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.