| Almost everybody is dancing around it here, but the real lesson here for us all is that capitalism, or, at least the way we're doing capitalism today, is unsustainable. You simply can't have the kind of sustained transfer of wealth from lower and middle income people to the top 1% that we've had over the past 50 years and claim what you're doing is a sustainable system. I recently saw this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th3KE_H27bs The speaker, Nick Hanauer, has a net worth somewhere around a billion dollars. In his talk, he explicitly says he's a capitalist, capitalism is good, etc. But, if you ignore all that and look at the rest of what he says, he comes this >< close to advocating socialism. According to him (and I agree), the lessons we should be learning here are fivefold: 1. Markets aren't anywhere near as efficient in reality as they are in theory. That leads to some counterintuitive things like when Seattle raised their minimum wage, it didn't lead to unemployment because the price of labor went up; it led to people who work in restaurants being able to afford to eat in restaurants, which is good for the economy. Oh, and unemployment actually fell in the region while this was happening. 2. A big pillar of the neoliberal myth is that "...the price of something is always equal to its value." He directly goes on to tie this to the case of one person who makes $50k per year and another who makes $50M per year. The second person's work isn't 1000x more valuable than the first. The person getting paid $50k is only getting paid $50k because workers have lost almost all their bargaining power in the market, period. "And by pretending that the giant imbalance in power between capital and labor
doesn't exist, neoliberal economic theory became essentially
a protection racket for the rich," he goes on to say. 3. Humans are not "perfectly rational, and relentlessly self-maximizing." Homo economicus is a myth; let us bury him where he lies. Greed is not good. Humanity's superpower isn't selfishness, but reciprocity and a willingness to cooperate. 4. The purpose of corporations is not solely to enrich shareholders (i.e. the "shareholder primacy" theory). Customers, workers, and communities matter as much or even more than shareholders. Which leads to... 5. The laws of economics are a choice. If we want to do something about all this, all we have to do is choose to do it. Finally, one thing he said in the talk really sums it up for me, and that's this: "[I]t isn't capital that creates economic growth,it's people;
and it isn't self-interest that promotes the public good, it's reciprocity;
and it isn't competition that produces our prosperity, it's cooperation." Unfortunately, the contemporary practice of capitalism is incompatible with these principals, and the people who are benefitting from it are very powerful as a result of decades of neoliberalism. Those people I mentioned in the bottom half of the income spectrum, they have the power to make change happen. Just look at what's going on in France right now. But the people at the top (not the 1%, really, more like 0.1% and the 0.01%) have the poor, the middle class, and somewhat well off all at each others' throats. Without mass, collective action, I do not hold out much hope for humanity over the next two decades. Oh, and BTW, keep in mind, this isn't just me, some random canine on the internet saying this stuff. I do say this stuff on here frequently, and what it's gotten me is mostly downvotes and being made into a second class citizen who can only post at an average rate of a couple comments per hour, for no good reason that I can discern or anyone will tell me. So, if you believe these words, feel free to not believe me. Hell, I got myself about as close to banned as you can get without actually getting banned or shadowbanned by, among other things, trying to tell y'all these things. But do believe this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Hanauer, because he knows what he's talking about. |