The GDP Myth and Government Policy: Late Capitalism a Survival Guide

Thanks to our Patreon members for helping to make this episode possible and we're now available on all the major podcasting platforms. You can find more information at the links below. Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to late capitalism of survival guide part two. Now, in part one, I made a couple of points and key is if you want to understand your own time, which is the most difficult time to think about in many ways because we're so blinded by our cultural assumptions, our own personal experiences, the narratives that surround us, all these sorts of issues that you can look at the places where people who are theoretically arguing with each other actually have a much deeper fundamental agreement.

If you can find that fundamental agreement and then interrogate it, often you'll see like, oh, here's the problem is the argument is taking place based on sort of some sort of mythology. This happens all the time. So when Catholics in Catholic countries and you know the 15th 16th century were arguing about Catholicism, they were really really arguing about I mean they're burning heritage at the stake there. This is not like just people disagreeing politely over lunch.

However, the underlying consensus was like, well, Catholicism is obviously true. We're just ask arguing about what that true means. And the problem for our governments is that they are captured in the logic of late capitalism way we are. They are equally baffled and they have all these assumptions that simply don't stand up to interrogation.

And so one of them I pointed out last time is liberals argue uh in this US context but in other contexts as well. The left tends to argue that oh all the productivity gains of the workers over the last 50 years are being stolen by the wealthy class and the industrial class and exploiting the workers and taking the wage growth and that's why our economies are in trouble. [clears throat] And then of course the other side is saying no no no this is how you get investment to the right place. you need to have opportunity for people and you need investors to be rewarded so the economy keeps growing.

And the problem with these arguments, as we noted last time, is that hey, you know what? There just hasn't been that much productivity gain ...