The Big Myth of Market Fundamentalism

is Rob Johnson president of the institute for New Economic thinking I'm here today with two extraordinary Scholars Eric Conway who's from Caltech and does History of Science and Technology and Naomi oreskies who is at Harvard University they've written books in the past a very powerful one which I would encourage everyone to read it's called merchants of doubt uh they've also talked about western civilization in the future in another book and but the book right now and it's creating a big stir among all of my colleagues and Friends people like Gus Smith people who've been on this podcast Gus Beth Nancy McLean and others are all stepping forward and uh I think how would he say well let's ring the bell and we'll have a nice conversation today their new book is called the big myth how American Business taught us to lose the government and love the free market thank you for joining me thanks for having me thanks for having us so well it's my pleasure uh so let's uh begin I see Eric either I'll start with you but either of you can can chime in what inspired you to write this book you've made very powerful points I mentioned Merchants that doubt nothing but what brought this one to the surface right now well so when when we wrote merchants of doubt you know that book was basically about four physicists who spent their retirement years um helping to cast doubt on a variety of environmental problems and we ended that book um with an argument that what they were motivated by was Market fundamentalism um they were they were cold Warriors who who had grown to load the government that that they had served um and worked in um and and worked to instead constrain it um under the argument that that that markets were a superior form of of organizing economic life um that markets were the only way to protect political freedom and that concerned them so the big myth when we we sat down to think about what do we do next um we we decided we should tell the history of Market fundamentalism um and so that's what we've tried to do in our our admittedly rather big and expansive uh the big myth no that's just right I mean it was it's really an attempt to understand the history of an ideology an idea that's been really powerful not just among climate change deniers but among Americans broadly and to understand why people have come to hold this set of views when the facts of history and many of the facts of Economics don't actually support them well I think you know for in our work at inet we've had the impression that people suggest that when on free market capitalism is embedded in a democracy it's morally legitimate but some of our Scholars Tom Ferguson our research director in particular said there's too many markets when you're spending a lot of money on campaign contributions when you're spending a lot of money on University endowments and they pick who the experts are or when commercial media is receiving advertising Revenue they may decide what to talk about and what to silence based on their so that the financial incentives are taking that which you might call idealistic sense of what a democracy does and how it governs and I think your work really plays powerfully into that I often cite the Bob Dylan song one too many mornings and I change it to one too many markets and uh I often refer people to the Lewis Powell memo that was provided to the uh Chamber of Commerce before he became a Supreme Court Justice about how why are they putting up with all of this turmoil from the 60s and the Civil Rights Movement they can influence the universities and uh so I see those Pathways uh we might call is consistent with the work that you're offering let's start through the book there's a various themes foundations the marketing the mainstream and Beyond the myths are those four segments of the book but let's go uh let's talk how do I say talk our way through the story what what is the section foundations Illuminating for us so the book is a lingerie book it tries to explain the Arc of Market fundamentalism where it comes from how it was supported and sustained and propagandized by a diverse group of business interests throughout the 20th century and then brought into mainstream American politics by Ronald Reagan so we begin the story with a set of uh discussions a set of arguments that took place in the early 20th century about market failure about the reality that markets were not actually serving the American people well and in the way we needed and those market failures were involved a number of different things and we focused in the early part of the book on three major market failures so one is the problem of child labor that children as young as two years old are working in textile mills here in Massachusetts in factories and mines across this country and many people thought that was not a good thing that children should not be working in factories children should be in school but the business Community fought back against that saying that it was the prerogative of the owner of the factory the owner of the mill or of the father and there's a patriarchal and gendered quality to this argument and that the government should not interfere with the rights the Privileges the freedom and the problems of factory owners and fathers and so in that argument we begin to see the kernel of the central or one of the central tenets of Market fundamentalism which is this claim that if you allow the government to step in to redress market failure even a serious market failure it undermines freedom and so trying to link capitalism and freedom this is a central part of this argument a second place we see the argument taking place is in debates over working with compensation today most Americans take workman's compensation for granted we assume that if we get injured or killed on the job that we will receive compensation or our survivors but that was not always the case in the early 20th century one in one thousand workers was killed or seriously injured on the job every single year that would be the equivalent of 1.5 million people today and so again a big debate developed about well should the government intervene to do something about this it was such a big problem it actually had a name it was called the accent crisis so people experienced this as a crisis but again the business Community by and large fought back and said it's not for the government to tell a factory owner how to run his Factory and then the third place we see this has to do with electricity which in some ways is the most conspicuous market failure of all because we like to believe that if people want something if people need something then the private sector will provide it to them and electricity was something that people really liked uh the rhetoric around electricity in the early 20th century is just gushing about how fantastic what an incredible Advance it is to have electricity in people's homes to light up their lives quite literally um but the private sector was not providing electricity to rural customers because they claimed it was too expensive to run lines and they wouldn't make sufficient profits and they claimed that it couldn't be done at a profit again this led to a big debate well rural customers wanted electricity and many of them were farmers who people argued deserved it that they really deserved to have their lives improved and again a big fight and here's where so in all these arguments we see the beginning of this argument about capitalism and freedom being made but here's where we see it goes really nasty because the industry led by their Trade Organization the national electric light Association launches a massive propaganda campaign and it's really a kind of prequel to merchants of doubt they hire experts basically experts For Hire to write reports claiming that private electricity is working fine uh even though it's not claiming that when the government steps in it's more expensive even though the evidence showed that it was not um propagandizing people through lecture series through um press releases to journalists and the most pernicious of all a campaign to rewrite American textbooks to pay academics to rewrite textbooks to promote free market capitalism and the argument that government involvement in the marketplace threatens personal freedom Eric nope dealers were always going to go to if anything we get added because the Nila story is is really fantastic the national like like Association story because it shows um it shows the involvement of in in Industry of trying to make sure that the public school system tells their story you mentioned that the outset that Ronald Reagan played a a large role in the what you might call acceleration of this type of thinking or this type of promotion can you tell me a little bit about why you underscore that in in what was what was taking place in America at the time he came into power or what role he played so one of the challenges in this book is to explain how an argument that is false that is heavily based on propaganda um and that is clearly self-serving nevertheless somehow succeeds in persuading millions of Americans of its truth and what we show is that in the first part of the book the whole section we call foundations the industry doesn't really succeed for example during the New Deal the federal government does step into electricity markets and does build the rural electrification uh Administration to deliver electricity to rural Americans so they don't really win the argument for the whole first half of the 20th century but they don't give up and so after World War II they do a number of things and one of the key parts of the story is to explain how they begin to succeed and who begins to work for them as a messenger and a key part of the answer to that question is Ronald Reagan so many Americans know that before Reagan became a politician he was a Hollywood actor he had starred in a bunch of B grade movies some of them with chimpanzees um but most people don't know how he segued from being a sort of second-rate actor to being one of the most successful politicians of the 20th century and a large part of the answer to that has to do with his job at the General Electric Corporation so in the late 1950s Reagan goes to work for GE he had a television show called General Electric Theater which they hired him to host and each week this television show which was extremely successful it was one of the three most successful television programs in the late 1950s presented didactic stories of individual success of people pulling themselves up by their bootstrap and succeeding by dint of their own hard work of boys learning to be a man by standing on their own two feet and Ronald Reagan was the host of this series so he would introduce the show each week and at the end thank everyone for watching and so through this his voice his face was beamed into millions and millions of American homes every week for several years so he became one of the most well-known people in the United States at that time but in addition hosting GE theater was only half his job the other half was serving as a public spokesperson for GE and he went on the lecture circuit particularly in GE Communities going to GE factories manufacturing plants giving talks in schools in communities where there was a GE Factory doing a dinner at The Rotary or the Lions Club and then all of this would be covered in GE publication so GE had a whole set of magazines and newsletters where they would feature Reagan's speeches and then these would be distributed broadly in GE communities and in doing this work he also was given a reading list so GE G had a massive propaganda campaign an internal campaign designed to persuade its managers and its workers of the virtues of free enterprise and also deeply deeply anti-union to try to persuade GE workers not to join unions and they engaged in a lot of union busting tactics for which they actually um were cited by the national Relations Board So Reagan becomes part of this deeply anti-government deeply anti-union ideology at General Electric and he becomes the spokesman the public spokesman for those views and what we see is that by the time he finishes his tenure at GE he now has accepted those views um and he comes out of GE with one so he comes out with a completely transformed ideology having previously been a pro-union Democrat he comes out an anti-union anti-government Republican but he also leaves GE with one other really crucial resource and that's a set of backers of wealthy corporate backers who finance his campaign for governor in California and also help him hire a kind of kitchen cabinet a team of experts who then advise him on a whole set of issues that he previously knew nothing about and this enables him to make this transition from you know second-rate actor to first-rate politician so Eric what concerns me a little bit is I hear this which you might call side by side of what is freedom and freedom is only eligible when it goes through a market system as if the market system is going to create wonderful things and you can't get in its way I get a little unnerved I've lived in Connecticut at the time of Sandy Hook where the freedom to have a gun does not move alongside the freedom not to be shot by someone else it just it seems like we're uh how do they say creating a subset of the freedoms we're not listening to what was that Isaiah Berlin the two types of Liberty uh how did how do we um which you might call inoculate Society from this one-sided way of seeing what freedom is is there is there a pathway you envision I hate it when historians are asked for the solution to the problem because that is not I don't have a crystal ball for that um and I I I wish there was some way I could convince my my fellow Americans that you know that all of these problems are issues of conflicting freedoms um and what we've seemed to have at the moment is a pathological information environment almost that only credits one set of freedoms and and does and promotes them in a very extreme way um without any discussion of the freedoms that are being suppressed by over-exaggeration of of as we were just talking about gun ownership right the freedom to leave free of fear of the the all the all the all of the gun people um is not a freedom I guess in the United States at the moment at least it's not one we talk about um and and what's the solution to that well a more responsible media that is not um so deeply invested in in just simply neutrality in the in the both sides is and we see all the time um but that would require them to take sides and they're really allergic to that um and a bigger and it's another thing I don't have any idea of how to bring about is I actually think a lot of this stems back to both the two-party system and you mentioned earlier about the privately financed aspect of the political system because it allows certain wealthy groups greater access to the media to get their stories and their preferred Liberties promoted um to the detriment of of those without the resources one of the concerns that I experience for many of my guests and uh I'll cite one of my recent podcasts was with the financial times writer Martin Wolfe who's written a book recently called the crisis of economic or Democratic capitalism excuse me and uh and what bothers me is and Martin underscores this when there is a constant barrage of indoctrination and it doesn't feel like the world you live in people become alienated and become despondent and then what I would say is for instance I'll cite David Sirota and uh Alex Gibney made a podcast on Audible it's called meltdown and it wasn't about the Meltdown of the financial markets it was about when they as Joe stiglitz had paid the polluters and we bailed out the people who made the mess the despondency occupy on the left tea party on the right Republic house shifting to Republican Senate going Republican Donald Trump being elected Trump was I'm from Michigan Trump was marketing that the system is rigged and there's Despair and I guess what I would say is the he may have seduced and abandoned people once he got to job as president but that despair or what I will call Donald Trump's candidacy is a symptom of the kind of things you're diagnosing where things are off course and I think it's very dangerous when one looks at what you might call the history of societal breakdown and authoritarian response we could go from which you might call bad marketing and neglect to something even more violent if we're not careful that's why I asked the question how do we restore how do we bring back the balance that we need It's haunting to me to read Franklin Delano Roosevelt's speeches or listen to some of his uh radio broadcasts because they had so much balance and it's almost like politicians no I'll give Joe Biden a little credit you can critique me but his latest State of the Union Address many people say how are we going to practice what we preach but at least he preached some things that we needed as a society but you see like you mentioned Reagan and you see these things what issues right now haunt you what is most off course and most dangerous for society in in either of your views well you know we we came to this book because of our work on climate change and climate change denial because that's where all of these issues really came to the fore that people in the private sector climate change deniers I mean why were they denying climate change well as as Eric explained earlier in the discussion because they were afraid that if the government became involved in fixing this giant market failure and it is a giant market failure that you know we would be on a slippery slope to totalitarianism and so we wanted to better understand why anyone would think that because most slippery slope arguments are kind of silly because we're grown-ups we can make decisions we can make choices um but we also saw that it was a much bigger question and so in this book one of the things we did was deliberately try to background the climate change question because we didn't want things people to think this was a book about climate change because it's not it's a book about a kind of reigning ideology that has foregrounded the Primacy of economic freedom at the expense of everything else so the freedom to buy and sell guns Trump's the right to life we're in the pursuit of happiness right and to partly answer your previous question I think we have tremendous resources in American culture to recapture the notion that economic freedom is one freedom and probably not even the most important one I mean we stress this in the book it's not something that the founding fathers actually really stressed I mean property obviously is part of the story but it wasn't their main concern part of what the market fundamentalists have done is to flip the script to put economic freedom on top and to say that that has to have privacy and that has to Trump everything else and that's where we get a society where people can pollute with impunity run dangerous trains that wreck and destroy you know livestock and crops and possibly People's Health so there's a whole set of issues that arise then from inadequate governance inadequate regulation and part of what we're trying to do in this book is to open up a new conversation to say look the balance is off here we're not calling for a Communist Revolution we're calling for a kind of rebalancing of our society to better accept what Eric just said these are really questions of competing freedoms and that's an old old question people have been worrying about that probably going back to Plato but how do we address them and the balance is way way off in American society today and we think our book partly explains why it's off because we have been bombarded we've been saturated with this message message of economic freedom at the expense of a lot of other really important considerations right so so Robert you you said one thing that struck my mind and that is that um there's there's this concern with Democratic capitalism so in that balancing I think that what we're calling for is more of the emphasis on the Democratic over the the capitalist because it's the Democratic portion of this that's really failing under the onslaught of of propaganda and also crucially thanks for raising Eric that the propagandistic argument is that you have to protect capitalism to protect freedom and democracy but what we're seeing is that that's not true right that capitalism run amok is a threat to democracy for precisely the reasons you just said Robert when there's too much concentration of wealth in too few hands that has a corrupting force and of course that shouldn't come as a surprising argument that's something that people recognize in the late 19th century we say this in the book one of the reasons that the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed it was passed primarily to protect competition in the marketplace and therefore protect market-based capitalism but it was also passed because people recognize that the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few was bad for democracy and to me one of the most interesting things we write about in the book was something that Eric found which was how um Robert Bork who played a big role in promoting the idea that core it should not enforce the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust statutes he writes a paper about the Sherman Antitrust Act which is incorrect In which he misrepresents the intention of that act and even misrepresents what Sherman himself the author of the ACT said about it now whether he did that because he was stupid lazy or dishonest we leave that to the readers to decide for themselves but it's pretty telling that one of the key architects of the anti-antitrust argument in our lifetimes misrepresented what that statute was designed to do historically I in uh I guess it's I say part of the side effect of being a father I have a son who's involved in venture capital in his mid-30s and he and his cohort and I often talk and they are which we'll call uh wanting to be protective of their right to innovate in a digital world but I see this is a dilemma again because I see some of these big platforms and what the Danish scholar Vincent Hendricks calls the info storms and the monopolistic control and so forth and so if you will if Silicon Valley has on restricted freedom they would argue that it's propelling creativity Innovation and that Rising tide will raise all boats others are saying we're not thinking about which you might call the externalities and the public good nature of these platforms and as a result people are doing wealth extraction platforms not something that's of broader interest you're Eric you're affiliated with Caltech you're you're much closer to Ground Zero than I am in all of this what would you tell my son and his colleagues uh about the freedom of technological r d and and implementation well this has nothing to do with Caltech but I'd simply point out that that there's actually not a great deal of at least not visible um what do I want to say change or innovation going on in not it not really in social media right that Facebook has been allowed to essentially buy up and eliminate any competition that might have been a better service um and so that's that's corporate freedom but it's not one that that benefits innovation in any kind of meaningful way um and and yet that is the Silicon Valley ideology is that we should allow that to exist whereas the empty trust mentality would be that that we shouldn't have one or two companies in that completely dominate um a sector industrial sector or information sector or Etc because there will be no competition um and without competition you don't get the most you don't have the greatest efficiency you don't get future Innovations because big companies are notoriously less Innovative than small ones um Etc so I don't think that that unlimited Freedom argument actually works the way the way many of the social media folks the Silicon Valley folks think it does this is you know since uh there's attention also I I do a lot of international work and I want to come back to this with regard to climate change in a moment but in the digital realm particularly when I've been in Asian countries they they tell me watch the movie The Social dilemma in America because they say they provide you a service but you are the product and when they talk about what I say commercial platforms like in amazon.com something like the leadership in the Chinese government and this is years ago that they were talking like this not just in recent months with all the tensions between us and China they'd say we're not going to allow you a window in to build an intelligence agency a law that is what might call cohabitation with your uh platform for Commerce and so they want to control their own base the Europeans have a different view of digital things than either the Americans or the Chinese who are arm wrestling over who gets to be the founder slash controller and so I see what you might call the pervasiveness of these what I'll call multi-dimensional externalities in the digital world requiring what I would say a lot more wisdom than has been set at the table uh though I'll give my son Nicholas some credit he wrote a book called modern monopolies and talked about these challenges in relation to say the oil steel company sort of the earlier monopolies but uh at any rate uh going towards climate change again you talked about what I will call economists will call the pervasiveness of externalities in the fossil fuel companies don't want to acknowledge that and then you would talk about how the government might play that role of creating the balance but what do we do in the era of globalization where companies can go to different places and the what you might call the sovereignty of Any Given country particularly with regard to climate change when we're talking about cumulative planetary uh carbon uh how do how do we even imagine governing in a in a globalization world where climate kind of how do I say carbon emissions in Africa can hurt people in Cincinnati or vice versa how do we put this all together how do we obviously with the kind of propagandistic uh preaching that your book talks about how how in climate can we rise above we don't really like to talk about the government because in a way that's part of the rhetoric that that the people we study have created that there's the government on one side and there's the market on the other side and we want to argue that that's a false dichotomy that there are markets many different kinds of markets they function many different ways some markets function very well I mean I really love this very cool and pretty green water bottle that I just bought on sale um so you know sometimes markets are great they provide people with goods and services that they want at competitive pricing that's capitalism working as it should but sometimes markets fail they create big external costs they hurt people they exploit workers they wreck the environment they destroy biodiversity and when that happens then you need Solutions and those Solutions I think I like I prefer to use the word governance to emphasize that those Solutions can operate on many different levels so it could be International governance and again a lot of people you know the kind of people we study are very hostile to International governance because they see it as a threat to freedom and it could be you know we want in Grant that that there's a risk there but if you look at the solution to the owner hole that we wrote about in merchants of doubt that was successful International governance countries the world got together agreed to ban the chemicals that were causing the ozone hole and it worked uh I mean sadly we have some new problems I was just reading how the Australian wildfires are hurting damaging the ozone layer so this is sad because it's how climate change ramifies into lots of other things but the important point is that we have a successful model for Global governance in the case of the ozone hole but we wouldn't argue that International governance is necessary the solution for all problems so it might be that the federal government should take a stronger stand on an issue like you know the Reckless use of firearms in the United States or it could be States I mean a lot of climate action can take place on the state level or even cities one mistake that I think some people in the climate space has made and maybe it comes out of the early development of the UN framework convention on climate change which was modeled after the ozone uh protocol so we understand historically why that seemed like a good idea at the time but the reality is that most economic activity takes place in cities and most cities are progressive right I mean the red blue split in the United States is not really a split between red States and blue States even that's how we always talk about it it's actually a split between early Rural and even if you go to a very conservative State like Montana or even Utah the cities are progressive and Democratic and that's where most economic activity place takes place which is where most carbon pollution is generated so if you could mobilize cities to act on climate change even through say an urban carbon pricing system or other Solutions you could remedy a big part of the climate problem and then there's corporate governance and one of the things that's been so interesting to me in the last couple of years is how we have seen the private sector stepping up to the plate with a deeper more thoughtful discussion of ESG right the environmental social and governance principles and what is the the right-wing sector the people we write about what do they think of that you might think they would embrace it because after all it's a market-based private sector solution but no they are all over China block it they can't even bear the idea of governance like that which I think kind of gives the game away that it's not actually a principal position about market-based mechanisms It's actually an attempt to protect the prerogatives of big polluters one of the um I would say recent challenges is the covid-19 experience we've seen a lot of work at inet on where did the research for the vaccines and stuff come from and largely paid for by the taxpayers what's happening now in the collaboration cooperation between countries what's happening in the dissemination to people throughout the what you might call Wealth or income distribution how are you seeing the covid challenge in relation to the work you've done and the how they say difference between marketing and Public Health marketing for profit versus Public Health I guess is the dichotomy outbring what what has been your uh awareness or observation with regard to that challenge in that environment well I guess I have to say I haven't paid as much or enough attention really to the international aspects of it um largely due to lack of lack of good information um I was when the vaccines first became available I was pleased to see the administration not initially taking um you know the free market everybody will just ask for these approach rather they really pushed them out into here in California and we had these large-scale vaccination clinics isn't even the word right we they would take over parking lots at the you know the Great Western Forum and other so forth for for you know to process thousands and thousands of people it wasn't a market Approach at all it was a it was a it was a mobilization approach right the the idea of it's kind of like wartime mobilization to solve this problem um and of course since then we've stopped doing it and they've gone back to Distributing it through private means right mostly you get vaccinated now at Rite Aid or CVS or Walgreens or or one of those um and the state has largely withdrawn from that um and I think that's partly normalization they wanted to get away from the emergency measures and and to some degree that makes sense um what I what I don't I know there's also been some efforts by I think it's moderna um to remove the federal federal research scientists from patins in order to to stake a free and clear um legal and financial claim um in order to I guess that that that's intended to to maximize their their profits on the vaccines um but that's disturbing because it you know as you said earlier Robert the vaccines were largely developed on federal dimes anyway even if those Federal dimes and dollars went to private manufacturers um in order to you know solve a a world emergency yeah I think one thing I would add is I mean I think what's good about the covid story when we see the emergence of the vaccines from Adana or Pfizer bio in Tech in a way it's a good model of a public private partnership because the private sector does have the capacity to mobilize distribute Market in a way that would be hard for the federal government to do and that's a good thing but if you think about the scientific basis for those vaccinations particularly the messenger RNA vaccines which are developing some pretty new technologies based on a deep scientific understanding of how RNA Works in our bodies that scientific Foundation is based on Decades of fundamental research most of which was financed by the US federal government and also by federal governments in Europe and elsewhere so without that scientific Foundation there's no way that those corporations would have been able to produce manufacture and distribute those vaccines so quickly so again it's not an argument against the market it's an argument for different roles that the markets and governance need to play and without that scientific basis though there's no way modern and Pfizer and these other companies could have done what they did and that you know gets back to the question about innovation one of the things that drives me and Eric most nuts about Silicon Valley and I don't know if they're hypocritical Liars or just ignorant of their own history but when all these Silicon Valley people especially you know someone like Peter Thiel right go on and on about the free market but the very foundation for the existence of Silicon Valley was government-funded research and if if you go back to say Hewlett-Packard some of the early Silicon Valley companies so much of that research came out of stuff that was funded during World War II by the U.S federal government huge amounts of Grants and contracts that flowed to Stanford which then led to Hewlett Packard being spun off from Stanford and then of course the internet we wouldn't be talking to each other today on this platform if we didn't have the internet and Silicon Valley didn't invent the internet scientists and Engineers funded by the US government did that the uh energy that is uh surrounding all of these questions I guess if I were to say what would an economist summarize our conversation by saying is that externalities are pervasive they're not a special case you look at some textbooks and they're like a little part of chapter 37 as opposed to front and center and uh I I think that it's very very haunting right now because they're hiding the externalities are so pervasive they're hiding in plain sight they're not really hiding I'm saying they're being masked through these other types of arguments uh I could just jump in I think that's exactly right and really it's as the saying goes in Silicon Valley it's a feature not a bug and so part of I think what we would hope that our book would do would be to help facilitate a bigger conversation about that that externalities market failures are part of capitalism and especially for the people who want to defend capitalism it's essential to figure out well how do we really look at that more closely and figure out better mechanisms to address the external costs of capitalism if I was a young brilliant potential billionaire right now I would want to abide by what you just suggested because I think the biggest risk to someone who's really creative is that the backlash from a despondent public worth having people talk about seceding from the union even presidential candidates suggesting that might be a good thing and if that were to unfold the disintegration of the institutions we have built and so forth would set existing billionaires but potential billionaire buyers back quite profoundly and I think having a sustainable platform is remarkable compliments with an e thic genius that a creative individual might be able to develop on behalf of his wallet and Society at the same time or her wallet yeah that's right that's right definitely I got three daughters and one son so three-fourths of my votes are uh on that side um Eric where haven't we gone in the book that you'd like to underscore what uh what makes sense oh my well I guess I guess I should should promote the one sound idea I had in in an effort and that was um I like to talk about spiritual mobilization in the 30s and the way it began to to try to bring free market capitalist ideas into the clergy into American clergy so so that the message would be reinforced every Sunday in church and that's a camp effort that goes on into the 50s it's brought into both um the liberal Protestant churches as well as the Catholic churches with the help of of the sun oil president J Howard Pugh who becomes a major mover and Shaker in conservative politics and after World War II um and we tell that story because also partly to underscore why we like to use the term Market fundamentalism because it it's intended to have kind of a religious valence um and in in order to ensure um it doesn't it's not questioned right the essence of faith is that you don't question it um the essence of faith in markets is that we shouldn't question it and and they had that in mind as they are erecting this framework of in of of of organizations and institutions to to ensure American clergy continue to Echo the free market mantra I spent several years as an Adjunct professor at the union Theological Seminary teaching teaching a course called economics and theology and uh it's very interesting to me what you're talking about there because what I guess and I how do I say you teach to learn I learned a lot from these graduate students and what they kept saying to me is in the modern world people talk as though the market is a deity the market is a tool it is a means to social outcome and satisfaction that can be positive but it's not how would I say uh it's not a deity you don't turn Society inside out to serve the market the market is there to serve the people in the social goals and uh absolutely and that that's that's a big that's a major Point people I we want people to take out of the book um there there was an effort by by James Fifield over in spiritual mobilization to set the market above Society outside Society so that it would become so that it would be seen as kind of a deity um and and again so that it wouldn't be questioned it it they didn't want it presented as a a tool a social tool because because tools are human constructs and we make them but their fifield's goal spiritual mobilizations goal was to present um the market as descending from God not from man that was the whole point of it um and and so your your students figured out that that was not right um but I'm not surprised it's a union either because Union was one of the big critics of what Fifield was doing well the uh I mentioned at the outset when we were talking uh the Bob Dylan song one too many mornings I thought I would Rebrand it as one too many markets with the market for social vision and goals at least I don't mind people being in competitive discourse but if it's dominant for financial reasons rather than inspiring it's it's uh potentially quite dangerous but Dylan's last verse in one too many mornings I thought was worth bringing to you it's a Restless hungry feeling that don't mean no one no good when everything I'm saying you can say it just as good you're right from your side I'm right from mine we're both just one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind and this zany lyric of Dylan was just about social confusion and the fomenting of social confusion and I want to thank you because I believe that you and Naomi who had to leave your co-author are really raising things hopefully making people a little uncomfortable with what they what you might call abide by or unquestionably accept because I think we are at a critical juncture in our society now and we have to re-envision what the north star looks like and what what we're pursuing thank you for being here today Eric and uh thank you along with not only for being here but but thank you also for writing this extraordinary and challenging book well thanks for having us it's been great

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Length: 47min 21sec (2841 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 22 2023