Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Hello, welcome to Call It Like I See it, presented by Disruption Now, I'm James Keys, and in this episode of Call It Like I See it, we're going to discuss what we see in China's substantial efforts to eradicate and their declaration that they have eradicated extreme poverty.
Joining me today is a man whose approach to podcasting is to do or do not, because he was taught a long time ago that there is no try Tunde Ogunlana Tunde, do you have any other tidbits of wisdom from your young Padawa days?
[00:00:50] Speaker B: The reference to Yoda's killing me.
Failure is the best teacher. He said to Luke in the Last Jedi when he was one of those ghost apparitions.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: That was pretty profound.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: There we go.
Now, we're recording this on November 30, 2020, and I would like to get right to our first topic today. We recently saw that China had declared it eliminated extreme poverty from its country.
Now, China's central government had set out to do this years ago, specifically by 2021, for their 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party's founding. And now they claim they've beaten their goal by a month.
So, Tunde, China is over here declaring victory on eradicating poverty. But is this really feasible, to eliminate poverty through central government action? And if so, why hasn't everybody done it?
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Great question, James. Is it feasible? I would say I don't think so, but I don't want to be that negative. So maybe, I mean, on a serious note, maybe there is a way that you could eradicate poverty in a relatively short window of time, you know, a decade or two. But I'm not sure if I can fathom that how it would be done without honestly implementing some total different system, which I'm not advocating for, but I mean, like, literally, like a communism or something, where you're just either making everybody poor or something. I'm just saying, like, you know.
[00:02:15] Speaker A: Yeah, I was gonna say, we know communism doesn't work to do it.
[00:02:17] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's what I mean. Like, there's.
It seems unnatural because it hasn't actually worked to do that. Seems like more of a theory on paper to have some sort of society that's either utopia or totally egalitarian, where everyone is equal. I think that's part of the human experience, the idea that somehow we can all be equal. And in this case, I'm saying economically, I don't know if that's doable in the way that our human brains work and in the way that we even deal with finance and barter. Like, I don't know if they're saying.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: But I don't know that they're saying that everyone's equal or that everybody has the same amount of money, but they're just saying they've lifted the bottom sufficiently that the people now at the bottom have running water, have electricity, have a roof over their head that doesn't leak and so forth. So they're saying that that's the reference to extreme poverty is like it's still people that are. That. I mean, not everybody doesn't have a yacht. But.
[00:03:20] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's a great point. Cause I remember when my older son, who's now 22, was younger, he was probably around 12, 13, we had driven through the hood of, you know, where we, you know, the local area where we live type of thing. And when I kind of made that detour on purpose so that he could see just visually that he should be thankful for the hard work my mom, his mom and I, you know, do to make sure he lives a decent life.
And also so that he's, you know, I used to expose him to stuff like that on purpose because I grew up more around that than he did. And also so that he respects it and that he doesn't as scared of it and he doesn't look down on it, that this is just other people and it's not that they're bad people or anything to be scared of or an other. Yeah. And so I remember that I stopped in front of a project building and, you know, parked a car and we were just looking and I said, tell me, what do you see here? And so he started telling me some random stuff on the street and all that. And basically what I was getting at, I pointed out to him, I said, you know, I want to let you know that in a lot of countries, even though we consider this poor here in the United States, this is probably lower middle class in many parts of the world. And I said, because look, they have paved roads going all the way up to the front door, basically, you know, that kind of thing. I said, they have running water and they have electricity.
I said, so in America, we don't want to live like this because in the relativity of the world, this is poverty relative to what we're used to. I said, but if you were to go. And I named a few third world countries, and I don't want to bash anyone directly on this podcast, so they'll nameless, but we can all picture XYZ Third World Nation And I just said, and I named those countries and I go in those countries, I said, half the population doesn't have the three things I just mentioned. They don't have paved roads, they don't have running water, and they don't have electricity or it doesn't work regularly. And so I said, so in America this is bad. I said, but in most of the world, this is actually pretty decent. And I think you make a great point, because I'll correct myself from my earlier statement and say I was thinking about with my American lens on of what we think of poverty and all that. You make a great point that we are so fortunate in this country. And I know that there are people in this country that are living in dirt shacks and all that. So I don't want to act like nobody's really, really at that level. But in our country, generally, the poor people are living in projects and. Or in the country somewhere, they got some sort of running water and electricity. And you're right, we also have a
[00:05:55] Speaker A: homeless crisis, though, I mean, which would speak directly to this, you know, like in certain areas of the country, like we have.
Where people don't have any of those things because they don't have a home, you know, so now we.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: Yeah, but I would say, I think ours are maybe more socioeconomic driven or I think in China there's still the issue, like specifically with China, that they've got a billion five people. You know, like, they've got such a large population and such a vast country that you really have had. Remember, they are coming from the whole Mao thing and all that stuff from the, you know, last hundred years.
And they've only been this modern China for about 30 years.
And really the China that we know today for about 20, 25 years, if that. And so they still have a massive hundreds of millions of people that are just living in the countryside, like you're saying, with literally just living out there like that. And that's just because of how the Chinese kind of journey has gone the last hundred years.
[00:06:48] Speaker A: And to your point, in looking at the issue, one of the things that stood out to me was that that was part of their target is they wanted to take people that were still living on the land and put them in essentially housing projects and force them then to live a, quote, unquote, modern lifestyle as opposed to a traditional lifestyle, which was. I don't know if that is. I don't know that that would be necessarily an improvement in some people's context. And so I wanted to jump in Real quick though, with just a thought, like central government action, I'd say that the aim is good. In the same way that when we try to do this in America with the Great Society, with Lyndon Johnson trying to eradicate poverty, or if you go back to the New Deal where we're trying to set up a social safety net and well, both of those set ups, we have Social Security in the New Deal and then Medicaid, Medicare and stuff like that in the Great society in the 60s with LBJ and setting up these social safety and that's setting up things that if you fall down, you don't fall all the way. You know, like there's something that'll catch you and keep you above a certain level. Those aims are good aims, but I do think just the approach of trying to create those things are kind of the break glass approach.
What people don't seem to really try to do, which I think would actually be the approach to do this, is set up the system so that you can, so that your own work, so to speak, can, can get you there.
Because if you separate people. One of the things that stood out to me in this piece that we read was, and this was something we read in the LA Times, which I'll share on the show notes, was just that they take people and they put them in these apartments, these high rise apartments with running water and heat and everything like that. And then they're like, all right, go get a job and pay for this. It's like, well, these people are used to just farming their food and like, what do you mean? So they're going to be day laborers now? Or some of them were day laborers before, but. And you've changed the nature of their expenses. You've changed the nature. Like now they can't grow their own food, so they have to buy food and stuff like that. So it's not a clean. It's not like they set out and made people's like they say, hey, let's make people's lives better. It's like, no, no, no, let's check some boxes here. Because honestly, that's how centralized governments work in terms of solving problems. It's like we need deliverables. We need, you know, like, this box needs to be checked. This box needs to be checked. All right, we're done. And it's like, well, hold on. Actually, maybe we should be looking at this. And as far as designing a system where people can advance themselves, you give people the means to and the opportunity to advance themselves and then they can raise Themselves up. And I'm not saying that exists in America. I'm saying I don't think that that exists here really in terms of being able to really rise up. It exists to some degree, but it's definitely been watered down. So, I mean, I would think that the answer to the question, from a feasibility standpoint, I would say it's possible to move someone's present case condition, to change someone's present condition. But I don't think it's possible based on just central government decree to actually make it sustainable, to make it so that people can that you, hey, we want you to be able to eat fish. You give them a fish and say, okay, nobody's hungry anymore. But it's like, well, actually you need to teach them how to fish if you want them to not be hungry tomorrow. The fish you gave them today isn't going to keep them fed for the next week. And so that's kind of the, I think the shortsightedness of the approach and time will tell if China's able to maintain people in what they're saying is a higher standard of living. But as of right now, it looks like they've just moved. They've changed the conditions, but didn't necessarily change what was creating those conditions.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: You're right. And I think that it speaks to what I mentioned in the beginning why I don't think it's actually feasible to do this long term for several reasons. It's interesting in reading the article as well, I read all that stuff about, you know, when they interviewed some of those, I guess they call them villagers that now have been relocated to apartments and running water and all that.
And it's just, it's fascinating because, you know, seems like there's mixed reaction, but you're right, a lot of them weren't that happy. And I think it's more spoke to me about just the human nature of that we all like kind of our comfort and things that we like, Right?
[00:11:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:03] Speaker B: And so someone else might think it's better for, you know, one guy to move from a village, literally living in some hut where he's farming off his own land and all that, to a city because those of us in cities thinks it's better and easier, but to that person, they like their little shack with the farm. And it's interesting because one guy did allude to that, that, you know, he can't save money anymore because he used to grow his own food.
[00:11:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: So he was able to save the money that he made. Now he's got to spend his money on food because he lives in a high rise apartment. He doesn't have the land and the stuff that he had to just grow his own crops. So. So it's interesting. But one thing that as you're talking it made me realize too is you're right, this has been tried in the United States and housing projects were the outcome. And I think from a similar. I'm not going to say it was only due to the great Society because I know housing projects existed before that, but this idea that in the early to mid going to the middle of the 20th century, remember we used to be a very rural and agrarian country.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: And we didn't really have suburbs the way that we got to know them after the second world War.
[00:12:09] Speaker A: I mean, it was basically like China was 20 years ago.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: That's what I'm saying. So it made me realize as you're talking that yeah, this is basically China is making the move we made around 70, 80 years ago or so on mass started doing where you had especially. I mean one of the needs for this, which is interesting in the United States, kind of uniqueness of this was the great migration of blacks from the south to the west and the north.
And what happened is you still had segregation in America. So they had to figure out kind of what to do with everybody that was coming in from these poor areas. And a similar thing. Right. You had blacks coming in from Alabama, Mississippi, really, really rural poor areas where they didn't have the skills and they didn't live in high rise apartments and all that.
And you're right, it was kind of adjusted and putting people in those type of environments and then getting them jobs.
[00:13:02] Speaker A: You should add, just briefly, you should add, I mean, the type of migration that you had there. Like a large part of that was escaping domestic terrorism.
[00:13:11] Speaker B: Well, I know that, but no, so
[00:13:13] Speaker A: my point to say that is that the numbers, it wasn't a trickle.
It was a lot of people that were going into these cities and. Yeah, you're right. Like it's like, well, what are we gonna do with all these people coming in here that are used to farming, that are not used to. And that's, you know.
[00:13:27] Speaker B: Yeah, that's what I was going to say is that, you know, you go from a farm in the countryside of Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, those kind of states and then you end up in Detroit, you know, and it's like. And then there's a cold winter where you can't even be outside, you know, half the year. So you're right within probably A generation or less. All of a sudden those guys are working at the Ford plants and, you know, they've been absorbed into kind of the industrial North. And it's fascinating because outside of what you mentioned about the whys and the kind of different nuances culturally with both countries, it's a reminder that these are experiments that are tried by societies.
And it helps me clarify my point, I guess, in equating it to our projects here, because I've seen footage, old black and white footage, when they first opened Cabrini green in the 50s in Chicago, or like the projects in Coney island, which, you know, I had friend, when I was younger, in the late 90s, I played on a basketball team up in Connecticut and half the team was from Brooklyn and most of them were from Coney Island. And I used to go there. We used to take the Metro north and I would go on the weekends and we'd hang out in New York. And I swear, man, I've never seen anything like this. I'm talking about, like, I would walk outside his building and look left and right and as far as my eyes could see, the same thing. 15 story gray project buildings. And I could count like at least 12 going each direction. And I tried to do the math of how many floors, multiply how many units, like how many people. There's like hundreds of thousands of people crammed into these areas. And I've seen the footage of those and they were very beautiful when they first opened too. You know, they're brand new, all the, all the walls are clean, all that. But when I'm there in the 90s, it was an absolute dump. I mean, it was literally, it was pissing the stairways, graffiti everywhere, stick up kids all over the place. And you know, you know those environments. But the reality is, my point is that it tells me that this is probably unsustainable for the long term in a place like China as well, because again, if everyone's a human being, this will be something that is, that is set right now and probably looks good in the short run, but in the long run, in the end, they're still poor, they're still uneducated, and they're still separated socioeconomically, maybe from the middle, upper middle class and wealthy folks.
[00:15:49] Speaker A: Well, that was kind of. My point is that you might change someone's condition, but if you don't give them the tools to actually maintain that condition or actually really to improve that condition, then you aren't really, you aren't going to make something that's sustainable. And that's what happened there. Like, you get all these people, you put them in until you give them housing, or you say, hey, we'll give you discounted housing and so forth. But if there aren't jobs in that immediate vicinity that or businesses that can be sustained in that immediate vicinity, then what's ended up happening is that you're going to end up back in poverty, so to speak. And it may be relative, it may be a different type of poverty, it may not be extreme poverty relative to what you did if you lived in a dirt road, you know, in a shack, you know, somewhere in, wherever, in a rural area. But it's still not going to be where you control the means of your ability to produce X amount of capital or to be able to sustain your lifestyle or whatever. And so that I wonder about. Another thing that stood out to me about this kind of changing gears a little bit was just when you had that such high level of centralized government action, just how on one hand impersonal and on the other hand how corrupt or how it led to corruption. And so, you know, like, what wasn't explained that well is, okay, so they got all these people up out of all these areas, you know, these quote unquote rural areas, and they're like, yeah, they're going to build some resorts and they're going to turn some into, you know, like museum type things and stuff like that. It's like, well, hold up, you guys have cleared a lot of land and who's getting all that land? Who's made. Who's going to be. Somebody's going to be making a lot of money on all that land. And actually in one of the things I noted was that supposedly the people who used to live on the land would get a small percentage of revenue generated from that land. But I mean, that's one of those things you believe when you see it.
That sounds good, but anytime. My point being though, just is that anytime you have such a level of centralized coordination of things, and this goes into some of the things we've talked about recently as far as when you have decentralization, it's harder to cheat, it's harder to steal on a large scale.
And so because everything that any lever that you have control of only controls a small thing, you only control a little fiefdom. So in this case, when you have centralized government action trying to accomplish all this, moving millions and millions of people and changing their conditions and clearing all this land, it's like, well, if someone gets control of a few mechanisms of power There, the level of corruption that you can. Can implement basically is staggering.
And it seemed like that was the other shoe that is going to drop at some point here is just that, hey, we've made this big change. We've created all these opportunities. Now who's going to get to take advantage of these opportunities?
[00:18:41] Speaker B: Yeah, and that stuck out to me too, and I'm glad you brought it up.
I think it was an 8% dividend in this one point part of the province that they had mentioned that part of the mountain where that was going to be turned over to the tourism and the developers there. They said that it's an 8% dividend that the villagers were supposed to receive based on, I guess, the size of the land they had given up.
[00:19:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:05] Speaker B: And that's. See, that's where I think again, and I thought about this when I was reading it. Like last week we did this show on that. We talked about science and religion and how there's always, like, there's certain people that want to always say, you have to be on one side or the other and why can't they coexist? And I feel like when I read this, you make a great point about the dangers of large centralized power and governments.
And then I'm looking here at the corruption of the capital side, the corporate side as well, where they're saying how basically these developers, the tourism company was paying off the local government people.
[00:19:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:45] Speaker B: To give them to kind of just kick people out. And they were saying how the tourism company also was hiring thugs to go beat the villagers. Those that were trying to be like, no, we don't wanna move.
And it's like, that's all believable too. It's like, all right, we've seen all this before throughout history in various societies. And I think that's where the idea of, like, yes, let's acknowledge that large central governments and bureaucracies probably have the chance to do more harm than good. Because, like, you'd have to have, like you alluded to in other discussions, benevolent leader or. I know you say dictator, but even if it was a large central government, you gotta hope that whoever's in charge really is a good person and they're not gonna be corrupt.
[00:20:25] Speaker A: You're praying for benevolence. Basically, you're praying.
[00:20:29] Speaker B: Anybody in a position of any type of authority or power knows that situational ethics can rule the day. And it's very. For some people, it'll be more difficult to make, to be honest, when they have power.
But then I look at something like that and say, well, that's a great kind of idea to play it like where you got this strong central.
Then you're kind of forcing people off their property. But then you're saying, look, we'll give you a piece of the action here. We know you're poor and all that, so we'll give you a part of this as a dividend and so that can help you buy food and do all this stuff that they need to do. Right.
And I think that's where the idea of regulation to me matters because again, like science and religion, so many people have been conditioned to think you have to choose a side. When I just look at it and say, well, why can't they coexist? There's many examples where they can. And I feel like regulation and free market and all that is also become like the religion and science debate where so many people in our, at least in our country have made this thing like you got to pick a side. And I think, no you don't.
You know, like that's a great example where if the government, the central government does regulate that and ensures that those people get a dividend. To your point, the long term road of potentially this not being backfiring might be paved a little bit smoother, that's all.
[00:21:48] Speaker A: Well, yeah, that would be, that's the concern is the same as you mentioned as far as centralized implementation of things. Like the problem with the centralized implementation is that all it takes is a bribe or two and they won't see any of that money. And so this 8% is great in theory, but what's their mechanism to enforce that? What's their mechanism to audit that? And so it's still like, it's still one of those things. Like it's a great sounding promise, particularly when you want somebody to move.
But who knows if that's actually going to play out like that. I think that one of the things that, and you kind of touched on this a little bit, but it's a question I want to ask you directly.
And that is it goes to this, it goes to the problem I'm pointing out in terms of you're not quote, unquote, teaching people how to fish. You're just giving them a boat and saying, hey, giving them a boat and one fish and saying, okay, here you go. And expecting them to then sustain from that is I think the problem of unskilled labor, so to speak. And I say that as a term of art. You know, I'm not calling people unskilled, but just as a Term of art, in terms of.
We are out of the industrial age when manpower was very necessary. We're out of the age that preceded that, you know, where agriculture required a certain level of manpower at all times. We talked about this a little bit, and when we did the show on the capitalism doc, the capitalism in the 21st century documentary. But what is there to be done into the 21st century and moving forward with the issue of unskilled labor? How can we design a system that allows everyone to have Tunde Because that's at its core. That's what this is about. They're saying, hey, we're taking you out of a shack, we're putting you into an apartment that I would want to live in, or I would be okay living in. You know, some bureaucrat saying that.
But again, I don't think they're addressing the root of the problem, or at least they're not addressing the problem sufficiently that a solution is sustainable. But what do we do with the issue of unskilled labor? How can we provide more Tunde more opportunity for everyone? Everyone can't be a computer programmer. Everyone can't be a finance professional. Everyone can't be an inventor. So what do we do?
[00:24:00] Speaker B: Man, I don't know. And that's where this is. It's a. It's a fascinating conversation because there's a couple things that just come to mind. I mean, obviously, like, we have a very materialistic kind of world, right? And that's why I didn't want. I was about to say society, but I'm not even gonna blame us. Like, like put the point the finger just. I mean, China's very materialistic. I mean, you know, they got the most billionaires in the world and they all like nice, nice stuff too. You know, the Europe's materialistic. You know, Middle East, Asia, everyone's materialistic. So I think the fact that we all share those kind of things, I think there's always going to be a segment of society that looks over and all these things that we've been taught our whole lives, they stay with humanity for a reason, because they make sense and they never change because of who we are. Meaning this idea that the grass is always greener on the other side. A very simple kind of saying, but it's so true that a lot of people will look over the fence and say, wow, that's so good over there. I want that.
And so I don't know how you kind of save from that in certain instances.
The other would be.
And you're right about the thing about Tunde And I think, and it's a great point you make when you said, why don't you come and live in this apartment that I would want to live in? I think that's the other thing too is we tend to impose what we feel is right on others who may not want it. So that creates conflict too. And it happens.
[00:25:23] Speaker A: We give people, we tell people what's best for them and then it happens
[00:25:28] Speaker B: in every aspect of every society. I mean, one of the things that I loved reading this article was it's just a good reminder that, you know, the Chinese are human beings and people too in a big society. And they're all trying to figure it out. And they have all different, you know, you can tell their government's trying to figure stuff out to, you know, and I'm sure the individuals that are at the top now want to stay in power.
Then you've got this layer of corruption. I mean, there was an estimation that 10,000 government officials have basically been corrupted and are given bribes taken bribes, or they're stealing some of the money that's coming their way and they're giving it to friends and family instead of to the villagers. And like all the typical shit that we hear all over the world. And it's just something that we don't generally hear about coming from China in this level of detail. But it just reminded me like, yeah, these are all people too. And you got people that are greedy, self centered. You got people I'm sure that are altruistic, trying to do the right thing with this program. And they're all dealing with it in their own individual ways. And it adds up to this collective just way that it's handled. And then the other thing that I found very interesting, it just reminded me of certain other things. Like I'm a read here. 73% of residents living in the relocation compound worked as migrant laborers. According to official statistics, 13% were self employed. It's probably their selling. I could see that being maybe a little restaurant merchant or someone selling to the 73%. And then it says 14% had government positions like public sanitation. So obviously that 14% is helping maintain order and running the area where all these people have been moved to.
And it's kind of like again, I was thinking about how we talk about China and I remember, do you remember like maybe seven, eight years ago, it was like all over 60 minutes and all this stuff like, oh, China is going to have this massive real estate collapse because they have these ghost cities.
You remember all that?
[00:27:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:15] Speaker B: And when I read this, I thought, you know, think about it. It goes back. Like, think about us projecting what we think onto a whole nother society because we're looking at those empty cities thinking, you know, that's bad. It's going to collapse. Like, you know, we remember when the skylight was. Was empty in Miami in 2008, 2009, because there was vacancies and real estate market crashed.
But when I read this, I thought, man, since 2012, the thing that we saw, they pulled 98 million people out of, like, you're saying the real extreme poverty, like the people that literally didn't have running water and lived on the side of a mountain somewhere.
And I thought, you know, we don't consider is building cities right now. For China, this decade was probably a jobs program because they also need to, like, when they're Talking about spending 20 billion, maybe some of that is also on salaries just because they got to get these people doing something.
You can't just move people, like literally 100 million people into somewhere and they're unhappy and they're cranky, and there's probably, you know, young men in their 20s and 30s that can get up to no good just because, you know, they're not happy and they're bored.
You got to do, you know, they got to do something. They got to move that energy in some direction. Yeah. So I was just thinking about all that. Like, wow, look at how much we project. And we sit here trying to figure these people out. But reading this, that whole ghost town made sense now to me, like, yeah, of course.
[00:28:35] Speaker A: Yeah, it does. It does something. It allows people to have something to do and feel good about.
[00:28:41] Speaker B: If that city never gets populated and is empty for the next 30 years, it still worked out for China because they got these people transitioned into some kind of labor that was different than being on a village. And then they learn different skills over that time, and they can use that somewhere else in the country if they want to. You know, it's interesting you say that,
[00:28:59] Speaker A: because that was the direction I was going to go actually, as far as the problem, the quote unquote problem of unskilled labor, I mean, part of it is societies need ambition, and even if you don't exactly know how it's going to play out. But you can look at our country, if you look back 60, 70 years in terms of building the interstate highway system or build, like, things that you can build that sound ambitious, but that can actually make things better. And that get people to work doing that stuff. And a lot of that stuff does require government action and actually centralized government action to be big enough and to be big enough in people, big enough in resources to actually have the big enough ambition to do that stuff. The other thing I'll point out though, and this is just a matter of economics and at the risk of opening up a can of worms that you won't let me out of, is ultimately, I think the labor movement, the labor union movement showed that the way that you address the issue is that people are going to have to be paid in many cases more than the sustenance level of what it is that they're doing.
If wages are always a race to the bottom, which is the preference of capital, then you're always going to end up in this situation, and that's why we're in this situation most of the time, is because whether it's serfdom, whether it's slavery, whether it's anything, if the goal is always to have wages be as low as humanly possible so that capital can have the maximum leverage, then you're always. Or can, because capital, I should say, is exerting maximum leverage, then you're always going to end up with a situation of what to do with unskilled labor. But if you set up a circumstance in a society where people can be like it's in our interest, instead of just mailing people a check, you can supplement their income, or you can give tax benefits to companies that pay people more, or you come up again, you come up with some systemic way to change the motivations that we see people acting on, to change the behaviors based on how they are rewarded.
If you pay your workers more, you pay less in taxes or whatever it would be. We have to do something like that in order to allow there to be more of a connection between a hard day's work and making enough money to live a life with Tunde And this isn't my idea. I didn't come up with this. I mean, this has been, you go back to the square deal. This was the square deal. This was the new deal. You know, this was the great society. Like the whole thing was to make it so that people can make enough money doing whatever it is that they do to live a sustainable life with the recognition that if capital determines that on their own, then they won't, it just won't happen. And you'll have situations like you have now where people work full time jobs at, whether it be Walmart or something like that, and need government subsidy for healthcare. And it's like, well done. They have A full time job. If they have a full time job and they're showing up 40 hours a week, then something's wrong with our system. If they then can't live a life doing eating food and having health insurance and having a place becoming of what it is that they're doing. So I think some of that stuff would require not necessarily a rethinking of our priorities, but it will require placing having it to be a priority that we reward hard work with a certain level of lifestyle, whatever that would be and I'm cautious or when China just does it and not necessarily ties it to meaningful work. It, it worries me. That's why I say I wonder if that's sustainable. But there are ways that it has been done and ways that it could be done. It's just a matter of whether or not society will prioritize.
[00:32:45] Speaker B: No, and you make a good point because it's got me thinking of, I think part of the issues we have in our country today with kind of the populism and some of this.
When I say social unrest, I don't mean what we saw in the streets in the summer of 2020 and all that. I just mean the social media unrest of emotions amongst many people is.
It's interesting you said it because I never thought of it until you were just talking about this. That the fact that we've lost so many kind of the blue collar unskilled labor I think has also not only has it hurt people emotionally and put them in a certain frame of emotional state of anger and misery and bitterness and looking for somebody to be blamed for that or somebody's. I think it also is why people are infighting so much on social media and all that. Like again, we have time as a society now to think about stuff that doesn't really matter and complain about that because we don't have this. You know, people aren't on mass working a lot or in a happy way. Because that's a good point you make about the Walmart full time worker that still has to get government subsidized health care.
That person is probably also just unhappy in having a life that is very kind of make ends meet and check to check. And it reminded me of the comment I meant earlier about the grass being greener. On top of that, as human beings we aspire to more. So you're looking at X amount of money coming in.
You got your social media, you got commercials showing you this and that that you want but you can't get it. And because you're unskilled and you may not have an education, you may not see even a way out of this. You see what I'm saying? And so it all adds up. And then the other thing, just to finish up, because I know we want to move on, is the idea of the singularity usually only involves artificial intelligence when it surpasses human intelligence. But I've made this allusion to you several times in different conversations that I think we're at a certain level of singularity already where technology has outpaced our ability to pivot at a generational level. Like now things are moving so fast that, you know, you and I are in our early 40s and the world is much different than it was when you and I were in elementary school. You know, back then, people were probably still thinking when they came out of college in the 80s that they were going to work somewhere 30 years, you know what I mean, and retire like their grandparents did. And look, now kids coming out of college today are not thinking that at all. So in our short lifetime, not even our full lifetime, this whole situation has changed dramatically. And a lot of it's due to technology.
And you're right, because it got me thinking as you're saying it, our whole system is built on the late 1800 models of the Industrial Revolution mixed with agrarianism. So I've said this in the past, like, why do our kids still forget Covid but under normal circumstances, why are kids still going to school from, let's say, 7:30 to 8:00 clock in the morning and getting off at 2 in the afternoon when most people work 9 to 5 in Asia, they already address that in many countries where kids stay at school till 5 or 6 in the evening.
[00:35:48] Speaker A: Tune day. Tunde, why do we still have summer vacation? We're not out here harvesting.
[00:35:52] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Why do we have daylight savings? So you're right. And that's kind of what I wrote on my notes here is not only like rethinking of the society, but like rethinking our system and kind of the flow of work. Like you're saying, like, you're right. What do we do with this bottom 20%? And by bottom, I'm not alluding to intelligence or anything, but a guy that's a janitor or whatever that gets replaced by technology, what are we doing with them? And then at some point our society has to appreciate that people like us are going to be replaced with technology too.
I think I told you once that between the financial crisis of 2008 and when I saw this, they had the stats as of 2019, there used to be. Prior to 08, there were around 75,000 bond traders on Wall street firms, if you add them all up, human beings. And by 2019, that number was down to 20,000.
You know what? Bond traders make good money. That's 55,000 jobs that were definitely, probably minimum 350,000 a year that aren't there anymore. And so it's coming for white collar, too, is my point. And you're right. What are we going to do with all of us in 50 years when so many things can be automated and what do we do? So it's a good question.
[00:37:08] Speaker A: Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, and that's. That's the question that needs to be asked, basically, is that we should stop looking at people, wherever they are on the income spectrum or the job spectrum, and start looking at our society in terms of what can we do to make the system work better under the constraints that we have now? Because as you pointed out, yeah, this is. This what we're doing now is dreamed up in a world that doesn't exist anymore.
And so if we want to be able to address the challenges that come now, whether it be automation, whether it be whatever it would be, you know, we have to be able to look at what's happening now and then figure out a system where, again, you're not trying to. It's not about giving people handouts. It's about trying to set up a system where people can find fulfillment and sustenance, you know, but fulfillment as well. And like you said, so everybody's not walking around unfulfilling, feeling like their job is unfulfilling, fulfilling like their income is unfulfilling, feeling like they need the government for this and that. Like, there is something to being able to feel like you stand on your own two feet. And so if our system right now does not do that for most people, then the system, we need to take a look at the system and figure out what to do.
[00:38:14] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:38:15] Speaker A: So ultimately, though, you know, it's a good conversation, man, to really look at, you know, the. What's going on in the world and what we can learn from where they're doing things different places, here or there. So, you know, I think we can
[00:38:29] Speaker B: wrap it from here, man.
[00:38:30] Speaker A: But until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:38:32] Speaker B: I'm Tunde in with Lana.
[00:38:33] Speaker A: All right, subscribe Rate Review. Tell us what you think and we'll talk to you next time.
