Upstream - The Logical Case for Socialism (and Against Capitalism) w/ Scott Sehon

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

Facts don’t care about your feelings. Logic isn’t fair. Reason isn’t concerned with your emotions. These oft-regurgitated cliches hurled at the left by those on the right might sound familiar to you. Hey, maybe they’ve even been directed at you personally. And, aside from seeing these claims from the right as simply funny, they’re also quite ironic. Because, when you actually dig down into the arguments of both the left and the right, it becomes quite clear, quite quickly, that the facts are actually on our side. That when you use logic and reason to argue for either capitalism or socialism, it’s socialism that comes out as the winner. Everytime.  There are many tools in the left’s toolbox when it comes to convincing those we interact with about the superiority of socialism. We do have arguments that center on fairness and equity, on more feelings-based arguments, which are very compelling and which we should certainly not abandon. But we also have a vast arsenal of arguments that rely on simple logic. And it’s some of these arguments that we’re going to explore—both in favor of socialism and against capitalism—in this episode. And we’ve brought on the perfect guest to walk us through this style of argumentation. Scott Sehon is a Professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College and author of the book Socialism: A Logical Introduction, published by Oxford University Press. In this episode, we introduce the philosophical study of logic and how to construct and deconstruct logical  formulas and logical arguments. We then apply this knowledge to the real world by asking what is the better economic system: socialism or capitalism? In the process we discredit and overturn some of the most common arguments for capitalism, we explore what we actually mean by socialism and socialistic societies, we explore a great deal of empirical data suggesting the superiority of societies with more democratic control and more egalitarian distribution, and, we talk about the importance of utilizing the tools of logic and reason as socialists. Further resources: Socialism: A Logical Introduction, by Scott Sehon Taking Stock of Shock: Social Consequences of the 1989 Revolutions by Kristen Ghodsee and Mitchell Orenstein Related episodes: Dialectical Materialism w/ Josh Sykes Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism with Kristen Ghodsee [UNLOCKED] How the North Plunders the South w/ Jason Hickel Walter Rodney, Marxism, and Underdevelopment with D. Musa Springer & Charisse Burden-Stelly The Spirit Level with Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett Suburban Hell and Ugly Cities Debunking the Myth of Homo economicus (documentary) Socialism Betrayed w/ Roger Keeran and Joe Jamison Cover artwork: Carolyn Raider Intermission music: "Invisible Rain" by Stick To Your Guns Upstream is a labor of love—we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Just a quick announcement before we jump into this episode. We've partnered with our friends at All Power Books to host a live podcast recording in Los Angeles on Saturday, August 24th with journalist and activist Abby Martin from The Empire Files. We've thrown a link to the Eventbrite in the show notes or you can go to allpowerbooks.org forward slash upstream. If you're in the area and available we'd love to meet you and see you there. Okay now on with the show. It's generally speaking the right that has tried to claim the mantle of reason and logic and argument. I mean, you have Ben Shapiro saying that facts don't care about your feelings and that the caricature of the left is that it's as if we're in a basketball game and the other team scores a point and scores a basket,

and we say, no, that's just not fair because, well, I don't know, I don't know, I don't like you or you're taller than us or you had a better background. So we win just by default. That's the caricature of those of us on the left. And so if nothing else, if nothing else, I want to show that, no, no, we can play that game too. I think it's a very good game.

I'm all for it. I'm all for reason. I'm all for reason. I'm all for facts. That's not to say I'm against feelings, but I think that we do need to base our reasoning on empirical data, on our reasons, and on logical inference. You are listening to Upstream.

Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Astream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Facts don't care about your feelings.

Logic isn't fair. Reason isn't concerned with your emotions. These oft-reguergitated cliches hurled at the left by those on the right might sound familiar to you. Hey, they might even have been directed at you personally. And aside from seeing these claims as simply funny, they're actually quite ironic. Because when we actually dig down into the arguments

of both the left and the right, it becomes quite clear, quite quickly, that the facts are actually on our side. That when we use logic and reason to argue either for capitalism or socialism, it's socialism that comes out as the winner, every time. There are many tools in the left's toolbox when it comes to convincing those we interact with about the superiority of socialism. We do have arguments that center on fairness and equity, more feelings-based arguments, which are very compelling and which we should definitely not abandon.

But we also have a vast arsenal of arguments that rely on simple logic. And it's some of these arguments that we're going to explore, both in favor of socialism and against capitalism, in this episode. And we've brought on the perfect guest to walk us through this style of argumentation. Scott Sion is a professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College and the author of the book Socialism, a Logical Introduction, published by Oxford University Press. In this episode, we introduce the philosophical study of logic and how to construct and deconstruct

logical formulas and logical arguments. We then apply this knowledge to the real world by asking, what is the better economic system, socialism or capitalism? In the process, we discredit and overturn some of the most common arguments for capitalism. We explore what we actually mean by socialism and socialistic societies. We explore a great deal of empirical data

suggesting the superiority of societies with more democratic control and more egalitarian distribution. And we talk about the importance of utilizing the tools of logic and reason as socialists. And before we get started, Upstream is almost entirely listener-funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways that you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes, at least one a month, but usually more, along with our entire back catalogue of Patreon episodes at

patreon.com forward slash Up upstream podcast. You can also make a tax deductible recurring or one time donation through our website upstream podcast dot org forward slash support. Through this support you'll be helping keep upstream sustainable and helping keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now here's Robert in have you on the show. Great.

Very happy to be here. Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to start by asking you to just introduce yourself for our listeners. We like to ask our guests just to kind of introduce themselves in their own words and maybe, you know, just giving us a bit of a background, like talking about how you came to do the work that you're doing, how you got interested in socialism to begin with. Yes, well, my name is Scott Sion. I am a professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College in Maine, where I've been teaching for several decades now. I got into philosophy itself in some ways through high school debate. I

just, you know, I was on the debate team in my high school in Lawrence, Kansas, and really liked the argument aspect of it, the sort of structured reasoning and that sort of thing. There in the debate context, one didn't really care what the topic was, and you debated either side of it from one debate to the other. When I then went on to college and realized that, well, the place where we really talk about arguments and where we really talk about reasons seems to be philosophy and they talk about absolutely fascinating questions that are of extreme importance and interest to me. So I thought I would give it a try and you know, my mom had hoped that I would go on to law school, but that didn't happen.

I figured I couldn't really see myself leaving philosophy. So I stayed with it. The interest in socialism is besides a more general political interest, it's actually kind of new for me as far as my academic career is concerned. I had taught elements of this sort of thing of moral and political philosophy, but my writing had been on other things on free will and agency and philosophy of mind. Ah, got it. And just a quick question. Do humans have free will? Yes.

No, I'm just kidding. I'll answer. Yes, they do. And we could talk all about that too, but that's not quite the planned topic for today. I'm just, I love one of the examples of an interviewer who does something like that sometimes. I don't know if you're familiar with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, but she'll have like 30 seconds left

in the program and she'll have like a paragraph long question and then just be like, you have 30 seconds. I won't do that to you. I'm wondering like how you came to write a book about the logic of socialism because it's a very particular angle and it's actually something I had never really thought of. Obviously as a socialist you're forced to defend your position oftentimes and you're always talking about why capitalism is a bad system and why socialism is a better system. And, you know, you're forced to create arguments, but really thinking about it as something as structured as, like, creating a logical explanation for why socialism is superior to capitalism. When you take into consideration all of these different criteria, it's not really something that I had thought about. And when I first heard of your book, which was recommended to us by Kristin Gatze, your colleague, I was really fascinated with it. And I really wanted to dive in. And so I'm wondering, yeah, like, why did you focus on this specific particular angle in terms of like a logical argument for socialism

and a logical argument against capitalism? Basically because that's what we do in philosophy when we're talking about any issue. And so I've been, as I said, doing philosophy for 30, 35 years now, counting graduate school. And that's our approach. We try to figure out the arguments for a position and the arguments against a position,

and we analyze and we break them down. We try to find out what the reasons are. Now, in some ways that might sound odd, but we always believe things for reasons. You don't just wake up one day and say I'm a socialist or there's no free will you have some reason for it and The analysis of arguments is just breaking things down and trying to say okay. So what are those reasons? What are the premises that are leading to this conclusion?

Are the premises true does the conclusion logically follow from the premises? So that's just our method. And so when I came to the topic of socialism, and I had been obviously interested in politics all my life, but hadn't written much about political philosophy or socialism in particular, that sort of arose because I ended up writing, co-authoring a piece in Eon Magazine, Eon Line Magazine, with Christian Gazi, whom you mentioned, about—this was called Anti-Anti-Communism. It was about arguments concerning being against the history of communism and against the practices. And we weren't in that article particularly concerned to support anything quite like the

Soviet Bloc or anything like that or even making arguments in favor of communism. But part of the article, the part that was more my responsibility because I'm the philosopher who deals with arguments, was breaking down the arguments that other people were making and showing the steps and saying but wait this argument doesn't work because you know either you have this premise in which case we've got this objection or you have this premise in which case the argument doesn't follow that sort of thing breaking it down and doing the analogical analysis and you know to my somewhat surprise the article was shared thousands of times on Facebook,

and it seemed to me, okay, there's interest in this, and that at least a lot of people do have some appetite for breaking these things down and actually seeing the reasons for it. And I'd always been interested in these real life political topics, but I thought it seemed like a good time to try to bring those tools to bear on this particular issue. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that's really cool to hear that that article kind of blew up and went viral because, you know, I think that there are all of us sort of, you know, our brains work in different ways and different approaches are a little bit more

compelling to one person or another. And I think oftentimes, you know, relying on the sort of, I don't want to like use the word emotional necessarily because it kind of, it might sort of come off the wrong way. But you know, appealing to people's feelings, appealing to people's, you know, morals when you talk about the ills of capitalism. That's a very compelling thing, right? But everybody might not be swayed equally by that approach. And so I really appreciate having this sort of other approach where you're really rationally using reason,

using almost like a mathematical, logical approach to figuring out, okay, well, actually, is capitalism good for people? Is socialism a better system? So yeah, I just really appreciate that approach. And I did study philosophy as an undergrad, so I'm a little familiar with this. It feels like about 500 years ago now. But I did take a course in logic. And to be totally honest, I hated that class. I had some sort of disconcertions

when I was about to start your book. Because on one hand, I found it super compelling. Like I mentioned, I wanted to understand this approach. But I was also like, is it going to be dry? Is it going to be like mathematical? Because that was kind of a little bit of my experience with logic. But you know, your book was so engaging and so clear and funny too. And like you really shifted my perspective, not just on logic, but the way that you demonstrate

how clearly these arguments can be applied to the real world conversations and real world conditions that we're experiencing. So I want to thank you on that front, but on that note, I think it might be helpful to sort of begin with a little bit of table setting. What exactly do you mean when you say that you are providing a logical introduction to socialism? when you say that you are providing a logical introduction to socialism. And why do you think the tools of logic and reason are important ones for us on the left to utilize? Well, first, thanks very much for the kind words

about the book. That's very nice. Yes, so a logical introduction. The basic idea is that I want to get behind various assertions on either side, various things that people say, sometimes like you say, just sort of emotional reactions of one sort or another, and try to get to the arguments. What are the reasons that people have for believing that we should have a socialist system or for believing that we should have a socialist system or for believing that we

should have a capitalist system. And the way I think about it is that reasons and arguments are kind of like the skeleton of what you believe. If you believe something, you presumably have reasons for it. If you don't have any reason whatsoever for believing something, then well, it's probably false what your belief is, and at least it's certainly ungrounded. So if you do have reasons, what are they? Let's figure them out. Let's figure this out. And like I said, it's like the skeleton of your beliefs. And if, you know, as with your literal skeleton, if your femurs are broken, then you aren't

going to be able to walk very well. And if your reasoning is broken, you won't be able to think very well and you won't be able to reach true conclusions. And so that's just the basic idea behind it. But I'll also mention one other thing that I think is useful and especially for those of us on the left, is that it's generally speaking the right that has tried to claim the mantle of reason and logic and argument. You have Ben Shapiro saying that facts don't care about your feelings and that the caricature of the left is that it's as if we're in a basketball game and

the other team scores a point and scores a basket and we say, no, that's just not fair because well, I don't know, I don't like you or you're taller than us or you had a better background. So we went just by default. And that's the caricature of those of us on the left that we just kind of shout. And you have like, sorry to interrupt. I was just going to say you have Reason magazine. Yes, exactly. You know, a libertarian magazine called Reason. So I thought that was relevant.

Exactly. That's what they call it. And so if nothing else, if nothing else, I want to show that, no, no, we can play that game too. I think it's a very good game. I'm all for it. I'm all for Reason. I'm all for reason. I'm all for facts.

That's not to say I'm against feelings, but I think that we do need to base our reasoning on empirical data, on our reasons, and on logical inference. And that yes, we on the left can play that game and, you know, that's like rather than walking away from the basketball game where the other team scored a point in the way that we didn't like, we say, no, we'll play that game and we'll actually win at that.

And I'm sometimes uncomfortable with sports metaphors for arguments because what we're trying to get at is the truth. But nonetheless, I think it's important for us to realize, and especially important for those on the right to realize, that the left and socialism is not just about fuzzy feelings and warm thoughts or ugly thoughts as they might think. We actually have evidence and reasons and arguments on our side, And it's good to show that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I thought it might be helpful to start out with, like you do in the book

in the intro, with a sample of the sort of argumentative analysis and the tools that you use throughout the book. So does that sound all right? Like maybe if we, if you could walk us through the, the socialism and starvation argument. Yes. Well, that starts because a lot of times it used to be a little bit more a few years ago when Venezuela was more in the news. Although of course, right at the very moment it's back in the news again. back in the news again. It is, yeah. Yeah, but you would say something about being in favor of socialism and somebody would just say, oh, what, you want to live in Venezuela?

You know, people are starving there. And you know, Venezuela was just used as a sort of general gotcha for anybody who expressed anything on the left, but especially if they dared to use the word socialism. And you know, it was true and is still true that there is hunger in Venezuela, that is, and literally people are, have food insecurity. Things are not going well there. But pushing back behind that, it's like, okay, exactly what's the argument here. So you're saying that Venezuela has a socialist economic system and they have food insecurity. People are starving. Therefore socialist governments should be rejected but the conclusion doesn't

actually follow from the premise. We need to know more about how you get from this premise that Venezuela has a socialist economic system and has rampant food insecurity to the conclusion that we should reject socialism. And then, so what's the intermediate premise is the sort of thing that philosophers often ask about. And you know, one version of the intermediate premise in a case like that would be, well, if there are any countries that have a certain kind of economic system and they have rampant food insecurity, then we should reject that

economic system. If you put that into the argument, and I do these things in numbered steps, as you know, but as your listeners won't, unless they've looked at the book, you know, you have this first step, Venezuela has a socialist economic system and it has rampant food insecurity. Now you have step two, if there are any countries with such and such economic system and food insecurity, then we should reject that system. Conclusion, we should reject socialism. Now the argument is, as philosophers say, valid, meaning yes, the conclusion does logically follow from the premises, but we can now turn to whether the premises are true or not and

realize first there are always questions about whether Venezuela is actually socialist. They call themselves socialist, but there are genuine questions to be raised about to what degree they are socialist. But putting that aside, just even that general intermediate premise, if there are countries with a certain sort of economic system and they have a problem, then we should reject that system. That's just not true because we know even the capitalist is going to reject that premise because there are capitalist countries that have rampant food insecurity. And the capitalist doesn't want to

infer from this that we should reject capitalism, so it can't be that simple. You might then say, okay, well, if all countries that have an economic system of this type have rampant food insecurity, then we should reject it. But then it's also not true that all countries that have a socialist economic system or lean in that direction have rampant food insecurity. And so then it won't, you know, you won't get the first premise that you need with that because it won't be true that all countries

with socialist economic systems have this kind of food insecurity. So you just go back and forth. I mean, to some extent, the question is, rather than just sort of, you know, hitting and forth. I mean, to some extent, the question is, rather than just sort of hitting them with some sort of counter example to a claim and saying, well, you're trying to get your own gotcha back. Yeah, well, what about Russia?

Russia is basically capitalist now. Do you want to live there? And there's a point to that. But we can slow down and actually try to make more progress and say, well, what exactly are we looking for? Because if the point is to say, well, in general, people do better under economic systems of such and such type, that if that's true, then we should adopt that system, that's reasonable. That has something to be said for it, but that's a much complicated claim and just pointing to venezuela is pointing to one data point and we need to look at other data points as well

venezuela is no longer a gotcha in a case like that but yes so that's the source stepping back is the only when you have somebody who wants to do something in an argument where it's basically just sort of a gotcha or just a sort of slam or just something that they're just trying to hit you with, slowing down and just saying, exactly what's the argument here?

And usually, you can learn a lot from doing that. And yeah, it's hard to argue with that, right? You can try, but it's a very strong foundation to stand on it. Like, when you approach the argument from that perspective, it cuts off the oxygen to the argument right away, right? Like, you can get into a back and forth about empirical arguments or counter examples. For example, like you mentioned, you know, Russia is versus Venezuela, that kind of thing. But when you deconstruct the actual argument

and show the flaws in the argument itself, it's almost like you're stepping off of that to go back to the sports analogy. Like you're stepping off that playing field and you're engaging your opponent or whatever on a different playing field. And I think it's a great way to just sort of cut these arguments off at the beginning

before you even like get down into a rabbit hole with them. And I think one thing that I noticed when reading the book, and I'll put my tendency, my Marxist tendency out there right off the bat, just so that we have an understanding. I think obviously most of our listeners know that I'm a Marxist-Leninist and I sort of gravitate more towards, you know, sometimes in the book you criticize the Soviet Union. And when I see stuff like that, I have all of these other counter arguments in my head going through that. But maybe we can talk about that kind of stuff a little bit more.

But I think it is really helpful because socialism can be quite a nebulous term and there's many different tendencies within socialism. There is a lot of disagreement over, you know, what constitutes socialism, what constitutes communism. And I'm wondering if you can just sort of let us know early on here so that we have like an understanding of what your sort of background is with how you see yourself fit within that broader range of socialism. fit within that, you know, broader range of socialism. And for example, like discussions around democracy and state socialism might be a little bit more clear as we go through the conversation with an understanding of like what your definition of socialism is

and sort of how you present it in the book, particularly as this idea of like degrees of socialism. Right. Yes. Well, first of all, let me just say that on this sort of question about definition of socialism and their definition capitalism or communism, any of these words here, I will actually say that at least in a certain very important sense, there is no right answer. We can use words differently. And if a Marxist Leninist uses the word socialism to mean one thing and I or somebody else uses it to mean something else, that doesn't mean that one of us is right or wrong. That just means we need to be very careful and make sure that we're not talking past each other and that we understand what each

other are saying. So that is to say, as long as I'm really clear or as long as you are really clear or anyone else is really clear about exactly what they do mean by socialism, we'd do better not to argue about the words but just argue about the substance. And so we can say socialism, you know, some Scott or socialism sub-Robbie or something, you know, to have different versions of it. So in the background, I just want to say that, you know, I don't dispute anybody else's use of the term socialism, except, well, sometimes people use it almost incoherently when, you

know, people like Senator Rand Paul who will... But we won't go into... Well, maybe we'll go into that later, but I'll start with my definition of socialism. The way I would like to see it is that, yes, it comes in degrees and in a couple of different ways. The classic idea of socialist economies is that there is collective ownership of the means of production, and so that the collective, usually through state, but partly the idea might be that that comes down to worker collectives or that, you know, various different options here.

But the workers, the people, own and run the economy. And if that's through the government, then that would mean government ownership of the economy. As opposed to having, you know, and then there can be the ideas on the classic idea that it's, you know, then there's no markets, it's all just centrally planned, etc., etc. But you've got these degrees you could have. You could have more collective control of the economy on one side, and then you could have far less of it on the other side.

So in the United States, we have some control of the economy. There are certainly regulations. We run schools. We run some forms of public transportation. We have a military that is publicly funded. There are various things that we do that are influencing and even owning part of the economy through the state that's democratically elected.

But we have a lot less of that than they have in some other countries in Western Europe and especially Northern Europe. There's more of that, but there could be much further. You could have much more collective control. So that's one axis. How much collective control is there of the economy. That could either be through direct ownership of the means of production, but could also be through how much do we regulate it, how much do we control it even if we allow people to

have private ownership. The other axis, the other thing that you might measure this on, is how egalitarian is the distribution of resources. In a purely capitalist world, there would be no redistribution. Whatever inequalities develop, that's fine. That's just the way they are. We don't redistribute at all, and we don't worry about initial distribution of resources. The more socialist direction is having it closer to equal. Not necessarily, I don't know of anybody who says that it should be absolutely equal. There's the Marxist ideal that from each according to ability to each according to need, that's getting pretty close to just saying pretty much complete egalitarian distribution. But again, you can have great

degrees of difference on how much inequality there is, how much egalitarian distribution of resources you have. And so I just think of socialism as coming in degrees on those two axes. And normally they kind of go together, that the countries that have more collective control also have more egalitarian distribution of resources. It wouldn't have to be that way, but they generally do. Since you brought up the Soviet Union and Soviet block countries, the thing that's interesting about them is that while they did have pretty substantial egalitarian distribution of resources

and they did have very substantial state control of the economy and ownership of the means of production. Since it wasn't really a democracy, I don't really count it as collective control because, yes, you had the party saying that they were operating on behalf of the people, but saying you're operating on the behalf of the people when you never have multi-party, free and fair elections is a little bit dubious. And so they don't fit easily into my chart. That doesn't bother me too much. I talk about the Soviet Union and some of these other countries in various ways, drawing data from them in various respects that we'll probably get to, ways, drawing data from them in various respects that we'll probably get to. But I'm certainly not advocating the sense in which they deviate from my definition of

socialism that they weren't really collectively controlling because it was essentially authoritarian. I mean, that it was one party non-democracy. I'm certainly not advocating doing that. I think we should still have democracy. In fact, democratic socialist, I think that we have democracy for all kinds of other things. We should have more democracy about the economy. But those are the two axes. So we have egalitarian distribution and collective control and degrees in each way.

The further you go in the two directions on those views, the further you are to a socialist. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. That's really helpful. And I don't want to get too bogged down on this part of the conversation because there's so much more stuff that I want to get to in the book. But one of the things, and I'm curious if you have a response to this at all, or if you just want to leave it as something that I throw out there as well. But the idea of degrees, for me, it brings up a bit of a problem when we think about moving towards a socialist or ultimately a communist society because when we talk about reforms, we're making an assumption that the more reforms accumulate that get us closer to what

looks like collective control or more egalitarian distribution, it can be a bit of a shimmer. For example, if you look at, let's say the United States during the New Deal administration of FDR, so beginning in the 1930s, and there was like a whole era of like Keynesian management of the economy. And we had all of these reforms, which, you know, the government intervened in the economy. And you could say that the United States was moving towards socialism, and maybe becoming quite socialistic during this period. But in a sense, if you say that you'd be dismissing the intention of those in power. And I know when we talk about intention,

and things get a little bit messy. But you can, and as we saw, move closer and closer towards what would look like socialistic policies, while at the same time, those in power were working on behalf of a capitalist class. And eventually we saw when the Reaganites and the sort of era of neoliberalism came to be, that all of these reforms, they hadn't gotten us any closer to socialism, because in the process, the state apparatus was actually weakening the worker movements in the United States, like communism was purged from the unions, a lot of the more radical socialist and communist traditions were eradicated during that time.

And so what appeared on the surface for, you know, a few years, and for it's important to note a very specific demographic of people, what looked like we were progressing towards socialism was actually undoing the very foundation of what could have been ultimately a socialist transformation. So I do think it's important to understand what class is in power and to take that into consideration when we talk about the state or when we talk about collective control over the economy because it's very much possible to see like on the surface Certain policies that may benefit workers or certain scraps of control, you know thrown to the working class by capitalists Which actually end up serving as backstops for the continued and long-term sort of continuation of capital accumulation.

Like at the time of the New Deal reforms, for example, actual socialist and communist parties and organizations were very much prepared to revolt and to overthrow the state. You know, and FDR, Roosevelt knew this. He knew that he had to convince the powerful men in the room with him that if they didn't give some concessions to working people, then they were all screwed. So that's why I think it's really important when you think about the modest social and economic reforms that were passed during this period, that it's very important to consider the intention behind them and that the system, you know, it corrected itself eventually in the 70s and 80s, like I mentioned,

you know. And so I bring this all up because I do think it's relevant to the conversation about whether the, you know, the Scandinavian countries are socialist or not. But I'll stop there because there is a lot more that I could say about this and our conceptions of liberal democracy and bourgeois democracy, etc., etc. We could get into dialectics and talk about how reforms don't accumulate into power and these questions of quantity versus quality and quantitative versus qualitative change. We discuss a lot of that in our episode with Josh Sykes on dialectical materialism. And I won't get into all of that here because it's too much of a detour for our purposes here.

But I did want to just bring that up because I think it's an important thing to note. And yeah, I don't know if you want to push back at all or you have any reflections or thoughts on that or, you know, if you want to push back at all, or you have any reflections or thoughts on that, or if you want to just move on to the next topic too. Either way is fine with me. Well, I'll just say a little bit that I certainly see the point, and the intent does matter. And if you do things in a way that we can.

So one way of putting it is that on my two-dimensional graph of what counts as more socialist, yes, I would say that in the 30s, 40s, even into the 50s and 60s and 70s, the dot was moving in that sort of direction towards more socialist, egalitarian distribution of goods, some more control of, collective control of the economy. Now the specific way that we did it and the specific mechanisms and some of the economy. Now, the specific way that we did it and the specific mechanisms and some of the things that were put in place might be empirically such

that those weren't the ideal ones to be able to stay there or to move further, which would have been better because just for the reasons that you say. That strikes me as, again, not necessarily about the definitional question, but about strategic questions and about questions, empirical questions about what sorts of policies are best and how far we should move. Of course, there have long been debates within the socialist tradition about whether, you know, reform versus revolution. And yeah, I'm basically for

reform, you know, in the favor of know, I'm in favor of democracy. I'm in favor of doing these things through steps and or at least when we can, you know, if we could go in one big step and, you know, democratically and not overwhelming the will of the people, that would be interesting too. But I am certainly happy enough to move in steps. But your point is well taken that we have to be careful what sorts of steps we're making and whether we are making steps that actually seem to make progress, but where the progress is so fragile

that somebody like Reagan comes along and boom, it's not only undone, but things are much worse than they were before. That is a genuine possibility. Yeah. I think it's a question ultimately of you know, which class is in power when when we're talking about these questions of the potential staying power of reforms and Yeah, I think this is you know, this is a really interesting question. I spend a lot of time thinking about it personally

We spend a lot of time thinking about it and talking about it on the show. So I really do appreciate you engaging with me on this and getting into it a little bit before we get back into the book and the meat of the book really, which is where you settle on a master argument to decide what system is superior, socialism or capitalism. And I really do appreciate how you set the book up, you know, like comparing socialism and capitalism really side by side and just, you know, holding them to this same set of criteria, like these same questions that you apply to each system.

And so I would love it if you could walk us through what you present as the master argument for a social system in the book. And then maybe we can sort of go through each system and really see how it sizes up. Okay. Yes. So just by a little bit of background before getting into exactly that argument, I talk about we're trying to answer a moral question here. The moral question is how ought we to structure our society?

And I don't think there's any way of avoiding that that is a moral question. There are some on the left and some on the right who get uncomfortable with talking about moral questions and think, well, there's no right or wrong there. But I think there is right or wrong there. That's what we're arguing about because it is a moral question is what sort of system should we choose? And what are the factors in determining what sort of system we should choose, especially at this broad sort of economic political level. Well, one thing we should certainly care about is human well-being,

the welfare of people in the culture that we're talking about. But we also should consider whether people have rights and whether those are being violated by one system or another. And we can talk more about that distinction. But so with that little bit of a background, the master argument is just really quite simple in some ways. As the first premise, I say socialism better promotes human well-being than capitalism or than extent styles of governance. That's just taken as a premise as far as the argument is concerned. Of course, much of the book then is concerned with defending that premise. But first premise, socialism better promotes human well-being than capitalism. Second premise, socialism

does not violate the moral rights of individuals. And then the general premise that was sort of what I was introducing as background to this. If you have two styles of governance and one better promotes human well-being and it doesn't violate rights, then well, we should do that one. And so from these three premises, then it would follow that we should choose socialism over capitalism or the other extensiles of governance. And before we dive in again to some of those arguments, I'm wondering if you can just sketch out a little bit the difference, since we're talking about rights, the difference between positive and negative rights, because I think this is an important distinction. And you use an example in the book to illustrate this distinction. I think you is an important distinction. And you use an example in the book

to illustrate this distinction. I think you mentioned Paul Rand already, so he may come up a few times in our conversation, unfortunately. This idea of Paul Rand versus Bernie Sanders and the idea of forced labor under socialism as a result of having a right to x, say, free health care. I'm wondering if you could just kind of illustrate

that example for us to make a little bit of sense of what we mean when we talk about rights. Yes. I'm going to take a slight tangent first and say just another distinction about rights that I think is important to get on the table. So we've got positive versus negative rights. That's your question.

That's about question is about that Before getting to that for just a second. I want to make a distinction between legal versus moral rights Because it's just important to note that I'm talking about moral rights here. So to make the distinction clear from 1973 up until a couple of years ago women in this country had the legal right to have an abortion. After the Dobbs opinion by the Supreme Court, they no longer had that legal right to have an abortion in states where abortion was then banned. That's just a question about what's on the books.

What does the law tell us? What does the Constitution tell us? And we answer that question by asking courts and, you know, unfortunately we got this result from the Supreme Court. The question of moral rights, I would say all along women have had the moral right to have abortions to do with their body as they chose. And that when states ban abortions and take away their legal right to have abortions, they are actually violating the women's moral right. So that's just that distinction in the background.

But now, within positive versus negative rights, as for negative freedoms or rights usually is the word here. A negative right would be a right against government interference, in particular government interference, but maybe interference by others. So if I have the right to free speech, then that means the government can't stop me and they can't punish me for just speaking my mind. If I criticize the president or I criticize the governor they can't put me in jail for that. That doesn't mean they're doing anything for me but they just can't do that. If I have freedom of religion and if my religion is Judaism they can't stop me from worshipping in that way. So that's something the government can't do.

So it's a negative right in the sense of freedom from interference. Positive rights would be a right to access something, to have something. So the standard examples, and you mentioned Bernie Sanders and Senator Paul, is Bernie will talk about health care as a human right or housing as a human right. And those are, they're certainly different from free speech because if I say that I have the right to criticize the governor, that just means, you know, the state can't stop me.

If I say that I have the right to health care, whether that's free or, you know, I pay something for it or something like that. But say that I have the right to free healthcare, then that's to say somebody has to provide it. And so that's just in terms of what that means. It's a positive right in the sense of that's saying that the government has violated my right by not providing that. Whereas with a negative right, as long as the government does nothing, they haven't

violated my negative rights. If I have the right to free speech and they've done nothing, they haven't tried to enforce any restrictions on speech, they've just sat there and done nothing, then they haven't violated my rights. Whereas if I have a right to healthcare, then there's something the government has to do if it's supposed to be a right to government provided health care. So that's the distinction. So I'm not sure what you wanted, where you wanted to go with that question and talking about that distinction.

Well, I am curious because, you know, there are people like Rand Paul or Ben Shapiro who will just come out and say that if you believe in the idea of having a quote right to healthcare then that actually means that you believe in slavery and I know that sounds absurd but you know the way that they frame it is because ultimately what's happening is you're making people have to provide that healthcare and they go as far as saying that you're advocating for doctors to be enslaved ultimately if you're advocating for a right be enslaved, ultimately, if you're advocating for a right to health care. So yeah, I guess I'm just wondering how you would respond to that. Right. And clearly that's hyperbolic and rather ridiculous. That's nobody is talking about

somebody being enslaved or that you can just walk up to Rand Paul's house and say, I want eye care because he is an ophthalmologist. It's not like he's a surgeon or something. And so to say that it's slavery is strange and doesn't follow from anything unless what he's saying, I suppose the most charitable reconstruction would be that suppose you've got a circumstance where there just aren't doctors or doctors have all gone on strike, but we say there's a right to health care. And so how is the government going to provide that health care given that the doctors don't

want to work? I suppose one extreme solution would be to come in and force them at gunpoint to give health care and that would be something close to work. I suppose one extreme solution would be to come in and force them at gunpoint to give healthcare and that would be something close to slavery. Obviously nobody's talking about doing that. And so Rand Paul's point is a little ridiculous. However, he does raise an interesting question that these positive rights versus negative rights, that it's whether to say that there's a positive right to healthcare, well, what does that mean? What if not enough people are going into medical school to treat everybody in the country?

What exactly is it that the government is supposed to do at that point in order to provide this right to healthcare? And those are complicated questions for somebody who says that there's a right to healthcare. You know, for my part, you know, and this is something that'll be much more controversial, especially with people that I regard as allies and friends on the left. I'm more dubious about calling that a right, but that's in part because of the technical sense of right that I use that we haven't introduced yet, but we can get to that.

I will say this much, that even though I'm kind of dubious about saying that healthcare is a right or housing is a right, I would say this, which is different, but it's going to sound similar, that given the circumstances we are in, how much wealth we have and the nature of the distribution of that wealth, we ought to give free healthcare. We ought to have healthcare for everyone.

We ought to make sure through government action that everyone is housed. It is the right thing to do. That's subtly different than saying there is a right to those things. So I don't disagree that it's the right thing to do. I'm all in favor of universal health care. I'm all in favor of housing, housing the homeless and making sure that everybody has a roof over their head. I'm just a little bit more dubious about using the language of rights, especially given the

way that I use the term rights within the context of the master argument. Mm-hmm. And can you, yeah, sketch out that technical sense of your use of the word rights for us? Yes. And technical makes it sound so, well, technical. It's reasonably simple in some ways. Remember, in the master argument, I distinguish between policies that increase well-being and trying to do something that increases human happiness, well-being, but then being worried about, but we don't want to violate rights. So what's a right? A right here, and here I'm following other philosophers, Ronald Dworkin in particular, is what we might refer to as a Trump on utility.

And this has nothing to do with Donald Trump. It's lowercase T, non-capital T. I don't know how many people these days still play card games that have Trump cards in them. I grew up in Kansas playing bridge all the time with my family. I gather not too many people play that anymore. But some people might play spades, which is a similar, more simpler version of bridge essentially, where you're playing, where you're taking tricks, meaning that somebody puts down the two of diamonds, somebody else puts down the six of diamonds, and then somebody puts the ten, and then somebody puts the ace, and then the person who put the ace down wins the trick, and they get all those cards.

But in games like Spades, where there are trump cards, the idea is that if it's gone around and there's been the six and the ten and the ace of diamonds played and now it comes to me, and I don't have a diamond but I have a spade, I can play a spade on that and that's a trump and it means I win. Anyway, even though I didn't have the highest diamond, I win the trick. This is just a metaphor for what the idea behind a right is for people like Dworkin. If we can imagine that there's a policy out there that, you know, that maybe we would all be somewhat happier on average or through some sort of distribution of happiness, we would all be better off if we banned certain sorts of speech.

You know, we'd have to be careful about that. We'd have to kind of know what we were doing, that sort of thing. But it's possible that banning certain sorts of even political speech might make us all happier. One might make the claim that even if it makes us happier, even if we're generally better off, no, you can't do that. You can't violate somebody's right simply to speak their mind. That's sort of a fundamental assault on their dignity, and we're not going to do that even when it means possibly decreasing happiness overall, that to have a right to free speech is like a trump card decreasing happiness overall, that to have a right to free speech is like a trump card on welfare considerations, utility considerations. So if we have a right to anything, say right to free speech, then in my sense, following

Ronald Dworkin on this, that's to say that the government can't violate that even if violating that would create better happiness overall. So it's a pretty high bar to say somebody has a right to something because you're saying that I don't care if people are better off if we do this policy, you're violating my rights. And so you have to have some pretty good grounds for saying that. And I'm not particularly concerned in the book to even defend the claim that there are any rights in this sense, although I'm inclined to think that there is a right to free speech and a right to freedom of religion in

this sense. But that's the sense there. So rights are like trump cards. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Scott Sion. We'll be right back. Not in my head, not in my head Lay my body down in the palm of your hand Deliver me from everything I slept on one stand Locked in a strain of losses and gains Of coming for you like a gun for me I am alive, alive

Just trying to survive Even life not meant for me I feel nothing Alone, alive Have I not got proof of it For the life I wanna live to feel something Find I, find I, unless you want Always learning

Find I, find I, unless you want Waste your life in your hands and your pain in your heart Move Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh Yeah I'm a dance of the wind Not in my head And I ask my name I am alive, alive Just trying to survive

In a life not meant for me I feel nothing Alive, alive Have I not gone through me? From the life I want to live To feel something The old world is dying There are no struggles to be won

Life scores with sleep and fury Now is the time of monsters Oh You're all dying That was Invisible Rain by Stick to Your Guns with lead vocals by Jesse Barnett, who co-founded All Power Books, the radical bookstore and community space that we've partnered with for our live podcast event in Los Angeles later this month, which we announced at the top of the episode. Now back to our conversation with Scott Sion.

So in this section on rights, I took, let's see, there's about two pages of notes where I really dove in, you know, talking about economic rights versus political rights, this idea of taxation is theft, the non-aggression principle. There's a lot packed into this section, and I quickly realized that I should probably just ask you a general question on this chapter and see how you would like to attack it, because we could spend, you know, a couple hours here just on rights. So, you ask in the book, you know, if either capitalism or socialism violate rights. And I'm just, I'm wondering if you can walk us through what you concluded there.

The quick answer is socialism does not violate rights. And the oddly ambiguous answer on the second part of that question is, I'm not sure whether capitalism violates rights, but I haven't seen a good argument for saying that it violates rights in these sense And that's gonna be controversial among you know My friends on the left because that's a lot of people on the left do think that capitalism does violate rights So we could talk about either side of that or What yeah, yeah, I think it's a really interesting question to explore.

Because so my immediate response in reading the book, and you do go through this, is this idea of exploitation, which is very central to Marxism and socialism, almost foundational that the basis of capitalism, it's a class system where one class exploits the labor of another class and that wealth is produced socially, but it's captured privately, right, by capitalists. And so, yeah, I'm wondering sort of where you landed on that if you want to kind of

like explore that with us. Sure. And I think that's right. I think that is how wealth is produced. I'm kind of behind the Marxist analysis of this as far as there being some sense. Now taking the word exploit to be sort of a technical term here that there is value that well, let me step back. In a market economy, if there are markets, then you make money by selling something. That's what you do.

That's no other way to make money. You have to sell something. One of the things that you can sell is your labor. And for a lot of us, you come into life and unless you've inherited some wealth or somebody has just handed you something, the only thing in the world that you have to sell is your labor. And then for other people who, through whatever set of circumstances, are now in a position where they own a lot of resources, they can buy your labor and then use the product that you have helped make,

sell it to other people, but they sell it for enough such that they make a profit. Which means, really does just mean, they haven't paid you everything that your labor is worth to them. If they paid you everything their labor is worth to them, they wouldn't make any profit. So the very fact that they've made profit seems to indicate they've paid you less than your labor was worth to them. And in that sense, they have exploited your labor for their profit. All of that, I agree with, I think that's true. Now my question is, did they violate your rights?

By doing so. And that's the part where I'm less clear, because again, keep in mind my test for whether something violates rights is a trump card on utility considerations. Would we say that you can't do that even if we're all better off when you do that? And so the scenario, at least the hypothetical scenario that you would have to envision to test the claim that this form of exploitation violates rights is say, okay,

suppose just for the sake of argument that if we didn't allow that sort of extraction of surplus value of exploitation of the value of workers labor, that if we didn't allow that, we'd all be worse off. I mean, suppose that the capitalist has something right about these competition arguments and that sort of thing, such that allowing this sort of exploitation, allowing people the possibility of profit means that they are more entrepreneurial, they innovate, they come up with greater products. They wouldn't just suppose for the sake of argument, they wouldn't do that if they couldn't make any money doing it.

And so that just again for the sake of argument that we would all be worse off. Suppose that the two societies, the one in which that's simply not allowed, you can never extract surplus value of labor and keep the profits, that people are generally poorer and less happy. Would we still want that? Would we say, yeah, but at least they're not having their rights violated? And that's where I'm just unclear. It's not obvious to me that we should go that way. Now in saying that, of course, I'm not saying that we should allow people to accumulate as much profit as they want or any unlimited amounts. I think there are all kinds of things we can do to redistribute, to regulate, to control all of this.

But those are the empirical questions on, okay, so how best do we maximize well-being? My question here is, does it violate rights if we allow for profit? And that's the part that I'm not convinced of, does it violate rights if we allow for profit? And that's the part that I'm not convinced of, that we violate rights. Yeah, yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that, like you mentioned earlier, the distinction between rights and is it right is important here. But like what you're doing is you go through and you say that maybe the terrain of rights isn't the place that we want to stick around and argue for socialism

and against capitalism. Maybe it's another terrain that will be more clear and sort of give us a more conclusive answer. So in the second half of the book, you ask a different question about you move on from rights and you ask the question, which sort of political and economic system leads to more human wellbeing? And so I'm wondering if we can start with the argument provided by capitalists, namely those like Steven Pinker and Thomas Friedman, who you bring up in the book, friends of the show.

What is your response regarding whether or not capitalism leads to more human well-being? Because it's a very common argument you'll hear from capitalists. First of all, just make a small correction. It was almost like a typo on your part. It's not Thomas Friedman that you were talking about. Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman, of course. Just to be clear. Yes. And people, including Pinker, he's a little bit more careful about it than Milton Friedman is, but he does this sort of claim as well. They note an obvious

correlation in history that the rise of capitalism, rise of capitalist economies, you know, roughly some point in the 19th century through now has been matched with, has been correlated with a genuine and very significant rise in human well-being. Some people will try to criticize them and claim that human well-being has not increased that much. I'm inclined to think they're right about that part. It has increased and certainly

you've got the life expectancy statistics to show it that if nothing else life expectancy used to be something around 25 or 30 even in 1800 and now of course is much much higher than that and that seems like a good thing. If life is worth living then having more of it would be a good thing. living, then having more of it would be a good thing. And of course, we have, you know, now even those of us of comparatively modest means have luxuries, the likes of which kings would have envied greatly back in the Middle Ages. And so in certain ways, you know, yes, there's been an incredible rise of human well-being. That's not to say everybody is doing great, obviously, but just on average overall. And that seems to correlate with capitalism having happened and increased during that same period of time.

Milton Friedman was willing to go even further and be more specific and say that the only cases in recorded history where people have gotten out of poverty are precisely where they've had capitalism. That's I think somewhat more dubious, but just first talk about the general correlation. So there's a correlation between the rise of capitalism and the rise of human well-being. I don't dispute that. I think there is that correlation, but correlation is not necessarily causation. The example that I use to make that distinction is that Putin took power in Russia, I believe it was 1999. Since that

time, Major League Baseball salaries have gone through the roof. They have increased dramatically. I don't think Major League Baseball players need to worry that their salaries are suddenly going to fall if Putin dies or if some even greater miracle happens and that he actually loses and accepts that he's lost an election, but that's not going to happen. So clearly, not all correlations have an explanatory relationship between them. And so the question is, okay, granting that there's a correlation between the rise of capitalism and the rise of human well-being, what is the reasons for thinking that there's an explanatory relationship here and that it's capitalism that explains it? And one

reason for doubting that is that there was something else that also happened shortly before the rise of capitalism that was seems dramatically important to human well-being and that was the scientific revolution and huge advances in medicine but also advances in technology that, you know, for the moment have made our lives much easier and much better. Now, of course, they also may be destroying the planet and destroying our resources. So, in the long run, it might be different. But in any event, the rise in well-being that we have seen seems easily attributable to factors not having to do with capitalism. But then there are other things where

one can point at the correlation, the claimed correlation, and saying it doesn't really account for all the evidence here. You know, that in particular, there was the Soviet Bloc countries In particular, there was the Soviet Bloc countries who were certainly not capitalist from 1917 to 1989 to 1991, depending on which year and which country you're talking about. And so they weren't capitalist. I've had some difficulty classifying them completely as democratically socialist and socialist in my sense, but they certainly weren't capitalist. They didn't have much state control of the economy and they didn't have the sort of free markets that Milton Friedman sets are the only thing that have ever led people out of grinding poverty, but it's just false

that that's the only thing that's ever led people out of grinding poverty. People in Russia prior to the revolution in 1917 were extremely poor in that system and their life expectancy was something like 25 years of age I think. I have to look that up but no actually the figures that I have cited are the life expectancy in the Soviet Union in 1920 was 21. And by 1990, at the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of that communist regime, life expectancy had gone up to 68. That was still behind the United States in 1990. United States was 75 at the time. UK was about the same, but United States in 1920, the life

expectancy was 55. And you can also look at productivity numbers that are a little harder to get good data on, but we have some rough estimates of how much economic productivity there was in the Soviet Union as opposed to the United States. And the basic fact when you look at the data that we have is that the Soviet Union as opposed to the United States. And the basic fact when you look at the data that we have is that the Soviet Union increased in its productivity and it increased in its life expectancy right along with the rest of the world. I mean, on life expectancy, they increased much faster in the United States.

They just started at a much, much lower point. So the Milton Friedman claim that no other system has ever taken people out of grinding poverty is just, just false. And even for those who just don't make such a specific general claim, but somebody like Pinker who says, look at this chart, you know, life, well-being has gone up. Look at this chart, capitalism rose. Must be because of capitalism. Well, then that doesn't really make sense of why economic productivity and life expectancy

and well-being did make huge and substantial gains in the Soviet block countries. Now it's the capitalist who has to... They can try to explain away that data and they can say, oh, well, we don't really know much about the GDP and the Soviet Union and we don't even know as we don't have as good a data on life expectancy there. And those are true. The data are not perfect. We don't really know for sure. But the interesting fact is we're trying to do the best with the data we have.

But more importantly, now rather than it supposedly as someone like Steven Pinker claims, that it's just dead obvious that the data show that capitalism leads to better human well-being, they're the ones running away from the data and trying to explain it away. It's like, well, wait, why? Having to say why their hypothesis doesn't make sense of what happened in the Soviet Union. I'll also mention one last thing about the Soviet Union and its collapse. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc countries, economic productivity

tumbled. It took a dive, and the next decade or so, and even later, even further, was an economic depression worse than that of the United States in the 1930s. People tend not to know about that. Even life expectancy went down. In 1990, Soviet Union life expectancy was 68.5. In the year 2000, it was 65. That was when they introduced markets.

One could again say, well, yeah, we didn't introduce the markets in the right way. We should have done it differently. And that is certainly true if you were going to introduce markets into these countries. It should have been done differently. But nonetheless, again, it's the capitalist who's now running away from the data and trying to explain it away. It's like, you know, we have capitalism always yields increases in human well-being. Why right at the moment that capitalism was introduced into the Soviet Bloc did human well-being fall? Why did it go down? And that's I think a tough question for the capitalist to answer who thinks that capitalism is the key to human well-being. Right. Yeah. No, that is a really compelling

argument. And of course, Kristin Gotsy does a lot of really, really great work around this question of what happened during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc. And we do discuss that with her at length, actually. I'll direct folks, if you missed that one, we spoke to Kristin Gatzee on her book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. A very compelling title. But it's a much better title than socialism, a logical introduction. Well, you just throw the word sex in there and then, you know, it changes the game. I could have said socialism, a sexual introduction, but that just wouldn't have been true to the

content of the book. Whatever that would have led to. But I'll also put in a plug for a different- I'm taking notes here for a book idea. I'll put in a plug for another book that she co-authored with Mitchell Orenstein, Taking Stock of Shock, which is about the Depression. And that's what it was, the Depression that followed the introduction of markets into the soviet bloc countries. They've got lots and lots of data there and and both ethnographic data, but also economic data and that sort of thing. And it's it's really quite a compelling story. Yeah, thank you for that. And I'll throw links to that stuff in the show notes for people who want to dive deeper.

stuff in the show notes for people who want to dive deeper. So there, there are just so many different ways to like refute this argument that capitalism is responsible for leading to the wellbeing that we've seen in the last century or so. And it's also easy to, as you just did, like refute this idea and talking, you know, like we did at the top about these like common arguments that pro capitalist individuals like to throw out there, this idea that like, oh, we did at the top about these like common arguments that pro capitalist individuals like to throw out there this idea that like, oh, you're typing this critique of capitalism on your iPhone.

Ha ha ha. Well, you wouldn't have an iPhone if it wasn't for capitalism. Like that really does easily break down. And I'd like to add another refutation to specifically Pinker and his graphs, because I came across this recently through the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel. So capitalism did not actually begin in 1850 which is where Steven Pinker's charts begin. Capitalism began much much earlier in the 16th or even the 15th

century and it was actually the rise of capitalism itself, like these proto forms of capitalism, like mercantilism, early merchant capitalism, and of course the slave trade in Africa, which had profound impacts on that continent. And it was those forms of earlier capitalism, which actually resulted in the horrible conditions that we saw in the 1850s, which is when Pinker decides he is going to take his snapshot.

So I'll get a little bit more into this. There's actually great research, like I mentioned, Jason Hickel and his co-author, Dylan Sullivan, they demonstrate how the rising capitalism during the 16th century resulted in a deterioration in wages, in a deterioration of human stature, and an increase in premature mortality in Europe as a result of the enclosures and sort of the mass dispossession of the peasantry in Europe as part of this process of primitive accumulation which began way before 1850 and then we're not even talking about like the global south here like during the 16th century and I've been Diving really deeply into I'm not sure if you're familiar with Walter Rodney He was a an under development theorist and a Marxist, and he's talked at length

about how early forms of capitalism really put the African continent, and this can be applied to all of the Global South, into this state of underdevelopment, which really restricted their ability to grow. And so the problem with Pinker's graphs are that they start during this period where capitalism has already been in full force, if not full force, it's at least been revving up for quite some time for centuries now, or for centuries since 1850. And what Jason argues, and Jason and his co-author Sullivan argue is the reason for why living standards and well-being and all of these indicators that we look at began to improve at around the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, end of the 19th century is because this was actually the beginning of the organized opposition to capitalism. So we see the trade

union movement, the beginning of like the socialist liberation struggles happening during that time. And in the global south, we see the rise of anti-colonial movements during this time. So their conclusion is that it's actually social movements that deliver progress. And when you look at it from this perspective, another perspective of why Pinker and the folks that make that argument, those really begin to break down, and they really begin to look quite ignorant. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

Nothing in particular. I mean, that's certainly very interesting, and it seems that certainly does seem plausible. I've always, I let Pinker and company go with the idea that, you know, the sort of rise of what we think of as industrial capitalism and, you know, big factories and things like that, that that's sort of, you know, mid 19th century and that's what they have in mind by capitalism. But it's a real question. And of course, it's also interesting, like you say, that there were social movements rising at the same time in various ways.

Again, I would not to dispute the contrary data on this, that it was that capitalism didn't have any effect on this at all, or that it was the social movements. But I would just highlight again, that it was the social movements. But I would just highlight again that in the background here I think kind of independent of the economic systems to a large extent was the scientific revolution. And rather than just always looking for social forces one way or the other, whether it be capitalism or social forces in the other direction opposing capitalism, it's worth noting that at the same time we were discovering the germ theory of disease and we were doing various things that were going to make our lives much better and much easier. And so I'm still inclined to think that probably what swamps

the effects on our well-being are so far have been these scientific advancements that have are so far have been the scientific advancements that have made medicine in particular so much better but also have made our lives so much more comfortable in various ways. But also, to step back and say all of these are empirical questions. It's not that I have any unique insight to them, especially not given that I'm a philosopher and that's not an empirical discipline. I deal with, you know, I try to bring together the empirical facts in the best given that I'm a philosopher and that's not an empirical discipline. I try to bring together the empirical facts in the best way that I can when it's relevant to this moral argument. But yes, these are empirical questions and I am not at all convinced that the Milton

Friedman's and the Steven Pinker's of the world have the right answer to those empirical questions. Right, right. Yeah. And I do really appreciate that perspective as well. I'll just sort of conclude by saying that, like, even those scientific advancements do exist within political economic questions of class. But again, that's another empirical question.

And I do really appreciate the philosophical approach and the deconstruction of arguments. Because right off the bat, it's just like that's correlation man that's not causation and then you sort of put the onus of proof on Pinker and you can really imagine that there's not much of a foundation there. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about what the researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrated about the toxicity of inequality and what that tells us about egalitarian distributions connection to well-being.

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have these two books, The Inner Level and The Spirit Level, in which they draw on all kinds of data from all kinds of sources and they compare degrees of inequality in various countries, sometimes in various states within the United States, and they compare that with various measures of well-being. For example, how many people have mental illness, levels of obesity, overall measures of child well-being that UNICEF uses, which draws on poverty and health measures and educational proficiency for youth.

And over and over, what the data end up indicating is that where you have more inequality, and the US is an outlier on most of these, for most of their countries are like OECD countries, Western European countries and various others, for most of their countries are like OECD countries, Western European countries and various others, but generally high income countries, that the USA is typically an outlier, that we have much more inequality and on many of these measures much worse well-being. But it's not just that the United States is an outlier, It is that there's a general trend. You see that when you have greater inequality, you have worse outcomes on these measures of well-being. And that

just happens over and over. Now, as I said before, we can't be too quick to infer causation from correlation. But they are very conscious of this and they talk about how the evidence of causality is something that you have to be very careful about. You have to see various indications that proceed stepwise and that there's a plausible reason for why the correlation would be there to begin with. And they are epidemiologists. This is what they do. This is where it's in that sort of field that you need to be able to distinguish genuinely explanatory relationships from their correlation. Their conclusion, and it seemed quite compelling to me, was that inequality is toxic.

When you have great levels of inequality, people are less well off. If we want people not to be less well off, if we want people to be better off, it seems like the prescription is then clear. We should have a more egalitarian distribution of resources. And what really, because it seems, you know, it seems fairly obvious, like an unequal society, those at the bottom will be doing worse off than those at the top. But what Richard and Kate's research really, the part that spoke to me the most, that was kind of the most surprising was that even those people who are on the top of that

spectrum of distribution in the specific society that is more unequal, even those people are doing worse off compared to people at a similar ranking in terms of material wealth in the regions or the countries that are less unequal. So literally everybody in an unequal society is doing much worse. So that I think is a really important point. And I just wanted to say to Della and I, so my co-producer and co-host Della, who you have not met, we lived in the UK, in the southwest of the UK,

for a few years in 2016. And we ended up actually getting introduced to the book, The Spirit Level, by a friend. And we decided that we would take the train up to York to interview Richard and Kate in their home. It was a really nice time. They actually took us out for a meal after and offered to pay when the check came. I remember very distinctly Richard jokingly said, unless you're both secretly wealthy somehow, we're more than happy to treat you. I just thought that was just a very after mark, you know, coming from him

in particular. But yeah, I mean, for anybody who's interested, if you go way back into our archives, you'll find that episode from like 2016, probably with Richard and Kate in the spirit level. And, you know, I think it's a really, that book is really a game changer in not only countering this sort of oft regurgitated mantra on the right that inequality is actually good. And we'll get to that in a bit, but it's a strong argument for, as you conclude, for socialism, even if Richard and Kate wouldn't put it that way themselves,

I don't think that they're socialists, but. No, they don't. I don't think they ever used that word. But I would have wanted to add one more just because they get this nice rigorous data. But as I mentioned before the interview, I'm actually at the moment in Germany and Berlin and was walking around and just walking and seeing people eating at restaurants and that sort of thing, especially out where they have them out on the sidewalk and that sort of thing. And I just was struck that people seem happier here than in the United States.

Now Germany's not socialist, but it's more egalitarian, more government control than the United States. And I'm not making a careful, very empirical, epidemiological argument here, but just sort of an overall impression. And there's the sort of obvious explanation too. I mean, yes, there's less inequality in there, all of the data and all of the theories that go behind Wilkinson and Pickett's books. But there's sort of something basic that if you don't have to worry that a health emergency will result in financial devastation, if you don't have to worry that a health emergency will result in financial devastation, if you don't have to worry about how you're going to pay tens of thousands of dollars

for your kid's college education because education is essentially paid for here, if you don't even have to worry about your car breaking down because there's really good public transportation, your life is just a lot easier and more secure, even if you're not necessarily any more comfortable or have any more iPhones or any more other luxuries than we have in the United States. But there's just something that's some sort of level of security like that. And then the lack of inequality, the less inequality, there's still plenty of inequality in Germany, but it's less than in the United States.

And as Wilkinson and Pickett show, that ends up having a toxic effect on you that lasts in general. And so even though it's not careful data, I just wanted to mention that, you know, walking around the streets of Berlin, it just feels to me like people are happier here than they are in the United States. Well, man, I am jealous of you. I would love to be there. I know I completely, I resonate so much with, with all of that.

So I'm talking to you from the Bay area and the Bay area is, I mean, again, this is not empirical or as you say, an epidemiological observation, but just in my gut. The Bay Area is not a happy place. And I've thought about this so much because it does feel like such a rat race out here from every aspect of life, from when you're driving and people are just fucking pissed off for no, whatever reason they have, right? But everybody feels pissed off on the road. whatever reason they have, right? But everybody feels pissed off on the road. Everybody's like racing to get the shopping cart

in the grocery store, like the closest one to you. And like, you're like, you're struggling to like find a place to like get into line in the grocery stores. Everybody's kind of like out for themselves, it feels like. There's just like all of these little examples that I notice every day where I just feel like everybody seems like they're in this deep competition with each other. Like everybody's nerves are just shot.

And you know, it makes sense. Like it makes sense because for one thing, like rent is really, really fucking expensive here and everybody is struggling to survive. Like everybody's walking around stressed out about money because the cost of living is so high here. And everyone is seeing other people as their competition, even if it's not like conscious, like it just becomes like infused in your soul

when you live in an environment like this. It really is a rat race. And like you said, there isn't the room to be happy. Like you don't have the space to be happy, but also profoundly, you don't really have the room to be sad, like about the parts of life that are human, right, like existential woes or really feeling grief or pain about like a lost loved one or

whatever reason it may be you don't have the space to do any of that you don't have the space to feel the full spectrum of human emotions from you know happiness to sadness from like contemplating the the stars to gardening like you don't have the space to do that because you were just stuck in this rat race to survive and yeah there's a reason why, like you don't have the space to do that because you were just stuck in this rat race to survive. And there's a reason why things like yoga and meditation are so huge here. It's because people really need that shit in order to just skim the surface of survival. So yeah, I really appreciate your remarks on what it's like in Europe.

And I lived in Europe, I guess we're still calling, are we calling the UK Europe? I don't know. But I lived in UK for a while. They call it Europe. Yes. I lived in Europe for a while. And even in the UK, which is like the, you know, they used to make the joke that the UK is the United States of Europe. Right. Even there, things are just way different. And, do these readings every now and then for our Patreon. And I did this reading a couple of episodes ago of this essay,

I guess, an article that someone wrote called Why Even Driving Through Suburbia Is Soulcrushing, where he really goes through just looking at the way that we design our cities and the car-centricness of much of the US and how that impacts us and our well-being. So even just on all of these different fronts, you can just have an entire conversation about the differences between living in Europe

or I'm sure many other parts of the world that just arrange things a little bit differently. And even if it's not full out socialism, right? Like these little things make a huge difference in our well-being. So yeah. Well, you certainly have a predecessor, a distinguished predecessor in such thoughts. Einstein, who was a socialist, he was also famous for some other things. He said the worst evil of capitalism is what he calls the

crippling of individuals and that this results from the exaggerated competitive attitude that is inculcated into us. And so we are trained to worship acquisitive success. And yeah, I think it's a horrible attitude. And I think if, you know, and even if, you know, I'm more of a market socialist, I still wanna have some markets, that sort of thing. I think there's something to saying that that works, that that produces goods that make us happier in the broad scale. But if we can at least diminish the inequality

resulting from that, then hopefully we won't have quite the rat race mentality that you refer to. Yeah, yeah. Well, and you did mention, so this idea of the crushing of the individual. A lot of people on the right would say actually, no, it's socialism that crushes the individual, right? So I think we're going to get into that in a little bit. My next question though, so from our discussion and from your book, it feels very apparent that societies that more equally distribute their resources, they rank higher on a variety of indicators having to do with well-being.

And so we can conclude most likely that equal distribution leads to well-being. What about societies with more democratic control? So this is the other part of the master argument for socialism. Do we have a reason to believe that well-being increases with democratic control? Yes, we do. I think in some ways it's, I'll just admit, a little shakier as in the data is just, you know, it's hard to get good data on this sort of thing. I mean, with both of these questions, whether inequality leads to unhappiness

and then whether more collective control leads to greater happiness, you can distinguish between two sorts of things. One is a sort of general reason for thinking that this should be this way, that this is what you would expect the data to show, and then you can actually try to find data. On the egalitarian side, we talked about the data to show and then you can actually try to find data. On the

egalitarian side, we talked about the data, but there's a general reason for expecting the more egalitarian distribution would lead to more happiness and that's the diminishing marginal utility of money that if you give me a chocolate bar, I'll like it a lot and I'll eat it and I'll enjoy it. If you give me a second one, I'll probably like it a little less. By the time you've given me a tenth chocolate bar, I'm sick of chocolate and I actually don't want any anymore. Money's not quite like that. We don't actually get revolted at the thought of a get bigger raise from our boss, if that were to happen. But it just seems obvious that it

should be of less value than a thousand dollars to a working mom who's just barely trying to squeak by and has two kids at home is very different than a thousand dollars added to the pocket of Elon Musk who wouldn't even notice it. Similarly here on the case of collective control, you might think that there's a general reason for thinking that more collective control would lead to more happiness. That, for one thing, it's more communal than you might think. It emphasizes these communal feelings rather than the rat race that you were talking about. And you might think that,

look, if you think democracy is a good thing in general, that we make good decisions in democracy, obviously we don't always make good decisions in democracy. But if you think that democracy is the best form of government that we have, because it's – well, as the Winston Churchill quote goes, it's the worst form of government, but it's just better than any of the others. I mean, it's not – it's the one thing that it has is better than all the others. But why? Because we probably assume that collective decision-making yields better

results and results that people can buy into more because they knew that they had a vote, they had a say in this decision. We do that for decisions about law enforcement and traffic regulations and courts and schools and the military and these sorts of things. But when it comes to decisions about major factories moving jobs elsewhere or owners doing this or that or the other thing, we leave that up to them, then it's not democratic anymore, even though it affects loads and loads and loads of people. So you might just think, just on these sort of general grounds, that if you think democracy is a good idea elsewhere, then barring some special reason to think otherwise, why not have more democracy when it comes to the economy? And wouldn't that make us happier?

That's the sort of general reason. Seems plausible to me. Looking for actual data, that's a little bit harder because when Wilkinson and Pickett may have their data on inequality versus forms of well-being, they measure inequality typically using the Gini coefficient, which has its problems as a measure of these things, but at least it's something that you can get a grip on. You can put numbers on it. You can do the charts that they do.

To what extent does each country collectively control the economy? And that's a much murkier question in some ways. We have some measures that we can look at. We can look at how much a government spends as a percentage of its GDP. We can look at the percentage of the workforce that's in the public sector. There are some things, but they're not perfect measures and nobody's even... Well, some people have sort of tried to talk about a general degree of the extent to which something is collectively owned versus a private market but usually those indices bring in all kinds of other factors that don't seem to be that relevant to it.

So it's hard to make these measures but the general thing we can say is that look those measures that I did talk about general how much government spending is there how much of the workforce is in the public sector if we take those to be? Indicative of more collective control because it's you know, essentially bigger government We see that say for example the Scandinavian countries The Nordic countries they have much more government control. They have much more government spending, much more of the workforce in the public sector, particularly Norway because of its gas and oil fund. They have much more of that than the United States does. And then there's the empirical fact that every year when this World Happiness Report comes

out, it's the Scandinavian countries that are the happiest. And so, yeah, there seems to be some correlation there. I think that evidence is less solid in the sense of it's hard to get really good data on it in the way that Wilkinson and Pickett and others can do on the inequality question, but I think there is that evidence there too. And like I said, it's in the backdrop of thinking, well, you would kind of expect more communal decisions to make people happier. And so it's not hardly surprising to me that where we do have this evidence of more collective

control of the economy, it seems that people in those countries are happier. Yeah. And I'm glad you're making the distinction, of course, between collective control over the economy, because capitalists will point to the sort of bourgeois democracy of like having certain political rights and talk about that. Capitalism is actually very democratic in that sense, or they will talk about like, you know, the shareholder model in corporations and talk about how that's extremely democratic. So yeah, I think it's important to not get lost in those distractions and really think about the way that we have actual economic control over the giant economic decisions that shape our lives.

I would love to ask you about, like, it does seem like a lot of the basis for the pro-capitalist argument stems from this deep belief that not only are humans deeply self-interested, but that individual greed is actually good for the collective. And so we did an entire documentary a few years ago debunking this called The Myth of Homo Economicus. So you know, anybody who's been a listener to the show will be very familiar with the argument

and how it breaks down. But I'd love it if you could walk us through some of these arguments and how you'd respond to them. Yeah, and it varies depending on exactly what the argument is. And there are two separate points here. One is about human nature. Are we inherently greedy in the way that some capitalists want to portray us?

Are we always so self-interested? And certainly that seems to be one of the claims they often make and then use that as sort of a bludgeon saying something like socialism would never work because people are inherently greedy and so you can't expect them to have this kind of communal attitude. And it's an empirical question, but one thing I'll just start with is saying, I sure hope they're wrong. I really don't want to think that about my friends and loved ones in particular, but also just about the people I see on the street.

I don't want to think that, no, they're all just out in it for themselves and they'll take my money as soon as they can if they can get away with it. And I don't actually think that's true. But that's the human nature part. Individual greed is actually good for the collective. There are interesting arguments there, and Milton Friedman is the one who's sort of most explicit about that sort of thing. He says that if you leave things up to people's self-interest, that's the more reliable spur than he calls

it. I think that was it, the term, more reliable spur of self-interest and self-motivation rather than caring about other people. And he thinks it'll work out for the best for everyone. I mean, I'm usually inclined to try to be charitable reading these people. I don't think that somebody like Friedman is saying, certainly I don't think he's saying that, look, I just want as much money as I can make and I really don't care what happens to anybody else.

I think the argument is that he's actually being honest. He does think that if we let everybody operate in accord with their own self-interest and build the economic system around that, it will be better for everyone. And I think that there's a crucial problem that he makes a mistake on with that. But there's something to be said for it. I use an analogy in the book of anybody who ever collected baseball cards or something like that might remember that I would have collected baseball cards or something like that might remember that I would have my baseball cards and my friends would have their baseball cards.

Sometimes we would make trades and try to make our collection better. Not that we were planning on selling it further, we just liked our collection. Mine's still back in shoe boxes in my mom's house. If I'm making trades, it's probably going to be better for me to make my own trades than for my mom or my brother or somebody else to come in and say, well, I think Scott should do this and that you should take this trade. I know my own interest better. I know what cards I want. I know what players I really want, I might know my collection better as well. So having me make the decisions rather than somebody else seems to make some sense.

And if I'm having a trade episode with a friend, Steve, and who was a friend of mine when we were still is, but we don't trade baseball cards anymore, that we would make trades and we would each be in our own self-interest, but we would each come out of it if it was fully consensual and we both had our eyes open and knew what we were doing. We'd each think, oh, my collection is now better as a result of this trade. And we'd each think that. And presumably that could be true. You can have consenting adults making contracts with each other,

and they are to the benefit of each one. Presumably that's the idea. If it was truly consenting, and nobody was under pressure, and nobody had more information than the other person, then hopefully they both walk away, both feeling better about it. Does that mean it will be better overall? I think that's the crucial move that Friedman and others kind of glide over. And you just sort of, maybe it kind of seems obvious

that if each economic transaction that is genuinely done fairly leaves each of the parties in that transaction better off, then we'll all be better off, right? If we just let the economy be done that way, rather than having other people come in telling us what to do, there's some plausibility to that. One of the problems with it, of course, is that it's not always perfectly consenting. You know, if one person is desperate for money of some sort because they are starving or they are going to lose their apartment, then they might take some job at some really ridiculously low wage because they're desperate. And so trading can be unequal in that sort of way. But there's also this move from assuming that it's better for the individuals even in the consenting case to assuming that it'll be better for

The rest of the people around us that I think is a big mistake and you do talk about I think like three different areas where the free market approach doesn't work and You talk about how the free market breaks down when you talk about public goods whose benefits are down when you talk about public goods whose benefits are diffusely distributed throughout the public. You talk about how monopolistic power threatens the positive arguments for the benefit of free markets, and then also about negative externalities or neighborhood effects. And I'm wondering if you could maybe just briefly sketch those out for us. Yeah, and you did a good summary of what the general areas were because that is the approach that I take.

I assume that, okay, there's something to be said for on the baseball card analogy that trades like this, economic transactions that are good for each party. That sounds good. At least those parties are better off. But I'll start in the middle one with monopolies. You can have trading situations where if there's a monopoly, that is to say, if I'm the only one selling a certain kind of good and it's a good that people need or even just a good that people really, really like, then the market mechanism doesn't really work anymore.

Then I can charge whatever price I want and keep jacking the prices up. And so each time, each transaction, each person who buys, say, electricity from me, if that's what I have that nobody else in the vicinity has to sell, yeah, they'd rather pay my exorbitant price than not be able to turn the lights on in their house or run medical equipment if they need that. But that doesn't mean that we're all better off for not having regulated that sort of transaction. So monopolies are an obvious sort of case that even the capitalists usually recognize are a problem. They're an example of what we call a market failure, where markets don't really work properly when there's a monopoly. People like Friedman are

usually quite willing to say, well, okay, that is a problem, but the last thing you want to do is involve the government. It'll all sort itself out, but I'm not sure there's good evidence for that. Public goods are this other sort of phenomenon where if you have some sort of good, like a road, where if you have some sort of good like a road, to take a simple example, that it serves a lot of people good. Now, we could make people pay every time they're on the road, and we do have some roads that are toll roads like that. But we don't do that for all the roads in our neighborhoods and all over the place. And it wouldn't really work because the benefit of having a system of roads where goods can be transported and our grocery store shelves are stocked

because trucks could make it to the grocery store, that's a benefit that helps everyone or helps a whole lot of people and not necessarily just the people who are using their cars on the road. The roads help me even if I don't have a car at all. And that's certainly true of education. It helps the person who's educated, but it helps everybody else that we have an educated

workforce and that we have an educated society. So there are a lot of these goods that are public goods, and I would include health care as one that is a diffuse good in that sense of where it's not going to work or it's going to work less well to have each transaction be the point of sale and that's the end of it and we just have it as consenting adults making private contracts. It's not that won't work as well as treating them as public goods and doing something much more publicly with them. The neighborhood effects ones, the third one is this, and like you said, that is

more often called negative externalities. That's the one that's kind of in some ways more obvious and in some ways bigger as well. If I have a factory and I make something or other that you want, but my factory pollutes the local river You've bought the thing you're happy with the thing you've bought. I've sold it to you. I'm happy with that I'm happy polluting the river. I don't you're live there I live in a somewhere else but the people who do live near the river might not be so happy and They might be getting sick and dying from this. So

Sometimes when you have two people interacting economically, other people who didn't get to be part of that economic transaction who had no say in it are nonetheless hurt by it. That's what economists usually call a negative externality. It is in fact Milton Friedman's term, a neighborhood effect. I kind of like that term better because it just is more descriptive. It sort of canoes what's happening. that neighbors are being affected by your particular economic transaction. And that leads to one of the biggest points of all that I think is a big point in favor

of moving in a more socialist direction is climate change, because it is like the biggest neighborhood effect of all. All of these individual transactions, people buying gas for their cars, et cetera, et cetera, things that most all of us do on some level, but having those economic transactions, given the way we're doing them, are having incredibly deleterious effects on the climate, which is in turn going to harm and kill

millions and millions of people and make life much, much less pleasant for everyone if we don't do something very quickly to reverse it. And it just doesn't seem like the sort of thing that the market can handle because the neighborhood effects are so large. It was Nicholas Stern, a World Bank chief economist, referred to climate change as the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen. And it's just hard to see how, I mean, capitalists will now try to, you know, for a long time,

they actually saw that point that if climate change is real, and if it's happening, and if it's going to be bad, then that's a really good argument for socialism. Rand Paul was explicit about that in his book on the case against socialism. I'm not quite explicit saying it would be a good argument for socialism, but what he tried to do in that 2019 book was to just basically deny that climate change was real. I mean, why are they so intent on trying to deny that climate change is real? Because if it is real, then yeah, that's a market failure.

That's not something that the market can correct. We need much, much more collective control of the economy and regulation and everything else to try to deal with that. And I don't have any simple solutions for it, but I know that the capitalist doesn't. That's why they were so intent on denying climate change. Now it's becoming more and more and more undeniable. And so they're kind of changing their tune in some respects and trying to say, oh, no, no, capitalism is the way out.

But they have never explained how capitalism is the way out of climate change. And it doesn't really make any sense. Yeah. I'm just laughing at the framing of climate change as a market failure. It's a very big fucking market failure. The biggest neighbor that we have. The biggest market failure. Yes.

So okay, my last question for you is obviously the big one, and I don't think that anyone's going to be surprised by the ultimate conclusion that you came through with the book, but I'd love it if you could just sort of share that with us, you know, how you feel we should structure our political and economic systems from a logical perspective. And you know, for people who are still hoping that I might follow up on that free will question from the top, you guys are gonna have to wait until, you know, if we do a part two with Scott. So we're just gonna leave you hanging on that one.

But yeah, I'd love to know what are your ultimate conclusions in terms of how we should arrange society? And if you want to talk about you wanna talk about why it's important for us to use logic when making these assessments. And of course, I would love to end by asking you if you've enjoyed any good German pilsners as well. So I'll throw that at you as well, knowing you're in Germany, and yeah.

Well, I think the master argument, as I presented it, is sound. That's the philosopher's term for meaning that the premises imply the conclusion and the premises are true. So I think that means that we should move very strongly in a socialist direction. And since I define socialism on these two axes and coming in degrees, it means move in that direction, more egalitarian distribution of resources and more collective control of the economy. How far in those directions? I don't know, to tell you the truth. This does heavily involve

empirical questions. The Wilkinson and Pickett data about egalitarian distribution doesn't seem to tail off. It's not that once you get to as equal a society as, say, Germany, that you get a certain amount of benefit, but then when you get even more as they are in most of the Scandinavian countries, that the benefit trails off. No, so far on most of those things, it just seems to be linear and keeps going up. So it seems like the evidence seems to indicate we can go at least as far as the Scandinavian countries but presumably quite a bit further in the direction of egalitarian distribution and in collective control of the economy.

I'm intrigued by Thomas Piketty's suggestions of a wealth tax, a very substantial wealth tax and a universal inheritance that he's suggested that each person gets some, I don't know, I can't remember the exact, the amount of money that he said, I think it was in euros, but something like 150,000 euros at age 25 or something like that.

Basically some sort of nest egg that you can then start with, but something like that. Now, be a lot of details to be worked out. And specific policy proposals are not really what I'm after in the book, but I think that the arguments and the data that I've drawn push us strongly in those directions. So why is it important to utilize logic and reason in doing this? Well, if it were just empirical questions, that would be one thing, but even there, you

need to think straight, you need to think clearly and logically. But in this sort of case, when we're talking about how to organize our political and economic system, you have empirical questions and moral questions that are intertwined. Moral questions like, how ought we to do this? Why ought we to do this? Well, because it'll make people happier and it won't violate their rights. How do we know it won't violate their rights? Well, we have to have that argument, we have to talk about that, and so I go through those things. But because these empirical and moral questions are deeply intertwined, it's much easier to get confused and to just sort of slap one another with two simple prescriptions or to shout at one another and just say,

you're racist, therefore you're wrong, or you just don't understand how capitalism works. You know, slowing down and actually reasoning with one another is, I hope and trust is the way that we can make some progress here. That it might not work at first, very few people are immediately convinced by an argument that you give them. But I think seeds of reason have a way of growing in people. And I think we've seen it before,

especially on moral questions. Within my lifetime, growing up in Kansas, if you were gay, that was just, and you admitted you were gay that was just and you admitted it Then that was just a reason to get beaten up after school Whereas is far from perfect now, but we've made huge strides why I think because people Came to their senses on moral reasoning and realized there's nothing wrong with this How could there be anything wrong who's harmed by two consenting adults getting together in whatever way they want to?

But that's just meant to be an example of, yes, I think reason can work, and I don't think we should avoid those tools. I think we on the left should use them. They're on our side. The facts, the evidence, and what those facts and evidence imply are on our side and we should use that. Finally, the most important question, German Pilsners. Yes, I have some

very good German Pilsners. My very favorite German Pilsner is called Furstenberg, but it's only available in the Freiburg area and right now I'm in Berlin, but my favorite Berlin Pilsner is called Berliner Kindle. So try it if you get here. Unfortunately, neither of those is available in the United States. You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Scott Sion, a professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College and author of the book, Socialism, a Logical Introduction, published by Oxford University Press. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode.

Thank you to Stick to Your Guns for the intermission music and to Carolyn Rader for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. Upstream is almost entirely listener funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways that you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes, at least one a month, but usually more, along with our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast.

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