 At the risk of softening the hard edge of this debate, which is, as I understand it, is community possible in an age of globalization, I would like to answer that question both in the negative and in the affirmative. On the negative side, it is my firm belief that if we continue to go on our present approach, which I think is an ideologically driven one-size-fits-all obsession with globalization for its own sake, then community, which I define as a place not only where we live and consume, but where we produce and make decisions that influence our futures, is dead. You cannot have community coexist with an obsessive single-minded focus on globalization for its own sake. On the other hand, if we recognize that while some of the elements of the next economy properly lend themselves to globalization, many others don't. And if we develop a framework that acknowledges that the new technological and environmental dynamic offers us the opportunity to satisfy the almost universal yearnings for democracy, stability, security, and a sense of place while still encouraging innovation and competition and productivity, then we can nurture strong communities. And it's possible to do so even in a world that becomes ever more interconnected. Unfortunately, right now, we're on the first path. The overriding goal of public policy today at all levels is to facilitate the movement of ever greater quantities of resources over ever longer distances at ever greater speeds. Albert Einstein once said, perfection of means and confusion of ends seems to characterize our age. And I think that our obsession with mobility, with transportation, with globalization is an indication of that. Indeed, globalism, like all isms, is more like a religion than it is a judgment. And its conclusions are more often required to be taken on faith than to be questioned. And like all religions, it has its own catechism. And its own catechism is, exports are better than selling domestically, absentee ownership is better than local ownership, giantism is better than humanly scaled institutions and mobility is to be favored over community. And of course, those who question its tenets are branded heretics, but it's 1997. And so we're not burned at the stake. We are just not invited into the room because we are petty, and we are parochial, and we are small minded, and we want to turn history backwards. And so we are not invited to the table. The central core of globalism is separation. The central feature of globalization is separation. We've designed rules that separate the producer from the consumer, that separate the farmer from the kitchen, that separate the power plant from the appliance, that separate the borrower and the depositor from the banker, and ultimately separate the government from its citizenry. That is, we have designed rules. We've encouraged the separation of those who make the decisions from those who feel the impact of those decisions. We have separated authority and responsibility, and we have deemed that good and beneficial. But of course, ultimately, if you strip people of their ability to participate in the decisions that affect their future. If you strip communities and towns of power and independence, ultimately you breed passivity, you breed alienation. You breed an abdication of personal and collective responsibility. And ultimately, I think you breed anger and even violence. And so if, in fact, globalization does undermine strong coherent geographical communities, if it does separate those who make the decisions from those who feel the impact of the decisions. If it does rely on physical transportation systems and begin to undermine our sense of self-confidence and our ability to self-govern, then it would seem reasonable to demand that the burden of proof be on those who would argue for globalization and not those who would argue against it. But of course, the opposite is true. If we take a look at the question, which is a very simple question, is globalization economical? We find that there's very little empirical evidence that would indicate that it is. Now, mind you, I didn't say is globalization profitable to those who are involved in it. But is it economical, even on their terms? I want to say their terms, even on the narrow terms of does it promote faster and more balanced economic growth. It's remarkable how little empirical evidence there is. Paul Krugman, who's a well-known prize-winning economist, points out that the idea that a country's economic fortunes are largely determined by its success on world markets is a hypothesis, not a truism. And I quote, as a practical empirical matter, the hypothesis is flat wrong. National living standards are overwhelmingly determined by domestic factors rather than by some competition for world markets. The fastest growth rates of virtually all countries in the world occurred in the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s. And that was during the era that governments were given a great deal of authority to protect family farms, to protect small businesses, to protect the environment, and to protect their domestic industries. In the middle 1980s, I became heavily involved in the pre-trade issue. When I looked at the debate going on, although there was a modest debate, to be true, but the debate going on in Europe, around the single Europe treaty. And I sent for and received a two-volume work, which was interestingly titled, The Costs of Non-Europe, two volumes, more than 2,000 pages. And I was struck by two things. In those 2,000 pages, there was nothing on the other side of the equation. There were only benefits of continentalization. There were no costs, not one. And even though there were no costs on that side of the equation, the benefits were trivial. The benefits were a fraction of a percent increase in the gross national product itself, a somewhat suspect indicator of progress. But a fraction of a percent increase in the gross national product over 10 years. Later on, we had the U.S.-Canadian Free Trade Agreement debate, which is a very vigorous debate. And once again, by the proponents of the U.S.-Canadian Free Trade Agreement, they posited that there would be a fraction of a percent increase in economic growth if we opened up our borders. And then in the NAFTA debate, the North American Free Trade Agreement, we had a pitifully small benefit that was to be promised us. In return for which, we were required to jettison much of our sovereignty and the purposes of our democracy. And it's fascinating how time and again, when the predictions of the globalists are confounded by real-world events, that they point the finger not at free trade, but at some other event. That's a little like the dog ate my homework. Three years after NAFTA, our trade surplus with Mexico went from a modest surplus to a $14 billion deficit. I remember they promised that it was going to go the other way around. And the Mexican economy imploded. Living standards plunged. A wave of drugs and violence swept the country and continues to do so. And the free traders kept the faith. In fact, they cried, the Mexican government's devaluation of the peso caused all of the problems. Not NAFTA. In the 10 years after Europe embraced the single European Free Trade Agreement, unemployment doubled. And the reaction by free traders was, well, it's excessive government spending and inflexible labor markets that are at fault and you just didn't go far enough. What you need is a single currency. Ever since 1974, when the President of the United States was given fast track authority, which meant that he basically could present an agreement to Congress and there could be no amendments. It was simply an up and down vote. So it made it easier to pass free trade agreements. Ever since 1974, the real wages of the majority of Americans have declined. Not the fault of the free trade agreement. Obviously, it was the fault of the something or other. And so the empirical evidence is very weak. And even when the empirical evidence is strong on the other side, we find that there is no acceptance of responsibility. Well, the lack of empirical evidence, that absentee ownership and long distance trade benefits a community, is matched by the abundant evidence of the costs of separation. When we separate those who make the decisions from those who feel the impact of the decisions, when we separate authority from responsibility, when we undermine a locally owned productive capacity, bad things happen. In the early 1980s, we allowed savings and loan associations to invest any place they wanted. And in the middle 1980s, we allowed the banking community to merge and to concentrate its assets. Now, if you take a course in economics, economics 101, and you talk about the benefits of bigness in the banking community, they would tell you that bigger banks are better than smaller banks for two reasons. One is that they don't put all their assets in one basket. A smaller bank tends to lend locally and communities can undergo a recession, whereas big banks can diversify their portfolios. It's a marvelous phrase, can diversify their portfolios. And therefore, if something happens over here, you still may be benefiting over there. And the second reason why big banks are better than small banks is that small banks all have their own board of directors. They have their own management structure. They have all their overhead structure. Which if you have one big bank, which owns many, many little banks and gets rid of all those board of directors, then you have much less overhead. So you have a cheaper cost of doing business. It sounds haminally reasonable, and I'm sure that every student would answer right on the midterm examination. Turns out that in the real world, it doesn't work that way. In fact, when they looked at the savings and loan situation, they found out that those that went broke were those that didn't stick to their needing, in fact, diversified their portfolios and loaned to borrowers far from their communities and those who did okay loaned to their neighbors. They found the same thing with banks. And after the fact, when they found out that was true, they suddenly realized, well, it's true that when you're big, you get rid of all those board of directors, but it's also true that suddenly loans are approved far away from where they're given and the people who approve the loans don't know the borrower and the connection between the borrower and the banker gets uncoupled. And so any responsibility that the borrower might have to the banker and any knowledge that the banker has of the borrower disappears and as a result, reasonably so, the default rate goes up. However, just a few days ago, the vice president of Nations Bank, I think it's our fourth largest bank now after its merger with another bank, whose name I forget, indicated that by the year 2000, there will be five giant banks in this country and you will need $500 billion in assets in order to compete. Well, there's no empirical evidence that's driving that, but what's happened is that we created rules or actually we discarded rules, 50 years old, 60 year old rules in this country, rules that created a community-based financial system in this country, we discarded them and we allowed this kind of orgy of concentration and of bigness when in fact, there was no empirical evidence to justify it. You know in California, probably better than any other part of the country, the costs of separating where people live from where they work, the costs of urban sprawl, and was it two years ago that the Bank of America quantified those costs, those costs of separation. We find out in this country that neighborhood schools work best. In fact, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the African-American community, which had gone through the integration era and had ended up with more segregation de facto than they previously had segregation de jura, decided that enough was enough and they asked if they could have a segregated school, once again de facto, in a African-American neighborhood and they were given permission in that neighborhood, the Longfellow School in that neighborhood, they found that the test scores soared after a couple of years and when they asked the principal why that was so, the answer was not surprising to anybody who grew up with neighborhood schools. The answer was that the parents lived near the school and we all know that parental involvement in their kids' education and with the school system itself is a primary determinant of their test scores and their ability to do well. When we separate the producer from the consumer, when we separate those who make the decisions from those who feel the impact of the decisions, we tend not only to weaken a sense of community, but we tend to end up with pretty lousy decisions and one of the reasons we end up with lousy decisions is that the decision makers don't take into account the full cost of the impact of their decisions. Six months ago in Lima, Ohio, British Petroleum decided to close its 111-year-old oil refinery. Now, it might have been 111 years old, but it was a state-of-the-art oil refinery. In fact, in 1996, that oil refinery generated $45 million in profits to British Petroleum, but British Petroleum decided that it could make more profits with that investment elsewhere and so it decided to close down the plant. Well, it was a very modern plant, it was a very profitable plant and so five bidders came forward asking for permission to buy the plant, one of the bidders being the existing management of the plant and British Petroleum decided not to sell the plant, but to shut it down because it didn't want someone else competing with it. 2,000 jobs will be lost in $100 million in income or in economic activity will be lost in that small city in Ohio. Clearly, that was the wrong decision to make for the community as a whole, for the nation as a whole, but we developed rules that allow that decision to be made by a source far away from the community. The strongest argument that tends to be made in favor of globalization is, in fact, not the economic argument, but the inevitability argument. That is that whatever one's feeling about globalization, it is inevitable. After all, hasn't the trend occurred for more than 100 years? The argument is made that as technology changed at the end of the 19th century, as we shifted from wood to steel, as we shifted from wind and water power to concentrated energies of fossil fuels, when we shifted from cottage industry to mass manufacturing, we inevitably shifted from small to big, from local to national and global. And that argument is reasonable, but I think at the end of the 20th century, one can just as well argue that our technologies are moving us in the other direction, that we are shifting from steel to plastic, that we are shifting from fossil fuels back to renewable energy resources, although this time with very sophisticated technologies, that we are moving from mass manufacturing to flexible manufacturing, and in fact, the business community doesn't talk any longer about economies of scale, but they talk about economies of scope, and their ideal now is to be able to produce one unit of many items as cheaply as they could produce thousands of units of one item. And therefore the technology allows us to move from big to little, from global to national or to local. It's the rules that we make that will channel human ingenuity and investment capital and entrepreneurial energy in a certain direction, and so far the rules that we have made move us toward globalization. I said at the beginning that I think that strong communities can survive in an age of globalization, and I think that's true if we recognize that economies are made up of different elements and they should be treated differently. Economists call these factors of production. They include raw materials, people, capital, information, and finished goods. Globalists put them all in the same pot, and they say, one size fits all, they should all be globalized. We should all honor mobility. We should all allow them to move on a planetary scale, except maybe for people. There's sort of an inconsistency here with people. It's sort of quite dramatic. Last week or two weeks ago, we had the fast track vote in Congress around the expansion of NAFTA, and I think 70% of the Republican party voted in favor of basically stripping us naked in the face of planetary economic forces, and so our businesses can move anywhere and capital can move anywhere and so forth, but at the same time, the Republican party is very adamant about limiting immigration, right? So the manufacturer can move from San Francisco to Tijuana and therefore the workers in San Francisco have to compete with the lower wages in Tijuana. That's acceptable because that increases productivity and makes us more efficient, but the people of Tijuana can't move to San Francisco and ask for wages that they would be getting in Tijuana because it's internally inconsistent there, it's an internal inconsistency there, but at least they realize that there are different factors of production and we need different rules related to those different factors of production, and I would argue with you and before you that if we examine the components of economies with a much more discerning eye, if we took into account the values that we hold dear, if we analyzed the costs and the benefits in a comprehensive fashion, that we would fashion different rules for different economic factors, for example. From an environmental perspective, what we want to do is to minimize the consumption of raw materials and especially non-renewable materials. We wanna reduce our dependence on physical transportation systems. We would require that sector to truly pay its own way. We would like to favor the regionalization and the localization of manufacturing and we would favor local ownership over absentee ownership. What that means is that we would allow restrictions on the use of materials and the flow of materials, that we would develop rules that would localize and regionalize productive capacity and we would honor local ownership over absentee ownership. But when it comes to information, we would encourage globalization. Indeed, the one-size-fits-all policy that the free traders embrace that the globalists embrace does in fact fit one factor of production, it's the factor of production that Steve is involved in, which is information. And we should think about the future economy as in fact two economies, a dual economy and use two metaphors to describe it, a global village and a globe of villages. We would minimize our reliance on physical transportation systems, we would miniaturize our physical production and extraction systems and we would globalize our information systems. We would import a good idea, a good software program, a good piece of data, a good story, a good book from anywhere in the world. But we would produce the book, we would produce the physical product from that good design, we would produce the software disk, if you will, locally. If we did begin to bring together the globalization of information which connects us as a peoples with the physical production from local materials of our manufacturing system, then I believe that we can have the best of both possible worlds. We can nurture and defend a sense of community, we can allow people a sense of purpose, we can allow democracies to be healthy and allow people to continue to exercise their right to create rules to protect their futures while at the same time engendering and encouraging a sense of information that comes from the free flow of data, the free flow of ideas and the free flow of information. Thank you. Thank you, David. Steven? Just searching for the fruit and vegetables. Actually, the intent here was to create some controversy, but the minute I heard what David was gonna talk about, I got much more excited to compliment his talk, sort of give a glancing blow, not even really a strong opposition, but talk a little about, I definitely am a pragmatist. I live the day-to-day world of Silicon Valley, high technology, and have had the wonderful opportunity through this company that I work for, of traveling the world, mostly to the third world and living, or not so much living, but experiencing some of the issues that David just mentioned. And I wanted to talk a little bit about, again, being a pragmatist here, where do we sit right now? Where do we really wanna be? And that's been alluded to, and how do we get there? In big business, it's really kind of, you get right down to it. It's a real hot topic these days in fast cycle time, and you make a decision about where you wanna move, and then you get a whole committee together and figure out what's the best way to get from here to there. So based on this issue of, I've basically got my Silicon Valley crutch here, my slides, I think that's just a natural, it comes with the territory. I'm a bit embarrassed, but I'm gonna go with it. So, just in terms of technology as a, a bit of an example or a bit of a model of globalization, what can happen, what can go wrong? So, I really come from the wireless communications business, but what I have to say here really is, can be very general, more on high technology, but technology in general. So, where is technology development active in the world? Why is it the way, why is it developed the way it has? Where do we need to be to kind of deal with some of the issues that David brought up, and how do we get there, and some thoughts on the outcome and what we might expect to have happen? So, this issue of centralized versus decentralized high technology activity. Let's just think about Silicon Valley, we're real close, just a few miles away, and what I've found in the last few years is that just even from travel from two years ago till very recently, a few weeks ago, just an increasing awareness in the world that this is where the action is. And it's certainly exciting, but it's a bit disappointing. And I'll talk a little bit about why I think it's disappointing. In addition to Silicon Valley, we certainly know that northeast part of the United States, the Boston area is kind of known to be a high technology area. Southeast Asia, an outgrowth of both these areas and some other parts in the world in terms of high technology manufacturing. Western Europe, also very developed part of the world. A lot of intellectual property and a lot of manufacturing based there. And of course, Japan. But I think what we're starting to see, and I think many of us can see this, there was an article in the Sunday San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's newspaper. And the front page was a picture of the traffic in Los Angeles and a picture of the traffic in the South Bay. And there were some dates there. And if I remember correctly, what it was was comparing the average wait time on the highways in Los Angeles in 10 years ago, whatever the comparison was, was 35 minutes. And in Silicon Valley, it was 15 minutes. And in 1997, we have now surpassed the waiting time in Los Angeles. And I think many of us would like to think that that's the place. And I don't want to cost too much controversy here, but I know a lot of people in San Francisco on the Bay Area say a lot of disparaging things about the traffic in Los Angeles. Well, I think we've arrived. And it's really tied to a lot of other things. It's not just traffic. We've got housing. There's over 100% occupancy and housing in the South Bay, running out of classroom space for higher education. There's all kinds of, our company, it turns out, is active in wireless control of traffic systems. Why? Because people stand at stop lights too long and create too much pollution. And so there's even a business in trying to automate and create more efficiency and transportation to improve the problem that is just getting worse and worse. So the reality of an exciting high technology center is that there's a limit. And in this area, we're even bounded by land. There's only so much space. So in terms of an improved model, you might talk about and a little bit, what is it about R&D that makes Silicon Valley in places like this so successful? The manufacturing, the education, I think we recognize here in this area having so many institutions of higher learning here certainly attracted a lot of people that work in this area. And that has a lot to do with the growth. Well, the other issues are incentives of governments and once something starts going and once people around, once companies exist that are in a certain marketplace, it attracts other companies and then the snowball starts. But what we're finding and what I've certainly found is not a personal note from our company, hiring is extremely difficult. And I think we read about that in the papers every day, trying to bring someone from other parts of the country. We were talking about this at dinner tonight, the differences between Minneapolis, Minnesota and the Bay Area, very, very difficult to get people to come here. On the other hand, in many ways, some of the very, very most important, a little bit of an arrogant statement on the part of the technology people in Silicon Valley. But the fact is, some of the very, very most important activities in terms of the move to globalization of information and the movement of the information that companies are in this area, it's very, very important that these companies are successful because it's sort of our belief that that's gonna really make quality of life better for everybody. So I think we're all interested in having this be successful. The question is, how do you move it away from the direction it's going? And I alluded to some of those things between the just overcrowding, housing issues, traffic pollution, infrastructure support. One of the things I feel very fortunate to have happened to me is my dad was a social worker. And I think I can't remember a day he didn't come home from work in the Bay Area here and talk about the slow growth of social infrastructure in the Bay Area. There's so much, so much focus on building the next factory, building the next building, getting more classrooms for Stanford and Berkeley and basically not a lot in terms of dealing with childcare and people who fell off the wagon and the homeless and all of those other things that go with this growth. So let's kind of take this more towards what does it mean to, where are we headed with this? Where we're headed is, how do you distribute some of this activity around the world? How do you convince the people who are in power, which really comes down to, and it's hard to face sometimes, the people with the money. Either the governments who have the administrative power in some sense, the regulatory power, and the big businesses that have the money. And I hope to some degree, the people who have the votes, but it's a combination of all those three things. So the concerns of industry, speaking from the industry side, is okay, come to SILINK or come to whatever company you'd like and say, we'd like you to do manufacturing in India. We'd like you to do manufacturing in China. We'd like you to move in that direction, transfer technology. Could be Latin America, could be Southeast Asia. So what's the response gonna be? The response is gonna be, how can we compete from there? Basically, how do we make money? The fact is, the companies that we've created in the Western world, and that's mostly what we're talking about, where most of the money is, are driven by, the business plans are driven by making money. It's as simple as that. You really can't talk to these people any other way. And as much as running a company, it turns out, as was mentioned, I'm gonna take over running a company now. As much as I'd like to push all of those intangibles, the bottom line is we're measured on performance in a very, very one-dimensional way, which is very scary. So, and finally, one of the other issues is, you move to some of these places in the world where there's this technology imbalance, where are you gonna find the people to do the work? So how do we get there? What I'm presenting is, we have to be there. We somehow have to, I'll call it decentralized, but distribute is maybe a better word. Distribute the intellectual wealth and distribute the manufacturing activity. Again, I'm looking, searching hard for ways to find differences with what David described. But again, I'm looking for some answers. And I think we're looking for some answers. We are where we are. How do we get there? And one of the things is, for example, this issue of creating overseas manufacturing. One of the most exciting things that happened to me in the last couple of years is three weeks ago, I just got back from a trip to India and China, and our small little company, $30 million. Now, 30 million is big to some, but in the wake of Motorola and Siemens and Alcatel and NEC and all these other big Cisco, Ullit-Pack or telecommunications company, a little $30 million company, my sense was, okay, what impact is it gonna have when I travel over there and tell these people, we're opening a service center in Beijing and in New Delhi. And really what this meant, a big secret to all of you, was an extra room in the sales office with a few pieces of Ullit-Pack or test equipment and an extra employee to turn the knobs. So I figured, okay, I'm gonna get the most bank for my buck for this, we're gonna travel over there, call the media in. The really exciting thing that happened was, it was a flood of interest. An order of magnitude more than I could have ever expected from the press, from all over India, from all over China and basically what they were seeing was, not the service center, but local manufacturing and jobs and high technology from Silicon Valley. And so I was just very, very, very encouraged that people are very aware in the most remote places that these are the opportunities that they're gonna need to take advantage of to make things happen. So one of the things that we also do is we talk to governments and again, I'm extremely encouraged from the perspective of someone from a very small company and again the global perspective, there's a lot of energy out there to make this kind of thing happen. I guess what I'm really presenting here tonight is, we just have to make sure we keep the pressure on to make it happen. So really what we're talking about is a skilled workforce which clearly requires education, but again in this age of the information age of getting on the internet and taking classes on the internet, you can really do that anywhere in the world now. And that's a really wonderful thing. Accessibility to transfer, these are questions that again a corporate guy might ask, accept accessibility to transportation, continuing education, complementary industries. The fact is you gotta start somewhere and where I'm leading with this is, how do you get the ball rolling? And finally I threw in my healthy environment because one of the disturbing things from someone who again and many of us I think have been blessed to grow up in the United States, the pollution, I had no idea. I mean I follow the political activity clearly not as much as I probably should and I do read the paper, but up till very recently I had no sense of absolutely how bad things were in Mexico City, in Moscow, in Beijing, I was just in Shanghai looking out the 17th floor window of my hotel in Shanghai, it's probably the fastest growing city in the world, but I could only see three skyscrapers over because of the pollution. I mean in Mexico it took me about an hour to stop coughing in the taxi on the way to the hotel. Very, very disturbing and I guess in California we have such a heightened awareness of this kind of thing, it really is an eye opener. And I just get back to the money, the money talks but how do you get at it? So how do you motivate these forces of change? On terms of big business we gotta be realistic here, they're motivated by dollars. Moving the factories to where the consumption is, what David talked about is absolutely necessary, important and very doable. And there really is a win-win situation. The benefits are huge and it really just comes down to just a little bit of a push, not a lot. And I guess the reason I even bring this up is because at times some of these discussions at least to me seem so overwhelming in terms of how do you change the, how do you create global change? It's amazing how close we are to making an impact here. The need to tell a good story. The world is driven by financial markets, I think we've been real aware of that lately, a lot of activity. It's not hard to tell a good story about, in terms of telling a good story about local production, local manufacturing, local education. It'll work and we've seen it work. The scary thing is though that money and just a little bit of a one liner, seems like money talks in the short term and it's the quality, superiority, convenience, all of the great intangibles are the long term, get the long term view. So it's one of those things where it's hard sometimes to hold out for what you know is the right thing when you know you can make the fast buck from the corporate standpoint. And that's an unfortunate byproduct of the financial system we've got in the country is it's driven by quarters, driven by short term estimates and it really, really does a tremendous amount of damage to the kinds of things that we're talking about. As far as governments go, just to give you a couple of examples of how much impact there could be, we again, our small company traveled, we traveled to China, we were able to get accessibility to the Federal Communications Commission of China as a different acronym, but same function. And these people were basically so excited to hear from suggestions from the United States on how to set their policy. And basically there was a whole, this really relates to the cellular industry, the paging industry, a lot of the wireless stuff that makes a lot of our lives a lot easier these days. They're just so excited to hear about what the rules need to be, a rational story about what telecommunications policy should be and very, very quickly, in terms of government movement, within three months we were able to petition the government of China to open up new spectrum for basically it was a part of the business that allowed internet access for small businesses in China. And within three months the approvals were done and sales started to happen. I mean, that's a really encouraging thing. In India, we were just there, the Department of Telecommunications kind of runs the country. And it's very much the way Bell Telephone was in the US some years back before we deregulated. Well, that deregulation hasn't happened yet in India, but the first stages of it are beginning to happen. And it turns out what they've got is for a wireless industry, they have right of first refusal. So if you're a business or an individual and you want decent telephone service, you basically get put on a list and I think most of us read about that. What's exciting and what they've done is up to now companies like ours couldn't sell because the phone company had right of first refusal and they said, we'll get a line in there in five years. Sorry, you can't do anything. For internet service providers, they've just changed the rules. So they're exempt from the right of refuse, right of first opportunity by the phone company and now manufacturers can come in and sell products to people so they can get online, get that information. So and by the way, that also as the volume increases, companies like ours will be able to start doing manufacturing and start shifting some of that, the brain drain, which we'll talk about in a second, shifting some of the activity from over here to over there. And I think really I'll just finish with a statement that when I really started to look at this, this is really an affirmative action program. There's a tremendous imbalance that exists. It does for whatever reason, for whatever factors over the last several hundred years that have caused this concentration of technology and intellectual property in certain parts of the world. Here we are. There basically has to be some exceptions made to move in the other direction. And I just don't, I don't see any other way except to emphasize to governments and to big business that this is gonna be a good thing for all of us. And what I wanted to just present here today was that it's very close, it's very doable. And it's basically an encouraging situation where I see, I'll just give you one last example and it's one that's very close to my heart. I kind of saved it for last. But in graduate school, most of the students in US graduate schools, at least in engineering are foreign. And that's very disturbing to a lot of the people in the United States. Well, it's even more disturbing to, like there were issues about, are they pushing American students out? Turns out they're really not. But it's more disturbing to those countries who are losing those people, to create the kinds of things we've gotten, Silicon Valley or in a Boston area or wherever. And so I would say that there's a lot of damage that's been done. It needs to be addressed, it needs to be addressed quickly. So there's motivation on both sides, the crowding in Silicon Valley, the loss of intellectual property and people from the third world to the United States. This is a really good time for change. And I think we have a lot of good stuff to look forward to. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Stephen. David, would you like to address a question to Stephen? We're gonna try and strip some controversy here. Yes, well, I mean, Stephen talks about decentralizing, I mean, manufacturing and also providing research and development capabilities in other countries. It may be that you're an enlightened CEO or you're an enlightened industry, but in most cases, that's not what industry does. I mean, the studies do indicate that industry will manufacture abroad if they have to, but they certainly will not provide their intellectual resources abroad or train our resources in other countries. And other countries now have the right, I'm specifically thinking of China, but other countries have the right to demand as your entrance fee, if you will, that you do not only manufacture there, but that you do transfer your technology there and you do buy your parts there and so forth. There is a free trade agreement that is looming next year called the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, which is sort of the next step after NAFTA and GATT, which would strip governments of their authority to do that. And I'm wondering what you would think of an agreement that would say that in those cases where we do not have an enlightened CEO, the government cannot force the unenlightened CEO to in fact transfer some of their research and development capacity to another country? I have to admit that there's certainly a diversity of management in the high technology industry. The point I was trying to make, and I certainly recognize that it is, again, because many of the decisions are very short term, it is certainly difficult in some companies to convince them that that's the right thing to do. I guess the point I wanna make is, just being a little forward looking, is the problem is so exacerbated now. It really hasn't, well, I have to be careful how I say that, it's not quite on the public radar screen, but it's right there. For example, they've been watching inflation lately and that drives the stock market, a lot of discussion on is it going up, is it flat? What's happening? Inflation is in some part, maybe in some large part, related to salaries and wages. What we're seeing in the high technology industry, which actually in this area has moved to almost all positions in high technology, the purchasing departments, the shipping departments, the secretarial pools, the wage inflation due to the inability to attract talented people has gotten really, really bad for those of us who have to deal with budgets and live with it. So I guess what I'm saying here is, I recognize that the appearances today are that there's more than hesitancy, but real opposition to, sharing intellectual property and moving to other parts of the world. My sense is that that won't last long, that some of the problems that we're seeing are fairly will spread to the other, we'll call it concentrated areas of high technology to the point where the market will be pushed in the direction that I described. So we probably could disagree on how excited people are now about moving in that direction. My sense is it's gonna happen. And the question is, how do we keep it moving along? And how do we just make sure that we're very vocal about it and make sure that it does happen? Cause it's definitely a benefit to everybody, especially those of us who have to live in this area and deal with the change. Steven, do you have a question for David? I do. How do you think that? I do, I have a. The issue of transportation, when you were making comments about the inefficiency of the global economy in most of its forms, in independent of the information issue, but basically moving people, moving parts, moving finished products, the waste there. I get, I guess I was just listening for isolationism and that I just hope you weren't moving towards concentrated areas of activity where everyone serves themselves. It's basically an island of we grow our own food, we do our own things, we serve ourselves. I hope you're not moving that far. Well, I wasn't arguing in favor of autarky or self-sufficiency, but I do think that the burden of proof if you're creating rules that encourage intelligence and scientific ingenuity and entrepreneurial energy and investment capital, if you're encouraging them to move in a certain direction, then if you're encouraging them to move in the direction of long distribution systems, you need to have a very good reason to do that. I think that if we set the prices at their full cost, I define prices what are cost the individual and cost as what are cost the community as a whole. If we set prices at what things truly cost the community as a whole, then we probably would find that we don't move things around nearly as much as we do now. Now you live on a coast and you trade with Asia and the ocean is this costless thing that you move across. But then when you get to your coast, you've got a dock and that is not costless as you know on the west coast as you're trying to dredge new channels and build new ports. It's always been astonishing to me, although maybe it shouldn't be, that the one exercise of governmental authority that all political ideologies endorse, whether you're a conservative or a liberal or a freedmanite or a Marxist, is the seizure of private property to build a transportation system. Whether it's a port or a railroad or an airport or a highway. I mean, they are all mobilists, if you will, under their ideological skin. And for those of us who have done studies on what the true cost is of ports and railroads and airports and highways, if you really had to pay the true costs of physical transportation, then you would find that you would factor that in and you would in fact begin to decentralize a production systems a great deal more. The highway systems don't remotely pay for themselves. We build airports to the point where the kids wake up at two o'clock in the morning crying because the jet planes are coming overhead but they don't have any right to ask for compensation for that because of the rules that we create. So I do think that on the issue of straight economics, yes, there would be more dispersion and one other point about growing our own food. Whenever I talk about globalism and localism, there is inevitably, so I will preempt the question, there is inevitably a hand in the back of the room that says, but do you really think that you can grow bananas in Minnesota as cost effectively as they can grow bananas in Guatemala? And so let me answer that question. And the answer is no. But having said that, bananas are not native to Guatemala. Bananas were first brought to Guatemala by the Europeans and they found that they couldn't make a go of it because the natives in Guatemala refused to work on such oppressive labor. And so they created rules. These were colonizers. They created rules and the rules were that people could not work their own land and grow their own food so that they would be readily available to work in banana plantations. And hundreds of years later, the banana companies and now we're familiar with them, United Fruit created their own rules which was you couldn't organize in order to get a higher wage for your bananas. If you took into account the real cost of bananas from Guatemala, I would argue that you may in fact be able to grow bananas competitively in Minnesota. But I would certainly argue that if you take into account what happened in Guatemala because of their growing bananas, you might decide in Minnesota to do without bananas. Or maybe to choose whether to pay the true cost of what it is to have one of those bananas which is not reflected in the cost of bananas. But these rules are interesting and important, it seems to me, because Stephen, you were saying that making money is the only language. Well, the fact is making money under the current set of rules. If the rules change, then your ability to make money would also change. So I think it does come back to the rules. But David, let me ask you, we've got all these rules that theoretically we're supposed to prevent globalization to some extent. For example, the monopoly and antitrust laws in this country, what do you think has happened to the enforcement of the existing rules that might have stemmed the tide of history? And how do you imagine we create the political wherewithal to come up with new rules and then see them enforced? Well, it's a good question. There's a man named Michael Sandel who wrote a book that maybe you're familiar with called Democracy and It's Discontents, and I'm sure it's in the library here, check it out. And there's a marvelous section in the book about the debate at the early part of the 20th century between Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt who were running against one another and their frameworks for running against one another. They both hated big business. And the difference was that Woodrow Wilson hated big business and loved small towns and small business. And he was interested in creating rules that would protect a disappearing way of life which was a small town way of life. Whereas Teddy Roosevelt hated big business but felt that bigness was here to stay and big business was here to stay because of the dynamics of technology at the turn of the century. And so he favored antitrust legislation and sort of big government as a countervailing force to big business. And it was an interesting debate and in fact the antitrust operations at the turn of the century did break up significant concentrations of power. And at the state level, at that time and going into the 1930s, there was a wonderful counterpart to the antitrust legislation which are called branch store taxes. That's what they call them. Sometimes they call them chain store taxes. And there are marvelous rule which I submit should be revived where states had a progressive taxation policy for businesses depending on the number of branches in the business. The more branches, the higher tax they paid as a percentage of their gross sales. And some were pretty stiff. And basically what the state was saying was we wouldn't ban you from having chain stores. You can have chain stores. But we recognize that there's a cost involved in a chain store because you move further from your customer and you also gain an economic clout which then serves you well when you're in the legislature at the state level to change rules in your favor. And so we're gonna impose some penalties related to those branch store taxes. Now the Supreme Court declared branch store taxes unconstitutional in several cases in the 1930s. And by the 1990s, or the 1980s actually, the antitrust policy of the United States had changed dramatically. And it was no longer to break up bigness and it was no longer to preserve small business. It was to preserve low prices. And in fact, there's a wonderful quote by Baxter. I forget his first name who was the head of the antitrust division under Ronald Reagan. And he said that in theory, there was nothing wrong with one corporation owning everything. As the head of the antitrust division. And what he meant was that was okay so long as you had low prices. Well, it's a very different interpretation of what antitrust was for at the beginning of the 20th century. So saying antitrust means very different things to different people. Well, the irony is that I can imagine American companies saying that our antitrust laws prevent them from competing internationally and that are therefore a violation of GAT and NAFTA for that reason. I mean, using it against ourselves. Well, that's true. And antitrust used to be how you competed in one town there was a monopoly in that town, but the current economist theory of antitrust, and I forget the terms that they use, but there's an index, Heidel Dog Index, an index of concentration, which is now a global index. And so if there are three automobile manufacturers that compete vigorously on a global scale, the fact that one of them has 100% of the automobile sales in one country is not a prima facie case of an antitrust violation. Which brings me to my next question for you to implicit. Well, perhaps not, but perhaps implicit in what you've been talking about tonight is the proliferation of development around the planet. And when you talk about manufacturing should be closest to the place where it's going to be consumed, it assumes, presumes, that people are going to consume manufactured goods everywhere that we're gonna build different kinds of plants everywhere, and that the planet is gonna become increasingly paved over. What's your response to that? Well, I guess, again, from the standpoint of a technologist, what I've seen in some of my travels, which is disturbing, is the need for catching up in some of these places. I mean, there are some basic needs that just based on overpopulation and lack of natural resources in certain areas, push countries and push cultures, push people to making decisions about how they design automobiles, how they build factories, to rush, rush, rush to get there, to try in some sense to catch up. The concern I've got in terms of, I think it's just so important that we recognize that that's gonna happen, and unless we get out there and help create rules to share some of the wealth, that again, some of the byproducts of the rapid growth in the wrong direction from people trying to catch up will really be the undoing of all of us. And so my sense is there's no way around it. There isn't a part of the, I know David's traveled to some places, I haven't been to Latin America and a few other spots, and the bottom line is I've been to a number of very remote areas, and it's just shocking how the technology, just the growth of technology is really touching places that you'd never really believed was, you'd never believe it would have arrived. And so I guess my concern is that unless we act quickly they're gonna make a lot of decisions in haste that you'd have just really dire consequences in terms of the environment and just their ability to survive. So I'm a believer in, they're gonna consume. It's gonna happen. And the best thing we can do is to get out there and share the wealth because it'll be an undoing. Maybe we can open now to questions from you all. Actually, I'll repeat, you don't need to go to the microphone, but if you- Well, that's okay, now that people are here. Yes, Ken Norwood, shared living resource center. Is it not guaranteed that we will see a future of local regional economics and self-sufficiency production and consumption by continuing to allow the so-called free trade or global free trade that is unplanned, uncontrolled, uncoordinated, over-invested, overburden ecosystems, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, which you've all described. That at a, which will bring about a worldwide economic, social, economic and ecological collapse, it is simply not sustainable. So we'll shall get the localization because when it all breaks down, there's only one place else to be. That's survive locally. Well, that's the, that's the localization through collapse, school of thought. And that may be true. I mean, that may happen. I'm not sure if I could sell that door-to-door to people and it isn't clear that that happens in the United States before it happens in the rest of the world. The key country, there's two things. Let me respond to that in two ways. One is there's a financial system that could collapse. And we saw what happened in Asia in the last few weeks. There's a, there's a human created artificial thing out there called capital, which we unleashed only 25 years ago. I mean, it was really very, very brief time. And we changed the rules and we said, go around the world at the speed of radio waves and basically manipulate markets and the like. And in 1970, 96% of all currency exchange were related to real economic activities, foreign aid, tourism, real foreign investment. Today, 2% of all financial currency exchange relates to the real economy and 98% relates to currency speculation. That is the speculation on money itself. And so you've had an uncoupling of that financial economy from the real economy. And yet the financial economy drives the real, I mean, it's interconnected with the real economy. And so that could collapse. And people are very worried about that thing which is created by our allowing capital, its own head. Then there's the real economy and the question of whether the real economy could collapse for the very reasons that you indicate. And most people think that the test of that will be China. And we don't know. I mean, I can argue the case of pessimism, but since I've never been to China, I would hate to make that argument. But China is a country, almost five times our size in population that has something like one fifth our arable land. For China to sustain our, it can't sustain our living standard if it's defined as our material consumption upper capita. It just can't. And so the question is, what happens? Now that China is part of a market economy and now that China is part of a rapid growth economy, what does it do? Well, I think it can get from here to there if it minimizes the consumption of materials, if it keeps things local, if it emphasizes information, if it uses renewable resources and so forth. But that's not what it's doing at the present time because it's operating under the existing rules. So I agree with you that if things collapse, then you have localism. But let's remember now, we have what six billion people on the planet. This is not 600 years ago where you had, or 800 years ago where you had subsistence agriculture and people live there in sort of a steady state environment. If things do collapse, then you don't end up with pastoral, local sort of regional economies. You end up with things that are much worse. Just, I apologize for maybe not answering the question directly, but just in response to what does collapse mean? What, again, what is, I'm not even sure what that means because what I saw in India, Pakistan, in some parts of China, and I know that exist in some parts of South America, looks like collapse already. So it's hard for me to deal with a discussion of what will happen. My sense is it's already happened. And just an interesting comment, though, as far as China goes, even though they still have pretty dramatic growth, India's the big problem. There's no birth control program there at all. Almost every single person I met in China only has one child. And so that was, it kind of slept in the face as a new parent. We had all the choices, just basically biology controlled what happened, but we had all the choices. To some degree, I was more encouraged about China than I was India, but the point I'm trying to make, just as an aside, is things are not real wonderful right now. So I'm hard-pressed to talk about future collapse. It seems like there's a lot of it there already. My question, I guess, Steve, with the model that you describe of decentralization, a concern would be that the manufacturing itself would be decentralized, but that the profits would remain, for instance, here in Silicon Valley, and that you'd end up just exporting low-wage jobs around the world and that the profits would stay here. How do both of you address that issue? Well, actually, absolutely not true, but that's a very fair statement in terms of would that happen? And the bottom line is the people running these, well, many of the people that I met that are in governments that we've described in these countries, they're very, very bright people. They're the same as we are. The encouraging thing is we're all about the same, have the same needs, want family, want friends, want a good quality of life, they want the same things, and they're real good negotiators. And so when you're out there talking to them about sharing technology, they're fighting for intellectual property, they're fighting for a big piece of the action. One of the, from a big business standpoint, one of the downsides of the information age is everybody knows what your products cost to make. It's just not a secret. I just find that it's a lot easier just to open right up, get it on the table, tell them what the profits are, and then negotiate from there, because it's just too easy to find out. So you think then that the technology industry is vastly different from Nike, for example, because there is an example where the people who are most affected are powerless to negotiate. I mean, your industry is vastly different than that? Well, it just may be that, I just have to think about that one, because that's a very valid question. Yeah, technology is not the only game in town. There's lots of other intellectual property, lots of other designs. I guess my sense is, yeah, the complexity of the product or the complexity of the marketplace, maybe it just breeds more willing to share. The complexities are so vast that going to other markets and asking for help is a real reasonable thing. I don't want to make any comments about the tennis shoe industry, but the fact is, I know it's not simple, but I know it may be more of a marketing game than a science game. But even in your industry, there will be the information piece of it, and then there's the chip manufacturing piece of it or the board manufacturing piece of it, and you're dealing, I would think, with those same inequities. Yes, but I think the marketplaces there have become wiser, and now, again, there's what's been happening for the last so many years, and then it's a question of the bargaining position. What I described about Silicon Valley and some of the issues of getting the people they need to do the job to meet the demand for this just unbelievable rapid growth in technology kind of levels the playing field a little bit because the human resources and even the material resources in these countries is a tremendous bargaining chip, and so I think they're beginning to realize that, and maybe I would just say, and this is a very naive statement, and this one I'll just put out on the table that I haven't given a lot of thought to this in the past, but in these other industries, it will catch up to them because at a certain point, when their ability to globally transport the shoes or do other things that they need to do to compete, they're gonna need help on the other end, there's gonna be a stronger bargaining position and the balance of some of the rewards will tilt. Let me jump in by saying that there's both an international and a domestic response and to Elisa who asked the question. On an international level, what Steve says is right, but he's bargaining with the government and once again the multilateral agreement on investment which will be coming up next year for debate, which as I said is the next step after GATT would ban the government from being able to bargain with Steve. And so in that sense the government would not be able to say you cannot remit the profits, you have to buy locally, you have to subcontract, in other words none of that would be able to be done. And so that would sort of strip the authority and once again they would do that because they think that the free flow of all resources including capital make the world economy more efficient. But right now Steve does have to bargain with them and as he says a lot of the information is open and above board. Domestically, let me just tell you what we've done in one small sector of the economy in Minnesota. Minnesota is an agricultural state and you can take plant matter and you can convert it into a fuel source and you can use that in your gas tanks. You can also use that in your tummies. It's called liquor and it treats your car just as well actually as it treats your body. And right now we import about a hundred percent, well a hundred percent of our gasoline and diesel fuel in Minnesota and the two companies, one company controls more than 40% of the gasoline in Minnesota. It's the Coque refinery out of Coque Corporation out of Kansas City. It's an absentee corporation. It's headquarters are in Kansas City. The profits go to Kansas City. It's much like a developing country in a developed country and the crude oil is imported increasingly into the country. 45 cents on the dollar you spend on gasoline goes for the crude oil and that's imported into Minnesota. So about 10 years ago, Minnesota said, well let's create some new rules. Let's create rules that require a different type of fuel and in that case they required an oxygenate. You have an oxygenate here in Minnesota but it's made out of natural gas and petroleum in Minnesota. Our oxygenative choice was ethanol and then we created more rules which favored in-state production because after all ADM could be selling its ethanol into Minnesota and the money would still be flowing outward so it created in-state and then we created rules that not only favored in-state production but it provided incentive to in-state producers but only up to a certain amount of gallons and after that they could continue to produce but they wouldn't get any incentive so we ended up creating a dozen right now and it's growing medium-sized ethanol producers and then we created another rule which encouraged cooperative ownership and so we now have 10% of our transportation fuel that is produced by plant matter or renewable resource inside of the state and there's 8,000 farmers that are the stockholders of eight out of those 10 plants and 95% of the ethanol is produced by cooperatively-owned manufacturing plants. The profits stay locally and in the local economy and 40 cents on that dollar is for the raw material in this case mostly corn although not entirely corn and stays in the state economy so what we've tried to do through the rules is to create another sort of transportation fuel system and one which was not only based on a renewable domestic or homegrown resource but one which was owned by the farmers but allowed for a competition among medium-sized plants there's no monopoly that's involved here they compete very vigorously and there's an increased productivity and efficiency of their plant equipment as a result of it so on the international level we are going to engage a free trade agreement next year which will strip governments of the right to require that foreign investors meet certain conditions for the privilege of investing and producing and selling in that country and on the domestic level we have the opportunity at the local and especially at the state level to create our own systems that allow for businesses that are not only figuratively but literally rooted in place. My name's Jim Bell and I'm the director of the Ecological Life Systems Institute in San Diego and I'm actually up here to give a couple lectures at UC Berkeley tomorrow on how to gracefully transform non-sustainable economies into sustainable economies and just to deal with what you're talking with here today I sort of think David you've kind of hit on it a little bit but I think for the most part we're sort of talking about something up here in the air and just ask yourself the question who do you know on the planet that actually has a job or a business that actually increases the material and energy wealth of the planet? I mean even in your ethanol example if that corn is not being grown organically it's dependent on fossil fuels it's polluting the groundwater supplies it's you know and even though you're doing the positive thing of bringing money back into the local economy which I agree in which I think we really need to do we have to look at the ultimate fundamental sustainability of all these activities. Even though our environment is we look at the skyscraper here maybe we can see 10 skyscrapers or further the average person in the United States has anywhere from 20 to 100 times more negative impact on the global system compared to the average person in Bangladesh. So even though it on the surface that may look like we're doing pretty good we are really gutting the life support system of our planet. Thank you. Thank you. Didn't really seem like a question so why don't we have another question? I can think of a bunch, yes. The manufacturers of photovoltaic devices no literally right now. No, now we're talking about two different things. Let's try and get a few more questions. One is talking about absolute purity and the other one is talking about generating a net energy benefit, a net wealth benefit. Yeah, David you've talked about sort of the continuing development of the ideological drift toward removing any barriers to trade and this investment agreement that you're talking about and that just makes me wonder really as a question I have two questions, one for you and one for Steve. If these kinds of agreements continue to go through do you see something like a local sort of trade civil disobedience movement arising and then, so that's your question and my question for Steve is do you have any concern that the creation of a efficient communications industry through technology and wealth transfer that you're talking about and I commend you on your principles there might actually just speed up transfer of wealth in the reverse direction by say for example transnational corporations appropriating biodiversity in the form of intellectual property, agricultural and pharmaceutical corporations for example. Well to the first question do I see civil disobedience around free trade maybe? There's a group called the International Forum on Globalization, Jerry Manders and the audience who started it and they're an international network, information sharing and organizing network that provides teachings and the like that sort of engages people on this issue which is what do you do and what's your vision and what's your strategy and what's your tactics and there are people around the world who may feel, who do feel that they've exhausted their legal mechanisms if you will. I'm thinking particularly of my friends in Canada who elected a man named Brian Mulroney in the early 1980s and when running for office he said adamantly that he would not sign a free trade agreement with the United States I mean very clearly, very forthrightly and then he did and then or actually then he negotiated it and then in 1988 they had another election and free trade was the single issue in that election, the single issue in that election and 55, I think 58% of the Canadians voted against free trade on a single issue election they split their vote between two parties and so the Catoires, the social conservative party got into power and then negotiated the US Canadian free trade agreement and then NAFTA came up and in the next election the Canadians not only threw out that party that had gone against the will of the people but they destroyed it, it ended up with two seats in the parliament that didn't even end up with standing in the parliament from being controlling the country and instead they elected the Liberal Party that said that they wouldn't sign a NAFTA and then within two weeks of taking office they did. Now, I mean at that point it does seem to me that civil disobedience, if not something worse is the only recourse that one has left. NAFTA was an interesting agreement at the time that it was approved in Congress 60% of Americans disapproved of it and 65% of Mexicans disapproved of it so you do find now of course the response by the policy makers is that we're all woefully misinformed and heady-minded and parochial and small-minded and heretics but be that as it may democracy presumably is based on the exercise of the popular will and so there are people around the world that are very much upset about it and I think that if the multilateral agreement on investment is engaged in 1998 during an election year in the United States and if you have a document whose sole and central function is to guarantee that absentee owners are treated no worse although they can be treated better than local owners that I do think that it will precipitate a discussion of absentee ownership not foreign and domestic but absentee and local which will not only engage our attention as an international issue and free trade issue but engage our attention nationally because we have those same rules the British petroleum example that I gave was not an example where they had the right to close down that plant even if it was profitable and not sell it to somebody because of some free trade agreement they had the right to do that under American law so I do think that people's patience is certainly wearing thin but it's very difficult for people to engage in an act of disobedience against some planetary phenomenon that they really do feel powerless both to oppose and to influence. You asked a slightly different question about just restated what I was describing earlier create a situation at some point in the future where the balance would shift the other way and or would we get into a situation where the intellectual property was transferred to some large multinational corporations or organizations that really went in the wrong direction? Was that the rough idea? Being the eternal optimist here I think that's kind of come out here tonight. I was in the Soviet Union, ex-Soviet Union in Russia, Moscow a few months ago and one of the dramatic things that I saw the first thing I described when I came back was if the Cold War was a football game the West won 100 to nothing. Basically, they're starting from scratch they're just starting all over again there are no systems, no structures everything's from the main roads between major cities aren't passable by car to there's no telecommunications infrastructure they're basically starting all over again. China is light years ahead of the Soviet Union just in terms of an infrastructure and an environment to do business. Where I'm headed with this is when SILINK for example, a company I work for goes out to sprinkle this technology just the way the free enterprise system works is we talk to 100 companies and we try to make deals wherever we can it's basically how do you survive? And then we go to another country and we do the same thing and Cisco and Yulit Packard and Motorola or whoever else is out there does the same thing. So again, from the optimistic side the way this global transition of again I've been saying intellectual property which I think is where a lot of this a lot of everything starts really is gonna provide for my hope is a fairly uniform distribution in the end run. Now from the engineering side of things there's always this oscillation effect just our hope is that it's damped in some way and ultimately will end up with somewhat even distribution of this wealth. I'm not exactly a pessimist but I at least wanna say it's not that the West won it's that the free market system somehow won that the dollar won because I think that Thank you for that. I mean because democracy I mean it's what we've been talking about here it's in limiting the powers of government that seems terrifying to me on the one hand and on the other hand to the extent that government ceases to be a protector of the people of what consequence is it and we are finding that governments our own and others are ever more the handmaiden of business interests rather than the people that had been elected for them to govern. And you mentioned this in your early remarks when you were talking about the pair of corporations and the pair of governments and oh yeah those people who vote or don't vote but it is all these people who voted or don't vote who are really suffering the consequences of these choices. For David could you talk a little more about how you envision the globalization of information and in particular I'm interested in where intellectual property rights would fit into that and just whether you see any potential costs in general. That's a good question I haven't worked that through that the you know I look at information as an entity that is different from capital or raw materials or finished products for a number of different reasons. One is that its environmental costs are minimal that is its cost to the natural environment. It relies on a renewable resource the electromagnetic spectrum. It increasingly uses few and fewer materials to send more and more messages across the globe. It allows for horizontal communication rather than vertical communication. It is democratizing at least not inevitably but it's democratizing in its capacity and its potential. And so it does seem now it has a cultural, it brings cultural baggage with it and there's no question that in that sense it is invasive of local cultures. It undermines local cultures. Some undermining like that I think is not bad. It's not at all when I consider them oppressive but then again I don't belong to those cultures and so that's a very ethnocentric, I suppose perspective on those things. But nevertheless it is culturally invasive. I don't disagree with that but it's not, it's not injurious to the natural environment. Now the question is how can you have a global information system and maybe Steve can speak to this better than I can but how can you have a global information system where the have-nots can become the haves and where one can have some kind of an equitable transfer of information. And I think we're still working that through. I think the internet domestically which is also internationally but the internet domestically is a very democratic, very anarchic system which seems to wanna become like television. I mean it seems to wanna become a commercial oriented, profit oriented, pay per view type of system and may move in that direction. And I think that similarly you might have an international system work in that direction. One question is who controls the airwaves and who controls the frequencies? And there is in this country, there was a petition, Steve and I talked about it during dinner by Apple to reserve a certain part of the spectrum as a kind of an open space and a commons where nobody would own those frequencies. And Steve thinks it was poorly done but I think that the concept itself is an interesting one that it's right now the debate about the digital TVs and the like is should we give it away to the broadcasters or should we auction it off? Well it does seem to me that there's a third alternative which is maintain it as a commons and allow everybody to have the use of it. And so that would deal with the highway itself but then the question is what about the information that moves across that highway which is the intellectual property issue. And the intellectual property issue is an issue that's woefully complicated and complex because the question of intellectual property is ranges from everything from I write an article and somebody takes it and they disseminate it and I don't get any royalties from it or I write a book to people in India isolate a tree and the tree has a certain kind of medicinal characteristics and a biotechnology company in the United States or a pharmaceutical company patents that and then sells that back to them as consumers and gives them no royalties. And so intellectual property means many, many different things and I think that we're still kind of working it out but I'm expecting to spend the next several months and sort of immersing myself on looking at this issue and how one might be able to allow people around the world to not have their dollars leave them because of information systems. One final point however on that is that I don't treat an informational system as a survival system. If your oil is shut off, if your food is shut off, you die, if your telephone stops, if your TV station goes blank, you're inconvenienced. Now we may talk about an information economy and it's extremely important, there's no question about it as a part of a dynamic and vibrant economy but it doesn't make you dependent on the person that provides you the information. I mean I can't see a future in which you would be dependent on that. So it is a different type of foundation to an economy and I think that we need to treat it that way. Unfortunately, that's all the time we have. Thank you both very much. Please turn the evaluation forms in at the back as you're leaving. Thank you all for coming.