WEBVTT

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From Michael… Duran, right?

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I see also connected. Which changes a bit of the topic.

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Let's have a look.

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Yes.

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Okay, I hope you can see and hear me. After this great physics concepts, I'm going to something different now to economy, some trivial comments I have there. I'm a physicist, so I'm not an expert on it.

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I will not talk about capitalism and communism, which was a historic divide and is very much emotionally touching people for whatever reason and science traditionally does not like to continue these kind of debates Today, I would like to show you a new approach to bridging science, politics and economy.

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Which to my mind is trivial and easy, but it might have a big influence if it really be implemented.

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So before I come to that, I show you a few problems of the current economy.

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Just five examples which are relevant in respect to sustainability. The first is the dominance of profit-driven global corporations. You all know them like Amazon or Apple or Tesla.

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What do they actually do in principle that takes the inventions and the achievements of scientists and engineers and turn that into profit.

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For example, World Wide Web was invented here at CERN and what do they do? They add money and management and make a lot of profit from that.

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This is not a problem. But in addition to this global corporations produce super rich headmen and they also have a very huge influence on people in politics So while their real job would be just to produce products and services, in reality.

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Say change our society and push politics in a direction which is not necessarily the same as the people would do it.

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The second problem is Of course, there are more or less sustainable products available on the market But there is an inherent unprofitability of our products in our current free market Because if products really would be inherently sustainable, they would be durable, repairable, upgradable.

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And if they are. If they have all these properties, of course, you sell them to the people not every day, but only once maybe or every 10 years.

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So that drops the sales volume and proportional to the sales volume would the profits drop.

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So no real company wants to have this sustainability at this level.

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An example you all know is the mobile phone. Typically, people want to have an upgrade after two years because, for example, the battery is bad or They want a better camera or more memory.

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If these products would really be done in a modular structure with updatable components, you would sell these mobile phones only once in a lifetime or every 10 years.

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The third problem is not everything which the people would like to have I need to levy produced on the free market. For example.

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A safe and transparent communication and information tools very important in today's societies.

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And it would be very good if there would not be a commercial interest spam tracking making money from personal data and so on.

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A good example is Wikipedia or Twitter in the old days.

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But that is not the state of the art today. So we would need a better email system, SMS, social media search engines, and nowadays especially also artificial intelligence systems.

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Which are open source, which are transparent and which have customizable algorithms They should have user identification, but also anonymous usage should be important and there should be high standards against the misuse of personal data.

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But as you know, nowadays, every app on your phone which shows you the weather of your of your location also sells the tracking data of yourself to to the market.

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A fourth problem, which is also easy to see is that a lot of response on the market is too slow to respond, for example, to the climate crisis.

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Just an example, the USB-C was invented 10 years ago and only today we get universal USB-C charge-offs on mobile phones so you don't have to buy a new charger every time you get a new phone or a new laptop.

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The fifth sent this is then my last example of negative things in the free market is that political initiatives are very much constrained by the global market inertia. What do I mean?

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It's very hard to change basic industries by politicians because there's a very They are very strong and there's a very strong influence and lobby on these traditions. We have seen that in a talk this morning, for example.

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So, um. You have, for example, the fossil fuel industry which has a very big impact on politics and it's very hard to change that.

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The screen paradox and many other things. Which you can discuss.

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My point is a lot of people say the free market will solve everything, but this is completely wrong to my mind. For example, slavery was not abolished by a free market but by force and law.

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Because to have slaves is very good for company to have more profit yeah so in the same way today's destruction of biodiversity will not be abolished by a free market, but we have to have a redesign of the market and updated economic laws.

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So I now come to the research organizations, which you all know. Cern is a prototype for that, but there are many other international research centers.

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Typically, they are non-profit, publicly funded and they are working in a global collaboration a lot of them are democratically structures with expert level decision boards. We heard about all the reports which are prepared by the students and professors now about the future of the linear

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Colliders, for example. So there's a several level there are several levels of decision boards to come to the aim and to see activities of these institutions.

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The efficiency of these institutions like the invention of the World Wide Web or the production of Higgs particles is not by competition as on the free market, but by cooperation.

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And in industry, it's completely the opposite. For example, if BYD nowadays produces small, efficient and affordable electromobility.

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Why don't we cooperate and ask for cooperation in design and production? Instead, the free market in the Western society, for example.

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Suppresses this product by tariffs in Europe, but especially in the United States also.

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So the question is, what is better competition or cooperation? And I think the success of science shows you that cooperation is the best and fastest way to to the best solutions.

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So how do we transfer the scientific institutions to the economic

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The concept I just call democratic capitalism is easy.

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You have international nonprofit organizations The task of this organization is to produce a certain sustainable product This product is then sold globally to consumers or also to other companies and states.

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And the revenues for this product is then used for fair salary. So there should not be the workers getting too little money managers getting far too much money for that for what they do.

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And the real returns of these projects then go back to the member states. And on the right side here, you see the same as a diagram.

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So you have several member states typical things on the global market are too large to be done by a single state.

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These member states give money to the institution so this capital could come from bonds for example which is an efficient way of a state to get money.

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Then you have elected committees of experts on different levels And like in SERN, for example.

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And at the end, you see the democratically governed economic entity which produces a certain sustainable product with employees which get fair salaries, including the management.

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And the revenue then goes back to the member states according to some shares which are defined in a constitution.

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So this is a very simple concept. We know that it works for science, so it will also work for industry in a very efficient way.

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So what is the advantage of it? First of all, you have a democratized control of the key global industries Also, of course, assuming that the states gives them money in a somehow democratically controlled ways in a like in the Western countries, for example.

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The system has, to my mind, a much faster response to global challenges like climate change because there are expert levels which can think about the best solution globally in common discussions.

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You have a stability through international shared governance. It's not like in a private company where somebody buys, for example, Twitter and makes artificial intelligence company and then sells all the personal data which were collected before to this new company of artificial intelligence. So there's a lot of

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You never know what happens next to a company nowadays. There's no production of super rich people and powerful business persons because the salary of the management team is like the salary at CERN, for example.

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So if you really want to get rich, you have to be a drug dealer or something, but it's not sufficient to to govern a global cooperation anymore.

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This leads to less corruption and economic exploitations to my mind as long as they Democratic control is working efficiently.

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And of course, the scientific methods fuel innovation and integrity in the way of the management, but also in the products and the resources they use.

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So the question is, is that a realistic alternative to a pure free market model as we have it in Argentina and in the US nowadays.

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And to my mind, this is a trivial addition. Might be in principle not only a vision, but also our next reality.

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But I would be curious to learn from you what you think about it.

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Thank you. That is all I wanted to say.

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Thank you very much, Nico. And we are welcoming questions, actually.

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And I see one from Thomas. Please go ahead.

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Yes, so I think it's a very interesting, attractive vision So this aspect of democratizing the control over industry, I mean, that's, I think also this aspect that you having communism which i mean if one looks at history was not so successful

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So where do you think this your approach is different from from this approach of communism.

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Well, the approach is that I do not have some I do lodge ideologics.

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Idirologi in German, where I believe this is controlling everything. I do not try to control the market I give the control to a management board and to expert boards like in industry. So there's no difference in the efficiency in this way.

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The only difference is that I am not working for profit.

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But you're working for the products, I could imagine that a lot of employees, if they are asked if they prefer to work in Amazon or if they prefer to work in a democratic company they put would prefer that later, you would get like CERN gets so many brilliant physicists these kind of companies would get many brilliant people, I think, because they like

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To work for the community and not only for the profit of the market.

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And… I don't do any micromanagement like in a communist country has been done in the past and i don't want that somebody who wants to sell his apples or his art is going under the control of the government but it's only key industries

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So there will be in a democratic capitalism to my mind you still have private companies which do all kind of things it's only for those big key companies which make billions of money and which and whether they be way of acting

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Changes our living conditions yeah I wouldn't mind if super rich people, but if they destroy our living conditions.

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By being not sustainable, by pushing people to do more consumption and by exploiting people and materials, then I wouldn't care but It's just for my own survival of my grandchildren.

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That I think we should have alternatives. And the easiest alternative instead of having a complete control by a government which just will not work due to complexity is that just the key industries are working instead of for profit they work for

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For common goals which the people define. Yeah, I mean… I'm not a communist. I also don't want to get super rich. I have lived my life and I like to to do with physics and I didn't do physics to get rich and the same way

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A lot of intelligent people like to work not to get rich but to do a good job and to be accepted by the colleagues and the community.

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Okay, yeah, thank you.

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I was just another hand.

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Hello. Yeah, thank you very much. It's a very interesting talk.

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I had this question on how like um We, the democratic people, how do we ensure that we are true to our democratic principles and how do we avoid the resistance from like profitable companies and specifically like more or less if you are from places where there is like the social security and everything is not available then we are driven to be

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Like maybe a bit more towards being more profitable than being true to our like you know social equality and stuff. So how do we ensure that it's

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There.

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I didn't quite get it. So how do we ensure that it stays democratically or

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So if we have this democratic capitalism, how do we ensure that uh As we, the people who like are part of the democracy, we are true to the cause.

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Of um The… Did that make sense or maybe I can Sorry, type it out in the chat.

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Yeah, I mean, um. If there's a private company who does the things better, why not taking their products?

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My idea is if there's… just a group of people and a few countries which think they should do it.

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And they produce, for example, a car which is um which is you know in a good state and has has a very sustainable properties and another company makes a better one while not buying the one from the other country

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But I'm pretty sure that if there's one company which makes things at a very high level, the other companies would have to do something similar also.

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It would push the whole market into a more sustainable direction because otherwise people will not buy their products anymore when they see You can get a mobile phone which works for 10 years.

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Then they would not buy one which is outdated after two years. So in this respect, I'm still there's still the competition of the free market we do not depend. So the people do not depend, the consumers do not depend on these private companies which

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Want to continue fossil fuels or whatever yeah it's consumer ideas. And it's very hard to change the global market politically And therefore, I think if you just additional companies which are democratically ruled and which have good ideas and good standards then you can

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Change as a global system this way because otherwise politically it will not Look. Yeah.

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Also why not cooperating with non-democratic countries like China or others, if they do good things and they produce good products, we should use this knowledge like we also cooperate in science with China and other countries. It will be to the benefit of the global societies

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Because we have to solve our we have to save our planet and this will be a hard job.

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And before we all die, we have to find new solutions.

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Great. Thank you so much. And I hope that answers Shirazi's question.

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For sure, it was a great and interesting addition to the end of the day.

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Be different than the others. And with this i think we can actually wrap up the day.

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Please join us tomorrow for another interesting day of talks, which will start with Sakhi the artist around 8.15.

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I don't know if you also like to add something.

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That was all and we really thank everyone for the great talks and the very great discussion sessions.

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Yeah, so I guess see you all. Tomorrow, we have a great number of talks.

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From individual submissions so yeah looking forward to tomorrow hope everyone learns Oh yeah, we have the transition.

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Also the penal session.

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So have a goodHave a lovely