Human Centered

An Earth-friendly Political Economy

Episode Summary

Arun Majumdar guides a discussion on the considerations and challenges of shaping a sustainable political economy with guests Eric Beinhocker, Genevieve Bell, & Kim Stanley Robinson, all members of CASBS's "Creating a New Moral Political Economy" program

Episode Notes

Creating a New Moral Political Economy

Episode Transcription

Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. How do we inform and design a new moral-political economy of climate change? Today on Human Centered, another episode in our Social Science for a World in Crisis series. This episode was produced in association with the CASBS program on Creating a New Moral Political Economy. Originally webcast April 28, 2021, this episode is titled An Earth-Friendly Political Economy. The panelists, who are all members of the New Moral Political Economy program at CASBS, were Erik Beinhocker, Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford. Genevieve Bell, the Florence Violet McKenzie Chair, Director of the School of Cybernetics, and Director of the 3A Institute, all at the Australian National University. And Kim Stanley Robinson, the acclaimed science fiction author, most recently of the book The Ministry for the Future. Moderating the conversation is Arun Machundar. The J. Precourt Provostial Chair Professor at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford. Current action in our struggle against climate change is not enough. Recent scientific forecasts paint a visceral picture of catastrophe averted only by large-scale transformations. A zero-carbon, economically sustainable civilization will require fundamental political and economic power shifts between those who are heavily invested in the existing energy economy and those demanding a different and new moral-political economy. What institutional arrangements will reflect values friendly to a thriving, sustainable relationship with Earth while reducing inequality for its billions of inhabitants? Let's listen in as the panel discusses an Earth-friendly political economy.

Arun Majumdar: Hello, my name is Arun Majumdar. I'm a professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford University and also Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy. Welcome to the 14th episode of CASBS's webcast series, Social Science for a World in Crisis. I want to acknowledge the co-sponsors for this episode, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford, and the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford. Okay, you've read the bios of the three panelists, and the event promo provides links to the extended bios, so I'll do a quick intro. We have Kim— we have a terrific panel. Kim Stanley Robinson— Stan Robinson is a renowned science fiction writer. His latest book is The Ministry for the Future. I highly recommend reading that book. Eric Beinhocker is a professor of public policy practice and executive director of the Institute of New Economic Thinking, both at Oxford University. And we have Genevieve Bell, who is the Florence Violet McKenzie Chair, the Director of the School of Cybernetics, and the Director of the 3A Institute, all at the Australian National University. As you know, today's conversation is on an Earth-friendly political economy. It's presented in association with CASBS's ongoing program on creating a new moral political economy with which this group is involved. So here's how we'll proceed. I'll make some opening remarks. We have the three panelists will each make about 3 to 5 minutes of opening remarks to set the stage, and then we'll go into an interactive discussion, which is where the fun really begins. A note to the attendees: you can submit questions using Zoom's Q&A feature. We ask you that you keep your questions concise and on point, and given the expected volume of questions, we probably won't be able to address all of them, but be assured the panelists will read them and/or I will interject these questions into the discussion, and if we don't address some of them, we'll at the end of the discussion, we'll get to it. So let's begin. Earth-friendly, that's in the title. Now, the Earth has a different language than English. So allow me as a crude translator of what the Earth may be saying right now. In 0 AD, when Jesus was there, the population of this world was 200 million people. In 1800, in 1800, it was 1.6 billion people. So it took 1,800 years to go— for the population to go from 200 million to 1.6, 8x. In 1,800, it was taking 300 years to double the population. By 2000, it took 39 years. So if you look at the population history, of the world, of the world, you— it goes steadily like this and then it just sharply goes up. I call that the human tsunami. The Earth may be saying, what has happened? We have all these people around. So that's one tsunami. We have pegged the 20th century success to GDP growth, which has followed an exponential growth as well. Simon Kuznets, the economist who proposed the use of GDP in 1934, warned against using it to measure human welfare. And yet that is what we do. Our quality of life has certainly improved dramatically, and we are not going to go back to the agrarian society. We have witnessed a massive increase in consumption, and our political economy is based on the growth of GDP. That is the political and moral choice we've made in the 20th century. So this double whammy of human population tsunami and the human consumption tsunami have led to massive fossil energy use to fuel this growth, industrialization of our food, agriculture, textiles, construction. This has now led to what we now call the climate crisis. And we now realize the 20th century model is unsustainable. So we are now asking everyone to go on a carbon diet. This is a major shift. I can tell you from personal experience, most diets don't work unless there's a change in a lifestyle. And in our values. So how do we value human and planetary welfare? Can we improve them while our GDP may be going down and our population stabilizes? How can we act now to address decadal or century-scale risks when all we— many a times we focused on is the short term. At the core are choices we have to make in what and how we value things. What is the new moral political economy? There are so many dimensions to this, and I'm really looking forward to the discussions that we are going to dig into more on this. But let me welcome now Stan Robinson to make his remarks.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, thank you, Arun, and thank you, CASBS. Good to be with you and Eric and Genevieve. I have been invited to this group in part because I'm a utopian science fiction writer, and my most recent attempt is called The Ministry for the Future, and it addresses the problems that Arun brought up in his remarks by way of the Paris Agreement, which has the right to set up standing subcommittees. So this is part of IPCC and part of the UN, part of the international treaty organization by which the nation-state system each nation defending its own interests is actually going to gather together to solve what is a global single problem for everybody. I was attempting to describe a best-case scenario for the next, say, 30 years or so that you could still believe in given where we are now, which is at the precipice of a mass extinction event that would also hammer human beings. So it seemed to me that some humans now need to be defending the interests of the planet, the biosphere, the other living creatures that are our cousins, and also the human beings that are going to be our descendants and come after us in the current legal regime. And that's what the Ministry for the Future was about. I concluded that we have the technical capacities to deal with the problems that Arun outlined. We don't need magical new inventions. Improvements are always possible, but we actually already have the tech if it were employed. And by technology, I want to also include things like law, language, and justice. These are the software technologies that are just as important as the hardware. But what we don't have is the financial mechanisms to do it. Capital goes to the highest rate of return. Rescuing the biosphere is not the highest rate of return, but is a cost similar to paying for your sewage system or the right or something like that. Therefore, we are doomed. So the crux of my novel came to be a kind of a shifting so that if you could imagine that saving the biosphere and creating a sustainable system of justice and prosperity for all If that were the highest rate of return, everybody understands that the engine of this world's economy would make it happen really fast. So some people call this a carbon coin or carbon quantitative easing, a kind of flipping of the sense of value, precisely as Arun said, from the making of profit, from GDP, to some metric or set of metrics that would be based around decarbonization and an increase in justice and prosperity. When I wrote the book, 2019, it was kind of a dark time in a lot of ways. And paradoxically, I would say that the pandemic was a slap in the face to the entire world community that indeed we are in a global biosphere and indeed it affects us. I'm seeing things like the Network for Greening the Financial System and other phenomenon occurring that in my novel I put in the 2030s or 2040s It's happening now. So this is kind of interesting, and maybe we could call this the pandemic effect, that we, we, we may be dispensed with 10 years of dithering by the, the crisis of 2020. It's a, it's an open question. It's up in the air. But that's, that's what I would give you as my initial remarks here for this. And I think that the rest of our hour's discussion will follow some of these threads. Thanks.

Arun Majumdar: Thanks, Stan. Eric, please go ahead.

Eric Beinhocker: Thanks, Arun, and also a big thank you to Margaret Levi and Mike and CASBS for hosting this. I'm going to use my 5 minutes to just share some thoughts that were provoked by Stan's amazing book. And don't worry if you haven't read it, I'm not going to spoil any plot twists, but I do recommend you read it. Stan's book can be thought of as actually in the great tradition of social change movement fiction. And there's a long tradition of novels having a big impact on social change movements. Think of Dickens's impact on Victorian reform, or Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin on the abolition movement. And I hope Stan's book has as big an impact as those books did. And Yeah, it's different than other climate novels I've read in that it's not just a kind of dystopian apocalyptic vision, although Stan very viscerally brings home the horrors of future climate change. For me, the most interesting part of the book was what he thought salvation might lie, you know, what might fix the problem. And he does a great job of kind of throwing light on the fact that this is a systemic problem. There is no magic bullet answer, but rather we have to poke the system in a variety of ways and if we poke it enough in enough different sensitive points, the whole thing might start to tip in a different direction. And some of the points that he pokes in the book are quite interesting ones. One Stan mentioned, which is money, reinventing what we think money is and how it works and what it does in the economy. And I hope in the discussion we'll get into that a bit because it's a very provocative topic. Another one— was that buying off the polluters is key in Stan's plot. That a lot of money has to be used to get them to stop destroying the planet. That creates an interesting tension between saving the planet and a truly moral political economy. An earth-friendly political economy may have some big moral compromises in it. Another point Stan makes is that changing laws is critical to shifting the system, and that's something the environmental movement has been focused on for a long time. But he also makes it clear that democracies are actually designed to change laws very slowly, to make it a different— sorry, difficult consultative coalition-building process. And the combination of speed and scale that we need to change the system just may not be compatible with those democratic processes. Pretty provocative thought. Another provocative thought is, is violence inevitable or necessary? Now, I'm sure neither Stan nor I or any of us would advocate violence. But history shows that old orders rarely go peacefully. Walt Scheidel, a historian at Stanford who's been part of CASBS, wrote a fantastic book called The Great Levelers, tracing some of this history of violent collapses of old orders. And it's a deeply uncomfortable question, but economists like me like to think we just put in a carbon tax and technocratic measures, and it all just kind of magically works out. But, you know, in Stan's book, there's a tension between if on the one hand we don't act, you know, violence is likely to become more, more likely, more wars and climate migration and so on. But in acting, we're going to provoke reactions, and some of those reactions may also be violent. Another provocative point about the old order fighting back is the book makes clear that our future is actually in the hands of a relatively small number of people. Fairly concentrated elite of politicians, business people, bankers, and so on. In fact, there's so few of them you can fit them all in a Swiss ski resort every January. And the book makes the point that that actually makes the system vulnerable because it's a relatively small number of people whose minds you either need to change or you need to change the people. And that gets you thinking about How do we change what's in the heads of those several thousands of people to make this shift happen? And Stan rightly points out that what's in their heads is an ideology that we could call neoliberalism. It's been the dominant ideology of our era. As Karl Marx famously said, the ideas of the elite are the governing ideas. And so the book quite rightly points out that to change the system, we're going to have to change the thinking that made the system. And then just my last point to wrap up. In some of Stan's other books, I'm thinking of his more futurist books like 2312, he talks about humans as being terraformers, a species that can change planets. Now, in those science fiction books, the humans change planets to make them habitable. But we're terraformers now, making our planet uninhabitable. We are geoengineers already on a global scale. There was a scientific report that came out just the other day noting that since 1980, uh, human activity has caused enough ice to melt on the Earth that the Earth's axis has actually shifted 4 meters. We have literally changed the rotation of the Earth from our activity just over the past, uh, several decades. So we're terraformers, but we're bad terraformers. So the question I'll end you with is, how can we become good terraformers?

Arun Majumdar: Thanks, Eric. Genevieve?

Genevieve Bell: Well, perhaps I have an answer to that, Eric, or at least a proposition. So I want to begin by acknowledging where I am, which is on the traditional lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people here in Canberra, Australia. And I want to pay my respects to elders past and present, and to acknowledge that my words in this broadcast are going out across the airwaves and the seas and the lands of many traditional peoples, and I want to pay my respect to Elders past and present of many other nations too. I want to acknowledge that the land I'm sitting on was never ceded and is always sacred. So here in Australia, we begin most of our events by acknowledging the Country that we stand or sit on or meet on. In many events, we would have a traditional Elder of that Country come and talk to us about the place we find ourselves in. And about the ways in which that country forms an unalienable continuity from past to present to future. And to remember in doing that, that we are relatively recent settlers in that place, and that the nation of Australia is a relatively recent one in the arc of the history of Australia unfolding. It's also a form of, I think, a kind of moral economy, right? So for Australia, that way of engaging is a longstanding Indigenous one. Aboriginal people always acknowledged where they were and whose country they were on and acknowledged who was coming through that country as a way of making the possibility of exchanges and ritual and knowledge. For First People, that's a longstanding tradition here. For settlers in Australia, We formalized that politic in 1988, which was the bicentennial of Australian colonial rule here. And in 1988, the government decided that they needed to start finding ways to acknowledge the older history of this place and the knowledge that was embodied in it. And so they agreed collectively that we would fly an Indigenous flag outside of all of our state buildings, and that large government events and other events would begin with an Acknowledgement of Country. And a welcome too, if that could happen. For me, that sometimes here is ritualized in that way that many of us in many places in the world would recognize. We, you know, start conferences by basically telling people where the bathrooms are and how to fill in the forms, and we thank whoever the sponsors were. And there's a way where those things become a little bit perfunctory. For me, however, the ability to begin by saying where you are and acknowledging what that place is is is a way of actually thinking about what a moral economy of the environment and of place might be. Also hugely important because when we talk about the future, my job as an anthropologist who sits inside tech companies and engineering schools tends to be to talk about the future a lot. I find it really important to remember that people have been, to borrow your words, Stan, terraforming, but my words, living, have been making sense of a place and telling stories about the future in the country I'm in for 60,000 to 80,000 years. And so about 1,000 kilometers north of where I'm sitting now, there is one of the oldest technological structures on the planet built by Indigenous people. It sits on a river, so, well, Australians would call it a river. I think Americans would be a little bit underimpressed. It's not a very big river, but it's the Barwon River. It runs across the state borderline these days, and that river has in it a set of fish traps Those fish traps are a series of stone enclosures. They're shaped like ews. The design was given to the local people by a cultural hero named Bayami. He dreamt them up and dreamt them into existence, and they were built. They are different heights. The stones have been gathered from tens of kilometers away and put in this river. They are designed so that you could have mesh gates at the fronts of them. They're designed to have different depths so they can deal with different movements of the water. They were designed to hold fish in order that you could have people gather on the banks of that river because it's the meeting place of lots of nations and language groups. So it's a place where people would have gathered for ceremonies and for ritual and for cultural exchange and knowledge making and business. And the use of those was designed to create enough food to sustain people in those moments but not to create a permanent supply of food. It was a continuous temporary structure, if you want to think about it that way. Archaeologists argue about how old that structure is, anywhere between 10,000 to 40,000 years. What we know about that place is that it was most recently used, well, probably about a month ago, because we've had big rains here in Australia, so the river system is flooded currently. But a month ago, the local traditional owners of that place would still be gathering on the remains of those stone weirs to fish in that river. So here you have a system 40,000 years in the making and the keeping, a system that demonstrates both incredibly profound knowledge of technologies. We're talking about advanced use of lithics. We're talking about advanced understanding of hydrology. We're talking about a system that was remade repeatedly through multiple glaciations and deglaciations over the arc of that 40,000-year period. We're talking about a system that was upgraded, if you want to think about it that way, as different materials came in. A system that demonstrates a strong understanding of animal behavior and fish, all of that technical knowledge. A system that understands the environment in which it finds itself— how heavy does a rock need to be not to be moved when the water is running fast and running slow? How do you think about how much water moves through that system, about where you would put that in that set of river configurations? And it suggests a deep set of cultural practices, a system that required multiple people to make it. It didn't have a single gatekeeper in that sense. The people who repaired it weren't necessarily the people who administered it, weren't necessarily the people who looked after the fish in it and whose country it was on. So a system that is complex, a system that is complicated, a system that required— I think of it, you know, in the language of the 21st century, a cybernetic configuration. It was always technological, ecological, and human and a system that says there are other ways of thinking about and making sense of and having relationships with climate and with the environment and with culture. And it is tempting to say, well, that's a kind of orientalising of a First Nations story writer, like that's just Indigenous knowledge. The reality is Indigenous knowledge has endured over millennia It has profound ways of making sense of the world and of people's place in it and of understanding a relationship between human and Country. And for me, whenever we talk about technology, sitting in the back of my head are the fish traps in Bawuruna, because I look at those and I think, okay, someone built something that lasted 40,000 years and lasted 40,000 years in a continuous set of negotiated relationships. And whilst, Arun, I totally take your point, the world looks very different now than it did 60,000 years ago, and the scale and the speed of the world looks very different, but there is something about saying whatever our starting proposition ought to be about how we build a future, the idea that that future has to constantly and continuously thread the ecological, the human, and the technical feels to me like I think you said utopian, Stan, but it feels like at least a hopeful promise about a possibility of the future. Not that we will necessarily get to make stone weirs that last 40,000 years, but that we might be able to find ways of thinking about how you hold those forces in balance and where you think about what you were doing as having a longer time scale and where the underlying regimes of value aren't necessarily about the accumulations of profit or about the, I don't know, the violent disassembly of cultural practice, but effectively about other forms of engagement. And so, as I often get to say in these moments, I'm in Australia, which means I'm already in the future, at least according to current timeframes. So, From a Thursday morning to a Wednesday afternoon and a Wednesday evening, I can tell you there's at least one way of thinking about the future that is deeply rooted in the history of the way the world has been, and for me is a hopeful sign of thinking about how we might make that thread through from deep time and deep history to a different kind of future.

Arun Majumdar: Well, thank you, Genevieve. That's a great way to put it. And in fact, I want to build on what you said. And this is a question for everyone. And by the way, feel free to ask each other questions. We'll have an open discussion. You know, we are 8 billion people on this world right now, and we are using the same tools that we have developed in the 20th century of the economy that we developed in trying to steer the ship in a sustainable direction. And my question to you, and building on what Genevieve said, is that Are there lessons in history where such changes have happened? Or going back, way back in history to the War Generals and others, where they— granted, it was a different time, but there were some common values that we could take up and that we could use in developing a system for the 21st century. So can we go back to the future And if there's some way to do that— so this is a question for all of you. Any thoughts on that?

Kim Stanley Robinson: The back that I am interested in can be directed as a kind of question for Erik. And thank you for Erik's comments on my book as well. I want to turn that around back to Keynes. Neoliberal capitalism was a rejection of Keynesianism in favor of an idealized free market that wasn't free and in some ways wasn't even a market, but in any case, it took over in the Reagan-Thatcher counterrevolution and we've seen it for 40 years. It's not a case of a complete damage, but it obviously has been out of whack with the biosphere and it also has created huge economic inequality. Well, Keynes was doing a political economy at times of gigantic disruptions— World War I, the Depression, World War II— and here we are on the verge of another gigantic disruption, or maybe we're in it and kind of trying to slide out of it. So back to the future, could we go back to Keynes to direct by government the economy to get us into a more healthy balance with the biosphere.

Eric Beinhocker: I'll try to connect Stan's comments with also Arun with your question. One way to— I might characterize things very crudely is we're working with 19th century social technologies, largely the nation-state, late 20th century ideology, this neoliberal free market fundamentalism, particularly in the US and other parts of the West, and 21st century physical technologies that are on this exponential path that Arun described. And we're seeing a clash between those three things. Our social technologies don't evolve as fast as our physical technologies. Genevieve talked nicely about how actually they could last for tens of thousands of years. But our physical technologies are on a very different clock speed. And the economic ideology that's knitting these things together has really been captured by a small elite, essentially, and used for purposes of extracting value out of the economy. So we shifted from a set of economic ideologies that were built on cooperation and built on the state, the market, and civil society working together, to a really a kind of utopian free market fundamentalism that has been, you know, basically turned into an excuse to extract value both from from 90% of the population. My group and others have done some calculations, about $50 trillion flowed from the bottom 90% to the top 1% between the 1970s and now in the US, and has exploited resources unsustainably from the environment. Coming back to Stan's question, it's not so much a matter of going back to Keynes. Keynes had lots of good ideas. He was also quite frankly, just wrong on a number of things. But can we come up with a new understanding of the economy as a complex system, a new ideology that turns that into political speech and policies that upgrades our social software to match the challenges being created by our physical hardware?

Genevieve Bell: Arun, I'd also want to suggest there are other ways of thinking about these things, right? So I'm always struck when we talk about these models, where we center them, and I'm sort of— it's been an interesting pandemic to be in the Southern Hemisphere, not the Northern, and I sort of think about what's been happening in New Zealand in terms of thinking through different notions of how you might constitute economic and political regimes and the way those things work together. And it's been striking to see how over the last, I'd say, decade, the New Zealand government has taken an old legal artifact, a treaty, in this case the Treaty of Waitangi, and use the provisions of that treaty to create a different kind of regime of value in New Zealand. So, you know, whether that has meant being very clear about the provisions of that treaty, which set up a right for the Māori in something called a taonga, or treasure, which were notions— a poorly translated word into English— but the idea of the acts of the creative spirits of New Zealand, which give you a notions about the land as the body of the creating force, the air as the breath, the water as part of the body politic, and basically saying that in that instance the Māori should have unalienable rights in those objects, which in a Western legal construct are seen as resources, but for Indigenous people are seen as the body of the creative spirit, right? So that's a, in some ways, an incommensurate legal frame of how you resolve that. But what that has meant over the arc of probably the 21st century, you have seen the Māori be given a piece of the spectrum during spectrum license sales on the basis that it was the breath of the gods. You have seen the ability for the Māori to delineate and determine certain kinds of other resource exploitation activities. And most recently, you have seen in the world of artificial intelligence and next-generation big data systems, a new algorithmic charter written in New Zealand. So a 21st century object for how we think about the ethics of algorithms, written through the lens of a late 1700s political artifact of a treaty, but trying to work out how do you take multiple different worldviews and conceptual views and find a way to make a space in which both of those things can be co-present. And again, suggesting that there are different ways of privileging different forces. So Stan, you started by saying, it's very hard to think about an economic regime in which the environment would get, first preference in that sense. There are places where people are starting to work out how to do that by again thinking through how do you have coexisting regimes of value? How do you have coexisting points of view about something where one person imagines it as a resource, the other imagines it as the body of a god? Those feel like, you know, Bill Cronon used to talk about this, right, in kind of first world and first nation kind of interfaces. Those are incommensurate values, but it turns out if you are willing to be a little bit patient there are ways of making them sit together. Now, you know, they're always clumsy and always complicated, but there are ways of thinking about how you might make other sorts of value present in a Western democratic system. And, you know, at the moment, New Zealand feels like one of the places that's at least trying.

Arun Majumdar: You know, that brings up a really important question, um, and since you reference COVID and COVID has been a shock to this otherwise freight train that was moving, and the shock has really raised a lot of issues about how we value things, how we conduct things, and how do we take care of our people. And, and it has brought up sustainability and environmental issues as well. So in your mind, what are the lessons that can be learned from COVID And where do we risk over-extrapolating? Because climate change and sustainability, I think, is even a bigger problem than that, and it affects everything. So what are the lessons learned? Anyone?

Genevieve Bell: Well, so I mean, you know, one of the interesting things again from Australia was that before COVID so in November of 2019— I think, Sam, that's when you said you were publishing your book— in November of 2019, Australia was on fire. We had, as many of you I'm sure will remember the pictures, we had an extraordinary effectively set of fires that ringed the country and over a 4-month period about 80% of Australian households and families lived either with a fire nearby or with the pollution that came from it, the smoke that kind of ringed the world ultimately. And so for Australia coming into 2020, we were at a national level having a moment of feeling the brittleness of the 21st century and of realizing that many of the technologies that we were imagining the 21st century would be built on were actually reliant on technologies of the 20th century, which turned out to be surprisingly fragile. The electrical grid cracked and creaked and broke. The telecommunications grid didn't function much better. The financial services, which actually turned out to be predicated on those two, didn't work very well. And it turned out Western democracy wasn't standing us in the greatest stead either. And so we had this moment where the infrastructures of the 20th century didn't look particularly good for the 21st century. Our pandemic experience has been profoundly different than I think for all of the faces I'm staring at in this screen, but for us, I think there has been a moment, and an anthropologist sort of lens on this would be to go back to the 19th century theories of people like Van Genep, and then the 20th century of, you know, Turner and Douglas, and say we've been in the liminal moment where some of the ways in which we think about moving through time and space have been all bets are off. But here in Australia, thinking through what it meant to have an existential climate crisis, which we were in in 2019, 2020, followed by a global pandemic, has perhaps sadly not propelled us into a conversation of urgency about climate change. And in fact, I think, you know, to my nation's somewhat shameful stance on the global stage about where it sits in all of this. And so for me, what's been interesting is that we have had two very rapid successive dystopic events. And I can't undercall quite what it was like to wake up where you couldn't see the front gate from my front door because the world was covered in so much smoke and where the air quality was so extraordinarily dreadful for such a period of time and our buildings were uninhabitable. I felt like I had a moment, to badly misquote Gibson. If the future was already here and unevenly distributed, we were in it. It wasn't a good look. And so there was something about if that didn't propel you to action, I don't know what would. So whilst I can be optimistic about a number of things, I have this moment of we had two totally dystopic moments here and it didn't shift us to action or urgency. And so that's been the political calculation there, Eric, I think that was your language. The political calculation here has not been overridden by the embodied knowledge of a world that needed help. And for me, that— these dissonances have not yet been productive ones.

Eric Beinhocker: I would just build on Genevieve's remarks. I think, you know, the pandemic has brought a kind of big aha moment, maybe on a global scale, that we do live in a system, you know, that all of these things are interconnected— the economy, you know, health, politics, the environment, that these things all interrelate with each other somehow. And to Genevieve's point, that system was shockingly fragile. You know, one little virus could cause the biggest economic downturn in Britain since 1709. And, um, uh, yeah, and, and we also, you know, we learned things that, you know, many of our supply chains are very vulnerable. And, you know, And you think about what a little thought experiment I did with my students is, what if the internet had gone down during the pandemic? Let's say North Korea unleashed some cyber attack and fried the internet. Would society have survived? Would we have had a civilizational collapse if you just combine those two things? And so it was shocking how fragile it is. And then you think of the shocks climate is likely to introduce on that at a whole other scale. Scale. And also that the irreversibility of those shocks, you know, one thing about COVID is we can see an endgame to it or a containment game, you know, through science and the vaccines. Once the climate effects really get rolling, they're only reversible on geological timescales, far, far greater than human timescales. Now, on the positive side, we're also hopefully learning that we can actually mobilize society at scale and speed against these problems. I mean, you know what the scientific establishment has accomplished is just astounding. But also, we see the countries that have responded best to this pandemic, and I put particularly your neighbors in New Zealand on that list among others, is where we've had the market, state, and civil society all working together, all mobilized together. The free market has played a hugely important role in this, in the vaccines, and supplying PPE, and making sure we get our groceries through Amazon or whatever. But, you know, states have been using smart policy to really, you know, mobilize all that power. And civil society has played a huge role, whether it's in the healthcare sector, the elderly care, and so on, in just kind of keeping the society glued together and working. So I'm hoping that those are some of the lessons that we've learned.

Kim Stanley Robinson: I think that COVID was a kind of strangely exposing and almost cruel experiment in political economies to see which ones would respond well and which poorly. And also other human institutions, not just the nation states, but science versus some of the other forces. And the scientific community responded superbly. And indeed, we could have had the vaccines rolled out and in people's arms quite a bit earlier than we did because the regulatory regimes were not able to move as fast as the, as the microbiological regimes. And so science looks good. But the, the experiment in, in different nation states trying out different things, right down to vaccinating the young people first and the old people later, because the young people were the ones that were going to need to do the jobs, do the essential work, as we as they called it in the United States. And therefore it was logical that they get vaccinated first. And every other variant has been tried and now can be studied by social scientists, which one succeeded, which ones didn't. But also here in the United States, we had a very stupid response followed by a much smarter response when there was a change in political regime. So you can also see the results of what happens when a social organization is brought to bear with the same set of scientific tools for good or ill. So, and also COVID was something that anybody could have died from. So it didn't matter if you were rich or poor, you could get the illness and maybe you would get better care if you were rich, but you just as likely to die of the disease per se. This was a big slap in the face. And I've seen changes since then that make me think that we have upgraded our attention to climate change. Whether we can bring that to bear will be the story of the next decade. The lessons that we learned in the pandemic, many people are going to want to forget them, pretend it never happened, and go on as before. And then other people are going to be saying, but wait, we have an even bigger crisis bearing down on us and we learned some lessons, let's put them to use in advance. I'm It's probably— I don't know when E.O. Wilson published "Half-Earth," but the idea that we need to leave about half of the planet's surface and its oceans alone for the other animals to prosper, and that our own health depends on that, that sounded like a radical science fiction idea 10 years ago. And now we have 30 by 30 plans all over as part of government policies in Western democracies and in more authoritarian states. We also— the idea that you would pay people to do good carbon work and decarbonize, that you essentially leave the free market and the market's misvaluation, its bad pricing of the environment, which has been systemic and terrible. Now the idea, which is maybe Keynesianism or maybe it's Modern Monetary Theory, but in any case, the idea that the state rules money, not finance, not the market, and sets even prices so that we could make it the highest rate of return to decarbonize. Well, this is partly the gigantic stimulus of the 2020 response and then big quantitative easing of 2008. Carbon quantitative easing is now something that— the Network for Greening the Financial System sounds like something out of one of my novels. It's an already existing organization of all the central banks, including the big, big important central banks, all devoted to how can we green finance quickly. These things I find remarkable. The good response on certain fronts response has been so fast and so strong that I think we may have saved a decade, a crucial decade of dithering. And if we can keep the momentum, there's a kind of a tipping point in our social action towards the good that if we can keep that momentum, we won't just fall back into our bad old habits.

Arun Majumdar: So there's a question out here, which is relevant, but just stepping back from what you said, Stan, on the COVID response, how the scientists sort of stepped up. So the question is, in what ways does the existing system of global economic political governance need to change to promote the kind of shifts needed for an Earth-friendly political economy? Where would you start? And I would add to that, and there's a follow-up question, well, let us say the scientists deliver on the climate front, not just the analyzing, but actual technological solutions just like we had the mRNA, Moderna and Pfizer. Those were quantum leaps in technology. So that's fine. But we also realize that developing a quantum leap in technology is one thing, but delivering, getting people vaccinated is an entirely different thing. So now if you take that, extrapolate that to climate, let's say the scientists show up and they develop these amazing technologies, Question is, what is the political system? Where do we start to change that? Because if you use the 20th century system, we're back on the treadmill.

Eric Beinhocker: Well, first on climate, I mean, the scientists already have shown up and they are showing up and the technological advances have been really stunning. When future historians look back on this era, COVID may be a paragraph or two. But the 5,000-fold decline in solar prices since the 1950s, that may be the most important story of our era. Because that is making renewable energy now cheaper than many forms of fossil energy. And likewise, declines in wind, battery storage, all this stuff. So the technologies are largely there and getting better. On a kind of Moore's Law path. But part of the problem, and this goes to the global political economy question, is we're stuck in a kind of late 20th century mindset of cost-benefit analysis with the climate. And Stan alluded to this in his opening, that solving climate change costs money. And so we have to make a trade-off between spending this money to save ourselves from mass extinction versus the benefits of avoiding mass extinction, I guess. Because there's this view that it costs money, that's created an international dynamic of you go first. If the US moves too fast and has a more expensive energy system, then China will clean our clocks. Or India says, well, you guys got to industrialize using cheap fossil fuels, so we have the right to do that. You know, too, even though it's, you know, going to hurt us in the future. And, you know, we— this is just a fundamental misunderstanding of the system, the economics, and the technologies that, um, and, and we've done some work on this in the center, and I'll post a report that we just put out. The more we make of this stuff, the cheaper and better it gets, and the more we use it, the more we learn, and the more we learn how to make the system go to zero carbon. It's not a first mover disadvantage, there's a huge first mover advantage to getting a cheaper, healthier, more modern energy system. Once that light bulb starts to go on in the minds of leaders of these countries and investors and so on, that has the potential to fundamentally shift the political dynamic and the capital flows in a very different way. So we have to kind of re-understand how this system works to actually see that the zero-carbon economy is a better economy.

Arun Majumdar: Anyone else? Genevieve?

Genevieve Bell: Yeah. I mean, I'm also struck by thinking about how is it that we imagine that, again, it's the system sort of the logics of the 20th and the 19th and the 17th century, sort of the pull-through of them. And let's be clear, it's only one set of those systems. So I'm also acutely aware that when we use 'we,' that tends to sound like we mean all, and it obviously can't, right? We know that there are multiple different forms of economic logic that run around the world, as well as different forms of political economy. I'm again acutely conscious that when people say Western democracy The Western democracy I experience in Australia is very different than the one in the United States and Britain. I come from a country with compulsory voting and where elections always happen on Saturdays, a thing that makes most Americans I know very, very squirrely, like not pleased with the idea that you might be told you have to vote. That feels like a not democratic kind of thing, right? So even as we talk about these systems, we're using words that I think make it sound like it's the same system, but it fundamentally isn't. What, you know, economics looks like in India and how that country is thinking about its economic system. Whilst it may be the largest Western democracy we know, it is unfolding in a very different way than, say, the United States. And there's a bit here for me that even as we think about systems that will by necessity need to be global, we know that the way they will be manifested locally may not look the same as the global imagination. So there's a little bit for me about thinking about 'Who's imagining we're talking about when we say we?' Or democracy or economics. And there's a little bit of the, what would it take in the speculative fiction sense to start with a different subject as ego? Like, what would this conversation look like if it was sitting in a different place? I mean, I'm acutely aware that I keep talking about First Nations and I'm not one. I'm acutely aware we're talking about moral economy and none of us are a First Nations person. I'm the only woman on this call. We're all sitting in Western, quote-unquote, Western democracies. So there's a little bit about, you know, what would this conversation look like if it unfolded with somewhere else as the center? If it were coming from, you know, pick any other spot around the world, would the notion of the urgency unfold over a different set of subjectivities and a different set of agendas? So there's a little bit for me about how even if we have these conversations about what a global response would look like or where the role of science would be, how we make enough room to imagine that might be configured with different pieces feels like important work to do too. Though I don't, you know, I don't disagree. One of the things that I think has been remarkable again for our experiences of the pandemic has been where the scientific voice has sat vis-à-vis the political voice and what it's meant to have Chief Medical Officers be in some ways the centre of the conversation, not the political classes. And that's made for some interesting trade-offs that actually didn't follow, at least down here, didn't follow the usual kind of economics where we've had a set of political people who would like to open borders and make for free movements of people and a set of chief medical officers who keep going, 'That doesn't seem like a good idea at all,' and the epidemiology says absolutely not, and the population who is currently rewarding our political classes for keeping borders closed and restricting mobility, which in some ways don't necessarily flow from an economic analysis. And so for me, there's just a little bit about how do we complicate the idea of what the global might be here.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, of course, there's difference, and we are in a nation-state system, and there's about 7,000 languages and cultures, and that's the set, and we're yet Nevertheless, all under the rule of capital in a global capitalist system, and we're all in one biosphere, in the same microbiological stew, and we're all interpenetrated with each other in that biosphere. So in that sense, you can say "we"— a daring thing for an aging white male American to do— admittedly, and yet refer to the species in terrible trouble and also about to kill off thousands of other species because of global capital. So I look to science. Science is also global and it's ancient. There was Indigenous science and science has Indigenous roots. Of learning to manipulate the environment for more comfort, more safety, better health. So it is not a Western imperialism, but a human urge to pursue science and engineering, as in the weir trap that Genevieve described. It's a high-tech development there, and humanity began and evolved into humans by way of the use of technology that pre-humans developed. So taking that and going to the global, I look to the Paris Agreement. We're in a nation-state system and that's a mess. It's a bad system for dealing with a global problem. There will be, as Eric pointed out, competitive advantage. You go first. No, you go first. Who has to pay the cost of being the leader? Whereas the leader might actually be the one to get the benefit, as Eric also pointed out. But this nation-state system will not get solved in the next 10 years. It will not, and probably it shouldn't because we need difference. So what you need is agreement. And so here I, again, point to the Paris Agreement, which is the foundation of my novel, but also I think the foundation of our larger solution of all the nation-states coming together and agreeing by way of their political representation. So that's an interesting question. Do people, are people well represented politically or not? Well, nobody's completely happy, but nobody is completely unrepresented, except in certain very bad situations around the globe. By and large, citizens, when they're polled, say, "Oh yes, my political representation is good compared to these other people." And that system coming together at Paris is going to have to cut a deal to decarbonize fast. And it doesn't make sense by way of profit. It doesn't make sense by way of neoliberal capital pricing, a system of pricing that is a kind of a gigantic systemic Ponzi scheme crashing to the ground and us having to make the next system fast. So where's it going to happen? I think it's going to happen by our diplomatic corps and our political representatives going out there and making treaties based on the Paris Agreement and going forward from there. And that's going to include states making up money from scratch and paying us to decarbonize, irrespective of what the market value of that would have been valued in the year 1995. So there's hope to be had in this combination of difference and commonality.

Eric Beinhocker: I was going to say, I agree that there's— I understand there's a kernel of optimism in the global negotiations. I think one thing that's kind of underappreciated is that the change from the Kyoto and Copenhagen earlier climate negotiations to Paris was a real regime shift. Instead of trying to actually get a true global agreement, a binding agreement on, we're going to set a global limit and divide it up, which did create this very negative you first race to the bottom dynamic. Paris flipped it on its head where it tried to create a competition. If we're all going to pledge our national actions, and then it creates some political pressure for leadership. Who's going to be the boldest and biggest? If you combine that with bottom-up political pressure from the populations of the countries, that creates the potential for this tipping point. And as the countries that do start to take the lead actually see the real benefits from that, as I said before, the zero carbon economy is a better economy, that can create a reinforcing dynamic. So it's a little bit less about everyone coming to the table and all 192 countries agreeing on a global plan. That isn't going to happen, and that creates this race to the bottom. But instead it's creating this race to save the Earth.

Kim Stanley Robinson: There's also something I would like to add about Paris that I think is very strong, is that it insists on climate equity. That essentially it says the developed nations need to pay more, that the developing world, which was, say, the colonized world, the post-colonial world that has been hammered by history of European expansion, et cetera, et cetera, the whole sorry history, Those clauses written into the Paris Agreement was a group of people deciding that this was so important that it could not be neglected or the whole plan might fall apart and be yet another World Bank, IMF, WTO imposition of the developed nations on the supposedly ex-colonized countries and never really got out of the colonial position. So climate equity was a strike towards climate justice, and it's written 2 or 3 times into a 16-page document. Now, you know, it's just a document. It's an idea right now, started in 2015. It could become the League of Nations, and this is the danger. It's in some ways so idealistic or so optimistic of a document. Just do it, that if it fails, we fall into chaos and disaster and people shrug in centuries to come, say, well, Paris Agreement, it was a League of Nations failure. But that would be catastrophic as the League of Nations failure was catastrophic for Europe, especially, but the whole world. So, I like this document, I admire it. I think we can hang our hats on it and try to proceed on the basis of that. Agreement set. And I like what Erik said about how really by taking it out of a kind of a zero-sum game and into a volunteer thing, which ostensibly makes it look weak, but then maybe that looks— it makes it look strong because everybody tries to outcompete for doing— for virtuous action. It's an interesting experiment.

Eric Beinhocker: On your point, Stan, about the developing countries, you're absolutely right, but We're a long way from fixing that. Unfortunately, the mechanisms in the Paris Agreement, most developing countries will tell you, don't go nearly far enough to fixing that. The vulnerability of these countries and COVID, what's going on with COVID in India right now, everyone should see as a giant red flag about what scenes we could be seeing with climate change in India and Bangladesh and all kinds of other countries over the coming years. And one of the things I found very interesting in your book, Stan, was you had a real trauma in India in your book. I won't, again, give away the plot points, but that caused a reaction in India where they said, screw the developed world, we're just going to go do this. We're going to go invent the future ourselves. We're going to take control of our own destiny. We're not going to wait for the developed world to act or go first. And, um, uh, you know, I, you know, at some point I wonder whether we're going to see that kind of a, a shift in, in the emerging economies, you know, when they realize you can negotiate till you're blue in the face to, you know, try and squeeze money out of these guys, and, you know, it's, it's— the reality is it's never going to come.

Arun Majumdar: So let me ask you this.

Kim Stanley Robinson: I mean, we are—

Arun Majumdar: this is obviously the discussion is about the moral political economy, and we had a massive shift in, um, in the politics in the United States. It's a— in, in the scientific terms, it's called a phase transition. And, um, and now President Biden has been introducing, um, ideas out there which are contrary to— I mean, they have not— they've been talked about but never quite put forth with the force of the office of the president. For example, 2 years of community college is announced today for free, right? This has been discussed, but now he's putting this out there. Economists would ask for carbon tax, But he's saying no, a clean energy standard would be a better way because that could bring environmental justice and climate equity into the picture because now you give choice to the people. So if you were to look at this massive transition, this could be seen as an opportunity. Are there lessons learned from history? And I know, Eric, you have talked about, you know, there were all this dislocation, social dislocations that have happened in the past, and they were losers. And, and how do we handle the social dislocation in this time? And I think we're on the hinge of history of a massive change to address climate change. So what would you advise the Biden administration today, and, and frankly, perhaps hopefully similar organizations, similar administrations in other parts of the world as well? What would you suggest them?

Genevieve Bell: No pressure, Eric.

Arun Majumdar: No pressure.

Eric Beinhocker: Well, first, I think during the Obama administration, they like to say, don't let a good crisis go to waste. But sadly, they let a good crisis go to waste. I think the Biden administration has learned that lesson. And they're trying to move fast and at scale on a whole number of fronts. On the climate front, I broadly agree with what they're doing. Carbon taxes always work great in economics textbooks, but getting them to work politically is a whole other matter. There's also some reasons to believe that they would be helpful, but they're not a game changer necessarily in terms of carbon emissions, that you need a whole set of policy actions and standards are actually have been proven to be extremely effective in a number of areas. But I think the big thing that's missing, coming to your question, Arun, is the political economy question. There's a lot of vested interest in the current system, and there's a lot of people who are going to lose when that system changes. And what do we do about this? And again, Stan Provocatively raised in his book that we may have to pay them a lot of money to let us save the planet, move to a zero-carbon economy. So we have to start thinking about What do we do about the unemployed coal miner in West Virginia? They have a very legitimate moral stake in this system that's going to leave them behind. Or the beef farmer who may be selling a lot less cows if we change our diets. Or the fossil fuel companies that are going to end up with these massive stranded assets that could create huge risks to the financial system. And so as we build this new economy and try to shift the river of capital into this new economy, we're also going to have to have part of that river of capital cleaning up the mess of the old economy. And that's a problem that we really don't have our heads around yet. And the Biden administration is They're rightly focused on building the new stuff, but at some point, we're going to have to get to what do we do about the old stuff.

Arun Majumdar: Genevieve, any thoughts?

Genevieve Bell: Yeah, listen, I think one of the complexities here, and Eric's just touched on it, is that we tend to imagine, okay, so here's the new state, and we're not good at thinking about as we change any one of those pieces, the entire system is going to need to be reconfigured. So it's not just about who are the quote-unquote winners and losers, which is already an awful formulation, right? But, you know, what are going to be the consequences of moving this piece, and where will all the other pieces be? So I think for me, one of the— I think, Stan, you said it, but one of the most important kind of instructive lessons of the pandemic, and Eric, you reflected on it too, has been realizing that the idea of the system feels like the most significant unit of analysis we have moving forward. And how do we think about the system as the analytic tool? And for me then, if we say, okay, well, we know we need to move to a different system, that means we're going to have to reconfigure multiple pieces of it. And we know we can't do those simultaneously because it just never works like that. But we know if we neglect pieces of that system in a full transformation, we will create not just instabilities and winners and losers, but we won't actually succeed in what we're trying to do. So when I think about, you know, what would you be saying to a Biden administration or frankly any administration globally, it's the, yeah, you need to have an end state, but as you think through that end state, that needs to include not only how are we restructuring the economy, but how are we managing the transition that will inevitably happen? 'Cause you can't decide today it will be this, tomorrow it will be that, because it just doesn't work that way. Things have different time constants and different timescales. We need to be investing not only in quote-unquote, a workforce for 10 years from now, but the workforce that will manage both the transition and all the lagging indicators. So even if you move energy supply systems and energy creation systems, you still need to have people who are going to finish managing the ones you already have and work out how to decommission them safely so that we don't just have kind of the language of stranded assets, but we don't just have systems sitting there still full of things that don't work and need sort of management. So for me, when I think about it, Arun, I guess part of the answer is you actually have to have investments in multiple time constants and in multiple kinds of notions of who are going to be the designers, regulators, provisioners, securers, decommissioners, even the resistors to all of those systems. Means investing in multiple forms of education, of different ways of kind of technical apparatus, but also different cultural pieces. And I think, you know, as much as we talk about and rightfully worry about the people who will be displaced and the systems that will be fragmented and changed, I do think we're not looking to some of the things we learned from previous transitions, which is also about how do we tell people a different set of stories? How do we help capture people's imaginations? Which is why, you know, Stan's investment in thinking about how science fiction gives us a different worldview for tomorrow, hugely important, right? We have to tell a different story about the future, but we also have to break the present open enough to make that future possible, which also means we need to be investing now in the kinds of things people will need to make a different future possible. And for me, that kind of the necessity of investment in not just capacity but in storytelling feels hugely important. I look at the transition to an electrified world or even a steam-powered world. And, you know, part of what governments and industrialists and citizen groups knew in any one of those moments was that you needed to tell a story about what that future looked like, that you could connect to every sort of citizen and every consumer. So whether it's all the kind of spectacle of the electrification of the planet, you had to show people what electricity looked like because they had no— you know, it wasn't a lived experience. And you needed to equip not just the regulators and the producers of electricity, but the people who were going to live with it every day, which mostly turned out to be women in their homes. You needed to make them into better consumers of electricity. And so for me, it's all those pieces of the puzzle, right? But again, I mean, I think the too long, don't read version of that is it's a system. Think about it at a systems level and pay attention to all the pieces.

Arun Majumdar: Fascinating. Fascinating. I know we are running out of time, but there's some Great questions coming through to me. And I'm going to ask this one since we are at a university, it's on education. And if you look at the education both at the university level and even in the school level and the childhood education, how— and by the way, for the university, we are launching— Stanford is launching a School of Climate and Sustainability. And we decided that that's a 21st century problem, we need a 21st century school. To do that, and we're trying to define it. But that's just us. But broadly speaking, what are the things you would do at the education level, at the childhood level, as well as the university to address this and create this value system that we talk about that will hopefully lead to a new moral political economy? So what is it that you would do at the education level?

Eric Beinhocker: Well, Not surprisingly, I would put changing the economics curriculum pretty high on the list because if you look at those several thousands of people who gather at Davos every year, run the big companies, run the big banks, in politics, and so on, most of them somewhere took an Econ 101 course. If you look at what they actually— most of them, because of their age now, took that course in the '70s, '80s, maybe '90s. And if you look at what they learned in that course, the big message was greed is good. It was this kind of, you know, Friedmanite, University of Chicago market fundamentalist neoliberal ideology. And there's actually been some good academic work looking at what was in those curriculums and how that influenced the culture and behaviors and so on. And You know, that curriculum has, you know, changed somewhat since then, but less than you would think. And until quite recently, you know, many curricula didn't even have things like economic inequality or climate change or the issues of the developing world in them. Students could go through a whole course at top universities and never encounter those topics. And it's actually— it's a remarkable change that really happened in the kind of '70s and '80s. Funnily enough, my father passed away. I was going through his library, and I found his economic textbook from 1948, Paul Samuelson's first edition. And this was after the Depression. What was in it? It was all about inequality, workers' rights, the labor union movement, how do we create a just society. There's a whole lot of moral philosophy in there. It was a much, much richer curriculum. Than this sort of dry, you know, kind of market fundamentalist curriculum we got, that the current elites got educated in. So, you know, in, you know, changing what the next generation of elites are going to learn in their economics could have a big impact on their behaviors and cultures.

Genevieve Bell: Stan?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, these time horizons that Genevieve brought up, that there will be I mean, at every given moment there were people from different generations alive at the same time and were contemporaries, but were also in different worlds. And I think that the— this Milton Friedman, we are just economic machines, this view is a story also. And it, it was not entirely her invention, but Ayn Rand was a bad science fiction writer. So bad science fiction can get you free market fundamentalism and greed is good. It can get you Scientology, that the brain is a machine that you can tinker with, and people's lives ruined by Scientology. The stories matter. So the story I like to tell is of us coming together and solving these problems. And over the time horizons, the, the younger you give people an education in solidarity and the fact that economics when you get to that level, is always a moral philosophy. It has axioms that are morally philosophical, which is the insistence at CASBS of bringing moral back into a political economy. So, in that vein, I would say full employment, a job guarantee, which Modern Monetary Theory talks about as a second pillar compared with— along with copious government-created money, A job guarantee changes everything. Everybody— and it's kind of a New Deal idea that people are in poverty, people are in suffering, and now we have the precariat, now we have this story, oh, robots are going to take over our lives and human beings will not have any work to do. This is so silly because it doesn't include social reproduction, all the work that women do for free and that the economic system is parasitical on, and you would never have a profit without enormous amounts of social reproduction work that isn't paid for at all. Now, it doesn't really make sense to economize taking care of your grandmother, but if everybody had full employment one way or another, this would be part of their education. That, okay, you're being educated because you are going to be guaranteed a job. There isn't going to be fear for you be taking some job for less than it actually costs to live, which is the current fear-based economy that we're in. So a job guarantee, full employment, everybody educated— this, in fact, 2 years of free community college. That's part of it. That's part of making as part of the social contract that you don't have to live in fear of not having food, water, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education, and electricity, that these are going to be part of your your membership in your species community, and then taking care of the rest of the biosphere is more, there's more work to be done there than there are people on the planet. It is a full employment program to take care of this biosphere.

Arun Majumdar: Genevieve, education?

Genevieve Bell: Yeah, listen, I think the only thing I would add to that would be that one of the ways we sometimes think about education is that it's a thing that happens when people are between the ages of 5 and 18, and then if they go on to university. And the reality is the time constants we're facing here around climate change actually require a cohort who aren't 18, who aren't 25, to be upskilled and literate in this space and exposed to the ideas of it. So in fact, I think one of the really interesting roles that universities have to play is about how do we take what we know and basically feed it to the planet. Like, it can't be that they need to come to us. It can't be that you can only get what we know if you're enrolled in a university curriculum. That feels like an old way of thinking about what universities do. If we're a bit more like a seed bank, we always need to take those and propagate those ideas kind of more globally. I look at this next moment in time and think, actually, the critical thing— yeah, Primary school and high school curriculums always need to change. That's a constant evolution and a constant reflection of, you know, the things that are kind of, you know, both top of mind and slow brain in a society. But when I look at where the critical conversations need to be had, they're not just with the people in the rooms at Davos, but with the people those people come back and talk to. And there's something there about how do we ensure a different conversation that's going on in 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds and 50-year-olds and 60-year-olds, not just 0 to 18. And so for me, the education piece feels like there's a critical set of conversations we need to be igniting— maybe not a bad word to use in the climate change world— kind of sparking or generating, you know, in that cohort. So for me, there's a little bit of work to do, not about what goes on in formal education environments or in degree programs, but with a much more of a willingness to meet people where they are and try and spark a a more kind of deliberative conversation in those places. And that feels like a very different role for universities than we've had in the last— well, certainly in the United States since the GI Bill, and possibly in Britain a little bit less than that. But that sort of feels like a more interesting role there for me.

Arun Majumdar: This is such a fascinating— you know, I almost, you know, I know this is all formal Zoom and everything, it almost feels like if we are around a campfire going camping and having a hot cup of chai or coffee and with some spicy stuff, and we're just talking around and asking— coffee, there you go. But, you know, all good things have to come to an end, but this has been an absolutely wonderful, fascinating discussion. Thank you all for engaging in this, and a big thanks to today's, you know, the panel for this conversation. And I want to thank this event co-sponsors, the Hewlett Foundation, the INET Oxford, The Precordance for Energy. And a big thanks to Margaret Levi for— and her team for putting this all together. And a heads up, details about the next episode of CASBS series, Social Science for a World in Crisis, and how to learn about the series, more about the series, is coming on the screen in a few seconds. So again, let's thank the panel and thank you all for joining.

Eric Beinhocker: And thanks to you, Arun.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes, thank you, Arun.

Arun Majumdar: Pleasure.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Thank you, guys.

Genevieve Bell: Bye, Arun. It was lovely to get to meet you, albeit virtually.

Narrator: That was Eric Beinhocker, Genevieve Bell, Arun Majumdar, and Kim Stanley Robinson discussing an Earth-friendly political economy. You can learn more about this and other CASBS events by visiting our website at casbs.stanford.edu, or you can find us on Twitter. We're @CASBSStanford. We've got more CASBS Live events coming to the Human Centered feed. And more original interviews exploring the work of fellows here at the center. So be sure you're subscribed in your podcast app of choice. You don't want to miss those. Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.