We are living in unprecedented times.
The future without jobs will come to resemble either the cultivated benevolence of Star Trek or the desperate scramble for resources of Mad Max
Unless there's a dramatic course correction, I fear we are heading toward the latter
We're entering this winner-take-all economy that is breaking down many of the capitalist relationships we take for granted
The American people are getting increasingly desperate.
We have been so brainwashed into thinking that human worth and economic worth are the same thing
that we are contorting ourselves in increasingly attenuated and ridiculous fashion.
Cheerleading this GDP number being at record highs makes no sense when your people are dying younger and sooner
This is the desperation we are in.
People are looking around and saying what does the
democracy hold, and our politicians aren't able to respond to the challenge
because they're too busy fundraising. We have to un-brainwash ourselves, really.
How can Amazon pay zero in taxes in 2018?
How did the trillion dollar tech company pay less in federal taxes the vast majority of the people in this room?
That is a colossal political failure at the highest levels
I think we should all be offended by the spectacle of Amazon pitting communities against each other to see who could bend over backwards more
for a preordained process
I mean that's thousands of man-hours put forward by like hundreds of communities around the country
Just to show the primacy again of a company saying like I have jobs you need jobs. Like let's see what you can do
We should all be offended by that. So we need to get with the program
Own the fact that our economy has evolved in fundamental ways
Get the public will to match up
to the policy and the only way to do that is just send a message all the way to the top because unfortunately
Most of our legislators are held captive by corporate interests
And there's a very limited way to make the feedback mechanism of democracy work
There are two parallel crises that are worked in tandem. One is climate change, two is the fourth Industrial Revolution
That we're in the midst of the greatest economic and technological
transformation in human history
And Donald Trump is a symptom of this transformation. The driving force behind his victory in
in 2016 was that we'd automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa
And now we're going to do the same thing to millions of retail jobs, call center jobs, fast food jobs, truck driving jobs
So we have these two crises that are unfolding in tandem, and we are completely ill-prepared for either of them
So the best path forward is to try and humanize our economy
GDP is a measurement we made up almost a hundred years ago
and even the inventor said three things: One, this is a terrible measurement for national well-being and we should not use it as that -
Two, we should include parenthood and motherhood in the number because they're so important.
And three, we shouldn't include military defense spending because it has no economic value
And of course we ignored all three of those things and now we're riding GDP off a cliff
And so what we should do is update our very measurements
So that's something like environmental quality, mental health, childhood success rates, life expectancy
Proportion of elderly who can retire in quality circumstances, we have numbers for these things
We can turn them into the new GDP and then we can channel our market forces to try and improve our lives
Because the market is doing what it's designed to do. The problem is that capital efficiency and human wellbeing are diverging.
So what you have to do is you have to actually make the measurements - human well-being itself
and then have that be the measurement of progress.
That is our best path forward and that actually gives us a chance to try and make progress on climate change and the automation of jobs
simultaneously in the timeframe we have. We need to do something about it as fast as possible for sake of our children, our grandchildren,
And leave a society that we're still proud of to them because we do not have limitless time and we know what must be done
The time for talk is well past and now we must act
We need to break free of this logic of the marketplace before it's too late
We must reshape and accelerate society to bring us all to higher ground
We must find new ways to organize ourselves independent of the values at the marketplace assigns to each and every one of us
We are more than the numbers on our paychecks and we are going to have to prove it very quickly
We must make the market serve humanity rather than have humanity continue to serve the market
Society will change either before or after the revolution. I choose before.