Thank you very much, cabinet secretary. That concludes that item of business, and we move on to the next item of business, which is a statement from Tom Arthur on Scotland's retail sector. The minister will take questions at the end of his statement, and so there should be no interventions or interruptions. I call on the minister for around 10 minutes, Mr Arthur. Thank you, Presiding Officer. There are less than two months to go until Christmas. The run-up to the festive season is the most critical trading period of the year for retail. The impact of the pandemic on the sector has been enormous. It has changed the way staff work and businesses operate. For some businesses, this Christmas could mean make or break, given the disruption of Covid on top of the challenges associated with Brexit. Since the start of the pandemic, businesses have benefited from more than £4.3 billion in Scottish Government support. That includes a generous, non-domestic race relief, which has been extended for the retail sector, along with hospitality, leisure and aviation, throughout 2021-22. I will set out a range of further policies and programmes that will support retailers and those who work for them to make a fair and prosperous recovery. Retail is important to each and every one of us. It creates jobs as one of the largest private sector employers in Scotland, with over 233,000 workers. That is around 9 per cent of Scotland's entire workforce. It creates wealth, contributing £5.8 billion in GVA to the Scottish economy, according to the most recent statistics.  There are almost 14,000 retail businesses in every part of Scotland. Shops are often the cornerstone of our communities, as demonstrated during the pandemic. We relied on retail workers during lockdown for the foods and essential supplies that we needed. Many of them went above and beyond, particularly to ensure that our most vulnerable citizens did not go without. Their efforts were not nothing short of heroic, and I am sure that all in this chamber would offer their thanks. Through the success of the vaccination programme, we have been able to lift many Covid restrictions. That has allowed individuals and businesses to get back to something much more like normality. However, Covid-19 has not gone away and we remain in a difficult position. It is necessary to retain some safeguards for now whilst we recover and rebuild for the future. Recovery and rebuilding is crucial for the retail sector, which was subject to restrictions for many months. The Scottish Retail Consortium estimates that some retail businesses were closed for up to 220 days during lockdown. Although I recognise that they are still challenges, they are signs of recovery. According to monthly GDP statistics, retail output is 10.8 per cent higher than 12 months ago and 4.8 per cent higher than in July 2019, before lockdown measures were introduced. However, more than 21 per cent of the wholesale, retail and vehicles repair businesses are reporting decreased turnover compared to what is expected at this time of year. Figures from the Scottish Retail Consortium published last week show retail sales down 9.1 per cent compared with September 2019. These depressed sales figures are compounded by wider challenges, including Covid-related global supply chain disruptions, but others, particularly labour market shortages, are the result of the UK Government's decision to leave the EU in the midst of the pandemic. Clearly, urgent action is needed and we continue to press the UK Government on this. However, we must look at the changes that continue to impact and transform retail. Technology is influencing consumer behaviour and being harnessed by retail. Online shopping now accounts for more than a quarter of all retail sales compared to 3 per cent in 2007 when the first iPhone appeared on the market. Innovation such as self-scanning check-outs, automated stock control and digital sales and marketing are now commonplace. Although Covid might have accelerated the transformation, some of our biggest retail brands such as Debenham and Top Shot have not kept pace and disappeared from our high street. We need a forward-looking, co-ordinated, collaborative response to support the future retail sector. Earlier this month, the Scottish Government published its Covid recovery strategy. It states that a strong, sustainable economy goes hand-in-hand with a fair and equal society. Our forthcoming 10-year national strategy for economic transformation will set out the ways that we will support businesses to create new, good, green jobs and build industries of the future. Key to this is constructive collaboration. For the retail sector, that collaborative effort has been delivered through the development of our retail strategy. We are harnessing the expertise of retail businesses, trade unions, academia, public sector and trade organisations to identify the challenges and opportunities for retail in Scotland. While the strategy will be published later in the year, I want to highlight one of its key components. The Fair Work Convention's report, Fair Work in Scotland highlighted the fair work challenges facing the retail sector. It also states that a sectoral approach, building on the core principle of joint working, would progress towards achieving our aim of becoming a fair work nation by 2025. I can therefore confirm that the strategy will therefore look to establish a sector-led group that will work jointly with partners, including trade unions, to focus on addressing the key challenges facing retail, and in particular will be tasked with improving fair work across the sector. I wish to turn to a matter of considerable interest to colleagues in this chamber—New Year's Day trading. The trade union Usdaw petitioned for a consultation on whether Scottish ministers should use existing order-making powers under the Christmas Day and New Year's Day trading Scotland Act 2007 to close large retail stores on New Year's Day. The matter was considered by the Public Petitions Committee in the last session of this Parliament. The Scottish Government this summer honoured our commitment to consult. While I am sympathetic to the campaign to legislate, the limits of the Christmas and New Year's Day trading act are clear, and having carefully considered responses to the consultation, the prevailing economic conditions and the options that are available to us under the legislation, it is with regret that I confirm that we will not be making an order. We have been consistently clear that, in line with the statutory requirements of the act, a decision on New Year's Day trading will take account of the prevailing economic conditions, which remain difficult for the retail sector. Employment law is, unfortunately, currently reserved. As such, this legislation would only restrict trading in stores over a certain size, and it will not give all retail workers a day off. The legislation would not even cover all workers in large retail. Simply closing stores will not prohibit restocking, deliveries or online shopping, so employees may still be required to work. Crucially, it also does not guarantee that those who get the day off will be paid for it. I am clear that this legislation cannot deliver what we as a Government and what the unions want—better conditions for all workers. We are therefore unable to guarantee paid time off or protect all workers under the act. We want to go further than the legislation allows and put fair work principles at the heart of the retail sector. Fair work principles should apply to those working in all stores and in all parts of retail operations. The retail strategy will have fair work at its core, benefiting retail businesses by making them more attractive to workers and more resilient, productive and profitable. As I have outlined, that requires a coherent, collaborative and long-term approach involving retailers, trade unions and employees, and I will be happy to discuss that further with MSPs with an interest in that statement. Retail is a vital part of our town centres and cities, and we must support them too. Through the work of the town centre review and city centre recovery task force, we are supporting those economies to become more diverse and sustainable as they face the challenge of changing and evolving retail patterns. Earlier this summer, I launched the Scotland Loves Local Fund. That fund will help bring creative projects and activity into our towns and neighbourhoods, building wealth in local communities and attracting footfall, which is essential for shops and businesses. With up to £2 million of investment this year, the fund will enhance the Scotland Loves Local Marketing campaign and Gif Card scheme. I am looking forward to being able to announce the wars of the fund for which I understand there have been 242 applications. I am also pleased to announce that Scotland Loves Local Gif Card is now available to consumers, backed by the next phase of the Scotland Loves Local Marketing campaign. I encourage people to support their local businesses, especially in their run-up to Christmas. The national planning framework NPF4 will provide updated planning policy on retail, recognising its role in the economy and for communities and linked to 20-minute neighbourhoods, connected, compact and accessible places that can contribute to community wealth building. We will lay a draft of NPF4 in Parliament and carry out extensive consultation later this autumn. Our vision is for a thriving retail sector in Scotland. The policies and programmes that I have set out today will support retailers and other businesses that recover from the impact of Covid and will exit by increasing footfall and activity or revitalising local places and town centres. However, recovery must be progressive. It must improve the lives of people and their families, people who work in retail and the customers that they serve. I want the retail sector in Scotland to become an exemplar for inclusive economic growth. Through the retail strategy, the sector will play its part in creating a fairer, greener and stronger Scotland. The minister will now take questions on the issues raised in his statement. I intend to allow around 20 minutes for questions at which point we will move on to the next item of business. Any members wishing to ask a question are kindly requested to press the requested speak buttons or place an R in the chat function. I warmly welcome the Scottish Government's response to the New Year's Day trading consultation. The minister knows full well that the overwhelming view of the retail sector was that such a statutory closure of shops on New Year's Day would have been a retrograde step at the time that we were doing everything possible to ensure that the retail sector gets back on its feet. It was also a contradictory message to tourists who were always trying to encourage to come to Scotland at the festive period. Minister, I have three very specific questions for you, which were written out of some of the evidence that we have taken at the finance committee just recently. First, what is the Scottish Government doing to assess the changes on consumer purchasing behaviour, not just the technological ones that he has mentioned in his speech as a result of the Covid situation? Those changes have huge implications for the retail sector, and it is incumbent upon the Scottish Government to do some assessment of what they are. Secondly, the minister has quite rightly mentioned that Scotland loves local, and that is something that has very strong cross-party support here. Can he spell out what action the Scottish Government is taking in line with local authorities to ensure that our schools, hospitals and other public bodies are doing an awful lot more to ensure that public procurement of local produce is enhanced because that record there is not particularly good? Finally, can I ask what measures the Scottish Government is taking in line with the banking sector to address the very high level of debt in some of the smaller firms in the retail sector as a result of Covid? I thank Liz Smith for her question. On her first point about changing consumer activity, that is what I recognise, and she will be familiar with the evidence provided by the Scottish Retail Consortium about different patterns. For example, we have seen an uplift in some goods that were not as in demand during the pandemic. During lockdown, for example, we saw increased purchase of food, but perhaps lower purchases of certain goods such as clothes and footwear. There was increased purchasing of, perhaps, a garden centre. That is changing. That is something that we are monitoring closely and will be considered as part of the work of the retail strategy. On her last point in debt, that is something that I am happy to take away and speak to colleagues on to look into further. We have obviously provided extensive support to businesses throughout the pandemic over £4.3 billion, and a lot of businesses on our high street and town centres will continue to benefit from a comprehensive package of non-domestic rates relief. On the second point that she made, that is an area where I could talk at some length, but we have a commitment to take forward a community wealth building legislation later on in this Parliament. As Liz Smith will be aware, one of the key pillars of community wealth building is procurement. I want to be working with local authorities, health boards and other public bodies and the private sector to ensure that we are leveraging the financial clout that they have and that money is going to support local economies. That is a conversation that I very much look forward to having with Liz Smith and other members across the chamber in due course. I thank the minister for early sight of his statement and I appoint fellow members to my register of interests given my interest in the retail sector and the fact that I am a membership of the trade union. My fellow members will feel let down and betrayed by the Scottish Government's failure to act on new day trading. Does the minister recognise that the Government entirely fails to grasp the point by referring to website administration and stock exchange staff? It is shop floor staff and those very large stores that the legislation allows them to act who are affected by the unpredictable and antisocial hours and who would get a day off if they chose to act. Does the minister think that it is fair to force shop workers to work on new year's day given the work that they have done through the pandemic? Does the minister recognise that this is a missed opportunity? A 10-year strategy will undoubtedly be welcomed when it arrives, but with fruit fall down by a fifth, supply chain costs up by a third, many retailers will simply not survive long enough to see the benefits of such a strategy. Retail requires a recovery and a survival plan and it needs one now. Will the minister commit to coming back to the chamber with something substantive and meaningful to allow retailers to survive into the new year? I thank Daniel Johnson for his question. I also recognise his interest in this area and his sterling work on his legislation in the last session of the Parliament. On his last point, I will come back to this chamber with the retail strategy when it is published. This is something that has been done in collaboration, including with representation from us. That will be a substantive document, yes, for a long time, but also to help us to meet our fair work objectives by 2025 and support Covid recovery in the immediate term. On the first point that Mr Johnson raises, I am hugely sympathetic to the points that he makes. As I said in my statement, it is a matter of regret. The issue with the legislation is that it does not deliver, in my opinion, in the opinion of the Government what those advocating for it to be implemented are seeking. It does not guarantee retail workers a day off. As we know, there are many people working within retail who are not in customer facing roles who could still be required to work on the shop floor in stock rooms on new year's day. Indeed, in the consultation response, 43 per cent of businesses indicated that we would still be requiring staff to work on new year's day. I would much rather have as a situation where we had powers over employment law in this Parliament, so we could have a broader look at fair work practices at holidays around the festive season. That is something that we are unable to do in this Parliament. That was something that was recognised when the legislation was going through Parliament 14, 15 years ago. I sympathise with the calls of us DAW members. I sympathise with the points that Daniel Johnson is making. I hope that he can trust that I am acting in good faith because I simply do not believe that this legislation can deliver what us DAW, what Daniel Johnson and many of us would like to see. During Scottish Business Week, I visited retailers in my constituency, one of which no longer has a post office. This has resulted in a surplus of floor area now partitioned off to form an empty but usable space. Can I ask the minister what can be done to support or incentivise businesses such as supermarkets to ensure that unused floor space could be used for community benefit? I am very keen, as we all are, to see community benefit wherever possible. I am conscious that some large retailers have, for example, been partnering up with local suppliers to create pop-up stores. I think that that is an excellent example of the kind of activity that can take place. More broadly, we are seeking to provide a supportive tax landscape around non-domestic rates and, with our actions in the Scotland Loves local campaign, our local gift card and, indeed, the work that we are doing more broadly in planning and town centre regeneration is work that can help to increase footfall, which will be a benefit to all retail. The Scottish retail industry employs over 240,000 people and makes a huge contribution to the Scottish economy. However, the pandemic and lockdown has resulted in almost one in six shops closing down permanently. Shopper footfall has fallen by 27 per cent and shop vacancies have spiked to a six-year high, all of which is contributing to an increase in empty shops on our struggling high streets. What the minister has announced today does nothing to stop the rot. No strategy is yet, no plan yet and no mention of our business improvement district. The minister said that the next two months could make or break for many retail businesses, so when will he open his eyes and provide real help to the retail sector? I can assure the members that my eyes are wide open. I engage regularly with the retail sector. As the member will be aware, those challenges are not unique to Scotland. Indeed, the challenges faced by retail are not even unique to the United Kingdom. We have seen existing change that has been taking place over a prolonged period for the retail sector, which has accelerated during the pandemic. The challenge is what comes next. I agree that there is a need for immediate support. That is why, as I made clear earlier, the Scottish Government has committed to suspending £4.3 billion in supporting businesses, a comprehensive package of non-domestic rates relief to support retail and other sectors throughout the pandemic. It is why we are taking action such as the Scotland loves local campaign to go and increase footfall, motivate more people to shop locally and ensure that activity is synchronised as we move into what the member will be familiar with. We are taking that immediate action. I will also later in the autumn, bring in NPF4 to the Parliament. There is a review to the town centre action plan, which we are preparing in consultation with partners including COSLA. Of course, we will later this year publish a retail strategy. I will be happy to come back and discuss that with members in more detail. As I said during my statement, I am happy to meet any member in the chamber to discuss those issues. I am passionate about making Scotland a vibrant and flourishing place for the retail sector. David Torrance, followed by Colin Smith. The economic impact of a pandemic has been felt across Scotland, but there has undoubtedly been a disproportionate impact on areas with pre-existing inequality. Can the minister advise what steps the Scottish Government can take to counteract such inequalities? I thank David Torrance for his question. More broadly, that is a huge area. The Government published a Covid recovery strategy on 5 October, which sets out an ambitious vision and plan for Scotland's recovery from the pandemic. That is focused on bringing about a fairer future for all. The strategy details three outcomes that are central to achieving this vision of a fairer future. Those are the increasing financial security for low-income households, enhance the wellbeing of children and young people and create good, green jobs and fair work. That work will also be taken forward through the national strategy for economic transformation, and specifically within the retail strategy. We recognise the key role that convenience stores often play in their localities, particularly in supporting vulnerable groups. That is something that will be reflected in the retail strategy as well. Of course, I am happy to discuss the matter further with the member, should he be interested. The minister said that the run-up to Christmas is the most critical training period of the year for retail. He says that it is maker break for many, but there was nothing in his statement to ensure that it is make. Why has the Government not considered a proper high street vulture scheme called for by labour and the Scottish retail consortium to give it a real stimulus to our high street, rather than the very limited Scotland loves gift card that consumers have to pay for themselves? I appreciate that this is an issue that we have raised before. We will look closely at what is happening in Northern Ireland and we will monitor it to see what impact it has. What we do know, however, is that consumers spend a lot of money during the festive period. What the gift card allows us to do is to help to channel that money into our local economies. That is what we are trying to incentivise. We have the gift card, but it also aligns with the Scotland loves local campaign, which will seek to go and drive more people to use the gift card and to spend money locally supporting local retail. Many local retailers in my constituency of Falka East did a great job in being innovative throughout the pandemic and demonstrated their fundamental value to our communities. However, at present, small local retailers are at a huge disadvantage compared to online only giants who can avoid local taxation, often do not pay anywhere near their full share of national taxes and do not invest in local communities. Will the minister agree to write to the UK Government to ask them if they have yet managed to make any progress to ensure online giants such as Amazon pay their fair share of taxes and provide value to society? We also look to ways that the Scottish Government can encourage large companies such as Amazon to increase their contributions to very worthy causes in Scotland. I am happy to write to the UK Government to raise those issues. I want to pick up on one point from what Michelle Thompson said, which is to recognise the tremendous contribution that is played by retail, particularly local retail in our communities. I wish to make a response to the question from David Torrance. Local convenience stores play a very important role in supporting people in our communities across Scotland. Often, there is a long-standing relationship between customers and the people who work in these establishments. That is a real value that retail adds to our community that can sometimes be overlooked. More broadly, the issue around online giants that Michelle Thompson raises is an important one, but that should be aware. This is a global issue, and global issues require global solutions. I welcome the announcement made by the G7 finance ministers in June to address this. The UK digital services tax introduced by the UK Government in April 2020 was a step in the right direction, but it is a short-term solution. What we need is concerted global action to address those issues. Of course, we are committed to the Government to exploring the options around a digital tax within our existing powers. If the Scotland loves local gift card is to have a meaningful economic impact on retail, it needs to operate at scale, otherwise it will just be tokenistic. How many businesses have bought bulk purchases of the card for their employees, and how many cards have the Government bought for its employees? Thank Willie Rennie for his question. He makes a very important point. That is only going to work if it works operates at scale. I do not have specific answers to those questions, but I will see if I can source that data if we do have it. More generally, the Scottish Government is making 5,000 of those cards available to each local authority to kickstart the project. The cards are now available to buy or are available to buy online. We are working in partnership with Scotland's Township Partnership, which administers the scheme to look to ways to expand opportunities to procure the gift cards that have gone into the new year. The specific points that Willie Rennie raised, I will look to see whether we are able to provide that data for him. If I am able to do so, I will do so in writing. I refer to the proposed retail strategy and note that local authorities are not specifically listed as possible consultees, yet decisions of planners, especially in rural towns such as in Midlothian South, Tweeddale and Loddodale, have a major impact on small retail businesses. Will the minister confirm that local authorities will be part and parcel of developing any retail strategy? I will confirm that we engage regularly with a range of partners, including COSLA, and we will take into account the view of all partners in forming the retail strategy. This strategy is going to be driven by the work of the steering group, so I hope that reassures the member. Maggie Chapman, to be followed by Tess White. I thank the minister for his statement and Asgore for the petition. The Scottish Greens continue to support statutory holidays over the Christmas and New Year period as a workers' rights issue, a right of all workers to not only have time to spend with loved ones at times of important celebrations, but also because workers have the right to decent time off and a good work-life balance. As the idea of the high street changes, with big brands such as Burton and Devinons disappearing, the need to reimagine our town centres and the retail sector becomes increasingly pressing. Does the minister agree that concepts like the four-day week show his shift in values from work all you can to more focus on better work-life balance and can he provide an update on the work being undertaken to shift to that four-day working week? I thank the member for his question and she will be aware that it is a commitment of this Government to pursue a four-day week. We have our own party student manifesto commitment to provide £10 million to support that, so that is something that we will be taking forward. I will be happy to write to the member and provide more details on that matter. More broadly, our high streets are changing and that is why NPF4, for example, will have the concept of 20-minute neighbourhoods at its heart. I very much look forward to the wide-ranging discussion and debates that it will have on NPF4, including its specific policies on retail when that is published later in the autumn. Will the forthcoming retail strategy address the marked decline in retail and customer service modern apprenticeship starts, highlighted by Skills Development Scotland, which are nowhere near pre-pandemic levels? I thank the member for her question. We have a specific workgroup and theme within the retail strategy, so the retail strategy will not address the issues raised by the member, but we will look more broadly at its skills within the sector in line with our broader commitments around fair work. I look forward to further discussions once the strategy is published. I welcome the minister's comments on steps that the Scottish Government will be taking to promote fair work. Can the minister expand on how the Scottish Government will engage with the retail sector and stakeholders as it continues to develop its approach? As I made reference to in my statement, one of the things that we are committed to taking out of the work of the retail strategy steering group is a sector-led group. The form of that will be agreed in discussion with the sector, but this is a strategy that is going to be a live document and we are looking to work in partnership with business, trade unions and employees to make sure that the sector delivers, and as I said, fair work will be at the heart of the strategy.


We are here to talk about celebrating inner peace, which is an event we're hosting, 14th to the 16th of July 2017 at the Living Miracles Monastery in Utah. And I just really am so excited that you can join us for this. Well, I'm always honored to talk to anybody who's in love with the Course in Miracles. What can I say?  Well, Bill was certainly a dear friend, an amazing human being. And I would say he was a mentor, but he was not a mentor because he told me a lot of stuff. In other words, Bill and I, strangely enough, did not talk about the content of the Course. I knew that he knew it. He knew that I knew it. It was like, what to say about that? I discussed it with other people, but Bill and I enjoyed this kind of energetic, kind of just loving and adoring one another. And obviously, not romantically, I was married, he was a gay man. But it's as if we recognized some ancient connection with one another. And the thing that's interesting is that he was visiting at my house one time because I would visit him, and he would come and stay with our family in Denver. He was in California, of course. And one time after the kids went off to school, he said, you know, I think we're supposed to do some kind of a project together, but I have no idea what it is. Now, this is like only the Course was published. It was first presented to the public in 1976. So this is probably 1979 because I met him in 1978. So nobody had written anything at this stage of the game and hardly anybody knew about it. We did actually teach together. I don't know if you know that or not, but Bill and Jerry Jampolsky and I, and often a fourth person, would do day-long workshops on the Course, primarily for the various campuses of the University of California. Not exclusively that, but primarily that. And when he died in 1988, and we hadn't done a specific project, but all of a sudden I thought as I was writing his book, well, Bill, this is the project that we're doing together. You happen to be on one side of the veil and I happen to be on the other, but this is our work that we're doing together, and it very much felt that way. I had any number of experiences after Bill passed that made it very clear he was present. So we have a very strong relationship. It was as if I was kind of a comforter for him, because he was so sick and tired of this endlessly long process and of the difficult relationship that he had with Helen in general. And when he moved out to California, he said, I don't even want to have anything to do with this course. You know, I want to be as far away from it as I possibly can. I need a break. It was as if the pressure of this enormous job he had at Columbia and the huge pressure of trying to get all this extra work done in secret with all of the stuff that his relationship with Helen and Ken and himself, all of that that was coming up was like an enormous, enormous kind of emotional intellectual load. He just needed a chance to decompress. I was kind of his decompressing partner. And he had done his service, he had done his function in form that was given to him and now the function of going all the way for peace. Yes. And I really feel that's what we're inviting people into when they come to this weekend in Utah. You'll be there, John Mundy, Garunar, David Hoffmeister, Rhea Felipe, and James Twyman's bringing the music. But we're there to celebrate that experience of presence and to remind everyone of the purpose of what this book is for. It's not to improve our lives. It's to come into a deeper, present experience of this love and I can feel it joining with you right now and I feel a deep gratitude that we're going to have you there to tell us more of these stories and parables and share your insights of your own deep and personal experience as you've been going along. Absolutely. And if we keep in mind, peace of mind is our goal. And a lot of people go, oh, dear, peace of mind, that doesn't sound very interesting. Well, that's because you don't know what it is. Peace of mind, the purpose of this course is more exquisite than any words can ever describe. And I feel that there's a presence. This will be your first time visiting us at the monastery, but there's a presence there. It's only a place. But because of the devotion of the place in this deep canyon, red rock with a little river running through it, there is that invitation into that presence. And it's a more informal weekend, going inward experience as well as celebration that we're having. So it is really facilitating that coming together and that great intimacy. We have a campground. We have people staying at the monastery. There's nearby hotels. So there's a great variety for people. There are even caravanning across the country as well as wine from the South Pacific to all just join in this celebration and this experience together. And I think it's just so important for us to support. It's a fun raising event to support also the work of the Foundation for Inner Peace going forward, who are the publishers of the course and do all those wonderful translations, which just keeps allowing all of us, the mind, to keep accessing this great material that Bill, Helen, Ken and Judy put such devotion into gathering into this original format. So yeah, maybe you could just talk a little about the work that they're doing. I could. Of course, I've known them from the beginning. And one evening we spent with Judy and her husband at the time, Bob Skutch, who is still an integral part of the Foundation. He runs all of the business of the Foundation and Judy and her current husband, Wit, do everything else. Wit is primarily in charge of the translations and Judy is the all-purpose godmother of A Course in Miracles, which I call her the matriarch of A Course in Miracles. But that first night she said, I know why you're here. I'm bequeathing Bill to you. So it was kind of like she was Bill's big sister and I was the little sister who came along to help with that. Judy and Wit and Bob's devotion to doing nothing but everything in support of the Course has been nothing short of spectacular. And it's great that we have Tamara, Morgan, Judith's daughter and then we have Bob Rosenthal and they're going to be taking FIP, the Foundation for Interpeace, forward with the same passion and devotion and commitment and we'll have both of them with us at Celebrating Interpeace and we're hoping to beam Judy and Wit in. So all of you can visit miracles-monestary.org and all the details are on there or you can go to the Celebrating Interpeace Facebook page and be sure to invite your friends. Great. Thank you so, so much Carol. Thank you. You're so welcome. I look forward to seeing you.


Thank you first of all for inviting me tonight here in the British Embassy, it's actually my first time here so I really enjoyed it here, it's a beautiful building. And I want to start by of course introducing myself, I'm Isis Anfeldt, I'm leading the news lab at Google for Germany, Switzerland and Austria. It's the past four years and I joined as it was mentioned before, I joined a month ago, so it's a whole new world for me as well. But for the past four years I was working at Twitter and being responsible for news and government relationships and the strategic relationship building there. And when I thought about the topic of tonight, making sense of big data, I actually realised that even before joining Google and before joining Twitter, I was working or I was trying to make sense of big data myself. That was 2009 and I was writing my master's thesis in political science and I was analysing the social signals during the 2009 Chancellor's debate. And I was focused on tweets at that time because Twitter and politics played a big role. And I think I analysed around 40,000 tweets manually, which took a long time. And now I know that it takes maybe a few seconds. So a lot has changed since 2009 and I want to talk today about how to make sense of big data from a really journalistic point of view. So a lot of things have changed in those years. But something that doesn't have changed is that the ticket doesn't work. No. Okay, so that hasn't changed. It's Google's mission and it's to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. And if we examine that mission in more detail, it's hard to think about a more important source than or a more important source of information than quality news content. And so we at Google News Lab and it's a really new team and new effort at Google. We at Google News Lab think about that in a way that we want to collaborate with journalists, academics and entrepreneurs, media entrepreneurs, to drive innovation in media. And so the ultimate goal of the News Lab is first of course to collaborate with those players, journalists, academics, media entrepreneurs, the new voices in media. And we do that by three or in three different ways. The first one is tools. We want to make sure that journalists and academics have the best tools at hands in order to make sense of big data or to really work or really enhance their storytelling. Second is programmes. We want to collaborate with the new voices in media and we work for example with the European Journalism Centre, Hex and Hackers and many other international, not only international but also European partners to create this level of innovation and to hopefully create new products or new ideas around storytelling. And the third part is of course data. Our goal is to provide journalists and academics and the new voices in media with the best of Google data and to help them create immersive, really interesting, really innovative stories. And tonight I'm going to focus of course on the data bit from a journalistic point of view. And I think the most successful or not successful but the most important data set that Google has is search. So just one number, 3 billion searches every day, over 100 billion searches every month. And that can be a really interesting source for journalists and academics. And because we have this new really collaborative approach at the news lab, at the news lab, we think that creating a more informed world, more informed society, journalists and technologists have to work together. We came up with a really broad curriculum at the moment but we listened to a lot of journalists. We visited many, many newsrooms over the past year and we figured out that not every journalist and not every academic has access to those tools and has access to Google Trends data for example. And so that's our biggest effort that we now trying to follow up on. Google Trends is the starting point for journalists and academics. And Google Trends or the data behind Google Trends has been in the past okay, I would say. So and also we talked to a lot of journalists, we talked, we spent a lot of time in newsrooms and journalists and editors told us every single time that the Trends data is not real time. I'm going to show you how it looked like. So that was Trends before this summer. You looked for, for example, Zepp Blutter and you got this graph. It's not really compelling and you can't really tell the story behind it or create a story behind it. And so the team, the Trends team at Google and within the Google News Lab thought a lot about it. How can, how can we create or make Google Trends a better data source for journalists and academics? And this is what Google Trends looks today. It's much more real time and it shows you the peaks of interest. So the peaks of people searching in that example for Zepp Blutter. And this is only a really basic search career that you do. And in the next couple of minutes I'm going to show you a couple of examples about how journalists in collaboration with us or without even our support made sense of Big Data, made sense of Google Data. And what we also incorporated in the Google Trends setup was Trending Stories. So Trending Stories feed that showed you and which is based on not only Google Search but also on other Google products like YouTube or others. And Trending Stories shows you in real time what is trending on Google. So it's the longest, I would say the longest feed of breaking news stories that can at least point you to a topic or to a story. Of course, the journalistic investigative work follows up on that. And it also shows doing, for example, breaking news events or moments like the US election that is coming up next year. It shows you different ways on how to use and how to analyze Google Data on what you can see on this election 2016 Google Searches site. So what Google Data can really tell you are different things. It can show you what people really care about because they search for different topics in real time and they're pretty honest about it. So and I'm going to start with a really simple data visualization based on Google Trends. Even though I'm not sure how many Halloween enthusiasts are still in the room but I'm still going to show it. So most of you know last weekend, it was Halloween, SET which is a new online site launched by Site Online recently, looked at Google Data and wanted to ask who's interested in Halloween in Germany and where should we look for party tips and how or who looked for party tips. It's a really basic question that lies behind this data visualization. But beautifully visualized in that way. And I didn't show that because I think it doesn't really fit into my whole run up of the slides but we also looked for costumes, dark costumes for Halloween. So even you can search for a dark costume at Halloween. Very simple and quite funny. But what you can also do with Google Trends data is looking at sentiment and looking how people react to certain events, breaking news stories that drive your market or drive another story that is following up. So BBC News in that example looked at the most searched for leadership candidates of Labour. And you can see on the map not only one instant and one snapshot of it but you can actually look at this data from seven days or 24 days or a month or over a year. So you can see the changes in interest in political candidates or in that case the Labour Party, Labour leadership candidates. And whenever there is a global event happening people either join the conversations on social media platforms like Twitter or any other platform or they go to Google and search for more information. So when you know what is happening, who's involved or what's the background story of that event that just happened. And I want to show you one example of Mashable and that example shows you the search interest after the massive earthquake in Nepal in April and how people search for the two words helping Nepal. And we helped Mashable in that way to visualize that data but Mashable on their side of course gave the context and gave the analysis and gave the background information for readers where they can help victims of the Nepal earthquake and how they can do that. So the important thing here is that Google data is interesting from a point of view that you can visualize it very easily but journalists, academics have to put it in context and analyze it and give a reader the perspective on what that beautiful animated visualization actually means. So I think at that stage where journalists and academics use Google data or data in general the most important thing is to really put it in context. Another example I wanted to show and it is visualization and it is interactive or it was interactive but we had some technical pickups here. So it's not moving at all but you can definitely look it up afterwards. But what we did there, we analyzed a year, a data set of over a year searches about climate change, so air pollution, global warming and other issues and ranked that based on three different approaches. So the first approach was we looked at the top questions being asked in the top 20 major cities. Second approach was we were looking at search interest in each city. So in Berlin, in Paris and Rome, what were people looking for on Google if there would look for global warming, air pollution, etc. And then we were ranking the cities by interest and so we got a really immersive picture of what were people thinking and looking for on Google if they were related to climate change issues and I would love to show you the moving of but it doesn't work. So Google trends data and data in general can't only tell you changes in behavior or changes in interest but it also can tell you how on which level curiosity is actually based. So this is again a very simple example and it's been done by the telegraph actually, looking at in which language do you actually Google. And they analyzed 135 languages in nine cities from 2004 to 2015 and you can see per city the change of the languages, which language was mostly used when people were searching on Google and a really simple idea behind that and so Google trends can show you how the world's most used languages actually change over time. Another example, which I found interesting, looking at Japanese as a language and you can see how the visualization is moving and New York still being on rank two in that case but it's changing over time. So that's the interesting part there that Google data can show you a wide range of data pieces and data sets but if you put it in context you actually see the changes of behavior or interest. And of course elections all around the world are from a data editor point of your data journalist or academic point of view, really interesting because you can analyze what people look for and search for. They search for candidates, they search for topics, they search for parties and they sometimes or this data set sometimes even gives you a trend line on what they will vote in the end. And I hope this visualization works but yes, okay, it works. So we looked at the Republican candidates and looked at the way it changes or the perception of the candidates changes. And I don't know if you see it, so red is Donald Trump and if you look now at another and the second visualization you will see that it's all red. So you see that there's much more interest in Donald Trump than there was before. Another really beautiful visualization, it's like a horse race but it's actually the GOP debate right after, well during the GOP debate. And this is also what Google data can provide. It's this real-time data and the interest and shows the interest in change, shows the change in interest in those candidates. And I think the way it is visualized is actually quite compelling and easy to understand even for a non-data expert or academic. So the question is always how do you get these data sets? One way and that's also the work of the Google Trends team. One way is to go to our open GitHub page and we provide journalists, academics and users with specific data sets that we give them access to. Another way is for example Google public data explorer. We can search for specific data sets, download them and maybe combine them with maps and create really beautiful visualizations. So in order to finish here, our goal and our mission is to collaborate with journalists, to collaborate with academics and to make sure that the data that Google provides from a journalistic point of view is being put in context, is being analyzed not by us but by journalists and academics. And I want to thank you for listening. And if you want to learn more about the News Lab, of course go to g.co.com or follow me on Twitter and approach me later. Thank you.


So when someone says education quality is bad could teachers aren't teaching you don't want to say okay teachers aren't teaching Don't want to say well. Why aren't they teaching? Mm-hmm? Oh because they're not being monitored Well, why are they not being monitored? Oh because the politicians don't care Well, why do the politicians not care because people don't care? Why do people not care in fact? Is it true that people not care? Maybe they do but they simply don't exercise their political rights Through the system. So you know you get a very different process for us It's really important that you spend time getting the diagnosis done because guess what if you don't do the diagnosis Write your solution which is step three for us the design will solve the wrong thing. It'll be the band-aid It won't be the correcting the internal trauma if that's what you're doing. So it won't be a sustainable solution Boom, what's up everyone welcome to simulation. I'm your host Alan Sakyan We are at the Harvard Kennedy School in the beautiful Cambridge in Massachusetts We are now going to be talking about economic development and empowerment. We have awesome quadrant joining us on the show Hello, hi. Thank you so much for coming on greatly appreciate it. It's a pleasure to be here Yeah, awesome's work. So interesting. He's the professor of international finance and development at Harvard Kennedy School He's the co-director of evidence for policy policy design e-pod and co-founder of the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan CERP Starting July 1st 2019. He will serve as a director of the Center for International Development CID at Harvard University All right, awesome. Let's start things off with the perspective of we're stewards of earth now What is your current take on the state of our world? That's not with the easy question, right? So I guess that the two ways to look at it one way is Kind of more the arc of history if you will and if you look at the arc of history In terms of particularly if you take the view of economic development, actually things are really good In terms of things like education levels maternal mortality health outcomes Kind of what you would think as the basic ingredients, you know Are people able to consume the basic stuff? What is poverty rates looking like like all these simple measures but powerful measures of economic development and empowerment actually things are The progress we've made in the last 50 to 100 years has been just spectacular. So in that sense, you know You know things are great That said obviously a lot of us don't feel that way And so it would be kind of naive to say well look at the data Clearly, we're much better than our forefathers were and so should all be really grateful and thankful about that In reality as you can see in the world There's a really concerning trend that people aren't unhappy, right? The kind of promise of globalization hasn't quite Given people what they expected there was resentment. There's polarization. There was increased xenophobia We aren't a great kumbaya place. We aren't a place where everyone is like thrilled with how they're doing everyone's opening up to others Increasingly if anything populism is on the rise. We don't want people to come in from outside We don't want to share what resources we have and a lot of people are very dissatisfied They're see their forefathers not in terms of I'm better than what my father had. I have a flat screen TV now I can eat comfortably now, but they see themselves relative to where they could be or where they think they could be in terms of ranks and that creates a lot of Unhappiness and so so I think if you ask me kind of what the pressing problem of our time is is to really Pay creed to that sentiment is to take it seriously to not dismiss it and try and figure out How is it that despite the economic progress we've made? These forces are still there. Are they real or are they also driven just by a greater global awareness? Are we just more sensitive to these things now? And even if it's all in our mind, it still is real, right? Emotions are real emotions are palatable beliefs are real aspirations are real expectations are real and Divergence from your expectations or aspirations is real because it leads to real behavior And some of that behavior is not the behavior we as humankind would aspire to we want to be a place where we provide Opportunities for others. We're not unhappy with other success. We want to share another success We want to help people who are worse off than us Become better and that's the world we aspire to and so in that sense I think that to me would be kind of a pressing problem now as an academic as a researcher As also a practitioner You know, I don't I don't get discouraged. It's not you know, yes These are these are challenging questions, but I do think increasingly we have the tools the information I mean, we live in an amazing era of you know, if you give me access to your phone I probably know more about your life than you do Scary as well, but it also says that there's a possibility that we have more We know now more about the human condition than we've ever done before now It's the onus is on us to use that in a way to improve our lives and when I say our I don't mean our personal lives But I mean our collective lives Yeah, the the state of the world being so So successful in so many ways of measurement and while simultaneously seeing so many things that are like Why do we have those errors happening and how do we fix them and one of the solutions that you name? There is this interdependence on one another and building systems that really uplift the collective meet basic physiological needs Make the self-actualization transcendence even more Commonplace so that we can reap the creative fruits of all people now Awesome now teach us about the journey that you went through in order to be able to get to this point That's a great question. I guess we all have you know We all have our personal journeys and I think a lot of us we do what we do partly because of that personal journey And it's very true for me as well. And so for my for me the personal journey was a just so you know, um, I Was born in England. My parents were doctors. They were originally from Pakistan. They were working in England I spent my childhood in Nigeria. My parents had a drive to be in the world They decided they were gonna work in Nigeria So I spent all my childhood actually amazing years in Nigeria northern Nigeria in a place called Kano As an adolescent I moved to Pakistan. So I did kind of my I would say my sort of Middle to high school education in Pakistan again sort of an amazing experience challenging times But an amazing experience and then I came as an undergrad to actually Cambridge Not Harvard a place down the road which Harvard makes fun of call MIT, but I love both places And I never left I did my PhD at Harvard and I joined the faculty here How did the transition happen from Pakistan to Cambridge? How did you find that? Yeah, it's a great So, you know, so the one thing that has worked for me And I'll say a couple of things and some might find contradicting so but I'll explain why they're not so One of the things I valued and I got from my parents very much and it's part of their journey as well It's part of my family's journey and my personal journey is Investing in human capital was always about that the way you'd kind of move to the next stage in life was you really invested in education and for me Kind of applying to the US. There were good places in Pakistan as well But nothing compared to the kind of places you could get here. And so it was all about Trying to do the best you can in that educational journey and sometimes at great personal cost I mean all my siblings I have two of the brothers all of us did that and you know My parents I sometimes feel you know, the best gift they could have given us was a very costly gift for them It was a gift of education and human capital, but it also meant a gift of mobility You know, my parents stayed back all their kids are Spread out in the world and you know, I give them a lot of credit to say that look I'm not gonna hold them back to me You know, there's an insecurity you want your kids to be with you But you know if you invest in people guess what happens they move And so for me it was very clear that human capital was very important The other two lessons I learned and again I credit lot my parents and my grandparents for this as well is kind of two realizations The first is even though hard work matters and education matters Most of what success is determined by is just luck. I was just lucky I was lucky to be born in a family Which was reasonably well off my parents were doctors my grandparents were professionals You know, so there was in a country where you know, the vast majority of people can barely at least in those times had barely enough food to survive I had the luxury of being able to invest in human capital now was just luck And also just their attitude right the friends I found in life who guided me the mentors I found a lot of these things you can expose look at them and say no no no, but there was some strategy here I really think maybe but mostly it was just I was there at the right place at the right time I was born in the right place and the reason I kind of mentioned this is I'm not saying hard work doesn't matter But the majority of what describes a variation in your outcomes is luck And then once you land in someplace, of course, you can have a positive trajectory based on your investment in human capital But because you realize it's luck then the third lesson is very obvious which again comes to me from my parents My parents were doctors and I remember as a child. I would really big grudge Like the patient always came first Right, we would be going out somewhere my dad's an ophthalmologist my mom's a gynecologist, you know and the emergency would come and it was never a question of Saying kids. Sorry, but I got to do this both my mom and my dad and I you know as a child You resent that but as you grow older you realize what message they were telling you that what matters is not your personal individual happiness but giving to others and So you know I vowed never to be a doctor because I was like man This is this takes over your life. Although in a very ironic way I've ended up being a different kind of doctor and equally as obsessed I would say in a good way about making that difference, but I think that that's really poignant because or Is really powerful once you recognize that most of life is luck then you feel like it's your responsibility To have whatever resources you have Because they're produced by luck like what you have is not just you know, you shouldn't feel ownership Even if you think you got it yourself through your hard work You should realize most of it was a gift given to you and if it's a gift given to you Then it's your responsibility to share that gift with others Whatever way you can and so that's that's really been a driving force in a lot of the work that I've done and a Lot of people that I'm impressed by Who who have lived that? We stand on the shoulders of Giants absolutely a hundred billion people that built civilization before us Absolutely, and also it makes sense now with understanding the journey that you went through a very Globalized journey with parents that were both putting others health First and that that makes sense now for me to better understand who you are and hopefully others as well Awesome now teach us teach us about These three evidence for policy design e-pods Center for Economic Research in Pakistan serp and the Center for International Development CID one Thing here that is a common thread that I've seen is that you are using Scientific evidence to show how to best develop economies and maximize people's potential. Absolutely. So, you know So I was trained as an economist And so for me, I'm not necessarily making a blanket statement of her I'm just describing how I found the world really a Way to contribute to the world using my own ability. So I was trained initially as an engineer So my approach the world as an undergrad I was, you know Did math computer science and economics, but you know, I very much had an engineering view of the world What I like about engineers is is In some sense, and I don't want to offend engineers who are rail engineers I became an economist is there's a simplicity in how they approach things which I think is beautiful and the simplicity is You start with a problem you face And you don't necessarily Theorize or philosophize about it endlessly you kind of her. Yeah, there's a very practicality to it There's a problem. I got to fix it Right and then you realize that you're fixed to the problem the machine you make to solve the problem isn't perfect It's never going to be perfect That's fine, but you still build the machine and then what you do is you kind of run the machine and you see how it does and As you operate the machine the kind of you figure out which parts are working what are not working and you keep adjusting and iterating What I find in policymaking or economics if you will is very similar to that approach You analyze a problem you then say, okay, I'm gonna try and design a solution to this problem I'm gonna diagnose first of all. I'm gonna figure out what's causing this problem I'm gonna try and design a machine a solution. It'll be a policy reform Now the role of evidence or analytics is critical in this because you can't while it's important to use human intuition Look, I'm a big believer in the power of the narrative the power of intuition the power of personal perspective But that's the initial driving force if you only rely on that you can lead to all sorts of bias decisions I think this is the right policy because I believe in it and that's dangerous So having that initial inspiration start you off But then marrying it with analytics, which to me is both theory and data is critical because that keeps that machine Running well it keeps that policy adjustment that you need to do based on real hard evidence And what often when I say hard evidence people think where you're an economist You're obviously gonna use like quantitative stuff only but increasingly and that is a weakness by the way I acknowledge that but increasingly we're able to use qualitative analysis as well So for me the framework is not about I'm running a regression or doing some really big data type of stuff It's just that I'm being analytical logical consistent in how I am Adapting iterating and improving my policy. I think that becomes fundamental the three organizations you mention all Sort of typify all exactly that approach Let me start with e-pod and SERP because they're both kind of sister organizations E-pod at a more global scale SERP at a country specific scale SERP really operates in Pakistan and you should think of e-pod and SERP having the same mission except SERP's view was look a country like Pakistan, it's huge 200 million people Still doesn't have as much evidence-based decision-making in policy. I mean the US is amazing in that sense of developed countries that how much Solid scholarship you have about any policy reform you could think of a lot of countries like Pakistan and other developing countries don't have that and so SERP for us was With a bunch of my colleagues Several faculty members who are kind of like me who are from Pakistan at if me at Princeton Ali Chima at Lums in Pakistan at naan Khan at LSE in London Tahir and Drabi at Pomona that we Bunch of people got together. We said we got to build something like this in Pakistan and that's been a fruit of love Where for the last 10 years or so? We've really pushed both in terms of creating evidence for policy training policymakers training future researchers Interfacing with decision-makers the whole gamut And you know, I'm thrilled that that organization has recently moved to stage 2 Where the founders people like us have stepped back a bit and new leadership is emerging to kind of scale that organization up E-pod is very similar E-pod was set up by Rooney Pande and Rima Hanna and myself kind of three academics who work in different parts of the world But the same idea we wanted to have you know, we're sitting at the Kennedy School So for me it was really important to say, you know evidence should be useful It should be applied we sit at the policy school And so we should really try and be at the same if you will not just design table But the problem discovery table as a policymaker We have amazing people who are students of ours some younger some older who are actually driving policy change in their countries We need to somehow have a partnership with them where the two of us are in the same table Working together towards this journey and that's just been spectacular I'm really grateful to have been part of that in different countries If you can look at E-pod's work and I welcome people to do so online You'll see kind of some of the examples of how these engagements work CID is is the parent of E-pod. We were all part of CID. I've now had the You know people think it's an honor But I think of it as a as a heavy responsibility burden perhaps is a harsh word to use I've I've reached I will be starting as director for CID In July and I'm taking over from a Ricardo Hausman who's done an amazing job as the as a leader for the last actually almost decade and a half And what I view kind of CID is very much that first thing I said to you Which is you know if I think of what one of the biggest assets that I'm sitting on right now The biggest gifts if you will is that I'm at Harvard and I don't mean that in an arrogant way I mean that in a way that Harvard is one of the unique places to me and whether it deserves it or not as a different question But which has amazing influence in the world In fact, it has amazing global convening power So it's not just Harvard has amazing set of faculty and students which it does There's just some of the most impressive people I've met here have been sort of In my in my years over here But what I find amazing is it is able to draw other talented people Into it even if they visit for a bit even if I get faculty from other universities that come in and work together And so so my vision for CID is really that we should leverage Global talent in the world to solve some of the most pressing problems of the world faces today It's a very simple vision, but I feel like it's a vision where we increasingly at Harvard are enablers We're doers as well. Some of the work we'll do ourselves But mostly we enable The best the most talented people in the world to connect with those who have the most needs and make that Work happen in the same framework in the same analytical evidence-driven style of work And that's what I'm most excited about Whether I'll succeed or not. We've already I think achieved somewhat in this but you know I'm I want to keep growing and so you should ask me in a few years how it's going, but that's that's the intent Okay, so I want to now learn from you about the the exact practices of policy design across the world that you have implemented and the scientifically analyze when you When your team gave a talk at Effective altruism global in Boston We were able to learn that there's a specific way to deliver insecticide treated nets For insects from specially mosquitoes in Africa and how it was crazy seeing over 15 years The amount of cases just decrease of malaria and I would love to Learn about deeper the specific yet cases and how you've been analyzing great So let me give you so the insectivite one is is probably Work done by JPL, which is great the poverty action lab at MIT and they're doing some wonderful work as well This let me answer this in in kind of both the micro of it and the macro of it The micro is kind of specific examples of projects Projects, I've been involved in and projects colleagues of mines have been involved in so I'll give you three examples Of the micro and then I want to kind of take it to the macro level to say what's what's the template over here? What's how do we get to scale this up so that it's not just us doing it? But many others can do it as well at the micro level I'll start first with my own work because I know it better So just one example of my work is I've been doing work in education now in in Pakistan for the last almost two decades And in that work we started very much with what I would call a Input-based approach like the approach was figure out specific things which are not working like you know Do schools lack good teachers or do schools lack good textbooks? Oh, and that's very much what the literature has done and then and this is the revolution the empirical revolution that People like Esther DeFloor and Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kramer and other spearheaded Which is kind of randomized control trials be very scientific about what you're doing Test these inputs see what happens when you randomly allocate these inputs to one group and not the other Just like you did in medical drug trials, and there's been a profound set of knowledge that has been created from that That's very much the approach that we started with but increasingly we have at least in my work I've changed slightly in the sense that rather than my concern with with inputs is that what if you don't get it right? Right what if you don't know in this environment? What's the right input and you could you could try different ones and navigate that way and that's one way to go The way we went is mostly maybe because of my own background, which is I I'm an industrial organization person as well And so so I I viewed schools and parents and teachers as very interesting actors And so one of the views I took is to say well if the actors are there and a lot of the times I saw in Pakistan the actors were there parents did want schooling for their kids kids did want to improve teachers as Long as they were rewarded appropriately did want to teach better Schools did want to provide good quality education as long as again They're rewarded and recognized for it And so a lot of the work that I've done now together with the jishnu das is at the World Bank and Tahir and the rabbi is at Pomona under the name of leaps learning and achievement in Pakistan schools is Understanding what are the frictions that prevent these actors from achieving success? So every one of our projects now has really resolved one or the other of these frictions It could be informational frictions. I as a parent don't know what schools are good or bad It could be financial frictions. I as a school can't get money to grow It could be labor market frictions. I as a school can't hire good teachers or reward them It could be educational intermediary frictions I as a school or as a parent can't buy educational support services like extra coaching or teacher training or e-learning and So like I use the word frictions exactly. It's exactly that and so that approach Touchwood has been working really well and now we're scaling it up to kind of do it at the economy wide level So I almost think create a virtual marketplace create a virtual mark just like it's Amazon meets eBay where you know parents and teachers and schools and financial providers and Education support service providers can all meet together and kind of exchange and so that's been one approach Let me mention briefly two other projects not of mine, but I think I Think these are amazing and just quick just to make sure it's clear So then these these key players will meet and talk about their best practices for decreasing friction and they'll apply exactly So they will because they we're enabling them to act basically And as long as this the nice thing about this approach is that as long as their preferences are in the right way They will achieve success test scores will go up school fees will drop education quality and improve and every one of our projects We see that happening right So I'm not saying look sometimes it is the case that preferences may not be progressive parents may not want to educate girls You know there are situations like that where this approach would need more nudging But by and large I've seen most actors do want the best for their kids parents do teachers do and so so I think as a first pass There's a lot of room to be made of improvement just by enabling actors I want to mention Rohini Pande and Rima Hanna's work, which is both as just spectacular Rohini has been doing some amazing work in India on environmental regulation and a very similar Spare to this work trying to think about and that's just one example try to think about how do I work with regulators and environmental agencies to have a Much more systematic design-based process through which they could improve regulation And her work has found huge impact just by doing simple design tweaks Well, not that simple, but you know reasonably feasible design tweaks finding amazing work similarly Rima Hanna with co-authors of hers at MIT Ben Olken and Abhijit Banerjee had done some Spectacular work a series of papers on improving targeting of subsidies in Indonesia So again, how do we use evidence and design to better target subsidies that a country may be giving its poor people? There's a whole bunch of papers. I'm not going to summarize them But all of this work and let me now go to the macro point Each of this kind of work typifies one specific style of working And we've kind of codified that in what we at Epod called speedy smart policy design and implementation And this is just one manifestation of this work I'm not necessarily saying well, this is the only way to go But it let me explain it to you because it'll highlight how we're able to be consistent and how Evidence analytics can be brought in So what we do in speedy is we kind of have the the following steps So first we want to identify the problem and this is non-trivial our times we focus on problems Which are not really the problems. We do kind of superficial problems. So To give you an example in education. My problem is enrollment Okay, so I might ask a minister of education or a secretary of education. Why is enrollment your problem? You might say well, it's because I want better jobs for my people or I want Better civicness and you say well wait a second Is your problem enrollment or is your problem getting the type of education which leads to personal improvement? And those are different problems because the first problem you just get kids in school The second problem you have to make sure that not only do you get kids in school But they're learning the kind of skills that would help them in life. Yes, so quality comes in not just enrollment Yes, so the first step for us is getting the problem right The second and by the way each of these steps is done in tandem with researchers and practitioners and people in the field It's not like any one of us has the right to decide that we all collectively Have that discussion. You're poking with the question. Why deeper why well that comes next. That's exactly right So once we know the problem then you want to do it what we would call in medicine a differential diagnosis Why is the problem occurring you keep asking why and you want to go beyond the kind of superficial diagnosis If you if you were a patient and you were bleeding and you walked into a doctor and you said hey doctor What's my problem? The doctor said well you're bleeding? You're gonna laugh exactly what you just did right you're gonna laugh and say well that's that's it And then the doctor says even worse and by the way here's some band-aids. I stopped the bleeding. Thank you so much Check please leave right a good doctor would say wait a second. Why are you bleeding? Is it an external injury is an internal hemorrhage if it's internal hemorrhage which organ is hemorrhaging? Why is it hemorrhaging so you want to do the same in policy? So when someone says education quality is bad cut teachers on teaching you don't want to say okay teachers aren't teaching You want to say well why aren't they teaching? Mm-hmm. Oh because they're not being monitored Well, why are they not being monitored?  Why do people not care? Mm-hmm. In fact, is it true that people not care? Maybe they do but they simply don't exercise their political rights through the system So you know you get a very different process for us It's really important that you spend time getting the diagnosis done because guess what? If you don't do the diagnosis right your solution which is step three for us the design will solve the wrong thing It'll be the band-aid. It won't be the correcting the internal trauma if that's what you're doing So it won't be a sustainable solution. It might work for a bit In fact, you do want to actually the joke and bleeding is the first thing you want to do is actually stop the bleeding That is correct, but you don't stop there, right? Especially if you have a lot of bleeding going on you don't want the patient to die from the superficial cause, right? So it could be that you solve that but there's a deeper analysis you guys go to the roots Exactly the root causes if you will that's step two for us step three is design Now you become the engineer. Now you say, what's the policy machine? What's the thing I need to make to solve this and to solve not the problem, but the deeper diagnosis you just did Step four is even if you can design give us a quick idea of what a design design would look like So so let me continue the education example. So Suppose I found out that the problem was that there's really political teachers are not present Teachers aren't present because there isn't bureaucratic pressure. There isn't bureaucratic pressure because there isn't political pressure But parents care Then you've said the deeper diagnosis is somehow parents are not being able to express their concern politically through the system So design would be and this is something I mentioned this kind of hypothetically But it's actually something I'm working with a political scientist Tiffany Simon who's a PhD student Used to work with me in Princeton. She and I are proposing this pilot project where in Pakistan We're going to go to households and see if we can get their preferences better politically express you So how do you get people to lobby for something if that's the deeper and I don't know if that's true or not But that the design we're going to do is basically effective ways we're going to examine for Parents in rural areas to express their unhappiness with their school in their village To either their local politician Or central politician or the local bureaucrat or the central bureaucrat. I mean, how do you how do they get engaged? Exactly. So so so what we're going to do is to say what is the right form of engagement? What is the right messaging? So it really is political activism But in a way that we examine different ways So for instance is the right thing for you to do is all get together and have a meeting with the Local bureaucrat and explain your concerns Is the right thing for you to do is go talk to the local media and basically say look at what's going on come see our school It's terrible. So it's almost like a you make the the politician the bureaucrat feel guilty Is it about taking your local? Politically active person and they go with you to the politician who says hey if you want votes next year You better fix this problem. That's how democracy works Which of these means would work and that's an example of two or three different ideas And the way we do it is and that brings me to the implement stage You know the devil really is in the details you can design something But I often think we underestimate how much implementation is challenging And so I gave you three or four examples What we would do is we would figure out with the local organization So in this case, we are going to work with local NGOs who know how to implement things and say in this context What is the right way to implement this idea? Okay, but we're still not done Even if you implement and even if you have the best design and even if you have the best diagnosis There's never be arrogant, right realize you could be wrong And so what we do is especially in a culture in of a different part of the planet So for us the last two stages we call test and refine Which is set up and this is where randomized controlled trial techniques or other techniques can come in like if I had four or five different ideas Try all of them in a scientific way that you can test their relative effectiveness. It's running the permutation It's running the permutations, right? It's when the engineer starts running the machine and gets lots of data to see how the machine is running In different scenarios And then the last step as you run the machine as you test this as you test these different policies new things will emerge Some things will succeed some will not and so the last step for us is refining It's a constant iteration Where you learn from this first iteration about what worked what didn't work You either improve or stop doing what worked you do more of and you get into more nuanced ways of getting it to work So you would take the different design that that you've that that are being implemented You would actually go and work with a couple different schools and a couple different methods Absolutely, and then you would analyze how successful those were and then continue the ones that were successful Maybe refine some of the ones that weren't to try and see if they that's exactly right And in fact my wish list for policy is that that's how policy should happen All policy should happen in this way now It's challenging because remember a politician or a leader doesn't want to say I don't exactly know what to do But I'll figure it out. That's not a great political slogan politicians and leaders say I know exactly what to do Vote for me and I'll get your problem solved. I think so there's a dichotomy there in my sense is look People want to hear that I get it people want us here So I think you can be honest While not necessarily getting into the detail of things you can say I will fix this But that doesn't mean sticking to a specific policy I will fix this by adapting Adopting a procedure or a process which is a self learning correcting iterative process So even if I start with my best guess, which I think may not be perfect I can improve every single iteration. I can get better and better and better So over time I am doing what I promise to you, which is I am fixing the problem Right, but I think we have a tendency of not only saying we're fixing the problem But also giving the solution at the same time and then we get stuck because if our solution isn't the right solution We have one or two choices admit that the solution was wrong and change it or just stick to it And most of us just stick to it and hope the next guy is going to come up and say well It was a perfect solution, but he screwed it up So I hope that we can get more nuanced in how we do policy And that's something I would like not only for us at CID, but at the Kennedy school to spread But also kind of teach amongst our students and practitioners Welcome this act of saying set up the right processes Become learning states. In fact, I'm I'm hoping to write a I'm beginning to write a book with a colleague of mine Adnan and a couple of other colleagues as well On how do we do evidence-based decision-making in the policy space? We're going to call it something like learning states, but the idea is to really Set up this this kind of learning iterative process. Yes. Yes, okay So now that you've laid out speedy for us and given us the idea of the evidence and by the way, I should say One other thing I wanted to mention two other groups Building state capabilities, which is at CID It does an amazing thing called PDIA problem-driven iterative adaptation Which is very similar to speedy. Yeah, same ideas and then growth lab Which is headed by Ricardo Hausman, which also has a very interesting diagnostic approach a more macro approach But basically says what's the binding constraints that economy faces and how do I alleviate those constraints? So so I do want to say that a lot of us Are overlapping a lot. We may use different terms and words But I think there's a general agreement that our approach is very analytical iterative self-learning correctives So that feature is not inherent to speedy. Yes. It's shared by all of us. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Cool. Cool And it totally makes sense running the permutations analyzing which ones are doing the best And continuing to go to different pockets of the world to continue testing these policy designs Now I want to know with the center for international development What what exactly is the kind of this future roadmap is taking this process that you've described and applying it across more places in the world And empowering people to get the process in and in applying it. Is that kind of I think that's it Yeah, I mean, it's very much taking it. So two things one the approach and the other the convening power That we are lucky enough to have over here. So and you know If I if I were to believe in my own process, I should admit that this approach is iterative as well There's lots of learning in this. So what I'm giving you is my initial thing But I want to be scientific in how I do policy as well, right? So I'm starting with what my best guess is my best guess is we have an amazing ability to bring people together We should use that gift And the the the responsibility we have is to make sure that matching is happening in the best possible way So we get the best possible talent, whether it's at Harvard or elsewhere We get the most needy people When I say needy people, I mean people dealing leaders or citizens dealing with really pressing problems in the world And we try and put the two together. Okay, so that's that convening aspect And then once you come together, how do we bring them together? What do we do when we come together? And that's very much this approach, which is And when I say the approach, I mean the meta version of the approach not the specific like everyone's going to be doing speedy I mean, I might personally love that to say, oh look speedy is happening everywhere But it's more the meta of the approach, which is people are willing to be in learning Environments people are willing to set up learning systems The specifics of how they do it is up to them We can give some ideas, but I think the idea that I can design something I can diagnose it properly. I can iterate. I may be wrong. I need to experiment This kind of thinking is critical, right? Failure is not a problem Like what we often think of failure as like a terrible terrible thing The terrible thing is is ignoring failure when it happens and not learning from it. That's terrible, right? And so just getting people comfortable with that kind of way of thinking. I think that's the meta So if I even succeed in a bit of this and you know, there'll be another leader at CID all I hope is that that journey I'm stepping on people's shoulders I would love it if in a few years I'm ready to step down and someone else is emerging who's taking this idea to its next level So then would it be fair to say that you really care a lot about identifying the Act the key actors within the areas of the world that you want to make help make policy design Permutations and and scientific analysis within you need to find those key actors put them together Especially from different socioeconomic statuses different backgrounds different Some in political office some in the education office that type of stuff. Okay. Okay, and actually Find a regard the onus on me if this thing works They come themselves right if you succeed in what they're doing people to recognize it And then people were like, where should I if I have a really pressing problem? And I want to work in this learning iterative way Where do I go and they'd be like, hey the CID at the Kennedy school? I know they've done it and so You know, they start approaching us and then all you need to do is basically just help match them Right, you don't need to go out and kind of the best sort of Signal that you're working is whether others want to do what you're doing Both in terms of joining you and even replicating what you're doing Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. Great. That that does seem like a really strong way You build out the process season and people reach out and you can pair people together and make the change This is awesome. I'm so excited for center for international developments To to continue making the impact and also to for us as a simulation to be able to continue coming and talking to the different Leaders you mentioned so many of them throughout the conversation for us to be able to sit down and dive deep into what's happening in India Or Indonesia and Africa. They're just amazing people Yeah, let's get deeper into the exact nuance of the gap of what how it's actually happening as well Okay, just two quick questions on the way out that we like asking our guests on our show Do you think we are in a simulation? Is this a simulation? I don't know. I mean, there's a deep question of is life a simulation that we live in I used to have a teacher who was teach something called phenomenology Which is everything we experience is an illusion And there may be multiple illusions that you're experiencing But for me personally, no, I I think this is very real I think everything we say everything we and you and I have talked about from my perspective is very real And it's something I want to commit to acting on and I hope You do and I have your audience does and so but yes in some grand scheme of things It could be an elaborate simulation Yeah, because at the very end of taking action on all of these pressing challenges You at the very end get to see how many levels you gained how much experience you gained Yeah, so you have to take these challenges on and build up the skills Yeah, okay, and the very last question we like asking is what is the most beautiful thing in the world? um to me I guess for me the most beautiful thing is when I see someone deploying their talent, whatever that may be For doing something which goes beyond themselves Yeah, that's profound I like that a lot. Yeah And that's in many ways what the processes that you're implementing do enables people to self actualize and then self transcend as well And what I like about that is it doesn't matter who you are where you are how rich you are how poor you are How talented you are I fundamentally believe each one of us has some beautiful thing inside them Which they can give Maybe just a smile, you know So yeah different colors on color wheel some smiles some race kids some build the billion-dollar Organizations as long as you're going beyond yourself going beyond the self. I love it awesome Thank you so much for coming on this show and sitting down with us teaching us about all of this Thank you. Hopefully everyone that watched. Thank you so much. We greatly appreciate it Please check out the links below We'll have all of the links evidence for policy design center for economic research in pakistan center for international development And go and talk to more people about these types of processes of economic development around the world to talk to your friends your family Online on social media with your co-workers. Let's get more people researching this and effectively being able to implement economic development strategies and also support the artists Entrepreneurs and organizations around the world that you believe in help them scale simulations links are below help us out as well and Go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world. Thank you so much for tuning in and we will see you soon Thank you. Peace That's it awesome. Thank you so much really appreciate


Is there a team you can let me adopt for the sweet ride? You know, Texas had an in season coaching change and Rodney Terry, the interim head coach, has taken Texas to incredible heights. Texas had only won one big 12 tournament title prior to the season. Rodney Terry won the big 12 tournament title and Rodney Terry beat Kansas twice in the final week of the regular season. Texas is back in the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2008 in terms of the second weekend. So you have somebody who is not the permanent head coach of this program, but is taking this program to brand new heights.