← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, 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, and currently I teach at the New School University in New York City. Well, there are many things to discuss this week, but I'm going to focus a little bit more than I usually do on education because of the important role it plays in our society and because of the economic revolution, and I really don't use that word so often that's going on in the production and delivery of education in our society. Well, let me begin then with a story about education in our society that will give you an insight into part of that revolution. And my source here is a story in the Chronicle of Higher Education. And for those of you who are interested, that really is the best ongoing, regular source of information about what's going on and at least in higher education. And by that is meant colleges and universities. The Chronicle of higher education February 12th of this year had a story by Kevin Birmingham. Who is Kevin Birmingham and what's the story about? He's an instructor in English language and so forth at Harvard University. That makes him a. A bit of a special kind of person in the United States because of the prestige that Harvard works so hard to cultivate for itself. But he was nominated and was given the Truman Capote Award, given annually by the university in Iowa and Iowa City. And, and this year he gave a talk in receiving the Truman Capote Award. The award was given for his book, his first book. Kevin Birmingham's book is called the Most Dangerous Book, the Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses. The book, by the way, is a very interesting study of all of the difficulties James Joyce had overcoming this censorship, overcoming people who reacted to his work as obscene because there were sexual references in it, and so on. A book that is now recognized as one of the greatest achievements of modern literature, James Joyce's Ulysses. It's sobering to read a book that tells you how close we came to never getting that piece of literature into our mental development as a people. It gives you pause when you recognize how current prejudices can have such devastating effects. And no doubt there were other James Joyces we will never know about who didn't have the brakes he did to get it out. So Kevin Birmingham's book, the Most Dangerous Book about that is well worth award, and he got the Truman Capote Award. But that's not why I'M talking to you about it. In the award ceremony, he gave a speech that's available through the Chronicle of Higher Education, if you're interested. And the story and the speech he gave has the title, quote, the Great Shame of Our Profession. And by profession, he means college and university teachers. And I'm going to get to that in a moment because it is so important, since let's remember colleges and universities are where Americans get whatever advanced education they ever get. Most Americans don't go to college, but if they do, then a section of those go on to graduate school. And in the college and the graduate school, what passes for higher education, education beyond the senior year in high school, that's where people get whatever education they get. So what goes on there shapes this society through shaping the skills, the aptitudes, the understandings of the world that we bring to our society. So let me tell you first about the award because it tells you something just like the book. It does. And we're not surprised that Kevin Birmingham tells us about it. The Truman Capote Award was created in the memory of Newton Arvin, an English professor at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. In 1960, Professor Arvin at Smith was charged with, I kid you not, lewdness and possession of obscenity after officers from the Massachusetts Pornography Unit ransacked his apartment. According to Kevin Birmingham, Arvin's real crime was that the sexually explicit material he owned was homosexual. In the course of the investigation, Professor Arvin apparently named two other untenured faculty members at Smith who also possessed allegedly obscene material. The courts. Now this is important, folks. The courts ultimately overturned the professors, all of their convictions for these quote, unquote crimes. But Smith College suspended Arvin from teaching and cut his salary in half. He died three years later, a relatively young man. The two untenured faculty members he named were fired. And Smith College has never apologized for any of it. What happened to James Joyce continues to happen. And so Kevin Birmingham told that story and said, I want to use my award to say something about the shame of the profession. And by that he meant the shame of the college teaching, college and university teaching profession. And by shame, he meant the insecurity, the injustice that is now suffered by the vast majority of. Of college and university teachers. Let me tell you about that, since, of course, I am one as well. And so this is about me and my colleagues and the people I have worked with all my adult life as a university teacher. Today, tenured faculty represent 17% of of college instructors. One out of six has job security. One out of six has a reasonable number of courses so that he or she can spend the time reading, thinking, studying, doing the research that make them an up to date qualified teacher. From 1975 to 2011, Professor Birmingham explains to us the number of part time adjuncts. That's the name that's used. People who teach one or two or three courses or maybe more at multiple universities, typically spending teaching two courses at college number one and one course at college number two and maybe another course at college number three. Cobbling together a teaching job, something tenured faculty never had to do. And I was a tenured faculty all of my adult life at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The case now is that the part time adjuncts are a majority of the professoriate. A majority of college and universities teachers are now part time adjuncts and, and their number is growing faster than anybody else's positions in colleges and universities. And now the statistics you really have to hear to understand. 89% of college adjuncts work at more than one institution. 13% work at four or more institutions. And the reason they work at multiple institutions is obvious. The median pay, that is 50% of adjuncts get more than this and 50% get less. The median pay of an adjunct in the United States, according to a 2014 congressional report, is $2,700 per semester course. Folks, what that means is if an adjunct teaches five such courses. Five. Two at a one university, then runs across town, two at another university, and then runs somewhere else the last day of the week. 5. At $2,700 a pop, this person earns $13,500 per semester or $27,000 per year. He or she is running around ragged. They couldn't possibly have time after grading the papers of how many of anywhere from 20 to 100 students per class, you're going to meet with them and talk with them about the issues they have? Probably not. Why not? Because you couldn't possibly do that in the time that you have and grade the papers and grade the exams and meet with the students to explain where they got the answer wrong so that they really learned something. No, the reality is American colleges and universities don't care about the quality of the teaching. They that's why they don't have tenured professors anymore. I had the time at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I had the time. Two to three courses a semester, plenty of time for me to read, to study, to be up on what had to be taught. Time to meet with the students for those one on one conversations that can make all the Difference to how a student does in the course, to what a student gets from from the course, and to what the whole experience means to a young person on his or her way to becoming a skilled contributor to our society. To be able to give you the statistics I just did that the majority of college and university teachers are adjuncts and that that majority is growing very fast. That only one in six tenured professors, only one in six instructors is a tenured professor. That is a comment on the quality of our education that is going to hamper and undermine the economic, social and political well being of the United States for decades to come. Bravo to Kevin Birmingham for taking the Truman Capote Award for an important book on Ulysses and the struggle of James Joyce to get it published. But also even more to indicate that he wants to do something about the injustice to college instructors. Having transformed the being of a professor from someone who really can learn and understand and have the space and the time and the support to bring that to young people to really make a difference in their lives. Wiping all that out to save money. Because that's what it's about, folks. To pay a tenured professor is more expensive than to pay an overworked, harried, underpaid adjunct. That's all it was ever about. Public colleges are doing it because legislatures in the states don't give them the money they used to. I've given you the statistics in the past about that. It is a tragedy. It is a tragedy of enormous proportions. And I bring it to you in the hope that you can learn from it and become part of a solution to it, rather than imagining it can still somehow go on as if it weren't a crippling situation. Let me read to you one of the lines from Kevin Birmingham Talk. One English Department adjunct who responded to our survey said that she sold her plasma, that's her blood on Tuesdays and Thursdays to pay for her daughter's day care. Another woman stated that she taught four classes a year for less than $10,000. She wrote, I am currently pregnant with my first child. I will receive no time off for the birth or recovery. It is necessary I continue until the end of the semester in May in order to get paid, something I drastically need. The only recourse I have is to revert to an online classroom and do work while in the hospital and upon my return home. And Birmingham concludes, and for those of you who are aware of gender issues, 61% of the adjunct faculty in the United States are female. Let me turn to the next economic update it has to do with the distribution of wealth in different societies. Here in the United States, it is often pretended that the distribution of wealth we have is only a little off of what is normal or typical in capitalist societies, particularly in relatively advanced industrial capitalist societies, not so different from our own. And that therefore one oughtn't to be critical or to complain about the distribution of wealth, since it really does reflect how clever some people are, how hard they work. And wouldn't it be tragic to punish rather than reward the effort, the skill, the ingenuity, and so forth and so on and so forth and so on? Well, I looked into this and I thought you might be interested, as I was, to compare the United States to four other countries that are in many ways like us and to ask the question two questions, really. One, is wealth distributed more or less in those countries the way it is here? And if not, why not? And what are the consequences? Okay, so here's the result, and I'm using here the work, as I have in the past, of the Piketty and Saez research groups, one located at the University of California in Berkeley and the other one located at the University of Paris. One of the researchers, Gabrielle Zucman, Z U C man, has a 2016 report on wealth and poverty around the world.
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And.
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And that's where these numbers come from. So let's start with Finland. Finland. The richest 1% of people in Finland own 12 1/2% of the wealth. So it's only 1% of the people, and they have 12% of the wealth. That's an unequal wealth distribution, that 1% of the people. If things were distributed equally, 1% of the people would have 1% of the wealth. The richest 1% have 12% of the wealth, which means poorer people have smaller shares of the wealth in Finland. But Finland is an egalitarian society. When we begin to look elsewhere, the second country I looked at, Canada. What does the richest 1% of people in Canada have? How much of the wealth of that country? 15 and a half percent. More inequality than Finland. But now let's move right along. The next country was France. The richest 1% of the French people own 18% of the wealth. Of France, 1% owns 18% of the wealth. The next country, Germany, in some ways the most like us in Europe. In Germany, the richest 1% own 24.5% of the wealth. That's right. The top 1% own a quarter of the wealth. That's a very unequal society. Significantly more unequal than France. Even more unequal relative to Canada and extremely unequal relative to Finland. So now let's come to the United States. How much of the national wealth of the United States is owned by the top 1%? Here's the 41.8%. That's right. The richest 1% own 40, 41.8% of the wealth. Now, Finland, Canada, France and Germany are all capitalist economies. They are economies in which the overwhelming bulk of goods and services are produced by private enterprise enterprises and distributed in markets. They are capitalist economies, but they do not permit, they do not allow anything like the level of inequality that we accept in the United States. We are the most unequally distributed society in terms of wealth of any of the advanced countries. We are an extreme outlier. What is this about? Why has this happened and what are the implications? Briefly, but importantly, how did it happen? We have been as a nation extraordinarily vicious and violent in turning against the institutions that might have prevented this level of inequality. And that's clear from my research, because when you look at Finland, Canada, France and Germany, they all have stronger versions of these institutions than we do. So there's a good hint that maybe the relative weakness of those institutions here is an important contributor to, to the extreme inequality of wealth here. Well, what are those institutions? Here they go. Trade unions. Stronger in terms of their social position, often also in terms of their membership. But membership is a different thing in those societies than it is here. The social position of trade unions is stronger in all those countries than than it is in the United States. Trade unions that advocate for their members, that push for higher incomes, that push for laws and rules and regulations that limit what corporations can do, all of those are stronger in those other countries than they are in ours. Here's another example. In every one of those countries, countries, there are left wing political parties that have considerable popular appeal and considerable electoral success. Some more, some less, and it varies at the times. But socialist parties, anti capitalist parties, parties closely linked to trade unions and expressing their perspectives in a systematic way, all of that is more present in Finland, Canada, France and Germany than it is in in the United States. Which means that both the trade union and the political party that speaks for labor and constrains capital is what's missing here in the United States. And is it missing because we haven't experimented with it? Not at all. Trade unions were once much stronger in in the United States than they are today. In 1950s, a third of America's private sector workers were represented by a union. Today it's less than 7%. So we know, it was once that we had strong labor unions. We don't have them anymore. And likewise we once had strong socialist parties, strong labor based wings of the Democratic Party. We don't have either of those. Socialist, communist and other anti capitalist parties are tiny shadows today of what they once were. And the labor or progressive wing of the Democratic Party has been in decline for decades. Although that may be turning around if the Bernie Sanders effort is any sign. Nor did the shrinkage of the labor movement and of socialist and communist parties happen in some quote unquote normal way. These institutions have been repressed by the private sector and by the government. We've had Joe McCarthyism, we have had anti leftism everywhere in our society, sustained by all kinds of politicians, by all kinds of private, well funded groups. We've had a fairly vicious race repression of the left for most of the last half century. So there's no surprise, but that inequality has consequences. When you have an inequality as extreme as that here in the United States, other things are extreme too. If 1% of the people together have 41.8% of the wealth and that's what we have in America, then those 1% have to be, let me underscore that, have to be very worried that the mass of people looking at this inequality will take steps to use their vote, one person, one vote, to undo that inequality, to redistribute that wealth or maybe even reorganize the economy so it never gets distributed like that in the first place. And therefore we wouldn't need redistribution to protect against that. The 1%, if they have that much wealth, can devote a sizable chunk of it to keeping the rest of it. That's why politics is corrupted in societies with this kind of inequality. It's corrupted because the rich understand, especially here in the United States where they are so extremely rich and where because of their extreme wealth, they can devote huge amounts of money to buying the parties, to buying the candidates, to pumping the airwaves full of messages to keep their wealth off the radar, to make people unaware of it, to make people concerned about other issues, to keep everything going in such a way as not to question or challenge or, or change the inequality that makes all this happen. If you are not satisfied with the economic conditions of the United States, please be aware that a capitalist system that gives so much of the wealth to so small a part of the population is a central cause of your economic distress. And that being angry at immigrants or being angry at government regulations is a mistake in terms of understanding, identifying where the basic problems lie. We have a system that generates a level of inequality that corrodes the institutions we depend on. We've reached the end of the first half of this program. Please remember to stay with us. We will be back after a very short interlude with the second half of today's Economic Update.
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Leave me floating at sea I count the stars that flow through my veins at night when I'm alive almost drifting out of sight the ocean takes me to the horizon like the sun at night Even when I wake myself I need you to pull me together I always have to tell myself, you know you have to pull it together There is a land that we all belong to it's all enough to to guilt confusion Cuz it's about time we move to higher ground down the hillside avenue Morning comes too easily I only closed my eyes for a second but I felt alive sun shines through the window.
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Welcome back friends to the second half of the economic update for this time in February 2017. Before beginning the major discussion for this second half of the program, I wanted once again to invite you and to remind you about the websites and other associated activity that we offer you on a regular basis. We maintain two websites. One is rdwolf with two f's com and the other one is democracyatwork.info that's all one word, democracyatwork.info both of those websites are available to you 24 7. No charge ever whatsoever for anything on there. We put up there a complete archive of these radio and television programs. We put up there my interviews that I give on various media from time to time, lectures, articles that are written. We now have a whole blog section of democracyatwork.info where all kinds of other materials, other writers put their contributions both to the critique of the economic system we have and to the notion that we can and should move in new directions and particularly the direction of worker co ops. As a much better way to organize the work process than the top down hierarchical and undemocratic way that capitalist corporations run. These websites are there for you. They offer you ways to communicate with us here, to tell us what you like and don't like, to give us the questions you'd like us to answer, and so on. The websites give you ways of following us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, all the social media that we make use of, and we do a great deal of that. These websites also allow you to communicate with us. If you would like me to come to your part of the country in order to speak and meet with you, which I would like to do in coming weeks. I will be, for example, in the Bay Area of California, speaking in a number of places into a number of different groups. Later on in the spring, I will be in Virginia, in Missouri, in a whole host of places where folks like you have gotten in touch with us and said we'd like to arrange such an event. We're also available here, looking all the time for more radio and television stations that might like to carry this program. Give us a hoot, tell us that you have somebody you can connect us to. We will follow up. We are now on 75 stations around the United States radio, two television stations that are sizable in their coverage. More are coming soon. And so we are very excited and interested in expanding our reach. And indeed, that's the partnership we offer and that we invite you to participate in. Make use of what we do, show other people who might be interested that we're here, that we do this every week, that that website is available for them to use, to teach with, to, to share, to discuss. There are no end of ways of doing it. And we now have action groups, they're called Democracy at Work Action groups in a dozen cities across the United States. If you're interested, let us know, you can go to our website. You can find out about them, join them. If you're interested, form your own. If you'd like to use the websites to partner with us in any and all of these ways, and if you have a new way to suggest, we're all ears, let us know. Okay. Much of the time that remains for me today is going to be used to talk about economic theory. Don't worry, this is not going to be an abstruse lesson of the sort you might get in a bad class in a bad school. I'm going to try to make it clear and I'm going to try to make it interesting. But we have to deal with this. Economics is not like fixing a car. If you want to fix a car, you go to a place where they teach you, this is the carburetor, this is the engine, this is how it works, this is how it breaks down, and this is how you fix it. When it breaks down so that it works again, things are kind of understood. They're fairly universal, car engines being what they are. And so you can become a mechanic and a skilled worker by learning how the engine is put together, what goes wrong and how to fix it. Economics is not like that. What do I mean? The economy is part of the mystery of how human beings Interact with one another, you know, other parts of that mystery. Because we all confront those mysteries. Why do I find that person attractive rather than the other one? Why did I marry him or her rather than that other one? Why am I friends with this person but not with the other one? These are mysteries of relationships, and we spend much of our time trying to figure them out. And we make progress. We learn how or why, at least part of how or why we marry the way we do, and we have friendships the way we do. And this job works for us and that one doesn't, and this neighborhood is attractive and that one isn't, etc. Well, the economy is like that. We don't experience the economy in the same way. If you are the head of a big corporation, you do not experience the economy in the same way that a person does who drives a truck, even if it's in the same corporation. If you're a farmer, you do not experience the economy the way you do. If you're an office worker, you don't. And that's not a fault or a failure. That's the way the world is. But it's even more complicated. If you were educated in certain ways, you were taught to think about the economy in certain ways, and if someone else taught you with a very different approach, then you learned that approach. It turns out that economic systems are understood and experienced differently by different people. And it has always been that way. Just like human beings understand love, sex, friendship, and all the other important relationships in life in very different ways. And indeed, one of the fascinating and interesting things about life is to encounter to discover other ways of looking at the world. It will change us. If I look at it in one way and I encounter a person who looks at it in a different way, my perspective will be changed. I will now be more sensitive. I will understand, even if I don't agree with other ways of thinking about the world. It's a little bit like discovering that there are other kinds of food preparation than the one you grew up with. You don't have to like them as well, but they're interesting, they're tasty. From time to time, you would like to taste it again. So here in New York, for example, one restaurant offers sushi, and one restaurant Tex Mex, and another restaurant Chinese food, and so on. And people in New York love that about this city, that you can literally go to a different corner of the world whenever you want to taste how differently human beings have understood the relationship between us and the food we eat. So let's do the economics. How do we get into it? Well, I give that a lot of thought because when I teach economics, I teach it in what we call a comparative perspective. I don't teach economics as if it were carburetor or car engine studies. The economy isn't a thing that it works in this. And this way that we can learn and figure out how to fix that makes economics boring, mechanical and technical when what is exciting about it is precisely how differently people eat. Imagine if I gave you a course about food and all I talked about was, here's how you cook the hamburger, here's how you cook the French fries, and therefore, here's how you make food. Eventually you'd figure out that that isn't about food. That's about one kind of food. And you don't want to be limited to just that kind. You'd like to at least know what the other ones are. It would be as if I taught you a course on religion, but the only religion I told you about was, let's say, Unitarian Universalist religion. After a while you'd say to me, look, I'm perfectly happy learning about Unitarians and Universalists, but aren't there other religions too, like Roman Catholicism or Muslim religion or Jewish religion or. And so on and so on. You want to understand that people engage with divinity, God, the spiritual, if you like, in different ways, just like they engage with food in different ways. Well, friends, your education is narrow, stunted and inadequate if you think economics is one way to go. Now, why do I stress that? Because that's how it's taught in the United States, and that's how it's been taught for most of the last 50 years. We do not admit to most of our students in most of our colleges and universities that there are alternative ways of understanding what an economy is, how it works, what's wrong with it, and how to fix it. There are multiple ways of doing that, just like there are multiple ways of singing or dancing or eating or dressing or praying or anything else, particularly anything else that really matters in life. And our economy matters, just like our eating matters and our religions matter and so on. So I am now, in the time that I have, going to try to address the different ways you can understand the economy. One last reason before I do it. Why? Because economics has been so narrowly taught in the United States because only one way of thinking about it dominates, almost to the exclusion, not quite, but almost to the exclusion of other ways. Our economic leadership in companies, in the government, has been poor. We have had, for Example, a crash in 1929, a terrible crash that gave us a depression, that's what it's called, that lasted for 11 years, roughly from 29 to 41. One of the reasons we had that terrible crash is we didn't have the insight, the understanding to see it coming. We didn't understand once it came, why it was there, and we didn't understand real well what to do about it, which is why it lasted 11 horrible years. Years. And did we at least learn after that? Not really very well. The narrowness of our economics prevented us from asking and answering crucial questions. And that's part of the reason why in 2008, capitalism in the United States and beyond crashed again. And once again the profession didn't see it coming. And once again, once it hit, they didn't understand why. And once again, they couldn't fix it. Which is why here we are, eight years, nine years later, in 2017, a crash that happened in 2008, and we're still, most of us, living in the consequences, the terribly damaging consequences. That should have been more than enough evidence to suggest that the way we were teaching, studying, learning and using economics was inadequate, was too narrow, missed too much. But it didn't. It didn't. And that's because there are reasons why we teach what we teach, even though it doesn't work very well. Dangerous way to run your society, but it's the one that has dominated in our society. So what is that way? It's called neoclassical economics. We don't have enough time to go into why it has this funny name, but it does. That's a matter of the history, of how it arose. And in this view, capitalism is a magnificent economic system. Neoclassical economics is not neutral about capitalism. It loves capitalism. It doesn't just love capitalism, but it loves a particular kind of capitalism. It's a kind with very little government intervention in the economy. Indeed, from a neoclassical perspective, all we want from the government is to make sure that nobody interferes with this beautiful system called capitalism. A system which is perfect, which rewards everybody in proportion to what they contribute. If you are rich, it's because you've contributed a lot. If you're poor, it's because you haven't. It's very morally loaded this way. It's a system in which what gets produced is what people want. So it's kind of fair, it's kind of responsive, it's consumer oriented, if you like that language. It's a system that's self healing. If anything goes wrong, it fixes itself. You don't need the government to come in. You just let it be. Let the private individual buy and sell. Buy the goods and services he or she wants, sell whatever they have to contribute to production, their labor, if that's all they have, or their capital if they have some wealth, or their land, if they own some. You contribute what you wish and have and you get in proportion to what you contribute. Pharesis, you might call it, a wonderful system that is the best way to organize an economy that the world has ever achieved. And therefore it should be celebrated, which is what neoclassical economics does. And it should not be interfered with, which is the message that neoclassical economics gives to the journalists who write about the economy, to the politicians who run the government, and to the leaders who own and operate the enterprise. Neoclassical teaches the private economy is what should dominate, is the best thing that could happen, should be left alone and works perfectly. Nobody has anything to complain about. Your income is your reward for what you contribute. Don't complain. If you want more, contribute more. And if you don't have more to contribute, if you don't have more labor you can do, if you don't have more capital you can offer, if you don't have more land you can make available, then it's your fault and you have to live with whatever rewards you get for what contribution you make. This is a celebratory system. This is what is taught in American colleges and universities 95% of the time, 5%, not quite, I'm going to get to that in a minute. But this is what is taught. Therefore you shouldn't be surprised that journalists, when they write about economics, right? As if we live in this wonderful system that works really beautifully and that the government should keep its hands off and nobody should break the rules. And if there's a problem, the market, the system will solve it itself. And you shouldn't be surprised that corporate leaders love this because it says they're in charge of an enterprise which can do everything it wants. The government is not going to interfere because that would only make things bad. This is what the people who run this society want. Politicians are told to think like this. That's why you can hear politicians so often saying these weird things like let the market decide, let the private enterprise system work its way. These are people who believe this. And after all, they were taught it over and over again. They got it from their newspapers and tv. They get it from their political leaders. Of course they believe it. But is this the only way to look at the economy? And the answer is an absolute Unqualified. No, no, no. To imagine that this is the only way to understand the economy is the same thing as imagining that the only way to have a meal is to eat hamburgers and French fries, or the only way to pray is, in the manner of Unitarians and Universalists, it is to misunderstand a part of the story for the whole story. And that does you no service and is no compliment to your smarts. So here we go. Here's the first alternative. The first alternative is called Keynesian economics, named after John Maynard Keynes, a British economics professor at Cambridge University who, in the depths of the Great depression of the 1930s, looked around him and said, I see a quarter of the people unemployed. I see poverty and misery all around me. Don't tell me capitalism is a wonderful system that works beautifully, that produces wealth, prosperity, economic growth, that gives everybody what they deserve. Stop it. You're describing an economy that may be a utopian dream you have, but it does not describe, and therefore it is not going to help us fix an economy that is clearly not working well. This was a bombshell for many. This was a man, John Maynard Keynes, who had been an accomplished practitioner of neoclassical economics, but who was realistic about what he saw in the Britain of his time, which was as devastated by the Great Depression as the United States was. And he said, capitalism, private enterprise markets, left to themselves, can and here clearly have produced social and economic disasters. Crashes, poverty, unemployment, misery, inequality, economic instability. Should I go on? And Mr. Keynes didn't waste a minute. He developed an explanation for how private enterprise capitalism can produce these disasters and what should be done about it. And to make a long story short, he said there were mechanisms, normal and natural to capitalism that could and regularly would produce economic horror stories. Disasters, failures, miseries, inefficiencies, depressions. And the solution, he said, was for the government to step in systematically. The government should pump money into the economy, when it turned down, to build it up again, that the government should. If the private sector wasn't spending enough money to keep people in their jobs working and producing well, then the government should step in. It didn't even matter to Keynes. Buy anything you want. Take in each other's laundry, build national parks, do whatever it is that has to be done. Keep people working by having the government buy whatever it thinks might be useful to build. But the government has to come in, otherwise capitalism self destructs. This is a very different economic theory. Most schools in the United States don't teach it. And if they do teach it, they have one or two faculty Doing that, everybody else is parodying the old neoclassical song and dance. But is Keynesian the only alternative? Not at all. The third big one, Marxian economics. And here's the big difference about it. Neoclassical economics celebrates private capitalism. Keynesian economics says private capitalism is good, but only if controlled, regulated, supplemented by government intervention. Otherwise the bad parts of it drown out the good parts of it. But Keynesian economics likes capitalism. It just wants it with a heavy dose of government involvement, which freaks out the neoclassicals who don't want any government. And so that's been the debate between them. More or less government, more or less government intervention. Marxian economics, completely different. For Marxian economics, the problem isn't more or less government. The problem is capitalism itself. This system of organizing production so that a tiny group of people at the top, the board of directors, excuse me, make all the decisions and the mass of employees do what they're told for that. For Marxism, that's the problem. You have an undemocratic economic system and it undermines democracy everywhere else. You have a system that gives a small number of people, the dominant say they'll make the system work for them and not for everybody else. And that's why you get the inequality that we talked about in the first half of the of today's program. No, no, no. The Marxian argument is you have to change the economic system at the foundation. You have to finally bring democracy to the workplace. All the workers together, collectively and democratically decide what happens in the enterprise. Not a handful of shareholders, not a handful of board of directors elected by the shareholders. No, no, no. The autocracy, the non representative nature of the leadership of enterprises, that's the core problem. And that has to be fixed. Otherwise you will have recessions and depressions and crashes. The government coming in, as Mr. Keynes proposed, wasn't enough to stop us from having another crash in 2008, not having learned what the Marxists want us to see, which is the crash in 1930s was also a problem of the underlying system. I'm not here to argue for one or the other of these. You can guess where my preferences lie. But that's not the point. The point is a proper education exposes young people to at least all three the neoclassical, the Keynesian and the Marxian. Otherwise you are being dishonest to the young people trying to learn. You're telling them that something isn't there when it is, that an alternative way of thinking is not there, because you ignore it when it is there and has very important insights to contribute. Why would a country like ours be this way. Why would we continue to, to teach one way of thinking when it hasn't worked real well and the alternatives are obvious? And the answer is fear. For 50 years, the cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union made Americans fearful about the Soviet Union. It talked about Marxism, so they didn't want to talk about that at all. If you talked about it, you lost your career, you lost your job. You were in trouble a little bit like James Joyce trying to write his novel. You were censored, you were pushed away. It's a tragedy. It's intellectually dishonest and it's a tragedy for our country. We need all the insights and all the theoretical avenues available to our people to solve our problems. Shutting us out of two of the three major theories in the world today is self destructive. It's only done to fearfully support the status quo. What the corporations now like, they are not the problem. It's the government intervention. It's this, it's something else. It's immigrants. But it's not the system itself. If you are interested in learning economics from a comparative standpoint, I wrote a book with my colleague Steve Resnick called Contending Economic, Neoclassical, Keynesian and Marxian, published in 2012 by MIT Press, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the leading economics departments in the country. MIT Press, Richard Wolff, Steven Resnick. Contending Economic Theories expresses economics as the confrontation of three alternative theories. It's what we should have been doing long ago. Thank you for your attention. Thank you for your partnership. Thank you, truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis. For being a partner for so long, I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Your time now, babe. But after a while, gonna be my time. My time, babe. They ain't gonna change. Thing gonna change. Yes, it is.
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B
It. Sam.