What is the trick in trickle down? (with Yuval Harari and Molly Crockett)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 25 December 2018

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What is the “trick” in “trickle down” economics? It’s how wealthy elites and their neoliberal lackeys convince you that what’s good for them (tax cuts, deregulation, etc.) is good for you… and that policies like the minimum wage, overtime, and paid sick leave will ruin the economy. Economics is a story we tell ourselves to help explain who gets what, and why. In this episode we explore how to tell a better story. Yuval Harari: Author of international bestsellers: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Professor in the Department of History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. PhD from the University of Oxford. Twitter: @harari_yuval Facebook: @Prof.Yuval.Noah.Harari Instagram: @yuval_noah_harari Molly Crockett: Director of the Crockett Lab, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale University, and Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge. Twitter: @mollycrockett Further reading: (1) https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/41/a-threat-not-a-theory/ (2) https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/18/to-my-fellow-plutocrats-you-can-cure-trumpism-215347

Transcript

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0:00.0	We're so good at doing things that are very selfish while at the same time convincing ourselves
0:08.8	that we're doing the most moral possible thing.
0:11.6	We'll trickle down a few crumbs from the Masters' Table to get
0:15.7	some of them through one or two Christmas shopping seasons. And let's tell them
0:21.0	that they can do their taxes on a postcard.
0:24.0	Our massive tax cuts provide tremendous relief for the middle class and small business.
0:29.4	What people have to recognize is that these stories that are told often are not told because they're true.
0:37.0	They're told because they're the most effective way ever devised for elites to continue to gain advantage and to keep other folks down.
0:47.0	From the offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitch Fork Economics, with Nick Hanauer.
0:57.0	Confessions of an American capitalist caught on tape.
1:00.0	I'm David Goldstein Senior Fellow at Civic Ventures.
1:08.0	Hey Nick, so last episode we learned that Econ 101 is a lie but of course most people don't actually take econ
1:16.1	101 they get the sort of popularized version of it which is trickle-down economics
1:22.2	so what is trickle-down economics and is
1:23.0	so what is trickle down economics and what's the trick.
1:30.0	Yeah, so,
1:30.0	so trickle down economics is sort of the popular form or narrative of something even deeper, which is neoliberalism.
1:41.0	And trickle down economics is a set of interconnected claims that have been advanced
1:47.1	by first some economists and then by some very rich people who harness their self-interest to those claims and finally
1:54.8	by political leaders and trickle-down economics the most famous instantiation of
2:00.0	it is the idea that tax cuts for rich people create growth and the corollary
2:05.0	tax increases for rich people will kill growth. That's great for you.
	...

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