Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance

Date: 2nd October 2017, 18:00-19:00

Location: The Henry Jackson Society, Millbank Tower, 21-24 Millbank, London, SW1P 4QP

Speakers: Professor Ian Goldin (co-author of Age of Discovery and Professor of Globalisation and Development, Oxford University) and Dr Chris Kutarna (co-author of Age of Discovery and Fellow of the Oxford Martin School)

Event Chair: Timothy Stafford – Research Director at The Henry Jackson Society

Timothy Stafford

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. My name is Timothy Stafford and I’m the Director of Research here at the Henry Jackson Society. People often ask me what exactly a Think Tank is and always try and explain it as somewhere between politics and university. Iim delighted to have two indivduals here today associated with the James Martin School in Oxford which is somewhere between a university and a Think Tank and for those that don’t know it, it’s a very interesting organisation which does some very interesting research. I’m delighted tonight to have Professor Goldin, who is the founding director of the school, as well as Dr Chris Kutarna who is a fellow there. They will be talking about their new book, Age of Discovery: Navigating the Storms of our New Renaissance which looks at how progress and scientific advances can be balanced against the disruptive effects that they have.

Professor Ian Goldin

Thank you very much.

What the book is aiming to do is to help make sense of this turbulent time we live in and Chris and I are talking about this a number of years ago and came to the conclusion that this period of accelerating change and great changing market places is one that echoes in some way that of the renaissance 500 years ago. By looking at our time through the renaissance lense, we will be able to learn some lessons that will help us in navigating and making sense of our time. There are many reasons why we came to this conclusion – the one that I think is compelling is that in many senses that period is ‘globalisation 1.0’ and we are living now in the second great wave of globalisation. It was a period in which the world changing from being fragmented and small, not least for Europe, but to a global, commercial interchange. There was circumnavigation, the flow of goods and services and with that the bringing back of different parts of the world, all sorts of new things – ideas, spices, gold and many other things. That set in train a very rapid economic interchange and most significantly an interchange of ideas. Another key similarity is that period, like this period, was driven by an information revolution. Then it was the Gutenberg Press – before that they were made in the handwritten manuscripts, most of which were in the preserve of the church. There was also an authority of the church over everything – from the way that one understood science to the world, to one’s relationships to each other – and the state was very much determined by that group; the church, the Catholic church. With the Gutenberg press, this was democratized dramatically – within the first 50 years, about 25 million books were published – there was a hunger to learn and literacy went up dramatically. This was in effect an exchange of knowledge that shared the breakthroughs in the arts, the sciences and the other areas that we celebrate today; the Da Vincis’, the Michael Angelos’, the Capernicus’ and others – we need to understand this in the context of an information revolution. Now whilst we now know that any dimensions, not least that of perception, sciences and arts, there was a break period, not least in that there was a recognition that the world was round… that we were part of a cosmos (not the centre of the universe) – it ended in disaster! It ended in extremists; (inaudible) and his band of monks taking over from the Medicis in Florence. It ended in radical challenges to the church – of course not least from Luther whose (inaudible) went viral and then the counter response which was the inquisitions etc. And so when you look at this period in the long sweep of history you see that there was very little in terms of economic progress and that there were many bad things that came out of it, not least the ships that went to the ‘new world’ spreading diseases that killed most of the Native Americans, slavery of course next… and in that process what we are trying to understand is why it is that this period of extraordinary progress ended with extremism and political pushbacks.

So looking at today, we see that basically a whole series of events associated with the falling of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, the integration of the global market, the Uruguay round and other trade negotiations, the opening up of capital markets and the development of the world-wide web  at almost the same time in 1990, shaping the way that global markets operate and in the participation of more people around the world in information exchanges and ideas exchanges – more scientists are alive than ever in history. Yet in this world, we see not only more rapid change but also the growth of more rapid extremism and responses which are again globalisation. So the paradox that we face is why is this process which we believe has brought more good more rapidly to more people in the world – more people have escaped poverty, more people have seen their life expectancy rising etc. – is it also associated now with a very strong tendency between extremism, nationalism, xenophobia and so on? Why do we see in a period of rapid change this pushback and what the book sets out is a series of hypotheses for why this is the case and remedies of what to do about it and with that I will hand over to Chris.

Dr Chris Kutarna

First let me just echo Ian in thanking Timothy for having us here. I feel that “thinktankery” is an essential resource today. We live in this moment where the physical technologies are innovating very rapidly whilst some of our social technologies are innovating very slowly and that gap is important for researchers, academics, for businesses to think about ‘how do we step in a square that difference’? So whether it’s at the Oxford Martin School or here at the Henry Jackson Society… maybe that’s going to be the next book – ‘Thinktankery’.

One of the themes that we saw back in 2010/2011 when we started to pen our book is this discourse about disruption, about rapid change and how we make sense of it. This notion that we live in an age of paradox, I think one of the core questions that we are trying to resolve is how to untie this knot, how do we solve this paradox? There’s a lot of what I think of as ‘’left brain analysis” – looking at the trends, patters and correlations and in a rational way, trying to piece together the processes. And something about that hasn’t worked very well as we continue to be shocked by events – you know despite all of the resources that we pour in to make sense of things. Brexit headlining the example. The election of Donald Trump. …what we do in the book is say that we need to step back and do some ‘right brain thinking’ and decide ‘what is the picture, what is the spirit of this time?’ This will allow us to develop a lense of scope in our thinking that will align better with the reality of what is happening around us. The question is how do we gain the perspective? One of the simple analogies I always refer to is that we already know how to gain perspective in space, it takes two points of view, a ‘here’ and a ‘there’. So to gain perspective in time in our present, it takes two perspectives in time, the ‘present’ and the ‘past’. I think that’s a fairly good starting point for asking ourselves how we step back and gain some perspective on the present. We need to find a good time in the past to help us see what is happening in front of us with a sort of wider lense – basically the role that history has always played. Why do we look at the Renaissance, that transition from the medieval to the early modern era (to use language that historians at Oxford would prefer) because if we think about the big picture, when the history of the ‘now’ is written, what will the first sentence be? I contend that is will be the advent of the internet when really for the first time in history that we took our tools and connected them together. If we step back to the age of discovery, the first line of that history is the advent of print which at the turn of the millennium was deemed the most important invention of the second millennium. So we share that basic condition and then if we think of what would the second line of our page in the history books be, I think it would probably be globalization. How we moved from previously a world of where suddenly we transformed the political and economic maps of the world – thanks to the fall of the Berlin Wall, into the WTO, China’s reforming and the changes in places like South Africa and most of Latin America. In the age of discovery of course, it was the voyages of discovery that completely transformed Europe’s political, economic and military maps of the world. The big picture correspondences between then and now, I think they just go on the more deeply we look into them. Another one of the defining characteristics of our present age that is underlying so much of our political, economic, military discourse – this is the rise of China, this power that for a long time has been on the margins of the world powers and now it is this massive actor. In history, that was Europe – the place that was lagging behind the most civilized nations on most measures of progress and by the 1550s was leapfrogging them all. Also with new technologies, a big question that we struggle with today, whether it is artificial intelligence (AI), human genetic modification, geoengineering to solve the climate crisis, these are all about putting into human hands, for the first time in history, powers that are beyond us (or above us) and the questions is are we going to be able to wield these powers with which we have no experience and which have such dramatic consequences for life and civilisation responsibly and Ian mentioned Capurnicus – we could have such an interesting conversation with Capernicus about what happens in society when you claim a power to understand nature that until you came along, was always seen to be above us.

As we continue to think about how events are unfolding today, and how to better make sense of them, it seems that the kind of lessons that we had to learn, struggling through this transition from the medieval to the early modern era are similar in kind to a lot of the lessons that we need to learn today. Maybe to give one example, one of the real challenges in front of Europe in the early modern era is to make new maps.

One of the interesting lessons that Christopher Columbus leaves us in the present is what not to do in a period of rapid change. Columbus set sail in search of Asia and found America but was convinced he had found Asia because of the map that he had in his head. Noah had three sons – after the flood they found the three major races of man – of Asia, Africa and Europe, so that was the world. So anything that Columbus discovered had to fit within that mental frame. It was Amerigo  Vespucci who ten years later visited this place that Columbus had discovered and realised that the reason we struggled to put these discoveries onto our present maps is because they aren’t on any of these maps – this is a new world. It was the popularisation of that idea that made the old maps obsolete. We need new maps into which we can chart these discoveries and it was that idea that unleashed Europe’s exploration of this new world. For that reason, America is named after Amerigo rather than Columbus. Personally, I look into this and see us making that mistake everywhere, so eagerly trying to keep up with the pace of discoveries but so often ramming into our current maps whereas we should be challenging our current maps so that we can keep up with our reality.

I’ll give you one quick example which I kind of telegraph in my next book looking at political maps. We still in popular discourse look at this political spectrum of left vs right as if the diversity of political parties could fit on a one-dimensional line. But where do we put Trump on this line? His protectionist tendencies are classically associated with very left policy, his proposed tax policy fit much more properly with the right and there’s nowhere to put him on the one dimensional line. So if we add another line, we now have left and right, and open and closed. Then we can easily map Trump as closed right and easily have a quick analysis of why he won. Trump was closed right – by winning the Republican candidacy he won over the open-right, by default almost, and made inroads into the closed-left. Having control of three of the four quadrants in the political field, it’s not surprising that he was able to turn that into a government.

Here today, we would place Corbyn on the closed left, and Cameron was certainly open right. I know certainly Justin Trudeau would be open-left. The political contest that seems very hard to understand, if we were to just change our maps, a lot more suddenly becomes clear and that’s what we are trying to do with the book. There are many areas of our thinking that we can resolve – the contradictions, the paradoxes that we perceive in our world, if we can get a hold of the maps that we are navigating with and challenge and change them, that is an important part of adapting our own software to the time that we live in.

Timothy Stafford

Thank you very much and a couple of quick points if I may because I found both of your talks tremendously stimulating. I really have always enjoyed the discussion of the quadrants as a believe now that is the best way to understand modern politics so I now always refer people to the first round of the French Presidential Elections where you have (inaudible) in the closed-left, Macron is open-left, Filon is open-right and Le Pen is closed-right. Everyone was drawing in between nineteen and twenty-three percent of the vote – clearly the French political system is broken down into four rather than two and I think we are seeing that more now in other parts of the Western World.

Just out of curiosity, you both mentioned the relationship between the renaissance era and the development of print, and now the development of the internet – both of which have led to greater awareness for individuals, more ability to be aware of what is going on around them politically. Someone said ‘we are now living in an age where everyone has a supercomputer in their pocket’ which of course would have been unimaginable just twenty years ago. Of course a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, sometimes when people acknowledge all of the political workings around them but don’t necessarily understand but dislike straight away, there’s a lot of information but where is the explanation? So there is a sort-of lag created. So the question is, if the renaissance led to a lack of moderation which we are now seeing in Western-developed politics, what was it that stabilised the ship in the immediate post-renaissance period? We can look to our current period and say ‘yes, this is a very volatile period but it won’t go on forever because at some point there will be a new equilibrium somewhere’. So I’ll leave that to you.

Dr Chris Kutarna

This is a great question but in classical oxford fashion let me just alter the premise of the question slightly – it’s just the very last thing you said – this idea of when the next equilibrium will be. I think that it’s very interesting that we think of history as sort of episodic, crisis and equilibriums. This is one of the dominant paradigms within which we see most of our issues – we think of economics in this way – there’s an equilibrium and then some crisis, there’s an equilibrium and then some crisis… I think some of the new [thinkers] (for example the Oxford Martin School) challenge this paradigm and it actually comes from physics actually where there is a notion of an equilibrium point. But in biology for example, it doesn’t necessary reach equilibrium points, there’s almost a kind of constant mutation or new discovery of what works and so step one I would say let’s do some thinking about whether the renaissance returned to an equilibrium and whether that’s what’s going to happen for us too. We are in extraordinary times right now but if we just get through it then everything will become normal again. I’m not sure about that – the one piece of history I would offer is that it seems through moments of the breaking of the status quo there is often a moment of accelerated adaptation to make institutions better adapted to the way things are which is not to suggest there is always clear progress in history but if we look at the breaking of the Catholic Church for example by Martin Luther’s Protestant reformation – this year is the 500th anniversary of the start of the reformation actually – there were reformist movements within the Catholic Church for decades prior to the reformation and therefore what he was doing was not new but rather he had the technology to spread his ideas and turn it into an inexorable force for change and in reaction to the reformation there was a counter within the Catholic Church to adopt the reforms that had long been discussed but had never been urgent enough to overcome the institutional inertia. Then suddenly, there is this existential crisis where now these reforms become urgent. I think that one could argue examining what’s happening these days that there is a greater sense of energy and possibility about mooting big changes that in a pre-brexit world were interesting ideas but not for the present.

Professor Ian Goldin

I think it’s a mistake to think in equilibrium terms – this destructive world that we are in is now normal – and it’s going to get faster and we aren’t near to the end of that so that’s why learning to navigate in this world is more and more important. And the reasons for it are quite simple – there are more and more actors and an increasingly complex system with technologies that are able to be accelerated… whether it’s agencies, or the financial system, airport hubs which make us spreaders of pandemics or the internet which has made us both good and bad spreaders of the tools of cyberspace. This is to do with demographics, we have gone from 5.5billion people to over 7.5billion people in the time since 1990 and furthermore we have gone from about 200million people connected in the late 1980s – and connected in rather slow ways like newspapers and the old style telephones – to a world now with almost 6billion people connected almost instantaneously and that means the system has become more urbanised and the system has changed. We are in a totally different world and none of that is going backwards – yes we can have cyberattacks, we can have pandemics, we can have disruption to the system – but the essential story around more and more actors in an increasingly complex system and therefore more interaction from more sources is, I think, a trend. Now politics (inaudible) a trend between what people hear from their politicians and what actually happens in their real lives. Politicians are basically elected – or in place in non-democracies – because they say to people ‘vote/trust in me and I will deliver a safe and secure future for you and a better life for you’ – that is the basic deal. The fact is that increasingly has to be a falsehood because they are out of control of the future. There are factors that shape all of our lives, no matter what country, that come from more and more different place and there is no wall high enough that’s going to keep out climate change, pandemics, or any of the good things that will help us to live longer, healthier lives – the new technologies, the new cures for cancer etc. So we are in a totally interdependent, integrated system and that means its more progress, more actors, more genius unlocked, but also more instability and risk unlocked – the butterfly defect of globalisation. So that’s one reason why I don’t think we are returning to an equilibrium and the second is that if you want to use the renaissance as your time frame, you’re going to get very depressed because it lasted hundreds of years (the religious wars and the instability) so it wasn’t really until the enlightenment in the 1700s that you got a return to stability and norms and with the Westphalian system developed later on. So a very, very long period of time. Two of the purposes of writing our book; one is that we need to learn so that we don’t repeat that terrible outcome of globalisation 1.0 and that we stop it happening in its tracks to have a better outcome and the second is that this is how you navigate in a world of accelerating change to have good outcomes. So I think for those two reasons, I’m with Chris that this is not a hiccup but rather a trend and the challenge for all of us in politics and other dimensions is to learn to navigate more effectively in this very stormy time which will continue to be stormy and the storms will get bigger.

Dr Chris Kutarna

Let me just briefly add to that. For me, this recognition that there are two basic categories of technology, physical and social, and to your question, how do we adapt? What happens is innovation in the social technologies. So one of the big innovations in social technology that separates us from the renaissance is democracy and we can see if you look back over the past 5 years how that has been an extremely powerful technology in resolving some of the pressures but also in far more peaceful ways. If we want to learn from history to manage a period of rapid and destructive change in a way we magnify the opportunities of genius and mitigate the risk, I think that’s a key area that we focus on. The question is, how do we accelerate the development in social technologies to keep up with and adapt to the changes and stresses generated from the physical technologies (inaudible). We have to think about ‘what are the social innovations that the technology of tax policy… of our economics, do we need to recognise data as a fundamental resource, the same way we recognise land and labour and capital and so on. These are the social technology innovations that are going to help us in a more stable and orderly and peaceful way, keep pace with the period of rapid change.

Question 1

By 2030, 80% of the world is going to be middle class (according to a Foreign Affairs report from a few years ago). I suggest that the idea of left and right is redundant. In a post-industrial society, is a social contract at odds with modern society?

Timothy Stafford – I would just like to make that question a little harder. One of the ways that social contract has been understood is obviously between the individuals in society but it’s also an intergenerational contract between the current and future generations. When you look at things like the scale of national debts and so on, this is something that increasingly comes to the fore. So I’m just wondering, in a world of change, how can you continue having the social contract between the generations to plan for those future generations given that it’s going to be that much harder for what the future holds?

Professor Ian Goldin

Let me try the social contract – intergenerational question. I think you’re right and this is pretty central to is – it is not just a contract of just what the state offers you but it is also a trust relationship. Can you trust those in charge to deliver a better future for you and those you care about? I think what is the case is that people often say we are in the fourth industrial revolution and I believe that is to trivialise what is really going on here because this is very different to the first, second and third industrial revolutions in the pace and scale and the amount of people involved.

We know a lot more. The trust relationships which used to be generated by secrecy, by the newspaper editors smoking cigars with the bankers in clubs, things like that… there are many other things, the financial crash and failure of two of the best institutions in our government, the Treasury and the Bank of England. What the best global institution? The IMF. What’s the best expert system by far in the world? Finance. You get the financial crisis and people ask ‘what’s our social contract with government when it can’t even manage a financial system?’ The system becomes inherently more unstable and the best experts prove themselves wrong, trusting authority collapses – and that’s going to happen more often. That’s as important as parts of the social contract that say ‘if I’m out of work im going to get unemployment benefit, if I’m disabled I’m going to get disability benefits etc’.

Then you get to the new dimension – AI (artificial intelligence) – which will lead to a third of British workers losing their jobs over the next 25 years or so – that’s what the work we are doing is saying – we are not going to develop jobs of the same quality quick enough etc. So I think you’re absolutely right. The social contract is stretched and particularly is we don’t have the fiscal resources to pay for it, it’s not going to be put back together again.

The final takeaway is that in a world that changes more rapidly than ever before, flexibility becomes more and more important. In other words, you’ve got to adapt as individuals and as government more rapidly to change. That means that the infrastructure of society, the housing network, the transport system, the health system, the education system, everything… needs renewing more rapidly and that puts massive pressure on the fiscal systems.

The question is ‘who is going to do this’? Does the individual have to be more flexible? What you see is increasing rigidity within our society – depreciation of our assets which are ageing and inability for people to move and gain jobs elsewhere – this is mainly because of rising house prices etc. and is a major problem in the US. Things like house prices in London really matter for flexibility. If you can’t get to where the jobs are, that’s bad and I am not one that believes you can take jobs to where the people are. Trying to create new jobs in the North of England is much more expensive than creating new jobs in London and in fact there is very low unemployment in London. But how do you let more people be part of a dynamic place is a key question. So how react and how they do it is a key part of this social contract as well.

Dr Chris Kutarna

I would just like to add to that. I vigorously agree with you. Chapter 8 has a subtitle that is ‘how the age we are in strains the bonds that holds us all together’. So just to read – ‘society is living together, and the social system is the bargains under which we do so, made firm by shared norms, values and institutions by which these shared thoughts take on concrete form’…

Just to echo Ian’s point about how the notion of another industrial revolution doesn’t do justice to the moment that we are in. This transition to medieval to the early modern world is far deeper than a change to the technology of production.  There was a real interrogation of what is our social contract. Another 500 year anniversary this year is Thomas Moore’s ‘Utopia’ which was quite explicitly in that moment, asking this question. What is our contract with one another? The Protestant reformation had a real deep impact upon the notion of charity in European society. Within medieval Catholic tradition charity is a Christian duty and virtue and in the embryonic Protestant tradition is was a duty of the state, of the community, to begin to provide welfare, houses etc. To begin to provide the early beginnings of a welfare state – and there was a debate going on that was asking if a state is providing, does it deny the individual an opportunity to provide an act of charity? The debate began in that moment of the schism of the Catholic Church.

Question 1

The center of the renaissance was the city of Florence. Italy today is a backwater – politically economically… so throughout all this fast change, are they interested in quantum theory/physics that tells us about the uncertainty of our very roots of our sub-atomic reality and it isn’t just theoretical.

Where is the ethical compass? Where is the moral framework to navigate all this change? We seem to be drifting without it and the Catholic Church for example can no longer dictate. The bible has almost no relation to anything.

Question 2

How can the countries that were at the heart of the ill-fated war on terror, and more recently the ‘credit crunch’ come back given the emergence of crazy personalities that we have in our system? Was the Anglo-sphere first hit by this change?

Answer 1

(Professor Ian Goldin): the Oxford Martin School is an amazing place and it believes deeply that ethics need to be ingrained in genomics for example. Should we create super-humans or not? These are absolutely central questions which I don’t think our government is dealing with and certainly society isn’t dealing with but these are actually pressing questions whereby legal systems have to be established today because these things may be happening tomorrow and you don’t want to decide after the first super-human is created, that actually that isn’t what we want.

So ethics, and I think our ethical compass and in particular how we define our ethical compass, especially in a world in which religion no longer provides that, is absolutely central and is one that we really do think about a lot in our book.

Answer 2

(Professor Ian Goldin): was the Anglo-sphere first hit? What’s happened here is an accelerating power transition and the change has been most rapid in the countries which were poorest before, like China. China has doubled its income almost every 10 years for the last 35 years. The pace of change is something that has never happened. Even countries like India have experienced dramatic change and democratisation across Latin America (although not everywhere and not always in a stable way) has been dramatic so I think the pace of change has been much greater in emerging markets rather than developed economies but what that has facilitated is a rise of new powers and a power transition and that combined with a financial crisis (so it’s globalisation combined with a financial crisis) which of course was the under-belly of globalisation and connectivity/technological change has meant that the rich countries are now all in austerity and that has accelerated their lack of appetite to play global leadership roles. I think yes, it is a power transition and it has accelerated it. The question of whether it can come back and what the Anglo-sphere can do – my own view is that it will have to go through an experience of learning how to be in a much more shared global-leadership role. In the UK we have done it with climate change and a few other areas but how you play in a world when you are no longer the leading player and how you deal with countries like China who are not democracies and how you establish global rule – I think the US and the UK are going to be the most challenged because the Euroblock will be very big economically – double the size of the US economically – and it has that ambition to play that game which the Us has retreated from so I think Italy’s future is not in Italy but in being part of Europe. My own personal view is that when you look at the numbers in terms of the growth of markets, in terms of power relationships, the future is East of Britain. The UK can straddle both sides however and be a bridge between them. The idea that America will be ‘G1’ as it was thought 20/30 years ago is an idea that I think will not come back.

Answer 1

(Dr Chris Kutarna): We talk in the book in the context of how the maps are changing. I think one of the section is called ‘Venice is Sinking’ and it’s about how the balance of trade shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and the effects that that had for the Italian powers – how it led to the decline of the silk roads. If you were a spice merchant in Florence or Venice, the year after Vasco de Gama discovered his sea-route around the southern-tip of Africa, prices of those spices fell by half on the expectation that everyone would get better prices elsewhere. You can imagine the disruption that would have had. Some people they stated, trying to pivot the economy towards new industries and many people moved to the Atlantic. We are seeing that reconfiguring of whole economies again today.

Where is the moral framework? One of the ideas that we talk about in the book is where do people look for the moral framework in the renaissance? One of the interesting things is found in classical Greece and Rome which was idealised by people at that time but there was a concerted effort to renew classical virtues of proportion, dignity etc. as a way of creating a shared discourse and a symbolic language about how do we confront the time in which we live. Theres a whole trend of early modern scholarship that looks at, for example, the art history of the early renaissance within that narrative – was Michael Angelo’s David simply another David or by choosing to carve in stone David’s moment of choice rather than victory which was the classic portrayal. Was Michael Angelo trying to resurrect the kind of courage that was displayed in this biblical story? I think that going all the way back to Aristotle that said the way to get out of the trap of going around in circles is wisdom – at every turn around we can reflect and based upon that reflection we can make different choices so that rather than a circle going round and round, human history is a spiral, spiraling upwards.

Answer 2

(Dr Chris Kutarna): I have a particular perspective on this because I lived in China for about 5 years and it was remarkable to be on the ground in china as a lot of policy makers and business leaders and just general people in the pubs were experiencing a whole notion of changes around them. There was this aura of expertise around the foreigner – me just being in the room gave me a certain level of unwarranted deference on almost any matter. After the financial crisis that disappeared and the narrative that we are learning from the US – how to run our business and economy – I think was broken or severely challenged by the financial crisis. Certainly if you follow the domestic discourse that is happening in China or the political discourse that is happening around the Trump Administration, they are making great hay of ‘the problem of democracy’ – there isn’t meritocracy, there isn’t a specific way of deciding who should be the leader and that is why we have this opportunity to present this alternative model and I think that maybe ours is better. I think that maybe even in the last 3-5 years, there has been a shift in public willingness and certainly corporate willingness to make bold bets, to establish beach=heads into foreign markets – our markets – and believe that they can win in those markets as they now believe they can step onto this stage as equals. I believe that is purely about the change in attitude that has been apparent in the past few years and I don’t believe that this will be regressing any time soon.

HJS



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