WEBVTT

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I am a capitalist,

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and after a 30-year career in capitalism

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spanning three dozen companies

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generating tens of billions
of dollars in market value,

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I'm not just in the top one percent,
I'm in the top 0.1 percent of all earners.

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Today, I have come to share
the secrets of our success,

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because rich capitalists like me
have never been richer.

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So the question is, how do we do it?

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How do we manage to grab

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an ever-increasing share
of the economic pie every year?

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Is it that rich people are smarter
than we were 30 years ago?

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Is it that we're working harder
than we once did?

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Are we taller, better looking?

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Sadly, no.

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It all comes down to just one thing:

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economics.

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Because, here's the dirty secret.

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There was a time in which
the economics profession

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worked in the public interest for everyone

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but in the neoliberal era,

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today,

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they work only for big corporations

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and billionaires,

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and that is creating
a little bit of a problem.

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We could choose to enact economic policies

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that raise taxes on the rich,

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regulate powerful corporations,
or raise wages for workers.

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We have done it before.

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But neoliberal economists would warn

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that all of these policies
would be a terrible mistake,

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because raising taxes
always kills economic growth,

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and and any form of government regulation

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is inefficient,

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and raising wages always kills jobs.

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Well, as a consequence of that thinking,

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over the last 30 years, in the USA alone,

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the top one percent has grown
21 trillion dollars richer

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while the bottom 50 percent
have grown 900 billion dollars poorer,

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a pattern of widening inequality
that has largely repeated itself

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across the world.

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And yet, as middle class families
struggle to get by

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on wages that have not budged
in about 40 years,

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neoliberal economists continue to warn
that the only reasonable response

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to the painful dislocations
of austerity and globalization

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is even more austerity and globalization.

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So, what is a society to do?

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Well, it's super-clear to me
what we need to do.

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We need a new economics.

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So, economics has been described
as the dismal science,

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and for good reason, because
as much as it is taught today,

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it isn't a science at all, in spite of
all of the dazzling mathematics.

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In fact, a growing number
of academics and practitioners

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have concluded that neoliberal
economic theory is dangerously wrong

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and that today's growing crises
of rising inequality

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and growing political instability

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are the direct result of decades
of bad economic theory.