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The that's cool man. Marvel Studios Thunderbolts the New Avengers rated PG13. Now streaming on you guessed it, Disney. All right. Hello everybody. So I've been hard at work on post labor economics theory. If you don't know, I'm working on a book as well as a business with Julia McCoy. We've been talking pretty much every day for the last few weeks and I've also been conducting a lot of interviews for this book. Now the working title of the book that we're working on is called the Great Decoupling. So with all that being said, here is my current work on a post labor economics manifesto. So this is published over on my sub stack. Yeah. So TL Dr. There are 11 policy proposals that I am gonna go through and explain it to you and I'm just gonna use the article as my slide deck. So number one, push all decisions to the lowest effective level, which is called subsidiarity. Basically, by decentralizing power, both economic and political power, as much as possible, you're going to create more efficient markets that are also going to be better for individuals. Now one thing that people often overlook or don't realize is that after the Roman Empire collapsed, nutrition and local economics actually went up dramatically around the Empire. So that was the transition from empire to feudalism. Now I'm not saying we should revert to feudalism. Just my point is that subsidiarity works and we've got plenty of other examples later in the article. Number two is radical. Transparency by default. So more information makes more efficient markets. But also information asymmetry is one of the ways that people are exploited and misdirected and so on and so forth. Basically, democratization of information is good tldr, very simple principle number three and the socialization of private risk. So you probably have heard things like too big to fail. And another way of looking at it is socialism for corporations, but capitalism for everyone else. So things like corporate welfare and too big to fail policies are not good because that socializes risk rather than internalizing it. Number four, information asymmetry is a market failure. So this goes back to democratization of information is generally a good principle. Democratization of information is one of the easiest and simplest ways to democratize power. And for instance, this is why the SEC requires public filings for public corporations. But instead of, for instance, Freedom of Information act, if information is not classified, it should be public by default. And not just public by default, but easily accessed by default. So fewer barriers to getting information specifically, specifically from the government, but also corporations. And the larger a corporation, the more information should be required to be public. And oh by the way, this should apply to all politicians as well. Number five, local, local ownership maximizes efficiency. So again, this kind of pairs nicely with the other concept of subsidiarity. So not just local ownership, but decentralized ownership. And this is not socialism. This, I'm not saying ownership by the state. Ownership by the state is not good. Private ownership is, is the way to go. Number six, minimize intermediaries between value creation and capture. So in this case I create content on the Internet and I either have one broker such as YouTube that will handle the subscriptions or Patreon, or people can subscribe directly. So there's very few intermediaries. Now YouTube certainly takes its cut. They take something like 50% of ad revenue, which is why a lot of people are abandoning YouTube and I actually considered not coming back. Anyways, moving on. Number seven, economic power must remain competitive. Basically, this is against regulatory capture. No entity should grow large enough to escape market forces or shape its own regulatory environment. Trust busting, that sort of thing. Number eight, align incentives with outcomes. Those making economic decisions must directly experience their consequences rather than externalizing them. An echo of the previous one. Number nine, decentralized power by default, power naturally concentrates unless this is prevented. So systems must be designed to maintain distribution of power. Number 10, prioritize automation of human labor. So this is going to be my most controversial point, which is basically that the, that the dislocation of human labor through, either through creative destruction or labor substitution is necessary and good. Basically, humans are inefficient. So if we want to maximize economic productivity, we should get humans out of the loop as much as possible. And this means changing laws around who can be doctors, who can be lawyers, licensing schemas, and so on and so forth. And number 11, build decentralized infrastructure, build the legal frameworks, build the regulatory frameworks, and then build the actual technology itself. So with all that being said, let's walk through the whole problem. So what I've talked about repeatedly is the social contract. So the social contract basically is the way that society is organized and the way that society has been organized for about the last century or so is, is that there was a three way relationship between business, labor and government. Now under embedded liberalism, under the New Deal, basically government was there to mediate between business. And there are some very dramatic stories of both FDR and Teddy Roosevelt, you know, the trust busters, you know, the New Deal, you know, for God's sakes, try something, and so on and so forth. Now that went into effect in the 30s, you know, as, as FDR was wrangling with the Great Depression. Then we had, you know, unemployment was still like in the Texas teen. Upper teens I think went at the beginning of World War II. And then at the end of World War II, unemployment was at 2%. And so everyone's like, wow, this huge injection of, you know, government taking out debt and, you know, new technologies. This was great. So embedded liberalism lasted from the 30s until around 1980 when we switched to neoliberalism. And neoliberalism had a whole bunch of characteristics, but neoliberalism has been undermining the social contract, basically taking power from labor and handing it very deliberately, very explicitly to business and government. And now business and government have a two way relationship, basically a revolving door relationship between the two of them. By the way, I just heard a rumor that Donald Trump is actually going to end that revolving door relationship between business and government where federal bureaucrats are not going to be allowed to go into industry afterwards. I don't know if that'll work out, but if he does that, great, I'm all in favor of that. So the problem that everyone has is people say like, you know, what happens if I lose my job. What happens if I, you know, how am I going to make ends meet if I can't work? So that's obviously a problem. But on the other hand, we're looking, we're staring down the barrel of GDP that's going up, you know, a factor of 10x or 100x over the next couple decades. So if economic productivity is going to go through the roof, how do we make sure that people get those benefits? Because even though GDP has been going up for the last 40 years since neoliberalism was implemented, we the people have not actually experienced much of the benefit. Trickle down economics just doesn't work. Now when people say, how am I going to take care of myself? How am I going to have a job, yada, yada, yada, what they're really talking about is economic agency. So economic agency is your ability to influence your economic status. And so I've broken economic agency down into several criteria. Now you can have economic agency without work if you're independently wealthy, if you've got some sort of subsidized lifestyle. And what I mean by that is if you're on, you know, either disability, welfare or retirement, economic agency does not require a job. So how can you measure economic agency? Number one is time sovereignty. Basically, how much free time do you have versus how much time do you have to commit to making ends meet? This can be done as you can look at. You know, you can measure number of free hours you have a week, you can look at number of hours you have to work per week, you can look at the ratio. There's plenty of ways of measuring it. But basically what has happened is between hustle culture and gig work and everything else, the neoliberal expectation is that you're basically maximizing your time. You're optimizing your time for making as much money as possible. And if you're not actively making money, then you should be improving your economic value by learning or upskilling or something like that. Basically, neoliberalism wants you to just be an economic producer and nothing else. Number two is financial authority. So financial authority has to do with things like property rights. It has to do with how much agency you have over the finances that you do have. And it also has to do with your ability to influence economic policy that affects you right now. Voting, you're voting for neoliberalism. Whether you vote Democrat or Republican, by and large, you're voting for a neoliberal policy. And by the way, neoliberal policy is not even set at the US Federal level it is, but it's also set at the international level by the World Economic Forum, by the IMF and the World bank and Davos and all of those people. They all believe in neoliberalism. So neoliberalism is the global de facto policy. And so even if you try and vote against neoliberalism, it's not going to work. So you actually don't have as much financial authority on the global stage as you would, as we would prefer. Number three, knowledge access. Knowledge is power. It's that simple. I've already talked about this, so I don't feel like I need to reiterate it. Number three, community power. As federal systems become stronger, cities and states kind of lose power. And this goes back to that principle of subsidiarity. Again, we've already covered it, so I don't think I really need to talk about it. But basically, the more power that is distributed locally, generally, the better. The next one is mobility freedom. So this is social mobility, economic mobility, and so on and so forth. So this is your ability to physically move, but also your ability to change your, your socioeconomic status through work. And then finally, bargaining power. So bargaining power is, you know, collective bargaining power, unions. I'm personally not in favor of unions anymore, and I'll explain why. But at the same time, bargaining power is also part of voting power. You know, the ability to, you know, take collective action and say we actually want to repeal a particular law, or we want to challenge a particular policy, or we want to vote in or out specific people. So that is another form of bargaining power. All right, so now let's talk about the principles of neoliberalism. When you talk about a manifesto or a doctrine, you have to have, you know, underpinning theory, but you also have to have specific prescriptions or recommendations. So in the case of neoliberalism, it came with a litany of policies and recommendations and prescriptions. These policies made sense at the time, and they were successful. The whole point of neoliberalism was to maximize GDP growth. That's what it has done. That which gets measured gets managed. And the fact that we've been measuring and managing GDP, but not economic agency of real humans means that the economic agency of real humans has been left in the dust. So the principles of neoliberalism, which again, this is. There's a silver lining. It's kind of a mixed blessing. It has worked for, for maximizing gdp, but it has also undermined economic agency of humans. So number one is if it exists outside of the market, bring it into the market. Basically, neoliberalism believes in the primacy of the market price signals, so on and so forth. Efficient market theory. Markets are not perfectly efficient, particularly if you don't actually have choice. This is a well known thing, we don't need to rehash that. Number two, deregulate everything that constrains capital flows. The idea is maximizing capital flows maximizes the economy and therefore it's good for everybody. Next one is privatized public goods and services. Privatization basically says, you know, you need to have proper incentive structures. Something needs to actually be profitable if it's meant to work. You know, you can't necessarily privatize all roads and schools and so on and so forth. And people still argue about that, but by and large a lot of stuff has been privatized and offloaded from government services. This is why healthcare is still private in America, for instance, is we really believe in that. That principle next is reduce all barriers to trade and capital movement. So this is globalization. And globalization is what has enabled multinational conglomerates, for instance, multinational conglomerates, you know, everything from Walmart to Disney to Craft and every everyone else. Which is good because on the one hand you get economies of scale, but corporations don't necessarily become more efficient the larger they are. And furthermore you end up with corporate hegemony. So, you know, again, mixed blessing. Next one is this one is the most direct disruption to the social contract, which is minimize labor power through union busting and right to work. Basically what happened is in the 70s and early 80s, unions had too much power and they tried to hold the economy of nations hostage. And that galvanized people to just say, you know what, we're done with unions. The coal strikes in England, the FAA strike here in America. And by the way, we just saw this trying to happen again with the longshoremen strike. So literally just a couple weeks ago at time of recording, a bunch of dock workers wanted to go on strike for higher wages, but they also wanted to prevent the implementation of autom. And they literally knew that they were holding the economy of America hostage for their own, for their own gain. Now the reason that I'm against unions is because it is still a form of concentration of power. And concentration of power in my view is generally bad. Next is create markets for everything. You know, OnlyFans is an example of this, of this theory. Basically everything is for sale and nothing is sacred. Under neoliberalism, your freedom is as however far your wallet will take you, your dignity, your economic agency, your personhood. Is tied directly to your dollars. Next is shift risk from institutions to individuals. So this is where neoliberalism didn't really work because you hear too big to fail and those sorts of things. But you know, this is why particularly the Republican party is about like individual responsibility. This is, this is just neoliberal doctrine, which is why I say both Democrats and Republicans are just neoliberal through and through with some slight variations on theme. Next is transform citizens into consumers. This is actually much older. This goes all the way back to Edward Bernays when the U.S. government back in the, what was it, the 20s or 30s, basically came up with the idea of consumerism. And so this is earn and spend. If you, it's basically you should adopt a consumer driven economic growth model, which actually America and the IMF have been trying to push China to take a consumer driven economic growth model and they're resistant to doing so. Instead they're more property based, real estate based. Next is protect property rights above all other rights. This includes intellectual property and so on and so forth. The idea is that it incentivizes the accumulation of capital. So whether that is intellectual capital, whether that is, you know, data capital or whatever. Next is ensure price discovery through market competition. Price signals. Price signals are one of the key innovations of free markets. Now price signals only work if there is actually market action, if the social brain of the market is allowed to discover prices. So price signals basically say, okay, well there's a finite amount of resource X and the demand is Y, so then the price will set itself accordingly so that the market will allocate resources as efficiently as possible. This works for, for goods like bread and steel. It doesn't necessarily work for heavy infrastructure stuff like hospitals and power generation. So price discovery works for basic goods and services, particularly food. It can work for cars. You know, stuff that can be easily traded, but stuff that is very, very infrastructure heavy. Price discovery doesn't usually work for. Next is reduced taxes, especially on capital and corporations. This is why I say that neoliberalism increases economic agency for corporations over real humans. And that is literally by design. It is saying, hey, corporations are the engines of productivity, therefore we need to give them a break. Socialism for corporations, Capitalism for everywhere where everyone else. Corporate welfare is literally part of neoliberalism, which is the global doctrine. Next is prioritize inflation control over employment. So once again, rather than ensuring that people are taken care of, the idea is you actually should, you should maintain a certain level of unemployment. And there's lots of, you know, theory and reasoning behind this, but people like Alan Greenspan literally said it out loud. I think it was in the 90s. He said something to the effect of like, you must have a certain level of unemployment because people need to be afraid of that real possibility. So there's an optimal level of employment. And the optimal level of employment under neoliberalism is not 100% employment. It's more like 97% employment. And so instead you should control inflation, which is why everyone's always freaking out about inflation. And for our parents who saw hyperinflation, you know, in the 70s and 60s, 70s and I think less in the 80s. But the idea is controlling inflation primarily is good. And you see in other places like Venezuela where the inflation is through the roof. And generally speaking, people agree that inflation is bad, but the idea is controlling inflation at the expense of employment. So once again, the social contract has been very deliberately eroded in favor or against employment. Employees, rather sorry. Remove capital controls between nations. This is already kind of covered by, by a previous one. Replace public services with market based alternatives. Again, this is also very familiar. And maintain flexible labor markets. So this is basically making it as easy as possible for people to change jobs, but also for companies to fire people. The idea is that labor mobility is a good thing because you, as an economically productive worker, you should always be making the most money that you possibly can because that is where you're adding the most value to the economy. And you can only do that if you move jobs. So it's really ironic when people say, you know, there's no company loyalty anymore. That's literally by design. And neoliberalism, if you're not changing your job every two years, you're a bad neoliberal. So here's some evidence. Neoliberal economics has made America more productive. So you see 1980, this is about when it became official doctrine. And look, we kept becoming more productive. Excellent. However, look at what happened at the same time. Real wages decoupled from actual productivity. So while productivity has continued to go up.