A diverse group of global thinkers answers 8 fundamental questions about economics and capitalist civilization.
The objectives of this project are to shed light on the most salient challenges facing human civilization, explore the role of economics and the inner workings of capitalism, and heighten people’s awareness of both the economic system in which they live and work, and the role of economics in understanding this ever-changing system.
One of the feelings that many people share across national frontiers is a sense of anxiety about the high and rising degree complexity of modern global society, its impact on the world’s environment, and critical issues related to social justice. The particular themes, questions and overarching objective of Age of Economics is not to validate or invalidate a particular ideology, but rather to provide as many people as possible with a clearer prism with which to analyze our world and seek common solutions to shared existential challenges.
*How the future would look like ?* People will know that the true value is in themselves, the oneself and the collective self. That would be the initiator to dynamics. No one would mind to give money to anyone entering his hand in their pocket. Energy is for free as it comes from the Sun or other renewable sources. And really there are plenty for everyone. Food, medicine and other basics are for free for everyone. Innovation is the key not the work as the latter can be done by robots. Our goal is to seek happiness for the individual and collective self, and perfection as much as possible.
Noam identifies as a Libertarian socialist, however in this video he loves government when criticizing Milton Friedman. In past interviews I’ve heard him talk about the evils of our foreign policy and then in the same interview he talks about how the United States offered so much opportunity and freedoms. The man speaks with a slippery tongue. Also, I wonder if he will leave his capitalist mega wealth to the poor workers of America or to his children?
Pls allow me to share my opinion here. I believe the kind of heart for making good decisions matters most in anything people. Too much knowledge without the heart posted a danger to humanity. I think people everywhere should study and learn about this most important and critical human quality
HE DESTROYED GREECE,, singlehandedly.. a communist socialist nutter who never created a single job nor built a single factory for a decade with 500 BILLION euroes.. his opinion is beyond WORTHLESS on anything.. we lived in crete during his disastrous rule.. he lives in TEXAS and has a texas JOB.. in a capitalist state with #3 economy in the world.. he DESTROYED the #200th economy in the world
1) Competition: Competition is always a wasteful thing. Copyright makes it illegal for you to use information that is already made for example. 2) Market economy is terrible for distributing goods acording to needs. (Needs specifically , not any other kind of wants) 3) All the rest is BS too. What markets can be good for, is for comerce of luxury and also for providing elasticity to a centrally planned economy.
I had worked for Sheila many years ago at Politeia. She was initially very charming, but after a few weeks, the facade fell and she became an unhinged, bullying micro-manager. She would arrive to the office late, sometimes close to 12noon, tell her staff off for small things like not picking up the mail even she could have done it herself, then proceeded to roll it off a lengthy list of actions for her staff to complete in that day that often keeps them working long after 5-6pm. I didn’t get home until 10pm some nights despite the low pay. She had a particularly vicious way of undermining young workers’ confidence by questioning the quality of their work, even telling them off when they have done nothing wrong. There was a really high turnover of staff for this reason.
If economics was a factor in running the site then it should have minimized it's focus to the one area that is sorely lacking in online chat. "1 to 1' chat with search and basic info. This site wasted time and resources trying to be everything to everyone instead of filling a niche market that it had become well known for and successful at. The problem wasn't the economics but the management who does not understand it's market. Now it has gone to Discord and abandoned the users who likes it's "1 to 1" format, I predict there will be a very quick downfall of the product and it will be sent the way of Yahoo Chat, ICQ, Paltalk, AOL, and others.
Don’t worry he’s already been living off the people for a long time and has done financially well with all his speaking fees. He’s one of the great capitalist entrepreneurs of our time. He’s a genius by criticizing the system that made him extremely wealthy. He reminds me of those preachers on tv preaching about helping the poor while taking the poor people’s money.
At the time, this great man was 94 years of age. 94!!! His recollection of dates, times, history, economics amongst many other topics is incredible. He would put men a quarter of his age to shame. IMO he is a living prodigy. All policy makers should be listening and shaping his ideas into reality. What a better world it would be.
Gotta say, my Dad , at 96, had the same razor sharp , clear thinking mind with excellent recall and detailed memory. Most of us have that natural ability. Many expect to lose abilities, to become old with time, and realize those expectations both mentally and physically. Better to emulate this kind of person intellectually and someone like Jack La Lane physically.
Chomsky’s brain is always actively searching for answers. Great exercise to defer senility. I am 80 and still have creative thoughts and constant questions.
Just started this video..economics.. Ethics.. morality.. Loving it !! Sounds like I'm going to be listening to a real professional !! Loving it !! The Lord reward and protect you !! I hope..
Mr Yanis studied economics, yes, but that shouldn't make you think he isn't ideological in his talks and speeches. Here's one of his silly ideas, he calls "diagnosis", of modern digital clouds, internet clouds, or technically, "servers" on which data and businesses can exist. He likens "land" with internet "clouds" as some businesses also call it "space" since you could, for example, build a website on that "abstract space". First off, it makes it much easier to understand Yanis' point of view if you also knew he was brought up in a Marxist family. As he himself said it, he saw "capitalism contradictions" from his childhood. Marxists in the past, including Marx himslef, saw "lands" vital for making capital. After all, you needed a piece of land on which you could build a factory back then. But modern digital age have created a strong headache for the Marxists. Modern businesses no longer necessarily need lands. So what should they do to continue selling their ideology? One idea, Mr Yanis', is why not assume the internet cloud is land? Surely most call it "space", and "space" can indeed be likened to lands, so Yanis believe. Sure, why not? Modern businesses are at least partially on the internet, and some don't have lands at all. But Mr Yanis continues to say, this digital land is restricted! He claims that companies like Amazon, a company that Jeff Bezos built out of nothing in the kitchen of his house, and now employs millions of people around the world, a company that he himself was the sole worker, delivering books to people, Mr Yanis thinks that the land that this private company created is restricted to few! The above silly, dumb idea is from this fella who has a PHD in economics. First off, the "digital land" is not finite, it's infinite, Non-excludable (an economics term), and Non-rival (economics term). Second of all, nobody's holding Mr Yanis' hand to build his own Amazon, his own cloud. In fact, some clouds can run right from your smart phones, including the server. Thirdly, if Mr Yanis insists to take a piece of Amazon "land", as his eyes are on this particular private company, he can, in fact, get a piece of it for free, free as in ZERO fees. And he wished to build a digital factory on it, he can do so with a very small fee, like the millions of businesses on Amazon. Marxists have a set of ideological, and expired beliefs that only exist in their simplistic imagination.
OK Mr. James.. you're throwing a lot of vocabulary building time at them . Do they have hours and hours of free time for dictionaries in order to get through one of your basic economics videos ?
Yanis should study Prout - Progressive Utilization Theory. There is an emphasis on cooperatives and economic democracy in Prout. This framework doesn't support having stock markets, an antidote to speculative capitalism.
Even in close history the Founding fathers Of The Constitution Of The United States, made language in that document that put checks into the creation of the Federal Reserve; This was in response to how the crown controlled its subjects, Financial Slaves. Then Breaking of the social compact that Americans consented to be governed. Don’t alter the principle document of consent.
Supposing Engineering is the Art of the Possible, Economics is objectively bias Ideology, mostly "Selfish self-interested Sociological inertia", in Accounting for the visible economy in the holistic ecologically integrated metastability, then the realisation of Susskind's Singularity-point Lensing orientation-observation resonance to Euler's e-Pi-i flash-fractal 1-0-infinity probability state in the Totality of Conception would make Reality of AM-FM Communication information In-form-ation substantiation vanishing-into-no-thing, another imperative for reviewing and reintegration in terms of Absolute Energy Holographic Principle Nucleation perspectives. Jobs for anyone who wants to volunteer to live on this planet..
Start more efficient recycling instead of fighting for a redistribution of wealth?? My respect for Blyth just went down. Blyth says the latter 'will never happen'. It HAS to happen. As in, it is both inevitable and must also be fought for. Do you really think the exponential flow of wealth into fewer and fewer hands - as per the necessary logic of capitalism - is sustainable? Whether it results in fascism and/or war or whether there is some kind of black swan event that saves the working class remains to be seen.
Excellent presentation, especially regarding accountability, assumptions, and the necessity to acknowledge the importance of nature in the economic equation.
Steve’s comment about Aristotle’s understanding of the universe really hit home with me. I often feel like economists have come up with this insanely complicated theory for how the economy works mostly because they keep “learning their lesson” when the economy doesn’t behave like they thought. Rather than simply recognizing that everything rotates around the sun, they will retain their earth-centric foundation and simply add another variable to their equations to account for the new phenomenon that their theory didn’t see coming.
Based on interactions I’ve had with mainstream economists, they’re not much better than the Neoclassical types in terms of how they think about the economy. Everything is about transactions and math. Zero thought is put into the social consequences of those transactions. For example, I raised the question of whether low interest rates were the most efficient method to stimulate aggregate demand. Just going off of logical outcomes, I would presume that because low interest rates generate demand primarily among people who already hold assets and can therefore get the cheap loans on offer, this would lead to not only rising asset prices, including houses, but also food deserts when there is no demand generated in poor communities where few people own assets. An academic economist told me that this “literally wasn’t happening” and that interest rates were working just fine. I’m sorry, I must be getting fake news about food deserts in the wealthiest nation on earth and unaffordable house prices in pretty much every developed nation. That same economist told me that QE doesn’t increase purchasing power, it provides liquidity and increases aggregate demand… as if those are different things. And other economist have made similar arguments, but this one was particularly blatant. Those seem like the arguments of someone who is looking only at the overall numbers and paying no regard for the distributions or how those distributions will impact the economy in the future.
My main problem with this analysis is, I'm not sure whether to accept the assumption that we ever lived in capitalist times, according to the standard definitions that he alludes to. Still, he successfully destroys the idea that our system is "capitalism" or "free market" anything. And I'll buy that we're in a historical phase that's "post" whatever it was after, say, WW2. Some kind of revolution has happened, overthrowing the previous order. And I'll buy that the crises of 2007-8 marked an inflection point. At the very least, all the masks came off at that time.
Next Up: The Chairman of the Fed lectures about Linguistics! Sounds Absurd-Right? Yet some misguided people still mistakenly believe this ridiculous old academic has any idea WTF he is talking about outside that one field! smh
Wow, really liked this guy untill the stupid shit he said in the opening of this episode. “90% of companies are owned by 3 companies” Black rock is the classic example, black rock does things like index funds. Add up all the stuff they “own” you get 8.6 trillion in aum (assets under management) “controled” by black rock. But you can buy blackrock at a rate of 100 billion (Market cap for whole company). So i guess you put one dollar into blackrock stock and get $86 worth of stock? Nope. These assets are not owned by , blackrock. Black rock makes things like index funds and when we jnvest in those, they get a very small fee (something like 3% of 1%) for taking all our money, and splitting it into tons and tons of different companies. When so many people put their money in its a good business, but they aren’t shadow running our economy, they don’t own everything.
I do not understand why Professor Varoufakis, experimental economies for ten years, completely dismisses experimental economists as irrelevant for real life. There are many field experiments which show that the stylised facts from experiments can br found in reality (e.g. win/loss asymmetries (Kahneman & Tversky) really matter in productivity when salary is increased or reduced). Laboratory experiments on universal incomes are even more relevant to reality than the short-sighted real experiments. Also it is simply wrong that macroeconomics is inaccessible for experiments. There are many macroeconomic experiments out there - just google. There are experiments with multiple markets and currencies. Varoufakis himself is very well qualified to design a Euro experiment for a situation like what Greece faced. As for the information asymmetry between buying and selling labour, I need not tell an established game theorist what contract theory is and what its predictions are. Unfortunately, Varoufakis’ prime dogma is that economics is irrelevant for the real world. In his case, this has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Although brilliant, he almost refuses to publish in established economic journals. This theory aversion is the major problem of the political left today. The old Marxists folded their arms like Jehovah’s Witnesses and expected capitalism to crumble under its own weight, because Marx told them so. In contrast, private-public capitalism/feudalism has emerged stronger from every crisis. The new left rejects theory altogether. Critical thinking is something different. Neoclassical theory is not the theory of capitalism. It can be applied to all forms of economics, including any alternatives such as UBI, C2C production, taxing accumulated capital, and breaking down parasitic monopolies.
Another great interview with Prof. Chomsky. With all the enormous damage to people, communities, etc. by this neocon ideology, it’s a wonder that we hardly hear critiques in the mean stream media. Answer, the main corporate companies, main media just ape this awful and erroneous so-call economic pseudo theory.
