Anand Giridharadas: Are Elites Really Making the World a Better Place?

you I'm happy to be here with an injure Dardis and my name is Marcos Cunha Lucas and together we have many syllables you know it's it's really a pleasure to have you here and to discuss your evocative title winners take all it is not a question mark it is a statement there should be an exclamation point he is suggesting that winners do in fact take all and we'll talk about that we'll explore the themes of his book and we'll also see where this takes us in contemporary America and maybe even in a global context as well you talk about elites and you talk about their desire to do good and and you often within the book talk about this concept of win-win as I was reading parts of the book it reminded me a little bit of and I'll take a little bit of a stretcher it reminded me a bit of how tobacco companies functions so that tobacco companies tend to do a lot of bad in the world they tend to give us cancer create health problems of all sorts but there are the companies that expend the most on anti-smoking campaigns is that a fair way of sort of somewhere creating a metaphor for what it is you're talking about here when you talk about elites and I'll let you use your own metaphors and descriptives and that's sadly a very smart way to think about it it may be a slightly more extreme form than some of the cases we're thinking about but to step back I came to the subject of this book because of an observation of a paradox that fits very much in the terms of that tobacco example but extends very much to our whole society and the paradox is the following on one hand it is hard to walk down the street without bumping into a plutocrat trying to change the world okay they're probably some in this room they're probably some in this room and you know we hope you give generously you know we have a new person announcing a multi-billion dollar gift every couple days in the newspaper right many of them in this city we now have in in San Francisco a contest between billionaires about whose approach to homelessness is more generous and we have a hundred and eighty four super rich people having signed the giving pledge to give most of their assets away in their lifetimes when you go shopping in the mall you know it's hard to avoid all these products that promise to change the world iPhone case it's going to change the world and Bono is involved somehow tote bags are gonna change the world socks that are gonna change the world when I go to college campuses you find young people who are it's hard to not find young people who are determined to start a social enterprise involving Rwanda recycled poop you know coffee and and like give one get one you know TOMS shoes is somehow connected and that generosity on the part of elites whether they're billionaires or just young people with with great education sits uneasily next to another set of facts with which are all also familiar which is the fact that this is the most unequal time in a hundred years in this country and getting worse that last year the wages of the top one percent grew four times faster than the bottom 90% the fact that last year eighty-two percent of all new wealth created in the world went to that top 1% in the world the fact that the bottom half of Americans have not gotten a raise on average since 1979 and so what you have the paradox is real and manifest elite generosity in our age real helping sitting uncomfortably alongside elite hoarding and the very people in many cases doing the helping as in your example doing the generosity starting a disruptive technique that's going to emancipate mankind writing huge checks vina taking care of the homeless those same p full are the people harvesting most of the rainwater of Progress and grabbing it for themselves and claiming to be making the world better and so I became interested in the relationship between that elite helping and that elite hoarding between the giving and the taking and I spent I'm a reporter so I don't I apply at the end of reporting and I went and reported yes did what I did and I spent time in this world I spent time with entrepreneurs and philanthropists and young people trying to figure out what to do with their lives and many others and my conclusion at the end of that journey of reporting of a couple years was that when elites step into the arena of social change they don't sit in the back row they sit in the front row they get on the board of directors of change Inc they take over change and when they take over change they change change they redefine change in winner friendly ways so on any issue you could pick say empowering women there's kind of real change and we know that would look like family policy that would actually be helpful women on the boards of organizations it said no harassment laws so getting groped at the office on an everyday reality for people maternity leave just to do something that every other rich country does but those things are all expensive for winners and men and people with power so what the winners of our age do is they don't say nope women you can't get empowered because that wouldn't work so what they say is that's all great but but you know I've got another idea so it's more of a win-win we will tell you to lean in and then you lean in and things will be great now never mind that they have just turned discrimination against women into a problem that women are supposed to solve in their private time but that kind of jujitsu we're a social problem that can frankly only be solved through real change real reform laws movements policy is turned into a win winner friendly thing where change can happen without changing who has power without disturbing the status quo without costing the people on top anything and I think you can take education and and do a similar analysis of real change with me an equal public schools for everybody and not Marin having better schools than you know South San Francisco but then you can have fake change which is like let's do one charter school for 300 kids and I'll tell my friends that I help those three minority kids get into Yale it'll be great and I think you can on any example in American life you can you can think of where we are hearing real change and pushes for real change and where we're hearing this fake change and my argument in a nutshell is that fake change is what you get when you put the people most with most to lose from real change in charge of change well you know your statistics were fascinating in fact you noted we're in San Francisco today we're recording this in California and in fact California is in a global sense the fifth largest economy in the world and yet as probably everyone in this room knows about a quarter of our population is living below the poverty line so that reality is something that we're confronting on a daily basis and that change in fact would be able to take care of that part of our population and that we're not seeing necessarily the types of abilities either at the state level or within private industry to be able to make the type of change that you are highlighting in which of course we should all be concerned about on a daily basis but are there places and you alluded to this are there places that are not necessarily system preservation structures around the world that that do this better you I think we're talking about family policies that exist in these wealthier nations other developed nations around the world can you let's touch on that a bit and then we'll return to this sort of system preservation idea that you're you're talking about now you've written about quite eloquently but first of all just to pick up on your San Francisco point the numbers are important there are about 70 499 homeless people in San Francisco by the last count and coincidentally 74 billionaires it's about a hundred and one billionaire's 101 homeless people per billionaire 74 billionaire's in this city if this city of the not just the city the five counties around it if this area were a country five counties yeah it'd be the ninth ranking country on earth for billionaire population we have a billionaire calling in right now it's someone's cell phone protesting and they alter the last word and and so the idea that you can have this problem persist in this city before you get to what the remedy is the idea that that problem should we get it the idea that we that such a problem could persist in a city with 74 billionaires that takes you know 15 minutes to drive across at the right hour of the day is just astonishing and so when it comes to places that are doing it right I mean people often come to me and say you know well this is what you're pushing is very very out there it's very radical well I'm sort of pushing for the end of a dismal exceptionalism the reality most of the things I'm talking about are basically solved across the rich world except for here we don't know that because we think the world is here yes and the flags you know fulfill that illusion but the reality is I'm talking about things that are pretty basic like it you know you know in our political ads you know this well I do and so many of our political ads right what's the the like iconic trope it's like an American family in a house it's like not too nice but not too not nice and they're sitting around a table holding medical bills right how many how many ads like that have you seen you're like a thousand ads right do you realize that in many rich countries there are no such scenes because there are no such bills and people are actually asking their kid how their day was or or doing art with their kid or thinking about the company they're going to start and they're actually not spending time thinking about whether their insurance company dropped them do you know like I'm a very privileged person I spend an enormous amount of time and my wife worrying about we're on Obamacare when like a great plan but they like dropped our daughter because she did have a social security number which she didn't have because she hadn't been born yet and then it's 2 months to get her back and you just want to get her sick when she's in the first two months of her life and you just think like I can navigate this I have the Education Skills and time to navigate this we are keeping millions of people in this like weird limbo that is just dumb in addition to being cruel it's dumb and that's just one example of something that literally does not exist across the rich world and I could tell the same story in education I'm not sure there's any other rich country that decided that the best way to fund public education is by ring-fencing property taxes in rich neighborhoods creating really good public schools there so that the people whose parents are best equipped to help them after school also get the best education in school and give the people with the most need for social mobility the worst education that's our system right who designed that so you could go on issue after issue in in most rich countries if you work 29 hours at a retailer you don't have a different set of health benefits and in social insurance than if you work 30 but here if you work 29 versus 30 that's life or death there's certain diseases you're gonna get they're gonna kill you if you work 29 that won't kill you if you get if you work 30 and so we have made a bunch of choices in this country to make life nasty brutish and short for a lot of people and we think that there the rectification of these problems would lead to gulags because we're ignorant it's just not true and one of the things that's actually exciting is if you look at all the people as you know while running in this cycle politically we are actually having a bigger more capacious conversation about capitalism socialism democracy what is really freedom then we've had in a long time and we got all kinds of people running on both sides we had nationalist Republicans and country club Republicans and we got Democratic socialists and we have like lefty progressives who are not socialists like Andrew Gilliam and then we got centrist Democrats and we are actually to my satisfaction having a bigger conversation about a set of ideas and what actually assures public welfare in a way that I think is an important beginning well I mean you certainly are adding to that conversation with this book and it was a book that you were able to have supported during your time at the Aspen Institute which means a lot of the folks who you're criticizing we're actually the ones who under wrote in many ways the research that you were doing or at least provided a framework yeah yeah yeah the framework of this and so I appreciate the fact that you've actually had to confront a lot of these individuals who really made it possible for you to develop your concepts and to then promote them and to confront it quite quite directly because I think a lot of them and you could speak to this of course consider your ideas radical socialist in line with Thomas Piketty understanding of the economics of the world as as capital tends to be a much more important aspect of how we what we value within our our societies and so what are you finding in because you were if you are going to try and have an impact with those who are involved in this systemic preservation what do you what kind of pushback are you getting from those who are in fact in that world who are engaged who are members of that billionaire class as you you know are in their face it's a great question and first of all I want to say that my real audience for this book is not billionaires who want to be better it's for everybody else to stop entrusting social change to billionaires right my hope for this book is the next time you hear Mark Zuckerberg telling you he's here to save mankind you understand he's just a guy with a company because I actually think if you're able to just see him for what he is or the people on Wall Street who tell you they're empowering 10,000 women you know or JPMorgan Chase who caused the financial crisis and I was doing urban revitalization you know or David Rubin scene who pushed for the carried interest loophole when he's The Carlyle Group and now calls himself a patriotic philanthropist helping the government pay for things that he helped defund it and be unable to pay for if I can change how the public sees those figures I think it will I hope it will induce the public to take change back and to remember how we actually made real change in this country which is from below from movements from policy from changing the law yeah but to your question about how the how the people I'm critiquing are taking it I have to say I have been shocked in a hundred and eighty degree way by that in I expected a kind of mountain of opposition and defensiveness and denial and I think there probably is a lot of that and I'm not seeing it because those people don't you know come to my events in huge numbers so I can't speak to the absence of that but I can speak to the presence of an astonishing array of very privileged people hyper elites coming forward to me publicly or privately and saying I think I need to change I think I need to do better I thought I was doing something good all these years I thought my foundation was doing good I thought my company was solving these real social problems but you got me thinking and making me look at my life and it's not just me by any means I want to say something very positive about a great about a man who's forced a great rethinking in America and that is Donald J Trump I'm serious about this because you know there's a lot of research about like people's assumptions right we are all stuck in our assumptions we all think what we think we know what we know it takes an earthquake a tsunami a hurricane illness divorce loss often to make people really rethink something fundamental in their lives change their direction we all know or have experiences ourselves well Donald Trump is the earthquake hurricane tsunami illness in the life of our nation and I find myself in conversation with a lot of people who say you know what I have a bunch of strong beliefs trade is good business is how you solve problems but a lot but if Donald Trump is president probably a lot of things we all think are wrong so I'm open and there is I'm finding in my reporting an openness to a new conversation and two new assumptions that I don't recognize in my time as a reporter and so I think we got to make use of that they say never let a crisis go to waste never let an introspective openness among very powerful people go to waste many of the most powerful and wealthy people I know are deeply rethinking their place in this society because I think they understand and it's not only Trump it's all the people running for office it's a there's a there's the country's turning and it's easy to fixate on orange Mussolini but there's there's actually a lot of shifts happening at once and many of them besides him are actually positive they're less attention-getting they don't happen in tweets but there's a there's a rotation of our culture I think towards public life again there's a I think desire to solve problems at the root again I think there's a retaking of citizenship and all of that a lot of that is inspired by the by the rock bottom that he helped us hit well you know the rethinking and the question of how elites are looking at the book about elites where you're challenging them I guess is in part answered in that Bill Gates is one of your blurb errs on the back of your book so if you can explain that to me let me know I'd used the top blurb on your on the back of your book you know this question of Trump and the effect that he's creating on our society I think he proudly sees himself as a disrupter and I think he is disrupted the thoughts and the assumptions as you say that we've all been operating on as a nation and has reactivated in many ways our society to organize regardless of where you fall on the spectrum really regenerated and re-emphasis reengaged a large part of our society but you know when you look at these this structure that we are talking about and and the challenges to that structure that is self promoting and self and as as acting in the ways that you are suggesting to to change change you and I belong to the profession of journalism I'm a columnist for the McClatchy chain you write a column in your reporter for The New York Times anymore I used to and he's following well you know just write books okay so now he's moved on because there is no more journalism because that was going to be the point is that journalism in many ways is a part of that self preservation system I mean when we talk about this perception that we have of the billionaires and of those who are doing good doing well to doing good and doing well at the same time a lot of the narrative and the myth that is being created is being created within the pages of our former institutions my current institutions how do we address that I mean it seems not just a question of how do we get our society to organize and recognize these issues but when those who are drawing and have the greatest influence on those narratives are in fact reinforcing them in building these mythologies making Mark Zuckerberg more than for instance the leader of a corporation profit-making organization how do we affect those institutions it's a great question and and I you know I think one of the when I was at the very early stages of thinking about the book I read that Paquette ebook that many of you bought and maybe didn't read have your book and in the early one at first the second chapter there's a passage where he's describing the levels of extreme inequality and the fact that it's gonna get worse but he says whether or not this level of extreme inequality is sustainable or not depends not only on the repressive apparatus I don't exactly what that means but it sounds tough but also on the effectiveness of the apparatus of justification and I just read that phrase and I underlined it then I circled it I underlined it again that ended on the side the apparatus of justification and it occurred to me that that was that was the marching orders from my book his book is not about that he that was an offhand comment and I said that's what I got to go do I got to figure out the apparatus of justification and I really believe a lot of these extreme inequities and this culture that tasks the people who caused our biggest social problems with fixing them and tasks the people who who the winners who took all to kind of help build a more just economy a lot of that happens in the realm of culture and as use rightly say in newspapers a lot of it happens because of a casual sense that a Mark Zuckerberg is a world changer because of these Fast Company magazine covers that venerate entrepreneurs instead of asking about their tax strategies that run stories about Johnny I of changing Apple instead of running a story about wide DeAnza community college which is right next to Apple is so starved for funds even though it's within the shadow of one of the most valuable companies on earth that has two hundred eighty five billion dollars offshore and where Apple executives send their kids to go swimming right it is that it has been a choice in journalism to participate in a kind of frankly Trumpy veneration of billionaires celebration of wealth as tantamount to intelligence and particularly when people turn to the giving phase there's there's definitely some scrutiny of people making their money but when people turn to the giving phase there's almost no scrutiny right and you know the fact Rob riche who's a professor political science at Stanford has a great book coming out on philanthropy couple in a couple weeks he says you know philanthropy is an exercise of power and therefore like any exercise of power it should inspire skepticism not gratitude okay when people serve in the military they often do so with noble intentions we have a military because we want to presumably make the world a better place well that's fine but none of us should say thank you so much and go home we got thousands of reporters covering that military we have multiple congressional committees investigating that military we have watchdog groups right none of that exists for philanthropy we just assumed that because it's Noble its Noble it's good well philanthropy changes the public conversation it alters the marketplace of solutions it has a direct impact on people's lives it affects what diseases are fought and what are not fought it's an exertion of power and when you put your name on buildings it helps you wipe dirty reputations clean etc etc etc and I'm not sure if how many American publications have a philanthropy correspondent it was four hundred and ten billion dollars last year that's how much philanthropy was that's a lot of money to basically not cover that's just a lot of exertion of influence to not cover and you think we go so hard after like some lobbying firm that takes five million dollars you know which we should but like there is stuff happening in philanthropy that as an as a matter of just the exertion of a few people's influence over public life exists on a scale that makes K Street look trivial and so I think one of the big things that I actually wanted to do with the book was to not only change how the public thinks about who would outsource has changed too but give journalists a new vocabulary for thinking about philanthropy and have to say I'm very happy that this is already happening with or without my book which is when Bezos gave made his announcement two billion dollars to give to homelessness in education it was probably the first mega entrant into this big philanthropy thing in some years and a lot of people have been waiting this is the biggest fortune in the world like what's he gonna do what's he gonna do it was there was there was there was a kind of anticipation and I I would say and that the general response was different from previous times it was not just bow down to the Lord there was some of that and there was a lot of yeah but he doesn't pay his workers enough and yeah but he doesn't did like that was baked that wasn't day one coverage right I know cuz I got a lot of those phone calls on day one coverage from reporters on deadline who don't have a lot of time that was in their head on day one that is progress and a lot of criticism was written in the ensuing ten days or so and then he came back and he said we're raising our wages to $15 an hour because we listen to critics now it turns out they also cut productivity bonuses and stock options so you know so there's work he's on it he's on a journey and he's on the early part of the journey we are not there yet to answer the kids question but I think there is something happening where we are starting to learn that when you hear rich man giving money away you think you you show up with questions not thanks so this all begs the question of how do we check this philanthropy how do we entice these organizations and these individuals to have more civic minded orientation that is systemic rather than individual or that happens to be something that is their pet project in certain instances how do we how do we engage at this moment in time a state that it seems the public doesn't necessarily trust organizations and organizations that are able to both deal with social failure and market failure traditionally meaning government at a time when we're seeing that there's also a great deal of distrust of the government and of those who are within the political realm it are there other structures institutions where should we be looking other than of course as you suggest our abilities a society to organize around issues create movements but but where do we channel that that if you have thought about it and I'm sure you have you know I think that the government is like your dysfunctional family okay you don't eat Thanksgiving alone in a McDonald's because you have a dysfunctional family you eat it with your dysfunctional family and you try to make it a little less dysfunctional and we all get that when it comes to our family but we Bale like chickens when our government is dysfunctional yeah our government is dysfunctional right now but I want to make a couple points one I know a lot of people who use Paul Ryan Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump as an alibi for not being civic well it turns out we actually have 90,000 government entities in the United States of America and as far as I can tell those guys control three out of the ninety thousand I know a lot of people who care a lot about criminal justice who have no idea what's going on in their local DA races local judgeships right I know a lot of people who are very excited to be senators who never think of being a county executive you know this world well there's and and so I think we have to accept the fact that we are in an age in which civic life is in a bad state we have to also recognize that civic lives in a bad state because the very moneyed interest I'm talking about worked in a concerted way to put it in a bad state starting the 1970s to push deregulation push for tax cuts for rich people that created a world in which social problems multiplied government could do less about them and then philanthropist were the only white knights on the scene to say well I can fill the gap you created the gap yes right I mean it's amazing for Google to say like we want to fight for an America in which the news business can flourish better you killed the news business you have an abusive monopoly in online advertising you are D oxygenating any other industry or player that relies on online ads it is morally and legally indefensible it is an absolute antitrust issue that simply fails to be one because it's a slightly new legal problem and then you turn around and say you want to help the future of news just stop hurting it and so I think we need to change where we go to change the world no one owes you a highly functional government if you find your government dysfunctional go make it more functional and that doesn't mean just running for office there's a you know I quote this woman at the book PR core Delhi is a political philosopher at the University of Chicago and she's you know she says you got to create the conditions work to create the conditions where we can solve problems publicly again that means training people to run for office that means working to get the money out of politics that means building movements I always say to people you're not really in a movement with people if you haven't barbecued with them right and we have a lot of simulation of citizenship in our time our phones make us think we're citizens we're not actually connected any of those people we're liking and poking and sharing and commenting and we're not in a movement with those people the people in the civil rights movement the people the women's suffrage suffrage movement they actually knew each other they were friends for a really long time when they took risks they actually were able to take those risks because they knew each other and trusted each other and had bonds we don't really have that anymore we don't have movements young people participate in a conversation about things but don't form durable movements that can scare the hell out of elected officials I think probably the most astonishing movement of the decade if not longer is the me2 movement and if you think if you evaluate that movement from the vantage point of shaping the conversation changing the conversation getting justice for some people changing the way women are able to tell their stories changing the way men look back on some of their own pasts this is an astonishing movement of resounding success but many people within the movement will tell you that it is a frustration of theirs that they haven't really introduced any legislation anywhere including in very liberal cities like this one where they might have a real shot at some ordinance something it is a hallmark of our age that even the most successful movements often pull up short before implanting their ideas in policy in law in the kinds of things that actually solve problems at the root for everybody instead of remain in the realm of conversation and media and the glare but to actually go down into the roots the way the Voting Rights Act did or any other kind of piece of legislation like that that works at the system and I think we have to really reclaim that history and that heritage of making those kinds of changes well and especially since our society actually allows for that there are plenty of places around the world where that type of organization and ability to engage in a civic movement action can land you in jail or worse and so when the opportunity is there it certainly feels as if it's incumbent on all of us yes to make that move I hope all those Silicon Valley people who are in Saudi Arabia this week will come back with a new appreciation for that yeah if they come back yeah that wasn't intended okay this is the part of the program where I pull the questions and in fact last question was from the audience it was an Aspen Institute fellow who'd asked about the linkage between private philanthropy and the negative views of our government and you addressed that but we have Monica who lives in Oakland California she's asking why American culture is so resistant to seeing problems not through a structural lens but rather as a dearth of individual will and effort and what will it take to change this it's a great question you know I've been reading this amazing book new book that you all should read called these truths budget Lepore it's its new sweeping history of the United States from 1492 to present first survey of that kind written by a woman it's extraordinary book and and her interpretation of the founding fathers very interesting I think gets to this question which is she and she's not the first person but she really frames the founding fathers as people who are overreacting like she kind of goes through like the Stamp Act and the whole tea thing like they were actually like the tea thing was just formalizing something that was already true the Stamp Act was like pretty minor and all the other colonies of Jamaica like they're all fine with it like we were founded by I always think like we were founded by like a nation of like highway ways right like like kind of these like renegade people who took like relatively small oppressions when they were actually visiting much graver oppressions on the slaves in their midst they were so exercised about like having to put stamps on paper and having a tea tax that was already in effect that they wrote this like extraordinary document when in the course of human and in this book you actually read the Declaration relative to the stuff that the British were doing to them it's almost comical right and it's it's an amazing document but like they weren't being hurt like that badly and and I think that's important to answer this question because I think in that heritage and the language of the country there is this like extreme dissident isolated sensibility of the heretic and we just have a very we don't have as much of a collective vocabulary I think we imagine ourselves like it's this nation of dissidents in that in that founding language and I think that's just carried through the present and we don't have a vocabulary so one like very simple example is we are very sensitive in this country to unfreedom that comes from concentrated government power we're basically still fleeing the king that's my point we are hypersensitive to the king King George is like in all of our minds right and so anything in this country today that derives from an unfreedom like that's a King George getting you the government coming to get your guns that's a king George coming to get your guns we're like the government charging attacks that's King George loving attacks we're hypersensitive hyper aware vigilant sometimes to have benefits sometimes not what we are much less able to appreciate is threats to our freedom that don't kind of come with the embodiment of a king threats to our freedom that come from sometimes the absence of authority right so we're much more sensitive to the government taking our guns than we are to thousands of gun deaths because of the chaos of not of having too many guns out there and we're much more in we're much less able to protect ourselves from the chaos of a housing crisis that costs millions of people their homes then we are so ready and willing to fight like one banking regulation we recognize tyranny when it comes in the shape of King George and we are totally blind to the tyranny of collective systems which is a long way of saying I just think we need to frankly like redo our imagination America because a lot of threats to people's freedom don't come in the shape that we as Americans have been trained primordial e to expect it and that's the end of my King George okay well I was gonna say you know maybe we should rename y'all be that large and I'll read these truths by jewel reports yeah unbelievable so an invite her here okay did whoever it is it's in charge of the programming should invite her here's a question from Susan Lucas and she asks are any of the billionaire philanthropist focusing on quote economic inequality and persistent poverty in the u.s. multi-generational in other words are the folks that you're being critical of actually doing something to raise taxes support the common good strengthen civic life and actually undermine their their ability to make a problem some examples you know for example if you look at the people who fund ProPublica mm-hmm there's some small dollar people but there's also some bigger people that is not the kind of that's not like the self-dealing kind of giving that I'm critiquing that's a very little benefit to a rich person right the best that can happen you go to ProPublica is that they're not going to touch anybody you know the worst that can happen they're gonna investigate everybody you know if you're a very rich person so and that's the kind of giving that makes a system better that holds people to account the benefits of which flow into civic life you know there are people out here in California who have done philanthropic work trying to improve the quality of the census count right there's this mechanism where private people can suggest to the government addresses that the government is unlikely to count properly someone living on a mattress on a roof the government's not going to have that listed but if you tell them that there's someone living on that roof on a mattress then they will add it to a database no count it right so there's folks who fund clipboard' walk-arounds which are very labor-intensive to do that that's again you're not doing that to benefit yourself as a rich person you're not putting your name on a library you're doing that because you actually want to enhance the count and by the way if we count more poor and vulnerable people that's gonna hurt you on balance right that's more of your tax dollars going to more people but you are you would argue that it would help you overall because you're strengthening your democratic system isn't yes right well I may not help you in a narrow sense I actually try to stay away from these like win-win like but it's still good for you in a long run it may not be good for you it's still the right thing to do yes but are you arguing in fact that that the health of our society and the health of our democracy actually relies on not yea cutting out yeah okay the health overall I'm not talking about but sometimes that means important lady Grantham don't get to live in a castle anymore you know yes and that that's better for the society but it's not better for Lord and Lady Grantham that's but it still may be the right thing for them to push and so then when you look at someone like although they may not be strung up in the end I mean that also is probably good for Lord Lee faster you move right yeah and so but let's turn it around to take someone like Bezos how could he shift from the bad side of this to the good side of this so he announced he's very early in this yeah two billion dollars a billion for homelessness a billion for education the preschool is going to be focused on the customer like Amazon so I guess you can return your education within two weeks or less and it comes sooner if it's pronunciation with those puffy plastic things so a lot of what he announced it's fine it's but it's symptom treatment right it's not dealing with the root causes of poverty or inequality it's helping some poor kids who don't get good education helping some homeless families in Seattle it's fine nothing objectionable people will be helped but how could he get to a place of the kind of giving or talking about dealing with civic life solving things at the root and so first of all when you employ people the way they do at Amazon you contribute to homelessness and inequality and poverty you know so the first thing I often say to these folks is first don't ask what you can do for your country ask what you've done to your country okay and first stop doing the things that you've done that our country so let's stop the bleeding first all right because if you're helping over here but you're still bloodletting it's not that helpful and just stop what you're doing and then and then if you were to ask okay well what can I do how could I give more transformative lis let's take one issue he made his money because of a glitch in history which is that the labor union movement was very weak as the internet was rising if unions had been where they were 30 years ago when Amazon started it wouldn't be what it was he wouldn't be worth a hundred and sixty billion dollars he and I'm not saying he created that reality because he didn't create that reality he made use of that reality but that was just a historical fact and probably in 20 30 years we will have figured out new ways to protect workers that's my bet but in the period that he happened to make 160 billion dollars it's hard to think about that fortune having been made if workers had had more bargaining power the model is built on how little bargaining power workers happen to have in that period okay so you say okay I want to give in a transformative way I got 160 billion with a B to play with imagine if he said okay I can't change what I did I have some regrets about it I'm willing to defend it in other ways but I want to invest billions of dollars in the future of worker power in this country right I want to help people figure out what are the unions of the future I want to strengthen labor protections I want to improve fight for legislation that would actually make it easier for workers to be safe on the job have some bargaining power have benefits and I understand that if I succeed over here in this philanthropic work it's gonna raise the cost of doing business for Amazon it actually may hurt Amazon my hundred I mean remembered a lot of his wealth is still stock one hundred sixty billion dollars may go down more from the devaluation of my stock than from giving money away but that I think would be real giving yeah it would be as a as a New York Times writer we did a piece where he wrote about my book and what it would mean for Bezos and the way Farhad Manjoo summarized it was Jeff Bezos should give in a way that makes sure there's never another Jeff Bezos right and and on this is you know we're in this global reality right so let's assume or let's hope that maybe Jeff Bezos takes this takes the bait sees the light moves in this direction and somebody in Beijing at $0.10 or Alibaba says ha there's an opening I don't have labor laws that are going to require me to do these types of things I can quickly fill in that very vacuum in an undemocratic society where there are no labor laws and and take advantage of the globalized weakness of a system that protects individuals and in their case doesn't protect the citizens of its own society well we should write better trade laws okay so and and and and that's what trade laws are for and again I mean like a lot of things Donald Trump says you know there's like a 5% truth in it but and then the remaining nine ninety five percent is less true than anybody who's ever used the English language even people who haven't used it well the way he can't and you know but there's a actually a kernel of truth that was ignored by people on both sides of the aisle yeah the trade was not working for many people and the Chinese for example are much better than us at like looking at their society and getting what they want from train arrangements then we are like for my favorite example this is the Chinese made this deal where basically if you want to be a foreign company operating in China you have to work with a local partner what's the kind of weird requirement well it's actually a kind of genius requirement you know why you you cause every company in the world to create a mentorship program for your entire like executive core and you force the world's companies that they want to come to your country to train like two hundred thousand executives over a period of years right that's brilliant that's not free trade that's smart trade yeah and we could be much more creative in actually saying hey if you exploit your workers you don't get access to this market all of this is policy this is what I mean by changing things at the root for everybody but in the same way and I'm gonna just follow up on this but in the same way that you're suggesting that American billionaires and corporations have essentially taken have state capture have captured the state haven't we now because of these weaknesses these market failures these social failures haven't we arrived at a point where in fact other countries too have been able and other corporations that are global captured the state to prevent the types of policies that may be Donald Trump is promoting but in practical actual fact are going to be very difficult to get employs I'm not suggesting we shouldn't try but it's a much another great place for philanthropic efforts what its gonna mean citizens united has to be one of the great priorities for anybody who loves this country getting rid of it and that's not gonna be easy that's a project of building movements of but that's an issue by the way wherever you sell it right there's a lot of people on the right average people who do not like the idea of companies running Washington right right there's that that's an area where the rights actually divided against itself well speaking of big companies Joel who works at Google agile okay hey wherever he is I'm not gonna point him out he was everywhere you he has a very simple question this is relevant because you were recently at Google speaking and he asks what would you like to see Google do what would you do if you worked there so I I went to Google in in early September they asked me to give a talk in Boston Google Boston yeah I never know if people invite me because they haven't read my book or because if they have so it's confusing and I was just gonna talk about my book in generic terms and about 45 minutes out of Boston on the train I realized that's kind of stupid I should talk about the specifics of Google at Google I had 45 minutes left so I made some notes and basically gave a talk about a lot of what we're talking about today but in the context of the story that prevails at Google I have one of the characters in my book was a important founding member at Google and I'd spent a lot of time with him and he talks about this idea that I think is so endemic in Silicon Valley in general which is we feel like whatever is good for our company is what's best for the world and we feel so lucky that we have alighted I love you yeah we we feel we feel so lucky we've alighted on a set of tools that simply building and developing them and jamming them out into the world will liberate humanity so the faster we can do that the less encumbered we can be in doing that then less questions journalists can ask the less regulated we are the better for Humanity now when you take something like Google search there's a certain truth to the fact that what has made them a lot of money he's definitely been good for the world we all probably a hundred searches today right if you're a doctor in Malawi dealing with a complicated case the world is a lot better for you in a world in which Google has built this than not on the other hand they've gotten so hooked on the story what I said in the talk is they have become unable to see all the places where the story breaks down all the places where what's good for them what's good for the world happen to be different and that's not a horrible thing that's just true of you know if you're a shoe manufacturer there are some ways in which making shoes is good for the world and fills a need you know but if you make them out of some you know chemical that pollutes all the rivers there's like some places where that may not be good for the world and you got to deal with it and that's why we have a government and and I suggested to them that their maturity would require them to accept that they are now power they're not rebels against power anymore they're not hackers they've actually made it their revolution succeeded and they're behaving like little babies who don't want to be regulated because they're still think they're fighting the power but they are the power and that there's nothing more dangerous than a Goliath who thinks they are David so that went over well I mean you should see it was not a packed room by the way it was like not a popular talk like ten people showed up and then those ten people were like the whole time is like have you ever seen an engineer thinks they're about to die it was it was it was nervous making and and and then they basically stalled on putting the talk online they were like we're definitely put it online like a month goes by no talk on YouTube so my publishers like my father's like we never seen this before you deal with them all the time I've never seen this before we contact them ah you know it's I'm not associated with that project anymore right all right that's not always a sign something's going wrong so I did what I do best which is leaked it to publication um people do it to me I do it to them so we haven't betrayed little favors so I called a great tech reporter and I was like this is happening I think it's a good story that turns out this woman has like a special expertise in the Google authors talk program for a different issue which has to do with conservatives and liberals but she knew a lot about that program and she's like yeah that it's weird so she starts making calls a couple hours late it's like yeah we're putting it online very soon you know and I would have been a better story if it was actually censored but I kind of screwed it up by having her call and and so they put it online yeah and but it it gets to the question of I think the biggest thing these companies need to do is stop doing the harm they do Google is a monopoly that needs to be broken up we could call it goo and go alpha and bad yeah exactly exactly and that monopoly has consequences just because monopoly is a boring issue does not mean it's not important that monopoly has basically killed the media business there are many states in this country that don't have a media outlet monitoring the state legislature writing about what bills are passed what happens in committee I mean that is how you lose a country that's how you got a Russia where basically the leaders can do whatever you know we're closer to that than we realized not because of some grand design but because we're just like the first amendment is not being exercised in a bunch of parts of this country because no one can keep a newspaper open and Google is doing that along with Facebook and so stop doing the harm don't try to do big things just stop first stop doing harm and look at your own complicity and not just your ability like solve all these big program you know the big problems first stop doing harm and get out of the way of the public when it wants to solve its problems acting as a public except that there may be things the public needs to do for its welfare that conflict with your interests and the part of being a grown-up as a company is understanding that what is good for you is not always what is good for society and being like an adult about it okay Joel wherever you're sitting please take that back to Google and and send don't resign during that yeah yeah now has a yahoo.com email address the only one in America beats the aol.com yeah that's like vintage it's like it's like bell-bottoms it's kind of back yeah Ask Jeeves why don't you let see what will happen look in your this is will make this last question here and then what we'll do is we'll open it up to four very short questions that will will let you share your book with others who are interested in taking it home you kyoya who asks in your book you should shine a light on oh you shine a light on fake change workers as sellouts who are willing to accept band-aids for social problems but change is slow and comes from many directions her real question is how you know what you're looking what we're looking for some big changes here whether they be questions of antitrust sore issues of monopoly how do we get civic engagement grow an understanding of the common good but that these things happen very slowly in societies such as ours especially democratic society such as ours where we have a lot of stakeholders how do we get there I want to do in the mean time we do in the mean the real moving in that direction as you are you know inciting us to get up out of our seats and leave our jobs and you know at least change the organization's where we currently work I'll give you a simple example of how to make that shift because I think it's a very important issue the kind of change I'm calling for is tough and takes time and involves building movements and building political power and all of those things and there is need right now there are those homeless people in the streets of San Francisco right now there are people disrupted by globalization and automation right now and none of what I'm suggesting is that we should ignore that in favor of the big changes but even in how we approach the immediate need there are ways of approaching it that serve solely as band-aids and there's ways of approaching it that help push us in the direction of that kind of deeper change and I'll give you I'll give you an example from something that's been in the news which is LeBron James's school in Akron so you may have heard about uni but this really amazing state of the art school in Akron which I visited a couple weeks ago for a couple months ago now this school is a completely philanthropic project he put a lot of money into it on the other hand he chose to work through the public school system which is an unusual choice not a charter and you know they had to work with the teachers unions with their existing contracts they put themselves through much more of a wringer because in some ways you wanted to make the system better but to be fair it's just one school with like a lot of money and a lot of sneakers on the wall and there is no question in my mind having visited that school that it is gonna make life better for anybody goes to that school a few hundred people right there there is what's called wraparound services where if you as a parent of a child in that school have an issue with the city bureaucracy there's a City bureaucrat who sits in that school several days a week so you could just go to your kids school sort out your missing pension check your insurance thing why because otherwise you're spending ten hours going around the city and neglecting your kid right so they've thought about that there's a pantry if you have hungry kids you go to the pantry there's big things of peanut butter eggs canned tomatoes you have food you know because that you don't want that they figured out everything that gets in the way of kids succeeding and they've put it in that school and it's amazing so the plus is like that's the band-aid in the sense that it's amazing it's going to hell those kids it's not going to change the fact that Akron Public Schools are where they are in the state of Ohio it's not going to change the fact that Governor Kasich and the Republicans in that state have cut business taxes and therefore cut education funding it's not going to change the fact that Akron's per pupil spending is about five thousand dollars I think and there's another part of the state there's a $31,000 a year education spending per pupil LeBron's schools not going to touch any of that right so we could set up a simple duality of there's the bandaid that he's doing right now he's helping those kids right now but not changing the system what I think is interesting is when you start thinking about how could he do the band-aid how could he build the school as he has done in ways that would push - we're dealing with the cancer and my vision of that is you could you build the school just as he's doing but instead of just leaving it at that you use the school as a cudgel to deal with the rest of the issue you invite documentary filmmakers into the school to tell the story of that school and another school that didn't get that help and show the difference you use that school if you're LeBron James with his stature to build a national movement you start a super PAC inspired by these stories of that school to fund candidates around this country who support the kind of policies that would give that kind of education to everybody so you you do the band-aid but you then work at the level of the cancer as well and you make a link between them and I think a lot of people who are doing important giving right now no one is suggesting that they should cease and desist the idea is how do you take what you're doing and make sure that ultimately it is not in any way shoring up a bad system by reputation laundering for bad people etc etc and that it's actually starting to push in the direction of solving the problem not just for the people you're helping right now but at the root for everybody through institutions solutions that are public institutional democratic and universal and I think that one example could be applied to any number of other examples where genuinely good works that are all around us in the in our time could be made so much richer well let's all think about what we can do that's democratic institutional and universal to help our society clearly we all want to be engaged and I think we've been inspired tonight to consider that engagement and how we can be involved in our civic life and I really appreciate your time with us tonight andand and thank you for the time effort and energy that you're putting into well that you've already put into putting together this book but also that you're spending to promote the ideas and to try to infect all of us with that level of civic pride engagement and an organization that's required to change our society in positive ways thank you and we'll be around a little bit longer so that we can ask just a couple questions before Anand sign some books so join me in thanking a nun for this evening [Applause] [Music]

Channel: World Affairs

Views: 258,460

Keywords: World, Affairs, technology, philanthropy, elite, democracy, institutions, service, progress, aid, community, wealth, poverty

Id: jbzvWkbUVEQ

Length: 62min 56sec (3776 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 24 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/UmamiTofu]

Same guy - is it a different idea this time?

I wish they would give transcripts for more of these talks.

[u/Dannyhealy]

What is the authors name?