In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviewed Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, about different debates surrounding inequality. Ghosh criticizes the flaws in some inequality indicators that are focusing only on measuring how the poor are doing and not on how the rich are getting richer, or other indicators that exaggerate the performance of the poorest vis-a-vis the richest. Other indicators such as nutrition are misleading, she argues, because governments are focusing on what people are eating and not on the outcomes such as body mass index, anemia or diabetes. Moreover, some governments are using statistical legerdemain to enhance their apparent performance. Finally, Professor Ghosh discusses her research on the COVID pandemic and the way pharmaceutical companies deliberately slowed down the process of spreading the vaccine for their own gain. She claims that COVID revealed and accentuated massive inequalities between countries of the Global North and Global South and that the recent increase in grain prices was not caused by the war on Ukraine but by the ability of global agribusiness to manipulate prices.

International Horizons is part of the New Books Network of academic podcasts. Subscribe to the RSS feed or find it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. A lightly edited transcript follows below. 

Transcript

John Torpey  00:01

Historic progress was made in reducing extreme poverty around the world during the years of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) leading to their supersession by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). China and India played a huge part in those changes in part because of their enormous populations, but also because they adopted policies that facilitated development. Yet now there’s a sense that we’re going in the wrong direction with regard to global inequality. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been seen as raising prices for basic foodstuffs among the world’s most vulnerable populations. What can we do to reverse these worrisome developments?  Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. We’re happy to have with us today Jayati Ghosh who’s professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She’s authored or edited 20 books and more than 200 scholarly articles. Recent books include “The making of a Catastrophe: Covid-19 and the Indian Economy,” by Aleph Books (2022) and the co-edited volume, “When Governments Fail: Covid-19 and the economy,” by Tulika Books/Columbia University Press 2021. Professor Ghosh has advised governments in India and elsewhere and was a Member of the National Knowledge Commission of India during 2005-09. From 2002 to 2021, she was Executive Secretary of International Development Economics Associates, an international network of heterodox development economists. In 2021 she was appointed to the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All. In March 2022, she was appointed to the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism, which is tasked with providing a vision for international cooperation to deal with current and future challenges. She writes regularly for popular media, including newspapers, journals and blogs.

Jayati Ghosh  02:37

Thank you. It’s a pleasure.

John Torpey  02:43

Great to have you with us. So, you know, I was prompted to invite you to do this from an article that I saw of yours in Social Europe. And, obviously, the issues that you’ve addressed in that article about inequality around the world are very important. And there’s a lot to say about them. So despite the successes of the Millennium Development Goals, the column of yours that I read, spoke to were a reversal of the previous trend towards greater equality. And could you tell us in what ways the world is becoming a less equal place? How much does this have to do with the India and China which I flagged in the introduction, which was such a big part of the decline of extreme poverty? What’s going on?

Jayati Ghosh  03:33

Well,  we have to distinguish now between inequality and poverty. And it’s true that poverty was significantly on the decline from about 2010 onwards, especially, and a large part of that was driven by China, and much lesser extent by India. But inequality actually has continued to increase and income inequality has increased dramatically, even after the global financial crisis of 2008 onwards. So what’s interesting is thatat the time when we’ve seen this whole explosion of discussion about inequality, the Occupy Movement, that we are the 99%, the arguments against inequality, the books about inequality, from then inequality has worsened further, it’s absolutely exploded, we are probably in the most unequal world economy ever. And that’s true, not just in terms of the differences between countries, which are also increasing if you leave China out of the equation, China is a big factor in the supposedly increased convergence. But it’s also massively increased inequality within countries. And that is really a reflection of economic processes that should be within our control, because many of them relate to the fact that we are allowing large capital and the very rich to extract more and more from the rest of the population in different ways. And partly because then we’re not doing enough of the redistribution, we’re not doing the tax policies that would make sure that excessive assets and excessive incomes do not get just explode out of proportion, we’re not taxing them. We’re not redistributing any of that. So, inequality has actually got significantly worse.  Now, what’s the reason that we wrote this letter, which relates to SDG 10–which is literally called reducing inequality– is because in a way, that particular goal was absolutely essential and necessary, but the indicator that is used is flawed. The indicator is something that the World Bank managed to push through, which is called shared prosperity. And what does that mean? It means that you’re looking at the bottom half of the population, and saying, is their income growing at the same rate or slightly faster than the average income? And if it is, then everything’s fine, it’s all shared prosperity, don’t worry, we’re getting more and more equal. Now, the trouble with that is that it leaves out the rich. In other words, you’re looking only at the incomes of the poor. And you’re saying, well, if they are growing along with national income, or they’re growing a little higher than national income, then that’s all we want. We’re not concerned with the top. We now know that that is absolutely wrong, you have to be concerned with the top, because the more you allow incomes and wealth to concentrate, the more you have, not just all kinds of expressions of extreme inequality, but you get much more disaffection among what you could call the middle-classes and unhappiness and insecurity, you get much more ability of the very rich to exercise, lobbying power, political power, that pushes regulations even more in their favor, and pushes fiscal policies even more in their favor. And so you end up with extremely dystopic social situations really. And that’s what we’re getting across the world. In rich and poor countries, we’re getting the anger and frustration of the bulk of the people who see this obscene wealth, and feel that they are being excluded. You’re getting very populist, aggressive kinds of political responses, you’re getting lots of political tensions, including religious conflict, ethnic conflict, all kinds of terrible things. So you really have to do something about the rich, it’s not just good enough to look at whether the poor a little better off.

John Torpey  07:57

Right, so one of the things that you point to as an alternative is a better measure of what’s going on really is the Gini Coefficient, as opposed to this notion of shared prosperity. And, I thought the Gini coefficient was something everybody kind of knew about it. I mean, people who pay attention to affairs, world affairs and things. But I realized, it’s not necessarily something that everybody’s familiar with. So maybe you could talk about the Gini Coefficient, then you know, what it tells us about inequality in you know, the recent past.

Jayati Ghosh  08:34

So the Gini Coefficient is a summary measure. Suppose you divide the whole population up into deciles, or percentiles, and you say, “well, every 1% of the population, how much of the share of the total income is it getting?” So it could be income, it could be any assets, it could be anything, but you know, let’s say we take income, and you say, the top 1% of the population gets so much percent of the income. And then you keep going down to the bottom 1%. And looking at these shares of income, you can then draw this line, which is called the Lorenz curve, not that it matters what it’s called, but anyway. And the, the sort of deeper your Lorenz curve, the more that curve slopes down, the more inequality there is, right? Because if everybody in the population got an equal amount of income, then it would just be a straight line, right? It would just be a diagonal. It’s not a diagonal because there is an equality because the people at the top get much more. And the more they get relative to people in the middle or the bottom, the more you’re going to get a higher Gini coefficient. So the Gini coefficient goes from a value of zero to one. And so zero is complete equality and one is complete inequality, one person gets everything. Okay, so the higher the Gini coefficient, the more unequal that society is, according to whichever indicator you have chosen; it can be income, it can be wealth, you can even do it in terms of  access to health, anything. But the advantage of the Gini Coefficient is that then you’re looking at the whole distribution, you’re looking also at the rich, you’re not just saying, you know, the bottom half of the population. And that’s important, because we know that even in countries where let’s say the bottom half has been a little better off, the Gini coefficient may have got worse, because the rich, the let’s say, the top 1%, the top 10%, sometimes even the top 0.1% have really made a lot of gains, relative to what we would call the middle classes. And that’s really a lot of what has been happening in the world today and in many countries.

John Torpey  11:02

Yes, well, I’m reminded of my colleague, Branko Milanovich and his famous elephant curve here. And I mean, he had been talking about the consequences for politics of inequality and the distribution of income and that sort of thing. And his elephant curve showed that there were increases in the proportion or the share of income growth that was being distributed to the less wealthy parts of the world, basically. And then the downturn is about what’s going on with the middle and working classes in the more developed world. And that seems to be the economic story behind a lot of the populist upsurge that we’ve been seeing in recent years. But I’m sort of curious about what is the Gini Coefficient? How do countries stack up in terms of you know, what their Gini coefficient is? I mean, where’s the United States stand in an international ranking of the Gini Coefficient, for example?

Jayati Ghosh  12:08

Okay, so can I come back to that, I want to actually just first of all focus a little bit on Branko’s elephant. And I have told Branko about this, I think it’s actually very misleading. Because what does that measure? It’s the proportionate increase in income over a period. Okay. So what he’s looking at is that he’s dividing the whole world population into categories. So, first of all, it’s a big leap of faith that you’re comparing incomes across countries. And then you make a global income distribution, which is a good attempt to try and do and many others have done it as well. But it does involve lots of assumptions. But then you say, and, of course, he doesn’t use the actual exchange rates, he uses purchasing power parity exchange rates, right, which basically inflate the incomes of the poor. They make the poor look less poor, and the rich look less rich. Anyway, that’s all fine. Then he says, “Okay, this is the increase over time.” Between I forget, I think it was 1980 to 2005, or 2010. Whenever he does for the periods. And then he gets this elephant curve, which is really that there are there’s a kind of hump in the lower middle part, which he says is India and China. So they their relative increase in income is very much significant, it’s 50 to 80%. And then it goes down again, because then the working classes in the north are getting much less proportionate increase, and then it goes up again, that’s the snout of the elephant, which is the very rich. But this is the relative increase, this is the proportionate increase from your base. Right? Now, if you are getting a very low income, if you’re getting $10 a day, and it doubles to $20, that’s 100% increase, okay? But if you are getting $100 a day, and you get another $10, more, that’s only, very little increase, 10% increase, right? So the same increase will appear as a massive increase when you’re relatively poor, and a negligible increase when you’re moderately rich. If you’re getting $1,000 a day, and you increase it by 10, “oh, my God, that’s nothing.” It’s negligible. So you’re not really comparing the same thing. If you look at the absolute increases in income, not the relative, not from your base, you don’t get an elephant graph at all. You get a hockey stick. That is to say, you get just minor increases, and then a massive increase for the top 10, 20%. And I think that’s the real point that, it’s the idea that “oh, India and China, the North etc, even the middle classes in India and China would be not even poor in the north, they would be below poverty line, well below poverty line in the North. Whereas this is all whole idea that they’re all now getting all rich and we shouldn’t be jealous of them and frustrated because they’re taking away all our wealth. The absolute measures suggest that the middle classes in China and India are well below poverty line in the US and Europe.

John Torpey  15:33

I mean, that’s, of course, the discussion of lifting people out of extreme poverty, which was the goal of the middle Millennium Development Goal, that got them from $1 a day to $1.25 a day, you know, doesn’t sound like very much to the rest of us, but maybe very significant if you’re living at that level. But it’s also true that this may have misled people, I suppose into thinking that, suddenly, the what we used to call the Third World has been lifted out of poverty in serious kind of in substantial ways. But, the people that you refer to, who would be poor in the United States, or not in the United States, right? So how do we sort of make sense of their the improvement in their situation that led to this shift from the MDGs?

Jayati Ghosh  16:34

Yeah, right. Okay, so there is improvement, certainly, if you look at, you know, basic indicators, life expectancy, and so on and so forth. But let’s take one of the more obvious ones, nutrition. Nutrition in many parts of the world, the indicators are not better. And it’s not just how much calories you consume, or what whether you can afford the what the FAO calls a nutritious diet, and so on. But it’s even things like whether your outcomes are all right. Do you have body mass index which is reasonable? And are you anemic? And all of those things. If you go by those indicators, there’s really shockingly little improvement in South Asia and Sub Saharan Africa. And that tells you something because presumably, when people get less poor, they’re going to eat better. Right. And I think one of the things we are not taking adequate account of is this nutrition indicator, which to me is a very telling indicator of the real state of people. So for example, the FAO has a description of what they call a nutritious diet, which is locally specific. So there’s one for South Asia, there’s one for different parts of the regions of the world. And they have estimated based on the the price indices, and everything, how much of the population can actually afford that nutritious diet? So in India, our official income poverty line is only about 15%. Now, because the government has made all kinds of assumptions about this line and done all kinds of statistical jugglery to get a low poverty line. So people will think, “Oh, sure, most of India’s not poor anymore.” In fact, most of India’s really poor because the FAO estimate of the proportion of the population that can’t afford the minimum nutritious diet, minimum, okay, 72% of the population cannot afford it. To me, that tells you something that suggests that this is a country that is still dominantly, poor, and poor by any global standards, you’re not getting what you really need as a minimum diet.

John Torpey  18:51

Right. I think I have been to India, I mean, I think people from the United States have little idea what it’s like to live as much of the Indian population lives. I mean, it’s a level of privation that we can’t really conceive of, in fact. So, in any case, I sort of wanted to ask you, if you wanted to go back to my question about the Gini coefficient, and how countries, stack up and that sort of thing. Otherwise, we move on. But if you want to say something

Jayati Ghosh  19:21

Absolutely, you know why the Gini Coefficient is a good indicator. And there is another ratio, which is similar, which is called the Palmer ratio, that’s the ratio of the incomes of the top 10% to the bottom 40%. And why is that because, you know, Gabriel Palma, who developed this ratio basically says, the people in the middle there share doesn’t change very much. It’s really the very rich versus the poor. That’s where all the action is happening in a way. But if you look at these indicators of inequality, the US is among the very high Gini coefficient countries, but there are some in the developing world that are really high South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Brazil, in Latin America, a bunch of other Latin American countries. In India, it’s a little complicated because we don’t measure income, we only measure consumption, and that underestimates the inequality. But our Gini coefficient is also growing and higher. We haven’t even done surveys recently. So we can’t adequately do that. But everybody who has tried to estimate even in relatively smaller surveys, are getting very hygienic coefficients in the range of 45 to 50%.

John Torpey  20:36

So just to remind people, the higher that Gini coefficient number, the more unequal the society.

Jayati Ghosh  20:41

That’s right.

John Torpey  20:42

So important to remember.  Okay, so, I’ve mentioned in the introduction, that you have written a book and edited a book co edited a book, I guess, about, you know, COVID in the world economy. And I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about, what you found in that work? And, you know, how has COVID, there was a lot of concern, of course, that COVID was going to, you know, hurt the prospects of the poor parts of the world more dramatically than the rest of us. And I certainly would say that, you know, is true, but I wonder what you would say about that?

Jayati Ghosh  21:20

Yes, I think the sad truth is that, in a way, all of our worst fears have been confirmed. And that’s true in terms of global policymaking. It’s true in terms of how national governments have responded. And it’s true in terms of what it has meant for inequality. So let me first talk about the global policymaking, you know, when COVID happened, it’s a global health pandemic, right. So here is the thing that doesn’t respect national borders, doesn’t have passport, visa requirements, it’s going to spread all over. So the optimists among us thought that well, this means that there’s going to be a global response, that people will see that you have to actually think globally and attack it, with cooperation. That didn’t happen. What we got is extreme nationalist responses in the worst possible ways. We got vaccine grabbing by the rich countries, we got aggressive control over intellectual property by a few companies, mainly based in the Global North, which prevented other countries from being able to make and distribute vaccines in time. And so you got a spread of the disease. I mean, it was a remarkable achievement to make those vaccines that fast, that there is no doubt and that was really because lots of states put their minds to it, decided that they’re going to do this, and it shows that you can do it, if you put your mind to it. But then once you got that, you still delayed the whole process of spreading it, and making sure that everybody in the world got access. Whereas if it’s genuinely a public health pandemic, the first thing you do is to maximize the distribution, because that’s how you stop it. It was in the interests of vaccine companies not to do that. Because first of all, they could maximize their profits within the rich countries where they were selling most. But also, the more you allow it to spread to other countries, the more variants you get, and therefore the more need for boosters. And as we can see, we’re still in this process where now once again, everybody in the US has to get another booster, because the thing is still going on and so on. So the profits for the vaccine companies dominated over the lives of people and the interests of the world.  The second failure, I would say, and this was this is a failure of government, because the companies will do what they have to do. This is the failure of governments in terms of how they subsidized how they regulate it. And then, of course, how they behaved which was extremely nationalisticly and foolishly I would say. But then the other big failure in developing countries, some of it was not internal. I mean, there is this broader issue that had mentioned, but among the middle income countries that could have done better (and I would put my own country, India in that group) among the countries that could have done better. Our response was a very brutal and unequal response. So the government imposed a lockdown very early in the game, basically following on China and so on, when there were only about 400 cases in the whole country in a country of 1.3 billion people, 400 cases localized in four towns or cities. And instead of saying, “Well, alright, we’ll do a kind of tracing and testing and partial lockdown in one place, they imposed a countrywide lockdown.” And it was like a military curfew. You could literally get shot if you were out on the street with four hours notice with absolutely no warning. Even the state governments that had to implement this we’re not have told in advance. So it was ridiculous. And of course, it meant and remember, this Indian economy is one where 95% of the people are informal workers. That is they don’t have social protection, they don’t have legal protection; they have nothing in terms of half of them are self employed. And so you suddenly say, “Well, that’s it, you can’t go out on the street tomorrow, for the next 21 days, the 21 days gets extended, extended, it becomes two and a half months.” You cannot go out and earn a living. Unbelievable. And yet, that’s what we did to our people. There are all these migrants, about 150-200 million migrants from rural parts of the India who live and work in the big cities, who were literally starving. And so you had this extraordinary long march of migrants walking back home. Because you closed public transport, you hadn’t allowed people to move. And even when they’re walking, they’re risking their lives because you’re not supposed to be on the road. And yet, desperation is such that this is what you do.  The kinds of extreme inequality that were evident during the management of this disease. Our I mean, I could go on and on. But there was so many instances. Now, India is an extreme case. But we’re not the only one. I think the existing inequalities were massively accentuated across the world. So that’s another way in which government responses I think were very, very lacking. And then finally, there’s the fiscal response. So the rich countries, particularly the US, they went out there and started spending. And it was funny, because it’s a complete reversal. All these years, we’ve been told all, you know, governments can’t spend, we can’t run fiscal deficits. The monetary policy can be used, we can make lots of concessions in terms of very, very low interest rates, maybe negative interest rates, and lots of liquidity being made available. But governments cannot run deficits, suddenly, it seems they can. Okay, so the rich countries spend anywhere between 10 to 30% of GDP additionally, in the COVID year. If you look at the period between January 2020, and March 2021, these are IMF estimates, the rich countries spent on average 26% of GDP more, can you imagine that much more. The middle income countries spent about 4 to 6% of GDP more, the low income countries spend only 2% of GDP more. Now, you can say that, that’s terrible. And it’s a big difference. But that doesn’t even tell you the extent of the difference, because that’s just your share of GDP, right? What does it mean, in absolute terms? In the United States, the US government spent additionally $26,000 per capita, additional money. In the low income countries, they spent $2 per capita, additional money. Now, what does that mean, if you’re spending only $2 per capita, that’s negligible, right? It doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t really change. And you’re in the same or maybe a worse economic catastrophe than in the rich countries. So you don’t get any support social protection, you don’t get a revival of your economy, many of these countries have yet to recover, really, from the impact of COVID, including in economic terms, because of the fact that they really didn’t do the kind of public spending that the rich countries were able to do.

John Torpey  28:37

Right. So even as they’re trying to get out of the COVID crisis, Russia invades Ukraine. And obviously, that has massive impact on the brain supplies, for example, and oil, cooking oil and those kinds of products that came out of Ukraine and huge amounts, and some of that’s been mitigated by some of these arrangements with Russia to allow for exports and that sort of thing but that’s a shaky situation at this point. So I wonder, what would you say we don’t know how long this conflict is going to drag on? Seems to me very little sign of anything changing anytime soon. So it could drag out for quite a while. I mean, how would you assess the impact of the Russia, Ukraine conflict on on the world economy, in particular, of course, on the poor.

Jayati Ghosh  29:35

So here’s another very interesting thing. The Ukraine war actually had no impact on global grain supplies. I know this is going to sound unbelievable, right? You’re going to say how can that be Russia and Ukraine together? They accounted for a quarter of global wheat exports Russia is a big exporter of fertilizer, how could it possibly be? Well, that is actually what happened. In fact, I have I have an article coming up. But there is a piece in Project Syndicate that I wrote precisely about this. The idea that the war caused global grain shortages is a myth. The war did cause an increase in prices. But that’s because the very fact that Russia and Ukraine are big suppliers of wheat was used by media, and then by big agri businesses, and subsequently by financial activity in the futures market to raise prices. That’s really what happened. If you track what’s happening to global grain supply. You see, that’s the funny thing about wheat. It’s globally produced, it’s all over the world. So when there’s a shortage in one particular area, it can be met by an increase in supply in another area. And actually, the FAO data now shows us and the International Green Council data shows us there was really no impact on global supply, or even on global trade. Global exports increased by 6 million tonnes in the period from July 2021 to June 2022. That is the peak of that price increase. If you look at what happened to wheat prices, they zoom up, they go up by about 30% between January and June 2022, then they come down again, by December the back to pre-war levels, but the war is continuing. Nothing has changed. So then people say “oh, that’s because, you know, we worked out this deal about for the Black Sea. The Russians had embargoed Ukraine exports from the Black Sea and Odessa. And then there was this deal worked out with Turkey and the UN and that’s why the supplies eased.” Okay, let’s look at what happened to the Black Sea grain exports that Ukraine was allowed to make, did it go to the starving people of the world? That’s what everyone said that “Africans are starving, it’s going to go to the poor Africans, etc.” No. Of the grain that Ukraine exported after the deal was announced, and since still date, 85% of it has gone to other European countries, rich countries in Europe. And I think 9% has gone to poor countries of which most of it went to Bangladesh. But globally, all these countries were then basically getting wheat from some other place. They had to face the price increase. But that price increase was not because of supply. It was because of the ability of global agribusiness to manipulate popular sentiment to just raise prices. Everybody said, “oh, yeah, sure prices have to go up. And so they accepted it.” And the activity of financial players in the futures market. So in the Paris wheat Exchange, which is the biggest exchange in Europe, financial players accounted for 72% of the long positions  by June. Now, why should the financial player hold wheat? What are they going to do with wheat? They’re not doing it for hedging. It’s entirely speculative.

John Torpey  33:01

So even if it’s not a product of decrease in grain supply, you know, in reality, the prices have gone up, right for these things. So the what has been the impact of that?

Jayati Ghosh  33:14

The prices went up, and then they’ve come down again, globally.

John Torpey  33:18

So they’re back to pre-invasion levels?

Jayati Ghosh  33:21

Oh, they went back to pre-invasion levels almost a year ago.

John Torpey  33:25

I see. So so the economic impact of the Russia Ukraine, conflict is not as severe as we were no actually led to believe.

Jayati Ghosh  33:35

Well, no, so that’s the point. It is not as severe in the rich world. Because in the rich world, the prices went up and came down again, global prices went up and came down again. But in poor countries, what happened, especially with importing countries, they and oil importing countries, they really faced it because their import prices went up. They were already facing difficulties because of the COVID situation, capital moved back to the US because the US tightened its money supply. So they really didn’t have the foreign exchange to buy. And then their currencies depreciate, because of all of these things that are talked about. And when your currency depreciates your domestic price is rising. Now, it first rising because of the import price, then it keeps rising even when the import price falls, your domestic price keeps rising because of the currency devaluation. So in fact, I have looked at four countries that are major importers of wheat. And it turns out that even after the global price fell back to pre war levels in none of these countries did the price fall, and in some of them, they kept increasing.

John Torpey  34:43

So I want to close out our discussion with a question a very broad question that arises from your appointment to this Secretary General’s high level advisory board on effective multi-lateralism and ask a very broad question about what the task of that commission or that committee, as I understand it is to develop a vision for the UN and other organizations. So what would you say are the most pressing global health problems today? And are they the same problems as prevailed at a time when the world was a poorer place?

Jayati Ghosh  35:26

This is a huge question. And it’s something we also considered in the WHO cancel on the economics of health for all. In fact, you know, both of those committees or councils have actually submitted the reports, we submitted the report on effective multilateralism in April, to the Secretary General. And it’s called a bat for people and planet, it sets out what you could do in five major areas, which include the international financial architecture, it includes governing the planet and nature, and doing that in a sort of sustainable way. It includes digital governance, and also peace security issues. So it’s very ambitious. And of course, not likely to see too much implementation but, you know, hey, we can always hope. The WHO cancel again, we really talked about four different areas in which we have to have a different vision in terms of how we are going to deal with public health concerns, which increasingly are going to be global, whether we like it or not. So we have something on financing health, which is relating to both the financial architecture and national approaches to financing health, we have a one on technology and knowledge, and how states have to assist in creating the knowledge and disseminating it. But also, the chair of the Council was Mariana Mazzucato, so as you know, she’s very interested in co-creating markets and shaping markets. And so a lot of how do you shape markets to make sure innovation is for the people, and so on. So we’ve made a bunch of suggestions or all of this, but specifically, in response to your question, I would say that the pandemic we’ve just experienced was a teaser. There is no question that we are going to face more and more, more and multiple, maybe even simultaneous public health threats, even stemming from climate change. Simply because there will be more zoonotic diseases, there will be more spread of different types of illnesses resulting from changing temperatures. And many parts of the world, people have not developed traditional resistance to these things. And that, in turn, will allow viruses and bacterias to multiply. In that context, we already have antimicrobial resistance growing as one of the largest public health threats of our time. And we are simply not equipped to deal with any of these. All of our efforts are piecemeal, ad-hoc, and still, ultimately, deeply nationalist in orientation; we still somehow cannot think cooperatively. Honestly, I don’t want to sound apocalyptic but I do believe that humanity, we are really standing at the edge of a precipice. And so insofar as any of us can have hope, it’s because we think that, you know, ultimately, humanity can step back, that we can pull it back from this precipice and and do the minimal, that is rational in such a context. And that’s, I think, the hope that all of us have to sustain.

John Torpey  38:40

Well, I hope they take up the recommendations that you’ve made, because I don’t think I can go through another thing like COVID. So the, the prognosis you’ve just provided is not an encouraging one. And it yeah, this always strikes me as a very difficult problem, you have to spend money on something that may or may not actually happen, and that has to be approved by legislators who have constituents that have other concerns, more immediate concerns. I mean, it’s a very difficult kind of problem to address, it seems to me. So I hope your work bears fruit and, you know, helps stave off some of those kinds of crises. But that’s it. For today’s episode, I want to thank Professor Jayati Ghosh for sharing her insights about what’s going on in the world economy and inequality. Look for us on the new books network. And remember to subscribe and read International Horizons on Spotify and Apple podcasts. I want to thank Oswaldo Mena Aguilar for his technical assistance, as well as to acknowledge Duncan Mackay for sharing his song International Horizons as the theme music for the show. This is John Torpey, saying thanks for joining us, and we look forward to having you with us for the next episode of of International Horizons.