Richard Wolff on Capitalism, Trump's Tariffs, and a Dying Empire

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The author and economist explains why capitalism doesn’t make life better, why Trump is slapping tariffs on everyone, and how to understand money and power.

filed 27 June 2025 in Interviews


Professor Richard Wolff is the host of the weekly program Economic Update, co-founder of Democracy at Work, and the author of numerous books including Understanding Marxism, Understanding Socialism, Capitalism Hits the Fan, and The Sickness Is the System.

He joins Current Affairs to explain how economics is deliberately taught in a way that confuses people and obscures the realities of power and exploitation. He dismantles the myth that capitalism delivers prosperity, showing instead how it generates instability, inequality, and crisis. Wolff also offers a sober analysis of America’s imperial decline, critiques Trump’s economic agenda, and exposes the economic lies behind anti-immigrant rhetoric.



Nathan J. Robinson
Many of your books have the word “understanding” in the title. You started as an academic economist, but you have in recent years dedicated yourself to helping ordinary people understand the often confusing and mysterious forces—the economic forces—that shape their lives. I wondered if we could perhaps start with some of what you are trying to get people to understand, some broad themes that come out. I’m sure you respect a lot of what ordinary workers perceive about the economy that perhaps many economists don’t perceive, but there has to be a great deal that ordinary people don’t understand about the economic world. So when you take someone who doesn’t really understand economics, how are you trying to open their eyes? What are you trying to show them?

SNIP
Robinson
As I take what you’re saying to mean, it’s that economics should perhaps start with the real world and build its theories and its knowledge based on what actually happened. But Milton Friedman made a famous argument that it is not, in fact, necessarily what economics should be. He had a famous defense of the unreality of economic models, saying that our models might not fit reality, and you can point out all the ways in which humans do not act like the famous homo economicus. But that doesn’t matter, because what matters is, as in physics, whether the models make sufficiently accurate predictions. He argued that, essentially, it was a red herring, or not a knock on economics, to say that their theories or their models weren’t realistic. You had to show that they didn’t work as predictors of what would actually happen in the world.

Wolff
Yes, the problem with poor Milton Friedman was that every prediction ever made has sooner or later not worked. That’s the reality: the reality in physics, it’s the reality in economics. No one predicted the crash of 2008, or let’s put it this way: I’m sure there were a few folks out there somewhere who did, but the whole of global capitalism crashed in 2008 and 2009. No one predicted that. The vast majority of models which I study and teach from had no clue. They didn’t have any clue before 1929 either. They didn’t have a clue about the pandemic of 2020. They don’t have a clue about Mr. Trump and his tariffs. They don’t have a clue, and they know that they don’t have a clue, but you can’t get a university position if you say that. And I say that as a person who has a university position.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/richard-wolff

Bio: Richard David Wolff (born April 1, 1942) is an American Marxian economist known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis. He is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs at The New School. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City College of New York, University of Utah, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, and The Brecht Forum in New York City.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Wolff

For some, meet the boogeyman, but not mine, for me, he is exceedingly smart.

[CousinIT]

1. Richard Wolff is always worth a read or listen.

I've been reading, watching him for years.

Also:

Robert Reich
Paul Krugman

All economists.

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2. He is honest, Reich is another favorite of mine too..smart and honest.