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- [00:00]
Richard Wolff
Sam. Sa. 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 coming down the road now with more certainty to torture us than even in the past. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and currently I teach at the New School University in New York City. As usual, before jumping into today's opening half of Short Updates, I want to make a couple of announcements in response to many of your questions and comments. The first is to remind you that we are NOW represented by SpeakOutNow.org that is a speaker's agency that handles my traveling around the United States and abroad giving talks. If you are interested in having me come to where you are to give a talk and allows me, of course, to meet you and vice versa, please get in touch with speakoutnow.org and the easiest way to do that is to go to their website or to send them an email at infospeakoutnow. That's all one word.org infoeakoutnow.org and likewise, for those of you who would like to see this program on television as a video program, please visit that opportunity for you@patreon.com I'll spell it P A T R e o n patreon.com economicupdate but if you go to patreon.com you can find Economic Update and you can see this program as a telev program. So please make use of those two websites and opportunities, speakoutnow.org and patreon.com and finally, our two websites, which allow you to communicate your thoughts, your likes and dislikes to us, to follow us with a click on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on. First one is democracy at work, all one word, democracyatwork.info and the second one is rdwolf with two f's. Com.
- [03:33]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
All right.
- [03:33]
Richard Wolff
Well, the first update this week has to do with United Airlines, which I've talked about before. United Airlines is most famous because of what happened a few weeks ago, which got a lot of press when they pulled a person who had purchased a bona fide ticket, a doctor, out of his seat to accommodate some UA United Airlines employees and in the process gave him a bloody nose and so forth and so on. I would assume many of you saw the photos and saw it and there was much talk afterwards of the abusive behavior of United Airlines among other airlines, in regard to their customers, the people flying the airplanes. And it was widely thought to be a major public relations disaster for United Airlines. So my attention and that of others was caught this last week when United Airlines proudly announced a significant increase in their profits over precisely the period in question when they have behaved so badly to their customers. Indeed, I myself was a customer of United Airlines coming back from Europe last month, and it was one of the worst flights I've ever had in terms of the quality of the service. Well, how do we deal with this? What does it mean? The New York Times on July 18 offered the following explanation for how you can be more profitable while at the same time basically abusing your customers and having it known. And the answer, the New York Times offered was the that these days the American Flyer, the average flyer, is in such desperate financial situation that they have to go with the cheapest flight wherever they're going that they can get. And they can't afford to pay attention to what they may feel about an airline, what they may have suffered in the way of bad service. And they are so desperate they have to buy the cheapest ticket. And United Airlines made profits by being able to do what it did and still get the tickets sold. Well, I thought I'd make a comment in economics, which is the topic we're going to return to frequently today. In economics there's a presumption, often made explicit, that if you leave things to private, profit driven capitalist enterprises, you get the best possible outcome. I always thought this was a kind of dogmatic assertion that wouldn't make much sense if you looked at it. And it strikes me that what happened with United Airlines is a perfect example. What they did was to maximize their profit in the situation that they face, which is a desperate customer base which will buy their tickets no matter how they treat their customers. In other words, relying on a private, profit driven capitalist system to deliver your services doesn't guarantee you the best services. It doesn't even guarantee that you won't be physically and otherwise abused by the very company whose tickets you buy. Left to its own devices, capitalism is not an engine of optimum performance. The next update also takes me back to someone I visited before Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JP Morgan Chase, one of the biggest banks in the United States and indeed in the world. He gave a private speech and circulated a private newsletter this last week that got a lot of political attention because he was very critical of the United States, by which he meant the political structure in Washington, which he called names that included four letter words I can't say on the air, so I won't. Well, here's what I found interesting about this banker's remarks. He attributes much of the problems of the world economy and much of the problems of the United States economy in particular, as an important player in the world economy, to what he referred to repeatedly as, quote, unquote, political gridlock in Washington. I guess he meant the way the Republicans and the Democrats kind of neutralize each other in their fighting, for example, over the health insurance bill that we've been watching for weeks and months now, and so on. And I found this wonderful because here's a big banker portraying himself and indeed all of us as victims of Washington, as victims of a political system that isn't behaving properly, crying victim, as if the big banks aren't a major player in determining who's elected in each party by the money they give, by lobbying.
- [08:50]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
Spending huge, many millions of dollars to.
- [08:53]
Richard Wolff
Lobby at the state level, at the federal level, for this bill, against that bill to portray the gridlock in Washington.
- [09:02]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
As something they are the victim of.
- [09:05]
Richard Wolff
But have no responsibility for, that's breathtaking. It's not just nonsense. It's an attempt, as always, to shift the blame for the outcomes in our economy onto the political side of the equation. As if the big businesses that run this society, not just its economy, but its politics too, are just like you and me, victims of what happens in Washington or what doesn't happen. Rather than shapers of that, yes, Mr. Dimon, there's gridlock in Washington and you.
- [09:40]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
Are a major reason for it. We turn next to China, something that comes into the economics news more and more with each passing week. This last week there were two interesting stories about economics out of China. The first has to do with a new company that unveiled its products at a Colorado seminar for new tech products around the world. This one is called Mobike M O B I K E and I'm sure you'll be hearing more about it. This is a company that provides bicycle rental all over the world. It's already active in 150 cities. It comes out of China. It's a new system in which you will have an app on your smartphone that will allow you to instantly identify where one of their bikes is located near you that you can go to. Click again on your app and the bicycle is yours to use for whatever time and purpose you have in mind. It is a product of a young man named Davis Wang who used to drive for Uber and basically wants this to be a kind of self driving, obviously bicycle Uber combination. Why am I telling you about this? For two reasons. One because it's a sample of a kind of innovative high tech startup culture that is now overtaking the United States, which was the center of this sort of thing and is now being outflanked almost every day by something comparable, but maybe a touch better happening in China. It's another reason to take very seriously the competitive, the different that comes out of China, which is now the world's second most important economic unit. The second thing about the mobike phenomena is that it raises a perennial problem for capitalism. Anyone with half a brain can see that having easily available low cost bicycles everywhere in cities large and small is going to shake up all kinds of existing industries. The automobile industry, for example, the taxi industry for example. And I could go on a rational society knowing that the advantages of bicycles being easily and universally available will improve our lives in countless ways. Bicycles don't spew pollution into the air. Bicycles don't use up anywhere near the fuel that is being wasted on automobile traffic. Bicycle bicycles don't hurt, injure or kill people, anything like automobile. You get the picture. We need to take the steps to accommodate the workers thrown out of their jobs, not by any malfeasance of theirs, but because of this new invention. Industries disrupted and changed. This has to be worked out so that we don't needlessly suffer as we transition to something we prefer. But nobody does that in our society. We have a capitalist system. We are afraid our businesses are of.
- [13:26]
Richard Wolff
Having the government do that kind of planning.
- [13:29]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
So we let the chips fall where they may. We lose the jobs, we lose the industries. Takes us decades to do what could have been preplanned and avoided in the first place. It's a commentary on how we manage, or to be more accurate, mismanage, technical change. Then there's a whole second way that China was in the news this last week, and I want to talk to you about that too. China announced last week the results of the second quarter of the year, the second quarter of 2017. And when you look at the second quarter, and the Chinese statisticians did that, you get the following result that the annual rate of growth of output goods and services in China is now running at a rate of 6.9%. It's actually a little bit higher than what the Chinese government itself had predicted before. So they are growing, as I say, they are increasing the output of goods and services, a measure of economic performance at the rate of 6.9% a year. How has that been handled by the media here in the United States? Basically in two ways. Probably the largest way is to ignore it altogether, not say anything about it, not find it worth a column inch of a newspaper or 20 seconds on the TV when it has been dealt with. And here I'm thinking of how it was dealt with this last week. I believe on the 18th or maybe even the 19th of July in the new York Times, you had a column inch of the newspaper story announcing that the Chinese have said 6.9% is their rate of growth. And then the next 20 inches of newspaper space was devoted to questioning the statistics, questioning the motives of the statisticians, talking about all the different ways that the reality could be different from what the statistics suggest. By the way, some of the things that are raised in those other 20 issues are perfectly reasonable challenges and skepticisms about statistics which apply, by the way, for many statistics, American as well as foreign, because of many of the innate problems of gathering and aggregating and putting together these statistics. But now I want to talk about what the real meaning here is. The growth of the United States output of goods and services this year will be somewhere between 1 and a half and 2% as it has been now for quite some time.
- [16:16]
Richard Wolff
So let's compare.
- [16:18]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
China's economic output is growing at just shy of 7% and the United States is growing at between 1.5 and 2%.
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Richard Wolff
Do you notice something?
- [16:30]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
The Chinese economy is growing much, much faster than that of the United States. That has been true for many years and shows no sign of going away anytime soon. That's why the Chinese economy has gone from one of the biggest, poorest, most underdeveloped countries a bare two or three decades ago to the number one challenger of the primary position of the United States in the world today. The Chinese are not only catching up, but as Mobike shows, running ahead. This ought to be leading to a big discussion in the United States. How do you explain such different performances? What do you do about them? What are their implications? What lessons can be learned? We don't do that in this country because we seem to prefer as a nation, either to pretend that it isn't happening or to throw up 47 reasons why we don't have to take these different numbers seriously. And all I can say, and that's.
- [17:47]
Richard Wolff
Something every reasonable person will, will agree.
- [17:51]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
That kind of response to such an important difference is a big, big mistake. The last updates, and they're a group that I have time for today, have to do with worker co ops. Three different stories about worker co ops, each with an important lesson. So let me begin, and I start with an apology for My pronunciation of a Greek word.
- [18:22]
Richard Wolff
I'm not sure how it's pronounced.
- [18:24]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
So I'm going to do the best I can. It's the name of a factory. And I'm going to say it's V ome, but I'll spell it V I O M E. This is a chemical product factory located in the second largest city of Greece, the Thessaloniki, in its north. And here's the story. The 2008 crash of global capitalism devastated Greece. It still does. And it devastated this company in Thessaloniki. It had hundreds of employees producing chemical products. It couldn't survive. The capitalists who owned and operated it closed it down and abandoned the factory. This threatened the lives, the families, the futures of hundreds of its employees. But what's interesting is what a group of them did. Which is to take over a part of the factory and run it as a worker cooperative to save their jobs, to save their incomes. And to prove that workers acting together, collectively, democratically, could maintain production, maintain jobs that the capitalist system had forsaken, abandoned, and given up. And they've done it. Here they are, years later, doing quite well. The workers together decide how much to pay each other. And they decided to pay everybody the same wage. They could have decided to do differently, and they may still, but that's what they've decided now. They make their decisions collectively. They have changed the products they make to survive. And that has worked. They've particularly survived on good relationships with the surrounding communities. In Thessaloniki, for example, after hours, they opened the factory to local doctors. Who volunteer their time to operate a clinic. Giving local people medical care of a sort they've never seen before. This produced in the community a feeling of loyalty and admiration for the factory that turned out to give good suggestions for other products that the factory could make that the local people needed and would buy. So, in a good relationship between community and factory, a worker co op has been much more successful than a capitalist enterprise. And there are lessons there. If you'd like more information, The British newspaper the Guardian, available through the Internet, dated July 18, has a detailed and excellent story about this. The second example are the drivers of school buses in New York City. New York City has millions of school children who get to and from school on those yellow buses we see all over the United states. There are 9,000 of them in New York City alone, these buses. But the way it's worked is the city gives a concession to private capitalist companies that run the buses. The buses are not in great shape. They break down. The workers are paid so poorly that the city Government uses tax money to help subsidize the wages. It's a bad situation. And now a group of workers has come forward through their union, the Transport Workers Union, to say we can do it better if we organize the production of school bus services as a worker co. Op. And they propose that the workers will then be more committed to their job, will do a better job, will be more reliable, because it's their own company, their own, and it will cost the city less. In other words, they're saying, give us a chance. They've proposed a pilot program for 15 bus routes, a small part of the system. Let us show you what we can do as a worker co. Op. Let us have a real sampling, a real contest between the top down capitalist enterprises that are making a fortune in this city by employing at low wages workers who may have very little commitment to the job, given the wages they're.
- [22:55]
Richard Wolff
Paid and the way they're treated.
- [22:57]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
We can do better, but don't take our word for it.
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Richard Wolff
Let's have a contest.
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Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
Give us a chance to compete clearly and fairly. And we'll abide by the decision, of course, as to who produces the better quality, safer ride, less pollution and all the rest, because we're going to use electric buses, the city uses diesel buses and so on. Now here's a question for the liberal mayor, Bill. Call yourself a liberal. Are you willing to give the citizens of New York real choices between capitalism and worker co ops as alternative ways to organize the very important business of getting your children to and from school? That's all the advocates of worker co ops ask. Give us a chance. We will be watching how this works out. Finally, there is the story of Williamstown, Massachusetts, where there's a food store, a market called the Wild Oats Market, which is a consumer co op. And what that means is the people who shop there, most of them are members of a co op, and that the co op together owns and operates this market, giving the consumers the kind of quality service, the kinds of good prices that they don't think they get at a capitalist enterprise running a supermarket. That's why they set it up. Well, they're having a problem. Here's the the co op gathers together the consumers, the people who buy the food at the Wild Oats market. It does not include the workers there. And those workers have joined a union. It's called the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, Local 1459. There in Williamstown, Massachusetts, those workers feel as though they're not getting the kind of pay, the kind of respect, the kind of job conditions that they feel they need and deserve. How interesting. Here's what this teaches us. A consumer co op is not a workers co op. A consumer co op is just what it says it collects into cooperation the consumers. A worker co op collects into cooperation the people who work in the enterprise. Those are two different groups of people. We have to keep clear that a worker co op doesn't necessarily mean that the consumers of what the co op produces are in their own co op and vice versa. The consumer co op doesn't necessarily include a worker co op. I happen to like both of them. I would like to see enterprises that involve both a co op of those who work there and a co op of those who consume the services. And I would like them to cooperate in running the business. Because the two most important groups of people associated with any business are those who work there and those who consume what they produce. I would like them together to make all the key decisions rather than a small group of moneyed people who have the shares, who have the money to buy the company and who then make all the decisions both about what is sold to the public and what the workers are required to do. Democracy demands no less. It shouldn't be a tiny minority that make those decisions. It should be the consumers and the workers. But let me take it one step further. I believe the workers are the key group here.
- [26:40]
Richard Wolff
They're a bit more important than the consumers.
- [26:43]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
They should both be making the decisions together. But the workers have the bigger say. Why? Because their livelihoods depend on what happens there. Whereas for the consumer, this is only one part of what they buy.
- [26:56]
Richard Wolff
So?
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Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
So it's not the same importance to the consumers as it is to the workers. So let them both share the decision making. Let them both have a veto power. But the dominant voice should go to the workers. And that's the way to have a cooperative economy work. We don't need the capitalist alternative. It isn't democratic and it would be a better way to go.
- [27:19]
Richard Wolff
And that's the real lesson from the.
- [27:21]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
Greek workers in Thessaloniki, from the bus school bus drivers in New York, and.
- [27:27]
Richard Wolff
Finally from the food workers in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
- [27:33]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
We've come to the end of the.
- [27:35]
Richard Wolff
First half of this program. Thank you very much for being with us.
- [27:40]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
And let me urge you once again to make use of our websites, rdwolff.
- [27:45]
Richard Wolff
With two Fs com and democracy at work. That's all one word. Democracyatwork.info Please stay with us. We will be right back.
- [27:59]
Guest Speaker (Poetry Reader)
Come you masters of war. Here that build the big guns.
- [28:08]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
Here.
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Guest Speaker (Poetry Reader)
That build the death planes here, that build all the bombs it hide behind walls, it hide behind desks.
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Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
I just.
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Guest Speaker (Poetry Reader)
Don'T want you to know I can see through your masks you that never done nothing but built to destroy.
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Richard Wolff
You.
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Guest Speaker (Poetry Reader)
Play with my world like it's your little toy you put a gun in my hand and you hide from my eyes and you turn and run farther when the fast bullets fly.
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Richard Wolff
Like a.
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Guest Speaker (Poetry Reader)
Judas of old you lie and deceive a world war can be won.
- [29:17]
John Summa
You.
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Guest Speaker (Poetry Reader)
Want me to believe but I see through your eyes and I see through your brain like I see through the water that runs down my drain.
- [29:42]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's edition of Economic update. The second half is going to be.
- [29:50]
Richard Wolff
An interview with my guest, John Summa. I'm going to introduce him to you.
- [29:55]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
In a moment, but I want to.
- [29:57]
Richard Wolff
Introduce him in a general way before we get to him as a particular person. You know, how Americans and other people learn about economics is a kind of interesting topic.
- [30:11]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
Lots of things about how the economy.
- [30:14]
Richard Wolff
Works are spoken to us as we grow up from infancy, not just our parents and family. And they have lots of ideas that they convey to us, many of which they're not even conscious of. But we get it in school. We get it from the media and.
- [30:30]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
What journalists write and say.
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Richard Wolff
We get it from what politicians want us to believe.
- [30:35]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
We get it from business leaders, labor leaders. It's really quite a noisy collection of influences that shape what we understand. But clearly one of the most important.
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Richard Wolff
Is what happens in the schools, those schools that teach economics. That tends not to be elementary and secondary schools in our country, but mostly colleges and universities. So what they teach and how they.
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Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
Teach shapes what a lot of the.
- [31:03]
Richard Wolff
Other players in our system say to us, whether they're our parents or our religious leaders or our political leaders. So I like from time to time to take a step back from analyzing the economy to analyzing how we teach and learn what the economy is and how it works. And that's our topic today.
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Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
I was also struck on my way.
- [31:27]
Richard Wolff
Over here to read a synopsis of a new book by Nancy MacLean, M A C L E A N. And this is a book about a Nobel Prize winning economist here in the United States, James Buchanan from Virginia. And the book reveals in a remarkable way how he arranged with and took money from the Koch brothers to tilt.
- [31:54]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
His work and to support his work.
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Richard Wolff
In arguing that letting wealthy people and corporations do whatever they want with their property is the best possible system in the world and any government effort to shape or control that is unwanted, unnecessary and to be fought. It's a remarkable story. And again, it goes to what is taught and how it's taught. So now let's back to John Summa. First of all, John, let me welcome you to the program. Thanks, Rick, and for coming. Let me tell you all a little bit about John.
- [32:31]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
He's been many things. In fact, I want him to tell you some of the different things he's done in his life. Unlike me, he has not always been an economics professor, but he has for the last good while been a professor at the University of Vermont. Indeed, he lives in Burlington, Vermont, where the University of Vermont is located. He began his teaching career in 1989. He's a member of the Union for Radical Political Economics, irpi. He has written for such publications as dollars and cents, investopedia.com that's now part of Forbes, Extra Multinational Monitor, and among others, he's published four books on quantitative finance topics. That's his specialty, and those books were published by John Wiley and Sons, a very well known, well recognized publisher of economics books in the United States. He holds a PhD in Political Economy from the New School for Social Research where I teach here in New York.
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Richard Wolff
And before we get to the questions, tell us a few of the other things you've done in your life.
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John Summa
John well, I wanted to keep the bio. You said two to four lines.
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Richard Wolff
Yes. You kept it well within the boundary.
- [33:44]
John Summa
Well in between and even before, mostly before, I should say before the teaching career started. I've been held a number of wage labor jobs. I was a steel worker and worked at Anaconda Brass in Ansonia, Connecticut. In Pasadena, Texas, I was oil refinery worker at the largest at the time it was the largest oil refinery in the world in Baytown, ExxonMobil, I think they still own it. But 247 City and I was a hydroblaster and was exposed to phosgene gas and all kinds of hazards doing that as well in the U.S. steelworker union. I was exposed to many hazards. So I know what it's like to be a wage worker in dangerous work settings and have developed an appreciation for unions and other kinds of government OSHA involvement. In fact, I probably wouldn't be alive if it weren't for the both of those institutions today.
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Richard Wolff
I think it's important for the audience to know that therefore you come to a study of economics not only through the study of the books and the literature, very important as that is, but also a kind of Hands on. From the bottom perspective, you can put those two together. Makes you an exception, since most professors of economics that I've known, and I'm one, have that kind of diversity in their background. So it makes it even more interesting, I think. So. Anyway, let's get to the key thing. Professors of economics in the United States who are critical of this system have always had a difficult time. That's been true for at least 100 years in this country. And there were periods of time when it was worse here than it was in other countries for people to be dissenters, to be critics. You have now become one of those stories in your school in the University of Vermont. I don't want the details and the individuals involved because it's really not the point. But give us a summary of what happened there so that we can go on from there to talk about what that tells us about economic learning and teaching in the United States.
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John Summa
Okay. Well, I think it does tell us quite a bit. So let's start. I'll give a brief kind of summary of the developments since my reappointment was denied. So let me just say first that right now the grievance, which I began late last year, is before the Vermont Labor Relations Board. So that's the last stop on the grievance train. Okay. So it went from the university grievance procedures for the collective bargaining agreement now to the. The final stop, which I'm appealing at the Vermont Labor Relations Board. Actually, I'm filing a grievance. I have filed a grievance there. So that's now in discovery mode. So documents being requested from both sides. They've hired a shark lawyer, and I've got my allies, legally speaking, and I've got myself.
- [36:43]
Richard Wolff
So you're contesting the not reappointment?
- [36:46]
John Summa
The not reappointment. So let's go back now to how this got started. In October last year, my four year reappointment review came up. So every four years as a lecturer, per the collective bargaining agreement, full time lecturer, you are reviewed. It's a review by the department and then external review as well as we'll get to in a second. So they reviewed my classes, peers came in, wrote letters, and I'm just going to give the facts. And then those letters led to the department not renewing my contract, but they don't have the power to actually remove me. So that's a recommendation. Then the next step is to the Faculty Standards Committee, which is an independent kind of third party. It's a checks and balances system. That we have. So the panel, five members who are independent of the department, reviewed the dossier.
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Richard Wolff
But they're inside the university.
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John Summa
They're inside the university, yes. Most of them are tenured. I think they're all tenured and one is a full professor. So they're well respected, senior, you know, faculty. They looked at the dossier just as the department did. The letters, the student evaluations, all of the evidence in there, letters of support. They voted exactly the opposite. So they unanimously actually voted in favor of my reappointment and stated clearly that I had met the standard and I was to be reappointed. So their vote was reappointment, hands down. They also said that the behavior of the department, particularly the chair, was unusual and procedurally defective. Okay, now I can go into some off the record comments, but that's essentially in their written statement. Now, that then goes to the dean. The Dean of Arts and Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences, is the only one who has the power to actually remove me.
- [38:37]
Richard Wolff
But.
- [38:37]
John Summa
So he had to look at the faculty standards committee review, conclusion and vote. He had to look at the department's review, conclusion and vote. It's yes and no. He's stuck between, what do I do? Well, he weighed all of the opinions and he came to the final paragraph in his written statement and he said, well, it looks as though, yeah, John probably should be reappointed. It was leaning that way, however, because he didn't take any center for Teaching and Learning training classes for making you more effective at teaching, like flipping classes and all the stuff they give you that they like you to take and that you don't show any attempt to engage other faculty members to improve your teaching. Thus, you appear self satisfied with your teaching because of that. Weighing these, that sort of tips the scales not reappointed.
- [39:36]
Richard Wolff
Gotcha.
- [39:36]
John Summa
When I read it, my jaw dropped. I was struck by how wrong he was because he pivots on that final piece, which is wrong. So I had requested through the union an informal meeting with the dean. And I said, you know, I have something I want to share with you. We didn't say what. We figured, well, he would be worried enough to agree to a meeting. So we got a meeting. I came in with evidence clear as day five CTL courses were taken. He didn't know that he got it wrong. I had letters from deans, associate deans, honors college deans, the executive director of some of these training programs supporting me. I gave those evidence of engagement with faculty members, everything to undermine the pivot of his Conclusion he was ashen looking. I thought, okay, we got it. Comes to the final. Then we waited for a response and he said, I would have made that decision anyway. It doesn't matter. So he contradicted himself right there. So here's the statement because of. But here's the evidence that's not true. Oh, it doesn't matter. I'm going back to the peer criticism and the peer vote and therefore grievance denied. So that stops grievance starts the grievance. Step two, up to the provost. Step three, they just whitewash and double down on the dean's decision. And now it's off to the Vermont Labor Relations Board. So that's the quick summary of the facts.
- [41:14]
Richard Wolff
Okay.
- [41:15]
John Summa
Okay. I mean, I can go into my take on it all, but I think we should probably stick to perhaps.
- [41:21]
Richard Wolff
Let's go back to the more interesting this sounds all too familiar. I have been through these things myself, luckily not at the wrong end of it the way you have been, but watching it as it befalls one or another of my colleagues. Let's go to the important question. What was the issue in your mind? Obviously, other people have different perspectives, but in your mind, what was it that you were doing in the economics department and what you were teaching and how you were presenting the material that would lead your colleagues, or at least a portion of them, to make this decision?
- [41:58]
John Summa
Well, I'm still wrestling with that question. It's complicated, but I think we can identify a few key reasons for that behavior. Number one, I open the eyes of students in ways that they either cannot do or will not do. And what does that mean? I'm trained at the New School. I've been in the real world. By the way, I'm a former hedge fund manager, so we can add that to the list. I've got a lot of real world financial markets experience. My books reflect that. I bring all that into class. Every piece of that life story of mine comes in the class and students like that. It's real. I'm real. And I bring in real critiques in terms of the standard model. I teach it well, but I also critique it well more than other faculty members would ever attempt to do. For a variety of reasons. They're not going to do that. But that's my passion. That's why I went into teaching, to engage the profession and try to transcend.
- [43:07]
Richard Wolff
So you are different.
- [43:09]
John Summa
I'm too different. Too different is really what I would say. I'm too different. I open the eyes of students as well, and I'm Popular at doing that. Students like me, not all of them agree with me. But I'm not there to win the students over. I'm there to say, hey, listen, it's not the Standard Model. Economics is not. It's not the only way to do it. Beginning and ending of this story. The story is, oh, we've got other traditions. We've got the heretical traditions. We. We've got Marx and Schaffa, and I bring it in and excite them. And they love that.
- [43:42]
Richard Wolff
Well, let me ask you a very pointed question. Were there many people who did that in your department?
- [43:49]
John Summa
No. As far as I can determine, there's one faculty member who kind of goes there.
- [43:56]
Richard Wolff
But that would be two out of how many?
- [43:59]
John Summa
Oh, well, the chair. Well, 12 at the time. 12.
- [44:03]
Richard Wolff
So one or two out of 12.
- [44:06]
John Summa
That's right.
- [44:07]
Richard Wolff
So for me, as an outsider, but.
- [44:08]
John Summa
Not the way I do it.
- [44:09]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
Right.
- [44:10]
Richard Wolff
But hear me out. If one or two out of 12 have a different approach, that gives the students some variety.
- [44:19]
John Summa
That's right. That's the point.
- [44:20]
Richard Wolff
In other words, the issue isn't that we all agree on everything. That would be a bizarre standard and one that would be rejected by most academics, at least in polite conversation. That if there are different perspectives within a discipline, as there surely are in economics, that a good curriculum reflects that and allows, in other words, that you're different isn't a reason not to have you. It's in fact a reason to include you. You, 1 or 2 out of 12 is really not asking for. So why not that perspective?
- [44:54]
John Summa
Well, I'm going to play the devil's advocate. The chair and others who are behind this operation would say, well, we offer a variety of. We have perspectives from left to right. There are some heterodoxers in the department. So we offer that. That would be the response to that. It's not the content of Summa's classes that we have a problem with. We like criticism. This has been stated. We like that he criticizes models. They've taken a position that without any evidence that I do not teach the standard model neoclassical model fully and fairly before I criticize it. So it's okay to criticize it, but you need to teach it fully and fairly. And therefore, if you fall short of that, you're not teaching up to the level that we expect. You're out of here, buddy. Okay. So that's kind of where the argument on their side has gone. It's even the position in the recent letter they've sent to me in the grievance at the Vermont Labor Relations. That's what they're kind of doubling down on that point of view, the problem there. And I don't want to give it away to them, they don't have any evidence of that. And I have a mountain of evidence. That's all I do. That's exactly what I do.
- [46:16]
Richard Wolff
But I come at it from a different I'm aghast.
- [46:19]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
And let me tell you why I'm aghast.
- [46:22]
Richard Wolff
I have supervised, I have taught at some of the best universities in the United States, et cetera, et cetera. The standard mainstream economics that my colleagues mostly teach is what they're good at. It's what they know. It's what they teach. When it comes to discussing, I'll give you the the most important example for me, Marxian economics. They wouldn't even claim that they do a fair and full critique. Mostly they wouldn't claim it because they don't know enough about that tradition, never having been taught it and never having devoted much time to learning it. If they talk about it at all, and by the way, most of them don't even do that, if they talk about it at all, it's in a quick, dismissive sort of way. So I find it the height of hypocrisy to fault a critic for not doing for the mainstream what they don't do for the critic and the critical traditions, number one. And number two, since out of the 12 people in your department, I'm assuming 10 or more are doing a full and fair presentation of the mainstream model, even if you didn't, it's not a deficiency for the department, which gives students many opportunities to learn that. So it strikes me as a bizarre framework for shutting down the critic. It sounds to me as an outsider, as what we used to call the absence of academic freedom. They're not allowing a perspective that a person knows pretty well that falls well within the traditions of economics to be articulated and to find fault with the critic because he doesn't do the complete analysis of the mainstream, which all of the rest of them do, is a thin excuse.
- [48:14]
John Summa
It's a thin excuse. However, I'm going to say again that what they're saying has no basis in.
- [48:21]
Richard Wolff
Fact, even in fact.
- [48:21]
John Summa
So in other words, and I argue that I teach the standard model. I've been teaching it 30 years, Rick. 30 years. The standard model. That's all we teach. This is very, very hard to get more than that in to the classroom. So I bring in that standard model. For example, the class that they reviewed was an international trade class. We did the partial equilibrium trade model, which everybody gets. It's a single product, two country. You derive the.
- [48:49]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
It's the standard everywhere.
- [48:50]
John Summa
Standard everywhere. And then we do the two country, two goods MA and two factors of production. Then we go to the hex row and derive some derivative theorems. I go through all of that, homeworks, exams, PowerPoints, slides on chalkboard work. So I do in fact teach. All this is the red herring. It's not me they're describing. I do that and then I critique it in a way they will never do. That is internal inconsistency. And that's.
- [49:26]
Richard Wolff
That's what's unbearable to them.
- [49:27]
John Summa
Unbearable. Critical. But no, that's not enough. That's not enough to get them to do what they did. It's that it inspires students, some of them to raise their hands in their classes and say, but Professor Summa said that you can't draw the marginal cost curve as a Nike swoosh or upward sloping. And that's maybe an exception at best. The Shaw, they don't know what to say.
- [49:53]
Richard Wolff
They're not equipped to handle things.
- [49:54]
John Summa
They're angry and annoyed that the students are actually motivated to engage the material in a way they would normally never do. So that's what got them angry at me. And students have told me how angry that some of them display that anger they display when they have meetings with them about me. The comments they make. It's not that they're just comments that you know where they're at. But popular, doing that, having fun doing that.
- [50:22]
Richard Wolff
Let me ask you a question, John. What's the anxiety? It's always been in my mind. Help me. What is this anxiety that seems to be particularly strong among economics professors? This anxiety about people who do it otherwise, who do it differently from you?
- [50:40]
John Summa
Well, look at Paul Romer who just published the paper. He's been tarted, feathered. He's the head of the World bank now. Paul Romer, for God's sakes, the macro king, right. One of the. He wrote that paper, published it, and thank God he's tenured and he's got a job at the World Bank. Because if that were anybody else. Well, I wanted to add that the fact that I'm not tenured allows them to do the. Flick him off. So I'm the only non tenured member. Well, at that time in the department. So what happens is you can be a tenured member of the department and do a little of that Marxian stuff or maybe something outside. There's nothing they can do about that. But Summa can't come in and do that. But again, we can get rid of him.
- [51:25]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
But the mystery to me, why is.
- [51:27]
Richard Wolff
That so scary to do?
- [51:30]
John Summa
Well, there's a level of insecurity. I'm not an academic pure. I know from years of interacting with academics with all due respect, there's a deep level of insecurity that academics of all kinds have because they're in a very specialized world. They publish their papers, maybe a handful of people will ever read and that's their whole life. The meaning of their existence is defined by something as arcane, as a representative agent in a stochastic general equilibrium model. Right. Well, but can you do anything other than that? You know, I think and you come in and start blowtorching some of that stuff. You're just a lecturer, you've never published.
- [52:12]
Richard Wolff
In a get you out of this.
- [52:13]
John Summa
Get you out of here. Because they can. And look, we all fail at teaching to some degree. We all are working. It's a work in progress. It's a lifelong quest to be a great teacher. And that requires hard work. You really have to know your stuff to be willing to not be lazy. Because that's what we were talking about earlier. Faculty fall back into these sort of lazy default positions and then do their research. They don't want to go after that alternative textbook Like I used Jerry Friedman's textbook, the Microtextbook, wonderful book. I have my criticisms of it. But you know, the students loved it.
- [52:50]
Richard Wolff
He by the way, is a critic. He is very critical of the standard material.
- [52:55]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
I know him personally.
- [52:56]
John Summa
Yeah, I used it now twice. So it's books like that.
- [53:01]
Richard Wolff
Since we're running out of time, let me ask you to comment on what in the end is where I began. What is the result of treating critics the way you've been treated and so many have over the years in economics? What is the result of the economics that our young people learn in colleges and universities and then go on to use as political leaders, business leaders, labor leaders, journalists, whatever?
- [53:28]
John Summa
Well, I think students are natively much more intelligent than the standard model itself. In other words, the students are too smart. They don't buy that standard model actually. And that's why you can connect with them. When you start to say there's some problems with it and deep problems with it, the message is ideological, it's embedded. In the business schools, the micro macro is a requirement. So that's cross linked and it's embedded. And what that sends to the students, they're not Aware of this is a message that business and markets know best and government interference is a suboptimal situation. Maybe it's a necessary evil, but generally.
- [54:11]
Richard Wolff
It'S not a good idea.
- [54:12]
John Summa
It's not a good idea we can do without, then we're better. That is a sort of functional role. You know, you think of Veblen and I always go back to Veblen. You know, this is sort of folklore, neoclassical economics marginalism is folklore dressed up with a lot of math fables, you.
- [54:32]
Richard Wolff
Know, but it's folklore that reinforces, legitimize.
- [54:36]
John Summa
It's a narrative of legitimacy.
- [54:38]
Richard Wolff
Keep the status quo for the status quo.
- [54:40]
John Summa
And by removing me, you take out one maverick independent voice who's yes, maybe a little rough around the edges. Sometimes I bring in a lot of offbeat stuff playing Beastie Boys videos and write to party to teach the Coase theorem. I mean, students like it, but it's effective. So taking me out makes, like Jerry says, microeconomics. It just sucks the standard model. It's boring.
- [55:07]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
Nobody but for me searching you out.
- [55:11]
John Summa
And others I've been told are getting removed.
- [55:13]
Richard Wolff
Yeah.
- [55:14]
John Summa
Oh, I've heard in Australia, same thing. Just email me.
- [55:17]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
Your story is repeated over and over.
- [55:21]
Richard Wolff
In my own life as just one person must have seen it 20 times. But the end result is to make economics narrow, unifocal, and it just has a simple story to repeat over and over again. It takes all the excitement out of fundamental differences that would engage students.
- [55:42]
John Summa
Conflict.
- [55:43]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
It's part of the reason why more.
- [55:44]
Richard Wolff
And more students don't study economics to learn. They study it to get a credential to go on. But there isn't this excitement about learning that always requires debate and disagreement. It's sad. It is a country engaged in self destructive narrowness of its own learning process. There's something very tragic besides for you.
- [56:09]
John Summa
Well, it's an existential crisis. The profession is in an existential crisis. It's clear to us that it has been in crises before. But the crash of 2008 really, really knocked it. You know, it's staggering, but it seems to have stabilized itself. But at the same time there's the leaders, Paul Romers and others are calling it out. And macroeconomics going backwards for 30 years. The representative agent model. You know, Dave Hollander, this stuff is. Forget it. You know what's wrong?
- [56:46]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
It's interesting when some of the leading lights.
- [56:48]
Richard Wolff
It's a little bit like Warren Buffet explaining that the American tax system is an abomination that isn't good for the American economy, as well as being unethical and unfair. It shakes up the.
- [57:00]
John Summa
Yeah. So the left, Marxist critics have been doing this for years. But when the center of the profession begins to call it out, well, then we got to pay attention.
- [57:11]
Richard Wolff
John Summa, thank you very much for sharing your story.
- [57:15]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
And I hope it gives people something to chew on.
- [57:18]
John Summa
Oh, I'm hoping to.
- [57:19]
Richard Wolff (Assistant/Co-host)
I want to thank everybody for listening. I want to thank you for being part of this program. I want to thank you for partnering with us and using our websites and everything else we do. I want to thank truthout.org that remarkable independent source of news and analysis. And I look forward to speaking with you all again next week. Change, change, change, change, change, change.
- [57:47]
Richard Wolff
Thing gonna change. Yep, it is it. Sam.