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  • Where We Go From Here Peter Joseph ZDay 2016, Athens, Greece

  • Thank you very much, everybody can hear me OK?

  • Good? All right.

  • So I really appreciate everybody being here.

  • Thank you Gilbert for all the hard work. None of this is easy to do.

  • Thanks to the Greek chapter and of course

  • all the International folks that have come both to speak

  • and all of you that have come here in the audience. Very appreciated.

  • The title of this talk isWhere we go from here

  • and it is not a transition lecture, even though it may sound like it.

  • Rather it's an homage to the American civil rights activist

  • Dr. Martin Luther King Junior, and his final book

  • Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?’

  • In this work he extends the civil rights context

  • that's very important to American culture and American history -

  • unique to it of course -

  • from trying to alleviate the mess colonial slavery

  • had done to race relations in America,

  • drawing attention to the structure that created that slavery:

  • capitalism itself.

  • And while he discusses how the market structure distorts culture,

  • erodes moral integrity,

  • is foundationally antisocial and unsustainable,

  • as many people here have talked about thus,

  • the main theme of the work was the abolition of poverty,

  • and this builds a little bit on what Rich had to say earlier,

  • which I'm really glad that he covered certain aspects already.

  • And I’d like to expand upon this particular theme in this talk,

  • specifically in regard to public health and social stability.

  • Of course while King certainly was not the first to criticize capitalism

  • for its perpetuation of inequality,

  • he brings the issue into a more palpable context as far as I'm concerned.

  • With tremendous victory behind him in the late 1960's, gaining stature,

  • global respect winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and so forth,

  • for him to take this position at that time was quite powerful and radical,

  • given the extremely antisocialist climate of the period.

  • Unlike more heady, broad anti-market theorists of the past,

  • from Karl Marx to Thorstein Veblen

  • to the 1930’s US organization Technocracy,

  • which still exists in certain areas of Europe,

  • King kept it simple and focused,

  • specifically seeing the resolution of poverty as not a utopian ideal

  • but a rational and logical issue of civil or human rights.

  • And he even did so transcending the issue of race itself

  • against many other in the community at that time,

  • in part recognizing that the poor white masses in America

  • were also victims of the same broad forces,

  • that being a social system based upon elitism, exploitation,

  • scarcity and dominance, a system of favoring a small wealthy elite,

  • while everyone else just fights amongst themselves.

  • Here are some notable quotes.

  • We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society

  • to a person-oriented society. When machines,

  • profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people,

  • the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism,

  • and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

  • And one day we must ask the question,

  • Why are there forty million poor people in America?'

  • (in 1967) And when you begin to ask that question,

  • you are raising questions about the economic system,

  • about a broader distribution of wealth.

  • When you ask that question, you begin to question

  • the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more,

  • we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society…”

  • And as proposed in this book, he saw the

  • implementation of a universal guaranteed income as the first step

  • (as was talked about earlier and excellently so),

  • to put it in this process of a reconstruction of the entire society.

  • “I am now convinced that

  • the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -

  • the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly

  • by the now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed Income.”

  • Sadly upon his death, these newly sought economic rights,

  • along with his anti-poverty movement and general, basically evaporated,

  • sort of dissipated. Even his most

  • devoted followers just seemed to give up on it

  • and sort of satisfied with this sort of political success they have

  • through voting rights and the like. Today, 50 years later,

  • it is great to see the conversation return to such things as

  • UBI - universal basic income -

  • and it's a very important step towards improving public health

  • and social stability specifically.

  • It may not address the root problem inherent -

  • the social structure that we all know about -

  • but it hones in on its most central flaw:

  • the grand misallocation of wealth and the creation

  • of caustic inequality.

  • So, what I'd like to do here today is to explore this logic more deeply,

  • considering what it means for public health, social stability,

  • to remove, or come as close to removing, socioeconomic inequality.

  • To clarify the term, socioeconomic means how economic activity affects

  • and is shaped by social processes.

  • I specifically use it to refer to economically-linked chain reactions,

  • such as how the economy links to personal, social, political,

  • and legal consequences, and health consequences as well.

  • So socioeconomic inequality

  • isn't just about imbalance in wealth and income alone,

  • but the vast range of effects they create:

  • the various forms of social inequality that can be linked back

  • to economic influences.

  • However, before we delve into that,

  • I want to step back and think about the framework of thought here,

  • something that we could generally term: Structuralism.

  • I first heard the term used by Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung,

  • who is also famous for coining the term, as Rich presented earlier,

  • structural violence,

  • which I have also talked about a great deal before.

  • While there are many forms of structural violence,

  • poverty is clearly the most obvious and most notable,

  • since there is little question of its negative effects overall.

  • Structuralism simply means were accounting for larger order relationships

  • when thinking about social affairs;

  • generally defined asthe methodology

  • that elements of human culture must be understood

  • in terms of their relationship to a larger,

  • overarching system or structure.”

  • We are looking for relationships, such as

  • preconditions to use a medical term,

  • and these preconditions, when recognized,

  • predictably manifest certain outcomes.

  • What I mean by that

  • is when you see patterns occurring on the population level -

  • meaning statistically derived (has to be)

  • over time across numerous people -

  • when you see these repeated outcomes youre left to assume

  • of some kind of larger order structural influence occurring.

  • Of course there's nothing particularly sophisticated about this.

  • If anyone here has studied sociology, this is basically what it's about.

  • However, the importance of this approach

  • still isn't given hardly any weight in the world today,

  • if you think about it and pay attention.

  • And of course this kind of makes sense.

  • For has society really embraced

  • modern sociological understandings?

  • specifically what epidemiological or public health research

  • has been showing us over the past century?

  • The current economic framework would make absolutely no sense,

  • and be completely undefendable.

  • While people rightfully talk about social justice and fairness

  • as an argument for change today,

  • the greatest indictment of this system is actually coming from

  • the emerging field of social science

  • and objective measures of public health.

  • All of this challenges the social structure’s integrity.

  • And it also challenges our sense of volition or identity.

  • When you see for example suicides increase across the world,

  • during periods of economic decline,

  • as has been noted here in Greece with its

  • massive austerity and all the problems that have been occurring,

  • those suicides can no longer be merely attributed

  • to singular human decision.

  • In the same way a certain percentage of cigarette smokers

  • will predictably get lung cancer, the effects of our economic system

  • show powerful population level outcomes.

  • This causality tree is a generalized attempt

  • to organize such negative health effects of the market economy,

  • specifically in terms of socioeconomic inequality.

  • At the top we have the raw structure itself,

  • born from mostly the geographical determinism from the Neolithic Revolution.

  • (I've talked about that before; you can

  • look into that if you’d like to know more of the origins.)

  • This economic foundation - based on property, exchange, labor for income,

  • competition - or competitive self-regulation I should say -

  • sets in motion this predictable array of outcomes at the start.

  • (By the way I apologize again if these terms-… if theyre new.

  • There’s a lot of background lectures; you can go back

  • and look at where all this stuff is defined.

  • And keep notes if you want to ask in the Q&A.)

  • The second tier down is Incentive.

  • This embraces the resulting social psychology

  • that supports and ultimately mirrors

  • the market structure.

  • This includes the pursuit of strategic advantage, self-maximization,

  • "in group" self preservation,

  • dominant psychology, and so on.

  • Then we have the institutions, third tier down.

  • These are the formal and conceptual institutions that surround us,

  • in our daily lives.

  • These include merchant institutions, such as good producing corporations,

  • financial institutions such as central banks through monetary policy,

  • ideological institutions such as neoliberalism or consumerism,

  • regulatory institutions meaning property, law, governments,

  • and legitimizing institutions,

  • which are biases, discourse of the intelligencia favoring the system,

  • general propaganda,

  • and even the industry of commercial advertising itself,

  • since it partly exists to promote positive values

  • towards cyclical consumption,

  • and the ethic of consumerism and vanity, and hence,

  • to go back to the structure, economic growth,

  • which the system demands.

  • And it is from these institutions that socioeconomic inequality

  • reaches the main population (4th tier down):

  • inequality and economic access, specifically material access,

  • along with consequential social/political inequality,

  • embraces this laundry list of injustices.

  • Of course, this is not a complete list;

  • I'm not gonna go through each one and there is great overlap.

  • But to highlight some things, on the left side

  • perhaps the most critical issues are the categories of

  • psychological and physiological disease;

  • these two issues resulting from socioeconomic inequality are engulfing

  • in what they actually embrace.

  • However, stress - psychosocial stress -

  • and addiction are also highly caustic as other examples.

  • On the right side, perhaps the most critical issues

  • are the categories of personal/group conflict,

  • and the negative externalities -

  • that’s a very important word when you begin to look at the market system.

  • Poverty for example is a negative externality just as pollution is.

  • However, oppression and legal discrimination are also

  • quite relevant to that side as well.

  • In the end, all of these injustices and detrimental pressures

  • lead to the final stage manifestation of effectively, structural violence,

  • as expressed in the two resulting categories at the bottom:

  • reduced physical, mental health and life span,

  • and reduced social stability and increased violence.

  • Now, I'd like to

  • basically - and this is the point of this talk ultimately -

  • is to give some notable research examples

  • covering a range of issues from these two broad categories at the bottom.

  • I have chosen these because they're a little less talked about;

  • theyre subtle and unique, showing again just how negative

  • public health relationships are,

  • as linked to poverty and socioeconomic inequality,

  • just the spectrum of disorder is so much more daunting

  • than we've come to realize in its nuance.

  • A 2015 Columbia University study

  • has found that cognitive impairment correlates

  • to poverty in the form of brain damage.

  • It found that the brain structure of children and teenagers in poverty

  • actually develop differently from those in affluent conditions.

  • That children in families earning less than $25,000 a year

  • had 6 percent less development

  • than those that earned $150,000 a year.

  • A similar study found that poverty overall correlates

  • to reduction of cognitive capacities and subsequently

  • an effective reduction in IQ.

  • This study concluded that the stress of worrying about money and survival,

  • clearly common in the lower classes,

  • can create a cognitive deficit equivalent

  • to the loss of 13 IQ points.

  • So the researchers suggest that this stress explains why poorer people

  • are more likely to make bad decisions,

  • exacerbating their financial difficulties.

  • I'm sure we've all heard that rhetoric of

  • those that have great wealth and success,

  • Well they must be smarter;

  • they must have tried harder, they must make better decisions.”

  • Well that may be true,

  • but the actual structuralism of it,

  • when this division occurs,

  • gives them that advantage on multiple levels,

  • so at the end result they appear that way,

  • not because they are, [but] because that's what the structure

  • has allowed them to groom within themselves,

  • while the poor and poverty-stricken become confused and dislocated,

  • and loss of confidence, and literally suffer brain damage

  • and a loss of their cognitive capacity.

  • ChildFund International, a nonprofit that compiles research

  • on the effects of child poverty, stated

  • One of the most disturbing links between poverty and education we see

  • is that ... low household income

  • correlates closely with poor achievement in school.

  • Children from lower-income families are more likely than students

  • from wealthier backgrounds to have low[er] test scores,

  • and they are at high risk of dropping out of school.

  • Those who complete high school are less likely to attend college

  • than students from higher-income families.

  • For some children, the effects of poverty and education present unique challenges

  • in breaking the cycle of generational poverty,

  • and reduce their chances of leading rewarding, productive lives."

  • These people talk about equal opportunity in the world as though it’s like

  • a policy. It's not. It's systemic;

  • it starts again at the socioeconomic level.

  • As far as mental health, a study

  • by researchers at Washington University, St. Louis in 2016,

  • actually found that child poverty can alter brain connectivity,

  • weakening important connections between regions,

  • leading to future clinical depression, in the long term.

  • More broadly, a 2015 study focusing on 63 countries,

  • found that, with respect to mental health, 46,000 suicides

  • were associated to unemployment in 2008 alone,

  • marking a dramatic rise related to the global financial crisis of the time.

  • A report published by the American Psychological Association,

  • examining a database of 34,000 patients with repeat

  • psychiatric hospitalizations, found that unemployment,

  • poverty, and housing unaffordability were correlated

  • with the risk of mental illness. It stated:

  • One of the most consistently replicated findings in the social sciences

  • has been the negative relationship of socioeconomic status with mental illness:

  • The lower the socioeconomic status of an individual is,

  • the higher is his or her risk of mental illness.”

  • Similarly, an analysis by M.H. Brenner,

  • covering 120 years of data from New York state mental institutions,

  • found that "instabilities in the national economy are the single most important

  • source of fluctuations in mental hospital admissions, or admission rates."

  • As far as lifespans: a 2015 report

  • from the National Academy of Sciences found that

  • an average lifespan difference of 13 to 14 years

  • between rich and poor exists in the US.

  • (And I’m sure that's pretty much the same across the world.)

  • A more extreme result exists in the City of London alone,

  • where the London Health Observatory concluded

  • a 25-year gap between rich and poor as far as life expectancy.

  • If that's not violence I'm not quite sure what is.

  • In that context we also have the prevalence of heart disease,

  • which is not only highly correlated to poverty but

  • the broad stress of living in an unequal society in general.

  • A study by UC Davis found that people with lower socioeconomic status

  • had a 50% chance of developing heart disease.

  • Using data from United States, where about 600,000 deaths occur each year,

  • the lead author of the study concluded: “Low socioeconomic status

  • is a heart-disease risk factor on its own

  • and needs to be regarded as such by the medical community.”

  • The power of stress is huge in this regard,

  • with economic stress naturally the most prominent for the general population,

  • and of course the lower-income population.

  • Plaque that builds up in the arteries,

  • leading to heart attack and stroke,

  • has been definitively tied to stress hormones such as glucocorticoid.

  • And it triggers immune responses, that lead to these problems.

  • In fact, psychosocial stress,

  • meaning psychological stress coming from the social environment,

  • links to brain damage, hormone problems,

  • depression, anxiety, reproductive complications,

  • sleep disorders, growth impairment,

  • memory problems, diabetes, cardiovascular disease,

  • gastrointestinal disorders,

  • sexual disorders, and overall immune deficiencies

  • that open the door to a host of other complications.

  • The effects of stress can also be long-term,

  • such as the case of child abuse.

  • Various studies tracked childhood abuse (stress)

  • to adult disorders, such as obesity and addiction; there are many.

  • This particular one concluded:

  • "The study clearly shows that difficult life events leave traces

  • that can manifest a disease much later in life.

  • The mechanisms behind this process include stress,

  • negative patterns of thought and emotions, poor mental health,

  • increased inflammation, as well as lowered immune function and metabolism."

  • Now intuitively, if you said that to most people they would counter and say

  • Well, you know, the physical, emotional and sexual abuse of a child

  • has nothing to do with the current adult socioeconomic status,

  • and hence class can't possibly be to blame,” right?

  • However, this argument holds little ground, since

  • the precondition of poverty has been found to be the largest predictor

  • of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of a child.

  • Where exactly this socioeconomically triggered causality occurs

  • occurs a generation or an individual, really doesn't change its relevance.

  • As far as broad mortality itself,

  • a 2011 study by researchers at Columbia University,

  • the Mailman School of Public Health,

  • they found that factors surrounding poverty,

  • lack of education and racial discrimination,

  • are linked to the death

  • of approximately 874,000 Americans, in 2000 alone.

  • About 2.8 million Americans died in 2000 meaning

  • 31% of [these Americans] died

  • because of these arguably preventable circumstances,

  • invariably tied to income, and loss of opportunity,

  • and elements related to the economy.

  • You can’t talk about racial discrimination for example,

  • especially in the US, without understanding the chain reaction and origin

  • that built up those discrimination, xenophobic views -

  • discriminatory and xenophobic views.

  • So the depth of this is quite profound.

  • And it gets even more weird and bizarre and frightening

  • when you look at even more macro conditions.

  • Globally, about 800,000 commit suicide

  • annually, with many more attempted of course.

  • 75% of this occurs in low and middle-income countries,

  • with 30% of them occurring by way of pesticide self-poisoning.

  • 30% - that's odd right?

  • Why pesticide self-poisoning?

  • This pesticide self-poisoning has become a powerful pattern

  • in rural regions in the developing world, agricultural regions,

  • while part of the larger global problem of farmer suicides' patterns

  • in the Global South, has specific characteristics

  • that link it directly to changes

  • in broad international trade and economic policy,

  • and effectively neoliberal globalization.

  • In fact of all the variations of structural violence that we could categorize,

  • the economically-induced mass suicides,

  • occurring by poor farmers that have lost their means

  • due to austerity, economic adjustment programs, trade policy,

  • and ultimately the stress of debt,

  • is very very unique from a structuralist respective.

  • A study by the Mumbai-based Gandhi Institute of Development and Research

  • found in 2006, 86.5% of farmers who took their lives

  • were simply in too much debt.

  • And then we have the broad behavior of violence,

  • something I'm not gonna go into too much detail as it’s

  • complex and is a lecture in and of itself.

  • But this isn't just about the deprivation of poverty,

  • it is also about inequality in general,

  • and the psychological distortions and sense of shame

  • created by feeling unequal, the feeling like you're worth is less than others.

  • A detailed 4-year study measuring the relationship between socioeconomic factors

  • and gang violence in Los Angeles concluded, obvious enough,

  • at the community level, gang-related homicide in Los Angeles

  • is most closely associated with lower income and unemployment.

  • This is also interesting

  • given that there's great political outcry, where I come from,

  • regarding gun violence, and it's been found that

  • half of all the gun violence is coming from 33,000 gangs.

  • So 50% of all the gun violence is coming from gangs

  • that have been born - on average, high probability overall -

  • from the destitute arena of poverty and inequality.

  • Yet no one is talking about poverty or inequality control,

  • while everyone raves and talks about gun control.

  • Guns are tools and they're ultimately killing people in the gangland world,

  • but the precondition of poverty, lack of opportunity and inequality,

  • is really the main problem, and guns just speed up the process.

  • In the words of Dr. James Gilligan of the Harvard Center for the Study of Violence,

  • Worldwide, the most powerful predictor of the murder rate

  • is the size of the gap in income and wealth between the rich and the poor.

  • The most powerful predictor of the rate of national or collective violence -

  • war, civil insurrection and terrorism - is the size of the gap

  • between income and wealth between the rich and poor countries.”

  • In the workThe Spirit Level’ - something I’ve talked about before -

  • why [equality] is better for everyone,

  • Wilkinson and Pickett present a large amount of epidemiological data,

  • and it’s explored and correlated.

  • Societies with large income gaps such as the United States,

  • suffer disproportionately across a range of public health problems,

  • including higher incidence of heart disease, obesity, infant mortality,

  • homicides, imprisonment, teen birth, mental illness, education, and so on.

  • Now that is this gamut of examples that I wanted to run through,

  • and it’s just the tip of the iceberg. And the point is -

  • and as we all basically know -

  • anyone that tells you that class stratification is somehow a motivator,

  • anybody that tells you that, were supposed to aspire to something

  • in this system, and that's why people have more than others -

  • they're just simply wrong, and probably an asshole.

  • We are allergic - we are literally allergic -

  • to socioeconomic stratification, and inequality as a society.

  • It's not just our culture, it's our system; it’s built into us.

  • We don't want to see this; we don't like that feeling.

  • We might in that nasty way (because this is what culture has done to us)

  • gravitate towards elevation, to feel like we've done something

  • over the capacity of others. But on the root level

  • we really strive for equality; justice is what we naturally gravitate towards.

  • And poverty and inequality is the most powerful economic precondition

  • for disease, violence, and disorder. Now to conclude this,

  • here is theEmpirical Table of Structural Violence

  • calculated byhler and Alcock in 1976 (again I've talked about this before),

  • comparing global lifespans as the basis and using

  • the countries with the longest lifespan as the benchmark,

  • details of which can be looked at - it's a very reputable study;

  • I'm not going to go into any of the specifics as far as why

  • the chosen measurements are what they are -

  • they calculate that up to 18 million unnecessary deaths occurred

  • annually at that time -

  • (there's no reason to assume these numbers have changed that much) -

  • and 95% of those deaths have occurred in the Global South,

  • showing the incredible disparity between the two hemispheres,

  • as is still the case today of course. It's quite startling,

  • as it means inequality is the leading cause of death on the planet Earth.

  • As an aside,

  • someone presented this book to me a while back and said I had to read it,

  • because ... it's everything that's true about the history of communism.

  • And these authors in this bookThe Black Book of Communismclaim

  • that 94 million people were slaughtered by communism in the 20th century.

  • Well let's assume this is accurate (and many critics say it's not at all accurate),

  • but based on these numbers,

  • socioeconomic inequality facilitates this death toll in a little less than 6 years.

  • And it’s very hard not to witness this, and then from a structuralist view,

  • not link it back to what is effectively its core point of origin -

  • market capitalism - which is predicated on competitive-produced inequality.

  • In the words of violence researcher Dr. James Gilligan once again,

  • Every single year two to three times as many people die from

  • poverty throughout the world as were killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews

  • over a six-year period. That is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending,

  • and in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide,

  • perpetrated on the weak and poor every year of every decade,

  • throughout the world.”

  • Meanwhile, as Abby pointed out, as of 2015,

  • 62 people have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the entire world population.

  • There are about 1800 billionaires in the world as of 2015

  • with over $7 trillion between them.

  • The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations calculated

  • that it would only take roughly $30 billion a year

  • to solve world hunger

  • through mostly developmental programs in poor regions.

  • Not only could the billionaires do this for 200 years and still be wealthy,

  • which wouldn't even be necessary because it's about development,

  • not just ... piecemeal aid.

  • Only a tiny fraction of course of the US annual military spending

  • would suffice as well, as weve heard.

  • Recognizing this deeply impoverished value disorder,

  • a former FAO director statedAgainst that backdrop,

  • how can we explain to people of good sense in good faith

  • that it was not possible to find US $30 billion a year

  • to enable 862 million hungry people to enjoy the most fundamental

  • of human rights: the right to food and thus the right to life?”

  • So with all those considered, returning to Dr. King

  • and the anti-poverty movement he attempted to start,

  • I hope everyone can better understand how deep the rabbit hole goes.

  • As far as I'm concerned, the new civil rights movement,

  • today picks up where he essentially left off,

  • seeking the abolition of socioeconomic inequality as a core focus.

  • This is the core public health crisis,

  • and it's only going to get worse as things move forward,

  • and that brings us to the chickens.

  • Some may know a rather idiotic idiom in American culture

  • referring to the chickens coming home to roost.

  • This is about the long-term negative repercussions of bad deeds:

  • acts with a lack of foresight,

  • set forward by a person or a culture.

  • And on the scale of global society,

  • as we've heard again today, I'm sorry to tell you that the chickens have arrived,

  • there are many many many many more on their way,

  • and they are pissed.

  • Part of the new civil rights movement is ensuring

  • that we have a sustainable habitat, obviously.

  • After 200 years of industrialization,

  • oblivious to the delicate nature of our habitat,

  • driven by an anti-economy that is artificially premised on growth and consumerism,

  • compounded by patterns of social dominance and unenlightened self-interest

  • through exploitation, colonialism, globalization,

  • and xenophobic outgroup fears that continually produce

  • war, oppression and anger,

  • the chickens are not coming home to merely annoy us

  • with mild pecking.

  • Due to time, I have presented this,

  • and originally the bracket of time for this event was a little bit shorter for me.

  • But, I added this in because -

  • I'm not gonna go through every single instance in any explicit detail -

  • but I wanted you to kind of get a sense of this.

  • We've talked about climate change earlier and other issues,

  • and of course that's the biggest one in the long term,

  • but there are numerous problems. I call this the Seven Nails,

  • and if we have a business-as-usual scenario persist,

  • around the 2040-2050 period, the convergence of -

  • just the destruction of the biodiversity and resource overshoot -

  • we use a sixth of the world's resources each year-...

  • excuse me, we use ALL the world's resources that it produces

  • a sixth way through each year -

  • resource overshoot. Of course, climate change.

  • We have all sorts of other general pollution problems

  • that take a back seat to climate change but are just as prevalent,

  • leading eventually to mass water scarcity that we've

  • been hearing about as well which no one's doing anything about.

  • And that relates to food scarcity; it works in synergy with all these other issues.

  • We have technological unemployment; that is

  • the profit motive our system - the contradictions of capitalism.

  • Companies are going to start using machines and, I hate to say it -

  • as writers-... Stephen Hawkins recently pointed out,

  • if we don't get a collar on this, it's just going to create that much more inequality.

  • In fact I argue that the mass inequality shift that we've had over the past

  • ten years, hasn't been because people have gotten more greedy -

  • it's because all the efficiency produced by this great technology that can help us

  • keeps going to the elite; to the 1%.

  • They're doing the same thing they always did,

  • but they have that much more they can extract in wealth,

  • because they don't have to spend as much for labor, and so on.

  • And then government debt is that final issue, as I've talked about before,

  • that Standard & Poor's predicts by 2050,

  • 60% of all countries on the planet will be bankrupt.

  • Now you have to ask yourself, even though it’s a fiction, it’s elaborate fiction,

  • but if that's the psychology of scarcity -

  • like in here in Greece where they're cutting welfare programs, you know -

  • if that's the psychology, how do we ever expect to rebuild an energy infrastructure?

  • How do we ever expect to budget out

  • for all the grand revisions that are really required

  • IF we're supposed to keep using money, of course.

  • So, within the new civil rights movement,

  • we have to see of course the broad picture,

  • and this is just as much a part of it as the

  • abolition of poverty and socioeconomic inequality of course.

  • So I'm sorry to torture you with this graphic at the very end,

  • but I'm gonna leave it at that, and thank you very very much.

  • [Applause]

Where We Go From Here Peter Joseph ZDay 2016, Athens, Greece

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