What happened to liberal democracy?

0:00Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Hello, I hope this microphone is turned on. Thank you very much and welcome to this morning's event hosted by LSE's European Institute. My name is Ja Prakurssoi and I'm Professor of European Politics and Chair in Contemporary Turkish Studies at LSE European Institute. I'm very pleased to be joined by Professor Daron Ajem Moldo for this event to discuss his new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity. Before we proceed, can I please ask everyone in the audience to check that their phones are on silent? And also, please be aware that we are recording this event and we are going to try to make it available as a video and a podcast later on.

1:03We have one hour, so I will keep my introduction as brief as possible. And frankly, I don't think that I need to introduce Professor Ajem Moldo. This is an LSE only event, so I'm sure that all of you know that Professor Ajem Moldo received his master's and PhD degrees from LSE. We're very proud of that. After he graduated from LSE, he became a professor at MIT and he's been there since 1993. And of course, very recently, he became a Nobel Laureate. I'm also sure that most of you are familiar with his ideas through his articles, books, and many of his media interviews. So rather than introduce him as such, I would like to instead explain why I'm particularly excited to share this event today. Before Professor Ajem Moldo's name became so widely known, or he became famous, as famous as a scientist and economist can become.

2:07I was working on my PhD dissertation in the early 2000s at the University of Virginia, so this was 20 years ago. In my builds, my main literature review around five key volumes that I considered essential for explaining the relationship between economic development and political regimes. Some of the authors of these books, like Robert Dahl or J.R. Moeudano, would be familiar to the audience in this room. But Professor Ajem Moldo's 2006 book, Economic Origins of Tiktate or Japan Democracy, called author it with James Robinson, was also central to that literature review. That book is how I first came to know Professor Ajem Moldo's work and how I became a huge fan. That said, I think it is also fair to say that that book was not for everyone or for the general public. I recall it being fairly dense with the equations that me trying to decipher what was going

3:07on. Although the theoretical framework was genuinely interesting and innovative, it was not the easiest text to assign to undergraduate students. When I began my career at Istanbul Big University, I desperately wanted to share with the students, Professor Ajem Moldo's work, but I couldn't find anything to assign. In 2000, when Y Nations failed was published, I was very happy. Again, this book was co-authored with James Robinson and it developed many of the same ideas from their earlier works, but it was written in a far more accessible style. It became a regular in my comparative politics course when I thoroughly enjoyed teaching and discussing with my undergraduate students. Through this book, I also discovered Professor Ajem Moldo's rare gift for conveying complex ideas to general readership in a way that also creates the right environment to discuss

4:10difficult questions in an open manner. It is a little wonder that that book has sold over a million copies worldwide. And don't worry, I'm not going to go over your CV. I will skip forward and say many articles and books later here we are. Your latest book, the book we are discussing today. What happened to liberal democracy? It is written as ever in a very clear and readable style, but it engages deeply with very difficult questions related to the economic, politics, history, technology and to my particular delight, philosophy. Some of the arguments built on Professor Ajem Moldo's earlier work, but they feel very timely as well. They are put forward very clearly and directly. Some of the details in the book also resonated with me on a more personal level, perhaps and I'm of course very proud to say this as well, because we share a similar background

5:14sort of. We grew up in the same city, which doesn't mean much because the city has 15 million inhabitants, but more importantly we grew up in the same neighborhood. And that neighborhood is very important because he talks about the significance of local communities for shared prosperity and collective knowledge in this book. And I thought this was the right moment to mention this. So I found the ideas on an intellectual level as well, the many details and references throughout the book affirming. And I suspect you will too if you haven't already read the book. So without taking up any more of your time, I will hand the floor to Professor Ajem Moldo to introduce the book. We will open up to questions from the audience in the second half of our hour together. I'm sure many of you will have questions, so I will ask for your patience until we reach that point. Thank you. Thank you very much, Herr Prak, for being here.

6:24That's a wonderful introduction and it's always great to be back at DLSC. In fact, DLSC was one of the first places where I talked about the current book. And now that it's published, I have the pleasure of being back here again. And let me, I'm just going to take no more than 15 minutes to give a background of the arguments, but also mixed with the motivation for writing the book. In fact, this is the book that I wrote most in a most rushed manner. I tried to finish it very quickly. And part of the reason for that is I was tired. But more importantly, because I think that liberal democracy's crisis is truly one of the most important and momentous challenges we're facing. Liberal democracy is in my assessment one of the greatest achievements that humanity has

7:32made. It is impossible for me to imagine how we would live in huge, complex, diverse, and broadly conflictual societies, but in great peace and in a way that provides services, protection, and opportunities to vast numbers of people. And it's impossible for me to think how without the institutions of liberal democracy, how we would be in a situation to protect the most basic freedoms. The book's argument is somewhat wide-ranging as Yaprak explained partly because I want to first put on the table why liberal ideas have been quite successful in making the book sorts of achievements that I've briefly mentioned now, feasible, what is about these

8:32ideas that make them relevant and why they will continue to be central in the 21st century and beyond. So in some sense, it is very important for me to convey why we need liberal democracy as the institutionalization of many of the most important liberal ideas. And liberal ideas themselves need to be defined and so on and I won't go into those details here. And that's a long discussion partly because liberalism is a big tent and some parts of that tent are more relevant than others. But I also try to explain why liberalism and its ideas were so important for some of the economic and social achievements of the 20th century. And that frames the discussion of why we are now in a crisis and it's a true crisis, it's not just a manufactured one.

9:33And why there is still perhaps hope that we can revive some of these aspirations for strengthening and rebuilding liberal democracy. So let me briefly overview that argument to sort of form the basis of the most interesting part of the hour where we'll have a conversation with the APRAC and then with you on these issues. But I argue that liberal democracies essence and its success cannot be understood without recognizing what it is that people want from liberal democratic institutions. And those I suggest are voice that's almost by definition they want to be able to express their opinions especially about how their lives are going to be governed and for those

10:33opinions to matter to some degree so that they have an input into how their lives are governed. Their prosperity meaning that the society that liberal democracy structures should provide the means for every group in society to benefit from economic growth. So that also presumes that there is some possibility of progress which is a very important part of liberal ideas but that also that progress is not just an elite affair that benefits one group or two and leaving many others behind. And third, all of these really often depend in modern society and some sort of public services, protection, roads, health, education and an insurer system. So all of these together were part of the promises of liberal democracy. And the brilliant thing was that however difficult and complex these promises appear to be especially in light of our experience throughout many centuries where governments were often an instrument

11:39of repression and inequality was rampant and people were sideline that it sort of worked in the 20th century. And I argue that while the ideas and aspirations of liberalism were very important for that, the times were also opportune for this kind of success. In particular, liberalism coming from the opposition, which is an easier place to be than a governing place, had to build a broad coalition. You can see that in Europe, you can see that in the United States where especially the driving force behind many of the liberal democratic reforms that came from the center left such as social democratic parties in Scandinavia or Franklin Delano Roosevelt's coalition in the United States or even labor governments in the UK had to form broad enough coalitions to come to power and govern within those confines. And that meant that the voice element, especially the ability of different groups to have their

12:44say in some parts of public affairs, was facilitated. Even more important was the nature of the industrial economy that was forming starting at the end of the 19th century. There's nothing automatic about industrial economics leading to any kind of shared prosperity. But under the democratic framework and with strong trade union presence, the combination of innovation investment created a very powerful pathway for shared prosperity. In particular, companies, when they innovated, when they wanted to expand, needed labor. You couldn't produce without large amounts of labor, even a manufacturing firm of the simplest sort would require engineers, technicians, managers, all sorts of white color workers, and of course, many layers of blue color workers. All of these were essential for the production process.

13:46And companies couldn't coerce or short-change workers if they wanted them to work. That was thanks to the trade union movement and thanks to the democratic governance structure. So the only thing they could do to get the labor that they needed was pay higher and higher wages. And that's exactly what created the conditions for shared prosperity. In fact, in country after country, when you look at where shared prosperity came from, you see the same thing, rapid, robust wage growth. So much so that in fact, in great contrast to what we have come to experience over the last half century or so and what sometimes people even take it for granted, the three and a half decades that followed World War II, experienced pretty much everywhere in the Western world, in Europe, in the United Kingdom, and especially in the United States, not just rapid growth, but rapid growth with falling in equality.

14:47Workers, lower education, segments of society, if anything had higher wage growth than GDP and the overall extent of inequality declined as the economy was growing very rapidly. So then where are we to find the roots of the current crisis of liberal democracy, which you can see in all sorts of aspects of its promises not being so much realized anymore. Inequality has increased tremendously in several economies, including the U.K. And in places where inequality has been a little bit more subdued, such as parts of the continental economy, you see that wages and opportunities for the lower education groups have been pretty stagnant. Public services have become much harder, and there is a general feeling as reflected in

15:47polarization and in the decline in support for democracy and in the attitudes that people express in how they are saying that the political system doesn't represent them anymore, that people don't think that they are really participating in politics and their voices being heard. So my diagnosis for that is that as the economy transformed from an industrial one to a post-industrial society, liberalism, liberal ideas and liberal democracy did not make the right adjustments. And it's not just an omission, but a variety of more complicated processes that structured the way that post-industrial society changed both the economy and politics. On the economy side, the most important aspects of it were digital technologies and some extent globalization that in many ways severed the link between business expansion and shared prosperity.

16:55You can see that most clearly, it's not the only aspect of it, but the most clear aspect of that is in the process of automation where you substitute machines, robots or algorithms for the work of humans. That severes the link in a very powerful way because instead of hiring more workers, now companies can expand, increase their profits, increase their reach while at the same time laying off workers. Same thing from globalization through the off-shoring process and other ways of restructuring the supply chain of companies. So that acted as a powerful drive for changing the nature of the economy. That by itself would have made the task of shared prosperity and creating a more cohesive society much harder, but that issue became even more challenging because of the nature of politics that changed together with the post-industrial society.

17:55And if I were to simplify, I would say the main driver of that is people like us in this room. People who are very well-educated, quite well-off, living in mega cities in a globalized, technologically-adept professions. And what has happened is that we were a very marginal group in society in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, but starting in the post-war era, our group became more and more numerous and more and more powerful. That is an aspect of what you expect in many market economies, in fact, in all economies that economic success and social status are coupled, but also numbers matter. But at the same time, as the administrative roles, HR roles, technical roles, engineering roles, management roles, and other expert roles required more and more highly-educated expert workers, the social organization of society started

18:55changing as well. And you see that very clearly in the United States and the UK, but to some extent in every advanced economy, the way that the more and less educated segments of society started living, the diverged. The neighborhoods used to be mixed. Now they are segregated by education. Social networks used to be mixed. Now they are segregated by education. Marriage patterns used to be mixed. Now they are segregated by education. The employment places used to be mixed, for example, as sort of symbolized by big manufacturing firms that are a true melting pot of very different backgrounds, very different occupations, very different skills. Now many workplaces are very segregated by education, either high education, tech places or customer facing, very low education workplaces. And accompanying this, the social values of the more and less educated groups started diverging as well. That underpinned a

20:01very uncomfortable dynamic, which is that as the college-educated groups became more and more ascendance, their links to exactly the segment of society that were economically losing ground became weaker and weaker. And again, a symbolic example of that is what has happened to what I've already described as the bulwark of liberal democratic institutions, center left parties. Center left parties like the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, the democratic parties in the US or the social democratic parties throughout continental Europe used to get most of their votes from the working class, broadly construed, people who worked with four wages, often in blue color or consumer facing simple service occupations. People with low education or no college degrees. People with college degrees, graduates of the LSE Cambridge Oxford in the UK used to vote more heavily for the center right. Starting sometime in the 1970s,

21:07that picture changed or began changing everywhere around the Western world. Today, all the center left parties get the majority of their votes from the college-educated and the working class broadly construed votes for the center right or the hard right. That is an indication of the golf that has opened in terms of the priorities of liberal democratic institutions or what sometimes people see as the establishment of these institutions. That made it harder for the ascendant groups to fully internalize and deal with the inequality problems and the shared prosperity challenge that the digital technologies and globalization brought. But it also made them prioritize other things. And in fact, the much discussed cultural politics has to be viewed not as an independent driver, but as a consequence of this reconfiguration of leading coalitions in post-industrial society. Cultural politics

22:07itself isn't anything to be surprised at. The cultural issues of inclusion, integration, ending discrimination, and dealing with ignorance and intolerance have always been challenges and they have become more important challenges, of course, in modern society. But the way that the establishment liberal institutions have dealt with them in a much more top-down manner has further divided the two halves by education, but also has been ineffective in dealing with these underlying problems. So if this diagnosis is correct, I think the way forward, especially now skipping the part about what are the fundamental key tenets of liberalism that will still be useful for the future, which depends on experimentation, free speech, and sharing that knowledge. All of these really necessitates that we need

23:12to find a new governing philosophy for the center left and for liberal democratic institutions. And that cannot exist, I argue, in the book, unless we put the working class at the center of liberalism. And this is the basis of what I argue as the working class liberalism. And in a nutshell, what it says is that liberalism has to absolutely prioritize the economic concerns, shared prosperity concerns of the population, so not leave the less educated behind the sort of the conceit that we can just solve those kinds of inequalities by sending everybody to college is worse than a conceit. It's neither feasible nor desirable to create such a quick other college educated 100% society, society requires diverse skills, diverse perspectives, diverse ways of interacting with the real world. But that means that we need to find a way of dealing with the age of AI while still bolstering shared prosperity,

24:13wage growth, job creation. So I talk a lot about that, I'm not going to get into that, but I'm sure there might be some questions on AI in that context. It has to reaffirm its commitment to free speech of all sorts. And community, which I argue, is a very important part of liberalism because it is not just the basis of the social norms and values that people have, but it's also the main conduit for trust and sharing of information that has to be reaffirmed. And that needs to, that necessitates creating a bigger tent. Of course, some of these things are very likely, definitely, much easier said than done. But I try to outline a way that this can be done. I'm not trying to be optimistic. I think optimism sometimes drives us into blind alleys. But I think we need to be hopeful and I think hopeful ways of imagining the future of liberal democratic society are essential because I'm also

25:14convinced and I try to indicate that a little bit in the book, but I could write a separate book on that, that our future would be completely doomed and very, very dystopian if we lose that liberal democracy. Thank you very much. Thank you. Great. I have a lot of questions, but I did bring them to, I love that. I brought them to the out of four questions because we don't have too much time. I'm telling you it's an advance so that you can pay for yourself. That's the question. Let me bring them to the front. And I know that we will have a lot of questions from the audience as well. So you say in the book that you are creating a new governing philosophy. I'm trying to encourage. I'm not sure that I will create that myself. And you call that working class liberalism. So of course I want you to ask you about the

26:20concepts itself. Why working class, what is working class, what do we mean by it? And are there no similar labels that we could have used like social democracy, deliberative democracy, which you mentioned, but you don't necessarily of course use. Even liberal democracy that is the title of the book. So we haven't recycled one of these old labels instead of perhaps coming up with a new concept which might confuse people. No, no, I think it's very, very important that we have a new concept because again, as I say, you just mentioned as well, we need a new governing philosophy. It's not just repeating of the old ones, even the old successful ones. That would be more like trying to go to the past, which I don't think is feasible or desirable. We need to learn from the past but recreate something that would work for the future. I think deliberative democracy, absolutely. deliberation is very, very important. You're 100% right. But there are many different ways

27:22of doing deliberation and there is also different priorities. We can deliberate around different priorities. I think putting the working class at the center of liberal democratic institutions and liberal ideas, I think it's very important that's why working class. I think the social democracy might come closest because in some sense historically, social democracy has achieved that. It has been very community integrated. The union movement itself is a community of sorts. It was a broad coalition. It was obviously centered on working class concerns. But I see social democracy as the institutionalization of these ideas in the context of an industrial economy. For example, the pathways for the labor movement that social democracy created and the labor movement really formed the basis of the government, the workers' parties, etc. in the Nordic economies and then some extent also Germany. Those are not going to be possible. We need to have

28:24a different way in which working class can become a driving part of the coalition and the working class needs to be more broad in the way that we conceptualize it. But also the efforts for creating economic opportunities for the working class have to be very, very different. For example, in the United States, you might say, well, if I'm going to find a think of a politician that perhaps captures some of what Darron is talking about, you might think, oh, Bernie Sanders. He talks about the working class. And indeed, I think Bernie Sanders has been very, very important. But if you look at his ideas about creating shared prosperity, I think they're completely out of touch. So in the age of AI, you cannot just say, well, okay, just mandate that firms have to pay high wages. Because if AI goes in its current path of, as an automation technology, and firms are already you know, clamoring to lay off workers, now you tell them, pay the workers 50% more. What are they

29:25going to do? They're just going to lay off more workers. So those kind of simple solutions that may have worked at least for some period of time in the context of industrial firms that really needed labor so critically, they're not going to work anymore. So that's why we need to couple this new philosophy with a new way of thinking about what technology is going to do, how we're going to steer technology, and how we're going to structure opportunities for shared prosperity. You also mentioned as a food note, I mean, not, you don't as a food note, I'm mentioning it now as a food note. No, no, no, no. Food note. That's why you know, that we're food note in the economic order, you know, the Danish metamorphosis, you said, it's too hard. No, no, I would say I should be thinking that it was good without the footnotes, it's close. You say that like the leftist party, the central left, comes out with the idea of taxation all the time, which also doesn't lead us to anywhere, like taxing the rich is not the only solution. It's not a solution by itself, obviously. I mean, in a society that has become as unequal as the United States,

30:29we have to deal with that. And you have to, of course, raise tax revenues in order to provide public services. But what I say is that using tax instruments in an economy that's becoming more and more unequal is not a way to build prosperity. That's neither going to work from an economic feasibility point of view. But even more importantly, and as I don't get into as much, I mentioned a little bit in the book, but I don't get into it as much, but it's something that I'm happy to discuss. I don't think it would create the sense of contribution that is so essential both for individual meaning. But also for communities. I think when communities themselves think that they're not part of a whole that to which they're contributing, and they're in a sort of a synergistic relationship, I think they become more alienated. And I think that's again, some of the reasons why we've seen the decline of community or the alienation of community over the last 40, 50 years, everywhere. And then of course, the role of community is very different, say in the UK versus the US.

31:31One issue in the US is that at least despite all of the dysfunctionality of the United States politics, is that there's a lot of local governance. The UK doesn't have local governance. That really makes the issue of community even harder. Yes. So you have the diagnosis in the book, and you also show us what can be done in the future. But when it comes to action or how we're going to get from point A to point B, there's not a prescription as such. And I don't blame you. You can't actually write about everything. That would be another important question. If I knew about it, I would write it. I don't know. Because I was thinking, I was reading your book. You said that, you know, a liberalism has been successful. It became the establishment. And it became the establishment with the V and a position. That was when it was the strongest perhaps. So there was a fighting power in liberalism in a way. And it was through wars and conflict and revolutions and even bloodshed that liberalism won.

32:36So I'm wondering whether we need to be a little bit more assertive when it comes to, you know, our vision of liberalism or protecting liberalism now in this day and age. Name more opponents, more clearly, perhaps called them illibralists. Perhaps in this book, I mean, I got this idea that fake liberals, the hornet actually liberals, but claim that they are. So we named down, we take action, we mobilize, because conditions are about consensus, but then you need an opponent in order to, you know, firm up the coalition as well. So what do you think about this? Yeah, I mean, I think that is true. That is true to some extent that communities sometimes cohere around enemies. It's a delicate balance because you don't also want to create these inseparable divides in society. Because I think if once you do that, then the whole nation as a whole cannot function. And so the example of deliberative democracy that I give, for example, in the book is like the Irish citizen assemblies and referendum on abortion were very successful and exactly taking a very divisive topic that everybody thought would split the nation down the middle and actually sort of rectifying that to some degree.

33:55Not perfectly at the end of the day, 60% of the people voted for it, not everybody, but still that's a huge success in this day and age. So I'm definitely open to the idea that you may need some sort of mobilization. Mobilization is very, very important and mobilization may be held, you know, you know, FDR famously said in one of his speeches that, you know, the business community hated him and I welcome their hatred because I'm trying to change society. So that kind of thing could be, could be helpful. But at the end, it's also very important to find shared moral principles upon which to build. And that is particularly central because I believe and I argue that liberalism, at least the liberalism that I'm defending, doesn't provide answers to all questions or even to most questions.

34:57It provides a framework. It provides a framework and it's always working progress, which means that for many challenging questions, we as citizens, active citizens, that's where the voice and self-government come in, have to find some way of enacting solutions and enacting solutions that are going to be based on some sort of compromise and consensus, again, coalitions and democratic governance works best in that. But how can you do that unless you have shared moral principles? And here, I think, I'm not a sort of an optimist, but there is one streak of optimism that is not explicitly stated in the book. But it affects the way that I look at things. One is that humans are very adaptable. And second, that humans, even when we are so polarized as we are today, I think have a sense of fairness that can be activated and can make them put themselves into shoes of other people.

36:05And that's exactly what you're so in the successful example of the deliberative democracy. And in the final world, in this book, I do not talk at all about the liberal ideas. And that's an explicit decision, I say that somewhere. And there are two good reasons for that. One of them is, I didn't want to depress myself by reading the liberal ideas even more. But the more justified, I've done some reading on that, so I'm not completely immune. But the more justifiable reason for doing that is because I don't think it's important to get into the details of the liberal ideas for the future of liberalism, because liberalism's weaknesses right now and its crisis are not caused by the fact that its opponents are much more formidable than they're in the past. And I'm going to find some people are excited by all tried ideas, but it's really not rocket science. It's internal problems. So that's why I focus on its internal problems.

37:11I have a follow up question on that. And that will be my final question. I'm not going to ask four questions. Because I keep going on. No, it's so wonderful to also listen to you, give answers to these questions, but we have to be economical when it comes to time as well. So, I mean, you talk about the many successes of liberalism, but you do mention that it never really results some of its dilemmas. And among those dilemmas, perhaps inclusion is the most significant one. And you say in the book that liberalism hasn't really results issues related to subjugation. Subjugation of minorities or women, and the continuation of colonialism by other means racism, these never really ended. And so isn't it that we are now in a fight where we are actually making liberalism more inclusive? That will be the sort of criticism that I think you would face with this book.

38:14And so are we not abandoning this very important fight if we insist on working class liberalism as you say? Can we have both? You called yourself an optimist, but I'm thinking if we're going to have both, are we becoming like a utopic maybe? Is this a utopic vision? So I think there's a very important question. And I single out the three eyes, inclusion, ignorance and intolerance as dilemmas that liberal thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries never fully grappled with. They're all severe, but yes, inclusion is super important, but ignorance perhaps is even more vexing today. And part of the reason why you can see why liberal thinkers were sometimes quite cavalier about that is because they were themselves very aristocratic, very rich, very elite, so they didn't really feel the pain. And the agenda of furthering inclusion is a very important one, absolutely. And that's why I said during the talk also, I do not blame sort of the ascendant well-educated groups to have for putting emphasis on cultural issues and dealing with discrimination, inclusion, immigration and so on.

39:38But the question is, how do you bring lasting change? And the one philosophical stance that I very strongly hold in the book and I explain is that liberalism, both for practical and philosophical reasons, has to abandon sort of, it's the parts of liberal thinking that go to sort of rigid social contractarian views. So, it's the kind of abstractarian views such as the genuine will or other types of social contracts because it provides the false sense of feasibility of progress that somehow those who are enlightened enough to know what the general will is or what the real nature of the social contract is can impose it on the rest. And it is not just a myth, it always backfires. So, sure, we may want a different society, but we have this society, we have to work with this. And the only way you can do that is by forming compromises and taking gradual steps to where you want.

40:45Yes, if we could take even bigger steps that would be better, but who's going to choose those steps that who's going to impose it on the rest and who's going to be then obeyed at imposition. I think that's the problem and that's why bringing the working class communities even in matters in which they have values that may not adhere that well with the ones that we have is so central because that's the only way to make durable change. Okay, we have 15 minutes and so I suggest we take rounds of questions. Let's start with one at the back. There are events, stewards with the roving microphones, so please do wait for the microphone to reach to you with the blue shirt. Right in the middle, right in the middle, let it the blue shirt. If you can, yes, it's you. Can you please raise your hand. And then here and then there is the second role a question we can take.

41:47Thank you for the talk. It was really, really informative. So what does I'm just wondering how the sort of in a sort of. Can you please also introduce yourself? I'm so sorry. I'm Casper. I'm about to start a master in international political economy here. So what does the medium voter theorem slash hoteling down this kind of model of liberal democracy picking up ideas that are big issues for the populace and absorbing them across time to become into power. So like the NHS being held on by that chair, then new labor kind of absorbing more privatization pro privatization ideas say about what liberal democracy can be used to do now. Are we in a bit of a transition period where there is a new valence issue that has to be picked up by liberal democracy in order to kind of make it survive and is that are those issues, especially ones that have been kind of made as an issue by social media. It's compatible with liberal democracy in order to sort of it to be able to preserve its values, whilst still holding this values.

42:54Thank you. Thank you very much. There's a question here. What's your name? Can you introduce yourself, Adam? Governor of the School of Former Student. I was wondering, there are some trends, demographic trends, AI and restricted immigration, which may be improving the prosperity of the working class at the moment. So perhaps in a way it's rational for that part of society to support the type of politics which we may not like. Your thoughts on that would be interesting. And there was a second rule question. And then after that, we'll get to take both questions. I'm Rojtni, I just completed my public policy master's here. I'm wondering, enjoying the principles of the working class, of the new liberalism idea.

43:58What's the closest parallel in history that we can look at? What lessons can we take? What to keep in mind, what to avoid? Or is this so unique that we can't really look back and learn from? Richard, I think Richard's question, I'm working. You raised the question of a moral basis for everything. And of course, the original moral basis for liberal democracy was the belief that we're on the society in which the greatest happiness, especially fairly distributed. And it seems to me that we've lost the justification for many of the things that we go for. So we talk about growth. I mean, what's growth for? If it's not to produce people who feel fulfilled in their lives. So it seems to me that if you're trying to build a coalition, and I totally support what you say about the working class, and I think my part in the political party is lost track of that.

44:59Unfortunately, but to build a coalition, you've got to have some inspiring idea that can unify people. And I don't know how we're going to get this back into political discourse. In a funny way, we've got it back technologically in the Treasury Green Book, but it's not in politics. How can we get this back into politics? Thank you. So let's have one minute per question. I'll try to do that. Well, let me start in reverse order, because the last two questions are in fact very strongly related, because I completely agree with Richard. And this is why I call it a new governing philosophy, but sometimes I refer to it as new aspirations. We need aspirations around which people can come around, and some sort of shared prosperity based on shared moral principles, I think, is the center piece of it.

46:04I don't think all of the liberal ideas from the past are going to be a perfect guide, due to the tyrannism, for example, maybe too naive in some respects. But I think there is a lot in the liberal tent that can be the philosophical basis of it. And in terms of historical examples, I think, for its time, social democracy did that exactly. Social democracy, especially in Sweden, Denmark, especially in Sweden, given the time in which it rose, and later, slightly later in Norway, you know, did that in a very dark hour with the great depression. All countries sort of struggling, and it said, no, no, we don't have to succumb to great depression. We can actually re-wive economic growth and revive wages. But to do that, they sort of abandoned, they had already abandoned, in the case of the Swedish workers party, and in the Norwegian one, they did it around that time. They abandoned all the sort of the Marxist pretenses, and they said, well, we have to form broad coalitions, or broad the middle class, and the farmers, and then ultimately reached out to businesses.

47:10So that's the kind of aspiration central, but in a way that is feasible. I think that's what we need to do. In terms of your question, I think that's absolutely right, and that's the only saving grace that we might have in the future, is that while the change in the demographic structure that's going on everywhere in the world, except Africa, with declining birth rates, et cetera, has, it's going to have chose many, pose many challenges. It also makes it easier for wages to increase, but there is a competition between that and AI. AI will be very helpful if you can still leverage that declining labor force, but on the other hand, if AI outpaces it, you destroy jobs even faster. So it's not an automatic take by any means, but that might create an interesting context. And finally, look, I think the median voter theorem is a useful construct, but in fact, if it worked, it would be a pretty good starting point for consensus, because it pushes things towards the middle in some sense.

48:24Then we have to think about how we can do social change in a model of the median voter, but the evidence from the last three, four decades is that the median voter theorem formally is not an excellent guide to how politics is working, and it's become much less so in our polarized aid. Now, social media, which you mentioned, is a contributing factor. I don't think social media is the cause of any of the problems that I'm talking about, but it's a big amplifier, and part of the challenge of liberal society is how to regulate social media, because you cannot abandon free speech, but on the other hand, I argue in the book, you can also not have consensual politics and compromise in a world in which social media has gone the way that it has gone at the end. And the way that it has gone at the moment, and AI might actually deepen those challenges, so that they gain is about regulation and steering of new technologies. Okay, let's take another round of questions. Let's take two from this side, and then, yeah, two from here. So at the back, towards the back, when I say at the back, I realize that I'm confusing to Stuart.

49:38I'm working with the dark blue shirts in the missiles towards the back. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. Like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to the event. There's also a question at the very back afterwards. We can take that one. So hello, thank you for your saw. I'm Danny, I'm just starting my MSC in economics here. So my question really is about, kind of, you say that the link between liberal democracy and shared prosperity has been severed and the idea is to kind of, you know, repair that link.

50:38But how does, and therefore, kind of regaining the confidence of people who have fallen out of favor of a liberal democracy because they feel disappointed. So I just want to go about making the changes to repair that link in the first place and shaping that coalition when kind of this move to reshape liberal democracy comes from, as you say, higher educated people, et cetera. I mean, we're speaking here at a closed LSE event, right? And also, like, for instance, in Europe, there's kind of this group, the right group that's been assembled to drive growth in Europe. And so, you know, the criticism because this group is essentially led by, you know, leading academics and business people, but again, it seems kind of the people who are trying to repair these links. Thank you. Thank you. There is a question at the very back at the very, very, very back just below the label. Yes.

51:39At the very back, if you can raise your hand. Thank you. Yeah, my name is George Gaskell, long-term member of the faculty. I wonder if you comment in the book on the emergence of what one might call commercialized eugenics, which take us back to Goulton, and the idea that with appropriate selective breeding, problems in society will be eliminated. Now, a great deal of money is going into genomics, and I noticed there are various groups in the United States who are pursuing a somewhat eugenic agenda. Quite an interesting question. Thank you. And then I'll take a few questions from here with a green shirt. Yes? Hello, Professor. My name is iPood Ajayan. I'm a new master's student at the LSE. So my main question is that you suggest that the taxation is not a necessary way to address it in a call, and I think you are totally right.

52:46And the implication of this thing is to build predestributional ways of achieving inequality, but in order to build institutions that can achieve predestitu- predestributional equality, for example, historical cases suggest that both the civil society, social democrats, and the US need dealers were able to achieve some sort of a cross-collegeational agreements. I mean, they both answered to the signals of the business interests in their own historical understandings. And today, how can we build such a coalition that can able to reconcile the interests of the board business community and the working class people, given that the huge polarization of the economics of Iraqis the world?

53:47We can't take, I guess, two more questions. I think I can answer because these, the first and the third are very related. What I'm asking those quickly. And then on Eugenics, I don't say anything in the book. I think it's an important issue. I've written separately on that very little, but germline editing, obviously raises a lot of ethical issues, which you may or may not see as parallel to Eugenics. But the other two questions are very related. And the last one, I think, really posed the question very sharply. Indeed, what I'm talking about sometimes people refer to as predestribution, being a very important part of it. And predestribution is something that often benefits from people having skills, opportunities, and bargaining means that are embedded in the existing business structure. And then going back to the first question, that's actually the sort of the way that shared prosperity, even in the age of AI, can be done.

54:54So the question is, is today's business community ready for something like that? And I think you can look at that question with glass, how full, how empty? And the half empty part is that if you look at the most dominant part of the tech business at the moment, I don't think so. Because the agenda of artificial general intelligence and widespread automation would not allow for any kind of meaningful predestribution or skills that would be rewarded by the market. But I think that state of affairs has been created by our lack of antitrust that has created a huge amount of monopoly, both from the finance side, but also from the companies being able to acquire their rivals and centralize both talent and resources. So I think antitrust, if it were to come back, would be a very important means for creating kind of the elements of a broader coalition.

55:59In fact, if you look at Sweden, the business community did join the social democratic coalition and the corporatist model, but not every business. There were enough businesses that wanted to do that. There were some businesses that weren't, and same thing exactly in the new deal. And then going back to the issues raised in the first question, I think all of these are about what can be done, but you're absolutely right in highlighting that. You cannot do that unless you at the same time build trust. And how do you build trust? Well, whatever you propose, and I don't know how to do that, but whatever you propose has to be realistic enough and has to be communicated enough. And I think most powerfully must leverage that demonstration effects. And that's one of the reasons why another aspect of community is so important. You start at the local level, you deliver what you promise at the local level, and that leverages that pathway in order to build trust on the next layer of more ambitious plans.

56:59And I think that's just one way there may be others and aspirations as Richard was mentioning could bring in dynamics that I can't even imagine right now, but that's the local politics is a very important aspect of it. So, a kind of question. You said that we are the audience for this book here at LSE, your alma mater. If we are on the same page with you both literally and figuratively. And if we could dream of being inspired from you, what would your advice be for us as a public intellectual as a scientist, how should we share our knowledge, our scientific methods, our experiments, with the society, with the public without falling into the trap of social engineering? Yeah, I think a very important question. And my answer would be, look, becoming politically engaged is critical, but also reaching out, reaching out much more broadly.

58:00Political engagement of the form that's going to form a broad coalition cannot be on social media and it cannot be just in your neighborhood with the people who already agree with you. So, I think being able to go and talk to people who normally don't talk to you, I think that's the most important thing. And it's actually more broadly true in my opinion than politics for science. I think part of the reason why there is this deficiency of trust in science is because as scientists we haven't engaged with the public enough, communicating both the nature of scientific knowledge, including its uncertainty and its sometimes tentative nature, but also sort of explaining the mechanisms and how we've actually reached our conclusions. And I think again that's a question of broadening the conversation.

59:00Excellent. Now I have to end this, unfortunately, this question. I wish we could continue for a couple of more hours. But the good news is that the book is being sold outside. And if you buy the book here, you can also ask Professor Dharana Jamal to sign the book. He has a very strict schedule, so he will be here with us for 10, 15 more minutes. Let me now thank all of you for coming here for your questions, for being patient with us. And so of course, Professor Dharana Jamal for introducing the book for this lively discussion. And we hope to see you here again.

1:00:06We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.