Economic Update: The System's Unwanted Results

Summary

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Episode: The System’s Unwanted Results
Date: February 8, 2018

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Episode Overview

In this episode, economist Richard D. Wolff delivers critical commentary on recent economic developments, focusing on the systemic flaws of capitalism and their wide-ranging effects on wages, health care, housing, and mental health. The second half features a conversation with Dr. Harriet Fraad about the profound intersection between capitalism and the mental health crisis in the United States.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Wage Stagnation and Misleading Statistics

[00:10–10:00]

• Wolff begins with the release of government data showing hourly wages increased by 2.9% between January 2017 and January 2018.
• He critiques the media excitement around this, noting that once inflation is factored (approx. 2–2.1%), the "real" wage increase is only 0.8%.
• Additionally, the average workweek shrank and labor force participation decreased, further eroding real gains.
• Quote (Richard Wolff, 04:15):
  "Wages are stagnant in the United States. They are as stagnant over the last year as they have been for most of the 30 years. The notion that it's different from that is a mistake. I'm being polite."
• Wolff accuses current political leaders and media of deliberately misleading the public by exaggerating wage growth.

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2. Health Care: The Capitalist Profit Problem

[10:01–18:22]

• Wolff discusses a new health care initiative by Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and Jamie Dimon, emphasizing their plan for an employee health system "free from profit-making incentives and constraints."
• He interprets this as a sign even capitalist leaders are “sick and tired” of overpaying for employee health, highlighting that U.S. health expenditures are double those of the second-highest spending country.
• Quote (Richard Wolff, 13:14):
  "They don't want to be extorted by other capitalists. They want a medical system...free from profit making incentives and constraints."
• Raises a rhetorical question about why such non-profit options are not available to the general public.

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3. The Airbnb Effect: Hidden Costs and Housing Market Distortion

[18:23–25:50]

• Wolff explores the impact of platforms like Airbnb:
  • They effectively shift costs (utilities, maintenance, cleaning) from hotels to individual hosts.
  • This shift is unaccounted for in profitability analyses.
  • Aggregators (those turning multiple units into “mini-hotels”) exacerbate housing shortages, driving up rents and reducing available housing for residents.
• Presents a critique of the so-called “sharing economy,” describing it as merely profit-driven cost-shifting.
• Quote (Richard Wolff, 24:19):
  "There's no technological innovation here. There's no sharing economy. That's not what this is about. It's about making more money... by pushing the cost onto others."
• Suggests that treating housing as a public service (much like parks) could alleviate such issues.

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4. Saudi Arabia’s Anti-Corruption Drive: Wealth, Crisis, and Social Priorities

[25:51–30:30]

• Wolff examines Saudi Arabia’s recent detainment of wealthy individuals under the guise of anti-corruption, leading to $106 billion collected for government relief.
• Argues this is evidence that mobilizing wealth to solve social crises is a matter of political will, not economic impossibility.
• Quote (Richard Wolff, 29:13):
  "The problem of getting the resources to solve a country's problems depends entirely on whether you go after it directly or not."

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5. Toxic Corporate Culture: The UK’s President’s Club Scandal

[30:31–32:00]

• Details the exposure of sexual misconduct at the President’s Club charity fundraiser, attended by business elites.
• Uses it as an example of how hierarchical, top-down business structures facilitate abuse.
• Advocates for democratizing workplaces to prevent such abuses.
• Quote (Richard Wolff, 31:56):
  "A hierarchical structure of business is an open invitation for this kind of behavior... A democratic business... would at least allow those who don't want to see this kind of behavior to have some power to change it."

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6. Housing Crisis: Vacancy Amid Homelessness

[32:01–34:10]

• Notes that in the U.S., for every homeless person there are two vacant investor-owned homes.
• Critiques the capitalist incentive to hold housing off the market for speculation, despite widespread homelessness.
• Highlights possible public solutions inspired by proposals in the UK to seize and repurpose empty investor-held homes.
• Quote (Richard Wolff, 33:28):
  "We have a system that encourages people to become investors in homes, side by side with a system that pays so few wages or gives so few jobs that we have hundreds of thousands... without a home."
• Suggests housing should be treated as a human right and a public good.

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Interview: Dr. Harriet Fraad on Capitalism and Mental Health

[34:11–55:41]

The Mental Health Crisis and Its Economic Roots

• Dr. Fraad asserts that 1 in 6 Americans is taking a mental health drug, mostly ineffective but lucrative for the pharmaceutical industry.
• Emphasizes the role of capitalism in isolating individuals, eroding the key to mental health: connection.
• Quote (Harriet Fraad, 33:01):
  "The key to mental health is connection...capitalism disconnects people from everything they need."

Capitalism’s Disconnection: Work, Consumption, and Loneliness

• Wolff and Fraad discuss how capitalist labor arrangements (Uber, Amazon) isolate workers, suppress unionization, and erode social bonds.
• Overwork, unpredictable schedules, and lack of time off diminish family and community life.
• Quote (Richard Wolff, 39:06):
  "You live in your own little house, you drive your own little car, and you get this loneliness built in. Once you open the space to see it, it's kind of everywhere."

Pharmaceutical Profits over Real Care

• The U.S. alone allows direct-to-consumer advertising by drug companies, boosting the normalization of medication as the solution for unhappiness rather than addressing underlying societal causes.
• Fraad shares a striking patient story about the failure of psychopharmaceuticals compared to holistic therapeutic approaches.

The Role of Technology in Deepening Disconnection

• Discusses the illusory connectedness of social media and digital devices.
• Fraad draws a comparison between genuine relationships and online interaction:
  "It's like making love versus watching porn. That's not the same." (Harriet Fraad, 50:23)
• Notes that such devices fill the gap left by capitalism's destruction of community, but do not solve the real need for connection.

Cooperative Workplaces as a Remedy

• Suggests worker co-ops as a model for reconnecting people, democratizing workplaces, and improving mental health.

• Praises the Mondragon co-op’s practices (job rotation, shared meals, weekly meetings) as fostering dignity, connection, and well-being.

• Quote (Richard Wolff, 54:48):
  "The co op builds the connectedness into the job because work life balance is on their agenda. Whereas if it's run by a small number of people for profit, it's a wholly different set of goals that govern how you organize work."

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Notable Quotes (with Timestamps)

• "Wages are stagnant in the United States. They are as stagnant over the last year as they have been for most of the 30 years."
  — Richard D. Wolff [04:15]

• "They want a medical system...free from profit making incentives and constraints."
  — Richard D. Wolff [13:14]

• "There's no technological innovation here. There's no sharing economy. That's not what this is about. It's about making more money... by pushing the cost onto others."
  — Richard D. Wolff [24:19]

• "The problem of getting the resources to solve a country's problems depends entirely on whether you go after it directly or not."
  — Richard D. Wolff [29:13]

• "A hierarchical structure of business is an open invitation for this kind of behavior... A democratic business... would at least allow those who don't want to see this kind of behavior to have some power to change it."
  — Richard D. Wolff [31:56]

• "The key to mental health is connection...capitalism disconnects people from everything they need."
  — Dr. Harriet Fraad [33:01]

• "You live in your own little house, you drive your own little car, and you get this loneliness built in. Once you open the space to see it, it's kind of everywhere."
  — Richard D. Wolff [39:06]

• "It's like the difference between making love and watching porn. That's not the same."
  — Dr. Harriet Fraad [50:23]

• "The co op builds the connectedness into the job because work life balance is on their agenda. Whereas if it's run by a small number of people for profit, it's a wholly different set of goals that govern how you organize work."
  — Richard D. Wolff [54:48]

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Important Timestamps

• Wage Stagnation Reality Check: [00:10–10:00]
• Health Care Capitalist Critique: [10:01–18:22]
• Airbnb and Housing Market Problems: [18:23–25:50]
• Saudi Wealth and Resource Redistribution: [25:51–30:30]
• President’s Club and Workplace Abuse: [30:31–32:00]
• American Housing Crisis: [32:01–34:10]
• Dr. Harriet Fraad Interview Start: [34:11]
• Connection & Mental Health: [33:01–52:33]
• Worker Co-ops as Solutions: [52:55–55:41]

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Conclusion

This episode provides a sweeping and critical examination of how capitalist systems produce 'unwanted results' — stagnating wages, unaffordable healthcare, housing crises, and a mental health epidemic. Through both data and compelling examples, Wolff and Fraad argue for systemic alternatives, such as public services and democratic workplaces, that could foster greater well-being and economic justice.

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Transcript

[A]

Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, incomes, debts, all of those kinds of dimensions of our lives that affect us, our children, our futures. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life. And as always, I hope that that has been a good training to bring you this analysis of the last week or so's major economic events. I want to begin today with talking about two related the release of regular government data about the economy. It is, after all, the United States government that is the major producer and distributor of data about jobs, incomes, interest rates, you name it. And then the media, the major media in this country who record and who announce and who distribute what it is the government says. So in the last week or so, there's been a release, as is typical this time of the year and this time of the month, of data, and the one that got the most attention was an announcement that wages, and here the numbers are important, that wages had gone up, hourly wages between January 2017 and January 2018 by 2.9%. So just under 3%. This got the media into a tizzy, which the government came, clearly wanted and fed. Why? Because wages have been stagnant in the United States for most of the last 35 years. That's right. If you adjust the money we get as wages to the prices we have to pay for what we spend our wages on, we're not getting much more today than we did in the late 1970s. Yes, we have more money in the envelope. But when you pay the higher prices, you're about able to buy the same amount of stuff today that you could then. For most Americans, if you're actually buying more stuff, it's not because your wages went up more than the prices they didn't. It's because you're borrowing more money. And that carries its own dangers. But let's get back to this almost 3% increase in wages over the year. See, a number of commentators said the economy is improving. Well, here we go with a reality check. How did prices go up over the last year while wages were going up 2.9%? The answer is between 2 and 2.1% is the rise in prices. In other words, when you adjust the 2.9% increase in money wages for the 2.1% increase in the prices we pay, you're left with a 0.8% increase in the actual wage per hour we get. And then we have more problems. In January of this year, the average length of the work week shrank so that you have less hours of work. So of course you're not getting paid as much. And compared to a year ago, the percentage of our people that are in the labor force either working or looking for work is lower than it was a year ago. Well, when you put these things together with the normal uncertainty of these numbers, here's the inescapable compound. Wages are stagnant in the United States. They are as stagnant over the last year as they have been for most of the 30 years. The notion that it's different from that is a mistake. I'm being polite. Or a deliberately misleading effort by the politicians in power to look better than they ought to. And that is justified. And by the way, the current leader in the White House promised to drain the swamp, meaning to drain the behavior of people who were not being honest with the United States. True enough, this behavior by the government and the subservient behavior of the mainstream media is nothing new. But Mr. Trump has changed exactly nothing. Our next update has to do with an initiative very important being taken by three of the richest corporate executives in the United States. Warren Buffett, the leader of the Berkshire Hathaway empire, Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon, and Jamie Dimon, the head of the Morgan Stanley bank, one of the biggest banks in the world. They got together over the last couple of weeks and announced something. They're planning a new health care company. It's not 100% clear whether it'll be health care and health insurance or one and part of the other, but that's not really the key thing. The key thing is what they said and what it means in announcing that they were doing something none of them has done, health care. That's not what Mr. Buffett does, that's not what Mr. Bezos does, and it's not what Mr. Dimon does. They are bankers, distributors, and a conglomerate, respectively. I'm going to quote their we want to do health care because we want it to be low cost and, and efficient. And here comes the key. Free from profit making, incentives and constraints. You know what they're saying? They're saying they're sick and tired of paying way too much money for the health care of their employees, who number in the many tens of thousands. They don't want to pay what all the rest of us pay. And why do we pay so much? Just a reminder, the United States spends more for its medical care than any other country on the face of the Earth. Roughly 18% of our GDP pays for health care. The second most highly paid health care system in the world is roughly half of that. We are way out of line with everybody else. Why? Because the doctors, the hospitals, the, the drug and medical device makers, the insurers, all of them hospitals, they work a monopoly together. They get together, help each other, and charge us enough money that they're all laughing on their way to the bank. Well, we suffer it. But Mr. Buffett and Mr. Bezos and Mr. Demon, they don't want to, they don't want to be extorted by other capitalists. They want a medical system. Let me read it to you again. Free from profit making incentives and constraints. So they're going to produce their own health care and they're going to make their own employees use what they produce because it's cheaper. It's a cheaper way to provide medical care for their own employees. I have been arguing on this program that we are all the victims of a medical industrial complex. Hospitals, doctors, drug and device makers and the insurers, they work together and have produced overpriced medical care. Now I have allies of Mr. Buffett, Mr. Bezos and Mr. Dimon because they too recognize, and they don't want to be victimized. Now, if they're going to do it for their employees, let me ask you a why isn't that available to you and to me? Why hasn't it always been, why are we still held hostage to a system that is not free from profit making, incentives and constraints? The third economic update for today has to do with, with the activities of the new kind of industry called Airbnb or HomeAway. These are services, I'm sure many of you are familiar with, that make it possible, if you travel, to stay not in a hotel, as you may have in the past, but in someone's home. And it makes it possible, if you have an apartment in a city somewhere or a home in the rural parts of the country, to make that available to travelers, to make a little extra money. Well, these services are having a lot of trouble, but mostly in other countries they have been either banned or rigidly controlled. For example, in Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris and Barcelona, just to take some major European destinations. And what's the argument being made there? Well, it's a very interesting economics argument. It goes like all that's happening with these services is that there's an effort to switch the hotel industry from what we've been used to, going to a hotel. That's a business that has built a building, maintains a building, maintains the rooms, cleans the rooms. You know, the whole bit as a commercial activity, typically hiring workers who are often in unions to do the work. What Airbnb, HomeAway and the other services like that do is switch it the business so that a good part of the rooms are not in a hotel or anything like one. They're actually your apartment. And why? Because they can make the price change cheaper and still make a big profit, but not because the costs aren't there. It's because the people doing this, the Airbnb and the other agencies, they don't have those costs. They've shifted those costs onto you and me. If we make our apartment available, it's an apartment we either build or rent. It's an apartment we decorate and heat and provision and we do that and we clean it before and after, as we maintain it, since we live there alive of the time, those costs are somehow not recouped. It's not a problem for Airbnb. We do it. And most people who do this don't count those costs the way a hotel would, very carefully to see whether it pays. So we absorb the extras that come with having folks stay over. We hope in the end it makes us more cash, but we don't really do that. And here's the next economic effect. While they're making money in these services and many of us who make apartments available are in fact subsidizing this whole thing, the companies in question make a lot of profits, very successful. But there's also another phenomena. Apartments that were once the homes of people are being increasingly removed from the market by people who buy lots of apartments or rent lots of apartments and in effect run little mini hotels in apartment houses where they can escape many of the costs and the taxes and so on that a regular hotel business has to pay. Once again, there's no technical innovation here. There's no sharing economy. That's not what this is about. It's about making more money than. That's what it's about finding a way to push the costs onto others so you can reap more of the profit for yourself. But as people aggregate, that's what they're called, aggregate apartments. To run them, like these sort of Airbnb hotels, they're driving up the rents in the United States because the apartments that are left for people to live in are shrinking. So the demand for apartments is what it always was. But the supply available for regular long term tenants is being reduced by these under the wire, let's call them hotels. No one counts these kinds of costs. No one asks, gee, if you're threatening the hotel business, losing people working in hotels their jobs. If you're raising the rents in a community, then maybe that ought to be factored into whether it's profitable to allow an Airbnb system. And if you really want to give that option to people who have an apartment, then you ought to take into account the effects and deal with it. The market doesn't do that. The market doesn't allow us to do it. The market doesn't make sure those costs are counted. It raises the question that gentrification has always raised. Why do we allow the decision about something so important as housing to be handled by buying and selling? So that the best housing goes to those with the most money, so that profit drives the rents and everything else? Housing has been in many countries, it still is in many countries, a public service precisely to make sure that everybody has a home and that the distribution of people in a neighborhood is diverse rather than being governed by money and prices and rents. And for those of you that are skeptical that the government could manage something as important as housing, I often find that a bizarre hesitation. Why? Because most of the same people really enjoy going to the public parks in American cities. Almost every city has one more, 10 of them. Here in New York City, we have Central park and Prospect park and many wonderful parks. You know what? They're maintained by the city, by public authorities of one kind or another who keep them well planted, who keep them clean, who keep them safe. We want the parks. We've given that to the government in most parts of the country, and it does a fine job. Why don't we do that with housing also? Maybe it would escape some of the kinds of problems that are bedeviling the housing industry, the rental industry, and so on. Before I get to my next update, I want to remind you we maintain 2rdWolff with 2f's.com and the other one is democracyatwork.info. that's all one word, democracyatwork.info both of those websites are available to you 24 7, no charge whatsoever, ever. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You can email us with your comments and criticisms and suggestions for what you'd like to see dealt with on this program. This is a way to partner with us, to share with us what you know, what you want. It's a way for us to reach many more people by asking you to make use of what's on those websites. So please make use of them. That's why they're there. We upload much more material than we can cover in this program. And finally, for those of you that are listening on the radio, on podcasts, if you would like to see this program as a television program, please know that you can go to Patreon, that's P A T R e o n patreon.com economicupdate and see this program as a television program. Okay? Some of you have noticed in my next update a remarkable thing that happened in the country of Saudi Arabia over the last several months. And since it's now come to an end, or nearly so, it's time for us to take a measure of what happened and to learn the lesson. A whole group of Saudi Arabian billionaires and millionaires were caught up by the current leader in what he called an anti corruption drive. This was really interesting. Lots of them. Something on the order of 381 billionaires and millionaires, most of whom were herded into the Ritz Carlton hotel in the capital of Riyadh. Okay? It's unusual for millionaires and billionaires to be rounded up, to say the least. It's doubly unusual for them to be rounded up in an anti corruption drive. And it is really extraordinary that instead of being taken to jail, they were taken to the ritziest hotel in the country. What's going on? Saudi Arabia is in trouble. As a country, it is totally dependent on the price of oil and gas. And when the price went down over the last couple of years, the economy of that country, like other countries that depend on oil and gas, Nigeria, Venezuela and so on, got itself into deep trouble. The new leader, relatively new, decided that he needed a large sum of money from these wealthy beyond words people, literally the 381 richest or nearly the 381 richest people in his entire country. He could very quickly take a portion of their money, he decided, and make it available to the government to see themselves through the very hard times. If he asked them for it, he'd probably get a giggle and a sneer. So he decided maybe he even tried that. He decided to do it more directly. He rounded them up, told them they were targets of an anti corruption drive, stuck them in a fancy hotel and said, I won't let you out until you give me a whole bunch of money. And he got it. Turns out they didn't want to be stuck in a fancy hotel. They wanted to ride around in their casualty expensive cars and do their usual billionaire thing. But he got $106 billion and he plans, he said, to use 13 billion to compensate the Saudi people for the rising cost of living. He's going to solve that problem that way. Notice it isn't that difficult to see a country through difficulty. Notice that these 381 richest people in Saudi Arabia, even after they had to fork over $106 billion, they're still the 381 richest people. The problem of getting the resources to solve a country's problems depends entirely on whether you go after it directly or not. In Saudi Arabia, they felt they had to, they did it. And we learn a lesson here in the United States. The richest people likewise have more than enough money to enable the government to solve the problems and still leave them the richest people. But they're strong enough so far not to have to do that. My next update has to do with an event that happened on Thursday, January 18, in London. An annual fundraiser for charities took place at the Dorchester Hotel. Three hundred and sixty of the United Kingdom's business elite, except for one, they were only men. They gathered together for the President's Club event. It's called Two undercover women reporters for the Financial Times took the jobs that were offered to. You'll love this. 130 hired hostesses to work for the 360 business elite men, yes, you guessed it. Groping, sexual misbehaviors of one kind or another. But this time it got caught. This time it got exposed. And in the most important financial newspaper in the country, the Financial Times. So no one questioned the veracity of it all. What is it? Another example that if you organize business with a few people at the top, those people will be tempted and by virtue of their power will be enabled to abuse those below them, whether it's men abusing women or men and women at the top abusing those whose jobs depend on what those few at the top decide. A hierarchical structure of business is an open invitation for this kind of behavior, which is why it is so old and so well known. All that happened were the British were caught out. The President's Club became a scandal. But the lesson to be learned, don't allow a few people to run everything because then you're a slave to whatever abusive instincts or desires they may have. A horizontally organized business, a democratic business where everybody participates in a decision would at least allow those who don't want to see this kind of behavior to have some power to change it. It shouldn't take undercover reporters after 33 years of this charity to break the story open. The last update we'll have time for today has to do again with housing becoming a very important subject in America, to say the least. First, rents in the United States today are higher than they have ever been in the history of the United States. Even more remarkable is this for every homeless person in the United States today. There are two vacant investor owned homes in the United States today. So let me repeat that. People are holding homes off the market, hoping to make a killing by getting a high paying tenant sometime in the future. The homes are empty, they're in the hands of investors who have no desire to use them, they just want to make money off of them. Side by side with many, many thousands of homeless people. When I say sometimes to you that we can do better than capitalism, this is a perfect example. We have a system that encourages people to become investors in households, in homes side by side with a system that pays so few wages or gives so few jobs that we have hundreds of thousands of people in this country without a home. And as I pondered this sort of situation, why we don't make housing a human right, why again, we don't make housing like our public parks, something that we give to ourselves as a people. Everybody has to have a park, to have a picnic in, to play with your dog, to play with your children, to, to get a moment of green, escape from your daily life. It's very important to have parks, which is why almost every city in town and village has one or more than one. But housing is also very important to your mental and physical health. Why don't we do it that way, that we have a shared housing stock for everybody? We don't have homeless people, but we don't do that, but other countries do. So I thought I'd close today by telling you what is being proposed in Great Britain by the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, the new leader of the Labour Party, and by the way, in Britain they have a homeless problem. It is much smaller than the homeless problem here in the United States in absolute numbers and per capita in terms of the relationship to the size of the population. But they don't call it homelessness. They have a wonderful name which I hadn't encountered before. Here's what it's called in England, in Great Britain, rough sleeping. That's right, rough sleeping. Which kind of tells you pretty closely what we're talking. Homelessness, rough sleeping. Here's what Corbyn has said in response to to what he honestly admits is his horror at contemplating the suffering of homeless people in the United Kingdom. Number one, the government plans to buy empty houses and make them available. None of this vacant homes next to homeless people and also to empower local authorities to seize deliberately vacant housing. That's what's called housing held by investors to make money in order to solve problems. He's very critical of a society that builds luxury apartment houses that sit half empty while not taking care of the basic housing needs of the fellow citizens. I had this final thought. The British don't make such a big thing about their family values the way the United States does. But it is remarkable that a country committed to family values is so much of a failure when it comes to providing housing for vast numbers of people. What kind of a family value is that? Thank you very much. We've come to the end of the first half of Economic update. Please stay with us after a short interlude. We will be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's Economic update. As often happens, we try to make it every month. My guest today is Dr. Harriet Fraad. She is a mental health counselor and a hypnotherapist in private practice in New York City. Our topic today is capitalism and mental health and it is a topic that, in a sense, we've been building to in the previous months when we've talked about a range of quite related topics. In addition to being here with us at the beginning of every month, Dr. Fraad is becoming well known as a specialist on the intersection of American personal, economic and political life. Recent articles that she's written have appeared in alternate and in the book Knowledge, Class and Economics. She appears regularly on the radio TV show Economic Update, namely this one, and also appears on such shows as Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp. Her work can be found on her website. Harriet Fraud. That's all one word. And the fraud is spelled F R a a d harrietfraud.com so it is with great pleasure that I turn and we're going to talk about capitalism and mental health. Thanks again for being with us. Let me start right off the bat with an observation and then ask your comment. People have been used to dealing with mental health issues, let's call them in the United States for a long time, but particularly in recent years, and all kinds of mental health issues have been raised which we're going to talk about and all kinds of reasons given for why we are experiencing these difficulties as much as we are. But I've noticed very rarely is the economic system in which we live among the causes or factors shaping mental illness. It's as if there's an unspoken taboo that we can think of stress or we can think of family issues, or we can think of lots of things that might contribute to mental illness or a weak mental health, if that's a way to put it. But talking about how the capitalist economic system that we live in contributes is some kind of scary place we're not supposed to go. So it's particularly important, I think, that we have this conversation that we explore that. So let's begin by tell me if I'm right or wrong about thinking that it's reasonable to say that mental health issues are, are an important and increasingly important problem in the United States today.

[B]

They're huge in the United States. It's not only the addiction that I talked about which is the biggest cause of death for people until age 50, more than car accidents or anything else, overdoses. It's also that one in six Americans is taking a mental health drug because part of what capitalism teaches us is, is a problem. Buy something and it'll make you feel better. Even though the research on these drugs is that in 75% of the time they don't work. And if they work at first, it's because there's an effect that if you believe in it, you feel better because you think it'll help you. And then you find out it won't. And so people keep taking greater and greater doses that don't make them any happier, but are guaranteed to do one thing, give you side effects and another thing, give great profits to the psychopharmaceutical industry, which is the most profitable aspect of the pharmaceutical industry itself. Highly profitable. You're talking about enormous profits and people are propagandized. Prozac, a popular drug, was very influenced by the best selling book My Life on Prozac. Well, it turned out to have been sponsored by the makers of Prozac, but that was not announced. That's really too bad.

[A]

But in a way, if I could interrupt, you're now telling us that capitalism plays a role in how we respond to mental health issues.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Tell us a little bit about how capitalism plays a role in creating those issues in the first place and then responding to them with profitable drug practices.

[B]

Well, that's a good question, because capitalism plays an enormously prominent role, which is why Americans are doing so much worse than most other peoples in the world who are ostensibly more privileged the Western industrialized world. And that's because the key to mental health is connection. As I talked before, there's a mental health table that needs four legs. One is a really close relationship, whether it's with a sex partner or a really intimate friend or relative. Another is a wider circle of friends who are connected. Another is a group that you participate in. And there are fewer Americans participating in anything than did in bowling leagues alone in 1970. So you have isolated people and also connection to the world, where you see yourself as a part of the world, whereas most Americans are deep politicized and don't have any feeling for the rest of the world. So all these legs are shaking. And in terms of what capitalism has to do with it, capitalism disconnects people from everything that they need, it makes through advertising. And people are deluged and so are children. They think that things will make them happier. In Johann Hari's new and excellent book, Lost Connections, he cites a study of little children that are given seeing a video. Some are seeing a video of a wonderful little plastic toy, others are not. Then they're split into groups. The group that sees the little plastic toy, as well as those that haven't seen it, are told, the person who has this toy is a nasty person. Who would you play with? The people who didn't see the advertisement said, I wouldn't play with him. The group that saw it, most of them said, oh, I want to play with him because he has the toy. Which is a little bit the story of what happens with advertising. You think that people are better or that you'll be better if you buy something, you'll be more attractive. Little kids of 3 years old in America prefer the same hamburger if it's in a McDonald's container than if it isn't. So that you are trained to think that it's brand names that will make you happy that are better. And if you can't afford that, you're a loser or worse.

[A]

So in a sense, you're saying, I just want to make sure I get it, that there's a kind of a tilting in the world we live in when we try to understand how to organize our lives, what to pursue, to go in the direction of things that have been profitable for somebody to produce. So that the capitalist profit mechanism literally shapes our desires and our preferences and.

[B]

Our sense of our values, of what is important and meaningful in life. And they've done excellent studies which show that people who can afford a lot of things are not happier than people who can't. Now, of course, if you're homeless, you have a whole bunch of other reasons to be unhappy, but people who have reasonable but not high amounts of money, people with more stuff, are not happier. They may be for the second that they buy the brand New, expensive thing, and then it's over.

[A]

I'm reminded of that famous joke that I don't remember the comedian who said it, that life is a game and the person who has the most stuff in his or her garage when they die wins.

[B]

Right. But what happens is people keep striving and thinking, well, I didn't have enough. If only I had X, Y, Z. And they're pushed to consume. And it doesn't give them happiness, even when they can afford it. And what we're talking about here in the United States, we have to remember is while people are taught they're no good if they can't afford things, 46% of the country can't afford $400 in case of an emergency. And so people get disconnected from each other. They think that things will make them happy, not relationships with other people. And there are a lot of other ways that they lose connection.

[A]

Let me draw you out and explore some of these other ways that capitalism as a system promotes or fosters disconnectedness.

[B]

Well, let's look at some of the most profitable businesses in capitalism now. Uber, Amazon. If you work for Uber, you work all alone in your own car. You tell them the area you're in and the dispatcher tells you if somebody's waiting, that is not an intimate relationship or even a friendly one. You can't reach other people. You don't unionize with other people. Your hours are different from other people's. The same with Amazon. The people who deliver the packages have to have their own car and they do what Amazon says. They report and they have no contact. When people do have jobs with other people, the work week has changed. The 40 hour work week for which so many people died in the United States is over. If you have a desk job, they can reach you on email. We're not France where the workers unions have forbidden businesses to call you after the workday. People can call you at any time. People who have those jobs work 40 or 50 hours a week. So do Uber people. You have very little time to connect and little time to connect at work.

[A]

You know, unions used to be formed when workers were brought together in a factory, in a hiring hall. Even taxi drivers get together at a particular place in the morning, have their coffee, share some stories. But you're right, the Uber model, and it's in many industries, is totally isolated. You live in your own little house, you drive your own little car, and you get this loneliness built in. Once you open the space to see it, it's kind of everywhere and it's.

[B]

Even in jobs that are better paid, let's say an advertising job, where you have to work like a demon on your job until 7, 8 o' clock at night, if you have a relationship with someone at home, he'll be exhausted by the time you get there. After these jobs, and that's typical, people bond with the only people around. They'll go to a bar and drink together. Those are the relationships. Any personal relationship that took an investment of time, it doesn't work. Our capitalism, even unlike French or German or even Brazilian capitalism, only gives at most two weeks of paid vacation. And for lower paid jobs, no paid vacation, except maybe Christmas Day or New Year's Day. So people can't bond with their families. They get home exhausted, mothers come home from work. And we have to remember that 78% of children with over 6 years old are in the labor force mainly full time, and 60% of children, women with kids under two people come home, they have to take care of their households, they're wiped out. And often after those jobs, the surveys show they're so frazzled, all they want to do is veg in front of a television to kind of recoup themselves.

[A]

Which is also an isolated event, totally isolated.

[B]

It's you, the advertising and the programming, which includes a lot of advertising in the brands that are shown in the program.

[A]

You know, it brings to mind that as we're sitting here talking, there's an immense strike going on in Germany. The largest union there, Ignite, almost 4 million members in Germany, is on strike. And the number one demand that provoked this strike was the demand of the union for what in Germany is called work life balance. The demand that if you have a sick person at home, if you have an elderly person at home, if you have an important relationship that needs your attention, that you ought to be able to reduce the time you work temporarily in order to be able to have a proper work life balance. And this is in a country where the work week is not 40 hours, but 35. They want it reduced to 27. For people who have the need to build up a relationship on the grounds that that makes a mental health work life balance, it's remarkable that that could exist there. And we don't have anything like that here.

[B]

We're barely fighting for some personal days of personal leave, or for paid maternity or paternity leave which all these other nations have. But they're making more money by working. Capitalism is more profitable if you give people the least possible and make them give you the most possible. So you have a Population who are exhausted emotionally. They're exhausted because they don't have much to look forward to. They're not going to get ahead.

[A]

Do Americans use these psychologically? I don't know what the word is. Psychological drugs. More than people in other countries. Are we a heavy user?

[B]

We are way out front. First place. We're one of two countries that allows direct to consumer advertising from the drug.

[A]

Company to the individual right to tell you. In other countries, they do what only.

[B]

The doctor can prescribe.

[A]

I see.

[B]

And they're not giving them out like M&Ms.

[A]

But they're also not allowed to advertise.

[B]

They're not allowed to advertise to the public. To the public. They can send a brochure to a doctor, but they cannot advertise. And they certainly can't do the kind of thing that drug representatives do in the United States, which is have the doctor or the therapist or whatever, the psychologist, the psychiatrist, have a group of colleagues over with refreshments provided by the drug company to tell them the wonder of whatever is the latest drug and make it minimum 30 grand a year for doing this every several months. They don't have that bribery and they don't have that proliferation of drugs. Also in other countries, people have stronger unions, stronger community organizations, stronger after school programs for their kids to connect and weekend programs and summer programs in the wealthy countries, they all have that. And so that people can connect and form the kind of relationships that give them mental health support. Also, the idea that. Which they've sold here's capitalist. Drug companies have sold the idea that if you are unhappy, it's because you have a broken brain. Now the Institutes for Mental Health in the United States have found that that isn't right. That if you want to figure out how people became unhappy, you have to trace their steps and see what happened. Rather than broken brain, the brain is a neuroplastic organ. It changes on the basis of experience. Maybe you're unhappy because you have a good reason. You got fired, your husband left you, your kid is sick, you're losing your home. Good reasons. And a pill won't fix those things. You have to see how you got there. But they sell people the idea that they could fix their brain with an easy pill, which is a lie. It's an outright lie that is wildly profitable. And even though the National Institutes of Mental Health don't endorse that, they don't have the advertising budget. So the word does not get out.

[A]

So the critique of use of drugs doesn't have the money behind it to become well known. Whereas the drug companies can spend unlimited on promoting the notion that the drug helps you. What's the relationship between the drugs and therapy in the old Freudian or other senses of talking with someone to figure out what. Where your problems come from and to figure out how to work your way out of them.

[B]

Well, I could tell a story from my client base which tells it very well. I had a client who was a highly accomplished businessman and he suddenly had paralysis of his hands. And he went to psychiatrists who first he got physically examined. There was nothing wrong. The psychiatrist said he had to take medicine. Medicine. He didn't want to take medication. So he found me, who am, because I'm a hypnotherapist and psychotherapist. And I asked when did this start? None of the psychiatrists had ever asked when did this start? And when he wanted to not take medication. They said, you're resistant, you're a resistant patient, that's even worse. And so on and so forth. And he said if it started. He was a man who was very attached to his father. And it started when he came in to wish his father good morning. Father was old by that time. And his father's hand was raised off the covers and paralyzed. And he went over there, the hand was paralyzed. And in about three months of hypnotherapy and talking about it, he realized that was how he kept his father with him, by paralyzing his hands.

[A]

His own hand.

[B]

His own hand. And we figured out in hypnosis and out how he could keep his father with him. The love that he got, the memories of the bonding that they shared. And his hands worked great.

[A]

In other words, he found a different way to hold on to the father.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

And so he didn't need to have the paralysis.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

And the paralysis went away.

[B]

The paralysis went completely away. He went back to full time work feeling happy, his hands worked fine, he went back to the gym, he did his things. And if he had listened to the capitalist psychopharmaceutical industry and its representatives who are psychiatrists, he would have taken more and more meds and they wouldn't have worked, but they would have messed him up. Drugs like Prozac, Paxil make you very fat. He would have gained weight and then gotten diabetes. He would have. If he took Zyprexa, he would have blown up. These are these drugs? Or if he took Prozac and got a rash, he'd have to stop immediately or he would die.

[A]

Can I ask a question about something I know many people are thinking about these days. If you travel almost anywhere, you see people in an intense relationship with their computer, with their smartphone, with their. You fill in the blank an endless array of devices that claim that they are about communicating with other people, but in fact, you're always alone. You're actually communicating with the machine. You're not really interacting in that complex way that two or more people. Is there something about the current spate of these kinds of devices that are making this problem worse?

[B]

Yes, and that's been nicely studied. Sherry Turkle and many others have studied this. There's something about looking into the eyes of another, feeling their presence, watching their face, smelling them, engaging with them, hearing them. That is not substituted with social contacts. You know the difference between a friend and a Facebook friend? First of all, a lot of the messages on the Internet are about, look at me. You know, look at me, look at me because I'm important, I'm on Instagram and I'm doing this and that. It could be lies. And you don't know, you don't know. And these devices came in to fill a need just when capitalism was taking away people's connections in a most extreme way. And so people look to these, but the statistics indicate that they really are absolutely no substitute, and they leave people very lonely. It's like the difference between making love and watching porno. That's not the same. You're not engaging the same intimate way.

[A]

So it's really your earlier point. Capitalism, in one way, makes you look for things as a way to solve the needs that are really relational. And now you're saying that they likewise distract you from meeting your actual needs for human interaction by creating these devices that can absorb your time, your attention, and so on. I think in an earlier program, maybe a long time ago, you spoke very movingly about the early weeks and months and years of a baby's life as the absolutely crucial part of that being the baby, held by the mother and father, touched a lot, looked at, gazed in the eyes, hearing even though the baby doesn't understand the words you're saying, hearing you talk all those intense interpersonal. And it makes me wonder, listening to you now, maybe that's not something that is only needed by the baby early. Maybe that's something we need all our lives throughout. And to take it away after you're a baby is a big hurt.

[B]

It is. And for a lot of people, the only times they really touch and are touched, especially men who are allowed to jump on top of each other or if they're in basketball, pat each other's behind. But the kind of holding hands and hugging which women do and gay men allow themselves to do, straight men often feel very worried that it compromises their masculinity to hold their male friend's hand or put their arm around him. And so they're denied the tactile connection that we all need unless they're making love. And people get sexually compulsive because they need to hold in touch and that's the only way they feel they can. It's very sad.

[A]

All of this is very sad, tragic. I don't want to end the program since we're running out of time without asking you what could be a different, a non capitalist arrangement of an economy that might be better able to either avoid the mental health problem or better solve it?

[B]

Well, one way that's being tried all over the world and is tried in the United States as well, is co ops where people meet together. First of all, they have the status and respect that everyone needs. They make the time of their work, they make the conditions of their work together. They meet together once a week or so to figure out where they're going and they connect so that even if, look, a lot of work is not all that intrinsically exciting, let's say cleaning work. But if somebody else is deciding everything else for you, you're trapped. But if you're in a group deciding it together, how to work, how to apportion your time, how much people should get for their work, what to invest in when the work is profitable, that no matter what the job, that brings people together, not only to connect with each other, which is crucial for mental health, but also to respect themselves as thinking and important people, not as someone who could be replaced by a machine. And to have consideration for how your work is going. So for example, when I went to Mondragon, the giant co op that was running the Frigor electric plant, I heard a buzzer every so often and I asked, what is that? They said, well, no one can do a repetitive job for more than a couple of hours at a time because it's not good for you. So between people get exercise, they walk to a different station and they do a different job, and then they all have lunch together and they meet together once a week to talk about the conditions of their job.

[A]

So the co op.

[B]

So they're helpless.

[A]

The co op builds the connectedness into the job because work life balance is on their agenda. Whereas if it's run by a small number of people for profit. It's. It's a wholly different set of goals that govern how you organize work.

[B]

And it's also an interesting thing. If the people who do the work participate in and make the decisions around their work, they know what needs to be done, but they're voiceless and lonely. If it's only a boss who has nothing to do with the work except financial management from afar can't even do it, it's impractical too.

[A]

So the logic of the co op is also this issue of connectedness.

[B]

Connectedness, efficiency, humanity, all of it. It's a much better way of doing things.

[A]

Thank you. I now have more arguments for worker co ops than I had before. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I want to thank not just Harriet, I want to thank all of you, ask you to again partner with us. Use what you've learned to today, what you found interesting, share it with other people. I want to thank truthout.org, that enormously important independent source of news and analysis that has been partnering with us for a long time. Thanks for your attention and I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Sam. Sa.