Will Brehm  0:30
Karen Mundy and Leonardo Garnier, welcome to FreshEd.

Leonardo Garnier  1:32
Hi, it’s a pleasure.

Karen Mundy  1:33
Thanks, Will.

Will Brehm  1:33
So, congratulations on your new pieces in IJED, quite a fascinating special issue when you go read it from cover to cover. I’ve invited both of you on today because I think you might complement each other a little bit as we take stock of the SDGs, sort of at the midpoint in their 15-year trajectory, let’s say. I guess, to start maybe Karen with particular attention to SDG 4, how would you start to characterize where we as a global community are today?

Karen Mundy  2:01
Well, I think we’re seriously off track. I mean, anybody reading the numbers will see that. We’re off track more in some parts of the world than in other parts of the world. And overall, if we look at the SDGs, which were very holistic in nature, you can see the rationale behind that; that we’re facing a world in which there’s lots of complexity and change and crisis happening all at once, and so we need educational systems that do more. The problem with a complex goal is that it becomes very hard to prioritize. And so, I think one of the arguments I make in the paper is that the SDG 4 goal really doesn’t have a prioritization rulebook. It is a lot of important things all mashed up together with no clarity about what is most important. And humans love that, right? It means you don’t have to make a decision, but it also is very problematic when you have limited resources.

Will Brehm  2:50
Leonardo, would you agree with Karen’s sort of general assessment of where we are with SDG 4?

Leonardo Garnier  2:55
Yeah, sure. When you say that SDG 4 is universal quality education, we are certainly far from that. And what I would add is that it’s a very unequal situation. There are countries which are much closer to that, and in other places, we are miles from that, and that inequality is what makes it so hard to achieve.

Will Brehm  3:12
To follow up, I mean, why would there be inequality in this, in terms of where different countries are in the progress towards reaching some of these goals or these indicators, I guess, within SDG 4?

Leonardo Garnier  3:24
Well, basically, the amount of resources that different countries are able to direct to education is very, very different. And we look at education as a national responsibility, not as a global responsibility. And we listen about the discussion on climate change it is a global discussion, but education depends on national governments, and there you find huge distances between what some countries invest in and others, and also differences within countries is also very unequal.

Karen Mundy  3:48
I mean, to give a kind of more sort of visceral example, if you think about a low-income country context where the median expenditure per child is $56 and a high-income context where the median expenditure per child is $8,515 you can see how stark the disparities are. Now, you’re going to hear some people say that it’s all about the efficiency of spending -do more with less. But actually, we now know because there’s been great re analysis shows us that how much you spend is germane to what you can accomplish. That isn’t to say that for every $100 you could spend it better or worse, yes, but you gotta have some basics. Think about $54 US dollars per child for one year of education at any level. Think about that. I was rereading the Education Finance Report that UNESCO and the World Bank put out and when I saw that number, I thought, well, I’m quite sure that 20 years ago, when I started writing my doctoral thesis, that it was $8 per child in Sub Saharan Africa. So, how did we drop to $56 and strikingly, $56 median expenditure in those low-income countries, who’s paying for that difference, the cost to get value? It’s the households. It’s not donors. So, it’s a frightening world, actually. You know, as Leonardo said, the inequality is vast,

Leonardo Garnier  5:12
Absolutely. And when you look at the numbers, because one side of the problem is what Karen mentions, countries spending in average, $8,000 but in real fact, when you look at Finland, for example, they spend $20,000 per year per student, which is -but when you look at it globally, and the question is in terms of whether UNESCO and other UN institutions have said that we need, like, $100 billion to fill the gap, it sounds like impossible. They say, “No, that that’s too much money”. But in fact, when you compare that with the amount that the world invests in education, that’s really a small percentage. I mean, the world is investing like 6% of global GDP in education, and what we would need to have this $100 billion is 2% of that. So, if we could really make this into a global issue, it wouldn’t look that difficult. But of course, when you look at the numbers that Karen is mentioning, you say, “Okay, a country that is investing 50 or -those are the poorest. But even if you talk about the lower middle-income countries, they invest $300 per student a year, even if they doubled that, which would be a huge national effort, that wouldn’t be enough. So, I think that for the lower middle-income countries, you would need some kind of international support for that. But a real one, because we all the time here that international cooperation, this and that, and the truth is that it is not only far from what it was supposed to be, but it is decreasing, which is crazy.

Will Brehm  6:30
It’s really interesting looking at where we are with the SDGs from a financial issue, and about sort of this financing gap and some of the disparities between countries. It’s really interesting. And then bringing in households. I did a lot of work on Cambodia, where households spend so much more money than the government on education every year per child, which then, of course, maps perfectly onto the socioeconomic status of households more generally. So, it certainly causes problems. I guess the question is, what do you do about it, right? So, is international aid -you know, maybe that’s part of the answer, but it can’t be all of the answer. I don’t think there’s enough international aid to cover that financing gap. So, is it about issues of taxation?

Leonardo Garnier  7:11
Absolutely. In many of our countries, we live like this crazy world where people want to have schools as good as the Finnish schools and hospitals as good as the Netherlands, hospitals and roads as good as the US roads, but taxes as low as in Guatemala, which is the Latin American country with the lowest tax rate. So, those two things really don’t work together. If you want to have good public services, you need taxes. And then the discussion is okay, first, we have to agree that we need to pay taxes. And the second question, of course, is who should pay those taxes, which is obviously what makes this discussion very, very difficult, especially in a global world where capital is moving towards different places and pushing countries into this race to the bottom, where I don’t tax you and the other country doesn’t tax you, so nobody taxes the global corporations, and then we’re in trouble.

Karen Mundy  7:58
I think the whole idea of taxing -having some kind of national tax, some kind of surcharge on flights or other kinds of expenditures globally, I sort of thought, you don’t see anyone discuss it anymore, and yet it was a very, I thought, a very smart idea, especially, I think rational for global goods. So, climate, peace and conflict, and maybe education, where there are so many externalities beyond national borders. But I don’t know if Leonardo, you might be more up to date on that debate than I am.

Leonardo Garnier  8:28
Well, fortunately, at least now there’s people talking about this, especially since Piketty published his book. Then you have this young French economist talking about taxes, and suddenly, then Stiglitz starts talking about it. There is this foundation based in Columbia University talking about the need to tax the big corporations. But it’s not only the big corporations even though that’s very important. Talking from Costa Rica sometimes feel very strange when you talk with people, I mean university professors or people like yourself, and they say, “Oh, the rich, the 1% should pay taxes”. And we say, well, like the upper 30% should be paying taxes, because if we feel that it’s not our responsibility, then it becomes almost impossible. But yes, the upper half should finance education and other services for the lower half. And that should be politically easy, but it’s not.

Will Brehm  9:16
And it’s not politically easy at the domestic, national level. I mean, how do you even begin the conversation at a global level? Like, is there a conversation even happening in UNESCO? What’s the debates?

Leonardo Garnier  9:27
There is a conversation -yes. It started at the OECD, and they had this task force for defining some sort of global tax on corporations. They were speaking about a 15% tax. But there was a lot of pressure from the Global South to bring that discussion not to the OECD, but to the UN where the balance of votes are different, and that’s why the OECD countries don’t really like that balance. But this should be a discussion at the UN level. Basically, we should have this policy that says you cannot push countries to this race to the bottom strategy. And I mean, it even happens in Europe, when you see Ireland charging less to Apple, so that Apple declares all their profits in Ireland, and okay, that that shouldn’t be allowed. And then you have all these tax havens, which usually they mention the Caribbean, but you’ve had tax havens in England, and you have tax havens in the US. So, these companies are -it’s not that they pay in taxes in the developed world and not in the South. They don’t pay taxes.

Will Brehm  10:25
Exactly. There’s a great new book by Quinn Slobodian called Crack-Up Capitalism, which looks at the idea of the zone as these havens for capital, and they’ve just proliferated around the world. There’s thousands of these zones that just allow corporations to evade tax. Not only just evade tax, but get all sorts of preferential treatment from the state.

Karen Mundy  10:50
And it’s not just the corporations, it’s the individuals who are benefiting from the profits of those corporations. I mean, I think some of the proposals have been focused on a sort of financial transactions tax that actually gets underneath the corporations to the actual owners of the capital themselves. But I don’t know, we’ve created a world in which taxing personal wealth is also, well, I guess it’s always unpopular, but interestingly enough, the rich seem to find it unpopular, but so do the working class find it unpopular. And so, we have a real problem.

Leonardo Garnier  11:27
Yeah, fully agreed. And this is like a narrative that started in the late 70s with Reagan and Thatcher and suddenly the average citizen feels that taxing is bad for him or her. Well, the truth is that taxes are the only way that he or she could get decent public services in health or in education. And the problem here has to do with something Karen said earlier, is that then they propose different sorts of private services so that families could have a better education using private services. But that means two things. One, that Karen was saying, is that then poor people have to pay a lot of the cost of education. And the other is that you reproduce inequalities, because some of us can pay more than others, so then you have an educational system that does not integrate the different sectors of society, but rather differentiates the different sectors of society. Nothing reproduces inequality more than education.

Will Brehm  12:22
I mean and this is exactly what I looked at in Cambodia, where, you know, what are households spending all of their money on in education? It’s private tutoring. And who are the private tutors? They’re the public school teachers, right? It’s in effect, creating this -I think at one point, I called it a de facto tax system, because there is household money going into education, in public schools, it’s just not being channeled through the state, which then necessarily means it’s not being distributed equally. And it just does reproduce that inequality over and over again. And it’s just sort of staggering to see at that level, but then to recognize that it is a global issue that many nations are facing and looks differently in different nations, but the same general premise.

Karen Mundy  13:03
I think it maybe looks worse today than it might have done 15 years ago, and that is partly because of lack of trust. And so, if we don’t trust the governments, then of course, we won’t want to be taxed by those governments. And you can kind of see this wave of decline in trust in the public sector that is happening. I mean, I’ve been surprised how advanced this is becoming in Canada, especially in the post covid era. And in the EU and in North America, we are not moving towards a more progressive sort of advanced welfare state capitalism. That’s not where we’re going. We are barely holding on to the arrangements of the 60s and 70s now in terms of a welfare state.

Will Brehm  13:53
Karen, maybe this is where we can get into some of the focus of your article, which is about state capacity, because I think trust is connected in some ways to state capacity. You basically say that we, as researchers, really need to focus a lot more on issues of state capacity if we want to think about achieving the SDGs. So, what’s so important in your mind about state capacity?

Karen Mundy  14:13
Well, I mean, it’s a bit paradoxical in a way, because you think about state capacity and the way it’s been measured in international circles has always been around things like trust, ability to tax. These are all, of course, very important aspects of sort of structurally, does the state have capacity to lead? But what I actually wanted to draw attention to was the fact that we’ve had a paradigm about state capacity for many years that has focused on using certain kinds of structures to lead the bureaucrats within the state, and that mental model just doesn’t work that well. So, think about high stakes accountability, performance management, introducing incentives. They do something, but at the end of the day, we need our bureaucracies to be mission-driven, to be values driven, and to be learning. They need to learn to respond to what we know will be an ongoing set of crises. So, for that, you don’t need people just to comply; you need them to innovate and to engage. So, I think sometimes we’ve gotten stuck, especially when we think about SDG 4 in thinking, what are the prescribed ways we can make people do what we want? How can we make teachers come into the classroom more often? Okay, let’s put a camera. Not ask them, how can we make them better learners and better leaders? So, that really was the focus for the piece. I don’t want to disregard all those other definitions of state capacity -like ability to tax, like trust- I think those are all very, very valuable but I’m thinking more about how can states function effectively in contexts that are more and more complex and also where even in more simpler times, I think the use of professional judgment has been at the core of what makes public bureaucracies work. They are just implementing things. They are using judgment to decide what to implement, how to implement, when to implement, and who to engage in that implementation. It’s a big job, and we have to think of that capacity as an essential asset, essential requirement for achieving SDGs.

Will Brehm  16:31
Leonardo, you’ve obviously worked in government, in Costa Rica, probably many different levels. Does Karen, sort of insight -how does that resonate with your own experiences?

Leonardo Garnier  16:40
Very much so. Maybe two things. One is that there is this narrative that nothing that the government does is well done, which is completely false. And for example, if I’m talking from Costa Rica here, the best universities are the public universities, and those who cannot make it to the public universities, then have to find their way to private universities. But everybody agrees that the public one is the best. The same happens with health. The quality of the public hospital is really good. The problem is, and Karen mentioned it at the beginning, when you start falling into this argument that you’re spending too much, that you have to reduce expenditures, that you can do more with less. Of course, you should always take care of efficiency and don’t waste public money, don’t waste money that you put into education, but a good education is expensive. And everybody in the private sector knows that a good education is expensive. Why is it that in the public sector it shouldn’t be expensive. Or health is the same. The US example in health is, I think, one of the best examples of how not to do it. You have private health with the most expensive system in the world, and when you look at indicators like life expectancy, it’s lower than in Costa Rica. So, yeah, I think this is something we talked a lot about at the Transforming Education summit -to recognize that we must invest more in education. We must invest it more equitably, making sure that the money gets to those that really need it most, because sometimes it gets captured in the upper part of society, and we need to invest more efficiently. And what Karen was saying is, what are the right incentives? And sometimes we try to transplant incentives from the private to the public sector, and it doesn’t work in the same way. I sometimes worry when they say we should pay teachers according to the performance of their students. That’s crazy because the performance of students depends on so many things, not on what the teacher -I mean, when you’re a teacher, you know that one group is very good, and the other group is very bad. It would be crazy to see your wage reduced because you had a bad group. Of course, you have to have a good remuneration for teachers, but also you have to ask, what is it that gives meaning to teachers? When do they feel dignified? And one of the things that worries me very much about the times we are living in is that we have an increasing narrative of adults saying that youth are disrespectful. They don’t respect authority, this and that, which is funny, because every generation has said the same thing about the previous generation. And the point here is that, of course, in the world we are living, the old sources of authority for teachers are not there anymore. Having more information than your students, it’s gone. So, you don’t have authority because you know more -Google knows more. And the other source of authority was evaluation, punishment. You can’t give a bad grade to students, and that’s a kind of authority that it’s not really earned, it’s just imposed. So, the question now is, what is it that makes you respect a teacher? And the crazy thing here is that we all know, when we think about the teachers we had when we were kids, the ones that we respected were the ones that made the best questions, that made it interesting for you to look for some answer to something. They made you care about some social problem that you hadn’t thought about that before. Not the ones that were punishing you day and night.

Will Brehm  19:42
I mean, for me, I don’t remember fondly any assessment. Actually, when I think back on my childhood, I get anxious when I think about assessments that I had to go through as a child. You know, it’s not the teachers I remember. The teachers, I remember, are exactly what you’re saying. They made me love things I didn’t know I could love. It’s a very different approach. It’s not the change models from business. You don’t change through performance indicators or incentive. But I guess Karen, you know, you brought up this notion of mission, and that connects to the economist Mariana Mazzucato. She’s written Mission Economy, and she’s been going around the world working with different governments, and I think she’s even gone to a lot of international organizations. Do we see that language in the education space, sort of at the global architecture? Like in the UN, in the World Bank, do we see people talking about education through that lens of missions?

Karen Mundy  20:31
Well, I think we do. UNESCO, of course, embodies this approach of thinking about value-driven approaches to education. Even if I think UNESCO is a very scattered organization and its work is very diffuse. I still think it bears the hallmark -and actually that’s interesting, because it didn’t really start like that. It started more like here are the rules that the world should operate by, and here are the norms. And it’s moved towards a more greater focus on values and mission. But in governments, I think we have a different problem. So, you have huge systems. Educational systems are often the largest employer in the country. So, you have a huge conglomeration of people who do have to be managed or led, however you want to put it. However unattractive it is to think about public bureaucracies and managing and leading people -they have to be. So, how do you get the best out of that group of people? And I think what I wanted to point out to, is that you might not get the best by using material incentives, or high stakes accountability. And you might get better if you can create an environment in which there’s a sense of shared purpose. This is Mariana Mazzucato’s work, also Dan Honig’s work and in which you create a stronger foundation, a network where people problem solve at the base of the system. It’s not just that everybody up here solves all the problems. It’s every way along the system has to have a degree of agency and problem solving embedded. Now, in education, what we did was we said, okay, let’s decentralize the heck out of public systems, which has happened all over Africa. Decentralize it, and then you push responsibility and accountability down to that level. But do you really empower that level to do that kind of problem solving, to be innovative, to really translate national goals into local priorities. No. Basically, that rarely, if ever, happens. And of course, money doesn’t flow, or not enough money to make that a reality. So, I think we have a problem with our public bureaucracies, and you can’t really imagine the public having trust for systems. Would you really trust a teacher or a school leader who showed no ability to innovate and think outside the box. No, you really wouldn’t trust that, because how could they model learning for the kids? And I think it’s not to say that people don’t think and don’t try -they do, absolutely. And recent studies that we’ve been doing on this middle tier in education show us very much people struggle mightily to grab the bull by the horns, but the systems aren’t set up for that to happen at all. And that kind of state capacity, the state capacity of these middle managers who try to hold the whole system together, I think, is one that deserves more attention. Now that’s not to say -the donors love this capacity building up the wazoo. I mean, give me a project that doesn’t have a section on capacity building. I’ve never seen it -not for education. But what do they mean when they say capacity building? They mean, I’m going to plant an expert in the ministry, so we’ll bring in some foreign expertise. Or I’m going to do a lot of one-off training, and then that isn’t built into a systemic national capacity to build capacity. I just come in with my expertise, and I do the training. This is happening in teacher education; it’s happening in the education of school leaders. Usually the middle-level district bureaucrats, they don’t get any attention at all. They might get invited to the teacher training. And then at the central level, you know, I think we do some good things. We take central level bureaucrats out for master’s degrees and other kinds of educational leadership type of efforts. But really, most countries that are receiving foreign aid, that foreign aid, a lot of it’s being used on capacity development. A lot of its channeled through these third parties who do capacity development. And I just wondered myself whether this kind of approach to state capacity building is really logical or effective?

Leonardo Garnier  24:24
Yeah. One thing that I always wonder is nothing that we’re saying is new. When we read Montessori, or Piaget, or Dewey or, Freire, we have been saying these things all the time. Teachers, when they go to the university or to the normal institute, they are, let’s say, educated with this ideology of progressive education based on questions this and that learner-centered; all the right ideas. And then they go to teach, and they teach exactly as they were taught when they were in school. So, I started questioning myself, why this dissonance? And probably the best example I find is that in education, we should be doing as they do in the health sector. When nurses or doctors are studying, a lot of their work is not at the university, it’s in the hospital. It’s in the practice. While in education, you have two, three, even four years of university education, and then suddenly you’re in the classroom. And nobody told you that the shock that you would feel when you go to the classroom. So, this idea of changing the way in which we train, and as Karen was saying, the kind of support they need, and not just teachers, the principals, are a critical element here. It’s terribly difficult. They don’t have the autonomy to innovate, but sometimes when they have the autonomy, then they don’t have the resources or preparation to do that. So, how to build the system that really produces the kind of teachers that we need? That’s their capacities, as Karen was saying, but with the resources they need. Because sometimes we think that you teach without resources. It’s just your responsibility. It’s funny, because in any other productive sector, you think, what’s the capital that goes with the worker to produce more. In teachers, we still give them the same or we start thinking about magic silver bullets, which the digital appears like that. Okay, give them a tablet, or give them the smart blackboard, and I remember when I was a minister going into a classroom where they had bought this amazing and very, very expensive smart Blackboard, and what the teacher was doing was projecting a PowerPoint of what he or she would have written in chalk on the old blackboard. So, how do we use those resources, and how do we prepare teachers and principals to really make a smart use of those technologies? And for me, the problem I felt when I was working at the ministry is that this is very much a supply-driven market where sellers are trying to sell you a lot of gadgets instead of thinking, again, based on the student. What does he or she need? First, to start with a question, and then to find ways to solve the question. You don’t really need huge resources for that. But you need the right resources, and you need a teacher attuned with that process of question and answers.

Karen Mundy  27:06
And I guess an observation I might make is that too often, -so the “we” that you’re saying, Leonardo, is the bureaucracy, because the we who’s going to help those teachers, help those school leaders are going to be central and middle level bureaucrats. So, they’re kind of invisible in a way. No one says, Well, you know, here’s a good way to train them. Even in Canada, I would say we’re rather haphazard in terms of training district leaders, in terms of their leadership capacity and their training, their ability to understand how to manage, how to lead in a mission-driven way, and so on. Of course, in low-income or lower-middle-income country context, the challenge is greater. You want them to do more with less, but they also have to have skills to be able to do that. So, you know, I think when we think of state capacity, of course teachers and of course school leaders, which I think we’ve thought a lot about how to do that well, but who’s going to affect the changes in teachers and school leaders? There’s some other level of the bureaucracy that has to be harnessed into that mission. And I think that’s a big challenge that we don’t talk about very much. And in fact, we have a paradigm that is probably less helpful than it could be, which is, oh, how do we get them to work harder? Well, we put a material incentive in front of them, or we have some kind of carrot or stick. But actually, that’s not the kind of teacher we need. We don’t need a teacher who jumps through hoops. We need a teacher who cares about the kids, who knows what their mission is, and who is thoughtful. They can problem solve, they can think about how to analyze an individual child’s learning and how to address their individual needs. Parents don’t want every child to be treated the same, they want their child to be treated in a personal way. The state capacity piece, I think, is perhaps a little different than we’ve been imagining it, at least from the point of view of international helpers, donors, development partner.

Will Brehm  29:01
It’s quite interesting to think about -I think Karen, you used the word mental model. We have the wrong mental model. And maybe a shift in what state capacity means is absolutely needed. But equally, what’s needed is thinking through the financing of education and thinking about tax justice and equality, and more equal distributions of funding, both nationally and globally. So, I guess, as a final question, where does this leave us? We’re midway through these SDGs, we’ve started with the idea that we’re sort of off track, and we brought up two pretty big issues that are problematic here -finance, state, capacity. You know, what does the future look like for the second half of these SDGs going forward? Maybe Leonardo, I’ll start with you; if you had a crystal ball, how do you see the future here?

Leonardo Garnier  29:46
It doesn’t look very good. And there is a reason. When you look at it from the perspective of the Global South, when you have a country with typically low wages, then a trap begins to work. We economists like to talk about factors of production and things like that, but the truth is that when a country has predominantly low wages, the kind of investment that that country attracts are investments with very little capital, very low productivity, they don’t need skilled labor. So, for them, paying taxes to educate the labor force is not really an incentive. They don’t need their workers to know physics or math. So, you start this first part of the poverty trap where low wages deliver low productivity, then lower taxes, then lower education, and the circle goes around and around. And the next part of the poverty trap is what we were saying before this race to the bottom, that you have to compete with other countries. So, you devalue your currency, you lower taxes, you try to pull the rug over your neighbor’s competition. And that’s good for those who are buying your product, not for your population. So, going out of that cycle is very difficult, and as Karen was saying before, the only way you could get away from that is through institutional change. But what everybody says now, after reading Acemoglu and Robinson, or if they read Polanyi’s Great Transformation many years ago, is that this kind of economy also results in very weak institutions. So, it’s the whole circle. So, again, a big political question that we have here is, what serves better the majority of the population. How can you use politics with a capital P to put the interests of most of the people in society over the interest of a really, very small group of people, hugely rich? And like Karen said, it’s not just about their incomes, it’s about their wealth. And we have not just the global inequalities, I mean from between the South and the North. No, when you look at the inequalities we have within the poor countries. I mean when you look at Carlos’ Lim in Mexico as an example of quite a rich guy compared with the average Mexican, or in Costa Rica, we also have two or three guys who they’re usually guys -they don’t care. And the kind of incentives they have don’t mean anything in terms of investing in the environment, or the health, or the education of the people.

Will Brehm  32:06
Yeah, Zuckerberg already built his, or is in the process of building his.

Leonardo Garnier  32:10
They get their own private education, private health, private security, and they will get their bunkers. I agree with you.

Karen Mundy  32:16
But you know, I don’t want to end on such a dismal note. And I think that where we look for hope in such a context is also an important question, one that we, as scholars, or people working in ministries of education, we have to consider it. So, let me say this; we did actually achieve something in previous global goal settings, and through a lot of national effort and collective action, multilaterally. That means today, we have children accessing schools. They just weren’t. When I was in high school, most kids in the developing world were not in high school or even in primary education. So, now today, that story has changed. How to get beyond that to quality, I think is a big debate, and I regret a little bit that the period where we saw a lot of emphasis on creating a stronger public system for education, and linking that public system to sort of collective demands of how to drive that growth. That seems to be over, but I still think we’re going to get back to a situation in which the public or the collective demands for good quality education will grow. And so, I don’t think our trajectory is -I think that, yes, for sure, by 2030 it’s dismal, but I think after 2030 we probably will have some reversal, and maybe we’ll have another glorious 50 years of development coming at us again.

Leonardo Garnier  33:53
And probably what gives us optimism, or at least for me, is the young people. These new generations -I always get so angry when I listen to people of my generation talking about them as a weak generation, a fragile generation. I say, “No, they are lovely! I mean, they care for each other, they care about the environment, they have this sense of belonging to a larger society”. So, I really like them, and they have this respect for the old authority, which is always healthy.

Will Brehm  34:23
I totally agree. I guess, to end here, I keep looking up at my wall because I have a quote by Franz Kafka on my wall, and it says, “there is infinite hope, just not for us”. Karen Mundy, Leonardo Garnier, thank you so much for joining FreshEd, absolutely fascinating. And I look forward to the next seven or eight years to see where we end up, and maybe we can have you back on to dissect what ends up happening. So, thanks again.

Leonardo Garnier  34:45
Thank you. It was really nice.

Karen Mundy  34:47
Thanks, Will.

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Education and Finance Watch 2023

Government expenditure  on education

Capital in the twenty-first century – Thomas Piketty

OECD Global Minimum Tax

UN country level tax discussions

Corporate tax haven index

Crack-up capitalism – Quinn Slobodian

Cambodia for sale – Will Brehm

Transforming Education Summit

Mission Economy – Mariana  Mazzucato

UN Model Double Tax Convention

Theories of tax justice

Recommended

Financing education: Why should tax justice be part of the solution?

Politics of “leaving no one behind”: Contesting the 2030 SDG agenda

Leaving no one behind? Persistent inequalities in the SDGs

Financing SDG 4: Context, challenges, and solutions

Trust in public institutions

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