Good afternoon. You're all very welcome to the IAEA, so I am delighted to be welcoming Professor Matthew Goodwin, who is a professor of politics and international relations at the University of Kent. Professor Goodwin is also a visiting fellow at Chatham House and he is a senior fellow with the think tank UK in changing Europe, which perhaps we should rename as changing UK in the changing Europe. Change indeed and change. It might not leave, who knows. Yeah, so the changing tone, the changing language and the changing object of western democratic politics is the object of Professor Goodwin's work and so he's just published a book on the challenge that national populism poses to liberalism. So without any delay I will pass on the floor to Eleanor and before that I would kindly ask you to switch your mobile phones to silent mode and you are nevertheless encouraged to tweet with the hashtag IAEA. Thank you very much and the reason I am here is that I'm representing Trinity Research and Social Sciences and this series on populism and challenges to the liberal order is a joint series between Trinity and the IAEA and it gives me great pleasure to be here to welcome Matthew for the third lecture in this series. I'm not going to delay our speaker any further but just to say that we're delighted to have Professor Goodwin and he will today draw an analysis from his latest book outlining what lies behind the rise of national populist movements and what's likely to happen in democracies across the west. So without Thank you very much. I'm going to set out the core thesis of our book, what we think is going on and where we suspect we may be headed and then we can have a debate and then if you'd like the book I have some copies with me so there you go. I think we are obviously in a very fragile moment when it comes to Europe and North America. I think there's a very lively debate as we know going on about what's behind the current political shocks. I think that debate will continue at pace through the European Parliament elections in the spring through the Brexit negotiations and then we move seamlessly into the 2020 American presidential election. But I do think particularly within the context of Europe our conventional models and thinking are being challenged really like never before in the post-war era. I wanted to start with Sweden because I found the recent election in Sweden particularly interesting for a number of reasons. Sweden reflected three trends that I think apply not to every democracy in Europe but to much of Europe. The first thing that we saw was a decline in support for the centre-left social Democrats who plummeted to their worst results since 1908. The second thing that we saw was the rise of the national populist Sweden Democrats, a party that was rooted in neo-Nazism, a record 18% of the vote, one of the reasons why we still do not have a government in Sweden is because the other parties refused to collaborate with the Sweden Democrats. But thirdly more generally we saw the fragmentation of the Swedish party system. A lot of smaller parties, more ideological distinctive parties doing better than at the last election. The radical left party, for example the Greens, the Christian Democrats, we saw the vote a bit like a balloon full of water when you drop it. We saw the vote spread a little bit more evenly across the political landscape. And those three trends I think are really playing themselves out in many other Western democracies. I want to focus on one of those today which is the rise and impact of national populism. And I think there's going to be a lot of interesting work in political science over the next five years on both the fragmentation process, the rise of the Greens in countries like Germany, perhaps the rise of the radical left in some democracies. And it's upon social scientists that that task is going to fall. But I've been working mainly on national populism and that's why with Roger Eatwell, who was my PhD supervisor, we decided to write this book looking at what's behind the rise of these people. Marine Le Pen, of course, polled 33% in the final round of the French presidential elections in 2017. That was a record high for her movement. The Austrian Freedom Party polled 49% in the Austrian presidential election, a record high result for the Freedom Party. It was then returned to government the following year. Victor Orban in Hungary polled almost half of the vote, one another super majority. Lager in Italy currently, if you look at the opinion polls, is the only political party that's growing. Currently polling 34%. That's a record. Also polling well outside of its traditional northern bastions. Donald Trump, I don't need to say too much about. And of course, then you have this emerging discussion about whether these parties can coordinate at the European level for the EP elections in the spring. National populism is not successful in every democracy. Look at Spain, Portugal, look at Ireland. But the negative cases are increasingly looking like a minority compared to the positive cases. And if you consider four democracies in particular, when I was studying my PhD, as I was just saying over lunch, that the edited volumes would always end with four chapters on democracies that were considered to be immune to national populism. The UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. And if you look at, for example, Gert Wilders, also the forum for democracy in the Netherlands, look at the alternative for Germany now represented in all 16 of Germany's state parliaments, more than 90 seats in the Bundestag. The Sweden Democrats, as I've mentioned, and of course, we had the rise of the UK Independence Party that consequently collapsed after it really got everything that it wanted, a referendum and then the vote for Brexit. And each of those democracies has witnessed considerable political churn. And if you just sort of look at the public debate too, as we've seen, we're seeing the axis of power in Europe shift somewhat in that a year ago, the front page of the Economist was very confident and bullish about the new Macron-Mercal partnership. Whereas only last month the front cover of Time magazine was Matteo Salvini with the story talking about the new so-called alliance between the Southern periphery and Central and East European states, particularly around the issue of the refugee crisis, though not exclusively about that issue. Macron's approval ratings currently 24%. Salvini's are currently around 60%. Indicative of two movements that are at odds with public opinion. And that introduces a whole series of questions, which is, well, how is this going to affect policymaking at the European level? How is it going to affect responses to economic reform, to refugee crisis, to ongoing international relations? And some political movements have unquestionably lost more than others, particularly social Democrats. If you look at the center-left across much of Europe, not all of Europe, but across much of Europe, the decline of social democracy kicked in actually around 2005. So if you look, for example, at Chris Hanretti's work, he's done some really good work on this, mapping the electoral trajectories of center-left social Democrats, it's really actually before the Great Possession and the financial crisis that that decline kicks in. But then accelerates as Europe comes out of the crisis, and we start to see some truly historic results. The SPD in Germany currently polling around 15%, 16% of the vote just polled at the last election. It's lowest level of support since 1933. Were it to poll 15%, 16%, that would be its worst result since the 1890s. The Austrian social Democrats out of power, the Italian social Democrats record low, French socialists collapsed, Dutch left, Dutch socialists also weakened, Czech social Democrats again down, Sweden social Democrats I mentioned earlier on. Now, we can contrast that obviously with the rise of the Greens and some radical left movements that are doing well, but increasingly, to me at least, it seems that the question that is being asked of social democracy is not how can it retain or return to a position of electoral competitiveness, but how can it survive and how can it hold together groups within its electorate that are arguably holding irreconcilable values, particularly on identity issues. How can you hold together blue collar workers on the one hand that are instinctively socially conservative, and how can you hold them together with culturally liberal middle class professionals? One group feels profoundly anxious over European integration and migration. Another group feels pretty relaxed and would like to talk about a lot of other things like environmental reform, or perhaps more EU integration, or perhaps raising the minimum wage, or other such issues. No social Democrat has the answer to that. Lots of social Democrats say we'll look at Jeremy Corbyn, maybe he has the answer. The Hampstead-Hartley pool divide within the Labour electorate is clearly visible. It is just concealed by our first passer post electoral system. So I would warn you against buying into the notion that Jeremy Corbyn has found the cure. My view at least, and we can pick this up in discussion, is that Jeremy Corbyn has been somewhat lucky in that he's emerged amid a very different institutional environment. So the interesting macro question when you look at all of this, at least for me is, and when I talk to a lot of people in business at least, is when they say, well, Brexit, Trump, what's happening in Europe, does this actually signal that we are nearer the end of a period of political volatility and change? Or do these moments, these shocks, actually signal that we're nearer the beginning of a new period of political volatility and change? And that's quite a simplistic framework, but it gets us into some of the arguments that we routinely encounter in our public debate. So if, for example, you think that this is an awkward transition moment as such, as Western democracies effectively leave the immediate post-war era and move into a new period of churn and change, you are probably won over by arguments that this is essentially all about angry old white men who are backlashing against the system and are soon to be replaced by more ethnically, culturally diverse populations as university rates, higher education rates expand and therefore the potential over the long term for national populism will diminish. This is essentially what you read probably weekly in the Economist, probably weekly in the Financial Times. It's a very seductive argument, particularly for those on the Liberal Left, because it implies that we don't really need to do anything about the grievances that this, in effect, is a waiting game and it's essentially all about generational change. Of course, if you just look at the socio-demographics of who's voting for these movements, you quickly realise why that argument is woefully inadequate. If you look across most democracies, Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the US, you're often faced with the reality that these movements are typically strongest among the under 40s, if not the under 50s. So if you look, for example, at Austria, the strongest group for the Freedom Party are 30 to 59 year olds. If you look at France, what was interesting about the presidential election that few people noticed, that was the first election in the history of the National Front in France, where the Le Pen brand, if you like, closed the gender gap between men and women. Marine Le Pen was just as popular among young women as young men. Nonna Meyer has a recent paper on this showing how Marine Le Pen actually became noticeably popular among 25 to 49 year olds and 1 in 3, 18 to 24 year olds. Germany, 30 to 54 year olds. Italy, the Lager is drawing its support evenly from across different age groups. There is no real noticeable skew. Sweden, second most popular among 30 to 64 year olds. Even in Brexit, and we forget this, we talk a lot about older voters, the vote to leave was endorsed by half of voters in the 35 to 55 year old gap age group, sorry. So 1 in 2, 35 to 55 year olds voted to leave. And in the US, 41% of white millennials voted for Donald Trump, 53% of white women, by the way. But also more diverse, 2 in terms of ethnicity, 1 in 3 black and minority ethnic voters voted to leave the European Union, 1 in 3 Hispanic Latino voters endorsed Trump, looking at the mid-term results, not much change actually in that respect. So we can see that actually as a movement, there's quite a lot more gas in the tank, if you like. We also conveniently forget life cycle effects. I mean, we are all likely to become more conservative as we age. Usually this is a point where somebody starts shaking their head very aggressively saying, I will never become conservative. But we're all statistically, well, if you believe the work of James Tilly at the University of Oxford, we are all likely to become 0.35% more conservative as each year of our life passes. And in fact, James has a very nice paper with Jeff Evans showing that if you look at the case of Britain across three generations from 1964, basically to where we are today, the probabilities of voting conservative actually hold pretty constant. James reminds me of the argument in the 50s, which was that well, Labour will dominate British elections for decades because of the demographic changes within domestic politics. And of course, actually, often the real world doesn't work that way. A different variation of that argument was Stan Greenberg's book, America Ascendant. Stan Greenberg, prior to Trump's election, argued that the Democrats would control the White House for the next 30 or 40 years because of the population changes and the rise of a new sort of diverse America. And I think what that argument has glossed is the fact that firstly demography is not destiny. It's often exaggerated the pace of that change. But secondly, simply by sending that message out there, what you're effectively doing is galvanizing other groups in society to become more active in politics. Indeed, we have a study looking at Donald Trump's election that now found that if you remind White Americans that they are on course to be a minority by 2042, they not only become more supportive of immigration reform, but they also become more supportive of Donald Trump. So simply by reminding people about how society is changing around them actually can have quite profound political effects. We also are slightly troubled by this public focus on these short-term arguments to make sense of these political changes. And if you look, for example, at how the public debate in general has tried to make sense of Brexit or Trump or what's going on in Europe, there have been a number of misleading arguments that we try and challenge a bit from the perspective of evidence. If you think about the focus in the US on what happened during the campaign with the FBI director letter, if you think about the excessive focus in Europe on the great procession and the financial crash, if we think about, and I'll come back to that because I know there are some economists here, if we think about the referendum campaign, what was written on the side of a bus, who said what? Was it merely a reflection of racism? Doesn't sit easily with the fact that racism within the UK has been steadily declining over the last 50 years? Was it the role of Big Tech and Cambridge Analytica? Was it the resurgence of historic fascism on the more excitable fringes of the public debate? I'm not saying that all of this is not important, but these short-term arguments have been given a level of influence that is wholly disproportionate to their actual significance, and I'll explain a little bit why. If you look, for example, at the takes on Donald Trump, I recently read this book, Hillary Clinton, What Happened? I got to the end and I realized she still doesn't know what happened in the sense that it's almost exclusively focused on the campaign, on what happened between starting the run against Donald Trump and the time that the votes were counted. If you look at some of the work by John Sides, as one example, actually the foundations for Trump were set long before Trump descended the elevator in Trump Tower. If you looked at the advantage or disadvantage for the Democrats among key groups in American society, then what you can see, particularly during the Obama years, is that the Democrat disadvantage, the net disadvantage among white voters with only some college education or white voters with only high school education, their advantage basically falls off a cliff and they become a little bit more supported among whites with degrees, still doing well among minority voters, but it's this key group that is basically disengaging or de-aligning from the Democrats. And we now know from two years of work that those defections were mainly driven by concerns over cultural change and migration, that around one in three white voters that had voted for Obama twice were also opposed to how American society was changing in terms of migration and demography. So the foundations were already set. If you looked at Brexit too, we had this discussion about Cambridge Analytica, not much evidence now, looking at the studies that have come out over the last two years to support that thesis. We also talked a lot about what was written on the side of a bus, but if you looked again at the long-term trends, and one of our key arguments in this book is we really need to take a step back from these short-term takes and look at the long-term trends. If you looked at the National Centre for Social Research and you'd looked at survey evidence, then you would have seen that pretty much since 1996, more than 50% of the population had either wanted to leave the EU or stay in the EU but dramatically reduce the amount of powers that the European Union had, with the exception of two or three years, but otherwise there was a clear majority in favour for that core message of let's leave or let's dramatically reduce the powers that the EU has. And of course we now know that the renegotiation or the deal that Cameron brought back in early 2016 was nowhere near enough in terms of what these voters were expecting in terms of that reduction of power. Something I talked about in my last book that if you look at all the polling, voters clearly wanted Cameron and the EU to have given much more than of course they were able to give. So again the long-term trends were really always favouring leave and bizarrely for obvious reasons confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, we collectively brought into the idea that remain actually were the favourites but there's a lot of good reasons to argue actually that it was opposite. Of course it's always easier to say that with hindsight. So there are two core arguments in the book. The first is actually if you look at the long-term trends, national populism is revolving around four deep-rooted shifts which were a long time coming and have given way to often legitimate grievances about the current settlement. This is probably the bit where I'll start debating with my colleagues. The second is that because of these long-term shifts that are changing our party systems from below and will be with us for a long time to come yet that national populism has serious long-term potential support from a broad alliance of people who share very intense concerns about how their nations are changing. It's unlikely in my view that we are going to slip back into an era of mainstream stable politics if indeed that ever really existed. And what we use as a device because this book is very much aimed at a sort of broader market than academics is what we call the four Ds and these are the four long-term deep-rooted shifts that are in their own ways influencing on voting behaviour today. Distrust, destruction, deprivation and de-alignment. And let me just talk a bit about those. So in terms of distrust there are essentially two arguments. It's no surprise that we if I was to say to you that we have widespread levels of distrust in politics that would not be particularly surprising. But what we argue in the book is actually to make sense of that level of distrust that we have we really need to look at how democracy has evolved pretty much since its formation and over the long haul. And there are two arguments that I think are really important to understanding why we're here. The first is that there has forever really since the dawning of democracy being a long tradition of what we call elite skepticism toward the masses, toward ordinary citizens that has been variously reflected from Plato to elite theory in the 1950s to arguments about democracy that praised apathy and celebrated elites being in control of key decisions and not necessarily giving too much power or too much room for manoeuvre to the people. It's reflected partly in how we've treated referendums. It's reflected partly in the emergence of European integration and democratic deficits within political organizations that are not seen to be sufficiently accountable or democratically transparent. And it's that elitist conception of democracy that has throughout history created room for populists that claim to speak for the people. And what we're living through is not by any means the arrival of populism as we know, but it is merely the latest episode in a long tradition of populist mobilization going all the way back to people like Andrew Jackson, to the US People's Party, to Father Cothlin in the US, to Huey Long, to the French Pujadis, to the progress movements in Scandinavia. Because we're living in it, we assume it's unique to our era. One of the arguments in the book is that the populist tradition is as long, in fact, as democracy itself. And we need to kind of understand that, particularly in terms of appreciating its durability. I'm a big fan of Margaret Canavan, who sadly passed away this year. And Margaret Canavan's work on populism was very influential, at least in arguing that as long as we have democracy, we will have populism of some description, whether on the left or the right, because democracy is by its nature unable to reconcile the competing demands, the competing interests, the competing calls for representation among our increasingly diverse and fragmented societies. But the second element is that actually that tension, particularly what is unique about today, that tension is being exacerbated by the way in which we have a growing representation gap between those in the corridors of power, and not only politics, but also media, and you might argue arts and culture, and ordinary voters. And national populism partly reflects a deep-rooted distrust of elites that can be traced back over decades, but which is now being given a new lease of life by the way in which certain groups in society have good reason to feel that they are not being represented to the same extent as other groups. If you look at the US Congress, and I'll only give you a few examples, obviously the book goes into a lot more detail, the US Congress now has record numbers of women and ethnic minorities representing voters. That should be celebrated. That is a core achievement of liberal society. It has record low numbers of non-graduates and of blue-collar workers. It has record numbers of millionaires, it has record numbers of MA and PhD holders, but it has record low numbers of people who have never gone to college. The UK, the House of Commons, has now the percentage of MPs who have any experience of manual occupations is down to 3%. The percentage who have only ever worked in politics is a record high of 18%. If you look at media, one in two of our columnists today have gone to still, today have gone to one of two universities, and if you look at other party systems, for example, if you look at Macron's cabinet, if you look at Merkel's cabinet, what we're seeing is the rise of what Mark Bovins and colleagues refer to as diploma democracy, the rise of increasingly highly educated, also highly affluent, but also highly socially liberal political representatives who are increasingly dominant across most political systems in the West. This is not just reflecting changes in society because in general our societies have become more highly educated, but this is now moving at a pace that is at odds with overall societal change. Why does it matter? You might ask. It matters for two reasons, particularly in understanding national populism. The first is that we now have still very high levels of voicelessness, you might call it, but a sense among large numbers of voters that voice simply does not count. This is especially high among non-graduates and workers. The euro barometer data that recently came out that was hailed as showing high levels of support for the EU across countries outside of the UK, one finding that was missed in that discussion was that one in two voters in the EU strongly agree or tend to agree with the statement, my voice no longer counts in the European Union, and that's much higher among non-graduates and workers. If you look at Brexit, the canary in the coal mine to some degree was three months prior to the referendum, 45% of workers in the UK said people like me have no say in government. They have good reason to feel that way, to be frank. If you look at how that breaks down just while we're here across the EU, you're looking at almost one in two. It's basically held static since this is the latest data, 2018. Some countries have fallen back, but generally there's been no significant change. But interestingly, if you look at Italy, if you look at Greece, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Latvia, here's the UK, right down the bottom, about 32% are saying my voice counts in the European Union, also very disillusioned before the vote to leave, obviously. But that sense of voicelessness really runs through the populist vote. Over 30 years, almost every study of national populist voters has shown that political distrust is a core predictor of whether or not somebody would vote for these parties. It matters, for one reason, is on the identity axis. Elites, if you want to call them, at Chatham House we did a large survey of about 15,000 voters and elites across Europe. Political, business, media elites, editors, business owners and elected representatives in contrasting them with a large sample of voters. It's on these identity issues, immigration is good for the country, immigrants enhance our cultural life, immigrants make crime worse, immigration is a strain on welfare, ban all further migration from mainly Muslim states, which was the Donald Trump policy. And you can see these, the reason I'm showing this slide is because these are the biggest differences between elites and voters. So this is the whole sample across Europe. If you look at these questions, you're seeing some pretty big differences. Blue is voters, red are elites. The reason that the changes in our political representatives matter is because the value set that is increasingly dominant among our elected representatives is not necessarily the wrong value set by any stretch, but is increasingly at odds with the values of those who are voting for national populism. And I can talk a lot more about that, obviously. The second core concern relates to deep rooted concerns about migration and ethnic change. And this is the most kind of, this essentially is at the core of national populism. And our argument is that throughout history, whenever we've had large waves of migration, they often generated a hostile response from the population. But amid today's unprecedented rates of change, we know that identity issues are now rising up the agenda. We know that large numbers of people feel instinctively negative about how their nations are changing. Not everybody, graduates are pretty relaxed, middle class professionals are pretty relaxed, but non-graduates, workers and traditional conservatives are not. And national populism is really tapping into these concerns. If you look, for example, at the Brexit vote, the overall level of migration with the grey line tracked overall concern among the population with the blue line. If you look at the U.S., overall share of foreign-born people in the U.S., which peaked in the early part of the 20th century, then declines rapidly and is now again on an upward curve. Again, the salience of migration neatly tracks this increase in actual change in Italy too. The refugee crisis over the last 10 years, particularly you see rising rates of immigration tracking also news coverage, but also levels of public concern. Now, obviously different in Central and Eastern Europe, but in Western Europe and the U.S., actual demographic changes are moving in quite close parallel with levels of concern. For Europe, this is a real challenge because the new issue agenda in Europe is very much about these identity issues. If you looked at UGov data earlier this year, they asked voters what are the top two issues facing Europe today, and in every member state except one, the top two answers were immigration and terrorism. The exception was Italy where the answer was immigration and unemployment. This may be a short-term reaction to the refugee crisis, which as we've seen overall numbers have come down. It may be that alternatively we're entering into a period of European political history where actually demographic change and migration are going to remain highly salient to voters, which will increasingly exacerbate those divisions. Central and Eastern Europe is really going to be in the firing line as such in terms of how this plays out with populism because a lot of these states are forecast to depopulate over the next 15, 20, 30 years. If you look at Bulgaria or Lithuania, they're going to depopulate by about 15 to 20 percent. Some estimates are a lot higher. Those states are going to need migration, going to need new workers essentially, or they're going to need to do a better job than they are doing at tempting young people back, but there is no real easy answer to how these states are going to prop up social care systems and welfare over the next 20, 30, 40 years unless they have a big injection of new labor. Those also happen to be the states that are most anxious over the demographic changes that they witness in Western Europe. If you look at the Pew Research Center, we know as well that Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hatred, and I sat on the government's group looking at anti-Muslim hatred for four years. We know that it's very strongly entrenched, but it's also very strongly aligned with support for national populism, that this is becoming something of a separate issue within the matrix of demography. If you look at the Pew Research estimates of how Europe will evolve even under zero levels of further migration, and obviously this is a sensitive issue that we need to treat very carefully, but if you look at the estimates under zero migration going forward, even then the percentage share of populations of Western Europe that will be Muslim will close to double in some states. Most voters will not feel at all anxious about that. Some voters will feel profoundly anxious about what that change means. So moving swiftly on was because I'm running out of time. The economists in the room would say, what about economics? The third core trend at deprivation, essentially the argument is that historically capitalism was always legitimized by national, by combination of nationalism and religion, whereas today the Golden Age has increasingly made way for inequality, wage stagnation, and the withdrawal of the state. And what matters is not objective deprivation in terms of actual levels of jobs, income, objective conditions, but a sense of relative deprivation that is running throughout large numbers, large percentage of the population, that people are feeling that both they and their wider group are being left behind relative to others, and often they're working in full time and often are on good jobs. I mean they have good reasons to feel slightly hacked off. If you look at overall rates of inequality from the mid 1980s to today, very few states have made progress encountering overall rates of economic inequality. In fact if you'd looked at Sweden prior to the election result you would have seen inequality rates in Sweden rising quite sharply. And also if you'd looked at the overall share of national income going to workers, then today the overall share going to workers is four points lower than it was in 1970. So if you are working class or you're low skilled working in the service sector you've got pretty good reasons to feel that this economic settlement is not delivering for you. Now it's the combination of these economic concerns in this sense of relative deprivation that's about loss, that's about community decline, that's about dignity, a word we don't talk enough about in politics but a loss of dignity and respect. Then actually a lot of these voters have good reason to feel very frustrated with the economic settlement. The share of jobs that are pretty rubbish, temporary, short term contracts, low pay has increased substantially in France, in Germany, in Italy especially and in the Netherlands. So when you're dealing increasingly with national populace who are saying like Le Pen is well it's not just about migration anymore, it's also about savage globalization and we can all talk about the rights and the wrongs of her message and whether it's just manipulation. But increasingly national populace are talking about economic issues as much as they are cultural and that's again where social democrats on the left have a really difficult manoeuvre to pull off because they're now fighting national populace on two fronts, on the cultural front but also on the economic front. And lastly before I get thrown off the stage the final core current is de-alignment and I think most political scientists would probably not have an issue with this, they probably agree with me that if you look at the foundations of politics and how our systems are changing one of the core things that we've known for a while Russell Dalton, Hans Peter Creasy, Peter Mayer who in many ways I wish was here to see what was going on because I think a lot of his analysis was spot on that the foundations of politics over time have become much weaker that the share of voters who now align themselves with the mainstream parties is declining quite rapidly but persistently in many western democracies. If you looked at UK, USA, Germany, France, if you look at the US, record share of independence, mainstream partisans declining, looked at Sweden. Prior to this recent election a percentage who identified with the main parties in Sweden has gone from 63% in the 60s to 27%. So we already have far more fluid volatile electorates that are moving from one party to the next at a much quicker rate than they have previously and that is why we are seeing these much higher rates of volatility that if you look from 1940 to today the overall rate of volatility across, this is across 19 established democracies is now on an upward trajectory. So more people switching their vote than ever before including in the UK. A journalist said to me yesterday, well 80% of people voted Labour or Conservative. It's the wrong stat. Underneath that 2015 and 2017 were the most volatile elections in post-war British history. Lib Dems going Labour, Greens going Labour, Conservative going Labour, particularly middle class Liberal Conservatives, working class Labour going Conservative, UKIP going Conservative. Underneath the surface we have considerable volatility and if you don't believe the thesis then just at least look at where party systems are going today in that we have three comparative studies now looking at the policy direction of political systems. Marcus Fargan and Thomas Meyer from 1980 to today show that increasingly the mainstream parties, centre left and centre right are following national populace from liberal positions to more Conservative and authoritarian positions particularly on migration and integration. That looks like the Sweden social democrat saying let's cut down on welfare. That looks like the Danish social democrat saying let's have a much more robust integration policy. That looks like the German left saying let's completely overhaul how we think about the migration issue. So that's it in a nutshell what brought us here where we're going and obviously I'm a bit more gloomy than most but also of the view that the period of political volatility that we're living in has only just begun rather than is coming to an end. So thank you very much.


The cost equation is a mathematical formula used to predict costs at various levels of volume. We will learn three methods to predict costs at various levels of volumes. Each uses the cost equation. The cost equation is y equals vx plus f. y is the total mixed cost, v is the variable cost per unit, x is the volume, and f is the total fixed costs. Another way to think of the cost equation is as follows. Total cost equals variable cost per unit times volume plus fixed costs. The cost equation is only valid within a relevant range. Outside the relevant range of volume, the cost equation changes. For example, if I owned one airplane, I could predict costs at various levels of volume for flights from Salt Lake to Las Vegas. I could determine how many passengers I could fly and how many flights I could make in a day. All of those things are within the relevant range. However, once demand got so large that I needed a second airplane to meet the demand, the relevant rain changes, and the original cost equation is no longer valid. In this case, my fixed costs would go way up when I had to buy a second aircraft. Graphically, you can see how the costs change over time. Total variable costs are often curvy linear, which means they increase, but not always proportion to the volume at any level of volume. Think about the purchasing power of Walmart versus a local store. As Walmart gets larger and larger, they can get discounts at volume levels that many smaller stores cannot. Fixed costs are fixed until volume increases too much that a new production plant or airplanes have to be placed into service. Fixed costs tend to be step costs as volume increases. So our ability to predict costs using the cost equation is only valid when we are within the relevant range of volume.


Now invite Mr. Yukia Amano, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency to introduce the report of the agency for the year 2016. Mr. President, the IAEA's 60th anniversary year is drawing to a close. In the past six decades, the agency has contributed to international peace and security and made a real difference to the lives of millions of people. Thanks to the support of Member States and the dedication of our excellent staff, we can take pride in important achievements in all areas of our work in that time, including in the last 12 months. The IAEA annual report 2016 has been distributed to you all. Mr. President, science and technology are essential for development. Transferring peaceful nuclear technology to developing countries is core IAEA business and one of the most important areas of our work. The IAEA technical cooperation program is central to delivery of Atoms for Peace and Development mandate. It has improved the health and prosperity of millions of people and delivered huge benefits to entire communities. The agency now helps countries to achieve the sustainable development goals in energy, food and agriculture, industry, water management and health, as well as in other areas. We focus on transferring knowledge and technical expertise. The agency works closely with key UN partners, including the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization for the benefit of Member States. The first international conference on the IAEA technical cooperation program this year attracted high level participation and enhanced awareness of a unique role in nuclear technology transfer. Mr. President, the modernization of the IAEA nuclear applications laboratories near Vienna continues to make excellent progress. This is one of the most important projects ever undertaken by the agency with investment likely to total around 60 million euros. I am grateful to the 31 countries and a number of individuals whose generous financial and in-kind contributions have made this possible. The eight laboratories provide assistance to more than 150 countries in areas such as food and agriculture, health and environment. The new insect pest control laboratory was inaugurated in September. It will help countries to use nuclear techniques to better control pests such as mosquitoes, insect flies and fruit flies. When completed in a few years' time, the expanded laboratory complex will greatly increase our capabilities as a technology holder to the benefit of our 168 IAEA Member States. Mr. President, nuclear power is likely to make a growing contribution to sustainable development in the coming decades. The agency supports countries that wish to introduce nuclear power or to expand existing programs. Today, 70% of the world's electricity comes from fossil fuels, 11% from nuclear power, which is one of the lowest carbon technologies for generating electricity. But when it comes to low carbon electricity, nuclear generates almost one third of the global total. By 2050, if climate change goals set under the Paris Agreement are to be met, around 80% of electricity will need to be low carbon. Nuclear power plants produce virtually no greenhouse gas emissions or air pollutants during their operation. The emissions over their entire life cycle are very low. So increased use of nuclear power as well as some of renewables will help countries to achieve their climate change goals. The IAEA Ministry Conference of Nuclear Power in the 21st century took place in Abu Dhabi 10 days ago. The concluding statement by the president of the conference said, I quote, for many countries, nuclear power is a proven, clean, safe and economical technology that will play an increasingly important role in achieving energy security, reducing the impact of volatile fossil fuel prices and mitigate the effects of climate change and air pollution. End of quote. In August, the IAEA long-arrested uranium bank storage facility was inaugurated in Kazakhstan. The L.E.U. bank will provide at least last resort mechanism to give countries confidence that they will be able to meet their future needs for nuclear fuel. Mr. President, turning now to nuclear verification, the number of states with IAEA Safeguard Agreement in force stands at 182. I encourage all countries to implement the additional protocol, a powerful verification tool that gives the agency greater access to information and locations. 130 countries have additional protocols in force. The agency continues to verify and monitor the implementation by Iran of its nuclear-related commitments under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, which was agreed in 2015. The nuclear-related commitments undertaken by Iran under the JCPOA are being implemented. Iran is now subject to the world's most robust nuclear verification regime. Our inspectors have expanded access to sites and have more information about Iran's nuclear program, which is smaller than it was before the JCPOA came into force. The agency continues to verify the non-divergent nuclear material declared by Iran under its safeguard agreement. Evaluations regarding the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran continue. Mr. President, I remain seriously concerned about the nuclear program of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The nuclear test by the DPRK in September, its sixth and largest to date, is extremely regrettable. I call upon the DPRK to comply fully with its obligations under all relevant resolutions of the Security Council and the IAEA. As you may recall, IAEA inspectors were required to leave the country in 2009. However, the agency continues to monitor the nuclear program of the DPRK through satellite imagery and by collecting open source information. The IAEA is also working to maintain its readiness to return to the DPRK when political developments make this possible. Mr. President, safety and security are extremely important in all uses of nuclear technology, whether for power or non-power purposes. Both are national responsibilities, but the IAEA plays a vital role in enabling countries to share experiences and best practices. Lessons from the Fukushima Daiichi accident in 2011 have now been incorporated into the IAEA nuclear safety standards, ensuring that they become part of global safety practice. Safety must always come first and safety culture must continue to be strengthened. I encourage all member states to ensure broad application of IAEA safety standards. With its worldwide reach and unrivaled technical expertise, the IAEA has served as the global platform for cooperation in nuclear security for decades. Member states have consistently recognized our central role in strengthening and the nuclear security framework. The IAEA Board of Governors adopted the Nuclear Security Plan 2018-2021 by consensus in September this year. As a request of member states, we continue to expand the assistance we provide to enable countries to minimize the risk of nuclear and other radioactive material being used in a malicious way. Mr. President, sound management of limited resources is essential if the agency is to be able to meet the growing needs of member states. We will continue to strike a balance between those real needs and the reality that many member states face continued financial constraints. I take the issue of gender parity on the agency's staff very seriously. We have significantly increased the proportion of women in the professional and higher categories. It now stands at 29.4 percent, the highest level ever, but we can and must do better. In June, I became an international gender champion. This is a leadership network which brings together key decision makers to break down gender barriers. I made a commitment to increase the proportion of women at very senior level in the agency. Mr. President, since becoming director general nearly eight years ago, I have focused on ensuring that the IAEA remains an international organization of excellence that delivers concrete results promptly. The IAEA's member states have appointed me to a new four-year term starting on December 1st. Delivering concrete results in everything to do with atoms for peace and development will remain my focus in the coming years. Thank you very much.


What's up Nerds, I'm Psy and I'm going to give you my review of season 2 of one of the most talked about documentaries of the past couple of years, Netflix's Making a Murderer. If this is your first time at Moving Nerds, then hit that subscribe button and hit the bell notification so that you don't miss a thing. And while you're at it, you may as well hit that like button too. For those of you who haven't seen Making a Murderer, it's the incredibly tragic true story of two Wisconsin locals, Stephen Avery and Brendan Dassey, who were convicted of the brutal rape and murder of Theresa Halback in 2007. Avery was recently exonerated in 2003 from an 18-year stretch in prison after being wrongly convicted of rape back in 1985. Avery was the victim of corrupt officials with a personal vendetta to put on behind bars and so set out to target Manitowoc County for a $36 million lawsuit and compensation. In 2007, Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey were arrested and convicted of the murder of Theresa Halback. The Emmy Award-winning documentary from Morridemos and Laura Ocardi, which is filmed over a 10-year period, is very much in favour of Avery and Dassey's instance and the extraordinary lengths that the Manitowoc County police have gone to to incarcerate them, including the suggestion of planting evidence and manipulating coerce and Brendan Dassey into a confession who was a minor at the time. Season 2 follows suit. Except with it only being a couple of years since the original documentary was released, then this is filmed over a shorter period. This gives the filmmakers more time to go back and focus on certain aspects of the original case in exceptionally more detail. For those of you who have already seen the first season, this is an opportunity to go back and look at the evidence, the story and the people who were involved in incarcerating Avery and Dassey. Thanks to the original documentary, Avery has acquired himself a new post-conviction lawyer in the form of bulldog Kathleen Zellner, who infamously exonerated a man named Ryan Ferguson after doing 10 years of a life sentence for murder. Zellner enlists the help of scientists and specialists to dissect Avery's case by using modern methods to test the authenticity of the evidence provided in his first trial. Almost like an episode of CSI. An example of this is taking the original bull casing said to have killed Theresa Halbeck and testing it for bone fragments, which of course they didn't find any. From then on it's pretty much the Kathleen Zellner show as the documentary follows her story and her attempts to get Steve and Avery a second trial and also prove on a number of occasions how the evidence provided in the original case was completely fabricated and points towards another person or maybe some other suspects. For a short period season two deals with the backlash of the original documentary and forcing opinions and protests from both sides of the fence. We see some development since the show aired on Netflix and how that's affected members of the family and people closest to Avery and Dassie. Dassie's mother Barb who's tormented by grief but never given up hope and Avery's mum and dad who are sadly and noticeably older and weary that they may pass on before he ever gets out. Beyond all the shocking revelations and the high-priced lawyers speaking technical jargon beyond all the sinister undertones there's a far more humble prestige at the centre of this documentary in the form of Avery and Dassie who are blissfully oblivious to the lengths that people have gone to to get them their freedom. Season two of making a murderer sets out to do exactly what it's supposed to and that's reignite the public interest in a case that the American judicial system seemingly wants to brush under the carpet. Whether they're successful or not well that's for you to find out but until next time I'll see you nerds at the movies.


So, Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim, people ask for the slides so I have made them available so you don't need to take snaps or photos of these. The links are given here for these set of slides and also for a related set of sites which deal with creating an alternative to Western education which I delivered earlier. So, these are closely related subjects. So, this is just the title, Rethinking Social Sciences and Humanities for Pakistan and this has been a central concern of mine for a long time. A paper I wrote in 2008 was entitled, Improving Social Science Education in Pakistan and basically my concern is that we are applying conceptual frameworks developed in the West without thinking about the fact that these are not applicable to Pakistan. So, for example, in Pakistan Marxists are still thinking about the laborer and the capitalist, the Masdoor and the Kisan even though this is not the class struggle in Pakistan. In fact, the class struggle here is between the English speaking class which inherited power after the colonizers left versus the vernacular class which is the people of Pakistan. So, basically it's the colonizers versus the colonized and this struggle never took place in the West and so the Western social theory does not deal with this. This is a heritage of colonization which the West never experienced and so to study the class structure and the power struggles within Pakistan requires going outside the boundaries of Western social science. So, one of the things that we need to study in developing a local social science is the impact of colonial heritage. Again, something never experienced by the West. So, the psychology of the colonized is very different from the psychology of the colonizer and I think this is one of the key messages of Edward Said's book Orientalism which basically says if you want to boil it down to one sentence is that the global colonization by the West created a superiority complex in the West and an inferiority complex in the East and this psychology of the colonized has been studied by very many people and basically it's psychological slavery and the solution to this problem is decolonization and this damage is done by the process of education. So, the colonization ended a long time ago but the colonization of minds continues today via the Western education which is globally in use. This Western education is deeply Eurocentric and what it teaches us basically if you want to simplify is that West is advanced and developed and the East is backward primitive underdeveloped and so this needs to be countered in the minds of the students and I have given a few talks on how we can counter this and but the basic is the central notion of development is not looting of wealth from other countries by force or other people by force but development consists of human development how to learning how to become better beings. So just as an illustration of the one of the efforts being done globally is to give Black pride, create Black pride and the Black Panther is a movie which has been praised for this effect but I would like to point out that in this effort and many other similar efforts all over the colonized nations including the Islamic world suffer from a deep defect. So this Black Panther movie basically shows a hidden kingdom a secret kingdom in Africa which has a certain kind of energy power and so certain science and technology in which they are very advanced. So this is the wrong kind of effort because basically it implicitly accepts the standards of the West to judge ourselves and the standard is scientific progress. In fact we don't need to play in the ball game according to the rules that they have created we need to develop our own standards which is basically human standards we should emphasize ginship family excellence in character skills integration with the environment which our religion and generally most cultures teach and honor whereas the colonizers only value wealth and disregard how it is acquired and so science and technology serve this purpose of providing power in the efforts to colonize and exploit either people or environment and this so we should not be attempting to create pride by competing them with them on those grounds rather we should emphasize the difference that we are we use different standards we we are concerned with human development not with the accumulation of capital so in order to be able to be able to reject social science and rebuild it we have to look at the puzzle created by social science in the use of the deceptive term science so when we say social science then the word science itself represents a claim to universality but when you look at the nature of social science this is obviously lessons derived from European historical experience there's it's very simple and many many people have remarked on it so for example Mitchell writes that the possibility of social science is based upon taking certain historical experience of the west as a template for a universal knowledge so the puzzle is why does social science when we when we talk social science we should be talking about the social science European or Eurocentric social science because obviously social scientists have used the institutional structures of Europe to develop their theories and so why should it be universally applicable it applies to European societies probably but certainly not to African societies or Islamic societies because we are we have entirely different institutions and conceptual frameworks and so the answer to this puzzle is the is the Edward Said's book on Orientalism that all western knowledge about the east is tainted by this conquest and colonization and because of the superiority complex created by this global conquest western society considers itself to be the more advanced and considers that all other societies that infants and when they grow up they will become like Europe and so basically development means becoming like Europe now this is actually not true and the counter narratives start by looking at the experience of the conquered so there are books describing the American conquest of the red Indians from the perspective of the Native Americans and similarly Dalrymple has given an account of how the whites the Europeans who invaded India realized the superiority of the local culture and similarly in Australia and in Japan there are books which describe the point of view of the defeated and the colonized so in general in world history we have seen many examples where barbarians overcame advanced and effete civilizations and in general in those historical events the barbarians learned from the advanced civilization but in the most recent wave of conquest the European barbarians overran the world but did not learn from the more advanced civilizations instead they destroyed them now the one of the reasons for this inferiority complex that we have acquired is a book mentioned in a book by jack goodie called the theft of history which basically the Europeans have written history so as to erase the contributions of other civilizations so one of these is the one of the ways in which it has been done is described in this other book the Greek strategy which is that the Schumpeter says that there is a 500 year gap in which nobody had any economic thoughts on the planet and the reason for this is that all of the contributions of the Muslims or the Islamic civilization in general either they were moved back to the Greeks or they were moved forward to western copyists so we think of Aristotle and Plato as the wisest men on the planet because a lot of advances on those philosophers by Muslim scholars have been attributed back to the originals and similarly Copernicus basically copied from Ibn Shater but he is known as the revolutionary person who gave us the conception of a heliocentric system whereas the fact that he basically copied the book of Ibn Shater is not known and those who know it don't agree or acknowledge it and the reason he did he did this he hid these origins was because the Catholic Church was persecuting anybody who borrowed from Islamic thought so they had to hide their sources so this fabricated history is one of the deadliest weapons which has been used against us and I have given some more details so one of the consequences of this theft of history is a direct attack on the Islamic faith because according to Islam the greatest treasure of knowledge is the that which was given by God to man 14 centuries ago and what the knowledge that God gave to man is obviously superior to anything that any human could create but today a western education only mentions the contributions of the west over the past three centuries and these don't seem to have any links to the Quran and the hadith so it seems as if western knowledge is superior to all other knowledge indeed there is no knowledge other than that which is created by the west so this is in direct conflict with the message of the Quran so how can we rebut this idea that one bookshelf of an Englishman contains more knowledge than all of the literature of Arabia and India so the problem actually is subtle the conflict is comes from the theory of knowledge epistemology according to the Enlightenment philosophers all knowledge comes from observations and reason but this is not true because we are built our hearts are built to know the good and the evil and once you exclude the heart from considerations of knowledge the Quran mentions repeatedly and also the hadith about how the heart is a instrument of cognition and it is not the eyes which are blind but the hearts so actually although the western epistemology asserts the exact opposite of what I am going to say all human knowledge is built on moral foundations if we say something is worth studying it means that this is worth test spending our lives on and when we say that can you making a moral statement economics started out with a branch of moral philosophy and it remains a branch of moral philosophy although the moral basis of modern economics have been concealed and have and there's a pretense of objectivity just like social science pretends to be objective and universal when it is built on a moral framework developed by the Europeans so to understand this better we need to look at how religion became marginalized in the west to understand their theory of knowledge and this has been studied by many people but I will skip over the details but basically the key is that in the 16th century religion was the master interest of mankind it governed all departments of life and by the 18th century religion became marginalized and became a system of personal beliefs which does which did not interfere with the public domain there are many reasons for this but it is not our job our task today to discuss that although I have discussed this in a number of different places and the central reason is that there was a century of religious wars which had between Protestants and Catholics which had deep effects on European psyche and thought and the consequences of these wars was that Europeans experienced the fact that religion is not capable their religion was not capable of governing the public domain without creating battles both domestic and international and so they rejected religion as a basis for creating a society and this led to the necessity of rebuilding knowledge from scratch from zero so this involved rejecting authority and tradition and the new philosophies of knowledge of empiricism and rationalism came in that knowledge only comes from observations and reason hard soul intuition and subjective human experience were rejected as a basis of knowledge because they had led to the misconception that religion was the right path and since their experience the European experience showed that it was not so they rejected these sources of knowledge so basically once you understand how once you understand that there was a vacuum created by the rejection of religion about how to govern public life then you realize that social science comes from the rejection of Christianity it is a way of understanding how society should be constructed after rejecting Christianity and so it is based on an ontology that there is no God judgment day or afterlife and therefore the universe and life on it is meaningless and once you reject afterlife and judgment then it's obvious that the pursuit of life is a is the purpose of life is pursuit of pleasure power and profits society is just a jungle of competition human beings are animals and the survival of the fittest is the only moral principle and so the key transformation which occurred from the 16th to the 18th century was that society was thought of as a community with common goals but just as Thatcher said there is no society and just as Hobbes said basically the natural state of human beings is war of all against all in this jungle of fierce competition so this was this is the conception which underlies all of modern social science and it's obvious that this conception is not matched with Islam so these toxic moral foundations where life is basically war of all against all and we don't care anything about others and certainly nothing about future generations there's no morality has led to the bloodiest century on the earth with continuous wars or there's the war against by the corporations against the planet for profits which has led to the extinction of millions of plants and animals the climate crisis which threatens human existence there there's a lead to individualism and hedonism which has led to loss of family community and since these are the prime sources of human welfare there has been a strong reduction of happiness in the advanced so-called the richer societies with 50 percent of the children more than 50 percent in the west being born to single mothers they never experienced the love and warmth of a family and this has been a dramatic loss but it is not measured when you count the GNP per capita so we need to develop an alternative to social science which is based on on Islamic foundations which accept God and consider success as being on the day of judgment and therefore they are built on generosity social responsibility cooperation and striving for success on the day of judgment and these are dramatically opposed to the capitalist ideas of greed competition individuality and hedonism so there has been a lot of work by different people so one of the one of my papers on this topic is listed here and Dr. Rajab Shantur has been working on decolonizing the social sciences and he has developed a fairly deep theory about this I have also offered a suggestion a sketch of an outline of how we can rebuild social sciences by going back to Ibn Khaldun rejecting the developments which took place on the west on the basis of western universalism the idea that everything that the western society is a template for universal society so we go back to Ibn Khaldun and we can develop Ulumul Umran on the basis of his work he is the first sociologist in fact and one of the key insights is that communities are created by collective identity and the communities are the drivers of social change and this is in contrast with methodological individualism at the heart of modern social science so one of the consequences of this is that in Islamic society we work at the community level not at the individual level and not at the national level those are the those are subsequent as opposed to this in secular society there is no community so the only possibility for collective action is at the government level and many Muslims being deceived by these conceptual frameworks have sought to implement Islam by working at the government level and this is impossible as while Halak has pointed out that the state itself is based on very highly Eurocentric conceptions and these are in conflict with Islam and therefore we can't use un-Islamic means to implement Islam the basic contradiction between nation-state and Islam is that in nation-state the state and the state authority holds supreme authority whereas in Islam the law of God the sharia stands above all state authority and will be enforced against the majority and against the king so that's a different conception of society and one can't create Islamic society by un-Islamic means so I have spelled out a three-dimensional framework for social change which we need to implement which is very different from modern social science and basically it involves looking at three different dimensions one is the normative dimension what is an ideal society look like which has been spelled out in the sharia and then there is the positive which describes the existing state of affairs and then there's the transformative how to get from where you are to where you want to be so each of these requires separate work one of the key elements in this new theory is to give human agency a vital role human history moves because we attempt to understand patterns of history by developing theories and when we use develop these theories then we our response to historical events is shaped by these theories these theories are often wrong but even when they are wrong they are effective in shaping history because our actions are based on our understanding of history and this understanding is mediated by theories so human agency plays a very important role in creating history human beings are not robots subject to mathematical laws and the trajectory of nations or societies is not determined by any mathematical laws and cannot be determined by regression because of the freedom that we have to think about what's happening and to change and to choose so the study of history cannot be insulated from human agency as in science where you're studying mechanical objects which have no free will in particular I have studied Islamic economics and I have explained how we have been stuck and an impasse because Islamic economists have accepted as a neutral and objective description of reality modern economics even though it is actually the neoliberal economics is a religion and not a science and the modern economics is based on assuming homo economicus and I have ongoing set of lectures in which the first lecture I said that let's develop a theory of behavior on the basis of gratitude contentment and trust and these will be opposed to the homo economicus behavior basis of greed and selfishness and distrust and so we can develop a theory on dramatically different foundations so this is the last slide and it gives you the link to these slides themselves and talk on rebuilding the social sciences and on also a talk which describes how we might go about developing


For the circuit python parsec I wanted to show you how you can use pretty much any GPIO pin on your microcontroller as a ground pin. Why would you want to do this? Well sometimes you want to plug things in like in C here I've got a couple of LEDs with resistors plugged in and they're on either side of a little cutie pie board. There's only one pin marked as ground on this, point at it right there, that's the ground pin. Well you can't share that too easily with a couple of these leads if you're going into a breadboard. Great, but sometimes you just have header pins on your board and you want to plug things into them. What you can do in this case if you don't want to kind of crowd things in is pick another available GPIO pin and set it at a low value which essentially acts as a ground. Now this isn't as high a current ground as the ground ground pin so you only want to use this for things like LEDs and buttons and switches, nothing higher current, but it works really easily and really well. So watch this, you can see here in my code I'm setting up by importing library for board and digital IO. Then for this red LED I'm simply setting the pin that the high side is plugged into which in this case I'm plugging into the RX pin. So I set that to be a digital in out pin with the direction set to output and I set the value to true. It lights it up because it's setting that pin high so we're getting three volts out of that roughly. On this other side what I'm going to do is same sort of thing, I'll set up one of the pins in this case the TX pin for the high side of the LED, the positive side, but then to fake a ground what I'm doing here is I've created a variable called fake ground pin and here I'm setting up a digital pin it's a GPIO pin A1 in this case and I'm setting its direction to output but then I'm keeping its value low I'm setting the value to false. This essentially acts as a ground pin so if I hit save now what you can see is our green LED lights up as well even though I didn't have to clutter things up by using a single ground pin and so that is how you can fake a ground pin on your micro controller inside of CircuitPython and this has been your CircuitPython Parsec.


Tim Mountford, veteran road and track Hall of Famer. Tim Mountford's 12-year international racing career during the 1960s and 70s helped to generate new enthusiasm for bicycle racing in America. A ferocious sprinter who excelled in a variety of disciplines, Tim placed 10th in the sprints at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City and competed with Jack Disney in the tandem sprints in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. At the 1967 Pan American Games, he won a bronze medal in the 10-mile event. Tim dominated men's sprints at the U.S. National Championships, winning gold in 1969, silver in 1968, and bronze in 1966 and 1967. Tim demonstrated his endurance by racing in four individual and team events at the 1970 World Amateur Sprint Track Championships. Mountford was part of four different professional teams, the Dutch Seiko Watch and Canada Dry Teams, the TI Raleigh Bicycle Team and the Shimano USA Team. Tim was famous for his racing versatility. He competed in track sprint and omnium events, Criterium Road Races, Madison Races, and Motor Paced Races. His passion was the winter indoor 6-day track races where he raced a total of 16 races from 1971 to 1974, sometimes teaming with fellow American racer Jack Sines. It was the most ridden by any American rider since the 1940s when 6-day racing was hugely popular in America. Tim's most memorable event was at the Night of Christmas race, 1971, in the Dortmund Sports Arena, Germany, when 12,000 spectators were on their feet cheering as Tim closed four bike lengths. In the final lap, to beat both the current and previous World Sprint Champions, Robert Van Lanker and Patrick Cirque, in the 3-up sprint final while wearing his Stars and Stripes jersey. In 1978, he was the first coach at the first USOC Olympic Training Center, then located at Squaw Valley, California. Tim went on to open three bicycle stores in the Silicon Valley and sponsored a triathlon team and a BMX team. He became a youth sports coach, a church youth leader, and a scout master for the Boy Scouts of America. Tim and his wife have four children and seven grandchildren. Tim Mountford, Veteran Road and Track Hall of Famer.


Yeah, so the theme of the day is economy. And I thought I would just come up here and basically tell you a story about my journey with that concept of economy. So in 2008, the world around me was crumbling. And I didn't even realize. I remember coming downstairs one morning in my flat in South London and my flatmate, this guy from Australia, who worked in banking, was just sort of sitting at the kitchen table staring at his half-buttered toast with his glowing phone in his hand. And he said, northern rot, bank failed. And I had no idea what that really meant. I didn't understand that that was, in many ways, the beginning of the financial crisis, which was going to just unfold and this crumbling around me. So I just left the house. I got on the train and I went to my own job in the financial sector in the city of London. I worked at a company that was a provider of high-speed financial data to sort of the whole global financial sector. And our office was just around the corner from the neoclassical buildings of the Bank of England and the London Stock Exchange and around the corner from these huge steel and glass skyscrapers of the biggest banks in the world. And you come in the office and there's like fish tanks everywhere and neon light sculptures. It was basically like working in a nightclub except everybody wore suits and wasn't having as much fun. But yeah, it was, I never expected to work in the financial sector. I was raised in California by hippies. My degrees are in arts and Asian studies. And yeah, I didn't have this aspiration to work in finance, but they needed somebody who was fluent in Japanese and knew about computers, so that was me. I worked on the IT, sort of the IT side of the systems. Yeah, so I was a weird fit for a corporate hierarchy. It had been a really strange fit, not really in my last job, which was as a civil servant working for the government of Japan.  And that is not what your middle management boss in local government wants to hear. And in this job, the same thing was happening. I was driving my boss crazy with these ideas, new ideas and initiatives. My boss was this guy named Paul.  And Paul was not interested in my ideas. Paul liked to keep things simple. Paul did not like change. But I just felt like, yeah. I just felt like I had this little flame inside me for wanting to make a difference, wanting to care about what I was doing and do something meaningful in my work. And I looked around me and I saw that things could be better and I wanted it to happen. But in that system, the only place for my ideas to go was to Paul, and that's where ideas went to die. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that little flame inside Paul had kind of gone out. Yeah. And so I was like surrounded in this company. The system of the company was all around me, but it was like I couldn't really touch it. I couldn't change it. I couldn't do anything with it. One day we got a message that a VIP was gonna come visit our floor. And so we were told to like wear our best business clothes and the fish tanks were all polished and yeah. And he came and it was the COO. It was the Chief Operations Officer of the whole company coming in from headquarters in New York. And he was like wearing a really sharp suit and had a toothpaste commercial smile and really looked like a corporate executive. And I was prepared to not like this guy. I, or at least to feel like he was literally from a different planet. But when he actually started talking, he talked to our department and as he spoke, I realized like actually, I think this guy kind of understands me. He's kind of on my wavelength. His name was Ken and Ken really believed that the company was there to do something, that we were all there to use the resources of a company to the best of our ability and that the company went to lots of trouble to hire smart people and lots of expense and that they weren't supposed to be put in a box with nowhere to grow. And I resonated with that. So I just wrote him an email. And I was like, hi, Ken, I'm Alana. You don't know me, but I've got lots of ideas. And I think that other people in this company do too. Yeah, because what I realized is like, he understood that way of thinking that he just couldn't hear us. He wasn't connected to us. He couldn't connect to those things. And he wrote me back and he was like, great, let's have a call. So I like, I logged off the phones and I get on to go to get this conference call and Paul comes over like, what are you doing? I get back on the phones and I was like, oh, it's cool. I'm just having a conference call with the COO. A bit of hierarchy hacking, what was he gonna do? And so Ken and I started working together and what we created was something we called the ideas market, which is like an internal system where employees could go in and post up their ideas and comment on each other's ideas and vote on them. And the top ideas would be picked up sort of every month by management and implemented. And that was cool. You know, it was like seeing like, oh yeah, all these other people around me are, they have their own little flames and can hear about that. So I was put on sort of the management track and I was made a team leader and sort of started climbing the ladder. Meanwhile, things were crumbling around me in this system. I would sit at my, this console with like, four screens with just huge amounts of data flowing by and news tickers and graphs and huge sums of money being moved from one place to the other. But it was really felt unreal. It was like the matrix was something like, it was all around me, but I could not touch it and I didn't really understand it, but kept hearing about how things were all going wrong and when I would go downstairs down the escalator past the neon sculptures out the glass doors, there were people like emerging from these skyscrapers with cardboard boxes and they were being made redundant and I was getting, it was getting a bit more real. One day I was walking back to the office after buying lunch and suddenly there were just like a lot of people around me and I found myself just in this big throng of people on the street. And then I couldn't, suddenly I couldn't keep going. I couldn't get out. I realized there were barricades and the police were surrounding us and I had wandered into the G20 protests in 2009 because they were outside my office. And the police were using this technique called kettling which I think has since been made illegal where they surrounded like 5,000 people and wouldn't let them out and wouldn't let them have access to food and water and just to basically shut down the protest. And just right near where I was standing, this guy, a 47 year old newspaper vendor named Ian Tomlinson was batonned by the police. I mean, he wasn't even there to protest but he was batonned by the police and he died because they wouldn't let him have medical attention. That was really real. And I, you know, I go back to my office and I think that kind of sparked what had been a growing realization that I was climbing this ladder but I looked ahead of myself and I saw that no matter how far up it I climbed there was nowhere up there I wanted to go. Because at the end of the day, no matter how well I did my job or how much I improved things, ultimately what I was doing, if I did my job well was moving numbers from one column to another column and it was meaningless. At this company when you quit, you're not allowed to talk to anybody and you're not allowed to say goodbye and they have a policy that anybody who quits is never allowed to come work there again. So as I was being like the security guard was leading me by the elbow to the door. Paul came sort of lumbering up to me and I raised my eyebrows because he wasn't supposed to talk to me like I was put on an ungrotta at this point but he said, it's too bad, we had high hopes for you. I don't know, that was a surprise, I didn't know he felt that way but it was too late. What I did next was in some ways utterly typical like I moved to Spain, I enjoyed the sunshine, I went to Burning Man. I moved to India and I lived in an ashram and I studied to be a yoga teacher and I learned a lot about myself and I started volunteering at an NGO outside of Mysore that supports children rescued from human trafficking situations and that was meaningful work. Those were real people who needed real help that I could have an impact on and I felt my flame kind of brightening back up a little bit. But after a while I just kind of got this old familiar feeling of like yes I was helping these people that were immediately around me but really it felt like I was just moving numbers from one column to the other because I wasn't touching that bigger system that was actually creating this situation in the first place and I can only have an impact as big as myself. So I kind of knew I needed to keep seeking. I didn't know really what I was looking for. I moved to New Zealand and I had no plan. I did not know what I wanted to do or what I should do and I just started going to events in Wellington around stuff I was interested in like sustainability and collaboration and technology and I kept seeing the same people there and after a while I realized they all seemed to know each other like what's going on and eventually I figured out that this was in spiral and in spiral at that time was really small. This was in 2011 and it was just a group of programmers, computer programmers and designers who were drawn together by this idea that they wanted to use their professional skills and their working hours on this planet to make a positive difference and that by collaborating and working together they could have more resources and flexibility in order to do that. I met Joshua, I got to know him and one day he took me out to lunch and said, how much money do you need? Can you start on Monday? And so I started sitting next to him and working in spiral and in spiral at that time I think like many organizations, progressive organizations that have aspirations to work collaboratively really had the drive to be a collective but was missing I think a lot of the how, the real nitty gritty of like how, okay how do you actually get together and work this way? And so that's kind of what I really started to focus on. The way it worked and this is still true for the freelancers collective and in spiral which is now called in spiral services is that, I'll give you an example like people can work as contractors so like I do consulting sometimes.  They pay to the bank account like normal and from the outside this bank account looks like any other business bank account in spiral services limited, big pile of money but what's going on inside is actually something quite different. From the inside we use a system that we've developed in house and this system like it doesn't even have a name and I think this is emblematic of how we haven't realized that this thing is actually cool until very recently. It was just like our like admin so we just call it the backend or by its URL which is my dot in spiral but what it does is allows us to take that bank account and from the inside it's virtualized into hundreds of tiny accounts that have money in them and that money is pegged one to one to the money in the actual bank account. So when I get paid that $500 comes in and my dot in spiral picks it up and it knows it automatically takes some of it and the default amount is 20% and puts it into collective funds and that's the money we use to build up the company and pursue the social mission and 80% comes to me. So $400 out of that $500 80% goes in my in spiral account and that money is 100% mine to control. I can log in there and I can see how much money is in my account and I can do anything I want with it. For example, I can pay myself so I'm an employee of Inspiro Services Limited and I decide how much to pay myself and my income tax is taken out and that stuff where I can spend it on business expenses like I bought a laptop or I go to a conference and I get to decide, I don't have to ask anyone's permission to do that stuff. It's like I'm the boss of my own business unit and that's the budget and also importantly within the system I can take that money and send it to any other of those hundreds of accounts. Frictionlessly, it's only when money leaves or enters the system out there that we have to worry about sort of accounting and taxes which we do, we pay our taxes and we do our accounting but inside like the money's not actually going anywhere so we can just send it, I can hire somebody to do something for me at Inspiro and then just pay them into their Inspiro account instantly and that enables some really cool stuff. So what about that 20% what about that $100 that went into the Collective Funds account? That's where our collaborative funding comes in and this is the process we use to make decisions about our collective resources. Before we had collaborative funding kind of for really practical reasons only a few people kind of understood the budget or had their heads around the numbers or had access to the bank account and we'd try to involve people in financial decision making and say should we spend money on this or somebody else would say can I spend money on this and the answer was almost always like I'm a designer, not an accountant, I don't know or like how much money do we even have? I don't know. You decide. And the effect of that was that a lot of power and information was really centralizing on just a few people and that's not what we wanted, we wanted to do something different. So like I said, like many progressive organizations we had these aspirations to work as a collective but I think unlike some other organizations we were ready to like make it real, really start experimenting and putting our real money on the line. We were inspired by this process we knew about for kind of an offline sort of participatory budgeting process that an intentional community used, what worked is they, if people had ideas of like how to spend the collective budget they would literally put out a bucket and people would come in and they would be given sort of monopoly money and go around and put money in the buckets that they wanted to support and the results of that would be the budget. So we thought well why don't we try to bring that online? And the way we started was with like a really ugly system of spreadsheets and forms and the way it would work is we'd put a call out and say okay proposals for spending the budget people would put their proposals in and we'd stick those ideas across the top of the spreadsheet and then down the side would be the names of everybody who had contributed that month to collective funds and how much money they'd contributed and everybody would come into the spreadsheet and put their dollars against the projects that they wanted to support and this really changed the dynamic. This meant that it wasn't just a few people making financial decisions but everyone the crowd making them together and it meant that 20% contribution to collective funds, it didn't feel like a tax. It felt more like you were an investor because you decided where that would go and people would decide if we wanted to take a risk on a project everybody could invest in that together and then own that outcome together. And critically it really helped us think more strategically about money because it wasn't just about advocating for the thing that you wanted to get funded it was about actually being invited to look at the whole landscape of here's all the resources we have here's all the things we might wanna do. If we say yes to this thing we've gotta say no to that thing so we really need to think strategically about what we're trying to do here. So yeah so that was transformative and Spiral began to really scale up and it went from kind of a bunch of individuals collaborating this way in one company to a network of companies. Sort of like a fractal level up because now we've got the Inspiral Foundation which is a charitable company that sort of sits in the middle and facilitates collaboration between the companies and the companies give financial contributions to the Inspiral Foundation and then they participate as companies in this bigger collaborative funding process. We've built an app for this process called co-budget and it's really kind of visual and engaging and it feels like doing the budget is almost like a game of fight, it's fun. And Spiral's grown now to about 300 people we call them contributors across New Zealand and the world and any one of them can come into co-budget and propose an idea for funding, propose a bucket and say please fill this bucket up I wanna do this thing. And to me what that looks like is 300 little flames that can be fanned. Now because we've turned this into open source software other groups are using it as well and enabling the same process and that's really exciting for me. That's a pattern you see a lot of in Spiral like we're hacking on our own challenges around collaboration and then we polish something up and open source it so other people can use it as well. Recently I was in Berlin at this conference called Capital for the Commons which was really cool it was about sort of like what could the future of the economy be and there were some really smart people there like academics who study this stuff and progressive economists, people who run public banks and credit unions and invent cryptocurrencies and stuff like that. And I learned a lot at this conference. I, you know these people really understand how the economy works and how it could be different and through listening to them the main one of the main takeaways from me was the global economy is not something that has emerged from the laws of nature like we human beings have decided how it is and made the rules and it emerges from that and because we invented it, we can change it and I found that really inspiring. Yeah, it was really inspiring and that's why these people do this work but I also felt this really underlying sense of frustration in this group of people because they could see how it could be different so compellingly but it's really it's like they're immersed in the system surrounded by it but they can't touch it because convincing governments to change policy or taking out an entrenched interest is really hard. So I got up there, I was asked to present and I was like, I'm a little bit nervous what am I doing, like I'm not an economist what do I have to tell these people but I just showed them how money works in spiral and my done spiral and co-budget and they were blown away. And I was blown away that they were blown away because I did not realize what we'd done. My done spiral is a bank, like it's a virtual bank we do accounts and transactions and we enable overdrafts and what we've done is taken the form of an LLC and use it to create sort of a walled garden, a bubble within which we can make our own economy where we get to set the rules and we don't have to wait for the world out there to change for us to start living in the transition economy right now. And yeah, this like really woke me up to that idea. I was sitting around my kitchen table the other night with Doris who's a lovely person she's a recent and spiral contributor she's about a generation older than me and she is not a tech person. She is an educator, a gardener, a nurturer and she was telling me about this bread making workshop that she's gonna host and she'd put it up on a spiral sort of internal pure learning platform and the way that works is she can charge a small amount for people to come to this bread making workshop and that's an income source for her. The experience as a community building exercise for everybody who comes to the workshop and also passing on this amazing skill because Doris' bread is delicious. But also a few dollars from every ticket of that workshop goes to the Inspiral Foundation into co-budget under Doris' name and she gets to go in there and decide what projects to fund with that money going forward. I think that the software is really helpful the technology is really helpful but I think some of the most exciting stuff is actually the legal and financial tools that we are building the way that we can set up companies and it's like how do you set up an employment contract so that you are the boss of your own miniature business unit inside the collective? How do you do shareholding for a structure for a post capitalist company? These are the problems we're working on and the ones that I'm really excited to start open sourcing and sharing. Doris was telling me that she's really inspired in her work by what she can learn from nature and that one of the most important principles is go from practice to theory, not theory to practice. And that really resonated with me because that's been my journey. Like I did not know that I was setting out to create an alternative economy. I just had a feeling. I just had this little flame inside me of like I think I wanna do stuff that matters. I want to care and I think other people do too. And I followed that feeling, found other people who felt that way and importantly started putting things into practice. We've made so many mistakes along the way it wasn't perfect but we are doing it for real. And that is how we can right now create this little garden, plant this little seed in the midst of this giant system we might not be able to touch or change but grow a new economy for the future right now. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


Hello, my name is Kelly Osborne and I am the Community Manager Supervisor at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, also known as NARA. I'm excited to introduce you to History Hub, which is a crowdsourcing platform for people interested in historical and archival research. History Hub is a website where people can get answers from multiple sources like the National Archives, the Library of Congress and State Archives, as well as a community of experts. So while we provide help to individuals who are not able to visit our reference rooms, we also provide help to people who will later search and find the same type of information. This was our goal, History Hub was our solution. We want the public to be able to have access to records and to get immediate help from knowledgeable archivists without having to know who has the answer. The National Archives is the nation's record keeper, but providing access to these records is just as important as safeguarding our history. NARA is pleased to announce that History Hub has just migrated to a new platform. Since launching in 2015, History Hub has strived to better serve the public interested in both personal and historical research by providing crowdsourcing capability for relevant information and improving access to the records held by government agencies like NARA and the Library of Congress. Over the last several years, we have had the opportunity to observe how the community uses History Hub and we have collected feedback from users on what improvements we could make to further this mission. Our new and improved platform launched at the end of February and provides an enhanced user experience and streamlined functionality. We hope you'll check it out and let us know what you think.