Great. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much, and Larry, both because you're going to be talking to me about this, and you really have been a leader trying to get academics to get a bit more real and to really understand the link between why our policies are failing and the underlying economics that has been informing them. So, that link between theory and practice — and you call it new economic thinking also when you were at the Hewlett Foundation — you really have been a leader in this space. So, I want to thank you for that and also for hosting me. Unfortunately, I'm very jealous about this building. We don't have nice buildings like this at UCL. So, I'm going to go back and say...
Also, I've just landed from my 40th high school reunion. Now, I must say — the older ones, if you go to your 40th high school reunion, it's fascinating. The only problem is that also I had been yelling, because I'm a big Arsenal fan, for the last three weeks, and then I get there and I got to yell for the next — and we drank too much during the 40th reunion, and I just landed. So, hopefully I will also make some sense today. But I must say it's also beautiful that this particular event is called the festival. I think we should really lead these discussions with joy, alegria. And I must say also that something very cool that I've been doing recently is thinking about how common good economics can also help us understand the value of festivals, the value of carnivals. So, we have a wonderful project. I doubt we'll have time to talk about it, but I will be speaking about it in some other events.
How do we measure the value of a carnival where communities come together to participate, to spend a year actually investing in the steel drums and the costumes and the floats, and yet, as you know, we're quite bad at valuing that. Just think of the Notting Hill Carnival, where all you read about is maybe two or three people getting arrested, and we don't realize this incredible value of it for community cohesion, mental health, and so on. So, as I said, I'm not talking about that — but I just started talking about that. So, I will actually come to that at the end, because I do think there's a strong link between common good economy and thinking about what we need, what the good life is. And so, the reason I wrote the book is because I actually don't think we understand how to do good in economics.
We think of it a bit ex post when we have market failures, when things go wrong, we try to correct it so we can get good results, but we don't embed good in how all the different actors in the system relate one to another from the start, in the contracts ex ante, in a pre-distributive way. And that's really kind of the one-line summary of the book, and I think it's incredibly important because of what this festival is about, right? We're trying to save the planet — at least some people. Of course, you know, Trump has been negating, if you want, even climate change, but most people, even in the US, if you look at what's happening in different states, really do understand that there's tipping points, that we have to act now, we have to act urgently.
Since 2015, we've had these goals, the Sustainable Development Goals. There's 17 of them, 169 targets beneath them. I've no idea if you can read the slides. Oh, you can. Very good. And if you read the recent UN literature on this, we're actually going backwards on a lot of them. And so really what the book says is, well, that's kind of not surprising. It's not a coincidence. It's by design, because of how we've actually designed our way of actually working together. We don't know how to work together well with good at the center.
And what I do in the book — and this part isn't that new, but I bring it together, then there's a big part that's new — is actually to say, well, the problem is kind of first principles. If you think about all the leading actors in our economy — labor, capital, government, different types of finance, different types of business — unless we actually think about how to shape our economies to deliver good, if we get stuck in thinking that the best that government can do is fix market failures, to the point that even the word public good, which sounds good, two words, one is good, is really just correcting for something the private sector doesn't do due to the non-excludable and non-rival characteristics of that thing that needs to be done, then it's kind of not surprising that we end up always kind of too little, too late, doing things ex post, and also a bit depressed along the way.
I mainly work through the institute that I run at UCL with civil servants around the world, and I often joke that I come in as an economist and I walk out as a therapist, right? Kind of, life's going to be like this. We're going to be happy again. This is good stuff. We can actually create a different system instead of just fixing things along the way. And what I again do in the book is not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Of course there's market failures, and of course they need to be fixed, but if the problems that we're seeing — whether it's the hydrological crisis, whether it's the loss of biodiversity, which by the way is linked also with a huge water problem, whether it's climate, whether it's inequality — if we continue to think of these things as externalities as opposed to how do we understand markets as outcomes of how we actually govern different types of actors in the system, how do we govern public institutions, private institutions, even labor unions and civil society institutions, and how they relate one to another, and understand markets as outcomes of that, and don't say really kind of superficial things like the market versus the state, because that doesn't mean anything, right? You might say the state versus, say, business, but the market is an outcome of how we organize the state and business. Karl Polanyi, as you know, was the big authority on this.
Anyway, so we're stuck. We've thought about government in a problematic way, I think, as fixing. We're stuck in terms of how we've organized our business sector, our corporate sector. Over seven trillion — twelve zeros — dollars has been used over the last 10 years just to buy back shares to boost stock prices, stock options, and executive pay. This level of kind of extraction out of the economy — already back in the day of the physiocrats in the 1700s, they worried about this. They were looking at the landlord class. Later, in my book The Value of Everything, I looked at how we've actually organized finance in terms of value coming out of the system, but they called this a problem of sterility, because they looked at the system in biological terms.
You know that a lot of modern neoclassical economics uses kind of Newtonian physics and calculus, but already the physiocrats were doing what complexity theorists do — that Larry and I deal with. I spent part of my PhD at the Santa Fe Institute, but kind of using biological metaphors. The system can't reproduce itself not only if we continue to kill it in terms of climate change, but also literally if the money's not getting invested back in. So, this problem isn't new. People have been writing about how we should replace shareholder value by stakeholder value, but one of the things I do in the book is I also criticize this concept of stakeholder value as not actually going deep enough. We haven't used it to actually create value differently from the start.
How does business relate differently, both in terms of paying its tax — that's like a no-brainer — but also in terms of how it treats the workforce from the beginning, instead of ex post doing good for the community or giving some leftover pennies to the workers? There we go. Oops, sorry. And finance, right? So, government is stuck, business is stuck, finance is stuck. And, you know, this a lot of people have again written about, but just think of the UK, where 80% of our finance goes back to finance, insurance, and real estate. So, this financialization of the economy, both in terms of how finance works, but also how business itself has become financialized, I think is really at the core of a lot of these problems.
So, unless we really rethink some of these first principles — how do we get the system, government, business, finance, civil society, which I haven't talked about yet, maybe we'll get to that more in the question time — to work together in a different way from the beginning? Coming back to Polanyi's really important insight that markets are the outcome of this: how do we shape markets to do good from the start? This is what the book's about. It's divided into three. The first part is theory, the second part is policy, and the third part is places. Where are the places that we can actually learn how to work together better?
And again, it's sort of an outcome of, as I said, what I've been thinking about quite a bit in terms of debunking the myths around government. You know, is it just there to redistribute the value created in the business sector, or actually create value in a different way with others? The Entrepreneurial State debunks Silicon Valley as somehow having just come out of venture capital and entrepreneurs and small garages. The Value of Everything was how do we then have a theory of collective value creation that underpins that? Mission Economy was how do you actually then do this in terms of policy? How do we have missions as bold as going to the moon and back in a short amount of time, but around our biodiversity, climate, water, health problems? The Big Con was none of this will ever happen if we continue to outsource all the knowledge from our civil service and kind of Deloitte-ify and McKinsey-ify our civil service.
And really what then the common good book was about was bringing those things together, but also from my own experience, because again, we do work with governments around the world, especially those that are progressive — Brazil, Barbados, Spain, South Africa. What I was witnessing is that even though some of these ideas, like missions and mission-oriented innovation or industrial strategy, were catching on, even this idea of the entrepreneurial state was catching on, unless the underlying economics is really pushed even further, it's impossible. So, bringing these ideas of collective value creation, sharing risks instead of de-risking, building systems that are based on reciprocity from the beginning instead of just talking about ecosystems — how do we define a symbiotic, mutualistic ecosystem, not a parasitic, predator-prey one? Again, going back to biology, how do we get inequality tackled from the beginning in a pre-distributive way? And again, overlying all of this, shaping markets.
And it's not meant to be like the theory of the common good. It's really meant to be a framing that also really helps those that are trying to do good, who are talking about climate, that are addressing, at least in theory, the SDGs, that are thinking about inequality, that talk the talk sincerely — I'm not dismissing them for literally just talking the talk — that are talking and trying to walk, but ultimately, we see inertia. We are not moving fast enough, and, you know, these problems, as I said, are urgent, so we can't continue to move so slowly.
This is a bit of a funny thing here, which is that actually I got super interested also in the word the common good when I met Pope Francis. When he talked about it, he always said there have to be principles behind it. We need the principle of subsidiarity. In other words, we need to be nesting our ideas of how to do good at the most local level. We need to be working with the lived experience. Something similar, by the way, that both in our work, but also think of Jennifer Pahlka's great work on digital public infrastructure. She says people who build our digital public infrastructure have never even used it to access, say, their welfare payments. So, we're not actually designing the system through a user focus with a human rights understanding of why we actually need a better system. So, seeing the world through the eyes at a very local level.
And he also talked about things like the preferential option for the poor as being a critical principle. In other words, anytime we do anything, always ask yourself: how will it affect the most vulnerable people in society? Interestingly, Pope Leo, who also — I just met, sorry, I promise to stop showing me and a bunch of people — but he actually just wrote this amazing encyclical on AI, and he comes back to these principles. And it was really that idea of also, what are the principles that we need to do good together from the start, instead of ex post fix those market failures or even government failures, which I think that the kind of common approach — Elinor Ostrom's very important work. Again, we're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but it really is again, if you look at the work, focus on kind of why governments fail and then why we need much more a kind of bottom-up understanding of how communities can engage to do good together and not over-rely on government structures.
And both in terms of early social Catholic thinking, but also political philosophy, this is not new, right? So, just think of Aristotle, the most obvious one to lean on. He talked about the telos, the goal, so that's the mission, but also the polis — not the police, but the polis, the community, the polity — building community together on the way towards actually achieving the good life. And also a lot of modern philosophy: Michael Sandel, if you haven't heard his wonderful lectures at Harvard, do so. His critique of John Rawls is precisely that you can't actually have a theory of justice unless we actually understand how we're all embedded in communities and how we build that community and relate to each other, value each other along the way towards actually achieving justice.
And so, that first part of the book really focuses much more on that, but also on non-Western thought about the common good. If you look at almost any great tome by indigenous peoples, whether it's in Brazil, whether it's in Australia, they've always had such a deeper understanding of how individuals relate to community and create sustainable practices with actually a much more symbiotic relationship again to the water cycle, the climate, and to nature. So, part of that first theoretical part of the book really also leans on some of the amazing insights, which for me was really just learning about what others have actually said about the common good.
But bringing it then back to — sorry, this is good because I drank too much beer at my 40th. I have to hydrate a bit. Bringing it back to this idea that we need a framing to hold us accountable, precisely so we don't get another kind of common good washing. I've seen it with mission washing. How can we create a framework so that if along the way we are trying to do good in a genuine way, we hold ourselves accountable? So the compass with these five elements is presented then in part two, and these five areas which I think are critical, what I try to do is also show that there's so many good seeds of this stuff. This is not about utopia. It's not about thinking things through from scratch. There's so many interesting practices around these elements, which I'll introduce in just a second.
Directionality and purpose: unless we know what we're even trying to do, and being very clear and explicit about it, instead of fixing things along the way. What is the good we're trying to do? Second, how do we make sure that good and those missions are actually co-created, as Pope Francis said, from the lived experience, the principle of subsidiarity? Not using the word co-creation in just like a tokenistic way, but because it will actually drive better policies if it's created by those people who've lived through very bad results on Earth. Collective learning and knowledge sharing: what's the point of talking about — back in the day it was the new economy, today it's fancy words like collective intelligence — if the way that we are actually building our systems is not sharing that intelligence? Think what happened during COVID, which I'll come back to. So how do we share knowledge along the way, precisely because we talk about our capitalist system today as ideally a knowledge economy?
And how do we share the risks and rewards along the way to stop what I have observed and written a lot about, whether it was the energy revolution, the IT revolution, the current AI revolution, where we've seen sharing risks but privatizing the rewards? What are the examples of how to do this right from the start? And lastly, transparency and accountability. Unless we know who's doing what, who's getting what, and why, none of this is possible. And that also comes back to some of my thinking about when you get too many intermediary institutions — not just the McKinseys, also others — the kind of NGO-ification in some ways of our goals.
So, I'll just maybe say something quick about this, because I promised I would speak maximum of 20 minutes, and I'm already at 15. I'll just give you a bit of the seeds, right? Because it's very important, I think, to give hope. The book is very hopeful. And that's why the part two looks around the world across the five continents of interesting things happening around those five elements, but also argues that unless we actually look at the whole compass OS together, it's not going to scale. And there's no point in picking and choosing one of the elements, like purpose and directionality, if it's not co-created. There's no point in thinking about co-creation if then the knowledge that comes out is all privatized. There's no point in doing any of this if we don't actually understand what's happening because of that lack of transparency.
So, that first bit on directionality, this is where I bring back this idea of missions. The reason I think that the SDGs actually haven't progressed is they never became really tangible goals. Yes, there's 169 targets, but we didn't actually turn them into goals at the center, for example, of industrial strategies. You know, going to the moon and back in a short amount of time — that was a mission. The challenge was the space race. We have sort of stopped ourselves at the space race level with many of the SDGs. We can't just talk about climate change unless it actually really delivers in very local, regional places, not only net zero, but also informing those policies, again, with very, very concrete ways in which we can then transform the whole system.
A lot of the problem with the market failure framework that I talked about before is it actually then leads to thinking about just kind of filling the gap, right? Of finance, for example. There's seven trillion, not just in share buybacks, but also in a financial gap for the SDGs. How do we then use this idea of directionality also in how we design all the different tools along the way? So, instead of thinking about financial gaps that fix market failures when there isn't private finance, how do we shape our financial institutions, whether it's the MDBs or the national development banks that have over 22 trillion dollars in them, in this outcomes-oriented way? And I look at examples of that.
But also, the idea of missions is having to actually speak to very concrete things that people are experiencing. Access to food, you know, that's SDG 2, no hunger, no poverty, all these great goals, you know, turning them into missions like making sure that every child in a country has access to healthy, sustainable, and tasty lunch, and how we then get governments to work differently — Department of Agriculture, Health, Finance, and Education together. So, that point of directionality is not new in my work, but I give examples of what it meant actually to do it properly instead of mission washing, and we maybe again can come back to some examples of mission washing.
But again, the point then going further is what should the missions be? How do we make sure that for the space race, kind of who cares? It better be the scientists that tell us how to get there. But for the missions on Earth around health, again, climate, biodiversity, and so on, that they are really and truly co-created. And some experience we had here in Camden, where we worked with 10 different housing estates and looked at adult social care problems in those housing estates. The first thing we did in terms of this principle of co-creation was getting the carers and the carees to the table to design that better policy of outcomes-oriented procurement for adult social care. It was incredibly inspiring. I learned a lot from that.
But also, the work currently that we're doing in the Amazon — this is the secretary for traditional peoples, then Morais, an absolute trailblazer — and she talks about the need for co-creation and participation again to not be tokenistic. She uses the example of the Bolsa Verde. Bolsa Familia is redistributive, as you know, in Brazil. Bolsa Verde is about recognizing the value that the indigenous communities have created for hundreds of years, their knowledge, their innovation. So, recognizing them as innovators instead of just, you know, groups that we need to put some money towards, and not building something like the Amazon Fund, as important as it is, without it actually being informed by and governed by the people that are supposed to be benefiting from that.
So, collective learning and knowledge sharing. That was already, by the way, I think an example of knowledge sharing, but also recognizing the knowledge that others have instead of continuing this very condescending approach we often have with our communities. Knowledge sharing did not happen during COVID. You know, what was the mission in COVID? It was not the vaccine. We ended up with eight vaccines. That's just the output. The outcome should have been global vaccination, you know, accessible for anyone who wanted to be vaccinated. Well, the way that we actually innovated, the way that innovation collaborations, the ecosystem was organized, was not based on reciprocity. It was not based on mutualism. Only one of the vaccines was.
That was the Astro — actually, I shouldn't call it that — the Vaxzevria vaccine. Should it be called by the private sector name? It was a collaboration between Oxford University and AstraZeneca. And in that particular case, that was a seed of the common good. Why? Because they put the result they wanted at the center ex ante of the collaboration, making sure that knowledge would be shared, that they would join the patent pool. And that's because the state-funded Oxford University researchers put that as a condition. And that idea of conditionality, of reciprocity, of mutualism is, in fact, at the core of what I've been writing about for quite some time, which again has led me to want to write this book.
This idea of conditionalities and reciprocity at the center of any tool, whether it's a water contract, a public procurement contract, a lithium contract — I'm looking at my friends here from Chile — whether it's a subsidy, a tax incentive, a bailout during COVID, how do we actually put the good result that we're trying to steer the economy towards at the center of that contract? Water rights are the most ridiculous ones in the world. 80% of industrial wastewater is not recycled. Put it in the contract, given that the state is giving the water right to PepsiCo and Anheuser-Busch. So, that idea of actually reward sharing, benefit sharing in the contract, of any sort of contract, that doesn't just happen. It has to happen if we actually frame what we're trying to do as good in that kind of ex ante way at the center of public-private relationships.
Transparency and accountability, as I mentioned, huge. Without that, we don't even know where we're going. Compass is about steering, right? Navigating the ship. And, you know, whether it's — and again, I'm sure we'll come back to this — how do we govern AI for the common good? How do we govern data for the common good? Well, it's a little late if you think of it ex post. If you think of where AI came from, most of it actually came from public funds. The LLM, the speech recognition also came from DARPA early on. And yet, we didn't think about these things around data. Now, there's so much lack of transparency in terms of what's happening, not only to data, but also, as I mentioned, the key point in transparency is also making sure that when we vote governments into power, that we even understand who is doing what within government.
So, this consultification, the outsourcing, the lack of knowledge — coming back to knowledge sharing within the civil service — is itself creating a lot of lack of accountability and lack of transparency. We've been working at the UCL Institute with Bloomberg around actually forming an index around this. How do we build those capabilities at that local level, also so we can hold our governments to account when they say that they're trying to do good? Let me just stop there and just remind you that some of the great work we're doing around how do you build joy, alegria, bem viver, the good life at the center of what we're all trying to do. There's no better place than Carnival to actually start examining both how we should be living, but also how it can go wrong. Some of the work we're doing in Brazil talks about Carnival apartheid.
I just want to finish with this because I began with it. But, you know, ultimately this is really about making sure that we not only — what's the name of this festival? — doing good things for the planet, but that we really hold ourselves accountable along the way so we don't have good washing. Thank you so much.
So, I guess there's a couple of points. One is the reason I actually look at really local examples is also I think that's where we learn how to work together. That's also why this public sector capability index, for example, that we're building, is at the city level. The very concrete problems that we have in cities, whether it's floods and the mayors have to deal with it. But even again, FIFA, the World Cup, and you have to organize, you know, how to again make it a successful event. Think of the London Olympics. When you have different groups working together, whether it's the police, government officials, business officials, business leaders working together to solve problems, I think that's a very good place where we can both study what went wrong, but also very inspiring ways of what went well.
So, I think what should happen is that the lessons go from local to national and to global, but the money then has to flow the other way. And that's a very different point from calling for — I'm talking about devolution, which I think is sort of a different issue altogether. But, coming back to your point, the last part of the book talks about places, both local places where we can learn how to respect each other again — the youth centers, community centers, public pools during the summer, like public spaces — but also literally places where people build things together, public squares that have also kind of been decimated in terms of the privatization of our public spaces, but also global places.
So, if you think of the Bridgetown Initiative, for example, one of the main points that they've been trying to think about through the leadership of Mia Mottley — I was actually with her when we first set it up in Barbados — was, you know, the global north created 80% basically of the carbon emissions we currently have in the world, but also, as she calls it, the double jeopardy, created the wrong financial architecture, which then currently isn't allowing the global south to actually invest in a proactive way towards actually solving those problems.
So, there as well, in that third part of the book, it's also about how do we actually transform not just the Bretton Woods system seen as a financial architecture, but also the voices of the global south, which have borne the consequences of this problematic structure. What does it mean to actually have voice, have deliberation, have a voice at the table? So, that's one part where I talk about that. But also coming back to just kind of, you know, your point, I don't actually think the book is all about local examples. I precisely look, for example, at COVID in terms of the lessons today, not just what went wrong.
The mRNA vaccine hub that today is in South Africa, that's precisely an example of a global initiative, but very practical again, so we don't just blah blah blah about, oh, we're all in it together, let's fight together, where they brought together — do you guys even see us? Sorry. Well, I guess we can't move this. Hello. — different countries so that they can actually collaborate around the vaccine, with again those principles of knowledge sharing, reward sharing, building local productive capacity instead of having to rely on expired vaccines sent over either from a philanthropy or what Dr. Tedros during the crisis called vaccine apartheid.
So, I think what we need to do is not say is it local, is it global, but where are the examples: where nations came together, that's the mRNA hub; where people come together in cities; how they worked, how they innovated, how they collaborated, how they wrote those contracts. I'm thinking also of your example in Chile, where because Boric had this very progressive agenda of inclusion, but also sustainability, the way then the state interacted with the lithium producers was a bit more with reciprocity, not just as a natural resource that, you know, needs to be at the center of competitiveness, but lithium producers had to change what they were currently doing to waste less water, to become more sustainable in order to get any subsidy from the government.
So again, is that local, is it global, is it national? These are lessons, these are seeds, but I do think that then the compass also comes in, because we know also that in both Chile and Colombia, there's also been protests from indigenous communities and then how that was done. So again, this isn't about saying it's easy — that would be stupid — but it is about creating a bit of a stronger, rigorous framework that holds us to account along the way.
Sure. I mean, I actually think these things aren't related, but just thinking of the academy because it's not just economics. It's also, coming back to the political philosophers, people like Michael Sandel, he talks about the common good, but the problem is it's often outside of how we talk about the market. So, he very eloquently, for example, looks at how markets fail around care, for example, and then says that we need a different approach to thinking about care almost outside of market mechanisms. I say that's fine, but then that allows the market to remain and our understanding of how markets work to remain fixed. And we end up doing good. Robert Reich as well, he also wrote a book on the common good where it just seemed to be very counter to then how the economy itself works that it ends up requiring us to bring kind of notions of civic life and relational value to the core, but it doesn't then transform in the way that I began of how, you know, what does it mean for doing government differently, the public service differently, what does it mean for corporate governance, for really getting a true way to think about stakeholder value instead of shareholder value continuing and then doing the stakeholder value on the side. So, that's one part of the academy which is that all the really interesting insights which are useful, by the way, I've learned from them. I mean, I think Michael Sandel's one of the best political philosophers of our time, but he does the mirror image of then what the economists do, right? We don't then transform how we understand the market and build a different type of market in that market shaping kind of way. So, I think the ideas in the book, hopefully, will be helpful, but they do kind of counter both of these sides, which is are we going to do good just outside of the market and that's the kind of Robert Reich, Michael Sandel, or on the other side, are we going to continue to think that the good, even in Jean Tirole's book called, it's not the exact title, the common... What was it called? Common Good Economics. He basically looks again at how we can do good using different types of incentives within again a pure market failure theory perspective. So, he doesn't then replace that, which I argue in the book we have to if we want to build the common good with a market shaping. So, I guess that first answer is it kind of counters this kind of dichotomous way that we either keep the market as it is, just fix market failures, or give up on the market and do good outside of the market.
On business, well, it's kind of, I don't want to be too simplistic, but there's a lot of money to be made in the current economy by not having a common good economy. And my own work, I've witnessed this literally in the rooms. That's why I come out, as I said, as a therapist. I'm like, "Come on, man. This is not a good deal." There is so much lobbying. There's so much lobbying, whether it's by the Pfizers of the world. And I used to tell my husband, "If I don't come home at night, it was Pfizer." Because I have been talking about Pfizer for a very long time. And then I have to also tell him it might actually be McKinsey because of the new book. But, you know, whether you look at the consulting companies, whether you look at the pharmaceutical companies, whether you look at how the financial system is structured, there's huge benefits to be made, excess rents. Let's not forget, by the way, that Adam Smith, when he talked about the free market, was free from rent, not free from the state. So, the rents in the system, the excess profits in the system, I've nothing against profits, the excess profits in the system and rents, anyone who's earning them, obviously, would love to lobby for a different kind of system. And that power of lobbying, even in the climate space, that there was actually a chapter in The Big Con where we talked about a climate consultancy, well, that's also what holds this back, right? Because there's billions, trillions, if we think of Elon Musk's IPO, or not IPO, money that he just made with SpaceX, to be made by not having a common good economy. But I also really believe in the long run, right, without sounding naive, we are all better off. It is in the long run a win-win.
Because we won't have a planet to live on first of all, right? And everyone's not going to, unless we really do have the billionaires and so on go live up, you know, on the moon. But if we want to live on this planet, we all have to solve these problems. So in the long run, it is a win-win. In the short run, and that's why I talk about we need to pay as much attention not just on the goal, but of what happens along the way, capital, labor. But by the way, labor's share of global income is at one of the lowest it's ever been. That's the other massive challenge that hopefully your festival's talking about. But capital, labor, public, private, public, public. What's public, public? How Eskom, a state-owned enterprise, interacts with the Treasury. That's a public, public relationship. Unless you have good as a goal, you're going to get the wrong kind of state-owned enterprises. Yeah. So I guess, you know, on the one hand it's inertia, on the other hand there's a lot of money to be made along the way in terms of business. But also, you know, if this was just utopia, then it would just be a book. Coming back to the institute that I set up, it's all about then working with teams on the ground. In Brazil, we worked on reforming public sector procurement with a lot of this thinking again of bringing the experience on the ground to the design of better procurement for school meals, on state-owned enterprise reform, on digital public infrastructure. Jennifer Pahlka's great work again on what that means to do it in a way that thinks of people, or GDS here, where Mike Bracken and folks had an arrow looking outside. They said, "Why are we making this?" And they had an arrow, you know, for the people. But what does it mean to do things for the people if it's not with the people? So that idea of actually getting experiences across the world where we learn how to do this better, but bringing it back to a framing that allows the seeds to scale because we're holding ourselves to account. And I should always come back to the fact that of the five elements, unless they're all there, it ain't the common good. I can't think of one of those elements that one could say is not important. So they're kind of first principles of doing good.
