that are not as desirable for societies, like fossil fuels, still insanely profitable. And we need to decarbonize the economy for the climate crisis.

Cool. Yeah. Happy to do that. Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here. So my work, I'm a social scientist. I'm broadly interested in theories of capitalism and post capitalism. I'm normally I just finished a project at Humboldt University in Berlin called Capitalist Plant Economies, in which I basically try to do research on the question of whether planning is already endemic in capitalism, what does it mean to say that there's planning in capitalism, and so on and so forth. But it's always related to the question of whether if we have planning already, how could this be democratized? How could we or how could it be organized differently? That's basically what I'm doing. And I've been right now, I'm in California. I'm a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. So I'm a say I'm traveling California to do research on public banks. There's a kind of do research is maybe a bit exaggerated. I'm this is an exploratory research. I'm trying to build a research project because there's been a kind of a new activist coalition that managed to push through a law that there can be public banks in California. And it's something I'm engaging with. I'm thinking about what what social movements to democratize and socialize investment could be. That's something I'm trying to learn about. So this is kind of my relationship to this topic because for me, I'm planning one of the maybe the biggest, the most important part of planning for me, for democratic planning is democratizing investment.

Yeah. So I've similarly, I've sort of engaged with this binary of you have capitalist markets versus socialist planning for a while. And for me, this used to be a question of thinking about feminist critiques or post colonial critiques of markets. Like, who are the people who don't really have access to this market? There's a lot about that. It was also from I studied global history, and there was some interesting accounts. I'm not an expert on Chinese history, but it's something I just engaged with for a little bit of question of, did pre capitalist China have relatively developed markets, but not a kind of capitalist market economy. Markets are older than capitalism. So if capitalism is not only markets, this is kind of destabilizing one side of this binary already. Also, socialist Yugoslavia and and theories of market socialism have shown that you could have a socialist market economy. This, again, destabilizing this equation. But more recently, I've been more interested in thinking about planning in capitalism. And this is there's a bigger legacy to that. If so this is a kind of a hinge I have. Like, I think my my my impression is that this has been decades of neoliberalism where this talking about planning capitalism seems kind of a bit weird. But if you look at a lot of the literature from the nineteen fifties and sixties, This is a kind of classical canon in in sociology. Jurgen Habermas, one of the most important philosophers at the time, his disciple Claes Offe, they talk about the kind of the exponential increase of planning in capitalism. You have people talking about monopoly capitalism. Markets are kind of disappearing. It's just organized markets and monopolies and so on and so forth. So it's this is a kind of discourse, and this basically just disappeared because of the rise in neoliberalism, but this used to not be, like, a crazy idea. If you look at the way this I I'll the way this returned for me is a is I think there's two important elements. A, there's been different forms of academic research, like different empirical research who people who look at different very different fields and who realize that planning is really meaningful concept for them. They find that there's an increase of planning of some sort. This is very different literature. So you have in the political economy of finance, you have people who look at central banks and they realize central banks aren't those neutral actors. They're actually engaging in in planning. They really try to structure markets, but they do so in a very technocratic way. Then people look at asset managers and universal ownership theory, they realize that asset managers start to own shares in competing companies and increasingly socialize the market in a way. And so in a way, they could, in principle, be kind of seen as social planners of markets because they own they kind of own own a large share of the overall market. They don't do so. That's also empirical. They don't really act as planners, but this is just, an engagement with the concept. I just look at the platform economy, digital platform, those large monopolies. They also plan markets in a sense because they basically they try they can control all the variables that make up the market design. And then I could talk for hours. I'll just break it down. The biggest one is maybe the new state capitalism, this kind of literature. They look at they argue that on a global stay scale, there's an increase of organized state owned companies, sovereign wealth funds, industrious heavy industrial policy, new investment banks, and so on and so forth. So there's different bodies of literature who argue that plant markets are increasingly planned and states increasingly intervene in markets with planning, and this is happening on a global scale. I think this is one big thing. And the other big thing is that progressives don't seem to have there's a lack of, like, an overall vision. In German, you'd say a bracket, a unifying bracket that can kind of bring together different ideas of social transformation under a bigger label. And at least in Germany, but also in some other countries, planning has served as democratic planning has served as such a bracket, like, conscious, deliberate structuring of social life to ensure freedom, security,

It's like title of a interesting paper by John O'Neill who won the socialist calculation a bit. And I think the answer is has been kind of shifting in a sense. I'll maybe just saying something in beforehand about why this Mhmm. Debate is so important, at least to a reason. So if what I said earlier is true, if this if planning is really increasingly important and if we relate this through the poly crisis and if planning is necessary to solve the ecological crisis, the care crisis, and so on and so forth, which I would argue it is because planning is the only way to kind of to organize sections of life that aren't really served by the profit motive. If this is true, then the important question for me is planning is coming anyway. How can we organize it democratically? How can we orient it towards needs within planetary boundaries? That's my formula. And so the people who kind of have tackled this question have been the people who were involved in socialist calculation debate, which is basically starting in the nineteen twenties and not by accident because you basically have this Bolshevist revolution. And for the first time so you had theoretical debates beforehand about what a socialist economy could look like, but then you have the emergence of an actually existing social econ socialist economy. And then that really post and plus, you have the first World War. And the modern wars are instances where governments don't trust markets with outcomes. Right? It's far too important. You can't just let the market the spontaneous market reign on its own. You really structure economic production for the war outcome. Not to romanticize wars, not by any not by a long shot. But, like, just this is this is basically posing the question of how you plan a modern economy. This question is practically posed in the wars. And so out of this kind of experience comes the question of can a socialist economy be rationally planned, and is it desirable? And so you have in the beginning, you have Marxist like Otto Neurath who has experience in wartime planning, practical wartime planning. He basically argues that you you could plan an economy and it would be a kind of in kind planning, which means not based on prices, but on in kind kind of variables, so hours of labor, tons of steel, and so on. And right from the beginning, you have a counter site, the Austrian School of Economics, which is basically arguing that if you don't have prices, you can't commensurate things. You can't compare different forms of production if you don't know the prices. Prices make things comparable. This is the early early debate. This and then, basically, to break it down, there's several waves of this debate throughout the twentieth century. It's a very complicated debate, but it's really worthwhile engaging with it because a lot of the important social science, economics, political science concepts come out of this debate, especially ecological economics. Things like incommensurability, that some things just aren't comparable, or externalities, very important concept in economics. That comes out of this debate in some form or another. And so in the beginning, by the mid twentieth century, I'd argue that the socialist have essentially won. You have Joseph Schumpeter always gives this example because he's a liberal conservative, and he essentially argues that, of course, in his book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, he says, of course, you can plan an economy. And he kind of kind of rips on socialist economists. He's basically arguing that socialist are so stupid that you need bourgeois economists to explain business to them because they don't know how to run their own economy, bit like that. But in doing so, he really acknowledges, of course, you can plan the economy. And he's kind of melancholic because he says it's so much more efficient. It's gonna this is the way things are gonna like, the modern corporation, which is a large sphere of economic planning and which is getting rid of the market by just dictating prices in an administrative way. This is all of this is winning, and he's a bit melancholic because it's destroying what he likes about the market economy anyway, roughly like that. So and Friedrich Friedrich August von Hayek, who's the kind of probably the most important Austrian economist of the Austrian School of Economics, is is furious at the time because with he August said, with Schumpeter writing this, the mainstream absolutely accepts the possibility of socialist planning, and his position becomes relatively marginal at the time. And that shifts again in the nineteen seventies, eighties when it becomes apparent that there's a lot of contradictions with the three big forms of planning at the time. You have Western Keynesian planning has a big crisis with the stagflation crisis. It's self so the global self based developmentalist planning has a big crisis with the Southern Debt Crisis. And, also, Eastern state socialism, central planning becomes apparent as it is becomes relatively bureaucratic. The contradictions become more, more visible. Whereas in the fifties, it looked like this is the biggest, most rapid industrialization in human history. This is insanely productive. Like, this is the narrative beforehand in the mainstream. So there's really a shift in discourse because there's a crisis and also the neoliberals attack at the time. And they win the battle of ideas, but they also maybe more importantly, they win the battle of politics. And wherever you have socialist tends to force socialist planning at the time, then they kind of in the East, you have reforms. In the South, you have a turn from this kind of more experience with developmentalist planning to more export oriented industrialization and structural adjustment. And in the global North, you have rise of neoliberalism as as an alternative to cleanseism. So planning becomes more like a dirty word. Markets become, more positively connotated. And I think this is still the status quo to a certain extent, but I'd I'd argue that the North Atlantic financial crisis in 2008, the climate crisis, and other like, the polly crisis overall have started to shift this debate again. So and, yeah, I think it's fascinating to think about, you know, in the fifties,

I mean, several things to say, I think. I would generally speaking about why socialism seemed like an answer in the fifties, I'd really encourage just an just an honest engagement and just critical debates, pluralist debates about the history of really existing socialism, taking serious Mhmm. The historical context and the kind of obvious limits that you have in this capitalist world market. And right away from after the socialist revolution, you have counterrevolution sponsored by the West and armies attacking it. It's like a very hostile environment. I think we have to take that seriously. We also have to take seriously the kind of the critiques of internal dissidents, I think, who were the best in articulating the limits and the contradiction of the system. I think all of those things have to be taken into account either romanticizing nor demonizing. The context for sure, if in in the world of the nineteen fifties, you basically have most of the world was colonized previously or in some kind if if China wasn't technically colonized, I mean, in a way by Japan. But so the regions that weren't technically colonized were just under there was a heavy influence by the colonizers and the imperialists. And so from the perspective of much of the world, if you look at the Soviet Union, which was a farmer state and which is very rapidly industrializing, and so this seemed like a relatively attractive model in there's a there's an interesting book called Planning Democracy by Mikhail Menon. I'm not sure if I pronounce it correctly. It's a US based historian of India. And he argues that takes India as an example. He basically says that Indian planners are kind of, like, imported, is not the right word. They basically asked Soviet planners to join them and to explain to them how you engage in planning, but they didn't want a Soviet style kind of authoritarian planning, so try to bring it together with more participation in a very contradictory way. And I think that brings me to to properly answering your question. So this kind of central planning, even in if in the case of India, you try to organize in a more participatory way, has a has this kind of problem where the central planning and the way it was constructed, it kind of technocratically has the correct answer. It figures out the best allocation of resources, optimal, like, optimal result. It's a question of a problem with token question because why would you wanna have participation? You already have Right. The correct answer. What's like, what what is the participatory council? What are they gonna, like, figure out if you already if the planners already figured out everything? And so Soviet planning the Soviet central planning had things one of the big problems, central output quota. So that's a it was called material balance planning. It was not as technically advanced as it could be today. It's basically manually adjusting kind of sectoral inputs and outputs to create a relatively coherent allocation. And then you basically have central output quotas. Central planning commission tells the local enterprises what to produce, and then they produce it. They don't the local enterprises don't directly engage with each other. It's a big lesson that kind of reformers draw in later years that this is kind of what would be necessary. You would need to allow and then this is also under the influence of the Austrian critique. So the Austrian economists critique that in planning, they argue that generally in planning, actually, it's just they just critique central planning. If you have, like, a central planning commission that is trying to figure out everything, there's a lot of knowledge that's embodied in time and place that Right. People just have. They can't easily communicate to a central planning agency. They might also not want to communicate it, especially in the authoritarian context, like in really existing socialism, but they might also not just not be able to do it. And so this kind of planning is happening on a limit on a basis of very limited information. There's lots of problems with that. This is kind of a important critique of central planning. It's not a critique of all planning. It's just a a critique of heavily centralized planning. Yeah. So this is the kind of limit with that. It's a kind of lesson for a more democratic planning that should be enterprises should be allowed to engage with each other. That's something that was tried in to a certain extent in market socialist Yugoslavia. It's the other case you mentioned. And this is kind of this is a complicated case because, essentially, I mean, it's not a political democracy, but they try to experiment with forecast management to to a degree to unprecedented degree. And so it's good that this is definitely, like, an advance that enterprises are allowed to choose their own suppliers and so on and so forth. But they go a bit far, and, basically, it ends up being a socialist market economy in the sense that you basically have worker cooperatives who compete on a market, and it's a full fledged market. And so what you right away have is when they experiment with that is a return of cyclical crisis because this is a market economy. So, basically, all the economic actors, they're making decisions without consulting Mhmm. The other enterprises, especially for investment. This is a problem. You don't coordinate investment. There might be overcapacity. Everyone invests. Once they have a larger share of the pie, they give overcapacity. It's a huge waste. Maybe if there's underinvestment, you have a a a lot of needs that are be not being met, which is a problem because you can't quickly adjust investment. It's something you need to train workers, build factories, buy machines, and so on. So there's a lack of coordination, and because of that, you have more you have cyclical crisis. You have regional inequality, which feeds in kind of with the kind of ethnic conflicts between different regions and so on and so forth. Having said all of this, I personally share this critique that a lot of the advocates of the democratic planning have of Yugoslavia. But to be fair, we also again, this is a situation of world context. So this is a small economy in a capitalist world market. It suffers as a lot of poorer countries do. It suffers from dependence Yeah. On foreign credit. There's a debt crisis. So there's all of that. And it's also just the single case that we have of a kind of vague market socialism. So I'm not a market socialist, but I'll give that to the market socialist. To be fair, it's a limited databases,

I think that's complicated to to answer to. I think that's like, I mean, with the let's say The US style libertarians, the right wing libertarians, I might I think they sometimes have a point and then they complete like, they draw the complete wrong directions or it's embedded in really problematic other views. This is, kind of my impression frequently. Polanyi has this Kai Polanyi, the Austrian economic historian, economic anthropologist, has this wonderful quote that essay fair was planned and planning was not. When talking about the classical liberalism, not neoliberalism, but, like, nineteenth century British style liberalism. And by by this, he means that once I just mean laissez faire was planned, he said, like, this is a deliberate effort to commodify and to extend the market, which is kind of true for neoliberalism. But it by by the second part, this planning was not planned. What he means is that central banks emerge, and he specifically talks about central banks as as planning central banks emerge as a kind of necessary corrective to protect societies and protect also the corrective to protect societies and protect also the economy from free markets, by which he means that you have and we we couldn't translate this lesson into to kind of recent tickets. We had we've had financialization for, I'd say, at least seventy years. So by by which we the increasing relevance of of finance for a capitalist accumulation for the kind of for generating profits, finance has been so important. And we've had financialization because there's really been there's been a problem of generating enough profit opportunities for leading corporations. And therefore, what they did was kind of channeling more of their surpluses, they which they had in liquid form. They didn't know what to invest in because there was no not enough profit possibility. So they channeled a lot of that into financial markets. And at the same time, governments were trying to solve their kind of spending crisis that they had in in the nineteen seventies, and they were kind of one of the way they were doing this was to deregulate financial markets so there was enough credit for everyone. So those things come together. Mhmm. Now I need to I wanna I lost my train of thought. I'll you can cut this out. I'll keep answering in a second. What did I originally talk about? Financialization?

okay. So you basically have this financialization trend, and and finance becomes so much more important. And you have a kind of finance becomes empowered within the kind of different kind of capital actors. Finance capital becomes really important. You have rise of institutional investors, the most modern asset managers, and you pay banks are getting bigger. And you already have this kind of narrative. This is becomes very important after 2008 in the global North that banks are too big to fail. You already see it earlier if you look at the global south debt crisis of the nineteen seventies and eighties. You occasionally there have you have the situation that large you have huge kind of huge private banks that were lending, that were engaged in kind of speculate speculation in the global South. There's a debt crisis, and governments jump in, to stabilize the banks because they realize that if this bank goes bankrupt, we have a huge financial crisis because it's such a powerful actor. It's gonna affect so many other, actors. Basically, banks become too big to fail. And so in this kind of situation where finance becomes so important and there's so many big financial actors that if they go if they go bankrupt, there's gonna be a huge economic crisis. Central banks right away step in to stabilize markets and use the kind of new financial tools to kind of direct markets. That's also so so in a sense, this is Polanyi. It wasn't planning wasn't planned that it's just kind of it's just kind of it comes it comes up regularly. It comes most naturally if you wanna pursue this policy. All these conditions, I guess, happening. Yeah. Yes. 100%. Yes. There's to a certain extent, one has to add that there's also a kind of policy discourse that by by by conservatives that they're complaining that governments are doing engaging in too much social spending and this is stupid elections every four years. And governments are too shy to have population swallow this utterance of the bitter pill. Big pill. What do you say in English? Yeah. So so they're kind of too shy to do this. And central banks, as when policy discourses, it becomes a kind of technocratic narrative that maybe we should have those expert driven, but actually really neoliberal central banks, and they're gonna do it. They're gonna they're gonna be the bad guys, and they're gonna push through those policies and other kind of depoliticized, not non electorally accountable actors, they're gonna pursue those policies that governments are too

Yeah. So in a yeah. In a I mean, in a sense, it's solving a real crisis of lack of profitability in, in stagflation and so on. So, like, you have those crisis and the whole shift of neoliberalism, it manages to restore profitability, which you need in capitalism. I guess the other trajectory would have been to this is what left wing social democrats wanted at the time, to extend planning and to democratize it and to basically transition into democratic socialism. But he so that was blocked. There was a blocked path or a path that didn't win. And so so it succeeded in its plan in its its ambitions in restoring profitability, but it did so at a tremendous social cost. And so but so in a way, it was not unpolitical. Like, it was very political decision, but it had this esprit of being this is just the the experts and with their economics due degrees, they're gonna pick the right answer, which is not a political question. It's just figuring out the correct answer. Right. So this kind of spurred this is central banks are very important for that. Yeah. As if it was a standardized test,

Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Wait. I need to I was still not sure if I a 100% get it, though, but, like, I I can relate it to you. So what was your question? Making a comment about

Yes. I think that's a very good way. And I I don't think I've I don't think I've done a good job in answering your previous question completely. I think this yeah. So this kind of planning by central banks and, like, the the point here, I think, to understand is that there is in the 80 like, Vesemiro, there is a decrease of planning in some sense. Like, states are less capable at shaping the outcomes of the market to a certain extent. But then it's not a complete return to a spontaneous market for sure. Also, because there's huge corporations who are organizing. Markets aren't that spontaneous anymore, and it's very hard to imagine kind of getting back to it. The point I'm trying to make is that central bank planning and other forms of, like, techno credit planning emerge because it's capitalism can't go back to this kind of Adam Smith style British nineteenth century family capitalism. It just can't do that. Production is industrialized. Everything is super interdependent. It can't go back. So it can't also just do away with all sorts of planning that emerged for a reason historically to stabilize markets. It just doesn't want it's just a policy transformation, like, kind of doing away with a lot of the social rights in order to restore profitability. I think that that's what's actually happening. Yes.

yeah. Sorry. Just maybe we can cut this out, but, like, what what was the second part of your question? I'm my career is not fish today. I'm sorry. I'm just thinking about the kind of contradiction of neoliberalism professing free markets while practicing planning. Okay. I know what I was gonna say. I think one of the one of the people who really one of the, people that I learned a lot from in in thinking about those relations was Johanna Bockman. And she was she's a economic anthropologist and a historian, and she studied the rise of neoliberalism in terms of kind of transformation of economics and economic knowledge production. And she always makes this point, and I think I agree with us, is that neoliberalism is not about doing away with the state. Neoliberalism actually advocates a really strong state, but a lean state. So it's a state that's centered on enabling profit maximization for companies, and that's the main thing it should do. And but in doing that, it can even be authoritarian. It can be really ruthless. Think about the Chicago Boys and Pinochet in Chile, but think about maybe Anwar Sadat in Egypt and, like like, other the earliest experiments with neoliberalism, this is an authoritarian state, and it goes together really perfectly. The state should be really forceful in pushing for fair, and it has a limited kind of space it navigates in. But in in that space, I can be really powerful.

Mhmm. So before I answer this, I need to say that I'm so I'm not a expert on China. I've I'm I've been interested in Chinese history and economic policy for a while, and I've roughly followed some debates, but I'm absolutely not an expert. Sure. Sure. So take it with a grain of salt. But I think but I'm comfortable I mean, and it's certainly not how I imagine democratic economic planning, but, like, I realize this debate about whether there is some kind of levels of part participation. Some people argue that authoritarianism is a bit kind of demonized. It's it's more democratic than one would imagine. I'll just say that's not true. I don't I can't get into those debates because I'm not knowledgeable to comment on that. What I'm comfortable in saying is that it definitely shows that so it's definitely the success of China shows that it's been neither complete central planning for sure. There's no central output quotas for the overall economy. It's not that kind of planning. It's also not less fair for sure, and it's very important to note that I think Giovanni Arrighi, economic historian, historical sociology, makes this in Adam Smith makes this case in Adam Smith and Biching, but others have made this point. Stieglitz had has made the point at the time, the nineteen nineties and February, that China was the country that didn't follow the doctrine of a rapid introduction of of laissez faire like we've seen in many parts of the global South. We've seen with really existing socialism in the East, in Russia, and in other countries, countries in Sub Saharan Africa, countries in Latin America. You have a kind of rapid privatization, and you have still in development economics for the last decade where living standards are decreasing tremendously and you have huge crisis. And then you have actual existing crony capitalism emerging in Russia because you basically sell off all the state assets very quickly, and you have a bunch of oligarchs emerging that are, in nowhere in in no sense of the word any more democratic than what was there beforehand. Mhmm. Absolutely not. Quite the contrary. So anyway so it shows that there's a that's an success of a model that was needed. Laissez faire, no complete central planning, old school central planning. But it's, I think, arguably what it has and which could certainly be imagined much more democratically, it has there's a dominance to a certain extent of the political over the economic. Even still, there's a capacity to kind of override particular interests of capital. There's a capacity to steer investment that no Western country has. And I think we see this in debates about the energy transition that basically the what the rise of solar energy in China. This is the success of being able to engage in intersectoral allocation of investment, like picking sectors, which is something that many western countries have been struggling with. Brett Christopher, the economic geographer, has made this point really wonderfully that fossil fuels are high are still highly profitable, and asset managers who are who have the premier driving motive of profit maximization, they're struggling with decarbonization because returns on renewables just aren't high enough. And even though renewables are profitable and they're getting cheaper and cheaper, it's just not rapid decarbonization on the scale we would need. And China, is much more successful, but from a much lower standard in building up a solar energy sector and so on and so forth. I don't wanna romanticize and realize this massive fossil fuel consumption and so on and so forth. I think this is one of the this may be the main lesson. This is me being biased because I'm interested in the democratization of investment. I think this is the big story here that has a capacity to steer investment for the green transition that can be mentioned in a much more participatory way for sure, can be mentioned in varieties of ways, but this is the big story for me. I mean, that's definitely something that for me has been, like, a common theme over the past year or two. It's kind of, you know,

It's a million dollar question. The I the I this is so just to give an impression to to people who are not familiar with this debate, there's basically it's probably 10 or more full scale models of what a democratic economy could look like, and that features democratic planning. And it's a very complicated debate, and it's very different visions. And to me, I think the most interesting ones, I call them Polanian planning. And they're basically a kind of a way of imagining planning. And this is Karl Polania I've mentioned. He's a very important economic historian who very early on in the socialist calculation debate kind of responds to both Otto Neurath, who suggests total plans of of complete central allocation of resources even though he mentions it's a very democratic process and that there's a kind of election, there's referendum over which total plan you're gonna pick. But still, it's a total plan. So he disagreed with that, but he also disagrees with I am and, yeah, van Mises, Austrian economist, who's who basically says there can be no rational form of economic planning under socialism. He disagrees with both of them. And so the two main things that he imagines is maybe three main things I'd say. This is a kind of he calls it, in a sense, negotiated prices. And then second is second important one for me is democratic decision making over investment. The third one would be a relatively illitary distribution, but it kind of the third one is derived from the others. So if you imagine there'd be social ownership, maybe all of society owns the means of production. But the people who actually do work in enterprises, they have the right to use those means of production on their own. They're kind of this is self management at the workplace. And this is kind of a bit convoluted, and then maybe I shouldn't go into detail too much. I'm also still learning a little bit about this. This is a original question of social calculation. There's a basically, the ideas that Polanyi has is that you'd that that'd be prices because they are they do make things comparable. But he does, like, this certain sense of acknowledgment of the critique of that prices are also very limited, especially in capitalism, that they should be negotiated. They should feature the social cost of action for planning. That's the idea that prices make

Yes. 100%. So yeah. And this is very this is a very technical and complicated question of how what such prices could do. If you wanna read more about this, maybe Beninov and the most to read the new editions of the new left review. He has a kind of a model that's very similar. My colleagues, they have, like, a model where costs are basically based on labor time, which they take to be an approximation for the social cost, good approximation, and then c o two emissions and raw material consumption, which they take to be good approximations of planetary boundaries. You could imagine different kind of models, but, like, they're supposed to this is different kind of ideas of how kind of prices should reflect social and ecological costs as very similar to idea in in in cybernetics. It's very different, but in a way, a very similar idea where the the kind of indicators and parameters and prices are kind of indicators should enable a local kind of enterprise to be to act kind of socially and ecologically responsible, and those kind of prices should basically do that. That's the main idea. But I don't wanna go into too much detail. Imagining that there is such a kind of a price system that features those kind of externalities and is much better approximation of social and ecological costs. The other big thing is that either depending on the prices, there are no surpluses or if there are surpluses. So if you're an enterprise and you have a big there's no profit that you're gonna keep. Again, not a kind of worker owned cooperative where you make a huge profit, and then you get to just pay this out, or you have a disproportionate share over societal investment. The kind of the surpluses, they flow off into kind of sexual bodies where which are democratic in some sense. They could be multi stakeholder, like the main stakeholders that are affected by the decision that they represented, like the consumers, the citizens, the workers, and so on. You could mention something like that. You could imagine a mixture of you have a couple of technical experts that are engaging complexity reduction, and then this is mixed to sortition style. People are just basically just enter via sortition. You could match different kind of forms of democracy. I don't wanna pick the best one. Just debate about that. But you have those sectoral bodies, and they basically deliberate over the allocation of investment in the sector. So that the different so that the different companies aren't kind of disorganized and allocate an investment. There's a space for debating investment and for coordinating it. This is the, I think, the big idea. And on a societal level, you could have something like a national investment authority. Let's assume there's still nation states, bring it far off in the future. There's a kind of democratic institution, which is shaped by elections and by large scale political processes that might be democracy could be further democratized. It's another topic. Let's mention there's a very democratic process at the societal level. This can shape the intersectional allocation of investment. So which sector gets which share of investment? This shouldn't be only based on productivity and profitability because car industry is insanely productive in the sense that work can be very effectively rationalized. But it doesn't mean that the car industry is more important than hospitals, where it's much harder to maximize profits by with heavy technology use. So there there should be a more more more conscious decision over allocating resources and just letting the market do it. Mhmm. Yeah. So intersectional at the societal level, there's a conscious allocation of resources for investment and then the sectoral self management in determining how exactly you spent them. Because you can also some share or can also go to kind of regional committees where you which decide over public expenditure, parks, swimming pools, and so on and so forth. They mentioned like that. But beyond that, there's self management on the local level. The workers get to decide how they wanna construct their workplace, what they wanna produce, and so on and so forth. So it would be a mixture of more autonomy on the local level, but at the same time, kind of democratic bodies at different scales that decide over investment and finance. I mean, that sounds very rational to me. Yeah. Thanks.

I mean, I think I agree with that in the sense that I qualified it by, I think, because I'm not sure if I have a good impression of the like, what's the overall status of progressive politics. But let's say I think it's some spaces, I would say, in some imaginations of a different kind of society. I think people underestimate how important finance is at the moment for different kind of reasons. I mean, first of all, because of financialization. We have a world where finance is so powerful and where investment is increasingly socialized in the hands of institutional investors already to a certain extent. So is this just a just for practical reasons, this immensely important topic of but also because much of the crisis we have, I would argue and so let's take climate crisis, which is, I think, the biggest one, such an existential crisis. We also have a care crisis. I think both of them in a way can be related to the problem of having a primacy of the profit motive. The profit motive is is what is the driving force of the capitalist economy. And what the profit mode and the profit motive can be very wonderful if things that are socially desirable that a society wants, if they're profitable, that's cool. I think who gives us an example? I think this is in the of the Republic of Walmart. They give, I think or it's just Lee Phillips somewhere else that he argues that. He takes the example of PrEP, I think, HIV medicine. He says, this is there's been activism to push for this kind of medicine was successful also because there was a way to make this profitable. And therefore, they found investors, and it's wonderful that we have this medicine. But there's a lot of things that are profitable that are not as over not desirable for societies, like fossil fuels, still insanely profitable. And we need to decarbonize the economy for the climate crisis. And there's also things that are really desirable that are just aren't as profitable. That's just the care crisis as a revival of the notion of the Baumal cost disease or sometimes Baumal paradox. The idea that it's very hard to rationalize interpersonal care work and the service sector at large without decreasing the quality of the product. So the idea that you can make care work you can make childcare in a sense more productive, efficient if you take a share of the day of children a couple of hours a day. You put them children go into childcare facilities. In a sense, this becomes more productive because you have fewer people watching more children. And in a sense, this is reasonable and this is really good for for children's development to have peers that they can engage with. But at some point, like, which is already the reality in many countries and certainly is in Germany where I normally live, You have too many people, too few people for too many children. The quality of the service just decreases because they can't watch their children properly. They can't encourage. They can't moderate, and so on and so forth. So this becomes a problem, and you can't rationalize, childcare and make it 50 times more efficient in this kind of sense. You can make it technically you can make it better with some technologies and with connectivity. We just give them all iPads. You get the point. With AR. You gave them the point by this. Yeah. Who is that? I think it's Helen Hester and Nick Sernicek. They say that television is the most important automating technology

Might as well persist. Yeah. No. It's definitely, yeah, a 100%. So, yeah, there's a sector and we so there's a sector and I mean, now I'm in The US and I realize normally, I say, it's just really it's it's just basically impossible to organize such a sector around the profit motives, but I realize this is happening in The US. But it has very detrimental effects. It's very hard to make this properly profitable, a lot of this work, which is why in many countries, it's the state who organized it and the private family. And so the lack of investment that you'll have in some of the related sectors due to decreasing profitability, there's also wages that are too low in those sectors. The way to kind of remedy that is to democratize finance and to engage a more deliberate allocation of investment in finance. I think this is making a very long point. Let's just get back to this. This is something that shouldn't be based on profitability. It should be based on on on conscious decision, I would argue. And maybe if it's okay, I'll just say one more thing. There there is a literature in academia on the democratization of finance, and there is there are lots of social movements in this civil society around democratizing finance. And I think there it's often about repoliticizing central banks and subjecting them to democratic proper democratic control, and it's about how to build a cooperative finance and how to extend public base. When I present in those circles, I saw my impression was that that ideas that I I articulated earlier, they're very open to people are very open to those ideas. They're very close to how people think about democratizing finance already. And the people who do empirical work on the political economy of finance, there, I think I get this might be self selection bias. Maybe it's the people who come to my presentations, but, like, I get positive feedback because there's a people are just so fed up with kind of studying, derisking, and how finance presently works and just complete failure to facilitate decarbonization. And so people are very open to hearing ideas about how to do things. Do you ever have, like, people studying finance coming to your seminars? Probably not. Not that often. Yeah. And the ones who would come would be the Right. Right. Heterodox economists. Yeah. I've yeah. This is something I mean, I need to move more out the need to engage more outside of my public. One of the things that I've been thinking

Yes. So I think I mean, I'm my thinking is shaped by the sociologist Eric Holland Wright in terms of transformation, who I think was one of the people one of the progressives who really has a good feeling for how things change in capitalism. And he brings together a kind of tries to bring together, like, a vision of transformation that relates a path of democratic socialism where kind of popular parties, progressive parties that unite kind of different subaltern classes. So you have that kind of route, and you have popular politics, and you pursue an institutional path, and you try to fight for, like, the space there is within the system, and link this towards a vision where you experiment with cooperatives. He calls it real utopias. I don't know. Kind of yeah. Cooperatives are probably the most important ones. In in finance, you could probably think about, like, kind of credit unions, more cooperative banks, and so on. Definitely, but it was not only in finance. And so the idea would be that for a kind of I mean, there's a level of there's a question of transformation, would be that you fight for within institutions, you fight for a kind of you you defend social rights, of course, but you also push for more space for experiments with something else. And the experiments with something else are, of course, always limited in capitalism to a certain extent, but they also for a kind of situations, if we for instance, climate change or the other crisis, they push us towards situations where, again, like in the seventies, we end up in a situation where there's an extra chance for pursuing a different overall path. The kind of fret block, another so such as makes this point of that every, like this this cooperative finance would have a tremendously important role. So any kind of public bank, but also co op a cooperative financial sector. In such a kind of crisis situation, if you have that, they keep on lending, and they don't engage in a credit strike or capital strike. So I mentioned it as a kind of situation where you actually would wanna pursue a different path and you want would wanna democratize the economy. And then you have large corporates, and they just don't invest anymore and they sabotage the economy. Or the HMMs might honestly feel that there's not gonna be profitability and they so they're gonna they're gonna withhold profits and surpluses. This they create economic turbulence. And so the more you have, like, a autonomous cooperative financial sector and you have public bans and the more resources that you have to keep on lending, the less destabilizing such a crisis would be. That also makes it makes it easier to transition somewhere else because that's not a disruption in the life world of the everyday citizen to the same kind of degree. So this would mediate what kind of the disruption of what might happen. The problem with having such a huge disruption and that you have if you I mean, I don't know. I'm not an expert on Venezuela, so I don't wanna comment on that. But maybe that's the case, but, like, that certainly, I can also discuss citizenship. If you have a if you have a heavy disruption in in the kind of quality of life of the everyday citizen, the kind of coalition that might carry such a transformation, they might fall apart. Maybe there's kind of middle class people, like a professional managerial class, who aren't suffering as much in today and who might feel like, oh, this is getting I'm not sure if I wanna kind of Right. Stay in this coalition if I'm happy with the direction a country is going. So the less disruptive such an experience would be, the the more the easier it is to transition and the less danger there is that that might be an authoritarian turn of some sort where you have to you have kind of elites are sabotaging to a large degree. The coalition is shrinking. You can either kind of clamp down and push through or you just it just falls apart. This is a kind of this is a this is a danger of authoritarianism in this kind of principle as well. So all this to say that a cooperative financial sector would be a great thing for a transformation. You could also imagine so all this kind of this image that I've painted of kind of sexual bodies and National Investment Authority, you can totally imagine a corporate financial sector for some not for a heavy industry. The things should probably be more negotiated. But, like, for others, like, small scale kind of agriculture services and whatnot, That could be a always could be a small scale of cooperative sector. And for that, a cooperative financial sector Mhmm. Would probably be a good idea.

Yeah. I mean, if you wanna follow my work, you can follow me on on blue sky. I'm transitioning over from x because, again, it's not pretty there anymore. And my I have a home page. I'm not even sure what the title of my home page is, to be honest. Just Google it. I think it's Just Christoph Sorg, which is my name. Yeah. But other than that, also my university page at Humboldt University, I'm just publishing and just updating that one with more recent publications. The book that we have, Creative Construction, has presently also translated being translated into German by by Bruner. It was published with Bristol University Press. If you have university affiliation, you can maybe help order it there. They're still keeping it behind a very steep price, which academic books frequently have. If you're struggling with that, just shoot me an email. Maybe we can figure out a different way, If you know what I mean. Maybe there's you also know that there's ways of getting around those huge university prizes that I, of course, don't condone. But, like, maybe There are websites out there. Something there. Our websites. You should know of them. They're keeping they're making academia possible, and they're making popular work Mhmm. Knowledge production possible. So maybe you're gonna be successful there. Awesome. Thanks so much, Christophe. Thank you for having me.