This session looks at how political choices between economic efficiency and strategic autonomy affect everyday lives and why ideologies must reconnect with local realities.
In “The Meaning of Politics,” speakers argued that today’s geopolitical turbulence is rooted in domestic political failure: democracies have struggled to manage globalization’s uneven gains and losses. Jeffrey Frieden framed politics as the mechanism for handling trade-offs between “the common good and the interests of groups,” but warned that OECD countries largely failed to address those “who have not been benefiting as much from globalization,” driving the backlash now reshaping interstate relations.
Daniel Diermeier emphasized an institutional paradox: evidence increasingly shows prosperity depends on rule of law, democratic governance, markets, and knowledge institutions, yet trust in all of them is declining. Rebuilding legitimacy requires both material participation and a compelling “shared sense of purpose.”
Arancha Gonzalez Laya urged leaders to reject “the politics of inevitability”: outcomes in life expectancy, women’s employment, and wealth concentration reflect policy choices. She added that economics alone is insufficient; cultural change and shifting global power “from west to east” must be accommodated in renewed institutions.
Arlie Russell Hochschild highlighted the emotional logic of politics in places marked by “loss,” where “stolen pride” narratives convert shame into blame and fuel charismatic leadership. The practical agenda: place-based investment, results-focused government, and community-rooted listening that restores dignity through work, not handouts.
Welcome to this session at the World Economic Forum. I'm Mina Al-oraibi, editor of The National, delighted to be hosting this conversation in partnership between the World Economic Forum and The National, entitled The Meaning of Politics. For those of you joining us online, you can contribute to the conversation using hashtag F26. And thank you for joining us. And to those in the room here. Thank you for joining us. We're meeting at the end of quite an exceptional week here at the World Economic Forum in many ways. And so we'll be talking about politics, not only local politics. And as I was saying to my fellow panelists before we came in here, many of the politicians we saw on stage here were really speaking to their home audiences for their own local politics. And that's one of the great things about broadcasting that you're not only speaking to the people in the room, but people back home, but that also changes the tone in which you address those around you. So we'll be talking about the local politics, but also global geopolitics and how it is changing. Prime Minister Carney said. We're going through a rupture, not a transition. However, for some people around the world, that rupture happened quite some time away. So different regions, different countries are experiencing the differences in politics at different speeds. However, all politics is local and we have great experts here to talk to us about that. I also want us to think about the end of the day politics being a way to serve people. And I think often that's forgotten. As journalists, we get really interested in the back and forth between different politicians and the positions being made, but ultimately it's to serve people. So with that, I'm delighted to welcome my speakers. I will begin with introducing Arancha Gonzalez Laya, who is dean of the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po and also former foreign minister of Spain. And here we have Arlie Russell Hochschild, who is not only professor of sociology at previously at UC Berkeley, but also author of several books and most recently a book, Stolen Pride, Lost Shame and the rise of the Right And has numerous publications. Actually, our panelists are incredible authors of numerous publications. And Jeff Friedman, who is professor of international and Public affairs and political science at Columbia University and also author of a number of books. And finally, we have chancellor of Vanderbilt University, Daniel Diermeier, who's a distinguished professor of at the Graduate School of Management and Political Science in the College of Arts and Science, in addition to being chancellor. So knowledgeable people who have been studying political science have been teaching political science, to reflect not only on this week, but this moment in time that we are living through. So, Jeff, I want to start with you. I mean, politics is an important vehicle to manage the trade offs that we need to live together. It feels very fractured at the moment. How do you describe it?
Right, well, I agree, politics is the mechanism, the social mechanism that we have to manage difficult trade offs between the common good and the interests of groups and sectors and regions between winners and losers, over difficult economic policy choices. And I think it's relevant to what we've been talking about over the last few days to note that over the last 40 years, our societies, and particularly societies in the OECD, the developed societies have faced a massive challenge dealing with a trade off between or a trade off that involves, on the one hand, globalization, international economic integration, which has led to extraordinary achievements, lifting 2 billion people in Asia out of absolute poverty, creating a great deal of prosperity around the world. But that has also caused a lot of difficulties economic distress, harm to regions, industries, groups in all of our major societies. And I think I would say perhaps exaggerating a bit, that most of our societies have largely failed at managing that trade off. Our political systems do not seem to have effectively addressed the concerns of those who have not been benefiting as much from globalization, the left behind, those who have found that, wow, per capita income may have doubled in the US over the last 40 years. The median household real median household income has risen at about 30%. So the benefits of globalization have not been equally distributed, and the costs of globalization have fallen on groups that have, in some sense used the political system to express their dissent with the existing consensus and their feeling that things should go in a different direction. And I think that's that is, in a sense, the story of the last 15 years of a backlash against globalization, that our political systems have not done well at managing that particular trade off.
Can I ask you, is it a failure of globalization or unchecked capitalism?
I think it's a failure of our political systems. I think that whatever happens in the economic environment is something that has to be agreed upon by at least a majority of the population. And if what's happening economically is not acceptable to the to the local population, local, national population, there will be a political response. And let me say something very much along these lines. Most of the discussions that have taken place here in the political realm have been about interstate interrelations, about relations among national governments. But lying behind that is the national, the domestic politics of every nation state. Politicians have to respond to their constituents, or else they're no longer politicians, or at least no longer in office. And so if it weren't for the fact that national political systems have been bubbling up with discontent, that national party systems are in crisis almost everywhere in the OECD, that national politicians find themselves beset by demands that they have great deal of difficulty meeting. If it were not for that, we would not be confronting the interstate conflicts that we now see and the differences among nation states. So I think that the underlying issues that we face have to do with the extent to which national political systems can address the legitimate concerns of their citizens in a way that is both meaningful, legitimate and economically productive. That's a challenge, and one that we have not, I think, fully addressed.
Danny, I want you to pick up on this point that what's happening domestically, politicians have to respond to their own constituents is clearly affecting the interstate play. And the global order has not been perfect, but it is fraying at incredible speed. How do you how do you approach that, but also how do you fix it if so much of it is domestic at the international stage?
I think, we have a we obviously going through a time of tremendous volatility and change, and I think it's very important we're going to go a little bit back to the fundamentals here. And there is a there's an interesting tension. On the one hand we now have I think increasing the better understanding and evidence that at the core of economic development, prosperity also like national security institutions play crucially important role. I mean, if you just look at like two of the last three Nobel Prizes in economics were really given for this insight. And so that's a growing understanding, how crucial institutions are historically and contemporary and what we have figured out, we may say, well, it took us a long time to figure this out, but here we are. Well, you need the rule of law. You need democratic governance. You need market economies, and then you need institutions that advance science and knowledge, like universities and related institutions. And if you have these things, then amazing things can happen because the dramatic growth in over in lifetime income, in life expectancy is a recent historical phenomenon, 200, 250 years old. Before that, we didn't have it. And it was that combination that triggered this. I think that's our current understanding. Now, there are two points to that. One that is not obvious. So it took it took humanity thousands of years to figure out that's what we need. We need the combination of these things to really to really trigger exponential economic growth and prosperity and the participation of that. And then on the other hand, now we have a dramatic decrease in trust in every one of the institutions that I've just mentioned. So for those of you that have followed the, the Edelman Trust Barometer themselves every year, it's like, every year it's bad news, right? And like, you see the decline in trust in the key institutions there. They're all sliding down. And so on the one hand, we have a better understanding that's at the core. On the other hand, they're being eroded basically on a year to year basis. So my sense is, is we whenever we are thinking about policy solutions or kind of global structures, it's super critical that we do not forget how so, how absolutely essential these key pillars, the key institutional pillars are. And as leaders that play a role in that, whether we're business leaders or governmental leaders or in my case, leaders of the university, I think we have a responsibility, first and foremost, to strengthen them and to remind people of the centrality that these institutions play. So I think there's a there's been a lot that has been missed. We have taken that for granted. We have basically forgotten, really, what the fabric is. That's at the core of, of of peace and prosperity. And it's absolutely critically important that we always keep this front and center.
But Jeff was saying and agreed. But Jeff was making the point that there are people who didn't benefit from these institutions. And by the way, I think some of these crises are quite Europe or Western dominated at this moment. We've had other challenges. I'm from the Middle East originally. There's other challenges in Africa, Latin America and so forth. But if we take a moment, just for a moment in the West, how do you rebuild the trust in institutions if people feel like, well, they never served me? I mean, this is not a narrative issue. It's a it's a real life delivery issue.
I think it's both. I think it is a real life issue. I think, you know, Jeff said it beautifully. It's like the key is, is that when you have when you have growth in income and wealth, people need to participate. And in a, in a democratic structure, that means the majority of people participate. Now, if you don't have that, you're going to get political tensions. Okay. But I think there's a there is it is it is a it is not to be underestimated how non-obvious the functioning of these institutions is. Let me just give you like my favorite example, whenever we have a real policy failure, right. The immediate intuition that people has is to appoint a czar. Right. We have a drug czar. We have a this dog. We have a that Xaa Xaa is the most autocratic, one of the most autocratic institutions that we can think of. So, so to so, so it's very easy to forget about how these things work and how these operate and to kind of move over, or we just need to have these kind of quasi authoritarian structures and everything will be fixed. So you're right, there are real things. The question of participation in this kind of dramatic age of globalization and technological progress is crucial, but it is also important that with all the specific policy challenges that we have, that we do not forget what the core pillars are that have enabled the progress in the first place.
I want to turn to you, you both hats, both looking at this on the global stage. And as a former foreign minister, you felt you felt these tensions, but also then looking at domestic politics. So I want to ask you, how do you what lessons have you learned? How do you approach this?
I'll give you three lessons that I've taken. Lesson number one is let's abandon the politics of inevitability. Things are not inevitable. They are the result of policy choices. If life expectancy in Europe is 82 and life expectancy in the US is 78, that's not by luck. If women employment in the US is 57% and in Europe is 71%, is not by chance. If wealth accumulation under 1 to 1%, top 1% in the US is 40% of the wealth, and in Europe is 25% is not the result of luck. These are policy choices. And this is something that we have to go back to all the time. Because policies of inevitability, this thing that globalization does not allow me to do, this does not allow me to do that has disempowered people. And when you disempower people, you just generate rage. And rage is a very destructive force. And this is what we are seeing in a lot of our societies fiscal choices, education choices, regulatory choices matter. And they matter so much that this is what we have to talk to our citizens about. The second thing I've learned is that not everything can be explained by economics, that there is the other dimension of social societal choices that we also make, that diverse societies that empowered women, has has also created frictions with power distribution within our societies. And this also needs to be treated. We cannot just simply say, oh, it's this is again inevitable. And the third lesson is obviously that power has also shifted internationally, has shifted massively from west to east, and also from north to south. And this new distribution of power has to find its accommodation in institutions. And I very much agree with you that institutions are essential, whether at home or internationally. This new distribution of power has to be also reflected in the manner in which we govern what this collective space that we call, international space. Right. So these are my three lessons. But, you know, I want to go back to this point that we have the possibility to make choices and that we have to own those choices. And if we don't, then, okay, good. It's revolutions, but we know where revolutions have taken us.
But choice is often not, one direction. It has to be reciprocal. Correct. So a country may decide that they will take a certain direction. And if it's not reciprocated, either bilaterally or multilaterally, it's a problem. I mean, we have this I mean, the conversation about Greenland here for the entire week and preceding coming here was one of those things. Well, the choice was not really going to come just from what Denmark decides or not. It was very much forceful from the US. So when you're saying there is choice, I agree with you. The agency of people, the agency of individuals, of leaders, of countries, but also how do you manage that at a time of sheer disruption and a fraying of institutions that would then put guardrails to your choices?
Well, choices doesn't save you from irrationality. Institutions does not save you from irrationality. You also have irrationality, and you have to deal with it. Right? But there has also been a lesson in this irrational, move from the US president. With all due respect, to push for sovereignty of Greenland as a means to treat national security, when the answer was, obviously, it's a national security issue. Let's work together in a security and defense alliance that is NATO to deal with this national security. But the lesson has also been hard. The US is interdependent with Europe, is not independent. It's interdependent. Our economies are very strongly linked. Our capital markets are very strongly linked. Our financial systems are very strongly linked. One saves another, one invests in bonds of the other and vice versa. So the logic of unilateralism also has its limitations.
Charlie, I want to turn to you because, this was a perfect setup to the conversations we were having about emotions that come into politics. So you have a very strong theory about this, the meaning of politics. The theme of our topic here, economics, institutions, but also emotions.
Yes, we've we've talked here about the failure of politicians, of politics to answer the changing pace, the chaos, the geopolitical uncertainty. And, the distrust, that's caused. I think in order to understand it, we need to change our paradigm. We need to, we need to enlarge it. We need to become bilingual. You listen to rational discourse, but you have to tune into emotional discourse because we're always saying, well, get emotions out of the way in order to really rationally understand that. No, we need to rationally look at the logic that's playing out, in plain sight, invisible to us. I've spent the last seven years hanging out in Pikeville, Kentucky. I'm a sociologist. I, I hang out and get to know people and, wonderful people, who are the losers of globalization. This is a. Vague. And it was cold coal area. Coal went out. And so it's a loss story. We're talking about the whitest and the second poorest congressional district in the country that used to be strong union and, Democrat. And the last three elections went very strongly for Donald Trump. What? And I wondered how so what what was the story? And the story was one of loss. Loss is different from deprivation. Studies have shown that if, people will pay twice as much to get back what they once had as they would pay to get what they really want. So loss has a psychological, emotional impact. The people I got to know were very proud. Coal miners. They they would go a coal miner would walk down the street or go to his kid's basketball game with a blackened face proudly. And people would say, that's that guy. This is the guy who kept the lights on, in America, who won World War one and two. Proud good money raises family. All of that gone. And it's not just economic. It's not just that you lose your job, you lose. You devalue what you know. You you have to move to a different place. They don't know you. They don't know all you know and who you are, your moral qualities. So loss turns out to be big. The people I came to know had given up on regular politics. Oh, you know, there was a they didn't feel heard. That's what they repeated. And so a magic man, a charismatic figure, came to their attention. And charismatic figures around the world are different from what Max Weber's sociologists would call rational bureaucratic leadership, where you say, well, look what I've done. Judge me on that. The charismatic leader says, no, look at my relationship to you. And I do believe that emotions are at the bottom of it, that these were shamed people and they were given first an appeal to recognition they felt recognized. Second, they were offered a a compelling narrative of stolen pride. You've lost something. You didn't just lose it. Who took it? It's been stolen. Let's go after who stole it. So it went from shame, structural shame. A very proud people to blame. That's an emotional transfer. Let's look at that. And I think there are I can go on kind of, a whole ritual that reinforces that, in different ways as we go. So that's a perspective I offer to enlarge us.
But knowing that and keeping that in mind, what would be your advice to politicians, regardless of the jurisdiction they're working in? But politicians who want to tap into that and address it because, like you said, it can't be just because, oh, we're going to raise, you know, we're going to tackle inflation by 1%, 2%. How do you tackle it emotionally?
What I've just described I call emotional capture. So you're starting with that. And the first thing is to see that's what's happened as a stick stick to itiveness okay. And the other thing is to peer on the scene to actually, don't do it through, email, get there. And, and, and the third thing is to offer real solutions, positive solutions on the ground. So, yeah, reconnect between the urban middle class and the, the rural working class. And it can be done to be positive in making the right decisions. It can be done. And I think in the state of Kentucky, as a Democratic, governor in a red rural state, and he's delivering and even the hardcore are saying, well, it's okay. It's so.
One of the things, one of the things we've heard quite a bit this week, or I've heard quite a bit this week, is that it's less about ideology and it's more about one how people feel, but also who they're connecting with. So that community point. So it's an interesting era of politics. If we feel it's not rooted in ideology. I want to come back to this incredible panel for more thoughts, but I want to give the opportunity to anybody in the floor who would like to ask a question, if we can please get a mic here to this gentleman. And then and then we'll go to the gentleman here.
So. , Professor Hochschild, there's been a lot of discussion among economists about place based policies. And so I'm wondering whether from what you just said, it follows that it is extremely important to find solutions for structural change that actually maintain people in the same communities or not. So how much does it matter?
It matters a lot. Where I hung out, there's a big differentiation between stairs and losers. Stairs and and levers and the levers they feel. Oh, they're looking down on us stairs. Won't you come back? And have you changed your accent? You know, we there's a request by the stairs to re accent themselves. You know you ain't talking, right. You know, talk like like people here. I think the solution might be regional hubs. In other words, you don't have to leave the for the big city. There can be kind of sources of good employment 2 or 3 hours away, let's say, and, Yeah. And we need to get the rural urban corridors going.
Jeff, did you want to come in on this?
Yeah. I think, German's point is really important that that what? One of the things we know about populism or backlash or whatever you want to call it, is that it is very regional. It's the industrial belt and the upper South. It's the north of England, it's eastern Germany, it's the north of France. And that's because these are areas that are affected, have been very seriously affected by the loss of especially well-paid manufacturing and other related jobs. And that's not about individuals so much as it's about a place, a small city or a town. 20, 30, 40,000 people loses a couple of factories. But it doesn't stop there. There's a loss of income. Property values go down. community loss, right? Loss. Local property taxes go down. The local government is less able to provide local public goods like education and health care and and law enforcement. Perhaps the best educated people leave and and the ones who are still the stayers, as you call them, are sort of stuck because you can't sell your home in a depressed community and move to a prosperous community. So I think that the the policy answer and here I want to say something about what Arlie said. The policy answer is place based policies. Very difficult because we have principles in political economy that say the winners should compensate the losers for their losses. But winners don't like being taxed to compensate the losers. So that's very difficult to do politically. So I think that is the in my view, that is the most productive path forward from a policy standpoint. But I also want to I being a perhaps vulgar materialist, I agree with Arlie that it is a false dichotomy to think about material interests and emotions. People create narratives about what's happening to them. They have understandings of why why Greece has defaulted, why Germans are being asked to bail out Greece, why their community is failing, why their economy is failing, why inflation is taking place and their response is driven partly by and even started with the material factors, partly by the material factors, but also by how they interpret them. And so as a scholar, I think, you know, this is of less relevant politically. But as a scholar, our goal is to try to figure out how do people make sense of their reality and how does that translate into politics and the failure. There has been a failure of compensation, but I think there's also been a failure of representation among of not representing the concerns that people in communities like Pikesville or elsewhere have. And that's more on the emotional or narrative side.
Daniel, you wanted to come in.
I it comes a little bit back to what you said earlier, right? I think the, the, the importance of framing something, giving kind of a way to understand the world in a particular way is enormously important. I mean, on the one you have, kind of you have shame, you have blame, you have pride, you have shared purpose. All these things matter tremendously. And anybody who has ever kind of run a large organization knows that incentives are great. But if you don't have a kind of shared sense of purpose, it's not going to work. And, you know, in the university context, that's things like, you know, we're doing transformative education and pathbreaking research, and it's noble work we're engaged in, despite all the criticism, and remind ourselves of that and then have that supported by values and structures. I think the same thing is true on the local side. And we're, we're, we're we're opening a couple of campuses now, one in New York, one in West Palm Beach, one in San Francisco. The story is totally different. And to have kind of a clear idea and identity, what this community is all about in South Florida, for example, or the kind of Renaissance story in San Francisco. If a mayor is able to articulate this clearly makes a huge difference, both for the local community and externally, because people look at that now in a place where they may want to invest or move to. So I think, yes, we need to fix certain things. Yes, there are incentives, yes, there are structures. But the way we talk about where we frame things is enormously important in this environment.
Let me build on that, because I think we have we are seeing the collision of two different ways of framing our future. On the one hand is the nostalgia of the past. And this is very relevant for places who were very good in the past. Yeah. And that fits very well with that part of the world. And it's in the northern, it's in the South. It's a lot in the north, but it's also in some parts of the South. But you've got the other frame that is basically the promise of the future. Those that have not been great in the past, they they don't want to go back. They are looking at something that will be more promising. They are looking they are projecting themselves in the future. Now the two have as a difficulty and this is something we have to be much better at, is that the future at the moment looks very, very uncertain, very unstable. There is a lot of projection of conflict, conflictual power, rivalry, and that doesn't help. That makes people either stay where they are, stay put, hang on to what they have, or look at the look at the past. So if we want to favor this narrative of let's project ourselves in a future that that looks brighter, which is where many people in this planet would want to be, then we have to be better at managing those very conflictual, outlook for the future.
It's fascinating what you're saying because I, for one, for example, left the UK and moved to the UAE eight and a half years ago. Brexit happened in the year that I left. I will only say that not more politically. And there was a sense that actually the political discourse became so parochial and destructive. Suddenly I went to a place that says, we're only 50 years old. There's a lot that isn't great here, but there's a lot we want to do. And, you know, the slogan of the country is impossible is possible. You know, just, you know, think about it, find a way to make it happen. And I think you're seeing and sometimes people are very crude and reference it in money and think, oh, people are moving to the Gulf because there's more resources there. But actually it's the mindset, the proactive mindset. It's contagious, especially for young people. It's contagious for those younger than us who want to see that sort of dynamic of what can you make happen? There's a gentleman behind me who also had a question. And please, if you have questions, indicate to me and I'll make sure we come to you.
All right. Thank you. My name is Michael. I represent the corporate sector. We have a company of 35,000 people working. And I really want to come with early, manage, mentioned about bureaucracy and leadership in our company. We try to balance that because we understand that we need bureaucracy to control, to to have no chaos, have a good Ordnung in the company. But we need to have a space for entrepreneurship that the leaders can survive in the company and produce a good decisions. What we see with interaction with the government, especially in in Europeans, we see that mainly technocrats are at the seats and technocrats bureaucracy sometimes lack the responsibility and lack leadership. And drug reports show that there are two main two reasons to want two. Reasons of the lack of the competitiveness of EU. It's a wrong decisions and lack of responsibility. So my question is here how to find the balance in the government on the government side. So you have a very good bureaucracy, right? Very good procedures. But you leave space for entrepreneurship in the government, for the leaders to take the decisions and to, to to take out the crisis.
Thank you. Okay. Well, you've been volunteered to answer that question by Jeff, who decided your answer?
Most successful leader. I know why we had a we had a little.
Preliminary look, I think this is humongous important. And, my the more I think you see examples of that, whether it's in the corporate side or the local side or on the national politics side, you got to be able to articulate a sense of purpose, a sense of direction, a sense of vision. And it is it can absolutely be magical. And I think you we see this very clearly now, in kind of, you know, in the sense of local economies and place. But I think this is like a huge question, you know, internationally as well, you know, what is there's you know, I'm German. Originally I lived in two countries. And when you look at the history of the European Union, what is the what is the vision for the European Union? And I remember very clearly what it was Maastricht treaty and all of that. But how do we think about this now, and how do we think about in opposition to the United States or something? What's the purpose? What is what what is it that will create, for example, a European identity? I don't think that's clear, at least not to me. And I think that's contested even to a certain extent right now. So being able to do this and being able to frame this in a coherent fashion, I think will have significant consequences for the politics because it shapes how we're framing our world. That's that shapes how we're seeing it, what's right, what's wrong, what should be done, what shouldn't be done. So I think these things are enormously important from a leadership point of view. Everywhere, everywhere where leadership matters.
I want to turn. I want to pick up on the other part of the question, which is about the accountability, the ability to to innovate. But your your decisions can have huge consequences. So how do you balance the two?
No, I think we are to become much more focused on results also. I mean, it's not just about describing the problem. It's not just about defining what we are going to do to address it. It's also to put on the table what have we done? And this is something that companies do very well, because at the end of the day, they have to say, we've created this much wealth, this is our profit, this is new products, this is new innovation. This is how much time it has taken us to get there. Governments need to learn a little bit more, and I think they have to be more focused on producing results. At the same time, companies probably have to learn a little bit more. The art of empathy, put a little bit more heart into the profit line at the end of your annual report. Right. So it's this mix that we have to get right between empathy, talking to people's emotions, talking to their desires, talking to their expectations for the future, but giving them some sort, some sort of results that that we think of Europe and we think of the Maastricht treaty is very worrying to me, because when I think of Europe today, I think of a sovereign continent, a continent that can write its future and not just be rocked between those new imperial powers in the world. But maybe, maybe this is an interesting moment to build this more, a European Union with a heart, with a sense of why it wants to exist. We have a great opportunity now to do that.
Okay, a quick response.
Quick response.
I think the words and the frames are so important on that. So if we just take that right, there's one way to say, oh, we have all these problems. So take you or you can say we're proud of what we've accomplished, but we're not satisfied. It's already shifts the emotional response, I think. Right. So we can talk about the need for change. And when people hear that they want to be under the table and watch TV, or you can say, you know, well, there's there's all the things can we want to evolve in a particular direction. So how do think about this? And I think, you know, how to frame it is such an important component in that. And I think the way you said it. and the way to think about it. Exactly.
Right.
And is that the heart of that politics?
100%, I think, on leadership in general, but in politics, super important. And I think we look back at so many leaders that when they were able to define that clearly, that was what made them great.
Are they?
I know we're looking for solutions and positives here. And, I think part of it to go back to economics is job retraining, which, I happen to study, a program that was took unemployed coal miners and taught them how to code apps for cell phones, and so they could do this in the local area. And talking to people was so interesting. It many of them had felt very alone, you know, unemployed and shamed. They came, they got together and, they made friends. One guy said, this is the first time I've really felt helped and I'm helping, and I felt part of a community. I thought, wow, so charismatic leaders are playing to social deserts and retraining programs. Government supported, and honored. It's not a remedial thing everyone needs to retain. And I'm my fear is that what I saw happen in Pikeville, Kentucky? And the response to loss and shame could happen now in the wake of the revolution of AI. Right. What happened to Blue Collar is a local place. Could happen to the middle class and a lot of other people globally. Let's catch it now. Look at the emotional needs and implement them through practical help. In in reskilling.
I mean, I was going to pick up on what you said about coding because the amount of people who were told learn to code and did, and now they're going to be displaced because actually AI can write code. And so then they have. So I think that constant retraining I please, if you have time, tune into a session that we had at the very beginning of the forum Tuesday morning, workers in the driver's seat, because we had the head of the International Trade Union Association saying that what you need is the profits being made from this AI revolution, some of that being taken to reskill so that people feel there's a benefit to this AI revolution. I'm also benefiting from it. We have a question over here. If we can please get a mic.
One of the things that, Excuse me, forgot everything. One of the things that I brought up is the importance of being there. One of the big, big surprise stories in American politics is the mayor of New York City. And I have to tell you, I didn't think he was going to make it. There's a huge amount of big money and big corporations against him. The wealthiest individuals in New York threatening to leave against him. What did he do? He went down. Little precinct. Little precinct. Every single door. He heard people's problems. He developed an agenda, a policy agenda which is precisely related to those problems. I guess I'm really interested in whether we learn from that. That case that is a charismatic leader using very, very local individual connections. And by the way, as an old person here, I would say initially an old economist here, I thought he's making promises he can't keep. He's making promises he can't keep. He shouldn't be elected. And you know, I was wrong. And it's the younger people I know in my world who said, no, no, you won him elected because he will mobilize. So I think the issue of the young, I think the issue of the future, and I think the issue of young charismatic leaders listening, I learn a lot from New York.
Great.
Charlie, what's your response to New York?
Well, I wonder, I just love what Laura said. And I would add to it, there's been research on how, Democrats, progressives, compare to conservatives in having an open ear to what's being said. One study found that, progressive Democrats were far more likely to break off contact with someone who says something they disagree with. Then we're, conservative Republicans, interesting. And, paradoxically, paradox being my favorite word here. Paradoxically, conservatives are much more likely to lower the temperature. Listen. And, when they're sitting opposite kind of 1 to 1 and having a meal together, that that mattered didn't matter to the more cosmopolitan kind of, urban folk, but it mattered to the rural folk. So you have to change your folk way. You have to go to where the people you want to understand are.
We've never been more connected than now, and we've never seen greater levels of loneliness than now. And this is a problem if you are thinking politics. So successful politicians are those that talk to people, not just simply those that do videos on TikTok and send and send posts, they engage with people. And the future of politics has to be to go back to engaging with people, talking to people, listening to people face to face like we do in today. These are this is why these politicians are successful, because they are going back to what is necessary to build a political space, which is the agora. I mean, we are not we're not inventing anything new. But all I can say is that technology is something that was promised to be this incredible connector, and it's turning out to be an incredible, divider separator, that we need to juggle against, in my view.
Jeff, I want to ask you, what is the future of politics? Is it that going back to local to the hyper local, I mean, news is thinking about hyper local too, because actually news organizations are really suffering because they got too distant from the people they're meant to serve.
Well, I'm not sure what the future of politics is, but I think if politicians and if our political systems are going to reconnect with their publics, it will take a word that's been mentioned in two different dimensions a sense of purpose. Dan, I think, is absolutely correct that politicians are successful to the extent that they express a purpose, a social purpose, a social purpose of their party, a social purpose of their country, what the country is about, what the goal of the government is within the country. And then they also need to be cognizant of the fact that people want a purpose to their lives as well. They don't want handouts. People in Pikesville don't want to get money. They want jobs. They want to feel that they're contributing. So a political system that works is one that gives people a sense of a national or regional purpose and of a sense of gives people a sense of a purpose in their own lives. I think that we've lost that by the bifurcation between a segment of society that's an extraordinarily well. And segments that have not done well, that feel that they've been left behind and ignored and feel that there is no purpose in their lives, and that there is no national purpose to which they can contribute. And if we are going to move forward, we're going to have to restore both that sense of national or social purpose and the sense of purpose in people's lives.
And on that note, we are coming to a close to the session. One of the conversations that stuck in my mind from this week is that people talking about how much of this was abdicated to the private sector, this idea that it wasn't for the government to create jobs. You know, you have, again, other jurisdictions in the world where people look to governance to create jobs. But this idea was that, no, you had to leave free market economics to take care of it. But maybe we do need politics to get involved, to make sure that people at least have that safety net, not of handouts, but of job security. And what job security looks like will determine much of what happens. The global Risks report that came out from the World Economic Forum said that two thirds of respondents to the survey of the Global risk report are worried about social polarization, and a lot of that is driven by broken politics and a lack of purpose, whether it's through jobs or national purpose. With that, thank you to my incredible panel and thank you all for being here.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.