Welcome to economics and beyond. I'm Rob Johnson president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with Dr. Brian Barnier who is a guest professor at the Collins Hall School of the City University in New York and he's the head of analytics at Value Bridge Advisors. Brian thanks for joining me. Hey, delighted to be here. I know it's doing such great things in the world and teaching new economic thinking so looking forward to the conversation. Yeah, I always enjoy talking to people from Detroit anyway so but we'll get into the relationship between Ernie Harwell and economics and various other things before we know it. Anyway, we're talking here on the 13th of May 2020. The pandemic is all around us. There seems to have been a very, very profound unmasking. People sensed a lot of unsustainability particularly as it pertained to social unsustainability inequality and they were very concerned about climate and the trajectory we were on but the pandemic brings everything forward and like I said it kind of unmasks the false security or false specifications of many of the ways we've approached the structure and the analysis of society. You've done some fantastic and innovative work in a lot of realms and particularly want to talk with you about things related to financial bubbles and psychology and so forth as we go on but how do you see the world and how it's changed in light of the pandemic's arrival and the call to action that it entails? Yeah, I try to think I'm just sort of following the footsteps of the greats of the past. When you look at the history of economics people were actually trying to explain things. Whether it was Smith trying to explain the transition out of mercantilism or Irving Fisher using mechanical diagrams or more recently Bill Powell with his water machine to try to model the flows of the economy. That's sort of the world that I live in. You've already said that we're kids from Detroit. We grew up on our driveways, fixing cars and stuff like that and so how does it work? Avoiding abstractions, avoiding going things in the clouds and far away and how it works. That's why I'm very intense in data and at the Colm Powell School of Cooney, a teacher graduate seminar on data analytics in financial economics and drill down into stuff because when you get to the data, when you get to the mechanics and all of a sudden you realize it's not so clean, it's messy and you've got to be interdisciplinary. You can't fix your car if all you're doing is saying I turn wrenches and I use no screwdrivers. That's not going to get you very far. You need to have a full toolkit. You need to be robust and this gives you a sense of context and that's important because it gets economics out of a bunch of theoretical specialists to practical systematizers and dot connectors and that's why I was thrilled to have the folks from your team come into my class and share what the Young Scholars Initiative is doing to give them that sense of context and then when they've got that context, now they've got a sense of causality that they can use whether it's for economics or when we're talking in financial markets, trading bubbles, asset management, whatever it is but you need that piece in order to avoid these surprises so it comes back to data and it comes back to these these core pieces. Well, Ryan, in the nature of your work which has been very disciplined about searching for data and also in which you might call interpretation of data for what it is. I guess what is shown by the pandemic is that we've been off course but there's a process of being off course. Why did people derive so much false confidence in an era where you have as you call it global tech trade and transformation and everybody knows things are in transition. Everybody's anxious, whether you call it diseases or despair or you know fear of transformation, fear of transition. We were not in a period of structural stability and yet acting like we were. Why do people do that? Well, to your point earlier, Rob, I mean that's a great question and it brings in psychology. So, you know, those of us that have been in the risk management strates in financial markets or business, anyplace else, you realize that people's brains are sort of blind. Now, I'm no psychologist but of course I love talking to them and getting educated by them and they talk about a notion of structural blindness and cognitive bias. And structural blindness is when we can't see what's around us because something about our structures are preventing it. It's the way we organize data. It's the data sources we pull. Sometimes it's the software we use. Sometimes it's the organizational silos of companies that are there. The silo effect is heavily discussed in this space and so we don't even see what's moving around us. Then the other piece is cognitive bias where we see the information but we don't perceive it correctly because we are proceeding forward with some kind of lens that causes us to not see what's going on. And there's a lot of literature around those two and PhDs and tenure has been gained by futzing with those terms and organizing pieces underneath it. But here in economics what happens or the markets more broadly is that when you are cutting out the types of data you use, for example using only the headline releases from the Bureau of Economic Analysis or the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Fed's financial accounts and you don't look at the wealth of data that our statistical agencies publish for us. It gets down to state and local data that breaks things out by product types. That's a structural error and then we move over to how do we process that error and there if we are looking at it through the lens of theory that hasn't existed since say the 60s or the 70s which is the case for many things then that causes to misinterpret what we're seeing. You know the notion of inflation is one of those where there's a theoretical assumption that inflation is mostly caused famously by too much money chasing too few goods. But I go to conferences just like you and I ask the question show me a filter that demonstrates that in our world of today where are the mechanics that show me that aggregate average price level change is mostly due to monetary factors being interest rates and money supply and more recently large-scale asset purchases popularly called QE. It's really difficult to find. I think if some of it's there I can point to certain amounts of it around like foreign exchange rates but I've come up with nobody that's given me a model or a filter as we say in econ speak to parse that out and if there's somebody listening to this I'd love to get an email from you showing me your model that parses out all the causes for the price change in every price published by the BLS or even the more summary set published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Well I've seen from our earlier conversations and some of the papers you shared with me also a lot of what you might call very severe criticism of Japan that did not bear out and you heighten my awareness as their economy on the supply side was under profound transformation and I was at the World Economic Forum and I was in a meeting towards the end where Corona started talking about your toolkit for macro the notion of a stable Phillips could these just are not the experience we're having and it seems now more and more of the world could benefit from what you might call the example of his perception or teachings but I but I still find it mysterious why people want to cling to these frameworks that how would I say don't explain the evidence they explain what you want to believe not what's happening it is just absolutely stunning Rob you're absolutely right I mean I have my students graph out the Phillips curve and I have them take you know first of all annual data and plot out the curve you know because you only have one point per year and if you plot it through about 1971 it looks okay but as soon as you then switch to quarterly data and you take it beyond then it completely blows up and all these attempts to inflation adjust or you know ex-flation expectations adjust or whatever it doesn't doesn't come together now your point on Japan is very you know contemporary because it seems like you can't go more than a couple days where somebody's talking about the Japanification the Japanification the sky is falling and the issue with Japan is nothing whatsoever to do in terms of the price level with with lower demand per shopper the situation that you've got in Japan when you actually look back the numbers and they're equivalent of the Bureau of Economic Analysis is the Economic and Social Research Institute when you pull the numbers apart what you find out are several things first of all that their demand for durables has actually been very good on a per shopper basis you know per capital basis per population basis and in many cases over the last couple of decades has been stronger than the U.S. so durables isn't a problem then we look at non-durables and non-durables has been stagnant but on a whole but on per person basis it's hanging in there and then we look at services and there the services trends is growing somewhat and then we sort take that apart and we look at what are the demographics and I have to give kudos to a research at U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that pointed me to a data set and when you actually break down the things that are falling off a lot of it is like traditional Japanese clothing baby clothing it is stuff like this it's it's a reflection of the demographics that's happening there and then you look at energy well there's a big energy conservation thing going on at Japan and so that's pulling it down and so you don't see this notion of falling demand and falling prices if anything you see durables especially because it's the most tangible thing it doesn't have the measurement areas of services you see that expanding out very nicely and prices are falling and as any shopper today in the midst of covid going to a casco or bj's or walmart or whatever it is prices fall shoppers buy more and there's no problem with that but there's this theoretical stuff the long run aggregate supply curve the L-RAS which everybody thinks is upward sloping that is on a where the vertical axis is price in the horizontal is quantity to say that if price is falling then you must have a collapse in in your quantity but go pull the data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis go pull the data from the Economic and Social Research Institute that's just not the case and yet policies being made as though that is the case they've got an issue of demographics absolutely that's going on over there population first and then the specifics of the demographics second they've got a fear factor that's going on which has been stoked by a lot of policy statements so that makes people be more apprehensive and then third they piled up a mountain of debt and they've been trying to pay down that debt so it's smart not to spend money and pay down debt when you've got an aging population so that's a very rational explanation for and then lastly there's some other measurement issues especially around housing and healthcare and higher education where the way the index is constructed varies significantly between countries so you can't compare these things very easily well at the center of this macroeconomic management and interpretation or false interpretation of data set an institution called a central bank and there are many many facets you know we went through a whole era of central bank independence my dear late friend William Grider wrote the book Secrets of the Temple and a book which cost a little bit of heartburn for Paul Volcker but late in his life he told me might be the best darn book ever written about central banks but these institutions which are said to be most helpful to society when they're quote independent they're said to be most valuable because they have high quality very well educated staff that is independent of a political process it feels like what they are is changing and what they can do is subject to that humility of this unstable structural system that how would I say can't be easily bracketed and put in a put in a file so the recipe book is a little out of balance historically central banks were founded for war finance somewhat later the central bank became important in making liquidity services particularly lender last resort services related to crop cycles and periods of financial instability and finally was the macro stabilization where in the modern term independence meant the central bank didn't need to goose the economy for the incumbent politicians just before an election but when i look at i look at this world now and you've said it to me in many ways central banks are fiscal agents in many ways by controlling very very large elements of what i'll call contingent fiscal capacity they may be a stabilizing force in the middle of a crisis when you're going over the waterfall and that's helpful but they may be also be what you might call the symphony conductor of the mother of all moral hazards and building bubbles and building aggressive reckless behavior among those who feel like they have political access to a one-sided bet how do you how do you see central banks today you know we talked implicitly about the macro instability so that their framework is a bit ajar but i i sense a deeper hostility now particularly after 2009 and beyond towards central banks as though they are what you might part the the fulcrum of a crony capitalism yeah i mean as they change their missions all they open themselves up to a variety of issues so let's just take as a departure the point that you mentioned before when you're so nicely going through the history so when you had this view that the philips curve was operating and the l rassus operating and all this other stuff that all right they had a set of policy objectives in the u.s the federal reserve website list three right you know interest rates stable inflation and unemployment or employment other countries they got different objectives but generally something around price level what happens is that when money supply is not a big driver and interest rates are not a big driver of of aggregate average price level right inflation is a theoretical concept deposits most of that generalized or average is coming from monetary factors when that doesn't happen right because durables have been falling since about 1995 in the u.s right non-durables have been flat for the last decade prices or for services have been going up but when you tear those apart what are you seeing it's like housing right which is controlled by a lot of government policy or the central bank's purchases of mortgage asset bass securities um you've got health care which is Janet Yellen pointed out in her october 27 speech to uh the national association of the economist you know that's a big factor of play and if the obama care thing hadn't worked the price level had gone up and that would have triggered them to be more aggressive in their monetary policy and then there's other things like you know higher education and stuff but as governor carney says those are policy inflation things right nothing to do with the central bank so the notion that the two big central bank lovers or three in the age of lsaps large-scale asset purchases can affect price level is sort of out the window and the notion that it can affect the unemployment rate uh unless you're into these liquidity issues as you just mentioned we haven't seen a lot of that over the last couple of decades so those big pieces are gone what does that leave a central bank as being well it's sort of a back to the future notion of liquidity as a service as you just mentioned or as you also mentioned being a fiscal agent for treasuries and of course remember when you go read the essays where they take it country by country a lot of those central banks are not as independent as one would think they are and then that comes into the issue of they're searching for a mission right it's like you're a hammer in search of a nail we got to do something right and they do have the ability to act fast faster than a deliberative elective legislative body so they do have the capability to act fast to walk into an fomc meaning is a bunch of non-elected people and walk out with a decision that financial markets are paused for but then what can they do with that right because you throw out all that cash and where does that cash go and this opens a discussion that you've had with some you know of your colleagues and on it for a while about is the central bank have any role in redistributive effects or not they're using blood instruments so while they're not specifically social or regulatory policy other than when they're working on the bank regulation side they are blunt instruments and so therefore they will affect people in different ways there will be discontinuities there will be distortions there will be inequities because of how these things hit people and that's the fact of life and the issue is in how do you manage that yeah well i remember uh during the 2008-09 crisis a lot of people as their economy went into recession felt like their municipalities had to balance their budget unless somebody bought issues of municipal bonds so it would allow their police departments and their schools and their local infrastructure to be invigorated and sustained at the same time while the fed didn't choose to buy those things they did buy a lot of the complex mortgage derivatives off of the balance sheets of many financial institutions and they could say and there is a logic to it that what they were doing was uh fortifying the financial system so that it didn't through negative externalities take down the real economy with it but just at face value it felt to people like the fed was picking winners and the winners were not the population they were the people who had made the mess and i think i remember Paul Volcker in the last years of his life was very very concerned about the integrity of central banking as he set up his Volcker alliance and i think i remember there was a group of 30 report which he had a lot of heartburn over because the authors were advocating for fortifying the credibility of bailouts ex ante by giving uh extra powers to the central bank and this felt like uh how would i say to some people that the fed goes in and they intervene when things are in distress and they actually make money by buying the distress alleviating it and then putting things back in the market later others said well you won that round but what happens when you lose and why should you have the right to use that fiscal capacity that might be devoted to paying municipal workers pensions like in the city of Detroit new infrastructure tuition a green new deal so the the kind of mythology of scarcity was blown open by the snapping fingers and two weeks later a tarp bill of over 700 billion dollars was materialized after the Lehman crisis and now in this pandemic crisis you have the snap of the fingers and trillions of dollars are being passed around by the central bank with the cooperation of the treasury department i i wonder how long we can continue like this before which you might call the eruption of distrust starts to overwhelm our politics yeah and that's a great question and um since you tossed out Detroit i'll have to you know bite at the head first but i mean what you've really got here is the ability of these funds we don't fear inflation you know monetary inflation intangible products goods and services that you know is out the window maybe it's going to find a way to come back but you know we haven't seen it in you know decades and the the causes we look for aren't there either so what can it do it can bubble asset prices so i did a piece several years ago at the end of the LSAPs and it also ran on yahoo getting getting hundreds of thousands of hits but it was basically with some you know not too difficult visual calculus to say that 93 percent of the gains in the market you know over the time of LSAPs were from LSAPs and that everything else was just the end and when you talk about the pension funds this created an enormous difficulty for people trying to pay pensions for you know municipal workers you know teachers for the whole state my mom's a retired teacher in michigan because a lot of them using their asset allocation models wrongly under and risk management models wrongly understood risk and so they entirely missed out on the rise of the public equities markets during that period and that then drives back to these issues about where we get money to pay people and this drives back into the issue of of the moral hazard that you mentioned in terms of how we pick in winners and losers in this of course the desire is not to pick winners and losers the desire is to say let's freeze everything and then you know try to basically reset to where we were and then let things play out as they naturally would but this stuff you know is trillions of dollars in activity and it's going some place other than than others so how does that come out and it screws things up for institutional investors because pension funds endowments trusts family offices that kind of thing because they can't just sit back and say we're going to look at market risk they're now tied to real business operating risk and that's something they haven't done in a long long time really since the 1970s are there about certainly since the late 1980s with the beginning of the derivatives they just looked at market risk and it was really you know trading spread risk like when you were in the hedge fund and fees that was making things work out for asset managers and then passing stuff on and the bottom piece that just chugged along because of the expanding credit bubble whether it was consumer credit cards home mortgages LSAPs whatever that's what was driving this big underlying gain in asset prices but that of course worked out for some people better than others and today because people fundamentally don't understand how the economics works that's where they get thrown off when it comes time to make risk management and asset allocation decisions in things like the pension fund for Detroit and many others and that's where people end up getting hurt because we have so many disconnects in the economy and that's added to by these trust issues you just mentioned because now you're trading based on a jury expectation about what the next FMMC pronouncement will be or ECB or whatever it is instead of how are companies producing widgets what's happening at the Ford Rouge plant or any place else that's growing the economy well there's a writer named Ian Welsh who has a very very interesting website and he about a week ago wrote an article on how he thinks neoliberalism is destroyed capitalism and he talked about how this which my call ability to apply broadly the anesthetic that we might attribute to central bank injections of liquidity services has kind of devastated the economy and he's talking about how the stock markets are doing pretty well the big banks are doing pretty well but in the midst of it all about 40% of Americans small businesses are threatened with closing permanently so the stock markets are doing fine but the small businesses aren't I think how would I say I don't know that people will attribute that so much to the central bank as a conduit but to the system and the the priorities of the bailout that we've seen how do you how do you react to that notion that Welsh suggests may be upon us yeah so it's certainly a valid point I peel it back a layer because I'm a data guy and the stock market you know is you know 10% 15% off of all time highs depending on what you're looking at but when you look at these broad indices we got a peel them back right so you've got you know five companies that are 20% of the market cap 21 last I think I checked of the S&P 500 right so they're having this huge outside outsized impact and they're all tech companies so and you've got you know Uber going after buying Grubhub now you know M&A and alive and well in that space so first of all it's an issue of aggregating rather than looking at the the details but then because you've got a lot of companies that are ailing in the S&P 500 as well but then second of all you look at where is the money coming from to fund this stuff the money has got to come from somewhere and that's back to this issue that happened during LSAPs the money is coming out of the central bank whether directly or as a fiscal agency and as making itself available in the markets and that finds some place to go so it's not to dare ourselves too much but you know Detective Colombo and follow the money and if you follow the money you can and you can use the federal financial accounts for this or if you're an investor and you've got access to a bit of database you can do that too but you can follow the money through and find out where it's going from coming out of the central bank coming we've got a lot of money coming in from overseas that you know varies but this is flowing into the US private or public equity markets and allowing that to happen so that's what the mechanics are of how does that work you've got this other issue that then is one of the mechanics of these small businesses that aren't getting money what are the industries they're engaged in what are what's shuttered because they're a restaurant or a service business what's shut down because of the supply chain that's in and then some of these are like going great guns because they are in areas of high demand and and then you've got those when you walk through the whole supply chain piece you know that they have dependencies on overseas that was shut off on them or you're in the meat industry that's had troubles so we've got a whole bunch of stories there and this gets back to your earlier point you can't look at the blood instrument of the central bank you've got to get more granular with figuring out what's going on and where you've got these disruptions going on in the economy and the stuff that's coming out so far is having a very difficult time targeting does that make sense yep oh yeah now I guess I guess see the question I'd ask is if you're a small business or if you're an emerging market country how would you advise them on a survival and resilience strategy in light of what you see before you yeah you know again very insightful uh and it'll take those in two pieces so first let's look at the the small businesses if we go back to being mechanics with wrenches in detroit how do these things work the good news is a lot of these small businesses have a good sense of how things work they're not like you know stratospheric CEOs on top of huge companies that barely understand how the things are made in their companies these people are much closer to stuff when you look back into the supply chain and for them it's an exercise of will what I need to make and will where I need to sell it be there and how far back will that that come some businesses were teetering and this goes back to sort of moral hazard point they may never come back because they had uncertain futures anyway others like for example we read a lot in the news recently about these businesses that are you know attracting people because they're in low density areas and they're marketing like crazy to get people to go do summer tourism who are all penned and cooped up under lockdown you know they're going to do well or people that are doing you know various kinds of things in the restauranting industry you know all the stuff you see in the newspaper you've got opportunities there the thing that's really a killer in the small business space is the short-term carry financing and then the other pieces people that are trying to pivot and that are really struggling to pivot because they don't know how to connect with buyers of what they see is are these scarce products and there's a lot of inefficiency in the market right now and that's where I look at some things that chambers of commerce or industry associations and others are doing say for example a caller was on recently that was trying to connect women farmers that normally fed the hospitality industry with truckers and the grocery supply chain to get them connected and get their their food into the grocery store so it is not you know these tragic pictures we see on tv of you know vegetables rotting and eggs and milk being broken and destroyed and everything else so those kinds of things have caused you know great amount of of damage that was completely unnecessary but it's in an area where again people don't understand how it works anymore the details so all the big program planners had no clue how these pieces work so those two pieces are the sort of the tragedy of the small business that I'm most focused on and when I reach out and talk with those folks is where I'm at from you know my world of data and mechanics does that make sense yeah well one of the features that people are talking about in our segment of the INET Commission on Global Economic Transformation that Joe Stiglitz and Danny Roderick co-chair pertains to the notion of what you might call the the structure of globalization what is the pandemic going to do to the notion of a global supply chain so this is one of those really great questions where in some cases you could say oh yeah there's me all this but people that are making that statement are not realizing what's already happening in the global supply chain for other reasons good and bad right you've got the ascendancy of India and Vietnam and that are trying to pull stuff away from China already going back years you can see it in the data and their activities Prime Minister Modi with his made in indian initiative and his incentives Japan incenting people in their bailout packages to help Japanese companies take china-based stuff and move it to some other country all these pieces are out there and that are already happening previously and now they've been accelerated by this another big trend that's been out there for years and this goes to your earlier question on emerging markets is that the traditional path and development of economics for a country has been starting the extractive industries agriculture and mining then build up a little bit like do more processing for your mines more food processing before you ship it off and then let's get into manufacturing climb up the manufacturing scale ever more sophisticated manufacturing that demands higher skill workers and you make tons of middle-aged wages and tons of exports and the world will be a good thing and reduce your dependency on imports the problem is that's been blown up by this global tech and trade transformation really by automation and it's been going on for centuries i mean real hat tip of book is Sir Harold Evans they made America two centuries of innovation from the steam engine to the search engine that's just about the US but now that's gravitating around the rest of the world as well and so the traditional path out of difficulty has been removed and the big you know sort of macro type economic programs to get them out of this that are focused on you know multipliers and money and rescue packages and all this they're not addressing these decades of underlying change and saying how do we take people in those countries who have domain knowledge about how to get something done how do we marry them up with people with tech skills better how do we give them the tech skills so that they can then improve those environments and then grow i mean a real poster child these days for example is Armenia where i've been several times and you've got the opportunity to grow in some of these spaces so that's this opportunity that people are overlooking because they're thinking it's just covid or it's just trade wars and not understanding there's decades of stuff that's been going on that is first of all been killing the path economic growth and second of all all these other country activities each trying to figure out how they can be a sourcing base and grow their exports and do it in a way where the automation that they're achieving to do it does not kill off their own jobs opportunity because every time some country prime minister gives a speech and says we're going to have more robots in the next country that means we've got fewer ways to employ people so these are these big issues that need to be focused on and there's good ways to do it but they're being overlooked as we're just sort of glossing over this and in the theory of economics or you know the geopolitical response does that help yeah well let's focus on what I'll call advice to the young scholars you'd mentioned they had come and visited you at the Colin Powell school and that they're almost 12,000 strong now with them in mind what are you what guidance would you give them I think this opportunity a lot of the what you might call stale traditions or paradigms that were misleading have been brought back into question I guess I'm asking about career development I run the organization what kind of courses lectures processes should be put in place to invigorate those young scholars and set them off on a course towards a healthy leadership and a reinvigoration of trust and faith in the integrity of and the value of expertise yeah I mean that's awesome and you're doing so much it's great already Rob it's all I can do is sort of emphasize put frosting on the cake I mean my way of thinking this is sort of back to the future as I said earlier because remembering that early economists were appreciative and trying to figure out how do things actually work I mean they were in factories they were looking at transportation looking at ships and stuff like this and then you also understand the context this came out of you know with mercantilism and the wars at ravaged Europe there's a great sensitivity to reading sort of the they are our geopolitical analysts of the past right Plutarch and Thucydides Plutarch's lives and Thucydides histories from the eastern signs Sun Wu or Sun Tzu as it's preferred and then you know just clear thinking it's new economic thinking we'll put a capital T in both letters around thinking read your Aristotle read epistemology understand how to put an argument together and what evidence is so that you know what you believe and why you you believe it and and that from your point about courses rather than blowing off all those cognates you know take you know cognates that help you build this I mean I had some in political science I did survey research at Michigan which is awesome right because that's where the Michigan survey of inflation expectations comes out of but there's other stuff right and that stuff is that survey is not stratified to this day the way you would if you were marketing orange juice and you know doing representative samples for you know market research or for politics and so we don't appreciate the the gradations when we look at at that survey so that helps I took my sciences and and astrophysics and it was great right because they were talking about how to understand and filter out data in astronomical observations you know way outside of our solar system and way in the galaxy looking at distant objects a lot of that you can bring it to economics so and then of course business right so where I teach the Coal and Powell School we've got an integrated economics and business department and many other schools do too I came out of that the University of Michigan starting in liberal arts and going into the Ross Business School you have to take operations management you've got to take financial management you've got to take financial markets you've got to take organizational behavior right so all these things that would otherwise be a shock to economists you get as part of your required core courses before you then go on and do your specialty so that's an opportunity for the scholars all over the world and then there's this explosion of data analytics but I emphasize in my class decision science decision science was really formalized in the some of the 1930s here in New York by a guy by the name of Walter Shwart at Bell Labs and looking at how systems work and all the system thinking stuff and cause and effect and trying to say can we connect a telephone call right became very important details to make work and then one of his great students and disciples was the famed Edward stemming who took systems and then who rebirthed Japan and who did so much to drive down their costs of their export industries and improve innovation and quality and and I guess I'm hung up on the back to the future movie today but when Marty McFly tells the shows the camcorder to Doc Brown he says how could it be from Japan because he's in 1955 and Marty McFly and speaking in 84 says well all the best stuff comes from Japan right and even you know the James Bond movies in the 60s right you know one of them showcased Japan and all the high tech stuff that was coming out of it that was all of this playing out and so the scholars need this kind of sense of history and where to put things in and they need hard data and then that allows you to get to these issues like understanding why behavioral yeah of course and when people look at externalities yeah of course how could you not do that when people look at utility functions in a very antiseptic kind of isolated way of course you need to understand the behavioral issues of all the things that people are thinking and it's not just some kind of you know numerical trade-off and then you bring in the interactions be human beings and it's now you're in a market right people picking over different oranges are buying different things but that's the power of what I see and you know I encourage listeners if they haven't seen your YSI videos to go on your website and look at them and see the energy that's coming out through them so it's all of that and and more to help people think differently one of the areas that you and I've discussed in relation to W. Edward stemming is the notion of how education is structured in America and Andrea Gabor who wrote the book The Man Who Discovered Quality and how he brought how Deming brought the quality revolution to America and then to Japan was recently applied to people by people in Texas to the governance and invigoration of a local public school system and we'd been used to large foundations you know the Walton family Gates Foundation Mark Zuckerberg and others who were well meaning trying to effect change in education in a way that would put people on a better trajectory but the people who adopted Deming instead of a top-down kind of vision from on high pledged faith in the next phase in that down in the grit down in the texture of the process and to let those people be at the the core of that innovation and according to Andrea Gabor in her recent book After the Education Wars America should have a very very deep look at the lessons of this positive experience that has arisen in Texas with the help of the insights of Deming and it's my it's my hope that people looking at central banks like you will be brought into central banks because they're a bit untethered right now they're a little out over their skis and you can help them rather than embarrass them and i know that's your your intent and people like Andrea Gabor can help people understand that these kind of dehumanized mechanical approaches to analysis of things like education systems are are full of danger of being false certain and misleading so when you tell me Aristotle or Thucydides or Plutarch or Sun Tzu or Sherward or Deming or Andrea Gabor i just i feel like it's it reminds me of the song by Natalie Merchant called These Are Days These Are Days You'll Remember but she gets into the middle of it she says see the signs and know their meaning and the signs we can see now are that our frameworks have been found lacking in yet in our midst our examples in beacons like yourself for moving things forward and being a better service to society and being of service to reinvigorating the faith and the trust and expertise Ryan thanks for being with me today this has been a delightful discussion absolutely delighted to be here and i just wish you all the best and and what you're doing with INED and with the young scholars and just really want to thank you for all that young scholars and issues doing for the students we've got at Colm Powell School in Harlem in New York City so thank you so much we'll talk again before too long i'm sure there will be plenty to discuss in another episode of this podcast thanks again right oh bye bye and check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at InetEconomics.org


Welcome back to my channel and welcome back to another baking series I am so excited to share this recipe with you. This is my Easter baking series So as you know, I do like to share some baked good recipes with you throughout the year And what better time than the holidays? So this is a sugar cookie not just your ordinary sugar cookie, but a frosted sugar cookie with candy on top That is WW friendly. You heard me sugar cookie with frosting and candy So excited to share this recipe with you guys So if you want to see step-by-step how to make the recipe check out the description box below for the recipe itself Just keep watching For Easter baking series We are going to be making super soft sugar cookies with frosting topped with candy that are WW friendly If you are a fan of those loft house sugar cookies, these are going to be similar to those So let me show you what we are putting in our sugar cookies. So you're going to need some all-purpose flour Some sort of sugar substitute. I'm going to use Truvia My points were calculated using this sugarcane blend which does have smart points So if you use an alternative sugar that does not have points Stevia are one of those you can modify the points to the recipe. I Also have baking powder baking soda Vanilla extract. I'm going to be using Pillsbury sugar-free frosting if you do not have access to this It is in my Amazon store down in the description box Or you can make your own frosting using cool whip or swerve or anything that you want to do But I am going to tell you the points using this frosting. I also have some fun neon food coloring some light butter Some organic eggs or any type of egg We're actually only going to be using the yolk and then I'm going to top mine with whoppers mini eggs So let's get started on our sugar cookies So the first thing we need to do for our cookies is we're going to go ahead and take our flour Here we have two and a half cups of flour. We're going to put the flour in a separate bowl We want to do our dry ingredients prior to our wet ingredients and then in my little red bowl here I have my leveling agents. So I have three quarters of a teaspoon of baking soda and a teaspoon of baking powder We're going to go ahead and add that to our bowl And then we're just going to give this a nice whisk together Just make sure that that baking powder and soda get mixed in with all of your flour And then you're going to go ahead and you're going to set this aside And we're going to get started on our wet ingredients Next we're going to do our wet ingredients So you have one cup or one I'm sorry one and a half cups of Truvilla or any type of sweetener alternative that you want to use and then I also Have one cup of I can't believe it's not butter So I'm going to go ahead and add that now you can either measure it out in a cup or You can figure out how many grams by googling the grams of butter in one cup and measure it out on your food scale So I went ahead and did it on my food scale and then just did it into a measuring cup So either way works and you're going to take your hand mixer And you're just going to give this a nice mix until your butter and your sugar are nice and combined And then we'll be adding in some of our additional wet ingredients Once you get your sugar and butter nice and creamed together The next step is we are going to be adding in our vanilla extract This is my all-time favorite the Trader Joe's so we want to add in about a teaspoon of vanilla extract And then we are also going to add in three egg yolks And then we'll take a spoon to that mix that all together get it kind of nice and combine Before we add in our dry ingredients so our flour our baking soda and our baking powder The recipe specifically says do not over mix So I'm just gonna gently incorporate in the eggs and the vanilla and then we will go ahead and add in our Bowl of our flour baking soda baking powder and again We don't want to over mix so we want to be really careful to just get everything nice and incorporated And then we will be ready to get these in to the oven on a cookie sheet first and into the oven Next once your dough is all nice and mixed together We are going to take a cookie scoop and we are going to scoop out our cookies We want them about two inches apart so that they don't Bleed into each other my goal is to get either 24 or 36 cookies out of my dough And that will determine the number of smart points So I'm going to scoop it out fill my tray see how many I can get and then we'll be ready to pop These in to the oven but these already look so delicious So here we have 15 Bald of cookie dough I'm going to go ahead and get these into the oven at 350 until they are cooked through and I'll continue to scoop and see Exactly how many cookies I end up with All right, our cookies have cooled so here is what they look like all nice and cooled You did see that I had mixed my frosting so I'm going to go ahead and start frosting the cookies So I'm going to take the cookie. I'm going to start with the pink And I'm just going to put a fairly Not a thin layer, but an average layer of frosting on top of the cookie We want less than a tablespoon because we want one smart point of Frosting per cookie, which would be less than a tablespoon in order to achieve the one smart point I pulled out my little green Wilton sprinkles. These are leftover from St. Patrick's Day. I am going to sprinkle those right on top of my cookie So that it looks all nice and festive for Easter and then over here I have my robin's eggs, so I am going to go ahead and add three robin's egg to each cookie so it looks like a nest and Three of the whoppers robin's eggs is one smart point So there is our completed Easter cookie. Isn't that adorable? So I'm going to go ahead and set those aside. We'll repeat that with the purple frosting So let's frost one of our cookies with the purple as well And I'm just going to go through and frost all of my cookies. I ended up getting 32 total out of my Batch of dough, so I will be counting my points according to 32. So again sprinkles robin's eggs and Ready to go on to the sheet to continue to cool So cute how fun are these for Easter?  I just had one. These are amazing. They are soft They are sweet to that crunch of that whoppers egg on top is so good Look at these up close with all of that frosting three of those delicious eggs on top These cookies are only four smart points apiece for smart points including the frosting and Including the whoppers candy on top So if you are looking for a Easter Ww friendly treat on Easter or leading up to Easter to keep you away from all that Easter candy four points for a frosted sugar cookie is Definitely going to steer you clear of all of the non Ww friendly Easter candy. I highly recommend you make these cookies. They are seriously so delicious Thank you for joining me on this Easter baking series I hope you enjoyed seeing the sugar cookie recipe with that delicious frosting and those whopper eggs. Hello It is complete Decadence and isn't it crazy? It's ww friendly So if you're looking for something to share with your family or to take to an Easter event This is a fantastic recipe. No one will ever know that it's ww friendly. They taste Absolutely amazing. So if you're new to my channel, welcome Make sure that you subscribe hit the notification bell to be notified each and every time I upload a new video Please take a moment and give this one a thumbs up Comment below. Let me know if you're gonna try these sugar cookies out Not only for Easter but really any time of the year and I want to wish you all a fantastic Fantastic happy Easter and I'll see you in my next video. Bye


One of the things that amateurs do is space. It's quite common for amateurs to have small portable radios that won't work well over urban distances with buildings in the way. So we put repeaters on the tops of tall buildings. Well, a satellite's just like a really, really, really tall building. And so right from the beginning of the space age, as early as December 1961, amateurs have been putting repeaters into orbit.  So you need payload. You need ballast for this particular payload so when you launch a rocket it's got to be spin symmetric otherwise the thing will fail to launch greatly. So there's the payload and there's often ballast to get the thing to balance correctly so the rocket will maintain a steady path. And so they're like, huh, you need ballast and we would like to put a repeater in orbit. And so really right at the beginning of the space age you've had amateurs doing this. So there are still about, today there are about 15 amateur satellites in orbit. Satellites that carry amateur traffic, some have another function like the International Space Station for example has human beings inside. But it has an amateur repeater on board, an amateur sort of email system and also an amateur station. So if you have the right gear you can in principle talk to astronauts on board the ISS. The difficulty here is they all work London time so you've got to be willing to do it at very odd hours of the morning and I haven't yet succeeded. So to deal with all the current amateur satellites they're all in low earth orbit. They will cross the sky from horizon to horizon quite quickly. Who are accustomed to seeing a TV antenna on the side of a building, not in Singapore. The satellite is pointing in a fixed direction. That's pointing at a satellite 36,000 kilometres away. Almost four times the diameter of the earth, so the earth satellite, very long way away. Much cheaper satellites orbit lower and all the amateur satellites are as cheap as possible and so they orbit quite low. The problem with that is that it's moving. And so yes, it did camp last year, Adrian and myself. Initially I was just holding the antenna and operating the radio at the same time, which was exhausting. So at some point Adrian could go pointing the antenna so I could operate the radio. Again, because the satellite is moving so quickly, about 20,000 kilometres per hour it's affected ground speed. Doppler effect actually changes the, measurably changes the frequency of the radio signals. So you're having to adjust the radio continually as the satellites cross the sky. So I thought okay that's really much too difficult. The obvious and simple solution to this problem is to build a device which will take care of the pointing, which is that thing there. And so that actually works. So the deal is there's really four things that you've got to worry about, at least four things with the satellite. One is that they are crossing the sky so you've got to point. One is that the frequency is shifting with Doppler shifts so you've got to keep adjusting the radio. And one is, again, amateur satellites are cheap so they don't have attitude control. They just tumble through space. And so the antenna's orientation changes continuously and unpredictably. So in addition to pointing, I was also twisting for Adrian. I was twisting to keep it correctly aligned with the satellite. So when you make a machine to do it, that third one's a bit difficult. And it's actually cheaper and simpler to just add a second antenna at right angles. And it's a bit, one more trick which we'll get to to make that work. But that's why it's two sets of antennas. The antennas are also at two frequencies to keep the receiver and transmitter from interfering with each other. Usually on the ground with ground better repeaters you have things called cavities with big brass tubes. On a satellite, weight is everything. And so it's actually cheaper and simpler to have the receiver at a lower frequency and the transmitter at a higher frequency so they can't interfere with each other. The transmitter won't cause the receiving antenna to resonate. And therefore it's much easier to keep the receiver and transmitter from interfering with each other by having the two radios of two different bands and also the antenna's are running. And so that's why the two different sizes of elements of the antenna. So the design I chose was produced by Agilio Disclavir to Work for NASA's Classroom Access program. So this is a program to make it easier for K-12 students to get access to space-related stuff in different ways and in particular to communicate with satellites. And so I thought, OK, I'll try his design. It's a fairly, well, it's a non-3D printing based design. It turns out to matter. I've forgotten all the metalworking I learned in high school. So his design uses mostly robotics parts. And as you can see they're pre-machined. So you're buying standard parts and putting them together. Give or take things like the cut around the brass tube in the middle. It's a sort of really rough cut. That's my extremely clumsy metalwork. This took about 10 or 12 iterations of cut, assemble, examine, dismantle, cut a bit more, assemble, examine. Nope, miss that? OK, dismantle. Do it again and again and again until I've got it to the point where all the moving parts work together correctly. What you're seeing is on its side, the two metallic cylinders of the motors. So the thing to the right is actually the azimuth motor, the motor that turns that way. It's inside the box on top of the stand. The motor at the top is the azimuth or elevation motor, which turns that way to point between the antenna and overhead. That's on the left, on the symbol machine. What you can probably see is a green board. They're actually printed circuit board. So this is an interesting way to attach a potentiometer to be a sensor. To make a very simple servo, you have a DC motor with a reduction gear and a bit of geometry. Instead of using steffans and then having to know where the thing is with limit switches. So it's just, it works. The plastic gears are only for positioning the pots, they're not load bearing. The load bearing stuff is all metallic. So this is from ServoCity, which is a robotics part supply in the US. The parts are designed for industrial and other robots. The white pipe is where you attach the antenna. There was a problem. This was the design for a single antenna. The guy who designed this thing updated it later for two antennas. The elevation motor is at one end and the thing attaching the antenna is this bit of white pipe sticking out the side. In the updated version there's actually two metal pipes and the elevation motor has been moved out to one side. So I was working through this and you can see how the two green arrows there handmade quarter inch to one inch places with set screws inside tubing. I'm not even mentioned in the text. I don't even know what that means. Let alone have the technical skills of the parts to make such a thing. So that, right, that's kind of a showstopper. Really need the two antennas otherwise the fading is horrible. If you only got one antenna and you can't twist it, which in the single antenna case you can't, half the time you can't communicate with the satellite. So I looked around Hacker Space and I had some PVC pipe. And so that's why it looks like that. It's a bit rickety. If I, after it's all operated and you'll see it, it does do what it's supposed to do, but it kind of wobbles around a bit. If it's out by a few degrees it doesn't matter. But it's a, this is quite a nice sort of tight assembly of robotics part. So this is a hastily assembled PVC pipe. The fully assembled set looks like that. Which is more or less what you can see over there. I'll call out. I'll just come back to the details later. The key thing I suspect that suggests at this point is the, the means of control is a USB cable. And again there's a change in the design which led to a rather strange and a lot of work which I'll explain in a minute. The fabrication was, for me a bit of a learning exercise. I've never done surface mount soldering before.  Everything else is through hole. There were just the capacitors that were tiny at all. One milliliter by one and a half milliliter of devices. So I ordered from element 14. You can see two syringes there. On the left is a grey one which contains the solder paste. Which turns out you're supposed to use an air compressor to deliver, not use a hand. Really, really, really hard to get the solder out at all. Pressing away. The hands are hurting to get pellets of solder out. On the right is another syringe containing the tack flux. So this is flux as the flux built into solder, but it's also sticky. So it's useful to put a bit down to sort of cause the component to stick where you want it to stick. Before the solder melts, once it melts, there's enough surface tension to get the component to sort of jump into the right position and then the solder will set again. But until then there's a risk of it moving around. Especially because for the smaller group of components I decided to use a hot air gun instead of an oven. The other reason was we didn't have an oven. So, frequently the hot air gun, which is the thing on the right. So you add the little tube you hold, which blows air up to 300 degrees Celsius. Keeping all the components in place with the tack flux and pointing the other right way is an interesting exercise. Roll up one tape in the back. If you put one component in place and then you want to do another one, it's like, ah, shrew a hot air is such that it will actually re-melt the solder and push the component away. So the cap on tape is actually enough to stop that from happening. I'm pleased to say it developed during the Apollo program for space use. More for near zero Kelvin use, but it also has interesting properties for soldering. The tack flux has dire warnings on it about it being an irritant. Which is why the duct and the fan, nonetheless, I got a whiff of the stuff up my nose in my eyes. It is really, really unpleasant. Like, sort of lindiment, but much stronger and just nasty, nasty stuff. Not toxic, not hugely dangerous, but really, really irritating. So, things to be aware of. If you see this stuff, like a tube that says in big letters, it says in MSDS the material safety data sheet first, and follow the instructions. The more sensible approach is indeed to use an oven, and the cheap way is to take an ordinary office shelf toaster oven. In fact, we now have one ad-hacker space earmarked for this purpose, and build a microcontroller. Don't use it for bread. Yeah, no longer food state. No, not appropriate for food, but put a thermal probe, a temperature sensor inside the oven, or rectifier to switch the thing on and off, and then there's firmware available that can be fed the temperature profiles for different solders. Different solders have different optimum peak temperatures, rates of heating, rates of cooling, and the amount of time they held at heat. So you say, yes, okay, I'm using that solder. Here's the profile, give it a controller, and it'll do the exact thing that that solder is designed to have done to it. So this is for 12 components, looking by hand, was fine, but for a larger number, and at some point I will do this, the radio end of this is interesting. So there are two different tricks here. This is very much amateur radio tricks, use of quarter wavelength sections of coax. So one of the problems I mentioned was to solve the twisting problem is to have two antennas at right angles to each other. That's not quite enough. You need them offset by quarter wavelength. So you can either physically offset them, which makes the mechanical design much harder, or you can insert a quarter wavelength difference in the feed line. So the signal from or to the radio, I'll get to the loop in a moment, but you can see that the two end pieces are about the same length, they go to the antennas, and there's a bit of cable in the middle. That is exactly one quarter wavelength at the speed at which a radio signal propagates inside this piece of coax, which is not quite the same as this bit of line of acumen, but similar. And so it means that whatever is put into the antennas or received from the antennas from one is a quarter wavelength behind the other. And what that does is creates, they call it circular polarization, but it's more accurately a sort of helical, it's like a helix in space. So instead of being that way or that way, it's that. And the important property that has is that will resonate with an antenna at any orientation except pointing at you. But at one position there's nothing we can do, so the signal is all going away from the earth. But in every other orientation, a helical polarized signal will resonate. And as I said, amateur satellites are cheap, so they don't have good attitude control or any attitude control. And so the two antennas plus the quarter wavelength of the way solves that problem. Two separate harnesses, this is the 70 centimetre one, but there's also another one with a bigger loop pieces for the two meter. The other piece is the loop, and here you have more amateur tricks. So connect two 50 ohm antennas in parallel and you now have a 25 ohm mode, which does not correctly match the radio, which expects 50 ohms. So how do you transform 25 ohms to 50 ohms? Well you can make filters and stuff with transformers, or you can go, special trick with transmission lines, if you are assuming everything else is correctly balanced, the, if you have a 25 ohm feed, a 50 ohm feed and a bit in the middle, that's the square root of the product of the two of the outside, the geometric average, then it will actually transform one to the other. So what you need to get from 25 ohm back to 50 ohm is a piece of 37.5 ohm coax. Well you can't get 37.5 ohm coax, but you can get 75. So the loop is actually two bits of quarter wavelength, 75 ohm coax in parallel, to make a single piece of quarter wavelength, 37.5 ohm coax, which transforms 25 ohms to 50 ohms. So how to do dirt cheap, and very light weight, both the circular or helical polarization, and the transformation to get from two parallel ohms and is back to what the radio expects with just its coax. There are other tricks that can be done with quarter wavelength coax. It's quite remarkable what average is going on. So I can use that for... I won't bore you with it. Another detail, unfortunately, between the publication of the instructions and the kit that I purchased, the thing had been revised. This never happens. In particular, the use of the USB cable creates a little bit of space for interference to arise, which is fine for Morrison voice, but it's a problem for packet radio. There are some digital modes that amateurs use that are fairly narrow compared to a white one. And the guy doing this wants to do packet. So he switched to using a pair of X-beads. I don't mind spending a bit of money, but it's like, really, I'm going to buy two X-beads, replace a cable?  I'm not going to do it. So the original board, it's easy on a green board, which is the new one. You can see the rectangles of hard white edges. Those are actually transistor pairs that form H-bridges for running the two motors all backwards. So you have a set of four transistors to run a DC motor one way or the other. And then there's a little driver chip by the button below. On the older board, you can probably make out the mounting points for the transistors on either way and the driving chip. But at the bottom, what is actually a USB socket for the mounting point for it. And next to it, a driver chip to match serial to USB. Right. I'm sitting in a hackerspace on a Saturday. How do I fix this? I looked around, I've got a USB cable, but it's a USB to GDL. And the microcontroller on the board expects 3.3. There's got to be a solution to this problem. And of course there is. I had a bag of 10k resistors. So I was like, right. How can I shift 5 volts to 3 volts? Well, like that. And I don't need to go the other way. The other board at the moment doesn't have a feedback channel. It's only commands going to it. But if I wished to go the other way, then one driver on resistors would be enough. So for the way that I did go, which is to bring the 5 volts down to 3.3 before going into the microcontroller, you can see the outline of the actually position on the board and then a little bit of the rear board that I sort of cut off and soldered for resistors to and a socket for the USB cable. And voila! I have the input on the front of the board there. Thank you. Sort of working stuff out as I go. So that was most of it. The other problem was the metalwork. It's fiddly and time-consuming and it's stuff I haven't done since high school and frankly I spent 20 hours on it. Had I understood that beforehand I would have taken a different design which I'll talk about in a moment. There's another problem and it's common to rotators. The device, how am I going to talk about that? The device has 360 degrees of azimuth freedom which is great to be able to point to any one direction. But if you're wanting to follow a satellite across the sky it might pass you zero. So for example, assume the satellite is crossing the blue line on the left and so your initial azimuth limit is vertical. So you can point here to here. So your satellite is crossing and suddenly you hit zero degrees. So now you've got to turn the whole machine this is the red line the other way and take a minute or so and of course the satellite is still moving. So you're out of communication for a couple of minutes and then reconnect it before it disappears below the horizon. This is not really a satisfactory solution. The fix is you decide before the pass where you want your zero to point and the software supports either north or south which covers most satellites. You turn the thing around you set a setting in the software and hopefully it all works. So that's really awful. So I'm inclined to look for a 540 degree freedom device there around and one of the options I'm looking at is sat-nawx. So a more contemporary not NASA attached open source project is working on a network of ground stations. In addition to running the network they also publish far more contemporary designs so apart from simple aluminium channel cut with a hacksaw all the complicated parts are 3D printed. So there's no hours of cut and fit and fiddle and cut and fit and fiddle and cut and fit and fiddle is just put the bits and go. So that's, I will consider that especially if it's easy to modify it for 540 degrees.  So I use this single heavens above on my phone don't yet know how but wouldn't it be nice to be able to say I can select a satellite and tell the tracker to follow it. So maybe. The addition of a digital compass and gyro to deal with 619 degrees of freedom so I don't even have to worry about correctly guessing orientation, just plonk it and let the computer whack it out but what I really want to do is eliminate the rotator completely and instead do something called beam forming. This is a vastly more complicated approach but the chips are doing it are getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper so maybe. So the idea is if you take in this case 6 antennas in a straight line this is a simple case a phased array and you are sending the same thing to all of them but you send it a bit earlier to the one on the right and then a bit later and later as you go to the left you end up with a coherent wave front not going down the picture but going to the right that is to say you can control the direction in which the signal is being sent not by rotating an antenna but by manipulating the phase relationships between the signal arrival at each of the antennas and so instead of having arrays of antennas on non-rotators the idea is to have a bunch of non-moving antennas unfortunately it is a larger number of antennas in radios but the radios themselves are sort of incomplete radios they are front ends of radios and a lot of computation are then complete like 400 radios so that it then becomes possible to communicate with amateur satellites both send and receive without having to have a moving thing in the first place what will invalidate all of this is that not quite invalidated but certainly another option is that in January QTEL, the Qatar Telco is launching a geostationary satellite and so far it appears that the Qatar Amateur Radio Club will get to write a transponder on that satellite all the way to geostationary and then a US satellite later next year so this hasn't been the case for decades we're now back to okay let's put ameters not at 500km but at 36,000 so anyway stuff to play with for some considerable time to come thank you


Welcome to our session, our hot issue, if you like, on the new space race. I am absolutely delighted and also honoured to be joined with the panel here today. First of all, on my left, Wilbur Ross, the Secretary of Commerce for the US. And further down the panel, Suresh Rakhabal Prabhu, who is the Indian Sherpa for the G20. So great that you can be here to listen to what I hope will transpire into a very interesting discussion about the challenges, but also the opportunities of space today. We are a really, really fascinating time for space. There is a bow wave of enthusiasm for space programmes at the moment. It's really evocative of, you know, the tremendous enthusiasm we saw all those years ago, some 50 years ago, when we were really venturing out into space for the first time on those really exciting exploration programmes. But this time we're doing it differently.  You know, we have old, we have new, we have the big public institutions, the small commercial operators and indeed the big commercial operators. And now nearly 100 countries having space programmes. But not only are there different actors, but we're doing different things with space. It's not just about exploration. Space is an absolutely essential part of our everyday lives. We depend on it in ways that most people don't even understand. Most people don't understand that 99% of the data we need for weather forecasting comes from space. Our societies, our economies are critically dependent on communications, navigation. A topical here today is the fact that over 50% of the measurements we need to even understand climate change can only be taken from space. So, you know, not only do we have this bow wave of enthusiasm, but it's also more and more societally relevant. So I think the discussion for our panel today really is how do we make the most of that tremendous opportunity and do so in a way that is sustainable and make sure that all actors can really realise those opportunities. So perhaps we'll start with the opportunities if I can turn to you first, Secretary Ross. In your view, what are the key elements that we would really need to unlock and help us take advantage of the tremendous opportunity of space? Well, I think, first of all, people may not realise that so many technological developments have already come from space. These include artificial limbs, velcro, solar cells and water filtration. All of those came from first generation space. Now we have an opportunity to accelerate the pace of innovation. And it's increasingly tied, the whole economy is increasingly tied to services derived from space. Many of the most important terrestrial sectors, like transportation and logistics, oil and gas, internet, finance and others, are fueled by state technologies such as positioning, navigation and timing, remote sensing and communications. Space technologies have increased productivity, communication and safety and have brought new products to some of the remote areas. To put some numbers to it, government activity in space is growing, but over 80% of the $415 billion global space economy is actually commercial. We believe that the future will be even more dominated by commercial interests rather than government. President Trump re-established the National Space Council in 2017 to coordinate national space policy and to prioritize economic development. Within Commerce Department, we revitalized the 30-year-old Office of Space Commerce to facilitate commercial space activities. And now, those activities are largely driven by venture capital and by private entrepreneurs. In the past 10 years, more than $25 billion has been invested in 535 separate space companies globally. In 2019 alone, $5.8 billion was invested, largest year on record. And in 2019, roughly 43% of space startup investment went to companies outside the U.S. And over close to 100 countries have meaningful space activities. So it's very much a global activity even though it's an importantly private sector. Our national and international governance activities must facilitate the private sector not get in its way. And I think that and financing are two of the initial needs. Now, while the overall satellite industry only experienced a 3% growth rate in 2018, the economic benefits that those satellites have created for other industries are much larger and growing much more rapidly. And by the way, that also pales to the sub-sector of satellite manufacturing which experienced a 26% growth rate over 2018. Bright space and technology assessed that the total economic impact of space had grown to $5 trillion annually in 2018. Television, internet and wireless communications, finance, agriculture, shipping, all of these have been revolutionized by satellite. In 2019, our Department of Commerce National Institute of Standards and Technology analyzed 10 economic sectors that use GPS daily. And those sectors now have 1.4 trillion in cumulative economic benefit just from GPS. So while those estimates are encouraging, we recognize the need also to improve how we account for space activities. Most traditional industrial accounting summaries focus on aerospace without separating space activities. So we've recently begun an initiative within Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis to more precisely define and measure the space industry's economic activity. We believe in the old saying that if you don't measure it, you can't manage it. Secretary Ross, if I may, I think you raised some really, really fundamental questions there. And I'm particularly interested to get a perspective from Minister Prabhu. So recording your points around finance and the role of private finance, I think the role of the insurance sector probably needs to change as well versus the intervention of government, as it were. Minister Prabhu, can I get your perspective on indeed what the key elements will be in order for us to realize this tremendous opportunity of space? You know, as Secretary Ross was saying, it's a full of opportunities. And we cannot even think about modern life without using space as a means of developing technologies and using those technologies for working on the ground. So this is inevitable process and we cannot stop it anymore. But space is not a vacuum really.  We think outer space is vacuum, it's not. And therefore, how to actually harness those opportunities is something very important. Most of the technologies now developing, the new technology which are evolving out of those technologies which are already developed, are actually using geospatial technology as a base and using large part of the technology which are operating from outer space as a means of doing that. We in India, we are already using space for a lot of civilian purposes. It's for weather forecasting, it's for education, which is the over a period of time, we can do it for agriculture and many other purposes. So we feel that use is something which is full of potential. So if you can develop that, one is economic opportunities which will be differently be there. But it can also put people life on a much better platform because what you can see from there is something different than what you can actually see on the ground. So this is a huge full of opportunity. Technology will drive it, but economic opportunities can be harnessed, but good for the people which in my opinion is a fundamental principle on which we should decide about it. Particularly that part of the world, developing world, which has not been able to benefit from it, can usually benefit from it in terms of forecasting and many other reasons. So I think we can use it for that purpose. There of course now as you can see, the space is dominated by states, take the governments, but also non-state players. So obviously there is a need to understand how both can function, how they can operate, how will be, well outer space will be secured for the people living on the ground. That is another very important thing we should really look into that. So I think opportunities are immense and we have a very ambitious space program, which is Indian Space Research Organization's Dives It. And one of the great achievement of this is that we achieved some technological breakthroughs at the lowest of the cost. So probably what India does on technological development of space technologies, this actually caused probably a faction of what is done in other parts of the world. So this is another very important development and I think we can obviously look into working with all the countries in the world to make space a safe haven. Because normally we don't know where we go after death, but even if we go wherever, we should try to make sure that that part of the world is that part of the space is make safe. I think Minister Prabhu raised a very good point about cost cutting. It's really cost cutting concepts like reusability, miniaturisation and repetition of design rather than one off products that's bringing it down to where it is economical to think about such new activities as space tourism, space mining, space manufacturing and space colonisation as well as journeys to remote planets. And we think as a result of all those things, projections appropriately place 2040 global space activity somewhere between one and three trillion dollars, huge, huge increments over where we are. Main rule we see for governments is to get out of the way and foster the conditions needed for the growth and technological advancement of the sector. I think it's a fascinating point and people, one to three trillion dollars, this is a really exciting time. We've talked a lot about the role of the private sector and how the private sector is increasingly taken on some of the roles which were historically dominated by the public sector. And of course somewhat hand in hand with that comes the issue of co-operation versus competition. Perhaps I can come to Minister Prabhu first. Where do you see those areas of our space programmes that will remain dominated by co-operation? And where do you see elements which will be largely about competition given that we are now, you know, space programmes are now open to many, many more players? I think really speaking we need a global dialogue on this because this is something which is uncharted territory. We are not really worked on that, but I was saying if you really look at outer space as a public good, then we can actually look at harnessing that public good for the benefit of larger part of humanity and this can really transform the human lives in a very significant way. This is really possible and as we are seeing now most of the new technology that are getting developed somewhere or the other there's a relationship with space. So this is something which is we should keep that in mind and therefore technological development and technological advancement, no one can stop it. I cannot say that I'll close the door and will not allow the air to come in. It is not possible. So we have to make sure that technological advancement will continue, but a means of technology, why is being used, so end of what's the means of then, what's the purpose of that? It should be for a public good for a common of people who will really benefit from this technological development. Right, but cooperation will be essential in two big areas, space safety and space sustainability. Why is that important? There are already hundreds of thousands of random objects orbiting at some 17,000 miles an hour. These are mostly under 10 centimeters in diameter, but even those little particles can cause severe damage to the solar panels that power these satellites. US has led in this area for decades, mostly through Department of Defense and NASA, but our current efforts are going to encourage a very wide range of commercial activities to improve and increase our understanding of the environment. We're creating a new civil organization in commerce to improve space situational awareness and increase interaction among space operators in the interest of space safety. That's inherently a thing that needs cooperation with all of the players, government and private sectors as well. We're also working with our allies to establish best practices and standards for existing space capabilities and for encouraging the new emerging ones. And these will eventually grow into the very much needed rules of the road going beyond the very general format in the UN prescriptions from some years ago. So, those are a couple of sectors we think will encourage government participation and global cooperation. Absolutely. I think the observations are so well made. I particularly chime with Minister Probably's reflection that space now really touches so many different areas of our life and so many different technologies I've enjoyed this week. You know, casual conversations where you discover that space is relevant to a lady doing research on ageing using bats who was also very familiar with the US astronauts that have been involved in those programs through to a lady working on the UN programs tackling famine. So, the ubiquity of our space programs is not under doubt. And I think that makes your points even more important around the need to work together to ensure the safety and sustainability of the environment. I mean, I wonder if we can just dwell on that for a little longer and perhaps some perspectives about where in particular we need to drive more rigor, more clarity, as you say, beneath those relatively high level UN countries. The codes of conducts and norms that exist at the moment. Well, the space situational awareness is one example. There it's for the moment limited by technology. The conventional sensing systems really can't deal with the objects under 10 centimetres, but they are the vast majority of the objects. So, we need some sort of a standard what is going to be the sensing format. Second, how will it be communicated? Right now, no one has the power, and maybe never should, to tell a satellite operator, move your satellite. Well, because it's about to have a conjunction that could be detrimental and even destructive to it. So, we need to think through how can we develop algorithms that will have enough credibility that when we call the space operator, he knows the overwhelming probability as we are right that there will be a conjunction and then move the satellite to avoid the conjunction. So, that's a very clear one. A further one is the durability of the satellites themselves. The original ones were meant to last seven or eight years, they've turned out to last somewhat longer, but you might have seen the two female astronauts change a battery by a spacewalk on a satellite. That's the kind of thing that we need to make them last longer. I must say, I wouldn't have the courage to have done that spacewalk and that battery transfer, but maintenance, space maintenance is a whole new activity that will help the life, help keep the satellites from degrading and therefore contribute to the control of all these objects flying around. But with the vast launches of large numbers of small satellites, this problem is going to become much more intense. It's already pretty crowded up there. There's another area that's needed. Who owns space? Who owns whatever we find? If you're the first one to the asteroid, does that mean you have a claim on all the minerals in that asteroid? How does it work? Are we getting into kind of a wild west situation of claim jumpers or will there be some methodology? Right now, the governing principle is, oh, this is all just for the benefit of humanity. Well, that's not going to last very long. It's not a practical solution. We need more nitty gritty solution to that. I think you're absolutely right. I think space lawyers will be busy for some years to come on that issue. But if I can bring us back to the very profound points you made around the sustainability of the operating environment and perhaps get a perspective from Minister probably, because I think it's incredibly relevant today and I think we very often draw the comparison between the climate change and the challenge of climate change on our own planet. That same thing is manifesting in the space operating environment unless we're careful. To a great extent, certainly in older generations, we didn't understand the actions and their impact on climate change. That's not true of the space operating environment. We do know. So we should be doing something to tackle that. Minister, perhaps your reflections on what more we could do and also who should be the responsible actors for doing so, given that the programmes are no longer government dominated, but increasingly commercial too? Obviously, we should do everything that we do even as a technological development. Again, I repeat, that should be for a better good of the people, not for something which will be just harm at them. So that is obviously the ground rule. We should be always be there. But a question, fundamental question, as you were saying, because who owns the space is a very important question. And therefore, I think we should work in a way that will be peaceful, which will actually develop new ideas and new technology will be further progressed. But in a manner that will actually not create more issues for future because we already have a lot of tension on the ground. So I think we can actually not add to that tension but actually address that tension. So I think this could be a very useful tool. This is a great opportunity. And I think human curiosity is something which is driving the change because we always, whenever a child is born, he looks up and find out what is there in the sky. And there's a story, a lot of even in Indian folklore, that everybody wanted to go and catch the moon and say, I want to catch it because I want to see that. Why is it so far from me? So that curiosity is driving the change. And that's a good thing. But again, and we have seen in India that using it for peaceful purposes has given us tremendous benefit. And therefore we can do villages, 750,000 villages in India. We can reach out to them for Medicare, for education and so many other things. And I think we should work as friends with many countries, find out solution to these vexed issues. But at the same time, if we have fundamentals clear, if you know what is bottom line, why you are doing it, I think that will always find solution to this. An example would be what responsibility should a satellite operator have for the end of service termination of that satellite? Should there be some requirement to destruct it in a way that doesn't produce very much debris? Some people have talked about putting some sort of a device on it and literally dragging it to a lower level so that it just combusts itself. And there are all sorts of ideas. But none of them will work except if they're implemented on a universal basis. If just one operator does the right thing, it's not going to do a hell of a lot for the whole problem. We will need some sort of collaborative or cooperative process. So I think it's going to be a combination of evolutions, evolution of regulatory concept. As you do that, then the question is how do you enforce it? Very interesting question. Marine law, maritime law is sort of a comparison. But that's a little bit different because it's going from finite destination to finite destination. Here it's much more complicated questions. So there are limits to quite how far just a broadening marine law will be. So toward that end, we're co-hosting with the State Department again this June a space enterprise summit in Washington to try to deal with these and many of the other issues. And we're hoping that gathering enough people together and we're also signing collaboration agreements with a number of other countries. We have with Australia, we have some others as well. And I think that's a way forward. But eventually needs to be more than bilateral needs to be multilateral. Absolutely true. Absolutely true. It's a fascinating conversation. I'm being told we have to draw to a conclusion. But perhaps I can just offer you the floor one more time if you can very succinctly. Just give us your reflection on the one thing that would really help us realise the opportunity of space. The one thing that needs to change today. I think the main thing is to continue to drive the cost down because at the end of the day, since it is essentially a commercial enterprise, revenues versus cost versus capital investment is what's going to determine what happens. Thank you. I think we should encourage more and more innovation, more and more technology of gradation, keeping ethical side of it in mind that would really help to ensure that we progress but we do not cause any damage and harm. Thank you. And thank you very much indeed. That draws us to a conclusion. We've had some fantastic insights from our panel so it just leaves it to me to thank our panel in the usual way. Thank you.


Hello everyone and welcome. This is the play of the day in the trading room CTRP. It looks great It's breaking a new low. Some people are still in it. Some people got out Nice turn around here to on the day and I told everyone they could get out They could hold it. They could do the ad it never did anything wrong here I said this is weak and it looks like it's going to zero even though it's really not gonna go to zero today Although that would be amazing It would go to zero, but it's probably not but it looks like it is so good luck everyone Congratulations, just gonna quickly review this We did this yesterday worked had to hold it in the clothes, but it was a good one yesterday Never thought we'd be doing a thought through a continuation gap today, but the market's weak This is weak. It did get down today. It was more of a follow-through though Looking for something that's still had a move in it So you could have done this aggressively here. We saw this later Okay called it here then said take more in here Then it got the drop in here and everybody was up and some people got out Then I lifted all the way back and I still said this is fine. This is good. This is amazing Now it's down in here 51 was alone now It's at 50 and it looks like it's going and I do think 26 dollars is not completely insane today That is only 50 cents away and the best thing about this was the entry today was 10 by 50 a 40 cent stop So we haven't had a 40 cent stop in a while for those people looking for good words to reward this definitely definitely Definitely had it today and if you did the ad even more show and this is not expensive So you could have really plopped on the size of this today if you had a hundred percent conviction in it and really believed in the gap So I liked this from yesterday. I didn't think anyone the planet would buy this today And I was right once again, so we will see where this goes. Good luck everyone Don't let this get away from you now. It is 12 o'clock new perfect timing here And you've got the market with you. Just let's see where it goes This is a nice play today to close out the week a long week for me Next week, hopefully will be much much easier. Have a great day everyone