Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I don’t know if I’ve ever called myself one in writing, but I certainly do identify as a socialist. I broadly identify as a democratic socialist. I’m not particularly impressed, I’ve got to say, by the fact that the last 30 Nobel prize–winning economists haven’t been in favor of socialism. You’d be hard-pressed to find many socialists in the academy broadly. We’re always hearing about the way in which the university has been overtaken by Marxists, but look at philosophy. You almost get none. Why is this? Because universities — for all I love them and admire them and think they play, or can play, an important social function — are pretty class selecting. It’s no surprise to me that they skew very liberal and very centrist on the whole. I suppose the question is, look, what do you do about 21st-century capitalism? I think it’s uncontroversial, or should be uncontroversial, that capitalism — understood not just as an economic system that embraces markets because, at least on how I would use the notion, you can have market socialism — but an economic and a social system that is founded critically on a class distinction. We can also talk about racialized and gendered forms of capitalism. We won’t go into that, though, here, or we don’t have to. It’s uncontroversial, or should be, that capitalism, so understood, has been an extraordinary driver, trivially, of growth, but also of innovation, of the alleviation of mass poverty, of technology, of medicine. There’s no question, I think, about that. I just am pessimistic about the induction from that to the conclusion that capitalism is what we should be doing now. What are the other hallmarks of capitalism? Poverty amidst superabundance. I think that’s uncontroversial. A tendency to crisis and break, which always disproportionately harms the already worst off. The pandemic is a great example of this. A system that produces forms of work that are — we won’t even have to talk about the question of exploitation — but just are subjectively very alienating and immiserating for increasingly many people. And finally, a system that has produced the single most potent crisis humanity has ever faced, which is climate change. So, my question is, what’s next? What do you think? Do you think capitalism is going to solve all of those problems? I think scientific innovation — supported by government, to be clear — is our best chance of solving climate change as a problem. But I would put it this way. I’m a little worried that you’re resorting to a kind of genealogical fallacy in dismissing the 30 Nobel laureates as from a particular class background. I would agree they are. But they’re also really very, very smart people who’ve looked at the evidence, and they think it’s about tradeoffs, and it’s comparative. They think that true socialist economies perform worse on all, or at least most, of the metrics you cite. What is it, empirically, that you know that they don’t or I don’t? That’s where I see a big gap between us. What I know, and, in fact, I think they know and you know, is that we are in an extraordinary state of crisis. The other thing I haven’t even mentioned is the profound deficit of democracy that capitalism entails. The idea that the US is a democratic system is just a complete joke. The idea that what you’re going to have is just some campaign finance reform to fix that is ridiculous. The most important institutions of American political and social life aren’t democratically run. That’s true not just of the Supreme Court, but it’s also true of corporations. Are there tradeoffs? Could it be that there would be less growth? Yes. Is that okay? Yes. I think we need to be thinking about a de-growth economy. Is it the case that you’re going to maybe have less innovation? Possibly. Are we going to keep on going full steam ahead with a system that causes mass immiseration, that’s exploitative, deeply alienating, is not solving the problems that it says that the profit motive is somehow supposed to magically solve? I think that’s the question. Now, when you’re asking about what kind of socialist models, I’m not proposing — I don’t think any plausible socialist does propose — that what we need is a form of Soviet state socialism. I think what we need to be thinking about is the radical democratization of the institutions that shape political and social and family life. You’re very, very far away from that in the US. What I’m fundamentally interested in is power of people to make decisions directly — not indirectly, through a rigged voting system, which allows them to cast a symbolic vote every four years for one of basically two identical candidates. That’s not what we mean by democracy. I would hope you would agree as well. My question is, how do we have people exercising more direct control over the institutions that shape their lives, including corporate institutions?…

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