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  • We are living in unprecedented times.

  • The future without jobs will come to resemble either the cultivated benevolence of Star Trek or the desperate scramble for resources of Mad Max

  • Unless there's a dramatic course correction, I fear we are heading toward the latter

  • We're entering this winner-take-all economy that is breaking down many of the capitalist relationships we take for granted

  • The American people are getting increasingly desperate.

  • We have been so brainwashed into thinking that human worth and economic worth are the same thing

  • that we are contorting ourselves in increasingly attenuated and ridiculous fashion.

  • Cheerleading this GDP number being at record highs makes no sense when your people are dying younger and sooner

  • This is the desperation we are in.

  • People are looking around and saying what does the

  • democracy hold, and our politicians aren't able to respond to the challenge

  • because they're too busy fundraising. We have to un-brainwash ourselves, really.

  • How can Amazon pay zero in taxes in 2018?

  • How did the trillion dollar tech company pay less in federal taxes the vast majority of the people in this room?

  • That is a colossal political failure at the highest levels

  • I think we should all be offended by the spectacle of Amazon pitting communities against each other to see who could bend over backwards more

  • for a preordained process

  • I mean that's thousands of man-hours put forward by like hundreds of communities around the country

  • Just to show the primacy again of a company saying like I have jobs you need jobs. Like let's see what you can do

  • We should all be offended by that. So we need to get with the program

  • Own the fact that our economy has evolved in fundamental ways

  • Get the public will to match up

  • to the policy and the only way to do that is just send a message all the way to the top because unfortunately

  • Most of our legislators are held captive by corporate interests

  • And there's a very limited way to make the feedback mechanism of democracy work

  • There are two parallel crises that are worked in tandem. One is climate change, two is the fourth Industrial Revolution

  • That we're in the midst of the greatest economic and technological

  • transformation in human history

  • And Donald Trump is a symptom of this transformation. The driving force behind his victory in

  • in 2016 was that we'd automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa

  • And now we're going to do the same thing to millions of retail jobs, call center jobs, fast food jobs, truck driving jobs

  • So we have these two crises that are unfolding in tandem, and we are completely ill-prepared for either of them

  • So the best path forward is to try and humanize our economy

  • GDP is a measurement we made up almost a hundred years ago

  • and even the inventor said three things: One, this is a terrible measurement for national well-being and we should not use it as that -

  • Two, we should include parenthood and motherhood in the number because they're so important.

  • And three, we shouldn't include military defense spending because it has no economic value

  • And of course we ignored all three of those things and now we're riding GDP off a cliff

  • And so what we should do is update our very measurements

  • So that's something like environmental quality, mental health, childhood success rates, life expectancy

  • Proportion of elderly who can retire in quality circumstances, we have numbers for these things

  • We can turn them into the new GDP and then we can channel our market forces to try and improve our lives

  • Because the market is doing what it's designed to do. The problem is that capital efficiency and human wellbeing are diverging.

  • So what you have to do is you have to actually make the measurements - human well-being itself

  • and then have that be the measurement of progress.

  • That is our best path forward and that actually gives us a chance to try and make progress on climate change and the automation of jobs

  • simultaneously in the timeframe we have. We need to do something about it as fast as possible for sake of our children, our grandchildren,

  • And leave a society that we're still proud of to them because we do not have limitless time and we know what must be done

  • The time for talk is well past and now we must act

  • We need to break free of this logic of the marketplace before it's too late

  • We must reshape and accelerate society to bring us all to higher ground

  • We must find new ways to organize ourselves independent of the values at the marketplace assigns to each and every one of us

  • We are more than the numbers on our paychecks and we are going to have to prove it very quickly

  • We must make the market serve humanity rather than have humanity continue to serve the market

  • Society will change either before or after the revolution. I choose before.

We are living in unprecedented times.

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