The investments that went into what we call today artificial intelligence, including, you know, LM models and think which models, speech recognition dates, you know, decades. And like so many other areas that was led by government. So if you look at even DARPA, which, as you know, was the lead investor in the internet, it came from problems mainly in the military industrial complex that then required, ultimately what we're calling artificial intelligence today. But again, in the entrepreneurial state, I talked about how everything in our smartphones that make them smarter, not stupid internet, GPS, touchscreen, Siri and so on, where government finance was very scary today. What's what makes today different with AI is that that's not really necessarily going to be true much longer. Why? Because these massive economic rents and I call them rents, not profits. So excess profits in excess of what these companies actually did, because we privatized all the rewards from this massive social and collectively created value in this area. They have so much money, right? Trillions, not billions, trillions, the salaries they are paying to the top researchers in universities, both public and private universities, and to people who used to work in the NASA's, the DARPA's, the coffers in Chile. They are going now to work in these companies and that hemorrhaging of talent, of top research expertise. I don't think people are talking about this enough. It it literally is the biggest change, right.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway. We're still here in Madrid. Tracy. Still here. You have a good time? I am, I've eaten a lot of ham and cheese and that's pretty much all I can say. Yeah, I'm going to turn into a ham on by the time I leave. I'm certain of that. You know, so we are at the out of the Bloomberg City lab conference. You know, it's funny, like the mayoral level of politics is not something we spend a ton of time typically on. But I would say, like it definitely. You know, when I think about it, when I'm like here and like listening to a lot of conversations, it's just so obviously like connected to a lot of the themes we talk about because so much of our discussions have to do with something related to, you know, innovation or technology or implementation of policy and how it spans both the public and private sectors.
Yeah. I mean, also when I think about a lot of lot of topics like AI or housing affordability or inequality, like cities, I think City Lab actually use this phrase at one point. But cities are really at the frontline of all of those challenges, right? And trying to implement policy in that local level in a way that's like very easy to see and observe and also to judge.
Totally. Yeah. No, it's exactly right. And I think maybe there's something like, you know, I don't it feels like to some extent the mayoral level of any governance is sort of maybe the least ideological and the most like, you know, we talked to the Baltimore mayor, for example, and so much of his theme was just like talking to other mayors, like, what's working in your time of working in your city and what's not working and so forth. They all have such similar challenges. So many things have been like repeated. You know, one time after another that, like, they all can sort of speak the same language and all have the same issues.
Yeah, it's funny, you kind of get that local idea swapping at a major level that I cannot imagine necessarily happening in national politics. Like, can you imagine Trump and XI Jinping getting together and be like, oh, we implemented this really cool, like national transportation program. Have you tried it? Yeah. You know, you hear like these stories, right, of a governor, a governor sometimes or a mayor will go to like another country is like, oh, we can learn from what the city did on transit or whatever, but now you don't really hear that the same way. At the at the real national level, which is where a lot of our discussions tend to sit.
Absolutely. And I'm really excited about today's episode. We're going to be speaking with a guest who I would say, like, since we've been doing Odd Lives is actually one of the more frequently requested, long requested, and so it's sort of a failure on our part that, like, we just, like, never made it happen before. But yeah, someone who like, really like, who's whole career is like, dedicated to a lot of odd. Lots of things. Well, we waited until we could do it at Madrid. That's a perfect. Just like, do it at any other random venue. Yes, it was all very strategically designed. So we really do have the perfect guest, someone that a lot of guests have wanted to listen, to hear from for a long time. We're going to be speaking with Mariana Mustacato, professor at University College London and founder of the Institute for Public Purpose, author of several books sort of touching on these themes of technology, public sector, private sector, the roots of innovation, how these things actually get deployed. So Professor Ricardo, thank you so much for coming on Adelaide. Thrilled to finally have you on finally, finally our completely our fault for not having made it happen sooner. But, what do you do? Start it. What are you doing here? What, what brings you to this particular conference? What, what attracts you here?
Well, first of all, I'm here also because the the government of Spain is, really kind of leading the way in many areas that I'm very interested in, especially the kind of new economic thinking that needs to underpin how we rethink government. And so I was meeting with both the Prime Minister and the, Minister for the economy, Carlos Cuerpo, who I'm on a panel on today with, about a council that we've just set up. It's called the Global Council for a Common Good Economy. Anyway, and besides that, I'm also here to speak at the Bloomberg, City Labs event about this new public sector capability index that we've been developing with them as a partner, which is really about, you know, reinvesting inside the civil service so that they can really tackle those wicked, complex problems instead of, you know, hiring Deloitte during Covid and giving them 1.5 million a day to do test and trace, which they failed at in the UK.
I definitely want to get you to go off on consultants. But before we do, like when you meet with someone like the Prime Minister of Spain, what is it that they want to know from you? Like what information or expertise are they seeking?
Right. Well, I'm actually quite lucky that my books actually get read by the Prime Minister. So usually what happens is that they've, especially the entrepreneurial state, which I, you know, wrote in 2013 that had quite a bit a bit of an effect here. They even wrote a report called, Les Vallon in Espana. And they really want to ask me, you know, what does that mean? What does it mean for actually even being able to fail, for example. Right. So venture capitalists are always bragging about all the failures that they had in order to get a success, you know, whereas as soon as a civil servant or a minister fails or prime minister fails front page of the papers. So they're very interested in the kind of narrative change, but also what the cultural change, but especially the theoretical underpinning within, say, a finance ministry or an economics ministry that needs to then accompany rethinking government. Because otherwise, if you continue to have the old economic models where we judge things by cost benefit analysis and that present value, all these really static metrics, we would have never even bother going to the moon. Okay, first of all, in the 1960s, had we thought of it as a cost benefit, calculation. And so what should replace that? Right.
So you mentioned the entrepreneurial state being published in 2013. And I feel like I need to emphasize this because like, there has been this mind shift since the 2020 pandemic on industrial policy. And we kind of take it almost as a given, especially on this show, that there is a role for governments to play when it comes to innovation and entrepreneurial ism. But you were there very early. Did you feel vindicated by the 2020 shift?
Well, I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding that just because government spending a lot of money, investing a lot of money, whether it's the IRA or the next gen EU 2 trillion recovery, plan in Europe, that that means that industrial strategy is back or that, you know, government is being really strategic. It depends. And I mean, that's the whole point, right? You know, how are we actually framing it? Is it just a lot of tax incentives? Are we focus too much on sectors. To what degree, is industrial strategy actually helping to create a more inclusive, sustainable, innovation driven economy? Or is it just another way of of handouts and subsidies to particular sectors? And then we end up socializing risks and privatizing rewards. And also, I mean, I used to joke that, the US government has always had an industrial strategy, but, you know, pretending not to and they've always, you know, talked, the Jefferson talked but acted the Hamilton talk or the Hamiltonian kind of, more, you know, proactive government strategy. But by pretending that wasn't there, they kept a lot of things under the radar. And the joke bit is just that finally, people understood what the hell it was talking about because of the because of the musical before the musical came out. Anyway. So I think that's really important to recognize that industrial strategy has always been there. Yeah, except that in certain phases, including now in some countries, it's not really strategy in terms of being driven by public purpose, which, as you said, is the title in this Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, I direct it's been just kind of vertical strategies, focus on sectors, technologies, types of firms. Right. The whole focus on small medium enterprises. So what I've been trying to do is to say stop focusing on sectors, technologies and firms focus on big problems. Right? As bold as going to the moon and back in a short amount of time. The mission idea, the missions that then require sectoral support. But you're not getting support because you are a particular sector. Yeah, you're getting support if you're willing. So moving away from picking winners to picking the willing, if you're willing to work with government around these very difficult challenges, which could be as I don't want I say simple, but as, concrete as making sure that every child in the country has healthy, tasty, sustainable school lunch. Right? Not just school lunch. That was the Reagan thing where he said, ketchup is a vegetable so we can reduce the cost. We all had t shirts of Reagan and ketchup, which was the vegetable is what the t shirt said. So having moonshots, even on something as simple as a cafeteria, that then requires innovation across many different areas. It requires government to wake up and not just have that be done. For example, from the Department of Education, you know, Department of Agriculture, health, education, finance would work together on a moonshot of healthy, tasty, sustainable school lunch. So that inter-ministerial coordination, which we saw during Covid. Yeah, right. So we had the war room, the Situation room, you know, the military, education, health and so on together because we had these really difficult challenges. But as soon as Covid stops, we go back to very siloed ways of thinking.
As someone with two kids in the New York City public schools, I can absolutely confirm that the degree to which they associate, the mayor with school lunch policy is extremely real. And they'll talk about like, oh, we used to have these, like, really nice waffles or something. And then Eric Adams got rid of them or so, like they're really like key to single issue voters. Like single issue. They're like really pay attention to the degree to which school lunch policy shifts with administration. And just like they're really yeah. They really think what is state capacity? Well, we we've been using this term for years on the podcast. And we were like during Covid, we're like, you know, you took a it took, you know, a long time to stand up testing facilities for censoring people like our lack state capacity. But what is it? What's the difference.
So we actually distinguish between the word capacity. Okay. Routines kind of administrative routines and then capabilities okay. So what States are often what governments are often lacking are those kind of dynamic capabilities. So capacity partly is like literally do even have fiscal space. Do you have a budget okay. But also, you know, how are you thinking about that budget in terms of do you well, put it this way. Capacity is, you know, number of people working in your administration, the budget that's been allocated, perhaps also the training, you know, that the civil service actually has but capabilities or what you actually then do with it. Are you agile? Are you flexible? Are you able to pivot during Covid and actually start working in this more again inter-ministerial way? Do you know how to work with others? Right. You know, do you set up good partnerships or are they problematic partnerships. And and also you were talking before about what you're learning here, which is fantastic about how mayors can learn from each other. Right. Have you invested in your ability to learn, to adapt. And so I think that latter, you know, this this concept of dynamic capabilities is, is a much more complex area to be investing in. And the only reason you would do it is if you actually have a theory about government that is more than what traditional economists think about government, which is at best, well, at worst, get out of the way at best. Fix the market failure. So as soon as you say actually, it's about shaping and co-creating a different type of economy and society that works for people and planet. Then the question is, what does that mean for the capabilities that you need? If you're just fixing, then you just need a lot of bandages. And that's in fact what we get. We get very reactive, kind of filling the gap kind of policies.
Pendulum constantly swinging.
Exactly, exactly. But I mean capacity of course is essential without, you know, a budget and fiscal space, you can do nothing. That third category that I mentioned quickly, administrative routines, that's, you know, are you also, you know, do you have a stable environment where you can learn by doing? Because if you're constantly changing what you're doing, it's going to be hard to have a learning by doing dynamic. So those kind of administrative routines, I even see this on my university where as soon as you get a lot of turnover, even those kind of basic routines aren't there, but capability. So these three areas capacity, routines and capabilities, you know, are equally important. But the capabilities are really what I find are lacking. And it goes back, as I was mentioning before, to the underlying economic dogma that has underpinned, the way that we think about policy. Government at different levels that by design, not by coincidence, is reactive.
Have consultants become a substitute for state capacity routine administrative ability. Right. I always wonder how we got to the point where consultants are so big anyway, because it feels like every time you hire a consultant, it's almost an admission of failure on your part to be able to do something right. And nevertheless, it's a widely accepted practice across governments.
So my last book actually was called The Big Con so con Free Consulting and and the subtitle was, how we've weakened businesses infantilized our governments and Warped our economies, basically due to this consult ification. I wouldn't blame the consultants. I mean, I actually blame governments, right? Like, why are you opening the door so wide right to consultants? And it's fine to have advisers and some consultants. The problem is when they are actually doing the core tasks that government should do. Again, test and trace during Covid was a core task. And so I think it really stems from, I'd say, the 80s when we, you know, the kind of Reagan Thatcher years, if you want it always goes back to Reagan. Yeah. But actually in the UK, for example, it even increased more during the labor government. So it's not it's not, you know, one party. But it did begin, I'd say in the 80s with this kind of downsizing of, of governments, which then ironically cost them more because as soon as you start downsizing without really strategically thinking what you need and what you don't need, of course you should trim the fat. There's no reason to have a, you know, a bloated, a government structure. But when it's done for ideological reasons and not strategic, reasons, then, you know, ironically, then you end up not having those capabilities that you need as soon as you have a flood, or, you know, Brexit or Covid and so I think then what happens with the consultants is, you know, it's not their fault that they're invited in. I do think it's very problematic what they end up doing once they're in. So there's huge conflicts of interest. Well, the biggest conflict of interest being that they have no incentive really to make government better later because they would have no contracts. It'd be like having a therapist your whole life that therapist is not very good. Which is. Which is just how the therapy model. Yeah.
Well, do you remember this came up in that episode we did about construction in New York and this idea that, like, one of the reasons it's so expensive and take so long for like, public funded projects is because consultants have no incentive to actually get the project done. Yes.
But also they're often working on both sides of the street. Right. So they'll be, for example, consulting for, I don't know, a state owned enterprise like Eskom in South Africa, as well as the Treasury, which should be regulating Eskom or in Australia. There was a famous case with PwC where they were consulting for a medical device, company, as well as the regulators of the medical device company. Like, come on. So that should just be illegal, right? And again, you know, getting the right kind of regulation that makes sure that we don't have these kind of scams. So what we also argued was, you know, the first thing is start investing back inside. Government. So you, you know, don't need so much consulting, but also when you do bring in the consultants, make sure the contracts actually embed learning within them, and that you are also bringing in the right people. You know, if you have an oncology strategy, of course, you should get the top doctors and consultants and cancer to advise. So the other huge problem is that these consultants, when they're coming in, they often actually don't know very much and they end up really bothering the poor public servants that they end up emailing. Oh, would you mind telling me what you think about or sending me your, you know, plan that we can study? It's like, why are we even working with government if you don't have within the consulting. Sure. That deep expertise which you know and I'm, I'm not saying this just because I'm an academic, but I don't think academics are used enough. You know, if you have a research center that's been thinking about climate change for the last 40 years, use them. Don't ask McKinsey, as Australia did, to design your climate strategy, which ended up, by the way, being terrible. So there is a bit of why is it that governments don't invest in their own capacity and capabilities and be when they do go out there and look for the advisors and consultants are kind of getting the ones that simply kind of provide a, how do you call it, rubber over time? Right. That makes them feel more secure. They haven't even done the homework to make sure they are getting the top people in the world to help advise them on doing, you know, just tasks just to take the other side of the coin.
So recently in New York City, it was, you know, there was, I don't know, I think scandal is too strong a word, but there are a lot of headlines about how much the city had paid consultants for working on redesigning, the trash collection system in the city. And on the one hand, it's a trash collection core city function. Why do you have to bring in a consultant? On the other hand, like reimagining the trash collection system, it's like, that's a one time thing. So maintaining it, implementing it, servicing it. Okay. That's like a permanent government function, but the actual like but the actual like, okay, we have to do a redesign. Yeah. That is that necessarily something that like we need to have in-house in government the capacity. Because do you want to permanently have that muscle. Because that's a one shot thing. Doesn't it like to me that makes sense is the time where people also argue for something like that. There's a value to having an external viewpoint, right? So there's like the redesign that a one time job like to me, I was like, all right, that that doesn't seem crazy to bring in a third party to like, help figure out what that plan is.
Exactly. So that's that's the myth, right? That somehow we're talking about either government does everything. Yeah, right. Or even nationalize everything, or it does nothing and it privatize and brings in the consultant. So the truth is obviously somewhere in the middle. So of course, you're absolutely right. Government doesn't have to have all those skills. It definitely needs the skills to know who to work with outside of government. But it also needs to even understand that kind of outside landscape to even think about what might we need? How might we start developing a strategy that reimagine, say, the trash collection process? So, you know, that's why you talk about missions. So when you know, NASA wanted to go to the moon and back in a short amount of time, they didn't say, we're going to do it all by ourselves. And they also didn't say we're just going to do it with the aerospace sector. Right. They said, we're going to have to work with so many different private sector people. They ended up working with something like 400,000 people in the private sector. They said we have a lot of problems, but we don't know the solutions. But we're going to set very clearly a direction for working with the private sector in a problem oriented way. So the first thing they did was change procurement. Procurement. You know, government purchasing is often like 30% of a government's budget. It's a very important part of their budget, whether it's Barbados, a small island state, or the US, a very large, government procurement is there. How are we using it? So they realized they had the wrong type of procurement. It was just again, minimizing costs. It was cost plus procurement. They changed it to outcomes oriented procurement. And they started to ask themselves, what are the outcomes that we need? We need to figure out how are the astronauts going to go to the bathroom, right. Which, by the way, was just a problem. Again, with Artemus, the toilet. Oh, is oh is a problem up in space. What are they going to eat? What are they going to wear? How will we communicate with them? And it was the solutions to those problems that happened within mainly not only private sector institutions, with NASA's also kind of leading investment, but especially leading kind of thought process of what the problems were. Okay, that ended up getting us camera phones, foil blankets, home insulation software. Yeah. So many different innovations across many different sectors aerospace, nutrition, materials, electronics. That itself is what we're talking about. Right? So whether it's going to the moon, whether it's trash collection, whether it's school meals, whether it's, you know, getting prepared for the next pandemic, which unfortunately, the science tells us will happen. How are we even thinking within government in a problem oriented way of solutions oriented way? In this, by the way, is why the City lab, conference is so wonderful and Bloomberg's, government innovation team is so, you know, how do you say, important for so many cities is because they then share their experiences of solving problems, and then they ask, and we're trying to help them do this with this public sector capability index. What did we learn along the way that we were missing? Where were the bottlenecks? What can we do better? But especially in terms of that flexibility, adaptability, willingness to experiment. Right. Remember what Kennedy said. We're doing it because it's hard, not because it's easy. Yeah. All the words and policy papers are about making things easier, facilitating. I'm Italian faster or in Spain, fast. Right. So if you're facilitating someone it's not going to be a good contract. If you're de-risking someone, it's not going to be a good contract. If you're simply enabling, facilitating, fixing, it's going to be a very bad public private relationship.
Just going back to consultants for a second, and I think this is actually relevant to the discussion of having cooperation among, like different parts of the government on big projects. But how much of the consultancy fetish just has to do with, diffusing responsibilities? So I always think back to the point, the old, saying about the purchasing manager thing, you'll never get fired for buying IBM, right? Like how much of it is just like, well, you know, I did my best, I hired McKinsey, what more can I do if it goes wrong? It's McKinsey accountability thing. Yeah, absolutely.
So that's a really important point because, you know, one problem is when government doesn't have those capabilities for the reasons that we said before, another is even when they have it, why are they not using it? Australia, again is an interesting example because they had really interesting capability within government with their innovation agency, CSIRO, and yet they gave this massive contract to McKinsey to do their climate strategy. And it's absolutely about defuzing that responsibility, but also because of the culture we have again, within government where if they do make mistakes, unlike in the entrepreneurial ecosystems and know VC and so on, we don't accept that. But it's also in the private sector. Right. So we also talk in the book about the consult ification of management basically, and there as well, you know, if you're going to be doing a merger or downsizing or a massive share buyback scheme, isn't it great if you have, you know, McKinsey told us to do it. Yeah. So also just not taking on I mean, it's kind of cowardly, right? Like you're not kind of owning your decisions. I do think it's different in government. I think that, you know, changing that culture, having more govt labs like they have in Chile, laboratorio del Gobierno, I think sounds better in Spanish. Yeah, right. You could say it's very true and it's true. Sounds like I don't I always say that in Italian. Every time we have a reform strategy on it's public sector reform, it's just cuts. But it sounds nice. It's just not a form of public discussion. It's literally just cuts. And so that idea that what we need is kind of a laboratory within government, but also between governments, I think is really important. By the way, the head of procurement in NASA, Ernest Brackett, in the 60s with the Apollo program, not only did he help change the procurement policy of NASA, but he also said, we got to watch out. There's too many consultants in these corridors. And his exact quote was, if this continues, we will get captured by bro showmanship, which is kind of endearing because they don't have PowerPoints at the time. Right? So now the idea that you're ruling by PowerPoint and that's basically all they know how to do. At the time it was kind of shiny brochures, and, but but he didn't say we don't want to work with the private sector. Right. He said, we won't know how to work with the private sector. We won't know how to write the terms of reference if our own brains are, you know, becoming weak. So investing within in order to work also outside with others. So it's not you're not working with others, it's working smartly with them.
So this gets to the sort of one of the big questions of the day obviously. And that is AI. Right. And so you mentioned okay, school lunches. You said a mission. It doesn't mean like the private sector isn't going to play a role in providing food or whatever. But first you establish what the mission is. Then you talk about the moon. It doesn't mean that the private sector isn't going to play a role of the private sector played a significant role through various technologies and procurement. But there is an overall mission. How are you thinking about I should government first decide like, what is our mission for this? What what missions could it theoretically enable? Like, does this feel different than other endeavors? We obviously know a lot of public sector money is going to wind its way up in AI, and already has a lot of benefit. It already has. But how are you? Does this fit? Is this different? Talk to us about how to think about this particular moment of extreme sort of technological ambition, right?
I mean, there's so much to say. So first, the investments that went into what we call today, artificial intelligence, including, you know, LM models and think which models, speech recognition dates, you know, decades. And like so many other areas that was led by government. So if you look at even DARPA, which, as you know, was the lead, investor in the internet, it came from problems mainly in the military industrial complex that then required, ultimately what we're calling artificial intelligence today. But again, in the entrepreneurial state, I talked about how everything in our smartphones that make them smarter, not stupid internet, GPS, touchscreen, Siri and so on, where government finance was very scary today. What's what makes today different with AI is that that's not really necessarily going to be true much longer. Why? Because these massive economic rents and I call them rents, not profits. So excess profits in excess of what these companies actually did, because we privatized all the rewards from this massive social and collectively created value in this area. They have so much money, right? Trillions, not billions, trillions, the salaries they are paying to the top researchers in universities, both public and private universities, and to people who used to work in the NASA's, the DARPA's, the coffers in Chile. They are going now to work in these companies and that hemorrhaging of talent, of top research expertise. I don't think people are talking about this enough. It it literally is the biggest change, right. Because otherwise just, you know, the fact that we've had, you know, big technological changes, general purpose technology is completely affecting, you know, how we produce, how we distribute and, you know, from the rise of electrification. So on the thing, like at one point, I mean, I don't think it actually panned out that great for them. But didn't Uber hire the entire Carnegie Mellon robotics team? Wouldn't surprise me. I think they did. I think when they when they were doing self-driving car technology, they just wrote a check for the entire faculty of the CMU robotics team,
And it was just, but not enough people are talking about this. So it's very hard to govern a process for good, you know, ethically and so on, if you don't understand it. So if this talent is in fact leaving these publicly financed institutions, even private universities, most of the research, as you know, has been funded by NSF and so on. Once they leave and the knowledge is so concentrated in these few AI companies, I don't think we've thought about that enough.
But so just the other thing is, I mean, just coming back to your question, which I don't think I answered properly, yes, of course, governments should be thinking because of its, at least a democratically elected government. Right? This is different for dictatorships. What we would expect from them, but we would expect governments to make sure that any big change, large kind of opportunities around technological change are done in ways that are, again, good for people and planet. Right.
But that requires not only that capacity that, as I mentioned, is being decimated, but also a certain type of regulation which is making sure we even understand the process of, for example, how algorithms are currently being designed and whether we have a situation like Shoshana Zuboff in her great book, Surveillance Capitalism, she says, you think you're searching Google for free. They're searching you for free. You know, that could have been avoided right through the design of the algorithms.
And given that the algorithms initially at least were publicly financed, there is this issue of how do we, in a pre-distributive way, instead of kind of exposed with redistribution or regulation or market fixing, think about innovation collaborations that have some of these really important ethical concerns thought about upfront. And an example of this would be during Covid, where, you know, the vaccines were not the mission. The mission was to allow these vaccines to be produced and available globally.
Given it was a global health pandemic, we were all better off if the world was, you know, vaccinated. And yet only one of the vaccines, the one that was a collaboration between Oxford University and AstraZeneca, had that kind of conditionality about what good looks like at the start in terms of how they collaborated. So it was publicly financed researchers. Oxford is a state school, that put that as a condition with their relationship with AstraZeneca, that they would share the knowledge of it. They would join the patent pool, keep costs in price as well. So more of that.
Every time I hear, you know, Tracy, like someone talk about studying AI in college and like their professors, I'm like, that's great, but why are those professors not in the private sector making 100? I mean, many of them are that. But I'm always like amazed that given how much money people leave money on the table, what are you doing at a university? You're probably making ten times where that money come from.
This is the issue, right? So this money that's being used to pay these very large salaries that you're talking about, it's, you know, it's very important to recognize that that didn't come about because of, you know, early on this amazing kind of entrepreneurship. And all the knowledge was in these companies. They gathered that knowledge. Now they're using it. Of course, they're pushing the frontier. Of course they're doing research. But that idea of also making sure that companies are not earning in excess, right.
So why did the public purse not benefit in those early days? Why are they evading so much tax? I mean, literally in so many countries paying almost no tax. You know, also labor exploitation, in the case of Amazon, you know, you don't hear it from me. You hear it from all sorts of different investigations, even during Covid, by the way, that they wouldn't even put the ambulances apparently outside the warehouse. I don't know, I read that, I'm not sure if it's true. But anyway, the point is that there, you know, what does a good company look like? And how does that then affect the returns that they're earning? And what is a just return versus these excess returns that now are being used to, you know, higher end.
