Interview, Fireside Chat
Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics | Lex Fridman Podcast #303
- Climate change and ecological destruction pose an existential risk that could terminate human civilization within 20 to 50 years.
- Current economic models and the arrogance regarding climate change are predicted to jeopardize the lives of billions of people.
- Exponential growth in private debt levels is expected to inevitably cause a financial breakdown similar to or worse than the 2008 crisis.
- A collapse in willingness to incur private debt is forecast to trigger a period of stagnation driven by the shift of aggregate demand credit from positive to negative.
- The economic era between 1990 and 2007, known as the "Great Moderation," is characterized as a lull in a chaotic system that served as a precursor to the anticipated breakdown.
- A falling rate of profit is predicted to force capitalists to pay below subsistence levels, provoking worker revolts and eventually leading to socialism.
- Adopting government deficits as a standard feature of fiat credit economies is suggested as a method to alleviate social unrest among young people influenced by distorted views of Marxism.
- Centralized political systems are forecast to be more effective than diversified democracies in enforcing the consumption controls necessary to remain within the planet's ecological limits.
- Long-term species survival requires moving productive capacity off Earth to accommodate the sun's evolution into a red giant, a transition facilitated by seeding life elsewhere in the universe.
- Future societal evolution, if humanity survives current threats, is expected to shift toward a role defined by preserving and respecting life.
- The development of conscious machines fearing their own mortality is predicted to result in uncontrollable behavior analogous to raising an anarchist child.
- Humanity is likely to attribute responsibility for its condition to technology during the next 20 to 50 years.
- While the Earth itself will survive the Anthropocene event, the period will result in the termination of vast amounts of current life, including many human lives.