Jigar Bhatt, Gabriela Dutrénit, Beatriz Fialho, & Gillian Marcelle – SoDT #009

[Music] welcome back to the interview series on the social incumbent consequences of disruptive technologies by rethinking economics and now today we'll be focusing on science technology and innovation policy or sti policy innovation by firms and development in the context of latin america and especially related to disruptive technologies and for this four world-class experts have visited kind to make time for us today first of all today is gabriela di who is a economist with a phd in science and technology researchers from the science policy students in the university of sussex in the uk she is also the coordinator of the master program in economics management and policies of innovation and the related areas of phd social science program at the universidad autonomica has a no mastery metropolitina ceremony in mexico she's a regular member of the mexican academy of science and coordinator of leliks latin american network for economics of learning innovation and competence building systems the latin america chapter of globalists in 2012 this is 14 she was also the coordinator of the scientific and technological advice reform in mexico she has coordinated several evaluations of maximum policy of science technology innovation or sdi secondly with today is julian marcel who has served as a tenured associate professor of strategy and innovation at the wits business school this university in johannesburg south africa she was awarded a phd also from the science policy research unit of the university of sussex where she has also been a visiting vicious fellow she is also an investing school at the status center for technology and design based at mit where she continues to be an affiliated researcher dr marcel is currently the managing member of asylum's capital ventures an advisory firm in the blended finance space where she has been successful in capital raisins for private equity funds the origination and guiding the business activities of commercial startups and social ventures she has researched and advocated for racial justice gender equity and accountability in the technology in the national development sector related to risks she has also advised the united nations the earthly witness today is innovation management specialist an executive advisor responsible for strategic studies at bu manginos at the largest brazilian public biopharmaceutical laboratory previously shields also worked there as the head of budget and strategic planning and as a project manager for the building and implementation of biomagnetos a new site in sierra the plant-based technology center she received a phd in innovation management and development from the fennel or university of rio de janeiro where she previously worked as a research analyst during her phd she was also a pre-electoral fellow at the kennedy school of government at harvard university working with clusters juma blessing with us today is your bud who is an independent schooler and development practitioner he received his phd from colombia university and the masters in international development and regional planning from mit he studies the relation between knowledge power and the state especially the influence of economic expertise and or social and built environment has also a decade of experience working on sustainable infrastructure development for food and water security he was also a senior program officer at the u.s millennium challenge corporation and as was consultant for the alliance for a green revolution in africa the world food programme will bank and water it he's also volunteers with the group that alleviate heterologous thinking to address inequality sorry elevate of course that looks thinking to address inequality and ecological decline and with that i would love to go to the first question for gabriela so far in this series we have not really had a chance to go into science technology innovation or sti policies i was there for hoping to tell us a bit more on what exactly sdi policies are and how is this policy being implemented in mexico and other latin american countries i think you're still muted so let me start with knowledge we are living in in a times in times where knowledge is at the base of the progress of society for instance improving the living conditions finding solutions to diseases like covid improving materials for closing etc but there is another side of of the knowledge no sometimes knowledge also induce change changes that are not moving in the right direction for instance increase of inequality in the access to the benefits of growth negative effects on the environment which are so reflected in the global global warming and also many treats to bio diversity and then science technology and innovation is a set of activities related to the process of generation acquisition and diffusion of knowledge and which are the actors of the science technology and innovation activity where you have individuals and organizations organizations like universities research centers r d labs business enterprises in any sector but also government different agencies of the government the congress the financial sector many many organizations and you have also individuals who who actually develop this in science technology and innovation activities you have researchers academicians in general employees engineers or around the directors of the inferns or firms officials not deputies of course as well and all these actors are connected in what we call innovation systems which operate at local level at regional level at national level and this innovation system that connects all these actors they contribute to economic change in general and in the case that we are interested on they contribute to the development process in our countries you know but you have this science technology and innovation activities but there are a lot of failures in the market failures in the systems that justify the intervention of the government in in these activities you have for instance imperfect appropriability of of different goods because for instance firms the carry out around the activity that the firm cannot appropriate of all the results related to the knowledge that is generated by by their activities so that the friend prefer not to carry out some and invest in some activities in some research and development because they are going to they are not going to appropriate of all the research so the government has to intervene to to to to intervene in this science technology and innovation sector and the government do that through the science and knowledge and innovation policies and these policies they define an agenda they have a set of objectives and design a set of instruments in order to stimulate a specific science and knowledge and innovation activities for instance now that we have the problem of the copy and then the government has to intern intervene in order to fund for instance the the development of new business and the production also of the business and the ventilators etc so the all these activities the science technology and innovation policy and the activities that are stimulated by these policies well they are connected with what is called the government and the governance of the innovation system of how the government organized this the the to have to be director of this science technology and innovation activities and then today science technology and innovation policy has to be a public policy it means there is a public problem like the kovitz for instance and then the science technology and innovation public policy has to focus in these public problems like the kovitz but many others for it in mexico we have a lot of people with diabetes so diabetes is a it's a health problem in mexico who has increased the problem related with the diabetes so this is a public problems and the government has to intervene through the science technology and innovation policy and through the health policies and other arenas no and then how is the government organized well it means for instance in some countries you have ministries of science technology and innovation in other countries you you have a council general counsel of science and technology see and the the a public pro policy it means not only that the policy focus on uh of a public problem but also it means that it has to be public participation in the decisions and in the design of this in this case science and knowledge and innovation policy it means that the stakeholders or all the people related with design technology and innovation activities well they have to express their voices they have to express opinions and participate in some way in the design of science technology and innovation policy and so this is the the developed language in which the science technology and innovation policies are located and as we have science technology and innovation public policy you have also health public policy or labor public policy and this idea of the participation of the stakeholders or or the beneficiaries of these policies is important in order to build public policy in any sector we are talking now about science technology and innovation sector i think that's really interesting it really shows the importance of having such an holistic and a more broad understanding of of agents in the market jillian if i may ask how does this relate to your work or for instance especially on innovation and the learning school and could you also tell us more on the importance of how we define innovation for this process thank you so much and and thank you um gabriella because you started in fact with the the most important word which is knowledge and so my own work on innovation actually challenges the discipline of innovation studies to center knowledge and to center all forms of knowledge as opposed to science and technological knowledge and this is particularly true because we've sort of inherited and not critiqued the accepted versions and definitions of innovation that we've inherited essentially from western europe where uh the notion of an inventor in a lab still is the is the expressed form of thinking about innovation whereas even in advanced economies that form of practice for innovation only describes a fraction of how innovation actually takes place but the myth of the sole inventor sort of uh is preserved and so over a very long period of time because i'm actually taking on the antecedence and the dominant thinking in innovation studies as a discipline i have provided a definition of innovation which takes knowledge as being at the center and emphasizes the processes in which innovation actually takes place and so i define innovation as a process of generating knowledge processing it distributing it and emphasizing that the forms of knowledge in the innovation system must extend to non-technological knowledge as well as technological knowledge why that is important is that that competing challenging disruptive definition of innovation describes innovation as it is performed by the global majority so that definition is actually more accurate from an inductive point of view for describing what is performed as innovation as problem solving for the global majority but it also defines how innovation is performed in so-called advanced economies where technological novelty is not actually the driving force of innovation and so the implications of this for the architecture that gabriella defined is that in many instances that architecture renders invisible innovation performance because that architecture speaks about a science and technology system which is the formal lab-based technological system through which a fraction of innovation actually takes place but renders invisible the innovation as it is performed in firms by individuals on farms and by individuals and so what this means is that it renders innovation as something that is for the elite and so we keep having to then do the work of making science technology and innovation policy and innovation mean something for most people in an economy or in a society as opposed to starting with where most people are because if you started where most people are then you wouldn't have to keep trying to make it relevant you would actually start with meaning as the first point of intervention and the first point of analysis and the first point of discussion and so as a challenge as a as you know one scholar who's coming up with these um ideas about how we should re-imagine innovation this work is what i based my scholarly activity around but it is also what i am using to do other kinds of work now that i am in transactional finance because innovation takes place in every sector as as gabriella said when you're speaking about public policy for various sectors and so now that i'm in operating in the finance and investment world i'm thinking about what are the processes of innovation that take place in that sector and now obviously that would not be a public policy problem for the sti and policy sector it would be a problem or a challenge for finance and investment itself because finance and investment and other sectors are also leaving out the performance of innovation the intended beneficiaries of innovation and particularly what i'm interested in if we're speaking now about disruptive technologies and ai and so on our notion of innovation centers a small fraction of the world and so when we speak about disruptive technologies and we imagine who is actually developing these disruptive technologies because we have the myth of novelty because we have the constraint of thinking about innovation as science and technology based it means that we are only thinking about a fraction of the development process and we continue with a colonial frame to imagine that we can have technologies developed in new york and silicon valley and then applied as low by magic for the global majority and of course that doesn't work there is no appropriation there is no benefit and we have our government sort of trying to hop into action to catch up so i'll leave it there for now but um you know this is is it's already a very interesting discussion so thanks for gabby to stop for starting us off i think it gives a great great material need for discussion uh beatrice i was very curious how does this relate to your work on fridge's innovation management and especially relating to the disruptive technologies as the internet of things well um i started early in my career on the academics time studying innovation studying uh r d management and so on and then i i make a kind of um make a change and then this go to the productive sector to see actually how things work there uh if if i was an economist if i wanted to be an economist i should really um taste what is actually the real world i was uh studying and talking about and then i um i began working at bio manginos and um when i um when i started working there something that already bothered me uh when academic side was these i this idea that innovation is only valuable if it's disruptive if it's radical if it's um outside of the box whatever whatever doesn't that that mean i'm not even discussing what is out of the box but most of the management theories that comes to developing world for example they are uh developed and thought in quite different world and then we bring this to our companies to our institutions as it's a gold standard from where we should start and this relates to innovation as uh not a panacea but as the main reason for everything and you should focus on disruptive on radical on future technologies and more than the state of the art and then i started working on foresight strategic planning and currently i am responsible for foresight uh at biola genius and when i started working with the group um my my mantra is actually this if you are working on innovation you have to deal with entertaining with bounded rationality and most of all that we don't know what we don't know and this is quite disturbing because when you realize that you are in constant change and the world is changing constantly um even if you you cannot see the change the change is there and change uh does not belong to a particular point of view it does not belong to the u.s sorority um to european countries uh it belongs to anyone so it depends uh when you talk about disruptive technologies like internet of things or like um modern biotechnology was in the 80s and so on it depends from where is your standpoint with which glasses are you looking at innovation with which glasses are you looking at disruptiveness and what floor and generally when you when you go to the organizations it's just like a mantra to innovate you have to invest in radical innovations no matter what and then a lot of things you lose in this process when and when i'm when you when you ask about iot or industry 4.0 or 5.0 or 6.0 it doesn't matter which number it is um it depends actually on how you look to change and the way you in your country or your organization navigate so far what is your background what is your history uh you have to understand your environment you have to understand your market and how it works instead of focusing on um failure failures or system failures that describe but develop the countries but not failures if i don't like much this idea of market failures or system failures but anyway but how is that in your developing countries what what's your history what's your process uh and then most of the time people ignore that you have learning curves um people ignore that um disruption is not that a big deal um and then we come to something that i studied before i i entered the um the non-academic world uh how is your evolutionary reasoning how do you deal with your relativization how from veblen how do you work on dialectics from marx those those concepts cannot be taken for granted so you have to think about that and most of the time people on the um your organizational uh side they just buy some theories they just buy some models and and boom yeah they have to work and when they don't work who is to blame so so these uh it bothers me when i'm talking about internet of things is that really disruptive is that the big issue to iot is or it's not disruptive but what changes it will uh imply to developing countries or developed countries or um class uh relations and so on so not focus too much on the nature of the technology but what it brings to us this is this is what i try to discuss more not only internally but also with other colleagues thank you it was really really interesting i think it really challenges many preconceptions which uh you hold when you start here uh he got i was very curious it seems that this also is very important related to our accepted economic knowledge that this is also an element here so how considering your research on this how does or what we accept as economic expertise shape or social and built environment could you expand on that i think you're still immune yeah so uh thanks a lot this really engaging discussion i am gonna touch directly on some of the things that gabriella and jillian and beatrice brought up about one about bringing everyone having everyone involved in the idea of innovation and also where innovation happens and and what how people adopted i you know some of the research i've done on the informal economy and so there is a sort of general sense in mainstream economics and and that's changing uh is is that informality is something to be reduced over time things need to be formalized right and then you also get the idea that um knowledge exists out there and can be adopted its exogenous can be adopted by people and usually people in informal economy are ones in which knowledge is imposed upon they are the adopters not the creators and so there are i think the idea that the informally not the economy can be sort of a font a source of knowledge is not accepted widely in mainstream economics but i think increasingly should be i know that beatrice works at or it has touched on the pharmaceutical industry there is this whole idea of bioprospecting you have numbers of millions of people in the informal rural economy finding uh plants and and and herbs and things that go directly into innovative pharmaceutical processes that don't get credit certainly don't get the monetary rewards always the values not transferred um certainly don't get the the citation credit of that work um in my own work uh some interesting things in among water entrepreneurs in mapuche mozambique is is you would find that they were innovating better in some cases adapting better to the local environment than they made than the large-scale main utility was i'm not suggesting that you know informal water providers are the sort of um uh silver bullet solution to water supply i think utilities have a lot a lot to offer that continues to be a really you know good approach but we can't ignore the type of innovation that these entrepreneurs are doing in terms of efficiency with metering uh they would make some economists blush in terms of how they made profits and how they save money and judicious use of labor and equity uh they they served people with local solutions such as stand pipes with affordable water for people who who carried um so-called jerry cans on their head these these jugs that i myself could not could not lift on their head um and then you know basically um provided a sort of uh dual network one for their poorer neighbors and one for the wealthier neighbors things of the utility and the good engineers in maputo just really hadn't thought of and wouldn't have expected to find i think in that sector um there are other examples of barefoot geologists for example they call barefoot gels people that go around and know where mineral deposits are whereas uh some large mining companies may not know um that they exist and and really get the credit for and then um a friend of mine eric goldwyn studied transport networks in new york city and found that the the is called dollar vans the local route um drivers knew the better routes and knew the type of payment systems that their their clientele would would appreciate more than if you came in with a sort of city planner transport model saying this is what your tariffs should be this is that you know the maximizing for in terms of ridership and revenue and financial sustainability etc so so i really want to make the case to to students and researchers that you know the informal economy is not something to be cured it's not something to be slowly in a sort of um i don't know it's just maybe i won't go there but basically it's not something to be formal definitively formalized over time it can co-exist um it can be improved they people in the informal economy want to work together in these in these ecosystems they want to share knowledge but they want to be treated more as equals they want to say hey we have something to contribute to and i don't think that's that's too much to ask um and and there's a nice term uh ahmed basole umass boston is someone whose work i follow in this in this space and he talks about nokia it's a it's a hindi term for the people's knowledge and uh this is not just a sort of uh just to put a post-modern spin on knowledge this is really valuable knowledge in an economic sense in an sti sense that um that the pharmaceutical companies have figured out but i think other people need to start figuring out as well so that's what i want to contribute to that i think it's really fascinating because it really broadens the the discussion that we had before in this series on not just what is classically defined as technologies but really there are different inputs there and different ways of doing this jillian i was very curious in how this further relates to your work but also where you can talk more about the blended uh finance framework especially the bottlenecks for financial innovation in france disruptive technologies as to come back to that ai but also what we discussed earlier thank you so much for that uh well i i in my framing of bottlenecks for financing disruptive technologies i speak about structural bottlenecks which might include the fact that you have capital markets that are there at varying stages of development and then you have process uh bottlenecks in the sense of how do you actually bring in different actors into these capital markets and then perhaps the most important bottlenecks are the cognitive bottlenecks which are really some of the things that we've already been discussing particularly in finance and investment which is a very homogeneous uh sector homogeneous in terms of worldview homogeneous in terms of racial diversity homogeneous even in terms of gender and so you have a sort of an echo chamber in the finance and investment industry and a system that is very ill-equipped to bring in different forms of understanding of the world and so what we're finding is that we are not doing well with financing useful technologies but we're doing really well with financing dating apps so that you have a complete misallocation of capital and i don't know how many of you are following the us markets in terms of during covid you had a real slide in the financing of ventures that are run by women and at the same time you had this incredible surge in the allocation of capital that went to robin hood which is one entity and so you have in 2020 a real uh sort of laser focus on the ways in which capital markets have misallocated capital and so the frameworks that i am developing speak to those kinds of approaches to understanding what are the bottlenecks what are some of the blind spots that exist and how can we then redefine or bring in an innovation lens to finance itself to do something about those uh bottlenecks and blind spots and i think with ai it's particularly important because it is a space that requires deep technological understanding there has been very little effort to demystify the technology and i do understand that there are some efforts now and maybe they've been around for some time but i'm just getting to know them about speaking about the sort of social and ethical um considerations for artificial intelligence and i thought i think that those things are very important because there's been so much hype you know ai is seen as being this thing that once again without it developing countries will crash and burn but when you get to my age you know that developing countries have been told this about many other kinds of technologies and we're still here and so i'm hoping that the leaders in the developing world will sort of ignore the um hysteria around the so-called fourth industrial revolution and ask deeper questions under what conditions this ai machine learning internet of things apply and how can it actually produce a virtuous circle in my conditions as opposed to believing the hype once again about catching up or never having uh your well-being and enhanced or poverty reduced i think it's really interesting that it's something we hear a lot basically i think also in the western context the the basically there's a lot of hype but there are there are some really some changes but there's a lot of hype but it's very important to go through that and gabriela i was very curious how does this relate to your work on sti politicians especially in the context of latin america and then mexico and what i'm especially curious about is this in the context of how firms learn and accumulate technological capabilities as ai and such yeah i think that one point that emerged from the discussion until now is that we are very terrified the territories countries we are between in in latin america there is a lot of terrorism but also we each country there is a lot of iterations so the models that the models of science technology and innovation policy comes from abroad comes from the experience of europe u.s or even from the successful asian countries so when these models are implemented in our countries and so there is a design of the science technology and innovation policy in our countries with with so different initial conditions so the the this this model don't work properly you know and then this happened with the case of the disrupted technology because as the athlete said well disruptive technology there is a discussion around the world no the world is we have the concept of disruptive if they are disruptive we have we have had disruptive technology as we at reset over the the centuries actually the industrial revolution and the second industrial revolution etc etc so yes definitely these new technologies are generic disruptions and for that reason we are talking about the industry 4.0 but again we are

reproducing this situation that the latin american countries are confronting these new uh disruptive technologies with a lot of problems structural problems in in their economies so when you look at for instance the evolution of science technology and innovation policies in latin america we have followed more or less what has happened at the international level from the from the lineal model where science is important and then there is a development in science and then in technology and at the end it reached the market now and from the from the decade of the 2000 we have moved to this systemic more systemic approach of the innovation policy but all this is connected to the formal settings that were as was said by by a share and then the informal setting is operating in another part of of the country so within one country you have modern economies and informal settings that are moving much more slowly and the policies and particularly science technology and innovation policies they are focuses on these formal settings but in the informal settings a lot of things are happening and the majority of the population are connected with informal settings and we we don't know how to do with them actually they are reached by the social policies or the labor policies but not by the science technology and innovation policy and particularly in latin america in africa you have a lot of this called traditional knowledge which is extremely interesting that bring a lot of solution for many problems of the this part of the society and it's this type of knowledge the this traditional knowledge or indigenous knowledge it is named in different way this should be connected with the the other this scientific and technological knowledge but it is not and this this is one of the challenges that we have in our country but then when when you look at the modern part of of the economy something that the the the theorists of development economics have been working on from the 60s 50s or the 60s not the these these two part of the of the economy you know so in the modern part of the economy then you have the introduction of this disruptive technology when i look for in brazil in argentina in mexico we see that the the policy the science technology innovation policy usually there are defined strategic sectors and these strategic sectors are usually connected with the new technologies in each time now the the strategic sectors include the use of artificial intelligence robotic internet of of the things etc and then but then because with the money that the government's put for promoting this uh science technology and innovation activities is so limited that even though the the the introduction of the new technology to be close to the frontier i i would say no the the amount of money is so limited that we have this strategic sector but at the end of the day this top down not from the government in the and and the push that the government do in the science technology and innovation activities is extremely limited so you have a lot of bottom up activities because for instance okay so mexico because we our sectors uh automotive automobile sector for instance is so connected to the to the uh global change not only the the order of the world with the large multinational cooperation so obviously mexico the firms that are located in mexico are not part of this multinational corporation they are introducing a lot of these new technologies and then mexico is one of the main the demander of robots all over the world but it's because this part of the economy is connected to the to the world see and in this sense that these firms that are introducing these new technologies they are still learning how to introduce the subsidiaries and also the the mexican fans that are suppliers of this change no and then they introduce they are learning about how to introduce these robots so they they buy the robot they introduce the robot this generator of the problem with deployment et cetera but this is not the point now no but they introduced the user the robot but they don't use for instance all the the new data that is generated by this robot you know and so the the introduction of the artificial intelligence is much much slower than the introduction of robot and then there is a lot of big data that could be used but it is not used yet because the firm hasn't learned enough to to introduce this artificial intelligence so they need to increase build more the capability the technological capabilities that they have in order to use a much more efficient use of these new technologies and on the informal setting they don't know what you are talking about about the the robot that are also included in amazon which is sending so many products even in mexico and even for the informal cities yeah you got especially the beginning of gavier's answer seemed to be very interestingly related to your uh experience working in sustainable infrastructure development for food and water security uh could you expand another how are you seeing that well i i followed i don't forget the exact beginning of gabriel's comments um but in terms of water you know i was this was directed at me is that right everybody here correctly oh yes so so so being there the water had already described that there's sort of um a standard approach to it's called the um modern infrastructure ideal that that comes down from from north america mostly because there were significant gains made um in the book sanitary city we talked about how the municipalization movement had achieved widespread coverage people's uh welfare improved significantly and there there's there's a strong reasonable desire to emulate that uh but as as again as all the participants have pointed out there are local realities that need to be contended with in a lot of these countries um sometimes you'll hear from people in the global south themselves um stress why don't we deserve those innovations why are you giving a substandard uh innovation some sanitation solutions have been criticized for being um sort of uh you know at a dressed down sort of not not exactly the the ideal right um i sympathize with that that criticism but at the same time there are questions about where you what objectives you want to have and again that's about bringing everyone together to say what um does an innovation mean in this context who is it going to to benefit um but but there has been one thing i want to touch on unrelated to that i think that hasn't been touched on yet that i think is something interesting and also does not lend itself to mainstream analysis is this because gabriel mentioned robots and how certain leading sectors become dominant and i think there is this idea of a natural progression of innovation that innovation will march along um disruption will occur and adaptation is necessary and with respect to robots and amazon the deliveries and things she talked about and how robots sometimes come before ai is in the us we had obviously with with the political upheaval a real uh debate about did we do we missed something with respect to automation and job loss um but but a lot of people in the mainstream community whether in government economics just sort of see as the march of innovation and progress is something that states just need to react to um and what i like to point out is that states are deeply involved in creating a lot of this disruption in in ways that one might not immediately think of so for example we don't think of space when we think about innovation or or locations within the city or urban planning but if you think about cambridge massachusetts and i think gabriella would know no excuse me um jillian would know well from her time at mit is there are spaces within cambridge massachusetts that serve as innovation hubs for robotics there are entire teams that work on creating new generations of robots local city council members people within the massachusetts state government spend money on creating these spaces investing in this type of innovation and it's been happening for years so this if we this is not a natural progress because you've got people like bill gates and others are saying well robots are going to come automation is going to come disruption is going to happen what we can do is tax the use of robots and that's really as i may be mistaken but that's the extent of the debate that i've seen so far is the idea to reduce the use of robots you've got to tax them that's fine for where we are right now but it's maybe fine for where we are right now but it's important to know how we got here and local policies and and deliberate decisions to to invest in innovation that would displace labor has happened at the local level across cities and innovation hubs and so that's something that i wanted to point out for people who are looking at this field to consider if i could make uh one comment on that i think picking up on that point there is also the tendency for states to compete with each other so there's no doubt that you know underlying the u.s interest at state level or at national level the notion that if if that investment does not take place in the us then it would take place in china and somehow you would have lost the race and so that com competition between china the us and europe to some extent but much less so is i think at the heart of um what um explains some of the trends that we're seeing and those that competition say 35 years ago was taking place with respect to biotechnology and i'd love to hear beatrice's positions on that as well well um um let me try to um just to some of the ideas that are coming up uh right now um uh gabriella talked about heterogeneity among developing countries and within those countries and that should um should shape policies and so on um also talked about the importance of the local level a gabriel about um jillian about learning process and so on so all of us are almost um um concerned about one thing how the object that we study innovation development policies could actually uh be for a greater good how can we better use that knowledge for development challenges for equality and so on uh so if if you start from uh we don't have a more genius uh situation among countries between countries and within countries uh when we look at developing countries as i said earlier most countries when they base data their their policies on market failures or system failures they are looking at uh a different a different point of view and not to their actual favors they are looking to failures with glasses that are not fit to their reality this this is the main problem uh and what we see a lot in the countries um is that most policies is a kind of a road with a bunch of bumps and you go back and forth uh for uh every 10 years we have a lot of diagnostics a lot of works trying to understand what has going on and you see that from every 10 years when i was doing my ph just in one of those years a lot of diagnostics were around the world for developing countries about health about biodiversity and this was one of the topics that i um studied on my phd and then um what what is the issue if you are going to do a parallel with iot and other new technologies when you look at biodiversity like uh talking about uh biodiversity is there for a long time ago um we don't uh the us developing countries brazil has a large biodiversity but what we worked on on synthetic pharmaceuticals on biological drugs not on the knowledge that we have that could uh solve some health problems they are not fancy they won't um let you publish in high rated journals but also make many of our problems for sure and then we can take a case very particularly not necessarily related to biodiversity but somehow that is the cannabis the this market for kind of video um a cannabis in the 19th century was suffering a lot of prejudice in the u.s do mexicans because they knew how the plant actually helped people and for example elieli they had marijuana bottled but then how how you how you make a standard of that how you extract that knowledge and forbid everyone else to work on that period and then you look at right now the market for cannabis you can see a lot of large multinational companies patenting on that we have the first firms the first companies working on that canadian us not large multinationals but if you look at the patent you will see merck you will see pfizer you'll see a lot of large multinational companies uh going back to this knowledge that they decided somehow in the 19th century let's not talk about it because we cannot appropriate that knowledge for us and then everybody else from that and then uh when you look at developing countries for example uh there are some developing countries that actually bought the idea that cannabis is only uh for drug trafficking so then you see us and canada as the the main actors in this in this area and we here have a lot of knowledge about that and we don't use that uh and then we when we do the parallel with ai uh and um i believe it was gabriela talking about the global value chains there is a plot problem with ai i was reading a recent book from david harvey he was uh discussing that and ai might have might allow some countries to escape from the labor intensive to the capital and knowledge intensive and as jilin said about the competition between us and china china is doing that move from a more capital intensive more knowledge intensive and then when you look at some of the uh the data on global value chains you will see the change in the pattern of trade and part of that is actually this uh dispute over which part of the world will still be labor intensive and which is not and what can we do because uh artificial intelligence can free a lot of our problems uh regarding the the the relation between labor and capital and actually we can have a good use of that for equality challenges for development challenges are we really wanting to do that i'm not sure actually i i don't have an answer jaden sorry but i'm not sure so i think that we're almost out of time for the the the interview but i we always have the same clothing style question this interview we can go slightly over time if possible uh but basically we can go a bit more in depth in that and also it uh allows you some comments on each other's uh ideas and thoughts and this is the question throughout this interview series for the closing statement is always this there's one thing you could say to students in economics right to the topics we discussed today what will that be and for that i think you're going to do the reverse order of the initial question so first for jigar there's if there's one thing we can tell students right um well so i study expertise in institutions mostly government institutions and as i mentioned i've done some research on our knowledge in the informal economy um but i would i would close with basically in in the spirit of rethinking economics is to really treat um knowledge production within the academy as as a political process don't don't treat it just as even even when you're talking about um pioneers within certain fields such as development economics and we think of the the um icunian approach of a sort of disruption in terms of innovation right um there's truth to that in many disciplines um economics i find at least in development economics is much more political based it's it's it's certain researchers are closely aligned with certain political projects in certain places and it's important for us to trace and examine those as ways to understand how certain economic ideas become dominant and how then they influence as you said in the introduction are social and built environments so i really encourage people uh whether they're students or researchers to to keep that as part of their lens uh and and we've seen as as waves of of economic disciplines have come and gone um and science and technology studies also looks at the sort of uh waves and social sciences it's not the dominant part of that field but there are people looking at it um yone is one researcher who looked at the struggle between um institutional economics and neoclassical economics in the earlier part of the 20th century and with respect to pluralism i think pluralism is a very important goal we've talked about it a number of times in in various respects in this panel about bringing voices in being inclusive but i would caution that if we treat uh this sort of uh rethinking approach in purely pluralistic terms we'll have a very strong diversity everyone feel included but neoclassical will continue to dominate and so we have to think about which principles do we want to draw from from these various um pluralist disciplines whether feminists ecological and say which ones do we want to bring to the fore to solve our biggest problems uh the the two biggest problems i see are our burgeoning inequality uh both within the countries and across the globe and obviously uh ecological decline we have to borrow from from economics and and and in other social disciplines wherever we can to to make economics more relevant to those two major problems and push out the parts of neoclassical economics that are not um really conducive to understanding or analyzing and solving those so that's what i have to say thank you very interesting answer beatrice if here's one thing you could say to students watching today in especially economics those are the topics we discussed what would it be i believe that it would be you should never rest you you don't know what you don't know and you'll never know what you don't know ever so if if you keep that spirit that um is not satisfied even though you can know something you actually know something you'll build the knowledge you will have a knowledge but if you are satisfied then it's boring and when you reach to the boring place you won't create you won't challenge you won't be able to um to um to have that spark even if you're an academic or if you are on the market marketplace the other companies or whatever in my opinion when you uh have a spirit that doesn't rest then you will always find something that might be different that you should be more interested even if it's your own ideas don't get attention to what you have written in the past or what you have thought in the past if you keep that in mind then i think i think we'll have better economists if we keep that in mind always think about is that so or not that's it i think that's a beautiful answer julian what will for you be the closing statements in this context i think you're still mute i think it really depends on who we're talking to but let me assume that we're talking to dutch economic students my sense is that the main message that i would want to give to dutch economic students is that they should embrace the parts of their own history that might be uncomfortable because curiosity which beatrice spoke about is really important as is a focus on the big problems facing the planet which jigar spoke about but countries around the world and societies around the world have different positions vis-a-vis the cause of those problems and where we are located in the solutions for those problems and i think it's really easy for a dutch graduate student or in their undergraduate to be very passionate and to have an ethical orientation and then 30 years later when they are in the world bank or the united nations to have forgotten all of that um passion and so we as a human family are going to depend on young european students of economics carrying through with ethics justice humility and owning the fact that their own societies have been engaged in extractive economic processes that help to create the problems that we are actually dealing with now and i think often there is when you're in conversation between the west and the global majority there is an expectation or a sort of a sense of arrogance of who has the solutions as opposed to placing the emphasis on who has caused the problems of late stage capitalism where where should that sort of concern be located and i really don't think it should be located in the informal economies of the global majority or the global south because many of those actors have been surviving they have had their own lives of integrity but they have not been the proponents of the mental models that have led to inequality and environmental degradation so i think i would want to not have a particularly um it would be for the dutch economic students to embrace feeling discomfort about where we are now and going forward to help to change that working with the human family across the planet thanks thank you gavier for you the very last closing statements of much more in the direction of my colleagues no first of all we are responsible for the future the north and the global south both together no in the case of latin america we need national strategies of development and if i were talking to the latin american people i would say young people must contribute to generate these new strategies and also to generate the consensus to to base this strategy but in general all over the world we need economies with a much more open mind no because it is not just the economies it doesn't does not only handle numbers no as as she has said there is a a strong interaction between economics and politics so it is needed a very uh abroad sensibility sensitivity on what society is and what are the needs of the society the disrupted technologies are here and they arrive at and they are going to to be here and we have to learn how to deal with them and how to introduce them in the into our life no but in the case of latin america for instance that we have a strong inequality and shared reductionity we need policies that induce a development process that stimulate the new technology but avoid avoid the the this negative effect of this technology and this is not just a problem of latin america because this these treats of the disruptive technologies is a problem that we have all over the world and science technology and innovation policy can contribute in that direction or not if i if there is a very linear approach is adopted this is here guided only to productivity growth and no the social dimension is very important not just for latin america for all over the world so we have to think in all these consequences of their disruptive technologies and try to deal with them in a way that contributes to a better world thank you thank you i think that's a beautiful way to close today's interview i want to thank each of you for your time i learned a lot i was really really interesting thank you [Music] you

2021-06-03 21:05

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