Hello and welcome to iNet Live. I am Ramefa Ruhar and the global business columnist and associate editor of the Financial Times. And I am so pleased to be here to moderate and help facilitate this iNet program on the future of work and whether redistribution policies are enough. We're gonna have a really, really rich conversation and I'll start by just introducing our two panelists. Can't think of anybody better to discuss these issues. We have Laura Tyson, who is the distinguished professor of the Graduate School of the Berkeley Haas School. And with her, we have Gordon Hansen, the Peter Wertheim Professor in Urban Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. And both of you all have thought deeply about the topic of what we can do beyond redistribution to help workers, to help people cope with the world that we're living in now. As many of you know, probably in the viewing audience, this is part of just a long-term multi-month, multi-year actually process of looking at the future of work. And this is only the latest iteration. So you can go online, you can look at the other panels we've had about how we've gotten here, what the future will hold, what the implication is to the future of work for society. But today, we're really gonna focus on what is the policy direction amidst COVID, but also in the post-COVID world and in a world of increased automation. As I said before on these iNet seminars, the virus is almost like a scrim that has been pulled back on things that we knew were going to happen, but are now dramatically speeding up. And it seems pretty clear that redistribution is not gonna be enough. So we're here to talk about what can we do? And we're gonna chat for maybe 40, 45 minutes, but there's a place for you all to, all the viewers to start submitting questions. So please do that. I'm gonna be eyeballing, and we're gonna save at least 15 or 20 minutes at the end, but if you have questions about a particular topic that we're talking about, just plug them in and I'll try and pull them into the conversation. But Laura, let me start with you because you have such a long history, both as an academic but as a policy maker across many, many different regimes, many different governments, in many different positions, thinking about these things. So what should the goal of policy around the future of work be right now? I mean, it's such a big question, but I'm gonna ask it to just dive in. I'm unmuting myself. Hello, everyone. And it's a pleasure to talk about this very important question, set of questions. First of all, I was led to want to discuss the goal of policy because redistribution itself is a policy about, I would say, addressing income and wealth inequality by distributing market returns, taking market returns and redistributing them. And I think the real challenge for policy in the world of automation and the acceleration of digitization of everything, the real challenge is the creation of good jobs because one of the things that has happened and it's happened over the past several decades is we actually have seen this polarization of employment. We have seen a disappearance as a share of total employment of middle-skill, mid-education jobs. And by the way, a good news part of this trend is we've actually also seen a fairly significant growth in the share of employment in higher-skill jobs. So it becomes to me, how do we create more and more of these higher-skill jobs and how do we give people the capabilities through education, through healthcare, through networks, through counseling, through active labor market policies? How do we give people the capabilities to move into these good jobs? So I say the goal is creation of good jobs and the mobility and endowments that individuals have to move into those good jobs. Okay, that's a very nice summary of a lot of complex ideas and we'll come and tease all of those out. Gordon, I'm actually gonna ask you, Laura's kind of provided the perfect pivot here for something I wanna talk to you about, which is the importance of place. I mean, we of course wanna create better jobs. We of course want to make mobility possible because that's a historic advantage of the US actually in terms of growth. But I will say I have had any number in my 30 years of being a journalist, conversations with folks that kind of believe maybe people living in a red state, I grew up in Indiana, that they're just gonna somehow be able to come and move to Wally, North Carolina or Austin or wherever it is and relocate and have that ability to kind of jump into a new world. You are concerned about bringing the labor force to different locations. So can you talk a little bit about that and how you see that tension here? Sure, and if you had asked me that question 20 years ago, I would have had a very different answer because I think a lot of economists were quite sanguine about the ability of workers to adjust to changes in the economic environment. Things go south where you are, just move somewhere else. Things aren't going well in your industry or occupation, change jobs. What kind of appreciate is, as you mentioned, that economics of place is a very powerful force in people's lives. How things are doing where you live matter enormously for your material well-being. There are a sliver of folks who are highly mobile in response to changing economic conditions. They're primarily young and they're primarily highly educated and they're in those occupations that are enjoying very high economic returns. So to set the stage for that, I think we need to think about moving from a world where policies are people-based to have more policies that are place-based. And it's something that we've kind of been coming to appreciate more and more intently over the last decade or so. Where that comes from is the fact that you think about any region, its economic success is gonna be based on what its export industries are. And I mean export in a very expansive sense. It's stuff you produce for other people, could be nearby cities, it could be cities elsewhere in your country, or it could be for global markets. And we've seen a constellation of forces, globalization, the rise of China, the China shock, technological change, and now the progressive decarbonization of the economy, which has led to secular decline and an important set of export industries meaning regions that were specialized in those things are now facing hardship and extended distress. So we need to think about policies that will help those industries pivot to find new drivers of their economic development. And just to throw this out there, something we can talk a lot more detail about, the policies that are gonna help regions do that are gonna vary a lot according to conditions in those particular places. That is so fascinating. Again, you've brought in about 10 different topics. I wanna tease you out on Laura. I'm gonna, as Gordon was speaking, I was thinking about a story I heard recently. I was in the run up to the election doing some reporting in Pennsylvania. And trying to understand why certain union workers and fossil fuels there might be voting for Trump. And someone said to me, look, yes, green tech jobs pay a couple of two, three dollars above the average wage, but traditional fossil fuel jobs are double the median wage or whatever the metric was, it was a lot more. And so you've got that shift. And then at the same time, someone was telling me that this is an international trade issue because the Biden administration is now gonna have to negotiate with the European firms that may wanna come to the US and place jobs that have less benefits, less of a security net in the US. So the US in some ways in clean tech has the potential of becoming the China for Europe. So very, very complicated here.  Wow, what do you say to all that? Yes, the politics of this are fundamental. I was listening to Senator Angus King yesterday and he was talking about how Maine itself had bifurcated in terms of the election and had gone for a Republican senator, so Susan Collins, but had gone against Trump. But he said there were very important parts of Maine that were Trump footholds. He talked about production of paper, paper of products. And he basically said there's nothing less and there hasn't been anything for quite some time. So I completely agree this is very interlaced with politics and very interlaced with the kind of notion of being forgotten, being left behind, no one cares. Now, the challenge, and so I think Gordon's absolutely right. As we're thinking about the creation of good jobs, you can think about that as a macroeconomic policy. You have to have the same right amount of aggregate demand. But that doesn't really get up the issue of in certain places the good jobs are declining and other jobs there, other places they may be increasing the people are not in the same places. Okay, so I think this is really hard though. I want to say this is really hard. I think about, I'm gonna go with a country that's tried to do this for a very long time and that is Italy. Okay, when I was a graduate student, the very first thing I worked on was economic development policies trying to bring the southern part of Italy to the level of economic development of the northern part. Today, that's 40 years later, that southern part of Italy per capita income wise is in worse shape relative to the north. So this is a really, really hard problem. And so I want to underscore that we, that thinking about what are the place-based policies that work, I completely agree that is the important. So let's say if I take my goal as creation of good jobs and mobility moving people into them or giving them the endowments they need to have the skills to get into them, that is, I should add, and I will add, how do you do that at a regional level? And I think an important distinction here, and I believe it's been raised in much of the other, the other sessions from the INET, is a distinction between pre-production policies and production policies, because they're really free levels. Redistribution is post-production. It's basically you take the returns that were generated in the market and you redistribute them. Pre-production is people. This is where the focus is on people. The skill, the endowments and networks and links and understanding and information, all the health, the things they need to actually have the skills to get the good jobs. But the production phase of all of this has to do with where are those good jobs going to be. And so there you get things like, you get to things like industrial policy, you get to things like sector-specific, what are you going to do to try to take a sector in decline and try to increase its competitiveness. If you mentioned the issue of alternative energy in the Europeans, you know, a region might reasonably want to encourage, I would say encourage foreign direct investment from European corporations. That has been a major part of the rebuild strength of the US auto industry over the past 30 years. I mean, basically we insisted, we actually insisted through a voluntary export restraint policy that Japan stops selling cars that they export to the United States and start producing cars that they sell in the United States. Just produce it here, okay? So I think there are those kinds of policies. Let me raise an interesting question that I'd love to get Gordon's view on this. Germany, so Germany a few years ago, first time ever introduced a minimum wage, first time ever they introduced a minimum wage because they were really worried about this service sector which was not very well organized unionized. Worker voice was fairly weak in the service sector.  And the wages, the jobs weren't very good. The jobs weren't very good. So what they did is they imposed a minimum wage. One of the really interesting things about this is that some of the minimum wage small firms disappeared because they couldn't pay the minimum wage. They couldn't afford to run at that minimum wage. The workers moved but they didn't move that far. Okay, that's really interesting. They commute more. They commute more. They commute more. Higher wage firms. So I think of the production process, the production policies here include things like minimum wage and that can have different local effects. And I was wondering what Gordon thinks about, should we have different minimum wages for different places? We do, in the United States, to some extent that's what we have. What are some other policies where we could, at the production phase, interfere in a way or interfere makes the wrong word, create policies that actually create good jobs in particular locations. So I guess that's my challenge to Gordon. You're on. Laura, you started off by saying that this is hard and it is hard. We've been confronting these challenges for the better part of half a century and helping regions in distress turn the corner as something that we haven't found a magic bullet for by any stretch of the imagination. So when we think about what's gonna generate job growth, you kind of start by saying, well, what are the sectors that are actually growing in the US economy right now? It's healthcare. It's hospitality industries, broadly defined. It's green tech and it's a lot of stuff related to e-commerce and the digital economy. I'm kind of ignoring the very high tech stuff that you find in Silicon Valley and Boston because when we're talking about distressed regions, it's just, it's not all that relevant. So then you think about, well, what are the anchors that are gonna help you track employers in those industries where growth is happening? A simple way to start is by thinking, do you have the anchors already there? We've got, think of a place like Lehigh, Pennsylvania, which is an apart of Pennsylvania and it's just been hammered by globalization, technological change, the changing energy environment. But you've got major healthcare facilities nearby that are a source of job growth and we can help workers in local areas plug into those jobs, then we're solving part of the problem right there. There are gonna be other places where they don't have an anchor in their community itself, but they might not be that far away from a place. So think of the Central Valley of California and its proximity to Silicon Valley. Thinking much more aggressively about ways of improving commuting linkages from disadvantaged places to advantaged places is another possibility. But then we're gonna have other places that don't have those sorts of existing advantages and this is tougher because you've gotta think about ways of improving the business ecosystem that makes that foreign investment or domestic investment wanna come in. And that's gotta start with at least two things. One is improving the skills of local workers and one of the things that we come to appreciate is how agile community colleges are in redirecting their training programs to meet the needs of local or prospective employers. And the other is a little bit, it's tougher, but it's thinking about providing the logistics, the right infrastructure, the access to finance that allows local business to flourish and here civic institutions and the engagement between business and local government and civil society can be really important in helping make that transition happen in these tough places that don't have kind of natural things going for them. Okay, you guys are getting so many questions on this topic, Laura jump in and then I wanna get, pull in a couple of thoughts in the audience. I only wanna underscore a couple of things that Gordon said because of my work, as I said, I've been working in the state of California as a council of economic advisors and we've been thinking a lot about the differences in regions, the different sectors. I think the sectoral approach obviously critically, we have a lot of the poverty issues in California, a lot of the lack of employment issues in California are in the central valley and that's a very, it got specific sectors and specific geography. But I also wanted to underscore the importance of both training and capital. So I think they're really interesting, again, working on Germany, I was again wowed by their, by their vocational and educational training system. I mean, these guys have it, they have nailed it. They have these systems of training are designed with the employers, with employers association sitting down and saying, okay, in this sector what training do we need? What should be in the vocational part of our education system? How should we test? You don't, they actually test people who go through vocational training to see if they got the skills that were designed in part by the employers sitting together saying what do we actually need? So I think that the human capital association with community colleges trying to continue to strengthen that link between the employers associations, employers and talent development critically important. There's a really interesting national initiative in the United States called Rework America that LinkedIn is helping to and Markle Foundation. They do a lot of good work in this area in Indiana. They're doing some really interesting places in India, work in Indiana, by the way. The other thing I want to emphasize is access to capital because one of the things that turns out to be true in the number of the activities at Gordness talked about where there may be growth is there's a possibility that these will be small relatively small firms. And it's still the case today that it's very hard for a small firm to get access to capital, particularly in a disadvantaged community or disadvantaged, there's nothing. So we really, they're underbanked. The banks have moved out. There's just, we've got to figure out a way to do this. And there's some really interesting things going on now in the community lending area in the United States that I think build out. I think that's one of the things that the Biden administration will do. The access to capital is, we always focus on education and that's right, but it's not enough, not enough. Okay, I want to bring in, because it's so interesting, we're getting all these great questions right on this topic from audience members. Just on the issue of training, then we'll move to capital. Laura, how would you, and then Gordon, I want to hear your thoughts too, square the build back better campaign of the Biden administration with some of these issues of revamping education, coming up with a more Germanic model. And to your point, I mean, there are so many, we all know there are so many existing models at the state level, at the local level, at the company level. But the dots don't always get connected. Some people would argue that's okay. Some would say we do need to have a kind of blanket national system where we start to really move in a more Germanic direction. What would you say about that? I don't think that we're likely to have a national solution here. I think that, and I'm not sure, given that our whole education system from preschool K through 12 high school college is very much designed and supported by local state governments, I think we're going to stick with that. I think the key thing here is actually to find ways to strengthen the links of those educational channels, relations with the employers with, and state and local government can help do that. But actually the link has to be with them. My understanding is that the Biden administration will significantly, wants to significantly increase the training resources that would go through the federal government to the states. The states would allocate them. So the federal government not going to allocate them. The state is going to provide, the federal government provides conditions, conditions on their use, but leaves it to the states. So I think the focus, and again it's nice to have the regional focus here, let's focus on how we can use regional institutions and policies to increase that link between the employers, the students, the workers, and the sectors that matter the most to that region. I think that's, and things that the Biden administration itself will help provide additional resources to support this, but the regions are going to have to figure out how best to use the resources effectively. Yeah, Gordon, do you see any particular, first of all, do you agree with all that? And second, do you see any particular models that you would call out that we should be looking at in terms of connecting the dots regionally around training and educators, job creators? Yeah, I think the one thing of advantage of having a more regional focus is that it doesn't make you as dependent on Washington for solutions to these problems. Right now we have an administration coming in, hopes are high, but we've got to be honest with ourselves, Washington has been stuck in a state of gridlock for some amount of time. And the issues we're talking about are ones that at the state and local level aren't as politicized as they are at the federal level. And this means you can work across party lines more effectively. So that's one advantage of a regional focus. Second advantage of a regional focus is that regions are already spending a lot of money on trying to create jobs through local economic development where the vast majority of that money goes in the form of tax incentives to kind of bribe business to do what business was going to do anyways. Tim Bartek at the Uptown Institute estimates that it costs about $175,000 to create a job via local, via tax incentives. It costs about $15,000 to create a job through funds that help with ground field redevelopment. So part of the challenge here is to think about how we can do what we are doing now better without having to rely on Washington for major infusions of funds. And that goes to then looking at individual communities and understanding what they have that could be the basis for a successful plan. Coming back to the training thing you gotta look at do you have any sort of four year university or community college that you can rely on? What industry was here before? You think about a place like Martinsville, Virginia which in 1990 had almost half of its working age population employed in manufacturing producing furniture and textiles. Import competition from China just wiped that out. The share of their working age population manufacturing was down to under 15%, 15 years later. You got all these factories that are now empty. Can we do something with those factories that allow Martinsville to make that transition to the capital stock that can be redeployed? And I really wanna come back to underscore something that Laura said about the importance of access to capital. When places get hit hard, housing markets get hit and home equity is an important source of capital for investing in new businesses and that generates job growth. So these places that are in distress not only are the labor markets having issues the capital markets are having issues too and we need to think about ways of creating pipelines for access to capital. That can work if we wanna generate a cycle of growth. Let me, I'm gonna take you guys in one minute to cap those we have a ton of questions about that but let me ask you one follow up we had a comment coming in from a union wrap saying you know to your point about what can we do with these factories? How can we use these resources that may be standing idle but could be deployed in a new and creative way? Do we need, and again to go connect with Laura's admiration of the German model do we need co-determination? Do we need some labor on boards? How do you see the opportunities there? So I think having more cooperation between labor and capital and finding solutions to local and regional problems would be great. We don't know that it's gonna work everywhere. It's gonna work in some places where business is committed to saving their particular industries and workers of course are concerned about saving their jobs and not putting the stresses on their family that would be involved with them having to move 100, 200 miles away to find alternative employment. But unions sadly are just a smaller fraction of the workforce. And so whereas unions would be a vital part of revitalization in certain areas in other places that possibility just isn't there. So this kind of speaks to the importance of an ecumenical approach that represents the latent advantages that places have that would provide an anchor for development to occur. Okay, Laura jump in. So I just wanted to jump in on this question because I think it is important to before we go to co-determination which I'm an admirer of but the problem in the United States has been the anti-union effort at the state level at the federal level in the department of labor. We have basically been pushing to reduce and we have succeeded in significantly reducing the share of labor that is unionized. And I think there's a widespread recognition now among economists and I would say both of the right and the left here that has been an important reason for why the share of income from productivity going to labor has gone down. Basically unions have lost their ability they've lost their voice. And so the Biden administration will be very committed to trying to strengthen unions. And I think that is the right thing to do. I think we have to start there. I'm struck by the fact that when the German company I think it was Volkswagen wanted to start a works council in its plant in Tennessee it was forbidden to do so. It has been consistent with state and federal law on representation of worker voice to change that. So I am in favor of trying to strengthen the unions. Co-determination is an interesting idea but basically let's get that union voice thing first. That's all. I know the Google union is interesting not because it's so much a dollars and cents but it's a cultural marker I think. So let's move to capital. We have so much ground to cover already a number of questions. I'm just going to run through them because I think it gives a breadth of what people care about. We have folks asking what is the relationship between money flow and access to capital and inequality? What's the research showing there? Do we need a national rebuilding bank? This notion of all right what is the public sector's role in allocating productive capital at a time when we've got financialization and we've had 40 years of all the things we know about banks doing more trading than lending. The housing market in all of this moving in some ways again to go to the new administration's language moving from work to wealth and the function of the capital markets in the shift that we may be trying to make. That's a huge question but since you guys are brilliant just pick what part interests you and let's start jumping around here. Gordon do you want to start? Sure. And I'm going to take the easier part of it and leave the harder part of it to Laura. And the easier part of it is to think about what do you do in places where the bad stuff has just happened? Where we had a bunch of plant closure where we're seeing a shift out of the particular industry and we kind of just lived through this with COVID, right? But when you think about major economic change that hits a community or a region it is a pandemic like event. And what do we know that worked? Getting money into people's pockets and providing a financial backstop to firms. We should have policies in place that are targeted towards providing that support in response to mass layoff events to widespread job loss at the regional level. Since we're talking about other models I'll throw the Danish model out there based on Flex Security which is the idea that you don't want to impede the mobility of workers between employers and between jobs but you want to make sure that there is a very strong backstop that will take care of them in the event of job loss. So there are rights and responsibilities there rights to that access to support but responsibility in the part of the workers to be very focused on a transition into new employment. And it ends up being not that costly and provides helps dampen some of these cycles. So that's something that we can take we've learned from COVID in terms of the stuff that worked and we can apply it now thinking about these events to prevent further distress from becoming hardwired in. Laura I know you have thoughts on Flex Security. Folks you're muted still. Completely agree with Gordon. I've always been attracted really to the concept of Flex Security and I think that it's being done well in certain countries in Europe. And basically again we need to think about what we're talking about here is the provision of good jobs to people but sometimes those jobs will disappear. And when we then it seems to me we do have to focus on people's connection to other good jobs. So basically it's not that you are we can guarantee through policy that you're connected all your life to the same job in the same employer. It's not possible. So this is really to say what are set of policies that will create enough good jobs and enough mobility and enough income support during that mobility phase from one job to another from one sector to another and sometimes even from one region to another. What are the policies that help people do that? So I think Flex Security is about that concept. So it's flexibility. So you can't we don't want to prevent we don't want to create zombie firms. We won't want to block innovation. We don't want to we don't those processes will lead to quote unquote creative destruction. The destruction part is extremely painful and extremely painful for communities and for workers. What do we do? I would say let's say creative reconstruction. We take the destruction part and we recreate something new in those locations. We help those people. We help those regions do that. I want to say another part of your question from the audience was on how can we leverage? Should we have a, I think the question was should we have a national infrastructure bank or something like that? In California, there is an infrastructure bank and one of the key things that the loan program that I've worked on focused on was how you take public funds that sit in an infrastructure bank or a public bank and how do you leverage those with other capital to provide a lending facility? So I think it's kind of a creation of a new kind of frozen entity in a sense. It's we did it through a SPV entity but they're bringing in more private capital to create new kinds of financial institutions that can lend to small and medium sized businesses. Interesting. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about we've been sort of dancing around COVID and what the impacts have been. I mean, there's so many impacts on work. Just what we're all doing here all the time. One of the things I've been very interested in is seeing the types of businesses that are surviving or being created in the U.S. actually applications to start new businesses are really going through the roof but they are different kinds of businesses. They tend to be more digital. As we know, digital businesses, companies that have a lot of intangibles can have very high margins but sometimes they create fewer jobs. Right. Certainly different kinds of jobs. That's the issue. Do you want me to repeat? Sorry, I think I froze a little bit. Let me repeat the question. In the COVID era, different kinds of businesses are being created. They're more digital. They're more intangible. They may create fewer jobs in the short term although they may be very good jobs and highly productive in the longer term. How do we think about any policy decisions being made around this shift which is happening so fast? Gordon, what do you think? So to look for silver linings in COVID I think remote work creates a possibility for distressed communities that is really exciting. One of the strongest empirical regularities out there in terms of what helps communities grow is to have an anchor of skilled labor. That anchor is hard to create if you don't have it already. Many places though have attractions for millennials or for more seasoned professionals to live and work remotely. Not everyone's going to be able to do this but we've discovered that a much larger fraction of the highly professional segment of the labor force is capable of doing it. So you think about some inducements that help draw in skilled workers to communities. They might be working for employers on the East Coast or the West Coast but they're now based in those places and once you're based in those places you bring your networks with you and those networks then create employment opportunities for people in the local area. They create opportunities for investment. So I think the remote work option is really exciting. I want to think about just one parallel to that which isn't so much COVID as more related to the Biden administration coming in as we think about reforming U.S. immigration policy. Maybe we should take a portion of skilled worker visas and tie those to working in areas where we want to generate job growth. We do this with foreign medical staff. We want to work as a doctor in the U.S. and you were trained abroad. You may have to work for a while in an area that just doesn't have much medical care. We could do that with skilled immigration visas too and in parallel with these new opportunities for remote work bring highly professional folks to areas that don't have access to the same networks that we do on the East and West Coast. Okay, Laura, thoughts on the post COVID world and how to shape policy. So I agree with Gordon completely. We can hope for and there's some signs that the hybrid model of work will continue. That I think there will and more remote work will continue the potential regional benefits that Gordon said. So just to me underscore, I completely agree with that. I think one of the things that I would also focus on is I think that we are going to have continued growth and probably acceleration of independent workers, gig workers, workers who are not tied to a single employer with a standard contract. And the argument in favor of that is all the flexibility and the additional jobs. But the problem is, and this is again, some of the Europeans are dealing with right now, those workers do not have social or legal protections to the same extent that a worker on a regular employment contract does and they don't have access to benefits. So we're gonna have to move, I believe, to a portable benefit system so that individual workers get collecting benefits and contributing to benefits as well. They've got to make contributions to their employers as they move from employer to employer. I think that's really important. We've got to figure out a way. We just had a stimulus package which took unemployment compensation and extended it to the gig workers. Okay, that was the right thing to do. But those workers are not in the social insurance system right now. So we're not finding a way to provide funds that go into the social insurance system. That is the unemployment compensation system. And then our distributed back to workers who are gig workers. So I want to emphasize that we've got to think about that whole other thing that's been accelerated, that independent worker gig worker. That's such a great question and it actually pivots to some of the several audience members to talk about which is monopoly power, particularly amongst big tech firms and the way in which this is affecting the world of work. We've just seen what happened with Uber in California, basically spending a lot of money to make sure that they didn't have to treat the workers as benefited workers. That may happen in other states. I don't even know where to go with this question except how do we make sure, particularly as we transition to the next phase of internet based innovation, the internet of things, smart homes, healthcare, finance. How do you make sure that five companies don't own the entire pie? I don't want to go back to that one. They're going to need another hour long session for this. I mean, they're two sides to it. One is a side that you're emphasizing. They're two sides to it. One is a side you're emphasizing on regulatory policy and in terms of what do we do with antitrust. But a lot of big companies are also big employers and might not just be monopolists in the stuff that they sell, they might be monopsonists in the workers that they hire. And here we need to be very aggressive about things like non-complete clauses about encouraging mobility of workers. Mobility has declined in every dimension in the U.S. labor force, not just between regions, but between employers as well. And we need to be much more aggressive about this. So something that economists have been, 10 years ago we were just kind of dismissed monopsony power as something that's a textbook curiosity. Now we are appreciating how incredibly important it is in the U.S. labor market and what role it's had for suppressing wages for workers in many different sectors. Laura. Yes. And I think I would just add to that. That's again, one of the ways you handle this is the monopsony power means that the employee side has, does not have appropriate negotiating power. And that really goes again to the importance of unions. And that's why I was very pleased. It's not just a cultural sign at Google, the fact that there's recognition. There is attempts to unionize Uber drivers going on right now. Okay, you've got to get an organized voice dealing with these very large firms. You can talk about breaking up the firm's power, but in the meantime, and that may never happen, actually having an organized voice in those negotiations becomes the antidote. And I think that we can see that again. You know, the OECD has done some really interesting work showing that wage inequality, wage stagnation really varies from firm to firm and that the firms, some firms pass through a lot of their profitability, their share to workers and others do not. And one of the features of the firms that do is union power, is worker voice. Is worker voice, is the negotiation of the contract between the workers and the firm, which gets at the issue of how the productivity benefits of say automation are shared with the workers. So. That's a great point. It's a great point. And also, I mean, to your point about Google not just being a cultural marker, it's interesting, it will be interesting I think to see in the post COVID work world, okay, I'm working from home, we're all working from home. That means higher wage jobs can potentially be relocated in ways that physical jobs might have been. And that kind of gets to this bigger question, which again, a lot of people are sending in questions sort of dancing around this topic of status quo globalization. You know, the post neoliberal paradigm, supply chains, tax arbitrage. Someone's asking, you know, how do we get around the fact that labor pays taxes, automation doesn't? These are big questions, but they do really seem important thinking about work and policy. Laura, do you want to grab any one of those? So I wanted to start with two observations. One is that, and Gordon can really speak to this in thinking about what's happened in the labor market, the disappearance of good jobs, the stagnation of wages. Many people blame globalization, probably more than globalization, the weight of globalization as a cause, and they underweight technology as a cause. But maybe the truth is to say, they're totally interconnected at this point. So it's a kind of crazy discussion. I mean, that we have supply chains, we have this very sophisticated way of stuff around the world because we have massive changes in digital technologies and transportation technologies and everything else that make it possible. We wouldn't have had that globalization without the technology. So I just want to get it clear that it's not globalization by itself that's been the issue, but globalization turbocharged by technology. And then the rise, frankly, of a major competitor in many spaces and that is China. So we can talk about China as well. But on the issue and one other issue in your question area, yet it is outrageous that we have these very large global firms that essentially have found a way to generate stateless income. Income, which is not taxed effectively by any state. During the night until about a couple of years ago, frankly, what was happening was the advanced industrial countries were competing to get that income by driving their tax rates on companies down. So there was this basically race to the bottom in terms of corporate taxation and in terms of taxing income that was earned by a corporation headed in your country. But if the income was earned elsewhere or put elsewhere, you didn't get to tax it. I think that is going to change. I really think that is going to change. I think that the OECD again has been doing some really interesting work on this. I think the Europeans are moving in this direction now. I think there's a real possibility that the US begins to negotiate with Europe on this. And that would be the right place to start because a lot of these multinational firms are basically they're the headquartered in Europe or the United States. And a lot of their activities in the US or Europe. It'll be a separate issue how to deal with this in China. I'm not saying but I think it's a really important problem. And I am somewhat optimistic that we will see a change from the race to the bottom to, hey, we've got to figure out a way to propose some taxation on this stateless income. Okay, Gordon, if you want to pick up on this and kind of address broadly how we shift this labor capital balance in terms of preference across all these different areas. I think Laura makes a really important point that we can't deal with this issue of firms escaping taxation without multilateral coordination. There's an article by Bob Davis in the Wall Street Journal today talking about how Robert Lighthizer's advice to the Biden administration is don't trust the World Trade Organization. Just like to counter that just as forcefully as possible and saying now is a moment where we need multilateral coordination more than ever. And if we want to take on big tech and we want to take on the declining labor share of income it's got to be in concert with other countries because going it alone does just put us into the race to the bottom mode. I do want to highlight something about the current moment though that is a sign of optimism. Along with David Otter and David Dorn, I've done lots and lots of research about the impact of the China trade shock on labor markets in the US and elsewhere. The China shock ended 10 years ago. China's completely different place now. Its firms are less dynamic. Its labor force is actually shrinking and the ability of China to keep gobbling up market share is that's over. And what that means is you now have the possibility of thinking about different technological trajectories for some of the industries that China just completely dominated. Not only that, Xi Jinping is doing the rest of the world a real favor by making China as uncompetitive as possible through the nature of intervention of China in major sectors of the economy. So we often make economic policy in a backward looking sense and the importance of China for what's gone on in the global economy in the last 30 years can't be overstated. But we really are in a different moment right now and it gives us freedom to think about possibilities and just we're off the table 20 years ago when China was in that no-go mode. Let me push back just very quickly and say though, I take your point entirely on China although I feel like every time I'm in China I think you can argue the case either way. I mean, I'm fascinated for example that Beijing is taking on the power of ant financial and Alibaba and thinking about breaking up their data monopoly. Laura, very quickly before we move to the last couple of questions do you have thoughts on China and its effect on US labor and the workforce? So a couple, yes, I do. I certainly agree with Gordon that's a simple, not simple but I'll call it simple labor arbitrage threat of China. That is low cost labor in labor intensive or medium labor intensive industries. That was the story of the China shock and it is over because China has lost its own competitive position in those industries. A lot of them are moving to other lower cost labor locations and the supply chain is moving with them. So basically, so I think for the issues for the US and China at this point are much more around high tech industry, industries which have national security implications, industries which have a significant amount of intellectual property rights associated with them. I think those will continue to be a big area of conflict because China is basically determined and we've been determined in our own history. We've had the US has had its own periods of industrial policy. I go back to Alexander Hamilton here but basically China has said we want to have indigenous capabilities in these industries and we will, we will. And so then the question becomes not so much to block them from doing that which I think fails but from trying to make sure through the WTO and through negotiations with China to make sure that US companies and US products have access to that exploding market in China. So I would focus on access to China rather than import threats from China, access to China. And I think that the other thing I want to emphasize here and then I want to raise a question is I think we can work with China and Europe on trade and climate because China, if you go back to the Paris Accord, the Paris Accord came out of the US-China agreement. China has the same issues in climate that we have and actually they have done some really interesting important things in Syria. They're doing a lot of bad things. I mean, they keep generating new coal plants and all the rest of it. But I think this is an area of trade, jobs that we can work with China on and I'm optimistic about that. My question is a little bit to go back to employment in the following sense. Gordon pointed out at the beginning that much of the growth in employment in the future is going to be driven by, I will just call it care, healthcare, care for the elderly, care for the young. Those are local jobs. Those are jobs that are provided by people in the place. And in our system, they are crummy jobs. They're not good jobs. They're not good jobs. I think there's a public policy issue here of how you make those jobs better jobs. Good jobs. Well, I can jump in because one of the last questions to come up here and I think we have time for just kind of one more round from everybody. Someone is asking, is there a gender issue here? How do we make the guys working on the oil rigs move into healthcare and are these feminized jobs being, is that part of the reason that they're crappy jobs? So how do you deal with that? It's certainly kind of gender. Yep, yeah. That's a very important question. How do you... I think they are gender jobs. By the way, we saw in... We saw going after education in the post-19 area where there was a lot of notion that the educators were too unionized and they had too much power.  They're basically women who are working in education. And they were able to get some real improvement because it led to political action, political representation and states began to make adjustments. So I think the regions here in the States are gonna have to deal with the reality that this is where a large fraction of the workers are going to work. And I'll link to that one other thing that I think COVID has pointed out so clearly to me. Why did we get that vaccine? We got that vaccine development so rapidly. We got it for two reasons. One was there was a lot of research money that was available. And two, there was a commitment to buy it. There was certain procurement. You were producing something which you knew was going to be bought by the public sector to distribute to everyone. Okay, so think about procurement in the area of if you are employing people to teach in your schools and such a year procuring their services. So I think the power of government to actually create better jobs in all of those things that they procure becomes very important here. And COVID certainly points to procurement. That's a huge deal. And I'm actually hearing good things from the White House on that front, taking that power of the federal government and their procurement spending seriously. Gordon, I'm going to very quickly give you the last minute or two and then we're going to have to wrap up, sadly. Sure, I want to just say one more thing about trade that we jumped off a little too quickly. Because there is no China to replace China, they're just not. That creates this opportunity for the US to rethink its role in certain global supply chains. And here we actually have a legacy of success through NAFTA in things like medical devices and things like aerospace and things like automobiles. And we don't want to forget the North American industrial complex and its potential for continued growth. The USMCA was a step backwards in that regard because it created trade barriers rather than facilitating deepening supply chains among within the region. But I would put that high on the agenda. I know President Biden probably didn't want to talk about trade, but keeping our connection next going to Canada is a way of helping you out to industry. Okay, I know we could keep going and going. You guys are fascinating. I love talking with you. I want to just alert everybody the discussion is going to continue with INET's Young Scholars Initiative in an open forum discussion. You can take a deeper dive on all this. Just click Young Scholars Initiative at the bottom of the screen to join that and just a reminder that on Tuesday, Jan 19th at noon, there's going to be discussion of the future of work and making technologies work for all with, it's going to be moderated by Katya Klanova with the amazing Mariana, Masakato, Tess Postner and Martin Reaves. So you can get all the details on the INET website. I got to go. I got a hard stop at one. Lovely to talk to you guys. Thanks for having me. Bye.


Today, I took another shot at Manhumpa with a spy. We used a plugin that randomly chose one of the hunters to be the spy.  This was really hard with 4 hunters, so stick around until the end to see if I was able to win. Also, I would like to mention that only 8.3% of the people who watch my videos are actually subscribed, so if you do enjoy, please consider subscribing. It's completely free and I put so much work into these videos. Hope you enjoy. Turkey for Thanksgiving. Turkey for Thanksgiving. Yeah. And what's that favorite Thanksgiving? My favorite, Stoffing. My favorite? Stoffing? My favorite? The pie or the croissant? Actually, none, none, none. Out of everything, pumpkin pie. The pie or the croissant? Pie or the croissant? You gotta love croissants. You gotta love croissants. Croissants? You have croissants. Thanksgiving? You have France, bro? Bro, are you crazy? Yeah, some from friends. Some from friends. I'm from France.  I'm from France, man. I'm from France. I'm a bird! Bird! Bird! I'm just not... I was busy. I was busy staring at my recording because I'm the smile. Catch him, catch him, blond. What is this? He's gonna complain.  Okay, there's a village. No. I'm gonna boost him. Chase him out. Chase him out of the village. Don't let him leave the village. Chase him out. Dude, he won't have time to. He won't have time to. Bro, did you see Blastman? There's no Blastman. There's no Blastman, too. Oh my god. No Blastman? Okay. We're chillin'. We're chillin'. I'll stay back and get the hay boughs.  I'll get the ravine that was right there. Are you sure there's no Blastman? Okay.   Brons, keep chasing. Oh, there's a Blastman. Oh, no. Please don't have stuff in it. Diamonds! Diamonds! Diamonds! Are you kidding me? He has a sword, he has a sword, he has a sword! Can we have a flank? Can we have a flank? Can we have a flank? Planky! Planky buff! Run back towards Spawn. Can we have a flanky. Can we have a flanky? Planky buff! Yes. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Blake, I have an axe for you. Blake, I have an axe for you. I'm leading you, I'm leading you. I'm leading you. Bro, go right there! Bury him here! Take that, take that, take that! Oh my goodness, leave me alone. You stick on him you stick on him. Yeah, I'm on a higher disorder He doesn't have food. He's okay. He doesn't have food. How much did you hit him last time bronze? Oh, he has food He has he got berries Oh, yeah, come here. Come here bud. Come here bird as good as you are. I don't know if you can beat it Yeah, boy It's not for an axe or a bucket if you want to be yes kill me. Oh, I got I got one axe crit on him blank You might be low. I'm so far away. I'm still at the village honestly There was a lava pool here You need to tell me what we need to do you need to tell me what we do, okay? Okay, first give me all your stuff everything.  Follow me. Follow me. Oh We do about this. Oh, uh Should we do first like yeah, or should we cover it? Did you find like a lot of pool or something? No Yeah, we found a water pool pool water. Yeah, we found a pool water pull the water Okay, I'm chillin now Peter's are doing some great. Make me just make sure you sleep in a bed. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah Guys just look for a fortress and break all the things in there. Okay. Yeah Where where where where where where where the bed where the bed? Why don't we move it? Yo, you should stay on him bro. You stay on him bronze It's probably far away though fine fine fine. That's a good little chicken feather to fly will be Are you calling bronze a chicken? Yes, good teamwork good teamwork right here. I can tell you guys are such a unified team here Thank you. Okay. Here's a shield. That's not too scary. Yes. He's also fighting something Yeah, no, that's right just was Get the gravel we got to get there first. Oh, can I use the lava book by the way? You're awfully quiet over there Like I'm gonna use it to fuel the furnace I'm using it to fuel the furnace bro Okay, just put it in the furnace. It'll disappear It's for fueling the furnace Yeah burning us alive. No, it's fine. Oh wait. Let me pick another one. Hey What? He is a diamond sword. Okay, put it in the second one.  Okay, it's light of light and blank light How are you doing? Yo, let me let me have Oh the lag the lag Yes No, oh my god, he got lava. He got lava. Thank you Thank you for that blank blank quick portal trap it when I after I get in portal trap after I get in You don't have the uh, where's the bucket? I don't know. I think Oh you got it from the blacksmith remember the diamond achievement Why are you guys in the nether I found something that I like What did you find? Sorry cryo tech What boy, whisper it to me. Say goodbye to your blaze spawn us. Oh, you found the fortress Okay, I'll go the opposite way. I'll go the opposite way to find any. That's so annoying I found one two. I found one two. We might find the same one No, mine's wait, which direction was yours in mine's east mine's I'm trapped I'm going to the baskin robins To me no actually I think it's bronze because they're the only one not in the nether right now. They're the only one away from us They could be helping her tech likes to accuse people when he's a Sus not sus Not sus. Not sus. Dude. He's gonna cover up one of the blaze spotters No, I cannot I cannot I cannot Dang bro my asthma. Hey, hey, that's not funny to joke about. Yeah, what the heck bro.  Yeah, bro. Are you are you that's just like not cool Megan's people with asthma. I would know You know how much we have to go through on a daily basis.  You know what that is I can't even swim for more than five minutes. I'm going to the baskin robins to see if there's diamond armor, by the way Can't there be like nether right? Yeah, they're coming. Yeah, they can. Oh my god. Did I make it to the baskin robins?  I'm a thief. I'm a criminal. Please lock me up. I'm in jail. Please Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Please don't please don't please don't please don't Oh I want to trace down a freaking one like there's only Blanks is having like a horror game Like you remember you went right? Did you break the bed? No Who broke the bed It's either Peters or bronze. No, I'm in the nether. I've been in the nether Peter was the bed there when you went into the portal. I think it's bird. I think it's bird Bro, I've been in the nether this whole time. I was in the nether before you No, you know, that's not true. That's not so he was he was Okay, I was in full The portal trap it I oh, yeah, yeah, you were the last one. That's true But I didn't break the bed. That was not me bronzes is being chased at the villas that we all spawned at Blond Come here Come here Blond's gaming Blond's gaming come here. Okay, then then what come here? That was so effective man. Oh, there you go. Blond's gaming Blond's gaming come here Come here Blond's gaming It's either piercer bird and I'm leaning to more towards bird because bird is like it all the time, bro I'm literally I've been in the nether this whole time. I'm about Like 500 blocks out. You know, that's not a valid excuse for you. You know that's not way bird I am at the I am at the fortress and I can't believe you would say that Yeah, you said that you were in it before you actually went in it. That's why I was sussing you What do you mean? You said I asked you are you in it? And then you said yeah, yeah right now and then I said no, you're not and then you just got the I said in you said yes for in I know it's peters Okay, no now now the bird is throwing the sauce on me. I think it's I think it's weird like his bird Is this like a mongoose or something? Oh because they're suspicious of me.  Are you kidding me? Yeah, plus I made a vow that even if like I can tell it's bird. It's not bird Dude, it has to be peters or bronze because those were the two people that you I just didn't get a kill because there's so many down. I'm trying to break it. I I swear Hey, yo, uh, if all of if all of the people are uh in there, you know, one of you one of you should uh collect some for me Just in case Oh, I'm throwing this one in lava. Yeah, don't worry. Uh peters your teammates there to prove my loyalty. I will literally jump in lava That seems like a good plan. I'll be able to play that far bro. I think I trust you now. I think I trust you But he hasn't done it yet Oh, yeah I can say anything I want Just give me the word Jump right now die Oh, yeah, right now right now Right now right now. You said you said so you said so. I am a man of my word. Let me find the lava. Hold on Okay, I'm gonna die. Yeah, okay. I died Well fighting a blaze that doesn't seem like he jumped in lava Yeah, because I was about to jump But then he died too. So you lied then. So you lied.   I don't even know. I'm just joking Geez, I don't even know where they're trying to your teammate Kyro and you're just throwing him under the bus He's third imposter. Yeah, Kyro. You're third imposter, bro. There's only one imposter Oh, you're second imposter second imposter. I'm the speed runner the imposter is helping I don't like your attitude Kyro That's all she wrote Dude, that was the most smooth boat transition. I've ever done. Thank you I've never gotten into a boat that smoothly. Holy. Thank you. Thank you. Oh my god.  You can't say goose to people. You can't say goose Do you have to listen to that? At six I'm like 11 Oh Goose, can you do this?    We've been over this. We've been over this.  Okay, so I built a very functional portal and I'm coming back through the port. That's a thing to the overworld I like that Okay, so Oh, I'm in a jungle I'm gonna find a pet parrot. No My one weakness parrots. They always beat me a manhunt blank.  I'll give you one of these if you uh, give you one of what? Wait one of what? Is he trying to pretend like he's near me I'm right next to freaking bronze bro. Yeah, man. We chill I'll give bronze one of these two Oh, okay You should be good for now. The lava's slowly going away. Well, you put him on. He put me on. Okay. Yeah, you're good Can you tell me the chords of the portal? Uh, the actual nether portal from the inside? Yeah, okay, I'll go in there. Hopefully Bronze don't you dare portal trap him. That'd be so sad Stop saying finna.  It's like whispering Represents Peter come on. What the heck? You're literally trolling bro Yeah, um, I destroyed all the spawners in there. So hey, that's so that's so rude. Why would you do that? Peter this way They turn into like That's more blank. That's more than it would be Is it not?  No, he made a diamond sword with the diamonds he got with blacksmiths. There's no way that throws No, no, I'm just saying we kind of like see him get the achievement again You guys messed up by not having anybody keep chasing. There we go. Oh, oh, that's all I'll say My brother here. I'm here. I'm here Where where where where do you just kill the skeleton? Look turn around turn around Listen up. There's another skeleton. Oh my god. He's in the nether. He's in the nether. He's in the nether Help. Oh, oh blank. Please help. Please help. Oh, he's been around here Pork tux can just be on the ground I figured that out through my ears. Oh, oh my god I figured that out through the years pork chops can just run blank. Just run. Yeah. Yeah, sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. No, I promise Listen, okay.  I always say my stuff at your portal Don't let Cairo get your get my stuff.  That's the worst possible way this can end dudes Peter do not go through. Do not go through dude. I think it's Peter. We need to infect your loot I'm in the jungle. I don't have I told yeah, you said I could go through that one. No, we said go through. He said not birds Or oh He pretended to message me when he didn't he hasn't messaged me once Yeah, I will literally share. I will literally Oh screen share you can't screen share. Okay, I always have my stuff playing I honestly don't have any of your stuff except for your crossbow here Hey Peter's please tell me you slept I didn't sleep. It's right next to blank. No, I slept. I slept. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm dropping on your trash.  He didn't drop on top of me.  Just like you told me that is true.  I Wait, so you did find out you had you have to run like another two years to find a better fortress Yeah, we broke them at both the spawner. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?    No matter what What is that thing? Enchanter. Oh my god. Wait guys. Did you know I could have Oh my god. I didn't know that was the thing. There's a piglin wearing the wither skeleton head The piglins can wear the wither skeleton heads. That's so cool That is actually that's so cool Hey, oh by the way If the artist is watching this someone do a really really really cool picture of me and bird from the last Drop the name. Oh, yeah. Yeah that one that one that one. That was that was a name. Drop the name. Give a shout out Yeah, hold on. I'll put it on the screen. Put it on the screen. Okay. Fine. I'll I'll put it on the screen right now This person drew a really cool picture of me and bird in the last man hunt And that was actually like a really a really cool one.  Oh Why are there so many zombies in this good though? So we're both as a collective group proud of peters right now Just came because you're the hunter. I mean you're the spy. I mean Yeah, I hear a baby. I'll be I hear a baby. Oh my god. I keep forgetting. There's a spine here I'm just trying to focus on chiro because I think it's bronze. Honestly Bronze is bronze is just like afk. Yeah. No, he's he's just afk. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, he's not Out of respect. I'm just not gonna so he got all the he got all the things he needed then No, I I'm I'm hoping that one of you guys has them Well, no one has him Oh, yeah, he's at bronze. He's at bronze You guys are gonna have to bully bronze when he comes back for just letting me go because he was afk No, I'm pretty sure bronze is the guy though. What if bronzes isn't afk? He has.   I'm smelling some food over here on the mountain What?  I thought that was two over there How many carrots did you bring hon? I'm gonna go ahead and carry it. I have a stack in I might as well just bring the rest of them. Dude, I have a song stuck in my head. This is an unfair advantage Dude, he probably went through my big portal Yeah, probably All right, wait blank. Are we going together? We're going together.  Stop it. Buffy monkey, baby Buffy monkey, baby No, is it still in the direction of kairos spruce?  Yay What if he's in my jungle and just got like a blue bird because he's such a simple.  What are your cords message message cords message cords everyone just target his dog when we get in a fight with him True true true. I don't know. Maybe you guys are behind me. Hold on Oh, no, you guys that I missed Yeah, you guys are already wait. What do you know where you are? Yeah, I'm pretty close to that. No, I just wait up. No What what? No No Did his dog die?  That's probably a low moment right there.   I'm behind. I don't know where you guys are. I don't know where blank went No, it's hiro. What's wrong? Did you did you do I died? Did you look in chat You didn't die. It doesn't stay in my chat. So I I had this 1000 IQ play, but you know what I realized It it only shows in chat for me I I I I named my dog chiro-tech and burnt it. Oh my gosh. You were really trying to do that He named his dog chiro-tech and then tried and burnt it lava and then Pretend like it worked till like it worked.   So you guys see the village then? Peter said there's a village look at bird watch me bird watch me Okay The kai's at the portal or he's getting he's gotten stuff. Look at that. Look at I spy. What is that? Okay?     That's scary. What is I spy Dude now. I think it's bird just for saying that dude. Oh my god. You know I first shooting at him, dude Hey, hey, hey, I'm just gonna say I'm just gonna say one thing.  What are you guys getting it's bronze? No, no one gave you rods. We were all together this whole time You found the manually found the you found the naturally spawned one. No, he's trying to he's trying to separate Someone left me a chest at a certain amount of corn in it Someone left you a chest. Oh, yeah, you're only near bronze. So now we know it's bronze If we each hit him once he's dead He's gonna change if we each what do you mean if we why are we each gonna hit him, bro? One of us is a spy. We know that Oh, yeah, well, no, we don't know because bronze could be Oh, see my sauce name. I saw his name That way that way This way this way follow me follow me I'm gonna be in the back, bro. I don't know I know we should be sure I could have done that a bit ago. Well, yeah, you always wait for the last second, bro You did this last thing last time, too We have content. What is that? So he's in the end. He went in he went in Well, okay, he's definitely got a trap. He's gonna trap. Did anyone bring it Peter? You got the bed still right? I'm not the bed. I got the bed.  Well, that's not good for us It's not good for any of us, bro Wait, if this spawned out in a platform open that would be good because we each have pearls Wait, wait. Oh, okay. I thought Peter's speaking. Okay. Well, I'm going last. I'm gonna make stands, bro I'm going last.   Look bronze is here. Bronze is here. Bronze is here. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in Why are you just crowds, bro? Why are you just crowds bronze? What because there's a slab there language Sorry, sorry, sorry It's safe. It's safe. It's not trapped. Go in bronze. I'm trapped Peter, I feel like I'm more trustworthy than you Yeah, bronze anybody right now bronze can always treat at us. You're shooting at us He is He's coming for us coming quick How are you? It's okay, right? Bronze say it's okay. Bronze say it's okay. Guys coming quick or else Who is it? Who is it? It's like near full diamond You need to show your beautiful armor. Bronze say it's okay. Bronze say it's okay. Yeah. It's completely fine. Yeah It's okay guys. No trap There's not too spice. There's no there's no beds. There's no lava He's coming for us. Please come here guys, please Y'all are taking a very long time. They're throwing dude. They're actually gonna Like he's he's coming out.  Stop me rowey. Oh my gosh. It's bronze. It's bronze. Okay. I'm dead. Thank you guys. Thank you guys so much for stalling Yes, okay three two one go I I I skip bronze guys Bro Come over here Why didn't you guys take so long Each other nobody Oh my gosh, you guys are so Why is there an intermittent after me?  I killed bronze. I killed bronze.  He has enchanted stuff. He's definitely up to the dragon He's then he probably up to stuff. Yes, it is wrong. I'm not gonna let it get to his loot. Okay. Kyra tech is scary We're over exaggerating bro. This is an easy win You have legs. You don't have legs. I don't have feet. Just come up here.    I'm tied in anderman. Blake. Wait, wait Okay, I'm I'm creating bronze. Got it. Got it. Come here. Blake. Come here. Now we can't respond here Yes This is gone. There's their bed's gone.    Oh, I found a different fortress Oh, yeah, I know that's why I was trying to break them. I was killed No blank the one I was trying to get to when I was killed and mr. Peters wasn't giving me food That's why I was so annoyed about that. I was trying to break them. I wasn't giving you food I wasn't even with you. I think you know, I think he did try giving you.  I didn't know he was I didn't know he was the spy I just didn't kill him because I felt that and yeah, this is even Oh my god I even called them out for like the simplest thing, but it still was kind of true The enchantment armor trying to get advantage them to to be yeah that I mean honestly if I was there I would just say like I was trying to get to you guys We're like getting all my actual resources and stuff and know what's gonna be in chance So I could harm us and easily play it off just like a team play and said We all just built this truck So and also at the beginning I I accused him for like the portal trap because I knew we're blank No, that was me. That was me. That was me. That was you. Oh, yeah, that did make sense when he said that He's like he's entirely Watch out bronze. Watch out bronze. Watch out He's a bomb I love wait, I love oh kiro killed bronze at the beginning too. Oh, yeah, I kept doing it Well, you feel like thrice dude. It was great ready ready. I'll send it to you if it's an GG Yes No, I'm at the I'm at the portal too The last fight decent. I tried. Oh my goodness. Was that fight between me and you decent?  I cannot believe that. Yeah, no All of all of the comments were so angry at me for not burning the stuff So I had to or else they would have called me dumb. Oh, I have 69 levels nice


So for this example, the focus is really not going to be on the performance equation. As we've seen, that's really simple. The focus is really going to be on figuring out how to construct the execution time so that we can put it into the performance equation and get a result out. So in this case, we've got two tasks. One of them works as the input for the other one. So we'll want to start by figuring out, well, how long is it going to take to run task one? How long is it going to take to run task two? If we add those together, we should get the total execution time. So in this case, we're running task one 1,000 times for every time that we're going to run task two. So our machine takes 10 nanoseconds to run task one. It's going to run 1,000 of those. And then it's going to take 30 seconds to run task two. So we have 1,000 instances of task one. Each of which takes 10 nanoseconds. So here's the execution time for task one. And then we want to add to this the execution time for task two. So task two is getting run one time. And it takes 30 seconds to run that. So one time at 30 seconds. And this is task number two. So 1,000 times 10 nanoseconds gives me 10 microseconds. And 1 times 30 seconds is 30 seconds. So these still aren't in the same units. I would want to put them both into say seconds or microseconds, 30 point. There's my milliseconds. And there's my microseconds. So that's my total execution time for this task. Now I can just plug that into the performance equation and say that performance is one over time. My time is 30 point 0,0001 seconds. And I can turn this into a decimal and get an actual answer out if I wanted. But it's not going to be too different from the 30 second task that we saw in the previous examples.


Thanks for the warm welcome, that's great. Welcome to Burning Down the House, a quick guide on how you can burn down your data center and hopefully put it all back again. So more specifically we're going to be talking about Backup and Restore of Cloud Foundry. I'm Henry. I'm Therese. We work on the Backup and Restore team pivotal and in this talk we're going to cover the current approaches to backing up Cloud Foundry, what we've found people currently do, the problems with those approaches, our solution to Backup and Restore and then what the future of Backup and Restore of Cloud Foundry and Bosch releases looks like. So why bother backing up Cloud Foundry at all? It seems like a reasonable question to ask. Well one of the first things we find operators tend to do when they become customers when they start to use Cloud Foundry is ask about disaster recovery, ask about Backup and Restore. Because if you're running a mission-critical apps on Cloud Foundry then you need to have a very reliable way of backing up and restoring your CF. Fundamentally we think that every company is a software company and if you're running your mission-critical workloads on it you know you need to be able to recover not just your foundation but your apps, your data services and everything around it. And we also find a lot of organizations use Cloud Foundry in their dev workflows. So if your Cloud Controller API is offline even for half an hour that means that your developers who are very expensive are unable to push their apps, your CI, CD pipelines aren't working. So what kind of things can go wrong with Cloud Foundry? The first set of issues we'll look at are like data corruption kind of problems where you might want to roll back. So that might be a failed upgrade of your Cloud Foundry deployment, user error like a few months ago, GitLab's this admin dropping the wrong database and finding the backups are all empty, all security issues. So more and more we're seeing ransomware as an attack vector and the easiest way to get back from a ransomware attack is simply to repave your entire deployment and just roll back using a backup. And then there are like more serious failures, kind of hardware failures. So this is your storage attached network dice or your data center fails, i.e. it floods. And we consider these last ones, these hardware failures, kind of a superset of all the rest. So that's what we're focusing on and what we focused on in this project. So what does it actually mean to back up Cloud Foundry? It's a complex distributed system. What do I need to take out of it so that I can put that information back into a new deployment and have it all just work? So that really begs the question where does the state in Cloud Foundry live? So if you imagine Cloud Foundry is having just these two components. So this is just a slice of Cloud Foundry looking at the Cloud Controller and the Diego subsystem. So a Diego brain, some number of Diego cells. This segment of Cloud Foundry, this view of it requires two data source function. You've got a relational database of some sorts. It could be an internal MySQL. It could be an external service that you connect to remotely and a Blob store, just like a flat file store. So that could be S3. It could be an internal NFS Blob store, whatever you like. And these are the canonical places that Cloud Foundry stores state. So if we have a CF user, they CF push their app, the spring app here. They push their app bits to the Cloud Controller, which will save some metadata down to the database about that app and then save the app source into the Blob store. Next, Diego sees that it needs to run an app. It receives a request for a long-running process. It pulls up the build packs and the app source and stages the app. So it essentially compiles it into a droplet. And then once you have your droplet, which is then saved, details are saved into the database and the droplet itself is saved into the Blob store, then Diego can run it. So it pulls the app up and then stages it. So if we want to back up and restore Cloud Foundry in a consistent way, we need to make sure that we have both of these data stores. And we have to make sure we take it back up from them at exactly the same time or in some consistent way. Because if your database points to a compiled droplet that's actually not in the Blob store, Diego is going to try and start that app up and find that it's missing the droplet and can't run it. And crucial to this process is the fact that Diego is an eventually consistent system. So if you take this state, put in a fresh Cloud Foundry that has no apps running in it, Diego will see, oh, I meant to have a whole bunch of apps running and it will begin to spin them up very quickly. Obviously, Cloud Foundry is more complex than this. It has a whole lot of other components. Some are stateful, most are stateless, and we'll just converge on the desired state. The only one I've not mentioned is the UADB, which has user auth information. So that's the state in Cloud Foundry. But what about Cloud Foundry itself? What about the VMs, the actual software running on those boxes? We need to go deeper. So as I'm sure you will know, Cloud Foundry is deployed on a control plane provided by Bosch. Bosch is responsible for deploying the Cloud Foundry VMs. And Bosch actually looks quite similar in some ways. So you have the Bosch director, and then you have a relational database and a Blobstore.  First, you upload your release to Bosch, which is just the app, the release source, essentially, saves metadata about that release in the database and then saves the entire release in the Blobstore. Then you deploy. Your deployment manifest gets saved down, and then it gets retrieved along with release information, and then Bosch will compile your release. Sorry, we'll pull the release bits up from the Blobstore and compile your release for your desired architecture and then deploy your VM. Bosch also then saves down the compiled release to your Blobstore for faster redeploys later on. So again, we see a very similar picture. If we want to take it back up with a Bosch director, we need to make sure we have both of these data stores, and they need to be in sync. It's no good having Blobstores in the Blobstore without any records or foreign to the database because your deploy is going to fail. Bosch is also an eventually consistent system. So if you put all this data back into a Bosch director, it should stand everything up again. Although Bosch has a meltdown threshold, some of you may have seen, at which point it just gives up if it thinks something too catastrophic has gone wrong. So this is sort of what the picture looks like, but there's also actually more complexity because you also have data services. So you have your Bosch director and your Cloud Foundry and your data services, all of which need to be backed up, and probably all of which need referential integrity between each other. So actually backing off all these things up in a consistent way is quite tricky. So when we started with Backup and Restore, we looked at what existing companies are doing. Because companies aren't just doing nothing, they all have their own solutions, often hand rolled. So the first one, and potentially the most common, are tools that reach under the hood, so to speak. So these are often binaries or scripts that know a lot about Cloud Foundry, and they know that this version of Cloud Foundry runs this version of MySQL internally, and therefore needs that particular version of MySQL Dump, and will just reach into the appropriate VM, run a MySQL Dump, pull the data out. So these will work, which is great, but they're very fragile. As soon as anything in Cloud Foundry changes, as soon as that version of MySQL changes, then your version of MySQL Restore is not going to work. So you end up with a tool that has a lot of knowledge about Cloud Foundry, and you end up having to maintain that tool, and yourself needing a lot of knowledge about Cloud Foundry. Backwards compatibility is a problem. If those versions change, then you have to have additional migration layers on top so that you can restore to, say, a newer version of CF, and consistency is not fixed by this, right? You still might end up with a backup of your Robstore taken a few seconds before your backup of your MySQL, for example, and those records are then inconsistent. Some companies do replication. So Active Active is just where you have two foundations, and Active Passive is where you have two, but one is in a passive kind of hot standby failover mode. And, again, this works really well, but it is very difficult to get right. Speaking to someone on the Cloud Ops CU team, it's found that you often end up with a lot of sort of cruft in your IaaS layer, because when something goes wrong, operators will tend to just rapidly jump on and try and fix things, and maybe not do quite the right thing in the heat of the moment, and you end up with, like, bits of state that shouldn't really be there. It obviously doubles your cost. If you have a 50-cell foundation, then you're going to need to, now, run 100 cells at least, and it doesn't mitigate against malware. It's not really a backup at all, because if you push, some user pushes a privileged app that's malicious, then it could damage your foundation, and then both are damaged by it. We also looked at snapshotting. So IaaS-level snapshots are these IaaS primitives where you can just ask your IaaS to take it back for the disk, and it's quite nice because the VM itself doesn't know anything about it, so it just happens, kind of out of band. But that's also kind of a weakness as well, because if the VM doesn't know a snapshot is being taken, then you might find that data is not being flushed to disk. So you have your Redis VM that has lots of stuff happening in RAM, you take a snapshot, you effectively just pull the disk out from underneath the VM. All that data that was in RAM hasn't been saved down because it didn't know it was about to be backed up. Also, you don't need all that state. You know, if I'm backing up a Redis machine, I want the Redis RDB file. I don't want Redis itself, all the logs, the whole OS. All this stuff is just, is cruft, and I have to store it. It's also very slow for some IaaSes, and you still have problems with consistency. Another option is just, like, do nothing. Allow it all to burn down.  So that's great if you can get it to work, but it requires a tremendous amount of discipline. Not all teams have, that discipline, not all teams have pipelines, and Cloud Foundry is also a fun environment to play with. It's nice to just be able to push an app, but if you do that without a corresponding pipeline to push it, then that app is just gone, if the CF fails. The time to recover is very long. You have to stand up for CF and repush your apps, which necessitates recompiling them all, and if you use services, then you're out of luck. None of that data is backed up, because they're on separate Bosch releases. There are some other themes, other things people think about when looking at backups. How do you manage artifacts? So how do you encrypt them at rest? How do you schedule backups? How do you deal with retention? Presumably you want to expire or back at some point, because if your blob store is a terabyte, you don't want to be keeping that forever. Do I take partial backups? Do I take complete backups? Do I want to just incrementally back up everything that's changed since the last backup, or do I have to back up the whole thing? So we end up with a kind of a quite large problem space where we look at data consistency, how restore works, how we do encryption at rest, forwards and backwards compatibility, and it's really quite tricky. And Therese is going to talk about how we set this. Therese? Thanks Henry. So we took all the things we learned when looking at other solutions for backup and restore, and we came up with a new model. So starting from the problem space, we divided the issues into two categories. One category, how to orchestrate, includes all the concerns around the backup. Things like encryption, scheduling, artifact management. The other category is how to do the actual backup and restore. So what data needs to be backed up, how is the data backed up, and what does a restore look like? So we've assigned these categories the role of orchestrator and component, and we've crafted a contract between them. So we end up with a backup and restore framework based on the contract that sets out the requirements for the orchestrator and the component. So now I'll talk through what the contract entails. The orchestrator expects the component to implement the hooks to do the backup and restore, lock, backup, unlock. The first requirement is for the orchestrator to trigger those hooks in a prescribed order. So for backup, lock, backup, unlock, add for restore, lock, restore, unlock. The orchestrator is also responsible for moving the backup artifacts after a backup is taken and before restore. So the other side of the contract is the component. If a component wants to be backed up and restored, it has to implement the backup and restore hooks. A component will implement the hooks that are appropriate to it. So if it doesn't need locking, it can just implement backup, same for restore. And when it takes a backup, it has to put the backup in a very particular place so that the orchestrator can find it and on a restore take the artifacts from of the same place in order to restore. It's also possible to specify the order of locking. So if multiple components implement locking, it can say this thing needs to be locked before this thing. Then that's optional. So here are all the things that are in the contract. So the contract separates the backup orchestration from the actual backup and restore logic. And the backup and restore logic is written by the people who wrote the component. So these people understand how the data is stored, what a correct backup looks like, and what a correct restore looks like. And because the backup logic is packaged with the component, it doesn't get out of sync. So it's shipped with the component. And so the contract addresses the fragility and compatibility issues that Henry described earlier by encapsulating the backup and restore logic within the component. There are other benefits to the contract as well. So firstly, correctness. By asking a component to do its own backup, so say you're Redis, right? You can flush things to disk and then create a current backup with all of the data. Secondly, consistency. Because you have locking, because you can quiesce data changes while the backup is being taken across components, you can have the consistency that Henry talked about as being required between, for example, the database and the blob store. Also, backup and restore can be smart. So it can choose to process the data before a backup is taken. It can choose to only backup some of the data. You can do a lot of really clever things. And the other benefit of the way we've designed the contract is that the backup artifact is transferred after the unlock script is called.  So now I'm going to talk about how we translated the contract into a real world implementation. And that's Bosch backup and restore. So we call it BBR, Bosch backup and restore. The orchestrator is the BBR binary and the components are the Bosch jobs in a Bosch deployment. So the unit of backup becomes a Bosch deployment, which makes a lot of sense because that's how operators think about the software that they deploy. So the BBR binary is a CLI, it runs on a jump box, and it knows how to trigger backup and restore hooks on both Bosch deployments and Bosch directors. So BBR backs up state, so it'll back up elastic runtime, and cloud foundry software, it can back up a Bosch director. But when you do a restore, it's like MySQL, where you have to stand up MySQL first and then put the data back in. So you stand at cloud foundry and then you restore the data. So earlier Henry showed you where state is stored in cloud foundry. Now I'm going to walk through what happens when an operator backs up cloud foundry using BBR. I'm only showing a few components here, but they sort of cover the range of implementations of the scripts. Okay, so you trigger backup and then the first thing is all the lock scripts get called. In this case, the cloud controller implements the lock script, and what that does is it stops requests to the CF API. Next, BBR will call all the backup scripts in no particular order, which are implemented on the jobs in cloud foundry. So the cloud controller will generate backup artifacts for its data in the database in CCDB and for the Blobstore. So the GoRooter is an interesting case. It only backs up one table and then Diego, because it has, it can regenerate its data, doesn't back up anything at all. So then BBR will call the unlock scripts and in the unlock script, the cloud controller will restart the CF API. And then finally, BBR will copy the backup artifacts back to the VM where the BBR binary was triggered, typically jumpbox. And then your backup is finished. Okay, so I'm going to show you a demo, but it's a video. I sped it up and also I have really bad luck with live demos. This is what, this is backing up Elastic Runtime, which is Pivotal's cloud foundry. So in this case we're using the ops manager VM as a jumpbox because it has access to the ERT network. So we've passed in the Bosch Director IP and the login and the name, the Bosch name of the deployment. You can see that BBR outputs quite a lot of useful information, like what it's doing at every step. And then you can also see that the artifact gets copied after the unlocked scripts are called. And then after the backup is taken, BBR checks each of the artifacts and creates a metadata file with a list of artifacts and checksums and the time that the backup was started and finished. So BBR will only work with Bosch releases that have implemented the backup and restore scripts. And here are the releases that currently do, have implemented those scripts. So the Bosch Director, Credhub, UAA, Elastic Runtime, and the work I talked about where so Rooting is backing up its own table and CCDB is backing up another table. That work is in progress and when that's done, BBR will work against open source cloud foundry. We're also working on BBR support for data services. So BBR, I mean Henry talked about the different concerns around backup and restore. BBR is this, I think of as a small sharp tool, right? It's the very kernel of how to take a correct backup and restore. There's a much bigger ecosystem with many other problems to solve. So Shield has written an integration, or Stark and Wain has written an integration for Shield. And then I have really excitingly, Dell EMC has, is announcing a white paper today where they have done a POC where BoostFS is mounted into the jump box so that the backup artifact gets written directly to a data domain appliance. And there's several benefits to this. One is it's a kind of more secure, straightforward workflow for moving backup artifacts to long-term storage. Also, data domain dedoops the artifacts. And so you have a really powerful reduction in the amount of data storage required. There, the white paper is that URL. And we have Jessica here from Dell EMC and she would love to talk to you after, you want to stand up? Thanks. She would love to talk to anybody about this after, after the talk. So going forward, we'll be looking at how we need to extend the BBR contract to handle different circumstances. So to handle external data stores, for example. One really tricky problem we're trying to solve right now is how to back up, how to validate backup artifacts without running a full restore. Full restores are really expensive, kind of risky. So yeah, that's something we're focused on. We may extend the contract to support partial backup and restore, incremental backup and restore. There's like there are, you know, it's not a static contract. And then BBR itself, we're looking at, so at the moment we use Bosch SSH to drive the contract. We're looking at using a Bosch agent, for example, or the new Aaron's functionality, that's new in Bosch. And we're also looking at optimizations like calling all the backup scripts in parallel instead of serially. And we're also, so we're currently working on writing scripts to support external blob stores and also external data stores, databases, and data services. So going forward, it's good to think about how to make Cloud Foundry itself more backup-able. So I know that some of the teams writing backup scripts are implementing a read-only mode instead of making their API completely unavailable. Minimizing data references between data stores, so there's less kind of fragility, less consistency required. And also thinking about storing data in Cloud Foundry in a different way. So storing data as a sort of series of actions that can be replayed instead of kind of having a snapshot of state to recreate the world. So we've talked about what it means to back up and restore Cloud Foundry, how people are solving that problem today, what the contract that we've come up with to solve the how-do-you-back-up-a-distributed system problem, our particular implementation of it, which is Bosch backup and restore, and what we're looking at for the future. So we're part of the open-source extensions incubator, so all of our repos are public and we're in Slack and we're super friendly, so come say hello. So thank you for listening and we've got some a little bit of time for questions. Yeah, many times. Many times. Many times. Come down here. Yeah, I understand the requirement for locking the database before baking it up, but what about in a production environment? I mean, I cannot stop my environment for more than a few minutes. And usually backup can take even a long time if it's a large environment. So to be clear, what gets locked is the CFAPI. It's not, so it doesn't, it's not downtime for your app, it's downtime from pushing new bits. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, but it means that no one can trigger stats for CF, requiring information for status of the application, anyone can push a new application or a stage or whatever it is. That's true, that's true. We have, certainly for the internal, internal Blobstore backup, we, rather than taking a full copy of the Blobstore, we use hardlinks on the, the Blobstore machine so we can create some hardlinks, unlock the CloudController as soon as the MySQL backup is done, which only takes a minute or two, and then as out of, out of band download all of those Blobs. So that, that minimizes the downtime. We've seen, yeah, we've seen downtime of less than 10 minutes for very, very large Blobstores. And the strategy we're pursuing for backing up external Blobstores is actually very similar, where we're, we're just taking references to the Blobs while the lock is held for consistency and then doing any sort of copying afterward. And one more question is how often do you, in your experience, so what's the frequency of the backup? The right frequency? So the, that is something that is dependent on how much data you're comfortable losing.  But if your app developers are only pushing once a day, then you can back up less frequently. I mean, I think a starting point is every day but, you know, that is a decision that needs to be taken by the operator. Okay, thank you. Is there a plan to offer the backup and restore features to the app developers with the CLI tool? That's a really good question. So you can back up before you see a push new code, which migrates data structures and if it fails, you can restore. Yeah, so the Service Broker API has a way, has a backup and restore primitive and because, so for example, with on-demand services that are offered via Pivotal, the unit of a service instance is a Bosch deployment.  Does that make sense? Exposing this to the to Cloud Foundry is probably out of scope. Like, we need someone to talk about it, but it is Bosch backup and restore.  The short answer is that there is, it's in the roadmap. Yes. I would love it for backup and restore to the exposed to users. I think there was mention of something with the the contract and the locking that there was an order that could be specified or something like that. So is that something that is not yet used or is it actually being used somehow in the backups now and I overlooked it because I was curious about that. Yeah, it is in use at the moment. So depending on what you're backing up, you might want to have certain components locked first. So a good example is if you care about backing up a particular a database that's changed by a CF app, then you might care that the app is stopped before the cloud controller is taken down after which you can't make any changes to app state. So that's one that's one case where we're using it. I'm not sure there are any others. No, that's that is the one at the moment. That's the case for that. Yeah. But I mean, in essence, it's arbitrary. So you can say I want this boss release is lock script to be called before this boss releases lock scripts. Very much. Thank you.