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I am a capitalist,
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and after a 30-year career in capitalism
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spanning three dozen companies,
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generating tens of billions of dollars in market value,
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I'm not just in the top one percent, I'm in the top .01 percent of all earners.
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Today, I have come to share the secrets of our success,
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because rich capitalists like me have never been richer.
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So the question is, how do we do it?
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How do we manage to grab
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an ever-increasing share of the economic pie every year?
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Is it that rich people are smarter than we were 30 years ago?
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Is it that we're working harder than we once did?
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Are we taller, better looking?
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Sadly, no.
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It all comes down to just one thing:
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economics.
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Because, here's the dirty secret.
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There was a time in which the economics profession
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worked in the public interest,
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but in the neoliberal era,
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today,
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they work only for big corporations
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and billionaires,
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and that is creating a little bit of a problem.
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We could choose to enact economic policies
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that raise taxes on the rich,
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regulate powerful corporations or raise wages for workers.
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We have done it before.
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But neoliberal economists would warn
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that all of these policies would be a terrible mistake,
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because raising taxes always kills economic growth,
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and any form of government regulation
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is inefficient,
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and raising wages always kills jobs.
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Well, as a consequence of that thinking,
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over the last 30 years, in the USA alone,
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the top one percent has grown 21 trillion dollars richer
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while the bottom 50 percent have grown 900 billion dollars poorer,
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a pattern of widening inequality that has largely repeated itself
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across the world.
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And yet, as middle class families struggle to get by
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on wages that have not budged in about 40 years,
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neoliberal economists continue to warn that the only reasonable response
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to the painful dislocations of austerity and globalization
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is even more austerity and globalization.
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So, what is a society to do?
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Well, it's super clear to me what we need to do.
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We need a new economics.
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So, economics has been described as the dismal science,
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and for good reason, because as much as it is taught today,
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it isn't a science at all,
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in spite of all of the dazzling mathematics.
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In fact, a growing number of academics and practitioners
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have concluded that neoliberal economic theory is dangerously wrong
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and that today's growing crises of rising inequality
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and growing political instability
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are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
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What we now know is that the economics that made me so rich isn't just wrong,
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it's backwards,
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because it turns out
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it isn't capital that creates economic growth,
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it's people;
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and it isn't self-interest that promotes the public good,
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it's reciprocity;
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and it isn't competition that produces our prosperity,
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it's cooperation.
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What we can now see is that an economics that is neither just nor inclusive
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can never sustain the high levels of social cooperation
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necessary to enable a modern society to thrive.
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So where did we go wrong?
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Well, it turns out that it's become painfully obvious
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that the fundamental assumptions that undergird neoliberal economic theory
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are just objectively false,
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and so today first I want to take you through some of those mistaken assumptions
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and then after describe where the science suggests prosperity actually comes from.
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So, neoliberal economic assumption number one is
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that the market is an efficient equilibrium system,
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which basically means that if one thing in the economy, like wages, goes up,
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another thing in the economy, like jobs, must go down.
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So for example, in Seattle, where I live,
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when in 2014 we passed our nation's first 15 dollar minimum wage,
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the neoliberals freaked out over their precious equilibrium.
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"If you raise the price of labor," they warned,
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"businesses will purchase less of it.
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Thousands of low-wage workers will lose their jobs.
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The restaurants will close."
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Except ...
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they didn't.
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The unemployment rate fell dramatically.
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The restaurant business in Seattle boomed.
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Why?
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Because there is no equilibrium.
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Because raising wages doesn't kill jobs, it creates them;
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because, for instance,
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when restaurant owners are suddenly required to pay restaurant workers enough
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so that now even they can afford to eat in restaurants,
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it doesn't shrink the restaurant business,
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it grows it, obviously.
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(Applause)
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Thank you.
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The second assumption is
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that the price of something is always equal to its value,
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which basically means that if you earn 50,000 dollars a year
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and I earn 50 million dollars a year,
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that's because I produce a thousand times as much value as you.
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Now,
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it will not surprise you to learn
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that this is a very comforting assumption
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if you're a CEO paying yourself 50 million dollars a year
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but paying your workers poverty wages.
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But please, take it from somebody who has run dozens of businesses:
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this is nonsense.
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People are not paid what they are worth.
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They are paid what they have the power to negotiate,
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and wages' falling share of GDP
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is not because workers have become less productive
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but because employers have become more powerful.
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And --
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(Applause)
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And by pretending that the giant imbalance in power between capital and labor
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doesn't exist,
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neoliberal economic theory became essentially
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a protection racket for the rich.
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The third assumption, and by far the most pernicious,
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is a behavioral model
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that describes human beings as something called "homo economicus,"
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which basically means that we are all perfectly selfish,
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perfectly rational and relentlessly self-maximizing.
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But just ask yourselves,
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is it plausible that every single time for your entire life,
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when you did something nice for somebody else,
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all you were doing was maximizing your own utility?
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Is it plausible that when a soldier jumps on a grenade to defend fellow soldiers,
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they're just promoting their narrow self-interest?
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If you think that's nuts,
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contrary to any reasonable moral intuition,
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that's because it is
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and, according to the latest science,
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not true.
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But it is this behavioral model
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which is at the cold, cruel heart of neoliberal economics,
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and it is as morally corrosive
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as it is scientifically wrong
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because, if we accept at face value
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that humans are fundamentally selfish,
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and then we look around the world
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at all of the unambiguous prosperity in it,
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then it follows logically,
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then it must be true by definition,
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that billions of individual acts of selfishness
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magically transubstantiate into prosperity and the common good.
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If we humans are merely selfish maximizers,
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then selfishness is the cause of our prosperity.
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Under this economic logic,
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greed is good,
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widening inequality is efficient,
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and the only purpose of the corporation
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can be to enrich shareholders,
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because to do otherwise would be to slow economic growth
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and harm the economy overall.
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And it is this gospel of selfishness
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which forms the ideological cornerstone of neoliberal economics,
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a way of thinking which has produced economic policies
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which have enabled me and my rich buddies in the top one percent
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to grab virtually all of the benefits of growth over the last 40 years.
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But,
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if instead
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we accept the latest empirical research,
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real science, which correctly describes human beings
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as highly cooperative,
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reciprocal
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and intuitively moral creatures,
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then it follows logically
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that it must be cooperation
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and not selfishness
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that is the cause of our prosperity,
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and it isn't our self-interest
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but rather our inherent reciprocity
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that is humanity's economic superpower.
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So at the heart of this new economics
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is a story about ourselves that grants us permission to be our best selves,
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and, unlike the old economics,
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this is a story that is virtuous
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and also has the virtue of being true.
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Now,
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I want to emphasize that this new economics
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is not something I have personally imagined or invented.
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Its theories and models are being developed and refined
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in universities around the world
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building on some of the best new research in economics,
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complexity theory, evolutionary theory,
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psychology, anthropology and other disciplines.
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And although this new economics does not yet have its own textbook
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or even a commonly agreed upon name,
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in broad strokes
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its explanation of where prosperity comes from goes something like this.
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So, market capitalism is an evolutionary system
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in which prosperity emerges
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through a positive feedback loop
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between increasing amounts of innovation and increasing amounts of consumer demand.
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Innovation is the process by which we solve human problems,
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consumer demand is the mechanism through which the market selects
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for useful innovations,
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and as we solve more problems, we become more prosperous.
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But as we become more prosperous,
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our problems and solutions
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become more complex,
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and this increasing technical complexity
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requires ever higher levels of social and economic cooperation
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in order to produce the more highly specialized products
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that define a modern economy.
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Now, the old economics is correct, of course,
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that competition plays a crucial role in how markets work,
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but what it fails to see
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is that it is largely a competition between highly cooperative groups --
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competition between firms, competition between networks of firms,
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competition between nations --
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and anyone who has ever run a successful business knows
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that building a cooperative team by including the talents of everyone
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is almost always a better strategy than just a bunch of selfish jerks.
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So how do we leave neoliberalism behind
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and build a more sustainable, more prosperous
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and more equitable society?
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The new economics suggests just five rules of thumb.
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First is that successful economies are not jungles, they're gardens,
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which is to say that markets,
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like gardens, must be tended,
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that the market is the greatest social technology ever invented
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for solving human problems,
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but unconstrained by social norms or democratic regulation,
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markets inevitably create more problems than they solve.
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Climate change,
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the great financial crisis of 2008
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are two easy examples.
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The second rule is
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that inclusion creates economic growth.
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So the neoliberal idea
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that inclusion is this fancy luxury
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to be afforded if and when we have growth is both wrong and backwards.
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The economy is people.
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Including more people in more ways
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is what causes economic growth in market economies.
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The third principle
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is the purpose of the corporation is not merely to enrich shareholders.
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The greatest grift in contemporary economic life
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is the neoliberal idea that the only purpose of the corporation
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and the only responsibility of executives
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is to enrich themselves and shareholders.
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The new economics must and can insist
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that the purpose of the corporation
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is to improve the welfare of all stakeholders:
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customers, workers,