Capitalism is good. Let me explain. 

A lot of people here confuse capitalism with deregulation. I did not anticipate this point to be so widely misunderstood. If I had, I would have stressed it more. I am sorry in case I caused confusion.

"We just need to use capitalism the right way" is the same argument as "just one more lane, that will fix traffic I promise"

Anybody remember the Nestlé leader board member arguing for why drinking water shouldn't be free?

"This is why we have laws against that" ... and the people avoiding those laws are either paying the people enforcing the laws, or optimizing how close to the sun they can fly before they fall, some can do it, some fall, and some get away with flying too close.

Here's a list of all the parts in which she says "but that's another story": 2:35 - Fiat money / cryptocurrencies 7:23 - Marx 8:01 - Different ways of governing a capitalist state 9:37 - Microeconomics shortcomings 11:46 - Water pollution (here she used “different” story, rather than “another" story) 13:50 - Social cost of carbon

This video was a shock. I watch every video Sabine releases. This is the first time I've seen her do many things... such as: 1) abandon topics she actually knows about 2) make a video without doing any relevant research 3) blindly spew an almost religious level of dogmatic propaganda 4) just be so blatantly wrong on virtually every asserted fact, both historical and present-day. Feels a lot more like a PragerU disinformation course than a Sabine video. Is it April fools or something?

I remember when Dr Sabine scolded and other scientists for stepping out of their expertise and talked nonsense.

As somebody who studied economics (micro and macro) and business administration, I should now make a video about loop quantum gravity.

This is like the meme of "if somebody is trying to rob you, just say no, its illegal to take your things without your consent"

I remember my economics professor saying that most people think that the job of economists is to advise governments, when instead it is more common for governments to hire economists to justify their policies.

I like how in her view capitalism is trusted and cant be corrupted because its illegal

You can compare this video with Albert Einstein's article "Why Socialism?" and understand that physicists also can have a profound view of economy and politics, if they are Albert Einstein.

So fun when all problems are answered with "but that's another story"

As an economist myself, I have to say, I really like your physics videos. Maybe keep making those

"Capitalism is good, except for when it isn't, but that's another story." Phenomenal.

I highly value Sabine's physics videos, and view her as an excellent science communicator. But even putting aside one's opinions about capitalism, the foundational explanation here about how and why money was created is demonstrably incorrect, and grievously so. It's well known - and has been pointed out repeatedly by Sabine herself - that scholarly expertise tends to be as narrow as it is deep, and this video seems to be a great example of that truism. From the initial "don't believe Greta Thunberg and don't believe RFK Jr" statement, it seems Sabine feels like she's taking a reasonable middle ground here - but reason, as Sabine always reminds us, can't be reasonable unless it's based on good evidence. And the evidence in this video is quite poor.

and this episode was sponsored by PragerU and ReasonTV....and Briliant

Your example is penicillin? I think you might be a bit off on your history there: The mass-production research was done by two groups. One in the UK, one in the US. Neither of which was done using investor money in expectation of a return. It was 1940-1943 when this happened, and a drug that would stop soldiers dying in field hospitals was of obvious application - both groups were government funded, in the belief that the research would be of value to the military.

This comments section is golden. Sabine, you have scolded other creators before for making fools of themselves by stepping out of their field of expertise. I think that boomerang has come back around.

How to defend capitalism in 16 minutes: say all the good things about it; and about the bad things, just say: "That is another story."

Sabine's channel is on such a weird arc. These non-physics videos are so much less objective, yet she acts as authority. I hate when experts in one area act like a know-it-all in topics they only have surface knowledge of.

One of the often unstated problems of free markets is that every agent in that free market is trying to make it as un-free as possible for the other agents.

USA big companies using cheap labor here in my country in the PH. And the wages are not liveable. How is that good?

"can't we just hold hands and sing around the campfire" vibes but in attempted technical speak

Sabine 600 years ago: "But for today, feudalism has been incredibly successful in advancing society. To the extent that it has caused us problems, it's because we haven't properly used it."

What does it cost to buy the rules ? What does it cost to break the rules ? What does it cost to hire someone who do it for you ? ... these rules are not like the rules of physics - they can be broken, and they are - that's part of the game !

This video has the same vibes that a presentation I gave on cybersecurity before I spent years learning it. A lot of my ideas around it back then were logical, but not correct, and some were based on out of date information that has since been revised, but I still didn't know that because I hadn't done any real research. David Graeber's work on debt, governmental systems and trade before capitalism, and before recorded history disproves some of your early points. It doesn't do so by glossing over critiques, criticisms, and ignoring valid arguments intentionally or just to shorten a video. I don't think your point on penicillin holds any water. Penicillin research was funded by governmental research to aid wounded soldiers. There was no capitalist innovation in that. The ability for mass production isn't uniquely capitalist, just the motivations to do so for fulfilling a hole in a market and making profit. Finally, I don't think that listening to economists is going to fix capitalism. There is no incentive to listen to them (unless it means short term profit). Using economist's ideas to fix global warming will not happen as long as economic power can be used to get political power. Using the political power granted by vast amounts of capital to prevent any real regulations is the most efficient solution. This isn't doing capitalism incorrectly, this is doing it optimally. Any change done to fix this system through official means will not happen in time to save us from global warming because capitalism deems it most efficient not to have any changes at all.

Please be nice. Sabine is doing a spectacular job showing us how effective capitalist propoganda is. Keep up the good work!

One of the great examples of survivorship bias is: We praise companies performing investigations, but we never know what investigations are never published because of inconvenient results. Like Coca Cola and nutrition papers.

Capitalism is good when its good and when it isn't thats another topic for another day.

Important part that is missing from this point of view is the corporate lobbying of governments. We cannot talk about setting rules that will benefit majority, if a minority can just buy access to politicians. Without that we can single out kids in headlines for not ‘getting it’ but we can do as little as them about the issue.

It's this simple: Capitalism requires surplus production to generate profit. It incentivizes over-consumption. No carbon capture methods can keep up with our production and consumption economically. It is not sustainable to expect endless profit going to the few. We much share our limited resources more fairly and responsibly.

I check back in every couple of weeks to see if this video is still up and somehow it still is...

"That's why we have laws against that" is doing a Herculean amount of work here lol

"Capitalism is good! Now here's everything that's wrong with it. But that's another story!" Indeed, an honest critique of capitalism is a very different story than the one you just told.

This is just a PragerU video. It's all here: the misdirections ("sure it has its criticisms but that's another story") the historical innacuraccy (money didn't show up because people were tired of trading goods all the time lol, also, people were lending money with interest for various reasons waaaaaaaaaaay before capitalism) the false equivalences (markets, economy, capitalism, these are all related but different concepts) overall lack of critical thinking (So the University developed penicillin because of capitalism? The university predates capitalism, c'mon thats an easy one; or like "The market didnt know the water had value" sure the people benefiting from the market understand water is good - what happened there?). Words not meaning anything ("Free market is capitalism + rules"? so marketed socialism is free market? or not because too many rules? what?) We even have the vague reference to Marx as "the guy who thought capitalism was bad because of the - _ew_ - wOrKeRs" You could sum up all the parts she brushes off whenever there's a criticism of capitalism and come out with an actual more productive video about how capitalism is bad...

This is a self-fulfilling argument. Of course capitalism is good for "progress" when "progress" is defined by the constraints of capitalism.

There are a few too many "that's another story"s in this one for my taste. Those are real problems that need more than a throwaway formula - at the very least, a short description of the topic and how it relates to the current one. Because there are a number of dragons hidden behind those throwaways.

Didnt you make a video about how your dreams in academia died because schools have become money-making institutions?! Do you not see the connection here?

Sabine, I really love your physics videos. That's why I come here. I don't care to listen to you talk about politics, economics or anything else besides physics. Because how can i know that you know anything more about these subjects than i do? Or John Smith who lives next door? Or anyone actually. You're not a political scientist or an economist. It's strange that you seem to be "branching out" into other areas that are not your field of expertise when your fans are just here for the physics. Watch out or you may begin losing those fans.

I didn't expect it to be one of the most middle of the run neo-liberal defense of capitalism.

I can identify a couple sections where a modicum of additional nuance could have led to very different conclusions, but that's another story

As an economist I am happy that this is an actually a pretty unbiased vision, But still too simplistic of a view of economy. Capitalism cant be seem as the reason of progress, just because you dont have anything to compare it, and marx pretty much agrees you need a really advanced capitalist society to make socialism work( why Cuba and thing like that dont work). But the reason the system Didnt collapse is because the exploration was moved to the “South”. Is so Nice to say in germany capitalism is good, when everthing you buy and wear is made by cheap children labor and slave labor in Asia , África, and latin América. And in Didnt even start with the changes made after the 80s, that basically made capitalism a Gamble speculation game instead of economic and social Growth.

New title "Capitalism is Good: Anything to the contrary Is Another Story"

Yes, and what happens if capitalists capture the organizations that are supposed to regulate them?

What kind of externality is it when companies pay government representatives not to pass laws against negative externalities?

I watched this video immediately before watching your video on doing your own research. I think you're obviously very intelligent and you must generally do a lot more research than other commentators. With the utmost respect, I also think this video is an excellent example of poorly done research. It may surprise you to know that Karl Marx agreed with much of what you said until you mentioned him. His Das Kapital is an analysis of capitalism and how and why it works, explicitly including how it's very good at producing commodities, like your penicillin example. Capitalism is obviously progressive as compared to what came before it. Marxists agree with that conclusion. The idea that Marx was just some dude with a bullhorn shouting about how bad capitalism is is a false one, no doubt pushed by people who would rather you trust what they have to say about Marx and Marxism over looking into it yourself. You can also see this ignorance about what Marxism actually does by the fact that you listed Laos, Cuba, and North Korea, while not mentioning China at all. I assume you did not mention China because you attribute China's success to capitalism. But here's the thing: So do Marxists, and China is also Marxist. If you look into the history of the communist movement in China, you will quickly learn that there was a lot of infighting among Marxists about whether and to what degree to allow the capitalist mode of production in China for exactly that reason. In fact, two of the five stars on the Chinese flag represent capitalists (the urban bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie). Mao even said that, due to China's economic backwardness, the capitalist mode of production was necessary to develop China's productive capacity. The controversy surrounding Deng Xiaoping's "Reform and Opening Up" was not primarily due to deviation from Marxist principles, it was due to that approach causing a lot of negative effects for the people. Deng responded to that criticism with "When you open the window, flies will come in." Thus, one major difference between China and the other countries you mentioned amounts not to "not Marxism," but to a disagreement in policy. Vietnam is much the same. In fact, there has not been a country where a Marxist party controlled the state which was in a material position that Marx considered a precondition to socialism: Fully developed capitalism. That's why Soviet Russia had the New Economic Policy. That's why Maoist China had the Unit System. That's why North Korea made the Tae-an Work System. These countries know that the capitalist mode of production is necessary to truly transition to socialism, but they're unwilling to just open up to full liberalization for a multitude of reasons, not least of which is that they have seen what happened to other countries that did that. Now let's address that other elephant in the room: Sanctions and blockades on the Marxist countries you did mention. North Korea is the most sanctioned country in history, Laos is the most bombed country in history, and Cuba is blockaded by the world's superpower, which is only 90 miles away from it. It is very bad form to condemn a country for its poverty while refusing to let that country trade with anyone else. I know I'm prattling on, so I just want to say two more things: 1. You said we should listen to economists more. I agree. But why limit yourself to non-Marxian economists? Some of the best economists in the world are Marxian economists. Marx wasn't some idiot, his approach to analyzing economies isn't useless. He also wasn't some prophet, and he was wrong about some things. 2. You are intelligent and well-read enough to not have an excuse to trash on Marxism without having read Das Kapital. It is dense, but it is not nonsense, and it doesn't have any preachy ideology. As I said, Marx wasn't some dude with a bullhorn, he was a philosopher. It's logical writing with logical conclusions. And since you're German, I assume it will be easier to read in the original German as well (but maybe not because English texts from the 1860s are pretty weird to read sometimes for me, too lol). It feels like most anti-Marxism is just people who looked at the Communist Manifesto and some anti-Marxism commentators rather than just looking at Marx himself. I can see this video has almost 25,000 comments, so I assume you won't read this, but I hope you do.

You skipped the step of money where the paper money was an IOU, that you could always exchange for the same amount of gold that was deposited in a bank. Fiat money, that is based on nothing but air and trust is only 50 years old, extremely new in comparison, and inflation has skyrocketed ever since. Fiat money will eventually collapse and tear this economy down with it.

One major problem is the huge political influence (directly and via media) of very rich people and companies. This leads to laws that benefit the rich but not the people.

How does Sabine explain that while polio was developed in a capitalist country (by Salk, who refused to profit from it btw) it was the efforts of the Soviet Union that resulted in it's mass distribution in 3rd world countries and subsequent global eradication? This was not seen as profitable by the western capitalist countries, but the SU argued for it and mass produced vaccines and argued for it in the UN and WHO until it finally happened.

The video doesn't mention the issue of social inequalities and wealth concentration created by capitalism. That's a pitty. I wonder if again the excuse would be that "we are not using capitalism correctly".

Little problem: wealth = political power.

From a science communicator I would have expected facts and data, not a lot of opinions in the form of an essay

This video is great but the title should be "The Dunning-Kruger effect"

Spoiler: she hardly addresses capitalism and doesn’t defend it basically at all. Indeed, what she does do is points out a bunch of the excesses of capitalism and argues that we need government to reign in capitalism. If anything this is a video about how capitalism is problematic. The primary innovations of capitalism that uniquely define it are free enterprises whose existence is determined by their struggle for the aggregate of surplus value, wage labor and middle managers. Free enterprises and capital investments, which she does discuss, existed in mercantilism. At least, that’s my understanding and would be happy to be corrected. But, at any rate, wage labor, the aggregate of surplus value and middle managers weren’t discussed. Even her comments on the value of competition generated under capitalism is ultimately a criticism about how capitalists won’t compete fairly if left to their own devices. It’s almost as if she thinks government regulation is a part of capitalism. 😂 then there’s the penicillin example, which basically demonstrates how capitalism is parasitic and unnecessary because all the capitalist did was exploit publicly funded research and then made a profit exploiting sick people who needed that medicine-I guess I’m not smart enough to understand why we need a capitalist for that and the government couldn’t have just distributed it to those who needed it at cost. 🤷‍♂️

love how she says “things went wrong during the industrial revolution” and chooses to ignore the incentives which led to conditions becoming so rapacious and cruel

Einstein really should have called in on this video and said some words.

I think you have summarized economics in a nutshell! But 'capitalism' was very much the basis on which the Dutch 'Golden Age' built its prosperity during the early 17th century. The Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602 by rich merchants in order to create a joint-stock charter company to trade in Asia. This was well before the 'industrial revolution' which is generally reckoned to be heralded by harnessing the steam engine in 1712, which led to the creation of semi-automated factories during the 1800s.

It's amazing. I don't want to know who and how told you to make a material about capitalism, but the way you evaded making capitalist propaganda by creating such a parody is absolutely brilliant.

Big corporations *love* regulation when it works in their favour. (e.g. extending copyrights on IP)

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair

Oh my Sabine, you're going to be busy...."that's another story" Looking forward to all of them in the future

According to the World Bank, capitalism raised one billion people out of poverty since 1990.

All I am going to say is that watching this video after having watched the one where ms. Hossenfelder gives advice on how to do our own research on a topic we are not experts about makes me think she didn't follow her own advice in this subject.

Sabine : "the capitalist system that allowed an efficient allocation of resources" People starving around the world even thought we produce enought food for everyone : Yeah...

Dr. Hossenfelder, do you know of the general trend of physicists speaking well outside their domain of expertise, assuming they understand it, and then saying a bunch of stuff that doesn't really work or hold up to scrutiny, leading to their later years being less about breakthroughs in their field and more about being cranks in other fields? ...Yeahhhhhh... This is not your area of expertise, and it really shows. I recommend the book "Capitalist Realism" by Mark Fischer, as it very closely describes exactly what you're doing here - presenting examples of the past that fit capitalism as we know it, rather than what the past before capitalism was actually like.

In my experience in helping disperse treats between hopeless nerds in video games, it's less about the system and more about how you maintain a sense of fairness. For example, most systems adapt some sort of moderate tax to prevent a former raider from coming back from a year hiatus and taking all the goodies from the team. TBH, suicide DKP always seemed to work the best. The person at the top of the list has priority, but when they exercise it they fall to the bottom of the list. It tends to prevent the newbies from hoarding all their points for a specific shiny object, and it lets the more well geared members jockey for position on the rarer stuff. Someone smarter than me can go ahead and figure out how to translate that into a workable economic system.

Two very crucial things you didn't really cover: 1. Markets are almost never free. Governments and other entities get involved to skew markets one way or another. 2. Monopolies and patents. As a company grows in size the best strategy to make money changes from 'compete with others to make the best product at the best price' to 'get rid of the competition by any means necessary' this includes buying out the competition, using patent law and other laws to prevent competition or influencing government to prevent competition. Many large companies spend more effort and resources on lawyers etc than on their 'core product'.

Just some two cents from a physicist turned economist. You did a fairly solid summary of the textbook version of capitalism, but "the devil is in the detail". The (understandable) backlash in the comments section stems from the fact that most people don't believe this simple picture to be close to reality (and of course, as you explained, market failures are a part of it). And I have to agree with them. While the simple microeconomic description works for goods with little specialization required, like apples, bread and Döner, the model quickly breaks down for most of the products relevant in modern economies. Economists often fail to validate the assumptions on which their models build, and thus apply this simple model in all kinds of ways which are not valid. Thus they implicitly assume that markets always tend towards a (unique) equilibrium. Real markets can get stuck in suboptimal equilibria, or equilibria might be unstable (hint: financial markets). Real markets overwhelmingly tend to converge to oligopolies or monopolies (e.g. the whole tech sector), so the static picture of many competing companies is the exception than the rule. Capital allocation does not favor the common good, but is driven by highest profit opportunities (no, they are not equal, even though assumed in the models). Planned obsolescence, advertising, etc... One might argue that the problems can be fixed just by the right regulations. And arguably, some of them can be. But some are side-effects of the system's dynamics themselves, i.e. they will always show up one way or another, and even regulation frenzies won't stop these underlying dynamics from showing up again. The matter is of course not helped by the ideological debate. Especially the economics profession tends to deflect criticism on the realism of their models and thus closes itself off to innovation in their own science. Which of course heats up the debate even more.

Incredibly simplistic! Have you ever been to Brazil?

I'm surprised this video is still up and you haven't removed it AND offered an explanation/apology.

This is a level of analysis more akin to a PragerU video than your usual work. What the hell is this?

People are fully within their rights to branch out and comment on topics that they are not "experts" in, but really sticks out to me is how matter-of-factly she presents loads of statements here. This is no way to make a video on societal issues, where is the reflection, reasoning, the sources? This lack of reasoning would be typical for PragerU and similar propaganda channels, but is far below what I expected from Hossenfelder, whose videos I have enjoyed for a long time. This seems like a classical case of a overconfident STEM person barging into humanities to "solve all of this", which I kindly ask all my fellow people in STEM to refrain from doing. A different and more nuanced approach is needed in these fields.

this is nearly as good as stevie wonders lecture on plate tectonics

Thanks for your work Sabine! … it’s ‘adaptation’, not ‘adaption’ 🤓

Isn't it ironic that this is the video coming right after one titled "Do your own research, but do it right"?

All the problems with Capitalism arise out of "but that's another story."

is not the special sciences that teach man to think; it is philosophy that lays down the epistemological criteria of all special sciences.

Wisdom is knowing what you know, and what you do not.

I remember my Econ professor saying that economic models are "oversimplified and based on bad assumptions". And he was absolutely right.

Your description of capitalism perfectly illustrates a fundamental imbalance inherent to the system. Everybody wants to be the one with wealth turning wealth into more wealth, not the guy who needs to borrow to turn apples into cider. That's why it starts off as a simple distributive system but ultimately tends towards stratification of wealth and power.

Very informative and entertaining! I would tell you what I found annoying about this video. But that’s a different story

Dear Sabine, consider that I speak as a fan. I really like your videos on physics and specially enjoy your sense of humor. I am not an economist either (I am a lawyer), but the amount of wrong information here is beyond field specialization. History proves the origin of coin has nothing to do with what has been said, for example. I urge you to refrain from stepping out of where you are great.

Unfortunately, I do not have a capital, therefore I am what Sabine would call “another story”.

Hi Sabine, I love your channel for your approachable coverage of science, but there are a few glaring errors in this video, both logically and factually. 1) Let's start with the notion that currency emerged as a workaround for the inefficiencies of barter-trade relationships. The narrative you outline is a common one, popularized by Adam Smith's work "The Wealth of Nations" as you said. The problem here is that Smith's account of currency being "invented" to facilitate barter was purely speculative. The historical record shows *zero* cases of currency arising in this way. In fact, there is not even evidence of a society in which barter is the primary mode of exchange. The evidence shows that tribal societies operate(d) on the basis of a "gift economy." Instead of strictly accounting for debts, these economies function on a loose basis of credit. This is in part because hording surplus is A) difficult to do when you're producing perishable goods in a society without refrigerators and B) unhelpful in facilitating the long term survival of your tribe. If you have extra milk, you would be happy to give it away to a neighbor who needs it because you trust that she is likely to have your back when you need something. Furthermore, this type of cooperation fosters strong social bonds between tribe members. In most tribal societies, it is actually taboo to give someone a gift equal to what they gave you, because it implies the debt is equalized and your gift exchange is over. If you gave me a bucket of milk, I might give you something more valuable, like a chicken, so that you give me something back and we keep the gift economy going. Even if it is difficult to imagine cooperating with other people in this way from the vantage point of our alienated society, these are the types of social structures we find in reality. Many currencies emerged independently around the world, often starting out as tokens of religious importance, or later as a way to more efficiently extract taxes from colonized populations. I'd recommend checking out the book "Debt: The First 5000 Years" for more on this topic. It would make for a great topic for a video. 2) The next point you make takes a huge leap from primitive economies to society where there are already capitalists ready to invest in your individual enterprise. I cannot stress enough that the "juice press example" you gave in the video did not happen in tribal society. You are already working off faulty premises you laid out in the previous point, so my main contention would be that Sue couldn't/wouldn't have accumulated so much more surplus from here chickens than apple juice guy got from his apples because both of these enterprises would require *private* ownership of land, because if the land is public, than anyone could take the chicken's eggs or pick apples and both businesses would collapse. Tribal societies did not enforce individual ownership of private lands, but lets assume they did. This begs the question then, how did each person acquire the land for themselves? Did they buy it from someone else? If so how did that person get the land? Did they just tell everybody a certain plot of land was their's? If so how do they prevent other people from trespassing? This line of questioning shows that we are assuming a level of societal development that upholds and enforces regimes of private land ownership (i.e. with some sort of police force). I'll repeat again, this did not emerge as the natural product of barter relationships in tribal societies, but instead out of the individual expropriation and hording of surplus from private plots of land, and the exclusion of other people from using that land. For sake of keeping this comment under 10000 words, the wiki for "primitive accumulation" explains this concept in more detail. The main point is that this example is a gross simplification of how societies develop and shows a projection of our current social structure onto those of the past. 3) The last few segments of this video are really what drove me to write this comment. The idea that it was not the industrial revolution, but capitalism itself that drove the last 150 years of progress is ridiculous on its face. For one, the birth of capitalism was a gradual process starting back at least since the protestant reformation. It seems a bit too convenient that you mark the beginning of capitalism at the same time that the industrial revolution took off, and even more ridiculous you claim that capitalism caused the industrial revolution and all the progress that came with it. I'm sorry, did market forces create the disproportionate concentration of coal in the British Isles that made the industrial revolution possible? Was it the free market that built all the train lines across Europe and the Americas? Even more, you say later that Marx gave capitalism a bad reputation, and that "there was an element of truth to his fears because some things went badly wrong during the industrial revolution." Funny how capitalism gets all the credit and the industrial revolution gets all the blame. Next you claim that capitalism is an efficient system to distribute resources. That's not true. In the united states grocery stores throw away anything that doesn't sell because giving it away to people who need it would drag down the price of food. Same with tech companies. They would rather destroy what they create instead of giving it away. Same with landlords, who keep their units empty instead of housing the homeless. Nothing against the landlords or grocery stores or tech companies btw, they're making the rational choice in a system that favors profits over utility. But it doesn't sound very efficient to me. I'm not familiar with the penicillin example you gave, but I do know that there were scientists who could have patented it (making a lot of money like a good market actor), but specifically did not because of ethical concerns. Or take Jonas Salk, who invented the polio vaccine and chose to not patent the it or seek any profit from it in order to maximize its global distribution, saving millions of lives in the process. Or take the internet, or highways, or libraries, or hospitals, or NASA, or the myriad of innovations funded by, created by, and used by working people, not because they want a profit, but because they want to make a better world for other people. If the greatest inventors and scientist of our time were looking for money, they wouldn't have become scientists, they would have worked in the insurance industry. Finally you talk about capitalism causing environmental problems. I agree. However, you can't just brush off everything bad about capitalism as an externality. Companies are just trying to make a profit in the market, any unintended consequences are necessarily a product of that original impetus. As far as your bit on taxing carbon as a means of fighting climate change, that's probably a step in the right direction, but the idea that the climate is the only downside of capitalism, and that we would've avoided the problem if only we listened to economists is silly. The reason oil giants didn't listen to economists is because they couldn't hear them over the "cha-ching" of the potential profits they could make by lying about the risks of climate change. Same story with big tobacco lying about the carcinogenic risks of smoking or DuPont dumping PFAs into the Ohio River. These aren't externalities, they are results people making the conscious choice to trade human wellbeing for surplus value. In summary, this video presents misinformation about to the origins of currency, the nature of investment relationships, the driving force of the last 150 years of human progress, and potential solutions we can use to get out of this mess. And I haven't even scratched the surface on the exploitative relationships between workers and capital owners or the devastating effect capitalism has on democracy. I understand you're not a big social-science person, but I really hope you make a more thought-out video soon. Edit - My favorite part is when she says "capitalism will kill us all"

In your opening analogy, a more accurate scenario would have been if the person who wanted the apples or whatever used the military might of a technologically advanced nation to murder the apple farmers and take their land and then destabilize their entire continent, squashing any attempt at democracy that was not in line with the interests of the nation who killed all the people. I know others have said this, but you are making the classic mistake of viewing capitalism as a hypothetical, contained set of rules for transactions between individuals. It is not that, it has very rarely been that and it will never be that again at any point. It can be argued that it has had its benefits (only for people born in the right places of course) but it is well passed time for humanity to step back, look at the reality it has created, and move on. The only way to reach any other conclusion is to ignore the impact it has on the planet and the toll it has taken on the global south. I just watched your video about people telling you to stick to physics, so it hurts me to say this, but at least this time you simply do not seem to have a clear picture of what you're talking about. If your argument is "well, it mostly makes sense and it's better than kings and stuff." We all know that, that doesn't make it good though.

Excellent video - should be required viewing for everyone.

“Capitalists only want a small return on their investment” is such a naive thing to say after mocking a teenager.

For someone who's brought clarity to complex physics topics, this video jumps the shark. It feels like a slow-motion crash (course) into the Dunning-Kruger effect. With simplistic, naive interpretations and moralistic undertones, it propagates myths and misconceptions that many experts have spent years trying to debunk from the public space - some of them Nobel laureates, and, multiple times requiring the use of the expression "Zombie Ideas" in the book’s title.

I'm pro-free-market but practical implementations of it have one big shortcomming: 3rd party liability. Enterprise manager should: * collect big chunk of profits and they does * pay capitalists shares of income and they does * should pay employees fair (according to contract and negotiation position) salary and they does * should cover effects of improper or invalid good delivered to customer and they does. Should cover loses of 3rd parties affected by enterprise and they almost don't (except extremely obvious cases).

Primary property of capitalism is production is done for profits and not for needs of society.

Capitalism is not about efficiently allocating resources to meet people's needs, but rather to meet private interests, which do not always align with the people's needs.

I didn't expect Sabine to be a radical or anything but I'm kind of shocked by the lack of any real material or historical analysis and the reliance on truisms we're taught in high school

"but thats a different story"... Thats a good way to declutter, keep coherence and maintain emphasis..

I didn't hear a definition of capitalism in the video. Perhaps I missed it, but all I heard was an example/definition of a capitalist--one who is willing to invest capital. Capitalism is defined by Oxford as "an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit." A lot of the benefits described are benefits associated with investing capital in markets plus science and industry but do not seem exclusive to capitalism itself, i.e. capital can, and maybe should, come from communal organizations--community credit unions, governments, organized labor forces, rather than private individuals.

Damn so now it's not "explain me like I'm five" anymore but "explain me like you're five"

If economists claimed that capitalists shit golden bricks I think Sabine might have said "shitting golden bricks can cause constipation.... but that's another story". Maybe next time read the critics of capitalism, not just their fanboys.

It's funny how the comments here say much more about people's emotions towards capitalism than about the problems of the system itself.

I think the problem with replacing capitalism is that there isn't a lot of models that are not capitalistic in nature that has proven themselves to be successful. The closest functional model that can replace Capitalism is social democracy (like the sort practiced in Scandinavian countries), but those are still based on capitalism. I think what we really need is a system for which basic needs like healthcare, housing, and food are provided for / heavily subsidized by the state but production and innovation is driven by market demand.

Sabine, why do you mention Cuba as a negative example of what happens when you don't embrace Capitalism when it has been cut off from most of the world and thus has literally not been able to participate in global Capitalism yet has produced some absolutely incredible medical breakthroughs (just a few examples being the first to develop a meningitis B vaccine, first to prevent the transmission of HIV from a mother to child, and the development of a lung cancer vaccine? How do you explain this? Just one of many critiques I could make, but at least this is one that I don't see being raised by others.