YouSaid · the spoken record

Steve Keen

lines on the record: 271
first: 2022-07-17
most recent: 2022-07-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Get better and better and better, better. Oh, yeah. I think that's just too much processing power. But you're going to have some confines. You can't go. I mean, if you look at the models to do the weather, they used to be of that 100 kilometer, I think, or about 10 kilometer grids now. I don't know. So, the processing powers let us get more and more precise that way. I do know that the models now include chemical mixing that occurs above cities. Added that complexity to them over time.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rectangles, whatever oblongs. That's how they're modeling the transition of whether from one location to another. So they've got a chunky vision of the plant, which they have to. They can't model down to the last molecule. So you're losing.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then in a thousand days, you'll have no data whatsoever because each time you're losing an order of magnitude of accuracy. So that's the point about the inability to predict for the very long future. But what you can just say, well, there's a prediction horizon. If we're close enough to our statistical measurement of where we are is close enough to where we actually are and our forecast horizon is narrow enough to not extrapolate too far, then for this and forward, we can make a reasonable fist of predicting what the weather's going to be. And that's the foundation of meteorological, the stuff we watch on TV. Most of the time the forecasts are going to be correct these days. 40, 50 years ago, most of the time the forecasts were wrong. So that's the background foundation to these GCMs. But even they've got a massively simplified world. So you have this enormous sphere of where they might divide it down to 100 kilometre by 100 kilometer by 10 kilometers.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And of course, that's the first model which we saw chaos theory, complexity, that beautiful, simple model, three variables, three parameters, an incredible complexity out of the system. And what that meant was you also had an exponential decay in the accuracy of your model over time. So, if you're accurate to a thousand decimal places,”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't actually. I think the sea level one is a poor argument, and I don't focus on it. What I mainly focus upon is the weather patterns. And if you look at, like we got the other, the wheat belt in America goes through what Idaho and places like that. And you've got an incredibly deep topsoil, Ukraine is another classic example. The depth of the topsoil in Ukraine is remarkable. And that's the wheat bowl of Europe. And that requires both right temperature for growing wheat and the right rainfall for growing wheat. Now when you look at the models that climate scientists are building of that, you have pretty much your ultimate foundation is the Lorenz model of turbulent flow.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's Tumo, in that case, yeah. I mean, to me, what we should be looking at is saying, what are the scientists saying are the consequences, probable consequences, not guaranteed, but probable consequences of increasing the energy level of the atmosphere by the amount we're doing?”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incredibly And this is like Bjorn Lomborg styles himself as the skeptical environmentalist and criticizes the environmental models. He doesn't take a look, he doesn't criticize the work come out by economists You look at it, it's so bad.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incredible stupidity at the arrogance, assumptions which you look at it and think, how did anybody let that get published?”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, his model, this is what really pisses me off about these people. It's the worst work I've read in 50 years of being a critic of neoclassical economics. The GCM is the one scientists produce, of course, include precipitation as well as temperature. The IAMs that the economists produce, and this is stated yet again in a paper in 2021, do not include precipitation. They simply have temperature. So they assume that if temperature improves by moving towards a temperature which is better for producing aquaculture, then so will precipitation. Now that's completely wrong. They've left out a crucial, imagine trying to model the climate while ignoring the fact that there's rainfall. What they've done. So their work is so bad, so dreadfully bad, it should never have been published. I'm going to go for them. Sorry, this is”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two and a half degree Celsius increase in average global temperature, then the proportion of the Earth's surface which is suitable for producing wheat will fall from 20% to 7%. Proportion for corn, similar sort of fall, the proportion suitable for rice will go from 2% to 3%. Now, that means a catastrophic, and that's the word used in the report, catastrophic collapse in food production. So that's what we're toying with. We are one and a half. We're actually less than halfway there to that two degrees, 2.5. And economists, on the other hand, and this is Richard Toll has published a paper 2016 claiming using what he calls an integrated assessment model that economists developed, that losing the Gulf Stream would increase global GDP by 1.1%.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Instead, we're blasting it right out of that range. And we know some of the past climates that have existed then. We can model what they imply for our food production systems, for example, not the only example, but obviously crucial. So when you look at what are called global climate models produced by scientists, one of the examples, and it was published by the OECD last year, 2021, in the chapter on what would happen if we lose what's called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, and people would colloquially know that as the Gulf Stream. And that's what distributes heat around all the oceans of the planet. It's part of a huge chain called the Thermohaline Circulation. But the part that goes across from the equator to the North Atlantic, that's called the Amok and Gulf Stream for a colloquial way. If that disappears in the context of a...”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And like when we've seen some of the storms that are happening now in Europe, the ones that washed away a village in Germany some time ago, the firestorm that hit Canada of all places. I've forgotten the name of the town that was burnt down. But enormous temperatures in Canada. Again, the storms that have been happening back in Australia, these are all manifestations of a complete shift in the weather patterns of the planet. And they can wipe out a village just disappears. It's wiped out by unprecedented rains. And this keeps on happening. We are still living in a sedentary lifestyle when we're a nomadic species. So to be able to maintain that sedentary lifestyle, we do need to engineer the planet. We need to keep it within that range of plus half a degree Celsius minus half a degree, which is really what it's been like for the last 10, 12,000 years.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're blasting it well and truly out of those confines. And my way of interpreting what climate change means is the stability of that climate that enables to build sedentary civilizations and not being a nomadic species is being destroyed.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We built our societies in a period of extreme stability of the climate. And when you look at the long-term temperature records, it's up and down like a seesaw like a sawtooth blade between, say, one degree warmer than now and four degrees or six degrees core over the last million years. But when you look at where we evolved, it's just at a turning point on the peak of one of those ups and downs. I've forgotten the name of the cycles, but the cycles caused by changes in the Earth's rotation around the sun. And so we evolved our civilization just at the top. So coming up from a cold period, and then we're going to head down to another cold period. And that's when human civilization came along. It's about a period of about 12,000 years. Across that period, the temperature has changed by not much more than half a degree up and down.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is not at all what is meant by climate change. It's meant changing the entire pattern of the weather system of the planet. For example, the most extreme form of climate change would be a breakdown in the three circulation cells that exist in each hemisphere, the Hadley cell, the Ferrar cell, I think it's called, in the polar cell, zero to 30, 30 to 60, 60 to 90. Those are the main bubbles, if you like, in the atmosphere. Now, if we get enough increase in the energy, just like you turn the temperature up on a stove and you have nice bubbles occurring in a pot of soup and then turn the temperature up and they all break down and you've got bubbles everywhere, that's called the equitable climate. If that happens, then most of the rainfall is going to occur between zero and 20 and 70 and 90 and the middle is going to be dry, except for extreme storms.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I haven't even tried to make the numbers. I'm reading what the scientists write. Okay, and what the economists have done, and like this is William Nordhouse in particular, Nobel Prize winner, ex-president of the American Economic Association, literally assumed that a roof will protect you from climate change. He didn't say it in those words. What he said was 87% of American industry occurs in carefully controlled environments, which will not be subject to climate change. Now, the only things that all have manufacturing, all of services, he included mining as well, forgetting about open cut mining government activities and the finance sector, all they have in common is they happen underneath a roof. He's basically saying climate affects weather. Okay. Now,”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not when they're systemic. You can insure against episodic events if you occasionally have a really bad storm, but in general the weather's not so bad that all the infrastructure is being destroyed, then you can share that around on a percentage basis. If you had a Gaussian distribution for your events and you don't, the mean doesn't move around too much and the standard deviation doesn't change all that much, then insurance works fine. But if you have, if that's episodic, If you have systemic stuff where the climate is changing completely and you're going to wipe out your agricultural capabilities, you simply can't do insurance on that front. You can't make a profit out of catastrophe and capitalism.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's 50 masks. That's 20 masks per person. Oh, that's too many. Let's just make 50 million masks. That's one mask per person. It was gone in a matter of a day. And therefore that's why they told us, well, masks don't work. You know, what they meant was we don't have enough masks for our health people, let alone for you and the public. So we're going to bullshit you and tell you those masks don't really work. And then people don't wear masks and then we've got enough masks. We rush up the production job. And by the time it comes along, people have got the skepticism about masks.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing is, maybe it shouldn't have been as small as it was. I mean, my favorite instance of that actually involves the UK because the whole neoliberal approach is about small, efficient government. Well, small efficient government works when you face small efficient challenges, when you face something systemic rather than episodic, then it's going to break down. And like this is, I mean, one of the things I greatly respect is Taleb's idea of anti-fragile. You want a society which is anti-fragile, not easily broken. Whereas neoliberalism has pushed us towards this vision of efficiency, but it's easily snapped. Like in the UK, I've forgotten the government minister involved, but she asked her expert committee, how many, this is before, well before the pandemic, how many masks should we have on hand in case of a pandemic? And the answer from the experts was about a billion.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't see them around here. It's a very human centric vision we have of this planet. And we're going to pay a price for that.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That has to do is that if you wish to impose dramatic controls on the consumption of the rich, which would be necessary to reduce our consumption burden so that we can get closer to the ecological envelope we've destroyed already, then you're going to be more likely successful doing that with a centralized system where people accept centralized political control than you were in a country where it's all diversified and you screams freedom between every point in a tennis match. I've literally seen that when I was in Philadelphia some time back. So the ideology that accepts a collectivist attitude may be more successful in controlling our reducing human consumption levels. Because when we talk about democracy, I mean... Who's voting here? How many horses and elephants and Birds get to vote okay. It's very”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, but at the same time, maybe, I mean, often people will say, you know, what's your vision for the future? And what they mean is what vision for the future do you have that I'm going to like? Now, what if you have a vision of the future you don't like? It's dreadful. That's the ecological crisis. I think we're walking blindfolded into”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You get your caligular effects that can happen. Like Z, from what I've seen, has got elements of that. So friends of mine who are Caucasians can get away with it, they have a game that they play at conferences scoring how often people use Z's name in a presentation and giving extra points for the number of photographs of Z that turn up in the whole thing. So you've got this sort of personality cult coming along as well. But at the same time, the planning for the infrastructure that's being built, the social services, the general freedom that exists is so great. And like any Chinese person alive today, like if somebody who's Chinese my age would have been an adult under the early period of the late period of Mao and God Almighty that changed the improvement they've seen in their lives, that's what they think about.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Australia now has internet that's about 50th or 60th fastest in the world. It's dreadful for the internet. Too political figures made that decision. Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, rivals and leaders of the Conservative Party we call liberal over there. Now, that was shitty decisions that wouldn't happen in a country like China because you've got actual engineers making the decisions. They say you can't get decent speed if you link optical fiber to copper. So what you get is even though you can't make the decisions yourself, a vast majority of the decisions are made intelligently. And therefore you expect it.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's also focused upon your skill levels. And you get people making decisions who damn will know what they're talking about. Like Australia's got a classic example. The internet in Australia sucks. The reason it sucks is that the Labour Party, which is our version of the Democrats, was in control during the global financial crisis. And as part of that, they wanted to bring in optical fiber connections to the House. They have an optical fiber backbone and an optical fiber right to your T100 output from your home. And the Liberal Party fought that and said, that's going to be too expensive. It would take too long to do. We're going to do cable to the node and then have a copper network linking from a node on a street to all the houses in the street. It's going to be cheaper and faster. Have it more soon, blah, blah, blah. Or there's a total technique.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, okay, and people did have fun, and they did feel free, but they didn't want to go and get divorced. But that dilemma was accommodated because the boundaries until you started hitting restrictions were wide. And like when you look at it, I mean, look at the Chinese Communist Party, the administrators of that are often highly qualified engineers who can then make intelligent decisions about what should be done as infrastructure and so on. And you go to China and you've got incredible high-speed rail fantastic infrastructure, internet telecommunications and so on, rapidly evolving solar. There's a range of things there that are so well done that reflect the fact that the selection process that gives you your political elite is partially focused upon sucking up, et cetera, et cetera. It's still there.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still know there's no such thing as that complete ignorance. But what I'm talking about is, experiences in China say back in about 2016, 2014, there was a feeling of freedom. Within limits, you didn't want to transgress because the system was working. So if you like.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not, but I mean, there's actually a classic book, a movie as well, called Mao's Last Dancer. And that is the young man explaining his progression from being a dancer in the cultural revolution through to a leading dancer in American and ultimately Australian ballet. And he explicitly says at one point that he's told that the Chinese people have the highest standard of living in the world. And the reaction of him and his kids, like his fellow six-year-olds, is, God, it must be miserable elsewhere in the world then. So they knew”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now that's destructive of everything. And that's the overlay that you've still got sitting over the top of China. But a huge part of the industrialization was simply saying, produce whatever you can, make goods, market them, sell them. And you get that innovative component of humanity is respected and the goods turn up and everybody's well fed, food and China is far better than food in America. So in terms of the material satisfaction and freedom, for example, enjoy dancing. I mean, we went to, I think somewhere in Shanghai, and there's this line of people involving a woman who would have been close to her 90s and a kid who was about six or four priority. Partying it up in the open air and doing this Chinese collective dance”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then you get the failings of the Soviet system are still there in the Chinese system in that The easiest way to avoid criticism is an underling carrying out instructions of people above you is to carry those instructions out to the letter beyond what the people actually want you to do at the top. So we had a classic illustration of that when I took these journalists. There was a news report saying that China's output of light industry had grown by 17% in the previous year, but heavy industry had fallen by 7%. don't compute. So we kept on asking, why did this happen? Every time we asked a question, this is back in 81, the answer would be the initial answer we followed the directive as a central committee, the Communist Party of China. We finally got a guy to elaborate and say what that was. He said, well, the central committee sent out a directive to promote light industry. So what did you do? Quote unquote, we stripped heavy industry factories and turned them into light industry.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before I've been to China quite a few times in my life, a lot in the last, not for about four years, but for the six years before that, a few visits. And staying in second and third and fourth tier cities. So, you know, populations of only 4 million people, which is quite small on Chinese standards. And I had a lot of happy people that I was interacting. My girlfriend at the time, her social circle. And you can feel when people can't discuss a political issue. For example, in Thailand, you can't discuss the king. They still have less majest laws. So you can actually be jailed for discussing the king. And you can feel that to some extent. And it is a political issue in Thailand now. But in China, what I got back from most people, it was a bit like a benevolent big brother. But then when you get things like the lockdown, which is applied recently,”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a bit like we were talking about Russia to some extent beforehand was centralized versus decentralized corruption. And when you had the centralized political stuff, means you know you can't criticize within China. But as long as you don't criticize, you can do what you like.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Planning that has to go into that, the pre preparation is necessary, is enormous. So there's a real respect for engineers as well in that society, which does not apply in the West.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The labor force was also building a capitalist class. And that meant that you had this, that's where all the Chinese corporations have come from. So they were building a capitalist system within a socialist command political system. And that worked. And it's still working. So it was the centralization of the economic stuff, the GOSPLAN approach. I think that was where the Soviets failed. And what the Chinese realized after what they went through under Mao was you have to have that capitalist period, but they weren't going to abandon the communist control politically, the country at the same time. And that worked out brilliantly. And there's a huge amount of innovation taking place in China today. And they also will do gigantic infrastructure projects, breathtaking, planning going into that. You would have seen videos of building a skyscraper in a day.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Group of journalists there, as I mentioned earlier, for a tour, we ended up going to the Sichuan Free Trade Zone, and that gave us an idea of why China was going to succeed, because they had a rule that you couldn't just come in and exploit the cheap wages. You had to also have a Chinese partner, and within five years, the Chinese partner had to own 50% of the business, which is huge. And that gives you an idea of the reduction in wages these American corporations are looking at. They'd shut down the factory in what's now the Rust Belt of America that might be paying somebody there at that time, maybe $2 an hour. And they come across to China and they're paying two cents an hour. So there were an enormous amount of wages that they dropped. They were willing to forego half the profits and the ownership of the firm. So what the Chinese were doing wasn't just exploiting...”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've got to have the goods. The big change from Mao to Deng Xiaoping was the characterizing that little saying that I don't care whether you have a black cat or a white cat so long as it catches mice. And there was a level of pragmatism to the Dong Xiaoping revolution over Mao and Mao in particular. And that was manifest in the desire to get as much of those Western goods as possible. And I was actually in China in 81.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is possible, and I think in some ways China is more likely to survive as a society going into the future than Western capitalist societies are.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anarchist party. It is. I mean, we literally spent three days arguing over whether there should or should not be a chairperson for conversations.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does he? Okay, now I've lost touch with Anarchist philosophy. I actually used to read Kropotkin and Bakunin and so on. And I enjoyed their philosophy. And then I helped organize an anarchist conference once. Was the biggest antidote possible. Being an anarchist.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even from the people living through it, I mean, I had enough conversation with Cubans meeting them on the street, hopping in a cab. There was one guy I was talking to who was he was an industrial chemist. He'd got a better money being a cab driver because he could make money out of taking foreign tourists from the airport to the city.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fundamentally, she's saying, I'm being paid shit money here. I'm not going to, I don't want to work. I'm not going to do anything apart from sit here and qualify for my time. And as much as there are reasons the Cubans have suffered from American embargoes and all that sort of stuff, you've still got that fundamental shortage economy that Corne spoke about coming out of the structure of central ownership and central control of distribution and investment.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eight years ago. Invited to give a talk there and I was staying in a hotel. It's self-the hotel's a story. There was one day my meetings were cancelled, so I thought I might go down to the beach. And in the hotel, they had a wing, which is the tourist office, and there were three women working inside the office. So I thought I'd just go up and ask them. Know how do I get to the beach? And one of them says to me, I stood there, just stood in the room waiting to see if they'd make eye contact with me. Women, nobody else in the place, none of them looked at me. So I finally went up to one of them and said, I want to go to the beach and do some surfing where she said, I can get a taxi outside.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What citizens of the Soviet world didn't feel was freedom. Not just, first of all, it wasn't freedom to buy commodities. The commodities were supposed to be on the shops weren't there. The volume couldn't be produced. And what you then got out of that as well was the classic Soviet joke. They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. Okay.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, happy people get pretty silly outside. I'm not particularly the extent to which Americans overuse and distort the word freedom drives me balmy”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's it. When you put your money down to buy a refrigerator, it'll arrive in 10 years because the factory is already fully constrained. So all these resource constraints mean that people aren't happy under socialism. And if you've got a whole bunch of people that aren't happy, then the best way to control them is to suppress them. So, I think in that sense, ultimately, yes, it does lead to something like Stalinism.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are all trying to capture as much of the market as they can. If you add up their marketing plans, you're going to get 120, 130% of the actual market. So they're all going to have excess capacity. When you build a factory, you're building it with a plan for it to exist for 5, 10, 15 years. You have to have excess capacity in the factory. So that means that capitalism has far greater productive capacity than it actually uses. And then the way that you manage to get demand into your factory is to innovate and produce something nobody else does. Or you're producing in volume and when somebody produces like a bung tire comes out of Firestone, then Goodyear is ready to expand its production and take advantage of that. So that's the actual nature of competition in capitalism. And that means that we get a cornucopia of goods, even if we're lowly workers, the variety of goods and capitalism is overwhelming. And that just doesn't happen in socialism. You get your 1942 Cossack as your motorbike.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Marx, the failure of socialism with Dionys Corn I captured beautifully, this idea already called demand constrained versus resource-constrained economies. And capitalism is demand constrained. And this is, again, where neoclassical theory is completely wrong, empirically, completely wrong. So the neoclassicals have a vision of capitalism being resource constrained. And it's about maximizing your usage of resources subject to constraints. And as Corne said, that's really what happened under socialism. What happens under capitalism is that you have 15, 20 companies producing automobiles.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All skill, and the bodies of the athletes, I can actually get off and measure what a sport is like by the bodies it creates. And you get these incredibly elegant, lithe muscular forms out of Aussie rules.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's too simplistic. I mean, there's skill in it. I've seen some really skillful rugby union. And rugby league plays in my day. But fundamentally, if you hit somebody hard enough, they go down Okay. Whereas in obviously rules, it's about catching the ball and then kicking the ball and passing the ball.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and look, Poncho's got a lot of Australian mates here He spent how long in Australia? And a half, and he's got all these mates who replace Aussie Rules football in Austin. Should join them one day.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source