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These are really smart people. Frankly, they're a lot smarter, I think than their counterparts in the 1930s'. They're very informed. The leading ones got there because they were the best, at more or less what they do, even if what they do is not so good. But they're smart.
Do they get that this is not the same kind? This isn't just about a business cycle; this is about several existential problems. Climate, from the tech side, like a jobless recovery. This is big-time when we're talking out 10, 20, 30 years where A.I. and robots may go, this pandemic is far from over, and it's probably one of many more to come.
There needs to be a real shift in how power is exercised, the role government plays. And I was reading BlackRock. I follow BlackRock a lot.
We got Larry Fink talking about climate change, and he's very aware of the threat of climate. But the obvious conclusion from everything Larry and BlackRock says about climate is you need serious government intervention. But that's the one thing they don't want.
Rana Faroohar
Well, you're getting it something really important which and this drives me crazy, frankly. I wrote a column about how in the context of education, which seems tangential but is actually connected to what you're saying about climate change. Corporations are always kvetching that, oh, we need the government to train up a better 21st-century workforce, and then we could create jobs. Oh, we need the government to do something about climate, and then we'll have certainty, and we can invest.
Guess what? You've been cutting the tax share of the government, of the public sector by offshoring and optimizing, as they say, taxes in a global race to the bottom as the private sector has gained power and wealth relative to the public sector for four decades now. So you have tied the hands of the politicians. You decimated the middle class, which would elect better politicians. So here we are. So I absolutely hate that hypocrisy. And I just think it's egregious when business leaders complain in that way. I always try and turn the point around if I'm on T.V. and ask them about taxes and how much they pay.
But to go back to your first point about do the elites get it? Yeah, they absolutely get it. And let me give you a couple of examples. They get it, and they think they're going to be able to weather the storm.
You know, Eric Schmidt, former chairman of Google, wrote a book with the head of his think tank a few years back. And the book, basically reading between the lines, said, you know what, they try to put a sunny slogan on it. But the message was technology, this tech revolution we're going through, which is as Niall Ferguson has written, it's kind of like the advent of the printing press. It makes things better ultimately, but you get 150 years of religious wars before that. That's what Schmidt said in his book with Jared Cohen. He said, look, tech's going to make things better in the long run, but in the short run, things are going to be really crazy. There's going to be huge nationalism, conflict. They didn't come out and quite say it this way, but this was the upshot. But the idea was in their minds that the biggest companies, the Googles, the Facebook's, the Buydo's, the Alibaba's had become so big that they were like the East India Company now. They are sort of sovereign international states that float above the nation-state, as Mark was pointing out, and that they actually kind of formed their own consensus. You know, you've got the Washington consensus, maybe the Beijing consensus. We don't quite know what that is yet. And then you got the Facebook consensus and the elites essentially, I think, believed that these corporations now have so much control and big tech does have way more control even than big finance did because it can actually influence our behavioral patterns because of surveillance, capitalism, and algorithmic behavioral manipulation.
They have so much control that they believe that they can move the levers now and simply weather the storm and come out to the other side of it. So that's where they are.
Paul Jay
There's really no wall anymore or distance between big finance and big tech, is there?
Rana Faroohar
Right.
Paul Jay
I mean, big tech is very financial lies, and more so if you look at who owns big tech, it's essentially the big financial institutions are the biggest shareholders other than some individuals that helped start the things.
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