Between 2007 and 2010, / 8.8 million people lost their jobs. // The bank also had to then be bailed out / by the US taxpayer / for the sum of 10 billion dollars. // We didn't hear the taxpayers bragging / that they were value creators, / but obviously, / having bailed out one of the biggest value-creating productive companies, / perhaps they should have. // What I want to do next is / kind of ask ourselves how we lost our way, / how it could be, actually, / that a statement like that could almost go unnoticed, / because it wasn't an after-dinner joke; / it was said very seriously. // So what I want to do is / bring you back 300 years in economic thinking, / when, actually, / the term was contested. // It doesn't mean that they were right or wrong, / but you couldn't just call yourself a value creator, / a wealth creator. // There was a lot of debate / within the economics profession. // And what I want to argue is, / we've kind of lost our way, / and that has actually allowed this term, "wealth creation" and "value," / to become quite weak and lazy / and also easily captured. // OK? // So let's start -- I hate to break it to you -- / 300 years ago. // Now, what was interesting 300 years ago is / the society was still an agricultural type of society. // So it's not surprising / that the economists of the time, / who were called the Physiocrats, / actually put the center of their attention to farm labor. // When they said, "Where does value come from?" / they looked at farming. // And they produced what I think was probably / the world's first spreadsheet, / called the "Tableau Économique," / and this was done by François Quesnay, / one of the leaders of this movement. // And it was very interesting, / because they didn't just say, "Farming is the source of value." // They then really worried about / what was happening to that value / when it was produced. // What the Tableau Économique does -- and I've tried to make it a bit simpler here for you -- / is it broke down the classes in society into three. // The farmers, creating value, / were called the "productive class." // Then others who were just moving some of this value around, / but it was useful, / it was necessary, / these were the merchants; / they were called the "proprietors." // And then there was another class / that was simply charging the farmers a fee for an existing asset, / the land, / and they called them the "sterile class." // Now, this is a really heavy-hitting word / if you think what it means: / that if too much of the resources are going to the landlords, / you're actually putting the reproduction potential of the system at risk. // And so all these little arrows there / were their way of simulating -- / again, spreadsheets and simulators, / these guys were really using big data -- / they were simulating what would actually happen under different scenarios / if the wealth actually wasn't reinvested back into production / to make that land more productive / and was actually being siphoned out in different ways, / or even if the proprietors were getting too much.