Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Economic Update: What Capitalism's Decline Means" video.

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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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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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 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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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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