 There is a connection between waste in one location, simultaneous starvation in another. Isn't there? In this film, we'll see how mainstream economists use these models to hide the forces of inequality and environmental destruction. Law of supply and demand. In economics, individual human want, that is not backed by purchasing power, does not exist. Nothing. It's prayer or something. It drops out of our modeling. So when we discuss a demand, we mean what's sometimes also called effective demand, i.e. demand backed by purchasing power. Mortgage. In addition, there are some things that are not possible to demand on an individual basis, but can only be supplied socially. As we're talking, corporate America has about a trillion dollars in cash that doesn't know what to do with. Competition. Dry profits down. Profits. The cost. The opportunity cost. Capital. ZOs are cost. That doesn't mean that accounting profits, that account will be driven to zero. It means that economic profits, as economists measure it, will be driven toward zero. Right. But it then sort of makes the issue of profits more difficult to tease out or be something that's discussed. Do you follow me? No. The mainstream theory is kind of incredible because in the mainstream analysis, when competition is perfect, there is no profits. So the mainstream theory is not a theory of capitalism at all. Basically the model doesn't have profits as its central feature, even though that's the goal of all business. It's not really part of the model. I know this is hard to believe. First, you learn about the efficiency of markets and then as a footnote, you learn, well, sometimes this is not the case. Underlying this concept of efficiency, there are no what are known as externalities. When your activity imposes costs on others, the very term externality is misleading. It suggests these are somehow marginal. They are the exception. If you can make money by imposing externalities on others, then why wouldn't you do so? Anything in life that spirals up, up, up, or spirals down, down, down is dominated by reinforcing feedback. And the essence of that is that the more you have, the more you get. At the time that you were taking that course... 2004, 2005, yeah. I would argue that, yes, we had damped them in the business cycle. We couldn't stop it all together. We had hopes that we could stop it all together, but there are just too many random shocks, OPEC, things like that, that are simply not forecastable. So you're saying that it isn't internal in the market economy, the instability? No, I think that the private market is still stable, but it's going to oscillate. I would eliminate the minimum wage.