Daily Episode 238 - Do people even want change?

0:00Hey, Cory here. We've had an influx of new listeners. And so I just want to make sure that if you are new to the podcast, you don't just jump in and start listening to these daily episodes, which we've been doing. Please go back and listen to the first at least eight episodes. So you have an idea of what collapses, what it is that Cory is talking about. Also, if you've been with us for a while and you're enjoying the content, please join us on Patreon. We would love to see you there. There's a link as always in the description. It's been a little bit of a different week on the podcast this week. And that's okay. I like that. I think it's great to branch out every once in a while. I also felt like it would be weird to do three days of episodes along a current theme this week. And then do today's episode just completely back to normal talking about an article. So today's episode is going to continue with the theme of the week. Tomorrow we will have a regular Friday, Fashism episode. And next week we will probably go back to talking about the news, reading from articles and research and all of that.

1:01And perhaps we'll revisit this topic again in the future to be clear and to be honest, I have this desire to talk about this topic every day. I meant what I said yesterday regarding my wish to spend my time and attention on fighting for a better world, a more fair world, and a world that makes the most out of a collapse situation. I find joy and fulfillment in imagining the world the way that it could be in spite of the way that it is and knowing that the desired outcome may never come to pass. If I could give up my day job and spend my time on that, I think I'd do it in a heartbeat. But that's not what this podcast was made for. We're answering a different question here. We are educating in a different way here. But I leave room for it in the future. Perhaps the day will come in which I have more time and could do a separate. Podcast or separate piece on this topic. And if I did, it would start with the topic of today's episode, which is when imagining a better world, a better future, and you begin to consider what would have to happen to bring about such a change. I think the first thing that comes to mind is you have to have a certain amount of people, not just a majority, but an outright super majority of people who are sick of the status quo, who openly and outwardly want things to be.

2:25And in this, I think collapse provides a unique opportunity. And we're seeing that play out more and more every year across the world. And I know we're seeing it here locally in the United States. Now it's a double edged sword as things get worse across the world. And people become more desperate for change. They become more vulnerable to propaganda. They become more vulnerable to calls for tribalism, for the world. And so, propaganda tells people that it's anybody's fault, but those who are in power currently, whether from a political or an economic perspective. It's not the fault of the billionaires. No, no, it's the poor immigrant seeking a better life. It's the person of a different nationality or gender.

3:25Or sexuality. It's the person on the other side of the political aisle. That person that likes all of the things that you don't. And that is unfortunately how much of the world behaves today because they're being told by those in power to feel that way. Now, the good news is, like I said, people want change. And I want to take a minute to look at some of the numbers because the numbers are big and they're rising. The Pew Research Center did a study in 2025 asking people about their support for changing the current economic system. This was done across 36 different countries in which they were simply asked about their support for changing the economic system. The paper says that in most of the countries they surveyed, there is widespread support for changing the economic system. In fact, in all but three nations, the majority say the economic system in their country needs major changes or complete reform. There is a table that shows the 36 countries that were asked this question. And it highlights the percentage of those who wanted a complete reform versus major changes.

4:32Like they said in these 36 countries, 33 of them had at least a majority saying they wanted either complete reform or major changes with a minority saying that their economic system needed minor changes or no changes at all. Now, what's striking here is when you look at the median answer across these 36 countries showed 79% of all respondents said they thought at least major changes if not complete reform were needed. Four out of five people, another 16% said that said that minor changes were needed and only 3% of respondents said that there were no changes needed at all. Only in the Netherlands, Singapore and Sweden do fewer than half of adults want significant economic changes. And this 80% that I just told you about the 79% that includes the numbers from the outliers, Singapore, Netherlands and Sweden. And I haven't done the math here, but I'm sure if you removed them, the median would be much higher, potentially somewhere between 82 and 85%.

5:36But people want change in our economic system. It's the powers that be that keep that from happening. Now, it was not asked here what changes it wasn't asked which economic system we should take on. And that's not the question that I'm here to answer right now. But the fact that people want change is an opportunity. Another Pew Research Center paper says that Americans stand out internationally for their pessimism about the nation's political system. This paper says that people in higher income countries are generally more likely to say their nation's political system needs only minor or no changes according to recent Pew Research Center surveys. Conversely, people in middle income countries are more likely to say their political system needs major changes or complete reform. The United States, however, is a notable exception to this pattern despite having the highest GDP per capita of any of our surveyed countries. 77% of Americans say the nation's political system needs major changes or complete reform. So first, before getting into the US part of the equation here, I'll know that it says here that the higher income countries generally are more likely to say their nation's system needs only minor or no changes, where lower income or medium income countries say that bigger changes are needed.

6:48That makes sense. If you're doing well financially, if economically you feel like you're doing okay, you would be less likely to say that changes were necessary on average. Right? That's definitely not going to be true of everyone. This again, in my opinion, provides another opportunity in collapse because overall the share of people who are doing well is going to decrease. The wealthy get wealthier and by a lot while the middle class disappears, right? You're creating more people who are unhappy with the system and who want change. The wealthier, the wealthy are the more they can consolidate power along with that wealth, but that doesn't mean that that's unbreakable. In so many cases, power is really only wielded if that authority is given by the people. All right, let's talk about the US being a notable exception here. There's a chart. It's plotted with each country as a point on the graph on the Y axis. It's the percentage of people who say that major changes or complete reform are needed.

7:48And on the X axis is the GDPR per capita. And so it starts up in the top left, the lower the income of the country, the lower the GDP, the higher their percentage of people saying changes necessary. And it goes down in a pretty steady line. As the nations get wealthier, they're less likely to say that changes are needed. Though again, the vast majority still sit in the majority of people saying that changes are needed. But then there's the US. And while we're the furthest right on the chart because our GDP is the highest, we also sit unusually high on the percentage. And I just think it's a great chart for showing how that that outlier relationship works. The article says, while most Americans think major changes to the political system are necessary, many don't have much faith that these changes can happen. Around half of Americans, 49% could be referred to as pessimistic reformers. People who say the political system needs major changes, but are not confident it can happen.

8:48The other half of Americans are divided. 27% think the system needs major changes and are confident it can happen, optimistic reformers. While 23% think the system needs no changes or only minor changes, status quo supporters. The US is not the only country where pessimistic reformers make up the largest segment of the population. Across 25 countries we surveyed in 2025, the US is among nine nations where this is the case. The others are Greece, France, Spain, Italy, South Korea, Japan, Turkey and Poland. Where are optimistic reformers common? Six of the countries we surveyed in 2025, optimistic reformers account for the largest share. That was India, Kenya, South Africa, Indonesia, Hungary and Argentina. Status quo supporters were most common in Sweden, Netherlands, Australia, Canada and Germany. Now I've actually pulled up like 10 different surveys here. The one we just talked about was regarding economic systems, but I've pulled up surveys for a bunch of different questions around things that sit outside of economics as well.

9:54For example, the APNORC, this is titled America at 250, the American Dream, only about one third of Americans believe the American Dream work hard and you'll get ahead still holds true. Half say it used to be true, but is no longer true at this time. Among 18 to 29 year olds, only 22% say the American Dream still holds true. Or this one from Pew, majorities of Americans say key financial milestones are harder for today's young adults to reach. 87% of people in that survey said that buying a home is harder for young people today than it was for their parents generation. 82% said paying for college is harder, 82% say saving for the future is harder, and 80% say covering basic expenses is harder. And what's interesting is much of that has deteriorated since 2021 sharply. The numbers don't gradually decrease over time, they have fallen through the floor. There was a Harvard youth poll done in 2026, earlier this year in the spring, get this, among Americans 18 to 29 years old, only 13% say the country is headed in the right direction, and only 15% trust the federal government to do the right thing all or most of the time.

11:09That's the lowest level in the polls 25 plus year history. Harvard talks about it as a loss of perceived agency, essentially that young people believe that what they do will no longer change or shape what happens next. All right, now if we want to talk a little bit about economic systems, there was another Harvard youth poll in the fall of 2025 support for capitalism fell to 39 down from 45% in 2020, so an additional 6% decrease over five years. However, support for socialism was only 21%, which basically means that there are a lot of people who are saying the current system isn't working, but there's not necessarily any strict agreement on what needs to replace it. Gallup did a poll at the end of 2025 that found that 74% of people were dissatisfied with the way things were going in the United States, only 24% were satisfied. Another poll from Common Sense Media in 2025 found that parents are worried that their children won't have the opportunities that they had.

12:09All right, not going to read through the mall for the sake of time, but the trend here is clear, in almost every situation we just talked about, the numbers are like 80% plus of people who are dissatisfied with the fact that the numbers are not going to be the same. People who are dissatisfied, who are saying that things need to change, that things are harder today than they used to be, that were headed in the wrong direction. And those numbers are climbing rapidly as collapse advances, even barring a full-on catastrophe, right, in which the whole system shuts down. As things get worse, people get unhappy. As they watch the wealthy hoard all of the money, all of the power to our detriment, people get unhappy. The question that remains is when people are fed up enough, what is the change that comes? What replaces the current system? Now, it could be much worse, right, depending on how that plays out, depending on if those in power can successfully be removed and if they are who replaces them, and what is the decision-making process for what comes next, and how successful is the rollout of those new desires?

13:17There's so much that can happen. And just like the people's desire for change can lead to better things, it can lead to worse things too. That may be why we see ourselves falling further into authoritarianism, into more war, not less, into more emissions, not less. And I think part of the problem is people not being able to imagine what the future could be, not seeing through the lies and the propaganda to work together towards something genuinely better. I think in reality, most people want good things, and they could agree on what they want. In the US, you can ask a Democrat, and you can ask a Republican if they care about the well-being of their family in the future, and they'll tell you yes, and that that's what they're fighting for politically. They will both tell you that they want to be well economically, that they want to have a good standard of living, that they desire security and safety. They'll tell you that they care about their neighbors, about other people. I think the average person does feel that way, and genuinely. They've just been lied to about what it takes to achieve that.

14:21Well, some polls were done, that I find very interesting on this topic. A 2025 study in the Lancet Planetary Health by Dario, Kurpan, Frederick Basso, Jason Hickel, and George O'S Callis did a poll experiment in the US and the UK. What they did in this was describe the underlying proposal of degrowth, essentially reducing environmentally harmful production in wealthy countries while prioritizing human well-being, meeting needs and reducing inequality, and compared reactions to the proposal of just using the word degrowth. So they thought if we can use various labels, how will people respond to these policy change ideas? In the US, 73% of people supported the degrowth proposal when it was explained without the degrowth label in one experiment. Another experiment, a replication, found 72% support. When people were only shown the word degrowth, just 28 supported it in one experiment and 13% in another.

15:23When the researchers actually explained the proposal and called it degrowth, support rebounded to 68%. Another proposal labeled well-being economy rather than degrowth received 72% support. So, halting there for a second, the word degrowth people don't like, because we have been trained on, we've been raised and taught that growth is important. And degrowth may make it sound like to some people that everything about their life must decrease or degrow. And I think in true degrowth there are limits to that that are fascinating to explore, but when people were essentially approached with the idea of what much of the degrowth movement stands for, they loved it. 73% and 72% in separate studies. Now, my point here is not to say that the degrowth movement as it is explained explicitly is the right choice. There are, when you look into it, so many questions, so many uncertainties, perhaps a lack of empirical data about how exactly it would function and if it would function correctly, but the ideas behind it are important and people want them.

16:31You might think, if you thought about degrowth before, you might have this idea that like, oh yeah, if people actually knew what degrowth was and all that only 10% or 15% of people would think it's a good idea. No, almost three out of four like the idea, a separate 2025 paper, this one in ecological economics did a study of 1,012 Americans and their thoughts are attitudes toward four policies associated with degrowth. So one of them was reduced working time, there was fossil fuel production limits, universal basic services and advertising restrictions in this one to support for all four was significant with particularly strong preferences for fossil fuel restrictions and universal healthcare. Well, mainly Americans want to work less, this was from a survey in 2024 work in America, 79% of American workers said they would be happier working four days a week, 81% believe they could be just as effective working four days instead of five, 67% believed a four day work week would become normal within their lifetime.

17:40And so this is asking the question within the post growth or degrowth movement within the well-being economy movement of essentially saying what if productivity gains by a society were converted into additional time and leisure rather than into more consumption because as it stands right now if productivity goes up, you work the same number of hours, that money that gain just goes into growth and makes somebody else richer. Maybe it makes you richer, it means that more things can be purchased, produced, more things can go to waste. When the question that's being asked here is what if society gets more efficient or more productive at something and instead of putting that into more growth, we put that into working less, would you like that? And these are the answers right, 79, 81% of people in different studies saying yes, this is the way. Alright, I think I've got my point across. Not only are people unhappy with the system as it is in a vast super majority, 79, 80% plus globally, but roughly that same number of people, 70, 75% of people, like the ideas that degrowth provide.

18:52So why are we not talking about it more? Is the problem, as is shown in some of these studies just using the word degrowth, do we need to just pick out individual policies and push for those policies to come to pass? The powers that be are not okay with this idea, they want you to continue to labor so that your productivity can make them wealthier and make them more powerful. The vast majority of people would prefer that productivity go towards them having a less stressful, more secure, more leisurely life, one in which they can pursue the things that interest them, which is the very nature of how I started this podcast talking about how I wish I could step away from the stresses of a full time job to talk about the things that interest me. And it's circular and that the very thing that interests me is the one that would allow me to do just that as I'm ending this topic this week, I just want to end it on this note that while this type of change seems so far away, and we don't necessarily have to be the change optimists that it talked about earlier in the episode, I do think we are doing ourselves a disservice by being change pessimists.

20:03And I know that I have been that I am cynical in so many ways of the likelihood of change occurring, but I hope that it doesn't stop us from talking about it, from having conversations with friends about the merits of some of these policies, and there are so many policies that could take us in the right direction. It's not likely to all come at once, even in the best case of scenarios. It's a shift towards policies that put people first, and I think the first step here is embracing this idea that people do want it. And the more we talk about it and the more people realize that other people want it, the less pessimistic perhaps they'll be about the possibility of those changes occurring, the more likely they may be to vote in that direction or the more options they may find themselves having to vote in that direction, because I guarantee you if 80% of people stood up and loudly and persistent. And recently declared what it is they wanted and that they weren't going to back down until they got it, that movement would happen in that direction.

21:05We think that because we're born into capitalism, we think that because we're born into exponential growth, that it's the only thing that we can accomplish. We think that because somebody's in power today, they will always be in power and they will always make the decisions. We have to be willing to try to shift the momentum in the other direction. All right, enough of my ranting on the topic. Tomorrow we'll get back to another Friday episode this week in fascism. Next week we'll carry on as normal. Again, apologize if this hasn't been your cup of tea, but I appreciate you letting me go off for a couple of days. All right, thanks for being here. See you tomorrow. Hey, Corey here. If you are listening to the back catalog of breaking down collapse, thank you. Those episodes are so vital. They're so important. I also wanted to let you know that I am now doing daily episodes. Yes, that's right. Here on the podcast, daily episodes. If you are enjoying the back catalog, great. Please also feel free to zoom forward to the most recent episodes. Catch us daily. They are quick little episodes. I think you'll enjoy them. Thanks.