AI, Trade Wars, Degrowth: What's Next for the Global Economy?

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2025

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Amid rising concerns about AI, inequality, trade wars, and globalization, New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer Prize finalist John Cassidy takes a bold approach: he tells the story of capitalism through its most influential critics.

From the Luddites and early communists to the Wages for Housework movement and modern degrowth advocates, Cassidy’s global narrative features both iconic thinkers—Smith, Marx, Keynes—and lesser-known voices like Flora Tristan, J.C. Kumarappa, and Samir Amin.

John Cassidy has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. He writes a regular column, The Financial Page. He holds degrees from Oxford, Columbia, and New York Universities. His new book is Capitalism and Its Critics: A History from the Industrial Revolution to AI.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show.
0:17.6	Hey, everybody, it's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show.
0:20.9	As usual, I'm your host, Michael Shermer.
0:23.3	To introduce today's guest and topic economics, capitalism, and so on.
0:29.7	I'm going to read an opening page from my book, The Mind of the Market,
0:33.4	and then I'm going to read a recent speech from Bernie Sanders.
0:38.1	Living along the Orinoco River that borders Brazil and Venezuela are the Yanomamo people.
0:43.8	Hunter gatherers whose average annual income has been estimated at the equivalent of about $100 per person per year.
0:50.3	If you walked into a Yanomamo village and counted up the stone tools, baskets, arrow points,
0:55.8	aero shafts, bows, cotton yarn, cotton and vine, hammocks, clay pots, assorted other tools,
1:00.9	various medicinal remedies, pets, food products, articles of clothing, and the like, you'd end up
1:05.9	with a figure of around 300. Before 10,000 years ago, this was the approximate wealth of every village on the planet.
1:13.9	If our species is about 100,000 years old, then 90% of our history was spent in this state of
1:19.3	relative economic simplicity. Living along the Hudson River that borders New York and New Jersey
1:25.1	are the Manhattan people. Consumer traders whose
1:29.0	average annual income has been estimated at $40,000 per person per year. This was in 2008. I wrote
1:35.1	that. So this is probably, I think it's about $65,000 a year now in Manhattan. If you walked into
1:40.5	the Manhattan Village and counted up all the different products available at retail stores and restaurants, factory outlets, and super stores, you'd end up with a figure
1:47.5	of about $10 billion. Something happened over the last 10,000 years to increase the average
1:53.7	annual income of hunter-gatherers by about 500 times. As remarkable as this jump in income is,
2:00.6	it pales in comparison to the different
2:02.7	kinds of stock keeping units, SKUs or skews, which is a retail measure of the types of
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Michael Shermer, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Michael Shermer and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.