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- [00:10]
A
Welcome friends to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, income for ourselves and our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to begin today by talking to you about a remarkable step taken by the city of Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada. It tells you where Bernie Sanders kind of campaign is headed and shows you that it is already happening elsewhere in our neighbor to the north. The decision in Vancouver was issued by the British Columbia government which has the authority. That government is currently a coalition of two political parties, the left leaning NDP and the British Columbia Green Party. Those two parties together are the governing coalition and here's what they as of very shortly, if they get their way, which they are expected to do, the level of income tax on wealthy people will go up for Those earning over $166,000 a year in US money, their money above that, everything above 166,000, the tax on it will go from 16.8% to 20.5%. That is a significant increase and the purpose has been made very clear. The people of Vancouver are suffering from gentrification, rapidly rising prices of homes, rents for apartments, and the government is pledged to do something to make Vancouver a livable, affordable city for the vast majority of people who are now being priced out. And that's expensive and that will take time. And they have deemed it appropriate to tax those at the top, the ones who benefit most from gentrification, to pay for it. The same government at the same time announced it plans to levy a 7% tax on sugary soda drinks in order to limit the amount of tooth decay suffered particularly by younger but also older people in it is an attempt of that government to begin moving in a different direction from what has been the norm. Taxing the wealthy is coming and it is coming to a theater near you. My next update has to do with a private report that was leaked. It was a report commissioned and paid for by the JP Morgan Chase bank, one of the largest banks in the world. The paper explains whether or not it answers the question whether or not climate change is something that threatens the world. And therefore, if JPMorgan Chase needs to, and I quote, rethink its investments in the fossil fuel industry. And the conclusion of the paper, which I've now looked at, is remarkable. First of all, it answers the question with a resounding yes, climate change is very real. Climate change's economic effects are enormous and it is advisable for JPMorgan Chase basically to get out of financing the fossil fuel industry. That's oil and gas for those of you who aren't cool clear on this subject. So beside one of the largest banks in the world taking a position, for example, diametrically opposed to that of the Trump government. And that by the way, has been done by the largest money managing firm in the world, BlackRock as well. So this is now a trend. But I want to go beyond that because the report says something even more important. It refers to to the whole climate change issue as an example of and again I quote market failure. And here's what they mean that for years now decisions have been made on what is or isn't profitable based on comparing the revenues of an investment with the costs of an investment. And what this report does, which JP Morgan believes in, is to say we were wrong in our capitalist system. That's my words, not theirswe were wrong in our system not to count the costs of environmental damage. Had we added those very real costs, many of the projects we've invested in over the years would not have been invested in because they weren't profitable. The revenues they generated weren't enough to cover the costs if you included the costs of the environmental damage. Good says my economist Hat this is a recognition that markets don't count many of the most important costs of business in our capitalist system. In the second half of today's show we when we interview Tess Fraad Wolff, she will explain and I think you'll find it intriguing that there are psychological costs of workplaces, impacts on workers that they take into their personal lives that really are big costs of capitalism that nobody counts and that therefore the market based on costs not counted is making one wrong decision, one inefficient decision after another. The love of markets, the celebration of markets, as if a market based economy is something to emulate, to celebrate and to praise means you don't understand how markets work and in particular how markets misestimate, ignore and miss the the real costs that go into the decisions made by market criteria. My next update is one that is increasingly in the news, one that many of you have asked me to talk about and it has to do with this perennially embarrassing question here in the United States about the relationship between money and politics. Let me begin with a statistic to talk about one of the relationships between money and politics. There are three I'm going to talk about in toto today. The first one is when money is literally spent by or given to and spent by candidates for office. To give you an idea, I looked at the amount of money spent by major Democratic candidates trying to become the Democratic Party presidential candidate. And the money I looked at is the money spent in the last three months up until, let's say, mid February. Those three months are the three months since Michael Bloomberg entered the race. And the reason I chose that is because his entry marks a major escalation in the flow of money to candidates. So here are the sum totals of of money spent on behalf of candidates in the last three months. Number one, Mr. Bloomberg, $409 million spent in those first three months of his effort. During that same time, the second billionaire running, Tom Steyer, spent $254 million. In third place, Bernie Sanders, who spent $117,000, roughly a quarter of the money spent by Mr. Bloomberg. Elizabeth Warren, 91 million. Peter Buttigieg, 76 million. Joe Biden, 63 million. Michael Bloomberg, 409 million. Joe Biden, 63 million. It's not even close. Vastly different amounts of money. The reason you've heard about Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer is not because they have a large political base. They don't have any. But what they do have is money. And if you think money doesn't shape our politics, then think about the fact that you've heard of and will hear of Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Steyer because they outspend everybody else by enormous amounts. But that's not all. What about the money spent on lobbyists, those people who are paid to be not only in Washington, lobbying the government, pushing whatever the folks who pay them want, but also in every statehouse in every state of this country, and in many mayoral offices, too. If you have the money to hire lobbyists, you get the ears of the politicians. That's how money makes things happen. Nor are we done. Then there's the money spent on countless think tanks, media outlets, schools in which some ideas are promoted over others. You know, it produces a dead, stale conversation when money shapes what positions are heard, what positions are thought about, what positions are written about, what you see on television, and you exclude those who don't have the money to buy their way in. It means you're denied all kinds of perspectives and you're provided with an endless repeat of those favored by the very few who can afford the money. If you're upset with the stale old quality of American politics, thank the way. Money matters in our system. It's a major part of the reason people are disaffected from our political structure. Don't trust it, don't believe in it, and are sure it's terribly lopsided. My final update for today is to in a way congratulate the United States Women's Soccer Federation. They have brought charges of gender discrimination in a suit filed in Los Angeles against the U.S. soccer Federation. The trial on these charges is set to begin on on May 5th. For those of you interested, the women soccer players charge one that they are paid markedly less than their male counterparts, that men's soccer supports more pay for women, even though the federation doesn't do it. The men support the demand of the women for pay parity. And the irony is of all of this that the men's soccer also feels they are being underpaid. In other words, what's emerging here is an alliance between men and women soccer players in which the men ally with the women partly because they believe in the justice of what the women want, but partly because out of a demand for themselves, they don't want to be told, we're not paying you more. You should shut up because look how much better we're paying you than those women. They don't want those women there to be an excuse to be underpaid and then that be used as a lever to keep them from being paid more. They understand, which is why I'm bringing it up, what all of us should understand, that these pay differentials between men and women, between white and black, between educated and uneducated, between older and younger, these are so many mechanisms to enable the employer to play one against the other. To say to the men, you should shut up because the women get paid less than you to say to the women, we give you certain side benefits, time off for your families, therefore you should accept lower wages. These are ploys. They have one goal in to leave more profits for the employer and less for the employees. Don't be fooled. And the women soccer players are taking the lead in refusing to be fooled and underpaid. And as they have suffered for so long, we've come to the end of the first half of today's economic update. I want to thank you and also to remind you, subscribe to our YouTube channel. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Be sure to visit democracyatwork.info that's our website to learn more about other democracy at work shows, our union co op store and our two books, Understanding Socialism and Understanding Marxism, which you can order from the website. And lastly, a special thanks to our Patreon community whose invaluable support helps make this show possible. We'll be right back with our special guest, psychotherapist Tess Fraad Wolff. Welcome back, friends, to the Second half of Economic Update for today. I am very pleased to bring to the microphone and to the camera a guest who's a specialist in psychology. It's Tess Fraad Wolf. She is a psychotherapist practicing in New York City. She's worked with both individuals and couples for nearly a decade now. And she has also trained in art therapy and in hypnotherapy. So thank you very much, Tess, for joining. Thank you. Okay, I want to jump right into it. This is a show that talks about economics a lot, but today's program has you here because I want to explore with you the link between how we experience the economy, particularly in our jobs, where we work on the one hand, and how it shapes our psychology, and a little bit on the back and forth, how the economy shapes our psychology and vice versa. So let me begin by asking you to kind of look back into your practice and what you've learned. How is it possible that you're experiencing on the job where you work in an office, a store or a factory could lead you to be what we call depressed? Is depression something that goes with work? Sometimes, always, never. How has the job shaped depression in your experience?
- [16:12]
B
I think there's a constant interdependence there where the job and one's feelings about the job sort of feed each other in this loop. But I feel that people are often increasingly without senses of meaning in their work and their workplace and their missions and the mission of their workplace. And this steadily and perniciously undermines their sense of satisfaction with themselves, with their feelings, with their everyday because they spend so much time at work, the demands are so high, increasingly high, and the sense of purpose increasingly rare that it creates a problem. It creates an estrangement from people to their sense of meaning and purpose. Feeling good, feeling necessary, and mostly I think feeling connected.
- [17:01]
A
Is it, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but is it in a sense that people have that they're just a cog in some big anonymous machine whose purpose is beyond making money for somebody else? Seem to be clear that they don't seem to be compelling. Am I getting that?
- [17:18]
B
Yes, I think that's exactly right. I think many people feel reduced to being a cog, which is objectifying and dehumanizing. So you're not a cog, even if you're part of a many armed operation, you're a person with the feelings and experiences and all the personal attributes we embody. And so it's undermining. It turns us into feeling robotic, like Automatons. It takes away the complexity and the emotional sort of basic experience that we embody. It takes all of that away to feel reduced to just being a piece of a piece of a piece. Especially if one doesn't feel particularly satisfied from the entire mission of their workplace or whomever for whomever they work.
- [18:05]
A
Also, in our capitalist system, things are organized hierarchically. All the interesting questions and problems, design of the business goals, mission, that's all done by a handful of people at the top, and that excludes the vast majority of people. So in a sense, the way we've organized businesses produces the very. I'm just a cog in a vague machine mentality.
- [18:30]
B
Yes. And there's all sorts of labels that different workplaces enforce. Some of them give numbers. I had heard that Amazon people had numbers. The six was higher than the five and so on. If you talk about the reduction, the objectification and the dehumanization of saying like, oh, this is my friend, fill in the blank. She's a three, but I'm a four. Oh, here's a five. It really turns people into different heights. It's very, very reductive. And I think it undermines one's senses of connectivity to self, to other, to workplace, to one's time.
- [19:06]
A
There's a joke that I've come to borrow from. I don't know who that talks about trying to be funny. That that thing after work that we stopped to do at the bar on the way home is called a happy hour, which kind of tells you what the other hours must be like to make that distinction. Is that joke's notion of unhappy, like what you mean that it can be depressing to be a worker in our system.
- [19:34]
B
It's extraordinarily and particularly depressing, I think, for human beings to feel asked to partake in things that have nothing to do with them on a repeated, lengthy basis. I think there's something terribly wrong when we feel that we have to participate in something that has no regard for us, no regard for our humanity. There's a splintering of a sense of self and self esteem and coherence internally that starts there. And I think it's very widespread. I think our society, contemporarily speaking, has normalized the notion of, oh, you're an artist. What do you do to make it? What is your job that you don't like? What do you really do? What do you really want to do? All of this has been normalized as though we should somehow make peace or accept the idea that we, we're going to spend an inordinate amount of our times, the time at work doing something for which we have no particular affinity, with which we have no particular relation. You know, this terribly lonely making for the majority of people.
- [20:38]
A
You know, as an economist, here's a question. Isn't it reasonable to suppose that workers depressed for all the reasons you've just gone over, are not gonna be as productive or efficient as they might otherwise be if they had a different relationship to their job?
- [20:56]
B
Oh, definitely. I think there's been studies about this on working on Friday and the four day work week and all the discussions there. Because it absolutely results in less productivity in all sorts of measurable and less measurable ways in terms of the attitude with which one presents at work in terms of camaraderie, solidarity, in terms of just care that someone might give for a mission for which they might not have to feel. Great relationship, but something. You know, when you take away people's humanity, you take away their capacity to give humanely too.
- [21:28]
A
This is extremely important because what you're saying in so many words is that the capitalist way of organizing production, top down hierarchical, a tiny number of people making all the key decisions is, isn't necessary, isn't efficient, can't be justified by some notion of productivity requiring it. It's justified because those people want to keep getting the bulk of the money out of it all and reduce everybody to exclusion from that. And the end result is we all pay in less productivity.
- [21:59]
B
Absolutely, absolutely. And it's a self spinning cycle because people get more depressed and they get more and more likely to accept depressing work circumstances. So you can certainly stretch and widen someone's tolerance for mistreatment by slowly depressing them over and over again into inactivity and all sorts of other problematic states.
- [22:25]
A
What about the logical next question? How does the depression that comes out of your work situation impact your personal life, your family life, your, your romantic relationships and so on?
- [22:37]
B
I mean, countless ways in which people. Because at base we first have a self relationship and then from our self relationship as people, every other one of our relationships is informed. So very first is how we relate to ourselves because we're our first mirror and a reference point and all of these things. And then we relate to other people. It's not that the relationships are all identical, they aren't to self or the other particular relationships and their respective qualities. It's more that first we have to have connection to how we feel and what we think and what's going on with us. Then we can connect to other beings. And so when that's undermined by an estranged relation to work and workplace, workplace mission, we start separating from what means something to us. Because in order to go to the same job over and over again, you have to start separating. It's a coping mechanism. Otherwise you just weep all day and you can't be acceptable. And that can then result in people connecting less with spouses, with partners, with friends, with children, with colleagues, with all manners of contacts.
- [23:39]
A
Yeah, it's what some of us have seen on the job. When you begin to notice one or another of your co workers kind of fading out, turning inward, becoming a little less of a social being and less present and less present even to themselves.
- [23:53]
B
Absolutely. And less emotionally available for whatever may be happening. You know, positive, negative or neutral. There's just less availability if you're distracted or dissociated. When people are in pain physically, sometimes you see them and their faces sometimes are a little pinched. Sometimes there's a little bit of sort of withholding energy that comes from them when they're in pain, when they're trying to navigate, sitting or walking or doing whatever they are when there's pain. And the same thing happens on an emotional level. It's just imperceptible and not often discussed. So there's a part of them that already isn't there. Even before they walk in, even before they might be spacing out at this or that part of the work, they're already kind of less available. And then there's less and less availability after that.
- [24:36]
A
Let me push you on this. Would you say that people are or are not in general, based on your practice and your life? Are they aware of being depressed when they in fact are? Is there an understanding in the United States that depression is a burden we carry because of the way we've organized work?
- [24:59]
B
There's some, but not much. I think there's an ambivalence that resides in a lot of people who feel simultaneously dissatisfied with workplace situations and self blaming about that dissatisfaction. So there's a sense that one is selfish for wanting more or entitled or they ought to be happy with what.
- [25:22]
A
They'Ve got, or they're just whining.
- [25:24]
B
Yes. This positivity culture that's been, I think, hijacked by a lot of corporations also adds to it that we're supposed to be in a good mood and we're supposed to plaster a smile on our face and be glad we're not like this and that and this person who have it worse and on and on and on which are ways of shaming people and taking from them their, you know, rightful honest states.
- [25:45]
A
Well, now, the kind of the conclusion, because we have limited time in your practice, what would you advise a person whether or not he or she is depressed or aware of it, but if they are, in your judgment, depressed by their work, what do you do about it? What would you advise a person who wants to cope maybe better than happy hour or something else with this problem? What might you suggest?
- [26:14]
B
I mean, there's a lot of things. I think one is there's certain literature you can read, there's certain things you can do if you can afford and are interested in therapy that can help group or individual. There's all kinds of therapy out there. I think one of the things is to really understand that wanting to have a job to which you relate, in which you feel you are present and from which you feel you can learn is a very healthy normative thing. And it's also a very healthy normative thing to have a sad reaction when those things are lacking, especially more and more lacking to understand the validity, to talk about things, including things that are difficult, especially things that are difficult, because then you can hear other people nod and say, me too, which is a very powerful two word sentence. And this can start to normalize, you can start to make different demands. But people have to first be interested in how they feel, recognize the depression and then open up about it so that it can be validated and shared.
- [27:15]
A
You know, it's the same recipe as across the board. If you want to change society, you got to first be honest about your own experience that makes you come to a position of wanting to change society. Because if you can communicate that to others, it's the best organizing tool ever invented. Just sharing and, and enabling other people to share that kind of perspective.
- [27:38]
B
Absolutely.
- [27:38]
A
How do you feel about the United States, given your practice and given what we've talked about?
- [27:44]
B
Very sad, but also hopeful. And, you know, I clutch at the little pieces of hope because there's so much, you know, destructive stuff happening and there's so much destructive energy. And people are depressed and they're inactive. And it's understandable that they're inactive because they're depressed. But it feeds on itself. And so we really have to grab at the pieces of positivity. People who look like they're gonna be honest leaders, people amidst us in all of our places, we can look to them also for these kinds of honest discussions. If we feel depressed, if we feel disconnected at the workplace, I think it's incredibly important to talk and to take risks.
- [28:25]
A
Thank you so much, Tess. I know the time has gone fast, but that's partly when things are interesting, and we hope they are for others, too. Thanks again, and to all of you, thank you again for joining us. I want to particularly thank our Patreon community, as always, for their invaluable support. And I want to conclude by saying that I look forward to speaking with you all again next week.