Is capitalism actually broken?

Explore the different types of capitalism, how they operate, and how they impact issues like climate change and rising inequality.

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People have become increasingly worried that the threats we face today, like climate change and rising inequality, can’t be solved by a capitalist economic system. So, is that true? And if it is, can we fix capitalism or do we need to tear the system down and build a new one from scratch? Explore the different types of capitalism and the role it plays in our society.

Directed by Lorenzo Mercanti, AIM Creative Studios.

This video made possible in collaboration with World Economic Forum

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Thank you so much to our patrons for your support! Without you this video would not be possible! John Hellmann, Poompak Meephian, Chuck Wofford, Adam Pagan, Wes Winn, Conder Shou, ntiger, Noname, Hansan Hu, David D, Mac Hyney, Keith Ellison, robin valero walters, Lynne Truesdale, Gatsby Dkdc, Matthew Neal, Denis Chon, Julian Oberhofer, Monte Carroll, Eddy, Jay M, Constantino Victor Delgado, Andrea Galvagni, Andrew Tweddle, Laurel-Ann Rice, Fernando A. Endo, Helen Lee, pam morgan, sarim haq, Gerardo Castro, Michel-Ange Hortegat, Enes Kirimi, Amaury BISIAUX, ND, Samyogita Hardikar, Vanessa Graulich, Vandana Gunwani, Abdulmohsin Almadi, AJ Lyon, Geoffrey Bultitude, Mi Mi, Thomas Rothert, Brian Elieson, Oge O, Weronika Falkowska, Nevin Spoljaric, Sid Chanpuriya, Anoop Varghese, David Yastremski and Noah Webb.

[maggiefarid]

The best joke on us when Ted Ed is sponsored by world economic forum who is literally group of billionaires enforcing their idealogy to the world and the subject is failure of capitalism .. 🤣

[niarudle]

Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist, once said:
"You have to ask yourself: if our economic system actively destroys the biosphere *and* fails to meet most people's basic needs, then what is actually the point?"

[soma]

Thank you world economic forum for providing critical and unbiased information about capitalism.

[JonasPolsky]

3:23 “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

[stevens]

The fact the few owners in a capitalistic system is allowed to fiddle with the dials or influence those who can is largely what's wrong with the whole setup.

[bulgna]

As a rule of thumb for the bare minimum I generally like to use: if you can't live because you're really poor, there's something horribly wrong

[crsm]

What worries me is that the reality is far more complex than this short video describes, yet this short video is far more in-depth than most people's understanding of the issue. Education has failed so many of us.

[samago]

The narrator saying “Will any of it make a difference? Is inequality inescapable?” Just as the WEF logo enters the screen is the kind of visual story telling Vince Gilligan would be proud of

[Nyaliva]

Great job, very on-brand for the WEF: break things down so you can say that technically things are not the worst they could possibly be right now, own up to the unavoidable individual problems without actually saying the current system is broken, and then throw your hands up with a "we need to have a deeper discussion about what we actually need to do next" and then not have that deeper conversation so that no answers are given and no problems are solved. Thanks WEF!

[zlosov]

Short answer: Yes

Long answer: Yes, but our sponsors would really not want us to admit it.

[matheuroux]

Having the World Economic Forum sponsor a video on Capitalism is deeply irresponsible.

[mathieubelliveau]

The fact that this is funded by the WEF and basically posit the question for destructive/reconstructive revolution concerns me, since they too are looking to take control of the dials on a global scale.

[greyl]

I trust the WEF for unbiased opinions on the social order :DDD

[yuliusseraph]

I wonder which unbiased answer video sponsored by World Economic Forum will give us

[rosverlegaspo]

Lets see how others would react to this. It presents so much to talk about.

My problem with this video is that it never gives an actual answer to any question it poses.

It first goes through a question: can a form of capitalist system solve climate change and inequality? No answer is given. It pretty much dismisses the climate change side of the question. They muddled the inequality question. They practically change the question from "can a form of capitalist system solve inequality" to " is capitalism increasing inequality or not." These are two entirely different questions.

Near the end when it "tried" to answer the question it proposes in its very title: is capitalism actually broken? It hand waves away the pure capitalism as irrelevant and is pretty much dismissive at contemporary capitalism (a wishy-washy "not looking good").

Then it quickly dismiss the original question, to essentially ask an entirely different question that they claim is the "critical" question: can we fix contemporary capitalism? Again, no answer, and I don't think a video even just "trying" to answer this is coming. And worse, by saying that this is the critical question, they indirectly say that the original question is not.

Overall, a pretty pointless video for me. Not only do it not give an answer to its central question, it pretty much dismisses it in end. Great animation though.

[MrCarpelan]

While capitalism has absolutely contributed to redistributing wealth from the nobility, the graph from 1801 shows us that's not the whole story. The rise of class consciousness, unions, and regulations, which unimpeded capital would inevitably lead to, was much more influential in the steady decline of economic inequality than the existence of capitalism itself was. This can also be seen in the graph, which shows how neoliberalism, deregulation, the disempowerment of unions, and the shift toward the highly-alienated society of today resulted in increasing inequality since the 70s.

[somecuriosities]

The solution to all these issues begins with the recognition that, in a market based economy, our political rights mean little unless they are backed up with economic guarantees allowing people to effectively utilise those rights and liberties, allowing them to have the same ability to affect in the governance of their society as the wealthy oligarchs.

Wealth needs to be decoupled from political power, and coupled with providing citizens a basic guarantee of their fundamental freedoms. In other words, what is is needed is a new wave of liberty, nothing less than an "economic emancipation", and the reforging of justice, so that the wealthy and strong many not harm the poor and weak 🗽

[djangokill]

"This lesson was made in partnership with: World Economic Forum" 🚩🚩🚩

[KarlSnarks]

One issue I have with the abstraction of these dials, it still works in the binary of government+command economy vs private property+markets (and a mix of those). It does not take into account systems that make use of non-government common property (cooperatives, commons etc.) and distribution systems that are neither markets, nor command economy, nor a mix (like decentralized bottom-up planning). It's not a surprise though, since the major players of the past century fit mostly in those three binaries the video used.

[dhypercube]

What's missing from this is a fourth dial representing the degree of direct worker's ownership and control over the means of production. Laissez faire capitalism is contrasted with a Soviet/North Korea-style state controlled system but both are systems with a ruling class at the top that exploits and oppressed everyone else. The real contrast is a system in which everything from workplaces, to infrastructure to government is managed democratically yet such a system is not represented anywhere in this video.