Panel Discussion: 'Uncovering the Offshore World'

welcome everyone to our last event of the term on the politics of the offshore world today's event is titled uncovering the offshore world despite the fact that debates on offshore data are Rife I think quoting two two figures from two different sources will give you an idea of the scale of what we're addressing here today according to the NGO text Justice Network up to 32 trillion dollars are in our aided assets that are held in offshore tax Havens Gabriel zuckman The Economist who works on offshore has calculated that about 7.8 trillion dollars or about 40 percent of corporate profits are held in tax Havens this is just to give you a sense of the increase in outflow of money into the offshore world that has been starving developing countries of government revenues that have been enabling kleptocrats to hide their illicitly acquired wealth and allowing Global multi National corporations to lawfully avoid paying hundreds of billions in taxes until recently we lacked comprehensive and detailed academic studies for understanding the scope and the inner workings of this offshore system this panel brings together three leading Scholars to discuss their path-breaking research on important aspects of the offshore World Beyond sharing their latest research findings on Global Tax Havens the global citizenship Market wealth asset management and the informal economy our distinguished panelists will discuss the research and investigative techniques that they have pioneered to reveal important dimensions of the offshore world so without further Ado let me introduce our wonderful panel let me start with Brooke Harrington Brooke Harrington is Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College prior to joining The Faculty at Dartmouth Professor Harrington was at the Copenhagen business school and at Brown University she holds a VA from Stanford University as well as anime and a PhD from Harvard her book on global wealth management tax and Offshore Banking titled Capital Without Borders wealth managers and the one percent which came out in 2016 with Harvard University press became a bestseller and won amongst others the outstanding book award from the American sociological Association Professor Harrington has been named recently a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London and is an accredited trust in the state planner something we're going to go into a little bit in the panel Kimberly K Wang is a professor of sociology and the call and director of Global Studies at the University of Chicago Professor Wang is the author of spider web capitalism how Global Elites exploit Frontier markets which came out with Princeton University press last year as well as dealing in desire Asian ascendancy Western Decline and the hidden currencies of global sex work which came out in 2015. spiderweb capitalism provides a behind the scenes look at how the rich and Powerful use offshore corporations to conceal their wealth and make themselves richer it draws on Rich interview data that uncovers the mechanics behind the invisible mundane networks of lawyers accountants company secretaries and fixers who facilitate the illicit movement of wealth across borders and around the globe finally we have Kristen surac whose associate professor of political sociology at the London School of economics and the author of The forthcoming the Golden Passport Global Mobility for millionaires which is coming out also at Harvard University press later this year Professor surak's research on Elite Mobility international migration nationalism and politics has been published in many of the leading academic journals but also in um mainstream Outlets like the London Review of Books The Washington Post the guardian the new statement and others she has been a fellow at The Institute for advanced study at Princeton of Fung Global fellow also at Princeton and she has a lifetime fellowship at Claire Hall at Cambridge so thank you for joining us today I'm very much looking forward to this conversation let me start with Christian if I may one of the issues that a lot of Scholars asked about work in the offshore World say 10 five years ago arguably they're still asking those questions in political science which has been a laggard compared to your own disciplines in addressing these issues which is about the data scarcity in in the in work on the offshore world it's about the fact that it is very difficult to access actors in this field it's very difficult to have hard data and therefore that work can be anecdotal but they they lack in the authoritativeness expected from the social sciences I'd like you to start by debunking that comprehensively and by telling us how you cracked open the offshore world um well it's supposed to start off by saying that in U isn't purely on offshore it's really on citizenship by investment in Residence by investment so it's it's in a way it's a cognate area that that has a lot of overlap and some of the people are moving in both worlds but in some of the ways I think that my own work didn't face as many challenges as there might be along those lines in some cases I found it actually fairly easy to get access because there's quite a number of professional conferences for this industry and so I started to you know I went to the first one just you know Anna Lark I was like whoa there's a whole Industrial whole world behind this and it's not you know occasionally there are Shoppers there there's a lot of wealth managers a lot of lawyers a lot of service providers bureaucrats the occasional prime minister you know Etc so I started to go to those and you get the due diligence companies the real estate companies Etc and you meet you get on the circuit and you meet the same people over and over and you establish Rapport and then you go to the individual individual countries and you already know um people who can introduce you to other people and to get in and get interviews and all of that so ironically I found that that moment of access you know people are all networking so I'd go and give them my business card and introduce my work I'm a professor I'm saying this and um but of course there's the things that people aren't telling you which take a little bit longer you know kind of sniffing around triangulating those sorts of things so that question of access was very easy but there was another thing that I suppose my work might be slightly different to um Kimberly and Brooks on this is that I also do some quantitative work and putting together the numbers on these programs not that it's impossible you know people often say oh the countries are terribly secretive it's like you know actually you know you can do free to you can do information requests you can find numbers and Reports online but they don't always they tend to be messy and they don't always line up and so it's been working with the statistical side of this has been in some ways very rewarding because you get an overall picture of things that nobody else is providing can do comparative work but it's also very challenging I think just working with Statistics in general but these sorts of things um as well where especially we're triangulating things there's a number that's been given in a parliamentary debate but that's different from what the ministry of the Interior is saying which is different from a leak that came out in the newspaper and trying to figure out what what's really going on there is um I think where my biggest challenges that's a really important point and I I'd like to emphasize for our audience that a lot of exists is open data that is just waiting to be mined and obviously there is work there is of difficult access that is risky but this field shouldn't be portrayed in that way and that what what you've just said is representative of a lot of the best work being done right now so another question what do you think your word tells us the work specifically on global citizenship on inequality and Global flows of money so that's a very interesting one in terms of what we often think about in with citizenship in the first place I you know if we go back to th martial citizenship is about equality you know it brings you know when he was writing his you know actually give a very famous talk at the other university down the road in Cambridge um about 70 years ago now on citizenship and talking about how in a world of capitalist inequality citizenship creates a fundamental basis of equality that enables a democracy to operate and the world that I'm looking at is none of that at all so if you think about who goes for these programs it tends to be people historically it's been people with quote unquote bad passports so you know if you're from the Middle East if you're from China southeast Asia you know you know Russia used to be a big demand area as well as you don't have a lot of good Mobility there was you know that was a lot of the demand or you don't know what's going to happen in an authoritarian regime you know Etc et cetera and so people people strategize around this so there's an inequality between citizenships across the world that we often don't think about if we have a very privileged one but if we don't have very privileged passport we think about it a lot and then there's intra-country inequality so it's um you know it's obvious you have to be able to afford these things in the first place um and so it's that intersection of these those two forms of inequality that create demand but the in terms of the inter-country inequality it's not all oligarchs or um you know massive criminals although there are some of those in you know Jolo who's the Mastermind behind one MDB has been in the papers quite a lot um because he also had citizenship in Saint Kitts and Cyprus through their citizenship by investment programs um but the but most people are actually you know it would be a whatever a college-educated you know highly paid Tech worker from Pakistan working in Dubai who can't travel in the region to take care of his his job or yeah and and so a lot of this actually ends up being quite mundane at the same time but I think it's very useful in thinking about what if you have a good passport what are those things that you're taking for granted that you don't have to think about that if you other people in the world actually often do one of the things you say in in your book is that many of the takers you you mentioned just the Russians but also many in the global South that are particularly keen on these citizenship opportunities precisely because of the restricted nature of the traveling and access they have under their home passports what do you think that does to citizenship this starting from those cases but the broader question is what does your word tell us about citizenship and where it's heading so in that sense so in this world it's pure it's instrumental there's not this sort of you know whatever feeling warm about the nation there's no identity side to this people aren't becoming a member of the diaspora in fact in several countries you never even have to go to the country in order to become a citizen people are very instrumental about this but actually there's been some work that's shown that um people who uh don't have good passports who come down literally you know socio you know even the power hierarchy within the world are strategic about citizenship too and it's interesting actually thinking about this in terms of what's happened since covid-19 U.S citizens the occasional paranoid person who is into this you get you know you get the flood of the Armageddon Americans because you know a fascist Trump or a communist Biden is getting elected but covid-19 and suddenly people with very privileged who has passports couldn't go wherever they wanted very easily especially to Europe shot the numbers of Americans looking for this through the roof and so so people are are quite strategic about citizenship in this case it's not about identity it's not about National belonging but it's also thinking about it's also about the extraterritorial rights of citizenship and if you think about a globalizing world you know Global Mobility citizenship is no longer just about the rights and privileges that it gets you within your home country it's about what that gets you internationally that means on the one hand that third countries control the value of citizenship by investment so you get a complex geopolitics around the market as well um but that also means if we think about globalization I'll just you know go go for for one or two more one more thing on you know kind of broadening out in a world of kind of global globalization increased Global mobility and we're thinking about flows of money and all of that nation states are still a very important unit for capitalism to operate in part because they also Define jurisdictions but not only that and they can do carve outs and all sorts of things as well but they also get power from defining populations and citizenship is that way that state such on the populations so as long as that's the case there's going to continue to be a demand for these sorts of programs you know just in terms of the way that capitalism operates in the world and what that means for citizenship more broadly it's it's in and yeah so a final thing on this kind of you know the Patriotic you know identity side of of citizenship a lot of people would still have it so I would talk to people who you know would renounce you know their citizenship and say but you know but ask where they're from they would still go back to that and be like you know but my passport's just an ID it's not my identity before I move on to Brooke just a quick final question one of the most surprising empirical insights from from your book much of the cost in your book of countries offering uh these sort of citizenship programs are the what you'd expect Caribbean countries Vanuatu obviously a couple of European countries like Malta and then the recent story is turkey which has become a global leader quite simply overnight over the last four or five years you can say a couple of things that's so counter-intuitive yeah it's absolutely fascinating the Turkish Story I mean part of it was well they started the program it was aimed at real estate but it was priced way too high it was a million dollars which you know you could get citizenship in an EU country for a million so they dropped it down to 250 000 which is you know and all you have to do is buy a nice house in Istanbul or on the on the coast it's in a region where there's a lot of conflict so a Turkish passport you don't get visa-free access to the EU you don't get visa-free you know but it's better than a Syrian passport it's better than an Iranian passport better than Iraqi passport and so they were getting that sort of demand what's interesting too though in terms of the geopolitics of it is slightly different because turkey is a big country not like you know it has yeah it has more than a million people even in some neighborhoods of Islam and so um the geopolitics are quite different so most of the countries the microstates fell into fall into line with U.S state Department demands and so if the U.S will have blacklists or sanctions list and say okay you can't do these people we'll still give visas to Russian citizens but you can't naturalize them and the countries Fall in the line but not turkey so turkey will still naturalize Russian citizens right now which is part of the reason you know initially they had big demand from the Middle East a place of big conflict and now they've got a lot of people they can also fly fly into Istanbul as well as well it's half the market thank you Brooke if I can start with a question that you've been asked many many times Brooke is you know the most noted expert on wealth management you actually became a wealth manager you actually trained as a wealth manager uh as it were to infiltrate this professional Community I guess that's putting it to too bluntly but uh tell us about it and how you did it and what you think that brought to your to your scholarship well for many years I had wanted to study the world of the ultra wealthy and I knew from growing up around people who were ultra wealthy that they didn't manage their own money that they outsourced that just like they outsourced the care of their homes and their children and their cars and everything else um so one day I realized that I didn't actually need to talk to Rich people and it would sort of be beside the point for what I wanted to know about which was like Christian inequality like like makes the rich get richer and the poor get poorer it's not the rich people themselves they're just the beneficiaries of the work of others um and the others in this case are these professional wealth managers who describe themselves as a combination of attorney accountant and psychologist several of the people I spoke to describe themselves as social workers for the rich because there's so many socio-emotional issues wrapped up in a family fortune and that's where all the threats come from it's not so much from business dealings it ends up being from oh you know the cousin Bob's bad cocaine habit or a daughter's habit of you know marrying narrative Wells who want to steal her inheritance that all becomes the problem of the wealth manager and one day I got a fellowship to for what I thought was nine months to go work at the Max Planck Institute for the study of societies in Cologne and I was only supposed to be there nine months but the director of The Institute had just published a book of his own on wealth so he was interested in what I was interested in plus he had a budget of 2 million euros a year that he could sprinkle like fairy dust on anyone who wrote him a half plausible three or four page memo any of you here ever submitted a real Grant application it's not two three pages it's like 40 pages of just dense and Target Pros so the idea of being able to access huge pots of money basically at the whim of one guy if you just sort of keep him interested with a short memo I mean these sort of opportunities do not come along very often and I was younger and single and didn't have a kid and so I got the money from him to go to wealth manager training school which was kind of like getting an MBA it's quite expensive and I knew it was going to cost me two years of my life so basically I cut my ties to my home back in the U.S naively thinking well anytime I want I can go back and get a job in the U.S hahaha because I didn't see the financial crisis coming which shut down hiring for about a decade hence my years at the Copenhagen Business School but anyways Max Planck Institute footed the bill for me to go to this very expensive MBA slash law school-like program to train to be a wealth manager and it was hard like I worked it was I came in there thinking yeah I've got a PhD how hard can this be accounting for rich people is really hard trust that was sort of fun offshore corporations that was sort of fun Financial investment I could hack it but the accounting nearly got me anyways there were five courses took me two years graduated but what it got me really in addition to learning the lingo and getting me face to face with people who would never in a million years talk to someone like me got me entree to those professional Society meetings because unlike the people who sell passports of convenience wealth managers don't just let anybody off the street into their into their professional Society meetings you have to have the credential or be studying for the credential so that turned out to be a very valuable source of data so I did that for about eight years got the credential ran all over the world to 18 offshore centers interviewing wealth managers at work eavesdropping on their professional Society meetings where they would yuck it up about screwing over the poor wife in a oligarchs divorce it was like a recurring theme everywhere in the world um and of course they thumb their nose at the tax man wherever the tax man might be and that's that was the Genesis for my 2016 book but there was so much data from that that it's also now the Genesis of a new book whose manuscript I just turned into W.W Norton on the first of this month right all right uh did I answer your question go on tell us about the new book book was actually published about five months after the Panama paper so it was the best possible sort of seating of the ground PR campaign I could ever have asked for because until the Panama papers even people in my own field even the guy at the Max Planck Institute who dropped all that money on me he thought this is a very weird Niche thing to study but he was also funding people who studied the trade in rhino horns which is fascinating from an economic sociology point of view but very Niche and so I was off in the sort of the Rhino horn quarter of Sociology like weird probably very interesting to me but to no one else and then Kaboom world history intervened with the Panama papers in April 2016. my book comes out in August 2016 and like suddenly everyone knows what I've been doing and and why it actually matters but then the paradise papers happens in November 2017 the Pandora papers happen in October of 2020 and then the Russian invasion of Ukraine happens and all of a sudden everyone wants to talk about oligarchs close to Putin and how they are dodging sanctions on them and how they've been dodging sanctions for years in the run-up to this Invasion and suddenly wow all this stuff I learned about how to hide rich people's money offshore becomes relevant to the news and so this new book is about all that stuff that's happened since 2016 and a bunch of stuff I never got to say in capital Without Borders but always kind of wanted to write about fascinating I have two more questions for you but let me just keep to the wealth managers for a second um you've contended that it is essential not just to regulate but also sanction not just the clients of wealth managers but at least in some circumstances wealth managers themselves which your professional Guild must be unhappy with that with that sort of recommendation of yours but can you explain to us why you think that wealth managers should be liable in this way they would just argue their service providers that they haven't committed any crime that their sector is legal that the strategies that they're providing we we some of us may think of these strategies as immoral but their legal strategies for the most part um why is that not so well the Paradigm for what wealth managers do and why they should be subject at least to what you might call Export controls on the provision of of knowledge the Paradigm there is not criminal activity because you're right for the most part these folks are not involved in criminal activities maybe their clients are like they're they're coming in with money that comes from drug running or human trafficking or from looting their country in one or another criminal ways but the wealth managers themselves are usually able to do what they need to do without breaking any laws at least that's how the clever one's working there's a Chasm between formally and obviously legal and formally and obviously illegal and as Professor Huang here has admirably coined the phrase playing in the gray that's what wealth managers do they play in the gray and they expand the gray they have a lot of influence over like how the laws get made to to create their professional jurisdiction so the Paradigm and this is what Professor Alex Cooley here from Columbia from is it Columbia from the Harriman Center at Columbia University he and I published an article in foreign affairs back in October in which we talked about how the correct Paradigm to look at this is is the the National Security Paradigm because since just after the second World War there have always been export controls on the provision of very important knowledge so that say understanding of how to make nuclear weapons or biological weapons or chemical weapons doesn't get into the wrong hands so there are lots of experts who know how to do those things and they're subject to special laws at the the national level called export controls and you might think of export controls as having to do with physical objects but it also has to do with information um the UK last year at least tabled the idea of placing export controls on uk-based wealth managers the U.S has actually done it and I believe the the EU has considered it I'm not sure they've actually done it yet but basically what it says is you can be a wealth manager do your job it's fine you just can't work with sanctioned people so you're free to practice your profession you just can't work with these people that we specify because we have export controls on your form of knowledge just one question there last week we had a wonderful event here with on a sort of related issues and one of the uh matches that were raised was that a lot of practices are becoming less and less acceptable even if they're not yet regulated they're becoming less acceptable in oecd Financial Centers and therefore they're migrating to Financial Centers such as for instance Dubai Singapore but the service providers are exactly the same magic circle law firms the same Western Banks the same wealth managers they just do it out of different jurisdictions with with what you've just described capture the truly Global character of this phenomenon or would they just migrate elsewhere would they just sort of take their skills to a more permissive context yes so this is sort of like any other practice that becomes morally condemned it heads off to the periphery but if you keep pressing then pretty soon the the amount of periphery available in which to hide gets smaller and smaller and it's no longer worth trying to hide in it one of the things I found Most Fascinating in the aftermath of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine was that suddenly this thing that we had been told for decades was not possible became possible which is coordination among the leading offshore Financial Centers of the world to basically out their Russian oligarch clients suddenly you have Switzerland Monaco little Monaco the US the EU the UK Singapore biting the hand that fed them by saying okay Russian oligarchs be gone scattered to the wind we don't want you anymore and losing a ton of money in the process now if you follow matters offshore you know like this is the most economically irrational thing they could possibly do because what they trafficking ultimately is secrecy so once you say hey these people are our clients and we we repudiate them to protect ourselves that's massive and in fact Professor Cooley here and I were writing about how a major form of sanctioning was not of the legal kind you know one that would come with financial or or prison type penalties it was a status penalty by saying you know you can't sit at the cool kids table anymore you can't you can't exist in polite Society anymore no one decent will be seen with you and you might think oh Poo you know who cares they care so much probably the most surprising thing I learned in all 15 years of studying the offshore Financial world was how thin-skinned rich people are so imagine yourself as like a gawky middle schooler I mean assuming some of you were like me in cocky middle schoolers and being like rejected by all your friends except you have billions of dollars to throw a gigantic tantrum about it and make everybody pay that's that's what you can do as a as a Russian or other now oligarch from anywhere it's one reason they can afford to be so litigious why they throw their money away trying to sue people into Oblivion for saying bad words about them Brooke one final question and it's a sprawling one before we move on to to Kimberly um the question is you've just described the problem why are governments doing why aren't they doing more to stop abusers of the offshore Financial system the diagnosis is out a lot of things we didn't quite understand 20 25 years ago when this system was already in existence had already matured now your work the work of the panelists Alex Cooley Ronan Palin in the audience we now know what's missing here and perhaps I'm striking a note that is less optimistic than what was implicit in what you said because at least in the UK it's not systemic reform it's a targeted anti-russian Vendetta which is very conspicuously living living all the other oligarchs in place and the industries themselves PR accountancy the law firms the banks they remain unscated so why isn't this moving even more radically towards some form of global regulation that's the question again the short answer to a very sprawling very multi-clause question I can boil it down to four words one of the words is conflict no five words conflict of interest and the other is count I'm sorry I'm jet lag six words conflict of interest and Collective action problem I'm not sure how social scientific this audience is obviously everyone understands what a conflict of interest is that just means that many of the people who are actually empowered to change the laws that would limit or constrain offshore activity are themselves beneficiaries of offshore activity um this country's former prime minister showed up in the Panama papers right after wagging his finger at at boy bands who were incorporating in Ireland to avoid British taxes remember that um almost every country in the world has an example of that a political leader particularly the the anti-corruption politicians seem to be the ones who always end up in one of the offshore leagues um [Music] and then uh in the Pandora papers a fellow named Andre babish who was their their I forget it was a president or prime minister he came into office as Mr populist anti-corruption campaigner and guess who was not only dodging his taxes but money laundering and using the proceeds to buy himself not one but two but several Villas in the south of France nice work if you can get it so conflict of interest there's also a collective action problem in that uh putting in stop to the offshore Financial system doesn't happen with one country acting or two countries acting or ten countries acting it requires something pretty close to unanimity at least among the the worst offenders or the most popular offshore Havens but why should they cooperate when they can make so much money from defecting I don't know if that language makes sense to you but there's this thing called the prisoner's dilemma where you have to decide under duress whether to cooperate or not cooperate not cooperating is called defecting looking out for number one so my country the United States famously did this with the oecd's most recent the CRT CRS the common reporting standard so I was at this oecd event and I think 2017 where Pascal santomo the the tsar of anti-corruption anti-tax evasion stood up and proudly said we are going to put an end to Offshore tax evasion by private wealth and I was like I hate to break it to you man but I don't think you're gonna do that and sure enough it doesn't work because the United States which is of course a member of the 38 Nation oecd refused to sign on to the common reporting standard and they knowingly did this because it meant that all the rich people who don't want to have to report the assets they're keeping in secretive trusts and so forth they would just pick up their money from the countries that did sign on to the CRS and take it over to the United States where it could remain secret and that is exactly what happened and the United States just got you know marginally richer because of that so that's why there's there's too much money from available if you just say naughty naughty to other countries that are involved in the offshore system but you don't clean up your own Act thank you Brooke Kimberly let me start by asking you how did in spiderweb capitalism your your new book how did you uncover your short world great well thank you for having me here I I kind of wish I went after Brooke because I I think I might end us on a more pessimistic note than her um but I I uncovered it by accident I was very interested in Southeast Asia and interested in the question of how Western investors and East Asian investors compete when they're constrained by different laws that govern their activities abroad so the basic U.S investors are constrained by the foreign car Practices Act investors coming from other countries their governments don't have similar laws and to the extent they do they're not really enforced and I started in Vietnam in Myanmar and as I got there had been I think similar to Brooke had a very hard time getting access to people that my methods are ethnographic and interview based and it wasn't until I was I started as an assistant professor at Boston College and nobody wanted to talk to me then I moved to the University of Chicago that's espouses free market economics and suddenly all the doors opened and um and so while I was there I realized that a lot of the Investments going into these two markets were not uh on Shore they were sitting offshore in other jurisdictions so BVI Hong Kong Singapore and then I so I decided okay I'll take the information of their lawyers and accountants and Company secretaries who set up these structures in that version of offshore and go to Hong Kong and Singapore and realize those are just subsidiaries of British Virgin Islands Panama Seychelles Samoa and so it really kind I I fell into it and never considered myself an offshore expert at the time or I was not interested in any of these questions and sort of then found this group of amazing Scholars along the way and if you could tell us a little bit about your methods um how that you actually ended up using to approach this question in the book and how you think those methods add to our understanding of the phenomenon you're interested in I'm specifically thinking in terms of Chris Kristen mentioned both her work in trade conferences and her large and quantitative work of course um there's the Deep Cover work that Brook engaged in where would you situate your your research so I traveled over 350 000 miles with people as they were raising Capital around the world and then sourcing deals to deploy that capital in really remote corners of the world places that often are not marked on maps or that are military controlled zones and so I had a very hard time getting access initially I started by working as an assistant to a CEO of a asset management firm but and that was great access at the beginning and I learned a lot about what happens in the front office versus the back office where the front office are relationship people and the back office figures out how to execute execute on deals and that's where kind of like broken didn't go through formal training but learn a lot of the financial language figured out the right questions to ask it kind of was a I guess live training but because I'm a US citizen and because I'm constrained by the foreign crore Practices Act it turned out that I could not sit in on meetings or witness deals because that would implicate me in criminal activity so after Consulting with the lawyers the University of Chicago and some of the lawyers inside of the firms I decided to remove myself from that firm and I also signed an NDA so I just decided that it was it wasn't a non-disclosure agreement which basically a number of academics do this where essentially Pharmacy I could say a whole thing about pharmaceutical Industries where they don't publish negative results they you agree that they can that the work before it gets published so they're proprietary data I mean this is going into a whole thing about proprietary data access and I don't want to go down that rabbit hole but the essential thing was that I removed myself from inside the firms but then used the relationships um and network that I built to start to interview a broader set of people and actually what I I think in the end it was serendipitous because I sacrificed um depth but got enormous and tremendous breath so I would so the way that I did it is I traveled with people instead of sitting out in meetings I went I went with them to breakfast had lunch afterwards had dinner and asked them to recount what happened and so what they said to me didn't implicate me um and so that's those were the method I would also say that it's very rare to be on a panel of women in this I was just I just did a talk yesterday at the Harvard Law School and it was all men it was the only woman and I just was thinking oh how nice it's very nice but as a woman doing this research most of my I had 13 undergraduate research assistants five were with me in the field most were young men studying economics and or public policy and people often thought I was a student and the my student was the professor but it was a deeply I would say humiliating experience because I got yelled at you know screamed out who do you think you are or what business do you have here all kinds of sexist things you can imagine so at the time of doing the field work it was I would say quite traumatic I often got on planes I didn't know where it was going um we we would land in some places and then there would be a caravan of cars that would pick us up and we would drive four hours and I would think oh my gosh why am I sleeping tonight with this Entourage of mostly men and so I was not single I was married but I didn't have a child and now that I have a child I think about these things differently um but that but at this well that was tremendously challenging it was also enormously helpful because I was non-threatening and got people to say and reveal a lot of things that I don't think they would have otherwise talked about and so yeah yeah Brooke wanted to come in there on the methods front Brew a sort of Symposium just about methodology I don't know what what your experience was like you said you're your data access issues weren't so intense but um yeah I think getting on planes with strangers to destinations unknown is that's pretty Intrepid don't you think I think Kristen you were slightly underselling it because I read your methodological appendix which is very very very nuanced and there's there's more to it yeah I did it I did do field work in an auto parts shop where they had all the government files of the you know Foundation of Saint Kitts in the back room but I think it but it's interesting the gender the way gender works in the field in all of this sometimes it can be useful and sometimes it can be a liability and to offer a Counterpoint or an elaboration of what you were talking about the sort of humiliation of being assumed to be subordinate or stupid or whatever is anyone here old enough to remember the TV show Colombo so if you don't um Peter Falk played this bumbling detective and his whole shtick was to basically play dumb so uh part of me was incensed at being patronized and treated to sexist language and all these things but another part of me was like oh this is going to yield the best data this is awesome so I just was like I went into Colombo mode and I was like oh uh-huh you know please explain my field to me or you know please scold me for being a Marxist I got I got that a whole bunch threatens with various forms of bodily harm you know we're gonna get you a young lady I was like oh uh-huh tell me more scribble scribble scribble and honest to goodness it provided fantastic data but you know what one of the most um provocative unintentionally provocative things that yielded great data and in a weird way I think just us being women in a male dominated field like Finance or sort of the Arbitrage of wealth to escape the nation-state system um that's what sociologists from the late 60s would call a breaching experiment that's an old tradition where sociologists would have their students go do things that were non-normative socially like one of the great ones this was by Howard garfinkel at I think it was University of UCLA late 60s he would tell his students go home and act with your parents as if you're a guest in their home be super polite and see what they do and of course the parents liked it but they were disoriented like you know who are you you can gather data through breaching experiments by violating social norms so being female in a male-dominated space or being a person of color in a white dominated space is an a breaching experiment by definition I had white skin privilege but you know what I was doing I was toting an infant around and a breast pump going into these places because I'd asked one of my cousins was a psychiatrist and I had to go out and do some field research and I said to him look should I leave my my newborn baby home with my mother while I go to to you know Shanghai for two weeks he said I wouldn't do that because babies don't understand time and if you leave the baby's gonna think that you died and that could be traumatic later on so just take the baby I was like okay so if you really want to do a breaching experiment show up in professional Financial male spaces with a baby in a breast pump and like see how people react everyone is very polite nobody said boo to me but I think they just thought I was brainless or something but that was great because as long as I could keep my own ego in check and not react to it they just spilled their guts right in front of me because I thought I was too stupid to understand or you know that you know like they were talking in front of a rabbit or something something and the rabbit was taking notes Kimberly um just to go back so some of the experiences you mentioned are quite Intrepid thinking place to Nowhere at the same time you underline the word mundane much of what goes on especially in the context of these professional communities is rather run of the mill these are professional routines can you tell us a little bit about the mundane sure I think that was the part of the work that I found Most Fascinating so um I interviewed asset managers wealth managers lawyers accountants company secretaries fixers public relations agents and one of the things that they would highlight and this is 2016 2017 when I was doing the field work so the Panama papers had exploded they would say you know people like they in Southeast Asia the big case was 1mdb and they would say which was the Malaysian software and wealth fund and they would say oh you know one MDB all those cases like yeah they're very big they're high profile in the media but this is everyday business and if you the the the phrase at the time was like pay attention to the small fish not the big whales and when you pay attention to the small fish you realize that this is far more mundane than we're paying attention to and they operate with a strategy of satisficing which is to lay low and stay small quote unquote and part of this is in a region where um there's a high risk of you know being charged on charges of corruption when a new person is elected into office they kind of let their you know we were seeing this now their underlings go on charge the corruption and they put in new people I'm sorry I'm probably I'm a little bit jet lagged and I'm thinking in Vietnamese right now but the the Vietnamese frame is like little soldier your new soldiers in in place right and so I it made me rethink what I see as charges of corruption in the media is it a political takedown or is it real charges of corruption if why if corruption is widespread um and so you know this sorry I've lost my train of thought the question again that where was I going about the um how what was the question Monday Monday is right and so what I what I I think this is where I would differ from Brook slightly and where I'm a little bit more pessimistic is that um in the book I differ so I theorized spider web capitalism this is a structure it's a 3D web it's kind of a maze it can be built in all different directions no structure no offshore structure is the same so I I have two chapters chapter one and chapter five of the book where I outline like one person says you know maybe he has 25 different offshore vehicles are all connected in different subsidiaries to one another and part of why I did so many interviews was because at the time Jason Sharman and crew were doing work experimental work on offshore and what they found was that the structures were largely very similar and I just thought I must be not interviewing the right people what we do in athletic is try to reach a point of saturation I kept going kept going until I hit 300 I realized I'm just telling a different story none of these structures are the same and in fact they're purposefully different in order to obfuscate each vehicle from one another and so in the story of spider web capitalism as a sociologist I I theorize it as a Social Web they're these communal spiders that are feasting together and there's dominant spiders which are the ultra high net worth individuals and subordinate spiders who are the high net worth individuals or highly compensated Financial professionals who carry out the footwork and there I would include many of these wealth managers and in my way of articulating it the wealth managers and the high net worth individuals Bear all of the criminal and reputational risks for carrying out this work on behalf of the ultra high net worth individuals and so we can prosecute them and if we look at the case of 1mdb the big I the people that they compare themselves to is Timothy um what's the guy's name who's married to Kimora Lee Simmons uh no the new husband he's the Goldman Sachs executive um why am I blinking on his name anyways there was a Goldman Sachs executive who was head of the Southeast Asian desk who was who was basically the fall person for one MDB and they see themselves as a similar type of fall person like Joe Lowe is not in jail and none of the Goldman Sachs executives are in jail but the people who bear that the the brunt of this are those that are whose names are there and so the other thing I would say that I think just because I know I'm going on now that ethnography adds to this is that when you go into the icij database what economists have done a great job at is giving us beautiful Network maps of offshore structures how they may be connected to one another the density but we don't know anything about what connects two nodes in a network or the substantive material that flows between Within These networks or how totally opaque networks are connected to one another disparate networks are connected to one another and what ethnography reveals are the strategies the material how much money is there what is this vehicle actually used for um and that I think this is where the ethnography reveals a lot about sort of the material substance that flows between two nodes in a network or how disparate networks are connected to one another thank you Kimberly I have one final question and it will open we'll open the floor to questions from from the audience and the question is the perhaps the contradiction between this mundane Dimension that you emphasized and the sheer inventiveness Innovative spirit I would say even Talent some of my best students ended up in wealth management that it requires to as you call it plain the gray how do we square that display in the gray is not just 40 and uh processing of same tactics there's a lot of improvisation and a lot of technical knowledge is the way that you're successful in this market is that you play in the gray what does it mean to play in the gray you're front running the law you're getting ahead of the regulatory system you take things that are regulated now regulated in developed economies and just replicating them in less developed economies where the state doesn't have the capacity to regulate the or govern those activities but it also is flirting in this space between what's legal and illegal and and for many of the people that I studied it's choosing the legal jurisdiction that governs our financial activities and so what they would articulate is that so as a sociologist I'm very interested in the people and so I moved the story moved from a macro of like laying out the web and articulating the strategies for how the web gets built which is playing in the gray but then it also zooms into the people and and the their moral regimes of justification so oftentimes people would say sure this is legal but it's morally reprehensible and while I can understand that it's morally reprehensible I'm just a cog in the system I can't change the system and what I think is challenging about you know to answer your question is that the University of Chicago 40 of our students go into finance and work in many of these firms and in fact at the time they were working as my research assistants getting paid five thousand dollars for the summer to be with me the firms that we were where we were interviewing were recruiting them for summer internships for sixteen to twenty thousand dollars I mean just the multiples are hugely different and what I find in my own students and where I have some sympathy is often it's the students who come from working class backgrounds who don't feel like they have the choice to go into creative work or do work of their you know think about work as a regulator is that enter into sort of low-level Finance positions hoping that they'll rise up um and actually now that I've been there for eight years a number of them have but I think the Big Challenge is that the private sector is just a brain drain from the public sector because the salary scales are so vastly different these days you know my husband was up for I shouldn't say this on camera but there was we were contemplating public office and at a low level and I just thought even at that like the the salary it's a it's a sacrifice and um you know I had spoke to a number of people we talk about the in the United States the revolving door of people who go between finance and the public sector and part of the why that's the case is that it just doesn't pay enough um and so there is this kind of brain drain and you take the smartest the best and brightest phds to make the billionaires wealthier by figuring out how to calculate how to put together an algorithm that's going to move a trade that one millisecond faster and so um I think that that is a challenge and I would also just lastly add that if we shift the perspective going back to what Brook said and I don't want to end on a pessimistic note but I I'm I'm less optimistic that we will get to a place a regulating offshore structures because if you if you start from the lens of less developed economies it's basically basically akin to asking The Regulators to regulate themselves if there's if it's kind of known in Southeast Asia that state officials have fixers who are getting percent deals of shares and offshore structures then they're not going to regulate these activities and I think that under the Obama Administration with the trans-pacific trade partnership one of the big things that they said was that you you know we need to form this trade partnership so that otherwise you know weak States I.E China are gonna they're gonna write weak rules of the road undermining U.S leadership in Asia and the reality of it is with the rise of billionaires not just in China and Russia in the Middle East but also in Southeast Asia the United States can't compete anymore that's the story of Asian ascendancy and Western Decline and so this idea that they're going to cooperate just doesn't really make a lot of sense and then if I would the last thing I would say is if we ship the lens back to the U.S Delaware is the largest offshore for many non-us citizens and President Biden who's a Democrat hails from Delaware and if he can't unlock those offshore structures in Delaware I feel very pessimistic thank you Kimberly and Tristan and Brooke for three amazing contributions to this to this debate and I'm just going to open the floor uh please when introduce yourselves and keep the questions relatively brief so we can get as many of you as possible thank you um great great talk all of you um I'm Matt Reynolds from the LLC and Saints apartment as Kristin um so one of my favorite things about um Brooke's book is her description of the habitus of the professionals and the pocket watches and the kind of British style and I'm wondering question to Kimberly and Kristen what kind of characters and performances appeared in your ethnographies thank you if you need a minute yeah yeah go first I might need a minute yeah so it's something as an ethnographer I was very cognizant of um one of the ways in which people paid bribes were through high and they talk about this in my book were highly sophisticated ways I I naively asked I'm Vietnamese American would ask this question my American side would come like how do you pay it do you just give red envelopes and I realized that was such a dumb question at the time and they would say no it's there's a there's a highly intimate form of gift giving and this comes in the form of Rolex watches Hermes handbags art so I think Art Basel Hong Kong is very much pumped up and props up by these kinds of transactions but they are so if you know anything about these I've learned a ton about these watches and Handbags um you can't walk into an erme store and purchase a Birkin or Kelly bag you have to develop a relationship with a sales associate by buying a whole bunch of other things and there's tons of articles about the ratio spends Home Goods jewelry you know Etc before you're offered the bag and when you're offered the bag you're not you can't you have no choice in the color of the leather or the type of leather it could be alligator or snake lizard matte alligator shiny alligator okay I obviously learned a lot about these for Rolex watches now nobody you could walk into a store and try right now you can't it used to be the case that you have to have a relationship for the you know um the Daytona right that was a coveted watch what you do is you buy starter watches to get offered those watches so it throws up the secondary market and what happens is in these highly intimate gift-giving practices they have a whole story of red is the lucky red is the color of Asia green is The Color of Money purple is your wife's favorite color you know here's this gift and then there's a secondary Market in Hong Kong and Singapore where you could immediately their stores of value trade them for cash right away and for much more because the secondary Market is so high and so and then it used to be um you know Johnny Black whiskey and then it turned into this whole thing of Japanese whiskey and so I think that that kind of world of consumption is something that I was really immersed into I would just want to say one thing and if this is not in my book I'm thinking it might be a throw-off article they don't pay for any of it so my habitues changed a great deal um first of all they don't pay for any of it because if you get one of these birken bags you can basically sell it for triple what the retail is and then over time essentially the stuff becomes free I mean it's it's really crazy to do the math on this but it it has investment value I mean the return on investment is huge and there's tons of articles on that but the other thing is as an academic I wasn't dressed appropriately for a lot of these things and so many of these people own franchises to high-end luxury and they completely transformed my whole wardrobe and um I kept all of it the wives hand me downs but also I they were just like you're not dressed appropriately and then I would get to go in and purchase things at cost they're called rack rates so at cost and my whole wardrobe changed and for me coming from as a first generation you know college student then leader Professor it actually fit the University of Chicago so it kind of it was a coming of age but I learned a tremendous amount as an outsider going in and being essentially adorned by them yeah unfortunately I didn't get to interact with the sorts of people who redid my wardrobe which is our second-hand stuff but usually from you know charity shops in London um but but instead I did get to go to you know some of these events are quite interesting it wasn't just events I also went to a lot of countries so there were both sides of that um but you get you know there can be this wonderful the you know sort of imaginative libertarian rhetoric and people who believe that we should be free of all of this and you know one one event I would go to they would have a big hot air balloon with passports all around it and you know geodesic domes built on you know coasts and different places and flying in people with helicopters I learned in Monaco there's an Uber topper if you yeah you can in Monaco if you look up Uber there's also a helicopter version um that comes up yeah that was one of the things yeah you know traffic um but also going to the different countries as well it was interesting in the Caribbean you know it's been a you know kind of a hot spot for these sorts of programs there's five countries with that countries do compete against each other but they know all know each other too so think about habitus and that kind of form of interaction it's it's interesting in thinking about the countries that you know where this is a big part of even GDP 20 50 or so get massive and so you get it often in these places the countries themselves there um will have large immigrant populations London New York Miami there's a lot of inter-caribbean Mobility as well there's free movement within the Caribbean and then there's also you you know there's large Syrian populations fourth generation Lebanese populations fourth generation um you know people of Indian descent as as well as people of um you know whose family members are enslaved 150 you know years ago or so even even more than nearly 200 years ago now so you get often sort of in afro-caribbean middle class that's um you know really kind of the the in you know whatever the the lawyers or so who who are kind of behind it as well so it can be you know it's an interesting sort of demographic when I was in Vanuatu one of one of the key informants I had was um also a village Chief who had to richly sacrifice things occasionally and I was very fortunate to catcher because she was going to meet the Pope the next week and you get you know you kind of run into these characters you're thinking you know how does this work um but um but yeah I think um You probably you were better off I just want to add one thing to rip off of what you just said though I want to highlight the cultural dimension of this because I think that when I'm in the U.S or even in Western Europe labels can seem very gauche and loud and out there and when I'm in Asia China Hong Kong Singapore broader southeast Asia it's a sign of Asian ascendancy and it's a marker of that and many of them now are invited to Paris for fashion week and purchase a tremendous amount as a way of signaling right as the West is on decline they can't afford it and so so if there's a very it's there is a way of articulating it as kind of this Dynamic economy that they're on the rise and so it doesn't have the same kind of gauche feel to it in that setting that it does when I'm cognizant as I flip between these spaces flip around in these spaces I think it's ironic that uh European luxury items that are sold at very high price compared to their cost in fact it's a bit of a racket becomes symbols of Asian ascendancy or valued symbols of status and in East Asia um let's move on to other questions or unless did you want Brooke to add to that or no okay well I'm a bit of a civilian in this audience because my background is engineering and Engineering research and energy and combustion Etc but I had a question for you because you all discussed this issue of wealth management in the new systems where there's lots of sanctions Etc against for example Russian oligarchs and so on is there any evidence that that money is moving to areas where you know these things are weaker I mean you know thank you that's a good question this is links up to the sort of point I made earlier I think certainly in my own work I see a lot of money that used to go from sub-Saharan Africa that you should go to more familiar oecd or you know Crown Colony context going to a place like Dubai and Singapore Hong Kong more permissive jurisdictions or jurisdictions perceived as being more permissive right now but our experts will be able to address that Brook would you like to start yes so the answer the short answer to your question is yes but somewhat reluctantly because more permissive often also means less secure in terms of property rights so one of the reasons that the former British colonies are preeminent as offshore Financial Centers is because oligarchs from around the world it's not just that they like the British brand the way they might put on a Burberry trench coat they have they have a lot of use for the specific kinds of property protections and rule of law that the common law system can give them so for example there's a gentleman I believe lse named kojo Karam he just wrote a really interesting book called uncommon wealth in which he quotes a person is in The Wealth Management Field is saying well if you invest your money in the I think it's the BVI the British Virgin Islands it's as good as putting it in London because it's safe you know it's safe so yes you can skitter off to the periphery and the Shadows Dubai will give you more secrecy but you know it's an Emirate and so if the Emir takes a dislike to you you don't get the same protection to the rule of law that you might in in a more name brand offshore Center Christian or Kimberly you don't have to take all questions just in case you want to answer that yeah I was going to say everything that I've been hearing recently especially since the U.S sanctions against Russians suspend that Dubai has been through the roof in terms of Interest also in terms of a place to go so because I'm also looking at this issue of mobility in looking at the Golden Passport Global Mobility for millionaires what seems to be happening is that you know so Russians can go to Turkey they can go to um Dubai and all you need to do is get a Visa can get a digital Nomad Visa within a couple of weeks that can get you there then you can get a golden Visa in the UAE which they've now developed hugely popular and that this has really been you know people at people living in Dubai was speaking to recently were you know actually a number of people who live in Dubai was speaking to recently have all said it's really changed the landscape in terms of the way things are operating and I think that's right Christian and Dubai is an absolutist monarchy and it has a previous erratic behaviors precisely you know that showed the discretionary power not of the state but of just individuals who just take it as liking to you but in recent years things verging from their introduction of Freehold laws that allow you to buy your your your property and own it whatever that means to the expansion of the so-called Dubai International Financial Center which is not real Financial it's a legal Enclave that allows you to sign contracts that provides for international arbitration they're trying to make credible commitments but it's very much um you know it's it's difficult to mimic The credibility of a common law sort of British former Colony or whatever so it may lag me high but for the Russians it's all they have right now so we'll have to do difficult to build up over centuries but the the emir the Emirates in general are doing their darndest our question from our online audience um so Les online has asked a recent book by Andrea binder about offshore financing and state power identified the use of legitimate offshore financing by states with weak economies to access Finance does this use of legitimate offshore Finance also need to be controlled what I articulate in playing in The Grand that it is all that much of it is legitimate it's it's playing in the space of legal illegal activity but what makes it so mundane is in fact it's is the fact that most of this activity is legal and I think it it goes back to your question which is that smaller States or I would say weaker States who don't have strong institutions like legal institutions financial institutions often the only way that they can attract foreign investment into the country is by it are through offshore structures and so informally when you talk with people and I'm not going to quote anyone but it I just I let me just say this kind of as a matter of common sense it doesn't make sense for State officials to regulate offshore structures from less developed economies if their investors don't have faith in their legal or financial institutions to protect the inflow of capital and so this is why Singapore and Hong Kong exist and it's not just for illegal reasons or it's not just for purposes of hiding money but it is actually perfectly legitimate and that's that is precisely the craft of playing in the gray I could just tag onto there with a quick observation about what this means in terms of citizenship too because sometimes especially if you're in a in a country with a weak rule of law and you don't know it's actually you get more rights as a foreigner and so there are cases where people become for citizens of foreign countries so Cambodia Vietnam or whatever because you can be protected by International bilateral treaties you know International arbitration those sorts of things you get more rights as a foreigner than you would as a citizen which you know raises a lot of complicated questions about the nature of pathology that actually includes domestic citizens who decide to round trip their investment and come into their own economy as foreign investors to Avail themselves of at least some privileges that they wouldn't have as as local investors trip models were copied after China and India and other places so yeah could you introduce yourself um hi my name is I'm studying conflict and African politics are quite far away from what you do I have actually two questions about the impact of the Panama papers Pandora papers like the people you've been interacting with like with their scales did they have to adjust did they consider this as a serious threat for all their businesses or their activities that's my first question and also about the Panama papers Pandora papers these were released by uh consortiums of journalists right so in in terms of your own impact as opposed to what investigative journalists can can do how I mean do you work hand in hand with journalists um in terms of the um yeah social utility of of their work and again our journalist journalists ahead of you how do you situate yourself thank you and your affiliation is University of Kent yes I could answer that I think um the Panama papers so one thing in my book in chapter five of the book I I tell the story of this guy named will it's a pseudonym and he says to me yeah go look in the Panama papers there's nothing there's nothing none of the firms I control are there but what is there are his and he reveals this to me are his subsidiary companies that are onshore and the names of the three directorates of the people onshore and so again this is why I think going after the wealth managers is a little bit complicated because they are the people whose names are there but even with the names it's very difficult to get what's inside of the vehicle so great we know this person has 600 offshore companies what are they doing what's behind it how much money is in it what vehicles connected to what so I think in the for the mundane group of people that I study it doesn't feel as threatening and in fact the the response has been much more like yeah there there's a guy I quoted my book who says yeah Obama giving a speech at the White House like Welcome to the Real World all businesses are domiciled in one building and even KKR or Carlisle like the legitimate businesses in New York it's the same story and so this is where um I don't think that it has had the impact that one would hope with the explosion of these papers aside from the reputational risks to public figures um and or high profile individuals particularly government officials who are hypocrites in the system but for those that are in this kind of mundane space I don't think that it's been particularly threatening I don't you know I in when I published my book I decided to obfuscate the networks and take out I don't have the names of real companies or directors that you just get the structures because I didn't know what consequences could be I mean publishing just takes a long time and things have a new life once it's published but even then um there hasn't really been much concern the people I interviewed weren't scared at all they were angry um if you're interested in this I published an article in a journal called human relations back in 2018 in which you can you can read pissed off wealth managers complaining about how the Panama and Paradise papers made them look bad to their Social Circle so back to the subject of status it it shamed them as a profession and they felt that that was very unjust and undeserved and they had a variety I identified four different sort of moral rationales that they used to respond to this the changing framing of what is legitimate so back to the question that was posed online what about legitimate uses of offshore well the concept of legitimacy by definition is socially constructed it's sort of what sociologists study is like how it gets constructed this also addresses your question about how what we do is different from journalists I used to be a journalist so I feel like I have some foot in both worlds it is not a journalist's job to to talk about sort of these high-level conceptual issues the journalist's job is to report the facts and let the public who reach them draw their own conclusions you have to carve out for a minute the idea of the opinion section or the editorial section but that's not what a reporter is supposed to do other people do the editorials and the opinion pieces it's just the facts ma'am um what we do as sociologists or social scientists in general we're not supposed to tell people what to think but we're able to put things in a much broader context like here's this new thing the Panama papers what other things is this like that will help us understand what we're seeing here and what's true significance is so the concept of playing in the gray that is a useful concept a journalist would never produce something like that because it's not their job and they don't have the Leisure to sort of step back and take the view from 30 000 that's our job to say oh this there are lots of things you could look at as playing in the gray and they're not just offshore Finance so you can connect the dots to multiple phenomena and see the big picture that they form yeah I get I get called up by journalists quite a lot who they're generally going for the big sexy story that's going to be you know headline piece and it's you know somebody's really bad who's gotten citizenship by investment basically and and there's cases of that for sure but for me I I want to know it's very similar to um what both of you are described I want to know how this Market Works how is it that citizenship can be a commodity how does that work how is that possible when The Sovereign is some you know the rule maker and the sole producer how do you trust what's going on in that market what's going on behind demand how is it what is this whole web of intermediaries most of it you know you go up and you want to invest in citizenship in some country you think you're dealing with one person and you don't know there's probably actually at least four or five different you know companies with different carve outs doing you know stuff journalists don't care about that they want they want the Jolo 1mdb story um and so I think in trying to understand and what's I think interesting also from the sociological perspective when you do that 30 000 feet overview you also about the way the world works today and the journalists are also not going to give you that either you know one thing I want to add that I just um riffing off of what Kristen said is that academics operate differently in that journalist often cite their sources and name names of people and academics can interview a large number of people and offer anonymity as a way of trying to understand a phenomenon so I'll give you one example that just came up in the New York Times yesterday there's this great story of super fake Handbags and if you're very interested in this there's this New York Times journalist who went through the process of buying procuring super fake handbags to try to tell the story about how secondary the secondary resellers can't even tell the difference and and in fact sales associates in those stores can't tell the difference and she has this whole thing so she's sews through if they're Manufacturing in China and they're shipped from somewhere else and she goes to well one consequence of that is now a bunch of people have reported her for engaged being engaged in illegal activity for trafficking Goods across illegal Goods into across borders right and so there's been this whole Reddit thread of people basically reporting her whereas an academic would say if we're really interested in understanding this phenomenon but we don't want to put any of the people that are telling us these stories at risk for the sake of knowledge and expanding our understanding anonymity means something and there's big debates in Academia right now about data transparency and replication and you know particularly assault on ethnography but even on quantitative work that we can have a discussion about but I think that's one sort of difference I would say between academics and journalists thank you I think we have time for one more question unless there's another one and we can wrap them together or no that's it hi thank you so much for this talk it's been so interesting um and I just wanted to riff off of what you guys were saying about motivation and how that differed to journalists maybe I wanted to ask whether your motivations were primarily kind of under that understanding or that impact I mean it's I have the sense that it's mostly understanding but is impact also at the Forefront and how do you kind of it seems to me that maybe journalists are more interested in Impact but then their spaces are different to yours and I'm just wondering how how those things interact uh for for you all that's a good point I do think it I think that especially in the UK where the language of impact is used at universities all the time you have to be impactful but I think you're right that in terms of impact it's quite different so a lot of the journalists um I encounter want to are are working very closely with um big Supernatural organizations or certain governments or whatever in order to I'm trying to get a political gender across whereas I think in terms of the sort of impact I've I've done and can do it's more in understanding how this works if you're going to regulate it then you need to know how things work on the ground otherwise your regulations are not going to work and because especially what I do it's it's been very so hyper politicized because people have very sentimental Notions about um citizenship and these sorts of things um so so that it's I think that does give some of the it's not to say that there aren't a lot of issues but that that gets wrapped into it as well as it's a sexy policy thing to wave European values are not for sale and you're kind of like what does that mean I don't but if you're going to regulate then know what's going on don't go in with your you know assumptions about the way the world works in the first place and I think that's what academics can do as well I I really appreciate your question and I I'm not in the UK and so I don't know what impact means in this so I will just go um sort of the what motivation and I think that one of the things that constrains journalists and I I deeply respect their work and I think in many ways they are ahead of academics I am thinking of nori params who hope has all of the stuff on quantitative easing and looking at the role of central banks it's deeply historical really well thought out work um is that they are looking for a villain in a story and when you are doing a quick you know expose there's a villain and I think that when I when I think of spider web capitalism one of the things that I struggled with a lot in trying to do a crossover trade book is that with a crossover trade book they want to follow a kind of journalistic you know practice which is okay these are the good guys these are the bad guys who do we go after and as an academic I think we have the luxury to step away and as Brooke said have this 30 000 foot View and as Kristen said really think about the systems and try to tell a story that's about systems which means that the policy impact is not one where you the question that I get a lot that I dislike the most is well what are the policy implications implications or how do we how can we fix this and the answer is it's a systemic problem that that crisscrosses multiple sovereigns that requires a kind of collective action that Brooke articulated which we don't have because we don't live in a world where nations are not in conflict with one another I mean as a daughter of Vietnamese refugees you know the Southeast Asian region is a region that the US Russia and China have been competing over for centuries and it's also a way in which they're raising Capital now right I mean that story of you know old age Minds that were there under British colonialism that can now be mined with new technologies right I mean this is this is the new frontier and so I think what I really hope we do as academics is to really paint a systemic story to try to get at this so my motivation as being a mother of a two-year-old daughter is really wanting to understand systems of inequality not just the consequences of inequality and to and to see myself as playing one very very small part of a larger group of people that are trying to attack this at multiple angles that there's no there's no villain just as there's no academic or journalist heroine in the story and we could talk about journalistic celebrity and academic celebrity but I don't think that that is my motivation Brooke you have the last word um I would like to examine the premises of your question for a moment one is that journalism is primarily about impact um one of the reasons I left journalism was because I I'd gone in thinking I'm going to make a difference in the world I'm gonna like show people the truth you know like Woodward and Bernstein and what I found was it was an industry that was becoming more and more of a tabloidesque you might say if it bleeds it leads I had a bureau chief at Associated Press who actually said to me with a straight face here we process the news it was like dude really that's what you think we're doing here and I realized that the the field that I thought I'd entered was not at all what I was expecting it was it was not about impact it was about um selling attention garnering attention and then selling it and of course you've seen this explode with social media and so forth it's sort of a PT barnumization of the news and I I couldn't engage in that so one of the dimensions I think has been missed in this discussion is the impact of like the financialization of everyday life the colonization of the life world by the business um the commercial uh institution the idea that everything should be reduced to Dollars and cents Academia is still a slightly sheltered place where you don't have to care if what you're doing is making money although I think especially in the UK with the ref system it's becoming less and less like that the the commercial logic is imposing itself more and more in academic work but here's what here's what it matters even as a journalist if you find a story that's going to have a lot of impact or you think it's important for people to know about it's not going to get published if it's not going to sell so you know the the JLo story that's a that's a people just eating kind of story that's tabloid-esque and yeah you kind of sneak some news in there DiCaprio be around the car that has a cast of Hollywood celebrities that you could yes yes so it the news it wrapped in a sugary wrapper of of salable easily digestible stuff so if you really want to know how things work you can't really be a journalist because nobody wants to spend the money on actual investigative journalism anymore I was invited by The Guardian newspaper the allegedly Lefty newspaper right to submit a column to they had a wealth column and I was going to write about sort of the the moral Corruption of elite philanthropy and they were like oh that's very nice but we can't publish that because we're funded by the Ford Foundation I'm like well this is exactly why I left so in my in my little Walled Garden it's not really an ivory Tower but like in in my little sheltered space where I don't have to be buffeted by the forces of the market where my undergraduates you know 20 21 year olds walking out of Dartmouth make more money than I do as a professor after 22 years but I'm okay with that because I get to ask the questions that I think are interesting and I get to investigate them in the way that I think is right and I get to write what I think is the truth not to say that I have any any kind of lock on the truth but I call them like I see them and nobody can tell me oh you can't publish that because it's not salable or the funder won't like it and that means a lot to me I'm willing to trade lifetime income for that thank you Brooke this has been a fascinating and inspirational panel I'm I'm delighted to have you here thank you so much for joining us [Applause]

Channel: Oxford Martin School

Views: 519

Keywords: oxfordmartin

Id: z2km-Mb7Y6o

Length: 91min 3sec (5463 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 14 2023