More than once today, I have mentioned that GitLab is a DevOps platform that can replace multiple tools from your DIY tool chain. Today, we are excited to have Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the president of the Video LAN organization, share the story of their migrations of VLC and other projects to GitLab and the tools they were able to replace along the way as they simplified their tool chain. Now, no journey is without its ups and downs, so he will also be detailing some of the challenges they faced during that journey, how they worked through those, and ultimately how they wound up where they are, and what their GitLab roadmap looks like going forward. So let's hop in and see how it went. Good morning. We're here to talk about the migration of VLC to GitLab. My name is Jean-Baptiste Kempf. I'm the president of the Video LAN nonprofit organization, and I've been contributing to open-source projects around multimedia for the last 15 years. I've been leading the VLC project, one of the main developers there, but I've been managing everything that is not only code-related on the Video LAN nonprofit. What you have to know is that Video LAN is a nonprofit that has several projects, a bit like Mozilla and Firefox. VLC is the main one and the most known one, but it's not the only project that we are hosting. And Video LAN is also hosting infrastructure for other third-party projects like FFMPag and many others. So what is Video LAN? Video LAN is this weird organization that wants to have traffic cones everywhere, and it started as a student project in the university in France in the south of Paris, and the main goal was not to create VLC. The main goal was to work on a solution to stream video on a local network, and that's the name Video LAN. It became, of course, known for VLC, which was the client part of the streaming solution, but it was not the main goal at the beginning. And even at the beginning, it was not even supposed to be open-source. The open-sourcing of VLC came 20 years ago in 2001. Since then, and it's quite important those days to understand that, it was developed by students and then young professionals who were working on VLC and other open-source projects on their free time. So we're very far from the corporate open-source that we have today. We have a team of people who are passionate and are working on their free time because they like it. Of course, most of them were students, but since maybe the last eight, 10 years, it moved to basically normal developers around the world. And it's important that the Video LAN nonprofit is not employing anyone and doesn't have the resources to employ anyone. So we're really like one of the largest small projects of the open-source community. We organize a lot of events with other open-source projects, and that's where we discuss about the future and where we go and where we move on the roadmap. And of course, everything related to hosting and infrastructure is a big project because that's very important for us and for any open-source project. So as you can see here, the origin of VLC was something that was able to stream on a multicast network, anything from DVDs, video files, graphic cards, capture cards, or even satellite, which was the beginning of the project, and stream that on a network and have some clients that can basically play the streams. The client, Video LAN client, which became VLC, was one part of the solution. But there are many of the tools and those are tools that still go on. In 2001, VLC became open-source and it grew and grew and grew mostly because it was able to play any type of files, any type of video, and all those codex packs that you used to know in the early 2000, which were very difficult to use. And VLC arrived and was basically a solution that just worked because all the codex were inside and has also other advantages, mainly because it was able to play broken files and also because it was able to run everywhere. A lot of those features in VLC came because it's a set of a small core and a lot of plugins, and those plugins are very important because that's how people extended VLC. Because the core team of VLC was always and has always been very small, but there is a lot of external contributors that arrived and add new formats, new support. And in order to be able to do a good contribution, the way that new developers arrive and contribute is a very important path for us. Today, VLC is around maybe 400 or maybe 500 million users. We don't know, right? Because we don't have any telemetry or spyware. So we don't know exactly how many people are using VLC, but we know that it's around those kind of numbers, possibly 300 to 400 million on desktop and around 100 million on mobile. That's quite large compared to other open source projects. And the open source projects that are in the same range are all professional. And if we count the number of downloads on our website, which is, of course, a smaller amount of all the downloads of VLC, we are around that 3.7 billion downloads, which is also quite large. Most of our users, of course, have no idea what open source is or why they're using VLC. They don't do it because they think it's great that is open source. They use it because it works. VLC runs literally everywhere from Windows to Mac to Linux. And the last version still runs OS2, which means that the three developers users are very happy, one of them being the developer. But that's fun because it shows that it's quite easy to port VLC on other platforms. So we have VLC on smartphones, smart TVs, smart watches, on weird BSDs, the derivative or UNIXs. So VLC runs literally everywhere. And one of the reasons why it's possible is because everything is a plugin. So you can basically touch your plugin and write your plugin for your own platform and still have the rest of VLC running. So as I said, Videolan is an umbrella organization for many projects. And we have, so the main VLC is a kind of monorepo where there is a core, which is around 100,000 lines of code. And then you have plugins. There are probably 500 to 600 plugins. And those plugins are around 1,000,000 lines of code. And of course, a lot of those plugins are, depending on third-party libraries, more left, 100 of them. And the total amount is around 10,000,000 lines of code. But the main repository, all the plugins, Contrario from projects like the Gistreamer, are in the same repository. And this core repository, which has basically the VLC core and the desktop versions of VLC, is basically the most important Git repository that we have. But next to that, we've developed a version mostly for Android and related, which means Android, Android TV, Chrome OS, and so on. And iOS, which means also iPhone, iPad, Apple TVs. And those were a bit too different to manage. So those are in separate repositories. But they're very small compared to the main one. And if you continue, we have a lot of other repositories for the Windows Store version, for the bindings in C-sharp, in REST, in Objective-C. And that's just for VLC. And as I said, we have third-party libraries, and some of them were developed by VLC teams as a video-land project. So there is, of course, a full DVD stack, which is live DVD reads, CSS, which is handling the description. But the same for the Blu-ray, which is basically a Blu-ray stack to be able to read any Blu-rays. We have an MPEG-2 stack, which is Codex for MPEG-2. And lately, we have an AV1 decoder called David, which is also a video-land project, but is used in Firefox, in Chrome, in most of the application on mobile, who are using AV1 decoding. And of course, we have also the X264 encoder, which is probably one of the most encoders used in the web. And all of those projects that, of course, are not known to the main public are part of the video-land project, the video-land non-profit. We even host some parts of our infrastructure for FMPEG. For example, we host a Geat of FMPEG. And in the past, we used to host also some binaries for Handbrake and other multimedia packages. So video-land is more than VLC, and the infrastructure change we do on video-land impacts more than VLC, which sometimes makes it a bit more difficult to evolve than we would like. So how did we do things in the past? One of the things important for us is that we only using open-source projects, right? So that means that everything we're running on our servers are and must be open-source. And that's how we grew. So how did we do that? We were using mainly for reviews and patches, like the old days. We've been using Geat since 2007 with GeatWeb, mostly to review it. So we moved to Geat quite early compared to other projects. As a bug tracker, we use Track from Edgeworld. As Wiki, we use MediaWiki. For the CI, we use Jenkins for basically reviewing and tracking the patch sets. We were using Patchwork. And externally, there were two services that we are not really open-source that we are using. One was Coverti for static analyzing and one for hosting translation, because it's a very tough project. And those were hosting services for the developers. And for our users, we're using PHPBB for the forum, IRC on FreeNode since forever. And even the support for the end users were done on the main list. And the documentation was on our website. So this was quite well managed on basically one or two servers. But it was quite annoying because there was a lack of integration between all of the services and was difficult for the users to understand that they needed a different account on the Track, on the Wiki, on Jenkins. And contributing to VLC became more and more difficult because of the CI. We support so many platforms that it's very difficult to contribute to VLC and not break one platform. Even like we have four architecture on Android, four on Windows, on iOS and so on. So it's quite difficult to have that. So we had to change. And one of the solutions that we discussed was one tool to rule demo, which was moving to GitLab. I think the first time we talked about moving to GitLab was in 2015. So it's a bit weird that we talked in 2021 about that, but you'll see why. So the decision was to move mostly almost everything to GitLab. So at the beginning it was just for Git host and doing merge request, bug tracker and CI. And then we decided to move also the Wiki, then work on the static analyzer on the user support desk and even like move the documentation. And then basically we have GitLab for almost everything. And then outside we just have IRC for chat and the forum and still the translation outside because there is no simple way to do that. So how did it work? We started with the Android project, the VLC Android project, which was mostly Java and now Kotlin. So in 2015 we moved this one directly to GitLab. That was the first project we moved. And here we were just using it as a normal Git repository and a bug tracker. Very easy. There were three or four people developing around VLC Android, so it was easy to synchronize. In 2017, early 2017, VLC on iOS which was hosted on GitHub moved back to GitLab for the same reason. The reason we didn't want to keep it on GitHub was because GitHub is not open source and that's basically a contraria from what we want on the VLC and non-profit. So we moved VLC on iOS for the same like Git hosting and bug. And when I mean Git hosting, like we did not use merge request. We're like pure Git. In 2018, we moved, end of 2018, we moved Android to merge request. And one of the main reasons why, because we managed to have a correct CI for Android directly integrated in GitLab. Before it was a bit difficult because of our build system and because the GitLab CI was a bit shaky for Android. And once we were able to do that, we moved basically the VLC Android to normal merge request. So people fork and on their repository and then create merge request on VLC and Android. It went well. So we decided to continue and when we started a new project which was David, which is the AV1 decoder now that is used almost everywhere, we decided to have for David something that was full GitLab. So there is not even a mailing list which we had on VLC on Android. Everything is managed on GitLab. And a lot of people from the open source community, from the VLC were basically complaining that moving to GitLab was not possible, it was too difficult, it was too slow or it was going to be impossible to manage large projects, a large number of merge requests. With David, we said, well, we're going to try with a smaller project and we're going to do only GitLab. And we have just a nice CI channel and the David GitLab project and everything works fine. We have issues, we have merge requests, I think not a single direct commit. Everything was done on two merge requests. The issues were done since day one over there and basically downstream Chrome developers or Firefox developers directly contributed there on GitLab. It works absolutely fine. And since quite early, we had like a very extensive CI on David. And once we've done this CI on David, then we moved, we've added the CI for VLC on GitLab, which means that we were still pushing on a normal Git, on our old Git host. And we are basically synchronizing the repository on the VLC project on GitLab and running the CI. So, of course, it was not as good because, like, of course, we would see that it breaks afterwards and not before, which is very bad. But at least we was able to give us the capability to check and to see what we needed. A few things were also missing on GitLab, so we reported some bugs that were fixed. And so that's how we moved basically the whole VLC to CI. And then most of the video and project moved in the same way during 2019 and 2020. In 2020, we started to, like, actually tackle the big part which was moving VLC to GitLab. The biggest issue after we moved the CI in 2019 was basically the bug reports because the issue tracker of GitLab is quite light and because it doesn't match what we had on track and because some developers were still very concerned about how we would manage all the merge request without using the main list. So, the issues we saw very early is that we needed to be self-hosted because we want to use only open source projects. We discussed with some people of the GitLab team and opened a ticket about the issue we were seeing. There were a few bugs on CI. I think that were fixed, most of them. But as I said, the biggest issue was the bug tracker simplicity. Like, it's an issue tracker, right? It's not a bug tracker. It doesn't fit many use cases and it's still too simple for most of the use case we had and we are going to see why. And as I said, the other issue was the merge request approval process because as soon as you start moving to merge request, we saw that quite early on, David, you have the tendency to want to merge as soon as CI goes and one reviewer goes. But that's problematic for a larger project because then you have a kind of group of developers that are like acknowledging each other request, merge request, and then merge that. And we didn't have a solution for that at the moment. And finally, GitLab was, still a bit, very slow on large merge request. And finally, some of the developers of VLC and FFMPEG are using and doing everything on command line and GitLab requires a web browser to do many things that are not able on the tool. So why do we need, why is a bug tracker too limited? Even compared to something that is extremely old, like track, the reason is that we need custom fields. I know a lot of people say that, no, you don't need that. But yeah, we do need that for basically two things. The first thing is components, right? Because as VLC is a kind of monorepo with a core and 500 plugins, you need to be able to take which type of component does it require? Because not everyone knows about the whole code base because the code base is quite large. So we need to be able to say, well, this is related to the video output or the audio output. And using Labels is clearly not enough because you have so many of them if you do that. And also like track is a very broken software. So migration from track to GitLab was difficult. There was a lot of bugs post on the track and the GitLab side. So it took us a lot of time. And the other part where we need some custom fields is about the platforms, right? VLC is not a web application. We have 20 platforms, right? So sometimes you need to categorize and the developers who are working on macOS are not the same one working on Linux or on Windows. So in order to triage, you need to be able to do that. And again, Labels are not enough for it. So how do we do that? Finally, we use the scope labels as you can see here in order to categorize. At least the scope labels is a kind of enum. So it's like it avoids conflicts who have been tickets that are on two components. So that's a bit like custom fields, but it's too limited in terms of you cannot search, you cannot have a default, and you cannot search about like I want to search for the tickets who don't have any component or stuff like that. Those are way too limited. So, and then the biggest issue for us is that the custom fields, the scope labels that basically was able to work around this problem of custom fields is not available in the open source edition, right? So we had to migrate to ultimate that was sponsored by GitLab. And we had to go through a non-profit because even if the source is available, it's technically not an open source project because we're using the high end. So finally, we voted to do an exception because we really needed to move to the bug tracker and use the scope labels. But we did something very weird is that we basically disabled every other feature of GitLab. So we went and we basically disabled all the features that were on the ultimate editions and the premiums edition and just keep basically the scope label. I still find very weird that the custom fields are not available because Track, Redmine, Buxila, Jira and all of those are managing that. And lately, GitHub has announced basically that they're supporting some custom fields. And the problem is that of course, scope labels are okay, but then you have a lot of labels, right? You cannot search. You cannot, you don't have defaults or like you cannot assign a default component and so on. So the scope label is top gap, but I think we, there needs to be something stronger in the future. So that was for the issue tracker. Writing the script was long, but it's open source. People can use it and other people have already using to move from Track to GitLab. The second issue we had was basically what we call merge request approvals. It's not a new problem that raised when we moved to GitLab. It was already existing. But when we moved to something more automatic with CI, with bug bugs, linked and so on, it became obvious that we needed to tackle that. And the problem is just like basically developers fighting, right? It's not really fighting. Of course, it's more like disagreements. Not everyone is merging at the same rate. And so it's very easy to open a merge request, see that it goes through CI and one hour or two hours, some developers say, yeah, that's okay. And then you move to that. There is a very complex system on the on the premium edition of GitLab. But of course, we don't use that. So what we wanted is to find a way to work around those community limitations, which are not only a technical limitation. And that's how we decided to create Homer or basically bot. It's called Homer because there is a famous bot around that is called Margebot. And this was based on the same code base. So it's called Homer. And it's a clear definition of rules about who can merge and when. Because whether the merge request comes from a developer or an external contributor or to know when you can merge your own merge request or like how long do you need to wait before merging your own merge request? Because it happens that you're basically in some small communities like ours around 10 people working full time, well, related to VLC on the core VLC. Sometimes you open the merge request, but no one can review because basically you're the only ones who knows. So when can you basically decide? So this bot is basically here to have a set of holes and basically says when you can merge or not. The thing is, of course, we could use that with some strong approval process that exists on GitLab, but we needed something to be flexible. And what I mean flexible is something that is a bit lighter than a full approval system, but also able to force it, right? Because sometimes, well, the rules are not you don't have enough developers and sometimes you need to basically go around the process. And that's why we have on VLC, we have a technical communities who takes decisions, but we needed something that was quite light. And that's why the bot is basically just labeling the merge request depending on the process. It has a few issues, but nothing very important. So here you see basically the graph of the request. So basically when a new merge request and the CI passes, then the bug starts saying, well, you can review. So pending reviews. And then when it's reviewing, it checks that all the threads are solved, that all the big issues that were open are done. And mostly that there is enough plus one, which is sums up, compared to the sums down. And when all those basically configurations are okay, then it moves to the acceptable, which is almost accepted, but you need to wait sometimes. And for example, if you're a developer of the project and no one contributes or anyone says anything on your merge request after three days, basically, you can activate and merge the merge request. But if you are basically an external contributor, you need to have an explicit plus one, an explicit approval before it says this is accepted. And if you're a developer and all the one other developer agrees with you, then it's easy to move to after one day only to move to accepted state. So the bot is just basically labeling this process and explaining this process. It's not merging anything. At the end, it arrives and basically you can click on the rebase and then the merge button. But sometimes there is no solution, right? Sometimes there is disagreement in the community. And so there is no consensus on the merge request. And therefore the merge request arrives and are marked as stale. And then the technical committee can say basically, yes, do we agree or no, we don't agree and solve this issue. So this tool is like enforcing a very light system based on labels. And that's why you see that having like using more labels with custom field instead of custom field means that you finish with too many labels and that's a problem. So we moved to merge request. We use this bot. It works pretty fine. And the community, of course, there are bugs in the bot. But the community agrees and likes it. It's interesting to know that the bot is a stateless bot. It doesn't have any database. It's just basically using the APIs to label. So sometimes there are bugs because of course some states are a bit weird. But that's a very simple bot. And it's very not intruding in the process. So what are our next steps for our migration? So the next step is the one that we started a few days ago, which is using the service desk. Because as I said, we're using mailing lists to answer to our users. And of course that's not the best way. And mostly it's difficult to see if someone has answered. Many people are forgetting to reply to everyone and so on and so on. So we are moving to service desk to be able to answer to our users. We are starting also soon the migration of our wiki from media wiki to GitLab. The wiki from GitLab is as less features, but it's easier to maintain for us, mostly because it's based on Git. And finally, we have some work to do on the static analysis. We've done that a bit, but it's shaky. So we need to move more projects on the static analysis instead of using a coverty as a next model. There are a few limitations in issue we've seen during this whole migration. I've talked about, of course, the issue. We've talked about a bit the approval, which is not only a GitLab issue, but basically a process issue. But there are a lot of features on some fringe features that are not that are blocking quite a bit. For example, the service desk doesn't have recorded answers, while any service desk is able to do that, which feels weird because you're answering to your users always the same things. The API is not always complete. For example, if you click on an app proof button, you have the timestamp. But if you do sums up and sums down, you don't have the timestamps. So basically, when we do the bot, there is some weird cases that don't work. And when we wanted to do like more complete bot, the API was not as good as we believe it should be. There is a big question about CLI, the fact that a lot of things are only doable on the web interface is a limiting factor. For two main reasons. The first reason is that the major request, some large major requests are extremely slow. The web viewer is very, very slow, especially when you have to pass assembly or review assembly in the web browser. It's quite tricky. And for some projects like FFMPag or David, which are done by people who write assembly by hand and see they are used to use CLI. And most of the tools on CLI around GitLab are limited compared to what the competition has or what we expect. So when you move from a pure mailing list using Mert and IRC and review everything over the email and acknowledge the issues over the emails to something with GitLab, some of the developers are frustrated and don't want to go on. So for example, we are discussing with our friends of FFMPag to move also to GitLab. And the lack of CLI tool is basically the highest issue that we have. And also one of the things that is missing, one of the large pieces that we still use as external is a management of translation. And this doesn't exist yet on GitLab as far as we know. And I think that I spent more of my allocated time. So you've seen basically how we managed to move video land projects from VLC, but in other video land projects to GitLab works pretty fine. And we moved from 10 tools to one. And I hope we are going to remove more tools in the future. Thank you, everyone.


We now turn our attention to some cosmological observations. The way cosmologists judge any model for the universe is to compare the model's predicted outcomes with what we actually observe. You may recall from our video book on general relativity that curved space has different volume implications than we have for Euclidean flat space. So one way to determine if the universe is flat, spherical, or hyperbolic is to count galaxies at different distances, i.e. different redshifts. If we look out into a flat universe, we would see the number of galaxies vary with the volume. If we look out into a spherical space, we would see the number of galaxies increase more slowly than for flat space, reach a maximum, and then come back down. And if we look out into a hyperbolic space, we would see the number of galaxies increase dramatically faster than for flat space. With our modern technologies, we can see galaxy populations out to around 10 billion light years. And as far as we can see, the number of galaxies increases according to the flat space model. Observations of galaxy diameters and luminosity distances also show a flat universe. Large scale space looks completely flat. But if the universe is large enough, say with a radius of curvature at around 200 billion light years, it is possible for it to look flat to us, examining such a small part of it. So it is still possible that we live in a three-dimensional sphere with a huge radius of curvature. But for the rest of our study of the benchmark model, we'll assume we exist in flat space.


Peek in Equality, let's start with that. One reason I've written a book called Peek in Equality is that I can't bear the idea of writing any more books about inequality. I've probably written too many, and I suspect that in the UK and the USA we are slightly far too productive as academics. If you were to look at the rest of the world and what people do, we tend to congratulate ourselves as aren't we very good, but we probably don't produce stuff as slowly as we should and as carefully as we should. But this is one of the many, many things that we can possibly blame on inequality. It makes us behave in strange ways, including in our universities. And I'm going to keep on about this issue because I think it does matter. I think our research, our way of thinking has been altered by the levels of economic inequality. How many of you are not based in the UK or USA or not from the UK or USA? Okay, so we've got this mattering. You're almost certainly from countries that I would describe as saner. So if you want to think of questions from at the end, if you could put up your hand and say, this country is awful, I'd be very interested in that. The last peak of income inequality in the UK was 1913. In 1913, the take of the top 1% reached a maxima. This was just around why the Titanic sank. It was when the most common job for women in the country was to work in service. It was a time of aristocracy. It was when the empire was at the last of its height. And inequality peaked then. It fell every year after 1913, partly because inequality is very expensive. You really have to have a lot of money, preferably an empire, to be able to get that unequal. But also we had a war. And the only people who could pay for the war, a war that was only supposed to take a few months, were the rich. And so taxes were increased on the rich to pay for that. But once you begin to reduce inequality, it becomes addictive. Because you discover that everything doesn't end if you start the tax to rich more. There were rent strikes during the First World War. That improved living conditions for people. Trade unions got active and so on and so on. But the 1920s were not a wonderful decade. A general strike and a financial crash. The 1930s were hardly great. There was a young PhD researcher called Hugh Dalton, who later became Chancellor of the Exchequer. And Hugh was one of the people measuring inequality at the time. But it wasn't an issue because it wasn't known. But the bad news is that the years after a peak in inequality tend not to be great years. But at least we may be hitting a peak. And I might end with some of the indications as to why that might be. And the rest of the talk is about how bad things are when you're at a peak. I'm not going to bombard you with graphs. I've got fewer than I normally have because I worked out to us at the end of the conference. This graph is one of only two that are in this book. This book called The Better Politics is available for free. You can just Google it and get the PDF. And I think the graph is particularly telling. So we're trying to understand why does the UK have one of the lowest funded health services in Europe per head? Why are our state schools lowly funded with the funding actually being cut? Why do we have a system of housing and housing subsidies that doesn't seem to work? So we have high and rising homelessness, 130,000 children in BMVs last Christmas. At the bottom, it is simply because we are deciding to spend very little of our GDP on public services. The debate we have in the UK between the two main parties, the Conservatives and Labour, is between moving that number at around about 36% in the future from 36 to 38. That's the game we play. That's the discussions we have.  How can you possibly do that? Everything will end if you have a state of that size. And the interesting question for social scientists is how do you get to a situation where you can fool yourself and the vast majority of the public to believe that spending 38% of all the money a country makes on public services is the beginning of the end? I'll take you through the graph today to come from the IMF. Way back in 2002, 2003, there's this large variation between these countries in terms of state spending. It's not that new a thing. I might have a dot. I've got a dot. See that little rise there? Do you remember Labour not fixing the roof when the sun shines and overspending? That was that overspending. It was actually quite naughty because you can account for almost all of that rise by the cost of having a war in Iraq that turned out not to be quite as good of an idea as we thought it did. But that's the variation. This jump here is the bailing out of banks. The bailing out of banks did cost quite a lot of money and almost everybody had to do it. Ireland, which is an incredible natural experiment now, Ireland followed the advice of George Osborne to underwrite every single bank account rather than underwrite up to whatever, 100,000 euros. And hence got that. And the latest IMF estimates for Ireland actually put it down here. I don't believe it. I think the Irish are reporting numbers to the IMF, which aren't true, but it helps dealing with the Troika and so on. In the aftermath of the economic crash, a country like Finland increased the proportion of money it spent on public services because GDP fell in these countries. So you have to imagine that as a possibility. Imagine having the largest financial crash that the Welsh has known, probably larger than 1929. And your response to that being, we'll tax more to make sure that the schools are still good. We live in the opposite kind of world to that. Finland is intensely annoying. I'm currently involved in a research project titled What's Wrong with Finland? To try to find. It can't be all great. Finland is the only country in Europe with falling homelessness. Finland has a policy that you house people first and then worry about their addiction and whatever later. And it's the poster country for homeless housing policy. You almost certainly know that it consistently scores the highest international educational test and so on. It has a manufacturing sector that is 25% of the Finnish economy. After Nokia failed, 25%, the UK is 10% until Empire 2.0 when we become wonderful again. But it's not just Finland. France, Germany, Greece. You can see all the countries up there. I don't have to go through the list. Switzerland, which I think isn't there, spends twice as much per head on health than we do in the UK. But they all spend more on health than we do in the UK. I've left Japan in because if you want to know what predistribution can get you, that's Japan. Japan is the most equal of all these countries before tax and benefits. Japan was the most unequal in the 1930s. The way you can become rapidly, incredibly equal is to dramatically lose a war, be invaded, and for the invading force because they are so scared that there might be a communist revolution to redistribute the land from the aristocracy as evenly as they can and create the world's most equitable affluent country. And that's thanks to the Americans. The Americans have given us an actual experiment of Japan. And here's the UK and the USA. I've been involved for about 20 years in these debates about inequality, the importance of levels of inequality and what they might lead to, how they might be related. And as this is a methods conference, we might as well talk about methods, the thing you constantly get, particularly from American social scientists, but also a bit in the UK, is correlation is not causation. And of course it isn't. But it isn't coincidence either. When your little dots keep on lining up in a row, something's going on. For those of you interested in statistics, my estimate is we'd need about 20 planets. If we had 20 planets, all quite similar, our sample size of countries would be big enough to be able to get the kind of numbers we need, but we don't have 20 planets, we've only got one. We'd also need several periods of countries diverging in terms of inequality to be able to test, but we don't, we only have the last 30 years of recent history. That doesn't mean you turn away and say, oh, well, you can't prove it. It means you're still interested. The early evidence about inequality was at least as strong as the early evidence about lung cancer and smoking. Doctors, and it's clever, the sample was doctors. Doctors who smoke are much more likely to get lung cancer than doctors who don't smoke. You worry later about the mechanisms, how quite does tobacco and the other carcinogens result in the lung cancer, but when you begin to see a finding as strong as that, you tend to act on it. The equivalent to doctors, set of affluent people, are rich countries. And so it's rich countries which are being compared for inequality. The best work, the most dedicated work, the most careful work. In fact, two people showing how to do this well and slowly are Richard Wilkerson and Kate Pickett. Their first book was 2009-10. I think this is the second edition. The spirit level, why equality is better for everyone. The subtitle changed in the second edition to that. Because one fascinating thing is how the better off do better in more equal countries. They spent nine years working on the second follow-up book, which has just come out called the inner level. And the book is full of references to the already academic papers they can find which support or refute the argument that our levels of economic inequality, particularly income inequality, appear to be affecting us in all kinds of ways. If you're talking about impact, I suspect these two books will have had more impact than any other work than in social science in the UK. But we'll see that in future. It depends on how people vote. And trying to prove there's a link between what they did and the changing attitudes in the country will be difficult. And if it hadn't been them, somebody else within a year I'm sure would have drawn the dots and produced a book. But if you want to read anything, don't read mine, read these two. For those of you who don't know, here is the basic story of the last century in the UK. The top line is the 10%. To get into 10%, if there are two of you, you're a couple and you've got a couple of kids, you're looking about £70,000 income a year. So if you've got two of you and you're on the £70,000 a year, you're in the 10%. How many of you are PhD students? Right, almost everybody else in the room is in the top 10%, if you want to get bitter. I thought, I won't do it, I thought if I wanted to give you an idea about why inequality matters, I won't do this, don't worry, because it's crucially painful. I would get you all to write on a piece of paper your household income in the last year.  And then I'd get you to swap places, do it again and again and again. It's called a binary sort until we had all the richest people in the room over here and all the people on the lowest incomes over here, that is the PhD students without an affluent partner. And then I'd get you to have a sense of the level of embarrassment about it.  That's it. It's very hard to get beyond that. Clever Conservatives are desperately trying to find ways to get people not to realise what the income distribution is. Their idea being if people don't know that they're on low pay, they could become happier and then they won't complain and then things won't change. But it's very hard to do that. The second most important thing after respect that money gives you is the ticket. It is the ticket that allows you to do things. It's a ticket that will allow me to get into a taxi and not worry about the cost. It's a ticket that lets me go out this evening and not worry about the cost. It's a ticket that allows me to have a mortgage in the city of Oxford rather than have an event and you know all of this. It is freedom. Essentially your income determines your level of freedom. Wealth turns out to be less important. It depends how you deal with wealth. But I'll give you one example. Richard Branson owns a very large country estate just to the north of Oxford which includes the River Charwell. If you go in a canoe as I do up the River Charwell, when you get to the Branson estate, you will find that loads of trees have been failed to go across the river making it particularly hard to travel through the Branson estate. I would happily allow Richard to keep hold of his estate and the Ross Charles who've got the estate next door and all the other people who've got the estate in Oxfordshire and the people who own the 2,000 lakes in my county which are private. I just want the right to roam across them and some decent footpaths and cycle tracks which they're responsible to look after as well as him having the legal responsibility to keep the river clear so I can canoe up it. And that's a very different kind of wealth owning land and the estate when people are allowed over it than what they currently have. And it's what you have in the north of England, essentially it's national parks. So when we look at those European countries where there are high wealth inequalities which you get in Denmark and Sweden you don't find the same detrimental effects because the wealthy are not allowed to behave in that way of blocking access to other people. Here are the successes in the OECD. So these are the countries which are some of the most equal countries in the world now. You don't become a rich country without becoming more equal. Equality is what's needed for economic advancement. This is the OECD. Genie coefficient. Very few people understand what a genie is. A statistician recently sent me this definition and what a genie roughly approximates to, I think it's worth saying. Imagine a country with just two households. One household on 25,000 a year, the other on 75,000 a year. To work out the genie you find the difference which is 50 and divide by the total which is 100 and a genie is 0.5. If you want to get an idea of what a genie of 0.5 means, it's 25 and 75. And of course you can imagine what it would be like to be in that country of two households. The life of the household on 75 would be very different to the life of the household on 25, although given how few of you there are you'd probably have to try and get on with each other. But in the UK and the USA and other equal countries we don't get on with each other. In the UK the majority of people in the top 10% spend a lot of money paying for their children to go to schools which mean they don't have to mix. It is quite stunning. This doesn't happen in the rest of the mainland. And we come up with all kinds of excuses about how this is good for their education and so on and they're lucky to have it and I wish every state school could be as good as this but honestly. One of the sad things about living in a high inequality country is people begin to talk rubbish which is embarrassing when you look into it to try to explain and rationalise their lives. So you've memorised all those countries. It's often said that high and rising inequality is a result of globalisation and winning the global race and there isn't really any option to it and if you want to attract talent you have to pay people more otherwise you couldn't run the BBC without all that top talent. I always think of Jeremy Clarkson at this point. And again you'll have heard this and the inevitability argument. This is the take of the 1% in the Netherlands and Switzerland. Switzerland is about the average country in Europe. The Netherlands is doing pretty well. Things aren't falling apart. You can take less and less if you're in the elite and your country doesn't get worse and your life in the elite doesn't get worse. If we had sorted you all out by household income then there probably is. Maybe not. Maybe not. There wouldn't be somebody in the room on 1%. University professors, they're in the 3%. It's not giving anything away, the 3% is a very wide band but we live in a country where university professors are better off than 96% of the rest of the population. A well-paid hospital doctor depending on what their partner does which is often also fairly well paid can be in the 2%. But no longer in the 1%. There were 200 doctors in the 1% a few years ago but they owned pharmacies and made money from that. As you can tell I'm obsessed by the inequality. My favourite measure is not the genicoefficient and it's not the 10 to 10 ratio or the Palmer 40 to 10 ratio. It is simply the take of the 1%. Because the take of the 1% appears to correlate incredibly well with countries doing well. And my suspicion about that and again no way of proving it is that those in charge will almost always be in the 1%. But the nearer their lives are to everybody else's lives the better idea they've got of what they're actually doing. But of course if you take the 1% down to just about 5% of all income which we last did in the 1970s the groups immediately below have to have less. To be in the 1% if you're single, 160,000 if there's 2 of you an income of about 200,000 a year imagine reducing the salaries of University Vice-Chancellors by say 5 or 10% next year. What happens to the salaries of everybody else in the university? Vice-Chancellors don't like being paid less than other people in their university. And you can begin to see how it forms a cap and controls what goes on. In the last year I think the Vice-Chancellors of my University and Vice-Chancellors of Imperial only took 1% pay rises. That's a massive advance on what's been going on as you probably know. And this is one of the many signs that we may be at the peak of this. But that's what is possible. And here's the failing countries in the OECD. So to go through the list, Mexico, although exciting political things happening in Mexico at the moment. Chile, although similarly in Chile inequality is currently falling but they have enormous fees for students. Turkey, hardly a country doing very well at the moment. The United States, interesting thing who leads these. Lithuania always annoyingly one of the free Baltic states does this and it's sample size. It's really really annoying for me because I keep on having to say the U.K. is the most unequal large country in Europe apart from one Baltic state. But the latest is Lithuania, it was Estonia. And there are interesting historical reasons about why inequality at very high levels is accepted in the Baltic states to do with basically being invaded by Russia. And there's Russia, there's Putin and there's us on point three six just above Israel. And that's Israel including everybody in the occupied territories and the Gaza Strip. So when I look at the U.K. I see a state where people are respected differently worse than in Israel. But one we've kind of got used to, one that isn't put forward in the same kind of way. One thankfully without many guns there are good things about the U.K. Not having guns is one of them. And there's lack for you just below. But social science in the world is dominated by people from the U.S. and the U.K. and so we don't tend to see this as much of a problem as we perhaps should. There's the historic kind of series. This is from I think the World Income Database. You couldn't study this kind of thing a hundred years ago because all the countries of the rich world were similarly unequal. All had a tiny elite taking about a fifth of all income who had servants and large houses. So it wasn't possible to see what the effects of inequality in the society might be because we had no comparators. And then they all come crashing down with the First World War and the Second World War and the Russian Revolution. And Thomas Piketty says, this is a one-off because he's an economist and not a historian. If you're a historian, you actually find that over time it does this. Inequalities always rise and always fall. They rise when you forget how important it is to keep them down and control them because you get used to being more equal. And they fall when they get so high that people can no longer tolerate them. Now, I'm very happy making extremely bold claims. But one of my bold claims is if you look at the origins of about 32 of the world's major religions, you will tend to find that world religions are begun in times and places of great inequality. And part of the message of many religions in the world, Islam's a great one, part of the message is you cannot have people behaving selfishly in this way. Everything goes badly wrong. Human beings have had mechanisms over millennia for controlling inequality, not just in small hunter-gatherer tribes, but actually across states and continents. This isn't a one-off. This kind of thing happens before. It's just that we don't have the detailed statistics. So what happened in the 1960s and 70s? And there's our natural experiment. Different countries went in different ways. It wasn't all accidental. There are historical reasons as to why. The crucial period for the UK was 1968 to 1974 when it was teetering. In theory then, around about 1974, the UK was the second most equitable country in Europe. Only Sweden was slightly more equal than the UK. So could we have become like Norway and had a sovereign wealth and far oil? Could we have become as stylish as the Danes? Could we have had ABBA? You've got to look at it. In fact, we got, if you talk about music, one of the best periods for British music was when we were most equal, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and they sang and complained about taxes. Very, very high rates of tax, 98%. Really good rates of tax. If you tax Jeremy Clarkson at 98%, he might think twice before flying to Australia to film another two-week series. He could still do it. He'd just have to do it for the love of it and I won't go on about music. There's the fanning out, there's our natural experiment. What kind of things happened to lead this to be? This is from Atkinson and Piketty and so on, this graph, and it's a change since, I think, 1960 in the top rate of tax. And you can see in the US and the UK the income of the top 1% has doubled or more rising to 6% of all income, 10% of all income. If you're talking about an entire national health service of funding going to people who already have more than anybody else, it would be an entirely unnecessary amount of money. Whereas in Switzerland and Germany and Finland and the Netherlands, a take of the 1% drops and at the same time the tax rate for very high incomes stays high. Whereas we drop our tax rate 40% or 50% at the very top. What high income tax does is not raise a lot of money. What high income tax does, say taxing people at, I don't know, 80% over 2 million, anything after your first 2 million, you know, your books done really well, you've done the film with the academic book, whatever else, and you're bigging in 2 million a year. On the next £1, say we're going to take 80p in tax. Terrible, you won't write another book again. What it does is it helps greedy people be less greedy. There was a case a few years ago of two bankers, one in Lloyds, one in Barclays, both doing the same job, both on 4 million a year, and one got a pay rise to 6 million a year and the other one demanded 6 million a year. People are of this mindset, some people are. If you were to tax at 80, 90% the marginal income at those levels, then not only would those bankers not ask so fervently for this money, but the board of the bank would be more reticent to waste as far as they're concerned the money, because they'd have to give it most of it to the Treasury than give it to these young men who needed it. And so you might employ some more cashiers in your bank rather than a few more young men trading money in London. Or think about it from the point of view of a university. When your very well-published Professor of Medicine comes to you as Vice-Chancellor and says I've got an offer from the University of Berkeley to move and I'm going and taking my team with me or whatever. And I need another 20,000 pounds on top of my special NHS allowance because I can't possibly stay otherwise. When you're a Vice-Chancellor, well, that doesn't happen if you've got high rates of marginal income tax. Because what happens is that the very egotistical Professor of Medicine goes to Vice-Chancellor and says please can I have another post in my department for somebody else to help teach? Because there's no point trying to get your salary increased if you're not actually going to get it. I won't go on about it, but I'm getting very annoyed when people say high rates of tax don't raise very much money that isn't the point. That's not why these countries that have kept high tax rates are doing it. It's to keep a degree of civility and good behaviour going in your country. There's been lots of work on productivity. There's an obsession with productivity. I think the Shadow Chancellor wants productivity to be a measure now that the Bank of England would have to monitor if Labour was to get into power. Productivity is generally lower in more unequal countries. And if you look at real productivity, because that measure is essentially GDP, a lot of it which is made by fooling people in trading rooms, not actually doing something that useful when you get found out eventually. If you look at real productivity, it's much, much higher in more equal countries. Because if somebody is paid twice as much to clean, they actually clean three times better. This is the difference. People behave in different ways. Whereas if you were to double the salary of that very productive professor of medicine, there aren't any more hours in the day. They can't write any more papers. They're not actually going to help very much. Even before you begin to ask, does the world need any more spaghetti-sliced papers, showing how good you are? I have hundreds of these kind of correlation graphs. I'm just going to show you a couple of my favourites. This one is the ability of maths as measured by the people who do the PISA comparisons. But the lovely thing about this one is that it's aged 15 or 16, which shows a correlation slightly weaker than this. This is when you do the same basic math test to 24-year-olds, adults up to the age of 24. And it really, really lines up very well at 24. And the only reason I can see it lines up so well at 24 is that in the U.S., where they call it math, and everybody's done calculus, and you ask them what calculus is, they've done it. In the U.K., where we give A stars at GCSE, now it's a nine, isn't it? We teach the test. We teach children how to get an A or an A star on the day, and then most of them never need to know it again. And in fact, most of them may not know very much maths. And even worse than that, you've managed to make the majority of your population hate maths by teaching it in this... It's not really teaching, I wouldn't call it teaching. And how do you test that? You test basic ability in mathematics a few years later, and you just find that in the U.K., a large majority of people can't do GCSE kind of grade D and grade E, including ones who got an A just a few years earlier. Whereas in more equitable countries, where the stakes are lower, because people can go into many different kinds of jobs and still survive and have a good life because the income is more similar, you can actually teach mathematics in a way that you might enjoy and learn from it. And you're not obsessed by the GCSE grades that your children are going to get. And your schools aren't being threatened with being shut down by off-stead or told how wonderfully they're performing if they manage to squeeze even more out of these. You don't have schools where young men are sent at a cost of £50,000 a year once you put the skiing trip in. Of course, a million pound aged 13 to 18, where every young man has to get an A or an A star. And most of them have their names put down at birth because they can as long as their father went to eat them as well. These are fascinating natural experiments. You can squeeze an A or A star out of almost any boy. We know they don't have special genes. I can go on about that. And the Human Genome Project is brilliant for studying this. But squeezing an A and an A star, particularly out of a boy, it's much worse out of a boy because boys go through puberty later, is a particularly good way to damage boys. Damaging people in general, I'm sure most of you know the correlations between infant mortality and life expectancy and health, mental health and inequality. But if you don't, read the spirit level and get the inner level, which was only published about a month ago. But other things go wrong. This was in the BMJ this year. This is the absolute rise in mortality in this country at the start of this year. And you get worse politicians. So when this came out, Jeremy Hunt, said, oh, it's due to aging, on the advice of Public Health England. Now, it's not very hard to take account of aging because we do have an idea of the age of the population. And thankfully, ONS have some guts. And ONS released data a couple of weeks ago showing that we have an age, sex, corrected or age mortality rate now rising. We have life expectancy falling in Britain. If you were to work out the life expectancy, less the very large number of extremely healthy young people who are in this country who are born in Europe, it's much, much worse. And if you were to put in the frail who are currently living in Spain and being of home, it gets much, much worse. But already we have falling life expectancy. Nowhere else in Europe has falling life expectancy. In Finland and Norway, it's still going up by a third of a year every year. In Japan, where it's the highest in the world, it's going up by a third of a year every year. And in the UK, it's falling, and of course in the USA, it is falling worse. Well, look at infant mortality. When I was born, which was 1968, a baby in Portugal would be three times more likely to die than my chance of dying in my first year of life in the UK. Today, you're better off to be born in Portugal. This is a neonatal mortality rate. In 1990, we ranked seventh pretty good. It's death in the first week of life, 28 days life. In 2015, we were down to 19th. It's an incredible slip, and it isn't due to the babies of the very fit, well-educated young people from Europe who've come in, by the way. That isn't very hard to show. Northern Ireland is the worst. Parts of Northern Ireland without a single immigrant are the worst. Since that data, and again, thanks to O&S for having the guts to keep on doing this, they put this up in November of last year. Since that data was released, we got the latest infant mortality statistics for the last two years, and it's risen absolutely two years in a row, statistically, significantly. Nowhere else in Europe has done this. The last time it happened in Britain was during the start of the Second World War. Why don't you know about this? UPIM will not report it. I have sent 20 emails to UPIM and had nice answers back, and I have helped a large number of people in the health service send emails to UPIM, and say, you are the BBC Health Correspondent at the time of the greatest disaster in health that this country has had outside wartime. Poor UPIM can't report it, because how do you remain politically neutral and report absolute numbers of grieving parents in the country? So I can see you've got a problem, but you also get worse information in a more unequal country. There's good news, at least from my political disposition, there's good news. Along the bottom, you've got the traditional polls, and you've got the events of June last year. The graph at the top is most interesting. The graph at the top is the swing as conventionally measured to teach general elections since 1945. We tell things in a different way. I'm going to go fast, don't worry, I will finish it free. But we're told that 1997 was an incredible swing for labour. Well, it was, but it was after 18 years of conservative rule. You know, it really wasn't that hard to do it. Tony Blair's next two elections, he managed to lose votes. What's going on? You've just taken over the country after 18 years of conservative rule. You can enact all your policies, things can only get better, education, education, education, and your vote share goes down, and it goes down again when you have a war, and then nice old Gordon Brown gets in and he manages to get even the biggest free against him, but it wasn't financial crisis. And Ed Miliband can be made to eat some bacon and manages at least, he did better than all of them. He got a 1.4% positive swing. You know, in context, Ed didn't do badly. It's a just different way of looking at exactly the same numbers. And then some doddery old fool comes along who didn't want the job and is made to stand by his mates because one of them has had a heart attack and he can't stand. And the doddery old fool gets voted in by a few other sympathetic MPs and he's got no chance two minutes to midnight. And the doddery old fool who can't do a public speech to save his life gets an absolute majority of party members and is forced to become leader of a party he doesn't really want to be leader of because he doesn't like leading things. And then they try and force him out again and there's another leadership election and then he wins that. And then he's up there with a party going forward to election where he's told they're going to be absolutely devastated. And he gets the highest swing since 1945. And it's bigger than 1945 because 1945 was over 10 years from 1935 to 1945. This was just two years without a war. And the war was a terrible war because it's the second time that our elders have managed to get us into a world war. So people were very angry in 1945. That graph round there, I would love to know if you've seen a graph like this before. It's showing on the vertical axis the proportion of the electorate who say they would vote for Labour if Labour were being presented for an election tomorrow. The dots are the average of the monthly polls. The polls are actually brilliant. If you average them over a month you get a nice smooth distribution. If you ask people how would you vote in an election tomorrow the answer they give you because of course nobody knows how they'd vote tomorrow. If you think you do but some of you would not vote as you would answer the answer people give you when you ask them how would you vote tomorrow is how they would have voted six weeks ago. 2010, 2015, 2017 the polls are spot on six weeks after the event. Anyway, that big loop I have drawn 200 of these graphs for every set of elections and every party since polling has begun that's never happened before. Theresa May was absolutely correctly advised to hold that election. It was inconceivable she wouldn't be returned with a majority. It never happened and then she wasn't returned with a majority. Things are changing. This is the segregation index of conservative voters. How many conservative voters she would have to move around the country between constituencies to get an even number of conservative voters. It was very high in 1922, 23, 24. It comes down to around about just about 6% in 1959. Conservatives everywhere. People who vote Labour everywhere. You get to jump up in October 1974 with a South-East one to the Conservatives because they'd had enough of the miners. And then you get that relentless increase in segregation just like the relentless increase in income inequality up until 2015 and David Cameron. And then, and it's only one election but just look how smooth the series is it wasn't just that lots of people didn't normally vote, voted Labour and other people stopped voting Liberal and voted Labour and Labour a bit naughty about the press of alliance. That little drop meant that people in areas that don't normally vote Labour began to vote Labour. There were many things which are very strange at the moment which haven't occurred for some time. The map is London. I challenge you to spot Barnett. The reporting of local election results was visible. Housing. The line at the top is taken from census data. Every census is 1911. It's the ratio of the average number of rooms, the best of 10th half to the worst of 10th in housing in England and Wales. Most unequaled in 1921. Drops, drops, drops to 81. And then that huge rise. It isn't aging. That huge rise in the inequality in rooms per person in housing is just how inefficient our housing stock has become. We have more empty houses and rooms in Kensington and Chelsea now than we've had for the last 20 years. There are more bedrooms in London than there are people. Everybody could have a bedroom. They don't have to sleep with anybody else, all on their own in London. But we let the market come in and the market is amazingly inefficient. And that's something we've helped prophecies that the market is a good way to allocate things like housing. The market doesn't allocate housing well, it doesn't allocate health well, and it doesn't allocate education well. Big ticket items don't work with the market. Ben Henig and I produced this map in August of 2016. It's the first map of the fall in housing prices. They began falling straight after the Brexit vote. They've been falling ever since. You get very little reporting of the falls in housing prices that are occurring. But this is interesting. And if you're interested in wealth inequality, it is falling housing prices that will actually bring the country together in terms of wealth. It's the only way in which it can happen. I've only got one more slide, almost at the end. I correctly predicted I had no time to talk about Europe or Brexit or voting and the extent to which that might be related to inequality, but I think it is. I know I'm a bit obsessive about this. I do try and check myself over it, but it may be no coincidence that the most unequal large country in Europe was the first after Greenland to vote out and Greenland was quite a long way away.  If you had 56,000 people, and in Greenland they had fish. And in Greenland, if you keep your Danish citizenship, you actually are still in. Anyway, that's the only other example. And Greenland doesn't have a land border. Who would have known how important a land border was going to be, eh? And my last slide for you. Now, it isn't that one thing causes another. People don't wake up in the Netherlands and say, I've just checked our Dessar Group ratio and it's really low and I'm going to get on my bike this morning. Okay? And we know from historical stories what happens in the Netherlands. What happened in the Netherlands is a group of parents in the 1970s got really, really angry about the death rate of children on the roads. In the UK the most common cause of death for children aged 5 to 24 still is to be killed on the roads on a bike or trying to cross the road. The most dangerous crime is speeding. In other countries in Europe, in Switzerland, if you drive your Ferrari through a village three times at 80 miles an hour, you will find 80,000 pounds. In Finland the fines are even higher, but my favourite is Germany, who find a footballer gets 500,000 euros for driving without a licence. He wasn't even under the influence of drugs. But imagine living in a country where you find people for doing something very dangerous an amount of money which might mean they stop doing it. That kind of incredible cleverness only comes with greater economic equality. The story of the Netherlands is a group of activist parents. These things don't happen by chance. People have to do things they have to be bothered they have to get out. And eventually you end up with a transport system and an urban planning system that makes sure that people can afford to live near where they will work so you can cycle and walk to work. There are people on the line looking at the outliers and trying to explain them. The problem with Japan is that people write down I use a train, which they do, rather than I use a bike to get to the train. But the car use in Japan has fallen every year for now 25 years. We don't believe in car use falling. There's a current proposal by the government to build a six-lane motorway between Oxford and Cambridge. I find this highly amusing. This starts in 2022. If you needed anything to help young people in the south of England become activists again if you can remember Newbury and the M11 protests. You know, it's deliberate. You don't need to build a six-lane motorway as an outer M25 between Oxford and Cambridge. But we think are doing that. My last anecdote, if you look at the US down there I think about 3% of people cycling and walking to work because there's no way you can do it is a mayor in Texas a few years ago who when it was proposed that in his small town in Texas that they might think of building pavements. He said we're not going to build pavements because that is the beginning of the road to communism. And that... And the last thought to leave you with if you're British is what do we say or do or behave like where somebody is sitting in Finland or Germany or Switzerland and saying you'll never hear what I heard in Britain the other day they actually believe this. And I think that's the thing we should worry about and we need to worry about our social science as well because we're not immune from this as social scientists. We probably produce much worse work overall while getting ever so happy for the Times Higher newspaper based in London has devised a way to produce rankings that say just how brilliant our universities are and we go well that's great, aren't we wonderful? And that kind of behaviour is the behaviour you get if you don't control degree D and you don't become more equal. Thank you very much.