Reimagining Democracy for the Future

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Supercharge your business today with the help of zero zero with an X . We get loads of comments from you guys that say that you love the economics episodes and want even more deeper dives. So let's look today at the history of our economic system, the difference between markets and capital, and should we have extreme poverty lines and extreme wealth lines? So today I'm going to be having a conversation with the Chief Executive of the New Economics Foundation, Dan Sri Skanderajan. Hi Danny, really glad that you're here to join us. We did an event recently for forty years of the New Economics Foundation. Happy birthday. Thank you very much. Um it is important to point out at the beginning of the podcast though, you are a non party political organization. In fact you're willing to give advice to any politician who listens. I really appreciated your advice. I hope Rachel Reeves asked for your advice too. I'm sure she's watching. There we go. She's gripped to bold politics, I'm sure. That being said, as part of my speech, a lot of what I was talking about was 40 years of neoliberalism around Thatcher and Reagan. And something I'm really interested in exploring with you because I know you've got this amazing mind particularly for history, both democratic history and economic history. Is is it just this forty years? Is this a historical, this gap between rich and poor, or is this right throughout human history? I think what's really special about the last 40 years, what's really worrying about the last 40 years, is that it's seen the dismantling of the sorts of things humans put in place during the middle of the 20th century to create welfare systems , safety nets, protections, to curb the power of capital. All the stuff that was being done in the early part of the twentieth century seems to have been dismantled in front of our eyes over the last 40 years. And that's what, you know, the privatization, the financializ ation, the deregulation agenda that we've seen in so many parts of the world has undermined what should have been a period of human flourish ing in which more of us are able to feed ourselves, look after ourselves, enjoy all sorts of opportunities, but we're going backwards. There isn't often a distinction made between capitalism and markets, because markets have been throughout history, but not necessarily capitalism. Yeah, exactly. I think the market is a is a very sensible way of organizing particular types of human interaction, right? It's a it's an efficient way of doing some things What seems to have happened is we've seen a very perverse and powerful manifestation of market ideology or power that seems to not only have corrupted capitalism , but has had pervasive impacts across the rest of society on politics, on aspiration, on human happiness. And that's really worrying. You mentioned politics there. You've written a book, Power to the People, which is about the attack on democracy. How exactly is democracy being attacked and what can we do about it? Well, I start with the sort of foundation of democracy, which is people. And you know, we spend a lot of time talking about politics and elections and changing the people in power, but we don't spend enough time thinking about the the buttressing of democracy, which is about citizens being able to express ourselves freely, to protest , to come together, to assemble, to associate through voluntary associations or even formal charities, what we call civic space, the the space in which outside the market, outside the family, outside the state , humans come together to solve problems, you know, to fix their communities, to speak truth to power, all that wonderful stuff that happens in civil society sadly is under attack almost everywhere in the world. That civic freedoms are being undermined by not just autocrats, but even in mature democracies, people's right to peaceful protest is being challenged. They're giving punitive punishments for for daring to protest. Organizations that speak truth to power are being undermined through regulation and red tape through bureaucracy. And of course, no wonder then that people are feeling more isolated, more angry because they're fed up with mainstream politics, which feels like it's not really speaking to their in needs and interests, but they're also unable to to sort of come together in civic life. We see it here in places like the UK, but you know, I I spent six years of my career working in a global civil society network, and we're seeing really worrying things happen around the world. You know, two-thirds of hum ans now live in countries where civic freedoms are under serious threat because they're inautocracies or their you know fundamental civic freedoms are being undermined. Trevor Burrus It seems to me part of the problem is that if you have a dominant narrative What can be done about it? Because presumably once it reaches a certain line it becomes very difficult for people to organize. Trevor Burrus Well I think the important thing is that each of us plays our role as active citizens. One of the things that I I worry about is that democracy has been reduced to a very sort of narrow realm about voting every few years, whereas democracy to work has to involve each and every one of us playing our part, as being an active citizen, of holding power to account, speaking up when we see injustice or or wrongdoing. The last thing we can afford to do is watch as the system is being undermined or challenged. And complacency is really dangerous. So I think the first thing, you know, the subtitle of my book is Use Your Voice , Change the World, because each of us has to play an active role for this to work. Secondly, we need to remind people, especially those who have economic and political power, that it's unsustainable. In fact, it's dangerous the path that we're heading on, because if you concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a few, that will inevitably tear the social fabric apart. It will lead to violent upris ings as we're seeing in some parts of the world. It will lead to people challenging even democracy itself. Worrying numbers of young people around the world would prefer an autocrat or a strong man leader to democratic politics because they're worried that democratic political institutions aren't delivering for them, aren't protecting their futures. And so think, hold hold on a minute, maybe some strongman autocrat might do it for us. And that's a very dangerous place for humans to be in. And so the reminder is also to power holders to be responsible, to take precious care of this fragile thing that we call democracy and don't be tempted to shut down a protest or you know for a justice system to not be tempted to you know meet out really harsh sentences for people who simply are trying to protest something that they feel is unjust. Aaron Powell And it feels like the two conversations are starting to really link now because we initially spoke about an historical moment or this moment of huge wealth inequality. And now we're also talking about a moment where powerful people Well the one moment in human history where we've really tackled in economic inequality, wealth and income inequality, has been in countries like the UK or the US or in other parts of Western Europe in the twentieth century, where we put in place tax systems that tax sometimes at you know really high rates, you know, seventy, eighty, ninety percent rates of tax on on very rich people, in order to build social welfare systems or the welfare state as we called it. So we know from history how to address inequality. It comes back to the point I was trying to make before, but you know, we did all of that, building in the 20th century , and then we've watched as all of that good stuff has been dismantled before our eyes. And you know, I've been fascinated by this sort of the history of wealth. Because most of human history there was no such thing as wealth. You know, we were barely surviving, barely getting by. There weren't things that you could hoard or controlled. And my reading of human history is most of it has be you know, we've been a very collaborative species. Yes, we've fought with other tribes or you know, we've been mean to each other, but we've also succeeded as a species because we've shared what we had. You know, you pulled what crops you had to make sure that no one, you know, in your community was left starving and we protected each other and nurtured each other. And then about ten thousand years ago, we discover these little trinkets and artifacts and you know coins and shells and money . And that led to across societies, across history, the temptation by some to hoard. And most of human history that was done through coercion. It was leaders, rulers, kings, chieftains who who sort of asserted their power or asserted some sort of divine right to control and hoard that wealth. And then what's remarkable about the last couple of hundred years in democracies, in social democracies, is we've said that's not right. That's you know we need to challenge that. It's not right for people to hoard wealth and power and we're going to correct for that. But then fast forward to today, we are living with eye watering levels of accumulation. You know, when I used to work at Oxfam, we published that report about how many people, men, own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world's population. When Oxam first started doing that comparison, it was in two thousand fourteen, it was something like sixty-two men owned the same as the poorest half of the world's population. Then it was thirty odd. And then it was twenty odd. Then it's I think the latest is six. Soon, if Musk Musk becomes a trillionaire, it'll be one person. How can we think that's an acceptable way to organize our societies, our economies? You know, you might agree that capitalism needs some sort of profit motive or some sort of incentive, but this is a really vulgar manifestation of that to allow a small number of people to not just hoard economic wealth, but then use it to buy political influence. It's thoroughly unsustainable and deeply dangerous. Trevor Burrus And it's not just with excess wealth, is it? Am I right in understanding that with stocks and shares, the amount of people who have a diverse kind of stuff that they own in inverted commerce is getting smaller and smaller and smaller because a smaller group of people are owning much more. Trevor Burrus Yeah. I mean it's what it's to your point around the sort of perverse way that capitalism itself is is evolving or mutating. Because you could argue that shareholder capitalism could be a very interesting and good way of organizing society. I mean in fact Margaret Thatcher used to call it shareholder democracy, right? The idea that we would all own assets in in society and we would therefore be sort of active participants in the way that capital is deployed. On paper, that sounds like a great idea. What's happened in practice? It's a smaller number of people who've started to own these assets. And instead of those assets being put to good productive use to create jobs in the everyday economy or the foundational economy, it's just become a system of extraction and those assets simply find the easiest way to seek returns. And that might be through effectively casino capitalism, sort of gambling on asset markets. Nothing to do with the foundational economy that so many of us rely upon. And so you're right that there's a sort of this version of capitalism is a sort of perverse interpretation of what I think the system was supposed to look like. And here we are, you know, this year is the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Adam Smith's foundational book, The Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith would be rolling in his grave to see this version of capitalism as it's being practiced today, I think. And you use the phrase there foundational economy. And I remember we were in a meeting once and you used it and I said, that's a great phrase. T tell me about it. So I'm gonna do it now publicly. Well what do you mean by foundational economy? Economics is often seen as this sort of really opaque, complex thing. That's part of the problem. We might want to talk about that. But ultimately for me, it's a it's a way that humans choose to organize the sort of economic aspects of our lives to trade or to share between us. In principle, a foundational economy is about how those economic instruments work to help humans thrive or flourish in their communities. And we know how that works. Throughout history, the world over, that's through being able to put your own talents to good use, to be able to enjoy some things in life, to be able to have some degree of choice and freedom in in what you do. So the foundational economy for me is about the economic activities that allow human thriving or human flourishing. What seems to be happening is that's sort of neglected and instead we focus on the sort of financializ ation of so many aspects of our lives that it's all about the returns to investment. And in the UK , which you know is an incredibly open economy , something like twenty-five percent of our GDP is accounted for by foreign multinationals. We've become not only privatized and financialized, but owned by asset holders in other parts of the world. And before you know it, public policy is all about making sure that we keep those markets happy, those investors happy, and not this idea of supporting people in their everyday lives going about their everyday activities. And we need to flip it. And you know, it's interesting, you you mentioned Rachel Reeves. In 2018, Rachel, long before I started at the New Economics Foundation, came to NEF launch a paper called Everyday Economics. Right. It has some really good insights into how you might nurture that. But I lament the fact that she and many other folk in public life aren't paying sufficient attention to everyday foundational economics. And you just referenced then the selling off of our assets to foreign investors. And in fact, one of the points I made of my speech and I I really meant it was when I talked to younger people about the fact that we used to own British gas and that we'd be owned the water companies and we just sold this off in kind of a bonfire of sales, they can't quite believe it. Now it's easy for me to say a narrative of the reason why that was done was because there was a game plan to move our public money to private wealth. Was that entirely the game plan? Or was this something that happened with good intention but actually along the way, dystopian forces took over? I think it was intentional on the part of of many actors. Coming back to the sort of historical moment, you know, one of the things that did hap pen in the twentieth century was bringing a whole bunch of things that were critical to society's functioning into public ownership. We invented railways, we recognized that in order to do that effectively and efficiently, to make sure that again it supports people's lives. You needed to have a national system, you needed to run the railways to the places where it needs to go rather than just where it was profitable, make sure that the pricing systems work so that people can have affordable travel to to get to work, but also to explore the country. And that worked in public ownership, so we had British Rail. And you could say the same thing for essential services around electricity, around water, even housing. As I'm sure you know, lots of young people can't believe that it was the public sector that built the vast number of new homes throughout most of the twentieth century. You know, something like sixty percent of house building in the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties in this country was backed by public capital of some sort. So again, remarkable progress in the 20th cent ury through public cooperation through the state or other forms of sort of collective ownership. But then that prevents capital or it limits the scope for capital to be able to exploit returns. And so the sort of at the heart of what we now call neoliberal ideology, people called it Thatcherism or Reaganomics rather, is the idea that, well, no, the state is actually qu,ite bad at organizing economic life, so we need to leave it to markets. Bonanza. Because before you know it, you have this sell-off often at discounted rates. The very rules in which that those sales happened, favored invest ors, and then before you know it, you've privatized so much that any public policy making is constrained by pleasing the investors. Just as we've got ourselves into this mess, I think the nephew , having been around forty years, is we can easily get ourselves out of this mess. Because we could reorganize our economic life, our public institutions, with people at their heart. And it might not actually involve recreating the stays the state as it was. It might be that we do things more creatively. Maybe we we make things mutuals. You know, let's make the post office a mutual owned by sort of shareholders across the country rather than say, okay, let's lead the state, let the state run it in the way that it might have been before. Trevor Burrus Could you spell out what a mutual would be? Yeah. A mutual is like a cooperative where we all own a share and become sort of co-owners of something, not through the state, because that you know the state works by saying we pay taxes and we contribute to the state, and the state runs it as a sort of arm of the state. If it's a cooperative or a mutual, it's something that's still held in public ownership, but where each of us might have a a say or a stake. And the good news again is there are hundreds, thousands of amazing cooperatives and mutuals in this country, and they've been around for hundreds of years. And some of the most inspiring new economic formations that I see are things like community energy companies, you know, renew solar and wind plants, owned by commun ities, driving decarbonization, but also community ownership of those assets. Or equal care cooperative, you know, the care sector is notorious for being, you know, for profiteering, lots of hhedge funds and oters own these care operators, they provide a bad service, they pay people poorly, and the people who they're supposed to serve be serving don't feel any ownership of of the services they're accessing. So why not make it a cooperative? And so this equal care cooperative is a small, but I hope part of a movement where the care givers, the care receivers, family members, and others are equal shareholders, if you will, in a cooperative arrangement that they all sort of co-own. It's an efficient way of organizing a important service, but importantly it's an efficient way of keeping ownership and power shared amongst us rather than sort of handing it over to some nameless, faceless investor somewhere else. It just makes so much sense. I had a public meeting recently with um some credit unions and they talked about how it's hardly used in the economy, but actually what a a mazing resource this is. I mean you just listen to these ideas and you go they're they're there for the taking. Credit unions are the fantastic example. I mean I think I mean like one or one and a half percent of the British population banks with credit unions. In Ireland , in Australia, in Canada, even in the US, it's something like twenty or thirty percent. Right. You know, I met someone from the Vancouver credit union. It has investable assets of thirty five billion dollars Canadian. Hundreds of thousands of people are members, and they're just opening up their first national bank owned by the corporate members. Like why in the UK, where we had some of the earliest credit unions, can't we be taking a leaf out of that book and say that's how we reform our financial services industry rather than having big corporates with big towers in Canary Wharf? Let's democratize the way our economy works. I realized I , but can you explain what a credit union is? Yes. Absolutely. Credit unions are some of the oldest forms in which humans have done financial transactions. And they started when a community, when someone needed a a pot of money to be able to buy a house, for example. And not everyone had enough. So people banded together and they pool their resources. And in some cases building societies, which is another form of o of ownership, said, okay, well, ten of us might pool our money together, one of us gets the capital in the first year or the first month, and then the next month we all put in a share, and then the second person gets that capital and so on. So we all access capital, but we're mutually accountable to each other. A credit union is where people with a common bond, because you work for an em you know you're in a profession, the police have lots of credit unions, for example, and you're all pooling your resources together, that then creates the capital from which now you can borrow. So again it's it's a communal way or public way of owning these really important parts of economic life rather than being slave to the market. I said this to them in public uh that they're not doing yet, but about credit unions for decarbonisation with businesses. So actually as a way of leveraging capital, but a conversation maybe for another day. Trevor Burrus But also for individuals. I mean buying a heat pump, for example, is a is an investment. The state is trying to subsidize it but not enough. But imagine if you had, you know, with your community members or people in your profession, you were able to access subsidized credit to be able to invest in a heat pump. Hey, we're still off a pickleball Sunday. Oh hold on a sec. Hey, how's the hustle? Pretty busy, actually. No time to chat. I'm married to the grind. He's asking me my 10K time. That's none of your business. This place so boring. It's just not me. Oh dear. Is your business stuck in the wrong place? Then try workspace. Look at our new space. It feels just like home. With your own space and your people, your business can happen. It all happens at Workspace. Hey! Did you know that GiftGaff offers a wide range of refurbished fonts from the biggest brands? With GiftGAF, you'll always get high-quality refur bished phones at a lower price. These refurbished phones work just like new. The only difference is the price tag. Plus, at GiftGAF you'll get a minimum 12-month warranty. Save money, and it's a more sustainable choice too, because you're helping reduce waste. Take a look at their wide range of refurbished phones at giftgaff.com. Terms apply. See giftgaff.com slash refurbished. Hi, Greg James. Oh look, it's Alice Levine. We're here to invite you to the world's biggest podcast festival, Crossed Wires. It's from the 2nd to the 5th of July. We are taking over iconic venues across Sheffield with some of the UK's biggest podcasts. Including Ellison John. Elizabeth Days bringing how to fail. The Blind Boy Podcast. The Scream Rock Podcast. With a special guest. That'll be me. Bold Politics with Zach Palansky. Jack Mate's Happy Hour. British Scandal. I believe that's pretty good. Guilty as charged. And Danny Robbins cold cases. But also there's a whole entirely free fringe programme as well. After parties, book signings, food and drink. We've basically got everything for an amazing weekend. Tickets are on sale now. Head to crosswires. live to get yours. So the new economics foundation is full of brilliant ideas, and anyone watching or listening can find those ideas because they're on the website as research papers, which I would say are pretty accessible. They're they're detailed but they're often laid out that you know people can follow the story. And one of the ideas that really caught my eye was this idea of abolishing the Office of Budget Responsibility or replacing it rather with an office of fiscal transparency. Can begin with the Office of Budget Responsibility. No, I think it was created with some good intent to say, look, politicians come and go, parties come and go, but there needs to be an independent assessment of sort of public borrowing and public finances. Let's create an independent committee, in this case three people, and give them the ability and a team to be able to check government projections on growth, inflation, borrowing, and assess whether the government is is meeting so called targets. And Chancellors at any any one point are sort of held to account by the OBR. The intent was good. In practice, what seems to have happened is that it's a very narrow way of defin ing success because you're basically each chancellor and each budget is being scored against a particularly narrow target, not a range, whereas almost everything in economic life is a range, no one knows for certain exactly what's going to happen on inflation or growth or whatever else it is. So it seemed pretty silly to base your targets on something narrow. Secondly, it's based on a system of scoring particular types of public investment that we've colleagues have written, reams and reams, but hopefully accessible as you say, that are problematic. Some public investment is not scored properly for its long-term return. So chancellors or treasuries are sort of disincentivized from spending in that way because we're not properly reflecting the value of them. And thirdly, it's not r at all a democratic way in which we can do this work. Because yes, our politicians are accountable, but these able civil civil servants are not really accountable. So they hold huge power using very narrow forecasts, we would argue argue with problematic methodologies. And those decisions and how the media and sometimes the market reacts to them basically condition everything else in public policy because if the Treasury says there's no money, every other department can't do what they want to do on transport or education or whatever else it is. So it seems a really undemocratic and unaccountable way of managing something so fundamentally important as public borrowing. And so colleagues have come up with an idea to replace the Office of Budget Responsibility with an Office of Fiscal Transparency. It's much more about making transparent the various assumptions that are being made. So it's not about scoring against the target, it's about being clear about the assumptions, and creating a system of fiscal referees, if you will. Maybe you can come up with a better term, but that's the best we can do. Which is sort of saying, well actually, yeah, this particular investment is likely to deliver these sorts of returns, so it's probably a sensible thing to do . This other sort of investment that the State's doing may not have so similar returns. And so more nuanced approach to particular decisions rather than a sort of very clumsy tool, if you will, that's driving these dysfunctional decisions, as one of our colleagues from the Institute for Fiscal Studies recently called it. Aaron Powell And then hanging over this whole conversation is I'd say the cloud of Listruss's mini budget, where in fact a journalist Nick Robinson, I was talking about our plans to invest in transport and schools and hospitals, and he brought up Liz Trust instantly. And my argument always is, you know, Liz Trust was borrowing to fund unfunded tax cuts, which is very different to borrowing to invest. And Nick Robinson just kept replying by saying, well, it's still spending. I guess it's partly a question about journalism and and economic literacy, but more widely, what is the answer to that when when people try and compare these things? Aaron Powell It's the same point as I was trying to make around having a nuanced approach to public borrowing, you have to say do the same for public expenditure. No. There are very different types of public expenditure. And we've got into this framing, I suppose, that all public expenditure is necessarily bad, that the state is bad and so therefore when the state borrows or spends it's also bad. Take poverty and expenditure to reduce poverty. Something like the two child cap that was in place until very recently . We've been told, well, that's a cost. If we were to extend lift the two child cap, it would cost the state X billions of pounds. It's nonsense. By allowing children in our society live in poverty, we are costing the economy as well as society billions more through the costs directly of addressing issues when they arise, because they have health issues or mental health issues or whatever else it is, through the loss of productivity, through the loss of those children being educated and being active contributors to the economy. And so we need to rethink the way we talk about public expenditure because I would say spending a bit more now to do the right thing to address poverty is exactly the right thing that we should be doing. I mean if you want to see it in economic terms, it will save us billions more down the line. But we've thought about it in the wrong way. The same with expenditure on the on the green transition. We're living in these turbulent times when we can no longer rely on fossil fuels from a security point of view, let alone a climate security point of view, we should be pumping as much public investment in as rapid a green transition as possible so that we can minimize or mitigate the adverse impacts on the climate, but also deliver energy security. And better still, if you could do that in a way that also helps people who are facing the cost of living crisis, then you've got a triple win. So if you still simply think of public expenditure as well, it's all very bad it as ifing involves borrow, but don't realize the payoffs on addressing poverty or the green transition, then we've got it all wrong. We're thinking about public policy in the wrong way. Aaron Powell Beautifully put. Something people will know about was this idea of an extreme poverty line that was looked at throughout the world. But you have a different idea, right? Aaron Ross Powell I think we should have an extreme wealth line. And there's a bunch of us who are working together, so the NEF working with a group called the Patriotic Millionaires, who are really rich people who want higher taxes, and an academic call Ingrid Robaines, who wrote a fantastic book uh on libertarianism, and some colleagues at the London School of Economics. And our dream is that every society in the world has an extreme wealth line, a line above which we as a society think it's immoral and harmful for any one individual or household to hold more wealth than that line. The analogies with the extreme poverty line, because you know, mo most people these days might know that there are poverty lines pretty much in every country. In fact, there are several poverty lines we talk about. But until the the nineteen seventies, we didn't have those. And in fact those people who talked about an extreme poverty line at the time were ridiculed by mainstream economists because they said, Oh, how on earth can you quantify poverty or why would you set a line or why should policymakers be obliged to make sure that ever yone is, you know, lives above the line. But we have one. So we say it might seem a bit counterintuitive now, and and there's a huge lobby of people, as you can imagine, who hate this idea. I think it's a really important we do, because we need to be just as worried about what's happening at the top of the tree as what's happening in terms of poverty. And having a societal conversation, a democratic conversation about when we think too much is too much, I think is really important and timely. And you know, I'd love to see a government in the UK ask a say a citizens' assembly, ninety-nine people randomly sele cted to sit for six months or a year or whatever it is, hear all the evidence about the incentives that people have to earn and and the opportunities through wealth accumulation, but also the harms. Like what does what happens to society when rich people buy political influence? What's happening when rich people fly in their private jets in terms of the carbon emissions? What's happening in terms of the sort of social harms of of wealth and come up with a sort of agreed line saying, you know, it might be a million pounds, it might be ten million pounds. I don't know what it is. And we say, okay, look, that's the line that policymakers then need to bear in mind when they set policies. So they might set their tax policies so that once you get have wealth above that amount, you are taxed at very high rates. Again, not unfamiliar because we were doing that through the nineteen fifties, sixties, seventies Or you might say, look, ten million is the extreme wealth line, and no one should be allowed to inherit more than that. So if you happen to do well and you know accumulate more than ten million in your lifetime, you just have to give it away or or or do something with it so that your children can't inherit more than ten million. And you know, one of the things we've been doing is interviewing rich people as part of this process. It's fascinating because many of them are very concerned about the sort of damaging impacts, the harmful impacts of wealth. But many of them have also set their own line for their children. You know, one very rich person soul told me recently, you know, they've worked very hard and the last thing they want is to have sort of their children have no incentive to work at all. And so they will limit the amount of money the child will get as inheritance because they want to for them to keep that drive to to to work hard. And so I'd love to see an extreme wealth line here in the UK, but maybe every country. And and of course we then importantly, you know, we need to have global cooperation, because capital is mobile, doesn't care about borders or nation states really, and so if we're going to have any chance of tackling the wealth emergency, the wealth inequality emergency, we're going to have to take global action. Trevor Burrus, Jr. And does that link our entire conversation together? Because we started talking about democracy and the need for people power. We're also talking now about extreme wealth inequality around the world. What does democracy look like around the world because we can't solve these things just as a country? Aaron Powell Yeah I, think there is a a fork in the road, I think, for humanity at the moment, because and it's a global one. It is exactly that. I think if we do nothing, we see democracy dying away and replaced by autocracy and dictatorships and strong man politics. If we do nothing and don't have meaningful international collaboration, then we can't address the climate crisis, the inequality crisis, you know, all sorts of other global challenges, migration. And we end up in this sort of dystopian scenario in which, you know, we're retreating into sort of nationalism and populism and warfare and resource compet ition. And I think that's what lots of people, um especially young people, are fearing, right? But there is also another very plausible road that we can take, and we have to take, and that's to say, actually , we can reimagine democracy. Let's make it more participatory so that in addition to voting every few years, we are manifesting our democratic citizenship through other forms of liquid everyday democracy. We're shaping how budgets in our local authorities are being spent. We're owning our community energy company. We're we're in a mutual that owns the Postal Sericev. You know, we're feeling empowered both politically and economically, and we're working together as one humanity to address some of these challenges. You know, take wealth inequality. We're told, of course, oh, you know, if you tax wealt hy people they'll leave. Well the obvious answer is to have one agreed minimum tax around the world on wealth. It could be done like that. It was done like that a few years ago for a global minimum corporate tax. Decades people said it could n't happen. Countries of the world agreed that you know every country has to have tax at least fifteen percent. We could very easily say every country in the world has to have a two percent tax on assets over a billion or whatever the the amount is. And so we renew democracy, we renew international cooperation. You know, I often think that this should be the century of the citizen. You know, for most of humanity we lived as subjects, and then capitalism said we should be consumers. This should be the era of humanity in which we have enough to survive, we have enough to thrive, we have all these amazing tools and technology to be able to live very interesting creative lives supported by machines, not ruled by machines. And you know, a few decisions I think that we need to take in the urgently in the next few years to protect and reimagine democracy, to democratize our econom ies, and