Understanding Capitalism: Technology and Resources
The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
Hillsdale College
4.6 • 621 Ratings
🗓️ 4 June 2025
⏱️ 32 minutes
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Summary
On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan discuss how capitalism develops life-saving technology before introducing Dr. Charles N. Steele.
Capitalism rewards man with profit or punishes him with loss, depending on the merit of his actions. It expresses the freedom and rationality of human nature in an economic system. The capitalist system depends upon private property rights, the freedom of exchange and contract, sound money, and the rule of law that supports all of these through formal and informal structures. Such a system encourages innovation and morality along with economic prosperity.
Technology is the unique human ability to discover how to convert resources into useful implements. Economic resources are created by human ingenuity as we discover new uses for previously worthless materials.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Hillsdale College online courses podcast. I am Jeremiah Regan. I'm Juan Dabalos. We're back with |
| 0:16.2 | Understanding Capitalism, Lecture Six, Technology and Resources. This is an interesting lecture because |
| 0:22.5 | it involves things like microchips and LED light bulbs, as well as water and soil and trees, |
| 0:28.7 | and how these things relate to each other in a capitalist economy. Yeah, I've always considered |
| 0:32.6 | myself a bit of an environmentalist, and in the sense that, not in the modern leftist sense, that, you know, |
| 0:40.1 | the environment is an end in itself and it needs to be protected above human needs. I think |
| 0:46.3 | God gave us the world to steward it and use it for our needs. But at the same time, |
| 0:53.1 | we need to therefore be responsible with it can't really |
| 0:56.0 | call yourself a conservative if you won't conserve foundational things like natural resources that's |
| 1:01.4 | right but i think something that that i appreciate about this lecture is how innovation plays an |
| 1:07.9 | important role in capitalism and in conserving resources, right? |
| 1:13.5 | I always like to say one of the greatest inventions for the environment in the last hundred |
| 1:18.5 | years is probably the LED bulb. It allows us to produce light much more efficiently, |
| 1:23.1 | getting more out of the resources that we have. And Professor Steele, who's a bit of an outdoorsman himself, |
| 1:29.0 | brings home this point nicely. |
| 1:30.5 | As humans discover new technological means, |
| 1:34.0 | there are more efficient ways to use the resources that we have, |
| 1:37.7 | therefore we leave more for others, including our posterity. |
| 1:41.5 | And we're getting here to the end of this course on capitalism. We're in lecture |
| 1:46.0 | six and then out of seven lectures. So we'd like to see if you can suggest what we should do |
| 1:52.0 | for the next course. Yeah, we'd like to hear from you. So you can find our podcast either in YouTube or |
| 1:57.1 | Spotify, which allows you to comment and let us know what you'd like us to do next. |
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