The dirty secret of capitalism -- and a new way forward

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.

What we now know is that the economics
that made me so rich isn't just wrong,

it's backwards,

because it turns out

it isn't capital that creates
economic growth,

it's people;

and it isn't self-interest
that promotes the public good,

it's reciprocity;

and it isn't competition
that produces our prosperity,

it's cooperation.

What we can now see is that an economics
that is neither just nor inclusive

can never sustain the high levels
of social cooperation

necessary to enable
a modern society to thrive.

So where did we go wrong?

Well, it turns out
that it's become painfully obvious

that the fundamental assumptions
that undergird neoliberal economic theory

are just objectively false,

and so today first I want to take you
through some of those mistaken assumptions

and then after describe where the science
suggests prosperity actually comes from.