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Sam. Saint Gonna change one of these days. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those of our children and those looming down the road. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life. Currently I teach at the New School University in New York City. Well, it's been a very eventful week since we last spoke on this program. So I want to jump into some of the news that was made this last week having to do with economics. Every year around this time, the AFL cio, the largest federation of unions in the United States, issues a report on the gap between the incomes earned by the CEOs, the chief executive officers of large American corporations, and the rank and file workers that work for them. And this year is no different. And so we have now the results for the year 2015. And the companies looked at are what we call the standard and poor 500, sort of the 500 major corporations here in the United States. Well, what's the result? What are the numbers? And I thought you would be interested. Chief executive officers of the s and P500, that's what they're called, on average made 335 times more money than US rank and file workers during the last year. Let me translate that into what the cash is. CEOs of the S&P 500, on average made ready $12.4 million in 2015. Rank and file non supervisory workers made around 3,36,900. So let me get that across so that nobody misses it. Average rank and file worker, non supervisory, that's most of us, made $36,900. The boss at the top of the pyramid, of which the rank and file forms, the base, made 12.4 million, and that's 335 times the amount. Has it always been thus? Some people will argue or ask. So I thought I'd answer that question because the AFL did the research there too. And the answer is an unqualified no. It has not always been thus. For example, in 1980, when the AFL CIO did the same research, they discovered that the Average S&P 500 CEO made 42 times what the average rank and file worker earned. So let me say that again. In 1980, the CEO made 42 times what the average non supervisory worker did, whereas in 2015, the CEO made 335 times. You notice something with me? Yes. It has gotten much more, much worse. The gap between the CEO and the average worker and let's see, what had the last 30 or 40 years been? They've been a time when the CEOs of America told us how wonderful globalization was, how wonderful free trade was, and is how important it was to lower taxes on those corporations because that would be good for all of us, and how important it was to deregulate the economy so that corporations could do what they do best and we would all be better off. That's what the people told us, while what they were doing was busily creating a gap between what they earn and what they pay us. That went from 42 times what we get to 335 times what we get. Listening to or doing what large corporate executives say is wise is indeed stupid. Let me turn next to a new book that came out and that I think deserves some comment. Very well known author, even if you haven't heard of him, named Branko Milanovic. He's been around a long time, and in the year 2016, nothing less than the Harvard University Press published his latest book, and here's the book title, Global A New Approach for the Age of globalization. To Mr. Milanovic's credit, he sees a connection between globalization and inequality, a connection I also made two minutes ago in talking about the gap between CEOs and everybody else. And here's what Mr. Milanovic is writing in his book about inequality. But before I go into that, let me remind you that this has been quite a couple of years now for books on inequality. Not so long ago, I spoke to you about Thomas Piketty's work, capital in the 21st century, which is basically all about how and why capitalism deepens inequality wherever it comes, and has always done that for 300 years. So the inequality is now so gross, so universal, so spread from China to the United States, from from Norway to Argentina, that anybody who's kind of not sleeping is writing books, if not songs or poems or other ways of trying to cope with the defining inequality of our time. So Mr. Milanovitch is interesting why he sees inequality coming and going in cycles. Basically what he says is capitalism produces inequality. Here, he basically follows Thomas Piketty. But every few years, maybe 10, 20, 30, it varies, there's a kind of pushback. There's a social movement that develops the policies of governments to undo or at least to slow down the inequality. And Mr. Milanovitch notices this, charts it for us, and says, clearly the solution is that we need to keep in place the policies rather than wait for the inequality to get terrible, then to respond with a policy that undoes it, or at least slows. We shouldn't wait. We should do it always. Well, this is a bizarre idea. It's as if Mr. Milanovitch didn't understand that there are very good, powerful reasons why these waves come and go. This is not a question of having the good idea that we should have a policy. Of course there were policies. Each time people pushed back against inequality that developed, they pushed back and they had a government step in, like happened in the 1930s and 40s here in the United States to undo the inequality that had built up and indeed produced the Great Depression. Yes, we instituted policy, but it didn't just evaporate, Mr. Milanovic. It didn't just go away. The very people whose growing wealth was slowed down or even reversed by. By the policy did something your book doesn't make very clear. Namely, they went to work to undo it. In other words, capitalism is a system that not only produces inequality, but gives to the people at the top the incentive and the resources to undo whatever it is the pushback of social movements ever achieves. So that if you really want to do something about the inequality that perpetually haunts capitalism, it's not enough to come up with a social movement that changes the policy. You've got to do something that prevents the people the policy is directed against from undoing the policy. And how do you do that? Well, we've talked about it before, but you'll allow me to mention it again. You have to convert from capitalism to a different economic system. Otherwise, the very cycles of growing inequality, periodically pushed back by superhuman effort of the mass of people, will continue to be the pattern, the very pattern Mr. Milanovic documents. More and more inequality, little bit of pushback, more and more inequality, little bit of pushback. Whoa. To stop it, you have to say, we don't want to allow there to be a group of people, they're called capitalists, who respond to the way the world works in capitalism by becoming richer and richer, who then suffer a pushback of the very people they've impoverished, who then see a policy that limits their wealth, who then use their wealth to undo the policy so we can go through this whole craziness again. That has to be changed. And the way to do that is, is to make enterprises, which is where all wealth comes from. The institutions, we call them enterprises that produce the goods and services we all depend on as human beings. They have to be democratized. They can't have a small group of people who have every incentive to change the system and make themselves wealthier. And then use that wealth to make themselves able to keep doing it. We have to get rid of that. And the way you do that is the same way we got rid of kings and emperors and queens and czars, all the rest of people who used to use their power for the same end. And that is to democratize the arrangement, for example, by reorganizing enterprises so that everybody democratically decides what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits. Which is not to give a handful of them to the CEOs who earn 335 times what everybody else does. That wouldn't happen in a democratic worker cooperative. And that's why that's the solution. That's clear from the very research Mr. Milanovic does. But he doesn't draw the conclusion, which is a severe weakness of his book. Next economic update for today has to do with estate and inheritance taxes here in the United States. But you can see similar things in other countries. Let me tell you what that's about. For hundreds, indeed for thousands of years, in many, many different cultures around the world, it has been understood that if you wish to allow human beings across their lifetimes to accumulate wealth, that's one thing you can believe, whether it's true or not, we'll put aside for a moment. But you can believe that the accumulation of we by individuals in their lifetime is connected to the effort they made, the ideas they had, the work they performed, and so on. But cultures have for thousands of years said you should not be able to pass the wealth you accumulate on to your children. Why not? Because it creates an unfair advantage to an accident of birth. It creates a non level playing field. The child who through no effort of his or hers is born into a wealthy family starts with every privilege. The child, through no fault of his or hers, born into a poor family, has none of the privileges. And what that does, every society has understood, is privilege. People who haven't earned it, who were born into it. And that is inherently unjust. Because most societies have had that view, they have instituted one or another form of what we nowadays call estate taxes or inheritance taxes. In other words, when you die, you must take a portion of your accumulated wealth and not pass it on to your particular child, but rather have it taken by the government to be used for the community's benefit as a whole. Not only does that enable the community to have the resources with which to run the schools and hospitals and public parks and all the other things communities are asked to do, but it also levels the playing field. It Makes the gap between the child born into a poor family and the child born into a rich family and at least less than it would otherwise be. That's been the argument, that's been the logic, that's been the notion of social justice. You let, in these societies, you let individuals accumulate wealth through their own effort, through their own ingenuity, but you do not make it perpetual. You do not give it to people who didn't earn it, who simply were born in a particular place to a particular group of people. All right. Do we have sale, estate and inheritance taxes in the United States? And the answer is yes and no. And that's what I want to make sure we all understand first. Estates and what you leave when you die are taxed both by the federal government in the United States and also by some, a minority of state governments. So depending on where you live in the United States, your estate will be subject to a federal tax and maybe I'm going to explain it in a minute to also estate tax. Let's start with the federal. The federal tax now is. Has an exemption. In other words, basically for an individual it's over $5 million, and for a couple, it's over $10 million. So right off the bat, let's be clear. If you have, when you die, you and your husband or you and your wife, $10 million, that passes to your children with absolutely no federal tax at all. Only what you might have above $10 million, which is a tiny less than 1% of our people leave 10 million, more than $10 million to their children. Unless you leave more than 10, you have no federal estate or inheritance tax. And after that you have a rate depending on how much you leave. In effect, what this does is it allows wealth to be passed from one generation to another. In other words, we don't have a level playing field, which I'm sure most of you have figured out already. You don't need me for that. You know that children in some families have tutors and helpers and every toy in the world and every advantage, go to the best private schools, get the most attention, have the most travel to enrich their experience, and other children have none of it. You know that. And that's in part a reflection of not having a society where everybody starts at the same place for not having a level playing field, comparing one child's opportunities to another. And one of the reasons we don't have it is that the federal government doesn't even begin to tax inheritance unless you have more than 10 million. The first 10 million that a couple has, they pass to their children without any federal estate tax at all. But actually, things are even worse at the state level. We have 50 states and the District of Columbia in the United States. Only 18 of the states and the District of Columbia tax inherited wealth. That's right. The other 32 states do not do it. So if you want to live in the United States and not be subject to a state inheritance tax, you have 32 states to choose to live in when you die. And then you will pay no state inheritance tax at all. And in Those states, the 18 in the district of Columbia, where there is an estate tax at the state level, don't worry, it's small. The total amount of money raised by the 50 states plus the District of Columbia last year inheritance and estate taxes was $4.5 billion, which is a very small amount of money. Bottom line, we do not use the tools available to us that are inherited from thousands of years in order to create a level playing field, in order to create no privilege for people who didn't do anything because they were just born in the right place, which isn't really a major achievement that we normally say ought to be paid in millions of dollars, but is in our culture. If that is an injustice, well, it's one that we have chosen as a country not to correct any more than we have chosen to correct a situation in which one person working at a company makes 335 times what another one does. Okay, let me turn now in the time we have left for this segment to responding to some of your questions. And by the way, these are questions once again to remind you that we invite, we encourage, we welcome. We maintain two websites, rdwolf, with two f's.com and democracy at work. All one word. Democracy at Work. Both those websites allow you to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. They allow you to communicate what you like and don't about this program. What questions you'd like me to respond to, what ideas you have for our future programs. We get a flood of these emails from you and I thank you for them. They are very helpful to us in designing every dimension of of this program. And also the websites are places where you can work with us as a partner to develop more radio stations to carry this program, to arrange for me to come to wherever you are to give a talk, which I like to do and which gives me a chance to meet you, and vice versa. All of the kinds of ways we can work together are enabled by these websites. Make use of them. That's why we update and develop them all the time. All right, let's do a quick response to some of your questions. What would be the role of money? One of you asks if we had an economy that was composed of worker co ops, no more capitalist enterprises, no more top down companies run by a board of directors and a few big shareholders, but workers themselves running it, would there be any need for money? My guess is that the answer is yes there would. But it would be money that works in a completely different way. Remember, money doesn't have its own nature. Money depends on the environment in which it is created. Money was always created by some authority. It could be a bank, it could be a government. Mostly in the history of the world it's been governments or communities in some way and it was designed to perform certain functions. And in a world of worker cooperatives it would probably be assigned certain functions. There functions that are not present now would be the role of money then and likewise, things that money does now, it would not be able to do then. For example, money now controls businesses. If you have enough money, you buy the shares, you run the company. That's never going to happen in a world of worker co ops because the co op by law in a co op society is run by the workers in it, not by some external owner of money, nor would you ever distribute the money to that was produced in an enterprise or by an enterprise in such a way that a few people would have a great deal of it and thereby be able to control enterprises, whereas others wouldn't. Those things we take for granted in a capitalist society where money functions in one way, money would function in a very different, much more reduced way in a world of worker co ops. Second question that was sent in that I thought was interesting. What would happen in a worker co op based economy or even in an individual worker co op when you had individual workers who took advantage of other people and didn't work very hard, didn't do what they were supposed to be, were distracted in or by things at the workplace. What would happen in those cases? Would there be a democratic vote to fire someone? Or is it just impossible to fire somebody who's a part owner here? Again, I think we have to think in new and different ways. Of course there will be people for a variety of reasons in worker co ops who don't get the spirit, who don't understand the sharing, who don't do their fair share. That's going to be a problem. I would assume that that's going to be a problem for quite A while. The difference is that in a worker co op, this is a problem the community of workers, the democratic community, will have to solve. And it won't do that by firing a person. Because taking away a person's livelihood is not going to be the way a worker co op economy understands solving problems. It's out of order. It's like we don't beat people up who don't perform and we don't execute them who don't perform. We don't take away their livelihood. There are a hundred other ways that a democratic loving, if I can dare say it, community of co workers will work with a person who doesn't understand what it means to be part of a community. All communities have those problems. Even if it's the little community of a family or the little community of a household or the little community of a neighborhood has to solve ways or find ways to solve the problems of people who temporarily or maybe even for a long time, are not part of the community spirit. There are ways of providing counseling. There are ways of providing partnership mentoring. Look, there are lots of ways human communities have found to deal with it. Capitalism allows the employer, when not pleased with a worker for whatever reason, to fire him unless the worker is protected by a union. In a worker co op, the whole idea is to work with a person to find a way for that person to be constructive, if not in the worker enterprise where he or she has a problem, then perhaps in another one, if not in that way, with some retraining, with some counseling, with some help, to find a place which is the requirement of all of us in such a society to be productive like everybody else. Last thing, here's a question that comes from a person who's interested in the Marxian theory that peppers our programs and that informs a good bit of what I do. This person understands that a worker's value in a capitalist system is what he or she produces for the employer, and that the employer understands that they have to give the worker a certain minimum of money to enable the worker to buy the goods and services without which he or she can't reproduce themselves and therefore can't come back to work the next day. And this is all clear to the questioner who sent in this question. When we're producing physical goods. But how does it work with a secretary or a waiter, somebody who doesn't produce a physical thing? So you can kind of compare the output that the workers labor results in with whatever the sum of goods and services is you give to the worker? Well, the answer is and this is something that has bedeviled people interested in Marxian theory. The answer is that in Marxian theory it doesn't really matter whether it's a good or a service, whether it's a physical thing or a, or a non physical thing like a haircut, which doesn't have an object at the end. It's a service done for you or for that matter a waiter, or for that matter any of these others. Because in Marxian theory, the whole point of understanding an economy is to understand the relationships between people as they go about producing. Marx's insight was, and he had several, but one of his profoundest insights was that when we look at an economic system, one of the most important things we want to know is what kind of relationships are imposed upon, cultivated in, shaped in human beings as they go about the process of producing the goods and services without which no community can survive. And we want to evaluate, to assess, to appreciate or not any economic system by looking at the relationships it cultivates in people. The critique of capitalism for Marx came out of the fact that, that he saw the relationship between employer and employee as negative, as evil, as destructive, not just to the employee who is in effect virtually a slave of the boss, but in the end for the boss too. These are relationships between people that are not healthy, not good, and nowhere near what they could be. And one of the reasons Marx is interested in what we nowadays call worker co ops is, is precisely because the relationships among people, whether they're producing a physical good or a service, are very different. And therein lies their superiority. That's the critique of capitalism that he argued for and that provides the power and the reason why Marxian theory is constantly being rediscovered, usually with every downturn and stumble that a capitalist system goes through, especially when it's as severe as what has been going on since 2008. We've come to the end of the first half of this program. I thank you very much for sharing it with me. I hope you have found these economic updates of interest. Please stay with us. We will be back in a very short time with the second half of this program and a remarkable interview with someone working to change the economic system for many reasons, including those we've been discussing this first half hour. Stay with us. We will be right back. I am not your little brother. I am not your son. You are not my older brother. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. It is my great pleasure to welcome back to our microphones Alan Shulman to remind everyone, in case you missed earlier programs. Alan is a 48 year veteran of the public schools here in New York City where he has been a teacher administrator, community and education activist and organizer. He currently sits on the executive committee of the association of Teachers of Social Studies that is a part of the United Federation of Teachers, which is the local New York affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, AFL cio. Alan has also served as a consultant to ministries of education in at least three or four different countries. And now, and this is what we're going to be talking about, Alan is in the third month as a program development coordinator of Democracy at Work. In that capacity, he is part of a group developing a critique of our economic system based on a belief that we can and should do better. And that's indeed what we're going to be talking to him about. Alan, welcome to the program.