I am a capitalist,
and after a 30-year career in capitalism
spanning three dozen companies
generating tens of billions
of dollars in market value,
I'm not just in the top one percent,
I'm in the top 0.1 percent of all earners.
Today, I have come to share
the secrets of our success,
because rich capitalists like me
have never been richer.
So the question is, how do we do it?
How do we manage to grab
an ever-increasing share
of the economic pie every year?
Is it that rich people are smarter
than we were 30 years ago?
Is it that we're working harder
than we once did?
Are we taller, better looking?
Sadly, no.
It all comes down to just one thing:
economics.
Because, here's the dirty secret.
There was a time in which
the economics profession
worked in the public interest for everyone
but in the neoliberal era,
today,
they work only for big corporations
and billionaires,
and that is creating
a little bit of a problem.
We could choose to enact economic policies
that raise taxes on the rich,
regulate powerful corporations,
or raise wages for workers.
We have done it before.
But neoliberal economists would warn
that all of these policies
would be a terrible mistake,
because raising taxes
always kills economic growth,
and and any form of government regulation
is inefficient,
and raising wages always kills jobs.
Well, as a consequence of that thinking,
over the last 30 years, in the USA alone,
the top one percent has grown
21 trillion dollars richer
while the bottom 50 percent
have grown 900 billion dollars poorer,
a pattern of widening inequality
that has largely repeated itself
across the world.
And yet, as middle class families
struggle to get by
on wages that have not budged
in about 40 years,
neoliberal economists continue to warn
that the only reasonable response
to the painful dislocations
of austerity and globalization
is even more austerity and globalization.
So, what is a society to do?
Well, it's super-clear to me
what we need to do.
We need a new economics.
So, economics has been described
as the dismal science,
and for good reason, because
as much as it is taught today,
it isn't a science at all, in spite of
all of the dazzling mathematics.
In fact, a growing number
of academics and practitioners
have concluded that neoliberal
economic theory is dangerously wrong
and that today's growing crises
of rising inequality
and growing political instability
are the direct result of decades
of bad economic theory.