Bhaskar Sunkara
speaker
1,609 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2022
last heard Dec 2022
Bhaskar Sunkara’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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That's often why a lot of, I think, R&D is often rooted in state institutions and research and whatever else is being drawn on.
And also, I think that that's a reason why
You know, the state has some sort of role in fostering firms in either my version of a socialist economy or a capitalist economy or whatever else to help with these time horizon problems.
So I won't dispute that workers could play a role or wage demands could play a role in time horizon problems.
But more often than that, it's coming from investors.
It's coming from just a host of other market pressures that people might have.
And I would say that in the real world, a lot of investment funds don't come from just retained earnings.
It comes from a lot of sources.
So I think this is a problem that could be solved through public policy, but definitely exists today as well.
I mean, I think that any society is going to have to make distributional choices.
You could have imagined a variety of capitalism in which workers are paid quite little, but there's extremely high taxation and there's redistribution after the fact.
You could imagine a system in which there's less taxation after the fact, but there's more guarantees and regulations on how much people are paid before the fact.
In my vision of a socialist society, there would be some other way that unions work.
And in my example, the centralized bargaining unions would work that bargain at the sectoral level and not just at the enterprise level like our unions do today.
There could be benchmarks set for different occupations or wages.
And the reason why you would want a benchmark at a worker controlled firm is that you don't want workers self-exploiting themselves in order to gobble up market share or because you don't want them collectively deciding, OK, we're going to invest in this longer term time horizon and outcompete other people that way.
So you might say, OK, if you do this sort of clerical work, you have to be paid for
the equivalent of $15 an hour.
That's a minimum.
But on top of that, you get dividends from excess profits.
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