Downstream: Here’s How Power Really Works w/ Grace Blakeley
Novara Media
Novara Media
4.8 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 11 September 2023
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Most people know that the game is rigged. Those who set the rules – win the game. Grace Blakeley has made a career of studying the rules, exposing the exploitative ways in which powerful institutions govern our lives and figuring out ways in which we can beat the banker and resist the game itself. Grace is an economist, writer and media commentator. Her work can be found in Tribune Magazine, Jacobin and Novara Media.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The game is rigged. That's something that people on the left have been saying for a decade, |
| 0:13.8 | obviously a lot longer, but that particular phrase really goes back to the mid 2010s. |
| 0:19.4 | And for a long time it felt like if you said it you were shouting into a void, nobody was listening. |
| 0:25.2 | Fast forward to 2023 and virtually everyone in politics on the left or the right accepts |
| 0:31.0 | that the game is rigged. That a tiny elite benefit while the rest of us lose from this status quo. |
| 0:37.6 | The establishment does so well at the cost of everyone else if you will. |
| 0:43.0 | But even though there's agreement about the game being rigged, that doesn't mean there's |
| 0:47.0 | agreement on what to do next. Clearly people on the left and on the right have very different |
| 0:52.7 | proposals going forward. And I think the reason why there is a gap between those two sides |
| 0:59.8 | is basically because there's a different reading on what power is, who has it, and how things change. |
| 1:07.2 | Now for people on the left, financial economic power is directly translated into political, |
| 1:12.9 | social and cultural power. It might be comforting to think we live in a meritocracy or that political |
| 1:18.0 | representatives are there on merit and they represent the will of the people, but fundamentally |
| 1:22.5 | they're there to reflect vested, powerful economic interests. And that is exactly why we got |
| 1:29.0 | Grace Blakely on for today's show. Grace is an economist, she's a writer, she also does loads |
| 1:34.8 | of media stuff from talk TV to the BBC and Jeremy Vine. She's a fantastic young economist, |
| 1:41.0 | and her interests have always focused on finance and the kinds of power which emerges from it. |
| 1:48.0 | Grace, welcome to Downstray. Thank you so much for having me. I have been waiting for this |
| 1:52.2 | conversation for so long. I have missed you very, very much too, it's been a while. It's been a |
| 1:57.8 | really long time. It's been really long time. I feel like I haven't really seen that much since COVID. |
| 2:03.3 | Yeah, well I mean I went away. You want to where you've been writing a book? Yeah, I wrote a book, |
| 2:06.8 | I went away to write a book partly, although I didn't spend that much time writing my book. |
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