Economic Update: Human Nature and Capitalism

Summary

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Economic Update: Human Nature and Capitalism

Podcast: Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Date: June 8, 2017
Host: Richard D. Wolff
Guest: Dr. Harriet Fraad

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Episode Overview

This episode of Economic Update explores the intersection of “human nature” and capitalism. Host Richard D. Wolff breaks down prevailing economic issues—including healthcare, housing, privatization, sugar market manipulation, and state debt—before engaging in a deep interview with mental health counselor Dr. Harriet Fraad. Their discussion dissects the oft-cited claim that capitalism is simply an expression of “human nature,” and challenges whether greed, competition, and avarice are immutable human traits or socialized behaviors.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Healthcare Reform at the State Level (02:00–07:30)

• Wolff critiques the failures of national healthcare policy:
  • Democrats expanded coverage but failed to control costs; Republicans threaten to remove millions from coverage.
  • Two states (California and Nevada) are moving toward broader public options:
    • California: Senate Bill 562 aims for state-wide Medicare for all.
    • Nevada: Proposes wider Medicaid access for more people.
• Quote:
  • “Bravo to California, Bravo to Nevada for going against the federal disaster that is imposed on us by Republicans and Democrats alike.” (06:38 – Wolff)

2. Housing Bubble in Canada (07:32–09:56)

• Canada's major cities, especially Toronto, suffering from rapidly escalating housing prices and instability, reminiscent of previous U.S. housing crises.
• Wolff Questions: Should housing be left to the private market?
• Quote:
  • “It ought to, in a reasonable, rational person, raise the question whether something as important as housing is to be left to private capitalist market activity, given what we know has happened in most large cities…” (09:18 – Wolff)

3. The “Economic Religion” of Privatization (09:56–19:53)

• Wolff tackles the dogma that privatization is always preferable to public provision.
• Examples:
  • Trump proposes privatizing air traffic control; infrastructure “public-private partnerships.”
  • False “common sense” that private enterprise is inherently more efficient.
  • Cites military, schools, police, public transportation as public sector successes.
• Quote:
  • “There is no consistent evidence whatsoever to privilege the private over the public… It really isn’t common sense. It’s nonsense. That’s what it is.” (14:30 – Wolff)
• Explains both capitalist and socialist societies end up blending public and private enterprise.

4. Myth of the Free Market—The Case of Sugar (19:55–29:10)

• U.S. sugar industry is protected, not a free market: government quotas keep prices high.
• Impact: Higher consumers prices, benefits to big sugar companies (e.g., Florida Crystals, Fanjul brothers).
• Such policies hurt American jobs as food producers relocate manufacturing to countries with cheaper sugar.
• Quote:
  • “Americans have, in short, been ripped off by the sugar companies because… government interfered in the sugar business to protect the sugar companies…” (23:54 – Wolff)

5. Illinois State Debt Crisis—Symptom of a Broader Economic Rot (29:12–28:41)

• Describes Illinois’ credit rating collapse due to political gridlock, fear of taxing the wealthy and corporations, and chronic borrowing.
• Connects this to national issues, indicating “an economy that’s spinning out of control.”
• Quote:
  • “We live in a society that is falling apart economically. We deny it, which is understandable… But meanwhile, the rot continues.” (27:22 – Wolff)

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In-Depth: Human Nature and Capitalism

Interview with Dr. Harriet Fraad
(30:09–56:38)

Setting Up the Debate (30:09–34:36)

• Question: Is capitalism inevitable because it reflects human nature (greed, competition)?
• Wolff summarizes the mainstream defense:
  • Criticism of capitalism is futile because it’s “just human nature.”
• Purpose: Dr. Fraad, with her background in psychology and child development, is invited to address this assertion.

Challenging “Human Nature” as Capitalism’s Justification (34:36–41:03)

• Fraad rejects a fixed human nature:
  • Cites cases of “wild children” raised by wolves—adopting wolf behaviors—showing malleability.
  • Early childhood education teaches sharing and cooperation, not greed, and socialism-like values.
  • Contradiction: Society socializes children to be communal, yet rewards capitalist competition and individual gain.
• Memorable Story:
  • A mother scolds her child for sharing an expensive toy, teaching the child cost calculation over sharing. (37:43)

The Role of Environment and Socialization (41:03–44:11)

• Human behavior changes with context:
  • Soviet orphan colonies; children became collectively responsible and cooperative.
  • “People can be whatever they need to be. If they’re left out and wolves discover them and they survive, they become wolves.” (41:00 – Fraad)
• Humans have always survived through cooperation, not competition—a legacy of “primitive communism.”

Contradictions Within Human Nature (44:11–47:57)

• Wolff synthesizes:
  • Human nature is not static, is malleable, and contains contradictions.
• Fraad: Past societies also rationalized oppression (“slavery is natural”), then moved beyond them.
• “Every form of oppression has been made eternal and natural… That couldn’t change until people changed it.” (45:06 – Fraad)
• The “natural” rhetoric is a tool to keep people from questioning or changing unjust systems.

Social Class, Education, and Self-Concept (47:57–52:16)

• Socialization depends heavily on class and environment:
  • Wealthy children are raised to lead and question; poor children are raised to obey.
• Study Example:
  • When teachers are told certain students are more gifted, those children’s performance jumps, reinforcing the malleability of self-concept.

Summing Up: Capitalist Behaviors Are Socially Produced (52:16–56:38)

• Greed, competitiveness, and avarice in capitalist societies are products of the system, not nature.
• Even in capitalist societies people share, respect, and cooperate (public transport, sidewalks, families).
• Ongoing societal contradictions shape “human nature” towards both competition and cooperation.
• Final insight:
  • It’s possible and reasonable to seek societal change—human behavior will adapt in tandem.
• Quote:
  • “It also implies that it does make sense to want to change a society, because if you change it… you can reasonably expect that human beings will respond, will also change, and that you’re not running up against some immovable, natural final barrier that prevents that.” (54:40 – Wolff)

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Memorable Quotes & Timestamps

• “There is no consistent evidence whatsoever to privilege the private over the public… It really isn’t common sense. It’s nonsense. That’s what it is.”
  — Richard D. Wolff (14:30)

• “Every form of oppression has been made eternal and natural… That couldn’t change until people changed it.”
  — Dr. Harriet Fraad (45:06)

• “People can be wolves if they grow up among wolves… Human nature changes over time, changes with the environment.”
  — Dr. Harriet Fraad (41:00)

• “It also implies that it does make sense to want to change a society, because if you change it… you can reasonably expect that human beings will respond, will also change, and that you’re not running up against some immovable, natural final barrier…”
  — Richard D. Wolff (54:40)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Healthcare policy failures and state innovation: 02:00–07:30
• Canadian housing bubble and critique of housing markets: 07:32–09:56
• Privatization dogma and the myth of private sector superiority: 09:56–19:53
• Sugar market manipulation as anti-free market reality: 19:55–29:10
• Illinois debt crisis as a microcosm of broader economic dysfunction: 29:12–28:41
• Core interview on human nature and capitalism: 30:09–56:38
• Memorable story on childhood socialization (sharing/sharing contradiction): 37:43
• Refutation of “human nature” as a barrier to social change: 45:06, 54:40

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Takeaways

• The argument that capitalism is the only economic system suited to “human nature” is historically, psychologically, and anthropologically flawed.
• Human behavior is adaptive, shaped by social, economic, and environmental factors.
• Cooperative, communal behavior predates and coexists with competitive, individualistic drives; both are products of socialization, not destiny.
• Systemic change is possible and necessary, as human beings adapt to new structures and norms.

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For further exploration, listeners are encouraged to visit the podcast’s companion blogs and resources at democracyatwork.info and rdwolff.com.

Transcript

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

Sam.

[Singer]

Saint gonna change.

[Richard Wolff]

One. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those of our children and those looming down the road for them and for us. 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. Before jumping into the economic Updates for today, I want to make an announcement and in fact, a request. We would like to know more about you, our loyal listeners and viewers, if you would be so kind and complete a very brief survey. I really mean it's going to take you less than one minute to do. We would be very appreciative. So if you have a pencil or a pen and a piece of paper, write down this website, very simple. You go there and you fill out this very short questionnaire and we will know more about you and be better able to design the program for you. So here we go. The place to go is the survey dot Libsyn. That's the only complicated word. L, I, B as in boy, S Y, n as in nothing. Survey.libsyn.com economic update. That's all one word. So let me do it again. Survey.libsyn.com Economic update. At the end of the first half of the program, I will give you that place again. We really appreciate your taking a moment to let us know really how we can better respond to you because we know a little bit more about you. So let's jump right into the updates for this early part still of the month of June 2017. Well, you know, we've been watching, all of us, how the Republicans and the Democrats have wrestled for the last several years with providing decent medical insurance to the American people, millions of whom have not had it, millions of whom continue not to have it. And we've seen first the Democrats do a peculiar job on this. They extended it to millions of people who didn't have it. That was the good news. But they were unable, or to be more honest, unwilling to control the medical industrial complex, to control the prices, so that in fact, more people were covered, but the prices for most people of medical insurance were jacked up. And so this is a very inadequate way of dealing with the problem. On the other hand, we've watched the Republicans who go, the Democrats one worse by taking the insurance away from now what the Congressional Budget Office says is 23 million if Trumpcare were to pass and in fact, doing very little to control prices either. So it's even worse in the face of the fact that the two major parties compete for the inadequacy of their attention to this problem. I am pleased to report that two states in the United States are going in the other direction. The first is California, where the state Senate in California this last week passed Senate Bill 562. And basically what it does is to provide for the citizens of California, which is the largest state in this country, Medicare for everybody, instead of just Medicare for people over 65, something for which people over 65 are grateful. And I mean Democrats, Republican and nearly everybody. This would extend it to everybody, which is what is done in other countries. Now it's true that the governor has waffled in California about this, that the Republicans are saying, as they always do, that that this is too expensive. Translated, that means they don't want to tax corporations and the rich to pay for it. So we'll see where it goes. But it is an interesting straw in the wind, and it shows that Americans disgusted and disappointed with the federal government may try to achieve similar things at more local levels. And Nevada, right next door to California, took an interesting step also in the last little while by passing a bill that proposes to provide Medicaid to everyone who has the money to buy in. You know, Medicaid has been the program for low income people, leaving millions of people who don't have much more than low income people without any access to medical insurance at all. Nevada would allow people who are a little bit better off perhaps than those at the bottom to buy into a Medicaid coverage which would give them much more medical insurance than they have now. Bravo to California, Bravo to Nevada for going against the federal disaster that is imposed on us by Republicans and Democrats alike. My next update has to do with yet another housing bubble. This one is in our northern neighbor Canada, where particularly in the city of Toronto, there is a crisis. Housing prices have spiraled to very high levels. The major non bank mortgage lender is in trouble and the public knows it. There are other cities in Canada, Vancouver and others that are experiencing too rapid a rise. I don't want to single the Canadians out here because the housing bubble there is still far short of what the housing bubble was in the United States, what it has been in places like London and Tokyo and so on. But it does suggest that everywhere where you allow a capitalist system to manage something as important as the housing we have, the combination of profit and markets produces a very unstable situation where prices go crazy for periods of time, then collapse when the bubble bursts, throwing people out of their homes in large numbers, millions here in the United States in the aftermath of 2008. And it ought to, in a reasonable, rational person, raise the question whether something as important as housing is to be left to private capitalist market activity, given what we know has happened in most large cities and now in Canada. The third update picks up on these two stories to talk about a more general problem of which they are examples. In modern capitalist society, there's a kind of economic religion. And here I mean religion not in the good sense, but the bad one. I mean dogmatism. I mean a commitment to ideas that are old, out of date, for which little or no evidence exists, etc. This economic religion goes by another name, privatization. The religious idea is when governments produce goods and services for the people, they do a bad job. When you give it to the private corporation, the private capitalist investor looking to make money, everything goes better. Now let me talk to you about that, because it's in the air. It's in the air in the Toronto housing bubble. It's in the air in the drive of the producers of hospital beds and doctor's care and drugs and medical insurance to make profit off these things that are basic to a decent life. But President Trump has added a couple of dimensions. That's why I'm talking about it today. This last week, he proposed that the air traffic controllers, the people who work in airports to make sure the planes can come and go without bumping into each other, that should be not a governmental agency as it now is, but it should be, yes, you guessed it, privatized. And likewise, his big proposals to invest in infrastructure, to rebuild our roads and highways and all the things that we need for a modern society that's going to involve a public private partnership. You might consider that halfway privatization, probably on the way to full scale privatization, but the same idea. Let's talk about this for a minute. The notion that the private is more efficient, more effective, more successful has now come almost to the point of being common sense, as though we're all supposed to believe it, something that bad religions also want. They don't want you to think about things and come to your commitments, moral and ethical, through a lot of questions and honest inquiry. They just want you to sign on the line, shut up and believe. That's what this privatization mantra is all about. I'm a professional economist. I've been doing this all my life. I can assure you there is no consistent evidence whatsoever to privilege the private over the public. By the way, there's none to privilege. It the other way either. For every example of a private company doing something successful, I can give you an example of a public enterprise doing doing it. For every example where a public enterprises screws up and does a bad job, I can give you an example of a private company, usually in the same industry, doing likewise. There is no basis for this common sense. It really isn't common sense. It's nonsense. That's what it is. And let me give you some examples. And to drive the point home, here in the United States we have committed to the public sector, to public enterprises, not to private enterprises, an enormous array of activities we all depend on. Let's begin with the one I find most interesting. Because usually the same conservatives, Republican and Democrat, who celebrate the private sector are likewise immediately the strongest supporters of the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marines. Well, those are government enterprises. Government runs those things. Government organizes them. Government pays the individual. Sailor, pilot, marine, soldier. This is a government activity. And isn't it interesting that the people who want privatization love this public enterprise, don't they? But defense isn't the only public enterprise. I'm now going to quickly list some of the others. Here in the United States, the police forces in our community, the fire departments in our community, the public parks run in our community, Amtrak, our passenger rail system, the post office, public schools from kindergarten through college and university. Let me remind everyone 3/4 of the students in America who attend a college or a university attend a publicly owned and operated educational enterprise and many roads and many harbors and many bridges and many bus systems. And I could continue, but you get the idea. Those are all public enterprises, and most of them have been for the history of the United States. Last point, public versus private has nothing to do with socialism. Interestingly, the notion that the private is the good way and the public is bad. What we believe, unfortunately so widely in the United States hasn't worked that well, which is why we have so many public enterprises, schools, fire, defense, you name it. And in the Soviet Union and China, where for a while the mantra was the government enterprise is good and private is bad, we can see the same slow, painful recognition that they have to leave some things to the private, which, by the way, they did in the Soviet Union and they do in China today. So in fact, the effort to say one is right, the other one is wrong has fallen apart wherever it's been tried. Socialism is about a completely different way of organizing the workplace, whether it's a private enterprise or. Or a public one. Socialism is about democratizing the enterprise, making it run, owned, operated, by the people who work there, collectively, democratically, fairly. It's about something different from putting a tiny number of people in the board of directors to run a private enterprise or a tiny number of state officials to run the enterprise. When the government is in charge, it's something to think about, lest we be drawn in to silly policy decisions based on some notion that either the private is always better or either the public enterprise is always better. These are silly, extreme dogmatisms. They're not reasonable and they're not rational. My next update has to do with sugar, that basic sweetener that we have in so many of our foods and is so basic a part of our diets. And here is a wonderful chance to kind of ridicule another dogma of our economic the notion that we have or are close to having ready free markets. As I have said many times, the market is an imperfect instrument for distributing resources and products. Most of the history of the human race, human beings, haven't used markets. They have, for example, had a tribal chief distribute goods among people according to rules that the tribe had agreed to for most of human history, the tribal mother might have played that role. The tribal council of elders played that role. Sometimes a king played that role, leaving it to the market to a kind of, I'll give you three of these if you give me two of those exchange. That's a very small part of human history that we have relied on markets. But the notion of a free market, where literally the only thing that determines how much you pay for anything is the bargaining between buyer and seller. This notion of a free market, that's a myth. That's a utopian ideal for people who love markets. But it's never been the reality we live in. And that ought to be made really clear, because an awful lot of the people who celebrate the private part of the economy are big celebrants of markets, too. Well, what has all this got to do with sugar? Sugar is a very important thing. We buy it literally in bags at the supermarket, but we buy it in countless numbers of the products that we eat and that we drink. Soda pop is a. Is a concoction mostly of water and sugar and then some color and pretense at flavoring, etc. Etc. Well, let me tell you a little bit about the sugar market in the United States and why. Because there's a big fight going on now between the United States and Mexico because Mexico under nafta, is allowed to ship into the United States without paying any duties, whatever it wants. That's part of the agreement between Canada, the United States and Mexico. And Mexico is a place that grows a lot of sugar cane, produces a lot of sugar which it is selling here in the United States. And the reason there's a fight is that the United States for many decades, has interfered in the market for sugar. It isn't a free market. It isn't anywhere near a free market. How has the government done it? And then I'll tell you why the government has done it. First, what has the government done? It has rigidly limited the amount of sugar coming into the United States from other countries. Why? For the very simple and old reason that. That if you limit the amount of sugar coming in, given the enormous appetite of Americans for sugar and sugared products, you're going to drive up the price of sugar. It's the old law of supply and demand. If there's a big demand and you withhold the supply, up goes the price. So for decades, the price of sugar inside the United States has been much more, much higher than the price of sugar in the world. Americans have, in short, been ripped off by the sugar companies because, of course, the reason the government interfered in the sugar business was to protect the sugar companies because they make much more profits from if the price is high than if the price is low. And let me be specific. Thanks to a very good investigative article in the June 5 issue of the New York Times. If you have the time to go back and find it, you will find the information you need. One of the biggest companies in this business, might better call it Hustle, is Florida Crystals. It's owned by two brothers, Alfonso and Jose Fanjul. F A N J U L Big, long time rich contributors to both the Republican and Democratic parties, so that whether one or the other is in control, they get what they want, which is limiting the import of sugar to keep its price way above that of the price of sugar in the world market. You might be interested to know, although I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the True brothers contributed $500,000 to the expenses of the inauguration of Donald Trump, they don't miss a trick, and it pays them in the billions. And every one of you listening or watching me at this moment is helping to contribute to the Fanjul brothers, to Florida Crystals, and to whoever they decide to contribute money to by paying more for sugar than you ought to. By paying more for sugar than would exist if there weren't the systematic manipulation of the market that I've just summarized for you. And here's a little side issue that might just come back to haunt Mr. Trump when he claims that he's concerned about American jobs precisely because the price of sugar is so high that the producers of products that use a lot of sugar have shut down operations in the United States, where they have to pay a lot for sugar, moved them out of the United States to places where they can pay the world price for sugar, which is much less, and then bring the candy or whatever it is back into the United States and make more money. Mr. Trump, like his predecessors, he's not different from them, has paid out for the favors given and the contributions received by keeping the price of sugar artificially high, thereby not only taking our money for sugar, but depriving Americans of jobs they might otherwise have had. The irony should be self evident. Over the last week or two, the state of Illinois, the fifth largest state in the United States, has had its credit rating dropped by the Standard and Poor's agency to the very low for this kind of government debt rating of triple B minus. What's that about? Every state in the union borrows because the politicians who run those states are afraid to tax corporations and the rich to pay for the services they provide. And having already taxed the mass of people beyond what they're willing to endure, they're afraid of taxing them either. If they tax the mass of people, they won't get voted in. If they tax corporations and the rich, they won't get the money without which they won't even be able to appeal for votes. So what do they do instead? They borrow. Well, for 10, 20, 30 years you can do that. But as the level of debt rises and as the ability to raise money from your own people shrinks, the thing gets difficult. And that's what's happened to Illinois. Standard and Poor, in announcing the rating decline, said that the gridlock between a Republican governor in that state and a Democratic Party controlled legislature has meant they can't work anything out. After all, the Republicans make a point of saying not only that they aren't going to tax corporations and the rich, but they're going to cut their taxes and they're going to cut everybody else's taxes too, just so they don't get angry. And then of course, they don't have enough money. And since they can't borrow anymore because their credit rating is too low, they're starting to cut services. At which point the Democrats say, hey wave, slow down. You can't hurt people by cutting the schools and cutting the road maintenance and cutting the hospital supports and cutting the public Education. That's what the Democrats do. They go with the Republicans. But not so fast, not so extreme. Let's do a little less damage. And guess what? The people of Illinois, like most Americans, can't decide which one of these is worse. And so they don't do anything. And so the inability of the state to manage its problems is frightening. Or all of the people who've lent money to the state of Illinois, which includes many workers, pension funds, many public funds that are in trouble if they can't rely on this state paying back. What is this all a sign of? Folks, as I've tried to explain, we live in a society that is falling apart economically. We deny it, which is understandable. We fake it, which our politicians are there to lead us in doing. But meanwhile, the rot continues. That's why we have to deal with our infrastructure, because our politicians haven't maintained it, because they've been afraid to work in a system that is so dysfunctional. That the fifth largest state, the home of Chicago, with all that it represents, is in such economic difficulty, literally on the edge of collapse in the terms of its credit, is a sign that all this talk about economic recovery since 2008 is just that. Lots of talk, lots of hype. True, the rich have returned to where they were. The stock market's back, the bank profits are back. But that's for a tiny portion of our population, for the mass. Look to what's happening in Illinois. And if you want to see where that's going, you don't have to wait to see in the future of Illinois, because you can see it in the presence of Puerto Rico, whose conditions are over the edge, where thousands of people are leaving the state because there is no present and no future where everything in the state is being corrupted, destroyed. Cut back the university, the public, 11% sales tax right now on the people unspeakable. We live in an economy that's spinning out of control. And the sooner the American people understand it, the sooner there'll be the kind of response overdue to deal with it. We've come to the end of the first half of our program. Please stay with us. We're going to have an extraordinary interview immediately after the short break that I think you will find well worthwhile. We will be right back.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

I never thought I'd be a killer.

[Singer]

Cause there's so much to lose but if I can drink the water what else can I do? And although the axe is heavy it still sits in my head While you're changing like a color hur not I'm sure every time I try to bring it down you always turn my head around oh, make up your mind Let me live or let me love you why you been saving your name? I've been pray the power is on Together my back to world let it follow make up your mind make it up for you the thought that I'd be facing See the blood and the.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

T.

[Singer]

Now my knees are shaking and I can't look in your eyes but.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

If you're going to make me do it.

[Richard Wolff]

Welcome, friends, to the second half of this program of Economic Update. I'm very pleased to welcome to the microphone, as we do at the beginning of every month, Dr. Harriet Fraad, a perennial guest, because most of you have let us know that that's what you want. Dr. Fraad is a mental health counselor and hypnotherapist in private practice here in New York City. She also writes for a variety of journals and magazines. She writes for the blog that is on the democracyatwork.info website and she also has her own blog, Harriet Fraud. No, I'm sorry.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

Harriet Fraud. F R, a, a D. That is F R, double A D. Okay, my mistake.

[Richard Wolff]

Harrietfraud.com we'll start the interview in a moment, but I just want to reiterate what I said in the first half of the program, that we are conducting a survey, very, very brief, to know more about you, our loyal watchers and listeners, and we would appreciate if you would complete. It takes less than a minute to complete a survey, and the way you do it is you go to a particular address on the web or which I'm going to read to you in a moment. And there it's all laid out for you. It's very quick. So please, if you have a pencil, note this down. You will be doing us and ultimately yourself a favor by letting us know a little bit more about you. Here we go. Survey.lib. sin. That's the only complex word here. L, I, B as in boy. S Y, B, N as in nothing. Survey.libsyn.com economic update. That's all one word. Economic update. So once again, survey.libsyn.com economicupdate thank you very much for doing that. Now let's go to our interview. Today's topic is human nature. What could be, in a sense, more appropriate, more urgent? I hear about human nature when I teach economics, all the time from my students, when I give speeches in the public, in your comments, our listeners and viewers, comments that come in to us by email. And so on. And very often I hear about it in a particular way that I would like your response to and your understanding of. And the argument I hear goes something like, capitalism is the economic system we have because it conforms to, it, expresses it is simply the working out of what is fundamentally human nature. We shouldn't therefore be angry at capitalism because the greed we see, because the avarice, the, the competitiveness, the disinclination to have much time or space for compassion with other people, that's not about economics. That's our human nature. And what can you do about that? That's like rain. It just happens. It's part of how nature. And if you don't want to shake your fist at the sky when it rains, well, then that makes no sense to complain about capitalism because it's just human nature. It's clear to me, and here's where I would like your input, that this is a way of defending capitalism because it basically says to the person who's critical, who wants a society that works better than capitalism, it's basically a way of saying to such a person, your hope your dream is hopeless is pointless because it's not realizable, because what you're suggesting doesn't go with human nature. And so there's no point, you might as well resign yourself to the way it is because that's human nature. We have to eat, we have to sleep, and we are greedy and we are avaricious and we are competitive and so on. So you've spent a lot of time looking at the psychology of your clients, your patients, and you've done a lot of research. How do you react?

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

Well, I have a doctorate also in child development. And so I have a strong sense of how people develop. And although babies are different at birth, they have different dispositions. One will be quieter and need less attention. One will be more demanding to be held. The idea of a human nature is foolish. It was ironically proven a long time ago, because the stories of Hansel and Gretel were actually true. When people remarried and they didn't want their children from a former marriage, often the stepmother wouldn't want to take care of them. They took them to the woods and the kid and lost them, just like Hansel and Gretel. Well, some of them were raised by wolves. And when human beings found these children, the most famous case is the wild child of Averron. But there were others. They were actually wolves. They made signals for what they wanted with their hands, as if ears. They learned the habits of wolves and they conformed to wolf society. We wouldn't ever set someone up in such an experiment. But there have been those instances. And there's a cruel irony that happens in capitalist America. No early childhood program can exist and no child can develop without learning certain communal or even communist ideas you have to share. No fighting, no biting. You know, we have a certain number of tricycles at the daycare or the nursery school. You have to wait your turn. And yet there are contradictions. If anybody saw Donald Trump push the Macedonian representative out of the picture so he could be in the center of the photo, they'd learn, uh oh, no fighting, no biting. What's going on here? And children have to learn. It isn't nice to grab, right? And what you can imagine is the contradiction that children face in our society, right?

[Richard Wolff]

When they're young, they're being what we might call socialized to be co respective of other people, to be polite, to.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

Be sharing, to be communal and sharing.

[Richard Wolff]

And then when they get older, there's a contradiction.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

I'll give you a little story. So you're in the sandbox, and Jacob has brought Mitzi. Tell me a Mitzi. This is one of those wonderful stories by Laurie Siegel. You know, Jacob has brought his pail and shovel. Susan has brought her truck that can take the sand and take it away. And they're sharing and the parents are saying, isn't that cute how they're sharing? And actually, Jacob loves that truck. And so Susan says, okay, Jacob, you can have that truck and I'll take the pail and shovel. And the mother says, are you kidding? That cost $15, that truck. And what did the standby? What did that pail and shovel cost?

[Richard Wolff]

5 bucks.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

Are you crazy? Don't give it away. So the children look around, wait a minute. Suddenly sharing isn't such a great idea. Suddenly cost calculations come in. Well, that's a little allegory about what happens to children. On the one hand, they're taught to share or they won't make it through nursery school. On the other hand, they don't live in a society of sharing. And there's a constant contradiction between the basic laws of civilized behavior that allow you to get along with other capitalist greed and competition which teaches you to shove other people aside. And basically the whole premise of capitalism, that to hire somebody means if you want to make any profit, you can't give them what they earned for you or you don't make any profit yourself. So you give them the least you can and you take the most. Now that's not nice. You learn that at your mother's knee or in daycare.

[Richard Wolff]

Let me provoke you now a little bit. Are you then saying that human nature contradicts capitalism, or are you saying that human nature is malleable and shifts and changes?

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

It's malleable and shifts and changes depending on the environment. Another huge experiment that shows that is what happened after the Russian Revolution when there were thousands and thousands of orphans orphaned by the death of their parents. And World War II.

[Richard Wolff]

This was, oh, World War II, okay.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

And they were roaming around in bands that were predatory. These young kids, these kids, you know, from little kids up to teenagers, they would go, you know, rip out the fur on somebody's fur coat with a razor. They'd grab purses, they would commit crimes. And so the nascent Russia at that time had to do something. And they set up these children's colonies and ran them in a very interesting way, in a very disciplined way. The kids took over. They had to produce their own food collectively, and this was with coaches and stuff to help them. They had to clean the place. They had to make some enterprises that sold things in order to bring money in. And they had to govern themselves. And they found that all but the most severely disturbed children learned to be collective members. They had their own little railroad. They did amazing things. It's in a four volume work by Anton Makarenko, who was in charge of it and had a lot of failed attempts before he got this down. It's there. And they became a really communal group all over the Soviet Union now. It was Russia, I guess, at that time when their revolution was really quite honest and principled. So that you have, you really have experiments in history that show that people can be whatever they need to be. If they're left out and wolves discover them and they survive, they become wolves.

[Richard Wolff]

So that human nature changes over time.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

Changes over time, changes with the environment. Look, when you're born, your brain is the size of a small fist. By the time you die, it's the size of a Nerf football. Every single bit of growth of a neuron that makes the width and the breadth of the brain, which has as many neuronal connections as would spread all over the globe and it wouldn't even be enough trillions. That's because you made a. You learned something from your society. Humans are totally social animals and we wouldn't have survived if we weren't. You know, if you want to hunt and get a woolly mammoth and you're a cave person, well, you don't have the best Eyesight in the animal kingdom or the best hearing. You're not the swiftest, you're not the strongest. What you have is the ability to cooperate. Together, you can dig a huge pit, enough to trap that mammoth together. You can make so much noise around that mammoth that you drive the mammoth into the pit and then throw your collective stones. And if you have them, spears and kill that animal and cut it up and share it, otherwise, we would not have survived. So primitive communism is what started civilization. Now, that's not competition and greed and killing. That's cooperation, which allowed people to survive. The environments that we've built, actually, beginning with agriculture, started to be competition and imprisonment of women in the household and a whole bunch of things. But that human nature, going back to our cave days, was sharing. And in early societies, it was sharing on every level, including sexual partners. In the Iroquois, when the United States. Well, when the colonists arrived, before it was the United States, women lived with various men of their choice. And when the woman decided, okay, I'm divorcing you, she just put his stuff outside the teepee. And the males that were important for growing children were her brothers or others. But everyone had some responsibility for the children.

[Richard Wolff]

It takes a village.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

It takes a village. And that's how we survived. Now, that concept is not greed and competition that would have destroyed early societies. So people are shaped, and ironically, for capitalism, they're shaped in highly contradictory ways, because in order to get through nursery school or Head Start or kindergarten, you have to learn to share, and you have to learn to wait your turn and not push people out of the way the way Trump did. And you have to take turns, which is not the capitalist model.

[Richard Wolff]

Well, then it seems to me you've made at least two or three really important points. Number one, that there's lots of evidence that human nature was different in past societies than it is now. Number two, that human nature is malleable over time. And number three, that human nature is contradictory. That is within us. We're pushed in opposite directions, often by the environment, which is itself full of contradictions. Okay, then let's ask the question that's sort of on my mind at least, and I assume on many viewers and listeners, what does this say about the use of human nature as a justification or a rationalization for capitalism?

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

Well, every form of oppression has been made eternal and natural. And natural people always had slaves. You know, whatever.

[Richard Wolff]

If I could just interrupt, because you remind me. You're absolutely right. If you look at much of the literature of slave societies, it is full of Claims, insistences, literature, poems, everything that says it is just human nature. Some people are born masterful and other people are born slavish. In other words, in those societies it was thought that slavery conformed to the human nature simply organizing that the masterful types would be masters and the slavish types would be slaves. And we would mock that today. But that's what the common sense said about human nature then.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

Well, that's what the church said often. And if you look at serf societies, feudal societies, it was natural in quotes, it was human nature. And it was ordained by God that some people would be born to work the land of other people for a small share of what they gave over to the Lord. That was natural. That was human nature. And that couldn't change until people changed it. The same thing is that. And then they looked for things in the Bible to justify it as they looked. The hewers of wood in the drawers of water, things in the Bible to justify slavery and justify chauvinism. Luther claimed that God meant for women to be at home because women have larger behinds for sitting and sitting at home, of course, guys who have a big behind, oh, but you know that this is what God meant. And that's the physiological evidence. People, whatever system people have to enforce that system, they try to make it seem inevitable and unchangeable and throughout history, and therefore natural. And so you don't try to change it.

[Richard Wolff]

And at some point, so really what you're saying is that the word nature or natural is just a sort of fancy way of saying unchangeable.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

That's right.

[Richard Wolff]

Untransformed.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

Don't even go there.

[Richard Wolff]

Don't even go there.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

It's either ordained by God or it's ordained by human nature. And of course anthropologists sometimes reinforce that and sometimes contradicted it. But as the group that's oppressed decides not to be oppressed anymore, they don't accept that line anymore. And that changes.

[Richard Wolff]

So when the slaves revolted and slavery is over, the argument that some people are by nature masterful and others are slavish has a harder time. I was about to say it doesn't exist anymore.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

It does.

[Richard Wolff]

But really in capitalism you hear very often that those who sit at the top of the corporate pyramid are somehow the smartest, the cleverest, the hardest working something. There's always this effort to naturalize a social arrangement, to insist that it's always been that way because you really want to believe it always will be that way. But really everything you're telling us runs against that.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

That's right. Because I am saying, you know, as Bertholdt Brecht said in one of his operas, what is man? Something and nothing, nothing until someone makes him something. You know, people can be wolves if they grow up among wolves people, it changes so much. And if you look in our society at the kind of education you get at Sidwell Friends, which is where Obama's kids went and where Biden's grandchildren went, it's a very prestigious school for Washington wealthy and political people. It costs $43,000 for a grammar school and it's not a boarding school either. But the classes are about five or 10 students studying things like robotics, advanced computer and going on trips that are amazing, like trips to the Himalayas for the summer or to places in Europe or to the Amazon to study. I mean, really, you're talking about a wealth that gives children a literal wealth of advantages and opportunities that the kids in the Washington public schools that can hardly afford an after school program for special help in anything, no less a wildly enriched expensive school and then piano lessons and a fancy soccer team and the robotics club and whatever they do, fencing, whatever they do after school, you're talking about socializing some people to be leaders and some people to obey. And there's a wonderful set of studies called the Hess and Shipman studies with African American parents of different economic levels and what they tell their kids on the first day of school. The poorer parents tended to say, you better obey. The teacher tells you something, you do that I don't want to hear, you didn't do what you were told. Whereas the people in a higher position say the teacher is there to help you. In other words, you're not her servant, she's yours. If you have questions you ask, if they aren't responded to, come and see me, you have a right to know.

[Richard Wolff]

That's a very different message.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

Different message. And we are our messages. We are the hall of mirrors of other people's glances at us and what they think.

[Richard Wolff]

So you're saying again that human nature is shaped by the society within which the human being goes from birth to death.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

Absolutely. And wherever the child goes to develop into an adult, he or she is shaped. Rosenberg did these studies where they told the teachers that certain kids, they all had similar IQs, that certain kids were particularly gifted and bright and other kids weren't. And the difference in the test scores after a year were phenomenal because their self concepts changed depending on the opportunities they had and the way they were attended to. So that, you know, we Are social beings. We are. Our brains are formed by society's messages. And if you give some people the messages that they are followers, that they're nobody, that they better obey, you're preparing them for that. Whereas other people, that they can figure out anything and that they are leaders, you're preparing them for that.

[Richard Wolff]

Well, then, to go back to the beginning of this discussion, it may indeed be true that people in a capitalist society are greedy or avaricious or competitive. But what you're saying is, to the degree that that's so, they are products of a system. If the system were different, they would be different. And that even if they have those things in them, at the same time they have pressures to be other than that, that are contesting inside their own minds and hearts all the time, constantly.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

That's why, you know, in New York City, a pregnant woman gets on the train, people get up. I'm older. People see me getting on the train, they give me their seat instead of saying, it's mine, I got here first. You know, people are discouraged from what they call man spreading, spreading out and taking three seats because there's a sense we're sharing this space. We're together, we share the sidewalk. You're not supposed to let your dog poop on the sidewalk because it's a shared space which you respect other people. So we have strong impulses that are formed very early on to share, to respect the other, to be kind. Nobody's family could exist as a totally capitalist network. They'd harm each other constantly. It's not a free for all competition to see who can get the most. You have to share. And so we are torn in different directions in a rapacious capitalist society like ours. And that isn't human nature. Human nature is what it's formed as. And we are formed by the messages we get.

[Richard Wolff]

There's also an interesting, to use a philosophical term, dialectic here. The society shapes the individual and the individual shapes the society. In a constant back and forth, each individual resolves, depending on his or her life, the contradictory messages they've been getting since their infancy in terms of how they behave. And they can go this way and they can go that way. And it also implies one last thing.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

Sure.

[Richard Wolff]

It also implies that it does make sense to want to change a society, because if you change it, particularly in certain ways, you can reasonably expect that human beings will respond, will also change, and that you're not running up against some immovable, natural final barrier that prevents that.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

Absolutely. You can see it with the climate change fight that certain wealthy companies with their emblem person, Mr. Trump, can decide that the rest of the world can fry. They're making money. That's a different ethic from the ethic, let's say, of California, that has recently they met with the Chinese governor, Jerry Brown from California to stress their commitment to the Paris Accords, and they invite others in the United States to do so as well. You know, you have so many contradictions in this society, and a lot of what is our government at the moment is very frighteningly greedy for the top. But there have been impulses all over and there are now millions of men and women and children were in the Women's March together.

[Richard Wolff]

You won the right after the inauguration.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

Right after the inauguration, millions of people of all colors, all incomes with children were there. In every mass movement, including Black Lives Matter, including democracy at work, every movement, people say, I need other people to make the changes that I need. And that's so in the United States from the American Revolution on, you need other people and you stress that. And that builds a different human nature, our need and respect for each other.

[Richard Wolff]

We've come again, I'm sad to say, to the end of the program. Thank you very much, Dr. Harriet Frad for being with us. And she will be with us again at the beginning of the month of July, as she has at the beginning of every month. I want to ask you all, make use of this program. Make use of this interview. Go to our websites rdwolff with2f.com or democracyatwork.in fox. They're available 247 with a whole raft of possibilities for you to pursue. Be a partner. If you can take that [e-mail] economicupdate I want to thank truthout.org that remarkable independent source of news and analysis who have paved the way for us to ask others to partner with them and with us as we move forward. And I look forward to speaking with you again next week.

[Singer]

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