welcome them in very pleasant you very much and welcome to you and the audience welcome very much in the audience is a pleasure great personal pleasure welcome to the program dr richard war for rick as he likes to be called i think he's a ph d and a true honest to god scholar of economics he's a professor of economics at the university of massachusetts at amherst currently after a long and distinguished career and he has a resume that would as you say in the vernacular knock your socks off he's written mightily in terms of economics and it's a great pleasure richard to walk through the conversation thank you very much my pleasure as i said you would like to begin by just every share a little of your background i guess you come out of ohio originally because you share live where you're born and raised educated there was a shark about economics the current state of the american and world economy and in some theoretical understanding is that what's going on in terms of the u condition my folks left europe to get away from at all fittler and they landed and ended up through the kind of work of the american friends service committee in youngstown ohio so when i was born my father who had been a lawyer in europe got a job as a  steel worker in the youngstown sheet and tube company in youngstown traveled around a good bit as he was looking for work he finally got work in the new york area and we settle in i grew up in a town called new rochelle a suburb of new york forty five minutes from broadway something like that my education well i was the child of immigrants who were very determined that i make it in the in the new world and so i worked real hard and under a good bit of pressure and so i ended up going to all the right schools in those days those schools were open to immigrants kids so i went to harvard and then i went to finished my education in history the one thing that became clear to me was that i needed to understand the economy it was the part of history that this professors at harvard had a lot of trouble with they didn't want to go near it they were afraid of looking at the economic sides of things so it was a real deficit in my education and so i decided to remedy that by going to graduate school and economics and economics is really important to understanding these to go political in europe i mean right it's really important in terms of trying to understand all the realities of the absolute world in the most immediate kind of ways and yes and then it became clear to me that leaving the economic aspect of things out meant you'd have a very strange and incomplete understanding of history and therefore also of the present yeah you know i went to stanford and why did you have to go to stanford you get a degree scholarship or got a scholarship i was i was the herbert hoover scholar there because i had done well at harvard people tend to think that if you went to harvard there's something really special about you frankly i've never understood that but it is what happens and so it makes it easier for you later and i went to unfortunately in the spring of the year i came there he had a heart attack and died and so i wanted to come back east which is where i felt most comfortable you had thought of going there because of his yes that's what i thought of graduate school are those i got a masters degree in economics at stanford at the end of the year but i discovered a new program that had just started at yale university called the economic history program a combined economic mind and history where they say political economy political history and it's sort of a grounding for understanding history and realistic terms and they were open to mixing the history and economics that's exactly what i wanted they also were very generous in scholarship help for  me and since my folks were immigrants we had no money so i came back east and i finished my education at yale yeah so i got my ph d at yale and a couple more master's degrees so i'm a poster boy for american american boys makes well if you're ten years i lived in the ivy leagues and learned my economics and my history and got my degrees and then went on to teach yeah and you were at the best school harvard yale although i think what actually happened to me was that it was very good to go to those schools because having been there for ten years yeah at harvard stanford and y was mediocre in most cases there were a few professors that were good just as there are a few professors who were good at all schools but most of the professors there had as their main goal in life being famous getting lots of attention and running off to washington and writing books what they did in their classroom was usually the last on the list of important things in their lives and as a result they didn't do a particularly good job you have to to graduate student many cases did the lion's share of the work they were like indentured slavery yeah so yeah and sometimes you know what my students we weren't so upset about it because having had a few lectures from the professor i preferred the graduate get a better job since being a professor in terms of being able basically what i saw the brick form you were really engaged and well i like it yeah right i held obviously you did it helps if you really like it yeah i mean life in general yes yeah absolutely if you like life it's you're better off than what many americans don't understand including people who've been to college is that in ninety nine percent of the cases to be a professor in the united states does not require you at any time to take even an hour's seminar in how to teach it sort of assumed even though it makes no sense at all that if you have stayed in school long enough to get a ph d you are then somehow qualified to teach  that's a what we call in the old non sequitur or that doesn't work it makes no sense teaching is a skill that's why we have many schools of education in the united states because it's a complicated skill or art or craft and if you have most college teachers without any expertise in it you're going to get the result we have which is lots of very poor teaching now you have you have the old saw about those who can't do and those who can't teach which is that  about how the teacher schoolmarms it was a late teaching in the high school level or in the autumn elementary was a thing that was you know it wasn't thought of as something that was a and yet it may be of the highest calling actually being able to bring out from people educate means university will hire this person to be a research and it's understood they're being hired to conduct research and to write and to add to the store of written knowledge and support and pass on tasks and that you hire different people who have a different function that is they're mainly supposed to do that very complicated thing of collecting what's been accumulated and knowledge and finding a way effectively not only to teach it but to excite students about it and you don't ask the teacher to do this research and the research it's a recognition that there are different ways of being  scholar now in united states we don't do that we basically clump them together we demand of most professors if they do both things and what they've really been trained for is research and what they are forced to do and often don't want to do and therefore good at teaching where you know all the time with these students and the students are required to sit there and hour after hour together in a room with a person who doesn't want to be there and you can't even go to sleep if you want to know as you get a big book you build those big fa mr gibbon you could put in front of you to go to slavers of all nowadays an increasing number of students have those very tiny device and they're here i pod they had a nice smile listening not to you know they're not listening to you that's right and everything and then and then you know the thing a human being my favorite i think at a certain sense my favorite human beings are five year olds five year olds are so gorgeous they're soak honest in everything and they're curious about everything they're really curious and i saw a thing let me just out we want to talk about the economy but i saw a study once and i got a subjective gauge in my mind it's about ninety percent accurate in terms of the overall the group a psychologist took an measure of what they would call the creative state of consciousness or a being and then they link that to age and in every country across the world every cross culture it peaks around five and then it goes down right we're going to school then we're also learning a lot of things that our people are trying to teach  d they're like training people also there is an academic there's a discipline to that when you've got a thing where you're trying to please the person in terms of a grading system or you're going to get it vance and all the competition a lot of testing going on how to measure all that kind of thing and i think that might really well get in the way of the creativity or the interest on the part of the individual in something who's running down some to because they're really interested in and so i would like a hound dog after a fox what do you think you know i  term is coming more and more into the lives of many to people it's an old idea that periodically resurfaces when he leaves here in the united states when some honesty allows enough people to recognize that the educational system has major problems that cannot be solved by throwing more money at the problem or not be solved by this or that little rule there begins to be a grudging awareness that in  educate you have to involve the learner in a process of self discovery of discovering the world and that the teacher's job is to facilitate not to dominate and to system falls into that pattern and but it doesn't work well for education no not for a budget but it is one of the charges overall in a systems kind of way when it is teaching people to do with the told by an authority figure which is a very important thing so you'll fit into corporate think and all of our institutions are hierarchy oh and so forth it seems to me they're not really very creatively organized for me the central issue if i had to pick something yes please is in education the rule is that the teacher knows and the student is to copy the teacher the teacher tells the student this is right this is wrong the irony is the teacher themselves  constantly each of them caught up in relationships with colleagues disagree with them grabau many different issues they're constantly required to recognize that there are different ways of understanding how the world works different ways of approaching problem different ways of finding answers but instead of teaching an appreciation for differences learning for learning what they do is they teach right and wrong the child is is is culture dangerous and the only danger is for the process of learning but dangerous for any notion of democracy also demarc not only democracy but also the fact that the vedas have this thing they say there are no academic disciplines in reality it is we're talking a political economy his but really  seamless web everything is interconnected everything out and the idea of specializing in people get a specialized take on one thing then they become the greatest expert in the world in the use of the blue perfect tense in th century poetry in the south of france or something and then they would treat that endless endeavor fascinated with that and they get rewarded for being specialized and so forth but to see patterns in a creative kind of way between disciplines and at the interface where the disciplines interconnect is where the action is uncertain so we don't have a thing we don't have a department of everything in the university or something and i don't i'm saying yes i see this very clearly in my field in economics yes where lord knows and i teach courses in the history of economics is a discipline no discipline is as diverse and complicated as economics the whole history for three hundred years of thinking about the economy the whole history of that discipline is a history of radically different ways of understanding one of the commie is how it works why it has the problems it does what might be the solutions it's a universe of profound disagreement yet the irony the way it is taught in most schools in the united states is as if understanding the economy is no more complicated than understanding how your car works the carburetor does this the motor does there's a flaw in so told this is the way the economy works they are not told we don't agree on how the a drug works we don't agree on how to understand it and we look at different things that the world is a place of people of the breadth of approaches that they could otherwise bring to solving the real problems of our economy q they don't have that now they just have one little narrow technical approach and if that doesn't work they sit there before and a lot of people are trying to turn that into an exact science economics they can be done in a rather your time russian things like that and kind of all that on technical hand in terms of the practical realities i told you on the telephone yesterday that i had a program i did with as a cause of one time that great person had written on everything under the sun and the only discipline that he could not fathom he could not understand with economics the one thing you could write on and yet economics is more important probably than politics is probably more important in terms of everyday life than anything else but there's a tremendous confusion in the eyes glaze over when they consider the dismal science you know and i think it has something to do with what i just said that is i don't know isaac asimov but i would guess that what he a way to translate what he said would be the following when he went to school he learned economics is this thing here's how it works here's how to understand it here is what the problems are here is the solution very straightforward very mechanical but h gut and his brain had already told him the world is much more complicated than the simple minded models that economists work with and so there was a disconnect between the economy which in which after all every student thought because it looks different to the do people and so there's an awareness of complexity an awareness of difference of opinion and yet when you walk into a classroom all that is brushed aside you're given the simpleminded a little story and there's a  reaction and one of the ways to handle it is to say oh well this economics is not for me that was him that's what it is he couldn't do it and they do that but also it informs it that's a term we use it informs mightily the political process itself that we've put so much concentration upon you know because there is a theoretical understanding of what it is that is behind the political process which is economic in the economic questions are probably in every day world more significant than you have the right to vote every four years or something in terms of economic situation and we don't understand it you understand it well having taught the history of economics and you know certain thoughts on it and so forth and we want to talk about that kind of thing both theoretically because i guess it began about a more modern economics began around with the adam smith laws same time the steam engine came along and then we have the you know the ricardo interwar than classical and marshall and all that we have this kind of history of economic thinking and it's down to where do you think we have a proper understanding our leadership our political economic or even intellectual leadership has a proper understanding when economic model that the future would perhaps require altered vision from other than that which we were headed out of history or at we had a time for a new understanding not only politics but maybe of the whole evolution of events on this universe that we have a vision that is adequate to what the future requires or do we see big changes coming that are required in understanding i don't mean holocene i don't mean to repeat myself but basically i think the people in charge of the united states economy at least in the government part which is very much within a very limited framework that's how they analyze the problems that's how they find solutions and the american people already know how well they've done and let me give you just a couple of examples ok we had an extraordinary stock market boom in the nd half of the one thousand nine hundred and ninety yeah it took it took on a dimension unprecedented in history crazy upticks in value huge amounts of money made everybody understood this is very strange and the dominant view was this makes this is reasonable there special reasons for it is mr greenspan the head of the federal reserve assured us that that home you know at the helm of the assured us we're in a new economic system they called it the new economy everybody thought this was reasonable except for a few people who said but they were effectively kept  apart and frightening everybody you know the people who have been in charge have not done a good job and everyone kind of understands it but because of the narrowness no one kind it has either the courage or the training to go a little bit outside and once again ask whether some of those other ways of thinking about the economy and exist and examining it and coming up with different solutions might pay some sense might pay us to pay pay attention it's very hard to get people to do that if their training has been as narrow as the economics training has been and you can see in our classes in the university that more and more the kind of people who come to economics because they want to understand the world and change it for the better are pushed away because it's made so narrow and so technical that the students who stay are the technical student or engineering students who see it as a puzzle to be  awards going that way it's becoming a narrow technical specialty you know recently disconnected from what everybody else thinks you know the business world figured this out decades ago we have very peculiar thing in america we have economics departments which thought they were teaching economics but what they were teaching was so narrow and so technical and so much devoted to celebrating capitalism rather than understanding as a science they wanted as i said ions like mr community began to realize that the economics being taught was useless for their own needs yeah so we could have in america to pour two systems of training in economics what is called economics and the other one is called the business school  very strange they teach many of the same things it's just the business community is disgusted with what economics is and develop their own universe of teaching model you know if the labor movement in america  the same understanding and the same resources they would long ago of decided the same thing and created labor schools because the economics taught me university is as useless for trade union people as it has been shown to be for business we've had a number maybe we and we had marshall and then we had what we had the lanes we had schumpeter hajek friedman the monitors and so forth and when he said when mr nixon is it we're all now if you were to look out in the world what are we all now if we are anything is it all chicago is it all friedman is it all monitors ruing of things in terms of informing the political class and so forth that's operating this very  economy very good question and the answer has to do again with the culture of higher education particularly in economics because it's a narrow field it is so frightened of dealing with difference of dealing with debate and alternative that we can't in the united states we can't really accept that an economics department could be and indeed should be a how does the economy connect to fit in the largest society is thank you very much for that they have a term the war is too important to leave up to the generals economic questions too important to be left to the economists yes in their own little cubicle like monitor and they're not i understand for example that my perspective is different from other people in economics i don't find that terrifying i don't find that frightening it seems to me that a student must be presented with serious advocates of alternative perspectives doing the best job they can to articulate those and let the student here think and dare i say it choose freely among alternative perspective  economics profession is much too frightened to do that so we have a succession of fad of fads yeah in the in the period after world war two in the great depression keynesianism was not only the dominant but it pushed everything else out when so peculiar thing happened in america and ideology settled in that while work became ever more difficult rising productivity more use of machines greater intensity of work workers could suffer the intensity of labor in the united states because they got a payoff they got higher wages job might be a burden but you could go to the mall at the end of the day  that this is like a trauma this is like a shock this is like a frightening phenomenon that most americans are still not yet aware of haven't yet come to learn personal success with rising standard of living right the puritans told us that didn't they would matter never d absolutely so what does a working class the vast majority of americans what are they going to do if they measure their own self worth if their own sense of themselves of their meaning and their success in the world is measured by consumption but the wages they get per hour of work don't allow them to consume more they did two things st they put in more hours how they were going to stick a most americans don't know in the last twenty five years the average number of hours worked in western europe and countries like france germany italy and so on has dropped by about twenty  half the reason we have a big discussion in america about family values now because the pressure of lower wages sent everybody out to work and broke down whatever relationships were sustained inside the household used to be one man  in the fifty's you could ever work on a job they all the call that college everything's gone or that's gone and it's a race to the bottom the globalization right trapping markets around the nd thing they did beside working more is in order to keep spending more and buying more to make themselves feel good cards you send your kid to school on a borrowed budget it's it's overwhelming and no one knows no one knows what's going to happen to an economy that is now beginning to run out of the capacity of borrowing more because they have borrowed up to here yeah the wages are still tending down there's no more hours you can put in now we already the working population most dependent on drugs of any in the world as well as most dependent on  understand meanwhile the public discourse coming out of economics professor everything's great nothing to worry about fourteen thousand and the people of the top twenty percent or so are doing very well by it's heading for that then you've got globalization going on the shipping jobs to china like crazy they're taking advantage of slave wagered ecological ignoring of things and so forth in those countries and so what heading for that but beyond that there's also lord keynes when he said beyond the about now he said you are going to be confronted with something you can't see now but you are going to be current we're going to be confronted with massive technological displacement of labor now i don't know if that's the case because all of our  er our basic grounding policy statement for the united states is still the employment act of one thousand nine hundred and forty six it's like the basic pa we are going to distribute income to everybody and all of your politician it will only be distributing of income through their labor participation in part a having a job that's the way they're going to distribute income and yet we have technological instruments and other aspects to the productive process other than labor are now are now increasingly more responsible for the actual production and those let's call them assets i'm not sure if we could relate them in another kind of way because they go verman bonds us over there part of the overall structure but they're all owned by a tiny group plutocratic miniscule plutocratic class and it seems to be we accept that somehow that it's all right for a small group of people to own virtually all of the capital the all the other than labor aspects of production and i wonder is that based on that labor theory of value and would  you've studied this the labor theory of value is that all production is done by human labor and everything it's ok for a small group of plutocrats to own the capital assets that represent think everything other than labor and that that is what's becoming responsible in the trends are on a world scale that's what's becoming responsible increasingly for production other than other than labor why do we accept the idea that it's ok for a small group of people to own it rather than democrat democratic ownership of technological instruments i say technology is a as another word for capital assets or something why don't we have a uprising or something to where we democratize the ownership of the machines that are increasingly responsible for production which could bring could bring back perhaps greater capital formation economic distribution and leisure as many of the people so rather than keeping everybody in a treadmill and they were going to distribute all income to the masses of the people and they all there like the feudal estate they own all the assets and we're picking up police and they set the template for the whole society and we're just picking up leaves on their estate why do we accept that well could you  maybe it begins with this labor theory of value this been associated with marx in large measure and you've done a lot of study of marx but it's also basically fundamental to all of the economic theory it seems to me virtually this been used to try and rationalize political of society throughout history and it is today well the labor of the theory of the labor theory of value is one of those ideas like god or like happiness that have meant very different things to very different people thank you and so it's been put to use in a variety of ways adam smith and david ricardo looked upon as the founders of economics as a modern discipline both found the labor theory of value that they understood to be useful to understanding what's going on in the economy and the idea of the is really quite simple that human beings have from day one  used tools and equipment to make things better in their lives to produce goods and services that they need but that in the end the really scarce feeling in our community is people people at the point of what we produce to make people's lives better and people are the ultimate resource a machine does not work by itself it will does not work by itself not yet a certain point well maybe but we haven't got there and it wouldn't be bad if it did no no it would be good to put people out of the economic productive process because that's the way in which they all get their sense of identity by their think that's a lot major way in which people get a sense of identity and it may be that there are other patterns by which we should  d the work ethic and bowing down to the work ethic and that kind of thing and meanwhile these guys get richer as they sleep by owning the gene that some guys pushing the button toward and there's a trend in that direction right i think that yeah yeah i agree with that but i think let me finish my sorry sorry i'm sorry no problem marx's the st one who used the idea of the labor theory of value to really make the point you're trying to get after to say look if what makes things valuable in the end is labor and if what can help labor produce it well i'd say you said he would that prove that premise right but yeah ok ok i'm sorry you may not disagree with the way i do wrap so if machines are also able to find technology let's call it also a land or land drucker's and it is right well let me go through the argument ok if you take the worker away things can't be produced we need people to produce it and the same applies to the land and the same applies say to the machines but what this same does not apply if you take away the owner of the machines or the owner of the land to be brutally honest the owner of the land can be pushed aside the land is still there  the machines owner can be pushed aside the machine is still there and it was the laborers who built the machine and it was the laborers who built a lot of it and the land owner sure as hell didn't make the land ok so we have the possibility to say look if workers make the machines and the machines then help future workers to be more productive than they otherwise would it is perfectly reasonable to say that the produce of human issues not the market not the merc not the market not the more good we eliminate the market would you want to eliminate yes rather part private sector my guess is that more we already eliminate markets in lots of places ok let me give an example that is that sometimes people enjoy i tell the story of a thanksgiving dinner and your family gathers around you make your turkey and your young daughter who has been taking an economics course at the university but is home for thanksgiving having learned about how efficient markets are and how appropriate they are and how wonderfully they work at the end of the thanksgiving dinner grandma leans across the table and asks louise to please take out the disgusting yes this is a family we all love each other we don't ask money from one another there's we don't do things by exchanging quid pro quo i'll do the garbage if you give me three dollars  if the way you would creep each other is i'll give you three dollars for this if you give me two dog everything's a transaction right yeah well what the people are thinking that way but what the father was explaining to the daughter if i can translate his language is the market may be ok outside the household but it is the enemy of love inside the handle not only the house but if i the society but if society right but here's the point you're out there eight hours a day in a society is teaching you necessarily you're doing all role outside in this society right if the market is yeah but they're also at the bottom line here that i think markets contrary to what is taught in economics markets have not been universally recognized by people as the efficient way perfect example or an artwork he's going to get down it's going to get down to my way of think it's going to get down to where somebody who produces a work of art would no more think of selling it or monetising it then they would think of asking money for sex or asking or are selling their hundreds of examples if i if i ask you to go for a walk with me i'm feeling kind of law is going to cost you three bucks right for my imagination can you imagine we would both have a moral repugnant feeling right about such as yeah but you know that's not fundamentally different from s t in the question look i need to build a hospital here because people are sick so i'm going to need some steel and i'm going to need some bricks to build a hospital a week before i can finish my sentence i've got to pay money to the steel make up and go to me well the question is not do we have to take care of one another of course we do the steelmaking has to earn an income and the coal maker it's not a question of recognising that we need each other it's a question of asking is the market the way to united states as economics fundamentalism you know he has become as dominant as religious fundamentalism and playing much the same social role ok now what about if you take it you say the market and you say the market that's the market in there but where you're talking about is production of thing and we walked around in the serengeti plain and you know there's been some progress and i mean we've got things going and we now have an internet we now have my dad was born in one thousand nine hundred and nine in the died and was buried in his forty eight birthday was the average age of somebody born in one thousand nine hundred and nine is now up in the seventy's that's something called progress there are some progress and we grew older there's been some progress made in everything it has to do with human effort and also it has to do with technology there it's all made by machines and so what the machines have been made by people turning out cheesecake and so what and those machines that are producing the wealth one and the trying to support the machines just uses a metaphor because it's more complicated because you get finance and that kind of thing but that process is more and more able to produce a greater amount of yes of capability and of the things that are needed from the material world and so forth so that this progress be made even to the point where maybe we're transcending scarcity which has been the law in which all human institutions are we may be coming to a time where we're going to have app blue and it's comfortable or affluent leisure and i see marxist talking often about transcending scarcity there's some other people and so we're we're coming to a point where maybe at the end of this process we're coming to a new situation in terms of the ontology or the reality where there's nothing wrong with having a television set or a computer or a good functioning automobile and all the progress of the modern world and everybody should have a right to have that particularly with good the word progress in order to cover a complicated and contradictory situation with the vinny year as though it weren't complicated and contradictory but it was all basically good that's what progress  careful the life expectancy in say russia and parts of eastern europe now and africa has been going down in the last twenty years that's on it again you know the gap between the life situation of the entire continent of africa and much of the rest of the world has got worse oh yeah there's no progress there are diseases decimating huge populations that shouldn't be hurting anybody we may have been able to produce more but our skill at sharing it is to make a decent life for ourselves on this planet system scale for everybody so i wouldn't say it's all us i would seem to me if we have reaming out for us you know if africa was in difficulty forty years ago and we have made a tremendous increase in wealth since then and africa is worse off that screens as a golden child talked about their work so that we're getting to a point and we do have hygiene i mean it used to be pretty grim when the slaves are all wallowing around in the mud and feudal estates and so bored out of history james joyce that history of the night will not you don't think it's getting  better let's say let's say capability the capability that we have is getting better to the point where perhaps we're coming to a point where we are able to overcome the scourges of the ancient scourges for everybody we don't have a system distribution because it's all a bunch of mafia dons fighting with protection at rackets coerce the people and they don't have a vision because all of our institutions were formulated within a context in history there was valid  but we've transcended it perhaps that's a positive view of the use of technology for the good use of the benefiting the homo's that all of humanity plus the ecology and that we have a capability just as we have weapon systems now that can destroy the whole species that we're coming to a time of qualitative transformation in the evolution of our eye on the system on the i understand that what you're saying to be a hope i do not understand it as a description let me again give us try to say with an example one of the achievements we have in the western world has to do with food production now but if you study closely for example be enormous role played in the enhanced amount of the diets here in the united states of corn production now corn as a central commodity corn is the feed for the animals and so on and if you read you know michael pollan's on the voice dilemma or a dozen other modern works you will discuss you will discover that the achievement of more food has had to go together with the destruction of large portions of our health by virtue of the chemicals used to produce that food you will discover that the ecological damage in the course of becoming mano cultural dependence on color is very serious and whose long term consequences we are only beginning to discover this is not  that's not an argument that we haven't got more and better food but it is an argument that to call it a kind of progress is that it is often playing the role of oak looting from us of of not facing the way this system matches its progress with horrific and unnecessary costs and inequalities is one of them that have to be confronted and so i'm i'm upset usually when i hear about progress but it's part of a song that is attempting to prevent us from seeing or coping with the sides of our society that say to us today as they have four hundred and fifty years yes you've made  compared to what this country could be oh yeah and what this society could have in the way of a life for its people you're falling as short if not shorter than in the past i'll be darned you think that right is out there are you optimistic we're a couple minutes left optimistic pessimistic for the human prospect in an age where we have weapons systems that it we can be told with modeled good efficient understanding that if there unleashed and we have all these danger signs and the fighting over things would mean the end of our species the end of this home annoyed line of evolution of consciousness we've got a telescope that's going to take the measure of the whole universe within one millisecond of  and even though you have the capability to do it you won't allow systems to come in they were allow us to do what we're capable of doing because you know are you optimistic for the human prospect or do you think maybe we're going to blow it all up well i'm going to answer by quoting to  person who whose work i admire and has influenced me a lot and his answer when he was asked this question was my intellect is pessimistic but my will is optimist ok thank you but it has all mystery and it's history but it has always provoked people to fight against it and i find as much to be hopeful for in the constant recurring demand of people not to let this go on  as i am pessimistic about how long they've been able to do a good and its attention and if those who are demanding that this thing not going any longer what prescriptions would there be in your estimation of how lucky for you to have a term we need an operating manual for space ship earth you get it you get it microwave you get it operating man you how the damned thing works something and base is a lack of understanding of economics that would take into account that perhaps the labor import to production is less and less and we ought to do i would think to democratize ownership of the means of production we put it as a way of forming capital and as a way of distributing income rather than depending upon putting it all through a labor criteria which is not serving as a very well and is major the major problem confronting us perhaps is the labor theory of value in forming the political and social process of understanding things as a thesis i would put it slightly different ok i would think so  put it this way we have to as a people come willing and able to ask a question that has so far been kept taboo and off the table  get a minute and a half to get it in use haiku ok ok what we have done is tried to think of changing the tax policy trying to change a government and it's our problem is in the organization of how we produce the goods and services and upon which we depend and distribute that's right produce them distribute them that whole operation to this moment we have a mass of people who do the work and a tiny group of people who make the key decisions in a modern corporation in the machines that i do most of the production in a modern corporation it's the mass of workers and the board of directors average size of board of directors in this country is sixteen people the average size of their employees can range in the hundreds of thousands so as long as we leave that in place as long as the people who run the american enterprises or boards of directors responsible for the shareholders who put them there we'd better run a credit can't have a taboo that can even be discussed well one of the taboos that might be able to be brought up is this idea since it informs all economic theory virtually all economic there is this labor theory of value we're going to distribute to the people through their labor while the assets that are built up are owned by a small group so ok it doesn't matter who owns it that question is going to have to be addressed and you've got to bring the people in on being related to the way things are being produced rather than a work ethic that is coming out of date with what is required is another idea a could be put on the table obviously i agree with you do agree that and you're going to distribute then you would be distributing to them according to their production their contribution to production