Charles Hugh Smith has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 3 ratings. The most-rated is Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege.
Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic
Summary
America teeters on the precipice: our government is now captive to special interests and big money, twin cancers that threaten our democracy. This accelerating crisis is exacerbated by a toxic social media-fueled tribalism that has replaced “what do you think?” with “which side are you on?” Our crisis isn’t just political - it’s structural: as the pace of change explodes from gradual to non-linear, the organizations that dominate our economy - centralized corporations and government - become destined to fail. We see this failure in both the soaring inequality that has hollowed out the American Dream as well as in the rising tide of social and political disunity. To prevent the fall of our democratic republic, we must transform our economy and society from the ground up. As we enter a new era of rapid, unprecedented tumult, it is we citizens who will need to save our democracy. For our political and financial elites will cling to their centralized power, doing more of what’s failed, even as civil society unravels. All is not lost - yet. Our way forward starts with understanding the fatal flaws of our brittle, self-serving status quo and embracing this basic truth: better options are available if we’re willing to explore.To pathfind our way to a better destiny, we must create new localized structures optimized for resilience and adaptability - a flexible, decentralized, sustainable, democratic, opportunity-for-all nation.
©2018 Charles Hugh Smith (P)2018 SpokenTome.Media
Will You Be Richer or Poorer?
Summary
Will you be richer or poorer? What does the future hold for you - and for the world? Supposedly, we're all getting richer, but many of us feel we’re becoming poorer. Why? One reason is our economy doesn’t even measure many kinds of wealth and ignores many costs. Clearly, clean air and water, good health, and civil liberties are valuable, but you won’t find these on any balance sheet. Our system’s incentives are to maximize short-term financial profits, and everything else is treated as if it doesn’t exist.This audiobook tackles three critical questions: What if everything we don’t measure is worth more than financial wealth? Our obsession with financial capital is blinding us to a traumatizing global decline in other forms of wealth. Will artificial intelligence (AI) make us all richer? What if AI will only enrich the few who own the platforms and technology? Is our economic model dooming us? We’re told we all benefit as the super-rich get even richer, but what if the status quo only benefits those in power at the expense of everyone else - and our planet? Though we may not be politically powerful, we are far from powerless. This audiobook will help you identify the things that truly matter and accumulate capital that benefits you and your family - and our planet.
©2019 Charles Hugh Smith (P)2019 SpokenTome.Media
Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege
Summary
Inequality is rising globally, and rising inequality is destabilizing. A status quo of increasing inequality self-destructs. To avoid this fate, we must answer this question: Why is the gulf between the wealthy and everyone else widening so dramatically? The answer boils down to one word: privilege. What is privilege? There are many types of privilege, but they all share two characteristics: Privilege delivers benefits, wealth, and power that are unearned. Privilege is destabilizing for many reasons: The dead weight of privilege reduces productivity, generates perverse incentives, and fuels social injustice. Innovation and competition are threats to privileged monopolies and are therefore suppressed. The only way to foster sustainable stability is to eradicate privilege. We have a moral imperative to eradicate privilege: Privilege is immoral, as rising inequality is the only possible output of privilege. Privilege is exploitive, parasitic, predatory, and destructive to the society and economy and generates inequality by its very nature. Stripped to its essence, privilege is nothing but institutionalized racketeering. The only way to reverse rising inequality is to eradicate its source: privilege.
©2016 Charles Hugh Smith (P)2018 SpokenTome.Media
A Radically Beneficial World
Summary
What if we could hit the reset button on the way we create money, work, commerce, and community? This is not an idle question, for technology now enables us to hit that reset button and organize the creation of money, work, commerce, and community in new ways. If we could start from scratch, what would a new system look like? To answer that, we must understand why the current system is failing. The current system is based on five principles that are assumed to be true: Money created by banks trickles down to create work for all, technology creates more jobs than automation destroys, centralization is the solution to large-scale economic problems, expanding debt and consumption (i.e. growth) is the path to prosperity, and maximizing private gain organizes the economy to the benefit of all. All five have proven to be untrue. No wonder inequality is rising and opportunity is declining. Clearly, we need a new system that offers what the current system cannot: meaningful work for all. This book describes a global system that integrates money, work, commerce, and community in new ways, using social/technical innovations that are already in daily use. This book is the practical blueprint of a new system that offers opportunities for meaningful work and ownership of the sources of prosperity not just to a few, but to everyone. In this system, every individual has the power to change the system for the betterment of themselves and every other participant. Being at the top of the heap is no longer a prerequisite. Everyone who is powerless in the current arrangement is empowered in this new system. Empowered to not just better themselves and their family, but better their community and the larger community of planet Earth. A radically beneficial world beckons - what are we waiting for?
©2015 Charles Hugh Smith (P)2016 Thirteen Ventures Ltd. / SpokenTome.media
Money and Work Unchained
Summary
The current conventional-wisdom view of our soon-to-be future is rose-tinted: Automation will free millions of people from the drudgery of work, then by taxing the robots doing all the work, we can pay everyone universal basic income (UBI), enabling a life of leisure and artistic pursuit for all. The result: a future of universal happiness. But is this accurate? Is this what UBI is actually capable of doing? More importantly, is this what we want? And even more importantly: Will this “future” be our best future? Will it account for and manage the practicalities of work, money, and automation, given the limits of endless growth on a finite planet? Money and Work Unchained drags the now-popular concept of universal basic income (UBI) from the shadows of pundit blather into a harsh, illuminating light, and in doing so presents an entirely new view of the future that upends our conventional understanding of work and money. This audiobook lays out a practical pathway that realigns work, money, and human fulfillment into a sustainable system that sheds the inequalities and injustices of the status quo in favor of a human-scale way of living.
©2017 Charles Hugh Smith (P)2019 SpokenTome.Media