he forgot the provacateurs when he talked about the sources of "violence", by which he means property damage.

this is sort of surreal to listen to , but i'm going to let him finish, first.

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obviously must be the russians, though.

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so, what's going on here is that you're asking homo economicus to explain something that requires a little depth of understanding into human culture, and he just can't grapple with it - and admits it. there was a study done a few years ago that indicated that only economists understand economics, which sounds tautological when stated like that; what they determined was that these growth ratios, these appeals to gdp and even the concept of competition are things that are entirely irrelevant outside of an economics classroom, and that only an economist wouldn't be able to see that, immediately. maybe an economist might laugh at a study like that. but, that's what's going on here - the economist is asked to explain what the numbers mean, and can't begin for a second to even feign to be able to grasp it. and, that's predictable, and repeatable.

near the end of the video, he's asked about the lag in growth rates and suggests that the function of privatization is not to maximize profit but to decrease poverty, which no doubt causes this baffled kid to drop his jaw to the floor. i mean, you don't hear that kind of nonsense this side of goebbels. maybe he let his time at the educationally superior catholic university seep a little bit of that christian exceptionalism into his brain, there. yikes. i'm old enough to remember a time when this was a debate; this kid no doubt just laughed at him for openly propagandizing.

....the point being that this guy isn't honest, and his charts are not honest, and he destroys any pretense to it at the end.

but, let's put that aside.

what the economist doesn't and can't understand through the filter of it's training is that people don't base their views on the value of the economy they interact with and live within strictly, or even moderately, on accumulation. rather, we have these ideas about quality of life and they get in the way of good jobs and rising gdp in terms of understanding how we want to live, how we want to exist. some people may tell you that what happened in chile was about student loan debt, but i've been in student protests in quebec and i know that what it's really about is a rejection of the world that the school to corporation pipeline really creates. it's not just about wealth generation, it's about how people spend their time; it's not just about access to health care in some abstract sense, but about how you have to spend your life gaining access to that care.

in years past, we had systems of social control to brainwash us into romanticizing the concept of work. catholicism was one; calvinism was even worse. these systems taught us that the meaning we seek is not outside of the workplace, but within it, either via some kind of rewards system of cosmic air miles points or via some concept of individual identity. but, we've seen that fall apart everywhere, and exposed as the nonsense that it really is.

so, if we are to be elitists from the catholic university, maybe we might argue that the system of control has withered away, and all of these kids are just lost souls that need guidance. sending them to school just took away their chains. what good is that, really?

but, if we are to be a little more enlightened than the faculty at the catholic university, maybe we might realize that the kids are right - that the world we live in is empty, and that what all of this book learning gave them was a better sense of self-recognition. maybe these kids saw themselves in the mirror and realized their existences were futile. and, maybe they decided they wanted something more than a desk job, something more than a pay check - and realized the foundational principles of the economy would need to change in order to facilitate it.

or, you can send your kids to oxford and get them to listen to superior rubbish like this.

up to you.