No, Capitalism DOES NOT Require Growth: Sometimes, the Left Lies.

the purpose of this video is sincerely
educational I am going to try very hard to address a widespread left-wing misconception about economics and politics I'm going to try to address it with absolutely zero mocking tone guys I was raised left-wing I grew up left-wing in a left wing town my parents to say they were left-wing is an understatement alright but you personally are not going to be able to make progress and become a better educated more sophisticated person and your movement is not going to be able to make progress if you can't sit back in a somewhat skeptical and Socratic way question some of the non empirical assumptions that are underpinning your moral ethical economic and political claims today's profit can only be achieved through growth a capitalist must always push production farther and farther however production requires the use of goods that are not infinite like labour and natural resources since capitalism cannot administer a limit it will always eventually crash in other words capitalism always ends up destroying the hand that feeds it eventually you will run into a situation whereby the capitalists produce too many goods which the masses of people who are now in poverty can't afford to buy back and as you know when there is no purchasing power there is a recession aka a crisis of capitalism the second major problem that results from this inevitability of overproduction is environmental crisis meaning a corporation will run out of resources to use or that pollution will start to be so great that it will start to affect the costs of production this is the natural outcome from a system that seeks to produce the most amount of goods for the least amount of money possible capitalism is a system that needs to perpetually grow and perpetual growth a finite planet with finite resources is impossible yes this philosophical claim were true it would have some definite real-world implications it would necessarily mean that a capitalist society with zero growth would be a disaster would be a dystopia would be in a state of internal calamity tearing itself apart the workers struggling against their employers so on and so forth right so if this is not just a Dogma if this is not a doctrine if this is not just an abstract principle that you're gonna insist is true regardless of the facts then we should be able to test this empirically in the real world so if you're a left winger and you've believed in this hypothesis for years maybe you've been out in the streets and you've seen people chanting it and you've seen it written on placards maybe you've heard people you know preaching it from the podium and political events it's something I've heard all my life and very few people pause to reflect on what it really means did I ask you to have some sympathy for the other side here I want you as a left-wing person to sympathize with a right-wing person who's grown up being told by their parents their grandparents and their the church officials no the church father the church pastor they've been told by authority figures all their lives that the best way to organize society is to let everyone own guns the gun control would be a terrible thing that the most peaceful and safe way to emphasize make sure everybody is carrying done all the time a lot of right when people grew up with that and to challenge that conception you have to say wait a minute why don't we look at real-world examples of societies that have very strict gun control where nobody owns guns are very very few people on guns just the police have guns nobody oh why don't we take a look at those societies now that work in the real world okay the right wing person who grew up with the mentality of justifying gun ownership they may have a completely coherent abstract argument from principles from from axioms as to why they think the world would be a better place if everyone can own a gun and how it's gonna lead to some kind of terrible tyranny despotism or actually higher crime rates and higher rates of armed rebellion and this kind of social social unrest social upheaval if you restrict the number of people who own guns that may seem convincing written out on a chalkboard in abstract principles but then when you work from real-world examples you thought of setting huh there are a lot of examples of societies that exist in the real world where almost nobody owns guns very strict gun control laws and sheath quality of life there is pretty good you know GE we have positive hills so I'm in the same position in addressing this argument to a person person who's committed to this view that capitalism without growth without constant growth without infinite growth the capitalism without high rates of growth will be a disaster have you heard of Japan Japan is constantly referred to in the mainstream press as a zero growth society has been for decades you can look up the precise statistics yourself if you wanna you can look up a chart of GDP growth in Japan over the last five years and you'll see it's sometimes below zero so so with negative growth and so it's just slightly above zero right now it's about half a percentage point of pump zero and then it goes back down again so over the last ten years GDP growth in Japan has hovered above zero often enough going below zero so people generalize and they say Japan is a zero growth capitalist society now in the same way that I have to ask a right-wing person I have to ask a conservative person to look at the reality of life in countries in Western Europe that have very tight gun control laws I have to ask them his life they're really so terrible and is it so terrible for this reason I have to ask you as a left-wing person to put down your preconceptions to not insist on this abstract and look at the reality of what a capitalist democratic society looks like in the real world with zero growth or even with negative growth with a contracting economy it may be mystifying for you to understand at first it may be difficult for you to understand at first why is it or how is it that life in Japan is so good without growth without what you call this this form of this supposed requirement of capitalism being a vibrant Society but capitalism and Japan is still a vibrant Society people in Japan very good quality education a very good quality health care almost zero crime very very low crime rates almost zero unemployment very very low unemployment rates okay in many obvious ways life in Japan during the last ten years the Japanese people have had a higher quality of life in Japan under capitalism with zero growth then any communist society ever had in any 10-year period really think about that with zero growth under capitalism in Japan they have a better quality of life than people had with rapid GDP growth in the Soviet Union rapid GDP growth in China grab another interesting example rapid GDP growth in in Vietnam okay you can go on down the list for Cuban so now I am NOT saying that in the last 10 years Japan was paradise they have some problems but you have to face up to the fundamental empirical facts that make your theory wildly implausible Japan is not a tiny exception here and you could go through the list of other countries capitalist societies that had a very very low GDP growth or negative GDP growth while maintaining basically a wonderful Society a wonderful quality of life but even if Japan were the only example to the contrary it's an example you have to take seriously even if in the whole world we only had one example of a country with very tight regulation on gun control you'd have to say to this right-wing person I want you to look at this country where nobody gets to own a gun nobody except the police in the Army I want you to recognize how society works there that fundamentally it's not this dystopia it's not this disaster that it would have to be for your theory to be plausible let alone for your theory to be true ok so that's the page we've got to start on with this deep-seated left-wing assumption about infinite growth and the significance of growth in a capitalist economy however production requires the use of goods that are not infinite like labour and natural resources since capitalism cannot administer a limit it will always eventually crash growth does not mean wealth growth does not mean the difference between a good society and a bad Society ok you could have a wealthy society with very limited growth or with no growth at all that's what Japan is an example of you can have a society that's tremendously successful and vibrant that does not have economic growth and you could have a society in which the individual members are all becoming wealthier all while economic growth is contracting while GDP growth is negative that's basically what's happening in Japan right now ok how is that possible if one family has ten children that's a lot of economic growth because what you're measuring when you talk about economic growth is just total production and total consumption that's it so if every family in your society has ten kids it's a lot of economic growth is that society becoming a better society or is that society becoming a poorer Society or could it be that all of the children in that society are getting poorer and poorer for one thing they don't inherit very much from their parents for another thing their quality of education the intellectual and emotional enrichment growing up there are a lot of problems when you have a society where one has 10 kids footnote my father had nine kids I was the ninth of nine I'm living proof of this theory what if you have a society where every family has only one child what happens economic growth is negative you have less total production you're less total consumption but individual wealth is greater quality of life for all the people in the society as a whole is greater right each of those children is going to inherit all the wealth from both parents they're gonna get way more care and attention better education they will almost inevitably in that situation with with population collapse each individual member of society will be more productive with a higher rate of productivity as an individual however that one person's production can't compete with ten children they're never gonna produce as much as if the parents had ten kids you know doing similar jobs okay so it's a very strange situation where the far-left has tried to criticize capitalism as if one of capitalism's greatest strengths is its greatest weakness capitalist societies can be wonderful and vibrant even in the absence of growth even with zero growth Japan proves it moreover finite resources are good for capitalism whereas infinite resources are really problematic in Japan when labor is finite when there are fewer and fewer people who can do the job then the whole market the free market without the government forcing them to has to respond to this by offering more and better incentives for labor jobs have to pay higher wages jobs can't just be dead-end jobs they have to offer some kind of training education upward mobility if you have an infinite pool of cheap labour who are willing to work for less minimum wage if you have people coming across the border illegally who are willing to work in a in a factory making shirts at a cloth and they say hey they'll work for 50 percent of minimum wage because they're they're as illegal laborers the factory owner has no motivation to provide these people with upward mobility or benefits or higher pay he also has no motivation the factory owner has no motivation to try to increase their personal productivity through better training through use of more advanced technology through reorganizing the factory hey labor is cheap and it's now very profitable to make shirts to take cloth and manufacture it into a shirt with no machinery no skilled labor then let's say someone builds a wall and all of a sudden that factory has no access to cheap illegal migrant labor anymore all of a sudden they have to pay everyone $15 an hour and they have to compete with every other company to pay people $15 an hour or more now the owner of that factory without government intervention has a huge motivation to provide some kind of better life for the employees whether that's through upward mobility education job training something or just paying them more money okay suddenly also that factory owner has a huge motivation to try to make each hour that all of his employees are working to make them more productive hey all of a sudden I'm paying you guys four times as much money so how many shirts can we really make it a cloth here and what kind of investment do I need to make in better technology or a better organization or something so that we can still compete this is a factor within capitalism that even Karl Marx understood very well and yet the far left wing is choosing to forget it in 2019 in the 21st century so that they can pretend capitalism is brittle in precisely the ways in which capitalism is robust finally any argument that scarcity itself is a problem for capitalism there's an onus on the person making the argument to explicate what is it that's unique about capitalism that makes this a problem if there's not enough drinking water people will die it's true but it's not true because of capitalism and it's not any less true in a society that's organized around feudalism well this organized around communism okay but what capitalism has are tremendous advantages in responding to scarcity through the price mechanism communism didn't have those advantages and it led to disasters feudalism didn't have those advantages and let the disaster okay scarcity is a fact of life for all actually existing economic systems in the history of the world but if you thought scarcity itself the absence of infinite factor and inputs the lack of infinite labor resources the lack of infinite water infinite coal infinite steel if you thought that was a problem for the history of capitalism why can't you point to real examples in history where that problem demonstrated itself whether in Japan Denmark or anywhere else on this earth guys the slogan that capitalism requires infinite growth is a slogan that many left-wingers have heard chanted had marches they've seen it written on placards they've heard it said in speeches but political leaders they've seen it written in propaganda literature again and again and again and people live their whole lives that's stopping a question what would be the empirical basis for that claim how could it possibly be economically demonstrably true that in a world where nothing is infinite capitalism must have infinity to be sustainable Japan is a great example that shows us capitalism doesn't just thrive on finitude capitalism can thrive with zero growth