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[WHIMSICAL MUSIC]
[RADIO FREQUENCY ADJUSTS]
MALE REPORTER: ...promise from the authorities
that there would be some change,
the pressure for reform is gathering pace
and is gathering support.
Differences between capitalism and communism is so strong
that only concrete and barbed wire could hold them--
WOMAN: We want another way to reconstruct our society.
[PEOPLE CHANT]
FEMALE REPORTER: On the streets of East German cities,
scores of people demanding democratic reforms
were dragged off by... [STATIC CRACKLES]
MALE REPORTER: Security police dragged individuals
from the crowd, beating them over the head,
and throwing them into the back of waiting lorries.
[PEOPLE SHOUT]
[LORDE'S 'ROYALS'] ♪ Cristal, Maybach
♪ Diamonds on your timepiece
♪ Jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash ♪
♪ We don't care
♪ We aren't caught up in your love affair ♪
♪ We didn't come from money
♪ But every song's like gold teeth, Grey Goose ♪
♪ Trippin' in the bathroom
♪ Bloodstains, ball gowns, trashing the hotel room ♪
♪ We don't care...
- ♪ And we'll never be royals - ♪ Royals
♪ It don't run in our blood
♪ That kind of lux just ain't for us ♪
♪ We crave a different kind of buzz ♪
- ♪ Let me be your ruler - ♪ Ruler
♪ You can call me Queen B
♪ And, baby, I'll rule
♪ I'll rule, I'll rule, I'll rule ♪
♪ Let me live that fantasy ♪
[PEACEFUL, WHIMSICAL MUSIC]
[TENSE, PERCUSSIVE MUSIC]
[GRUNTS, OINKS]
WOMAN: In the 18th century, life for the poor is grim.
If you're lucky, you might be a servant.
Everyone else is a hand-to-mouth laborer,
moving from place to place, following the work,
being treated by the landowners exactly as they please.
And of course there were no benefits,
there's no health service, there's no free schooling,
there's absolutely nothing.
So poverty is a death sentence.
And what's very striking is the average life expectancy
in the 18th century is 17.
[CHILLING, DESPONDENT MUSIC]
MAN: At the time, what capital really looks like is
money, money-lending and land-owning.
You have a guy that sits in a fort and basically claims taxes
on all the people that work his land.
And we sort of know what that looks like
from all kinds of movies.
Really, with what I get from these peasants,
I can hardly afford to pay my perfume bills.
What about Roulet? Has he paid his rent?
Roulet died last week.
[ECHOES] He died with his rent unpaid.
- What did he die of? - Hunger.
Hunger is an indulgence with these peasants.
Oh, I keep forgetting, Gabelle,
you're a humanitarian, aren't you?
You think that one person is as good as another --
a naive notion so contradicted by the facts.
[BIRDSONG]
WILLIAMS: For the rich, inheritance is the obsession.
It's a very strict code.
The eldest son gets the capital.
He gets everything -- he gets the money,
he gets the house, he gets the land --
and that makes him incredibly powerful,
just through an accident of birth.
These land-owning men, these first sons,
they also have a huge amount of political power,
because a lot of them are the MPs, they're elites.
And as a consequence, they are driven by a desire
to protect their own income, to protect their own world,
and it simply doesn't occur to them
that poor people deserve some redistribution of wealth.
Taxation, they resist very strongly.
And this is the way that the aristocracy worked,
not just in Britain, but all through Europe,
and the aim is to conserve the aristocratic power.
[PENSIVE MUSIC]
The examples that Thomas Piketty has
of Jane Austen and Balzac, they're very fitting,
because when you read Jane Austen,
it is all about money,
and this money is not earned through work,
it's not earned through owning businesses,
it's earned through land, it's inherited land.
[JOVIAL FOLK TUNE PLAYS]
[LAUGHTER]
WILLIAMS: Mr. Darcy, for example, in Pride and Prejudice,
he has this huge estate.
He doesn't even have to be there.
This land just creates money for him.
- How good of you to come. - [ALL WHISPER]
LIZZIE: He looks miserable, poor sod.
CHARLOTTE: Miserable he may be,
but poor he most certainly is not.
- LIZZIE: Tell me. - CHARLOTTE: 10,000 a year,
and he owns half of Derbyshire.
- The miserable half? - [SNORTS SOFTLY]
[CHUCKLES]
WILLIAMS: Jane Austen created a fantasy
that you could get your hands on this wealth
if you were just a bit fun and a bit witty.
But the reality is there's no way a Mr. Darcy would marry
girls like Lizzie Bennet,
who actually haven't got a penny to their names.
He would marry an heiress, possibly even a cousin,
and create this, sort of, megalopolis estate.
[JOVIAL FOLK TUNE RESUMES]
WILLIAMS: Money marries money. There's nothing to do with love.
And what we see now,
almost a cycling back to the 18th century.
[FUNKY VOGUE MUSIC]
In Britain, inherited wealth is everything... again.
Nowadays, 1% of the population owns 70% of our land.
♪ I've been broke all my life
♪ Now wonder
♪ How does it feel to be rich?
♪ Oh, I done worked all my life ♪
♪ Now wonder
♪ How does it feel to just live? ♪
WOMAN: There's always been an elite, which is usually adept at
reproducing its privilege through generations,
monopolizing both economic and social and cultural capital.
The way the elite stays in power and passes on their privilege
to the next generation
is also by shaping the way that we think.
♪ How does it feel to be rich?
♪ How does it feel to be ri-i-ich? ♪
♪ How does it feel to just live? ♪
♪ How does it feel to just live? ♪♪
[CAR HORNS BLARE]
TETT: Traditionally, economists have argued
that inequality is a very powerful driver
of progress and innovation
because the idea is that competition, essentially,
makes people try harder.
The problem is that extreme inequality
increasingly seems to be a source of great economic stress,
social stress and political stress.
Because if you have a situation where an elite
are so rigidly protective of their ranks
that nobody can ever rise, there's no social mobility,
you tend to end up with a full-blown revolution.
[TENSE, DRAMATIC MUSIC]
[PEOPLE SHOUT]
WILLIAMS: In the French Revolution, the banner is
"Liberté, égalité, fraternité."
It's going to be brotherhood, everyone's going to be free.
[GUNFIRE]
But yet within a tiny amount of time,
you have this government of bankers,
and what they do is start to create the elites once more.
♪ This is the land that fought for liberty ♪
♪ Now when we fight, we fight for bread ♪
♪ Here is the thing about equality ♪
♪ Everyone's equal when they're dead ♪
♪ Take your place, take your chance ♪
♪ Vive la France Vive la France!
- [MEN YELL] - ALL CHANT: Vive la France!
[DARK, DESPONDENT MUSIC]
WILLIAMS: What we see in the late 18th
and early 19th centuries is the Industrial Revolution.
It replaces the work of people's hands with machines,
so you bring in machines to make wool, to make cotton,
to make all kinds of commodities.
This makes goods faster, it standardizes them,
and this makes more profit.
Capital's no longer this fixed thing that's your land
or even your ability to lend money.
You finally figure out that you can expand your own factory
by, kind of, selling stuff, keeping the profits,
then reinvesting those profits in expanding your factory.
And that's kind of what capitalism in its modern form
really lets us do -- is that capital becomes this thing
that can, kind of, perpetually expand.
[PENSIVE MUSIC]
But the gap between wages and productivity is substantial,
and you have these kind of feudal legacies of labor
persisting very, very late into the game.
British master and servant law meant that it was a crime
for you to quit your employer without permission.
And, you know, this is getting actively used
in the mid-19th century, during, like, the heyday of capitalism
in England -- the most advanced country in the world --
and they're throwing workers in jail,
and they're being beaten
because it's a crime to go on strike.
[DOG BARKS IN DISTANCE]
[POIGNANT MUSIC]
MAN: This whole idea developed around escaping the Old World
and setting up a new, more egalitarian society.
When the new world countries were being set up --
so New Zealand, Australia, Canada --
these places were being set up by these refugees, essentially,
fleeing Europe
at a time that capitalism was really taking hold.
And that's why a lot of these people wanted to get out
of these countries -- they wanted a flatter society.
It was this idea of moving beyond the class system,
but it was done largely in a laissez-faire way.
It wasn't a political movement, by and large.
And very quickly it was the wealthy that started dominating
right from the start.
NAIDU: If you're a white man in sort of, like, 1800-ish,
Australia and the US --
these places are, like, the best places for you to go.
You've got this wide-open frontier; it's filled with land.
But the big constraint on your production
is your ability to mobilize labor.
So if you're a small family farmer,
the only labor you can mobilize on to the frontier
is your kids.
But if you're a slave owner, you can basically go to New Orleans,
you can take out a loan, use that loan
to buy a bunch of slaves in the New Orleans slave market,
then take them out to the Alabama frontier
and start clearing land and growing cotton.
[SOLEMN MUSIC]
And you're again able to take the profits from that
and expand, buy more slaves, buy more land,
and so you can again now think of the slave economy
as participating in this circuit of accumulation.
But also being a slave owner didn't just mean that you had
access to the labor of your slaves,
it also meant you had increased access to capital,
because you can use your slaves as collateral.
So if you, basically, are looking to lend to somebody
and they can offer an equivalent amount of
slave collateral versus land,
you'd prefer the slave collateral
because it's much easier to move them around
or resell them or something like that.
[SOLEMN MUSIC]
[MILITARY SNARE DRUM ROLLS]
[DRILL SERGEANT YELLS]
[BUGLE CALL BLARES]
MAN: Attack!
[HORSES HOOVES THUNDER, BLADES RING]
[PEOPLE SCREAM, SOLDIERS YELL]
[WOMAN GROANS]
[CHILD SCREAMS, BLADE RINGS]
[BUGLE CALL BLARES]
[DARK, TENSE MUSIC]
WILLIAMS: It's no good speeding up production
if there's no one to buy the stuff.
So fashion fuels the Industrial Revolution.
By the 19th century, the cult of fashion is all-encompassing.
It's come down even to the working classes.
Even working class women are trying to stay in fashion.
The idea that, "You can't wear that. That's from last season,"
that will be very strange to a 16th or 17th century person.
They think, "Well, it's still working,
it's still hard-wearing. I'll wear the same outfit."
[INTRIGUING MUSIC]
And the industry that accelerates the fastest
in the 19th century is the industry about Christmas.
[ROUSING MUSIC]
In the 18th and 17th century,
Christmas was a very low-key affair.
It was usually about drinking with your friends and relations.
It wasn't really about present-giving;
that was perhaps in New Year.
But by the mid-19th century, we have the Christmas cracker,
the Christmas card, the Christmas tree.
People are bankrupting themselves
to have a yearly Christmas, and it really was seized upon
by the manufacturers as a way to make a huge amount of money.
NAIDU: Just as you were getting all these new technologies
like the railroad and the telegraph and mass production
and the corporation -- all of these new innovations,
all of this additional production --
and inequality becomes very, very large.
It's actually this period of enormous conflicts,
where you have open wars in the mines in Colorado
between strikers and armed militia hired by capitalists.
[PEOPLE YELL]
And the overwhelming use of the US Federal Army
in this period is strike-breaking.
[GUNFIRE POPS, PEOPLE SHOUT]
[TRAIN WHEELS CLACK]
[ELECTRICITY WHIRRS]
And similarly, today, we have this whole
transformation of the economy happening,
both with trade and with technology,
that exactly have the sort of same property of
creating lots of monopolies.
[RADIO STATIC CRACKLES, PHONES BEEP]
And so it's generating, again,
a small class of very, very wealthy people.
- 22... - 43 million.
- 75 million.
$107 million. [HITS GAVEL] Sold.
[TENSE MUSIC]
ARCHIVE: In Berlin, the Germans know the hour
of glory is at hand.
[TRIUMPHANT MARCHING BAND MUSIC]
NAIDU: There's like a cultural militarism that's happening
on the Continent, and they're competing with each other
over both imperial territory and trade routes.
ARCHIVE: The warlord is ceaseless, indefatigable,
as he makes the rounds of his armies.
WILLIAMS: The British Empire was so powerful;
they had a quarter of the world's population.
The other countries wanted a piece of the cake.
And Germany, in particular, wanted a piece of the cake.
NAIDU: A lot of these new capitalists
are still, kind of, basically feudal in their outlook.
So particularly in Germany, you have these Junkers
that are these big industrialists,
but they also think there's nothing better for society
than a good fight.
[EXPLOSION POPS]
WILLIAMS: Britain and the Allied powers take on Germany
in what they think is going to be a short, sharp shock
over in a few months' time.
[CANNONS FIRE, MEN SCREAM]
[EXPLOSIONS WHISTLE, BOOM]
Instead, it goes on for years and decimates both populations.
[LOUD EXPLOSION]
[FLIES BUZZ]
[MELANCHOLY MUSIC]
World War I is, at its base, a fight over capital.
And we see this massive post-war economic crash.
So, you have this new idea after World War I,
basically born out of the fact that the government is bankrupt,
that tax is not bad, that it actually could be good.
And the only way you're going to get money
is by taxing the aristocracy.
[FIRE WHOOSHES, CRACKLES]
There is nothing in the working class and the middle class
left to tax.
So you see the beginning of the drop in aristocratic power.
And also what you see in the '20s is the growth of the power
of women and also of the working classes --
both of them, essentially, are saying to the government,
"Look, we worked really hard for you in this war.
We sacrificed. You need to give us something back."
So suddenly the whole principle that the working classes
and women must sit there and put up with the way that society is,
is completely overturned in the '20s.
[CAR HORNS HONK, CHEERING]
ARCHIVE: All of the crowds of the Empire City,
the wonder city, the windy city, the passion city,
the people, yes.
[GINGER ROGERS' 'WE'RE IN THE MONEY']
♪ Gone are my blues, and gone are my tears ♪
♪ I've got good news to shout in your ears ♪
♪ The long-lost dollar has come back to the fold ♪
♪ With silver, you can turn your dreams to gold! ♪
♪ Oh, we're in the money
♪ We're in the money
♪ Let's lend it, spend it, send it rolling around ♪
ARCHIVE: All of the crowd get the big money --
2 million, 5 million -- make a pile and raise a pile.
WOMAN: The '20s was maybe irrational exuberance.
ARCHIVE: Watch us grow! What am I bid? Going up!
WOMAN: There was a boom in stock prices,
but people kept bidding into the stock market,
because people always think there's magic in Wall Street.
You know, we have a mythology in this country, in particular,
that what's good for Wall Street is good for Main Street,
but that's really never been true.
♪ We're in the money, I'll say we're in the money ♪
♪ We've got a lot of what it takes to get along ♪♪
A lot of banks were selling products that they knew
were absolutely no good.
There were dodgy bankers doing dodgy deals knowingly.
There weren't a lot of regulations in place.
It was a real free-for-all of capital.
MAN: The bubble of the 1920s
was characteristic of many other bubbles --
a kind of euphoria that happens.
Stocks go up, you can borrow against that stock.
You use that money to buy more stock,
the price goes up even more, and everybody's feeling giddy.
[BELL RINGS]
FOROOHAR: At the same time, you've got tremendous
dislocation going on in the job market --
a lot of people getting very rich,
but a lot of workers at the bottom,
not enough in the middle.
Credit was then being offered to kind of paper over that divide.
STIGLITZ: That credit cycle fed this bubble,
and like every other bubble,
it broke.
[PEOPLE SHOUT, JEER]
FOROOHAR: This time around,
a number of bankers actually went to jail,
and there really were some regulatory changes, you know,
like, in particular the Glass-Steagall Depression-era
legislation that actually fixed the banking system
and made it safer -- until it was overturned in 1989.
[SOLEMN MUSIC]
After the financial crash, countries all around the world
also ended up getting in a trade war.
There were tariffs that were imposed,
and that created a snowball cycle,
which led to more pain globally,
and that helped to provoke the Great Depression.
[SOLEMN MUSIC]
They told me to tell you to get off,
and that's what I'm telling ya.
You mean get off of my own land?
Don't go to blaming me, it ain't my fault.
Whose fault is it?
You know who owns the land --
the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company.
And who's the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company?
It ain't nobody! It's a company.
They got a president, ain't they?
They got somebody knows what a shotgun's for, ain't they?!
What's the use of pickin' on him?
He ain't nothin' but the manager.
And he's half crazy hisself tryin' to keep up
with his orders from the East.
- Then who do we shoot? - Brother, I don't know.
- If I did, I'd tell ya. - [CAR ENGINE STARTS]
I just don't know who's to blame.
I'm right here to tell you, mister, there ain't nobody
gonna push me off my land!
My grandpa took up this land 70 years ago.
My pa was born here. We was all born on it!
And some of us was killed on it!
[SOLEMN MUSIC]
[SOLEMN PIANO MUSIC]
[TENSE, PERCUSSIVE MUSIC]
[PEOPLE SHOUT]
[GUNSHOT POPS]
[ALL CHANT, SHOUT]
[GUNFIRE]
MAN: The pain in the United States had become so great,
so grave -- absolute poverty -- and as a consequence of that,
the willingness to make political solutions
that were severe.
ROOSEVELT: This nation is asking for action and action now.
BREMMER: Price-fixing, massive change in labor rates --
all of these things under FDR
was something that Americans hadn't seen before,
and absolutely that led to massive infrastructure build
and it led to extraordinary redistribution.
The existence of a communist alternative
scared the capitalist world into thinking that if it didn't
at least address some of the basic inequality issues,
that they would lose the battle for ideas.
[LOUD EXPLOSION]
In the New Deal itself, Roosevelt actually borrowed
some ideas -- the heavy state involvement in the economy;
heavy regulation.
There was a clear recognition that unless the state tried to
do something about jobs
and do enough redistribution to keep people from starving,
that you wouldn't have basic social stability.
[GLASS SHATTERS]
[DARK, OMINOUS MUSIC]
WILLIAMS: The Wall Street crash creates poverty in America,
it creates poverty in Britain,
but it has a massive effect on Germany,
because Germany is already poor. After World War I,
they were given these very punitive reparations --
they had to give huge amounts of money to the other countries.
And what you have is this horrific inflation
in the Weimar Republic --
Germany as it was known in the 1920s --
in which, basically, at one point,
a whole barrel of banknotes cannot buy you a loaf of bread.
We can absolutely link, as tight as that, the rise of fascism
in Europe in the 1930s and extreme poverty.
[TENSE, SOMBER MUSIC]
And you can see how seductive it is
when someone like Adolf Hitler comes up and says,
"I'll make Germany great again. We'll be powerful again."
And really what he's saying is,
"The reason why we're so poor in Germany is because of Britain,
is because of America, is because of the rest of Europe."
[SOMBER MUSIC CONTINUES]
These downtrodden people were so open, so vulnerable
to the rise of fascism and the call of racism,
the call of exclusionism
and the call of invading other countries.
[UNSETTLING MUSIC]
[TRIUMPHANT, PATRIOTIC MUSIC]
ARCHIVE: One American airplane factory -- one of many.
One bomber -- thousands on the way --
an angel of death.
NAIDU: What really gets rid of the Depression is transforming
the economy into World War II.
And the scale of this is just something that humanity
had never seen before.
[CLICKING, WHIRRING]
The governments of all the societies involved
just kind of take over production,
and this is an industrial war,
so production is, kind of, the terms under which,
in the long run, this will be won or lost.
[TENSE MUSIC]
The labor movement got a lot of political power.
Like, if you're producing for the war,
you have to automatically recognize a union.
And then just also raising the money to pay for that
just involved raising taxes.
This period was the last gasp of feudalism,
and it took this to finally purge the influence
of the aristocracy in advanced countries.
[OMINOUS MUSIC]
[ENGINES HUM]
[OMINOUS MUSIC CONTINUES]
[AIR RAID SIREN WAILS]
[TORPEDOES WHISTLE]
[EXPLOSIONS BOOM]
[RAPID GUNFIRE, BOMBS BOOM]
[PROPELLER WHIRRS]
[BOMBS WHISTLE, BOOM]
[EXPLOSIONS BOOM]
[JARRING MUSIC]
[MUSIC FADES]
[RESONATING RUMBLING]
[WATER LAPS GENTLY]
[QUIET, MELANCHOLY MUSIC]
[ELLA FITZGERALD'S 'DON'T FENCE ME IN']
♪ Oh, give me land, lots of land ♪
♪ Under starry skies above
♪ Don't fence me in
♪ Let me ride through the wide open country... ♪
♪ Let me be my myself in the evening breeze ♪
♪ Listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees... ♪
♪ Don't fence me in ♪
The social landscape is completely different
in the aftermath of World War II.
You see the biggest shift in attitudes that you ever see.
Bit different from what it used to be,
I can tell ya.
[PENSIVE PIANO MUSIC]
ARCHIVE: There will be sickness and unemployment benefits,
retirement pensions, industrial injuries benefits,
guardians allowances, widows' benefits, maternity grants.
WILLIAMS: It's a move towards creating a benefit system.
We have the idea of sickness pay, holiday pay.
In Britain they created the National Health Service --
free service from cradle to grave.
[PENSIVE MUSIC]
It's a move towards nationalization of industry,
it's a move towards taxation of inheritance,
taxation of property and wealth.
I'm telling you, it works out fine.
ARCHIVE: Television, with its promise of endless hours
of enjoyment, entertainment, was part of the peacetime green.
Television -- an unparalleled blending of private incentive
and public service.
WILLIAMS: In America in the '50s,
you see capital restrained also.
You have rent controls on apartments,
you have limits on landowners.
Capital can't just roam free, it can't just increase itself.
Capital must be harnessed like some wild horse.
TV: This is the land of the thoroughbred.
WILLIAMS: There is a very clear vision that capital needs to be
helping the people, that actually the whole principle
in which the rich do whatever they want with their capital
and that's good for the nation,
well, that's being challenged across the world.
♪ I wish I had a castle in the sky ♪
♪ A way up high where bluebirds like to fly ♪
The new vision is that the '50s is going to be the age in which
everyone can have wealth.
♪ ...with a hundred rooms or more... ♪
...some day...
♪ With stars for windows, clouds for rugs ♪
♪ A rainbow for a door ♪
People who are born just after World War II
had a life that no child before them could ever imagine.
WOMAN: I just wish I had a decent kitchen.
[BELLS RING, PEOPLE EXCLAIM]
WILLIAMS: For the first time,
hard work and study can get you to the top.
[CHEERING, APPLAUSE]
- Hello, Mrs. Thatcher. - Nice to see you.
- Have a seat. - [CHEERING, APPLAUSE]
My father left school at 12 or 13,
and didn't have some of the chances
that you and I have to go on to college.
And I think you'll find when you're a parent,
what you're always trying to do is to give your children
the sort of chances you didn't have.
Would you like to see a woman prime minister?
I think it depends upon who the person is.
I don't think that there will be a woman prime minister
in my lifetime.
WILLIAMS: What you see in Margaret Thatcher's life
is incredible social mobility.
An ordinary shopkeeper's daughter from the North,
she went to grammar school, she went to Oxford,
and became the first female prime minister,
and, of course, wealthy.
And that is simply through this new society
in which social mobility was actually possible.
And what you have is this real surge of the middle classes
and the lower middle classes into positions of power.
[PENSIVE MUSIC]
And we'll have the kitchen right here,
so we can see the children playing in the yard.
Children?! How many you planning on?
Not more than six, I hope.
[CHILDREN CHATTER]
[UNSETTLING PIANO MUSIC]
[UNSETTLING MUSIC CONTINUES]
[BIRDSONG, CHILDREN SHOUT]
FUKUYAMA: The decades immediately after World War II
were quite remarkable.
There was a high degree of social consensus
that really sprang out of the whole war effort.
It was so-- You had a solidarity,
but it was on the basis of a pretty stratified society.
There were other forms of inequality that existed
in that period.
But that began to change after the civil rights movement
in the 1960s and then all of the other social movements
that occurred thereafter.
- ♪ You better think - ♪ Think!
♪ Think about what you're trying to do to me ♪
The negro still is not free.
♪ ...let yourself be free
- ♪ Oh, freedom - ♪ Freedom!
- ♪ Some freedom - ♪ Freedom!
♪ Oh, freedom
♪ Yeah, freedom!
FUKUYAMA: I think that, politically,
having a broad middle class is quite important.
It's part of what's called modernization
through this idea that as your income rises,
you develop a middle class that are better educated,
and therefore they will demand a higher level of participation.
- ♪ Oh, freedom - ♪ Freedom!
- ♪ Some freedom - ♪ Freedom!
♪ Oh, freedom! Yeah, freedom! ♪
WOMEN CHANT: We have been victims for so long.
- ♪ Freedom - ♪ Oh, freedom
- ♪ Freedom - ♪ Give me some freedom
♪ Oh, freedom!
- ♪ Whoo! To the ball, baby - ♪ To the ball ♪
Then that kind of all unravels in the '70s.
ANCHOR: This is NBC Nightly News, Wednesday October 17th.
Good evening. The Middle East war produced developments
all over the world today.
The oil-producing countries of the Arab world
decided to use their oil as a political weapon.
REPORTER: There was an announcement in Kuwait
that prices for Arab oil were going up --
a huge increase voted in an overnight meeting
until Israeli forces leave occupied Arab land.
[TENSE MUSIC]
NAIDU: This oil shock hits all of the advanced economies,
and oil was an input into everything.
REPORTER: It was announced today that gasless Sundays
will go into effect as of next month.
REPORTER: The price of foreign oil
had jumped from $3 to $12 a barrel.
NAIDU: Quadrupling the price of oil translated into this period
where, like, prices started to increase
and wages weren't keeping pace,
but then unions and workers started demanding
even higher wages to keep pace with prices,
and then what firms would do is then increase prices
even further to pass on the effects of wages,
and so you got what's called a wage-price spiral.
And so you had this period of high inflation and low growth,
so that's why it got called stagflation.
[OCEAN LAPS]
[PLANE ENGINE WHINES]
FOROOHAR: Globalization is starting to happen.
The emerging markets are coming online in the world.
Europe is back on its feet,
Germany is becoming a producer again,
a number of European nations are becoming more competitive.
[DOLLY PARTON'S '9 TO 5']
FOROOHAR: The global picture is changing.
American capital suddenly doesn't have
the world to itself anymore.
♪ Tumble outta bed and I stumble to the kitchen ♪
♪ Pour myself a cup of ambition... ♪
FOROOHAR: But another thing that's happening in the 1970s
is you see a very kind of siloed, financialized
way of thinking about how to run a corporate balance sheet --
cut costs, marshal your capital,
treat labor as a cost, not an asset.
♪ Working 9 to 5
♪ What a way to make a living
♪ Barely gettin' by
♪ It's all takin' and no givin' ♪
♪ They just use your mind
♪ And you never get the credit
♪ It's enough to drive you crazy if you let it ♪
FOROOHAR: Companies are not investing in their workers,
they're not raising wages,
so you start to really get that big 'X'
where Wall Street's going here, Main Street's going down here.
♪ It's a rich man's game
♪ No matter what they call it
♪ And you spend your life puttin' money in his wallet ♪
♪ 9 to 5... ♪
[MACHINERY WHIRRS]
FOROOHAR: Germany and Japan took a different model --
a model in which workers sat on the boards of companies,
had more of a say.
This actually gave them a big advantage.
They were able to use that expertise
and increase their efficiency,
and eventually gain market share from US companies.
[SINISTER MUSIC]
ARCHIVE: When it started, America was unprepared.
From across the ocean, they came --
little cars determined to change the buying habits of a nation.
It's a great-looking car. What do you call it?
- Isuzu. - Gesundheit.
Road-hugging, heart-pounding,
hood-soaring, deck-sloping...
♪ We are...
♪ Cadillacs drive Subaru
MAN: Reagan for president.
Japanese production of automobiles is almost
twice as great per worker as it is in America.
We were once the greatest producer of automobiles,
producing more than all the rest of the world combined.
That is no longer true.
- [PEOPLE CHANT] - Thank you very much.
[HORN SOUNDS]
Can anyone look at our reduced standing in the world today
and say, "Let's have four more years of this"?
CROWD: No!
For those who've abandoned hope, we'll restore hope
and we'll welcome them into a great national crusade
- to make America great again. - [CHEERING, APPLAUSE]
[CROWDS JEER]
BRITISH REPORTER: Here comes the Prime Ministerial Rover,
bearing now Mrs. Thatcher.
AMERICAN REPORTER: Enter Margaret Thatcher,
a grocer's daughter educated among the privileged classes
at Oxford University.
[OFFICERS SPEAK INDISTINCTLY]
There is now work to be done.
In deciding that, actually, what we need to do
is increase the value of assets in order to increase investment,
some of the thinking behind what would happen
when you let capital free,
you had to suppress the power of labor.
[PENSIVE MUSIC]
REPORTER: This 12-foot-high pile is part of two weeks' rubbish
piled outside the local refuse depot.
Like others in Central London,
it's been closed now for two weeks
because of the dustmen's indefinite strike.
REPORTER: The teachers' union are today putting forward
a pay claim. 33,000 school children are out of school
in the worst-affected London borough of Haringey.
REPORTER: Cancelled operations
meant empty beds up on the wards,
which would otherwise have been used.
SHAHEEN: You have to remember, at those times,
there were issues about strikes; the public were upset about
the way some labor unions were acting in that time.
I'm going to boil everything because the sewage men,
I understand, are still on strike,
and so it'll be polluted, so you can get typhoid,
can't you?
SHAHEEN: There was a mandate to do something about
the power of labor against capital.
And it certainly is a tricky job trying to get that right.
This government has rolled back the frontiers of the state
and will roll them back still further.
Millions have already become shareholders
in British Gas, British Airways, British airports.
[INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER, ENGINES WHINE]
WOMAN: Attention, all passengers.
Flight 307 is cancelled until further notice.
NAIDU: This incredible hostility to unions
starts in the '80s and is really crystallized
when Reagan fires all these air traffic controllers.
REAGAN: I must tell those who fail to report for duty
this morning, if they do not report for work within 48 hours,
they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.
End of statement.
NAIDU: That's kind of seen as like a greenlight
to a whole industry.
[MICROPHONE FEEDBACK]
Good evening. This afternoon, President Reagan started firing
the strikers, and the government claimed it was ready to rebuild
the whole system without them.
[MEN SHOUT]
By this evening, federal judges had sent
five local union leaders to jail.
[PENSIVE MUSIC]
SHAHEEN: What we've seen over time -- and this is fundamental
to understanding why inequality has worsened --
is that the share of all the money that's made in the economy
is going less and less to the workers, so that is declining --
the wage share --
and the profit share, essentially what those that own
the capital will get, is growing.
And that is essentially about power.
[MICROPHONE FEEDBACK]
Well, I, uh -- I appreciate the opportunity you're giving me,
Mr. Cromwell, as the single largest shareholder
in Teldar Paper, to speak.
America has become a second-rate power.
Now, in the days of the free market,
when our country was a top industrial power,
there was accountability to the stockholder.
The Carnegies, the Mellons,
the men that built this great industrial empire,
made sure of it because it was their money at stake.
The point is, ladies and gentlemen,
that greed -- for lack of a better word --
is good.
Greed is right.
Greed works.
And greed --
you mark my words --
will not only save Teldar Paper,
but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
- Thank you very much. - [APPLAUSE]
TETT: When Gordon Gekko was seen on film saying,
"Greed is good," that was intended to be a howl of protest
against the system.
But such had the cultural fabric changed,
that actually for some people coming through universities
applying to join investment banks,
that phrase "Greed is good" actually became a license
to pursue riches.
[KIM WILDE'S 'KIDS IN AMERICA']
TETT: The era of the yuppie came to rule.
♪ Friday night and everyone's moving ♪
♪ I can feel the heat, but it's soothing, heading down ♪
TETT: It began to become very cool to be an entrepreneur,
to be riding that boom,
and the idea of arguing for high taxes and redistribution
began to seem very out of fashion.
- ♪ We're the kids in America - ♪ Whoa
♪ Everybody live for the music-go-round ♪
The new mantra of deregulation took hold,
and so financial services were deregulated dramatically,
bankers began to get paid a lot more,
and then market forces were unleashed,
which made capitalists a lot richer.
♪ Hot-shot... ♪
[MUSIC FADES]
[WHOOSHING]
STIGLITZ: The big reforms of the Reagan-Thatcher era
were lower the tax rates on the rich
on the assumption it would trickle down. Didn't happen.
[CAR HORN BLARES]
When they adopted these kinds of policies,
it was very clear that they would increase inequality.
The promise was that the pie would be bigger,
you would be getting a smaller percentage
of a bigger pie, and your slice would get bigger.
So in some sense,
there was no surprise
that there was a growth in inequality.
But the magnitude of the increase in inequality
was much larger.
When we look at the numbers, we can see it very vividly.
The bottom 90% have experienced near-stagnation.
Most of the growth has gone to the top 10%.
Median income for a typical American household is roughly
at the level it was a quarter century ago.
Real wages, adjusted for inflation, at the bottom
are at the level they were 60 years ago.
In fact, life expectancy has been declining.
These are dramatic statistics that shows the economy
has not been working for most Americans.
[EDGY, TENSE MUSIC]
By the 1990s, American banks really became the exporters
of American capitalism, and they went everywhere --
they went to Europe, they went to Asia.
And everyone was sold our version of a trickle-down,
laissez-faire deregulate capitalism.
[JARRING TECHNO MUSIC]
Life seemed to get better in the 1990s,
because the globalization of the system
made things for ordinary people for a while cheaper,
but then on top of that, you get credit.
[EDGY, TECHNO MUSIC]
When the credit boom took off,
suddenly ordinary people could get credit.
MAN: Master the moment.
Suddenly, extraordinarily poor people could get credit.
- You can apply... - ...right over the phone.
People with terrible credit histories could get credit.
MAN: There is absolutely no risk.
People who in no way should be given a mortgage
could get a mortgage.
And the investment banks created ever more exotic
credit derivatives -- ways of parceling up your bad debt
and disguising its badness.
That's what kept the system going for as long as it did.
And 2008 was where that blew up.
Wall Street in panic mode this morning.
How did this happen?
22% of homeowners are underwater on their mortgage...
Millions of American homeowners...
- Homeowners defaulting... - Greed.
The essence of the American Dream could be threatened.
- Sub-prime lending... - Higher interest rates...
Let's see here, uh, balloon payment,
37% interest compounded every minute,
not understanding the contract fee,
da, da, ba, da, ba, ba-da, bow.
And here's your new monthly payment.
[BOTH GASP]
Listen, you, when you gave me that money,
you said I wouldn't have to repay it till the future.
This isn't the future! It's the lousy, stinkin' now!
Now, calm down. This country takes care of its middle class.
[SOMBER MUSIC]
Ah, don't be sore at the banks.
Hell, we fired our CEO and he barely got out with $50 million.
[BELL RINGS]
REPORTER: Banks are afraid to lend money to each other.
We're seeing a freezing of the credit market.
- ...credit markets. - ...credit markets.
REPORTER: The fear is rising.
The fear was, and I think it was a well-founded fear,
that the availability of credit would disappear,
and perhaps our ability to even transact,
to even be able to access cash to make payments,
use a credit card, use a debit card.
Perhaps that would break down also.
REPORTER: Worst week since the crash of 1929.
- ...global sell-off. - ...the Dow tumbled...
- ...hoarding cash. - Japan down nearly 10%.
REPORTER: The British government blamed American bankers.
When it starts to unravel, then you start to worry --
how broadly will this spread around the world
and are we on the verge of another Great Depression?
American taxpayers woke up this morning to learn their money
makes up most of a...
Big package, because it was a big problem.
Too big to fail.
REPORTER: The Fed loaned the banks some $7.7 trillion.
Global markets soared at the news of the US rescue plan.
With the bail-out news, the stock rebounded nearly 60%.
...Hong Kong more than 8%. London's FTSE...
REPORTER: Stokes rose 15% in one hour --
the largest single bounce in FTSE history.
Those companies came to us and said,
"Uh, if you don't give us $700 billion,
everything you love and hold dear in this world
- will turn to [BLEEP]." - [LAUGHTER]
And in return for this in no way ransom money...
[LAUGHTER]
...the American people would now be the proud owner
of these bales of [BLEEP].
JOHNSON: The collapse didn't occur. The system was preserved
and the opportunity to substantially reform the system
was set aside. The stock market went down sharply,
and then it came back up sharply as a result of these measures.
In addition, wealthy people, rich people,
have a lot of exposure to the stock market,
so they kept their jobs, they kept their bonuses,
the businesses they were in were not
substantially disrupted, and they made more money
through stock appreciation
and through dividends and through expected dividends
than they had in the last couple of years.
REPORTER: Bloomberg estimates the banks made
a $13 billion profit on the spread.
REPORTER: 73 executives from the unit that engineered
the company's downfall all just got bonus checks
- worth a million or more. - ...$1.6 billion in bonuses.
JOHNSON: Wall Street and the views of Wall Street
had taken over policy.
That's the quiet coup.
[TENSE MUSIC]
FUKUYAMA: Democracies in general are susceptible to this
capture by elites.
And unless the democracy is renewed by the non-elites
every now and then rising up,
the democracy will continue to move in this direction
where power and wealth are more and more concentrated.
All across the world, you now have this layer of oligarchs
that use their money to buy political influence.
[POP! LAUGHTER]
[SIREN WAILS]
[DREAMY, WHIMSICAL MUSIC]
MAN: Rationally speaking, it would make sense that
the more of something you have, maybe the more inclined
you would be to share it with other people.
But that's not what our research and what a lot of other research
seems to find.
We brought strangers into the lab in pairs of two;
with a flip of a coin determined
who was going to be a rich player
and was going to be a poor player.
[INTRIGUING MUSIC]
The rich player got two times as much money to play the game,
they got to roll both dice instead of one,
so they got to move around the board a lot quicker,
and that mattered because when they moved around the board
and passed 'Go,'
they would collect $200, whereas the poor person,
they'd collect $100.
The inequality's almost immediately apparent
to the players. How couldn't it be?
But within a couple of minutes, dynamics start to crystallize.
And the rich player started to behave a little differently.
Rich players become more dominant.
Rich players eat more pretzels.
When moving their piece around the board, they become louder.
They start smacking the board with their piece.
And the rich players were significantly ruder.
They were far more likely to showcase and talk about
how well they're doing
and to belittle the plight of those poor players.
So they became less compassionate.
These are patterns that we're observing consistently over
hundreds of different individuals.
You see people who are winning because of the flip of a coin
start to act as if they actually deserve to win.
One of the questions we ask is "Why did you win the game?"
And you can imagine the rich players would say,
"Well, I won the game because of that flip of the coin
and I had two times the advantage."
But none -- not one -- of the rich players
attributed their inevitable success in this game
to that force of luck that randomly got them
that privileged position in the first place.
And when we watch patterns of human interactions,
people who feel entitled and deserving of their own success
are more willing to privilege their own interests
above the interests of other people
and often engage in ways that undermine
other people's welfare so that they can get ahead.
And that's a fairly pernicious social consequence.
But it's not about people who are rich,
but rather that the experience of being relatively better off
than someone seems to affect everyone,
or would affect everyone, in the same way.
Yes, we won the lottery!
[LIGHT-HEARTED BRASS MUSIC]
[METAL CLUNKING]
Peter, my God, what the hell are you wearing?!
It's a solid gold tuxedo, Lois. I had to fight three rappers
down at the Nonsense Store for this.
Look, Peter, this is not who we are.
I'm worried the money is changing this family,
and not the way you hoped.
Well, I was hoping it would make you shut up, so you're right.
PIFF: When we, in experiments, get actually poor people
or we make poor people feel rich,
again, same pattern of results.
Lois, don't you understand?
We don't got any of our old problems anymore.
We don't have to worry about paying bills,
we don't have to worry about saving dough.
All we gotta do is enjoy ourselves.
Interested?
[GASPS]
Oh my God!
Peter, it's beautiful. Is it a blood diamond?
Ah, the bloodiest.
The two kids who found it were forced to murder each other.
Oh, Peter, I love it!
We translate perceptions and experiences
of being better off than others materially
to being better than others.
The mind makes that translation, it seems.
[ENGINE ROARS]
[INTRIGUING MUSIC]
MASON: Once you get people whose entire life is lived
on a kind of plane, you know, in First Class,
in the bubble of the security system,
and your villa in three or four different countries
you can move to if things get a bit unpleasant,
what happens to taxation?
What happens is large amounts of wealth are moved offshore.
[INTRIGUING MUSIC]
For decades, individuals and companies have moved
their legal selves in order to avoid paying tax
that benefits the people who work for them.
So that when you come out of the HQ of one of these
giant trendy IT companies,
you fall over, you hit your head,
and you're lying on the pavement in a pool of blood,
an ambulance arrives
that has not been paid for in any way, shape or form
by the taxes of that company.
[MONITOR BEEPS, OXYGEN PUFFS]
That's a very new system in capitalism.
And it is unsustainable
because to make it work,
the state must have access via taxation
to the incomes of the rich.
[BABY CRIES]
[RESOUNDING BOOM]
REPORTER: The EU has ordered the Irish government
to recover almost $15 billion of unpaid taxes from Apple.
REPORTER: $15 billion is more than the four years
of annual austerity cuts imposed by the Irish government.
WOMAN: Amazon's tax benefits are illegal.
REPORTER: Facebook paid less UK corporation tax
than your average teacher.
90,000 come from zero corporation tax.
- Scrutinize... - ...the rich avoiding taxes.
[VOICES OVERLAP] Google, Microsoft...
- McDonald's... - Facebook...
[OMINOUS WHOOSHING]
FOROOHAR: It just works much better for the holders
of capital than it does for people on the ground.
In particular, the giant cash-rich tech firms
can put people and money wherever they want to put them.
They just fly 35,000 feet above national concerns.
They create far fewer jobs than big industrial companies
of the past, yet they make vastly more money.
[ATMOSPHERIC ELECTRONIC MUSIC]
The great irony here is that everything that makes
a smart phone smart --
the internet, GPS, touchscreen technology --
all that was our taxpayer money going into federal agencies
like DARPA that created this stuff,
and yet the wealth doesn't flow back into the ecosystem.
Irish guys pay a fee to Google Netherlands Holding BV.
Is that to save withholding tax?
That's my understanding.
It therefore goes to Google Holdings Ireland?
-That's correct. -Which is registered in Ireland
but administered from Bermuda?
-That's correct. -So if that happens,
your profits actually go to Bermuda?
[THE WEEKND'S 'THE MORNING']
♪ All that money, the money is the motive ♪
♪ All that money, the money she be folding ♪
♪ Girl put in work
♪ Girl, girl, put in work
♪ Girl put in work
♪ Girl, girl, put in work
♪ Girl put in work...
♪ All that money
- ♪ The money is the motive - ♪ The money is the motive
♪ All that money, the money she be folding ♪
♪ Girl, put in work...
♪ Girl put in work
♪ Girl, girl, put in work ♪
[TRAFFIC HUMS, HORNS BLARE]
[STIRRING MUSIC]
[POP!]
[SIRENS WAIL, TRAFFIC HUMS]
BREMMER: Globalization has opened a global community up
to each other,
but it's also meant that in the developed world,
corporations were able to take jobs and move them
and make a lot of money out of it.
[PENSIVE MUSIC]
And on the other hand, the working and middle classes
that were doing quite well have lost quality of life
and opportunities.
And their governments and their corporations
have done very little -- in some cases, really nothing at all --
to address that.
The United States and Europe are vastly more divided
because of globalization.
India, The Philippines, China are not.
[INTRIGUING MUSIC]
Chinese people, they believe that if they work hard,
their kids are gonna have better lives,
and that's probably true.
But in the United States, that's just not true anymore.
[DRAMATIC, STIRRING MUSIC]
If you go to Beijing or Shenzhen or Shanghai
or Guangzhou or any of these sort of
wealthier cities in China that have made it --
Shanghai, where per capita income
is higher than Portugal -- you will meet middle class Chinese,
and I mean global middle class Chinese;
I don't mean middle class from the Chinese context.
And that is a very different China from what you saw
even 10 years ago.
China's now almost the largest economy in the world;
within the next decade it will be,
but it will still be state capitalist.
[DRAMATIC, STIRRING MUSIC]
State capitalism is where state-owned enterprises
are the most important actors in the economy.
These corporations are, in principle,
trying to make money and build themselves,
and sometimes they do compete against each other
in a fairly controlled fashion.
But the other important Chinese actors are what you'd call
privately owned national champions.
So, in other words, they are actively supported by the state,
even though they're privately held,
and they benefit accordingly.
[PLANE ENGINE ROARS]
Also you have hundreds of millions of people
who are quite poor,
but they want state capitalism.
It's fine for them, as long as they can make enough money
to ensure that their kids will do better.
[INDISTINCT TRAIN ANNOUNCEMENTS]
[TENSE, STIRRING MUSIC]
FUKUYAMA: China does show what freeing up capital will do to
income distribution.
Capital really has to be regulated much, much more
strictly than things in the real economy.
[TENSE MUSIC]
There's a fundamental difference between liberalization
of capital markets
and liberalization of trade and goods and services.
This was one of the big lessons of the Great Depression.
FOROOHAR: Modern capitalism is all about the free movement
of global capital,
and the financial system itself has changed
over the last 40 years.
The financial industry has about doubled in size as a percentage
of the economy, and that's actually created slower growth,
not faster growth.
When Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism,
was thinking up the idea of the free market system,
he was living in a very different world.
Hey, why not? My own business.
All you need's a little capital, a little push and an idea.
FOROOHAR: Small and mid-sized family-owned businesses
were the norm.
I wouldn't wear that hat to a dog fight.
WOMAN: Why, there isn't a decent hat in the entire village.
Why not? Women's hats! My own business!
FOROOHAR: He believed that the financial markets
were just an intermediary -- they were supposed to take
everyone's savings, hold them as bank deposits,
and then lend them out to the hairdresser down the street.
Not to be too cliché, but it's kind of the
"It's a Wonderful Life" model of banking.
I think if Adam Smith time-warped,
he would have no idea what to make of a "too big to fail" bank
or a giant multinational company that's doing business
in 120 different countries,
all of which have different regulatory systems.
It's a completely different world.
[TENSE ELECTRONIC MUSIC]
Statistics today show that only 15% of money
coming out of the largest financial institutions
is actually going to that kind of productive lending.
So what's the other 85% doing?
It's just moving around this closed loop
of the financial system --
its assets being bought and sold by the same people;
their value going up, up, up, up, up.
MASON: For the rich, it's easier to keep your wealth away
from productive, risky activity,
and this is producing a new social story.
It's easier to build a property,
and maybe you don't fill that property,
maybe all the apartments in the property aren't filled,
but you know in five years' time that property will be worth
so much more, that your business is really to sit on assets
and hope their value rises,
rather than to try and make money by risking your money
in activities like open a factory or invent something new.
EDWARDS: If you own a house, you're making capital gains
out of that far in excess of what people get
through just regular jobs.
Therefore, people have become property speculators.
And this changes the whole way the housing situation operates.
And, essentially, it starts dividing.
This housing crisis that's happening
really throughout the West is something
that particularly affects the young.
Most people view this as some sort of generational fight.
The baby boomers benefited from buying houses
when they were relatively cheap,
and therefore have a very nice nest egg for their retirement,
and it's the young people that can't even rent cheaply.
Those at the bottom, I think, are quite polarized --
angry, in fact.
These houses, essentially, earn more money than they do,
and they have to rent them.
[SIREN WAILS]
MASON: It transmits to the poor or middle class person
that the best thing they can do is to hope that their home
rises so much in value
that it offsets all the other problems in their life,
like that their pension was destroyed
or that they lost their job
or that their kids are gonna be poor.
[EDGY, TENSE MUSIC]
SHAHEEN: Young people are naturally more hopeful.
But they are aware, they are acutely aware,
that they've been given a raw deal.
You know, why is it, to educate yourself,
you have to get yourself into £50,000 of debt?
And a lot of young people feel infantiled.
Why does my incredibly smart 26-year-old brother-in-law
still have to live at home?
He's asking that, my in-laws are asking that.
[TRAIN HUMS]
[BRAKES SQUEAL]
What we've told people is that, "You're not poor;
you're a millionaire-in-waiting.
And because of that, don't worry about inequality,
just focus on how hard you're working
and trying to run, run, run, run up that hill,"
which is ironic, because societies that are more unequal
have less social mobility.
The rungs of the ladder grow apart,
people have the money to make sure they stay at the top,
and it means it's harder for people to climb.
That's something that you find again and again in the data.
The system is rigged.
And people aren't stupid -- they recognize that.
[SOMBER MUSIC]
[SIREN WAILS]
[PULSING, BROODING MUSIC]
TETT: Essentially, what's happening is that you're
getting an economy which is more and more productive,
but where the gains of those productivity increases
are going into the hands of a very small number of people.
And where there is job growth
is at the lower end of the spectrum,
which is often low-paid, fairly unsatisfactory work.
[UPBEAT, EDGY MUSIC]
Our labor market is shifting.
More and more, it classifies people as "self-employed."
And what that means is that companies won't owe them
holiday pay, won't owe them a pension,
and those individual workers have to make sure
that they can look after themselves if they're sick,
if they want to take a holiday.
[MUSIC CONTINUES]
MASON: You know what, when Piketty says
that the future for capitalism is this highly illegal,
highly socially immobile future, it's already happening.
[EDGY, TENSE MUSIC FADES]
TETT: America's about to see the biggest wealth transfer
in history take place, as the generation which made money
after World War II
is passing that wealth on to their children.
[PLAYFUL MUSIC]
Something in the order of $12 trillion or more
is going to be passed on to the next generation
in the next 10 to 15 years.
And that will be invested in a way that it creates more wealth.
[INTRIGUING MUSIC]
[TENSE MUSIC]
There's now research showing that in advanced economies,
that two-thirds of the population is now on track
to be poorer than their parents,
which is a huge, huge mega political trend.
[EXPLOSION BOOMS, GLASS SHATTERS]
[SIREN WAILS]
[PEOPLE YELL INDISTINCTLY]
MASON: People on the streets are starting to say, "Enough" --
...enough of the inequality and enough of not having a story
about how this ever gets better.
And people are reaching out
for the nearest thing they can cling to,
and often that is their identity, their ethnicity,
their religion.
[TENSE MUSIC]
And they lash out against the nearest enemy they can find.
BORIS JOHNSON: Vast amounts of unskilled labor
coming into this country.
DONALD TRUMP: They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime,
they're rapists.
But ultimately, none of that will work.
Blaming your neighbor doesn't make you any richer.
[SIREN WAILS]
[POIGNANT MUSIC]
[STIRRING MUSIC]
[MUSIC CONTINUES]
BREMMER: You know, if you wanna think about what the longer term
implications are, I mean, the truly dystopian implications,
you think about horses.
I mean, we used to have a lot of horses.
End of the 19th century, right,
I mean, horses were critical for industrialization.
And then they weren't,
because you have all these industrial processes
that are much more efficient than horses are.
And, you know, for all of the technophiles
that are saying, "Technology has always created more jobs,
and so it will continue to,"
I say, "Technology has always created more jobs,
as long as you had things that human beings could do."
But when technology starts actually getting at
the basic functionality of a human being,
then human beings start becoming the equivalent of horses.
And that doesn't mean
that we can no longer have meaningful lives,
but it means that you have to change your model
because capitalism is no longer about labor.
[STIRRING MUSIC]
And the problem is this is coming soon, soon, soon.
You look at driverless technologies.
Driving is, by the way, the single largest or second largest
employer of people in every one of the 50 US states,
and within 10 years, most of those jobs are gone.
So you will address capital, because if you don't, right,
you are going to have very serious problems.
[OMINOUS MUSIC]
[TRAFFIC HUMS, DOGS BARK]
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
[VEHICLES WHIRR]
NAIDU: We're leaving an industrial economy
and going to a post-industrial economy.
And we have to make choices
about which future we wind up in.
You can have abundance that is very unequally distributed,
where we have the robots that can do anything,
but the only people that own the robots are a very small
segment of society,...
basically like Elysium, where a bunch of people
live in ecologically protected spaces
and everyone else is living in, like, a hot, putrid mess.
And so it's a political problem.
[REFLECTIVE MUSIC]