A Conversation with Anand Giridharadas

evening good evening and welcome to the John F Kennedy jr. forum my name is Ryan Sears and I'm a sophomore studying government at the college and I'm a member of the JFK jr. forum committee here at the Institute of Politics before we begin please note the exit doors which are located on both the park side and the JFK street side of the forum in the event of an emergency walk to the exit closest to you and congregate in the JFK Park please also take a moment now to silence your cell phones you can join the conversation online with the hashtag JFK jr. forum live and interact with our student run instagram at JFK junior forum for behind-the-scenes highlights so please take your seats now and join me in welcoming our guests and Institute of Politics director Marc Kieran thank you good evening everyone and welcome to the JFK junior forum we're delighted to have such a great group here tonight for the form and we warmly welcome you here we feel very fortunate to have an Angora Dada's here to reflect on his new book that I know many of us have looked at in read and at an important time when many of the issues that he unpacks in his work from political analysis to social commentary to do your work reflecting on philanthropy the proper social and political implications and ethical implications to it so we warmly welcome you to the forum we're fortunate that our colleague DT Kumar from the Belfer Center executive director will be in conversation with an on and their BIOS are before you so I think because we want to jump right into this conversation I will not rehearse any of their important respective background other than to thank you all for coming we'll gather again at the Forum on Thursday where author and journalist Tatiana schlossberg will be in conversation on topic of her new book everyday environmentalism with IOP resident fellow Bob Cohen the former president of Atlantic so join us back here on Thursday but I turn it now over to Aditi for the forum welcome thank you thank you thanks mark thank you to all of you for being here and thank you anand for being here i guess it's no surprise to you that a lot of people at the Kennedy School really enjoyed reading your book when there's take all and a lot of us think that these are exactly the types of ideas that we should be discussing here so appreciate you making the time to engage with us so I'm just gonna I'm going to jump right in I wanted to ask you about one of your tweets about this away about this event so you said I think I should mix things up at Harvard tomorrow and thank all the people who have never donated to Harvard because those are some truly honorable people so I guess I guess I'll start with that you can you can do that you can start with that and then you know tell us what are some of the ideas that you presented in your book what are some of the problems you identified and how do you see Harvard and our donors contributing to those problems I'm excited actually to be in the only room thank you all for for coming at all Heights of this very weirdly shaped building it's very intimate it's actually great as you were saying this I was like looking over your head this may be the only space at Harvard not named after like a random rich guy who gave a lot of money so it's great to that you're sitting under John F Kennedy juniors name there they're gonna replace it with Epstein soon but it's it's nice that it's not that what's there for now I was like a delayed contract and so look I started to feel something and observe something some years ago that led to the book and I'll just share the kernel of that and and the observation was was really a double observation about American life in this very weird time when so many weird things were happening and the question on so many people's minds was why is this happening to quote the title of Chris Hayes's excellent podcast why is this happening as a very dominant not just question but emotion right now why is this happening and there's a lot in any given day to add fodder to the why is this happening from the most dangerous president American history to the more tectonic kind of fundamental shifts going on so I observed two things thing one was that whether you're in university like this or on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley or any number of other spaces in American life elite spaces you couldn't walk down the street without bumping into hyper privileged and in many cases incredibly rich people doing everything they could to change the world right and you know this at Harvard cuz you've educated like half of the worst ones and but but the good news is they all dropped that the worst the really worst ones dropped out so you can absolve yourself of some responsibility you dropped out right I did but exactly I know I know something Mark Zuckerberg and I have in common right and and it's everything from philanthropy the richest people giving away more money has that ever been given away in the history of the world you know that every company right which big company today does not actively engage in CSR I would say like the the worse the company the bigger the tab on the website is like community or like healthful solutions like if your company literally kills people in the business model not as an incidental by-product then that tab is going to be even bigger and it'll be like like life-giving solutions or something like that all these new tools and modalities again practice researched at places like this inspiring to a lot of people in places like this impact investing how many of you were involved in studying or thinking about impact investing social enterprise right how many you mess with that okay you know various tools that are promising us that some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world some of the wealthiest most powerful institutions in the world have the solutions to the problems of an age of plutocracy and they've checked and like as with Dick Cheney's vice-presidential search they looked around and the solution turns out to be them and we saw how that ended now the other half of the observation is that the very same for all of these heroic efforts and I'm not minimizing or saying these things don't exist they do exist they're real and lives are being saved them and it's not trivial what's happening in bucket number one bucket number two however is at the very same class of people but in many cases the actual same people right your esteemed owner David Rubenstein is a great example are at the same time rigging systems hoarding progress and monopolizing the future itself through the ways they pay people or don't pay people through the ways they prosecute their private equity buyouts through the way they avoid and evade taxes through the way they lobby for bottleservice public policy in Washington that's good for a private few but bad for most people and so when you have someone like your esteemed owner David Rubenstein or any number of others who is over here fighting for the carried interest loophole which we can use as a stand-in for any number of things people fight for that are morally unjustifiable that are part of making America work for a smaller and smaller group that are part and parcel of why the 1% now takes half of all new income why the 0.1% has more wealth from the bottom 80 and on and on when you take the people doing that and then you hold next to that fact the fact that these people are also doing all this nice stuff you got to ask yourself what's the connection between the nice stuff and the other stuff what's the connection between the rigging and the kindness what's the connection between the dror de neri elite helping of our time which is real and the extraordinary elite hoarding of our time which is real and in a nutshell what I think a lot of the conventional wisdom was when I studied here not in this school but but not far away and spent some time here what I felt was the conventional wisdom in in many of these quarters was that the relationship was a drop in the bucket yes we have all these problems of inequality and plutocracy maybe yes we're in a second Gilded Age but the helping was on the case if only we had three Mark Zuckerberg instead of one if only the effective altruism movement could teach people like that to give their money away with more effectiveness if only Chinese billionaires donated at the same fraction that American billionaires do if only if only if only it's the helping can work if impact investing could really get to scale how often do you hear these kinds of if onlys and I became curious about a second equal opposite possibility that perhaps it is the extraordinary elite generosity of our time that upholds a system of extraordinary elite hoarding that frankly operates on a much vaster scale because it operates through things like the tax code through a regulation through policies that affect us all and what if this do-gooding of all the kinds we talked about is just enough to preserve a form of manic hyper capitalism that is grinding most people down that makes it impossible for most people to live a decent life what if they're making a difference is the wingman really of making a killing what if the changing of the world is the wingman of keeping your world as a plutocrat the same and not paying at 3% wealth tax what if all the generosity is the wingman of systems of injustice and although you may perceive me to be a highly opinionated person I am also a reporter and so before I had these opinions I had questions and I went on a journey of reporting this for a few years and spent time in this world and you know this is something that I don't do on Twitter and many of us don't do in general which is actually like go talk to the people you disagree with the problems with and that's what I did for three years I spent time people in this world in the foundation world I wanted to think about who is the greatest best friend of plutocrats everywhere so I spent time with Bill Clinton some people have you talked about gaydar some people have a you know like I don't know what gaydar is for finding shady rich people but Bill Clinton has that and spend time with him and really had like an hour argument with him and but but but tried to get these places with people and the conclusion I came to in the end was that we're living in this time in which most people agree we need transformational reform and we're not getting transformational reform because we have out sourced the job of changing the world to the people with the most to lose from real change okay so okay so I get all that there's a whole can I get all that yeah I get all the no no harm thing right like you shouldn't evade taxes and you shouldn't spend a lot of money lobbying to undermine consumer protection and all that stuff so the bad stuff seems bad talk a little bit about how the good stuff that do-gooding is the wingman what are the mechanisms by which the do-gooding upholds the system because you know David Rubenstein I was a MPP student here he funds tuition for a lot of students and people like me you can go to schools that they can't afford and you know hopefully do something good in the world having had this education so what's what's wrong with that and how does him doing that allow him to preserve the other stuff it's a it's a fantastic question so let me answer first he's really getting his donations worth with us talking about him tonight let's let's deal with the case of him in a in a in a microcosm because I think it's helpful to see it and then I'll tell you some of the mechanisms by which some of the good things are actually fueling bad things yeah so David Rubin seen last week or the week before building on many other such gifts announced a ten million dollar gift to the Jefferson Memorial right he he does a particular firm philanthropy he calls patriotic philanthropy and he has said in media interviews with a kind of moan mournful tone the government just doesn't have the money it used to it just doesn't just doesn't have the cash government is broke and I David Rubin seen I feel bad about he always trots he work in the Carter years briefly that era of cardigans and he cites that as proof of his public spiritedness and he you know I got a step up and donate to the Jefferson Memorial or by the Thirteenth Amendment parchment and you know whatever and most media reporting on these gifts that's the story now The New Yorker I wish I had written the story but it was not me The New Yorker wrote the only really thoughtful story about that situation which is like um hold up David Rubin scene is one of the earliest and most consistent advocates for one of the most morally indefensible tax loopholes in a country full of morally indefensible tax loopholes the carried interest loophole right which basically is the famous thing of allowing people who make their money investments to pay a lower effective tax rate than their secretaries famously and the carried interest loophole according New York Times costs the US government 18 billion dollars a year okay now there are big tax loopholes it even bigger than that but this is an easy one that like no serious person that I have talked to thinks is like really important 18 billion a year so first of all if David Robinson didn't give the ten million to the Jefferson but he hadn't fought for that tax loophole and people I came out and fought for that tax loophole and the government at 18 billion dollars more year quick math is that we could afford ourselves to repair the Jefferson Memorial 40 times per year and for those of you who are really good at math we could also do 40 times a year like that for all of the other presidents to 1800 repairs a year total of the kind that he just paid so the question so there's the contradiction out to your question what role yes you may say that's regrettable it's hypocritical even I think your question is very good one what role is the 10 million dollar donation playing is it at least saying okay it's a bad situation but at least he's doing the 10 million or is the 10 million keeping the 18 billion dollars a year out of our hands and I and my argument in some ways that the crux of this book the thing that I was trying to flip a little bit in the debate was I actually think some of these acts of do-gooding while doing real good are also abetting a harm on a much bigger scale okay and I think there's three mechanisms we should talk about first of all and this illustrates a few of them first of all a lot of big giving but it's not just giving it some of the other types of do-gooding also is a reputation laundering service it could be for individual reputation laundering or for class reputation laundering right but you take people Jeffrey Epstein the Sackler others who are at very high risk of resentment unsustainable levels of anger at Goldman Sachs you know unsustainable levels of public anger brand problems maybe gonna go to jail maybe gonna have newspapers dogging them that's not a good situation to be in right there's a lot of people like that in our society because of the choices they make but do you think the reputation laundering is working do you think anybody out there is like oh the oxycotin but you know the museum donation so maybe like that's okay because and I'll touch yes and all in a second but you know first of all if you or your class of people can get out in front of this thing and do a lot of this lavish donation what it does do to your question is it first of all just scrubs reputations right I mean a senator is not gonna meet with someone if the only story about them is they screwed people on the financial crisis but if you're Jamie Dimon or someone like that and you also in addition to you it's not like you didn't do that but you also do revitalizing Detroit through something in the millions even though that thing was in the billions a senator now has a way to meet you here's what I'm saying like you've cleaned yourself up enough that a senator might say like let's talk about this 60 minutes is not going to do the profile it did on Jamie Dimon if you don't do the other thing second of all for regular people we're all just busy and when you're in your mind you kind of think about like the Sackler who are they again oh he had the art family right which is where a lot of us were until like two years ago right there was a New Yorker piece again two years ago but Patrick Brad and Keith that really put this on the map like I grew up in a city with Sackler arts institutions obviously we got a nice one here and most people I know did not know that the opioid crisis was also brought to you by that family they just about the Asian art wing or whatever right so it works second of all and and by the way Epstein is an even more flagrant example the only way he was able to come back after convictions on sex crimes of children the only way he was able to come back you think he'd be given money I mean let's not be rude but if you think if Jeffrey Epstein had an association with the University of Alabama do you think he would've been able to prosecute his comeback into New York high society he needed a Harvard like place he needed MIT like places this is a service that gets sold by a place like Harvard it's precisely because Harvard is Harvard that it has something of value of redemptive value to offer someone like Jeffrey Epstein and what it is universities emit so much surplus virtue and surplus knowledge and surplus good stuff but they need money so they make a trade with someone who is emitting money but is has a real deficit of name and virtue so that's one the second is how good things up hold a bad system is the philanthropy and these other do-gooding modalities are often undemocratic ways of intervening in public life so even if you say someone like Bill Gates did not make his money in the way the Sackler did by the way monopoly is still actually a really big problem but let's cut him that break for half a second Bill Gates having thoughts however good those thoughts are about common core and redesigning public education for everybody I just can't explain to any of you why he should get more votes on common core than you do I don't know what moral justification I could pick so a lot of these do-gooding things while doing real good are helping to entrench a power differential that is the root cause of that very problem and third and this is the subtlest but in some ways the most pervasive when the rich and powerful get involved in social change they change our conversations about change they change the language in which we speak about change right which university is going to fund be able to get funded an institute on wealth taxation versus an institute on social enterprise you think that the Union goes are equally easy to fundraise for they both vaguely promised some benefits to those down below one promises benefits to down below those down below in a way that will also make people on top richer great fundraising pitch you can see the PowerPoint deck the two by two matrices everything the second is more plausibly but more troublingly suggesting that we help those down below by removing the people standing on their necks now that may be a more correct assessment of the situation in a given moment in history but it's much tougher to fundraise for so what happens when not one University but ten or twenty and then think tanks and other institutions all are making that choice you don't just get these acts of do-gooding that are like doing a nice thing you start to distort like why do you think there are so many different social enterprise programs all around this country and so few people who study how to do wealth taxes relative to that right how come the people doing corporate feminism like lean in which as I understand is trying to convince women that thousands of years of patriarchy is a posture problem if if women were to recline at a different angle men would just stop being jerks how come those initiatives get so much more funding and support in the discourse than people looking at what actual policies have actually empowered women in other countries and like trying to pass them like universal child care which you know would cost people like Sheryl Sandberg a lot of money on each of these issues there is real change and there's fake change masquerading as the real thing and in some ways one way to understand what I'm arguing is that the winners of our age have done a masterful job of staving off real change by not opposing it frontally which is what they used to do but by coming at us and making a counteroffer hey I hear you on the wealth tax I hear you on universal child care but if you tried raising your hand more in meetings it's this super cool new thing women are doing and it's incredibly effective and you can trace it on every issue we could spend the whole night doing what is that for education what is that for the racial wealth gap and what I'm hoping people do is wake up to the very profound moral and practical difference between real change and fake change okay so I want to talk about the solutions a little bit too let me start with the some of the bad guys here so at least in the u.s. we have this tendency to put entrepreneurs and business people on a pedestal in a way that you know we don't you know people in Europe don't do that and you know Zuckerberg for example has definitely fallen off that pedestal but not too long ago he was considering a run for president that seemed plausible people were like kind of into it and the t-shirts and all that so why do you think Mike Bloomberg got into the bad personality lane and doomed his chances yeah exactly so why do you think that is why why do we accept that these entrepreneurs are businesspeople are the solution to so many problems here I think one of the things that is underappreciated you know we all live in the present and one of things it's hard to realize in the present is ideas and and just social reflexes that seem very common in the present are often engineered that the the fruits of a campaign that someone else waged and so now for you it may be normal to be like you know well if you want to change the world you got to do it in the world of business right that's so just a mantra you hear so much now businesses how you make change now now obviously if we're family disagree with this but it's everywhere and you may come to this school another school and you just hear that around you and without thinking too much about it you flow through it and you make life decisions accordingly and it may never occur to you that that was an idea that was an invent that was invented to solve a problem someone had and now you're acting in their drama so the story that was spread and there's an amazing book called dark money about this by Jane Mayer if you haven't read it you should read it this was an incredibly concerted plan she talks about in particular five families on the right the cokes Richard Mellon Scaife some others that in a very concerted way fought for a world in which academia the media and others would reinforce a story that in short government bad leeches government's just like the DMV basically all governments a DMV tax is bad regulation bad and then everything in business good right entrepreneurs good America's backbones on now this is a country for all its the flaws of its founding founded by people who actually believed a tremendous amount in public spiritedness and public service and so you had to do a lot of rhetorical work to try to backfill our history so that suddenly like America has always been the land of like the business dude on a connecting flight from O'Hare but that's been the project I always sit next to that guy to Bob Bob Bob and this project has been so successful that has rewired the assumptions of an entire culture and so when you have young people trying to make decisions about what to do with their life when you have public policy figures set in what policy is to pursue we're all operating within this reflex so I think the biggest solution the meta solution before we get to other solutions is to think our way out of the phony religion that has told us that you solve the problems of the world through markets what this is fundamentally is an anti-democratic ideology it's an ideology that wants you to believe that you save the world through cupcake companies that give 5% back that you saved the world through TOMS shoes allegedly giving a second pair of shoes to other people other countries I've been to a lot of other countries I've never seen those shoes been given out that you changed the world through the people who caused the financial crisis on Wall Street adding the word impact in front of their investment funds and now taking care of the people they screwed 10 years ago that you change the world by having social enterprises you change the world by putting someone like Bob Rubin from the private sector in charge of government ministries and the nice thing about this approach is we tried it we tried it and it led to an America in which the country was working for fewer and fewer people and in which more and more people started to feel correctly that this country was working for somebody but nobody they knew personally and we have pushed that emotion to such a dangerous place that a semi-literate buffoon is the president of the United States of the most sophisticated country in the history of the world and I think if we don't wake up to the phony religion and to the fact that Donald Trump is just a boil a small Posse boil on a very badly diseased body politic that is experiencing all kinds of organ failures in all parts and has been for some time if we don't realize that and get to the work now of not just getting rid of him although that's important but reforming this country so it begins to work most people again and solving these problems at the root for everybody solutions that are not ice cream or cupcakes or shoes that do not involve bono but that are in fact public Universal democratic and institutional solving the problems the biggest shared problems we have at the root for everybody if we don't do that the next time we may get a Donald Trump figure it may be someone who can read and give a good speech right right so what is your advice to some of our students here that a lot of students in the room a lot of people are thinking about what they should do next I think the cue for getting a security clearance to work in government is like two three years now people might have a student debt and they're thinking about that McKinsey offer versus thinking about going into the public sector what it what is your advice to our students first of all this is an Ursula decision that people have to make and there's not a one-size-fits-all you know if you are from an immigrant family and you're in like suffocating debt you've a different answer than theirs or not etc etc people have to do what works in their context that said I think there is a general tendency in our age of the brightest most educated people most capable people of choosing lives of very marginal social value in the private sector that have a marketing spiel of being tremendously socially useful but that are simply not right Bain or anything connected with Bain is never and has never been how the world has changed you can tell yourself whatever you want to tell yourself Bain is literally not involved in the changing of the world and it's involved in changing the world the wrong way actually and so what I would advise people is to think about ways to make a life in public service and public spiritedness broadly defined everybody does not have to run for the City Council tomorrow everybody didn't have to get a security clearance also stopped using Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell as your alibis for why you can't work in government right now there are 90,000 distinct government entities in the United States those guys run too they run two important ones but this is a very decentralized country and one of things I talk about a lot with folks is even in these very liberal cities like this one where Democrats might have 80 90 95 percent of votes the really cruel reality if we're gonna be honest and I live in one of those places in Brooklyn New York is that these places are as or more unequal or more plutocratic than the reddest states in America as in New Yorker I can't lecture Idaho about plutocracy my team runs New York City and it's more plutocratic than Idaho and more plutocratic friendly there's some nice things it's you know we don't go after immigrants as hard maybe but like on the fundamentals the fundamentals of how many people are able to live a decent life housing cost New York City is as cruel as Idaho and so you look at something like the Fair Work Week movement right which is trying to go into communities and say simple thing but a thing that has transformative effect on people's lives you can't change people's hours with like two days notice now for many people in this room that may not be an issue that affects your career you're gonna be paid on salary but if you're paid by the hour having your hours changed moved around cut when I was in a restaurant not long ago and as his waitress crying because she was sent home early three hours early for like the third time that week right which means not getting paid because there was not enough demand at the same shop the company's risk being put on her back she's gonna miss a bill this is happening to millions of Americans now the thing about a Fair Work Week law is you don't need Mitch McConnell any city in America can pass this counties can pass it states can pass it isn't it interesting that we keep using a couple parts of government that are dysfunctional and absolve ourselves of the fact that in all these cities where liberals completely control everything no one's doing it no one's passing these Fair Work Week laws very small number of American cities have it I'm just giving you one little example of something where if people in a school like this said you know what San Antonio is going to get a Fair Work Week law that is a less hard problem to solve than most problems you all thought about in this building today but it's not the kind of thing that appeals to many of our best and brightest young people and if that passed in San Antonio a few hundred thousand people's lives would probably immediately get better and there'd be a demonstration effect and so I think we are fundamentally at an age where the emphasis of our society needs to shift back from the foot of the private to the foot of the public doesn't mean all that stuff has to go away I don't think even Bernie Sanders is proposing nationalizing a single company what we're talking about is what is the what is the central tendency of the society what's the emphasis I think we need a new public spirited age of the kind that the guy over your head called for okay thank you all right we'll open it up to your questions just as a reminder there mics around the forum if you could go grab a mic do state your name and your affiliation please do ask only one question and make sure it is a question with a question mark at the end like an actual question like an actual question yeah I'll try to cut off statements all right go ahead yeah please this is on yes Oh fantastic so thank you so much for eloquently putting what really is the disaster of our day I'm someone who has worked in government can you just state your name and sorry to be a karate mid-career graduating this year so I've worked in government for 13 years as well as the UN and trying find solutions to the most dysfunctional bureaucracies and what I've also seen that kind of piles on to what you described is an outsourcing of our dysfunction through proxy wars through our international programs through the UN so how do we then solve the problems that we are not just creating our own country but are also implementing in countries worldwide it's a great question and you know I think particularly it's true of so many problems but particularly with climate change it's become very clear that national solutions the things are limited I think on that a lot of the taxation stuff now right in a world where you can move money on your phone through like within the iMessage app what does it mean to collect taxes if countries are not cooperating on that people are literally just going to be like DMing their money to Switzerland soon and there's nothing people gonna be able to do about them it's already happening you're doing a crypto yeah come to the simulation next Tuesday in the forum on digital currencies thank you for the plug you're welcome crypto is one of these technicai I'd just sit out certain technology I can't learn all of them so I just sit a certain one out so I just skipped Bitcoin crypt I don't know anything anything about this and I think we need to solve some of those global things but also recognize that if we believe in democracy the unit of action remains countries and in some ways there's been this Airy globalism of like let's solve these big things to global cover but if each of our countries is not well and healthy and democratically robust and able to deliver on what most people want like global cooperation is just a bridge too far I think the best thing we can do for some of that cooperation stuff is like frankly make America a place that works again for most people I think that would do more for the world then then some of those initiatives on their own okay we'll go up there hi my name is sue Blake I'm a sophomore studying economics at the college you mentioned that you know cities still face their own issues of rampant inequality and that the issue is that they have enacted those sufficiently progressive policies that you believe they have the opportunity to do so my question relates to the fact that cities like Chicago and st. Louis have had almost a century of straight Democratic Party rule why do you believe that it's there insufficient progressivism and not the failure of they're already fairly progressive policies love the econ major questions you know there was this line that Cynthia Nixon had when she was running for governor of New York she said we don't just need more Democrats we need better Democrats and I don't think all this stuff is about a spectrum I think you know Chicago for example is that it's had a unbroken run of Democrats also had a tremendous number of corrupt Democrats and corrupt Democrats are Democrats who are working for themselves not other people and you know I don't think that invalidates progressive ideas or any other ideas it invalidates people stealing as a tool of making the public good better I do think the kinds of policies that I'm talking about if you look at the problems of a city like Chicago having stability in your work life knowing how much money you are going to have not randomly missing bills because someone cuts your cuts your cuts your hours having a place to send your kids for daycare so that you can take a job and not have to miss your job and get fired and then get evicted creates would create as stability in people's lives that would seem to me to push back against the problems that a lot of people have but let's try it we tried it the econ major way for the last 40 years let's try it another way please go ahead my name is a I'm MPP student first year I'm really glad I do believe we are glad to have such a conversation here HKS but given how an institution like Howard is involved in the business that you described do you think by inviting you to speak here Harvard is also doing some sort of the reputation laundry that you describe that could well be that could well be you know and I could be the detergent and and I want to be very clear and and you know and and that's why for me it feels important to talk about someone like David Rubin seen with the lack of politeness that he deserves to make sure that I'm not participating in that of that is their goal because that's not what I'm here for I think Harvard has so much to answer for I think he agrees yet you know whether it's the fossil fuel investments question with the endowment whether it's sackler 's and others and I understand the issue here's a little more complicated with the Sackler because of which family member it was but it's an important topic you know I think from the comments I've seen from the president is University feel like not even like advanced level PR deflection just like very very basic PR deflection I have not seen the president of this university University seriously morally grapple with the very real question that Harvard has become the world's premier drive-through reputation or laundromat I'll say that again Harvard has becomes the world's premier drive-through reputational laundromat it is the best of the best right if you if you're pharma company was a little bit too aggressive you can give to Tufts and that's plenty to clean your reputation I'm being serious here I mean you forgive me but you know if you raped and trafficked children giving the tough to may not be enough that's when you gotta come to Harvard right that's when you need that glow to shine so bright that it has a chance to change your name the fact that I mean he the fact the center here that he gave to his called ped it's just amazing and I don't see what I would expect to see which is people at this university holding the people who run it to account to say a place where so people are coming to learn coming with hope coming to support their families coming to go back to various countries and build up those countries the motivations of students here is important thing of course there's a lot of people trying to become Wolves of Wall Street there's a lot of people trying to do other stuff and it besmirches all of your names to have your learning institution being also used as a drive through reputation laundromat and it's not a couple of people it's all the worst financial crisis people it's the tech people and they are using you to clean their name they're using you to deflect questions about why we have a system in which people make that kind of money to begin with and I think there's a real real reckoning that needs to happen and it begins with anybody who's part of this institution making it clear what is and is not acceptable to you and that gets to one larger thing that I would just briefly mention which is that someone else gave me this phrase the other day and in a conversation I forget the name of the writer but the phrase was you know are we living in an age of acquiescence whether it's this issue or any other I find it very hard to explain the lack of serious protest in this era on campuses like this but in the country I mean you all saw those Hong Kong videos how many of you saw those Hong Kong videos and felt like ashamed we have not generated days that look like that we had a couple great marches they weren't necessarily even at that scale or fraction of the population why is the country not in a standstill one day a week why our campus is not shutting down why is nothing being occupied I would bet a very large fraction of people in this room feel this is the most dangerous president in the history of this country has class has been interrupted here one day since January 2017 they multiple presidential candidates running on the other side have said this is a white supremacist in the house that is the color of his ideology and has anything shut down so you get the country you're willing to fight for and whether it's the kind of micro world of Harvard which I hope now it's very clear I'm not here to help clean or the the macro world of the country or things beyond it we have to start truly disrupting these power structures and truly making clear to the institutions we are part of one way or another what is not acceptable to us I always go everywhere once thank you so much my name is Hassan Sheikh I'm a second year MBA student here and you've talked about Harvard more broadly I'm wondering if you could speak more specifically about the Kennedy School itself as a school of government and when you look at the billionaires whose names are on our buildings and who fund our fellowships can you give me some I don't know can you give me like a quick rundown of the names uh top in a table in Duman wexner offer that Wexler yeah that way that's great and table you know you're not allowed to double dip chip so you do an Epstein you shouldn't do a wax exactly and Todman is actually like a convicted criminal whose name is still on our building and so I'm wondering if you could speak about how an institution like HKS perpetuates kind of a win-win myth and what it should be doing about it yeah it's a great question you know and again like I'm an outside on't know that much about the Kennedy School relative to you or most people here maybe I'll tell you what I do know my wife went here graduated from here I company to her to some of these forums one observation that I this is some years ago that I made at the time that she made that a lot of her friends were talking about was it was around the time where they took the word government out of the name of the school which I thought was a huge mistake Harvard Business School never take the word business out of its name I'm serious here but in our neoliberal culture to be in business is something to be proud of to groom people for government is something to be ashamed of I'm not saying that was the motive I don't know the story of how that happened but it just felt like a culturally fitting moment that a very good thing that I was very grateful this country had which was a prestigious and an important school of government felt the need to remove it and the conversations I heard at the time among the students who were here my wife's friends was that there was this insecurity about government not being an adequate enough thing to teach people that you and more more people at HKS for taking business classes across the river more and more people started to feel around that time like if you don't tack on a business degree if you don't add an MBA midway through you're somehow in adequately educated what used to feel like a perfectly fine degree on its own started to feel to a lot of people like an inadequate degree because it was only understanding the public only the public that used to be enough in America was founded by countries founded by people who thought that was enough and so what I see is often in these spaces that are devoted in principle to the public good an insecurity about the market world and the and a need to almost mimic and copy them and I just want to be very clear like I don't think the Kennedy School has much to learn from Harvard Business School although there has been many efforts to have such learning happen I think Harvard Business School needs to be completely dismantled and rebuilt according to some of the values of the Kennedy School but my guess is and tell me if I'm wrong there's a lot less flow of information that way I don't think the business school is reorienting itself in rebuilding itself alongside kennedy-esque lines but I do know the courses here have drifted in an ever-more businessí direction because of that insecurity and I would say those of us who believe in the public sphere who believe in government need to stop offering a milquetoast defense of those things and start passionately defending the idea of the public and public goods and public institutions as militantly as the Koch brothers the dead one and the alive one have fought for anti-government principles and to stop internalizing the idea that government is slothful and inefficient and business is limber and cool and spelt you know that the reality is business is faster and efficient at doing many things because it does things that are way less import and then what public institutions do I always say my my my single friends may boast to me that they sit on their bed and eat a slice of pizza and watch Netflix and they finish dinner faster more efficiently then I finish dinner why cuz I got to cook for two kids put them in the bed bade them first made them then put them to bed usually cook dinner for my wife and I eat that dinner now if you're if you're coming to me and saying and you're so slow you took three hours to do all that stuff alright then that I had dinner in 10 minutes on my bit you're so inefficient it's like dude I'm doing a more important thing than you right but and I'm being serious here like people who build apps for a living at like photo sharing apps will in perfect sincerity be like you know I mean these people you know running the health care you know health care regulators in America man they just don't know what they're doing it's like they're trying to figure out how to keep 350 million people alive you are making an app where you can use your finger to go to the next photo you can't call them inefficient like you're not doing the same kind of thing and instead of like being like yes we gotta make government more efficient we instead of like internalizing the prejudice having sat next to that Bob that I mentioned on many connecting flights from O'Hare I hear what business people are talking about on their phones because they're talked about it so loudly you all sit next to Bob - right Kelly oh yeah just make sure you copy me on that email and I just I don't want Megan to have any surprises and yeah just go with the meeting it's the PowerPoint is like good yeah bad loves in another movie is Bob adding like tremendous efficient social value to the United States I go Silicon Valley how many people in Silicon Valley are adding tremendous social I don't know like my guess is the average person the Social Security Administration the Department of Energy is adding way more social value United States every day than any bro in Silicon Valley and we have to like fight back against this silly and completely uninformed caricature of public action go ahead hi my name my name is ruqaiya I'm a first year students at the MPI D program I would like to know if and how your time at McKinsey and the exposure you got there contributed to form your current ideas I felt that I and I say this in the book like I felt like I was drafted into this fraud that happened to be one of the great like meta frauds of our time and the only lucky thing about that is like you learn something about you know something that a lot of people actually going go through I you know my reasons were much more particular to me and I think not part of this like change oh I don't want to mislead people into thinking like I'm exact like I write about this woman Hilary Cohen in the book who's I think more typical of what you have here which is like people who really want to do idealistic things that change the world and they're and they're convinced that that job is the way to do it because these recruiting strategies that's not really what happened with me I had a very specific ambition I like wanted to be a reporter I knew I wanted to be a reporter I'd always want to be a reporter since I was in high school like 14 years old I basically wanted to get a journalism job and I couldn't it's like this is also one of the problems all these other fields don't make it very easy to get into and the other fields that are like boring make it really easy so I got some advice from a mentor of mine in journalism who actually teaches here Jill Abramson she said to me like don't something like don't hang around the building for 10 years trying to get internships and I gotten an internship with New York Times one internship don't hang around the building try and get into like go out into the world go someplace other people don't know about in your country let go collide with the world learn something I feel don't know so my goal became to like go far away and so I was a little more mercenary about like I just wanna find some country to and I try to get journalism jobs I could not I basically applied to the local office of McKinsey and India and got a job there and after a month I was like I I was asked with my first days I was a history major I say the history of political thought like the most useless major by their terms in the history of the world but also just sort of a useless major my Indian grandfather was like so in America do you study that before you do engineering school or how does that work I was like yeah it's like a prereq yeah so I go there and within days they're like okay great European European history history political thought great once you go to this pharmaceutical company in India and advise them on building a new leadership development system you have to come up with the traits of leaders within this company the four traits of a successful leader come up with a rating system of one to four on each of these traits and then and then you have to help the company runner exercise where they rate all the people in that company and then decide like who did keep him from oh and I was like okay like so who should I talk to about that oh you should just come up with it there's like you can look on the internet there's some stuff no joke I came up with that company's entire leadership development system which I completely made up and was based on nothing and was very bad and it absolutely went into effect and then I was in a meeting where like the CEO was like raiding people according to a bad made-up framework that I had invented that I knew was bad all I could do was like write well so that it was like crisply written but it was wrong and it went through in these men there's all men in that company not shockingly it was were evaluated according to this made-up thing that was I knew was wrong and I just never recovered from that it's just like this is such a fraud and I'm not saying everything everybody does it those firms are frauds but it's just you know now you have like actually criminal investigation I think this state is opening one against the conceive of no mistaken or maybes New York that's New York for bankruptcy there's been issues in Saudi Arabia Puerto Rico various scandals but the bigger scandal I find is these consulting firms have sold a story that they're doing this idealistic stuff and they've basically been the handmaidens of the cost-cutting outsourcing offshoring union-busting pension rating revolution while telling people here that they're helping Haiti and universities to go back to Harvard have an obligation to not let people come on campus and lie they are not honest about what the nature of the work is when they come here and therefore places like legal aid or you know just other types of problem or public-spirited things have no shot because they're telling the truth about what it's like to do those jobs and other companies that are well-funded have receptions with canapes whatever those are and they're lying to your students it's got to stop but don't these consulting firms they're not changing the world but aren't they giving you some credibility didn't having McKinsey as part of your career trajectory and Aspen group and all these other parts of the market world as he call it giving you now the platform to share your ideas and only McKinsey gave me a platinum in the New York Times for 11 years gave me a platform I mean in in if I'd maybe work for a tire company McKenzie might have given me a credential I'm never like I mean everybody knows I think I wrote about in the book like everybody knows that I was like put bad at that job and like hated it and you know was not wanted back so I don't think that's a very good credential I think what I see is if you want to work in that space fantastic that's not what I hear my notes I get a lot of emails from people which is what happens when you write a book or you go on TV or whatever and people tell you things about their lives probably the plurality like the most common thing that I get is young people in spaces like this who basically feel completely hoodwinked by recruiting it's an enormous a small fraction of people it's an enormous fraction of the emails because there has been this story that the way you change the world is by like having a career like Mitt Romney's the early part not even the public service part and it just flies in the face of everything we know about how we actually make change and maybe this is like a plaintiff or are we wrapping like a place to we doing more questions are we I think that was probably a final question so let me say this it's particularly significant that we have this massive diversion of talent that could do public-spirited things to the private lane in an age that is so thirsty for transformational public action this is not a normal time and the things I'm saying tonight don't apply equally in all times what I'm saying tonight might not have been true in 1973 I don't know I wasn't here what I'm Sid my hair looks like I was here but I was not even I think for 40 years we have been living in an age of capital an age defined by the strivings the whims the dreams that longings of capital if capital wanted it that's what was gonna happen think about the things Capital has wanted in the last four decades how many of those dreams have not come true right unlimited money in politics they got it cutting taxes they got it cutting regulation they got it having subprime mortgages and then not paying a price for having done that they got it they they tried they got what they wanted and I think the question facing us now is whether we have the courage to not tweak not turn some Dobb knobs and dials not spreadsheet our way to a slightly better age of capital but to actually end the age of capital end an age organized around what money wants and the second Gilded Age the way they ended the first Gilded Age by building an age of reform an age defined by public purpose by people wanting to make lives in the public arena in which our language is a public language not a language of optimization and leverage and scale but a language of public words philosophical words words about the common good words about sacrifice for each other and I think the best thing that ever happened to the age that were in bear with me here is the arrival of Donald Trump because for the last 40 years those who have been advocating to end the age of capital before this never had as flamboyant a discredit er of the age of capital of the neoliberal fantasy as Donald Trump he is the fantasy incarnate businesspeople are smarter than everybody else success in one micro industry means you know everything about everything can fix all things having caused social problems is the best way to know how to solve them you traded Mexico and China in your business you know how to get those jobs back if they're for being rich makes you specially incorruptible you remember all these pictures from 2016 Donald Trump is the most flamboyant this creditor of an age of capital of an age of business heroism of an age of philanthropy lism and the hope now is that he inspires enough people to rise up join other people because joining is the only thing that actually builds power and actually end the age that he is running into the ground and make him not just a president in the past but make him the last president of the age of capital and make the next president whoever that's going to be the first president of the new age of reform thank you very much thank you for coming [Applause]

Channel: Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics

Views: 113,934

Rating: 4.8735862 out of 5

Keywords: Harvard Institute of Politics, Harvard University

Id: 7m2AumufJfw

Length: 63min 52sec (3832 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 12 2019