 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Trevor Burris. And I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Bill Emmett, editor-in-chief of The Economist from 1993 to 2006, and currently chairman of an educational charity, The Wake Up Foundation. His new book is The Fate of the West, The Battle to Save the World's Most Successful Political Idea. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Bill. Great to be with you. What is the West, obviously the central character in this book? What is the West as you conceive of it? The West, as I conceive of it, is any country that follows a liberal, open model of society and social organization and that protects that openness with a form of political equality, which we call liberal democracy, but is the open, equal citizenship that the Greeks talked about thousands of years ago is Sonomia, an equal political voice, political rights. It's a liberal model, but it's not geographical. It's not cultural. It's about that balance between openness and equality, in my opinion. And that definitely includes someplace like Japan. Would it include Hong Kong? It would not include Hong Kong because Hong Kong doesn't have political equality. It has the rule of law, but it doesn't have political equality because it's not a proper democracy. It's under, despite the one country, two systems structure of China. It's nevertheless under Chinese control. So I wouldn't consider it part of the West, but I would include Taiwan. I would include South Korea, and I certainly would include Japan. So you write that, quote, a feeling of decline has set in, in the Western heartlands of the US, Europe, and Japan. What do you see as the source of that feeling? I think that the principal source of that feeling is economic failure, or economic disappointment, let's call it that. Economic disappointment since the 2008 financial crisis, most spectacularly, but actually also in the decade before then. Economic disappointment and failure in the form of high unemployment, in the form of increasing inequality, in the form of declining real incomes for a very, very large proportion of the population. And therefore, a big sense that the good times might be over, that the times when each generation of children could be expected by their parents to do better, to have more opportunities to hopefully be wealthier, but at least have more freedom and more freedom of choice, that the suspicion that that might be at an end is what I consider to be that feeling of decline. I don't see it, therefore, as a relative issue about cause by the rise of China or of other emerging economies. I don't think that most citizens of the West think of their position in the world or their own life prospects as being in some sense relative to that of a country far away like China. Maybe geopolitically, strategic thinkers may think in that way, but most ordinary people don't. I think ordinary people think about their economic prospects, their social status, the prospects for their children, the sort of opportunities they're going to have. And I think that really in an accelerating way after the financial crisis of 2008, the sense has taken hold that perhaps an era might be over. Now, I believe that sense can be wrong, should be wrong, must be wrong, but nevertheless that it is there, I think is inundoubted. There's something I've been curious about because this decline and the stagnant incomes, the high unemployment, it's not evenly distributed in the US or Europe. There are certainly categories of people in the US who are doing quite well. It's kind of the working classes that seem to be largely in decline. I'm curious when we say that it didn't used to be this way. So pre-financial crisis and going back a little bit before that that these people are doing quite well, but was this kind of an anomalous thing? Does this sense of decline to some extent depend on over-reading the history of the success of the working class? The Western ideal has been around for a long time, but the time period during which a working class person, so a person of relatively low education, relatively low skills could be comfortably middle class is itself fairly recent. I don't think really a matter only of the working class. I think that it's a matter of a very large part of the population, both in the United States and in the UK. It's clearly not a question of the top 5 or 10% and certainly not the top 1%, but I think that any definition of the working class is really something that's really quite a small group of people, particularly these days with manufacturing down to 9%, 10% of employment on both sides of the Atlantic, at least in Britain, France and America. So I think that this situation of declining incomes applies, I'm afraid, to a much wider group of the population than could be described as the working class. Now where I agree with you is to say that I think expectations are part of the issue, that expectations are high, and that some of the issue is about a disappointment of expectations and of things that people have taken for granted, that we've all taken for granted as being, if you like, immutable parts of modern life. Where I also agree with you is that I think it's really only in the post-war era in which this sense of widespread adoption of an open and equal society, of widespread adoption of open trade, of open markets and of relatively limited government has taken hold and that has spread to more and more countries around the world only in that post-1945 or really 1950 period. So it's in historical terms, it's quite a limited amount of time. It's really, I'm 60 years old, it's my parents' generation in the latter half of their lives, but it's not my grandparents' generation. So it is a relatively short period, but that, the bulk of the British population have seen declining real incomes in the last 10 years is true. It's not a working class issue. It's also not a working class issue only in the United States. Is that, it was 2008 a particularly bad financial crisis or putting these countries in a particularly uniquely bad, historically bad situation that would require such a response as we're seeing or we would expect this kind of response for the illiberalism that is creeping around because for example I was thinking about for your home country of Great Britain, the 70s were pretty bad there with especially with the 70s were bad here too of course, but 70s were pretty bad in England and that created a situation for calling for Margaret Thatcher. That didn't create a situation for calling for Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen type figure. So is there something unique about how the financial crisis in 2008 was either worse or the way it was bad? Well, I think that the financial crisis of 2008 was certainly worse. It was the worst financial crisis for 80 years. It was distributed very widely across Europe and North America. It led to or required an enormous response by government, both in terms of fiscal policy and in terms of monetary policy that really drained resources from everything else. So I think that it was both the direct hit of that financial crisis which really has really hurt people on both sides of the Atlantic, but also the fact that with public budget deficits at 7, 8, 9, 10 percent of GDP with public debts jumping from 30, 40 percent of GDP up to 100 percent of GDP and above, the resources were really drained away from almost all other activities, whether they are healthcare, education, job adjustment assistance, you name it, resources have been pulled away from it. So that some of the longer term trends that we were certainly all experiencing like the effect of technology on the altering distribution of income, the effect of technology on displacing some working class jobs, the effect of an aging society, particularly in Europe and Japan on the balance of resources and of the burdens it's been putting on healthcare systems. These things would have been there anyway. We would have been worrying about slow growth anyway. We would have been worrying about the difficulty of dealing with these subjects anyway, but suddenly all resources were drained away because everything had to be used to prevent a new Great Depression. And now we've been in a fiscal consolidation period of where politics has gone strongly against the use of fiscal policy in a stimulative manner at least until very recently. That may be rightly or wrongly, but it does mean that policy bandwidth has been basically taken away from other issues. And I think that is a large part of the legacy of the financial crisis. In addition, I would just add one other important legacy, and I think crucial in the political response. And that is the sense that the financial crisis showed a disproportionate influence over public policy for Wall Street, for the banking sector, for finance, for the city, for the European banks in Germany and in France that has fed into a belief that, quote, unquote, the system is rigged, that not just it's not just billionaires who are able to donate money to political campaigns and get a disproportionate income, but also that public policy is distorted by these groups and that the response after the financial crisis in many countries exhibited injustice. So I think that this has discredited liberalism to some degree, but also it has made the system, quote unquote, political system in particular appear especially unfair, which has then opened up the path for populist ideas that are about addressing perceived weaknesses in the system, which include access to foreigners, immigration, include openness to trade because that displaces jobs allegedly. And because of the disproportionate power of some blocks of interest, corporate groups and oligarchs supposedly and so forth, that also feeds into a really a William Jennings Bryan type populism that is now exhibited on your side of the Atlantic by Donald Trump and on my side by Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage. So why is the response that? So if you're looking around at the kind of global liberal order that existed in say the 1990s and early 2000s and you think that it's rigged and that it's rigged against you and I mean we certainly here at the Cato Institute spend a lot of our time pointing out all the ways that it is rigged by interest groups and people in power and corporatism and so on and so forth. So those are all kind of legitimate complaints and they have hurt people economically. That's legitimate. But then why is the response not to un-rig the system? Like okay, let's figure out how to give big banks or big corporations less power or let's figure out how to make it so that governments not rigging things in certain people's favor. That would be one response but the one that seems to dominate with Le Pen and Trump is instead what we need to do then is now radically rig it in my favor instead. So we need to direct all the policies at propping up the group that feels itself most hurt. America first. Yes. Why do we drift in that direction as opposed to the better one for all of just let's derig the system? Well I think first of all countries have varied a lot in the way in which they've drifted since this crisis. We often comment in Europe about how surprising it is that two countries that were worst hit by the financial crisis Spain and Ireland have actually had relatively weak populist responses. Both have had some populist reactions and a movement in this direction but they haven't actually been strong enough to get in or even near government. So then you have to ask yourself why in America Trump and why in France did Le Pen get a third of the vote. She didn't win but she got a third of the vote in the presidential election and more than a third of the vote. I think one answer is a decade. A decade has passed and patients has sort of been stretched in that decade. The first response was as it were a relatively orthodox set of responses and 10 years later we see a resort to a more extreme recipes if you like and one should say also that Barack Obama was perhaps the first populist leader although a populist leader of a different thought maybe in response to the Iraq war more than the financial crisis since he coincided with the financial crisis rather than following it but he might have been might be considered to have been something of a first American reaction to some of the long-term issues that we've said. His council on for economic advisers highlighted a lot of the issues that the Kato Institute also highlights about consolidation of power about rigidities in the labor market of effective licensing of state level and all of those things that have rigged the system in certain ways but he failed to get anything through Congress. Why did he fail to get it through Congress? Well I would say probably because of the overwhelming effect of the financial crisis and that that sucked out all bandwidth and from what he could do maybe there were other failings of course. In addition I think that governments on both sides of the Atlantic shied away at first from doing anything very radical about the banks because they needed banks to counter it carry on lending. They were afraid that the harder they hit the banks and the more that they reacted to the abuses that we'd seen the worse would be the recession and so I think that there was a definite reluctance to really point the finger where a responsibility should have been pointed. That was true in many countries it was certainly true in in European countries as well through the euro crisis where governments connived really in helping banks conceal the reality of their situation of the sins that they done and therefore were not willing to really take radical measures. Now 10 years later I think and I would agree with you and the Cato Institute that the time is ripe now for more radical measures of the sort that you've described and that I would describe. For the moment the politics has gone in the opposite direction in your country at least. In France potentially it has gone in a liberalizing and de-congesting direction but we wait to see whether President Macron can really deliver. Going into sort of France and Western Europe and I think less so for the UK but it struck me for many years especially as I've been traveling around Europe for starting my travels 15 or so years ago every couple years that there's a trade-off that Europeans tend to make and you write about this in the book are more likely to make I think than Americans where they trade off for stability over dynamism especially when it comes to their daily economic life their daily their working life so for example you write about the kind of labor policies that are constraining the ability of people to get fired for example we had this problem this problem is really bad in France where it's nearly impossible to get fired so it's very difficult to hire people because the cost is so high and there's a lot of these things that the workers vote in that end up hurting them and make a very low growth weight very non-dynamic economy and I often say that if you're looking for this and this of course has little to do with the financial crisis you have a fairly stagnant Spain and fairly stagnant especially France like Greece of course is a different problem but if you compare the level of public employment that's another issue we see where there's a ton of people working for the government and then the level of youth unemployment those are two really good indicators of when an economy is kind of circling the drain or just not going to grow much at all unless we can remove some of these strictures that they tend to choose in western Europe no I agree with you and I think that many of those damaging restrictions really were a response to the crisis of the 1970s the one that you rightly and accurately described as being being a kind of precursor of this one in in Italy and France these very strong labor protections were introduced in the 1970s essentially to buy off at that stage a rebellious revolting trade unions and really a wider part of the population whether it was the 1968 generation in universities and after or actually just you know massive strikes taking place in that time they bought it off in what seemed temptingly attractive away but has become more and more damaging as time has gone on I cite in the book a kind of general fact which is that until the 1980s mid 1980s unemployment in western Europe had since 1950 always been lower than in the United States in the 1980s it overtook the United States and it has stayed higher than the United States ever since and that basically seems that it basically seems actually now we now see an effort to try to reform them finally Spain has done it quite substantially but you know in the depths of a financial crisis and therefore it's going to take time to see the effects of it but it has done it France now has to begin to do it Sweden did it in the 1990s and has liberalized its label labor system rather dramatically compared with the extremely rigid system that was there before so it can be done but it's certainly tough to do it and I think a major part of what we're going to see played out over the next 10 years is is the question of which countries in Europe can actually succeed in in modernizing their labor labor system in order to achieve the dynamism that they used to have Japan by the way has some degree gone through the same thing but it has it has dealt with its rigidity at its labor system by creating a larger and larger pool of very unprotected and very and very sort of discriminated against workers who are now 40 percent of the pop of the labor force so it's had a got a extremely dual divided labor system now so we've all faced up to this but I would agree that you some have certainly dealt with it better than others just the youth unemployment rate in some of these countries I haven't looked at it recently a few years ago I did look at Spain's and I think for 18 to 34 it was almost 50 percent does that that seems incredibly concerning on in terms of the this the books right now how much pensions are going to cost in the future but if we're not having young people being able to work in these countries because the labor market restrictions this could be a very like very long slow and painful decline that actually may not look terribly different than Greece than what happened in Greece at the end well I think that you're absolutely right that it is very concerning so I think that issue is going to be a crucial one in Europe I think in Spain we probably should accept that they have made very considerable reforms to the labor market and we're in a probably in a lagged effect of the of the financial crisis still there are youth unemployment has fallen quite substantially from its peaks but it's still ridiculously high in Italy it's very very high again because of highly laid the rigid labor labor system and that is not being improved so I think it's going to be this is going to be the battleground over which over which Europe now has to fight Macron ran in his campaign by not proposing Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-American labor reforms but rather Scandinavian style labor reforms because they sound kinder and they sound more reassuring now he has to prove that he can actually deliver on those and do what the Scandinavians have done which is provide a very effective combination of great flex of greater flexibility with government assistance very substantial assistance in adjustment at times of recession and of job displacement so that's the flexibility and the security what they call flex security that's what he promises to do in France now he has to deliver on it what does that look like in practice compared to the way that it's handled in the US and UK well compared with the US it really essentially means spending a serious amount of money rather than rather than a derisory amount of money I mean US spending on job adjustment assistance is really very tiny by OECD standards and of course you have a very very large country so it's extremely difficult to have a focused and concentrated way of doing it I guess whereas in small country like Denmark or in Sweden they devote considerable resources to that kind of retraining and job adjustment assistance helped perhaps by the fact that they are all part of a broader European economy that in most periods but not very recently has allowed trade and economic dynamism to be imported even when they were in their own bad times so they've had some benefit of if you like the scale effects of the European Union that is not so true today because of the the the long euro sovereign debt crisis but it's really about that concentration of greater resources do democracies tend to put off problems it seems that the kind of adjustments you mentioned that will have to occur in Europe will affect a lot of people who vote and and they will be said they will be told for example we're going to make it easier to fire you which I think if I remember correctly Sarcozy tried to do in France which was one of the things that created some riots in the streets if I remember correctly those those reforms are pretty unpopular usually unless there's some pain to be had so democracies because the way politicians react to voters they tend to put off the debt they put things off onto their onto their children and if the politicians don't have to deal with they won't but the as we talk about here Cato a lot of time the the fiscal reality of say the pension obligations in the elderly population in Japan for example which I believe in the next few years will have one centenarian for every newborn child in Japan which is an astounding fact that these this is going to be a really hard reckoning and the democracy simply will not deal with it until it's a crisis well I think that democracies do two things one is that they certainly try to put things off until after the electoral cycle of course so does everybody by the way I think dictatorships do that as well but but nevertheless it's clearly a particular problem of the electoral cycle but secondly the problem of democracies is that a pro is that a an entitlement once given is extremely hard to take away because every receiver of that entitlement whether it is a farm subsidy or corporate welfare or a social security entitlement or Medicaid or you name it every receiver of it has a vote and they feel desperately angry at any thought that it will be taken away so that we have a particular rigidity built into our systems in the way in which handouts go out there and then extremely hard to to to dismantle and reverse as you say absent a crisis or absent some very helpful form of trade-offs as happened with the rake and famously with the rake and tax reform but that's happens only once in a in a in a blue moon so it is tough I think and we and democracies have got to try to push harder on some of these these trade-offs I think Margaret Thatcher did it very well in Britain in the in the 1980s really bulldozing her way through a lot of entitlements and a lot of privileges and we've got to see some leadership of that sort coming through in in other European countries and hopefully in the United States as well populism even in Western countries is nothing new there's always been people who agitated for these kinds of anti-open society policies anti-trade anti-open markets but they just seem a lot more powerful than they used to be is that were they empowered by the financial crisis do you think more people have just kind of joined those movements because of this this feeling of decline like why why does it seem like the the elites have lost the level of control over the conversation that we used to have that's then enabled these movements to be far more successful than they used to be because it's you know Trump Trump won but he in the US but he won with a minority of the vote he he powered through the the primary system but it was you know in the past it feels like elites could have kept that stuff in check and they can't anymore is that is that a more universal thing than just this instance and if so why well i think that it you don't really need more than the biggest financial catastrophe in 80 years that risks producing a new a repeat of the great depression of the 1930s you don't need much more than that to explain why populism is doing as done well in the last 10 years populism is an ever present factor it has been around for hundreds of years it is a response to stress and response to perceived failure and the elites if the elites are described as the governments and mainstream political parties delivered a financial crisis and then delivered the slowest economic recovery from that slump that had been seen in the post-war era one that coincided with declining real incomes for the average person and that in your country have has coincided with a big decline in labour force participation and particularly prime age working males so i i think that that there is a populist response under that there is a market politically for populism should not be seen as at all surprising the question is why haven't established parties been able to respond in more effective ways and deliver better goods better better prospects and thereby win some of these some more of these votes i mean i suppose the the real answer is why haven't they managed to win all of these votes since populists have had in fact only been elected in a very in a very small set of countries most obviously your own the united states but they haven't been elected actually the government directly in britain they haven't been elected in france they haven't been elected in spain they haven't been elected in germany they haven't been elected in the Netherlands they've obtained a foothold in power in a few countries like finland and austria and other countries but where they are where they are in most countries is as is as a large pressure group at around 25 to 30 percent of the of the voters rather than a majority i think that the united states outcome in last november has to be seen as being a prospect of a series of of accidents but the fact that is that the the political system of the united states was was as we're in a state that was susceptible to such accidents and such a series of accidents i think by the way the same can be said of britain's decision to leave the european union that was an accident waiting to happen because we never really had a had popular support on a widespread basis for our membership of the european union since 1973 when we joined and that at any time when a referendum had been held there would have been a a serious possibility that we would that voters would would vote on balance to leave the question is why was a referendum held in 2016 and the reason for that was a series of political accidents that led to a government feeling obliged to do so it wasn't because of a massive demand from public opinion for a referendum so i think we in our democracies we are capable of having these accidents but then once a decision is made like brexit once a an administration is elected as with the trump administration then consequences develop and can lead to the situation spiraling in a new in a new way in a new direction of course in britain by the way we are released although we have a lot of rhetoric about wanting to be an open global nation actually there's quite a lot of protectionism being talked about and i'd say it's an open question as to really whether the outcome of this decision to leave the european union will be towards a more a still open society or whether it will actually lead to britain becoming more protectionist is inequality a problem or or more specifically i guess is it a problem is it part of this problem um or is it contributing to this decline of the west or the liberalism well i think that the way i think about inequality is that it's not a problem arithmetically or you know depending on a particular measurement on the genie coefficient but it it is a problem if insofar as it gives rise to a widespread sense of injustice and dissatisfaction with with the the political system as a whole um so it has to be correlated with with a grievance about injustice with a sense that barriers have been raised to um social mobility uh that inequality is kind of producing entrenched advantage uh that uh that um you you're much like to be able to get your children into a good college um if you are uh very wealthy rather than not that you are liable to have a big influence over public policy if you are google and you're contributing to a lot of congressional races rather than being um an ordinary joe so i think it's it's that sense of grievance about the system and the sense that it that advantages are going to become entrenched and become permanent that is the problem with inequality does it you write a lot about the differential voice in politics by the wealthy and uh and within you also write about things like pensioners and the political blocks we've already discussed but does it really seem like the wealthy have a disproportionate voice when you look at the large welfare state that we have i hear this conversation a lot oh that's clear that the wealthy get their way in society but in america even in america we have a very generous welfare state uh we've been increasing minimum wage we haven't been only passing policies that quote unquote benefit the rich uh we've been passing and the same thing is true in other countries it doesn't there a lot of impact from the voice of the voters and the and the ones who work for the government the ones who want those employment restrictions kept in place as we discussed that seems to have a really big impact too and may be more than the wealthy no i wouldn't single out only the wealthy i don't in the book either i think that interest groups um in a the way in which mansor olson described them in the rise and decline of nations and in his previous works about uh interest group politics and the dynamics of them um are the problem that they set up as great big uh roadblocks to um to sense of equality and to uh the smooth functioning of the market and of the smooth functioning of a democracy and that um it's those that need to be cleared away from time to time the wealthy are among them however um because they are an interest group they are an interest group that once their taxes reduced uh at at every instance and even all of them perhaps because they of course pay a large proportion of taxes because they are the wealthy but uh there is never a time when a tax cut for the wealthy is not a um a uh a desirable um call as far as they're concerned of course um and uh the same with as it were corporate wealth um the sort of the the monopoly uh position that big companies have that to give them uh the ability also to influence public policy over whether or not they should be regulated and whether or not they uh they should be uh subject to antitrust investigations and so forth so it's that form of of of uh advantage for the wealthy that i'm talking about i'm not being marxist about this i mean there are a lot of people who are wealthy in america i think the last i checked of this changes periodically but there are more millionaire uh democrats and more billionaire republicans and the millionaire democrats may be okay with raising their taxes i don't you seem to think that the positions of the wealthy are fairly monolithic well i'm sure they're not i don't think the positions of any a lot of individuals are absolutely a monolithic i think uh certainly in your two-party system the democrats have a lot of wealthy people supporting them and indeed one of the reasons why hillary clinton uh was not supported more than she was appears to have been the fact that she was considered to be like both highly wealthy but also tied to um very wealthy donors and very powerful wall street financial institutions uh now clearly she did win the popular vote but she didn't win enough to win the win the presidency so we're talking about tipping points here rather than rather than mega influences but uh you know that was the issue on the democratic side as well between bernie sanders and hillary clinton good point one point i want to talk about some of the prescriptions that you have uh in the last chapter of the book some of the ones that i thought were pretty interesting uh the first one is uh openness is all but it's not everything and not everything has to be open all the time can you explain what that means well what i mean is that while openness is absolutely the important virtue of of our societies in stimulating growth uh competition new ideas um all of the ingredients of our progress i don't think that it is um as we're a theological uh requirement that everything has to be open and in particular i think the capital flows uh were require some regulation now that doesn't mean i want to go back to um the old days of exchange controls and uh of uh restrictions on the amount of money that we can carry abroad when we're when we're traveling but i do think that um we should not be theological about um complete openness to flows of the most speculative capital and of theological about allowing uh very highly speculative capital to be unsupervised and not subject to to uh forms of forms of regulation and particularly reporting requirements so i think that some adjustment of openness on capital um is required and and indeed a breaking up of some of the big banks i in my belief is required on immigration i think it's a it's a a a subtler point that i'm trying to make which is that uh while i am actually very much in favor of open borders and open immigration i recognize that politically the citizens of a nation state have the right to have a view about who should be entitled to come and live in their country who they should share their political rights with and that it is not democratically legitimate to um have a debate about um the volume of immigration and indeed the nature of immigration so i don't think that we as liberals as uh as libertarians can have um an absolutely kind of principled position on on immigration um i would argue always in any debate for more immigration rather than less but uh i recognize that there's some contradiction between that and the belief that um everyone is created equal and is able to um have their own there's the unequal voice um in the public policy decisions of of any given country you write that uh quote equality is all but it isn't all about money what do you mean by that what i mean by that is that um i don't think that we should have a target for the distribution of income uh saying that we need to take from the rich and give to the poor simply for the sake of it but rather that the what's the really at issue with equality is a sense of justice a sense of social mobility of equality of political influence and political voice and that uh inequality can get so out of hand uh in particular when it gets tangled up with interest group politics um and the way that we've discussed in this in this conversation um it will need and can require some government intervention particularly investment in in ladders of equality uh to redress um that as a natural outcome of of the democratic and um and economic markets uh that uh inequality is something that uh from time to time but not always uh public policy has a legitimate reason to uh to at least lean against um some of the extremes of inequality one of my favorites is a boring consistency is a fine goal for economic growth it's a it's a good phrase i'm arguing against the sort of uh miracle mongers of um among populists who say that what we're gonna get is four percent annual growth forever because i think that um going for going for really rapid growth usually leads to policy mistakes that then produces a boom and bust cycle which ends up on average with you um suffering so i believe that um a consistent growth depending on the capacity of the economy of one and a half two percent two and a half percent depending on you know the demographics and the and the and the productive capacity of the economy is the sort of thing that a government should target rather than um miraculous um escapes from uh from previous stagnation into new illusory uh periods of magnificent growth in you uh defend free speech which uh which over here on this side of the Atlantic is is pretty hot topic with our college campuses and we've discussed on a few episodes of free thoughts i'm not sure what the freedom of speech discussion is currently in in great britain but you write that freedom of speech is a vital bridge between openness and equality not a trade-off between them well the the debate on college campuses is is also very uh active here in britain and the same are the same syndromes of seeking to choke off discussion um for political correctness reasons have also been something of a virus that has gone around british universities and that really needs to be argued against um in in my view but also i think that uh the open debate including an open scrutiny of where the of what are the facts and what is what is what is truth and what is uh what is what are the bases of our discussions um are and are the essential groundwork for um being able to um run an open society in a way that is is not socially divisive that is that leads to groups accepting uh the trade-offs that need to be made and accepting the sacrifices that they may seem at one stage or another to be making free speech free information is an important lubricant of that in my view are you optimistic um that we can we can write this ship or i guess at the very least stop dismantling it and throwing pieces overboard as we sail along i am optimistic i i believe that we uh because we are open democratic societies we have the capacity to correct our mistakes and we have uh an evolutionary strength that allows us to uh make mistakes to uh to injure ourselves but then to adapt to new circumstances and i believe that is what we're doing i think that we can damage some of the structures of international law and treaties and alliances that have helped to protect our our international system and we can make life easier in how we behave for some of our unopen and illiberal uh um let's call them rivals around the world which of course i mean china and russia but in the end i believe that we will be back that we will be able to restore much of our or some of our dynamism and that we actually still have a lot of things going for us we just need to pay real attention to um where our problems have have arisen from and uh former consensus which institutions find institutions like the kato institute contribute a lot to doing former consensus about what needs to be done thanks for listening this episode of free thoughts was produced by test terrible and evan banks to learn more visit 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