From the Archives: Anand Giridharadas on Capitalism in the Time of Corona

and uh hello and welcome to this intelligent squared plus event uh with anand guerdales who is editor at large for time magazine host of the new vice show seat at the table which i've watched an episode it's very entertaining an author of the best seller winner takes all the elite charade of changing uh the world if you like to buy a copy of winner takes all click on the books tab in the top right of green click on the image of the book and you'll go through to the books page on waterstones so um tonight's event is going to run for an hour for the first 30 minutes i'm going to be in conversation with anand and then in the second half we're going to be taking your no doubt highly intelligent uh questions but you can start asking questions now i mean if you do start asking questions now it suggests that you don't really listen to anybody else but you can if you want to start asking questions now by clicking on the ask questions butter under button under the video screen and typing in your question and then you simply press send so and it is great to be talking to you and i have to start with i mean i think everyone wants to know the answer this question how has the pandemic affected you personally uh where are you locked down how was your life uh thank you for asking it's um it's been [Music] you know we're very very lucky to not have um suffered any of the the health consequences that so many people are dealing with um and to not you know and to be like blessedly free of the the hunger and economic pain that so many people are going through um we have a daughter who is very immunosuppressed um and so we had to leave new york city pretty early in this in this period um in march and so we're you know upstate in upstate new york and and you know trying to make a tv show and highlight the issues um that are exposed by this um while doing so in the new in the new world that you and i are embodying right now which is you know people on video chats trying to to work together and illuminate the moment i've spoken to people all around the world um over the last few weeks in events and podcasts and stuff like that and it seems to me one of the things we always have to remind ourselves is if we're if you're a knowledge worker like you are like i am and if you have somewhere reasonably nice to live this is actually not such a bad experience at all and you have to continuously remind yourself of how completely different it is if you are for example in the developing world or if you are in overcrowded accommodation or you've lost your job you're falling into into debt we have to continuously remind ourselves of the very different experiences people are having don't we yes it's a very good point and and it's it's you know it's many many dividing lines right and we're seeing those show up in our politics it's people who have this thing versus who haven't you know in a year from now it's going to be a lot of people who have the antibodies and may or may not have immunity and people who don't um it's people who as you say continue to draw a salary continue to have their jobs and just need to do it you know with a greater incidence of boredom in their life and with with kids running around versus people that you know 38 million people in the united states now who have lost their jobs um it's people who have are now being called essential sort of being flattered into being called essential but who have long been invisible and continue in many ways to be invisible and paid as if though they are invisible um who are doing the the vital but but very difficult and dangerous work of keeping these societies humming and one of the things that's fascinated me is that a lot of the language we use in crises like this is we are all in this together you know and and we are not all in this together that is uh complete you know in fact this crisis has revealed and accentuated all the dividing lines um that that i have been writing about that many others have been writing about those things have now just been ripped wide open yeah well i i want to come back to uh the crisis and the relationship to change uh in a moment but um i've read your book twice it's absolutely brilliant it's incredibly uh a significant book one that's really shaped and changed the debate um and i'm gonna ask you to remind us of the core thesis but actually when i was just finishing my second reading of it i found one paragraph and i it's normally the author who reads from their book but i i love this paragraph so much that i'm going to indulge myself by reading it i i i encourage this very good it's on page 246 of the edition i've got in the final chapter and i don't even have a copy of my book around me well there we are so this is what you write if anyone truly believes that the same ski town conferences and fellowship programs the same politicians and policies the same entrepreneurs and social businesses the same campaign donors the same thought leaders the same consulting firms and protocols the same philanthropists and reformed goldman sachs executives the same win wins and doing well by doing good initiatives and private solutions to public problems that have promised grandly superficially to change the world if anyone thinks that the market world complex of people and institutions and ideas that fail to prevent this mess even as it harped on make about making a difference and whose neglect fuels populism's flames is also the solution wake them up by tapping them gently with this book now i thought i'd read that to you because it captures the kind of essence of the book but for anyone who hasn't read it read it and it's a very subtle book there's a whole lot of different arguments in this book but if i was to ask you to to to do the impossible and to summarize your argument beyond what i've just described what how would how would you do that um thank you that that's probably my favorite paragraph of the entire book you know there's kind of one one paragraph you allow yourself with a insane run-on sentence that is completely grammatically unjustifiable that you just allow yourself one in every book this is new channeling henry james yeah exactly but i you know i i usually attempt 10 in every book and then nine of them are killed and one i i fight for that was the one i fought for um funnily enough the lawyers one of the only legal edits on the book was i think i had something like wake them up by hitting them with this book and the lawyers were like that could be considered as incitement to violence so we need to do you know tapping them comma gently come on with this book so you know lawyers are often very helpful in that way and that's why i'm still a free man so the thesis of the book starts with a question right which is i think a phenomenon really really true and developed in the u.s to a lesser extent true in the uk but i think happening from what i hear which is that we live in this time in which the richest most powerful people are everywhere around us bending over backwards to do good more money being given away than ever everybody's got a social business they're starting every billionaire's got some africa angle they're trying to change africa people in africa are very tired of being you know changed by western billionaires um you see young people at the best colleges and universities graduating with all kinds of designs of i got to change the world i gotta do this i gotta you know make tote bags that give money back to this disease so and above all the billionaire class is giving money away in a scale it's never been given and all of that is kind of fact number one that sits alongside awkwardly fact number two which is that the very same class of people often the same exact people themselves are actually hoarding more and more of the world's wealth and power year by year every year this the philanthropist class i'm talking about in the billionaire class more broadly is actively grabbing more is actively rigging the power structure more is actually organizing the united kingdom and the united states and other countries to work more for them than for regular people and so i began not with a thesis but with a question which is how is it that these two facts side by side what's the relationship between fact number one and fact number two and i think the michael lewis the writer has a great line that writers write because they feel the world has fundamentally misperceived something and the thing that i felt the world had misperceived was the relationship between fact number one and fact number two between the the helping and the hoarding the kindness and the and the kind of theft the conventional wisdom it seemed to me was the relationship was one of a drop in the bucket that fact number one was it was trying mark zuckerberg is trying to get rid of all the diseases bill gates is doing his thing jeff bezos is doing his thing richard branson's doing his thing it's just not enough it's not fast enough it's not effective enough there's not enough of them if we could get chinese billionaires to start giving at the rate that american billionaires do if amer american billionaires could start giving more effectively if we could have you know consulting firms advising the chan zuckerberg initiative on how to get the best marginal use of its dollar then maybe maybe maybe we could start delivering against these cruelties of the age and i became curious about a second and rather opposite possibility that perhaps the extraordinary helping of our time is why and how we have upheld the extraordinary hoarding of our time maybe all this do-gooding serves to buy just enough reputational cleansing for a class that would otherwise be incredibly resented in this era to stave off meaningful change perhaps this group of people does all is open to every kind of change except the kind of change that would actually change the system that allows them to stay on top and keeps others locked below perhaps the philanthropy the social businesses they're doing well by doing good the public private partnerships the davos stuff the aspen stuff perhaps all of it is the kind of generosity that actually serves as a substitute for injustice and for justice rather perhaps it's the kind of do-gooding that actually perpetuates the opportunity to keep doing harm on a much greater scale if less visibly perhaps all this talk of changing the world is fundamentally about keeping their world as the plutocrats the same now one of the things about the book uh is that it's actually you you you focus on a number of individuals each chapter actually most of the chapters are constructed around particular individuals and one of the things that makes is compelling about that is that although sometimes you're clearly irritated by some of the people you're dealing with generally speaking it's written almost more in sorrow than anger it's that you are talking to people who think they're doing good but for some reason they just can't engage with these systemic issues now the intelligence squared audience that we're speaking to this evening they're lovely people but i guess that they would be a reasonable overlap between privilege and progressive values amongst them and i can imagine them sitting there nodding their heads but i think one of the things you want to say in the book is is that some of this stuff is really quite psychologically difficult for people who are well intentioned that thinking about the system is some it's not it's not it's not something that you can simply do by you know reading a book it really requires you to think deeply and to be quite humble actually about yourself and what you can do alone it's a very good way to put it you know so in terms of the form thing you know i experimented with different ways of writing it and a lot of how the book was in the early drafts was more anand's criticism of what i call market world and often me going to spaces and kind of writing as a fly on the wall critiquing them and i have a brilliant editor jonathan siegel at alfred knopf my publisher who really said you know um it really it clicked for me when he said you know you're setting this up like a like a kind of fight where you're on one side of the table and there's like all these people on the other side of the table first of all that's a fight you can't win second of all it's not accurate there are some people in that world who actually agree with you who actually feel reservate who are in various stages they're not all identically on that side of the table so find some people on that side of the table and bring them to your side of the table narratively find the people who are struggling as you say find the people who have felt this word to be fr world to be fraudulent that they're in but are still there right find as i did there someone like darren walker who runs the ford foundation is therefore one of the most powerful people in the world frankly and certainly in philanthropy but who is also black gay and grew up very poor and therefore has an understanding of what it means to be on the wrong end of a power equation or two or three and but yet believes enough in the world that he's in to have the job he does and so i found several people like that who are grapplers and it's a it's a lesson i've kind of had to learn again and again in my writing career grapplers are the best way to write about this kind of thing because they contain the multitudes of an argument and so i wrote about these grapplers and you're right that what all of them had in common to different degrees was a sense that there was something wrong with the overall system we live in fundamentally defined by a system of hyper capitalism in which money has become the most important moral language and the only moral language a lot of people speak and grappling with that in their own ways so it started with a college senior woman in her final year of college at georgetown hillary cohen and her version of that grappling was what do i do with my life very relatable question for all of us and certainly if you're a college you know senior and she wanted to change the world she wanted to do big things she and she ended up at goldman sachs and then mckenzie and years later when i was interviewing her she was still confused by how that had happened to her and we processed a lot of that together she actually reached out to me first for advice and i said instead of me giving you advice you want to be a character in my book and remarkably she said yes and we sort of processed it that way and she has helped by the way a tremendous number of people uh just from reading her story and you know i i was talking to a group of a few dozen stanford mbas on zoom yesterday to try to help them think through these issues and hillary's story is often very helpful all the way up to someone like bill clinton who i think is grappling much less than hillary was hilary cohen um but who very much embodied this notion that you know that was maybe the default view in the 1960s when he was coming of age that the way you changed the world is politics his law his movements and the guy who could have gotten a fancy job in any law firm did not do that went and ran for attorney general and then for governor of arkansas maybe not the most you know exciting life that bill clinton could have had in that early days but chose public service and and now toward the back end of his life as after having run the most powerful government in the history of the world has basically gravitated to this notion that the way you really make change now is by partnering with big corporations and again i had written about his big conference cgi as a fly on the wall and and my through my editor's advice i decided to go back and interview bill clinton i tried and he was willing so we grappled for you know more than an hour with how did he go from this view that you changed the world through law and politics and policy real change how did he go from that to this kind of newfangled belief um that you changed the world by partnering with the rockefeller foundation mcdonald's and goldman sachs to you know help some kids with a nutrition issue in the book and there's a one of the things you you argue is that there's been a kind of systematic uh process which which clinton was part of and i'd say blair actually i worked for bear blair much less so but but certainly clinton which was the left saying well we're suspicious of the state as well we don't really believe in the state being able to do stuff and now i absolutely get your argument which is that when people philanthropists and others suggest that change is possible without the state it's it's a ludicrous and self-serving argument but what about the kind of left perspective of the kind of mutual aid movement or various other movements who are themselves suspicious of the state and whose own model is is more as it were to do with um kind of bottom-up collectivism now some people are equally scathing about that as a model of change so tell me what your model what is the model of change that you've arrived at through your thinking it's interesting you know i mean to be clear and this is something maybe i wasn't clear enough in the book what i'm really talking about in terms of you know i'm an advocate for the public solution of our biggest shared public problems to be clear that is only a certain number of our problems right the provision of iphones is not one of those problems i that that is something that is well taken care of through the market even though the public sector did a tremendous number of things to make the iphone possible which it should do um but you know air travel is not something that i think of as the kind of problem that needs to be provided by the government regulating it is um so when i'm advocating for our biggest shared problems to be you know solved once again in public institutions i'm talking about problems like the collective health of a country right now you and britain understand this because you have an nhs even though there are attacks on it we in america are you know kind of medieval on on this score um or you think about a problem like the racial wealth gap in the united states right 400 years of systemic plunder of african-americans there's just no foundation strategy or frankly in my view mutual aid strategy that is adequate to the task of rectifying 400 years of systemic plunder of african-americans or you think about you know the the problem of how do you build a post-patriarchal society that allows women to play all of their roles i i just don't see any kind of you know bottom-up i don't wanna say bottom-up like mutual aid non-governmental approach that is adequate to that challenge these challenges are by their definition systemic and they require solutions anchored in law and policy and the point you made about you know blair and clinton and and these kind of third way new left democrats is really important because i think there was a calculation made about the way you respond to the war on government coming from the other side right so reagan says government's not the solution government is the problem a year or two before that margaret thatcher says there's no such thing as society only men and women and you have a choice when you're and by the way that doctrine was catching right i mean they were winning it was effective it was working on people it actually is one of the most successful ideas of the last 40 years if not the most successful idea right now in the face of that kind of success you have a choice as an opponent but how do you respond and i think what we saw in the blairs and clintons was you respond by kind of sidling halfway toward that idea and resisting it while existing within the framework of it right so you basically say yes yes like i concede the government is often tired and bloated and inefficient and as bill clinton said to me for the book it's always better if you can solve something through the private sector blah blah blah but after that long kind of uh conciliatory wind-up but i still think there's some role okay that's one way to counter a strident militant war on government that we've been living amid i think what many people are now seeing what i'm arguing for is you know the milk toast kind of meh defense of government is actually not up to the task of countering something as as ferocious as the war on government and instead making an equally passionate militant forthright unapologetic case for government actually maybe the tonic and i think it was just a kind of strategic miscalculation maybe there was some hope it's sort of the joe biden approach as well now like that if you you know creep closer to those people they'll creep closer to you but you just end up kind of naked in the middle of the highway and i think what we're seeing now is is a notion that actually even middle of the road people even in some cases people on the right may actually be more persuadable by the pure vodka case that is distilled and a little bit bracing rather than the you know like warm lager case right it is actually more persuasive to say healthcare is a human right we do not leave people behind in this country over my dead body rather than to say let's expand health access and bend the cost curve which is sort of what the obamacare line was right sometimes the pure version of something is actually more seductive to a wider array of people than the watered-down version that is attempting to please everybody well i was going to come on to the crisis and that's a very good point to do that because you know if ever we wanted a reminder of the importance of competent government you know we've got one so you know i kind of thought this was going to be like a world cup final between the us and the uk as to who was going to perform least well but it looks like president bolsonaro you know the brazilians once again may come through and win the world cup you know so that could be even worse so um do you hold out the hope that people will look at government and they'll look at the fact that in america to a lesser extent in the uk government has been run down capacity has been run down or they'll look at the performance of populists like bolsonaro like trump like putin and they will start to form conclusions then and this could mark the end of this kind of long period where the lazy assumption it is that that government is useless i mean i think what's really really interesting and and and fills me with feelings of of darkness and and light right now is that this could go down in two completely different directions and we don't know which it's a sort of choose your adventure book in which we haven't really yet chosen so direction number one i would say you know direction number one is further along right now direction number one is this crisis being leveraged and exploited by the very powerful to deepen their power right so you got a bunch of millions of small businesses going under and private equity buying it up while cornering bailout money you have you know online retailers like target and amazon and walmart increasing their market share over small shops while those small shops go under their stock going up and that really may feels like it may be a kind of permanent shift right you come back from this people can still go to their shops again but they just are no shops those stores have now transformed retail forever into a fully online thing right those kinds of power grabs you know i don't know how much has happened in the uk but with our emergency relief here in the u.s like big companies and multi-gazillionaires cornered such a huge fraction of money that was earmarked for you know poor people for small businesses so you know that's the kind of naomi klein shock doctrine crisis is this in extraordinary opportunity for the rich to you know have a strangle increase their stranglehold on power however however however something that has often been said to me um in like book signing lines over the last couple years before all this by older people um was people would kind of whisper in my ear we're with you we believe in the kind of change you're calling for but let's be hon i'm an old person i've lived through a lot let me tell you this stuff only happens after wars or horrible horrible calamities it doesn't give me pleasure to say it but that's true and you know it was interesting it was a sobering thing that i i couldn't really argue with um you know i i'm not sure that you get women's suffrage when you do if you don't have world war one right before that and women suddenly playing all these roles that they weren't permitted to play by society right before world war one does that mean you want world war one to get suffer i mean like it it's it's it's these are very very complicated things but the very good things that that happened around uh the the post-civil war constitutional amendments in the united states 13 14 15 amendment particularly the 14th which is basically the basis of every claim of equality in american life thereafter only obviously happened because we murdered each other in a civil war the fact that you're the civil rights movement when you did cannot be separated from the fact that you sent a bunch of black soldiers american soldiers to germany to fight white supremacists and lo and behold they came home and were like guys you see what we got here and so the sad news in the last two years for me was well i guess maybe some of these things won't be able to happen well here's the very dark good news we are now finally living and no one's happy about it but we are finally living in the kind of time that has been known throughout history to change things fundamentally it's not automatic and i think left left kind of to natural trends scenario one will happen the scenario we're already seeing the consolidation of power but if you are you know under 80 years old this may be the first meaningful thing in your lifetime where the space for new coalitions new types of parties new intellectual alliances new belief systems is actually possible right to give you one simple example one of the articles of faith in the united states that separates us from you in the united kingdom is the notion the reason we don't have an nhs is because there's a belief that healthcare linking healthcare having care be a perquisite of employment is the best way to do it and people believe that for a whole bunch of reasons that it's it incentivizes working i mean it's a bunch of fraudulent beliefs but widely believed i have asked multiple times online if anybody still believes that and can explain on twitter the basis for the belief i would say there's a majority belief before the crisis right i'm not saying my tweet replies are a scientific sample i have yet to find one person in the post-pandemic world willing publicly to reply explaining why linking healthcare to employment is the wisest course so there's an opportunity there the the last thing i'll say is what that requires to not go down to scenario one and have scenario two the scenario of light of change of reform is political vision is imaginative leaders right and honestly i look at i mean donald trump is a obviously like an imbecile but i look opposite him and in the united states we have the congress nancy pelosi and chuck schumer and we have joe biden as the presidential nominee i'm not sure if you asked americans setting aside politics to pick the three most visionary inspiring people who they thought would most be able to transform the possibilities of the country and and create imaginative new realities i'm not sure those three people would end up in the top 100 in that list and so that's a problem it's not an easily solved problem but it's a problem and it's going to take a heroic amount of organizing to seize this moment to not only help people not only mourn where is appropriate protect and prevent whereas appropriate make people financially secure and whole where appropriate but to look beyond the emergency to say this is the great rebuilding opportunity of many of our lifetimes um we started to get questions coming through you know the great thing is i'm sitting at home you're sitting there i i don't i'm not i don't see the audience i could just completely ignore them because i just want to carry on talking to you but i'm not going to do that because i'm a pro and i'm going to take the questions unfortunately a couple of people have asked questions which ones are going to ask ask you anyway but i am going to take up just one last bit of time with you because i'm really interested in this question about the relationship between crisis and change and my analysis looking at these historical examples you know why did world war ii lead to the tragedy of the 30s and 40s world world war one why did world war ii lead to 30 years of relative equality of growing welfare state productivity rising family incomes are reasonably consensual politics why did we come out of the aids tragedy with the gay community uh taking responsibility for its behavior and feeling much more united uh treatment investment in treatment which ultimately led to hiv not being a terminal condition anymore and the past being laid to the liberation of lgbt community and changes in legislation whereas we came out 2007 8 thinking it would lead to change and things just got worse right so i'm interested in this and my suggestion to you is that there are three conditions that determine whether or not it is that crisis is most likely to need to change the first is there needs to be demand and capacity for change before the crisis so the change doesn't just come from nowhere in the crisis there's demand and capacity before secondly in the crisis as you've said the demand gets increased people want they see that the argument gets stronger but also in elements of the response to the crisis the attitudes the actions the innovations you see the future prefigured there are things that we do in the crisis that hint at the possibility of change and then thirdly and critically as you emerge from change there are the political coalitions and the practical policy suggestions to take advantage of that period of time when people are up for change willing even to imagine making sacrifices to achieve change now the reason i'm asking that long-winded question is it seems to me that the hardest part of that is actually political coalitions and particularly on the left because you know i'm part of that camp that you weigh into very eloquently and i accept many of the criticisms in your book and i'd argue one of the reasons why progressives did not win the argument after 2002 seven eight was that you had incumbent liberal and social democratic parties trying their best to cope with that crisis and having to make compromises and then you had a radical left of the one percent movement and occupy with enormous power but possibly not the kind of practical program and in that kind of split the opening was created that was exploited so are you hopeful as we emerge from this crisis that we can unite the different strands of progressivism because it seems to me that's critical as to whether or not we come out in the past that you want rather than the past that you fear yeah it's a great question you know i mean to go to your list of three like i think the first thing is has certainly been satisfied i think there was absolutely a kind of pre-existing language in the united states you saw it in the first bernie sanders campaign in the second one you saw it in kind of uh congresswoman alexandria ocasio-cortez being kind of by far the most consequential new member of congress in you know a generation if not longer and changing the language and discourse of this country within months of taking office um the second and third are harder and i will say uh and and this i say this is a criticism that i think actually contains a lot of hope i don't think the progressive movement has hit its ceiling you know in this i think there's a lot more room to grow and that's the nice way to say it i think the more critical way to say it is i think the the people who want to do a lot of the things that i'm talking about in politics in the united states bernie sanders and elizabeth warren jeremy corbyn in the uk in the last couple years i think have been quite limited figures electorally to be honest i think if you are up against the power structure as much as they are if you really wanna you gotta bernie doesn't wanna just bernie's policy ideas are almost secondary the fact that bernie wants the united states to become a different culture right he wants money to be less on everyone's mind like it's i think he's correct but that is a lift that is a real lift and if you want to do that you have to be firing on every political cylinder right you can't just have the policy ideas you can't just have the plans you can't just appeal to kind of more educated people the way elizabeth warren did you can't just be a kind of angry movement the way you know a lot of the the most vocal elements around bernie sanders movement where you have to have that and be a movement of exuberance you have to have that and be a movement that is evangelical and it's in its expansion and persuasion you have to have that core and constantly be conquering new territory and i don't know if it would be different in the uk but in particular in america you know there is a 25 or 30 ceiling on the progressive ideas if they are framed in this kind of lefty social justice language but to me the framing is the constraint the like healthcare for all is is an idea without you know without limit in its possibility but you know a certain way of framing it that's bashing insurance com by the way a bashing that i fully agree with and fully on board with but that approach frankly sounding like i sometimes sound is is something with if you're running for office it's a you're gonna have a passionate minority with you right the question is and a lot of people thinking about you know working for bernie sanders who i reported on for time last year we're thinking very hard about this question where's the next 10 percent come from where's the next 10 after that come from and each of those next 10 percents was gonna was gonna be people more skeptical about your core message people who maybe didn't even like you right you gotta remember barack obama won a tremendous number of racist white people just think about that right there were all these reports in the time people doing phone banking for obama in 2007 2008 and and the people on the call right rural areas of the country white voters would be like yeah yeah i'm voting for the n word think about that first barack obama want a lot of people who hate black people who use the n-word that is the mark of someone who is so damn good at politics that they're just electrifying people even people who hate them okay i don't think the progressive cause has had that right i don't think it's been able to like this for this moment to be successful you need to have people who say i hate socialism i'm a proud capitalist i'm a business owner but that guy makes me feel something or that woman makes me feel something and i'm going to walk to the end of the earth with them that's politics particularly if the lift is the lift that the progressives need to achieve and so one of the things i spoke of during the campaign is there's two missing languages in the united states at least that i that i find in the progressive movement one is the language of patriotism the second is a language of personal transformation patriotism you want to sell health care for all it's not only a justice issue it's not only a human rights issue you don't have to sound like a leftist exclusively talk about the idea that we're a country that has each other's backs we're a country that sent soldiers to europe and when one of those soldiers died in the battlefield the others ran back a thousand yards on normandy to pick them up and make sure that some new bride in indiana didn't have to wonder the rest of her life what happened to her husband right we're that country and say that country is not going to see people dying of cancer or pneumonia because they didn't have health insurance in this country right say it like that same policy right but now you're you're invoking deep values that a lot of people share and going beyond an ideology that frankly many many people don't share second and kind of almost at the opposite end of the spectrum personal transformation right you think about in the united states maybe to a lesser extent over there you the grocery store the magazines at the end when you check out what are 90 of them now are basically like personal transformation right you eat this weird superfood lose 30 pounds and you know seven hours whatever and you know before and after pictures pants out to here change your life change your marriage spice up your sex life all of that right okay the magazines are telling you that's how people think that's what people want people want to know how their life can be different easily well you know what is the ultimate personal makeover really good public policy right so speak to people in that language universal healthcare is going to do more for you than any of those magazines but no one's telling you that no one is telling you that your marriage will be better when you're not stressed about retirement medical bills and your children's education costs explain to people that you know if you in the united states did not have to worry about losing your health care if you lose your job or quit your job what businesses would you start and and and to go even deeper who would you be in your life if you weren't a person who had to be afraid of losing your health care who would you be and the progressives i see don't know how to talk in these languages they talk in a certain language that has done a fabulous job of winning that 25 or 30 percent right but i have spent a lot of time reporting on that remaining 70 to 75 percent many of whom i think are susceptible to these pitches but you've got to change the language you've got to change the framing you got to speak to deeper values um that actually are quite universal uh well brilliant uh uh uh an answer and um so look we've got loads of questions and uh what we'll do is we'll we'll let's zip through as many as we can yeah so yeah here's one i was gonna ask you right at the end because i didn't want you know i didn't want us to fall out with each other but uh i guess you get it asked all the time which is do you ever fear that you are becoming part of the problem of which you describe i mean you you say some disparaging things about ted speakers in your book but you're a ted speaker you know and you know i guess you get invited to some of these events uh which you were very critical of and how do you stop yourself becoming kind of radical pawn that you get up there and you say these things and people think well i've listened to anand that's good for me um but then they don't actually have to do anything about it well look i i try very hard to make sure that that's not how i'm being used but i i also find it difficult to control how i'm being used what i do is you know i i did i have spoken to ted twice it was before i wrote the book um it was made very clear to me that i won't be speaking there again after i wrote this book um no i'm serious uh it actually was and um you know a lot of these spaces are spaces uh same thing with the aspen institute i was essentially kicked out of my fellowship class um for writing the book so a lot of these spaces have kicked me out and these are spaces i'm very happy to be kicked out of but you're right that i have particularly since the book came out um it was often not the same spaces it was a lot of new spaces i went into many bellies of the beast in talking about this book i mean the last intelligence squared event i did if i remember correctly i think was with uh was you know in partnership with the economist and with uh uh you know somewhat libertarian uh editor at the economist who you know really really tried to to to uh to interrogate me pretty pretty toughly and and you know we had this great moment in london where um i i asked the entire room if anybody wants to you know get rid of the nhs and and she kind of was excited for all the hands that would go up and i don't think anyone did so so i have tried very much to go into these spaces because i i am you know a believer in persuasion i'm a believer in conversion um i have tried to make sure that i am not changing because of these spaces um and in fact i'm the one changing these spaces and you know if people think that i am changing by going into these spaces and trying to change them they should they should tell me how they see that and i'll try to do better great thank you um uh so here's a question from sylvia bull uh i hope i've pronounced your name correctly sylvia um uh sylvia says do you think that a post-corona virus the affair of society and needs to be based on fairer taxation and on strict wealth caps uh for individuals and for kind of corporate top echelons that sort of top one tenth of one percent do we have to do something to just say look that kind of wealth is simply not acceptable in our kind of society yeah and and and i think you know sylvia's question gets at the two different ways to do that which we could separate into pre-distribution and redistribution um and look there's a million specific policy ideas on each of those but just to oversimplify it a little bit pre-distribution is on the kind of regulating companies side right before those fortunes are made right the for the fortunes are what accrued individuals after they kind of pass through companies based on profit so before you make those profits the regulation we have around companies affects how big those profits are and a minimum wage is literally how much of the cost of a product or service goes to the worker versus goes to you know the the billionaire owner's bottom line um we should have a higher minimum wage in places where it's way too low like the united states and it's criminally low uh we should have you know environmental regulations and worker safety regulations and have protections for you know the kind of gig economy companies like uber that absolve themselves of any obligation employees all of these are cost-saving measures one way or another that if we had proper regulation in place and some countries already do on some of these issues you'd literally see greater security for workers and and and less billions for billionaires it's it's you know jacob hacker a political scientist has a great uh book from some years ago called the great risk shift and he basically details what companies did was offload risk and volatility from their balance sheets onto uh onto workers that should just be reverse regulation that's the pre-distribution side you're still going to end up with giant fortunes but they will be less giant if you're doing proper corporate taxation minimum wage anti-trust regulation getting money out of politics so they can't do bottle service public policy that benefits them in the private land and hurts everybody else in the club however you still will get the big fortunes and that's when you get to the redistribution side and i think sylvia is absolutely right a wealth tax is an idea whose time has come i don't think there should be an argument anymore uh in the united states this is notoriously anti-tax uh society we might we might still be part of the united kingdom uh if not for some of those uh you know taxes you threw at us um you know 51 of republicans uh supported elizabeth warren's wealth tax because you know what even most republicans understand that they're not billionaires and this is this is a moment i think to really insist on on on taxing wealth properly it's an idea that obviously thomas piketty and others have kind of advocated and popularized through their work and i think now it's a mainstream notion you know dan riffle who works for congresswoman ocasio-cortez i think captured one of the most important ideas of the zeitgeist in the last couple years by changing his twitter name from dan riffle to every billionaire is a policy failure doesn't mean every billion is a bad person that's not the claim every billionaire is a policy failure every billionaire is actually our failure a failure we can rectify great um by the way uh for those who are watching if you want to tweet the hashtag is iq ii um a question from warren bramley and actually a number of the questions coming uh through ananda are a bit like this that you can see people are really kind of personally wrestling with some of the things you've said so i'm kind of paraphrasing what warren says what warren bradley says in his question but what if you what if your instincts and your skills are in setting up a business you know what if you really believe in social justice but you find politics boring it's just not what you're good at i mean after all i've lived in the world of politics and it's not for everybody you know um uh as someone famously said you know politics is for show business they show business for those who for the ugly which is slightly disparaging but you know um what would you say to somebody who wants the world to be a better place but their strength is being an entrepreneur well you know i i don't think i have anywhere suggested that everybody needs to run for you know city council or mp or you know senator tomorrow that that that's not the only path to change i think if you are in the business world there's many things you can do um to to make the world better in this moment but the dominant types of uh efforts that i see in that world right now are wrong-headed in my view so you know the the overwhelming question you get from folks like that in that world is often uh what can i do what can i start what initiative can i do what project can i do what can i create and the problem with that question is you know to to to paraphrase and invert john f kennedy you know ask not what you can do for your country ask what you've been doing to your country because it may be that the company you work for the company you started is involved in this problem and unwinding the complicity of the institutions you're part of is actually more important first step than starting some business to solve a problem right if you work for a big corporation what does your company lobby for do you know i i've spoken to so many audiences and said whatever company you work with do you know what your company lobbies for it definitely lobbies in london and washington elsewhere it definitely lobbies on you know wto trade negotiation types of things sticking things into legislation into treaties do you know what it lobby's for and everybody says no senior people and companies no idea what they're company about lobbyists for well that's a big problem because a lot of the stuff your company lobbies for is crap so if you're at a big company and you're saying i agree with anand what can i do well that's something you can do you can poke your nose into what your company lobbies around you can raise the question of whether your company should actually be using the double irish for the dutch sandwich tax maneuver or parking money in the cayman islands or whatever those are questions you can raise it may be less important to do some csr project for your company or start some small business you know helping people through giving back five percent of ice cream sales uh then to unwind the complicity of the institutions you're part of in the injustices of the age um we've got time for a couple more questions and uh i mean i'm kind of slightly hijacking these questions because some some parts of them have been covered but uh reginald title of the book was hijacked so that's very funny uh rajiv prakash asks a question about about you know the inherent human tendency to want to be at the top and then talks about family structures and one of the things i was taken back taken by in the book and is that your last chapter is called other people that not your children right and um i think what you're saying there is you know you've got to respect and listen to other people and not make assumptions about them but it also put me in mind of the argument that i think robert putnam made in a book a couple of years ago in which i think the book was called our children and what he said was that when he was growing up our children met the children of america and now my children just means my own children and it seems to me that part of the rationalization for people who hoard wealth is the you know they want to hand it on to their children and so a lot of a lot of bad stuff get gets done in the name of family loyalty uh doesn't it so do you agree with that kind of partner morgan that one of our challenges is that we we have to take responsibility for all children not just our own children yeah it's funny i mean i hadn't thought of that connection to the the phrase i have in the book which comes from um kyra cordelia political philosopher who i was interviewing so so it kind of cuts both ways right it's very interesting juxtaposition you raise i think the putnam point is very important and and something i've i said for a long time and i don't know if it's in the book or not because i don't remember um is one way to think about different societies on these questions of inequality and justice is where different societies draw the line collectively between your love for your own children your love for everybody's children right i mean in theory we all love our own children infinitely and and other people's children less but actually it's a pretty differentia like you know i would say in india for example where my family came to the united states from the line is in a very different place than is the united states it doesn't mean people love their children differently in either place i think that's actually probably constant i think in india people love everybody else's children considerably less relative to their own which means that you might be more likely to evade taxes or uh you know not pull over for an ambulance um or various other kinds of civic commons oriented behavior litter because what's for the family is is absolute and the commons is sort of a problem beyond yours i think part of what was unique in the united states even among democracies tocqueville noticed this you know back when we were you know a place people admired still was that the line was drawn quite differently that americans at their best had this notion of the commons certainly it's not a you know you don't love other people children more than your children but that there was quite a high level of relative love for everybody's children right and you were willing to take a bunch of money that you know could have gone to your children and instead pay it to public schools for others schools your children may or may not use you're willing to develop programs like medicare and social security that you know may benefit other people net more than you um and we've lost that to the point where now i think we are heading in that other direction in the united states where you know rising inequality has made people just want to hoard opportunity protect their own kids and score everybody else the flip side of it to kiara's point is not really saying other people not your children in terms of you shouldn't care about them it's saying other people are not your children in that you don't have the right to govern them and a lot of this private do-gooding to the extent that people might say well if we can solve hunger through for-profit business or through philanthropy if we can empower girls through you know foundations why do you care on it if we do it through government versus through this you know if bill clinton said to me as he did it's always better if you can make it work in the private sector uh you know as he worked with pepsi and the other soft drink companies to try to fight childhood diabetes which is sort of like working with arsonists to combat conflagration um you know why is it that i have this preference for solving it publicly well the answer and it's a it's a philosophical answer that chiara gives but it's an important one is when we do something privately of that kind that kind of helping it is a relationship of master and servant it's a relationship of helper and health it is fundamentally a feudal relationship it's a downton abbey relationship it doesn't mean you're not helping them but it's a it's help within a context of a power distribution and when you do the same thing you feed the same people the same amount through the organs of democracy the people you are helping are not only objects of the help they're subject of the help because it is through their common institutions in their name with their consent that that help is being given uh and i think that's a you know a really important point to think about um that's great uh two well i've got one more question we've only got two minutes for it by the way the first question we got anna was uh how have you kept your hair so immaculate during the lockdown and of course i couldn't ask that because it was entirely unclear which one of us the question was addressed to right exactly so uh chris richardson i think uh asked the question you know and it's a good one to end on uh and i'm gonna give my answer first and then you can give yours right so he said what what's the one thing we can do because you know you've inspired us and i'm gonna hold the book up again because people should get this book you've challenged us but but still we have to kind of do something so here's my answer my answer is that in an hour's time all across britain people will go out into the street and they'll applaud the nhs and care workers and that's a great thing it happens in my street my suggestion if you want to do one thing is go and talk to your neighbour keep your two meter distance and start talking to them about policy don't just applaud the nhs and cheer and banger saucepan which is what people do but but say to them what do you think we should do to fund the nhs or to make social care work or how do you think we should make sure social care workers are paid more or protected more so try to stretch the conversation from a collective act of empathy into a more sinuous conversation about policy so that was my one idea for you chris and you've got like a minute to tell chris what you think's the one thing you should do well first of all the first question which is the more important one my wife has now cut my hair twice under lockdown um and it is on your show i saw it on your show we featured it on the show um and and it has been um you know a bonding experience we put our marriage at risk for it but but we're still very much um very much married so um so that's that's great um you know on the on the question of what what's something you can do first of all you know there's a singular you and a plural you right i think there's very little you can do on your own i think the more exciting question is what can we do and and that goes to your point matthew so you know i think the thing i would leave you with is talking to your neighbors is great what you're talking about next time you see a problem in your society you look around and lord knows there are plenty to look around at right now next time you see such a problem that animates you think of a solution that is public democratic institutional and universal those four things that solves the problem at the root for everybody and yes talk to your neighbors talk to your friends talk to your crazy you know right-wing uncle um and and try to start thinking in this era of what are some of the things where we actually might be able to get 60 70 percent of people on board with new ideas new thinking to build new societies after this crisis and then that's fantastic i can't believe i can't believe someone told you about my crazy right-wing uncle that's um you know that's uh well perhaps perhaps it's just that everyone's got one uh i really really enjoyed that the time we've had together i'm going to wave your book just one more time because in the list of things you should do getting this book and reading it because you know it may some of you listening to this may have thought well is this a kind of one idea book there are lots of one idea books this is not a one idea book there are lots and lots of every chapter is a very different and very powerful argument so i can strongly recommend it so thank you and thank you to the audience for your question sorry that i can hijack some of them uh thank you to intelligence squared and i'm gonna hand back to chris

Channel: Intelligence Squared

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Id: B2YqpC9LRz4

Length: 59min 31sec (3571 seconds)

Published: Thu May 20 2021