I've visited over 80 countries around the world and it's become clear to me that people are no longer convinced about democracy and its efficacy in terms of contributing to economic success and human progress.

The question that I've asked myself is why are we failing to convince people about the importance of democracy?

And to me, the answer is that we are no longer convincing people like myself who believe in democracy, but also in the importance of market capitalism.

And I believe that there are two fundamental problems with democracy today.

One is the issue of legitimacy.

So this issue that around the world democratic societies, people in democratic societies, people are looking around and they do not think that the electoral votes, whether it's through a referendum or through a general election.

People don't believe that those those elections are free or fair.

Um and indeed even if they do, they are very skeptical about the results.

Um We know about the situation here regarding Brexit as just one example.

But the second thing that's really critically important is that I'd like to address with my solutions is the issue of Myopia.

The idea that virtually all the economic challenges are long term economic challenges their deeply entrenched and their structural and threatening to upend the global economy.

and yet our politicians are very short term in their thinking and they're constantly fighting elections and constantly interested in winning those elections with very little consideration for the long term costs and the trade offs.

But let me start off first by giving you a little bit of flavor for why it is, I worry that democracy is today under siege.

First of all, voter participation rates are down in the United States, for example, in the 19 sixties, voter participation was in the high sixties and even the seventies in some places today, voter participation rates in the United States are around 50% for general elections and they're as low as five, 30% for people who are indigent or low-income households at at least $30,000 per per annum incomes.

This is very far from the one man, one vote mantra that liberal democracy has always touted.

A second issue is that money has seeped into the political process.

Again, looking at the United States, there is a survey that was published in the New York Times a couple of years ago that estimated that only or just 158 families in the United States were responsible for 50% of the political contributions that have been used to fund the president's election in 2016.

More fundamentally, there's a deep concern about lobbying and the amount of money that's gone into lobbying in, in the United States.

If you look at the 2019, excuse me in 2000, the amount of money that went into lobbying was approximately $1.5 billion $3 billion dollars that goes into lobbying.

And this to me again, is creating this fundamental problem of where money has seeped into the political process.

More generally, political freedoms have been on the decline around the world.

According to Freedom House over the last 10 years, political freedoms all across the world, in both liberal democracies and illiberal states has gone down, it's gone, it's become so extreme that not only are we seeing this trend in places like the United States, But also we are hearing that um when, when there's some surveys like the Pew survey and people are asked about their faith in government, we're seeing large increases in dissatisfaction and a lack of belief in government.

According to a Pew survey, 80% of Americans do not trust their government to regularly do what is right.

A World Economic Forum report has that was published recently, suggests that when citizens around the world have been polled, people do not believe in the democratic process as a means to deliver economic outcomes.

In fact, in that survey, the world economic forum, they found that citizens believed more or had more faith in authoritarian governments than they did in political systems that are more democratic.

Just to give you a few more data points in this regard.

There are the economist Intelligence unit has downgraded the United States from being a full democracy to being a flawed democracy.

And a lot of that has to do with what they see as an erosion of the three key pillars of the democratic process, which is the executive office of the head of state, the legislature, which as you know, a it's very combative beyond the combat levels that I believe that the forefathers had expected when they tried to create a bit of competition in discussion in the political process.

But also there's deep concern around the judicial system, which is the third arm and real concern that the judicial system actually is not fair and equal.

And that certain in the United States are lots of surveys around this, but also in other places around the world, especially with the rise of anti immigrant sentiment.

Deep concern that there's one judicial system for people who are white and or rich and there's a different judicial system, criminal justice system for people who are black, latino asian and form more poor and indigent backgrounds.

So taken together this suite of challenges, is creating this very unsettling discourse around democracy and of course, in the background, we know that illiberal democracies in fact, countries that are blatantly nondemocratic, such as china have shown economic progress that has been unprecedented and legendary and have also continued to show a lot of significant improvements in social metrics as well.