Anand Giridharadas with Larissa MacFarquhar, “Winners Take All” | Event - Sep 26, 2018

...times from 2005 to 2016 and it's also written for The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New Yorker. I'm sure you've seen him on various television stations because he does a lot of that commentary. He's a fellow of the Aspen Institute and a political analyst for MSNBC and a former McKinsey analyst which And a former McKinsey analyst which gives him special insight into his subject. As I said he teaches here which were delighted about and has spoken on the stage of TED. You can look up his TED Talk which I think you'd find inspiring his writings have been honored by the Society of publishers in Asia the Pointer fellowship at Yale and the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein award on which I serve on the committee and actually was part of that and he lives in Brooklyn. So anyway without further ado I delighted to welcome our guests we're going to they're just going to have an informal conversation on the topics that the book raises and that Larissa has also engaged with and please. Thank you thank you Brooke so I am very excited to do this because I I've been wondering about the questions that Anand addresses for a long time there's one moment in particular but they really crystallized about I think three or four years ago when I was on the campus at Stanford and I met an idealistic young woman very very much wanted to change the world she just graduated and she was going to work for uber and I found this baffling and I interrogated her why white uber and she said what we were is changing the world and I was like oh that's true but and then another time at Stanford I met this young woman named Hilary Cohen who again was fiercely idealistic brilliant warm likable young woman whose first steps on the road to changing the world for the better was to go to McKenzie and Goldman Sachs and then when I picked up on Anne's book there I see the same Hilary Cohen and I think this book is going to answer all these questions I've been asking for years and indeed it did it was revelatory on so many levels but before I start asking some more questions having read the book a couple of times with amazing deep interest I want you to just give us a lay of the land because you're going to do this much better than I could so just tell us the argument of the book and the kinds of people you've been talking to you and the conclusions first of all thank you all for being here it's fun to do this in a place where I teach there's usually less lights when I teach but it's really fun to have you all here so thank you and and to sit next to you I mean honestly for me like this is how like an aspiring choir singer feels sitting next to Aretha one of the one of the truly great writers of our time so so thank you for doing this the book grew out of a lot of moments similar to the kind you had and I think these are moments when I start to say well they are that you all feel like you had them and they're moments that we often have of cognitive dissonance of kind of just these weird little details about our age so every time I went to a store and saw the proliferation of these products that are gonna change the world this iPhone case of this tote bag or those socks they're gonna change the world there was I didn't have a huge analysis of it but there was something in it that felt off not right there's something that that actually made me feel sad about living in an era where that was what was considered changing the world every time I had the experiences you had of those idealistic young people and having frankly had something of that experience myself that was not exactly my motivation but but knowing young people who were so idealistic and then into their eighth year of a two-year stint at goldman sachs learning to change the world that was a detail that arrested me and left me with that kind of intellectual heartburn and then every time i heard and we've had so many headlines like in the last couple of weeks and I'm so grateful to these billionaires for doing this to us for me from my book promotion like uber donating ten million to help the congestion problem even though it also caused it you know Larry Fink of Blackrock this week lecturing the United Nations lecturing here in New York on sustainable development Larry Fink runs Blackrock largest asset management company in the world he got very famous recently for making a statement that all businesses needed higher purpose all businesses when the biggest asset manager in the world says that it was earthquake stocks plummeted other stocks rose it sounded for a moment like if you weren't a company with a social purpose Blackrock might not own equity in you in the future which might mean like you'd be dead right big moment he got a great press this new Wall Street the Barron's post you know he's leaning like this is Larry Fink the new conscience of Wall Street reaps all the press right this week addressing the UN as a result of that press but during the last six months as he was getting this press his black rock bought four million new additional shares of ExxonMobil right that's just one example slightly the kind of example and and we saw Bezos giving money away recently while people were saying well bunches pay your taxes and pay your workers more etcetera etc and so there was a lot of just cognitive dissonance about my age and about what I felt to be a phony story about change that didn't match I was a history major he didn't match what I've learned about change growing up it didn't didn't match the stories of how women won suffrage or how african-americans won civil rights or how immigrants won the right to be in this country in a safe and stable it just didn't match it was something was being denuded from the idea of change and often irritation becomes a book and I think this is a case of like sustained irritation becoming a book and the the the bridge between irritation and the book is hopefully reporting so I actually the book originally in a speech that I gave at the Aspen Institute I was asked to be a fellow there it's mostly businesspeople who are asked but they throw in a couple people for spice and entertainment every year because you know businesspeople can be a little boring and they they had us in there and I just again this whole thing of like why are we in the Koch seminar building named after the brother not the beverage talking about making democracy better why are we in the you know Pepsi on Monsanto sponsored ideas festival Aspen ideas festival talking about like empowering kids like you are fattening kids while we are here in Aspen you're fattening kids everywhere who are not here and they asked me to give a talk about my previous book but about a hate crime I said yes and then I sent them an email saying I'm gonna change it slightly I rewrote I read a new talk that was about how millionaires and billionaires have gathered at the Aspen Institute are the embodiment of the problem not the embodiment of the solution as they claim and I gave that talk to a roomful of 400 super-rich people some of them sat in their hands some of them gave me a standing ovation one woman was a billionaire came up to me and said thank you for voicing what's been the struggle of my whole life that I can never tell anybody another guy private equity investor came up to me that night at the bar and said you're an asshole and then shook my hand so out of that speech the speech grew out of those irritations and that cognitive dissonance and then the book grew out of that speech it's such a good book I mean I I'm sure I've been seeing also not so I think everyone has had look everybody has that tote bag yes and everybody knows that they didn't actually change the world by buying it yes oh well so so I mean I've been baffled and frustrated by a kind of and I'm sure many people in this room too Silicon Valley is one of the places where this stuff gets most ripe where billionaires and and those who work for them think that they're changing the world for the good because they are literally changing the world in the sense of putting things there that didn't used to be there and yet since 2016 election as we know this has been somewhat deflated because of the rule Facebook played in the election have you had conversations with people in sulfone Valley since the election like how how has that particular flavor of faux utopianism changed I actually think it's not even confined to that I think I mean I'm starting with this point so you have to trust me that I hate Donald Trump more than anybody America or it may be tied with all the rest of you but and I don't have many good things to say about him however I think Trump has done us an enormous service as a country that gets to the question you asked which is I have found and I found this actually even while writing the book which was 2015 2016 2017 even during the reporting and now certainly after I think a lot of people who know a lot of what I'm writing about is really elite self-justification right is people who are trying to do things and save things and change things but it's fundamentally self-preservation --all self-protective and fundamentally about keeping oneself on top and so it requires a lot of wall of rationale is a what I found as Trump got closer and closer and then started serving my reporting spanned that whole period basically into let's say the first summer of his presidency what I found was that there are very few events that can make powerful people open to introspection about their their own deepest convictions right there very few things because they're powerful because there's not a lot of people in their lives who tell them they're full of shit etc etc and so it takes big things either in their personal life so like a very common thing I found in this book is like rich people getting cancer is often a spur to like changing their lives and you know it's so you have these personal epic personal events things happening with your children or off but but here was something on this scale that I started to find what's actually making these very self-justifying people say sometimes privately sometimes to me in the book you know if this is happening maybe we're all wrong about everything right like maybe the assumptions that I had like at some level I mean it's easy for people like us sitting here in New York to be like man those racist white people in Alabama really got this guy elected but the math doesn't work and particularly if you go beyond the electoral thing to talk about conditions in this country that allowed this to happen like you don't get a Trump in a country this extraordinary without there being 18 massive system failures in parallel that were uncorrelated that all happened at the same time right and so I think there's a lot of people who I've found are like okay maybe I'm all wrong about everything let's have a conversation and that is actually I won't say and Donald Trump that's a really beautiful thing it I don't know what we're gonna do with it but I have found more people I mean really really rich people thinking about like maybe we do need a confiscatory estate tax I don't think we do but maybe like maybe I'm wrong and I think there's a maybe I'm wrong here about a lot of different things and as Rahm Emmanuel said I think you know never let a good crisis go to waste never let a crisis of the elite soul go to waste we should make sure we're taking advantage of this moment well I mean I want to ask you about that because I mean on the one hand it's clearly the case you talked about that that in certain elite circles something about poverty is more acceptable than talking about inequality because poverty is something that you know will always be with us and you can address it privately with your own charity and it doesn't threaten structures in the way that talk of inequality does on the other hand inequality has become a very fashionable buzzword in those same circles and thomas piketty's book was a huge bestseller which was not just you know oppressed people buying it you know I'm sure it was a lot of of these same people buying it and so there there's I think there are a lot of people who ought to be made uncomfortable by talk of inequality but are not in fact made uncomfortable and you know I'm thinking about also the reception that your talk about at Aspen you set out to uncover and make uncomfortable the people in that room but all of them gave you a standing ovation so can you tell us about you know you spent time with these people what kind of rationalizations and sort of double ways of thinking go on to enable those same people to talk very fluently and enthusiastically about inequality and yet do not much yeah I mean one thing I found you know if you like lurk around the darker parts of Reddit and you try to understand like what's the reigning theory of the world here it's a view in which which people are you know in the tall towers of New York and San Francisco like having conversations over cigars and whiskey about how to make people's lives worse right right and what I found is that's not true there are some people like that but what I found that in some ways is scarier for just all of us as human beings is there's actually a lot of rich people who since you and I got behind a lot of enemy lines and gates and found out about things that I wasn't even and like rich people spend a lot of time at least in our time and this then there are historical precedents thinking about how to make other people's lives better and what I found was a lot of decent people upholding a profoundly indecent system that they have reason to know is indecent and so the question then becomes what's the bridge that allows decent people to uphold an indecent system and and to get to your point that bridge is a whole set of beliefs you need the the decent people couldn't live with themselves if they didn't have the scaffolding of these beliefs to uphold you know because they would hurt them too much and so this book in many ways is an attempt to dismantle the phoney beliefs that allow decent people that hold the Indian system so let's just to rattle some of them off at the heart of it I think everything in the book is about one of these ideas which is the win-win right the win-win a win-win is a and as an idea that's totally fine that emerges from commercial exchange like you have ice cream I have money I want ice cream you know we make a deal that's a win-win particularly with ice cream and there's no disputing that I don't think that's fake but that's real and that's an idea basically from trade what has happened in our time is the idea of the win-win has been like dragged into the idea of social change so that social change is now expected to be a win-win so one of the ways these decent people uphold an indecent system is they insist more and more that the kind of social change that matters that would help people that would really be the right thing to do our win wins and what win wins means it should help those people but it should certainly not hurt and maybe even kick something upstairs to the powerful also right so what that means I you take any issue like the empowerment of women there's like the stuff that would actually work based on other countries experience like maternity leave at the level of policy or you know just other social policies like childcare tax credits or like not you know creating laws that make it less likely for women to be groped in the office every day or by Supreme Court justices and instead what will all those things I said they're kind of they're costly for men they're costly for the winners they would cost billion there's a lot of money to do all those things so they're not win wins right there.when lose in a certain sense and to help millions of people you'd have to some people would have to sacrifice something that discourse has totally been overtaken by the idea of like win-win so what's win/win feminism llenan you know it's a win-win cuz I just told you to do it and now we're done now you just do it didn't cost a dime no powerful person no man has to stop standing on any woman's neck you just say when went you can even say win-win to the woman while you're standing on her neck you know rich people don't have to change anything they're doing they don't have to stop hurting women or hurting poor people are hurting minorities in any way they can just like tell you to empower yourself or did one charter school while keeping everybody else in bad public schools or whatever and that's just one example of this belief that's totally easy to see why people fall for it win-win it's like two victories not one but the more truthful version of win-win maybe have captured by the goldman sachs elevator twitter account which is supposedly at one time an account of things are overheard and that elevator for real i don't know if this is real and the line was a win-win is when i beat you twice i mean that yes that is the the i you one of the brilliant brilliant things about this book is the way he describes this because he just takes things that you've there's sort of the problem that we all swim in every day and then he exposes the this sort of underpinnings and what what those those cliches entail but i have to say i was cringing as i when i found myself and i when i read your description of a certain mindset a certain width you know this win win optimistic let's think constructively rather than critically let's unite let's not divide let's let's all work together a way that no one has to lose I have to I found myself thinking about Obama and I thought you know is there some way in which in a sort of I guess parallel way to the way that you described Trump's shocking and if every wanted to realizing how they were wrong that Obama's style of uniting politics helped this mindset continue I think that's I think rhetorically that's fair I mean I think the situation of the first african-american president was such that I think he was denied the use of anger by because of our yeah cultural faults yeah they're not his faults and I think of what to my mind is a very useful and important tool in politics anger even a little accurate scapegoating I mean I'm a fan of a politics of like in an accurate way like makes enemies of actual enemies right you know I don't think he had I don't think he could do that yeah because of who he was and like you could even just see those moments when the Michelle had a little more of that in her constitutionally and you saw like how she was treated anytime you got a glimpse of that out of her it was like she was treated so much worse than him so but I think setting that aside I think a lot of his policies you know many of his policies I mean some of the tax Stephanie in Obamacare like did hurt the rich but in a way he because he couldn't sell it that way mm-hmm there's this way in which the left has refused to be a mirror image to the right and there's a lot of ways in which you don't want to be a mirror image to the right but I actually think there are some ways in which it would be useful I think it'd be useful to love government as much as the right hates it instead of saying we totally get that you hate government and yes it's awful but but we can bend the cost curve down on health care and you know it would cover some people but like I just think it's harder to do that than be like government is amazing health care life is so much better when you never to think about your health care again and like fight hard I think sometimes the equal opposite position is actually the better and partly because of who but it's not just his race and his predicament I think he's also not he's not a flame thrower right and he and I think there's a reason that like Bernie who was like as to my mind like kind of personally unappealing a figure and not a kind man by many people's account and some you know in like personals just someone who brought a lot doing wrong way at that personal level you know was able to connect with so many people because he was willing to connect those policies to like people who'd stood on other people's necks and I think if you know if you exclude that from the story if you school like a lot of what I found I still find like on this book tour is like people are like well why do you have to name what's wrong why can't we just move forward you know and I I finally found a way to shut these people up which I'm gonna try out on you tonight I say you know in in like political economy there's two kinds of problems in you think of social problems we have there's two kinds of problems right one is problems that are like an engine comparable to an engine right where tweak things you dial things you'd shift some things and you can fix the engine and so I think if you went to Chicago Public Schools and you found that the teachers best able to fix you know classrooms that were needing the most remedial help were assigned to the wrong classrooms and you could do an algorithm and you could evaluate and you could match teachers better and everybody's performance could go up that's a real thing and there are many problems like that great win-win tweak dial but a bunch of other problems in a society are more like a crime scene than an engine right and a crime scene is like you have a problem but your problem because someone did something to someone else and you do not show up at a crime scene and say you know okay let's just move forward let's just let's just that what's done is done let's let's focus on solutions we all know that you don't focus on solutions at a crime scene but somehow when you have the mass crime scene of gender inequality right when you have the mass crime scene of poor kids systematically shut out or equal equal education by the fact that we fund education according to home values and ring-fence like rich people's house values like into their public school area like those are all crimes in my view they're not punched someone in the subway crimes they're worse they're more diffuse but they're much bigger and they hurt way more people and they like through indirect ways kill people and shorten people's lives and make people's lives impossibly hard and they're there it's a different kind of brutality and my kind of big thesis here is that those kind of problems are not susceptible to win-win solutions they can't because someone's standing on someone's neck and you can't like the only answer is to get that person off the net the first thing it's like stop standing on their neck right and then you can move forward but right now you can't build a charter school for someone and save poor kids because you're still standing on their neck by insisting that your property taxes in Greenwich don't go to them right right and you can't you can't have your cake and give it to so like I completely agree with all that sometimes the thing that worries me is I can I can support government 100% in theory but sometimes your government is not so great and sometimes your government for instance is deregulating and the energy industry at a speed that is threatening the planet and the only thing that seems to stand between you and the apocalypse is Tom Styer what do you do call Tom Steyer I guess and I think it's a very good question that's one that obviously comes up a lot now so I say a couple things in nowhere nowhere in the book do I say we should stop giving stop capitalism stop it I mean people you know people who work in some of these spaces like fantasize if that's what I've said but I I you know have a pretty good editor who made sure I didn't say that what I wrote in my drafts is up to me and you know what I the way I think about what I'm saying is like you know when you're standing on your feet and you shift your weight from one foot to the other you're still standing on two feet both your feet on the ground but there's a shift in your way this shift in emphasis a substantial shift possibly I am in a way advocating for a shift in weight from the private to the public in American life right I'm calling for a shift in like the emphasis of the age the the tendency of the age that does not mean there will be no private business that people won't be giving etc etc it just means that like at the margin the average young people with idealism what go run for a county executive position instead of good at holman Sachs it just means that at the margin next time any of you see a problem with public schools you won't think of joining the board of a charter school you'll think about fighting that lawsuit to make unequal public school funding unconstitutional it just means that we'll look for solutions that are public democratic universal and institutional next time we see something that bugs us and so on your specific thing like yeah if there is emergencies and if there are issues that that frankly need to be addressed right now and can't be addressed by local government like climate change yeah like do it I still think there are ways for those people to do it that it grand eyes themselves and ways to do it then actually put communities first there's ways to you know fight climate change by someone like Mike Bloomberg that would you know that would help that would have someone like Mike Bloomberg overcome his own biases and and not necessarily need to be the CEO of it I give the money to people doing the best work but yeah sure like but I other thing climate change is a very specific example where like there's no way to not do that work right now but the other problem I have is we all use Paul Ryan Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump as like an excuse to not do public service you know how many government entities there are the United States 90,000 ninety thousand government entities all but three of them not controlled by Paul Ryan Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump right and that's where I think we all become more complicit like how many people you know run for those boring like county clerk jobs and though and like how many I mean how many people who feel very strongly about mass incarceration like actually run for like not Attorney General but like like local prosecutor either just work as well or run for local judges or you know those kind of things like there's been a neglect of all levels of government by people who claim to want to change the world that I think can't be explained away by the dysfunction on the top and the last thing I'll say about the Bloomberg's desires is I think there's a way for them to give I end the book by talking about with this woman Kiara Cordell II it's very rare to like give your last words as a writer to someone else it's not always it's it's for me it's right in a book you know but I was just like her words better than mine I was gonna go out on TR cordeliers words and the reason I did that was she just says so eloquently like the fact that government is bad I'm not saying it eloquently now I'm just summarizing it but the fact that government is bad is not an excuse to stay out of government that is the reason to dive in and so when you're doing these gifts on climate whatever and you're working around there's still ways to work around that as she would put it create the conditions for us to govern ourselves better down the road which maybe 20 years from now there's ways to do that on on climate let's say you're spending 20 billion on climate there's ways to do that that in the work of funding that would train thousands of local leaders around this country in civic life and there's ways to do it that would be like you running a program from Bloomberg philanthropies to stop climate change what I'm saying is every opportunity think about how do you give in ways that actually do two things one put your own privilege at risk shift from giving back to actually giving something up and to shift from crowding government out to crowding it in so that next time the sugar daddy and sugar mommy's not needed well there's another area of this that drives me crazy and I'm guessing it drives you crazy so I wonder what you would say about this there was a story I heard about a conversation a meeting in the Open Society Institute George Soros foundation in which there was a debate going on about how best to you know what to donate to what how best is my money and a certain point apparently sores shut down the debate saying look you know in the end it's my money so I'm gonna decide where to give it and a staffer said actually it's not your money half of it is your money and the other half is the taxpayers money because you because of the tax relief that is money that you would not have if it weren't channeled through this foundation and I was wondering what you think about the charitable tax the charitable tax relief deduction do you think it should be abolished because you know when it's not only a kind of plutocratic situation when rich people get to decide the course of let's say charter schools our educational system by donating large amounts of money according to what they believe is best but it's also us who's subsidizing this correct what do you think should we eliminate it so it's a very important issue so I I'm two minds about it so one thing is first of all I don't think many people know this and to put it in a more Germany have the deduction but to put in ass any more dramatic way all of you work longer hours every year and make more money than you would otherwise need to in order to pay taxes more taxes to subsidize those rich people claiming the charitable tax deduction right right so when Bezos gives two billion if he claims it right so the government's now lost the government's down a billion or eight hundred million dollars right like they've got to get that from someone you so I think first of all we seem to understand that like worry we are choosing a subsidized up we do that in many ways like how we subsidize private jets but not daycare so I think in that sense like there's no justification for it the more interesting proposal that I have made and you know I make a lot of proposals but I don't I don't think I have a single record of anyone being implemented yet so but they say I have no solution I have some solutions I just don't have good ones but I think one thing that's interesting is if we made it a sliding scale like those yoga classes so basically the way would work is if your donation was public-spirited in a few ways that I'll say in a second you can get the full deduction and if it's not public-spirited if it's more price if it's still kind of benefitting you you know then it's you get no deduction right and how do we judge public spirited so a couple things if you put your name on it it's not philanthropy I mean you're you're purchasing it's a swap right you're giving away money and you're getting a name on a building that's a purchase that's totally a fine thing to purchase but it's like me buying shoes right if I have that much money instead of buying shoes or in addition to buying shoes I would just buy my name on the New York Public Library so that's fine if you want to buy that and like good for the New York Public Library that got done and a half a billion dollars for that or whatever it was but like that's not that's a purchase that's not it so no deduction if you control if you insist on controlling how the money's spent again that's not charitable that's you purchasing like it you're older and you don't have stuff to do and you've now bought the right to sit on a board and like you've bought some interesting work for yourself to go four times a year and like rich explain to these people how to run their organization fine good for you that you enjoy that but you bought something you bought a service which is like the service that makes you feel useful no deduction if in that or any other ways if you're crowding out government you know we could figure out how to scale it evaluate it rather know deduction if on the other hand you don't put your name on it no one knows about it you're purely giving to others you let communities or government authorities actually administer the program and and you actually strengthen their muscles of self-government next time if you do what philanthropist it 100 years ago Carnegie was a famous example which is you actually use your private donation contractually to force the government do something do more of what you're just testing out an ongoing basis so he's actually made them sign contracts with him to like raise taxes and fund his libraries an ongoing basis well they couldn't afford the libraries he wanted to use a small donation as a catalysis to make government do more stuff if you do that you get the deduction right I think if we did that we'd get more of the kind of giving that is actually a benefit to us as society and we'd get less of the kind of giving that's about putting your name on things rich explaining to people how to run their programs and like aggrandizing yourself at the expense of the public good I think it's the moment to open this to questions I'm sure people have plenty so again I'm going to ask you to come to the mic over there there's a very bright light in your eyes when you get there so maybe shield and just line up and we'll we'll take as many as we can over the next 15 minutes please how are you one of my students if you could tell us more about the conversations with your help with your editor about critiquing capitalism of the system yeah I mean it was very interesting Thank You Jess it was a very interesting thing because you know my editor some years older than me and really came of age at a time when this fake change had not taken over I mean he came to the age time with like there was still real change and people still got in buses and went to Mississippi and like did stuff and put themselves at risk to help other people so at one level I think he was like yeah whatever you're writing about and describing is like crazy that people think that this is change and he was like all for it and I don't think substantively he you know I don't think politically we particularly disagreed I think I just has an editor which is different from your personal beliefs as the professional skill of an editor and he was very determined that I be heard right which is a tactical matter more than a you know so everything that I sound like one problem that we edited out of the book was that when you're spending time in some of these worlds like I went on a cruise ship with three thousand entrepreneurs called summit at sea right I went there so you didn't have to and it is easy to when writing that to be mean you were so restrained I had three chapters on that cruise ship in my room it's down to one and the reason like I I mean look I privately still read some of those three chapters and there were there was some nice material in there but but it didn't it's not just that I was gonna piss people off like it wasn't me at my best and it wasn't their easy shots versus actually trying to make people see reality in a different way and it just wasn't it wasn't really what I was doing I wasn't just trying to be snarky I have twitter for that I at my best in his book I'm trying to make even you know my main audiences book is regular people like take change back from these pretenders but I had some hope that a minority of people within these very elite spaces who do have power right now actually and I know this from experience actually don't like the systems they're standing on top of and I think I thought it was important to write it in a way where like you might poach some of them and so a lot of the editing was just like no one was against strong claims they were against strong claims didn't have enough evidence it didn't come you know let them let them let the material do it let the reporting do it don't hang out to dry by yourself with some crazy opinion that you're not gonna be able to justify and that's always good training go ahead yeah I'm an education advocate and I think your formula for distinguishing what should be considered charitable and get a deduction from those that shouldn't be doesn't really make any sense we have a lot of billionaires who are trying to remake public education and one of the ways they do it is they go into communities and they say I'm gonna spend you know a hundred million dollars to to help you rate teachers via test scores and then the district will spend two hundred million dollars trying to do it and it doesn't work and it demoralizes teachers and it actually makes schools work worse and at the same time they by consent through their money and influence and by tremendous donations to various think tanks and advocacy groups which back that up with various rationales about why this is good for public schools so in a sense when you're pressuring government to do a certain to institute a certain policy which really doesn't have a strong evidence based and doesn't really make any sense you are participating in the reins of government and you are forcing them to spend money but you're making things worse rather than better so it really it's yeah I think I think you're missing I actually agree with you I'm trying to limit their influence over public things I do not think they should get a deduction if they have influence my point about there's this framework at Stanford about is this giving contributory to democracy or disruptive of it and the simple measure of that is does the giving result in this amount of public goods end up being larger or smaller I don't think they should have control in being able to say do this program or that or that but I think they you could evaluate them for does they're giving result in the state doing more or the state doing less and if it results in the state doing more that's good and yeah more money on something which wasn't doing good that's the issue right but to me the me the problem that stories they controlled what the deed was and I don't think you should have that control so if any of the many individuals who are going to run for the Democratic nomination for president come to you and ask you for advice if they say to you Armand based on your very popular book one pose you're overestimating me one proposed they will quick give me one proposal that I can best highlight that can I value for me in my campaign and if I get elected president that if I pursue I can make some real change one give me one proposal I think probably the thing that's most easily saleable as a matter of fairness and rights and also a good idea that would do a lot in this era of globalization automation is just radical equality around public schooling and I it's hard for me to think about any other issue that encoded in the law still today we have basically like class segregation in education that is de facto racial segregation it's still on the books through this property tax thing if there is one and and I think when you actually talk to people about it offends every American's sense of decency I think that's a very powerful issue that almost no Democrat talks about because actually what are those really high per pupil spending districts they're actually not Republican districts some of them are but it's Greenwich and it's Marin and it's Westchester and it's it's actually elite liberal districts and I think that's an issue to like to run and the second thing I'd say is a more general philosophical thing was like run as I said before like run make people love government again doesn't mean bad government doesn't mean the DMV but like tell the story like when was the last time you got sick eating in a restaurant in this country in most countries in the world like that's not something you take for granted like this we have an extraordinary civilizational accomplishment we are sitting on top that we take for granted like tell the story of government again I think we're actually ripe for a new story about government the same way they told an amazing compelling an awful story about how government was awful let's keep them going because I see the line is long so short crisp lightning wounded lightning where you got to make yours lightning want questions also though make sure it's so bright here that you're not the only one chatting a spot you talk a little bit more about some of the international dimensions of this use a lot of the examples you've used tonight are really from the domestic sphere and you can take that where you want I guess I'm thinking particularly about the the charitable contribution in the u.s. context that actually has enabled a lot of flambéed to go to international causes and frankly if we just reliant on public sources there's just not that much support in the US for north-south income transfer I'm curious yeah I chose these good questions I chose to write the book focused on the US for the following reason that the world is like too big and too much and and I think a lot of this giving and I say this in the book has done great things for other countries and I think particularly when you're talking about other countries that don't have effective governments don't have the kind of systems that could ever combat some of the problems that we're talking about in those countries I think you know there's some actually kind of redistribute of justice in like the former like the descendants of northern Europe sending money to those country like and I I think there's often problems with how aid is done and there's like there's have been a bunch of books about that but I don't that's not what I'm taking on I am taking on all these rich people in this country who've watched their own countries dream unravel and who have tried to step into that and and have hurt so maybe we need to think about if we do the this way no one follows my policy ideas but like maybe we need an exemption for foreign stuff I don't know but I think the issues that I'm concerned about fundamentally are issues of democracy and those are less when you're once you're dealing with more than one country it's just less of a democratic issue and more of a like kind of like colonial dynamic or are those people listening on the ground etcetera etc but I'm really concerned about like why did we spend so much time and force in one person one vote and then give some people like eight million votes through philanthropy next - quick quick bullet questions based on your can we do your best one okay best one you asked about Larissa asked you about Obama as maybe being the origin of this kind of thinking but I think it's the Clinton years and triangulation in the Third Way in the 90s as the beginning of this and I wonder what you think about that yeah I don't think it began with either of them I think both of them were symptoms of it I mean this began in the 70s and there's a very well document history when Jane Mayer's book dark money is like one of the great books of our time and it's so important for understanding where we are today and that book really documents basically this really interesting moment in the 70s when there was a real fear that communism was gonna win and that that had create a spillover effect in the culture where people hated business people and if you look at like the 1% share of the nation's income it was like it was at a low it was about 10 12 percent in that period and it had been since the 40s but some of that was because of the war and then now we were not in a war anymore and it was like still there and even getting smaller and it was this real worried and there's thing called the Powell memo where Lewis Powell before getting on the Supreme Court wrote this memo basically warning business interests like organize capture government get your shit together and they did so that's where it started it's start with the anti 70s anti-tax movements I mean they did an amazing you like I think it's hard in politics is to respect other people's game if you don't like what they're doing I think it's like really important that we learn to respect people's game they did an amazing job they made poor people hate the estate tax that only taxes super rich people they like you got like hate like like hate the the outcome but like that is good that is real good and what I don't know I feel like we got to learn to do that for our stuff right redefine terms make people you know and so it started with that and I think when in terms you're Clinton and Obama thing one of the things that happens when revolutions succeed and win is that everybody who then plays within the regime that results is like playing within that regime and so even the dissidents or the the opposition they're still living in the era they're living in so we are living in the Reagan era it's just the really late stages of it right the same way Nixon was living in the FDR era right which by Nixon created the EPA he was a Republican he didn't love big government but he lived in the FDR era so the form that that took he was he was working within the premises of someone who thought government should be huge and so the opposition was like government should be sort of big right and wears now we're operating within like government should not exist that's the dominant frame of our time and it's evil and it's predatory and so Clinton says the era of big government is over that's the softer liberal opposition version of government evil it's the era of big government is over but the era where we let them fend for themselves must never return or something you know and then Obama I write about in the book when he created his the first new office he created maybe the only new office he created the Office of social innovation interesting that that right that whole social innovation is like government's not gonna do stuff let's find people who are doing it's very Bezos Ian you could say and there was a statement I was reporting the book I went his website my wife had interned in that office like in 2009 first year the presidency and I went I was like looking up the website of that office a couple years ago and there was a statement that like took my breath away and says you know we're doing the office of Social Innovation because top down programs from Washington don't work anymore you thinking community organizer from Chicago liberal I mean he could only vote because of a top-down program from Washington a very good top-down program from Washington that wasn't that long ago like the fad it's become the water in which we swim right it's become this it-- this is like there's like the second hand smoke version of Governments bad like probably most people in this room don't think government's evil but probably all of us in this room have participated in some way in this culture that just kicks it to the side every time you hear a well-meaning 19 year old being like well if you want to change the world right now you start a business that's not Reagan but they're living in Reagan right and part of what I'm calling for it's like to end the Reagan era and like figure out with the next arrows which I call the age of reform we can take about three more oh we have three more I know we have three more good yes the choir I was wondering it you've given a TED talk you've been asking fellow you're on a book tour you're speaking to audiences around the country you are basically you know you're on TV you're becoming a thought leader of sorts Oh God and I just I mean just stab me it'd be so much faster that's good I mean you must have had that thought some point yourself and I wonder how you grapple with that and how you check yourself and becoming a part of the problems that you yeah I mean I I think I wrote the book to grapple with that and to like write myself out of the problem and I will only find out later if I succeeded in writing myself out of the problem I I mean I think part of what bothered me made me so angry is if I'm right about that fish in the water like we're all in it it's hard to not be part of your time everybody's part of their time and you know to be totally honest like I don't like a lot of TED talks I find they have an ideology of solution ISM that bothers me I also live in an era in which like it's been very hard to find ways to get your work out right I live in an era that in which like as a journalist who's not been among the most successful of my time but also not among the least successful like I've struggled many many years of my life including recently they're like have a platform for my work in so you know because newspapers have half the staff and even less of the money and you know everybody is an adjunct at universities including me at this university and like a lot of the people who did thinking for a living 30 years ago just had institutional support for doing that and it's all gone and that's just like one of the ways in which a lot of people who give TED talks have problems with TED Talks but like it'll also get your work to people and so a lot of people I wrote about are inversions of that dilemma and I became interested in like how do you navigate that how do you live in your time but also question your time and how do you be a realist about the institution's being what they are and also live for those there being different types of institutions and you know I cut myself out of a lot of the worlds that I was in I think this book has you know hurt some of the people who would have thought that I was in their camp when I I never was but I was affiliated with some of their communities or fellowships or whatever and all I can hope is that I that I yeah I wrote my way out of it thank you that's two quick quick racial justice and then also five years in philanthropy and philanthropy was this kind of ivory tower you know where all the money flowed to the work that we were doing but it was really like spending time inside of it I mean it's very white and it's very rich and it's very business increasingly it was business driven with the speak of business kind of filtering into nonprofit work and and all of that and you know we're talking about government and you know other embodies trying to be more representative you know of the population of the body and so to what extent is like the realm of Landsman and I went to so many meetings and so many things about diversifying and and didn't see any of that happen during my five years and that like to what extent is the realm of philanthropy kind of complicit in kind of perpetuating this in making corporate donors feel like they are more than greater than more not yeah totally that's a great question and I think I was there two things one the very structure of philanthropy in many cases reinforces and accentuates the power relationship that philanthropy setting out to solve and this is a common pattern where the solution replicates the problem right so a relationship of wealthy white people like with their hands like this and needy black and brown people with their hands like this like I mean it's hard to think about a worse way into solving this problem but I'd say a further thing which is another part of me says like I don't expect what are essentially clubs of wealthy people hanging out to be any different than that right I would spend less energy trying to diversify philanthropy I just think like rich people hanging out in the club is always going to look like rich people hang on the club and it's never gonna be diverse I don't know why we'd expect it to be diverse I actually find it a little bit of a waste of time all these efforts to light it it's like trying to make Mariano Annette's like Kingdom more I mean a palace more diverse the problem right like I just think those people should not be solving public problems or have much less of a voice in doing so we have institutions that represent us they're not great right now they're they're better than we sometimes think they stem in this country is still functioning right and I think like we have a system that is designed to it's funny there's this joke and like San Francisco becomes like uber is gonna end up like rien like inventing public transport and thing invented it like okay so it's like uber we're gonna do like like larger like new buses and then everyone will just pay like a standard fee then you just get on and off whenever you want and you know actually the government will subsidize it attacks and and like what doesn't get back to like right where we started and I sometimes feel like that with philanthropy like okay well let's make it more representative of community okay maybe we'll have people in the local community like choose people to allocate the funds it's like yeah like Congress so like City Council like thing right like let's just actually use the thing we have to solve problems which are still very good ideas regardless of who occupies them right now thank you all right last one is there one more make it good no pressure okay can you clarify your comments about Bernie you said you don't really like Bernie I'd say that ok can you clarify her comments about that and Bernie and I was standing who's your like ideal Democratic candidate for the next couple of lectures I did not say I don't like Bernie what I said was I think Bernie I was trying to actually underline how remarkable Bernie's success was given the difficulties of being a white man in his 70s who almost uniquely in American politics did not care for the little niceties of holding people's babies and making small talk and waving and say thanks for being you know and doing all that a guy who just like came gave his message and left like the faculty one out of 22 states whatever it was I all I'm saying is I think if to bake into Bernie's results like Bernie would have won ten more states if he was like we're out right like as it just doesn't matter like person right he was you know it's like the Larry David portray on Saturday Night Live he's like you're irrational uncle he knows that like I'm not saying anything that's out of school here like and I think the fact that as a socialist who was very old had no foreign policy experience I was a little scratchy the fact that he won suggests a hunger for different ideas out there that Trump's victory also I mean Trump ran against Wall Street and the global financial elite which I hate what he did with it but the fact that he could do that suggests again creative possibilities in American life that I think better politicians could exploit right and so I don't know the ideal is like I I'm not gonna you know play that game right now what I do think is I was listening as podcast with Martha Nussbaum the philosopher the other day and and she K it was look so funny because she's it's like not like her but she gave this enthusiastic endorsement to John Hickenlooper and so then I was listening to podcasts with hymns like the chain of podcasts and to hear like it is philosopher like endorse a president who called Colorado governor and and the reason she gave us something I've never heard in politics before but it struck me particularly in this era as a really good one to think about which is she said he'd worked on himself more than almost anybody she's known and he dealt with great grief he'd lost a parent at the young age and he'd worked on himself and he'd and he'd grown you and he talks in the podcast but you speak inaudibly angry and he's worked on it so now he's like not at all angry and it struck me that like what better repudiation of the Trump era than someone who's actually introspected and worked on themselves a non do you have a closing comment something you didn't get said I am so happy to have this conversation with you all I think what the most important thing to me these days and in these questions is not whether you like these rich people that I'm writing about or not I think the more important question is like what you want for your society I think what sometimes gets lost in these conversations is when did we stop believing when did we start believing that the world has changed by Mark Zuckerberg throwing stuff down at you when did that become our frame of change and what would it mean to actually reorient our lives so that the next time you see something that disturbs you that upsets you that makes your heart hurt you don't radically reorient life but you just you look through door be in centered or a you just think about what it would mean to solve that problem for everybody at the root instead of by someone's gilded women nice thank you Larissa Anan we want to thank you so much and now I'd like to invite everyone to finish the food finish the wine and Anand will be signing books over here at the left which are available for purchase and we thank you all deeply for coming and come back again soon and often thank you

Channel: NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute

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Id: ZRhkn8k6W80

Length: 59min 16sec (3556 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 14 2020