 Από την 1870s, υπήρχαν δύο ενδιαφέρονες φορές που κολλέστηκαν. On the one hand, some economists, political economists at the time, tried to become established as academics in universities. And the way they tried to do that was by mimicking physics, to pretend that they were the physicists of society, the scientists of society. And to do that, they tore up the whole political economics tradition of Adam Smith, David Ricardo Karl Marx, and tried to reconstitute economics on the basis of some kind of analytic synthetic method where the individual was the economist that which the atom was the physicist. So it became an atomistic individualistic. By the moment you try to mathematicalize on the basis of atomism, of individualism, you end up with mathematical models of market exchanges which lose any sight they might have had of the social relations of production. And the fact that once you enter into the labor contract at the basis of the incorporation of the firm, the business, you exit the market and you have a social relationship with your boss. And therefore from the 1870s onwards, what we call neoclassical economics, marginalized economics, became utterly disconnected from really existing capitalism. That was one force. The other force was that at that time, of course, with the second industrial revolution, capitalism, the powers that be, the ruling classes, were desperate for a legitimizing political economy, and that presented them as cogs in a natural science experiment. So that naturalistic, mathematical, neoclassical economics suited them down to the ground because in it there was no room for exploitation in these models. There was no room for social relations and they allowed the economists to create mathematical models which were in a perfect ideological cover that allowed them to present themselves as parts of a natural system of efficiently allocating resources. So once we got into that framework of thinking about the economy, capitalists became invisible, and therefore any analysis of capitalists became irrelevant. But more generally than that, it took me decades to come to this conclusion. It's not something that I always knew. Any attempt to create mathematical models of capitalism, whether they are founded on premises like the ones I mentioned, or Marxist assumptions, end up spectacular failures because capitalism cannot, just like Darwinism, cannot really be encased in a well-defined, determinate mathematical model. And then any attempt to do it will only succeed if it distances the model from capitalism. And this is a fate that unfortunately has befallen even Marxist economists who became scholastic and consumed by their own models. It can't do that. All GDP can tell us is whether capitalist activity is going up or down. Now when GDP is falling by five, six, seven percent every year, it is in Greece at the moment. You know there's something wrong with great capitalism, right? So in that sense it's useful. But on the other hand, it has no capacity to relate to us and to capture the quality of human life and of the human condition. So the standard example, a forest breaks down, GDP goes up. There is a tsunami in Japan. GDP goes up very quickly because of all the effort to save people which costs diesel fuel and all the effort that reconstruction, putting up tents and so on and so forth. So let's say you are an extraterrestrial on Mars or some other universe and you are only watching the GDP time series. You will have a very distorted view of the human experience. You know one of the great evils of our time is this penchant for quantification of unquantifiable variables. If you look, it started in Britain in the National Health Service and the universities and then spreads in different realms in different countries. The attempt to quantify for instance the quality of academic research of the care given to patients in hospitals. There is a logic in doing it in the sense that we want hospitals and universities to be accountable to the people so that we know how well they are doing. But when you try to quantify the quality of the goods that they are producing then what you are doing is because this quantification would always be false will always fail to capture quality. Because how do you measure beauty? How do you measure love? How do you measure care? How do you measure the quality of a poem or of an essay or for that matter a philosophical text because this is what you are doing when you quantify the performance of philosophers and universities. The answer is you can't. You can't quantify a lot of important stuff which cannot be quantified and that creates awful incentives for people who get rewarded on the basis of the quantities that are reported on their behalf to do all the things that increase their indices which are sometimes actually more often than not detrimental to all the good stuff that cannot be measured. So you should be aware of the need to quantify. That's why we need some descriptive data, descriptive statistics and a sense of how society is served by different policies but we have to make sure that these are multiple quantities not one statistic, not the alternative to GDP gross happiness index as in Bhutan and so on. There should be a series of statistics and we look at all of them so for instance life expectancy. How happy kids are when they come back home from school. The consumption of books. How many people read books? How many people attend concerts in order to gain a sense of cultural life? How well are our museums doing? So I would favor a menu of different quantities which give us a whiff of the qualities. Judgement. You see I am a science freak. I love science. Science is the greatest instrument we have against superstition and stupidity. But the problem is that we have pseudoscience. You know economics is a pseudoscience. Any attempt to measure beauty scientifically is not scientific. It's rubbish. So I just don't like rubbish. Science. And when science is used in order to pursue particular political agendas by supposedly creating scientific measurements of things that cannot be measured. This is an affront to science. Well I think that what is of the essence is to decoupled and to make the very sharp distinction between growth and development. Growth I don't care for but development I do. So there are lots of things that I want to see go into recession. Not in growth. I want to see the financial sector be in recession. That is to shrink. I want to see CO2 production not grow. I want to see lots of poisonous activities diminish, not grow. But development is a humanist concept. Development doesn't mean necessarily bigger. It means better. For me development is to have an educational system which is very unproductive. To have one teacher for 100 people. If we can. I mean the bourgeoisie wants that. They send their kids to Oxford and Cambridge because they have one-to-one tutorials. Why shouldn't the rest of us want the same thing? Perhaps one-to-one is overstated but one-to-five is not. So an economy which can sustain one teacher for five pupils. Is a developing economy. Is a developmentalist economy. But it's not one that necessarily leads into capitalist growth. Growth is a miasma on this planet. Look at the way that suburbs have grown. Contributing massively to GDP growth. It is catastrophic. You've got the expansion of the cities at a horizontal level. Far and deeply into the countryside. Which means that you have to create very long distribution networks. Both for people and for goods and services. Which is very inefficient. At the same time you create isolated communities. That create a lot of middle class desperation amongst those who live there. And the destruction of the environment appears in statistics as growing GDP. Because to sustain these suburbs you need to produce all these stuff. That you extract from nature and you destroy. Now that kind of growth of course you have to be mad to be in support of. But if we are going to create truly sustainable energy solutions. We need development and we need a growth in that green industry. So it's a question of what we want to grow and what we want to shrink. And it's a question of not focusing on growth but focusing on development. Which makes human life happier and freer. Creating networks of producers and consumers. Which find ways to communicate and coordinate their activities. That do not rely on market signals but rely on a generalized system of gift exchange. That's how I see it. Is a great hope for creating oasis within capitalism. Having said that, I don't believe that you can have shared prosperity at the global level on that basis. The problem with this is that let's say that we succeed in minimizing the pain experienced during a recession. Like the one we have in Greece, depression. By having a community which is based on solidarity and gift exchange. That's wonderful. It's a wonderful resistance mechanism during the price of recession. But it's not a model that can threaten globalizing financialized capitalism. Capitalists don't have a problem with that. They simply don't have to worry about that particular community rioting or dying on their doorsteps of hunger. But it is not a real threat. It will become a real threat. When through the powers of the internet these communities find ways of creating a global version. In which capital goods can be produced and shared amongst different communities around the world. Helping bring about synergies in capital goods production between Kenyans and Greeks and Irish and Croatians and Chinese. That will constitute effectively a transcendence of capitalism. That should be our task, not simply to retreat to small parochial communities that resemble the Middle Ages. Well firstly, divide and rule was always a very profitable strategy for capitalism. To divide private sector workers from public sector workers and to make one set think that the other is the enemy. It has been a very successful policy for making everyone worse off. Secondly, the notion that you cannot have or that you should not have a state sector, because the state sector is antagonistic to the private sector, is evidence of the deep seated incomprehension by private sector workers of how capitalism works. It's something that republicans in America, conservatives in Europe like to propagate. It's a fallacy, the fallacy being that the state is antithetical and antagonistic to the private sector. It is not. The private sector would shrivel and die without the public sector. The state was not created by socialists, it was created by capital, because it was an essential regulating device, ensuring that the private sector would have demand so that it could actually function. So capital creates the state, or usurpses the state, puts it in its use. It employs workers, public sector workers in order to do that. It uses them in order to intervene in cases of what we call market failure, failures of the private sector. And then succeeds at the same time to set off the private sector workers against the public sector workers, and therefore to retain greater control over both of them. The sooner private sector workers realize that reality, the better it will be for them. The European Union offers us a wonderful opportunity for progressive change. It doesn't give us any guarantees. And as an institution, it is very inimical. It's an enemy of progressive change. But against, despite itself, it's giving us a great opportunity, because it does away with borders. It allows us something that the rest of humanity doesn't have. If you go to the United States-Mexican border, you will realize what I mean. It is great. It is wonderful that we don't have borders in Europe anymore, if we are members of the European Union. However, the economic policies of the European Union are trying to create borders and walls separating our peoples. In the US in particular, we are divided by a common currency, which is a delicious paradox. And the only way of not allowing these neoliberal institutions to stop us from uniting in order to achieve a progressive alternative in Europe is by genuinely utilizing the capacity to move around, the lack of borders in order to stop thinking of ourselves as Greeks or Croatians or Germans. There is not such thing as the Croatians. There is not such thing as the Germans. There is not such thing as the Greeks. There are different perspectives on shared prosperity and we have institutions and the logic of European capitalism, which goes against that shared prosperity. We should utilize the borderlessness of Europe in order to bring it about. All three, trade unions, political parties and something else, and civil society organizations, grassroots movements that are pushing our policies and ourselves to think of Europe as a vital space that belongs to all of us and in which the human condition could liberate itself from its current shackles and chains.