Bhaskar Sunkara

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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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Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · 22 Dec 2022 podcast

So you end up with people like Khrushchev, you know,

people going from peasants to, you know, supreme leaders of countries just through getting hooked up in the bureaucracy and advancing within it.

And, you know, not all these were bad people.

I don't think Khrushchev was that bad of a person, or Gorbachev, you know, but this is their mechanism to advancement in systems like this.

The vision of democratic socialism that I propose, the state doesn't have that overriding power to begin with.

But I think in either case, you know, corruption has arose in many different systems and has been successfully dealt with.

I think on the developmental trajectory of even countries today that we think of as being very corrupt, corruption will, you know, fade away as well.

But you definitely need...

a system in which individuals are incentivized to act rationally.

So if you're in a system in which cops who are corrupt are prosecuted and investigated, and there's internal controls, a civilian board review, and kind of an internal investigators within police departments or whatever else, there will be less corruption over time if people are punished.

If you're in a system in which you're running a firm or you're the manager of a firm, an elected manager, and everyone at that firm is trying for more efficiency and trying for more excess profits or whatever else at the end of the day, dividends at the end of the day, then if you try to hire your nephew and he's not good at your job, you're not going to win re-election, right?

So you shouldn't.

I think no system should rely on a change in culture that come naturally or some sort of individual altruism.

I think the systems have to be constructed in such a way that it's not rational to behave poorly.

First of all, I think in theory, maybe capitals and words, meritocracy.

But I think in practice, anyone watching this or you and me would think of some of the people we know that work the hardest and they're often, you know, working class people working in the food service industry or whatever else, right?

I think we don't have...

In practice, I don't think we actually live in a society that rewards people for hard work.

I think we reward people for a combination of accidents of birth plus hard work.

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