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[Applause] thank you hannah very much indeed and i'm going to go completely off script to start with and say as an islington girl how wonderful it is to be back in the union chapel as many of you here is when
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i came to see billy bragg you're very brave to come out on a rainy monday night we're very pleased that you haven't lost the habit of coming to live events we very much look forward to hearing from our speakers in just a
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moment and your participation and of course we started with a really small topic can we fix capitalism uh no point in messing about we went for the the big topic with intelligence
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squared tonight and i thought it was an interesting moment to step back of course from all the internal party political party fighting and to invite two people with very wide-ranging
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views and very wide-ranging experience of the topic but before they get their say in the democratic manner we thought you should have you'll say first or at least your show of hands a way of communicating with us
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so we're going to ask first who thinks capitalism albeit with tweaks and reforms is still the best economic system we've got so if you think that give us a wave
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this is fabulously oh she's off julian is just i think i think that's my job in this whole event leave your hand up just a minute can i have a look can is everyone unscientifically taking stop i like the
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way that julian voted for herself there it's a good moment and who thinks we need a completely new economic system thank god because otherwise it was the wrong booking
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but that was fairly clearly capitalism can be fixed in our audience tonight but i would say from intelligent square debates i've done a few recently obviously far less interesting in the sense of being uh online only there was
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quite a lot of shifting around once that people had heard the speakers so the that is really where we're going to go next i would perhaps give them this challenge from the marxist literary
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critic frederick jameson who once said it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism i wonder whether that is still the case i'm going to uh turn first i think
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janice is going to to lead us off tonight if i read my annals true janice varoufakis will be known to many of you from our screens and his fiery contributions to this debate
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he was greek finance minister from january to july 2015 a short period but one in which he managed to be in the headlines in those days he resigned refusing to sign a loan
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agreement on the grounds it would worsen greece's economic circumstances which brought him into some conflict with angela merkel who's just uh leaving the international stage as german chancellor at the moment nowadays he is chair of political
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economy at the university of athens as well as visiting professor of political economy at king's college london a best-selling author of many books including another now dispatches from an alternative present
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bit of a clue there i think and a wonderful one actually which i remember talking to him about a few years ago called talking to my daughter about the economy a brief history of capitalism i once interviewed janice and said you're
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a bit of a champagne socialist aren't you he said no no not really but so i don't like champagne but i like very good white wine i hope that's still the case janice murpakis the floor is yours five minutes
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on can we fix capitalism thank you anne it is wonderful to be back not only the union chapel but also yeah with people in the same space
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okay now the problem with these um boys games you know oxford union debates is that uh the force upon us a dichotomy you know either either you're in favor of emotion or against
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emotion which is fun but not very helpful so allow me to answer the question in my own way i don't think it's an interesting question
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whether we should fix capitalism because capitalism and this is something that i have managed to convince myself of in the last year or so
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and with the subject of my next book i i think that 2021 is a little bit like the 1790s
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when adam smith was writing the wealth of nations in the sense that the world was feudal but there were small pockets of capitalism
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that were emerging that adam smith managed to cut onto you know glasgow university it was happening and just below him in the clyde valley he could see it but it was tiny it was a
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speck of capitalist dust in you know a desert of feudalism still adam smith managed to see that what was growing you know under
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his window in the clydes and in manchester and elsewhere uh was infecting feudalism and feudalism was not going to be on the way out even when marx was writing the communist manifesto and
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of course you know the first five six pages are appearing to capitalism really all about you know breaking down superstition and you know ushering in new technologies and so on
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it was a kind of prequel to globalization which was not actually taking place he was um ahead of his time i think we are in a similar moment i think that capitalism is on
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his way out not because the left one in our pathetic lot have managed to overthrow no we have not done that we if anything we have solidified capitalism i'm talking
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about the left through our orchestrated idiocy across many countries and continents no but capitalism is overthrowing itself in the same way that feudalism overthrew
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itself and here's some food for thought and for criticism by jillian look before we can have any meaningful discussion about capitalism we have to
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define our terms what is capitalism capitalism has transformed itself so magnificently over the centuries you know the capitalism of adam smith doesn't exist it's not the baker
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the brewer and the butcher since the second industrial revolution it was you know the henry ford's the edisons the large monopoly or the goblet capital then we had big government with
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the new deal and the great society then after that we had financialized capitalism or interior capitalism you know it really has this capacity to transform
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itself but throughout all these transformations capitalism retained two main characteristics first the fuel that drives it is profit
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profitability profit which then gets reinvested becomes new capital and the thing goes on the second characteristic of capitalism is markets
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the creation of the labor market following the enclosures uh the eviction of the peasants from the lands created a mass of workers who then became the proletariat the commodification of the land
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every process production process extraction process is happening through markets so profits and markets central pillars of capitalism
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looking around i already see it's at very early stage wherever we look at we see capitalist relations there's no doubt about that in the same way that wherever adam smith looked around him around the world it's
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mostly it was mostly feudal relations but i think that i can already see the end of capitalism because on the one hand profits have ceased to be the fuel
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of the economic system we have it is central bank money now without central bank money the whole thing collapses even the sectors that big tech and so on that are highly profitable
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they are squeezing out all the other sectors and participating in ending the markets and replacing them with platforms amazon facebook and so on they are not
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alternative markets they are new technological systems you enter amazon you exit the marketplace you exit capitals you enter a realm where everything that is being bought and sold is controlled by one algorithm one
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person one owner this is like a fifth dome only it's a techno techno victim so for me the question is not can we fix capitalism the question is
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is it true is my hunch right that we are already moving into a post-capitalist system which i call techno feudalism for
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want of a better term and given that this techno federalism is highly at odds with liberalism with adam smith not just with socialists
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what do we do how do we plan our collective strategy for not becoming techno peasants
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within this global technofeudalism you left us there hanging on a note where many of us have probably spent the day feeling like techno peasants one way or the other as we we struggled with the bits of technology which they told us
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long ago would make our lives easier and you know seem to take up about three hours of the day so that's a really interesting challenge and particularly i'm going to hang on to that final point we're going to hear a bit of to and fro conversation
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between our panelists in in just a moment which i'll moderate but we must hear from julian tet for the other side of the coin on fixing capitalism and no
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one better to discourse on that julian is chairman of the us editorial board and u.s editor in at large at the financial times she has covered capitalism i think in how many countries
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would you say over your career julian quite a lot quite a lot she said mystifyingly but certainly not only american capitalism but the uk asia you were based in japan for a while so you
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you have a truly global prism on this she's also co-founder of the very successful moral money section of the financial times which is dedicated to environmental social and
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governance i.e esg in the new linga news that investors and companies are increasingly embracing her new book is anthro vision how anthropology can explain business and life and she's a
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former academic anthropologist by background in her first degree so a very broad view of capitalism jillian what it means how it works and i'm suspecting how you think it
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might be fixed well thank you very much indeed and it's great to be here tonight i feel at a disadvantage with janice as my adversary because not only have i ever tried to run an economy but sitting
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here in islington he is on his home turf home pitch and i'm not but i'm going to try and defend capitalism but not the current form of capitalism
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because i'm trained as an anthropologist and one of the things anthropologists spend a lot of time doing is look at the gap between what people say they do and what they actually do between rhetoric between the rituals and
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symbols they aspire to and the actual lived reality and the core of my argument is that the capitalist flag the flag of adam smith that jan has talked about
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has been waved around a lot in recent years by politicians by business leaders by financiers yes by financial journalists but what we have today is not what adam smith sketched out
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to understand that you have to go back and realize that there are two books of adam smith and only one has been focused on in recent years the wealth of nations lays out a theory
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about why competition is good i happen to believe to channel i hate to say it boris johnson by quoting winston churchill that actually competition and profit is
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the worst way to organize an economy except for all the others that have been tried i say that having lived in the former soviet union where i did my research and seen other
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other visions um playing out but when adam smith laid out his two his vision of capitalism his vision of market forces he didn't use the word capitalism his vision of markets he had
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two books the wealth of nations about competition and trade and the theory of moral sentiments which is one of the inspirations for the moral money column which i co-founded at the financial times
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and that vision essentially argued that there were four components you needed to make markets effective you needed to have free access to markets people had to be able to take part in them
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you need to have free access to prices people needed to know what the prices were in a transparent way you needed to have an illusion of ownership between the people who managed ventures and actually owned them which
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in adam smith day were mostly family owned owned firms so it wasn't a problem and you needed to have a shared moral ethical and legal base which basically provided a foundation for people to have
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shared values and shared trust remember the roots of the word credit come from the latin to trust and without that it's very hard to have a market now if you dial back and think about what
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was happening two decades ago on wall street you can see that all four of those components were missing people did not have equal access to the markets because guess what it was
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powerful cartels on wall street and the city of london who were running the show they didn't have access to prices because yes you can get access to stock market prices but there's many other
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prices in finance that are not visible to the wider public there wasn't effective collision of ownership and management because guess what the people who were supposedly owning companies which is all of us for our
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pension funds tended to outsource that to asset managers who were largely asleep at the wheel and didn't understand what was happening inside companies or banks and there hasn't been a shared moral
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framework or even one could argue a legal and ethical framework essentially putting what's been happening in business and finance into the wider social context anthropologists are
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obsessed with context obsessed with a sense of consequence of what business and finance does i would argue that many of those shortcomings are found in other areas of
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modern capitalism such as the tech sector which janus just spoke about i'd actually agree with you that there is a fundamental problem of monopoly power of a lack of transparency
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of a lack of access inside the tech sector as well and so i would agree with you that capitalism actually isn't particularly effective there at the moment because we don't actually have that at the moment we have a gap between
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rhetoric and reality and yet i personally still think that that vision of competition that vision of using profits to be
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reinvested back in growth that idea that actually innovation occurs when you have some friction when you have a sense of personal responsibility
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that is still a good set of principles to be using to be driving an economy forward so for those reasons i remain a fan of adam smith when you look at both books
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and i'll leave you with two last ideas which again infuses how i see capitalism how i'd like to see capitalism play out as an anthropologist again i'm fascinated by words and language
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i don't know how many of you know here where the word company comes from originally i talk about it in my book it originally comes from latin from old old italian actually con paneo
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meaning with bread because companies were originally seen as groups of people who ate together and then did business together similarly i don't know how many of you know where the word finance comes from
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but it actually comes from old french veneer meaning to finish which sounds completely bizarre because people think that finance is basically never ending loops of money going round and round like sugar in a candy floss
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maker building a bigger bigger puff of speculation that's kind of meaningless but originally finance was about paying off blood debts and finishing actual tangible commercial transactions
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it was a means to an end not an end in itself so to go back to adam smith if you put those two books together the vision of capitalism that i uphold is one where companies are recognized to be about
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humans and groups of people competing together building things together and money is a means to an end the fuel that drives forward the economy and growth and i personally think that is a vision
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that we should be upholding and aspiring to today and i'll say last of all i realized janus and i both got the dark blue shirt memo so we may end up agreeing more than we're disagreeing and sadly
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effortlessly stylish i thought i'd just um just pick up a couple of points there to to question both of you janice she's just trying to put together a list in my head and it's a pretty obvious one but it goes
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something like this karl marx vladimir ilyich lenin stalin boo any number of post-war communist leaders and supporters after the great rift in
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in europe of course in in 1939-45 1968 radicalism maoism and on home turf jeremy corbyn um
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sort of in illustrious company um you see that the line of argument there's and each of them has seen the death rows of capitalism in some form and yet here we all are having a
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discussion about whether we can fix it what makes you think that this time it's different factor applies to 2021 you're quite right uh
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every socialist and account myself as one um has always been like a stopped clock that eventually tells the the right time
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you know we kept predicting a massive financial collapse ever since i was you know 10 and it happened in 2008 so eventually you know all our predictions come true
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it doesn't mean we will write analytically about it look why do i think that this time it's different
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to quote famous economists first i'll repeat some of the things i said but in a different manner hopefully helpfully
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take what happened in the summer of 2020 here in london i think it was the 12th of august when you had the announcement that
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your gdp fell by more than 20 for the first time in the history of british capitalism remember that august 2020 the market expectations were for a
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fall of about 12 13 it was much much more than that and yet 15 16 minutes later the london stock exchange went up that has never happened before in the history of capitalism
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why did it happen for a very logical reason because market players thought oh my god 20 plus then this immediately nanoseconds later they thought okay if we're panicking the bank of
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england are panicking so they're going to print loads of money and they will pump it in our direction okay to refloat the disaster so let's keep buying
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okay now this is simply a little tale that i tell in order to capture the manner in which financial markets have completely decoupled from really existing
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capitalism and if you think about it in 2008 we had in 1929 our generations 1929 the difference with 1929 was that unlike the hoover administration in the united
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states in 29 that let the banks fall uh the g7 g20 april 2009 gordon brown london decided to float them so they went into
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a spasm of printing mountain ranges of money to refloat the financial markets which they did very successfully proof that if they want to do something they do they do it right
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but ever since they did that and they did it in a staggered way the european central bank really began doing it in 2012 and then went all out in 2015 with mario draghi first of march but
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the way i see it now capitalism has completely been hooked on the central bank money and therefore why is jeff bezos 50 billion dollars richer than he was at
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the beginning of the pandemic it's not the profits of amazon of his businesses it is the increase in the share market because what happens is qe means that uh you know the central bank prints money
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they give it they effectively given a higher a larger overdraft to you know the bagless banks deutsche banks of the world they look at you people to say oh no
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we're not going to lend them because they're hopeless so they pick up the phone they call volkswagen siemens asks them you know google apple and they say do you want a few billion those people don't need money because they already
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have stashes of money which itself is a problem because corporations should be borrowing not not saving but they take their money because it's free and they take it and they go to the stock exchange and they buy back their own shares
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okay so now you have a bifurcation of of capitalism you have the companies that maintain profitability because it's not monopoly that they have
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for me amazon you know um general motors had a monopoly or an oligopoly amazon is different it's a platform it means that you exit capitalism you exit the market and you go into a place that
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where everything that is sold or bought are controlled by one company one algorithm that is very difficult because there's quite a lot in there janice let jillian come back on that qe quantitative easing money
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slashing just one one final phrase then i can throw it over to you yeah one final phrase so if [Music] if what i'm saying holds water then adam smith is simply not relevant
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he's as relevant as karl marx was in the soviet union when you were there in other words not at all so you're saying adam is not relevant because the financial markets today don't tie into the real economy and
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because essentially you have platform monopolies on technology yes and even the companies that are not platform companies through private equity takeovers they're being taken over loaded by with debt which is
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financialized those companies are then split up asset stripped so you have the squeezing of the capital sector of what adam smith would consider to be
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the capitalist sector you know the squeezing of it completely until all you have is central banks on the one hand financial markets and the platforms so let me turn around and
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say like this would you believe that competition is a good thing in an economy absolutely okay let me ask for questions do you believe that prices are useful
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yes yes i've read my highest okay i understand do you believe that profits are a good thing as an incentive and that you should reinvest profit back into ventures no
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but i do believe that no hang on wait wait because of you know after when you read this you'll see um there's a chapter in there called markets with without capitalism
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right so i in it i tried to answer your question by in this book i tried to create a blueprint of how we could have done things differently this is the book so in in my in my utopia
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in my in this utopia in the other now that i call it uh markets are essential because iris the anthropologist modeled after you right as you know uh she says that you know at some point
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that the only thing that stops uh authoritarianism and the soviet kind of gulag from descending upon us is markets and competition and freedom
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freedom of enterprise but the problem is that the the moment you have share markets that are being effectively turbocharged
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through central bank money and you have the financialization that you experience and you explain very nicely in the book then the competition dies so your basic argument is with equity markets and the current
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form of equity markets and stockholding companies if i understand it rightly i mean let me say this if you believe that competition is valuable if you believe that prices matter if you believe in a diversification of
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different roles and specialist functions and that's good i believe in all that okay well that doesn't make you sound very socialist with orbit or due respect well that is not true do you remember oscar lange
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sorry oscar lange right do you remember oscar yeah you may need to remind us 1920s one of friedrich von hagek's great adversaries the other was john manier keynes oscar lanky was a
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socialist communist actually who believed in not the center he was completely against the idea of of a central plan but he was in favor of what effectively i have tried to
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you know to map out in this book [Music] a market where let me give you an example right imagine a world where you join a corporation
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and you get one share in the same way that you enroll in university you get a library card and that library card that one share gives you one vote it allows you to do stuff you know borrow books participate in decision making and so on and then
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when you have to leave when you leave you take your capital out and you have to hand over your library card your one share now just for a moment go along with this imagine you have a
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market where you have competition between companies that are owned by those who happen to work in them and you have you
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you ask me whether i don't believe in profits no i don't because if you have that system you have net revenues because there's no distinction between profits and wages everybody profit shares and then you're going to chip in and ask you did say you
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believed in competition absolutely diversity so i wanted them what you're going to do with your prophets julian asked you that then you said and she said that's not socialist and you said well actually it is but then i was
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got a bit confused sorry this is of course but what would you do with the profits oh you reinvest them or you divide them so let's turn them out let me give you an example and this is this is this is a
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really existing example i won't mention the company but i've worked for that company back in 2011 2012. it's in washington state united states so imagine look it up look it up imagine a company where
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the revenue total revenue is divided in four parts one part is fixed costs rents and servers and stuff the second
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part is r d the third part is the basic income of everybody working from you know the janitor all the way to the arch designer and the fourth part is bonuses
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and imagine that the rnd segment is decided as a result of a vote where the members employees vote between
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different business plans that are presented once a year once every two years the basic pay the same and then bonuses are decided on the basis of the eurovision song contest scoring system
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where every employee gets 100 points but you can only distribute them award them to other people depending on your understanding your appreciation of their estimation so the problem is with yourself is actually quite good except
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britain would always lose you know this is a different corporate structure right the company wants to maximize its revenues there's no there is competition
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but there's no capitalism it doesn't and there's no distinction between wages and profits okay the idea that workers get skin in the game yes absolutely the idea they have some checks and balances and some involvement absolutely the idea
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you're going to organize 50 500 people into a committee to take through business decisions have you ever tried organizing 10 people into taking swift decisions well you
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know i'm greek so i can't organize myself i have five opinions therein lies my point because i think i think you have a slightly higher vision of what humans will do to left
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their own devices but it doesn't have to be a committee it doesn't have to be committed firstly in the company can you name one cooperative that has actually swelled in size and
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become a really effective operation okay let me tell you that the company i'm referring to had 350 employees and 1.2 billion dollars of revenue a year and it worked really very well with
00:32:20
complete flat management so why aren't there more companies copying that because they're being gobbled up this is why because you know think of the the trustee savings bank remember
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what happened to it it was gobbled up so the idea of cooperatives that work is well established from the 19th century in this country yeah cooperative banks cooperative supermarkets and so on that work
00:32:45
magnificently but in an environment in an economic environment where you know the the the large fish it's a smaller fish especially you know the smaller um energetic fish
00:32:58
what's happening in in silicon valley all the time but the issue you know google and so on they're destroying competition by buying them up so you know that company in particular right you have no no idea i mean i'm
00:33:10
sure you do uh the extent to which there were all these attempts by big money to buy it out and and it will it will go but that's a separate issue that's a separate issue because you're basically arguing two
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things on the one hand you have the question of what's the best way to organize a bunch of people who want to be in business and get money to fund that should they sit around as a happy cooperative and sing kumbaya doesn't have to be happy it's not going to be
00:33:36
happening i'm but that's one question i.e how do they get money to finance what they're doing um and the second question then is is there a regulatory structure to create a level playing field that stops the
00:33:50
winners from essentially taking all and buying up the other two separate questions this is great and i would agree on the second point that absolutely we need better umpires to create regulatory structures that stop
00:34:02
winners taking all and doing unfair competition comes back to my four points about adam smith on the question of how to organize companies um yes cooperatives can sometimes work yes i happen to think that with digital technology probably is getting easier to
00:34:15
organize that than before and digital transparency is changing things radically and i think in many ways maybe the savior of capitalism and i can talk about that if you want however i happen to think that in most cases the
00:34:29
ability to raise outside money from people who have a stake in the company which is called an equity market is a pretty efficient way of doing it unless and i would agree with you unless you have
00:34:43
central banks printing all the cash which essentially is distorting prices right now i don't like what the central banks have done in recent years yeah but you know what jillian it can't be otherwise we are in this situation where
00:34:54
now if central banks stop printing money the whole thing collapses so you're saying you don't like capitalism 2021 version but like what i'm saying is that that that you are being completely topic
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in you i think you talked absolutely you're being your topic well [Laughter] let's speak your topic in [Laughter] is more realistic than yours the idea of
00:35:29
going back to a capitalism that works is absolutely impossible now and you mentioned you said you talked about the importance of having empires of improper regulation it's impossible they will always be captured because the
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concentration of power now under this what i call technocriticalism is always going to be so gigantic that there is no government on this planet however well meaning its functionaries that can do it this is why
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i'm saying that if you really want competition and freedom and liberalism to be given a chance we need to move away from share markets we need to go to a system where
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you ask the question where where does the capital come coming from from savings we need to do that which adam smith recognized because adam smith was exactly on my side here he was
00:36:18
totally against public limited companies because he understood that the moment you have liquid ownership you have the ownership split up in tiny little pieces that can be traded anonymously in the stock exchange suddenly
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his prerequisites for a well-functioning competitive market are gone so why not just have pension funds automatic enrollment to have people owning asset you know mutual funds and
00:36:45
things like that providing some of the fuel for investing in companies and then combine that with radical digital transparency so that people can actually track what companies are doing and actually express
00:36:58
an idea of vote if they want to i'm going to move on because the pension funds are taking over the pension funds will always be taken over by those who happen to have a greater um
00:37:11
percentage so why not ownership than others they will all i mean look look at you know the three big you know state street vanguard and so on the control yeah 90 of the new york stock exchange
00:37:23
so you know who controls them so why not work on reforming the pension funds and getting better financial oversight and regulation and working with a system that appears to actually in many ways spark innovation
00:37:36
and growth it can be done better but why not work with that rather than aspire for something which has never actually materialized anywhere in the world on any scale effectively australian capital is never materialized anywhere in the
00:37:49
world until it did save it for the q a you're going to be first it's always good to know there's someone in the audience and in any case i'm arguing that is already evolving
00:38:05
a bit i want to move us on because i think we're in danger perhaps on the markets and models i did a little bit of a squeeze on julian on on one point that i've heard and this is the problem the big tech monopolies and what that means
00:38:18
and we need to remind ourselves the unprecedented levels of growth and consolidation yeah so what are you going to do about yeah well it's about facebook because what i'm saying is you know corporate law which says one
00:38:30
employee one share that kills off the power of facebook what is your proposal okay hang on it's more awkward right gosh it's through that you are behaving beautifully um
00:38:44
just in your way no what i was thinking about what you said about the regulator which was an interesting thought but look there's an example julian how many people eminent people in america and elsewhere run round in
00:38:58
circles saying we need better regulation than tech companies mark zuckerberg doesn't give a anyway it just doesn't happen this and the to this point i think janus is right to be pushing on this yeah it would appear to be an area
00:39:11
which is immune to the sort of reformist regulatory okay let me give my answer to facebook what i do about facebook and it's different from what you expect there's one thing that adam smith got totally wrong in fact several things but here's the most important thing for
00:39:24
today he thought that barter was an old-fashioned prehistoric practice that really just involved cavemen sitting around in caves swapping piles of
00:39:35
berries for meat and he presumed that barter would essentially die out once you invented money and credit he was a hundred percent wrong economists automatically assume that
00:39:47
barter is old-fashioned and doesn't matter anthropologists and i don't know if there are any anthropologists here tonight this is your moment anthropologists know that barter is actually something which
00:39:59
has often been around in many communities at the same time as money and credit anyone who's read david graber's wonderful book debt the first 5 000 years will know this but also it's gonna help us with the tech i'm gonna
00:40:12
tell you sparta is alive and well today big time because silicon valley actually runs off barter the wholesale swap of data for services that is the bedrock of much of the tech
00:40:25
sector today it does not involve money and we have no way of talking about it day to day except to say that it's free and we tend to only focus on one aspect of this which is how tech companies take
00:40:38
our data we don't look at the services the reason i say this is important because actually we're missing a lot of things that are happening in the economy today and also in terms of corporate valuations we're also missing something
00:40:50
that i would expect if i was to go to all of you in the room today and say would you like to pay for your services that you get from google facebook your email would you like to use money to buy
00:41:04
all that and in exchange they can't take your data or they'll pay you for it you might say well yes for privacy reasons but i guess that many of you would
00:41:15
actually say you know what i don't want the hassle of having to use money to pay for it i like getting free services so the reason i mentioned all this is really important if you want to reform tech today and
00:41:27
create a more ethical tech system you don't necessarily need to abolish barter you need to change the terms of trade of barter and that means essentially giving consumers more power in that bar to
00:41:41
trade which involves one more transparency about how data is being used more transparency about what the companies are doing inside the company with your data and most
00:41:53
crucially and this comes back to the power of market forces data portability if we had the ability to pull our data out of any tech company and go somewhere
00:42:06
else we'd actually have the beginnings of a proper market for our service for our us as customers if you put the on tech companies to
00:42:18
guarantee data portability then you'd get the beginnings of a proper market and i'll say two more things quickly i think that competition would be more effective in giving consumers power
00:42:30
and actually saying you know what i hate what facebook has done so i'm going to pull my data away and go somewhere else then it would actually be in terms of regulation and there is a model for it already and it's called finance
00:42:43
if you change your bank account today the onus is on the bank to ensure that your money goes from one bank to another it's not on you you don't have to go and basically physically you know get your pile of cash out and put it to another
00:42:56
bank that company is required to move the move your money that is what we should have for tech companies today along with better oversight along with looking at breaking up platform control
00:43:09
and monopolies in terms of vertical platforms but actually that is why consumer power and competition matters convinced yes and no let me start with another
00:43:22
okay i take that as a b-plus well you know that's what you get with when you have an economist on the one hand on the other hand remember what truman said i want a one-handed economist i'm convinced that we need to change
00:43:40
property rights over data over personal data so here we are on and actually in in in my topic um other now you'll find that there is a system called and if you haven't seen it
00:43:52
i'm going to show that you know i describe various systems one is you know how banking would work in my socialist market system and also how data should work and i have a system where i
00:44:08
came up with the label pending for your thoughts so you know tiny micropayments that are automatically made by people so that they can also own their own data so we're on on the same page on
00:44:22
this but what you're suggesting is not going it's not doing anything about the power of facebook anything about the power of amazon because let's face it the reason why people are in facebook is because everybody else is in facebook so it's economies of scaling the condoms of
00:44:35
scope and there is nothing you can do about that uh by changing the you know the system and one more thing teenagers aren't on facebook do you have kids teenagers wouldn't be seen dead on facebook
00:44:47
fashions change surprisingly fast okay whatever i mean the people who are on tick tock be on tick tock because the people they follow are on tick tock so this these are the network economies which you understand very well and when it comes
00:45:00
to amazon there is this technological structure that supports a whole economy that is a non-market and based on power and there's nothing you
00:45:11
can do about that if you stick to the idea of liquid property that is owned and traded in share markets i want to bring us to something else and of course feel free to come back to this so we just need to sort of move through a
00:45:24
couple more cycles of themes perhaps before we get to questions it would be very remiss i think on the road to cop26 not to talk about parole planet earth and the impact of capitalism on
00:45:36
planet earth and whether you think julian that green growth is possible i know you're a big if you can be a big cheese can you be a big cheese in esg a big environmentally friendly produced cheese
00:45:49
in this area suggest that you do believe in green growth but there are many reasons are there not if we look around the planet today and uh man made global warming to say that capitalism has played a very negative role in that and
00:46:01
to be rather skeptical yep i'd come back to the fourth part of the adam smith framework i laid out about the need to have a shared ethical moral legal vision and above all else a theme that i go on about in my book
00:46:14
which is the need to move from tunnel vision to lateral vision most of the tools that we developed in the late 20th century um to make sense of the world like economic models apologies honest because i know you're
00:46:25
an economist but these lovely economic models these lovely corporate balance sheets these lovely big data sets are all very bounded and marked by tunnel vision you don't need to apologize because i agree with you
00:46:37
i was trying to needle you but um but they basically treat everything that isn't inside the economic model or the balance sheet as an externality or a footprint something outside that model
00:46:49
and what i would argue is that one of the things that went very badly wrong with a lot of the corporate vision and the economic models was treating the environment as an externality they ignored who was
00:47:01
going to pay for the damage that was created or the cost of the natural resources they were that's quite a big flaw in the capitalist argument well if you could actually start measuring that and putting that into your models you start to get a very different vision of
00:47:14
how companies are valued how they're looking at the world there are ways of doing that and people are developing that impact weighted accounting impact weighted accounting esg accounting is going to thrill the ns
00:47:26
impact rated accounting well for that you need the the regulation that you are never going to be able to have as long as power is so heavily concentrated um let me give you an example because um i think
00:47:39
we didn't manage to meet and this hammer because uh half of greece because everything you just turned me down no because half of grace burned down and i was going from by the way you know that exactly is what happened actually in fairness just to
00:47:51
not be trying to and you missed you missed you missed an important part of my cv in these days you know i lead the political party in greece you presented me as if i'm an author and professor i did that that's a previous
00:48:03
life so you aspire to have power yeah but the reason why i mentioned the the the the fires is because look speaking of green growth okay um
00:48:19
i also believe that in in green growth but i also believe in green big growth there are things that need to grow and things that need to grow like we need less cement less co2 less of all the toxic derivatives the toxic fumes right
00:48:32
we need fewer of those fewer cars whether they're electric or not more public transport [Music] but going back to the forest fires in greece this summer
00:48:45
this is a failed state right but nevertheless when it comes to profit making it's very fast so the day after we were devastated and the flames died down
00:48:57
large corporations came and took over the attempt to prevent those uh forests from uh becoming mud baths with
00:49:10
the first rains so you think oh that's a good thing they came to to help shore up the you know the soil and all that first thing they did was to
00:49:21
offer contracts to the local population that effectively signed all their rights away for 20 euros a day okay forget that that's you could expect that the second thing
00:49:35
they did was they're trying to win um new contracts for replanting the forests using genetically modified trees that will grow very quickly
00:49:48
and they will give them the opportunity to in in the context of the green transition harvest biomass for the purposes of you know green energy
00:50:01
if we allow them to do this you're going to have under the cover of green growth you're going to have the devastation of the flora and the fauna of the land
00:50:14
and the conversion of these areas in heavy and so on into fifth domes of monsanto bayer who will have genetically poisoned the land while making it very green now
00:50:26
is this the green growth that we want this is the green growth that this market-based system not because it's a market but because monsanto is not a market toxic monolith let me come back to this point again
00:50:39
[Applause] as i said you are on your home pitch there there are numerous examples of green washing there's numerous examples of companies
00:50:52
and finances using the green label to do all kinds of egregious things that i would completely agree with however one of the other reasons i believe in competition is that i believe in checks and balances
00:51:05
and i don't think we can sit there and trust government alone to turn us green when back in the 1970s when milton friedman developed his vision of shareholder capitalism which i did not
00:51:18
agree with there were two things that were very different one back then people thought that they could outsource the really difficult decisions in life the social stuff to governments and companies just worried about their balance sheets
00:51:31
and secondly you did not have radical transparency and most people did not know what was actually happening inside companies today we have a world where no one actually trusts the government to get stuff done
00:51:44
and we have a world where all of you have cell phones with extraordinary levels of access to information if you choose and many aspects of corporate life are subject to radical transparency the
00:51:56
reason that you know so quickly about what was happening in those forests is precisely because of this radical transparency so i come back to the point it's not either all we don't need
00:52:08
government or companies to be green or ngos we actually benefit by having different groups in society doing this it is a good thing that actually we're not just relying on
00:52:21
the greek government alone to deal with replanting those forests it's good that we have citizens armed with cell phones giving you the data you just quoted and it's good that we've had companies coming in and feeling the need to do
00:52:34
something about it even if they are being essentially up driven by less than virtuous principles and even if some of the things they're doing are wrong many of the things that companies are doing today are better than they were
00:52:47
doing two or three decades ago so my question to you not giannis is this would you wind back the clock and have companies to go back to where they were 20 or 30 years ago would you only rely on government
00:53:00
the governments we have to shine us green because look back what's happened in the last decade it ain't been so good one of the reasons why companies where governments are under pressure to come to cop 26 and do something is partly
00:53:14
because there is a shift in zeitgeist amongst investors and businesses that reflect social shifts that comes back to radical transparency come back on that because we then must open up to a very
00:53:26
patient audience you're quite clearly mistaking me for for one of those socialists that likes the state i loaded the state in the same way that i load monsanto and bayer right so
00:53:38
my my worry julian is that the state and those large corporations are in cahoots they're working together and you know for you know i want diversity i want people
00:53:51
who live in these areas to be empowered to do things without either buyer monsanto you know descending upon them and effectively taking them over or the state saying oh i will fix everything
00:54:05
for you the question is how do you empower communities with their necessary capital the necessary expertise and leave them to their own devices in order to do stuff
00:54:17
i think that that is the future the future is for neither for living neither under the thumb of the state nor under the thumb of corporate capital those companies that go in there are not
00:54:31
going there to do anything good because of transparency by the way the transparency is an illusion because you know i'm telling you now what most of those people know
00:54:42
in those areas of the forests but i can tell you that not one television station not one radio station not one newspaper has ever reported on what is really happening on the ground they are owned by the same corporate
00:54:56
interests newsflash not everyone gets their news anymore from newspapers much like i'd love them to do it i'm afraid they do not even not newspapers but they do get it from even from the internet sites that have
00:55:09
the capacity to dominate the internet absolutely right you reminded me that you lead a a party a newish party in greece now called because we have the dm-25 movement in europe and in greek it's merit i'm going
00:55:35
to ask you just very briefly and i do want to go to questions we started a bit late we can only people here have got very busy social lives we'll have to let them go at some point um what about the wider world you know what about developing
00:55:47
china at the top scale of kind of importance in terms of of its uh economic output india and everything that flows from that it can be a bit comfortable perhaps for western progressives to sit in gatherings like
00:56:00
this saying what they think should happen on green growth do you think you could persuade people in countries who feel that they've come later to the fruits of capitalism perhaps in china yes you can call it state capitalism but it feels quite capitalist when you're in
00:56:12
it that they need to replace their economic model i have no doubt that the large majority of people in india in bangladesh in nigeria
00:56:23
in south africa in china itself do not want to play catch catch-up with the west in the sense of more cement more environmental destruction more destruction of their communities more
00:56:36
blocks of flats you know destroying their villages i'm sure that they would like to be empowered the difficulty that we have with people in indian bangladesh is the same difficult we have here in the united
00:56:48
kingdom in greece in france and germany and it is because you mentioned david graber the difficulty is to move away from thatcher's dogma of tina that there is no alternative to what david was saying
00:56:59
that everything could be different great fantastic what a great point at which to go to questions you can ask all the things we didn't get to this is the bit that gets like strictly come dancing for me because we've got an audience here we've got an audience at home and
00:57:13
as one of our producers pointed out tonight whatsapp isn't working because mark zuckerberg was having an off day so this bit is going to be really good fun please bear with me so if you're in the audience you'd like to ask a question well it's the good
00:57:25
old-fashioned way and we are in a a chapel uq up to the microphone stands which are at either side of the hall can someone sort of just give a wave to where they are if you could right thank
00:57:38
you what they said either side so you actually do have to come to the microphone we're not passing microphones around at the moment for obvious reasons if you are watching online you can ask
00:57:49
questions by putting them into the chat tab on the right hand side of your screen um what's this q and a button under the video hang on you're gonna you're gonna miss
00:58:01
the really good bit um the exciting bit is you can ask a question by clicking on the q a button under the video screen and press send yeah we're obviously we're obviously doing this uh and people have never used a computer before press send
00:58:14
people and somehow it's going to show up with me who knows how because i don't like the sound of this very much i'm going to start with people in the hall but if you are at home of course you are very much part of this live event so we will find
00:58:28
a way to turn to your questions too uh and it's i'm also supposed to tell you to tweet as well hashtag iq2 so now i've done it please tweet because otherwise they keep reminding me and
00:58:40
it's just terrible right who is it we have people a microphone well go for it if you're first in the queue hello [Music] yeah sure so
00:58:56
my question is sort of a a spin on one of the the prompt of this uh discussion which is just to ask is capitalism even possible or has it even been possible as a system of economic organization
00:59:10
uh because it seems as though the brief history of capitalism has been guided by technological advancement which in turn uh caused inequality which itself was a source necessary to finance uh that
00:59:24
growth of capital and my question is just when you look at the rise of wealth inequality and the gap between creditors and debtors that emerges from that um and then when you look at economic
00:59:36
recessions and the necessary uh need for uh uh just like you just come to the question if you would mind i think i got the inequality no i don't mean to be rude i'm so sorry yeah it's just this kind of everyone's just pleased to be able to see we've got a
00:59:49
lot of questions in short it seems as though you need government consistently in order to sustain capitalism that's after that thought panel i'm going to take a question from the other side as well hi uh my question is just focusing on
01:00:02
information because i think we said you know back in the day there was no asymmetry of information and today we have all the information that we need to make informed decisions and for markets to run efficiently
01:00:15
i would argue that actually there's do not think that to fix capitalism we need less asymmetry of information in the market i think that today there's more information but it's not the right information and without the right
01:00:27
information how are you supposed to fix these issues well you answer first janice and we'll flip over to julian just try to unite the two questions or take the one that most speaks to your views or fully formed prejudices
01:00:40
my reaction to your question is you reminded me of this great illusion that is motivated that you know capitalism is a system where
01:00:53
wealth is produced individually and then the state comes and socializes it when it's exactly the opposite and the state has always been part of the evolution of capitalism regarding information yes i mean information is
01:01:06
power and exorbitant power is goes hand in hand with the exorbitant asymmetry in information uh but it's you know this power comes
01:01:19
it's not simply based on information if i have a gun and you don't have a gun you know i have power over you if you're starving if your kids are going to bed hungry at night and the only way of getting you know some milk
01:01:33
or bread is uh you know to do whatever i ask you to do then that's not the question of the symmetry of information asymmetry information then comes on top
01:01:44
of it and it gives me even more of an extravagant exorbitant privilege over you um i would argue that if innovation is power then some elements of the power structures are changing today because in the past information really
01:01:57
was held very tightly by vertical hierarchies and trickled down or at least as they wanted today information is available to many many people and they may not have the ability to frame it and pass it it's still
01:02:10
concentrated i wouldn't pretend we have a complete the democratic information system at all but there's more information out there today than there ever was in the past and that has really interesting
01:02:22
implications i mean whether it's the leak of the papers that we've just seen the last pandora papers in the last 48 hours suddenly casting a spotlight in a way that would have been unimaginable 30
01:02:34
40 years ago whether it's things like hashtag metoo where suddenly women who had been fragmented powerless isolated managed to use an information
01:02:46
sharing platform to coalesce and actually topple some people and i wouldn't pretend for a millisecond that those that shift in power is complete or perfect whatsoever but it's striking compared to the past and back to your
01:02:58
point about capitalism has it been tried perfectly do we have examples absolutely not but i go back to that winston churchill point it's the worst system to organize an economy except for the others that have been
01:03:11
tried right let's roll on we'll keep questions and answers flowing pretty rapidly if we could just to get a lot of variety yes madam hello hi there my question is from miss tatt and those four factors from
01:03:23
the theory of moral sentiments that you mentioned my question is in this competitive system driven by profit where money is basically what you're uh where wealth is basically what you
01:03:34
are valued by isn't it inevitable that the winners of the system will co-opt the political system that is supposed to cre and therefore unequal access is inevitable yep i would argue that's one reason why
01:03:47
you need checks and balances okay we're going to take another question from here because it's perfectly balanced tonight impartiality but i just think it's just a good way of getting a load of questions in so another gentleman on the left like capitalism and short-termism
01:04:00
are like identical twins and essentially you have them hand-in-hand to have instant gratification to technology and also instantaneous markets but we live in a world where you have long-term problems for climate change and you need global coordination not
01:04:14
competition how is capitalism going to be compatible with that great questions from both great questions janice um quick replans if he could adam smith's idea was that through
01:04:27
the market conflict of interest turns into collaboration coordination but he himself knew the limits of this for instance when it came to education he thought that this doesn't work
01:04:41
the problem however is and this is an answer to both questions that you know if you look at the theory of moral sentiments which jillian did very well to bring up you know smith quite rightly explains
01:04:55
that the baker the the butcher and the brewer in order to provide the common good for the common good even though that's not their intention the intention is to make a living for themselves
01:05:07
they need to have a you know a bed of shared models and shared values on which to operate the problem is that with the second industrial revolution and now
01:05:20
especially with the digital revolution you have economies of scale in the economies of scope that destroy both the moral bed on which the baker
01:05:32
the brew and the butcher can operate as well as their businesses they are taken over by starbucks or whatever and then suddenly both the theory of the modern of moral sentiments and the wealth of nations goes out of the window
01:05:44
and we have what i think is can be described quite feasibly and reasonably as techno federalism that's why we need anti-monopoly laws that's why we need regulation that's why we need government it's not an either or
01:05:56
you know if you're going to play a good game of soccer you need to have an umpire you need to have agreed rules you need to have someone organize a league but you still need to have the players compete and that's why i'm calling you your
01:06:08
topic because it is impossible to have those rules in these governments when you have two parties both representing the techno feudal lords in parliament in every country well i would argue that actually doing without
01:06:21
the competition doing without the product motive without doing without the pricing because pricing i still think is an amazingly good mechanism for crystallizing probability and competition without without all that
01:06:33
that's even more utilized i agree that's why we need to do away with capitalism to have proper competition in proper property markets so you argue that socialist socialism done properly would include better markets and better companies that
01:06:46
is not a vision of socialism i've often seen well i'm you know i'm not your run of the military socialist what can i do [Applause] we call it socialism 3.0 those of you
01:07:00
who've watched federer nadal know that where that rally was going right um let's get a couple more questions and i've got a couple from our audience at home sorry to speed us up a little bit but we'll have to do that just to get the nice range of voices i'd
01:07:13
love to hear yes sir and then and any women would like to join the queue please do because men always do women not so much right we're up here oh my goodness hello is that what they did with you
01:07:28
listen if you have a question i'll come to you next not that i can actually see anything but you know it's great to know you're there so i should take this gentleman because i said i would a question for janice you described it's an unprecedented situation the
01:07:40
monopolies of the digital platforms and that capitalism can't recover from that but arguably the context of standard oil the rockefellers with railways and the fledgling sort of u.s capitalist states
01:07:51
in the 1890s was much more impactful in those days and through regulation capitalism was fixed jillian describes data transparency and governance and regulation why can't that fix the current situation with digital platforms
01:08:05
i have a supporter somewhere in the hall great was there a question from upstairs which might be a little difficult but i couldn't resist that call from the gods hi
01:08:17
it's me hello go ahead i was just wondering um what you all thought about like emerging um socialist societies like the zapatistas in mexico or stuff to that nature
01:08:32
could you just just that last about merging social societies was that the question societies yeah like like do you want an example like
01:08:49
um like like the zapatistas in mexico right sample okay hold your thoughts thank you well done by the way from getting in touch and there's another gentleman here thank you so much so uh i mean all three of us
01:09:02
i need to should come to the all right sorry sorry so both speakers today i think i also agree like we noticed that there is this um remarkable emergence and proliferation of these super companies
01:09:13
the corp governments but i was wondering why i was wondering why janice you think that this is a terminal point of capitalism rather than the some cyclical feature of the system when uh you know large
01:09:26
companies existed and were eventually gobbled up by governments the most notable example being the east india company and why cooperatives are going to replace them when cooperatives by their very nature have no incentives to reinvest
01:09:39
and expand their operations great quick points on each i will combine the standard oil question with this question about east india company the east indian government is a very interesting example because you see
01:09:51
if it was if capitalism was less of that it would never have succeeded the reason why capitalism succeeded was because it went beyond what the east indian government did with production not just simply
01:10:03
exploitation expropriation and trade and arbitrage but the standard oil questions is fascinating look rockefeller and standard oil was extremely powerful and you know theodore roosevelt amazingly well to break it up
01:10:17
and the anti-trust and legislation is um you know to be uploaded can we do the same no i don't think so i don't think we can do the same with amazon with facebook and let me tell you why standard oil was a monopoly
01:10:31
there was a market you know they managed to corner the market every petrol station in almost every state was owned by them by user market right
01:10:43
compare standard oil and contrast it with amazon imagine a science fiction horror movie where you know or scenario where you step out in bristol and suddenly you
01:10:56
realize as you're walking down the street that every building belongs to the same person everything that is being bought or sold is controlled by one person or the
01:11:09
algorithm owned by one person that the park bench on which you see it is controlled by the same person but moreover not only the air that you breathe but what you can see
01:11:22
and what you can't see is controlled by the same person this is worse than orwell that's amazon that is not a monopoly that the only thing i can imagine coming close to that is the fifth doom you know
01:11:34
downtown abbey the lord owns the whole thing only this time it's a technology and the power that that bestows upon the people who own it
01:11:47
and the people who own the people who own the people who own all the other companies that are fading within the capital israel is such that i do not believe it is possible to do that
01:11:58
which roosevelt did with standard oil try to go back to the questions if you could julian yeah just anything that hasn't i just wanted to go back to the issue about zapatista which was a very interesting point to make and i should say by the way that um as part of my
01:12:11
belief in the power of competition i also believe in pluralism in different models different types of companies i should say that i don't i am to believe that um societies and economies are best served and you have a divergence of ownership
01:12:24
structures and ownership models i don't think that having public equity markets listed um companies is the only way to run companies i think you should have checks and balances and going back to the issue about whether there are other ways to organize
01:12:36
societies i say bring on the experiments and let's see what works so by fiat had the same uh just trying to take a couple of thoughts and questions that have come in by carrier pigeon from the from those at home and
01:12:48
welcome thank you for staying with us selma asks is there a version of capitalism that wouldn't require constant growth of profit um i guess you would say no to that um i think there's a version of
01:13:00
capitalism where you could certainly introduce regulations that wouldn't introduce growth at all costs and ignoring the externalities and the footprint of companies but the imperative to have growth competition um
01:13:13
you know is a great driver of innovation okay let's get the lady over here hello um can capitalism exist without exploitation because frankly one of the arguments against capitalism is how
01:13:26
exploitative it is for people that it exists that exists in a way that rich people are able to stay so so like really affluent and
01:13:39
there are people that are that exist that are just like exceedingly poor so is there a world that exploitation cannot happen at all great question i think better brexit wrote about 25 plays about it so that's
01:13:51
a really big idea can i jump in there and say can you i'm not sure you can i think i'm going to take the other joke out first not because i'm in i'm just i'm i'm like i'd be right down that i think it's a great question i i just very conscious we could stay on a little bit we have
01:14:05
one more okay let's do this this gentleman my questions were julian so i hope you jump in on to this one um you spoke about how there is sort of radical transformation of technology and we have more information at our
01:14:17
fingertips so we can decide better but there was little discussion about the agency that people have so three quarters of the world or at least 40 percent of the world is living below the poverty line so they don't really have the agency of choosing whether or not to
01:14:31
interact with google or whoever uh so in that situation can capitalism be counted upon that now i can choose to interact with a company or not choose to interact based on where i'm placed so rather
01:14:43
interrelated questions as it turned out julian first the answer is that i would argue no you can't rely just on capitalism alone to fix that definitely not that's why you need government and regulation
01:14:56
however having better information is a good place to start and a good place to start getting people focused on trying to campaign for change and focusing on it because the key point is this can
01:15:08
capitalism exist without exploitation not if you believe that any competition produces winners or losers and if you think the competition spurs people to compete harder to fight harder and to innovate and help growth then
01:15:22
that's inevitable but what you can do is introduce checks and balances to actually rein in the egregious levels of exploitation and competition and prevent the winners from abusing the losers um
01:15:35
and prevent that being recycled over generations absolutely i would also turn around ask janice and say this my experience of looking at systems which claim to be socialist or run on
01:15:47
socialist systems principles is that they often have embedded insidious forms of exploitation of inequality but less acknowledged as
01:15:58
well i've yet to see a truly egalitarian socialist system well look i where we will agree is that we cannot have a society which is free
01:16:11
and worth living in and fighting for if it's not based on markets and competition here we can agree where we disagree is on is on private
01:16:23
ownership of things that are necessary in order to produce other things capital this is where this agreement is now jillian may very well say that and she would be right
01:16:35
that a market which operates without private ownership of means of production has never been tried before it's true what i'm saying is it is time to go for
01:16:47
it because the alternative which is regulating the beasts of uh um this capitalist system which i call technophilism by the way um
01:16:59
for me this is it's a question of which is going back to the to a previous uh altercation which is more eutopic to think that you can regulate this beast which is running out of control and is
01:17:12
seriously anti-liberal anti-democratic it's turning against the basic principles of liberalism remember friedrich von hayek the great guru of the libertarians even of thatcher once said that you know socialists are
01:17:24
not bad people he said about us the problem is that in order to enact socialism they have to do to do things that contradict their principles i reverse that and i'm saying that those who are advocating in favor of
01:17:37
capitalism but they're not you're not bad people you want good things and things that we share but in order to do it you will have to violate your own liberal principles let's take two more questions and for that may be what we have time for in the
01:17:49
hall we have one more up here hello is that another is that the voice from yes all right okay i'll take pity three they'll shoot me after you know what's gonna happen don't you the lady here and then up there and the
01:18:03
gentleman i'm afraid we'll have to compress them into one glorious round of just a minute off you go thank you so my question is directed to janice so one of the main points with which you seem to
01:18:14
differ with capitalism was on profits so you've mentioned as another alternative for the government making money just basically printing money which of course is not a sustainable solution in the long term so without companies being profit they're in a competitive
01:18:26
environment what incentive do companies really have to then fund those governments right hold that thought hello hello thank you um so my question is about power in both the visual utopic
01:18:40
visions that you've presented and there's something about what you said that assumes that inequalities will be eradicated once capitalism capitalism is either fixed or
01:18:52
completely taken over by something new but that doesn't account for what cedric robinson has written about racial capitalism and actually racial inequality and the black lives matter movement about it which is very
01:19:04
anti-capitalist so in your utopic models what very good that you brought that up actually that would have been a big big miss if we haven't had it i know sorry it's going to be extremely squeezed just the way our time is run but
01:19:18
you might both have a thought on that and i'll take the gentleman here as well just to i just wanted to get your views on how much of the issue with capitalism might be the over financialization of it because we
01:19:31
have a situation where global capital markets are now worth more than cumulative global gdp um and where does this stop does this break at some point or will the qe so you dealt with that a bit
01:19:44
earlier yep okay all right please please range range freely but i would like to hear certainly i would like to very much answer the second question because we didn't talk about as much as we should sure so who's going to have the last word oh just get
01:19:57
on with him do you want to have a go so you're going to have i don't me which depends on the pub closes but go no no i will go first so so jillian can have the last word oh i
01:20:10
see well okay okay so very briefly i hate doing this but i'll do it i explained this in the book seriously you know just in case you haven't i'm not saying that i'm explaining it in a convincing way but my answer to your
01:20:24
question is there how can you have a fully functioning market-based system which is technologically advanced free liberal democratic without capitalism it's in there i'm not going to try to emulate it
01:20:37
but let me say something about power racism and i will add patriarchy i don't believe that we have the answers to these things in my in you know this is a novel and in it i try to make it absolutely clear
01:20:50
that i do not believe that my side of politics even my very quaint version of socialism even if we manage to sort out all the problems with corporations with the power of capital
01:21:02
to exploit to reproduce itself and so on that we can deal with patriarchy or racism discrimination runs very deeply in our societies and you know we can reduce the toxicity
01:21:18
which always breeds more racism and more xenophobia and more sexism but i'm pessimistic about human nature we really need i you know i look into
01:21:31
myself and i find a nazi living in me a racist living in me a sexist living in me i constantly have battles with me with myself and anybody who tells me that you're not like that you're lying we are all
01:21:44
like this we all have a dark side and we all need to fight constantly against it [Applause] julian i would say that one of the messages that anthropology
01:21:57
tries to hammer home is that by immersing yourself in the lives of others who seem strange to you you don't just get empathy for another point of view and a vision of how you could do things differently you also get the ability to
01:22:10
look back at yourself with more clarity and understand yourself because the fish can't see water unless they jump out of their fishbowl and i think that's what we need to do today because we assume that the vision
01:22:23
of capitalism that we've seen in the last 20 or 30 years is the only vision of capitalism out there that could possibly exist and that's simply not true the profit principle the competition
01:22:35
principle the idea of trade has been expressed in many different ways markets have been expressed in many different ways too giannis now appears to be defining markets as something that you can have
01:22:48
in socialism great bring it on incorporate it back into a broader church of capitalism under that idea but my key point is this that actually it is possible to reimagine capitalism it is possible to
01:23:01
fix its flaws it is not a perfect system but capitalism and markets operate on the idea that you need to have a plurality of ideas and competition you need to have checks and balances
01:23:14
things move in cycles and right now we need to fix capitalism and i would argue we actually could with a combination of digital technology the fact you have more people empowered the fact we're
01:23:27
being forced to widen our lens beyond balance sheets to look at things like the environment and the very fact that we're having this debate today tonight where actually janice and i have probably ended up agreeing on more than
01:23:40
we've been disagreeing on the last question came in so i'm going to actually squeegee one in not looking at the organizers in case they tell me to get off but lauren sanchez had a great last question and this one fortunately you can answer
01:23:52
very few words she said please because otherwise we'll get kicked out who will be the biggest players in determining whether we do fix capitalism if it can be fixed thank you lawrence great question very last thought honestly julian and
01:24:06
then we take another vote it can't be fixed because it has evolved out of itself to no big players because doesn't matter capitalism is not a problem anymore i thought you're going to say we have
01:24:19
another problem capitalism in the same way if i'm right right in the same way that you know if we were having this discussion in the in 1800 how can we fix feudalism the answer is it's not relevant capitalism is already taking
01:24:33
over let's talk about capitalism i would say in the 1800s similarly today i'm saying capitalism is no longer relevant it's dead everything else is topical that we're discussing uh about how we can fix capitalism
01:24:46
democracy by means of you know regulation and so on it's a different beast we're facing and we're all going to be victims of it it's a highly liberal let's let's get julian's final final word and then the
01:24:59
vote uh who are the big players in this fixing capitalist who is going to address it or fix it well inevitably the next generation short and sweet absolutely great let's retake our vote let's see if anyone's
01:25:15
changed their mind since the beginning of our energetic debate who thinks capitalism albeit with tweaks and reforms and twiddles and regulation and whatever is still the best economic system we've got
01:25:30
hmm i don't know i don't think that's as many as when we started but i'm an entirely unfair judge and who thinks we need a completely new economic system well i don't know panel what do you
01:25:44
think uh who's who can give a view on i think that was fairly i think we lost do you think it would be fair who else is looking into the audience hannah did you have a look it's very hard to do these are boys games you should not be playing these boys games
01:25:57
who wonder who lost well you said that doesn't believe in competition and i do so so by default i win speaking speaking as the patriarchy
01:26:17
i think that uh perhaps some votes went from that original proposition i'm not sure where they landed because they seem to come out and it probably is down to the brilliance of us because it seemed to come out about 50 50 at the end so
01:26:29
there you are thank you so much to janice verofakis to julian for a great conversation [Applause] they will both as promised or threatened
01:26:48
be signing books at the back of the venue so if you'd like a copy do stick around and i'm sure they'll have a word with you as well they came in from athens and new york and i came from amwell street
01:27:00
it's been great thank you all so much where you came from thank you
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