2023 World Economic Trends
Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Democracy at Work
4.8 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 2 February 2023
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this week's show, Prof. Wolff identifies and examines the larger economic dimensions and trends of three key aspects of today's global economy: Russia/Ukraine war, Europe's quandary, and the decline of the US empire. Attention focuses on the immense direct and indirect costs of the war in Ukraine; on Europe's desperate position and choices caught between the US and China blocs in the world economy; and on how the US empire is responding to its decline in the world economy. Our approach is to stress what so many others deny or minimize. The risk of war and lessons of the past decline of empires figure prominently in the analysis.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives and those of our children. |
| 0:20.0 | I'm your host, Richard Wolfe. |
| 0:23.4 | Today's program is going to start by talking about very little things and then explode into |
| 0:28.7 | talking about some of the biggest things happening early in this new year. I'm going to be talking |
| 0:35.1 | about the war, that's right, the peculiar position of Europe these |
| 0:40.3 | days, and then what it means to talk about a declining U.S. empire. But before we get into those big |
| 0:48.0 | topics, I want to set the tone for talking straight and honestly about them, by talking a bit straighter and more |
| 0:56.5 | honestly than usual, about two little topics. The first one is inflation. Everybody's |
| 1:02.6 | talking about inflation. Prices go up. But let's be honest. The inflation, the one we're |
| 1:10.1 | living through in the United States, Europe, |
| 1:12.1 | and beyond, is also, and ought to be honestly acknowledged as a class struggle. And here's |
| 1:19.9 | what I mean very simply. Prices are going up in the United States, for example, between |
| 1:27.1 | 7 and 9 percent per year. |
| 1:30.4 | Let's remember what prices are. It's what you and I, the vast majority of people, pay to the tiny |
| 1:37.6 | minority who are employers in our society, the ones who set the prices, who raise them, because that's what an inflation |
| 1:45.7 | is, when employers raise prices. So prices are the money we, the employees, give to them. |
| 1:54.0 | Wages are what they give to us as employees. Prices have been going up by 7 to 9 percent. Wages in this country have |
| 2:03.3 | been going up roughly half of that. In other words, we're giving much more to our employers |
| 2:10.8 | than they are giving to us. It's going up in both cases, but they're getting the lion's share. That's a shift of wealth from the |
| 2:19.7 | employees, the vast majority, to the employers, the tiny minority. That ought to be |
| 2:26.7 | understood when we talk about abstractions like inflation. Here's another one. Entities, businesses that call themselves non-profits or not-for-profit. |
| 2:41.7 | Don't believe it. I'll give you an example in a minute. They are for profit. They always have |
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