Special Episode: An Interview With Dr. Richard Wolff
Nick Hauselman is out for the day, leaving Jared Yates Sexton to fill his chair - luckily, Jared was able to rope famed economist Dr. Richard Wolff to join him to talk about why economic news isn't everything, what's going on with the declining American empire, and so much more.
For those interested in joining Jared and the Pete Dominick crew for the Stand Up PodJam in Las Vegas/Henderson, NV March 22-March 23rd shindig, here's the link for tickets and other info: https://events.humanitix.com/stand-up-podjam
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He will be back for The Weekender on Friday, but I'm in a jam.
I need somebody that I can talk to on this show.
Somebody that can help me make sense of what's going on.
They got to be a humdinger of a guest.
It's got to be somebody who's smart, who's engaging, who hasn't been on the show before.
You know, this might be a good time to check out with one of my personal heroes, Dr. Richard Wolff, the economist, one of the best ones out there, and again, one of my personal heroes.
How about that?
The co-founder of Democracy at Work, the host of the internationally syndicated show Economic Update, and the author of several books including Understanding Marx and all kinds of other things that helped me understand economics and politics and the way the world works.
So yeah, how about we talk to Richard Wolff here in a little bit?
Yeah, I think that's a good ticket.
Before we get going, a couple of important housekeeping notes, including an exciting announcement.
So I am now confirmed that I am going to be a part of Friend of the Pod, Pete Dominick's stand-up podjam, I believe is what they're calling it.
On March 22nd, that's a Friday, and Saturday, March 23rd, that is in Las Vegas, or more specifically Henderson, Nevada at 1600 Wigwam Parkway.
1500 Wigwam Parkway on Friday, March 22nd.
This is big news, people.
I'm going to be doing my first live public bourbon talk.
That's right.
Friday night belongs to Jared A. Sexton and you.
You can come out, Henderson, Nevada.
Hang out on Friday.
Hang out while I drink bourbon.
I'll have a bottle of bourbon.
I'll have a glass.
Unless I decide to drink directly out of the glass.
Who knows?
What the hell?
It's Las Vegas, right?
Answer your questions and tons of other questions and generally hang out and have a good time, which I'm really looking forward to getting to meet Pete's audience and our audience and all that good stuff.
Then on Saturday, March 23rd, it's going to be an all-day leftist podcast bonanza.
Pete's stand-up podcast is going to have a live taping.
I'm going to be a part of that.
You're going to have other people such as Christian Finnegan.
I assume more names are to come.
It's very, very exciting.
But I heard a rumor.
There's a little rumor going around, and I know this rumor is going around because I started it.
There's a possibility that my friend and yours, Nick Halseman, co-host of the Muckrate Podcast, could very well end up in Las Vegas with me To tape, that's correct, the first live episode of the Muckrake Podcast.
So, that is going to be in Henderson, Nevada.
The location, it says 1600 Wigwam Parkway.
Tickets are on sale right now.
You can find the link to that in the show's notes today.
We're going to be selling these things to you for a while.
I'm really glad that Pete's doing this.
I'm glad that we're getting a bunch of these people together, a bunch of these podcasts together.
I think it's high time that we start creating a larger community that can interact with one another and possibly take some action and start to organize a few things.
I can't wait to hang out with everybody.
That, to me, is worth the price of admission.
To be honest, I'm not paying.
I'm going, you know.
But yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing people.
Looking forward to hanging out again.
That is Friday, March 22nd and Saturday, March 23rd.
I hope some of you can make it.
I would love to see some of the muckrakers out there.
Yeah, this is really exciting.
I'm pumped.
I'm really giddy.
Really, really giddy.
Reminder, go over to patreon.com slash mcgregg podcast to support the show.
It keeps us ad free.
I don't want to read ads at a time like this.
It keeps us editorially independent, which is pretty important considering how many people with leftist and progressive perspectives are being fired, let go from their jobs, losing sponsors, you name it.
We want to continue telling you like it is, and it keeps this podcast growing.
I mean, look at this.
We're possibly going to tape our first live show.
That's exciting.
We need to keep this thing growing so that as Patreon.com slash Montclair Podcast supports the show, and also make sure that you get to hear the weekly Weekender podcast on Fridays.
I see the numbers.
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You're loving it.
You can't get enough of it.
Come and join us.
patreon.com slash mcgreggpodcast.
I don't want to oversell this interview, but I absolutely loved getting to talk to Dr. Richard Wolff.
I mean it.
One of my personal heroes.
And we talked a while back on his show Economic Update, and I appreciated him so much, and I felt like, you know, I talk a lot, whether it's on a bourbon talk or on this show, like this is a lonely kind of existence, critiquing capitalism and neoliberalism in this environment and also, you know, calling authoritarianism what it is.
I felt a real kinship to Dr. Wolf, which was shocking, as this is somebody who I've looked up to for a very, very long time.
So if I sound excited in this interview, that is only because I was legitimately thrilled to talk to Dr. Wolfe.
I hope you enjoyed this conversation.
We will be back with the regular crew this Friday for The Weekender.
Again, patreon.com slash mcgreggpodcast.
And yeah, let's go talk to Dr. Wolfe, and that will take us to the end of the show.
All right.
Thanks, everybody.
Be safe.
All right, everybody, as promised, I'm here with Dr. Richard Wolff, who is Professor of Economics Emeritus at University of Massachusetts Amherst, the co-founder of Democracy at Work and host of the internationally syndicated show Economic Update.
He's the author of many, many books, including Democracy at Work, A Cure for Capitalism, and on a personal note, one of my dear, dear heroes.
Thank you for joining us, Dr. Wolff.
My pleasure.
And you're someone whose work I've learned about recently.
I should give you credit.
And my daughter, too.
I have a daughter that I love dearly.
And she took me aside, I don't know, a couple years ago and said, you have got to read this person.
And at that point, I had not yet come across your work.
I think the circles we travel in a little bit different, but maybe we'll fix that now.
But she was right.
She knows me real well, needless to say, and she understood that there was an affinity there that was… and I've been, you know, following ever since and really interested, so… Well, Dr. Wolf, that means the absolute world to me.
And thank you.
A very, very affectionate thank you to your daughter.
So this is a treat for me.
And, you know, I just want to start this off.
And I was hoping, as an expert, you could tell us.
The economy is great.
Why are people so upset?
Like, I mean, the numbers are wonderful.
Like, the stock market is just gangbusters.
Dr. Wolf, why can't people just be happy?
Yeah, you know, I find this one of the most Bizarre moments of American history, and that's not easy since there's a lot of them on offer these days, those moments, because it combines ignorance with
An arrogance, and a looking down your nose at people who disagree with you, with this sort of instantaneous presumption that they are completely in the wrong, and the only interesting thing about it is how they could be so far off base.
Wow!
You know, all of that in a moment of this peculiar notion That they don't get it, that they have an unhappiness that means we ought to investigate, I don't know, the music of Taylor Swift or something in order to come at it.
It's very strange.
So let me give you my standard answer to this question, and I'm going to do it by means of a simple metaphor.
If you're really feeling badly, so badly that you're not going to just rely on an aspirin or an orange juice or chicken soup, you're going to go to a doctor.
And you're going to go to a doctor because somebody you care about looks at you and says, you should see a doctor.
So you go to one, and now imagine this.
You go into his or her office, or their office, and They put a thermometer under your tongue and they wait the requisite minute or whatever it is and pull it out.
And there it is, 98.6 or whatever exactly it's supposed to be.
And the doctor says to you, huh, you're in great shape, go home.
And now you say to the doctor, wait a minute, if I were in great shape, I wouldn't have come here.
I would hope that you would leave that office You wouldn't understand exactly what was wrong with you, but you would know what doctor you would never visit again, because this person has just shown you that they are really — and there's no nice way to say this — incompetent.
Because we all know, right, doctors have blood tests, they have urine tests, they have x-rays, they have C scans, and I mean a list that overwhelms the rest of us who don't know this material.
And they're supposed to use all of that to gather a whole range of data, and then we're supposed to rely on them to Interpret the ups and downs, the signs that you're doing pretty well, and the signs that, well, you're not doing so well, and put them together and come up with a diagnosis.
Okay, the economy is exactly the same thing.
If you want to tell me what the condition of an economy is, there's lots of evidence, and you've got to look at a reasonably Justifiable collection of it before you start telling me anything.
Having said that, now let me give you an example.
We have the worst inequality of the American economic system in half a century.
It's gotten worse across the last 40-50 years pretty much in a straight line.
It hasn't been slowed down by boom and bust.
It wasn't even slowed down by the pandemic.
I mean, that is a statistic that screams problems at you.
Let me give you little ones.
I learned yesterday that the syphilis rate in the United States has taken off in the last two or three years, partly because of federal money used on a program to get people to be aware of syphilis because it's controllable.
We know how to deal with it as an illness.
It's not a death sentence the way it once was.
Okay, what is that?
What?
Why are we doing it?
The opioid crisis that at least we talk about, it's off the chart.
And we've had now, what is it, eight years, nine years of 100,000 people dying per year, or in that neighborhood anyway, and we haven't solved it.
We obviously haven't gotten to the root problems of it.
You know, what are you talking about?
The level of debt.
Now let me be a specialist, a doctor-like character.
The level of corporate debt in the United States is off the chart.
What do I mean?
Companies, large, small, medium, have been borrowing money over the last 20 years At a scale we've never seen before, which puts us in a new place.
We don't know whether the next economic downturn—and we have them every four to seven years—but the next one, the one, by the way, people are predicting this year or next year, we don't know quite how bad it'll be because we don't know how many people will be hit, not directly by the downturn, But indirectly, by the inability of people affected by the downturn to pay their accumulated debts.
But here it gets even more interesting.
Well, why are the corporations indebted?
Well, we've had three crashes in the new century.
The dot-com crash in 2000, the subprime mortgage crash in 2008, And the COVID-19 crash, so-called, over the last two or three years.
And the government's response — crazy, by the way — but the government's response has been to lower interest rates to levels we've never seen before.
We even had significant numbers of months during which the interest rate was below zero in significant parts of our monetary system.
Okay, unheard of.
Why?
Because the government was desperate to prevent these downturns from becoming Great Depression-like events.
Ten years written off like we did in the 1930s.
Not only does that show you that the people in charge of our economy were very clear how close we were to take such an extraordinary step,
But they also understood what I'm about to tell you, which is if you lower interest rates to next to nothing, you're basically hanging out a sign in front of the Federal Reserve saying to every corporation, every banker, every manufacturer, every service sector employer,
If you've got an economic problem, any problem, you're selling to a demand that's not there anymore.
People have lost their flavor for you.
They don't like what you do.
They don't like how you package it, whatever it is.
Or you mischose your technology.
You're not at the cutting edge.
You took the wrong road.
Whatever your problem, No matter whose fault it is, the quickest, easiest, and cheapest way to solve your problem was to borrow money, which was virtually costless, printed by the Federal Reserve and given to you at the drop of a hat.
Okay, everything I've just told you are signs of an economy in, to use a technical term, very deep doo-doo.
And this deep doo-doo doesn't go away because you can point to a cherry-picked number of data.
Unemployment rate of 3.7 percent, inflation only 3.5 percent, as opposed to the 7 or 9 percent it was a year ago, and on and on.
Are there data that are better than they were?
Yes, there are.
Are there data that are worse than they were?
Yes, they are.
The job of the economist who's not a phony, who's not a propagandist, paid off by somebody, by a presidential candidate, by a corporate interest sector, by you name it, if you're honest about it, you would never have the arrogant, ignorant gall Of saying to the American people, why are you unhappy?
They're unhappy for damn good reasons.
The middle class is gone.
The prospect of Americans that their children are going to live better than they did because they did that relative to their parents, that's not true anymore.
I'm a professor.
My students can't get jobs as regular professors.
They're all adjuncts, which is a weird name for somebody who does way more work than I ever did for way less money than I was ever paid.
I'm the last generation of people for whom an academic job will never make you rich, but it's comfortable.
I'm married, I have two children, I could live my American dream more or less.
I'm not Jeffrey Bezos, but I'm okay.
My wife works full-time, I should explain, and both my children are self-sufficient, and I count my blessings.
But yeah, my first reaction is, you're living at a time where — and I don't want to become morbid, and I understand people who are social critics maybe have a special responsibility when it comes to not — I don't want to depress people.
I really don't, because I feel optimistic myself about where we're going.
But I've got to tell you, it is a time in which You know, you need a George Orwell or an Aldous Huxley to explain to us how it has become possible to look at something that is black and insist that it's white, to look at something that smells awful and think it's the greatest aroma you ever encountered.
I mean, what is this?
You know, the war in Ukraine has been lost.
The rest is all BS.
What are you talking about?
This is very strange, this need to carry through pretenses.
Look at our political parties.
We thought we had put white supremacy behind us as a culture.
And there were a lot of people who hoped for that, and believed in that, and fought for that.
And here it is, right back, and with full energy, ready to go.
You know, wow!
You ought to stop and ask the hard question, why is that?
What has happened to the American people that they would decide to scapegoat the poorest people on earth, those immigrants coming from Central and Latin America, To do what immigrants have always come to the United States to do.
My relatives, your relatives, come.
And yet, people in America who will go to a parade in their town celebrating the heritage of the Germans who came umpteen years ago, or the Polish people who came, or the Irish, or whatever they were, They now hate the next group that comes.
I mean, wow, these are all signs.
You'd have to be — let me turn it around — you'd have to be crazy to talk about the mystery of why people are unhappy.
And let me conclude it.
The daughter who recommended you and my wife are both psychotherapists.
That's what they do for a living.
And if I didn't know, because it's not my field, but if I weren't married to them, you know, but we go for walks and we have dinner and we talk to each other.
And they're reporting to me a level of upset of their people that they have never seen before, the extent of it, the depth of it.
They're really worried that there is something which they as professionals haven't quite captured yet to help them help their people, their clients.
That's what they're there for, to help you through a hard period in your life, which we all have sooner or later.
But an awful lot of us are having it sooner, and there's not enough attention as to what is going on.
Yeah, I've been researching for my newest book because I fell down that rabbit hole as well.
You know, for the last book, I wanted to understand the history of how this stuff happened.
I want to talk to you about American decline in a minute.
But one of the things I found was the answers are very easy here.
You can dismiss Karl Marx all day long, but we know how these cycles work.
And if you understand that, it's the same thing as knowing how an engine works and all of a sudden the engine doesn't work and you understand it.
I think a lot of people in America don't have the educational background.
They're not educated about any of this.
They never come across any of this theory.
They're never given actual history or actual knowledge.
Meanwhile, the people who are supposed to explain it to them, whether it's the journalists, the pundits, the political class.
I don't know if you read David Brooks.
It's amazing that this man makes six to seven figures to write articles that say, I don't know what's going on.
It must be psychosomatic.
And meanwhile, I think what you're talking about, and what your people are talking about, and what everybody feels right now, is a larger circumstance.
There is a mental health crisis in this country, but it's not originating from nowhere.
It's the consequence of decades of neoliberal hyper-capitalism, redistribution of trillions of dollars, the death of a promise that we all thought we had, and on top of that, America is in decline.
We feel it.
We know it.
We look around.
We feel it.
We know that this game is getting more and more rigged.
And meanwhile, we're being gaslit by people who, I don't know how you feel about it.
I don't know if they know it.
I don't know if they have the knowledge or if they're in such delusion or what.
And I think that makes the feeling that much worse.
And that's where the panic and the fear comes from, I think.
First of all, I agree.
Let me amplify a couple of things where I think I can.
Most of the people where you ask that key question, I don't think they know.
Not because they don't have the tools to figure it out.
I think they have many of them.
I mean, many don't, of course, but I'm going to talk a little bit about those who have.
I'm going to give you an example in a moment, because I like to make fun of her.
There's nothing else than that.
So let me give you her name, and then you'll see the example comes out of it.
I'm the child of immigrants.
My mother was German, my father was French.
I speak French and German because I have since I've been a kid.
I didn't learn it in school, I learned it at home.
Unlike most immigrants, my parents, who were grateful that they survived here, they were refugees, they came to America to save their lives, and they saved them, and they're grateful.
I mean, they're dead now, but they were grateful through their lives.
But they never understood other refugees whose feeling of gratitude meant that they expunged from their children knowledge about, respect for, even acquaintanceship with the old country.
My parents were the opposite.
I had to learn German.
I had to learn French.
I had to learn Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach, and all of that.
And I am eternally grateful that they had that mentality because good friends of mine with similar parents didn't.
So I got that.
And one of the impulses that you have to cultivate if you're the child of immigrants like that is you are told You're an immigrant, you don't have any money, you're going to have to make it in this society, so your only way up—I mean, I'm not a boxer and I have no great athletic capability—is education.
You're going to be educated out of the dilemma you would otherwise face.
So, I'm a kid who works real hard to do real well.
My parents were such that I had to do everything very well across the board.
Otherwise, they would take me into the living room, a place from which I was normally banished, you know, because that was for company.
And I wasn't company, I was just a kid.
But they would take me in the living room and they would cry.
So you don't have to be a deep psychologist to understand that the pressure on you here becomes I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy.
Anyway, I had to go to the right schools.
I had to learn which they were, and then I had to do the proper everything to get into them.
Long story short, I did that.
And I finished my education at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, getting a master's degree in history, economics, and then a PhD in economics.
They had a special program for that.
In those days, people doing graduate work in economics were overwhelmingly male.
There were one or two women, but never very many, and Lord knows how they got through, but they did.
But you knew who they were because it was a room full of young men and then one or two women.
So, one of the women in my class was a young woman named Janet Yellen.
So, why do I bring this up?
She had the same teachers I did, sat in the same classroom I did, read the same material, mastered the same PhD exams, you know, the whole gamut, you know, over the same period, in the same environment.
I know what she knows because it's what I was taught as well.
But she never took it in any kind of social critical direction.
She just didn't.
I don't know her well enough.
We're not personally friendly, so I can't tell you why that is.
I couldn't venture to guess.
But I'm assuming, you know, her family didn't take her in that direction.
She's married to another economics professor who's actually a Nobel Prize winner out in California, blah, blah, blah.
She's part of the profession of economics, which, believe me, I know very well, being a part of it all my life.
They believe that they live in the United States of America, which is the greatest, best thing there ever was, or ever could be.
Does it have some flaws and problems?
Absolutely, it does.
But it has the capability, the mechanisms, the self-awareness to see them, to identify them, to solve them.
And she bespeaks a confidence there that if you're kind, you admire as real positivity.
If you're unkind, you would call it Self-delusion to the point of frightening in terms of where that might allow you to go.
And I think she, and I really I don't mean to pick her out, she's never done me any wrong, I don't mean any harm at all in the world, but she is to me what I have found among so many of my colleagues.
You know, I remember a story I went to Harvard as an undergraduate.
I told you, I went to the right school.
I went to Harvard as an undergraduate.
I remember early in my experience there, I raised my hand and asked a question about socialism.
It was a namby-pamby question.
It wasn't very good, but it had to do with something that was being said.
And I learned early in my life to look at the eyes of the teacher, to look into the face, to read the eyes.
And the eyes of the teacher, in this case a good teacher, a teacher who tried and from whom I learned things.
But the eyes were saying, please don't pursue this.
Please let go of this.
You know, I'm not a nasty person, so I stopped.
I don't want to—whoa, you know.
It's as if she had said in the middle of my question, I happened to step on her toe, and it hurt, you know.
Whoa, I'm sorry.
Back away.
She stopped me on the way out of class, and she said, how about you come and see me in my office hours next Tuesday at 4 o'clock or whatever they were, which I did.
And I told her, I saw something in your eyes, would you tell me?
And I mistake, you know, is that me?
Maybe it's not you.
No, she said, you see it right.
And she explained to me.
Nice woman, very nice woman.
And in fact, I won't mention her name because she's still around.
She said to me, if I answered your question in class, There'd be two or three other students in the class who inadvertently would find this material interesting.
Because it is, she said.
And they would begin to tell other people — their roommates, their boyfriend, their girlfriend, whatever — about Professor — her name — who's really good on socialism.
I can't do that.
My career is... I'm talking the 1960s and 70s in the American academic establishment, in the elite of the elite schools.
That's why today the economics profession, which knows everything I say because I'm just a product of that system, They know what I'm saying is true somewhere.
I didn't invent this.
Did I read Karl Marx?
You bet.
I learned at Harvard that there was this guy, Karl Marx, and he had really interesting things to say.
And when I read it, I went, wow, because now I had a new thing.
Now my teachers were no longer justified because I now understood it wasn't just their career.
It was a whole system that made it necessary to think that economics should be handled as a species of cheerleading rather than economic analysis.
If you want me to be blunt, my education at the most elite schools of this country was an education in the justification and rationalization of capitalism.
And no critical impulse was allowed.
And if you did talk about what were acceptably defined as problems, you had in the next breath to begin to elaborate How we handle.
So we have young poor people or we got social security.
You forget.
No one ever tells you that the whole capitalist class fought against social security.
That they want us now to give them credit The business community, having fought every progressive act this country has ever taken, whether it be Medicare or public schools.
The minute you do the research, it's all there.
It's not hidden.
That's one of the things your work does.
It beautifully brings forward, come on here, let's do a little bit of homework here, and you can see what's going on.
Yet we're surrounded by, and here I don't want to sound conspiratorial, but it's not easy for me to avoid it.
It's hard not to see what you mentioned before.
The media, the pundits, the academics, the journalists, the politicians in this kind of a
Mutual glad-handing society in which we pat each other on the back or shake each other's hands about how everything is really going to go great, and we're not going to let that Putin fellow do us in, and we're not going to this, and we're not going to that, and Joe Biden is going to go into the desert of Yemen and whack a few hooties.
I mean, you know, on one level it is so childish that it's embarrassing.
When I go out of this country, which I do sometimes, particularly Europe because I'm comfortable there, I encounter people for whom they don't need to look at the United States that way.
They're often not critical when they should be, and they're full of envy, which I understand, but it still leaves room for them to have some sense of criticism.
I get emails from relatives to this day reminding me that they have a little house in the back of their property in Switzerland or France and that I should know that if I need to I can come with my family and we can stay safely in that little shack back there so we don't get shot in the street by all the people with guns that are killing each other.
And I'm talking about people who are very well educated and traveled, but for them the United States is a frightening mystery.
It absolutely is.
And I want to touch on something that you were talking about in terms of Janet Yellen and a lot of these other sort of status quo sort of mainstream sort of people, the people who are in power.
One of the things that really struck me as I was doing research on the last book is it's a religion.
It literally is a belief in neoliberalism and hyper capitalism as if like somehow or another, it doesn't matter what the numbers do or what the crises are, like it all sort of comes out in the wash.
And meanwhile, it is almost a belief, because like you said, they do understand the crux of this thing.
They've got the education, they've looked at all this stuff.
We can sit here and say between us that capitalism is a parasite that jumps from one major body to the other.
It grows within it.
It uses nationalism.
It uses all of the structures and all the systems.
It jumped from Great Britain to the United States, and it's just about done with the United States now.
Yes.
And we know this from history.
We know it's happening.
But there's a hubris to it.
And it's almost like they believe, like, they have this mad, like, rabid dog on a chain, and they believe there's no way that dog will ever get off the chain, right?
It's a tenet of faith that this thing will never turn on them.
And meanwhile, what have we seen for the past few decades is everything that capitalism's doing uses the United States, uses its military, uses its systems, uses its power, and has used it to spread itself into a globalist system, That exploits everybody, and by the way, moves authoritarianism from every country and gets everybody and exploits everybody.
It would never happen to us though, right?
It will never ever happen to us, even though we're looking at neo-fascism now and we're looking at the exact same thing.
And I'm glad you brought up Social Security.
People forget that the industrialists, the wealth class, they wanted to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt.
We literally wanted to carry out a coup.
They supported fascists in Europe.
They supported fascists in the United States.
Meanwhile, we're watching this parasite.
It hasn't just grown like a tick.
It's almost like a body snatcher.
It's taken over the body and it's done with the body.
It's done with it.
It's looking for where to go next.
China looks pretty good!
And not just China, but Chinese-style authoritarianism that can go throughout the system and bring more exploitation and profit.
And meanwhile, I think it's that religious delusion that they really, truly believe whatever happens, they're going to get this thing fixed.
No, very good.
I was going to suggest we talk a little bit about it because I can see these days, this has been true now for about a year, when I first began about a year ago to talk about the end of the American empire and beginning to think about that.
Can we get together to talk to see whether Histories of the declines of previous empires or just general knowledge.
If we apply it to us, would it fit or would it teach us that that's not a phenomena we ought to pursue?
And the more I did it, the more I became persuaded it is exactly what holds it all together analytically.
But I also noticed That my audiences are paying more and more attention.
And that is consistent with what my wife and daughter are telling me about people having a sense that there is disorder in the world and it seems to be getting worse.
They don't understand why what's happening is happening.
But I do think that the United States is now
In the downward phase of its empire, and that the model of where it's going is presented to it by Great Britain, and that Great Britain, which once had an empire upon which the sun did not set, and is now a bad joke upon that idea, that the United States ought to be terrified of becoming a comparable joke
On that idea, you know, and I try to be productive and provocative without going too far.
But I'm noticing that as I go and see, oops, did I go too far?
I haven't hit the too far yet.
Even when I say, you know, I give an example just the other day.
We lost the war in Korea.
We lost the war in Vietnam.
We lost the war in Afghanistan.
We lost the war in Iraq.
We're in the process of losing it in Ukraine.
Do you think there might be a reason for all of this?
You know, the last war that you can unambiguously say we won was World War II, when we were allied to the Soviet Union, which, by the way, more than half of my students do not know.
That that's the case and do not understand how that would have been possible?
You know, they make fun of a senator from Alabama, the coach there.
Did you hear that story when he got himself into trouble?
He was boasting about his father, his daddy, who fought against the communists in World War II until the press corps around him helped him to understand that something is not working in this story, and he better fix it pretty soon, which he never did, by the way.
Anyway, no, I think it's I am scared in that way.
I am scared.
Because of my parents' history, because of my own education, I did a lot of work.
I wrote my thesis as an undergraduate on the Hitler regime.
I wrote my master's thesis on the experience of the communes in China.
I wrote my PhD dissertation at Yale on the economics of British colonialism in Africa.
So, I've kind of been always interested in the margins, you know, in the edges of the main story, but always in order to understand the main story.
And I think that, you know, in my Elderly time.
This is all kind of coming together.
Being a citizen of and a relatively rare product of a declining empire just at that moment, I'm kind of hopeful that that will give me a chance to write things and to say things that wouldn't have occurred if I'd lived 20 years earlier or 20 years later.
That's all most of us are.
You, me, folks like us, we are the products of our time through which it all speaks.
I would love to do things with you in an ongoing way just to cross-fertilize that whole process.
Well, I agree, and that is a great honor, and I would love that, because I have to tell you, I've never seen people more aware that capitalism as a system isn't working, and that it has reached a point where you can make arguments all you want for how capitalism with, like, an aggressive federal government can do this or do that, even though we see what always happens every single time.
I mean, the New Deal coalition could not last.
That's right.
But it does feel, and I was wondering if this lands correctly with you, it does not feel like there has been a broader consensus that capitalism, at least as it works right now, does not work.
And that it is not just unequal and damaging and oppressive, but that something has to change in order for any of this to go forward.
Does that sound right to you?
Yes, I think.
Here's what I would say.
The people at the top Don't think like that.
They don't believe that.
Any talk like that for them is immediately assimilated into a kind of caricature-ish mingling of conspiracy theory, Stalinism, just noise that they can comfortably brush away if they even bother doing that.
So, yeah.
Then there's a mass of people that are honest, think about these things a little, and they are frightened.
I think you're right.
They know something is terribly wrong, but they really are lost when it comes to explaining it.
They are vulnerable to really, I mean, come on, QAnon?
Really?
Because there are degrees of nuttiness in all of this stuff, you know?
You can be nutty, you can be really very nutty, and you can really be way out nutty.
And there's an awful lot of people that are, in no other part of their lives that I'm aware of, nutty.
I know them.
I've known them all my life.
But coming to this stuff, they become very, very nutty.
They really want me — and maybe you and I have to talk about this, we may not agree — but I try to look at them and I say, we're a country of 320 million people, whatever it is, and from what I've been told, undocumented immigrants in our country at this point might be 10, maybe 12, Okay, you don't need a PhD in economics.
You don't need a master's degree.
You don't need a single minute in a class to know that the 10 to 12 million of the poorest people on the planet are not a threat to the 320 million American People in one of the richest countries on earth.
I mean, they're an opportunity.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just a joke.
It's just what, you know, it's like convincing.
I used the example with children the other day.
If you go to the zoo and there's that building with the 27 elephants, And there's a mouse crawling, trying to eat the rice.
And the elephants are all backed up into a corner because there's a mouse on the ground.
And the kids start giggling because they understand the children.
Elephant large, mouse little.
This story is funny.
That shouldn't be.
The elephant should step on a mouse or otherwise solve the problem.
And yet here they are, adult people, giving me details.
I'm at my dentist here.
I live in Manhattan.
I'm in Manhattan now.
I go to a dentist.
Wonderful woman.
Really, just super, super.
Best dentist I ever had.
And she lives on Staten Island.
She's an immigrant from Romania, yet.
And she has two assistants.
And I'm talking to middle-aged women who help her as dental hygienists.
And one of them starts going off on immigrants.
She's — I know from her last name, and I know because I grew up with this — I know exactly which immigrant community she comes out of.
I make a very soft joke about it.
She giggles and laughs, of course, and we talk about her ethnicity.
And then it comes.
I kind of push a little.
Can you, I'm sorry about that.
Call from.
How, I ask her, how can you be kind of so harsh on that?
Oh, my ancestors came over here to work hard.
These people came over here to mooch off of the welfare system.
And I say to her, every member of your ethnic group had that said to them on the street where they live for the first 10 years they were here, hurting them, embarrassing them, frightening them.
Don't you want to save these?
You want them to have to go through it?
And there was no answer.
And I knew that I had brought the conversation to an end.
She wasn't going to pursue it.
It was clear that I had not persuaded her.
Maybe she'll think about it.
Maybe she won't.
But that or imagining that if you elect Donald Trump, I mean, my God, what a choice!
But it's an interesting choice because There's nothing to suggest competence, passion, commitment, nothing.
He's a low-life real estate hustler who abuses women and the people he has contracted.
It's wow, you know.
It's one of those experiences after which you want to wash your hands quickly lest any of it rubbed off.
And yet he can become It's sort of the genius of the human mind.
He can become the stand-in, the savior.
I see the t-shirts.
Trump is my savior.
These are religious people.
They don't use the language lightly.
They really mean that this man and Jesus are the same thing.
And I know what it means to take Jesus seriously.
They do.
I mean this is a compliment I wouldn't even dream of aspiring to.
He's already got it, and I didn't do any of the things that he did, you know.
It's just, I think for me these are signs of a severe social, you know, chaos.
It's just, it's like a population deciding that everybody, you know, I remember when I first read When I learned that the Holocaust wasn't just Jews, I read a book by a gypsy, one of the Roma community in that part of Europe, Romania, Bulgaria.
And what their families had gone through in Germany, where they were just passing through in their little caravans, but they were determined to be, you know, vermin, like Trump said, you know, bad blood.
And they were killed and tortured.
Their children were killed.
Whoa!
And I know the German mentality, I really do, and how a German person growing up in some North German Lutheran framework would be able to kill gypsy children, you know, You know that something must be terribly wrong here.
That's the only thing you can be sure of.
And so to say, oh, America's in great shape.
We're doing fine.
We are so much better.
I mean, it's just... Besides... I'm taking you afield, perhaps, here.
But you know, often it's statistically wrong also.
The Europeans Who are terrified right now about their situation, not because of the reason Americans feel.
They don't look at the United States the way Americans imagine.
They are going through the following agony, which will become their politics within a year.
It can be summed up as follows.
Maybe we bet on the wrong horse.
And when I explain that to people, I read French and German press almost every day.
I just, I do.
When I explain that to my American audiences, you can hear a pin drop.
It is an angle, which I'm going to be using now because of that.
It's an angle of approach to understanding that is so novel because no one here encounters that, you know.
Why would Spanish politicians be thinking like that?
Why would German politicians be thinking like that?
Why do you have this peculiar split in which the governments of Europe are all right, center-right governments, or worse, But what's coming up below is a very powerful left wing which is going to explode European culture in the months and years ahead in ways that you and I are going to be talking about.
No, I couldn't agree more.
And I'm optimistic about that because history tells us that, like, as this stuff gathers up and as the inequality gets worse and as the suffering gets worse, that's when that happens.
Yeah.
I'm very excited about that.
And I was very excited for this interview, Dr. Wolfe.
Again, the co-founder of Democracy at Work, the host of Economic Update and one of the best people out there.
Thank you so much for coming on, Dr. Wolfe.
Okay, and let me warn your audience that I'm going to be imposing a comparable invitation on you very shortly.
