Is This The End Of Capitalism? | Answers With Joe

so i'm going to start this video off by saying something that's probably not a popular opinion right now and that's that despite how awful this year has been when you look back at the long view of history things really aren't that bad and i just lost half my audience but for those of you who are with me just just hear me out the author stephen pinker made this case in a 2018 ted talk where he pointed out that really by almost every indicator imaginable things are going in the right direction life expectancy has gone up child mortality has gone down famine deaths are down extreme poverty is down war deaths are down the number of people living in a democracy up homicide rates are down motor vehicle deaths are down plane crash deaths are down occupational deaths are down natural disaster deaths are down literacy rates are up work hours are down housework hours are down and even lightning strike deaths are down now granted that was made in the before time and a lot has changed since then but the point still stands you know society has its ups and downs we are definitely in a down moment right now but in general the trend is still upwards now there's a lot of factors that can take credit in this rise science being one of them but one of them you have to point to and give credit to is the economic model that made all this possible and the dominant economic model over the past 200 years has been capitalism but like the rest of us capitalism isn't having its best year right now in fact many people are making the argument that it's on its way out having entered its final stage what they call late stage capitalism but what is late stage capitalism are we really in it and if so what comes next [Music] all right so this is going to be a video about capitalism we're going to take an honest look at capitalism the good points and the bad points we're going to be critical of it and if there's anything that i know from six years on youtube it's that some people really really really hate when you're critical of capitalism so before we start this you know let's just let's just bring it in real quick group hug group hug let's have a hug who couldn't use a hug right now oh oh that's good that's good stuff so i've gotten a lot of requests for a video on this but it is an uncomfortable subject i am uncomfortable talking about it some of you will be very uncomfortable listening to this this will be triggering for some of you because here in the us throughout the decades of the cold war we've been taught trained indoctrinated whatever word works for you to believe that capitalism is the same as democracy itself that capitalism and america are intrinsically linked and to criticize capitalism is the same as urinating on the flag and look i'm right there with you whenever i hear somebody really slam capitalism i get that reflexive hey you know but capitalism isn't the same as democracy and it isn't the same as america it's just an economic system and there are many different types of economic systems around the world and there's many different types of capitalism around the world each have their pros and cons none of them are perfect so before we examine those pros and cons i'm just going to have to ask you to try to kind of sever that connection in your mind because we are going to talk about the criticisms of our current system and you may even you may even hear the word now just bear with me socialism and it's okay it's okay it's it's just a word it can't hurt you anyway if you've already activated your caps lock key to declare war down in the comments i invite you to check out any of the other 600 videos i have out there this just might not be the right one for you and i feel like i should also be sure to point out to those of you who have stuck around so far that i am not an economist i'm just a guy going through this along with everybody else but people keep asking me what i think about it so here's how i contextualize all of it all right so late stage capitalism you may have seen this as a hashtag in various social media places it's usually used to highlight hyper consumerism and class divide although people have now started to kind of use it ironically as just a way of saying that society sucks right now basically it means something different for everyone my boss only gave me a three percent raise hashtag late stage capitalism my rent went up another 250 dollars hashtag late stage capitalism the growing disparity between the wealthy and ultra wealthy are taking money away from the lower classes causing them to precipitously shrink as they consolidate both power and wealth actually that is late stage capitalism for some it's black friday stampedes for others it's a prison industrial complex for others it's people having to do gofundme campaigns to get diabetes medicine for their kids it's an amorphous concept in its current form more of a feeling really it's the feeling that our capitalist system has completely stopped working for all but the very few at the top while the rest of us you know stare down at our phones burying our head in the sand of mindless consumerism while the fabric of our society unravels slowly around us it's not a great feeling the term late capitalism was first coined in 1902 by the author of werner sumbart in his three volume book durham modern capitalismas also known as history systematic dardlongs death wait history system is dish history system of this darling garrison is gonna i'm gonna need some help with this hey felix oh hey joe how can i help you yeah how do you pronounce this historic system of slaves okay what does that mean historically systematic depiction of the pan-european economic life from its beginnings to the present ah okay okay cool that helps uh donkey shane claudio gana venom um yes farfight nougat somewhere believed that capitalism relied on boom and bust cycles in order to exist and he named the stages of those cycles early high in late capitalism he believed that a capitalist society has to quote ceaselessly devalue existing wealth whether through war dereliction or regular and periodic economic crises in order to clear the ground for the creation of new wealth which he called creative destruction basically for the engine of capitalism to turn society has not constantly replaced old product with new product whether it's needed or not so you could say he wasn't capitalism's biggest fan uh which shouldn't be a surprise because he was a follower of karl marx karl marx was not only one of the most polarizing and influential social philosophers of our time he was also fond of housing birds in his beard that's probably not true an entire video on marx would only scratch the surface but at the basis of base levels he didn't like capitalism because he thought that it would create a stratified society where the minority upper class would benefit by exploiting the lower majority working class and to him the answer was communism all right so i know that here in the states we've been trained for decades to basically vomit in our mouth at the mention of karl marx and his ideas but it's not hard to imagine why at that particular moment in history his ideas were pretty popular the world had industrialized seemingly overnight and society was still struggling to catch up child labor was normal the average work day was 16 hours with no weekend wages were below the poverty line safety rules and regulations were non-existent deaths and dismemberments on the job were common with no social safety net city populations exploded leading to overcrowded shanty towns muddy streets caked with horse manure choking smog overwhelmed sewer systems undrinkable water and cholera outbreaks and cholera outbreaks and cholera outbreaks and cholera outbreaks and cholera outbreaks oh and cholera outbreaks and wealth inequalities skyrocketed as robber barons built business empires that rivaled the empires of old monarchies were replaced by monopolies it was the opinion of most people that things needed to change people clamored for a solution and marx gave it to him but yeah marx and other writers would push this idea that capitalism goes through boom and bust cycles and at the late stage of that cycle with the point where things get so unsustainable and so out of whack that people eventually rise up burn into the ground and start all over again it was the decadence that precedes the revolution as marx was quoted as saying and to get a better perspective of what he means by that it helps to look back through history so believe it or not there was a time before capitalism for something people seem to think is the natural order of things it actually is a fairly recent phenomenon now commerce has been around for a long time you know people trading goods and services for other goods and services or an item of approved value like precious metals the first coins but for most of human history economic systems were futile they were controlled by royal families and lords that owned the land that people worked on the landlords if you will and the lords got to dictate who got to work their land and how much they got paid and this social strata was maintained by the fact that most people were uneducated and the education they did get usually came from the church and at that time the church taught that wanting money was sinful jesus was the guy who overturned the tables and with the money changers you know to want more money was was a sin it was against god it was against your station the rule of the serfs was to serve their lord both the spiritual lord and the landlord and this kept the working class stuck for hundreds of years in fact it took the great plague the black plague to kill off a third of the workforce before they finally had the leverage to rise up and demand more autonomy yeah there's a reason why pitchforks are associated with people rising up against the system and these revolts against the traditional system is kind of what helped usher in the protestant reformation in the mid 1500s and one offshoot of the protestant reformation was calvinism john calvin taught that hard work and self-denial were paths to god so he taught people to to reinvest into themselves and into their businesses instead of spending on extravagances and this sort of set up the protestant virtues that would define capitalism later on and these virtues are reflected in the paintings of the dutch artists of the late 1600s the dutch were considered one of the first real capitalist societies they valued hard work over you know inherited lineage and so the the artists of the time they started to focus less on aristocrats and royalty and focused more on you know glorifying the dignity of of hard work in the in the working class in 1723 bernard mandeville's book the fable of the bees kind of turned calvinism on its head and said that actually you should spend money on unnecessary things and extravagances because by doing so you would give work to a poorer person and benefit society this was pretty controversial at the time but it did sort of plant the seed this idea that it's it's okay it's good to want things it's it's good to buy things even things that you don't need because that is the engine of an economy and it benefits everyone more like fable of the gecko am i right gordon gekko wall street greed is good shut up it works but it was 1776 the same year that the united states declared independence that adam smith published his book inquiry into the nature and cause of the wealth of nations this was the birth of capitalism and it played a huge influence on the creation of this new country in it he argues for specialization and division of labor that by moving away from a craftsmanship economy and hiring a whole bunch of people to do very specific jobs that you can produce more and grow he also argued that by people working in their own best interests it would create sort of an invisible hand that would guide the economy to improve people's lives increase education and improve happiness and material satisfaction as you can see the united states took a lot of this to heart adam smith's ideas seemed to bear fruit in the 1800s economies grew education spread a middle class formed and quality of life improved it was the right idea for its time and then the times changed as i was saying before the late 1800s ushered in an age of mass industrialization and the glorified workers of the dutch paintings kind of became just an extension of the machines that they were working on the workers and their wages if we're being honest became more of a liability in the eyes of the corporations you know it was something that lowered their profit margin and more importantly their stock price so workers were pushed harder and harder and had more and more control taken away from them their lives revolved around their jobs to the point that in many cases they had to live in housing accommodations that were provided by the company it was serfdom all over again and just like the farmers with their pitchforks in the middle ages that's when the riots started yet labor riots were super common and people would often like sabotage the factories to get their revenge against the company and in fact breaking machines became such a problem that the uk parliament passed the frame breaking act in which breaking a machine was punishable by death you want to get karl marx because that's how you get karl marx so just like adam smith's ideas were right for its time karl marx's ideas were right for his time or at least a lot of people thought so and ran with it with the russian revolution communism took hold and the cold war between these two economic systems began ultimately capitalism won out but times are changing again fast and drastically and some are starting to make the argument that capitalism just isn't working anymore now at a technical level if things are being bought at a cost and sold at a profit then things are working with capitalism but even adam smith believe that capitalism should do more than that it should improve people's lives and the quality of living and spread education and that kind of thing and here's where that becomes a little bit more difficult to ascertain because yes americans are more educated than ever before but that education has settled an entire generation with 1.4 trillion dollars in debt a debt that already has a 10.4 percent default rate and that was before the pandemic hit so yeah there's a reason why they call this a debt crisis and on top of being saddled with debt these recent graduates are facing a world where the money that they make from their entry level jobs or their gig economy jobs just don't doesn't go as far as it used to according to pew research today's hourly wage has just about the same purchasing power as it did in 1978 following a long slide in the 1980s and early 1990s and bumpy inconsistent growth since then in fact in real terms average hourly earnings peaked more than 45 years ago the 403 an hour rate recorded in january 1973 had the same purchasing power that 2368 would today when it comes down to it american workers aren't making any more than they did 40 years ago but the cost of living in the u.s has gone up quite a bit which has led to wealth inequality that is quite frankly sobering and this is how you wind up with a middle class that's still only living paycheck to paycheck in fact in 2018 the federal reserve did a study and it showed that 50 million americans wouldn't be able to afford a 400 emergency so don't get sick don't get hit by another car heaven forbid a limb should fall and land on your house there are an endless number of situations that could randomly occur that could completely wipe you out this is living on a knife's edge all the time and the stress from that has led many people to turn to drugs hence opioid crisis and not to mention the constant threat of layoffs or your job being outsourced or replaced by automation which yeah you could be retrained to do another job but that retraining requires education education costs money which puts you in debt it's a negative feedback loop so yeah people feel stuck just like the serfs did just like the industrial workers did and just like in those time periods there's another segment of society for which the exact opposite is happening the income of ceos in the u.s has risen to the point that the average ceo makes 296 times that of its average worker so if you're making fifty thousand dollars your boss is making 14.8 million compare that to the 60s and the 70s where ceos are making 20 to 30 times more i should notice not necessarily money from salaries a lot of ceos make their money from stock options elon musk for example he has a one dollar salary but he brings home 600 million dollars a year in stock options stock options that are taxed at a much lower rate than salaried income which is just one of many tax loopholes that people in the top 1 percent enjoy that we don't when the majority of congress people who write the laws that govern our economy are millionaires there's not a lot of hope that anything's going to change so that's where we are when a tiny minority of people control all the wealth and the majority of people feel trapped exploited that's when class division sets in and just like in the surf days just like in the industrial days riots riots in the growing sense that capitalism needs to be replaced by something else so what might that be now the past is prologue then one might expect some kind of neocommunism to rise out of this and there are elements in this recent social upheaval that are arguing for something like that but something that you know learns the lessons from and avoids the pitfalls of the old soviet system now there are issues with this though as noah yuval harari mentions in his book 21 lessons for 21st century he points out that the current crisis in capitalism is based in part on automation taking over jobs and says quote communism was not built to exploit that kind of crisis 20th century communism assumed that the working class was vital for the economy the communist political plan called for a working-class revolution how relevant would these teachings be if the masses lose their economic value and therefore need to struggle against irrelevance rather than against exploitation how do you start a working class revolution without a working class this is an important thing to consider because these technological changes are happening at an increasing rate and future economic models are going to have to factor in the case that you know whole classes of people not just working class but also middle class people might become completely irrelevant as a workforce so for that you might be looking at something closer to a resource-based economy i've covered this idea before but simply put if ai and automation are able to create all the you know products and services that we need then the whole concept of buying things becomes antiquated along with that the need for a job and income at all money basically would cease to be a thing now this sounds crazy but we love this vision of the future this is the general idea behind the worlds in star trek and the jetsons in fact the most dystopian sci-fi worlds that we've created are based on capitalism where where one or two corporations run everything and there's seedy black markets that everybody uses now obviously right now technology is not up to that concept but we're inching closer to it every day it's not impossible to believe that someday in our lifetime this could be a thing whether or not we would accept this kind of lifestyle is a whole other question maybe a sort of middle ground might be our old friend universal basic income again i've covered this many other people have covered this this was actually a core tenet of andrew yang's presidential campaign but the basic idea is that people would receive a monthly stipend that would cover their basic living expenses this is meant simply to offset the loss of jobs and to keep people from slipping into poverty experiments on this idea have taken place in finland and ontario canada and various cities around the world the finnish experiment showed that it decreased people's stress and made them happier but it didn't really increase employment interpret that how you will now there are endless debates around ubi and there will be for quite some time i will say that i was happy to see andrew yang bring this out in his uh in his campaign because i felt like it was something that needed to be talked about this automation issue is just going to be more of an issue as we move down the road and it's something we need to be prepared for now another idea that's been floated around basically requires redefining what a job is now there's a lot of things that people do that improve their families improve their communities but don't have an economic incentive they rely on benevolence to make it work and this is where something like a social credit could come in this is a system where people get social credits for doing things like staying home and taking care of your kids volunteering in the community hell what if you got a buck or two for returning the grocery cart to the bin at the grocery store you can think of it as a good citizen reward and of course you know we like to think that people would do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do but i think even adam smith would disagree with that logic giving people credits that could be used for products and services would incentivize people to do good things in the community and it might be a little source of income for unemployed people now china has been testing out a program like this that they call sesame credit but this has sort of a black mirror component to it because it's more of a credit rating that can go up if you do things that the government likes and goes down if you do things the government doesn't like like you know criticizing the government in any way but one of the most promising options to a lot of people is to just drop out of the economy altogether and create new ones out of cryptocurrencies i mean the ultimate way to transform an economy is just create your own crypto had a big boom with the bitcoin bubble a few years back and it's sort of calmed down a little bit since then right now the value of all bitcoin is around 218 billion dollars which is pretty impressive sounding until you realize that apple amazon and microsoft are worth 4 trillion dollars but crypto does solve some problems like giving extreme transparency to where the money goes and it allows for creating micro economies around different markets and sectors of society but cryptomicroeconomies don't really resolve how to take care of people's basic needs and it doesn't prevent exploitation now there is another option one that's a little less pitchforky but one that could work because it's been done before change capitalism i talked earlier about how the industrialization of the late 1800s led to marxist ideas and communist uprisings and obviously that didn't happen here in the u.s but capitalism didn't continue unabated the gilded age of the united states created wealth inequality that makes jeff bezos look like a chump these were the days of rockefeller carnegie and jp morgan three guys that literally ran the world for a sense of perspective when andrew carnegie sold the carnegie steel company to jp morgan he was worth 303 billion dollars in 1901 money jeff bezos is currently worth 192 billion dollars just for context this prompted president theodore roosevelt to break up the monopolies and enact a series of progressive policies to you know protect the american worker that he called the square deal not to be confused with franklin d roosevelt's new deal which was 30 years later those roosevelts just love their deals teddy roosevelt was a republican by the way and considering himself to be an avid capitalist you know he just saw the writing on the wall you know the paradox of capitalism is that it only works when there's healthy competition but if you're in a business the very last thing you want is competition so as companies get big enough naturally they squeeze out and buy up any competitors so anti-monopolistic policies have to be put in place to keep that from happening and that's just one example there are countless ways that we can tweak capitalism that don't get anywhere near the ideas of socialism and it's happened before and it needs to happen again capitalism is malleable it's flexible it evolves and as society changes and technology changes it needs to evolve and change along with it as i said in the beginning i am not an economist so i'm not going to try to say what needs to be done here but i will say that dogmatic refusal to change is a losing strategy whether it's in economics or society or nature for that matter and i think more than anything that's the shift we need to make right now a shift towards solutions and away from blind following of ideologies i think there is a way for us to find an american system that works for us and with that haven't helped me i'll put this to you guys what do you think do you think that we're living in late stage capitalism do you think it's actually a thing have you seen or experienced anything that falls into that category and what do you think are the best ideas to fix it i know this is a heated topic and people have very strong opinions about it but i have to ask please living room rules down in the comments be respectful share ideas and we'll get through this all right thank you guys for watching this i hope that this maybe just gave a little bit of context to what's going on and maybe helps to kind of frame some solutions and get some thoughts started that's basically the whole point here but today's video is brought to you not by a sponsor but by the patreon supporters over on patreon i can't do it without you guys you have helped out so much i want to thank you and there's some new people that have just joined i got to murder some names real quick we got chris gunn mark umbers john regal eugene foss keri silco lori scott are you related i don't know robert james curry ali lasar uh keith boucher boucher keith boucher david stowe zapp rosdauer stephen lodwigs eric saylor molly matthew eric enrique montes and cynthia johnson okay thank you guys so much if you would like to join them get early access to videos exclusive patreon content and whatnot and just join a really cool community you can go to patreon.com and if you're a huge fan of capitalism t-shirts available at the store it answers the joe.com store i'm just kind of like wearing a branded thing i need to be using that last smarter logo a little bit more i think that's that's always been a fun thing for the channel but lots of cool 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 866,248

Rating: 4.7734475 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, capitalism, economy, late stage capitalism, wealth inequality, income inequality, the industrial age, karl marx, adam smith

Id: Wny-d15ZETw

Length: 24min 38sec (1478 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/---gabers---]

Loved that video. Glad to see it being shared

[u/Darkomega85]

I'm glad that Joe mentioned the Resource Based Economy which he covers in another older video.