Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Демократия в Деле" channel.

That is a great well thought comment.
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Its NOT a European thing - its being done every where. I'm Australian and you just perfectly described what BOTH our LEFT and RIGHT parties have preached since the late 1980s. They did it to our transport sector, our energy sector, our communications sector and more recently our water sector. AND EVERY TIME we were promised that we would get cheaper prices on these basic commodities and EVERY TIME prices went up. I hope you can see this YT from DW News. It was blocked into Australia for many months. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oyFRoxuf4g At just before 20minutes it introduces Mike Young and calls him a "renowned economist" who attended Harvard the same place where the clown who constructed the Texas Power system came from. You know the one that filed and had children freezing to death. Well he's so renowned that NOBODY I know has ever heard of him. But note what he says with pride (20:50) "It's fascinating to see how sophisticated our water markets have become" He doesn't say if they WORK or that how well they work. NOBODY asked the Australian people if they wanted or needed a "sophisticated" water market. Neo-liberalism is an ideology nothing more. It got a massive boost when Milton Freidman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics and then Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan both adopted it as their central economic doctrine. In practice its failed for 99% of us and monstrously enriched 1%. Mark Blyth keeps pointing out the Rand study on wealth that basically brags how the top 1% of America have made over $50 Trillion (yeah that's trillion with a T) since Reagan started his garbage. The hard part of countering neo-liberalism is the fact its been the main ideology taught in economics courses since the 1970s. So everybody trained in economics will tell you "No Neo-liberalism ahs brought incredible wealth to everyone" because that's all they have been taught. Go and look up Prof. Mark Blyth and listen to any of his lectures where he uses his computer analogy. Sorry to hear Romania has joined the club.
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@Vebunkd Well sorry but its people LIKE YOU who are the reason why the world is the mess that it is. If you wanted to point out that many who proclaim to be intellectual and mislead many are false teachers or advisors or consultants that nobody should listen to I'd back it up. I'm an engineer and these people who call themselves "futurists" and tell us what technologies we'll have are just bullshit artists. For sure there are many college programs that are misleading because they have been written or influenced by big business to suit what they want. Its well known that the major banks have had way too much influence over business degrees at places like Harvard. BUT your call to "shut all the universities" is ignorance and stupidity at its worst. The very web browser you are using right now traces its history back to 2 University of Illinois students who developed the Mosaic program and founded Netscape. Most if not all of the products you buy and use in your life has some or most of its development based on University research. All the Doctors, Dentists and other medical specialists you have ever seen were all educated & trained at Universities. All the technology you use is either designed or made by University graduates. The electricity grids, water systems and sewerage systems that YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON are designed and maintained by engineers educated & trained at Universities. Your life as you know it is because people went to University and got educated. If you hate Universities then fine, BUT GET OFF the INTERNET, STOP using ELECTRICITY, NEVER SEE another DOCTOR and go LIVE IN A CAVE.
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Here's another quote from arguably one of the finest minds of recent centuries. “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” ― Isaac Asimov, News Week, 1980.
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@atomicstyle7344 Couple of very astute comments there. The best being how everyone thinks they too will end up a billionaire. I'm Australian but went to college in America on a sports scholarship (late 80s) and they used to love telling me "that only in America can anybody become a millionaire." It was this idiotic mantra that almost everybody preached and NOBODY could explain.
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Thank you so much. Being an engineer and NOT a student of political theory, (in fact I generally hate such people, for the utter garbage they sell society) I normally run from such people and any of their advocates. Its taken only a few minutes of looking through other quotes to see mister Wolin is a great thinker who has seen through the smoke and mirrors. Most interestingly (and unlike so many others) he seems to like pointing out historical facts from Athenian and Roman societies which oddly I studied in college as humanities options. Please don't hold it against me that I hadn't heard of him, but I come from a different path. Here's another of his quotes from the same book that immediately struct me as the privatisation of Australia is such a hot topic for me. “The strategy followed by privatization’s advocates is, first, to discredit welfare functions as “socialism” and then either to sell those functions to a private bidder or to privatize a particular program. A traditional governmental function, such as education, is in process of being redefined, from a promise to make education accessible to all to an investment opportunity for venture capital.” ― Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: And this one which when put into the context of "Citizens United" and the current makeup of the ultra pro-corporate SCOTUS is chilling. "When power is organized in the form of an economy based upon private capital and the division of labor, then ipso facto the lives of most persons will be directed by others. Dependence is thus institutionalized as inequalities of reward and, consequently, of power.” ― Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated:
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What you're forgetting is that Thatcherism and Reaganism smashed the power of the unions around the Western World. What you might not know or have forgotten is that a lot of people welcomed it. I'm Australian and we got tired of Unions holding society to ransom with opportunistic strikes. Every holiday at least one of the unions threatened some sort of industrial action. Baggage handlers, air refuelers, airline cabin crews were among the worst. Over in the building trades we used to have all sorts of actions. One year back in the 1970s the electricians simply went on strike and just waited until the power stations shut down.
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Well you can go to college and pay to listen to this or you can be here and get it for free. I like Prof. Wolff because at the very least he gives a rational alternative perspective. Where l'd disagree is that Marxism is the answer, because the countries that went down that path had their own catastrophes and that included economic catastrophes, environmental catastrophes and social catastrophes. I think he might agree as he has pointed out in other talks how Russia, China and other failed that the solution isn't a puritanical 100% Marxist state anymore than it is a puritanical 100% Capitalist state, but that the solution lies somewhere in between. Many point to the Nordic models where they have incredibly strong socialist systems wrapped around democratic and capitalist systems. The Norwegians instead of wasting their oil & gas wealth as others have did an almost communist thing by pooling the income into a sovereign wealth fund that they then used capitalist methodologies to enhance.
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@xelakram The great eye opener on economics was an exposé by the BBC program Panorama years ago when they were investigating some of the American banks and how they influence politics. What they found was that professors at Harvard, Yale,.....etc. were on huge money to write papers that helped of promoted what those banks wanted. If you tell a politician "A study by Harvard Business school has found....." or "A recent paper out of Yale Business school says....." that carries serious weight and people pay attention. The Banks found that if you wanted to influence monetary policy it was A LOT CHEAPER and MORE EFFECTIVE to pay-off "the prestigious" professors to write what you wanted. In the Panorama program the confronted one professor with how much his base salary was to how much the banks paid him (it was like 4 or 5x as much) and how many pro-bank papers he was writing and how they influenced policy. Instead of defending his work the professor off with "how dare you this,... how dare you that,.... I'm the chair of blah blah blah." It was really telling that he never defended the work he'd done. Being truthful the engineering research I encountered was just as bad. The entire process is never about results its about doing enough to get the next grant. Its a fundamental reason we haven't solved nuclear fusion or been back to the moon. We've spent billions in research but produced very little, as most of that was about getting the next research grant. I actually did Economics 101 as a humanities option. I remember asking the professor about 2 weeks in when we would see a formula, because all he was showing us was graphs with different shaped supply & demand curves. He laughed at me and told me economics wasn't about numbers. Numbers were for accountants and actuaries. But my real disdain for economists are the insane lies they tell, like "consumers will be better off." What it really means is that consumers will see lower prices because we just sent jobs to a place with lower wages that help with profit. For the consumers who still have a job its better but for the poor bastards who no longer have a job its BS. In Australia we have something even worse. Basic supply-demand economics says that if demand rises prices should as well if supply cannot match the new demand. Australia's population has gone from 15million in the 1980s to 25million so the demand for dairy products, have also increased. Plus Australia now has enormous markets in Japan and China to supply dairy into. Chinese demand Australian produced baby formula is insane. Chinese students in Australia fund their education by mailing the stuff home where it can double or triple in value. Its got so bad that there are now limits on buying baby formula in our supermarkets. In any reality dairy farming and dairy manufacturing in Australia should be profitable if not super profitable, but the number of dairy farmers has crashed from over 22,000 to under 8,000 and we are closing down manufacturing plants. I love throwing that at people with business or economics degrees the stunned looks are brilliant.
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@xelakram Not certain of your age but I am a md 50s Australian who went to college in America in the late 80s. So I was there to witness Reaganomics first hand as well as the rise of televangelism. My college the U. of Illinois was a center of the worlds current computer technology. The browser you are using right now is inherited from the work of 2 of my fellow Illini who were there at the same time. They decided that the text based paging of the Plato System sucked so they came up with a GUI based program called Mosaic -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen#Early_life_and_education Because I was over in the aerospace department at that time and there'd been the soul searching after the Challenger disaster. Then there was the end of the cold war and with it the end of Reagans Star Wars program and my aerospace degree went from hero to zero in a blink. After that I did a few years of University based research back in OZ and that's when I got first hand experience with how dirty that world is with the "the purpose of this research is to get the next grant culture." Like many I had little idea of the monster that big pharma or big ag was until more recently, but because of my background I was not surprised by it.
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That's actually not that abstract and you are on the right path. What you are basically saying is that you want the wage floor to be at a point where everyone has the opportunity to gain. I might re-define that slightly as: A prosperity wage enables a worker the ability to provide a family with equal opportunities to use their abilities as far as practical. I say "as far as practical" because you have to set practical boundaries. That's the giant failure of Milton Freidman's idiocy. Its doesn't take any genius to realize what he preached was lunacy. Corporations have no other obligation but to deliver for their owners. Just think through that - all of society exists for the financial benefit of the corporate owner class WITHOUT LIMITS or BOUNDARIES. There's another word for that its called "serfdom" and serfdom failed to grow any nation any real true wealth for 1000s of years. Freidman just wrapped serfdom up in a nice piece of pretty silk that we called Reaganism, Thatcherism or neo-liberalism. His claim to fame was the Nobel Prize for Economics. Its not even a real Nobel Prize. Go check it it was NEVER sponsored by Nobel or his family. It was sponsored by a Swedish bank to raise the public image of economists like Freidman. Its a PR device used to drive governmental policy and in that it has been incredibly effective. You must listen to this person because he won the Nobel Prize for Economics. Freidman's lunacy is why we've had no wage growth for 45years while the cost of living have gone up and up. Mark Blyth had a cracker that he gave in the analysis of Trump's 2016 win. -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWMmBG3Z4DI&t=1104s Based on what Mark Blyth said the money exists for paying what you call a prosperity wage. Instead with Milton Freidman's greed is good serfdom that money goes to a tiny minority in the form of bonuses. More recently Mark Blyth pointed out the Rand study that says the top 1% has made of with $47trillion between 1975 and 2018. That's only grown since. Here's the time article on the Rand Report -> https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/ Here's the actual Rand report -> https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html I'm an engineer with Economics 101 as my 1 and only class in business and I can see how obvious this stuff is.
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Here's some quotes to all that others have provided me in that last year. The first is by Isaac Asimov and even though its aimed at American society it can be just as easily applied to EVERY SOCIETY that has ever existed on this planet for the simple reason that every society has what we call "the village idiot." the second is by Vice POTUS Henry Wallace and is so accurate in describing the behavior (as in method) of Donald Trump it almost proves time travel was possible in 1944. The others are ones I have picked up an seen others quoted a lot lately. Enjoy them and share them with others as they were shared with me. “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” ― Isaac Asimov, News Week, 1980. Henry A. Wallace, Vice President of the United States in the New York Times, April 9, 1944 “The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.” “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” ― Voltaire “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” ― Aldous Huxley “Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.” ― Mark Twain “I think it would be very, very, I think we’d have a very, very solid, we would continue what we’re doing, we’d solidify what we’ve done, and we have other things on our plate that we want to get done” ¬― Donald Trump answering the NY Times on his 2nd term agenda. August 2020. "He's America's colonoscopy – it’s all on camera, you don't wanna watch, it helps to be sedated for the whole thing and it’s a huge pain in the ass!" ― Stephen Colbert Sept. 2020
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@colonelautism9957 Half and half. Like so many things its not black and white. Half the problems in the world right now is that too often people people demand black and white answers to grey problems. I'm an aerospace engineer and its CRITICAL across most of engineering that engineers follow "the book." Its how we avoid Boeing Max-8 like disasters and when people don't follow "the book" you do get Boeing Max-8 issues. But on the flip side of that if you DO NOTHING but follow "the book" then you kill innovation. Its like everything if you don't balance out things and skew everything blindly towards a specific ideology you eventually get disasters. The Russians and others drove left wing ideology TOO FAR and it destroyed them. When we think of environmental disasters Westerners think of disasters created by greed and capitalism, but capitalism had nothing to do with the destruction of the Aral Sea or the destruction of the Yongding River in China. I like Richard because he is at least willing to call capitalism out on its failures. But he also ignores or sidesteps the disasters of the Marxist states. the simple fact is when put blindly put ideology in front of reality you eventually destroy your own nation. It just took America longer than it took Russia and the Chinese are not far behind in trashing their own nation.
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@blackknight4996 There's a really smart sensible TEDx done by another engineer Emily Calandrelli called "Making science nicer, stupid" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9haKpJakU4 Yeah I know the whole "T" for technology in TED/TEDx has deteriorated in the last couple of years into fantasy futurism crap, but that talk is from when it still meant something and they had quality people on. Emily pointed out that one of the biggest issues in the world right now is STEM literacy coupled with STEM people NOT talking sensibly to the world. these days I get way more frustrated with the techno-promoters than almost anyone. Every time some techno-promoter says something that the media jumps onto it can take months if not years to straighten out. Look at Prof Wolff's comments on automation, robotics and AI. He's just repeating what so many have said. Here's a perfect example of the garbage about automation and if you tried to remove this item of automation from society 1/2 of the developed world will simply kill you. Its called the clothes washing machine. Prior to it, women had to wash EVERYTHING BY HAND 1 item at a time. There was a TV series back in 2000 called the 1900 house. They took a typical family of 5 (2 girls and 1 boy) and put them into a 1900 tenement house where they had taken out EVERYTHING made after 1901. I only saw a few episodes but there was 1 where the wife explained laundry. After explaining how much time it took, she said "No wonder girls didn't go to school!" So when people bash automation I like to tell them "Fine lets start with washing machines, so that girls DON'T get to go to school and learn how to read an write and when that special time of the month comes around there wont be any modern products for that either." People forget all the automation in their lives that make things easier and better.
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@blogintonblakley2708 I get your point up to a certain degree. I'm an engineer and work in automation - robots & production machinery are among what I have done for a significant part of my working life. I have had that bullshite line that people like me cost other people their jobs. At times YES, when you upgrade a production system there might fewer jobs, but that is not always true. WHEN companies do upgrade and INVEST its very rare that they then shut shop and go somewhere else. The jobs that remain actually become more secure. If you are a worker in any western company for the past 40 years and management DOES NOT upgrade. Then your job is at risk. if you are in a company where they are investing in new automated plant automation then your job is usually secure. Most job loses were through retirement or attrition (people who just moved on). Plus most of the tasks that get automated away are jobs people don't like doing. Tasks that get automated are tasks that are repetitive. Where there is a real problem with automation is the utterly false assumption by managers that workers need less skill. They actually need to LEARN more skills. The easiest example to give from my experience is welding robots. I can program robots to do almost anything. My grandfather taught me to arc weld when I was about 13. BUT I CAN'T out program a welding robot compared to someone who was formally trained as a welder. NONE of the robot engineers can. So what happens with robotic welding is that the welders have to learn the basics of programming or at leat how to adjust exisitng programs. They don't need to learn how the robots communicate with master control systems that's my job. The don't need to learn how to configure the robot to do welding - that's my job. But when it comes to getting the robot to weld parts together so that the new part is what its supposed to be - THAT'S THEIR JOB. So there's a lot of misunderstanding about manufacturing and jobs. There's also another aspect. When companies don't upgrade to maintain their production machinery, which accountants love to do because they just hate letting engineers spend money, one of 2 things eventually happens. 1) It breaks down and broken machinery costs money. Wages still have to be paid, bills still have to be paid and there's the cost of fixing things. And if companies are stupid enough (and many are) machinery eventually catastrophically fails and it can't be fixed. 2) Other manufacturers will simply pass you by with more efficient production and just as likely higher quality production. Its sounds obvious but you'd be amazed how many economists, accountants and business managers don't get is that newer, upgraded or well maintained machinery makes better parts.
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Well you can go to college and pay to listen to this or you can be here and get it for free. I like Prof. Wolff because at the very least he gives a rational alternative perspective. Where l'd disagree is that Marxism is the answer, because the countries that went down that path had their own catastrophes and that included economic catastrophes, environmental catastrophes and social catastrophes. I think he might agree as he has pointed out in other talks how Russia, China and other failed that the solution isn't a puritanical 100% Marxist state anymore than it is a puritanical 100% Capitalist state, but that the solution lies somewhere in between. Many point to the Nordic models where they have incredibly strong socialist systems wrapped around democratic and capitalist systems. The Norwegians instead of wasting their oil & gas wealth as others have did an almost communist thing by pooling the income into a sovereign wealth fund that they then used capitalist methodologies to enhance.
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Yeah, this popped up in my recommendations and since I've watched some of Roberts recent stuff I thought this would be worth a watch AND IT IS. Its worth a watch because the fundamental argument is that if you allow greedy and selfish people the opportunity they will grab power NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO. No matter what "fixes" or "systems" or "solutions" you put in place their are certain types of people who will endeavor to pull it apart for their own gain. That's not economics. That's basic human psychology. I just want to see Richard Wolff admit that's exactly why Marxism has failed and fail and failed everywhere it has been tried. That's why I have mostly stopped watching him. Almost every video he puts out or interview he does is singularly themed "capitalism bad" and on the few occasions he's talked about Marxist states all he has ever done is blame a few selfish people for blowing up which ever Marxist system people tried.
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@greenvelvet The problem I have with Richard is that he has a 1 track mind that capitalism in any form is wrong because all the examples we have are failing. Its not that I disagree with Richards assessment of capitalism it his unwavering belief the Marxism is the answer, but if you apply the same logic then you get that any form of Marxism is also wrong because all the examples we have FAILED and the few surviving examples are currently failing. And before you ask the Chinese are NOT (economically speaking) Marxists. If you go and listen to Eric Helleiner's explanation they are a form of neo-mercantilism. He had a really good discussion with Mark Blyth on the RCP podcast about it.
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@xelakram To be clear one of the things I point out is that what people call things and what nations practice are usually not the same thing. Did you know that the old East Germany and the North Korea both call themselves "Democratic Republics." East Germany never held a single election as did NK. Plus Since NK started passing the leadership via inheritance its actually became an absolute monarchy. Its really important thing to no confuse labels with reality. The problem with any of these political systems isn't what they espouse, its that ALL of them can be bastardized into something they aren't. Did you know the Russian Communists used to have elections? Then one day they voted Stalin out so he and his buddies purged the Party. I recently watched/listened to Prof. Wolff's series on Marx (the man) and was fascinated to find out that more than anything he was an economist. Here's part 1 of that -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srx5kXts1Jg All communism was meant to be was collective ownership of some things like a tractor, or bus or factory. At its most basic publicly listed companies whose shares (not stocks or goods) are traded is a form of democratic communism. Because its your democratic right to be part of or not part of a COLLECTIVELY owned entity. The crap the Soviets and others practiced where they literally banned private ownership wasn't communism it was just a pack of criminal thugs taking everything they could. Similarly socialism at its most basic level is nothing more than communities deciding to do things together. Socialism comes from the world social and being sociable means doing things together. So when we collectively pay for schools, police and other services its actually socialism in practice. Go back 500 years and the local police didn't exist, but the kings army did. Its 1 reason why America has the 2nd Amendment. All this talk that socialists want to take all your stuff and control what medical care you get is just garbage. Capitalism is no different - what it is supposed to be and deliver for a society isn't the reality we see. Every person in Western society should have a job, a career, be able to buy a house, afford to raise a family and yet that's not what we see for millions. Instead we have seen the greatest transfer of wealth in human history and entire chunks of society exist in financial servitude via credit. Its worse than when the kings and emperors simply took everything at least then you could see what they were doing. As a teenager in high school I studied both Animal farm and then 1984 (by Orwell). By the end of that all we wanted to do was kill every socialist and communist on the planet. Both my parents were high school teachers and my mum one day sat me down and we went over this stuff. She got me to understand the problem isn't ever what the ideology preaches or claims its what the preachers practice and do to the rest of us that matters.
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@xelakram Well for starters you replied back to me with the incredibly standard American response of "socialism bad" line. Your words -> I have no time for communism or real socialism either. If you actually studied politics then you should have known that's in incredibly simplistic and inaccurate line. If you actually had any grasp of places like East Germany you'd know that their version of what they called socialism wasn't actually socialism - it was straight forward totalitarianism. Stalin also labelled himself as a socialist, which might have been the worst label in history except for Hitler doing the same. If you want to criticize states people who want to advocate a pure communist or pure socialist system then go after them for the fact those systems are easily hijacked into totalitarian nightmares. At least with capitalism and plutocracies they don't hide the fact its about money and power. That's the point with these sorts of labels and why way too many people these days ignorantly throw them around. I did engineering and this stuff interests me because my brain is wired for wanting to understand the faults in systems so they can be fixed. One of the biggest issues these days is people throwing words and labels around. Your right on one thing America should be described as a geriatric plutocracy. Mark Blyth recently pointed out he incredible age of some of Biden's cabinet like John Kerry. My preferred description has been "bi-partisan oligarchy," because there are 2 distinct partisan groups ruled over by oligarchs. That comes from being an engineer and considering functionality. But for a single word plutocracy is probably a better description because oligarchies are more often associated with tyrannical oppression, where as plutocracies are more to do with wealth control.
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@xelakram For when you wake up. I don't think being an aerospace engineer gives me a better understanding of economics than those who trained as economists. BUT I do have a skill set that includes complex systems analysis training and that's something most people DON'T HAVE, including most engineers. Its why Mark Blyth looks like a genius among economists. He keeps saying what he does isn't that difficult, he just doesn't ignore inconvenient factors and thinks the effects of those factors. Plus there is also one huge issue with every economics/degree course in the world. The banks and other big businesses have been influencing what gets taught for decades. In particular the banks in America have been influencing places like Harvard, Yale, Princeton for decades. Its simply cheaper to have Professors write papers and advise governments compared to the cost of campaign contributions. Plus you can give both sides of politics the same story from what everyone thinks is a credible source. It might be cynical but my reason for being dismissive of people with economics degrees is that I know your educations are compromised.
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@xelakram On the browser I had no idea about it for over a decade. Yes I thought like an engineer that computers are for use to do stuff with and to hell with the rest of you, except for word processing. Plus my experience with the old Plato system made me insanely cautious about database systems. All I had ever heard was "this will be great" but none of them could ever explain why. It was a bit like economics, I thought it was all bullshit. Its maybe why I do like Mark Blyth, he's less of an economist and more a person who uses analysis tools and history to explain how we got here and what will work going forward. Like this lecture -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJoe_daP0DE In recent months he has mentioned Reagan and Thatcher a lot, because that was the era where they flipped the economic model from full employment to zero inflation which turned the world from a debtors paradise into a creditors paradise. That's seen the greatest transfer of wealth in human history. What craps me up the wall is that if it wasn't for science and engineering the massive growth humanity has seen over the last 200 years simply doesn't happen. I saw this earlier this year and it stunned me, because its the sort of history EVERY engineer should know and we never get told. -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djB9oK6pkbA
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@xelakram Yeah - what you just wrote is word for word what Australia has done and the baby boomers have made like bandits while the rest got fukt. If you watch Mark Blyth's stuff they all bought houses and got to write the interest off against inflation. There's a really important intergenerational cut off with those born between 1960 and 1965 (I'm a 64 my brother is a 61). Because he went to work not college he was able to save and make that 1st deposit on a house in his mid 20s. I graduated into the end of the cold war, my degree lost value then Australia had the "recession it had to have" under the stewardship of then treasurer Paul Keating (a NEW Labour acolyte - a white collar leftist). So I never go those initial few years to save enough for that 1st deposit and only bought my 1st property in the very late 1990s and even then it was only an apartment not a house. Plus if you consider Mark Blyth's work my age group never got any real wage growth at any time in our entire working lives. That group just ahead of us did for a short time and it allowed them that first asset to grow from. Yes it didn't grow like our parents but it did grow Paul Keating installed the Superannuation scheme that many have derided but it created a secondary saving system that operated just like the American hedge funds. The incredible downsides to that system is its contributed to wage stagnation because it was the employers who paid that money. Its called superannuation and instead of hedge funds Australia is dominated by "super-funds." The fund managers of those super-funds have NEVER looked after the funds under management because we were never the share holders we were the cash supply. Its been an incredible boost to our stock market because by law those super-funds have to by law invest in the ASX top 200. Its become a big thing in investor circles - if you go public with any company its hyper important you get into the ASX-200 because the moment you do super-fund managers BY LAW have to start buying your shares as they dump the shares of the company that just dropped out of the ASX-200. Because by law they have to spread those investments across the ASX-200 they can't hedge in just the top 50 or 20 or 10. So for the investor class (mostly boomers) they got a double whammy bonus - on top of their asset growth which was that boost to their share portfolios that none of the following generations have generally had. But better than a double whammy was the triple whammy many could take advantage of. To support our building and construction industry those who can invest in housing were given huge tax incentives. They could take advantage of with negative gearing. Houses take wear and tear so they can right of those costs as well. So even though the following generations struggled to buy a house the baby boomers got to invest and buy houses for them that they then charged rent on. Basically our entire economic system is geared towards those with an asset base and excess cash - i.e. the Boomers and those few who found ways to make enough to move forward. And there are several industries where you can get ahead. But we have massive blocks of our society who are trapped. Its our version of Reaganomics and Thatcherism.
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Well you can go to college and pay to listen to this or you can be here and get it for free. I like Prof. Wolff because at the very least he gives a rational alternative perspective. Where l'd disagree is that Marxism is the answer, because the countries that went down that path had their own catastrophes and that included economic catastrophes, environmental catastrophes and social catastrophes. I think he might agree as he has pointed out in other talks how Russia, China and other failed that the solution isn't a puritanical 100% Marxist state anymore than it is a puritanical 100% Capitalist state, but that the solution lies somewhere in between. Many point to the Nordic models where they have incredibly strong socialist systems wrapped around democratic and capitalist systems. The Norwegians instead of wasting their oil & gas wealth as others have did an almost communist thing by pooling the income into a sovereign wealth fund that they then used capitalist methodologies to enhance.
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Actually NOBODY should ever get a Nobel Prize of Economics every again. First off, its NOT A REAL NOBEL. It was never instituted by Alfred Nobel or any member of his family. In fact members of the Nobel family have said they want it stopped. It was actually instituted and funded by a Swedish Bank and its fairly obvious why. It gave economists a staggering amount of credibility. I basically its a fake award meant to give credibility to a profession that otherwise wouldn't have any. Its enabled lobbyists to approach any government and say "Here you should do this, because look what the Nobel Prize winning economist has to say."
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Well you can go to college and pay to listen to this or you can be here and get it for free. I like Prof. Wolff because at the very least he gives a rational alternative perspective. Where l'd disagree is that Marxism is the answer, because the countries that went down that path had their own catastrophes and that included economic catastrophes, environmental catastrophes and social catastrophes. I think he might agree as he has pointed out in other talks how Russia, China and other failed that the solution isn't a puritanical 100% Marxist state anymore than it is a puritanical 100% Capitalist state, but that the solution lies somewhere in between. Many point to the Nordic models where they have incredibly strong socialist systems wrapped around democratic and capitalist systems. The Norwegians instead of wasting their oil & gas wealth as others have did an almost communist thing by pooling the income into a sovereign wealth fund that they then used capitalist methodologies to enhance.
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Your not wrong on that and their criticisms of Western Politics and Economics is justified, *but I am yet to hear either of them offer an explanation of what the world is meant to do about China. Here's 3 things I have seen them both avoid any and all discussion on. 1) The Solomon Islands: I'm Australian and we have a genuine threat on our doorstop with China corrupting the Solomon Islands with a slush fund for the Solomon politicians. Its totally corrupted their country and threatened the stability of a fragile nation that's been troubled with tribal conflict for decades. 2) The South China Sea: Not even the international courts of arbitration have been able to prevent China or get them to back down on their claims in the South China Sea. Go look at where the Spratly Islands actually are they are just of the coast of the Philippines and they are closed to Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam. They are no where near China or Chinese territory. they just happen to be in the Southern most part of the South China Sea. Its a ridiculous claim that threatens the Asian trade routes to Europe. 3) The Genocidal policy of enforced labor and re-education camps for the Uyghurs of Western China.
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@tekannon7803 I really do get where you are coming from but the reality is Australia will never have that the ability to take out retribution on anyone in Asia or the Pacific. that Asians have too much to throw at us and if we bash anyone in the Pacific we'd be a bully the world will hate. Sorry for the long answer but I have been looking at this stuff for a while. Ward Carroll an ex-US Navy F14-RIO (backseat Goose) has a channel here on YT. Mostly he talks about flying stuff but occasionally interviews people he knows on serious topics. One such interview recently was with a buddy about America's military budget and strategy going forward. He talks about 2 strategies - Retribution and Denial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9-ArzOhSGI Retribution is simple: If you hit us we will smash you and you wont get up. Australia just can't do that. Denial is more complex: Its when you have enough stuff that the other guy is always DOUBTING if today is a good day to try something. Yes he knows that he can overwhelm you and take your nation, BUT AT WHAT COST. The aim is you keep them guessing and always concluding "Today's not the day." Right now there are people in China is wondering what an invasion of Taiwan will cost. They have just spent years building their navy up, but they are also seeing what's happening in Ukraine. The Russians have all the numbers, but they have lost ships, lost 2000+ vehicles, around 1000 tanks, lots of artillery and within the first 100 days lost more men that America did in 19years of Afghanistan and Iraq combined. They were not ready for 21st century missile based warfare. The Russians have a great army for the 20th century but its not the 20th century anymore its the 21st century. The Chinese have a great navy for the 1970s maybe the 80s and possibly the 1990s, but not the 2020s. Watch this from the BBC and check out how accurate guided artillery is. During the first Gulf war we got to see smart bombs. 30 years later we have smart shells and they are lethally accurate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTQ5ZGHV9Zs In the first Gulf War artillery was good for about 20-25km and with accuracy measured in 10s of meters. These guided shells are good for 40km accurate to centimeters. Basically if you're in a tank and spotted by a drone and they can call in artillery its already too late to hide. Out on the ocean, these days torpedos have ranges over 50km and can run slow and silent for most of the time before they attack. WW2 subs had maybe 10-12 torpedoes these days 20+ and some 30+ including missiles. Plus they don't need to fire 3 or 4 torpedoes at each ship just 1. No doubt if China wants Taiwan there's almost NOTHING that can stop them except the cost. They have to be willing to lose dozens of ships and maybe an aircraft carrier as well as 100+ fighter jets. They'd have to pound Taiwan into submission, possibly flattening the microchip factories. Who's going to deal with China if they smash the worlds microchip supply for 3-5 years? We'd just build our own factories and then what's the point of taking Taiwan? What do they get for all that cost and all that pain? So for Australia going forward its not a matter of what we can throw back - that's pointless because they can all throw more at us than we can at them. Its a matter of having people think "Today's not the day, because it will cost too much."
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@pahatpahat9566 There's no need for the snide shitty remark, we well know that without the US backing we'd be FKD if ANY of the large populations in Asia threw themselves at us. Its just a numbers thing. There's lots of other countries around the world facing the exact same situation. Its gone like that for centuries. Its why smaller nations align themselves with more powerful nations. That's why the only military strategy worth pursuing for Australia is what's called Denial. Its where you make the bigger nation continuously conclude that today isn't the day to start something because it will cost too much. There's nothing new about that strategy either. The time that Denial fails is when that bigger nation for any reason thinks it can afford the cost. Russia thought that. America and its allies thought that before invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Go watch a documentary called "Rumsfeld's War" and watch for the attitude of people like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas MacGregor. The Denial strategy can also fail when the big partner the small nation has becomes unreliable. Its why I think Australia's greatest threat isn't China, Russia, Indonesia or anyone else in Asia but a couple of billionaires in America trying to break the current system and re-write the US Constitution and remake what America is as a nation. That's not just a threat to Australia either. Its a threat to every nation that trades with America and especially any with security arrangements with America.
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I normally like Prof. Wolf as he gives a balanced view of capitalism, but in this entire video he's ignoring the fact that his Marxist brothers have been equally as bad just as every "ism" has inherent faults. I challenge any Marxist to explain the environmental cost to the planet of the destruction of the Aral Sea buy the Marxists in Russia. I challenge any Marxist to explain the environmental cost to humanity of the destruction of the Asian river systems as Marxists in China and other places built dam after dam. I challenge any Marxist to explain the environmental costs across Eastern Europe as Marxist regimes cared just as little as Western Capitalists about pollution. I challenge any Marxist to explain the personal, social and human cost of "re-education camps" that Marxists ran in VERY COUNTRY THEY HAV ECONTROLLED. I agree with all these costs Prof Wolf is talking about BECAUSE HE IS RIGHT, but lets not forget that Marxist regimes have their costs too and that more often than not they are just as inefficient, decided on by people just as selfish and just as greedy. The one fact that all proponents of political systems ignore is that POLITICAL, SOCIAL and/or ECONOMIC POWER no matter what "ism" it operates under attracts narcissists and selfishness just as sure as shit attracts flies.
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@MrDXRamirez Nice parrot points but the whole claim that if wages rise then profits fall is CRAP. The Germans have the highest wages in manufacturing anywhere and their companies make money just fine. People get told that bullshit story so that there is the money for the executive bonuses. In the post 2016 analysis this came up as part of the explanation why a lot of people DIDN'T vote for a Wall St hack like Hilary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWMmBG3Z4DI&t=1104s The money is there to raise minimum wages. Its just that the top 1% don't like sharing.
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@MrDXRamirez Sorry but I have spent 30+ years as an engineering automation. The labor cost hasn't been significant in manufacturing since the mid 1990s. There's just this endless parroting form economists that labor costs are to high. When labor costs are down below 10% it doesn't matter where product is manufactured. The material, energy and transport costs are far more significant. Closing plants and sending jobs to China had nothing to do with labor costs and everything to do with establishing a foothold in the next giant consumer market while at the same time destroying every union in the western world. As for the bullshit "services sector" massive blocks of that has seen jobs go to places like India and the Philippines and that's because the labor cost in service industries is the majority of costs. There's this truly idiotic bullshit that people will be retrained as "coders." Yeah sure go onto the google store and see how many versions of Sudoku there are. That's because Western Universities have been training IT programmers in India and China for the last 25 years. We trained them well and now they are experienced AND STILL VERY CHEAP. This is the idiocy of Western Economists they modeled our future on their high powered consulting businesses. It was farking idiotic then and its still idiotic now. You can spin all the market theory you like and it still comes back to simple common sense, EXCEPT economists don't have any common sense.
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@MrDXRamirez If you had made the argument American Economists and American TRAINED economists you be much closer to the truth. I have been sending YT link to a DW report on global water. Much of it focused on Australia and its water market that was "designed" by a "renowned Harvard Educated" economist. Ask any Australian how that water market is working. I'd give you the link but its suddenly gone "private" which is very odd for a video form a news service. Basically our water market is just like the Texas energy market, also done by a Harvard boy and also a total disaster for everyone except the market speculators.
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@tony3003001 Brilliant, simple honest, straight forward, comment deserving way more that the 1 thumb I can give it. So here's a 100 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
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@colonelautism9957 That's pretty much on point and why we (the entire human race) keep stumbling from one catastrophe to the next one. Way to often we equate ignorance to knowledge and in the worst instances value ignorance over knowledge. Asimov said the following, but to be fair these days it applies to every country. “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” ― Isaac Asimov, News Week, 1980.
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Yeah its a pretty interesting concept. About the only thing he said that I balked at was when he said there's no alternative form of capitalism than we can have. I find that as narrow minded as the fools who say there's no form of socialism that can work after the experiments of Eastern Europe and Asia. If we use those examples then there is no alternative to the world. Humanity has failed with socialism and failed with capitalism before that humanity failed with feudalism, failed with monarchies, theocracies, meritocracies, oligarchies, plutocracies and kleptocracies to name a few. It was a great talk but on that one point I'd ask him: What are we then left with? Because Marxism failed everywhere they tried it, because id didn't eliminate the one thing he points to here - the ruling class. All the Marxist states were run by a ruling class and all their policies were for keeping that ruling class in power.
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There's actually a series of giant misunderstandings in this. I am an engineer who's worked in control systems, automation and robotics for 30+ years. NOBODY ever lost their job to automation or a robot or AI. This is a trope that economists (both Left and Right) have used for decades and its simply WRONG. NOT ONCE in 30+ years has a job I have done cost a person their job. You see when a company INVESTS in automation jobs don't disappear they change. Most of the jobs lost in the Western World were lost when companies closed older inefficient factories and MOVED. In America sometimes they moved to another state with incentives like lower taxes (like Texas) but usually moved to places with cheaper labor like Mexico or China. As for AI that's a pathetic joke. The Software that's marketed as AI is not anything that's actually thinking. Its one of the greatest frauds perpetrated on the general public in history. There simply is no such thing as a mand made intelligence. What exists are algorithms that can mimic specific tasks and do them in a way that seems intelligent. They are particularly well suited to methodical repetitive tasks - things like facial recognition. Where a human can look at a photo for a few seconds and compare it to a known photo an algorithm can do the same but at a rate of 100s each second.
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