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Yeah, go ahead.
Rana Faroohar
Yeah, actually, that's good.
Mark Blyth
I mean, I'm huge on hydrogen. Who knew hydrogen was finally going to pay off? The E.U. put in I think 12 billion into hydrolyzers. Right. The Russians are all over this. They can use their pipelines to pipe blue hydrogen all the way to Western Europe.
Paul Jay
We need to do this again because the thing I'm about to say, in some ways, starts a whole new conversation. But Mark instigated this. This contradiction that you're talking about, how it makes sense for individual tech and finance companies to pursue their short term interests, but it's giving rise to chaos otherwise, which in normal times, I guess you could say there'd be time to evolve out of it. But given the time frame of climate, there's just no time. There needs to be something dramatic and radical. Quickly, if the U.S. descends into the worst-case scenario, I guess we're screwed. We will be hitting two and three degrees, and I guess we'll have to see what that looks like.
But I think what you're describing, Mark, is a kind of consciousness, a conclusion that's really growing and it expresses itself. The pandemic is showing the advantages to public health care system that's run by government. And certainly, if you compare, there is the pandemic results in Canada, to the United States, the public health care system has done significantly better than the American. It's pointing to socialistic solutions in everywhere you look.
I mean, that's really what the New Deal was. It strengthened socialistic characteristics of the capitalist economy. And of course, the right despises this because they think any strengthening of those characteristics wakes people up to the advantages of it, which means people may say, well, we don't just want public health care, we maybe we should have public banking, and that can go on from there. So I think we need to do another podcast about this. But Ranna, why don't why don't you conclude for us?
Rana Faroohar
Well, you know, I would just build on what you said. I do think that that's another podcast. In the way, I think of it is that, you know, there tend to be economic pendulum shifts every half-century or so, give or take. And we had a pendulum shift. If you look at the period leading up to the 1929 market crash in the 30s', that period in which the ten years or so before actually from the Spanish flu too 1929, OK, you had the Spanish flu first and then the market crash. We had a market crash and then the coronavirus. But that, that ten years was similar and that you had basically underlying problems that then central bankers papered over with debt. There was a huge asset bubble. There was a lot of technological change, shifting labor markets, demographic change, urbanization, lots of moving pieces. You eventually got a debt bubble, a market crash, the 30s'. And then from the 30s to the 70s, you had kind of another pendulum shift where there was a movement away from private sector power. There were certain curbs. You got the Glass-Steagall regulations. You know, these are sweeping generalizations, but they're basically true. And you had the public sector getting more power. You had labor getting more power. That was over, as we know, with the Reagan Thatcher revolution in the 80s. And then we go pendulum shifting, and we get Trump, perhaps as the apex of all of that.
I think we are now in another pendulum shift. And I think that many of the things that we've been talking about could come to pass. And even though there are some big challenges, some big dangers, I think that it's possible that with the right tweaks and incentives, we could get a shift finally between capital and labor. We could get a shift between the private sector and the public sector. We could see a conversation moving from consumers to more talk about citizens. I think all those things are possible, and we should come back and talk about it.
Paul Jay
And all those things are possible. If there isn't some kind of Trump coup, assuming Biden actually wins the election, which sounds like he's going to win the election. But whether that's, he, I should say it sounds like he's going to win the vote. It's not clear he's going to win the election. Anyway, thank you both very much, and let's schedule another one soon. Thank you, Rana.
Rana Faroohar
Thanks to you both. Mark, you're a rock star. Thanks. Thanks for having us, Paul.
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