Okay, thank you so much. A huge apology for not coming. So, yes, I am quite ill and I have already spread it to two people in my family. So, it's good I'm not a super spreader. I was meant to be actually with Aria today, who I know you gave the prize to last year. So, it was also a double disappointment. We have a poster which I shared with Lazlo of she and I with the Thelma and Louise, you know, how do you say, billboard, and we got in trouble because you might remember they have guns [laughter] and the poster went viral when she was still the minister for the environment in Spain. She was the only courageous minister who decided to tax the excess profits being made by the energy companies during the energy crisis. This is before the Ukraine war.
Anyway, so it's an honor for me to get it from you, from FEPS, and all the amazing people that are there today, but also because my very good friend or sister in arms. I heard Lazlo's introduction to your amazing yearbook and all the work that you do. So I would also like to congratulate you for your work. And maybe I can just start with this point about value. You know, I always say that it's not a coincidence that the tech bros in Silicon Valley like universal basic income because it doesn't debunk, it doesn't upset the mythological theory of value where value is created only in the private sector and especially by them, right? The garage tinkerers, the entrepreneurs, and the tech field. And then they generously pay their tax, which of course we know they don't. And some of that tax then gets distributed to people through some sort of universal basic income which they think is a good idea. Why do they think it's a good idea? Because it completely doesn't change any of the narrative which if it's debunked would actually question where they got their wealth from in the first place.
So if we start using different words like a citizen's share, a citizen's dividend, in other words, getting back what you deserve, what you contributed, what you created, this collective creation of value between workers, between different types of organizations also in civil society, the state, I've written a lot about the state's role, and of course the private sector, then all of a sudden the discussion is very different. It's about making sure that we are sharing not only in the risks, not only in the contributions, but also in the rewards. And I think this is what I've tried to do really is to debunk the narrative and the theory of value which then justifies this very bad distribution, skewed distribution and increase in inequality that we've seen.
And it's interesting when you look at Piketty's curve, his famous curve showing how inequality has increased since the 1970s. I sometimes have fun going decade by decade, sometimes five years by five years, and showing the lobbying that happened in those years in order to introduce very regressive, not progressive. So thank you for the progressive award. Regressive taxation which was an outcome of the stories, narratives that are told about where wealth comes from. So, as an example, the capital gains tax in the United States fell by 50% in just four years through lobbying of the National Venture Capital Association, through this narrative that in order to stimulate innovation, we needed to reduce massively their taxes. And then we needed a communist like Warren Buffett, that's a joke, to say, 'Stop reducing my tax. It's just increasing inequality. It's hurting jobs. I invest when there's an opportunity.'
Anyway, just to say I'm very happy to receive this award now in this moment because we have so many regressive forces, not progressive. The progressive forces have to become allies. We need the academics, the trade unionists, those civil servants that are fighting every day to create better policies even though they are, how do you say, often blamed because we love to blame government anytime anything goes wrong. But you know, really also the different types of labor both through the trade unions but also all the work that goes into producing our economy. We don't have a theory of value in economics that captures all of that. And what I have focused on is the theory of the state that it shouldn't just be fixing market failures but shaping markets. But that's not a normative point. It's also a historical point. But when you shape a market, you can also shape it badly.
So it's really just a point to say economies always have directions. Economies are outcomes. There's no economic pressure. The economy itself is an outcome of how we govern public, how we govern private, how we govern trade unions, and how they interrelate one to another. And when those relationships are parasitic and not symbiotic, when we have badly governed public institutions that forget their role and are just giving out subsidies, when we have a private sector that over the last 10 years has spent $7 trillion, that's 12 zeros, on buying back their shares to boost stock prices, stock options, and executive pay, then we have a huge problem.
And so maybe I can just finish by saying it's impossible to tackle the problems we have today, whether it's global warming, whether it's the water crisis, whether it's inequality, without actually radically changing these governance structures. And government is often part of the problem. Even public banks, you know, they sound good, but if the bank is just giving money to a sector to stay alive instead of putting conditionality to make sure that sector produces better work, reduces carbon emissions and so on, then the public bank is part of the problem. So, I think this is a real moment to really transform how we even think about capitalism and look at things like climate change as the consequences, the symptoms of a much deeper problem.
And I think the idea of really coming together and debunking this myth of where value comes from to hold also the energy companies, the pharmaceutical companies, the tech companies to account on the huge contributions they have received by others and then extracted so much just for themselves through all sorts of gimmicks including the gimmicks that government comes up with like R&D tax incentives or the patent box, these ideas that often come about through lobbying by those companies, but it's the state that's actually giving away what ultimately is the social value and social infrastructure.
So, thank you so much and I really hope that together we can, you know, fight back what I really see as all sorts of different regressive forces, but also to remember that those people who are voting for what I would argue is problematic governments, populist governments, they are not stupid. They have been left behind by all sorts of terrible ways that we have governed our global capitalist system. And until we change that, until we bring, as Reiner was saying, people not only condescendingly saying that they should benefit in wages for example, but give them a voice, deliberation, participation in the planning itself of how to govern this system better, then it's not surprising that we have so much distrust of the so-called elites.
And I think that issue of participation and how to co-create even areas like procurement which is 30% of a government's budget. There's no point in procuring better if the people who are supposed to access the service that's being procured are not being listened to. And you know, bringing citizen engagement in terms of actually designing what I call mission-oriented outcomes I think is key. And anyway, let me stop there and just thank you so much again and I hope that I can see you live very soon. [applause]
