ANAND GIRIDHARADAS: Wealthy corporations and
people love to ask the question: What can
I do?
What should we do?
What can we start?
What program could we launch?
I would say to the billionaire change agents
and corporate social responsibility departments
of our country: Ask not what you can do for
your country.
Ask what you’ve already done to your country.
TIMOTHY SNYDER: The United States is a country
which is among the least equal in the world.
According to Credit Suisse, which is a Swiss
bank and not some kind of crazy left-wing
organization, we are second in the world in
wealth inequality after the Russian Federation.
In the United States since the 1980s, basically
90 percent of the American population has
seen no improvement in either wealth or income.
Almost all of the improvement in wealth and
income has been in the top ten percent and
most of that’s been in the top one percent
and most of that has been in the top 0.1 percent
and most of that has been in the top 0.01
percent, which means that not only are people
not moving forward objectively but the way
they experience the world—and this is very
powerful—is that other people are on top.
JOHN FULLERTON: Living systems have what are
called healthy hierarchies—so it’s not
that hierarchy is bad.
It’s that hierarchy where the top extracts
from below is definitely bad and unsustainable.
So, take the lion in the forest or in the
jungle.
The lion is at the top of the food chain,
but the lion sits around sleeping most of
the day rather than eating and killing all
day.
And the lion, therefore, serves a very healthy
hierarchical purpose in the food chain keeping
the herd, keeping the balance between smaller
animals and larger animals.
But when the king of the jungle decides to
extract as much as possible for its own benefit,
you have a very unhealthy system.
And unfortunately, that pretty well describes
how the modern capitalist system works, where
there are benefits of scale; the bigger get
bigger, they get more powerful, they get more
political influence.
But their intention is to maximize shareholder
value because that’s what we do.
So, the cycle of growing inequality is sort
of locked into the system design.
GIRIDHARADAS: Before you want to start something
of your own—a little private, unaccountable
venture—do an audit.
What do you pay people?
Do you pay people enough?
Do you use subcontractors to avoid responsibility
for those workers?
Do you pay benefits?
When do your benefits kick in?
What do you lobby for in Washington?
Do you lobby for things that make everybody
have a better life in America or do you lobby
against social policies that would cost you
something?
What’s your tax avoidance situation?
Do you happen to be this earnest company that
wants to change the world?
I mean, is this company paying its full measure
of taxes?
Does it use tax havens?
Does it do the double Dutch with an Irish
sandwich tax maneuver?
Does it send money to the Cayman Islands and
then back and do all this complex routing?
ALISSA QUART: Now to be middle class, you
might not be able to have a summer holiday.
You might not be able to own your home.
You certainly wouldn’t have two cars.
What interests me is also we had this idea
of the middle class as a solid thing and now
it’s a shaky thing.
We also had this idea in the middle of the
twentieth century of it as a humdrum, boring
thing that we wanted to escape, kind of like
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates.
And now it’s like everyone just wants to
get into it, into the dream, the American
Dream of the middle class that’s now so
unstable.
One of the things that happened was unions
weakened.
It used to be that 30 percent of employees
were in unions in the ’60s and now it’s
seven percent in the private sector.
And that’s a pretty huge drop-off.
And at the same time, you’re seeing a lot
of the workforce become gigified or turn into
freelance contingent, et cetera.
Not stable, not with healthcare, not with
a promise of security and long-term employment.
There are other reasons why the middle class
has been under siege.
One is the concentration of wealth.
You see the rise of the one percent, the rise
of the wealthiest.
Since 1997, the income of the top one percent
has grown 20 times the rest of us.
They’re an ownership class so they tend
to own many of the corporations that are,
say, creating the Uber economy or hiring people
to drive part time or the companies which
employ people at hours which mean that they
can’t take care of their children—hours
in the middle of the night or odd hours in
the early morning.
SNYDER: One of the fundamental problems with
our American, right-wing politics of inevitability
is that it generates income and wealth inequality
and it explains away income and wealth inequality.
And so, you get this cycle where, objectively,
people are less and less well off and subjectively
we keep telling ourselves this is somehow
okay because in the grand scheme of things
this is somehow necessary.
Individuals and families no longer think ‘I’ve
got a bright future.’
They no longer believe—and this is something
Mr. Trump got right even if he has no solution
and he’s making things worse on purpose—they
no longer believe in the American Dream.
And they’re correct not to do so.
If you were born in 1940, your chances of
doing better than your parents were about
90 percent.
If you were born in 1980 your chances are
about one in two and it keeps going down.
So, wealth inequality means the lack of social
advance, means a totally different horizon—it
means that you see life in a completely different
way.
You stop thinking time is an arrow which is
moving forward to something better and you
start thinking hmm, maybe the good old days
were better.
Maybe we have to make America great again
and you get caught in these nostalgic loops.
You start thinking it can’t be my fault
that I’m not doing better, so whose fault
is it?
And then the clever politicians instead of
providing policy for you provide enemies for
you.
They provide language for you with which you
can explain why you’re not doing so well.
They blame the other, whether it’s the Chinese
or the Muslims or the Jews or the blacks or
the immigrants and that allows you to think
okay, time is a cycle, things used to be better
but other people have come and they’ve taken
things away from me.
That’s how the politics of inevitability
becomes the politics of eternity.
Wealth inequality, income inequality, is one
of the major channels by which that happens.
GIRIDHARADAS: If you’re telling me that
there are companies that do none of this stuff,
that pay people well, that don’t dump externalities
into the economy, that don’t cause social
problems.
If there are such companies that exist, yeah,
then once you’ve taken care of all that,
great, doing some projects to help people
is great.
But I haven’t found very many such companies
and more often than not when companies do
a lot of CSR it’s because they understand
that they’re not on the right side of justice
in their day operations, so they want to do
virtue as a side hustle.
And the problem is a lot of these companies
tend to create harm in billions and then do
good in the millions.
And you don’t need to be a mathematician
to know that we’re the losers from that
bargain.
And you look at the B Corp movement, there’s
a lot of companies that actually have an interest
in trying to invent a new kind of company
that is not predatory.
There is, in the B Corp movement, a certification
process for those companies now.
The challenges of them is that it’s a great
thing but it’s fundamentally voluntary and
what this does is it means that if you’re
an already good, virtuous company you may
be motivated to get into this club.
But if you’re Exxon or Pepsi you’re not
going to be in this club.
One of the things I’d like to see is how
can we actually use the power of public policy
to get more companies to sign up to simply
not dump harm, social harm, into our society
whether that takes the form of toxic sludge
or obese children or workers with unpredictable
hours and income.
QUART: You know the job numbers may look like
they’re up but, first of all, they often
speak to how many jobs people are having,
multiple jobs, which is not a great state
of affairs for a lot of people.
People now have more jobs.
Each person has more jobs than they did in
2016, like individuals.
It’s up by two percent or something like
that so it’s substantial.
You can be looking at these job announcements
and you could be thinking: What’s wrong
with me?
Why can’t I figure it out?
Why can’t I get that second or third gig?
But the point is why should we have to have
all these side hustles?
Why should we have to have second acts when
we’re 42?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Traditionally, technology
has moved us from low-value occupations into
higher value occupations.
So, while we always decry the loss of jobs,
we usually create new jobs which are more
fulfilling and less taxing and therefore those
who have cried wolf when they’ve seen technology
laying waste to the previous occupations,
those people have usually just been wrong.
But the problem with software is that software
spends most of its time in loops.
Almost all code can be broken into two kinds
of code: Code that runs once and never repeats
and code that loops over and over and over.
Unfortunately, what jobs are is usually some
form of a loop where somebody goes to work
and does some version of whatever it is they’ve
been trained to do every day.
Now, the danger of that is that what we didn’t
realize is that our technical training for
occupations maneuvers the entire population
into the crosshairs of software.
It’s not just a question in this case of
being moved from lower value repetitive behaviors
into higher ones, but the problem is that
all repetitive behaviors are in the crosshairs
of software.
So, I think it’s really important to understand
that where we are is that we may need a hybrid
model in the future which is paradoxically
more capitalistic than our capitalism of today
and perhaps even more socialistic than our
communism of yesteryear because so many souls
will require respect and hope and freedom
and choice who may not be able to defend themselves
in the market as our machines and our software
gets better and better.
And this is one of the reasons why something
like universal basic income comes out of a
place fiercely capitalistic like Silicon Valley,
because despite the fact that many view the
technologists as mercenary megalomaniacs—in
fact, these are the folks who are closest
to seeing the destruction that their work
may visit upon the population and I don’t
know I think of any 9-, 10- or 11-figure individual
at the moment that I’m familiar with who
isn’t worrying about what we’re going
to do to take care of those who may not be
able to meet their expectations with training
and jobs as in previous models, whether it’s
truck and car driving as one of the largest
employers of working-age men threatened by
self-driving vehicles or any of the other
examples.
For example, computers that are capable of
writing sports stories from the scores alone.
So, in all of these cases, I think the technology
is actually forcing those who are most familiar
with it to become most compassionate and whether
or not we are going to leaven our capitalism
with some communism or start from some sort
of socialist ideal and realize that if we
don’t find a way to grow our pie very aggressively
with the tiny number of individuals who are
capable of taking over operations of great
complexity, I think that we are going to have
some kind of a hybrid system.
I wish I could tell you what it was going
to look like, but the fact is nobody knows.
WENDELL PIERCE: We have gotten away from the
idea of true capitalism.
Now we have people who claim to be capitalists
saying: I want to restrict our resources.
That we have a finite amount of resources,
so I’ve got to make sure only my kids get
opportunities at school, and we’re only
going to have access to capital, that my tax
rates are going to be here at the expense
of other folks.
And that’s actually not true capitalism.
We grew as a country when people said hey,
listen, it’s important that everyone has
access to a good education.
It’s something of great importance because
that means the more people that are educated,
the more ideas, the more growth we’re going
to have and that’s what capitalism is based
on.
And I go back to art, music.
It’s what jazz is all about.
It’s an American aesthetic.
It’s freedom within form.
Yes, there’s confinement and restriction
and technical proficiency, but the idea of
the jazz solo as improvisation is a finite
amount of notes with an infinite amount of
combinations.
And so that’s what capitalism is.
There’s ultimately an infinite amount of
possibilities with this finite group of people.
But the more people that are in the mix, the
more ideas are going to come about which produces
growth.
YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Brute power, determining
in the spoils.
Civilization was all about moving away from
a situation where brute strength and power
determined the quality of life of the members
of our species.
That was the theory.
To a very large extent, we moved in that direction
and this is something we should be very proud
of.
But we’re very, very far away from having
created social relations between us—a legal
framework, a way of organizing economic life—that
takes power out of the equation of civilization.
Economic surplus is essential for humanity
to develop.
If we don’t have an economic surplus, we
cannot grow, not just physically but also
spiritually.
We cannot create new literature, we cannot
create new film, we cannot create new theater.
We need to have a surplus in order to be able
to invest it in all those activities that
make human life richer.
But the question is who controls the surplus?
And, of course, in societies that are very
asymmetrical in terms of who owns the means
of production, whether we are talking about
slave-owning societies where there’s a few
slave owners, or feudalism, or capitalism
where you’ve got 0.1 percent owning most
of the productive abilities or machinery and
factors of production in society.
They can, in order to preserve their property
rights over those means of production, they
use debt, they use political power, and they
use the monopoly position that their property
rights afford them in order to skew the whole
process of creativity of production in a manner
that, for instance, in the end, in the case
of the media world we have 50 channels of
rubbish to watch from.
We have industries that are dedicated to producing
things that we neither need nor want, destroying
the planet in the process.
We have billions of people working like headless
chickens, driving themselves into depression
and going home and crying themselves to sleep
at night if they have a job, or consuming
antidepressants and becoming obese and seeing
shrinks if they don’t have a job.
In the end, we have a joyless economy.
Even those who are extremely powerful, in
theory, the haves of the world, are increasingly
feeling insecure.
They have to live in gated communities because
they fear all the have-nots out there that
envy their wealth.
In the end, we have developed fantastic means
of escaping need and escaping want which we
are not putting to good use because, in the
end, we are developing new forms of depravity
and deprivation and universalized depression,
psychological depression, which is incongruent
with our fantastic advances at the technological
level.
GIRIDHARADAS: I think what is undeniable in
this country is that for 30 or 40 years many
people on the left and right have felt that
things were not going right, that the country
wasn’t working for them, that it felt rigged
to them, that it felt impossible to secure
the life that they were promised by this country
and to give their children something better
than they had.
And all that while there was a lot of richsplaining
to those people by the American elite that
‘No, no, no.
Things are great.
Trade is good.
Trade’s great.
It’ll be perfect.
It’s going to lift everybody up.
Globalization, perfect.
It’s great.
Look, there’s a couple of bumps but no worries.
And the aggregate all will be well.’
I mean, as though anybody lives in the aggregate.
‘Tech.
Don’t worry.
Don’t worry about the fact that everything
got automated and your jobs all went to Taiwan.
Don’t worry about it.
We’ll be better off on the whole.’
And there was just a lot of this kind of richsplaining.
I grew up and I remember studying this stuff
in college when I took economics classes.
I went to the University of Michigan.
I was sitting in Michigan in Econ 101 and
I remember getting this lecture on how all
this stuff was for the good and we would be
better off.
And right around us, all around us in Michigan
in 1999 the state was falling apart.
These long tectonic shifts were basically
like—work was disappearing and trade was
not benefitting most people and globalization
was not a walk in the park and aggregate effects
were not really of any comfort to anybody.
And how was it possible at the University
of Michigan in 1999 with all of that evidence
all around us that we could sit in an intellectual
cocoon and explain to ourselves that rising
tides lift all boats, essentially.
There is a way in which American elites, and
this is not just a couple of greedy hedge
fund billionaires, the American intelligentsia
also has been complicit in a false story.
Rich people and wealthy corporations spent
a generation waging a war on government, defunding
government, allowing social problems to fester
and allowing their own profits to soar.
And then with government weakened, social
problems multiplying and their own pockets
full, they reinvent themselves as the new
replacement of government which is instead
of trickle-down economics we now have trickle-down
change.
Let them make their fortune and then they’ll
just throw some social change down from the
mountain.
Well, we have to decide in America if that’s
the kind of change we want.
But what I do know is if you project that
kind of change backwards throughout time,
we wouldn’t have created most of the change
that we all take for granted today.
There would, frankly, have been no New Deal.
There would be no modern American economy
if we had depending on the powerful to throw
down scraps.
Many of the most important things in American
life had to be taken from the powerful and
given to the many.
It’s time that we reclaim that heritage
again.
