Bookshop Barnie with Joel Kotkin on The Coming of Neo Feudalism

my name for those of you don't know is austin williams i'm the director of the future cities project um and this is in some ways the first bookshop barney for a while the first international bookshop barney so it's a good evening from the uk it's a good morning in california and it's good grief if you're awake in china we're here to discuss uh joel's book george cotkins book which is the coming of neo-feudalism warning to the global middle class it doesn't matter if you haven't read it yet joel is here to convince you um just to say uh just as an aside we have readers groups for any of you are interested on the 10th of february we have the only non-fiction readers group in the country i would argue uh where we're discussing anne applebaum's book the twilight of democracy uh and on the 18th of february one month's time we're coming back again for a new bookshop barney which is with michael schallenberger who is also in uh america who will be discussing apocalypse apocalypse never why environmental alarmism hurts us all uh he's an environmentalist but he's a critical environmentalist so that should be quite lively so the purpose of the barney is to give the author opportunity to convince you to read it and if you've already read it then obviously uh just shows how easily manipulated you are by advertising it's a it's a great read thoroughly recommend it it's a great gift remember there's only 11 months till christmas and if the lockdown continues that's only about 20 shopping days so buy early we'll keep the amazon link up occasionally for you to click through if you so wish um and a few days ago i was only thinking a few days ago if we if i was to kind of tell you that i was going to introduce um an orange presidential fellow you might not have come along but you know those days are gone tonight we have joel cotkin who is the orange county presidential fellow in urban futures at chapman university and he's zooming in from california he's been described as america's uber geographer which doesn't mean that he draws maps for taxi drivers uh but he's an internationally recognized authority on urbanism on global economic political and social trends um and he's written more than eight also books he's written lots of influential papers and articles with the likes of city journal and he's the executive editor of the widely read website newgeography.com new geography all oneworld.com take a look so yes this book uh the coming of neo feudalism is a is a terrific read um some might ask obviously some have asked why write a book why we're discussing the book on feudalism after all that was another era you know when ordinary people were confined in their local areas when they lived unproductive lives where they were ruled by decree when they knew their place what could possibly that have to do with today they ask uh i'll leave them to my level over but quillette says that this book is timely compelling and well written counterpunch says that it's fundamentally unsound uh this conversation is for you to decide if you want to sit on the fence or take a position but for me it's ultimately a book about democracy it's a defense of democracy and all the more important for that it's a cracking read um the bookshop barney is where you make your mind up on on issues and where you put forward your own comments and questions but the idea is that we explore the ideas in a bit more of a forensic style than you might do in a normal um book presentation so joel has kindly agreed to do five or six minutes or so just to talk you through the general theme of the book to try to inspire you to kind of think about some of the broader issues um i'm going to ask that four or five questions from my reading of the book i'll draw out some of those things to give joel another bite of the cherry uh for him to kind of uh explore some of those ideas more and then it's out to you in the audience uh to come in like i say for questions but also for comments uh and what have you so if we can just unmute and give joel uh a round roaring uh uk or global round of applause um so please welcome joel cocking live from california uh to convince us uh of uh the benefits of this book all right thank you um austin you know one of the reasons i wrote this book was as much descriptive as also as a um as a warning um you know we've been brought up with this idea that history is always going in the direction towards greater rationality greater progress greater material gain greater uh technology and the reality is that may not be the case and we know in history that there have been periods where we regressed and i think we are on the verge of a serious regression and i'm going to go into some of the ways i make that point first and foremost um is the inequality um like the feudal era um there's very there's a diminishing middle class pretty much throughout the world particularly in europe and north america um and a growing concentration of power in small hands the uh the uh the house of commons estimates about one percent uh of the top earners now control something close to 50 percent of the world's wealth and now they figure by uh by 2030 it will be almost two-thirds um the pandemic and we can certainly discuss that has accelerated that made uh hundreds of thousands of small shopkeepers everywhere throughout the high income world uh basically driven them out of business or an interpunery out of the middle class while jeff bezos gets richer every day and the tech oligarchs i think now drunk with almost unlimited power um are now essentially um doing a hostile take over the u.s constitution which um as an american i'm not very happy about um but this is a kind of power that and that this is what i would call the oligarchical class somewhat wall street but wall street is inevitably uh really second rate to the tech oligarchs you would really have five at best seven companies who um outside of china uh dominate the world economy dominate the financial markets in ways that we really haven't seen in at least a century so that's one thing you have a concentration of wealth concentration of power concentration of land ownership uh i was just on a call where apparently bill gates is now the largest owner of farmland in the united states i'm sure that makes us all happy um and and so you have this oligarchical class which really is where the power um is is concentrated but their power is is met with what i call the clarity the clarity is um in if you uh did your french history um the old first estate in france um whereas the church determined what people thought what was acceptable uh dominated the education system um and and really sort of also played a nice role of allowing uh the aristocrats to do horrible things and then get penance by uh by building a part of a church um this is a a another very powerful class and they have done remarkably well particularly at the upper end what you might call the upper end of the nomenclature in the old soviet union um and this group uh this group um it doesn't always agree sometimes there are some conflicts with the oligarchs but they work together and the oligarchs fund the non-profits that these clerics uh belong to so you know when when jeff bezos i don't mean to pick on jeff but i will um give us you know 10 billion dollars to the green uh establishment um they now have enormous resources to do things um black lives matter also getting enormous amounts of funding um from the from these groups so the clarity has moved up and the part of the non-super rich who have done well have generally been the clarity university professors certainly not their adjuncts university professors medical experts high-end lawyers these are people who have actually done reasonably well the third group what i call the yeomanry is really the old middle class and that middle class is largely small business owners artisans people who have um you know some property but not a great deal of property and they as i argue in the book with a bulwark of the middle class and the democratic revolutions that took place um in the in the 18th and 19th century um they are the one group that is um independent relatively independent um and uh because they've been very tied to the idea of um homeownership um family very critical in the growth of religion and this group is being squeezed as the oecd uh points out virtually everywhere in the world and even now increasingly in china which had an enormous increase in its middle class but that's beginning to change as well but certainly in europe in the united states in canada um and this is really important because even what we consider to be egalitarian societies like like canada my wife's from canada uh has become increasingly uh hierarchical with increasing concentrations of wealth and power the group that's growing is what i would call the serfs and the serfs are very often people who would have been in the middle class at one time uh they would have started a business they would have um bought a house but under the current circumstances under the regulatory regime under the competition of the tech oligarchs under under the way that wall street allocates capital um it is very difficult for them and so what we see is a society which is very very very uh divided by cl by these classes and what is most frightening is my adopted home state of california i came here in 1971 and it was the land of opportunity you came from all over the world all over the country this is where you could make it and you didn't need a phd you didn't need uh you didn't need to to be uh from a wealthy family people came they they they prospered they they created a huge home owning class that was the california i came to lots of economic opportunities of different uh of different kinds but on on the other hand now california has the highest rate of poverty of the united in the united states if you're just for income we have about a third of all the welfare recipients our two great cities los angeles and san francisco have become essentially a pock mark with homeless and count uh encampments very high rates of poverty um that are um and and we see this happening more and more so california which was really sort of america cube sort of the um has as it has become more dominated by the tech oligarchs has become increasingly unequal and by the way other industries in the state which don't have political power have been leaving manufacturing logistics um you know good blue-collar jobs have disappeared so what what i really um concerned about um you know sort of to take the old term uh from the uh early history of the soviet union when i i believe maybe it was max eastman who said i've seen the future and it works well maybe i can say from california i've seen the future and it's pretty dystopic so i'll leave it with that hopefully i stimulated a few thoughts very good joel thank you very much um what didn't exactly end on a high uh but uh i think it's quite important that you you have this kind of just general thread of um i don't know telling a real story throughout the book so it's important that we have a negative point of view as well as some kind of positive ones but i just wanted to to um address there's a lot of things you just mentioned there which i'll leave some of that to the audience to come back on i just want to go through the book particularly i'm going to start at the very end if you don't mind you end with a a quote by uh rh torny british historian um where you say well he says happy is a nation whose people have not forgotten how to rebel uh so this you know given the events of the last uh week or so uh i just wondered whether that made a you know a happy situation for you or whether you were equally disturbed as the press seemed to be what do you make of what's happened in the last week well i think there are two things i think that what we have in america because you know i mean obviously what happened in the capital was terrible and you know president trump should you know be impeached i mean i i have no sympathy at all for him even though i agreed with some of his policies i always thought he was a a very inappropriate person to be present i think he'd be inappropriate to run the corner store but that's another story but what has happened you have to look at it as there was this summer there was a one millennial riot and now there was another millennial riot so what we have to ask ourselves is why do we have a class of people who don't believe in the basic institutions of society and of the american republic why do why are they so angry and i think in the work that i talk about in the book and i and in many of the other projects i've done and not just here in the us the millennial generation is what i call the screwed generation they are unable to buy a house they've been brought up in an education system that doesn't teach them useful skills and certainly doesn't teach them the discipline they need to succeed in the world um they are being constantly told the world is coming to the end you know saint greta says you know in two weeks the world will come to an end i mean um by the way you're having my friend mike schellenberger and mike uh really uh does a great job of expelling this out but there's something very almost medieval in this kind of atmosphere of fear um atmosphere that the world is coming to an end or the notion this summer that um that anybody who doesn't agree with black lives matter is a inveterate racist and and you know should be dismissed from school i mean literally i you know i don't know how many of you teach um in the school today but if you teach if you're in uh in publishing um you live with fear now in a way that you never thought because look i agree that alex jones you know i'm not going to defend alex jones and i'm not going to defend you know donald trump and and and stop the steal i mean but although i don't think that they need to be silenced they you know they're um you know the truth will win out over time and and and it's not a good strategy but fundamentally what we're seeing is a growth of a whole generation and by the way not just here you see it in europe you see it in australia who are completely alienated and there are two variants so i would say the riots this summer and what happened in washington are just different sides of the same coin the only difference is if the far left wants to duke it out with the far right they'll get their asses kicked because the far right is much better on but uh but i do worry that we could be headed to something like happened in weimar germany where the communists and the nazis fight it out on the streets this is not what america is about it's not our tradition um and um but i think when you what is also not our tradition and i'll sum it up this way this is the first generation in american history that will live worse than their parents and particularly if you're in new york or california one way people are able to get around it as they move to a less expensive part of the country the the beauty of of america and same thing can be said of australia for sure uh and canada it's a big country and you can move somewhere else to improve your conditions but fundamentally this is a angry generation um who are complete so instead of protesting the way we're supposed to protest that they they reject all the standards okay okay well i mean again you've covered a lot in as much as you know this whole idea about by the way i see people have got like their little blue hands up if you can just bear with us while we explore some of these ideas and then i'll bring you all in in book uh at the end it'll be about 20 minutes or so um the uh the the clarity you know this is this kind of right thinking opinion formers uh from universities the arts tech sector that you talk about and you explore that very well um i know and you've just kind of gone into that idea about whether it's censoriousness or as twitter has just said you know it's a private it's a private platform therefore uh we can decide who comes on it or not it's not censorious it's just a vicious uh kind of a business decision but i just wondered that having seen rudy giuliani speak yesterday um with the title of his little broadcast called the tech oligarchs are taking control of our country there's a rise of kind of conspiratorial thinking he went on and all the rest of it and then there's you saying the same words but meaning something different i was just wondering how you can how do you how do you balance what you say so you don't sound like a lunatic well first i i base everything in history i've covered started covering silicon valley in 1975. so these aren't uh first of all the initial silicon valley was made up of engineers a lot of them from the midwest very solid people no great pretensions that they knew where society should go um and over time these tech oligarchs have um changed they've become more arrogant more feeling that they have a right to tell people what to to to do and one of the things that the head of the bay area council the leading business organization the bay area told me he says these these companies are also scared of their own employees that the the the you know now what my experience with nerds which is pretty extensive most of them are pretty apolitical but the ones who are political and the ones who let's say work in the hr departments and the and the uh public relations department are very political so they are driving this agenda we have to remember silicon valley in 1980s and even into the 90s was very sort of moderate republican was a big part of it the congress people were from the center of the republican party never the trump east uh types but always you know sort of more moderate republicans independents and moderate democrats and by moderate um today you almost can use the word sane um but this this has changed as they have become more powerful they have become more convinced that they know the answer and the terrible thing is it's not that they're bad people i mean you know giuliani really um you know he should really uh talk to a psychiatrist or something um and uh and and you know because i think you know he's a terror he's done a terrible job to his own legacy but but and and this idea you know i've been writing about this tech oligarch issue for years and years and years the danger is that these people now are not so powerful you look at the obama administration now the biden administration filled with people with financial and uh employment ties to the to the the tech oligarchs um and they are completely convinced of their power so i'm going to give you the perfect example of this um the site parlor which i've never been on and you know i'm i'm sure there there are some bad people on it but as as there are some very bad people on facebook that nobody seems to be getting rid of um but they um the what was the coup de gras was when amazon cut their uh access to to the to the cloud um and guess what happens the next day there's an editorial in the washington post saying what a great move who owns the washington post the guy who controls amazon so what you've got is this incredibly incestuous group of people who live in their own world i'll give you one less example state of california we have one of the highest unemployment rates in the country now we have a terrible issue um in terms of poverty expensive housing i can go on and on terrible education gavin newsom says wow what's the problem our we have all these ipos and the ultra rich are richer than ever this shows you where unfortunately as a lifelong democrat the democratic party has gone it's become the party of oligarchs um and this is this is really a a uh it's not a conspiracy you know when people talk about conspiracies i always make the point people too stupid to have conspiracies you know they're they're too selfish they you know they fight each other um they're self-centered i i don't think that they sit there and you know it's not like the the you know the you know trotsky working in the in this in the soviet and by the way there was more good luck involved with that and then anything else but that's a whole nother story but but the but the key thing is that we now have people acting in what they see their self-interest reflecting the cultural mores of their activist employees reflecting the politics remember that two of the most in quote progressive places in america the bay area and the puget sound dominate the world tech economy outside of china um so i i think that to say it's a conspiracy it gives them too much credit i think they they look they're reflecting their class and and regional buyers biases and obviously or the other thing that as google for instance is increasingly politicizing its search engine it also is increasingly favoring those people who guess what advertise through google well look okay we move away from conspiracies um maybe um aoc alexandria or cortes uh you know the voice of liberal democracy uh in some people's eyes um has argued just recently just the day before yesterday argued that the federal government should reign in our media that uh actually that disinformation uh whatever that means should be uh suppressed um so that idea that the first amendment rights which have been around for quite some time free speech freedom of assembly and and uh what have you um they've come to be seen as a danger to a free society it's quite an interesting turnabout so what you described i think is a very interesting kind of surrounding to this conversation but obviously it does beg the questions that why it's happened how has it happened especially in such a seemingly swift uh period so what what what's going on when freedom is seen to be hateful and and and suppression is meant to be an expression of freedom well i think there are a couple things um uh first of all and i don't know if this is the same truth true in britain as well kids don't know anything about american history or or the um or the constitution if anything they're fed with misinformation talk about misinformation 1619 is one of the most incr the idea that the united states was founded um as a slave society that that drove our economy um well i don't know uh somebody ought to tell the southern uh generals who got their asses kicked in the war because the north had many more people had much more wealth had much more industry and technology as as marx wrote about actually quite well um so the reality is that we um we really have a a a a situation where many people are thinking that there may be a a conspiracy they may think uh that these things are happening um purposely but they're really happening because they're in the interests of people and because this is really important as a person who's taught for many years um kids particularly the millennials were brought up to say no bad thoughts should not be allowed if some if i somebody disagrees with me it's a threat um i had a student a very nice uh student a woman um half french half african-american uh who said i feel unsafe because ben shapiro was speaking on campus and i said well why would you feel that way you just don't have to go listen to him well because he you know he's a racist i mean it's like this idea that if you don't buy the agenda of let's say black lives matter you're a racist i had a student say this to me uh yesterday um well if you begin to say okay somebody doesn't agree disagree with me is a racist and therefore they should not be employed by the university they should be knocked off the editorial pages of the new york times um that that whole generation and i think a lot of it has to go back to post-modernist theory the idea of narrative that there is no universal truth that there is no inherent advantage um to um to free speech and dialogue you know and the contrast i felt that i did a program uh well wednesday night my time thursday morning their time in singapore and the the uh my other the other speaker besides me was the uh the ambassador to algeria from um uh from singapore and he said a successful society has to be a particularly if it's multi-racial has to be a dialoguing society you have to be able to have conversation the problem is that we now have a group of academic leninists um whose view is that we have to suppress speech in order to produce a certain kind of person with a certain kind of view and it's become rife and you know the aoc is in the world i you know i understand she has a degree in economics i don't know what economics she's learning because uh her ideas are are you know ludicrous and terribly destructive to the working class in particular um but but the the fact is that the value of free speech is just not there it just isn't there i mean in ways that my grandparents who came to america from from russia would never have understood i mean or my mother-in-law who survived world war ii uh hidden in a convent she would never understand how people can say that if i if somebody disagrees with me they're not only wrong they're evil and not only are they evil but they should be banned from the internet banned from teaching banned from writing you know i i mean what we're talking about is the creation of a digital gulag um where you you know you'll you'll be able to you know type something up and send it like osama's dot to your to your friends but you won't be able to put it on any major social media and my colleague mike lind has made a very good point that we need to apply to the internet the same rules that we have for accommodations for hotels for who can get on a train can you imagine a situation where you can't get on the train because you have the wrong point of view um we these these platforms have become public conveyances and have to be regulated in that sense or allowed for more competition yeah well i mean just on this this point just to kind of i suppose dig down a little bit more into it but but reasonably quickly because you say that the clarity that we've now identified uh or the tech overlords or whatever you want to call it there are engineering illiteracy they're entering what you've just talked about the unknown history and all the rest of it and and there's there's a truth to that although there's also a kind of a curious um paradox with the fact that actually this kind of technology has opened up all the literature of the world to everybody so how that kind of plays out so is it is it more a question of government failure to in some way kind of drive a narrative or an educational policy right which the tech giants are responding to or is it as were saying are the tech giants in control of this narrative or is it a failure of government is that what i'm gonna say i think it's both i think it's a failure of government certainly in education to teach the basic principles of what made the uk or the us or canada or australia you know places that people want to move to um you know the the you know certainly the education system which at least in parts of the country particularly here in california has really been taken over by you know sort of uh post-modernist uh you know they like to call themselves marxist but as somebody who studied marx i sort of doubt it um i don't really take their i i think marx would would wretch if he heard what these people were saying um but but more to the point and by the way marxist historians dismissed 1619 as much as anyone else but there also is sort of this tech oligarch mentality i have a good friend who's um was the largest uh apartment builder in silicon valley uh very distinguished businessman um former mayor a democrat um and he said to me he said i have never met a group of people talking about the tech oligarchs who have less consciousness of the impact of what they're doing than the tech people he said i frankly i can work with an oil company executive and they understand what the consequences of what they're doing are whether or not um there's enough housing should we locate in a particular place he said these are people who are oblivious to history oblivious to sociology oblivious to what the impact of of what they're doing is and the last part of it is that the technology itself because we don't ask people to read anymore means that their brains are atrophy atrophying you know we uh um there's something about picking up a book now i'm an author so i'm prejudiced but picking up a book and having to think about it you're reading a section of a book and you start thinking novel or fiction or non-fiction your brain is coming up with oh what is the image of that what does that look like um that is an enormously um useful mental exercise um that's now replaced with clicking on google so if i ask somebody okay um what was the the the policy uh in terms of religious freedom in the middle ages i go to google i get an article i take the first paragraph of that article do i sit there and and and read max weber do i sit there and and and and read mill do i do i read marks do i read together so all the great work that we've had is being this is literally disappearing and by the way not only here um i i strongly urge you at some point to have um a session on chinese science fiction because it tells you where they think that world is going and i can tell you the chinese classics don't do any better than than alexander hamilton i agree on that um just in terms of um having a critical engagement with ideas i i thought your section on environmentalism which i'll just throw in was very interesting because um instead of it being high-tech and authoritarian it's actually kind of quite low-tech and people think it's got nothing to do with politics it's non-political for some people isn't it but but you point out that environmentalism has led to the revival of the notion of poverty as a virtue yeah austerity in some ways is a moral good um so that bit you know you're critical of the idea of frugality but then towards the end of the book i thought it's interesting because you seem to suggest correct me if i'm wrong that environmentalism might be a way out because you said courts uh young activists may not tolerate the oligarchy successes as did earlier generations of environmental campaigners uh so you're kind of saying that prince charles richard branson people they're a little bit pissed off by being talked down to by them um but it is kind of exposing hypocrisy of the elites is that enough or does that actually sometimes reinforce the various certainly hypocrisy is pretty there you know i i don't know if i want uh your uh your prince i guess he's still a prince um yeah and and and miss markle to tell me that i shouldn't drive and i should live in an apartment and i should take the bus to work when they're living in what 24 000 square feet in santa barbara um you know i i probably couldn't afford their garage um the the idea that i'm being told by but my favorite image is davos where there there were so many private jets that they they couldn't park them all i spoke at an environment conference uh in santa barbara actually uh sponsored by the uh i was with beyond lundberg and it was in uh santa barbara and about a year and a half two years ago and um one of the i asked the organizer how are people getting here a lot of them were from silicon valley they were all taking their private jets by the way it's a four-hour drive to santa barbara it's a gorgeous drive it's a pleasant drive there's not a lot of traffic but they had to take their private jets so you know i don't have anything against people having wealth and i think and i think this is the achilles heel of the oligarchs but i don't like being told that i have to live more modestly while they live outrageously i think that is a real problem and i would link this to what i find a very scary thing this and i i assume has come up in the uk as well because actually the one thing i'll say for your greens is they're equally insane but they're more honest um you know this idea of the great reset that we should go you know that that in the future we're going to give up on economic growth now i don't say economic growth is the solution but economic growth that only helps asset inflation is not a good thing but economic growth that allows for opportunity uh for upward mobility um for a higher standard of living i'm certainly in favor of that and what frightens me is we now have a group of corporate oligarchs who want to impose austerity on everyone else while they live well and of course the medieval uh analogy is quite good because um the the bishops of the catholic church and the aristocrats would say isn't it great poverty people aren't i mean literally sometimes we even have people say that dharavi and mumbai is the ideal of where we want to go but i don't think leonardo dicaprio is going to move to to to deravi um you know so what what you see is this incredible um uh period of of of hypocrisy that is equal to what you had in the middle ages the good part is and we're doing this here in california we're beginning to talk to people on the left and saying are you sure that it's good for working-class people to pay three times more for energy than they do in another state do you think it's good for uh here in california that the unionized construction worker cannot not one can afford a median price house in any of the counties in the coast of california you think that's good you think that's social justice and i think what you have to do is you have to expose the contradictions and then begin to provide alternatives very good very good all right uh joe i had a question about brexit which you had under the chapter heading the peasants rebellion which i thought was great um but um i'll just float that out there in case anybody else wants to pick up on it that was terrific stuff uh joel as i expected um can we take the questions in or not just questions like i say comments but don't um over labor your opportunity to speak at length um i'll take you in order if that's all right let me just quickly skim down who we have here so nancy is first up right um hi can you hear me indeed yeah okay um my question comment was about inequality um and whether we need a better way of talking about this because i absolutely agree that it is a problem that wealth and power are being concentrated in the hands of a few um but there is this discussion of inequality which i think is really more of a discussion of entitlement um and what what strikes me is uh things like uh aoc and you know in her kind of ilks discussion of um of universal basic income um and this idea that um that what we should be aiming for is for um some sort of uh uh caretaking um of people so that they you know they get their universal basic income they're homeless they get their tiny house they live in their tiny house um and and and the really disturbing thing about it is that i think we have a couple of generations now that have a very different uh moral outlook which is based on a therapeutic understanding of the point of life so you know you can see that there are some people who you know they want to have their life coach and their universal basic income and that's how they they want to they want to um live their life and and i i just feel that we need to find some sort of way to promote um the adult aspiration to shape the world around you no guarantees but the ability to determine your own future um so i wondered you know if that's something that you thought about and if anybody had any good ideas of ways we could do this well you know what um chip in uh rudely from the chair if it's feasible that we can take maybe two or three or so questions the reason for doing that is because we know the time is short your time is short okay so also right yes scribble even up here but uh and it's also the fact that maybe there's a question that you couldn't care less about answering and you want to skip over it so you want to do two more questions and then no more questions and then yeah just in case there's a theme you might want to just cover it that way yeah okay good man uh gareth your next please um hi hi joel thank you so much for that i i'm really fascinated in your work i've just been reading michael lint whom of course you mentioned earlier on and um and david goodheart's work in this country both friends yes they they i'm not surprised they both make the argument that the education system turned into the one of the prime ways that you know that the membership of the cleric is kind of validated it's the gatekeeper in um and you've you've already sort of mentioned where you think some of the places education system may have gone wrong um at the same time the the the clericing the oligarchs are very good at pointing to the lack of education of the serfs as a reason why you know the decisions they make are so bad and and so on and big tech is really really interested in the education system so i i wondered if you might have a any ideas on how you think the education system might be rehabilitated do you think it can be reconstituted is it a lost cause now and particularly this idea about should the classroom be politics free now or is there a way of bringing politics in that doesn't politicize the classroom you know the teacher can talk about it without uh instantly creating a whole fuss and probably getting themselves in a lot of trouble i wondered if you had any views on that sure hold hold hard hold hard we'll do one more just excuse me assuming there might be a theme but there isn't there's three separate questions but uh we have daniel please danny open me okay well this is a theme uh austin so you'll be happy because uh my question follows on from what nancy was asking uh which is about what you might call the paradox of inequality because it seems to me job you're absolutely right to argue at least within the western countries uh you can make a strong argument there is widening inequality between the very rich and the rest of society i think that's that's true but what also seems to me to be a strong trend is that both the very wealthy and what you call the clericy are really really concerned about inequality and they keep on saying we've got to do something to stop this inequality so just one example that really strikes me if you think about the davos by world economic forum conferences on the top of the swiss mountain tops you get all of these both plutocrats and clerical people coming along really really wealthy people or very powerful people and yet the people who are the beneficiaries of inequality keep on saying well we've got to do something about it we've got to somehow contain it and control it so how do you explain this paradox okay okay um thank you yes please john can i go ahead now yes please okay i i think actually the the um uh i think the the uh first and third questions i think hit at something very similar um the question really is in terms of inequality um is how do you address inequality i see the the lack of upward mobility as the biggest problem um and what the universal basic income approach which by the way a lot of the oligarchs support is this idea that well we're going to pay people enough so they don't first of all they don't come with pitchforks and uh and and due to us what happened in britain during some of the peasant rebellions that i write about um and even worse ones in russia and france um but but also um it's a way of sort of solving the problem of no entrepreneurial opportunity um uh it it supports the idea that you don't have you don't have a an economy that generates new uh small businesses and innovation everything's controlled from the top and you basically it's uh what the mark's called the proletarian arms bag we just buy everyone off now what scares me the most about that and this relates to comment about adulthood is that what we're saying to young people is uh don't worry about buying a house don't worry about starting a business don't worry about having a family we'll give you two thousand dollars a month you can play as many video games as you want you can you know smoke pot drink whatever it is that you like to do um you don't get married you don't have kids you live you live in a little apartment and you water your plants that's basically sort of where they're going um and um and you see some of the some of this even without ubi um in countries like japan where young people um they don't date um they don't have sex they they play video games all day actually their sex life is mostly on the cyber side um i know austin's worked in asia too the the young asian men are a very different group than the older asian men uh and you know obviously there are some things that may be better uh in terms of their attitudes but but this idea of you for stall ever accepting any responsibility and this reflects my beliefs on millennials if millennials feel they're never going to get anywhere why won't you vote for a universal basic income uh why wouldn't you support the idea that that you know college is free um and even if it's completely and totally irrelevant um but then you get your degree and i guess your parents are happy and maybe you get a job as a receptionist although i don't know if there are receptionists anymore um but the reality is it is a way of of creating a society which a will be incredibly have incredibly low fertility rates uh and in which um and which the entrepreneurial grassroots economy is basically goes underground is basically uh quite small so i think these are connected and then that leads me a little bit to the the whole question of education um and this is something i've been talking with my president of chapman who is an italian mathematician and has really been very good on the free speech issue but i'm beginning to wonder whether the university system has constituted as we get rid of the old academics and we replace them with much more woke much more limited and i have to say in terms of the english language these are the people who probably have done more to slaughter the english language than than any group of illiterates could ever hope to to achieve i mean as i've i've written 10 books now and i find every year i get less and less and less out of academic studies a because they're very often politically correct and and and and and slanted but also because they're just not written in english they're written in some other language not sure what it is um so i think we're probably going to have to start looking at alternative s systems of education and the one good thing about about what we're doing today and what zooms are doing is allowing people to access thoughtful important speakers um instead of listening to some person who got a degree in you know um you know women's history from 1852 to 1853 and boy that person knows more about that than anybody but if you ask them who was fernandel they couldn't tell you um so i think we're gonna have to see a change and i just did a piece for corlett which is one of my favorite publications uh which is actually based out of australia um and what we found is in religion that there is a a a real increase in the audience for religious studies that's online but it doesn't mean that you have to listen to your you know your local imam or your local um uh priest or pastor or a rabbi you can go and directly access really really interesting provocative thinkers so i think there's going to have to be some change the other thing is at the particular k-12 level two issues one i agree you can't avoid politics but it should be more in the case of civics let's learn why the electoral culture is there i had one student of mine after the 2016 election said to me my professor said the electoral college was created to protect slavery and i said well do you know which state proposed the electoral college it was a state called connecticut connecticut was one of the first free states what state opposed it virginia it was the biggest state it happened to be a big slave state so this it was a all an issue with i'm not going to bore you with american uh uh history but just to say basically uh the big concern of the small states the rhode islands the south carolinas the connecticuts was that they would be overwhelmed by a few big states um and that's and and the way that they're being taught another teacher um in my in my wife's uh book group said the police were there to catch slaves that's why we had professional police i said well what does it explain the origins of the british bobbies or the or the or the cops in boston i mean did you ever see the gangs of new york i think new york needed a police department i don't think it had anything to do with catching slaves so this sort of so if we could teach sort of the basics of of history you don't have to go back to the kind of history that existed in the past where we didn't deal with african americans and we didn't deal with slavery and we didn't deal uh uh enough with what happened to the native americans um that can be included as part of the tapestry of of our history just like the uk you have many things to be proud of and there are many negatives but you don't just do the negatives and and and you want to have what um one historian called the usable past um so that's one big part of it and the last part is skills education um many states in the country in the middle of the country are are emphasizing you know how do we teach people to be plumbers how do we teach people to be uh electricians how do we get them to or um uh to uh to do a a uh numeric a computer-controlled machine tool um the basic business skills and you know what i have yet to find a chamber of commerce in this country that says you know what the problem is we don't have enough post-modernist english professors and if we can only have more of them our economy would do great yes john um look um eloquent and humorous as you are i'm gonna i'm gonna cut you shorter next time and i'm gonna also now uh because there's quite a few hands up i'm gonna take five questions uh again you can be dismissive with your red pen but again can this the questions or comments be reasonably pointed uh kerry please i think am i unmuted yeah you're removed yet hi um great uh introduction joel thank you very much for that fascinating material quick questions um i do agree with daniel's points on inequality i wanted to ask because your description seems very apt in terms of the oligarchy and the clarity and even of the search but are they the cause are the oligarchy and clerically hand in hand are they the cause of polarization or are they the survivors of a unproductive and stagnant system do they actually keep people down and in relation to that what about the working class are they serfs whether they fit in as class does seem to be back on the agenda more than ever before and where does government or the political class fit in are they just hand in hand with your oligarchs and clericy or are they those people in fact or do the oligarchs and clarity are they the state in its new form i can see political suppression but i just like clarity on that and lastly very sympathetic to your um uh you know view of how bad environmentalism in terms of holding people back but i do think there's a massive problem with your um maybe it's i haven't read the book yet i've ordered it it hasn't arrived um but you've inspired me to read it with your points about hypocrisy because surely if people are obsessed with um saving a non-human world for a non-human reason then hypocrisy simply means that stop the the top you know um doing what they're doing and flying jets to davos conferences and then we should still get on with fighting to save a non-human world for a non-human reason and i would think that's pretty problematic if we want to argue for more okay thanks carrie thank you very much uh nico uh hi joel i'm really enjoying your thesis um i'm interested in and we've talked quite a lot about not economics per se but you've referenced marx quite a few times and i'd be interested to know what your economic explanation for this is because in a way it is quite like the late 19th century in the united states with the you know um carpet baggers and the robber barons and so on um and the early part of the century um can you what's your thesis about why this is happening and secondly i'm interested also in the democratic republican party inversion and thomas frank who i'm sure is a mate of yours talks about how the professional task has become much more powerful and shifted dramatically to the democratic party whereas the republicans were you know back in the day the party of business of the upper middle class and so on um whereas the working class or blue collar workers have tended to move more towards the republican party and obviously trump in particular and also there was a very nice editorial off-ed in the telegraph yesterday where dominic green characterized the democrats as a gerontocracy pouring the oil on the fire of racial grievance which you've talked about the creepy oligarchs the creepy oligarchs of big tech that's jeff and uh all the rest of them the servile jesters of the corporate media and the periwig aristocracy of the never trumpers which is hillary clinton and all those below her i just throw that in because i love the language and i do too how you saw the democratic party today yeah i could certainly deal with that yeah that's very good sorry to make you scribble these notes down uh uh joel right uh we have tony tony pace all right can you hear me yes joel's gonna get a bigger sheet of paper okay tony okay um yeah my question is about uh democracy in relationship to growth and cities i've read your book it's great book uh i found it shocking because uh i didn't appreciate just how rapidly and how far they struck the changing structure and destruction of um cities and also the increasing disdain for democracy that uh you point to in the book you know you give good good strong evidence of how millennials in particular how disdainful they are of democracy which is you know quite shocking and frightening uh to someone uh from my background now this raises a number of questions and and unfortunately you you tend to conclude my one by one criticism of the book is you conclude it very suddenly um very quickly and um you you say that in order to answer all this we need to have more engaged citizens and understand how one should behave and you've started in your talk tonight you know what you said tonight about the alternative systems of education and exposing contradictions that's good but what do you you know are you planning another book you know it seems to me a sequel should be expanding all the positives about democracy and how democracy is essential for us to live in cities i know it sounds strange but uh you know you point out that cities themselves not just as suburban middle classes are decaying and being prevented from growth it's it's all of us and cities in particular the form you know what you've specialized your studies in are really changing rapidly and dissolving you have to ask the question what is the city for nowadays unless we're really pushing for democracy so i'm asking you is your next book going to be about expanding the positives of democracy and how we can rebuild our cities very good this is buying a book um before even it's been written or proposed uh very good we got alex next please alex cameron um thank you it's a it's a it's a straightforward question but i've yet to come up with a um sufficient answer and i'm hoping joe will um help me out on that and it's around this idea and who are the principal drivers behind these ideas because and this and lots of other discussions and stuff i've read and it seems to flip from one group and society to another and the more emphasis is placed on one than another or more on the next than that so for example are the tech oligarchs driving this uh the post-modern academics or the new political activists because it strikes me that the ideas that are being discussed in your book the ideas that are being discussed quite widely at the minute precede all these people by decades so i'm just wondering how you might try please um and enlighten um some kind of answer to that question so who is behind these ideas okay yeah yeah uh can i go for one more joe are you already laid down yeah well we'll take uh daryl daryl's ipad please no no no i'll answer not my ipad hi daryl joel thanks um i i first know of your work through um speaking about the suburbs i'm a built environment professional so i just want to see if there's if there's a spatial dimension to this kind of reorganization of classes and i think going on from what tony asked um the city as a bastion of free exchange of ideas have we moved on from that concept very good very good question okay all right thank you very much daryl okay joel i'm afraid i'm gonna see if you can round up on these i will let me um start maybe with with what daryl and and uh brought up and and also tony on the issue of the sort of geography of what's going on um you know one of the the uh ways that we were able to have upward mobility and people living a better life is during the um well in in britain between the 20s and 30s and then later on um in the 1950s there was a quite a bit of building creating new communities we did this obviously in the united states on a massive scale this allowed for the middle and working class to achieve a decent quality of life at a relatively low cost um what we've done now is the cities have become so expensive so overpriced so much of the of the elites money is there that is no longer um a place where families can be i mean what i find really interesting is how little concern urban planners have on the question of whether families live in cities or don't it just you know in a way they want that you know that two thousand dollar a month ubi person in a tiny apartment you know uh smoking a joint playing video games and watering their plants that's that's their ideal urbanite well that is not the ideal urbanite that aristotle wrote about um it wasn't about living better it's sort of like being warehoused and part of it sometimes the greens will say well then you'll use less uh uh energy well of course you know if you if you just lay in bed all day you don't use a lot of energy either um i mean the reality is that the cities as we they've developed have are no longer places where of upward mobility they've actually very poor highest um uh inequality when i worked uh on a project in the in the uk um london had both the very rich and the very poor um and we we don't seem to be concerned with maintaining families in cities i was just talking to a former um student of mine in san francisco um right before this and she was telling me stories about you know you go out in the street and somebody's shooting meth right in front right on your doorstep um you know you have uh you have you know people you know defecating on the streets can you imagine having two young children like she does um and having that as your environment so we've you know and this we've been um electing in some of our cities insane district attorneys who essentially will not prosecute almost any crime short of you know blowing somebody away on the street if you are in san francisco your car gets broken into forget about the cops even saying well okay you can file a report um so you know what we've forgotten is that to have the freedom of the city which you know i've written the history of cities myself you have to have water you have to have some notion that i can walk down the street and not be accosted and of course during the the disorders this summer and now continuing we have a law for instance here in the state of california where essentially you could steal up to a thousand dollars with no felony uh concerns and you're never going to go to prison well you know if i talk to my my my uh indian friend who owns a a liquor store in fullerton this isn't such good news for him he said people can just go in and they they just have their calculator and they're saying i'm up i'll just go up to a thousand dollars uh my my former student in san francisco told me the exact same story so you know we have to have an idea what is the city for and i think the city is a it's got to be a safe place it's got to be a place where families live you know the you know i i loved many of the evocative um notions of of jane jacobs um but the jane jacobs city doesn't exist anymore particularly in the core city she would write about uh for instance um uh chelsea in new york i know you have a chelsea in london but the chelsea in new york um oh this wonderful ballet of the small the cut the the candy store owner who watches after my kids and the and the extended families when she was in uh in chelsea it was heavily italian there were there were lots of extended families um and um and people worked in the the on the on you know in the port of new york and you know had blue good blue collar jobs in many cases that new york is gone it doesn't exist anymore it's college students it's what we call trustevarians um you know people with trust funds um you know i think simon cooper the uh writing i think it was in the guardian years ago said that new york and london are places where the one percent marry each other um and so that that idea of the city as a place where you come and make it in the future is just not there if and if you don't have a wealthy parents you really can't do it anymore um and and i think that that is a tremendous loss for what the city um was about and i don't see anybody concerned with it um cities are increasingly run by by lunatics i mean that's i don't know how else to put it they're run by people you know who aren't interested in jobs you know aren't interested in manufacturing aren't interested in in the kids actually learning in school um so what do you think happens the people in in in middle class and working less families they move to smaller cities this is one of the great options we have in this country and because of covid and the increased use of of digital technology it's more and more um possible the the massive movement of people out of new york san francisco um is quite profound um and these cities don't seem to be interested and in some ways i i've i've read in numerous particularly progressive publications oh maybe we'll get rid of the rich people and the city will go back to being you know sort of you know the new york of the 1970s you know where you had needle park i guess that was a better era um but the the fact is the purposes of the city are being undermined so one of the projects i'm involved in right now is what kind of new cities can we build um you know i i did spend some time uh in some of the newer cities in in in the uk um but you know but i but i think that there's really not milton keynes in particular but but i think that you know we're going to have to develop a new kinds of cities many of them will be 30 40 50 miles from the historic downtowns because people will be able to work either at home or near home and maybe we can get it right there um because the right now what one of the other factors that nobody talks about is because people can afford to pay the rents in cities they um they drive up the the people who would have bought a home 20 years ago are still renting and because they're renting they're driving up the cost of housing beyond anything that working-class people could afford so hopefully that so there is a spatial dimension um in america and we're seeing some of it in in europe people are opting to go to a different geography to find the kind of uh of middle class environment they wanted um the uh uh um the the remainder which was about you know um who's in control and all the rest of it if you can just go through those final questions if you would and then we'll take the reminder okay just on in terms of the democratic party the transformation of the democratic party which um i i i worked um for the democratic leadership council um uh the democratic party has been is what uh my friend fred siegel calls the coalition of the over-educated and the under-educated it's the the the well um uh the well-educated clericy and the tech um oligarchs are the basis now the democratic party and what they do is they they waive the bloody uh shirt of of uh racism to try to keep the minorities um supporting them um and the republican party um its only hope now is to become a middle working-class party but the only way that will work is to get rid of uh trumpism because of the the fact that the majority of the american working class in 2030 won't be white and you've got to learn how to communicate with with that population um and then the question just very uh from uh carrie about uh the oligarchs did they did they cause it no because they don't have any consciousness about uh about causing anything and they would never see themselves as being um uh cause of the danger are they the survivors they're survivors of a game that that they now increasingly um structure so only they can survive um the obama administration refusal to uh and previous administrations to address the idea of antitrust and monopoly um is is one of the major reasons why we're in this situation now i hope that was quick enough austin yeah sorry joel to confess to you on this but we've got we've got six i've got six hands up here if i just take them in order um i have more this more appeared just now so i'll have to stop at where we're at at the moment so first up we have sally sally milad okay thank you that was really great and your book is brilliant i've i have read it and it's so jam-packed full of detail really it's a really interesting read um my question really goes right back to one of the things that you said right at the beginning where you said that um the protest of the summer blm and the the recent protests at capitol hill uh were two sides of the same coin um and yet uh you've then gone on to really uh describe how one side of that coin i suppose the blm have the general support of the clericy uh whereas the other side of it really don't and i just wondered um if you could it really because it's they're both both from a similar generation so i don't think you can explain it from that point of view so so what's really different and how how does how do we get those two differences can you explain that a bit more okay great question thank you uh michael michael owens so um the the um my questions are to do it to do with the typology and the the idea of of of of of neo-feudalism and i suppose you know if this is a warning uh i'm i'm interested in what's the clarion call if you will so you know based on the analysis that you've got in the book and it is brilliant in its detail um how would you see the opportunities to raise productivity uh where that's where would that come from uh and link to that um the third estate you know comes right at the end of the book but um you know if we were to look for it look for a new third estate um you know what's the basis for the formation of a third estate today so it's kind of you know it seems to me that you know the the you kind of surfs but who else you know who's gonna who's gonna line up together against the forces that you've uh you've outlined i'm just intrigued right because you know there's it's a kind of fun analogy it's a great uh you know kind of an analogy but i'm wondering you know when you were writing it where did you think it fell apart as a as a way of thinking about classes today very good that's a phd student's question to a lecturer um okay uh we have james james please yeah hey um thanks uh mr cotkin uh i read a lot of almost anything i see of yours online i read and it's very valuable and uh i just wonder if your outlook is overly pessimistic due to focusing on california and being in california and and are you projecting california to the rest of the us and other parts of the world or the west um i i i know just you just a few minutes ago we're already talking about some other developments in other parts of the country um and i know from reading you um some of the more interesting things you highlight or how some of the areas of the midwest which uh you know which might be of interest to people in the uk as well to sort of see that there are regenerated areas in the u.s cities where there's been including the tech industry growth in jobs um and and there's also some interesting you know social developments of the working class i think if you to simplify and talk about demographic groups i think it's quite interesting to see um how uh hispanic uh asian american groups which were reflected i think politically in the election you know and how some of them are clearly not devoted to the democratic party and were quite willing to vote with the republicans and break from that kind of thing i mean even in cat york california i thought it was very interesting how the vote for the affirmative action was rejected in particular again those groups i just mentioned asian americans hispanic americans voting against against that and um so yeah i guess just as you're being provocatively negative in terms of neo-feudalism i wonder if if i could turn that around and sort of say if you could say a little bit about what might be positive and some good potential very good thank you very much uh dennis and bernie and all are you there hello can you hear me there yes indeed yeah i can hear you oh hi yeah um thanks very much for that um i i suppose you could say i'm from the blue collar end of the spectrum looking at this with a smattering of politics behind me but um uh i'm i'm kind of i asked a question if you took all the money that jeff bezos and the oligarchs and all of them had and spread it across society or even american society how much good would it do for american society i'm not a an economist but my my thinking is that they wouldn't do a lot uh for all the wealth that they have yeah and then so the problem is you know the old marxist problem as you might recognize how to raise the level of production in society and it seems to me that that's the one question that's kind of left out of the whole sort of discussion and not only in relation to the problems that we face in the contemporary world of fighting for free speech and fighting for basic freedoms you know to discuss and debate with each other which are very important and the essence of what it is to be human but when you present yourself as an advocate of free speech for what purpose it's okay to say yeah i want free speech but to me there has to be a purpose and when you present it to the world it's a it's a purpose that serves the interest of somebody and um it doesn't serve the interest of the clarity it doesn't serve the interest of the oligarchs and probably a whole strata of the middle class who are imbued with a kind of anti-democratic anti-rational sentiment but uh it can serve the interests of a lot of other people a lot of them support the trump as it happens yes yes and and you know the problem was there seemed to be nobody that was able to put an argument to those people that would make them recognize what a that trump was in terms of their interests or inability to meet their interests but that we should be able to throw up some people who can put this together into a logical argument that serves the interest and i mean the material interest because raising the level of production in britain and america is the problem that we have if we're going to raise the level of culture of our society and you know that's that to me is the big problem that we have very good thank you very much sorry joel i'm going to take three more i know you're writing furiously but uh has to be done uh so penny please hi hi hi um the mysterious penny yes sorry um i i thought it was really interesting what you were saying about um about cities and i recognize a lot of what you're saying but i would um concur with the person that said there's a danger that we generalize too much from these patterns so in the uk people talk about um gentrification now and they talk about it in relation to everything and my students just assume that everything is gentrification and somehow the categories get in the way of us actually looking and observing carefully at what is going on because somewhere like dundee we we could do with a bit of gentrification we don't have any of it so um so i think that that's one thing that's important but also in terms of as a way of looking at the world i heard jodie dean talk about this recently and she she was sort of saying well if we're going towards feudalism that's capitalism eating itself and that's an opportunity for us and i know she she talks about being a communist but it seems like i'm slightly worried that it actually becomes a useful framework to understand things that are different but it doesn't challenge any of the sort of ideological problems we have and the the ideological problem that are particularly interested in um is this idea of us as victims whether you talk about the working class or anyone else i don't know whether it's a similar discussion in america but in the uk there's a lot of discussion about modern slavery and i was discussing it with my daughter today and there doesn't seem to be the capacity to really look at the world and understand what it means to to be exploited in other words you're free to sell your labor you're free to withdraw your labor it's a contractual arrangement that you've entered into with somebody else um and that's quite different from slavery and it's quite different from being a surf and i suppose this is some of the thing you're talking about about people being encouraged to be passive um but i'm wondering whether there's a danger um by calling us all serves that we're not really getting to the nitty-gritty of what the real relationship is and exploitation is a much better relationship than serfdom as far as i'm concerned because we are free and we have the potential to transform things so it's the agency aspect of things which i think is is kind of underplayed in this analysis when it goes from looking at the world to the potential to transform it it somehow falls short and i'm interested in what you what you think about that very good thank you um so i got what somebody else has just crept in uh so we have three more i'm afraid still but we have to stop at this uh so we have martha next please martha either martha martha i have seen you several times all right okay martha's disappeared okay hi hey joel um i'm coming here from uh richardson texas so i have a little uh a little bit more of an opt i own a home actually here in richardson that feeds into jj pierce high school i consider myself like one of the lucky americans out there do you think it's time for a third political party do you think that it could really gain traction coming up or is it just because right now i see the third political party in this country is china you know and that's so and i'm i'm interested in starting that and uh running for office because i'm 32 and i just i'm i can't sit back anymore i you know you have to be the change that you want to see and i i want places to be like richardson i want people places to be like texas and have the things going on here so i just yeah very good thank you martha remember that name remember that name you saw him here first uh okay we have john fender and then jan baum and that's that's the or teresa i don't know which one both of you are there great it's it's right here um sorry i did put my hand up a lot earlier and i seem to have got disconnected um simon sharma recently in being asked about the capital riots um quoted orwell and aaron and ultimately said this is what happens when you don't have a consensus on truth so this is looking at things from a different angle how much do you think you know everyone having their own truth relativism is actually possibly a root cause behind a lot of this because we've had the feeling hegemony for such a long time and now here with the pandemic people are saying we need more counsellors to deal with everyone's distress as a pandemic um when i would have thought we needed more critical reasoning skills more problem-solving skills thank you very much and final point or question whichever from jan bowman please can you hear me indeed um it was great book joel i loved it it was very grim and i thought i wanted to say something about um you know something about what to do about it because i i i i think if you could have said more you would have said more at the end so there's not much um you don't say more so i i think you're a bit pessimistic i i'm i'm i i you have a right to be i agree but i think that it's worth looking at just how the things that are on offer today um i don't think that that um video games and shopping feed the soul and i think that environmentalism doesn't feed the soul either um and i think there's always people who in any sus in any situation in any situation have had something in their experience in their background makes them dissatisfied with the existing answers and looking prepared to be looking for something new so i think that that's going to continue um and it's not going to stop despite all the awful things that you describe in your book and i also think that um the populism of brexit and the populism that gave right rise to trump i actually find quite inspiring i think that our job really has to be to give democracy i think as you mentioned in the book some more meaning and to reinspire people with what humanity could be um and i think that kind of approach what humanity could be and what democracy can mean which i think people don't have any clue what democracy means anymore i think you're quite right in your book to talk about like a pre-political situation in that sense i think you're right about calling the working-class serfs they know how no longer have an idea um of themselves of the class either of themselves or for themselves and i think that uh re-establishment a re-understanding of democracy um and repopularization of democracy would lead to um a much more conscious and active um majority of people that could actually change things so i think you should we should positive side to what's going on to counter your the grimness of your excellent book thank you very much okay joel lighten up will you uh so look um you've got a hell of a lot of questions there i'm sure you can't tackle them all but give it your best shot uh we've got maybe 10 minutes or so all right well um i'm gonna do the best i can first of all i want to thank you all just in the sense that you're making me think a lot which is really useful um you know uh several people say well you know shouldn't you write another book about how to get out of it and the you got to get past my wife uh she uh when i wrote this book she said you went into your office for six months and didn't come out um you know and uh uh you know i've got kids and you know a wife and a dog and you know writing another book would um would be a problem plus to tell the truth publishing is not what it was um the the you know i think austin could back me up on this you know the advances aren't what they were the the the publishing companies i'm not necessarily sure that mainstream publishing companies would would even publish a book like this anymore um we know we've we've been seeing um people who don't buy the party line um uh having a harder time but just in terms of of what to do which is i i really like um i do think that there was something positive about the um uh about the the support for trump not trump himself um had you know had had you know donald uh you know trump been you know something more of a human being um it would have been much better um but i i do think also with brexit um there is and and some of the negative votes on eu throughout europe that there is a grassroots rebellion i am working on a piece for coilette about that grassroots rebellion and i do see something good about it um i think that the the uh uh the the what we really need to be thinking about is and i the question of productivity i thought was very good um i just finished a study on reassuring of industry in the united states um and it's happening it's happening overwhelmingly in the middle of the country um many of the people involved in it are worried that the new administration will will uh impose regulatory uh issues and tax issues make it hard um we have many areas where the skill sets don't even exist anymore i was talking to a company actually originally that came from france um which was trying to do ppe and they said there were certain things you just can't get in the united states anymore the skills don't exist um i thought and i have to say um and what and i i don't mean to uh to sound negative about the united kingdom but you guys are farther along in de-industrialization than we are um i think that that it seems to me that doesn't even seem to be the tories don't seem to care whether you have any industry i guess they think like our our leaders in california think the tech oligarchs will solve everything i guess the people who run england think that the that that the uh the people in the city of london will will save everything obviously that doesn't work it doesn't spread jobs here's some positive things um one of the things we're beginning to see is with 3d printing uh that industries that went offshore for low labor costs don't have to go offshore anymore um the the pandemic has shown us how important it is to have um uh have better supply chains i mean think how dependent britain is now to food imports um i mean that you should be able to produce more things like when i i love london and my wife used to live in london but try to buy something to bring home to my kids that's english that was hard i mean it you know what am i going to get what was made in in the uk not very much so but we have an opportunity and we also have an opportunity um an industry i'm working on now is the space industry which um the united states is still pretty predominant um though those building airships is going to be something that will require working-class skills unionized labor as well as rocket scientists and we're seeing thousands of jobs being created in the long beach area which is south of los angeles um where we we do create industries a medical instruments another industry which could create a broad spectrum of jobs for people if we if if we promoted it the good news in terms of politics is that that for instance in the state of ohio uh you have um senator brown who's far out on the left and senator portman who comes from the right sponsoring legislation to encourage the manufacturing of ppe and other essential equipment i think that countries have to have to give up the idea that you know globalism works wonderfully if you're just transferring money around it doesn't work so well for the people on the you know on the grassroots so i think the new technologies will allow us to do things in these countries uh in our countries that we couldn't have done before um and we also have to re-discover our workplace you know one of the good things of being a reporter and i'm an old-fashioned reporter i really the hardest part for me about zoom is i don't get to go and see you know go visit people in arkansas but i did an interview in ohio and they they couldn't find welders they took um their welders are now almost all women he said why can't a woman be a welder you know we had rosie the riveter british women participated in industry during the war there are ways that we can create new opportunities for middle and working-class people um instead of bringing everything to china or for instance where the chinese will eventually they'll automate everything too um and some that's happening to some extent already why why can't we build the golden the the uh the bay bridge with american steel why did we have to report what turned out to be um uh defective steel from china um why why can't we look at this so i've been trying to work on you you've chastised me correctly about a lack of a upward or forward um agenda what i am doing as we speak is doing that for the state of california this is my home um i still think it's the most interesting piece of of real estate in the world um we have an amazing we still have amazing legacy amazing technology um very obviously a very diverse population um i think that that that trying to figure out how we do it education is a big part we've got to be able to educate kids so that they actually have a skill and a career one of the terrible things we see now is some school districts in california they don't even they don't even give you negatives for not showing up um they they they have quotas on who can be who can be criticized for being disruptive i mean the the the more postmodernist lunacy gets into our education system the harder it will be to reverse these changes but the realities are there um the realities are that with technology with with a better education system we can create a whole new world of opportunity a for working class people but also for some of those left behind cities whether they're in the united states the uk france you know whole areas that have been essentially abandoned by globalism these places could go back to life they offer affordable quality of life um they're sometimes in very attractive areas um and they have a residual when i interview ceos about why they're they're moving re-shoring to let's say ohio they said this this place has a history of producing they see a value to it um i don't know how this will work in new york my my grandfather was a manufacturer and the other one was a on the other side they they worked in the factories as as union labor you know that new york is is well and gone and and and can we replace those jobs with artisanal jobs um you know i just on the oligarchs um people say well you need uber and lyft because they've got the technology why why couldn't you with these same algorithms have a taxi company in every city in this country that that is locally based that uses the same technologies there's no miracle about what uber was able to do was by accessing endless amounts of capital they could lose money for years where their competitors couldn't um same thing with facebook um you know it's that access the capital if we were able to to spread capital more to um to smaller companies and if we prevented the the accumulation of every interesting new startup by a handful of companies i think there were years i i in the book where you know google would would acquire 10 15 companies in a month we can't have that lastly to my fellow american in texas and i spent a great deal of time in texas i'm writing a feature about dallas right now um i think we need we do need a new party because i think if we if the republicans go in the trumpista direction and that's all we do um it will be right you know the national front in in france so we'll get 30 35 of the vote and lose every election nationally and most elections locally um on the other hand going back to the old you know sort of country club republicans well they don't have any members anymore so that would be difficult um and the democratic party um as an old democrat myself uh now an independent but um the democratic party has abandoned the middle and working class almost completely and uh a third party would be great um uh the question is you know where's abraham lincoln when we need him there you go thank you very much who said you weren't positive um look i think it's uh a terrific uh presentation joel i i second everybody who says it was a great book uh as are all of your books but this one is uh particularly opposite for uh today's condition i think um he was a penny who was talking about feudalism um and making the point that actually under feudalism we didn't have agency whereas one of the good things about modernism or modernity at least is that we we still do um and so that that level of distinction i think is very important and similarly you know looking for the positives those tech oligarchs they may be screwing us over but they've given us zoom and given us the opportunity to converse across the continents uh to enable us to have this conversation in the first place so um you know more fool then uh we take advantage of it where we can um and i thought that those kind of connections are really important and i think the anecdotes that you've given us to be to be honest with you even reading the book some of the stories that you've given us of life in in america are worth their weight in gold because i didn't have that level of insight from reading articles or seeing you know tv so thank you very much for all your in-depth analysis for your generosity of time uh and for writing a terrific book which i urge everybody to get a hold of if you haven't already and even though we haven't answered all the questions uh i think you know they can float around there we can carry on this conversation uh more broadly in in zoom or on other occasions but can we unmute and just give joel a huge uh thanks for his time and efforts thank you fantastic session

Channel: Austin Williams

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Id: A7wLBfRgctI

Length: 100min 40sec (6040 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021