ANAND GIRIDHARADAS: Wealthy corporations and
people love to ask the question: What can I do? What should we do? What can we start? What program could we launch? I would say to the billionaire change agents
and corporate social responsibility departments of our country: Ask not what you can do for
your country. Ask what youâve already done to your country. TIMOTHY SNYDER: The United States is a country
which is among the least equal in the world. According to Credit Suisse, which is a Swiss
bank and not some kind of crazy left-wing organization, we are second in the world in
wealth inequality after the Russian Federation. In the United States since the 1980s, basically
90 percent of the American population has seen no improvement in either wealth or income. Almost all of the improvement in wealth and
income has been in the top ten percent and most of thatâs been in the top one percent
and most of that has been in the top 0.1 percent and most of that has been in the top 0.01
percent, which means that not only are people not moving forward objectively but the way
they experience the worldâand this is very powerfulâis that other people are on top. JOHN FULLERTON: Living systems have what are
called healthy hierarchiesâso itâs not that hierarchy is bad. Itâs that hierarchy where the top extracts
from below is definitely bad and unsustainable. So, take the lion in the forest or in the
jungle. The lion is at the top of the food chain,
but the lion sits around sleeping most of the day rather than eating and killing all
day. And the lion, therefore, serves a very healthy
hierarchical purpose in the food chain keeping the herd, keeping the balance between smaller
animals and larger animals. But when the king of the jungle decides to
extract as much as possible for its own benefit, you have a very unhealthy system. And unfortunately, that pretty well describes
how the modern capitalist system works, where there are benefits of scale; the bigger get
bigger, they get more powerful, they get more political influence. But their intention is to maximize shareholder
value because thatâs what we do. So, the cycle of growing inequality is sort
of locked into the system design. GIRIDHARADAS: Before you want to start something
of your ownâa little private, unaccountable ventureâdo an audit. What do you pay people? Do you pay people enough? Do you use subcontractors to avoid responsibility
for those workers? Do you pay benefits? When do your benefits kick in? What do you lobby for in Washington? Do you lobby for things that make everybody
have a better life in America or do you lobby against social policies that would cost you
something? Whatâs your tax avoidance situation? Do you happen to be this earnest company that
wants to change the world? I mean, is this company paying its full measure
of taxes? Does it use tax havens? Does it do the double Dutch with an Irish
sandwich tax maneuver? Does it send money to the Cayman Islands and
then back and do all this complex routing? ALISSA QUART: Now to be middle class, you
might not be able to have a summer holiday. You might not be able to own your home. You certainly wouldnât have two cars. What interests me is also we had this idea
of the middle class as a solid thing and now itâs a shaky thing. We also had this idea in the middle of the
twentieth century of it as a humdrum, boring thing that we wanted to escape, kind of like
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates. And now itâs like everyone just wants to
get into it, into the dream, the American Dream of the middle class thatâs now so
unstable. One of the things that happened was unions
weakened. It used to be that 30 percent of employees
were in unions in the â60s and now itâs seven percent in the private sector. And thatâs a pretty huge drop-off. And at the same time, youâre seeing a lot
of the workforce become gigified or turn into freelance contingent, et cetera. Not stable, not with healthcare, not with
a promise of security and long-term employment. There are other reasons why the middle class
has been under siege. One is the concentration of wealth. You see the rise of the one percent, the rise
of the wealthiest. Since 1997, the income of the top one percent
has grown 20 times the rest of us. Theyâre an ownership class so they tend
to own many of the corporations that are, say, creating the Uber economy or hiring people
to drive part time or the companies which employ people at hours which mean that they
canât take care of their childrenâhours in the middle of the night or odd hours in
the early morning. SNYDER: One of the fundamental problems with
our American, right-wing politics of inevitability is that it generates income and wealth inequality
and it explains away income and wealth inequality. And so, you get this cycle where, objectively,
people are less and less well off and subjectively we keep telling ourselves this is somehow
okay because in the grand scheme of things this is somehow necessary. Individuals and families no longer think âIâve
got a bright future.â They no longer believeâand this is something
Mr. Trump got right even if he has no solution and heâs making things worse on purposeâthey
no longer believe in the American Dream. And theyâre correct not to do so. If you were born in 1940, your chances of
doing better than your parents were about 90 percent. If you were born in 1980 your chances are
about one in two and it keeps going down. So, wealth inequality means the lack of social
advance, means a totally different horizonâit means that you see life in a completely different
way. You stop thinking time is an arrow which is
moving forward to something better and you start thinking hmm, maybe the good old days
were better. Maybe we have to make America great again
and you get caught in these nostalgic loops. You start thinking it canât be my fault
that Iâm not doing better, so whose fault is it? And then the clever politicians instead of
providing policy for you provide enemies for you. They provide language for you with which you
can explain why youâre not doing so well. They blame the other, whether itâs the Chinese
or the Muslims or the Jews or the blacks or the immigrants and that allows you to think
okay, time is a cycle, things used to be better but other people have come and theyâve taken
things away from me. Thatâs how the politics of inevitability
becomes the politics of eternity. Wealth inequality, income inequality, is one
of the major channels by which that happens. GIRIDHARADAS: If youâre telling me that
there are companies that do none of this stuff, that pay people well, that donât dump externalities
into the economy, that donât cause social problems. If there are such companies that exist, yeah,
then once youâve taken care of all that, great, doing some projects to help people
is great. But I havenât found very many such companies
and more often than not when companies do a lot of CSR itâs because they understand
that theyâre not on the right side of justice in their day operations, so they want to do
virtue as a side hustle. And the problem is a lot of these companies
tend to create harm in billions and then do good in the millions. And you donât need to be a mathematician
to know that weâre the losers from that bargain. And you look at the B Corp movement, thereâs
a lot of companies that actually have an interest in trying to invent a new kind of company
that is not predatory. There is, in the B Corp movement, a certification
process for those companies now. The challenges of them is that itâs a great
thing but itâs fundamentally voluntary and what this does is it means that if youâre
an already good, virtuous company you may be motivated to get into this club. But if youâre Exxon or Pepsi youâre not
going to be in this club. One of the things Iâd like to see is how
can we actually use the power of public policy to get more companies to sign up to simply
not dump harm, social harm, into our society whether that takes the form of toxic sludge
or obese children or workers with unpredictable hours and income. QUART: You know the job numbers may look like
theyâre up but, first of all, they often speak to how many jobs people are having,
multiple jobs, which is not a great state of affairs for a lot of people. People now have more jobs. Each person has more jobs than they did in
2016, like individuals. Itâs up by two percent or something like
that so itâs substantial. You can be looking at these job announcements
and you could be thinking: Whatâs wrong with me? Why canât I figure it out? Why canât I get that second or third gig? But the point is why should we have to have
all these side hustles? Why should we have to have second acts when
weâre 42? ERIC WEINSTEIN: Traditionally, technology
has moved us from low-value occupations into higher value occupations. So, while we always decry the loss of jobs,
we usually create new jobs which are more fulfilling and less taxing and therefore those
who have cried wolf when theyâve seen technology laying waste to the previous occupations,
those people have usually just been wrong. But the problem with software is that software
spends most of its time in loops. Almost all code can be broken into two kinds
of code: Code that runs once and never repeats and code that loops over and over and over. Unfortunately, what jobs are is usually some
form of a loop where somebody goes to work and does some version of whatever it is theyâve
been trained to do every day. Now, the danger of that is that what we didnât
realize is that our technical training for occupations maneuvers the entire population
into the crosshairs of software. Itâs not just a question in this case of
being moved from lower value repetitive behaviors into higher ones, but the problem is that
all repetitive behaviors are in the crosshairs of software. So, I think itâs really important to understand
that where we are is that we may need a hybrid model in the future which is paradoxically
more capitalistic than our capitalism of today and perhaps even more socialistic than our
communism of yesteryear because so many souls will require respect and hope and freedom
and choice who may not be able to defend themselves in the market as our machines and our software
gets better and better. And this is one of the reasons why something
like universal basic income comes out of a place fiercely capitalistic like Silicon Valley,
because despite the fact that many view the technologists as mercenary megalomaniacsâin
fact, these are the folks who are closest to seeing the destruction that their work
may visit upon the population and I donât know I think of any 9-, 10- or 11-figure individual
at the moment that Iâm familiar with who isnât worrying about what weâre going
to do to take care of those who may not be able to meet their expectations with training
and jobs as in previous models, whether itâs truck and car driving as one of the largest
employers of working-age men threatened by self-driving vehicles or any of the other
examples. For example, computers that are capable of
writing sports stories from the scores alone. So, in all of these cases, I think the technology
is actually forcing those who are most familiar with it to become most compassionate and whether
or not we are going to leaven our capitalism with some communism or start from some sort
of socialist ideal and realize that if we donât find a way to grow our pie very aggressively
with the tiny number of individuals who are capable of taking over operations of great
complexity, I think that we are going to have some kind of a hybrid system. I wish I could tell you what it was going
to look like, but the fact is nobody knows. WENDELL PIERCE: We have gotten away from the
idea of true capitalism. Now we have people who claim to be capitalists
saying: I want to restrict our resources. That we have a finite amount of resources,
so Iâve got to make sure only my kids get opportunities at school, and weâre only
going to have access to capital, that my tax rates are going to be here at the expense
of other folks. And thatâs actually not true capitalism. We grew as a country when people said hey,
listen, itâs important that everyone has access to a good education. Itâs something of great importance because
that means the more people that are educated, the more ideas, the more growth weâre going
to have and thatâs what capitalism is based on. And I go back to art, music. Itâs what jazz is all about. Itâs an American aesthetic. Itâs freedom within form. Yes, thereâs confinement and restriction
and technical proficiency, but the idea of the jazz solo as improvisation is a finite
amount of notes with an infinite amount of combinations. And so thatâs what capitalism is. Thereâs ultimately an infinite amount of
possibilities with this finite group of people. But the more people that are in the mix, the
more ideas are going to come about which produces growth. YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Brute power, determining
in the spoils. Civilization was all about moving away from
a situation where brute strength and power determined the quality of life of the members
of our species. That was the theory. To a very large extent, we moved in that direction
and this is something we should be very proud of. But weâre very, very far away from having
created social relations between usâa legal framework, a way of organizing economic lifeâthat
takes power out of the equation of civilization. Economic surplus is essential for humanity
to develop. If we donât have an economic surplus, we
cannot grow, not just physically but also spiritually. We cannot create new literature, we cannot
create new film, we cannot create new theater. We need to have a surplus in order to be able
to invest it in all those activities that make human life richer. But the question is who controls the surplus? And, of course, in societies that are very
asymmetrical in terms of who owns the means of production, whether we are talking about
slave-owning societies where thereâs a few slave owners, or feudalism, or capitalism
where youâve got 0.1 percent owning most of the productive abilities or machinery and
factors of production in society. They can, in order to preserve their property
rights over those means of production, they use debt, they use political power, and they
use the monopoly position that their property rights afford them in order to skew the whole
process of creativity of production in a manner that, for instance, in the end, in the case
of the media world we have 50 channels of rubbish to watch from. We have industries that are dedicated to producing
things that we neither need nor want, destroying the planet in the process. We have billions of people working like headless
chickens, driving themselves into depression and going home and crying themselves to sleep
at night if they have a job, or consuming antidepressants and becoming obese and seeing
shrinks if they donât have a job. In the end, we have a joyless economy. Even those who are extremely powerful, in
theory, the haves of the world, are increasingly feeling insecure. They have to live in gated communities because
they fear all the have-nots out there that envy their wealth. In the end, we have developed fantastic means
of escaping need and escaping want which we are not putting to good use because, in the
end, we are developing new forms of depravity and deprivation and universalized depression,
psychological depression, which is incongruent with our fantastic advances at the technological
level. GIRIDHARADAS: I think what is undeniable in
this country is that for 30 or 40 years many people on the left and right have felt that
things were not going right, that the country wasnât working for them, that it felt rigged
to them, that it felt impossible to secure the life that they were promised by this country
and to give their children something better than they had. And all that while there was a lot of richsplaining
to those people by the American elite that âNo, no, no. Things are great. Trade is good. Tradeâs great. Itâll be perfect. Itâs going to lift everybody up. Globalization, perfect. Itâs great. Look, thereâs a couple of bumps but no worries. And the aggregate all will be well.â I mean, as though anybody lives in the aggregate. âTech. Donât worry. Donât worry about the fact that everything
got automated and your jobs all went to Taiwan. Donât worry about it. Weâll be better off on the whole.â And there was just a lot of this kind of richsplaining. I grew up and I remember studying this stuff
in college when I took economics classes. I went to the University of Michigan. I was sitting in Michigan in Econ 101 and
I remember getting this lecture on how all this stuff was for the good and we would be
better off. And right around us, all around us in Michigan
in 1999 the state was falling apart. These long tectonic shifts were basically
likeâwork was disappearing and trade was not benefitting most people and globalization
was not a walk in the park and aggregate effects were not really of any comfort to anybody. And how was it possible at the University
of Michigan in 1999 with all of that evidence all around us that we could sit in an intellectual
cocoon and explain to ourselves that rising tides lift all boats, essentially. There is a way in which American elites, and
this is not just a couple of greedy hedge fund billionaires, the American intelligentsia
also has been complicit in a false story. Rich people and wealthy corporations spent
a generation waging a war on government, defunding government, allowing social problems to fester
and allowing their own profits to soar. And then with government weakened, social
problems multiplying and their own pockets full, they reinvent themselves as the new
replacement of government which is instead of trickle-down economics we now have trickle-down
change. Let them make their fortune and then theyâll
just throw some social change down from the mountain. Well, we have to decide in America if thatâs
the kind of change we want. But what I do know is if you project that
kind of change backwards throughout time, we wouldnât have created most of the change
that we all take for granted today. There would, frankly, have been no New Deal. There would be no modern American economy
if we had depending on the powerful to throw down scraps. Many of the most important things in American
life had to be taken from the powerful and given to the many. Itâs time that we reclaim that heritage
again.
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We could just have a civil war, reduce the total population of takers and dead weight, and we could easily have a capitalist only economy. We need more abortion for Democrats and Democrat voters.