while these other places are doing things to foster material and economic development. Now, there may be some, which you might call dark sides to that too. One only has to look at the British ownership of the transportation system in Argentina to understand who made the profits from the raw materials being disseminated to the rest of the world. And the, how would I say, the farmers and the miners felt quite dominated by the British in that day. So it's not clear that it's a win-win situation in Africa. It may be a monopolistic domination and that does feel like competition between the United States and China. But I think in the, which I'm gonna call American market mind, externalities and public goods are considered to be exceptions, special cases as opposed to pervasive, which in the realm of climate and pandemic, it now appears. And as I see the Chinese spending about four to five times as much as the Americans in billions of dollars on research and development, I don't know if that's a competition because some of their findings may disseminate all over the world and make us all better off. So it's very hard at this juncture to know how to, which you might call, recognize and reset the dialogue in collaboration when there clearly is a sense within China that they don't wanna be subordinate. They wanna be a large-scale partner into the Americans it feels like that's a sunset on our world leadership. Right, thank you. Jean, can I ask you to jump in on this? But I'm also gonna weave in this question that came from our audience that Rob referred to and it says that recently China poses defining US-China relations as one of competition. These are an alternative to that framing. And I don't know if an alternative is what I was asking. I was asking, is there an ability to rise above the very serious tension points and look at a more existential set of questions on climate? What's your sense? Does economics give a model of where that's possible? Well, absolutely it does. I mean, I think the problem is economists aren't very honest when it comes to economics. So I was making the points earlier about the decimation of the working class by our trade policy. That's denied. I just saw a piece by Fareed Zikari in the post saying, oh, that didn't happen. And it's just like, no, it's like climate to dial. No, it happened. It's not an arguable point, but it's very, very difficult to try and move forward when there's so much unreality in public debate. And it is bipartisan. I mean, Trump was running around yelling China won, we lost. China didn't win. China did well, of course. They made a great economic progress, but our manufacturers that were outsourcing to China, they did great. Walmart that was setting up low cost supply chains, they did great. So my point was just, we're not even thinking about the issue. Now, can you envision cooperation? Absolutely. I mean, Rob was making the point about China spending so much on research and development. Well, that should be competition. We should be going, that's fantastic. You're spending money on research and climate technology in healthcare. I mean, I keep mentioning those because we don't lose if they develop better ways to harness solar power to store energy. We don't lose. Let's share that and vice versa. So you can do that, but because they're class interests that are so clearly opposed to it. I mean, I raised this with people, economists type people, and they look at me kind of blank face like, oh, if we didn't have Pat monopolies, who would have incentive? And I almost have to yell at them. We would pay them. We would pay them. I mean, it should be alien to economists that people might work for money. And of course we do pay them. The National Institutes of Health spends over 40 billion a year. So we need to change a mindset. And the problem is that it's so deep among our elites, our policy people. It's very, it's hard to, I'm really happy we're having this conversation, but I can't do this most place. They don't want to hear me saying this. Well, I think, I mean, I'm giving a very real sense of things. Patrick, you also frame this in very stark terms that Cold War 2.0 has begun with the AUKUS deal for those who are following AUKUS deal was the sale of nuclear powered submarines by the U.S. They're not going to get them for probably till 2040, but nonetheless, the commitment of U.S. nuclear submarines to Australia. But a Cold War 2.0 is a very, very stark and very different escalation in the tensions. And I'm just wondering if you were to be challenged as we're looking towards Glasgow and you're looking at an element of climate reality out there that's going a different direction, what are your insights on how to navigate this? I think I should probably start, I won't be long, I'll take my, I'll be brief, but I think I should probably start with a point I made earlier. We Americans are going to, and not just our policy people in this case, are going to have to understand how to address the rest of the world as a community of equals. We're not there yet. If we wanna get somewhere with the climate question in China, we're going to have to address the Chinese differently than we have. That's my starting point. And taking from my notes that I didn't get to explore earlier, we need to think differently. I think, Steve, you made the point earlier, there are a lot of people thinking about strategy. That's quite true, but how are we thinking? We need to escape the seven decade framework of how Americans think about the world. There are many ways to name it. I don't mind a post exceptionalist. We have to get beyond exceptionalism. It's the root of many, many things. And when we do, we can go forward with matters such as climate in a properly cooperative way. Dean made a great point. What's wrong with China spending a lot of money on R&D? We should be clapping, right? Right. It's the way we think. And Dean made another point. He can't talk to economy. We are not speaking honestly with ourselves. I say that as a lifetime hack, right? And looking at all the really bad journalism that's going on now, pumping up all this sinophobia. It's just dreadful. We're confining ourselves to a state of ignorance if we continue on in this way. And I think it comes from the fact that we can't face 21st century realities. In some, I don't think America likes the 21st century very much. And we ought to get used to it because it's ours. Well, and thank you for that, Andrew. I'd love to get your quick thoughts. Look, we're already near the end of the hour. These conversations, particularly the ones that are really good go fast. So I want to try to get at least one other set of questions in. But Andrew, your thoughts on this question of rising above. And I mean, you basically laid it out in terms of the tragedy of horizons. Is there an opportunity in horizons? It is true because if you really think about, I absolutely agree with Patrick. We have to deal with in a multi-polar world, you have to deal with equals. In a unipolar world, it's very clear. It's number one, number two, number three, number four, number five. That's very linear. In a multi-polar world, you have to treat it as equals. Now, people forget this. I always remind people that there are 3 1.3 billion. There's 1.4 billion in China, 1.3 billion in India. And there's 1.3 somewhere between 1.3 to 1.6 Muslim. There are all the way from Indonesia to the Middle East. And they're the fastest growing religion in the world. And sometime in the 2050s or 60s, they will equal in number to the Christians. Everybody will have a voice. If you truly believe in democracy, everybody will have equal voice. And the world will be very complicated. It's not just the Chinese will have a say. The Indians will have a say. The Indonesians will have a say. The Brazilians will have a say. The Nigerians will have a say. They will have around maybe 800 million people by the end of the century. So the world will be very different. So we have to get out of the idea that only our, what we say matters. It's our way or no way. Let me give you a simple illustration. The Chinese are not revisionists. When they wanted to change the voting power in the IMF World Bank, guess what? The America and Europe refused to dilute them. But it's not just China arguing for it. The Indians arguing for it. You know, the Brazilians arguing for it. The South Africans arguing for it. And if it was a little bit more equal, the Chinese would not have moved to create the AIIB, okay? What has happened? The massive capital of the Bretton Woods institutions, which America helped to create, is at the moment, only 1.6 trillion in total assets. 1.6 trillion. The China Development Bank alone is $2 trillion. Right. So, you know. Amazing. You have to recognize that the climate change issue, just to SDG goals, you need two and a half trillion dollars investment in infrastructure per year. The Americans can solve this overnight. The $650 billion of SDRs being created, if you leverage it nine to one, as like the World Bank, you immediately create trillions that will help the billions of people that are suffering from the pandemic. And everybody will be grateful to America to do this. But for some reason, we can't get there. Right, right. Well, listen, guys, we're getting to the end of our session. We've got about seven minutes left, and we've got four of you. We have two questions that have been posed, and we have to end on time. And what I'm going to say is just to acknowledge the questions, because we're not going to be able to address them. One asked about a spirit of collaboration between the US and China. What can they learn from each other? Another question asked a question about the US debt ceiling, a more, you know, the question in the news now. And what is the role of Chinese holdings of US debt? This reminds me of old US-Japan relations in terms of the fear of, you know, people holding America's paper in this. But we can get it. I don't think we're going to have time. I do want to ask one question I think is very important for the next panel and for our concluding panel and with somebody who will be back. And I just need to ask each of you to be disciplined in a minute, which is unfair, but it's all we have. And that is when you take what we've all heard from each of you, which I think has been brilliantly framed and you pour on top of it AI and, you know, 5G and major data and, you know, biotechnology competition, you take the technology dimension, which is racing so fast and you kind of look at that. I've sort of been asking myself, what should a US response look like that? And I began, and then I finally saw something that was a little bit of like putting China up as the boogeyman, but it was really designed to look at, what can we do to reinvest in America? Reinvest in science and technology, build human capital in this country, get back into what we used to do and in a bill that passed on a bipartisan basis called the Endless Frontier Act, it's still sitting in the house. But I'm interested in the reflection that if you add the technology competition piece, does the situation become bleaker or more optimistic your quick thoughts, Dean Baker? Well, I'm worried it becomes bleaker because we're making it that again, we can look to be cooperative, but we're not. And that's because the people in control of policy are completely protectionist. And again, I talked about the trade policy, that was done to whack the working class, it was bipartisan and they wanna do it again on the other side, they wanna be protectionist and get more money going to those at the top. So I look at Moderna creating three billionaires in a year and a half with Pat Monopolis and I go, that's a disaster. They're looking at that and go, that's a great success story. And as long as that's the case, we're in trouble. Thank you, Patrick, a minute for you, my friend. Yeah, very quickly, I may not even need that. I think we're interpreting the technology questions through a national security, by way of a national security framework, and it's at the extreme we get Huawei and all that, right? It's the wrong way at it, in some to spare time for somebody else. The national security state is far too influential in our national conversations. And we need to broaden them out to have people like Dean Baker, Professor Shang and so on and so forth, right? Who don't have, nevermind, I'll stay there. Well, I mean, I think it's incredibly important guidance. Thank you for that. Andrew Shang? Well, Andrew, you just muted yourself. I'm sorry, if you don't use technology to deal with climate change, you have no tools, okay? So for example, we all agree that we should get rid of coal. The secret actually is technologically to actually, in a sense, decarbonize clean coal, right? Or alternative energies in that regard, okay? Now there's a very quick 30 second response to debt issues. I don't worry about the debt if you spend the right money on the asset, but if you blow it on something that ends up with no asset, then you worry about the debt. That's my only issue. We have a good asset in the world, the planet that we live on. We should nurture it, just create the debt, but clean up the waters, the atmospheres, replant the forest, we'll be fine. Well, thank you for that. Rob Johnson, I'm gonna give you the last minute. Well, I'll come back to the question of distribution. Technological change contains tremendous possibility and it's also disruptive. And when people fear that governance, and that's both in China and the United States and other places in the world, will use that technology to concentrate and fortify power. It increases the kind of dread that Dean Baker talked about at the opening and makes it harder for us to collaborate. When we see what you might call the possibilities for all of mankind contained within that technology, if we trust whether it's multilateral systems or national systems to use technology, not as a God, but as a means to social ends, and we start to demonstrate the capacity to do that, technology offers great possibilities within each country and throughout the world in ways that we can help each other. Well, listen, I think Rob, you just hit the nail on the head and I think there's not a great abundance of trust in this relationship. There are certain things that can enhance the opportunity for that, but we have not, and I wanna thank Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Rob Johnson, president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, INET. Patrick Lawrence, author, SAS columnist at The Nation and many more wonderful journals of opinion and Andrew Shang, distinguished fellow at the Asia Global Institute. What a wonderful conversation. I think this has hopefully provided some fuel for the next conversation, particularly as they wrestle over this trust question and where to go, but we will have a new panel coming in and this was my very good friend, Jillian Tett from the Financial Times, I managed in a session called Beyond Thucydides Trap in search of alternative public discourse featuring Yan Yang, who just wrote an incredible piece in Foreign Affairs Magazine about the different dimensions of corruption in China. I highly recommend it to everyone. Or Bill Sheldon, we've been discussing Martin Wolf, Jillian, the floor is yours. Thank you all very much for joining us and thank you for your excellent questions. We'll be back in the third session. I'll be back with some of our panelists back then in part three. Thank you.