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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Income, jobs, debts, burdens for ourselves, for our children, issues, events, trends. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and I hope that that has trained me to be a useful interpreter and presenter of the economic changes swirling around us. Today's program is a little different from the usual because it's an overview. We're trying to take stock of an economy as we move out of one year, 2017, and now into a new one, 2018. It's important for us to talk about the major events and the major trends that are part of last year's history and part of what's unfolding now to get a better sense of where we've been and where we're going. So I've picked several of the key events and trends to bring to your attention, to give you a sense as well of how the economy is shifting. One of the big things that happened at the end of 2017 was a decision by the Federal Communications Commission to end net neutrality. That is to change the rules that have been governing access to the Internet for all of us, and likewise access to the Internet by all the people and institutions that provide the content, which is why we go to the Internet to get that content. Several big companies control that access. Probably the most important and biggest one is Verizon. And Verizon plays a big role here because the person who's the head of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, used to be a lawyer for Verizon. So now he's in the position of deciding what to give to his former employer. And if he's like others, maybe his future employer, too. We'll never know until that day happens. Here's the issue. The rules up until now, and these are the rules that allowed things like Google and Netflix and so on to become the giants that they are today, to give the United States economy a kind of technological edge that we have been losing in many other industries. They've all benefited from the rules as they've been, which are everybody has access in the same way, and everybody who produces content has access in the same way. That is, we are neutral. We do not discriminate. Or to be more accurate, we don't allow the access controllers like Verizon to control how we communicate and how we interact on the Internet. Under the new rules, these companies will be able to do that. They'll be able to let some content through and others not they'll be able to allow us to get some content quickly and some content less quickly. Why would they be interested in doing that? Well, you know the answer before I tell you. Because it will allow companies like Verizon to charge money for the faster communication, for example, to charge fees for access to certain kinds of content that they couldn't do under the old rules. So this big struggle that took the entirety of 2017 actually began earlier than that, was about one group of companies like Verizon wanting to change the rules because they make more profits that way. And other companies, for example, content providers like Netflix, Google, Facebook and so on, they were scared when this conversation began that they would have to pay fees, they would lose profits. So like so many of these big issues, it turns out they're between one group of companies and another. Companies that stand to get more profits by a change and companies that stand to lose. And they're fighting it out to get the government to decide. And as they fight, it's useful for them to get the public on their sides. So one side tells us all kinds of good things will happen to the public if only we do what they want. And the other side gives us the counter argument wonderful things will happen to us if we do what they want and we're supposed to choose between them. Well, here's my advice as an economist. Neither of the two groups that are fighting, those who want to keep the rules and those who want to change them are interested in us. They are all profit making capitalist companies and big ones to boot. They are looking out for their bottom line. And what is likely to happen is that Verizon will get to charge money, but won't dare charge it to the major content producers because they're too big and might find a way around them. So they'll work out a compromise that protects their profits. And who will be having to pay a bit more here and there for Internet access? Yeah, you and me. Because this is an institution we all now need and they get that and they're going to make us pay. What's the alternative? Deal with the Internet for what it is. And by the way, there are countries around the world already doing that. Finland I recently read about, for example, absolutely considers the Internet a public utility, like the land, like the forests, like electricity and so on. It is not going to allow that to be used as a football between competing profiteers. It is a public utility and the public's interest comes first. That would be the way to deal with this. Make the rules, serve the majority of the People. What an idea. Rather than small groups of profiteers, the shareholders and executives of one group of companies fighting another, another enormous issue of enormous historical importance has been a struggle in the workplace. And this one has been led mostly by women, some men involved, too, but mostly women who have brought out of the shadows a fundamental issue of the working workplace for all of us. And what is that issue? Well, the way it was brought UP, particularly in 2017, was an explosion around sexual harassment and sexual assaults in the workplace. Names like Susan Fowler at the uber Corporation, Rose McGowan, a leader in the critique of Harvey Feinstein and the film industry, and perhaps most important, Tarana Burke, who started the MeToo movement, which has transformed so much of America in such a short time. What's this all about? Well, it goes far beyond the immediate question in which men imposed sexual demands on. On women, and even on some men as well. By using what? By using the particular way we organize business in this country, how we organize factories, offices and stores. And what do I mean? I mean that we have a tiny group of people, the top executives, the board of directors, literally 10, 20, 30, 40 people have enormous power. They can give you a job or take it away from you, give you an income or take it away from you, allow you to move up in the hierarchy of the company or keep you down, give you an opportunity of a lifetime or block you from it. Tiny group of people with enormous power over the livelihoods, the jobs, the career futures, the opportunities of a large number. Does that sound democratic? No, it doesn't, does it? And guess what? Which should come as no surprise. If you give that kind of unequal power to a few, you're literally creating the opportunity for them who have that power to abuse it, to make demands on people below them to meet their needs. Sexual, but not sexual too. Or else risk losing a job, or else risk losing promotion, or else risk losing the opportunity. The fundamental issue brought by the women in particular who have said this has got to stop goes far beyond the immediate demand, stop sexual harassment on the job. Important as it is, crucial as it has been, because what these women are doing is calling out the hierarchical structure of the workplace for everybody. Why do we allow a small group of people to have that kind of power over a large group with no return? Power. That should have been the problem all along, and particularly in a country that fashions itself democratic. If democracy is a valuable thing, then it belongs in the workplace from which it has been excluded from the earliest days of our society. We're not a democratic society. If we mean to include the workplace, which is a remarkable kind of thing to say in a country that calls itself democratic and where most people are spend most of their adult lives at work in the workplace, the women are teaching us that there is an inequality that has horrific personal consequences. And, you know, while the suffering you go through if you are sexually harassed or assaulted is unquestionable, there's lots of other kinds of suffering that are very similar. A career denied, a career broken, a job lost, a family dislocated, because someone with power has the ability to do that to you. And the solution comes immediately. If we had worker cooperatives as the basic way we organized jobs, if when you went to work, you went into a community run democratically, where everybody who is an employee is also an employer, where the people who work are their own bosses working to divide the labor amongst themselves, everyone holding everyone else accountable, you're not then going to have a few people in a position to extort things out of other people. You don't even have the employer employee dichotomy. Nobody's in a position to abuse another as a worker because everybody who's a worker is also an employer. And everybody who's an employer is also a worker. Hiring and firing is a collective decision, not one that is concentrated in a few people you know, in the human race. If you go back and you read about kings and emperors and czars, people who had power in a whole society, rather like the power that a board of directors has at a workplace, you will remember that you read about things like concubines and harems and all the ways that those kinds of people, kings and emperors, abused, including in sexual ways, their authority. We got rid of kings, and part of the reason was we didn't want that kind of authority. No government that isn't accountable. Well, if it's going to be a government that has to be accountable to the people, what about the government inside the workplace? Why isn't it accountable? Why haven't we set up the institution, the democratic working out of the big decisions, so that nobody is in a position to abuse. Last point on this that this struggle by women across America has brought home. This is not a problem that's going to be solved by telling people not to misbehave. Let me remind everyone that a few decades ago, when we had a big drug problem in this country, we had leaders saying that the important thing to do is to turn to the people abusing drugs and say to them, just say no. Well, we've tried that. 30, 40 years, our drug problem today is worse than it was then. Telling people to just say no doesn't work. Telling people not to sexually harass or abuse others, not going to work either. You have to change the way people are connected, how they relate to one another to stop this from happening. And going away from a hierarchical, top down, undemocratic workplace to a collective community workplace where everybody's accountable to everybody else is a way to reorganize society. So neither sexual nor other kinds of abuse are driven by a system that reproduces that kind of behavior. As these women in 2017 have taught us so well, the next bizarre event of 2017 can be called the bitcoin explosion. What was that about? Well, let's talk first about the reasonable side of it. As you all know, money is something that is basically produced by governments and also produced by banks in the normal way that banks do business. But the banks set up their money by creating checking accounts and so on, using the government issued cash in this country, the dollar bill, the $20 bill, the $100 bill, and so on. It has always, therefore been a fantasy of all kinds of people. Why can't we have other kinds of money, multiple sources of money? And you know, in the United States, as in most other countries, we did that for a while. The early years of the United States as an independent country had money coming from all sides. Different states had money. Sometimes different counties within states issued their own currency. If you were doing business and moving, say, from Maine in the north to Maryland or Virginia in the south, you as a businessperson would traverse regions with different money, and you'd have to exchange the money from Maine for the money from Massachusetts, and then that money with the money from New Jersey and that money with the money from Delaware and so on. And then we unified all that into one money. And that always left the question, gee, how would it be if we had multiple sources of money again? And you know how unkindly the law looks upon people who take it into their own hands to do that by counterfeiting money, for example. So it's always been a fantasy. And there's an interesting question about what would be the economic consequences of, of different people issuing money if it wasn't only the government. Bitcoin begins by saying, here, here's another kind of money, and let's see if we can get people to accept it in exchange for work they do or goods that they sell. Will they take another currency, an electronic currency, Bitcoin, as a substitute for dollar bills or euros and if they take them, will they be able to spend them on other things so that it works like money? And that's an interesting question and that began to be asked by these people who make cryptocurrencies, alternative currencies or what you call them. And the biggest of them has been bitcoin. That's the reasonable side. Now we come to the unreasonable side. Every commodity that has ever existed, every good that goes through a market, from buyer to seller and so on, has become at one point or another an object of speculation. What do I mean? It begins to be purchased not for whatever use it originally had, but for a very different purpose. It is bought in order to be resold at a higher price. Let me give you an example. Perhaps the most famous example were tulips grown in Holland back in the early 18th century. Now, tulips had a purpose. They were a flower. They were grown by gardeners. And because of their beauty, they would be purchased by people to beautify their gardens, et cetera, useful things. But then somebody got the idea, whoa, if I buy these tulips in the right way, in the right color at the right time, and I wait, I could sell them maybe for more money. And that person did it. And everybody noticed, wow, he bought them for 10 and sold them for 20. Maybe if I buy them for 20, I'll be able to sell them for 30. And they did. And that brought more people in and they convinced folks, look, don't buy these tulips because they make your garden beautiful. Buy these tulips because you're going to get rich quickly. And you know how and why? Simply because if you buy it, it's going up and you'll be able to make money by sell at a higher price. And how will you be able to do that? By convincing the person you sell it at a higher price to that he or she can do the same. And it's just an upward and onward spiral. That's what happened to bitcoin. It went from something worth a few hundred US dollars to something on the order of 20,000 or more by the end of 2017. And a lot of people made a lot of money buying and reselling bitcoin at a higher price. That's a speculation. It happened to tulips, it's happened to gold, frequently. It's happened to almost everything. All you need is to get enough people to believe that they can resell at a higher price and then it gets going and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. You suck in more and more people. The More they observe how much money you could make by simply buying something, sitting on it for a matter of weeks or months and selling it. No work, no production, no value added. Pure speculation. The bitcoin phenomena is that, and like every other speculation of its kind, it ends badly. We look back on what happened to the tulips and refer to it as tulip mania. Finally, as the price went higher and higher for tulips, it got to a point where the risk was too high. The amount of money you would have to spend to buy tulips was so enormous that the risk that it might not go up simply was too frightening. And at that point, nobody stepped in to buy, which meant the last people who had laid out money discovered they weren't going to make more. So they quickly sold it for fear it would go down. And when it goes down, the fear that it's going to go down further makes everyone holding it dump it, and the price goes down as fast or faster than it went up. Everyone thinking of playing with bitcoins has to understand this is just another crazy speculation, which is one of the side effects that can be so disastrous of the institution we call the market and has to be weighed when we wonder whether there might not be better ways to distribute resources and products that buying and selling them, given the potential at any time for the kinds of crazed speculation bitcoin has been seen to go through. Before turning to our remaining updates, I wanted to remind you that we have two websites that we ask you to make use of. Rdwolf with two Fs.com and democracyatwork.info these are websites available for you, no charge whatsoever. 24. 7. There are ways for you to communicate with us, to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and basically to become a partner of what we're trying to do, help us reach other people, make use of what we put up on there. And I want to address, particularly those of you who are listeners to our program on the radio, that if you would like to see this as a television television program, the best way and the most helpful to us would be to go to patreon.com p a t r e o n patreon.com economicupdate and follow us in that way. A trend across 2017 is continuing into 2018, has been going on for 30 years now. And that's the growing inequality in the distribution of income and wealth. There is no end to it. In fact, it looks and feels sort of like a speculation a la bitcoin. What do I mean? As more and more of the wealth of the world is concentrated in a few people at the top. And this has been going on across the board. North America, Western Europe, China, India. It's unbelievable how it is everywhere. The only thing these countries have basically in common is the world capitalist economic system of which they are all an enthusiastic part these days. And it's the capitalist system that is producing and sustaining this rising inequality. It is a very serious thing. And the connection between that and Bitcoin is easy to pinpoint. The more you concentrate wealth in the hands of a few, the less the purchasing power of the many. So the few have all this wealth, but they don't invest it in producing goods and services because the mass of people can't afford to buy it. The very inequality destroys itself and eventually it blows societies up. We have leadership in the world that has been bought and paid for by the people at the top with the wealth, which is why nothing is being done to undo it, to reverse it, even to stop it. We have the kind of society, that inequality now that resembles people on a train rushing towards a stone wall. They see it, they know it, but they can't seem to stop it. There's something unspeakably tragic about all that. Having said that, I want to point out that Europe is in a different place. Europe has lost an entire decade from 2007. 2007 to 2017 is a lost 10 years. The European economy collapsed along with the world capitalist system in 27 and 28. And it hasn't recovered until now. And everybody's excited that there's some recovery actually happening in Europe now after 10 years of decline, of lost production, of lost jobs, of destroyed lives. Countries like Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal are living in a economic downturn that they're only beginning to emerge from. And I of course welcome that. Economic conditions are improving in Europe and it's not only good for Europe, it helps the United States and so forth have less economic suffering. But let's be clear. We are recovering from a system that produced 10 years lost for people who lived through it. Those are not recoverable for people whose homes were lost. And they number in the tens of millions. They'll never recover from this. The effects of this will last lifetimes, educations that were destroyed, governments that were destroyed, wealth of a society that was destroyed. Capitalism is a fundamentally unstable system and we've just come through a 10 year collapse. Even if there is a recovery, what are we doing keeping a system that works like this? Are we waiting for the next calamity? The next 10 year collapse. The time to act is now. We know the system is unstable. We've just lived through it. The last economic update we have time for today has to do with something that struck me. The state of California has had a very serious time, 2017, particularly with fires, fires in the north of California and fires in the south. You may not know it, but an army, a small army of thousands of firefighters are needed to control these fires and prevent them from doing more damage than they already did. What you may not know is that somewhere between 7 and 10% of the firefighters in California are prisoners from the prison system of the state of California. I began to look into this when I was told of the difference in what they are paid. If you're a regular firefighter and you're hired, you get paid from $10.50 per hour up to $41.34 an hour for your work, which is ard and dangerous and so on. If you are a prisoner, you get paid $2 a day plus $1 per hour. Folks, that's slave labor. That's making use of people who are not free and paying them very little. It's only possible because the 13th amendment of the United States Constitution, which outlawed slavery, made an exception. If you are being punished for a crime. And so here's my appeal. One, what kind of rehabilitation? What kind of help are you giving to a person who has the problem of being convicted of a crime by requiring them, or, excuse me, they can volunteer as a prisoner? Be a good idea to do what your warden tells you to volunteer for, wouldn't it? What are you doing by imposing slavery on people? And my second question, why do the working people who are not in jail permit this? Those people being paid very little are taking the jobs of people who could and should be paid appropriately for such difficult and dangerous and socially important work. This is not an acceptable arrangement for either party and nor should anyone say, gee, prisoners sometimes really do volunteer. I'm sure they do. And the way that's done is to have the prisons so unpleasant, the work inside so difficult, the rehabilitation so minimal, the punishment and the lonely isolation so awful that it's actually better to go out and fight for a fire than to stay in jail. That's not a celebration of voluntary, that's a denunciation of conditions. We've come to the end of the first half of economic Update. Please stay with us after a short break. We'll be back for the second half. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. For this special program, which looks at the transition from 2017 into 2018 in terms of major events and trends that have shaped the economic system we're living with. And that give us a pretty good idea of some of the big issues waiting for us. I want to begin by talking about consumerism. So let me begin by telling you what that means. It's a kind of overdoing it as to what consumer goods can do for you. It's a sense in which not looking at goods and services as part of life and sustaining your life, but as the point of your life. It's what ministers and rabbis and priests often rail against when they say, don't be too materialistic. Remember that other parts of life are just as important as the quantity and quality of goods and services you get. The relationships you have with the people you love, the relationships you have with the people you work with or encounter or are neighbors and so on. All those indefinable but crucial parts of life that really have to do with relationship in the largest sense of the term. Well, why is it often that people tell us to avoid or to beware of consumerism? Why do people overvalue consuming, buying, going to the mall, going to the store, accumulating objects? What's that about? Is that some sort of basic human failing? Is it some part of the basic human nature we all share? I don't think so. I think it has to do with a particular economic arrangement in our society. And it's that that I want to talk to you about. And I'll admit I was struck this last Christmas season, Christmas 2017, by what struck me as an unusual intensity of people wanting to go and buy things, give them to one another, which is a generous impulse. But there was this notion of the buying and the getting and the consuming as a kind of what kind of meaning of life? A kind of reward at the end of the year 2017, for all of the work that it took to accumulate the money with which then to buy all the goods. What's that about? And how do I link it to the economy? The answer has to do with the way our economy is organized. Something that I talk about every chance I get. And here, I mean how we organize labor and the reward to labor. Here's what we do. We say to the mass of people, you must have a job. You must come to work Monday to Friday, more or less at a certain hour, eight or nine in the morning, and stay until four or five in the afternoon. And while you're at the workplace, you are to do this kind of work in this kind of way, with these kinds of tools and equipment. And when you're done, the work you've created, what your mind and your body have been able to help you produce, belongs instantaneously to somebody else. Your employer, Even if that employer, the board of directors of your company, for example, are people you don't know, people you never see. These are the people who get what your work produces. Well, you would be forgiven. And it would be very easy to understand that somewhere inside you and somewhere inside all working people is a sense that there's something wrong here. That if I have used my brains and my muscles to help create, create something, then in a way, I've poured myself into it. And that ought to give me some say, not exclusive, but some say, into what is done with the fruits of the labor I have performed. It is in some sense part of me, and in some sense I'm part of it. That's not where our system works, is it? The worker who helps to produce everything goes home at the end of the workday and has no rights whatsoever over what he or she has helped to produce. And that causes trouble. You may not be aware of it. It may not be psychologically possible for you to face what you're losing, but you feel just as upset as the little child in the sandbox playing with a little truck until another little child comes over, yanks the truck away and goes, plays in another corner. Something has been taken from you. Something is no longer yours or under your control. You can't even play with your truck. Is it really yours? These kinds of issues don't go away when you grow up because they're reproduced in the workplace. You all know this. What's the compensation that is given to workers who work all day, pour their brains and muscles into something, and then lose it to somebody else who didn't work on it the way they did? The answer is your payment, your wage, your salary. You are taught from early on in your life that this is a reasonable exchange. You come, you work, you create, you give and you get. What? Money? The means of consumption. Consumer is the part of you that is the reward for the labor. The labor, intrinsically, is not only not satisfying, the labor can be downright unpleasant. For many of us, it is, if not all the time, part of the time. But we offset the displeasure, the pain, the loss of time at work by saying to us and being told all our lives, yes, but you're going to be able to consume. Consuming is the reward for labor now hidden in this arrangement. Is an assumption that labor is likely to be, and kind of is acceptable to be a drag, unpleasant, unwanted, the negative, which is offset, which is compensated by the positive of consumption. If you grow up in a society like that, if you live your life in a society like that, of course you will be driven sooner or later to overvalue consumption. It's literally the good side. You work all day so you can go to the mall in the evening. In the transition from the unpleasant part of the day to the consuming part, you have an interlude which you call your happy hour. It's a way of recognizing that the previous eight before the happy hour begins were the unhappy hours. In the field of economics that I've spent my lifetime teaching, here's how it works. Labor is considered in economics. It's how we teach our students to be a disutility. That's a nice way of saying, no good, no fun. A drag, a loss, a penalty, a punishment, an unpleasantness. Consumption. What you can do with the fruits of your labor, that is your wage, that's positive, that's good. You are taught to think that labor is acceptable as a burden, as an unpleasantness, as a drag, because it is adequately compensated. If you're properly paid, of course, then you come to value consumption. You've literally been trained to see it as the good part of life, Just as you have been trained to accept work and the workplace conditions as the intrinsically unpleasant. But why should you? The workplace is where you spend the best hours of your adult life. Certainly where you spend most of those hours, nine to five. Remember? Five out of seven days. And besides the eight hours a day you give to work, Think about the hour or two beforehand that you get ready and get dressed and get made up. And think about the hours you recoup at the end of the day. You're built around work. Imagine, just with a moment with me, imagine if work were to be as satisfying to you as consumption, as how you relate to people at the job. What you learn from one another, what you teach one another, what kinds of affection you can show for one another, what kinds of nurturance you can get from one another. Suppose the workplace was a place of sustaining powerful, helpful, important relationships. And suppose it was necessary that work be organized that way. And here comes the big point. Because what the relationships are at work are at least as important to the quality of your life as what you can buy in a store with what you are paid. Why did you or I or anyone accept that you can be made to work 40 hours a week? At an unpleasant, unsatisfying job, but should say nothing about it because you got paid and could consume. It's as if, if I can quote the Bible, I had to remind myself that human beings do not live by bread alone. Bread is consumption. That's not all life is about to be able to consume. The quality of the work life ought to have been, ought always to have been ever every bit as important as the payment for it. To give up on the quality of life at work is to give up on a major part of your life. And there's no reason to do it, because making the quality of the work life better for what is the vast majority of people, working people, is more important than making profits for a few. And that's why the quality of work is bad in so many places, because it's profitable for the few. But it is much more important to make it meaningful for the many. A genuine democracy, a genuinely democratic economic system would do that, would have done it long ago. Another big change from 2017 to 2018 we might call a gathering revolt. What do I mean? The last 30 to 40 years have been a time, as you have already learned and we've discussed on this program many times, a period of rising inequality, concentration of wealth and very few hands, extraordinary instability, the crash of 2008 being the culmination and so on. And the two big parties in the United States, Republicans and Democrats and the two big parties in many other countries where they have that kind of a system or multiple parties, if they have more, have basically presided over an economic system that has performed really poorly for the mass of people we now have in the United States, for example, a level of personal indebtedness completely different from what existed 30 or 40 years ago. We are indebted for our homes, we are indebted for our cars, we are indebted through our credit cards. And now we have the indignity of having subjected our young people trying to get an education to loading up on debt as well. The rich get richer and we get debts. A revolt is building a revolt against this system and a revolt against the political forces that have presided over a system that has worked so badly for so many of us. Where are the signs? I want to go through them with you because they are going to be a big factor in this year, 2018. I'll start with England, even though I could start anywhere. A radical socialist left wing politician, Jeremy Corbyn, the head of the Labour Party, first gets elected to the head of the Labour Party. A very different kind of Leader from, say, Tony Blair of a few years ago. And he goes from someone laughed at by the press to someone currently, early in 2018, looking like the likely next Prime Minister of England. What's that about? It's about millions of the citizens of the United Kingdom in a kind of revolt. Revolt not only against an economic system that is not treating them well, that is making them fall further and further behind a terribly rich and very small minority, but also angry at the old leadership of the Labour Party, at the old leadership of the Conservative Party and its current leadership, Theresa May and so on. This is a revolt. It's slow, it's haphazard a little bit. It's uneven here and there, but it's an unmistakable shift of opinion, shift of passion, shift of where the economy and the politics are going. You have the same thing in the United States, a disagreement with and a disinclination to follow the old leadership of the Democratic Party, the Clintons, for example, or the old leadership of the Republican Party, the Bushes, for example. The people who were in power power are now losing it in their respective parties. Moreover, the people coming up are people who explicitly say they will be different from what happened before. Whether it's Mr. Trump on the right or Mr. Sanders on the left, their whole campaign is a revolt against the old establishment. You could see it also in the election, a very important election in the last month of 2017 in the state of Alabama, where Roy Moore, literally a walking exemplary of the old way of doing things, was defeated in a state that has been solidly Republican for a long time, that has strong support for Mr. Trump in the election, turned to Mr. Trump and said, we don't care that you endorse Mr. Moore. We're voting against him. We're sending a Democrat, not a Republican. I don't think that was a vote for Mr. The Democratic candidate. It was a vote against what has been. And Mr. Moore was seen as a. Has been a representative of what has been. Let me go on and give you more examples. In France, there was likewise a rejection of the old. The government last in 2017 that fell was a government of the Socialist Party, which was the major opposition party, roughly equal in France to what the Democratic Party or the Labour Party, the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively. He was voted out because the French people were disgusted by the Socialists, particularly because they had promised to be socialists in the sense of not having a system that made the rich richer and everybody else poor. And they didn't deliver. They delivered actually more of the same old same old. And if you promise to be really different and you really deliver no difference at all, people can get very angry at you. And the French people voted out the Socialists. But here's the interesting they didn't vote in the traditional Conservatives. The traditional conservative candidate in the last election was exposed during the campaign for having arranged no show jobs at very high salaries in the government for his wife and children. And as that became well known, you had the kind of disgust of the French people turning against this traditional right wing conservative leader, Fillon was his name, with the same anger that they had turned against the Socialists, which allowed a newcomer whose only claim to fame was, I'm a newcomer, I'm different from them, to win the election. That's Mr. Macron. But the fact that he got in that way is closely connected to the fact that, that his popularity in the first half year of his being there has collapsed. No one likes what he has to say. He doesn't really offer anything new at all. He's more of the same old same old. Something that has happened to Mr. Trump as well. There's a revolt. People want something new and different. They don't want a capitalism that works as badly for the majority as it now does, and they don't want the politicians associated with that. So there's a revolt brewing and I think it's going to shape the economics and the politics very profoundly. And that leads me to my third topic about something that happened in 2017 and is roaring into 2018 as well. Well, and this goes by a peculiar name, populism. We are told that we are in an age of populism. Trump is a populist and Bernie Sanders is a populist and Corbyn is a populist and many others are getting that name. What is this about? What does populist even mean? Well, I suppose if you look it up in the dictionary, it has to do with people, because that's what populist refers to. And there is a glimmer there of what I've just been talking about, that there's a revolt of the people emerging. They are angry, they have been ripped off, they feel for a long time and it's only getting worse. And they don't see in the regular politicians any sign of recognition of this problem and doing something about it. So the people are angry and they're demanding change and they get called populist. The trouble with the word is it covers an immense array of very different diagnoses of what's wrong and correspondingly different directions for how to fix it. So Mr. Trump and the right wing get called populists. Marine Le Pen in France, whose own platform is about getting rid of immigrants, is a populist. And there's a truth here. When people want change, they're wondering how to get it. Having been kept out of politics as it is controlled by the elites in each country, they're kind of new at this, getting involved directly. Before, they either ignored it or they went and voted the same way each election, the way their parents had and their people around them had. But now there's a question. Are we going to go to the right and solve the problems of the economy in the way right wingers urge the people to go? And we know what that is. Be angry at the immigrants, be angry at the poor, be angry at the government. Standard moves of the right wing. Organize the people, direct the people, stimulate the people, enrage the people, and aim at these immigrants, the poor, minorities, the government, and maybe women. Who knows? You all kind of know it's a very old story. And on the other hand, there's the left, which says, no, no, no, it's not the immigrants that's your problem. And it's not really even the government, because the government is what it is, because we allow an economic system to concentrate all the wealth in a few hands, who then, of course, pick and fund the politicians they want. So if you're angry at the government, it's like getting angry at a puppet. Why be angry at the puppet? You want to get angry at the hand that manipulates the puppet. You want to be angry at the economic system that gives so much wealth and therefore power to so few at the top. And so the left says to the people as they get involved, make allies out of the immigrants, make allies out of the women, make allies out of those that are marginalized, those that are kept out to together become strong enough to change what matters, which isn't the government so much as it is the system to which government always responds. If you change who has the wealth and if you change who runs the businesses, the government change will follow as the night does the day. And so there's a struggle going on across 2017, in all the candidates and elections I've already listed to you and many more that we don't have the time to. And it's going right into 2018. It may well be called the year of populism exploding. And 2017 was the year of the gathering storm of the populism, if you mean by that the emergence into public political life. Of millions of people who had been kept out, who had lost interest, who hoped somehow the economy would take care of everybody without their having to get involved. Because they could see that politics was often a sleazy, if not a dirty game. Well, they've waited a long time. It isn't getting better. So now, yes, they're getting involved and some will go to the left and some will go to the right. And the question for everyone is which way will prevail? Because, excuse me, the one thing that seems clear is that the old is dying, that the center cannot hold, that the establishment is wobbling. All of the key promises of the establishment of the last 20 years in economics have dissolved. We were told that globalization was a win win situation for everybody. It wasn't. And now globalization has a bad name. We were told that the entrepreneur would be the leader of a society. We see, in fact, that entrepreneurs are busy becoming wealthy and they often do that at everybody else's expense. And so it's not so clear that this is advantageous. We were told that capitalism is a system which, like a rising tide, lifts all boats. And we learned, yeah, capitalism may be thriving, but it can thrive for an ever smaller slice of the population, leaving everybody else wondering. Yeah, populism is the revolt of masses of people from a kind of passivity, a kind of let's leave it to the other people, let's go along to get along, etc, etc. That's over for good reasons and for bad. Young people see that their own lives, their own careers, their own futures, literally in the United States, the ability of young people to get out of the debts of college educations, to get out of the bad jobs that are being offered to them with enough to have a family, to get married, to have children, all the rest, the most basic needs of life are being squeezed and undone and nibbled at in a way that makes makes you despair, get angry, and sooner or later recognize you cannot solve this problem by yourself. These are social problems. And social problems are never solved by individual people. Social problems are solved by social movements. What the individual needs to do is understand it and to help build that kind of social movement, to get the improvement in the individual life as well as that of the society. A famous poet once said, beware, lest you live in interesting times. Well, not under our control, we do live in interesting times. It is a good time to be alive because there's a reckoning underway and there are winds of change. And I personally, for those of you that are interested, see the potential of those changes as enormously positive and well worth the effort to shape and to participate in. Let's see whether the issues and trends we've identified in this program play themselves out across the rest of 2018. Thank you very much for being with us today, and I look forward to speaking with you again next week.