 Good afternoon to everyone. My name is David Gunhoo. On behalf of the Institute of International European Affairs, I'd like to welcome you to today's event with Professor Jeffrey Sachs, which is entitled Building Back Better, Sustainability Post COVID-19. Jeffrey Sachs is, as you all know, a renowned economist, author, educator, and one of the world's leading authorities on sustainable development, as I can personally attest. Jeff is Director of the Centre for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He's President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and he is a UN advocate for the Sustainable Development Goals. We're delighted that he has been able to take time out of his extremely busy schedule to speak to us today. Today's event is the sixth in the IIA's Development Matters series, which is supported by Irish Aid, the Irish Government's Development Cooperation Program. First, some housekeeping points. Professor Sachs and I will have an introductory conversation for the first 20 minutes or so, covering a number of broad questions, and then we will go to Q&A with our audience. The event I should make clear is entirely on the record. The audience will be able to join via the Q&A function on Zoom, which you see on your screens, and please feel free to send in your questions at any time during the session as they occur, and we will come to them or to as many of them as we can in the time available. We'll do so when we finish the initial conversation. Please feel free also to join the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IIA. We are also live-streaming this afternoon's discussion, so a very warm welcome to all of you who are joining via YouTube. I would now invite Michelle Winthrop, who is the policy director at Irish Aid, to offer some words of introduction. Michelle, please. Many thanks, David. Good afternoon, friends, colleagues, and I'm delighted to be here today for this Development Matters lecture, and I'd like to welcome Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Ireland has been supporting the IIA to hold these seminars for some time now, and now that we've gone virtual, we are really glad to see that the engagement is continuing in a virtual format, if not, in fact, increasing a little bit of feedback there. Special thanks in particular to Professor Sachs for being here today. Professor Sachs is, of course, no stranger to Ireland. In fact, I'm probably disclosing too much by telling you that I have a distant memory of attending a lecture by Professor Sachs, I believe, in about 1993 in Trinity, particularly on the subject of post-communist transition economics, and indeed we may reflect on how much the world has changed since then. More recently, much more recently, Professor Sachs, I know we relied a lot on your insights and ambition as we worked together to shape the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, jointly with Kenya. Particularly now as we enter the decade of action during this unprecedented time, I think we're particularly looking forward to your thoughts on prospects for global progress towards the 2013 agenda. The topic of today's event is Building Back Better. It is fair to say, I think, that the world has changed drastically in recent months. Every aspect of our lives has been impacted by COVID-19, and of course all countries are feeling the impacts. I think we're particularly conscious, of course, that developing countries are especially at risk. Many started out this year with existing weak health, education, social protection systems, and many indeed faced a high death burden to start with. Of course, many are exposed to external risks more than others, such as climate change, political instability. We are still learning about how COVID-19 will impact on the STGs and the architecture that supports their achievement. But I think we are beginning to see some emerging fault lines in social, political, and economic systems. And I think now it's a great opportunity to really consider opportunities for alternative approaches as we make progress towards the STGs. Professor Sachs, we're very interested to hear your wisdom and your views on how we can harness this period of recovery to develop sustainable and equitable solutions. Ireland recognises the need for coordinated action to save lives and save livelihoods, but it's also important to ensure that eventually economic recovery is inclusive and sustainable and helps build resilience in the future, particularly for communities. We are also, of course, deeply committed to the importance of the multilateral system, to reach those furthest behind, but also to help us navigate multiple complexities, complexities that existed prior to the virus, that have been caused by the virus, and indeed that have been exacerbated by our attempts to control the virus. So I'm very much looking forward to this discussion today, and thank you again for your time. Thanks very much. Well, thank you very much to IIEA for having me back, and I look forward to the conversation with David when he gets that mute button turned off. David played an enormous role, a unique role, in bringing us the Sustainable Development Goals, so it will be a special treat to be discussing the status of the goals with him. Clearly, we're in a very deep crisis globally, though less of a crisis than we were before November 3, because our perhaps most important crisis is a crisis of governance, and when the center country of the international system, the United States, is poorly governed, nothing else works. So we have been suffering the collapse of multilateralism, because we've had under the Trump government a rampant and reckless attack on multilateralism, including the withdrawal of the United States from the World Health Organization this year, the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement, cuts that are very irresponsible to development assistance, and so forth. Now we have a new president-elect with the Irish dissent, that's always great news and great promise, and I think we can therefore really turn to the theme of today's discussion, which is building back better, because now we have the prospect of really doing that in a cooperative way. There are obviously two huge challenges that the world faces. The first is to stop the pandemic, and remarkably, part of the world has done that. Most of the Asia Pacific region lives almost without the virus. Now this is something for us in Ireland, in the United States, and in Europe to contemplate, why is it that many countries have gotten this completely under control, whereas it is out of control in our country. So that's the first challenge, is stopping the pandemic. The second challenge is then taking some lessons from the pandemic to reorient our economic and social policies. The pandemic is not only a disaster, it is a wake-up call to the weakness of our governments, to the weakness of being able to heed warnings, to the weakness of our systems of engaging science and expertise on behalf of human well-being, because this has been a huge failure during this past year in Europe and the United States. So we need to heed the lessons of the pandemic for redirecting our politics, and specifically the sustainable development goals and the Paris Climate Agreement and the Convention on Biological Diversity, the important things that the world has agreed to. We're agreed to for real reasons over the past 20 years, and we need to take them seriously forward. So in our discussion, I hope we talk about governance challenges, how we are more serious about following through on the things that we promise to do. And as I'll describe, and I see David is back online, through making real plans, basing those plans on real evidence and data, mobilizing the financing that is needed to implement those plans, and then living up to what we aim to accomplish. It's all rather straightforward, rational, I would say, but our politics have not been rational. So I think the biggest challenge is to restore rationality to our politics, meaning linking means and ends. And with the sustainable development goals and the Paris Climate Agreement, we have some very clear goals in mind. And we'll talk about how those can be achieved in specific. But the main point I'm making is that we have to decide that we're going to act to achieve the goals that we've set. And by doing so, that will define the course ahead. David, welcome back. Saying that the most common sentence in the English language these days is you're on mute, which despite zooming every day, many times a day for recent months, I find myself often speaking on mute, but glad to be back with you. So I will turn it back over to you. Oh, now you're on mute again. Okay, you can hear me now. Now we can, absolutely. A lot of these too, for my unavoidable absence, very, very sorry. Jeff, I mean, there are many avenues of interest there. How do you see us actually, I mean, international cooperation is clearly a must in order to restore momentum for implementation of the STGs. But although the arrival of the new administration in the US is hugely encouraging, we have nevertheless seen a growth in populism and nationalism over the last four years since the STGs were signed. I asked myself how we can actually restore the momentum that we had in 2015 with the Paris Agreement, with the STGs. So if you like, almost before we get to COVID, is there, what can we do to actually galvanize the international or re-galvanize the international commitment towards achieving the STGs? Well, let me say that populism does not work. It does not improve the well-being of the people in whose name these populists pretend to speak. Trump now has presided over 244,000 deaths in the United States. We have about 330 cases per million, more than 100,000 per day. Trump, I won't belabor the point more, but he is a mentally disordered individual who is called a populist, but he is creating death throughout the country and mayhem. And a wonderful Irish scholar, Ian Hughes, has written about disordered minds in high places in politics and the profound tragedies that they caused. So I think we need to start with populism as a concept. Populists are, these days, people with disordered minds who are not operating rationally, who through their demagoguery have power, but they cause destruction. Most of the people don't want destruction of themselves, their families, their livelihoods, so we need to get back to serious politics, meaning solutions for the public that are real solutions, not games of power. Even today, by the way, I'm sorry to be obsessed with it, but the Republican leaders like McConnell and Cruz and Graham in the United States are playing to Trump's fantasy that there's some vote fraud and so on. This kind of irrationality is killing our country, literally, these days, because every day that we waste on this, there are another thousand dead. There's another day of neglect of a pandemic that is raging out of control. And it's not a game, despite what these politicians think. So this is the point that I'd like to say to Boris Johnson. I'd like to say to Bolsonaro. I would like to say to the other populists, stop, you're not there for your own amusement. You're not there for power. You're there because the public needs public goods and services for its survival and its well-being. And when we don't get that, we face disaster. And we in the West should reflect how badly we've done this year, how flawed our politics are, because this pandemic is controllable. Why is it that Taiwan has no cases right now? Australian, New Zealand, countries familiar to us in culture, language, and all the rest have no cases right now. China, no cases. Korea, basically no cases, because they've had government that has just rationally done the job. Whereas, I'm afraid that in our countries, it's been a debacle. Trump is such a maniac, but we're not the only one. So with that kind of lack of seriousness, we can't solve any problems. And it's not a coincidence to me that Trump totally bailed on trying to stop the pandemic, but he totally bailed on issues like climate change, made it up the same way. It'll get colder. It will go away firing the person in charge of climate reports just yesterday. You can't make this up. We're a country of 330 million people with the greatest scientific expertise in history, and a madman is running around firing the scientists in the government. And this is called the 21st century. So every other goal falls by the wayside when we have this kind of madness, which we have. So I would just say to the public, elect politicians who are rational, who are calm, who are committed to listening to expertise, who are committed to being transparent and honest, because this is not a game of how you can defeat your opponents or get an extra tax deal. This is about our lives, our survival, our well-being. And we need to understand this is not one part of America against another or one part of Ireland against another or one part of Britain against another. This is us together grappling with problems that are hitting the whole society. So this is fundamentally a governance challenge. Once that's accepted, David, then, of course, there are real complexities. That's the first point. None of us understands in technical detail what needs to be done, except in narrow areas of our expertise, what we need to do is to understand who to talk to, how to consult, how to be transparent about it, how to hear hard truths that the politicians don't want to hear. Sometimes it's the truth that things are going to cost more than we say or that we have to do more things or that we have to raise taxes, the great bugaboo of our time, because everybody wants the money in their pocket. No one wants the social obligations that are part of making a society work. And all of that means evidence, deliberation, government reports. And this is my message to the Biden administration also. I don't want to see a raft of laws and other things done without public deliberation. I want to see reports, studies, evidence so that we're following a rational pursuit, not just Democrats beating Republicans or Republicans beating Democrats, or as my crazy country is doing today on a new show that I was on this morning already starting to talk about the 2024 election. What is this? Use of power or life? So I think that this is the point, but enough preaching. Maybe we could talk about some specifics. Jeff, you've been very eloquent on the governance problems, which stand in the way of an effective response to COVID and also to implement the STG agenda. Are there macroeconomic constraints as well? I mean, because of the pandemic, budgets are collapsing. Resources are extremely strained. Will we be facing challenges like those as well in terms of moving the STGs forward? Countries can reasonably say that their own fabrics have been stretched unbearably by COVID and therefore the STGs are almost a luxury. Or can one see the STGs as the blueprint for the recovery? I think we should understand where is the income and wealth in our world right now? Already it was lopsided, but during COVID the greatest redistribution of wealth from lower incomes to higher incomes has taken place in a short period of time. This morning, if you look at Bloomberg.com on its billionaires list, you'll find that five people in the world have $600 billion of personal wealth, five people. You'll find that Mr. Bezos alone of Amazon has about $190 billion of personal wealth. You'll find that the top 500 richest people in the world have, hold your seats, $7 trillion of wealth. And since January 1st, these 500 people have had an increase of their wealth of $1 trillion, 500 people. That's where the money is to be taxing Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, the other big tech companies. Ireland has resisted collecting the tax on Apple, for example, $14 billion is in the bank. My advice to Ireland take the money. Ireland needs the funding. I give half of it to Irish aid so it can do the work around the world, use the other half right at home. But stop agonizing about Apple's state. For God's sake, this is the richest company in the world. And our governments urgently need funding. Ireland has been in ringing its hands. We don't want your taxes. We want to show we're a good low tax country. We're so good, we'll be a tax haven. Don't be a tax haven, collect taxes, provide social services, use half of that money to help save the world from hunger and starvation. And thank Apple for providing good products and then paying its taxes. And we need to do the same with all of these companies. But we're in a mind warp, David, because something maybe about the human mentality. These people are so rich that they are, it's almost an idolatry that they're looked at as untouchable. But that's where the money is. So we need to tax them. We need wealth taxation. If you have 500 people with $7 trillion of wealth, it's simple arithmetic to see that you could leave each of them $1 billion, which I have on good authority is enough. You could leave each one with a billion and you'd have $6.5 trillion left over, which we could use to feed every person on the planet, have every child in school, provide universal health coverage, achieve SDG 3, SDG 4, SDG 2, SDG 6, SDG 7. And that's just 500 people that could do this. So I say all the time, Mr. Bezos, what do you need your $190 billion? Okay, you've made a very good company, but you don't need $190 billion. And the world is hungry and suffering right now. And I have here, I read it in the middle of an investigation of competition in digital markets by the US House Judiciary Committee showing how these companies have used their monopoly power to take over their markets. So there's also, we shouldn't be mystical about this. These are powerful companies making huge, huge, huge profits. And then our governments are bereft of revenues, but Ireland is so vividly saying, we don't even want your revenues. And then it's saying we don't have a budget to meet our domestic needs. It doesn't make sense. Kate, the money, please. Well, thanks, Jeff. That leaves us neatly into a question from Brendan Walsh of IDA Ireland, who thanks you only for your talk. And he's curious to have your thoughts on the role of large financial institutions in achieving and implementing the SDGs and more broadly the potential of sustainable finance as a sector for financial services. So, Jeff, if you'd like to take that one, I mean, the Apple discussion is certainly one that has edged back and forth in Ireland a lot. I won't attempt to enter into it, but if you could respond to what Brendan was asking about the future. Let me say hi to Brendan first and thank him for the question. And say the following. First, we need to make a big, big distinction between the kinds of SDGs that require outright budgetary outlays versus the kinds of SDGs that require investment finance. So when it comes to healthcare, when it comes to education, when it comes to nutrition, these are budgetary outlays not to be financed by private investment. There's the return as a social return. The return is livesaved, children educated, but there's not a direct income that you collect as the counterpart to that financing. And so you don't run a school system through public borrowing or you don't run a healthcare system through public borrowing, you run it through revenues of the budget. On the other side, if we're investing in clean energy, wind power, solar power as part of the energy transition, those are bankable projects. And then comes the question for the large financial institutions. Are you investing in those or are you investing in oil, gas and coal, for example? So we know that in order for climate safety to be achieved, we need to decarbonize the energy system. We need to move from the fossil fuels to wind, solar, hydro, geothermal power. And then the question is where is the responsibility for that? Well, first it starts with government to make the rules of the game and Europe really should be commended for the European Green Deal. It is the best blueprint for decarbonization on the planet today. And I hope that Biden will put forward a comparable plan shortly. Then comes the financing of that transformation. And a lot of that will be private market. Now, if this is the law of the land to decarbonize, to some extent the investors don't have a choice, you're not allowed to build new fossil fuel plants if the regulations are put in place properly. But I would also say to investors, why would you invest in fossil fuels right now when the principle is to decarbonize? And maybe some investors will say, well, that's fine, Professor Sachs, but you say it's to decarbonize, but we're not really going to do it. And I would say to you that if you look over the last 10 years, the single worst investment you could have made would have been in fossil fuels. It has been absolutely the surest way to lose money. And I said that 10 years ago, I said that five years ago, and I'm going to say it today again, it's not just a matter of doing good. It's a matter of, do you want to lose all your money? Because if you invest in fossil fuels more, your assets will be stranded. They will be prevented from use maybe in 2025 or 2030 or 2035, but you're going to be shut down. Peabody coal today is in the Financial Times on the verge of bankruptcy. Good riddance! It's a coal company. We don't need coal. Coal was okay in 1800. Coal is not okay in the year 2020, period. Go, leave Peabody. We don't want you and need you. Your workers will help. That's a just transition. But we've got to move on. And now that wind and solar are such low cost, we know how to move on. And so this is the basic point I would say to the investment community. First, be smart. See where the world is going. Look ahead because that's what investors are supposed to do. Don't look at the propaganda of Exxon Mobil and Conoco Phillips and others that say, oh, we're going to continue the same ways we are. Exxon Mobil fortunately is shrinking away. It used to be the great giant. It's disappearing the faster the better as far as I'm concerned. Unless it becomes the Exxon Wind Company, which would be fantastic. It's actually got the skill to do it. Just like stat oil became Equinor and now is making the offshore wind off the U.S. Northeast. So this is what I would say to investors. Be smart. The world will not tolerate product lines that are destructive of the planet. And so all of this reporting is important guidelines for being smart in this. And I would say to the business community, the big problem with what I'm saying, of course, is that the business community lobbies, they delay change that needs to be made. They propagandize. They run advertisements about how much Exxon Mobil loves nature and all of this nonsense. So they delay the clarity. They fund campaigns in the United States. By the way, this election cycle was $14 billion in campaign expenditures. You know how much corruption that means 14 billion changed hands. So this is where our real problem is. But to the investors, don't try to be cute and game reality. Face the facts that we're moving in a new direction. Thanks, Jeff. One of the areas which clearly requires huge investment is nutrition and food security. And I mean, clearly that area has suffered a large under COVID. Tom Arnold is a former director general of the IIA has a question of what importance do you attach to the food system so much next year? Well, Tom is one of the great leaders of sustainability. So hello, Tom. I was just talking about you a couple of days ago, because I need your advice on some things like the constitutional assembly of Ireland. But the hunger crisis is deep, and I believe larger than we know. Because hunger is the kind of thing that is first largely silent of the most powerless. It's sometimes not noted. Certainly micro nutrient deficiencies are not something that's screened in the headlines or the data. And especially under nutrition of young children with growing brains is devastating. And I'm sure that it's happening right now more than we know. So one thing that Ireland might that I would recommend because Ireland's long been a leader in this area is connect with the FAO and the World Food Program and try to promote better surveillance right now, much more survey data on what people are actually eating, how hungry they are, so that we're not just learning in a survey a year from now or two years from now how bad it is, but that we can see immediately what is really happening on the ground. The reason for fear is that remittance income has collapsed, tourist income has collapsed, retail trade, petty trade has been hugely disrupted. So there's every reason to believe that the incomes of the poor have plummeted and therefore that their food insecurity has soared. But we won't see it until there are riots or deaths or new waves of disease, but we ought to see it in real time so that we can respond to it. And then what to do? My own advice is any place that we see a growing hunger hotspot right now, the IMF should give an emergency financing to that country for use to address within days and weeks the hunger crisis. We're not in a food shortage in the macro physical levels. The supply chains did not collapse in the way of preventing us from getting food to people that needed. It's the incomes that have collapsed. And we need not to delay on that or even to wait for development aid, which is slow moving and difficult, in other words, to increase that envelope. In the very short term, we need the IMF to essentially be extending credits on an emergency basis so that finance ministers don't feel that they can't afford to address the hunger crisis. Thank you very much. Turning to health, do you see the US rapidly resuming support for WHO? I mean, what will the attitude of the Biden administration be, do you think? I think on the very first day of the Biden administration we'll be back in the World Health Organization. I would be shocked if it last if it took even 48 hours. This is something that the president can do on his own authority. And I expect that would be one of the very first actions on January 20th of the president. Biden understands multilateralism. He understands the destructiveness of and the petulance and the mean spiritedness and the pure sheer domestic politics involved in Trump pulling out of WHO. It's all a game to deflect blame from China. And so it had no substantive merit. But Trump clinically is sociopathic and so there's no remorse or feeling for the damage caused. And it's that combination of political, evil, and sociopathy that really explains this. We'll be back in WHO. Again, what I really want to emphasize is that even before we get a vaccine, this is a controllable epidemic. And by the way, Ireland should have it under control because islands have a much better feasibility of control than countries on mainland continents that have land borders. So with Ireland, I'd really urge you to double down on the public health measures, the face masks, physical distancing, massive scale up of testing and contact tracing, and take some guidance from Taiwan or from Korea or New Zealand or others that have beaten it down to zero. Maybe Prime Minister Ardern of New Zealand could also give some tips to the Tehsuk about what to do. But you could get it down to zero. Use the island advantage to really control the pandemic and show the rest of us how fast this can be brought under control. I think this is what Biden is going to try to do. Of course, the U.S. with 330 million people is much more complicated. But in Ireland, there was lots of really pernicious videos coming out. I don't remember the individual's name, but there was one person saying we've already reached herd immunity. It was almost a virally watched video. It was a bunch of nonsense, terrible phony claims just as the second wave exploded. And we can do better than that. And Ireland is filled with the good public health specialists. This is really controllable and really worth controlling. Jeff, more generally, how do you assess the prospects for achieving more effective multinationalism with a Biden administration there? Obviously, that requires a high degree of international consensus. And as we look around the landscape at present, and clearly, there will be greater tensions between the U.S., for example, and Russia and China than we've had over the last four years. But that's just one example. I mean, we all want to see more effective multinationalism. Do you think it is realistically achievable over the coming years? And Quiva de Barra, who's the head of Trocra, a leading Irish development organization, makes the point that we will be joining, Ireland will be a member of the Security Council as of January. And she suggests that we might have a role to play in relation to supporting a more effective multinationalism as a member of the Security Council. Any thoughts you have on that would also be appreciated. Thank you for being on the Security Council. This is extremely, important at this moment. The main message I would urge is no cold war with China. This kind of anti-China drumbeat of Pompeo and Trump has been extraordinarily dangerous and extraordinarily obnoxious in my view. China does this, China does that, China is the great evil. This is part of American evangelism. We always need an enemy, whether the enemy was the Soviet Union or Vietnam or the global war on terror or Saddam Hussein, the United States always needs an enemy. And Pompeo, who is in my view simple-minded and nasty, and a really fundamentalist who believes in imminent Armageddon was stoking this kind of conflict with China. China is not our enemy. This is the most important point. China wants global cooperation, needs global cooperation, and we should be cooperating. It's not as if every issue was easily solved, but of course China is major power. It's got major interests and it's got 1.4 billion people with a huge amount of talent. And we should be cooperating with China to stop the pandemic. We should be cooperating with China to address climate change because they're the number one emitters of greenhouse gases. We should be jumping with enthusiasm. The President Xi Jinping announced at the General Assembly in September that China is committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2060. I want to nudge that forward to 2050 because China can do it by 2050 and it should do it by 2050, but these are grounds for cooperation. And one of the bad ideas that some people around Biden have is we need a new coalition of democracies to fight the autocracies. Stop the divisions. Let's work with other countries and not emphasize right now the divisions, but emphasize the common interests so that we can practically solve problems. We're exhausted in the United States. This is no time for a crusade. This is time actually to solve our domestic problems and to understand that other countries have domestic problems and that if we work together, we'll help each other to accelerate the progress. So I would really hope that Ireland would be that voice of reason to say to the big powers, get along with each other. And I think that this is really important. I'm not a fan of, every leader of every big power, but I am really a fan of us taking a breath and stopping the conflicts. Of course, we shouldn't turn a blind eye if there's cross border aggression. That's what the UN is for. But if it's merely pointing, you're evil, you're this, you're that, that's not helpful. What is much more helpful is to say we have all agreed on the sustainable development goals. We've all agreed on the Paris Climate Agreement. What together are we going to do about this? We are all reeling from COVID. What together are we going to do about this? And I think that this approach could make really a big difference. Biden will be very good on much of this from the start because we'll go back to the UN, we'll go back to WHO, we'll go back to the Paris Agreement. I hope we'll go back to UNESCO right away because we certainly should do that as well. But there is a more hard line track or hard liberalism which says we have to oppose the autocracies. We need to make the world safe for democracy and so forth. And this is just too simple-minded. I'm sorry. We need to cooperate across the world right now to solve problems and not to be running a race about who's more saintly and who's more evil, but actually very pragmatically working to address the the challenges that are so huge in front of us. So I'm excited for the new Security Council. Let me say that. Thank you, Jeff. Well, I'm sure Ireland will want to play the kind of role of reasonable intermediary, which you've been suggesting. That's very much in our tip-matic tradition. Jeff, just a final point on multilateralism. Simon Carzwell of the Irish Times wonders really whether the huge divisions we've seen reflected in the respective votes for Trump and Biden, whether they carry over to the issue of effective multilateralism. I mean, is the American public itself divided on the issue? Perhaps if you just briefly address that point and then we'll end with a number of questions focused more on STGs and financing them. Well, first to say that in the election campaign, foreign policy was mentioned for about three minutes, 12 seconds. So I don't think that the American people have a desire about anything internationally right now. I don't know if they're aware of the rest of the world or not, but it's not a top issue. It's easy to stoke American fear. This is obvious. My country is not the most sophisticated country in geography, in history, or in almost anything else, I'm afraid. So if you say there's a global war on terror, well, there's a global war on terror. If you say that these countries are the evil empire, well, then they're the evil empire, whether Americans can identify them on the map or not. And so in this sense, there is an anti-China feeling right now. I watched it in shock, frankly, because within four years, China went from a counterpart to an enemy in the casual rhetoric. And there shouldn't be casual rhetoric in this world when you're talking about nuclear superpowers to start calling someone an enemy has consequences. But our politicians are inconsequential, unfortunately. And so their lacks, they're lazy. They blamed China for release of this virus and so many other absolutely senseless things. But the public, which doesn't care too much about this, hears and believes often. So I think the point is that the American public's not the constraint on foreign policy, but this is really a more elite activity and very much an executive branch activity, which is why Trump could do so many things almost on a personalistic basis. Because we have a flawed constitution and an inattentive public. And it means that the president has a tremendous leeway in these areas. Congress, of course, can frustrate or Congress can beat the drums of war, which is also a great American tradition. So lots can go wrong politically. But the main responsibility in our constitutional order, if one could call it that, is the president. The president is the one in the American system that has to stop going to war. I always think it's like souped up a car with the engine revving all the time. And the main job of the president is to keep the foot on the brake because otherwise the war machine will move forward. We'll go bomb someplace. And we need to stop that behavior because it keeps boomeranging on America. And it keeps creating waves of refugees in Europe. And it's just made a disaster. So in this sense, the long and the short of it is we need responsibility at the top. Biden fortunately is very level headed. He's a very decent, serious man. And I just hope that he doesn't have too many hotshot advisors who want to prove themselves by some regional war or conflict someplace. We might conclude with a number of questions more about the STGs specifically. In the order, one relates to what advice you might have for the SME sector in a country like Ireland, which is trying to progress the STGs within their own local economies. And another question relates really to debt relief comes to me. And Casey of Merchant Cara, the issue of debt, public and private and debt sustainability in terms of its potential impact on financing for development and achievement of the STGs. A third question relates to your views on what the World Bank and IMF and others can do to support the restructuring or writing off of LGC's debt, which is owed to private creditors. I'll just give you one final one, really what's this is from Jerry Machiavilli of Coalition 2030 in Ireland. What steps should governments take to improve governance, coherence and accountability in relation to the STGs in their domestic policy making? For example, the extent to which STG targets should be systematically considered. I mean, I have to say this is one of my own hobby horses that there is, but can we do more to encourage systematic handling of STG goals and targets? That should see us out. If you were good enough to respond to those, we'd be very grateful. Absolutely. So let me start with the end, which is governments should plan for achieving the STGs. And at this point, the Irish government or the new Biden administration or others should have a 10-year framework that says here's where we want to be in 2030, whether it's with schooling, with healthcare, with the energy system, with the sustainable land use. And ask the question in a transparent and expert manner, what would it take to get from here to where we want to be in 2030 in terms of policies, public investments and the financing to accomplish this? So this I think is the first point, make a framework, use the great universities of Ireland and there are so many wonderful institutions to work on these challenges, invite expert groups to submit ideas about how to reach 2030 in a particular area, but harness the information and the knowledge in the society in a creative way. And Ireland is just the right size to do this well. And with so much talent that I would say 2021 can be a great learning experience for the country. Here are things we can fix. Here's what we promise to do. Here's how we are part of the European Green Deal. Here are the challenges that are still unmet where we ought to put in our R and D and so forth. Within that context, SMEs will find their place because this will be the new economy. In general, I believe that we are moving to a digital world. So digitization within the SMEs I think is a basic point and Ireland is very much part of the information technology in all ways. You've got all the headquarters and links between the U.S. and Europe on many of the key digital sectors and digital technologies. That is crucial for achieving the SDGs. Think about what that means for digital health, for digital education, for digital governance, for digital payments. These are the growth areas of the economy and I think very promising ways to achieve the SDGs. On the questions of debt and the World Bank and the IMF, I think the basic point is we will exit COVID probably in 2021 with a global financial structure completely out of kilter. Huge budget deficits, large public debts, an overhang of bad debts in many countries, and really a financial need for more government revenues, an international tax system that is a sieve rather than a collection bowl, and all of this requires rethinking the international financial system. All the pieces are around in the debate right now. The need for new SDR allocation, the case for permanent debt relief, the OECD's plans on taxation of the digital economy and so forth. All of it has been blocked by Trump up until now. So one by one the proposals on the table have been blocked by the Trump administration. On the America First principle, don't you dare attack us. We will put duties on your goods, we'll break you. Trump's gone. We can get back to rational discussion. I rather think just like we had to Vatican II, I think we need a Bretton Woods II in the future, probably starting in 2022, 2023. It could be like Vatican II that it goes on for two or three years, but we need really to think holistically about finance, digital currencies, debt management, tax reform, ending tax havens. We need to make the world suitable for sustainable development. We need an international financial system that is suitable for sustainable development, and that really does mean a new conference. It won't be in New Hampshire. It could be in Dublin or a nice place in Ireland. This could be, we'd all love to come there. But this is what I would recommend to take a look at this issue. In the short term, I just want the IMF to give out credits to meet emergency needs and not worry about the long term. But then I want us to have the accounting in 2022, 2023, where we say, okay, we're past that pandemic. We have built up so many financial instabilities and overhangs. Now we have to clean up for a truly sustainable world. And so let's have a comprehensive view of international finances. Jeff, thank you very, very much for that. It should be promised to end on time. There are many, many more questions as you can imagine. You're always extremely stimulated across many, many fronts. Jeff, thank you very much for joining us today. It was a pleasure as always. We hope that we will see you in person before too long. And we were really grateful and apologies once again for the technical glitch earlier on. Thank you for making the time available. And we look forward to our next encounter. Thank you very much, Jeff. Thanks to all the friends, David. Thanks so much to you, Michelle. Thank you so much.