The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Ask Me Anything

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates.  The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus.   On this week’s edition of the Friday Focus podcast, Janice and Rudyard answer listener questions submitted over the holidays. From the fate and future of healthcare to whether Putin is a “madman” or not, the Friday Focus’ first-ever Ask Me Anything explores a host of fascinating topics. To access the full-length editions of the Friday Focus podcast, consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.comBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The following is a complimentary excerpt of this week's edition of the Friday Focus podcast by the Monk Debates. To access full-length editions of each and every episode, along with all kinds of great additional benefits and perks, become a donor to the Monk debates. You can do that for as little as $25 a year, and you'll receive each and every year 50 Friday Focus episodes at full length. That's all available right now on our website in just a few. simple clicks, triple W the monk debates.com. Look for the Friday Focus option in our navigation bar, the top right of the website. Make your donation and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to the full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Hello, Mug members, and welcome to Friday Focus, our regular podcast, unpacking the big issues

and ideas in the news, hopefully leaving you with some new analysis and insights. I'm Rudyard Griffiths, the chair of the monk debates. As always on this, in every episode, I'm joined by Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs, an internationally renowned scholar and author. Janice, are you looking forward to our first ever Ask Me Anything podcast featuring questions from our listeners? I really am, Richard, and I'm expecting to be stumped. as we could only have thought it would be so. What we've done, Janice,

we have a whole bunch of terrific questions, but for the sake of trying to keep to our half-hour format for the show, we're going to try to get through five that we thought were interesting, that were diverse, that touched on different ideas and themes. So what you're going to hear listeners are the voices of your fellow listeners, having recorded and sent in questions to us. We're going to play them to each other and you now.

and then Janice and I will take them up one by one. So Janice, here's the first question. Hello, this is Harold from Toronto with a question for both Redyard and Janice. The health care system in Canada has been fragile for many years with rationing, resulting in inadequate access to investigations, and both primary and specialist care. Although this has been obvious to health care workers for decades, it's now in crisis and it's obvious to everyone. This is now in the context of expanded federal commitments to immigration, massive commitments to home building, for example, a million and a half homes in Ontario,

which may translate into 6 million new residents on top of a predicted recession. So in that context, what are your recommendations on what are the achievable steps required to provide Canadians with truly high-quality, safe, reliable health care? And then what do you think will really actually happen? Thank you. we don't dodge the tough ones do we Janice so Harold thank you so much for that terrific question Janice I'm going to be a coward and let you go first that is a really hard question that Harold asked and it's a question we've been struggling with as you rightly say Harold for the last

two decades but COVID just blew the lid off it the easy answer And the wrong answer, throw more money at it. And we've been in this conversation for 20 years. But that will not fix what is wrong with our health care system. And it won't do what you asked, provide really top quality health care across the system. So what can we do? Well, there are some really good ideas that there. One is have national license.

of physicians. There is no reason that a physician who's licensed to practice in the province of Ontario can't practice in Manitoba. This is frankly ridiculous. I can understand this across national borders, but this is the oldest form of interprovincial barriers to trade. It is lunacy in this day and age, and it would enable. doctors and, by the way, other health care practitioners, nurses to move when there is greater demand of different parts of the country. There's no words for how insane this is, frankly, Roger. And the reason I said this is not only a money question, one of the biggest issues we have is a shortage of human resources in health care.

We are, like everybody else, our family docs are getting ready to retire in very large numbers. Nurses left the profession to some degree because of terrible pressure during COVID. So we have an HR problem. And one of the things we have to fix is the educational system. Governments limit medical schools, admissions. And they do this because they don't want the cost to rise and the billing numbers to grow. But we've reached the point of no return on this. The second thing we need to do is raise those caps on medical school admissions.

And Richard and I can see each other and he's looking skeptibly at me right now. But let me just tell you, we have Canadians being trained in Dublin, in South America, in Israel, who want nothing more than to come home to this country and practice, and they can't do it because there's not enough residency requirements for people not educated in Canadian medical schools. Easy steps, change some rules to make the system more flexible, more mobile. That is a first quick win that we could probably get done next year. I like those practical ideas. I'm going to purposely try to be a little bit controversial and take on part of Harold's, I think, excellent question, which is linking the phenomena of highly accelerated rates of immigration to concerns about health care.

Because I think this is an important conversation that we have to have for two reasons. One, that there's this incredible social license that we enjoy in Canada around high rates of immigration, the highest legal. per capita rates of immigration in the world. And that's a good thing. But we have to understand that that social license needs to be renewed. And it needs to be renewed on the basis that people broadly support those high rates. And what I've seen Janice in the last year, and I think Harold's question gets to this, is people increasingly connecting very high rates of immigration, over 400,000 permanent residents announced to have arrived in 2020 the highest ever on recorded history, stats can announcing approximately a million new arrivals to the country over the last 12 months.

People are starting to link those numbers with the stresses that we are seeing in our health care system because, understandably, as they should, all immigrants enjoy charter freedoms as soon as they've set foot in Canada. And that means most of them end up in the GTA in the greater Toronto area, approximately half of all immigrants each year settle in the GTA. This is putting incredible strain on all public infrastructure, on public infrastructure that is related not just to hospitals, but education systems, roads, you can go on and on.

My bigger, Boulder idea, I think, yes, would be to have a conversation about linking to immigrants, federal resources in terms of grants to provinces. We are right now doing kind of immigration at the federal level on the cheap. It's basically like, let's be honest, it's politically popular for governments, especially this government, to be in this case, exceedingly pro immigration. They don't have to deal with it. The provinces, primarily British Columbia, bit Alberta, to most extent, Ontario have to deal with immigration. They have to deal with the cost

of finding the hospitals, creating the educational capacity, building the roads and highways, that make this all happen. I think we need to have a much more realistic, in tune, synchronized conversation between the provinces and the federal government on immigration to ensure that everyone, including new immigrants, as much as people born in Canada, have the right to timely, effective delivery of health care. And we cannot, Janice, keep fooling ourselves in thinking that you can have these extraordinary rates of immigration and this, without adequate public funding for the very institutions that all of us need to function. So Harold is correct.

We have to tie these two things together, immigration and health care, have a tough and difficult conversation and come up with some solutions that balance capacity with demand. You're not going to get an argument for me, Richard. I, because frankly, and I think that's why Harold's question was terrific, because we tend to say, well, the problem is in our health care system, and we sell all that. Oh, the problem is housing, and we silo that. Oh, the problem is immigration, or the opportunity is immigration, and we silo that.

What's the need about this question? It's a package, right? And to be honest, the problem in our health care system is not a function of immigrants. It long predates that it was under stress before these record high numbers, Roger. We just don't have enough people and our infrastructure. structure has not kept up, even with the needs of our own, frankly, older population that is putting much more stress. But looking forward, we're in a frustrating, beyond belief, frustrating federal provincial conversation. It's enough to make any Canadian go out there and just

scream because the federal government says, we're going to give you more money, but you've got to be accountable. And the provinces shout back. No, you can't get into our jurisdiction. Our jurisdiction is health care. We have to move on from this and do this on a population basis, as you just said, Richard. And that's one way to do it. There are other ways, but we have to think about this as population health. and health, when you have decent housing, decent education, and kids are reasonably well-nourished, the demands on the health care system drop. That's the truth. Yeah.

Here, here. Well, Harold, thanks again for a great question. Let's go to number two here. Our second audience member question that was submitted by a voice memo to us. I'll play it for you, Janice, now, and our audience. I hope it's easier. Hi, Roger. And Janice, a big fan of the show.

Thank you for hosting this AMA. I had a question for you about, as a follow-up for the debate on mainstream media. You know, Neil Ferguson mentions this in his book, The Square in the Tower, of a corollary between the printing press and the fractured, decentralized media landscape today. And I was wondering,

if it is true that we cannot trust the mainstream media as our main source of information, then how do we, as a socialized? society function when everybody gets their news from a different outlet and everyone seems to have a different fact or a different truth. How do we come together as a society in that landscape and pursue truth and honest and open debate? Thank you. Great. Thank you for that question. Janice, let's have your answer first. Well, this question is terrific and it goes to the heart, of course,

Roger, what you are doing with the Monk Debates. There are two issues with the mainstream press. One, can you trust them? And that's a process question.

I'm probably, Roger, I don't think that came out as sharply as it might have during the debate that we had. It's a process question. Do they fact check?

Do they fact check in a way that is more trustworthy than, frankly, social media, all of us use. And the answer is open and shut. Yes, they do. They do because they have bigger staff. They have reputations to uphold. People pay them behind digital walls to get access to what they do. And if they mess up, there's a cost. There's a reputational cost. So of course, they don't get everything right.

But they have processes to check. And you or we might get into a discussion of whether they're correct. anybody reads them, but they hold their own feet to the fire. And a journalist who makes stuff up gets fired. It's as simple as that or messes up on a story gets fired. And so I think trusting the content of what we read in mainstream media is still a good bet. There's a second part of your question, though. What if all of us are getting our news from different places and when we get together, in our virtual coffee shops or water coolers, we're not talking about the same stuff.

Well, that goes right to the heart of democracy, frankly. And there's two parts to that one. We need to be able to exchange facts. So when I say to Rudyard, well, this is a fact. If he says, I don't believe you, then the two of us can go together to a source that we both might trust and check. So we have to increase our capacity to check. It's hard, though, because even in something that is so devoted to evidence as science is and medicine is, there's differing interpretations. And it's a work in progress.

So at the beginning of COVID, our best scientists knew a little. By now, they know much more because they've learned and they've, and they've, some experiments, and some procedures, they've said, no, that doesn't work. We thought it did, but it doesn't. And it's got better evidence. So that's part of it. But ultimately, there are some issues that we are not going to agree on. And we need to learn a set of skills here, and that's what the Monctobates are all about.

We need to learn to disagree with each other in a civil and respectful way. Listen to what somebody else is saying. in a reasonably open-minded way. And if we can't agree at the end of the conversation, I cannot label somebody. That is key. I cannot label somebody. I have a whole checklist of very tempting labels in my head.

They stay in my head. They don't come out of my mouth. Otherwise, it's democracy that will fail, frankly. Yeah, great answers. Just a bit of all that. First, what's a possible solution here? One I've often thought about is, you know, we have designated certain activities in our society. You know, the provisioning of health care, the provisioning of education, a lot of the arts as things that are charitable, that are important to our society, that are common goods, that we allow people to support through charitable donations.

Up to this point, we haven't really included the media in that, interestingly. And I'm not quite sure why we're still drawing that line. Yes, I get it. Some of these larger media businesses are businesses. They're for-profit businesses. But there are a lot of other groups that are, could be, LePress is one example, that actually converted to a charity. And I'm wondering if there isn't maybe a future Janus for media, kind of like the opera, or, I don't know, pick your favorite charity, the Red Cross, as something that is funded

through people's individual donations, in a sense, a subscription model, but where the government gives you the money to apply the subscription to the entity of your choice and to fund that so that the market, the hand of the market is still working here. It's sorting out between those that are satisfying for audiences and those that are not. And maybe you layer over that, as you say, some common standards that to achieve this status as a media organization to have this charitable ability, you have to conform to certain basic rules about journalism and a commitment to factual evidence in your stories. I think that would get us a long way out of this kind of media desert that I worry that we're entering into. You know, you just have to pick up our

any one of our local papers, our city papers, regional papers here in Kansas. And they are, they are getting thin, pretty insubstantial. And I think that just means that social media becomes all the more powerful because it really doesn't have any competitors. You know, the objection to that, Roger's longstanding objection. But I think the way you formulated that really takes the edge off the objection. The objection is that when you get a charitable receipt, you claim it back on your taxes. And so the government is a silent partner. And there's this insidious thing that gets in your head like a worm when you're the editor.

Well, I don't want to be too critical of the government because if they take away my charitable status, I will lose my secure source of revenue. And that's a risk. But it's much better when it's funded by individuals than when it's funded directly by the government. Which is currently the case in Canada. Hundreds of millions of dollars of labor tax credits that are going to profit, not for profit, to the entire industry as a giant subsidy, which I think is really queasy making. It is queasy making, but just to push you a little bit because really what has to work here

is there has to be a bargain about accountability. If you get that status as a charitable or not-for-profit, organization. You have to be accountable for it. It's not a free good. And all charities are accountable. You know, charities have to file financial statements each year. They, they're audited. They're audited by revenue Canada. If they're doing things that are not related to what they're charitable objects are, they lose, they can lose their charitable status. But in this case, and that's what makes it tough, Roger, it would be about, are you doing a reasonable job of fact checking? Yeah. Now, who's going to audit that? Is that going to be in some often?

in Ottawa. It's easy for the CRA to say, are you filing your financial returns and are you handling that's easy. The tougher problem is if the core of this public good is that you're committed to some standard, which gets at this issue of trust and your fact checking, tell me how you're going to audit that. Well, we have all kinds of other systems in Canada where we allow, you know, for better or worst, real estate agents to set up associations to police themselves. We do that with doctors. We were just talking about health care. I mean, maybe there's an argument here that, you know, there's an association of journalists that provides the initial assessment and the credentialization of these groups to then go on to receive charitable status or something equivalent for it.

I just think of the absence of this, we end up in a place where, you know, we're kind of drinking I think that goes to the heart of the question. We're just drinking each other's bathwater. And the bathwater is largely full of bacteria. In this case, kind of factless, you know, memes and assertions that, you know, as you say, go right to the heart of democracy that lead our public conversation in place to places that are more often dark, more often driven by anger and resentment. and a place that none of us want to go. But we seem, Janice, as if we're incapable from a policy perspective, of really wrapping our hands around this very good challenge raised in the question.

A great question, Roger. And I actually think we are going to go to a version of what you and I've just been talking about. Because the erosion of trust is so profound and so destructive that it's overwhelmingly in the interests of Democratic government. government to ensure a fact-based public discussion. And so we're going to have to find ways, a version of what we've just been saying. Yeah. Okay.

Let's go to our third question now, Janus. We're getting through these. This is terrific. Thank you so much, listeners again, for sending them on. And let's listen to that now. Hello, Reger and Janus. My name is Mark, and I live in Toronto. I have a question about the fertility crisis in Canada, which is seldom talked about in

news. Canada's birth rates are very low and declining to the extent that without immigration are population which actually decline every year. This is generally due to the combination of declining fertility due to pollutants in the environment, delaying childbearing due to economic reasons and difficulty finding suitable partners. Fertility methods such as in vitro fertilization are often prohibitively expensive for those who need medical intervention. In your view, at what point will this develop into a crisis that we can't ignore and what do you think the solution is? So that's a great question, Roger, and the crisis that

you're describing of declining birth rates and falling populations worldwide, especially in developed richer society. There's no country who can sustain their population. today with their birth rate. The second piece of evidence here that matters is nobody has managed to reverse that decline despite all sorts of policy interventions. The ones that help, relatively speaking, the most are great daycare because it allows one parent at least to go back to work, both parents instead of just one. That's a big one. And the evidence shows that if you know you've got good daycare for your kids, you're more inclined

to have a second child, frankly. And so that's affordable daycare. It's not just having daycare, and we've made progress in Canada on that in the last few years. It's still not where it should be, but it's much better. But that is the biggest one. A capacity. possibly look after little little kids, you know, who are six months plus so that the parents can go back to work. That is the biggest reason parents do not have a second child. Then there's the cost of education. That's the second biggest one because it was prohibitively expensive. I can't do better here than our neighbor to the south, way better, frankly, and then our neighbor to the south, but the Europeans probably do best. But ultimately, even if all that were in place,

the only way our populations will stay stable is with very high rates of immigration. And that's partly where we started today, Roger. That's why governments are growing the numbers of people who come to this country to keep our population level stable to prevent the decline in productivity that will ultimately happen if our labor force declines and to allow the economy to continue to grow. Yeah. I mean, just to pick up that one point, I think it is important to note that the age structure of the immigrant population coming into Canada is almost identical to the age

structure of the existing population because rightly so, we don't run a guest worker-style immigration system in Canada. we allow people to reunite families, which means bringing over parents and dependents and others once they've claimed citizenship in Canada. And that's, I think, a fair and equitable policy. But the reality of that policy means that we're not making our overall population, the combined population of everyone in Canada younger through immigration, unless we changed our policy, and this would be a controversial idea, to say, okay, we are going to give way more

points. We're going to select for much younger immigrants, and we're going to start creating barriers to family unification, such as having to post higher bonds or sureties around health care and other services on the basis that many of these people lived in another country and didn't pay into the tax system or the pension plans or other things that allowed those benefits to accrue to people who have been in Canada for decades, whether they're immigrants or not. So that is one direction we could go. We haven't gone there yet, but maybe we're going to have to think about that because you're right, Janice, this is a, to me, an unsolvable problem because it really has to do

with higher rates of education and higher rates of affluence. You know, societies that become more educated and richer have less children. And this is a pattern that occurs all across the world. Canada is not immune to this. And I think it's inevitable that we're going to see a global population roll over. And maybe the silver lining here in a kind of stormy looking cloud is that the decline will be relative. Everyone will be going through this decline together. Canada, you know, in the middle of the pack, Japan, China, at the front of the

the line, the United States coming in behind us, Europe looking quite old also. So it's going to be a mix and some economies will go into this decline of productivity, these very painful dependency ratios. So you're going to have far more people retired than people in the workforce and then how do you pay for all those people who aren't in the workforce but have spent their lives arguably working to, you know, secure those benefits that are due to them when they become old. So these are, I think the big, you know, structural challenges that we're going to have to solve. And maybe we're going to have to look at a harder-nosed immigration policy that selects for more for age and creates disincentives for family unification. That would be a really controversial choice, as you said.

And yeah, but just think for a second, rather than the period of the Black death that ripped across the whole world, frankly. We have never been in a period of sustained population decline, which is about to start. China's population has peaked this year. It is starting now to decline. We've never been through this. We have no real human history. Up to 1800, it grew very, very slowly. After 1800, it started to take off, and we've been on a tear.

But we've never been in a period. period of population declined. So this is a novel problem. Do you think it's good for the planet? Do you think it's in a strange way? Yeah, it is. It'll over, I mean, we still have the problems of, you know, runaway climate change where that all may lead in the next 50 years.

But in the next 100 years, we're going to have less of a carrying load, right? The planet is going to have to support less of a voracious human population on its surface. Yeah. Just look at Venice during the COVID, during those two years of COVID, what happened to the city? It revived. It came to life because there were no big cruise boats coming in, right? Well, that's a metaphor for what we're talking. But as you lift the pressure of these large numbers, and they really are incredible.

And I don't know. The number I'm about to cite is, you know, you get as Smiths vary so much. I don't have a lot of confidence. But the grimmest prognosis for China's population, 80 years from now, it would be cut in half. Yeah. I mean, only 80 years. Yeah. And only 80 years of short time, right?

It would be 750 million if the worst conditions apply. Yeah. Now, that's just stunning, frankly. Stunner. Okay, let's go to our next question here. Hello, Roger. Hello, Janice. I have recently been disappointed in the coverage of Putin in particular,

though I'm not an apologist for Putin in any way. I do try to take a rational approach to my understanding of the conflict. And the podcast, Friday Focus, has referred to him in their synopsis and online, numerous times as a madman. And I'd like to hear your explanation of why you've diagnosed madness on his part, when from what I can tell the Russian perspective, he's entirely rational. So please do tell. I think we're in the business of journalism.

And so a disinterested academic neutral perspective is fundamental. So yeah, I'd love to hear what you have to say to that. Well, I'm going to play a mean trick here. We can really lowball and say what you said in the question online. And in the summary, because I don't ever remember using the word madman to describe Putin, I actually do not think, I don't think he's mad, frankly. You know, there are discussions from people who know him well, who say they have seen a tremendous change in him, which was brought on by the period of extended isolation that he insisted on.

in the first two and a half years of COVID. And some people say this changes so striking. They actually use the word paranoid to talk about him. But I don't think it's in that sense that people use the word. They mean he made such an irrational decision to invade Ukraine. It was so clear that the costs were going to be enormous. And so even people who were watching that true. buildup almost a year ago could not quite believe that he would be that he would do something

that would be so damaging to Russia. And it's in that sense that we're debating his rationality. How could you score such an own goal is really the question. I think it's important to understand he is just coming at this problem from an entirely different place than the rest of us. He has gone back in history to talk about a period in which the Russian people, the Russian soul, were united together. A lot of is deeply connected with the Russian Orthodox Church. And he is reliving a part of Russian history in which Ukraine was not an independence. state. He was not allowed him to make that astonishing comment when he attacked Lenin for allowing the creation of a Ukrainian, independent Ukrainian Republic. So this is a man who is right now

gone back and living in a different period of history. Is he rational? He has, and this is that, you know, this is something that we struggle with all the time. If somebody has an end, a goal, we keep the word rational to mean, are they choosing appropriate means to achieve that goal? But the goal itself would strike so many of us as so harmful to Russia. Putin's invasion has an attack on Ukraine, has set Russia back 40 years. It has blown up relationships that took years and years to build. It has forced, in some ways, the most talented, the most educated people in Russia to leave the country. It will be decades and decades before Russia recovers from this.

It's difficult not to think that he's living in a world that doesn't conform to the world that the rest of us are seeing. Yeah. So, you know, I want to take this question on fairly. I think maybe sometimes in the show descriptions, I may have got a bit lazy and kind of conform to, you know, language that is more commonplace in the media that does, I think, characterize Putin maybe excessively as mad or insane. I don't have to go back and actually look at what I wrote. But I do take the questioners. assertion there that I think that is kind of lazy. And it is, as you've just described, Janice, it's a more finely calibrated kind of dysfunctionality. Is it madness? No. You know, was, was Hitler mad insane? I think you could absolutely say yes. By the end of the war, he was some clinical description of something. Stalin, Stalin was clinical, Paranoid. Stalin's paranoia, the doctor's plot, you know, towards the end of his reign of terror.

So we have in history, I think, had people that do reach to that level, and it's genuinely worrying, thinking in a nuclear age, you know, whether Putin's true circumstances, because you have to remember, it's really circumstances, often the pressures of these circumstances that creates the potential for insanity. And so I guess my answer is I don't know, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility that Putin is becoming more unbalanced, more unstable.

Where does that end? What kind of clinical diagnosis would you potentially apply to him today or more worryingly again apply to him six months or a year from now. So I think it is an interesting question to continue to kind of monitor and ponder. And I'm sure the CIA and British MI6 and others have a host of psychologists and psychiatrists that are trying to work up kind of diagnostics on Putin to understand exactly who is this interlocular.

Is there the potential for someone here to have a conversation about a settlement of this war. I think that's what we all ultimately hope. Right now, what do I know? But I would say the balance of evidence would suggest, yes, this is someone who has enough rationality to understand his interests and Russia's interests and to understand that they've been grossly abused over the last 12 months because of his actions. So I think he is looking for a way out. Just think right now, that door is not opening, and we will likely see another year, unfortunately, of conflict. Do you agree, Janice?

I think looking at his statements, and by the way, let me just say that psychiatrists are forbidden by their professional, it's really interesting, are forbidden by their professional association as doctors from using any diagnostic language on somebody they have not seen, right? So doing a diagnosis at a distance is enough to disqualify you professionally. That's how strongly they feel about this. And that's what we're all so careful when we talk about this. I think there's signaling going on right now. Both Putin and Zelensky have put peace plans on the table that they know the other side it's going to reject. But this is like the very beginning of a dance, right?

It's the very early steps that they're both signaling because they both like, and this is where ultimately you always have to get to. Both of them, when does the door open right? And we actually know from comparative study, it opens when both sides come to the conclusion, there's not much more to be had on the battlefield. So it's not that it's fighting war negotiation.

It's actually fighting and negotiation. And there's a gradual dawning realization. Well, I'm going to get another 10 yards here, but that's all. And that's not worth the cost. That's where we're going to have to go. And so I take the tiniest bit of hope that even though the terms are mutually exclusive, there's no deal, all of that. There is the very beginning of a conversation now.

You know, Zelensky laid out a 10-point plan, eight points of which Putin, would never accept. And Putin said, yes, I'm open for peace negotiations except on my terms, but the dance is starting. Right. Okay, let's go to our final question. We have a slightly longer show than normal, but we're doing that in order to get as many of these questions in as we could. So our fifth and final question is as follows. Hi, Janice and Rudyard. Thank you so much for your wonderful podcasts. I've been listening to them for, it seems like, a very long time, many, many months, and I've learned a lot. It's sort of like

being in a lecture hall with you both, and it's wonderful. My question is about women, and, well, I guess not just women, but women and men as they're aging. I, myself, am 68, and due to circumstances in life, I will be working for as long as I possibly can, and the nature of my work is in the academic world, but it's of a precarious nature in terms of employment. And I worry about that in the future. I don't own a home. I would like to buy a condo, but it's such a crazy market right now. I'm kind of afraid to go ahead and do that. Part of the reason I'm afraid to go ahead and make financial choices is because I feel that there is a real imbalance and how much. And how against older people, I'm healthy and I want to stay healthy and I'm afraid if I am not healthy.

I mean, look at what happened in long-term care homes. I don't want to be one of those people, but I do live alone with my dog. So having heard Rudyard mentioning his comments about the possible motivations of China making their decision recently about just opening up China and letting COVID go wild, unleashed, and knowing that it would affect the elderly population who have had very little vaccination and not the same high-quality vaccinations that we have here. And I think, you know, I don't think it's just China.

I just wonder about the value of older people, as our society goes forward. So a great observation. I picked that question because, you know, so much public policy in our conversation, Janice, as it should be, is focused on youth.

They are our future. We know the, you know, the phrases that roll off the tongues of our politicians all too often. You know, what have we learned about through this pandemic,

about, the older cohort in our society, what we owe them, what they contribute to us. You know, I think of differences in culture, you know, Asian culture, there is a veneration of the elderly, both within families and to a large degree within society that's often missing in Western cultures. And I wonder, I wonder why that is. It's a great question, Roger, because I think there's no question that in Western cultures, there's what our listener described, it's ageism. There is really, it amounts almost to discrimination against older people. It undervalues the contributions that older people can make.

you know, we know that having a mix of people in a room is a really valuable thing to have. Young people will be more innovative, more risk-taking. But boy, you need some older, more experienced people who've seen the movie before and who can just intervene and say at times, hey, let's not do it this way. I've seen this and it doesn't work. So it's that mix. What you were really, the optimal teams we know are diverse in age as well as diverse in experience or background. And we don't get that.

And what do we do in Western society? We segregate our older people in separate long-term care homes. I'm not surprised our listeners said, I don't want to be one of those people. because there are some really awful expressions that I've heard people use to describe those long-term care homes. But I'm optimistic, okay? And let me give you two, especially our listener who asked that question, because I could tell it was hard for her. Let me give you two grounds for optimism. One, we are facing a labor shortage.

Companies cannot find, now some of it is the right mix of skills, I agree, but there is a greater demand now for workers than that is a supply. So that is almost ideal times for older people to stay in the workforce, frankly. Because, and I'm older, we're needed. And so there's encouraging news, I think, for older people who want to continue to work and be productive. I think you'll have the opportunity to do that. I also think it's the best way to stay healthy, is to stay engaged because there's social contact, there's mental exertion. It's probably one of the best ways. It's like any kind of exercise, exercising your mind when you're at work, it's just good for you, frankly. So it works on a number of levels.

And finally I'm optimistic, Roger, because COVID did one thing in Western society. It made people aware of, frankly, the nightmare that long-term care is in our society. It's underfunded. It's understaffed. It doesn't meet the task of treating older citizens with dignity and respect. And so people are beginning to innovate. Now, people are coming together, not to buy a condo for themselves, but to buy a condo with three others that has three bedrooms or four bedrooms and making arrangements that will allow

them to stay on together if one of them becomes unwell. I think we're going to see an explosion of not government-directed innovation. of innovation actually, again, from people who get that they have to now think about alternative ways of aging, either by extending nuclear families or by creating families for end of life that shares the burden, but what we have built is simply not okay. I wholly agree with our question. Yeah. Great insight. So just add one factoid that I came across over this holiday week that just blew me away that the U.S. labor force. So there's probably parallels to Kennedy here grew by almost 10 million people between 2009 after the great financial crisis and 2019, the year before COVID.

So that was great for labor forces because you got lots of people pouring in. You've got wages and inflation remaining cooler. Well, guess what? 98% of that cohort of all the people that joined labor force over that 10 years, they were 55 years of age and older. So when I read that, the light finally went on. I thought, okay, now I understand why we can't find people in the workforce, because over the course of COVID, that cohort, many of them aged out of the workforce permanently. Many of them decided that the prevalence and the continuation of the virus in a variety of

workplace settings was unacceptable from them in terms of a health risk. And I think others simply said, you know, I'm done. I've, you know, whatever happened after the great financial crisis, I was able to kind of put my finances back in order and I've got enough for me to get by on. And I think that the question that we've taken up now in our discussion, I think it is one of the clues to try to understand that what we're confronting here in society, this labor shortage is not something that's going to go away over the next year or so. Nope. Really, the boomer cohort, going back to our previous conversation about population and the replacement of population, that great boomer cohort after World War II is now exiting the workforce. And I think this means that inflation is going to be here for longer. And as you say, that could be a really good thing for everyone.

55, 65 or over. Employers are going to love you. and a job is often a terrific way to, in a sense, have connection, purpose, intentionality in your life outside of, you know, your day-to-day life. So maybe there's a silver lining here in this exceptional kind of inflationary economic moment that we're living through that is going to help people older feel, you know, connected and valued and engage, at least in terms of the workforce. and employment.

Well, Janice, a terrific asked me. Anything, our first four Friday focus, let's do this again. I think maybe every quarter, every three or four months, we should listen to our members, see what's top of mind for them. I've certainly enjoyed the back and forth. I know you have too. And thank you to all our listeners for those great questions that you send in all important, rather challenging and great to talk about.

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