"What is the American Dream?" First Session with J.D. Vance and Darrick Hamilton

hello I'm on behalf of the Center for Ethics and human values and all of our partners I'd like to welcome you to today's event on what is the American dream this is one of those events where the only person who needs an introduction is the person giving the introductions so my name is piers Turner I'm the director of the center for ethics and human values and a professor in the philosophy department here at OSU so each year our Center our has a compass program that hosts a year-long series of events focused on a major social challenge and it brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines and works to promote informed and respectful discourse this year we're focusing on the question what is America and as I say that I hear jazz in the background which is a very American thing but if if you know good we're good so what is America is our year-long series and this is a fraught topic obviously in our polarized political circumstances and our guiding question has been whether there are any values we share as Americans and how those might help us build a better future together one of the most resonant phrases in American public discourse is the American dream politicians community leaders and regular citizens alike use that phrase to capture something of the promise of our country often connected to social mobility economic opportunity and its relationship to hard work the phrase itself first appeared during the Great Depression and historically the idea took shape during the post-world War two economic expansion polls show that Americans today remain remarkably optimistic about the American Dream while most people do not yet claim to have achieved the American dream and there are large differences for instance in the answers of white and black Americans on that question large majorities of Americans across groups believe they are on the way to achieving the American dream it clear really has a powerful hold on the public imagination even at a time when for instance social mobility in the u.s. is declining we're lagging behind some other developed countries and economic inequality has reached historic levels today we're lucky to have four distinguished participants help us understand the promise of the American Dream and what steps we might take to help make the dream a reality for all Americans we're going to begin with brief remarks from JT Vance an Ohio native and Ohio State graduate who's best known as the author of the influential memoir hillbilly elegy the New York Times number one bestseller now being developed into a movie by Netflix with director Ron Howard at the helm ins and some big-name actors Vance is also a graduate of Yale Law School and now resides back in Ohio where he's founded a nonprofit called our Ohio renewal after his remarks we will also have brief remarks from Derek Hamilton executive director of our Kirwan Institute for the Study of race and ethnicity and professor in the Glenn College of Public Affairs professor Hamilton is a pioneer in the field of stratification economics his TED talk proposing what are called baby bonds to address wealth inequality now has over 1.5 million views on YouTube and he's also been a consultant with a number of political campaigns Vance and Hamilton will then join Dean Gretchen Ritter for a moderated discussion and Q&A Ritter I mean I said they didn't need introductions but I'm doing it anyway reader is Ohio State's executive Dean of Arts and Sciences professor of political science and a leading scholar on women's rights and citizenship whose most recent book is the Constitution as social design gender and civic membership in the American constitutional order at the conclusion of the first session we'll take a 15-minute coffee break and then return for a talk by the new york times pulitzer prize-winning columnist david leonhardt leonhardt was also the founder of the upshot section at the times and he's also a former Washington bureau chief his talk will be entitled reviving the American dream now before I invite JD Vance to get us started I want to take a moment to thank our partners on this event the Kirwan Institute for the Study of race and ethnicity the honors and scholars center and the minorities and philosophy organization we really rely on our wonderful partners to have these kinds of events and we're just grateful for not just their financial support but also their moral support I also want to thank our organizing team Eric MacGillivray who's down here in the front his professor of political science and our centers compass coordinator he's really led the way on this year's program kate mcfarland our associate director has overseen all the planning and Avery White our center associate and lavender McKittrick Switzer our graduate associate have been vital members of the team making it all happen so finally thank you for coming out today for this event it's brainy out there and if you would please join me in welcoming JD Vance to the stage [Applause] well thank you for the introduction and you know thanks especially to the folks at Ohio State Kate Avery Gretchen Eric piers for for making this happen and from letting me be part of it especially to to Derek for participating and you know I'll try to set set the stage and just give some insight into my own thinking on these questions but before I did that I wanted to sort of do two things first it may sound like a little cheesy but it's always really wonderful to be back at Ohio State a lot of the things that I'm thinking about to this day a lot of things that I'm writing about a lot of things that I have written about I first started thinking about an Eric McGee over a split achill theory classes when I was an undergraduate so I ought to this university and especially to his to his teaching and I hope at least you're not embarrassed by what I'm about to say the second sort of introductory mark that I wanted to say is that I always think it's useful to put your cards on the table you know we live in this sort of hyper ideological moment and while a lot of us like to pretend that we don't have particular biases that we bring to the table I think I like to acknowledge that I do and actually let the audience know where I'm coming from so you know you can get some sense of what I'm saying of why I'm saying it I am I guess theoretically here to present the conservative perspective and I certainly consider myself a conservative and sit on the right side of the American political spectrum but I do think that we're in such a weird moment in American politics in American life that it's actually worth talking about what that actually means I actually received when I was sitting down an email from an academic who writes on on labor and immigration I'm very big fan of her work and I'd never reached out to her I'd never talked to her but she saw something I did recently and decided to send me a very nice email and she described me in this email as a conservative laborious and I I don't necessarily know what that means but I think what it means is that within the American right these days there are sort of two big strains of thought one I will call libertarian though that I know that's a bit of a generalization it is very focused on questions of economic growth very focused on the idea that the market especially the freest market possible is the creator of prosperity and then there is it's a looking to be a little bit more individualist and its ethics a little bit more passive and its approach to cultural regulation and so forth and then there are the group there's a group that you might call communitarian and that's sort of where I fit on this conversation and what's so weird about American politics these days is that very often the communitarians find themselves in weird areas of disagreement with what might be called the far left on certain economic questions and I think that that's useful to set that stage because while I wouldn't say that I'm gonna vote for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 election I do think that there are a lot of critiques that left populist make of the country that are valid and are at least attacking some of the right issues so for example relevant to a lot of the folks in this room I tend to think that the question of college debt and the question of whether folks like you can actually afford to go to school but more importantly whether you can field afford to build a life after you've left school are important questions the answer cannot simply be you chose to go to college you chose to assume the debt and that's all there is to say about it so I sorry I think we have to be sort of more cognizant of a lot of these economic questions in formulating our view our vision of the common good and I have my own particular vision of that as a conservative as a person of faith but that's sort of where where I'm coming so with that let me say just a couple things and a third introductory thing I'm gonna make sure I'm on time I get until about 2:40 or so and then I should shut up okay so this question of the American Dream is very rhetorically powerful it's something that a lot of us think and talk about it gives us a sort of thing to shoot towards when we're formulating public policy and thinking about what type of a society that we want to live in but it's of course a very fraught term it's a term that if you ask a hundred different people you might get a hundred different definitions a definition is very common among economics folks among social scientists is this idea of relative or absolute upward mobility that you're either moving through the socio-economic ladder in some way or perhaps that you're just earning more than the generation that came before at that first term is relative mobility the last is absolute mobility I think that absolute mobility is a decent way of measuring in economics terms this idea of the American Dream I think most parents and this is certainly true of me when they look to the future when they look at their own children they want those kids to have a little bit better of a life than they did and while that's not I would say primarily an economic question it's at least partially an economic question especially if you don't have a lot of money so when my grandparents who grew up in very extreme poverty thought about their own children's lives at least part of living a better life was knowing that your kids would have a little bit more financial stability a little bit more comfort and a little bit more money than they had that was a very important way in which we we talked and thought about the American Dream however I do think that this sense the monetary the economic the material sense in which we measured the economic dream while useful has gotten a little bit out of control in our current society and I think this is especially true for the people in this room I imagine that most of the people here are either students at Ohio State in some form or another or affiliated with the University and in a very important way we are the winners in the American meritocracy we're the people who have to have or will acquire the credentials that allow us to gain a little bit more financial comfort than other people to gain a little bit more social stature than other people you don't quite realize how powerful a college degree is until you talk to somebody who's a shame that they don't have a degree and unfortunately a lot of people do feel like that and so despite the problems with debt and so forth there are real problems the unfortunate in some ways but unavoidable fact is that we are the people who are perceived and I think usually rightly so as winning in the modern American system that's that's an important thing because I think it gives us a certain division from the rest of the people that we share the society with and one of the good things about how I grew up I come from a background where nobody really had a college education in my family is that I I never quite could get what I call the Stryver way of defining the American dream there is this sense that the American Dream is earning a lot of money it's gaining a spur street prestigious credential it's getting a very fancy job it's doing things that give you a certain amount of social stature and social privilege but to me you know the American Dream is always a little bit more simple it was always a little bit more humble you know there are a few things that I wanted out of the American Dream and I think it's useful to categorize them by the phase of life you know I tend to break life up into three phases I'm sort of in its middle phase now where I have a young family of my own I think in the first phase the American Dream meant to me living in a stable comfortable home being around people who loved each other who didn't fight all the time who weren't abusing drugs knowing that food was gonna be on the table each and every night knowing where you were gonna lay your head at the end of every night it was a very basic sense of stability and comfort and frankly it didn't require relative mobility to achieve that American dream it didn't require that I go to an Ivy League law school it didn't require that I have a prestigious profession now if the mid phase of life the way that I thought about what I wanted out of my life is I'm very happy to say basically where I am right now I wanted to have a family I wanted to have a wife who I could care for in the way that so often husbands weren't able to care for and who could care for me in turn and so often the way that I didn't see a whole lot of wives caring for her husband's I wanted to provide my own kids with this type of stability and comfort that I didn't have when I was a kid that was my American dream I want my kids to be happy I want them to know where they're gonna sleep at night I want them to know that I'll always be around I want them to know that their mother will always be around that's really all I wanted again doesn't require a whole lot of relative mobility doesn't require a lot of fancy education pretty simple and if I can be a little provocative when I thought about the end stage of my life I I thought about having grandchildren I thought about having regular visits with the people and friends and family that I loved I thought about reading a lot reflecting on life I think an important part of being an elderly person in our society is passing generation excuse me wisdom onto the generations who come after you and in a very important sense I think that this notion of the American Dream is in crisis at all three phases and let me just walk through why I think that is first describe it so in the first phase that childhood phase we know that children are much more likely to experience depression anxiety that's true up and down that the income ladder we know especially that working and even middle-class children are increasingly likely to experience family breakdown dissolution childhood trauma and our home state they're much more likely to grow up in homes that suffer from serious addiction problems they in other words we are we are currently in arguably the most chaotic generation of childhood that we've seen in our country so I think in that sense the American Dream is very much in crisis in this middle phase of life again the way that I thought of the American Dream it's it's very much in crisis you have rising rates of family dissolution you have people who can't acquire the jobs that are necessary to provide for that family when they have work it's very often not especially meaningful or not especially well paid and so this idea that you would have a stable job and be able to provide for a family I think that too even in what is frankly an economic boom is more in crisis than it has been in a very long time and then finally at this in stage of life which is something that I worry a lot about because of course all of us are gonna get there eventually we live in a society where increasingly elderly people are living alone where they don't have children and family around in part because our fertility rate is so low that there aren't a whole lot of children and family around in the lives of the elderly we know where this trajectory is taking us and it's taking us to something like modern Japan again I'm gonna be intense particularly and intentionally provocative here and I hope you'll forgive me if I overstep but we now have a phenomenon in certain countries in East Asia increasingly in Western Europe where people are dying with such little care and comfort around them that they're going unnoticed and unrecognized for weeks or even months after they pass I think about my grand grand mother grew up in extreme poverty my grandmother who grew up in extreme poverty when they died they were surrounded by over a dozen people who loved them we were singing church hymns we were reading the Bible that way of finishing your life of feeling like you're part of a family unit of feeling like you're passing something on to the generation that comes after you is increasingly disappearing so again in all three phases of life we're experiencing an American dream that is lonelier that is less fulfilling in our family lives that is less capable of providing the basic things that we all need that are not necessarily easy to measure with money now the financial piece of this is of course important because a lot of the things that are necessary to provide the sort of familial or communitarian sense of the American Dream are harder to provide when you don't have money of course and so there are a few things that I think are going on and I'm going to categorize them in sort of two big categories I want to focus on two things and I think you know at least in my current thinking this is where the American Dream is is most substantially going awry so or I should say this is what's causing the American Dream we go substantially right so the first is I'm gonna get back to the economics a little bit the first is I think primarily an economic phenomenon and it's about productivity it's about the labor market it's about what we're doing in the broad American economy specifically we tend to think and I think we still have this weird inability to look at the world around us and see it for what it is we tend to think that we're living in an especially high growth or dynamic world we have these iPhones they could do things that you know no no computer could do even thirty years ago we have new new programs we have artificial intelligence big data all of these buzzwords about how much better and more technologically progressive our society is getting but in important ways we're actually not progressing technologically as fast as we used to my mentor and friend Peter Thiel famously says that in the 1960s we were promised flying cars instead we got 140 characters like as twitter has now updated it has 280 characters so that's real progress compared to flying cars we're not any closer to flying cars than we were 50 years ago if you were to take a flight today from New York to Paris it would take you longer to fly there than in the 1970s we have no commercially available hypersonic aircraft think about energy we of course have a climate problem in our and in our society one largely caused now by unrestrained emissions in China part of the reason we have that problem is because we're not generating energy much cleaner than we used to 30 or 40 years ago and in fact the biggest improvement in emissions is solar energy which can provide a substantial amount of our power but can't provide anything like 50 percent of our power definitely not a hundred percent of our power and through sort of you know our increasing reliance on natural gas which of course is an improvement over dirtier forms of power but isn't exactly the sort of thing that's going to take us to a clean energy future along a lot of these dimensions healthcare everybody's living longer right well that's true if you count the amount of years that they're passing doesn't really hold if you count the amount of quality adjusted years that they're living we're not any better at treating dementia or various neurodegenerative conditions than we were 30 or 40 years ago we're no closer to even understanding how Alzheimer's works much less hearing it and so on the one hand we have the phantom of dynamism the feeling that things are growing rapidly when really we have a lot of improvement in this thing but not much improvement and what I call the world of atoms the world that most of us actually live in most of the time and importantly though there's been a lot of progress and this thing we're starting to realize that maybe that progress isn't as significant or as good as we might have thought it was we're realizing that there's a pretty powerful connection between the amount of time that we stare on our phones and how little we talk to our family we're realizing that a lot of the app makers who benefit from every second that we stare at these phones care a lot more at key about keeping us focused on those phones instead of participating in the broader social world around us we know that the suicide rate especially among teenage girls is rising just as their the amount of time that they spend on their mobile devices is rising we're learning about all of these really disgusting online communities that bully that traffic and sexual victims these things frankly are not what a lot of people were promised when they were promised technological progress in the 1960s they were promised a hundred year lifespans clean energy Rapid Transportation and instead they're finding out that the biggest thing that we've technologically progressed on may in fact be making us more mentally sick than than we would like to admit that's one thing an economy that in important ways is stagnating in a very real sense and the second thing that's happening is that our institutions are fraying so it would be one thing if our economy was stagnating even as our institutions were incredibly dynamic powerful stable but they're not if you look at the institutions that working-class Americans especially have always depended on you're gonna look at three things the first is their local political shop their little local political participation function whether it's a guild whether its Tammany Hall whatever the case may be people have always felt even at the lower rungs of society I should say everyone but a lot of people have always felt that they had a representative democracy and access to it that sort of disappeared we now have a hyper nationalized politics to the extent that we have successful democratic politics at all you know we're electing congressmen senators I don't know what they actually do it's sort of oddly late Roman Republic they just complain and talk all the time they don't actually legislate so two of the most significant pieces of federal conduct in the past ten years or Barack Obama's immigration change in daca and sorry were Barack Obama's immigration change in daca and Donald Trump's I'm blanking on the the the big administrative action of Donald Trump's sorry reversing reversing that that immigration action so we're primarily you know we had health care you know that was Obama care that was now over ten years ago I believe or maybe just just now ten years ago we had tax cuts which frankly president Trump probably could have done through changing IRS regulations without a whole lot of complaint we live in a world where the basic machination of democratic government don't actually work that well anymore the second big institution that working-class Americans always relied on the first was in politics the second was in the economy was the labor union in the late 1950s we had 35 percent private participation in labor unions that doesn't count public participation in in labor unions you know fire police teachers and so forth those were the institutions that gave working-class Americans real bargaining power and the American economy I think the the private sector labor participation rate is now around 5% so they've completely disappeared in an important way and then the final one is the church that was the way that working-class Americans had real say in the culture we don't realize this now but there was a point in American history where Hollywood script writers would actually seek approval for scripts through working-class institutions like the church lest they didn't produce anything that would be so unacceptable to the broad population that it wouldn't make any money now of course working-class participation in churches and bowling leagues and a whole host of community institutions has fallen off a cliff and we don't in any real sense give working-class Americans any real participation in the cultural the cultural making of our country that to me is primarily a story of of globalization meaning these declining institutions have declined I think because you've combined relatively stagnant economic progress on the one hand with rapid globalization on the other hand let's just take one example one of the reasons we don't have in my view the same sort of technological progress that we used to is because we have American firms American corporations increasingly invested not in technological development but in labor arbitrage in the 1950s if you as an American American company wanted to make more money you needed to invest in things that made your workers more productive that was typically technology in the 1990s if you wanted to do something that was gonna make your company more money you would just undercut the cost of labor by either shipping a job to China or some other place or by having somebody in the country willing to do that job at a lower wage than another American so this combination of a labor arbitrage built into our economy built primarily around globalization that has led not to workers increasing their productivity increasing their wages but it's led instead to a decimation of the American working in middle class and of course if you look at the evidence the primary driver of the decline of private sector unions is not right-to-work laws I'm not a big fan of right-to-work laws but the big problems in American labor happened before it they happen primarily because the jobs that people unionized into no longer exist in this country in 1994 1999 2006 we lost seven million manufacturing jobs just to China alone that's where a lot of the union jobs went you go online I could give more examples but that's my sense of what's happening is the institutions that gave working-class Americans a sense of stability of comfort of participation in their society have frayed at the very time that the economy productivity gains have stagnated in a very important sense I think that our society could survive on one or the other of them I don't think that it can survive on both and let me just give a couple of reasons why I think the very important sense American government has never experimented with what you do in a world where the institutions are broken down and there isn't any productivity but of American constitutional government is fundamentally a story of one side being able to give something to its constituents another side being able to give something to its constituents but if you have very low growth and you have very weak community institutions then Democrats can't give anything to their constituents without taking something away from Republican constituents and vice versa it gives our entire politics a very zero-sum feel before I worked in in venture capital I worked in the law firm world and one of the things that's happening in the legal world right now is that because the broader economy isn't growing law firms themselves aren't really growing and so you have this dynamic of very ambitious associates who are trying to get ahead in their law firms but the partners aren't retiring and the firms aren't growing enough to actually promote them and so you have these very sociopathic law firms where people know they're not going to get promoted they bust their rear-end even harder going after that one promotion opportunity that may eventually arise and at the end of the day many of them are left without real employment prospects without the partnership that they so did that desire and a feeling that despite working very hard their labor and their work wasn't really rewarded there are all kinds of ways in which stagnant institutions and stagnant growth infect our broader society I'm gonna shut up in just a couple of minutes but I I want to sort of leave us on hopefully not a too pessimistic note but I do think that there's something very deeply wrong and what gives me some optimism is that as unstable and as chaotic as our politics sometimes feel we're at least expanding the Overton Window a little bit I think it was appears we talked a little bit about Derek's work on baby bonds I think the idea of a baby bond in late 1990s of America would have seemed a little too absurd people wouldn't have bought it it's too radical it's too extreme there are a lot of ideas out there some of them terrible but some of them very good that are starting to enter the mainstream conversation because we recognize that the debate has gotten too stagnant that the things were allowed to talk about in public policy are too narrow and consequently I do think there's some hope that you know the people in this room your generation to use an overused term is actually in a position to start solving some of the problems in the American dream I hope so because I think the alternative long term stagnation is something this country has never experimented with and if you look at history the last time that I think we had this significant of a disruption in the labor market was in the early 20th century and basically with the exception of the UK and the US nobody really made it through successfully you had the Communists taking over in certain parts of Europe you had the fascists taking over in other parts of Europe we are as we as as people as civilizations aren't good at the combination of stagnation and institutional decay so we've got to figure out one of those things that we hopefully will figure out both of them and at least while I'm not gonna set up here and provide any answers I think we're at least at a time in our public discourse where we can start to formulate those answers because the band-aid has been ripped off and people recognize how serious the problem is with that I'll shut up thank you thank you very much okay and now professor Derek Hamilton from the Kirwan Institute [Applause] okay well first gratitude gratitude for you all coming on a rainy day and thank you for the invitation kate eric piers gretchen and JD so my comments aren't meant to directly either compliment or refute what was just said but inevitably there will be some contrast for example at the risk of oversimplifying I wouldn't characterize the American despair that we have today as resulting from deficient values or scarcity rather I would frame it as a as a problem you know I think the American economy is abundant I think it's a problem of inequality and resource hoarding in 2018 I delivered a TED talk and began by stating that quote there's a narrative and idea that resilience grit and personal responsibility with those things people can pull themselves up in achieve success we call that the American Dream our american emergent American Dogma radically situates the market as the great efficient self-regulating colorblind arbiter of our worth and the solution for all our problems economic and otherwise this political discourse is upheld by Democrats Republicans blacks and whites alike basically it goes that if black brown and poor people would simply reverse their self sabotaging attitudes and behaviors and adopt the right attitudes and norms full equality could be reached although it may seem like a distant memory the transcendent election of Barack Obama provided the ideal symbolism and spokesperson person for this political perspective his rise to the highest office of lamb became an allegory an allegory of hard work merit and personal responsibility during his 2009 presidential address at the 100th anniversary celebration of the n-double a-c-p the then president identified himself and the parenting behavior of his mother as examples of racial transient transcendence here's what he said quote I was raised by a single mom I didn't come from a lot of wealth I got into my share of trouble as a child my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse when I Drive to Harlem or I Drive through the south side of Chicago I see young men on the corners I say they're but the grace of dare but for the grace of God go I they're no less gifted to me they're no less talented to me but I had some breaks that mother of mine she gave me love she pushed me she cared about my education she took no lip she taught me right from wrong because of her I had a chance to make the most of my abilities so what is omitted from the Obama narrative the fact that his mother had a PhD and the fact that he received an elite education both abroad in Indonesia and domestically while on scholarship at one of the best high schools in Hawaii private schools in Hawaii instead he emphasized the love motivation and discipline that his mother instilled which he presumes is lacking in the households of black inner-city comparisons that he makes in general these cases of black exceptionalism are meant to serve as prima Fakih evidence of what individual and familial acts of perseverance and hard work can achieve the problem with these convenient anecdotes is that they are tautological and they lack the systematic use of a proper counterfactual to empirically validate or invalidate their conjecture there's no accounting for the zero-sum nature of American social mobility system nor the volumous cases of black Americans and other poor people who are exemplifying perseverance grit and hard work but are not able to attain successful economic outcomes perhaps the greatest rhetorical victory of this neoliberal paradigm that we're in is convincing the masses that implicit in unfettered markets is the American Dream the opiate of hope that even if your lot in life is subpar that with hard works perseverance and patience you can turn your proverbial rags into riches this neoliberal approach explains poverty and inequality as deficiencies internal to the poor and blacks themselves stigmatization based on race and an anti blackness are strategically used as political fodder to implement harsh and punitive control on the underclass blacks become the symbolism by which we define a surplus population they're characterized as persistently unemployed and unemployable a source of urban crime and malice and whose subsistence needs become deemed a drain on fiscal budgets this fuels the rationale for starett II policy if behavioral modification particularly with regards to personal and human capital investment if that's the central issue why fund government agencies and programs which at best myths allocate resources to irresponsible individuals and at worst create dependencies to further fuel these irresponsible behaviors we end up with we end up with state and local and federal interventions as well as public-private partnerships that attempt to leverage private and charitable resources to manage and incentivize so-called effective black brown and poor people to get an education and become more more employable what is glaringly missing from these narratives is the role of power in capital and how power and capital can all to the rules in structure of transactions and markets in the first place power and capital they are self-reinforcing and without government intervention they do what they do best they iterate and concentrate the promise of economic prosperity and relative racial progress of this neoliberal progress paradigm has never materialized and worse blacks along with government social programs there used escaped goats to fuel this neoliberal agenda despite the widespread growing inequality that we see we use words like choice and freedom to describe the benefits of the market but choice is an illusion it is an illusion if an individual lacks basic needs like a job adequate income shelter food and health care it is literally wealth to gives us choice freedom and optionality and the way in which wealth is created it is wealth to begets more wealth for the last 45 years essentially all the economic gains from Americans increasing productivity have gone to the elite and upper middle class so prior to the early 1970s productivity and real worker wages they rose in lockstep one to one after 1970 real wages flattened out but American productivity continued to rise this manifests in a concentration of wealth where the top one 10% of earners those earning above 1.5 million a year own as much of the nation's wealth as the entire bottom 90% while the bottom 50% of earners in America own about 1% we would have to reach back to the greatest generation a generation born nearly a century ago that entered adulthood around the time of the great Great Depression to find a generation with lower homeownership rates than young Millennials faced today what's even more disheartening is that the racial gap in young adult homeownership is larger for Millennials than any other generation since we've been recording it America's obscene concentration and its accompanying plutocracy the likes of which we haven't seen since the Great Depression it's not natural nor is it our destiny for instance the gnudi reined in unfettered capitalism and corporate consolidation and provided the nation with a balance of power that set a foundation for a strong labor labor movement and an unprecedent American middle class growth President Franklin Roosevelt knew that quote necessitous men are not free men that real freedom to pursue happiness required what he called the second Bill of Rights for Roosevelt full citizenship demanded more than political rights it required economic rights and the first article of his second bill of economic right of Rights was the right to guaranteed employment once dignity is not limited to work but everyone should have the right to work with the dignity of at least decent wages benefits and working conditions not only would a federal job guarantee restore psychological balance of the millions of unemployed individuals who desire to work but cannot it would address America's long-standing unjust and discriminatory barriers to keep large segments of stigmatized populations out of the labor force and reverse the rising tide of inequality for all workers by strengthening their labor market bargaining power by eliminating what tenured professors have that eliminating the threat of unemployment this is in contrast to the free market revolution which emphasizes deregulation tax cuts and tax incentives to cajole or bribe a private sector to provide more jobs under the Lord that this is going to deliver an innovative dynamic economy that's supposed to trickle down to all of us it's critical to note that there was never the case that a white asset-based middle class simply emerged rather it was government policy and to a large extent literally government giveaways or entitlement they provided White's with the finance education land infrastructure in order to accumulate and pass down wealth in contrast by both design and implementation blacks were largely excluded from the policies they created these wealth generating benefits and even when blacks were able to accumulate wealth their land and enterprise was often stolen destroyed or seized by government complicit death fraud and terror our unjust racial wealth gap is rooted in a history from slavery to the Homestead Act to the redlining to redlining in the current and the more recent foreclosure crisis and which whites have been privileged by political and economic interventions that afforded them resource and intergenerational accumulation while blacks have been subjected to a history of exploitation and extrapolation of both their resources and their personhood to achieve racial justice we need an honest and sobering conversation of our historical racial racial sins this authentic analysis would counter that neoliberal frame that characterizes black brown and poor people in general as undeserving welfare queens deadbeat dad and super predators and instead it would pave the way for narratives that more precisely frame inequality is grounded in resource deprivation however acknowledgement and apology alone would be empty if not accompanied by some form of redress reparations provides a retrospective direct and parsimonious approach to address the racial wealth gap moreover it is a racially just policy because it requires the u.s. to take public responsibility and atone for its long history of ratio and justice a seed capital program like baby bonds is an economically and racially just prospective approach since it targets a domain and outcome in which whites and blacks have every oval very little overlap wealth the permanence 8 seed capital program would provide everyone with a capital foundation to build wealth and assets security and perpetuity trend us towards the just and egalitarian distribution of both capital and wealth but here's a key point to fully understand the iterative concentration that we're end of economic and political power and why the status quo is able to persist we need to embrace a third pillar in this relationship and that is race or more broadly the existence of an underclass marked by some subaltern identity by which more dominant identity might be willing to trade off their vertical positioning in society in order to establish their horizontal positioning in other words relative status becomes more important to the dominant group with growing inequality a white person could say at least I'm not black at least I'm not a Mexican and unfortunately we live in a paradigm where that has value it's not hard to see this theory play out in 2016 presidential election that caught us off many pundits and political scientists off-guard but if we viewed this from the perspective of critical race Theory the results would have been less surprising President Donald Trump's divisive appeal to whiteness was loud boisterous and it was clear his campaign slogan of making America great again a fictional period in which white dominance was unchallenged and unquestioned and his not-so-subtle dog-whistle that this one didn't get a lot of play when he said I'm your last chance with an overture to the pending demographic shift and when White's would no longer be a numerical majority that was all about codifying the property rights and whiteness to things that are unambiguous from racial stratification is one black workers have made worse off to the capitalist class which is overwhelmingly white is made better off what isn't ambiguous is the economic positioning of the white working-class and you know why it's ambiguous because white privilege offers psychological and material benefits an authentic racial coalition to address our growing inequality would necessitate that the dominant white class give up the benefits of white privilege and that that's obviously not an easy ask but this privilege is based on an immoral or amoral notion of benefit and it's largely predicated on self-interested neoliberal and tribal norms in which accumulation knows no bounds the good news is that change may be happening younger generations and social movements are beginning to redefine economic good to incorporate morality sustainability and common Manatee so we need a bold transformative economic Bill of Rights that is consciously legislated and implemented in a racially inclusive way basically we need race and gender conscious economic Bill of Rights we need a government to use public power to assure that all people have access to the necessary resources to attain human dignity and self-determination there's a set of essential good and enabling goods and services that are so critical for individual life liberty and self-determination that their quantity their quality and access to them should not be vulnerable to the pricing and rationing that come about from firms trying to meet their profit maximizing fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders we need public entitlements we need public entitlements to directly compete with and crowd out inferior private options that do not ensure universal and quality health care housing schooling financial services capital and the free mobility throughout society without the psychological and physical threat of detention or bodily harm because someone's identity is linked to a vulnerable or stigmatized group rather than a government that emphasizes the market to sanction or discipline the choices of poor people we need a government that provides competitive alternative that discipline exploitative practices of private entities and firms perhaps with the moral imperative of an economic rights frame the divisive base and despotic political appeal to whiteness which perpetuates inequality perhaps then it would begin to lose its LMC so in closing we can reject the empirically unsubstantiated regular rhetoric that ignorance and so-called grit and personal responsibility of the sources of inequality as well as the accompanying neoliberal paternalism in which government attempts to coerce and incentivize insinuated defective people to behave accordingly and make better decisions instead we can change this paradigm we can be bold we can work at federal and local levels we can go into progressive and conservative communities and we can advocate for programs and initiatives that truly empower people with Economic Security with dignity and the agency to a chain to achieve their self defined goals and finally have a long term vision that's not caught up in the myopic neoliberal scarcity frame which at the outset constrains all of us from reimagining the society that we might want and deserve thank you [Applause] thank you very much so if I could also invite Dean Ritter up to the stage to for the next part of our session which is going to be a moderated discussion with Dean Ritter and our two speakers since uh so this is fun I am so excited to be part of this conversation I want to also express my thanks to the center for ethics and human values to the Kirwan Institute to honors and scholars and to the minorities and philosophy and I want to say that this is exactly the kind of conversations we should be having at a university it's exactly the kinds of conversations we should be having as American citizens and so I'm really thrilled to be part of this and I'm very excited to be part of this conversation and on stage with two people who make me think and who I find inspiring these are both folks who are trying to make a difference in Ohio these are both people who are concerned about economic opportunity these are both people who are talking about dignity and morality and human security they're both engaged I think in important ways in national conversations and they're both thinking hard about what we can do to sustain a pathway to the middle class so with that let me ask you some questions and I think my first question would be do you see the American dream as a promise and if so what kind of promise is it and both of you have talked about this a little bit already and there are different ways I would think about frame eeeh we've talked a lot about framing it in terms of economic opportunity but there are other ways it strikes me of framing a notion of the American dream one that might draw from Martin Luther King or from the Declaration of Independence that puts more of an emphasis on notions of dignity and equality and participation one that also might have to do with the notion of civic culture and how sustaining inclusion in a civic culture is a critical part of believing that the next generation will do better do you believe in an American dream and what is it and do you think that this is a dream that is currently constrained yes I believe in an American dream but of course there's a but I believe that you know it's hard to say co-opted because that would imply did it ever actually existed I don't think it ever was put into fruition I think it has largely remained an ideal or an idea I mean there are periods in American history where it became put into fruition for certain groups of Americans but obviously as a black man it's hard for me to ever say that the American dream was ever really extended to black people in America I'll say one other point and that is the word opportunity in and of itself I think has become a political ruse that opportunity is strategically used in a lot of ways to put the onus on two individuals if we contrast opportunity with rights or entitlements entitlements and rights obviously not obvious but presume that because other people would argue they don't but entitlement and rights in my view provide the agency and resources for people to do things with their life and make choices and be self determinate the word opportunity I think has become a political ruse that has been able to absorb the public of responsibility and put the agency on individuals and we could probably get into a conversation of what education means you know I think education certainly has some functional returns we know that people with a college degree earn more but I think those functional returns are exaggerated I think they are exaggerated in comparison to the functional returns of resources to begin with and it even becomes hard to disentangle with the resources to begin with produces independent of education so one framing is to think of education Gretchen you brought up civic engagement well education is important in its own right we might want a citizenship a citizenry that is highly educated period with no other need for justification so that they can be able to synthesize information and turn it into big ideas but I'm concerned that the rhetoric and the strategy of using education as a ruse for the reasons I've described is very central to the American dream yes so I you know my remarks were were largely about the fact that I do believe in the American Dream and I do think it's constrained in important ways I want to just you mentioned there were there was a lot of a lot of Derek's remarks that I agreed with actually some things of course I did disagree with but I what he was talking I was sort of thinking that you know maybe a better a better interlocutor what would have been a would have been a libertarian because the you know the libertarians hate me I think more than they hate you they always say heretics more than they hate enemies and I'm very much a heretic but the the thing that I I really want to emphasize is that while the material components of the American Dream and opportunity are very important I do think we often you know I think it was Schumpeter who talked about the way in which we measure material progress we account for it can sometimes distract us from the things that are very important that we're not measuring and so you know I think of you know I think of female friends of mine who would really like to start a family but can't because it's either too expensive or because they have plenty of money but the social and cultural pressures of leaving their job or even scaling back from the workforce are not something that they're they're willing to do right now I know friends of mine who you know would really like to give up a job at Goldman Sachs and if you measure it in economic terms they are the winners they're making a lot of money they own property they hate their jobs and they hate the sense of striving they hate the sense of pressure that they have to constantly consume more earn more climb higher up the economic ladder I think that there's something really broken in our society right now where we measure things in such material terms that we've lost the ability to think about the ways in which economic opportunity and the non material things can actually conflict they're not just always you know sometimes they're aligned and sometimes they're important but sometimes they actually do conflict an old professor of mine just came out with a book a few months ago called the meritocratic trap it's by Dan Markovitz it's very interesting but he talks about this way in which this treadmill that frankly all of you are on in some form another especially the you know the sort of under 25s in the audience this this treadmill to achieve in worldly material terms leaves people feeling hollow even when they're ultimately successful and I do think that's the piece of it you know where maybe Derek and I just disagree but if we're only measuring it by money or economic opportunity we're missing this way that folks are just a lot less happy I think than they otherwise could be so just a little bit of clarity I got a hold it closer to my face all right a little bit of clarification on how I see material things I can't agree with you that thinking about material things as an outcome is somewhat problematic and exaggerated that that is not the way I'm conceiving of material things I'm conceiving of material things you know in a different way in in that the agency that it might provide for you to do things as it relates to your life to it to to authentically have choice and we could define it and in terms of assets more broadly and those assets in the American context has historically been individually based but more broadly we could talk about community assets as well the idea of having material things to afford you the ability to see a doctor when you want to see a doctor to get a quality education to have a home etc we can do that in a public way or we could do it in a private way but the agency and the functional role of material things is what's important I want to ask you both about morality and the marketplace so it seems to me that each of you has been involved in work that might be seen as raising questions about the morality of the marketplace so Derek you talk about geography about race about opportunity and you do a lot to frame the importance of government regulation to having a marketplace that is more moral and JD you also talk about failures in various ways of the marketplace you talk about the erosion of Labor Eanes you talk about college debt you've been talking about in addressing the opioid crisis and of course one can't help but think about the role of corporations in that so I guess I would ask you Derek whether or not the marketplace can be moral and I'd ask you JD is can the marketplace be immoral [Laughter] my discipline has pulled the roost on everybody's well I'd say this notion of the market is being somehow natural somehow inevitable markets are political constructions so the question of Khem markets be moral well we can choose for them to be moral or not right it is we this thing that somehow individual agents come together with self-interested molded motives and engage in transaction and that's how markets work I don't know any market to work that way people point to farmers markets I don't even think farmers markets work that way you got to get a permit you got it right I think it's I think they're children in the work room so I can't say not children young adults so I can't say BS but I guess I just did but so you know that that's my take on it I think we can make choices and make decisions you know for example if we ensure that that we might say I'm happy with deregulation if we have public public banks so we want to go to deregulate Wall Street if the government came in with public banks to ensure that the most vulnerable in society have access to liquidity and aren't so exposed to predation from private private entity and you thought the deregulation allows them to innovate I'm okay with that type of mark I think I'm okay with that type of market I'd have to see the details but that's an example I want to say one thing about labor unions really quick is that is we can't ignore the role of race when we think about labor unions to me it's not a coincidence that labor unions today are proportionally predominantly black and their power in general has weakened dramatically to me it's not a coincidence that states where we have large shares of black people are states that have the harsha's right to union type legal infrastructure it's not a coincidence that in the heyday of unions blacks were largely excluded so this is my point about right now the way which capital is able to capitulate the dominant groups in society is to enforce relative status I think that ultimately if we're ever gonna get beyond that system we've really got to have a more moral economy that emphasizes values like common humanity so yeah this question of whether the market can be moral immoral how much it's shaped by public policy is sort of very interesting to me so I'll try not to get too much in the clouds I mean one thing I'll say just just directly in response to what Derek said is as much as you know we can blame various legislative changes and their effect on labor unions I think the evidence at this point is very overwhelming that the biggest reason the labor union started decline in the late 1960s in the early 1970s is globalization primarily labor arbitrage through offshoring and as much as I know I can I can tell Derek you know really really dislikes the president and there's certainly critical things that I would say the end of the day there are two candidates two mainstream politicians in America who have been making a sustained critique of globalization in the past decade one is Bernie Sanders and the others Donald Trump they're the only two I think that's important especially we talk about the decline of unions and this this question of whether you know the market can be more like you know I'll illustrate this with you know by making a point that got me in in some hot water in the world that I work in in technology investing and if you live in Silicon Valley you go to Silicon Valley there's this exit off of highway 101 Willow Road and that's the highway or that's the exit you take if you want to go to Facebook's global headquarters in Menlo Park and as you're going to Facebook so at headquarters you'll pass a bunch of biotechnology companies and those biotechnology companies are you know trying to cure Alzheimer's they're trying to cure cancer they're developing therapies they're gonna make everybody's lives better or at least some people's lives better and if you're a neuroscientist working at Facebook you make way way way more money than you do as a neuroscientist trying to cure Alzheimer's and one of those biotechnology companies at a Derek's point that is a function the way that our public policy has decided to create incentives for various people in various professions and my view is that we shouldn't be politically agnostic to the fact that if we want more people curing Alzheimer's we should be willing to say as a matter of public direction the people curing Alzheimer's should make more money than the people who are developing applications that sexual predators use to attack your children but that is the difference between the tech economy and an IT sense and the tech economy that I care about which is you know in the world where people's real lives get better and the final point that I'll make on this is you know I'm sure that I'm sort of more to the right than Derek on questions of economics I do think that the market is good at pricing things it's very good at driving and creating pricing signals when people are buying and trading without without encumbrance and I do think it's it's valuable to be able to buy and sell the things that you want to be able to buy and sell though obviously you know there are there are a lot of qualifications that I'd make to that point all that said I agree with Derek and again this is why I almost wish that I was watching a libertarian up here to bait Derek that our public policy creates our markets and frankly our markets create our public policy we know that corporate actors can influence the direction of public policy and important powerful ways so I think the market can be immoral but I think that the the way that I would put it is that we can be immoral if we choose not to accept that we do actually have influence over these things both of you have noted that were we're in a difficult time right both of you have pointed out that this is a moment in our society where we're dealing with really high levels of social division and social polarization we've talked about it in terms of class we've talked about it in terms of race it's something certainly that I think about all the time and one of the ways that I worry about it is our sort of lost ability to imagine a common future and why believing in a common future believing in a some some society if you will is necessary to be able to come together to solve some of the problems that we're contending with so I guess I'd ask each of you how do we create a sense of a common future again well I wish I knew the answer to that question I do think it's a very important question I do think that you know to take a topic that Derek played it played around with a lot there there is a sort of neoliberal consensus that polarization and division in our society is primarily a consequence of the news media of the fact that people are just haven't figured out how to talk to each other well and if we could just sort of you know get together and hold hands and talk to each other everything would be fine and I don't mean to disparage the importance of talking to each other but I think these divisions come from the fact that for 30 or 40 years a lot of people have had this deep sense that things are getting worse and the Overton Window for how what you could actually talk about was very narrow I think that the polarization in our society in other words comes from the fact that a lot of conversations that need to have been had over the past few decades are finally actually being had and you know they're you know our history suggests that the you know you look at one of the great pieces of American Legislative progress the 1964 Civil Rights Act I don't think people realize that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed by a Congress that I may have the number off by a couple of points but I believe was 89% veteran so one way of creating unity is to go and fight a gigantic world war and then all the people come back and pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act because they feel like they're part of the same team the problem of course is the yes fight of World War and I think that's not what any of us would want and I don't know what we can do to create that same sense of national purpose without some external enemy that's what did it in 1945 we're not that good I think we're not that good at feeling like we're we have that common purpose absent some external shock and I don't know what that's going to be so let me just press you on that for a second if I could what about some of the proposals for service and tying service to opportunities and education for instance I'm supportive of a national service program it's become one of these things that I've probably become too preoccupied with the past couple of years my friend michael lind who is a political scientist in austin aversive texas at austin always tells me though that it's the best idea that has no chance of ever happening so we'll see if it's actually viable so I want to go back a little bit to the other question that was raised because the Sanders campaign would be very disappointed with me if I let it go that Trump and Sanders are aligned when it comes to Trey I'll say that your globalization is certainly has many dimensions but you know I think the Sanders approach when it comes to trade is one of thinking about worker rights more broadly not even just in the United States and thinking about competition in an international perspective or more fair terms in fact if we're gonna have a moral Society in America it almost inevitably would have to spill over to the rest of the world moral values are not compromised so if you believe in human dignity for Americans I think if you really adopt that frame inevitably it would have to include what it means to be a worker in China or workers somewhere else as well so I just want to make that point and it's related to the other question that you raised which is you know I'm optimistic I think younger generations are now starting to adopt the values that we need to have a holistic economy that overcomes some of the some of the barriers we've had in the past I'm thinking of me too I'm thinking of black lives matter I'm thinking of the protests against climate change where they're not caught up the way my generation was I think JD's a little younger than me but seduced by reaganomics of notion that if I sin we work hard and study hard that I will have a pathway towards success and that those in my case other black people that don't go to the Ivy League school and don't do these things well it's because they're not motivated enough I think younger generations are saying that note that's a problem it's not accurate and they are less willing to compromise notions of justice just for the sake of justice and and not be cannibalized so that's my hope and and I also think that you know we've had dynamic leaders in the past that have emphasized the values of morality common humanity and sustainability these are not pie-in-the-sky ideals these are real things that are human and I think people can grasp grab ahold - I think that again the wool over our eyes is this thing that humans inevitably are going to be self-interested in selfish and can't see our common humanity I think the clergy community if we look at leaders like Reverend barber if we go back to Reverend dr. Martin Luther King when they started when they start to get mass appeal is when they start appealing to those common values of humanity morality etc so to me that's the pathway forward you know I was struck that both of you ended on positive notes both of you talked about this being a moment of openness to new and bigger ideas particularly seeing the generation that we're seeing out in this audience as being those willing to consider and put forward some of those ideas I'd love to hear two things one is what are some of the big ideas that you're especially excited about and are there any big ideas that you could imagine working together I will I won't say no but I'm not gonna say yes either on I haven't thought enough about the federal job we are teaming it so so I'll just take a couple of ideas that have come up from sort of the the right-of-center universe that I think even five years ago it would have just been absurd to imagine this so one is is is from my friend Warren caste who's a think-tank fellow and you know fellow sort of heretic on a lot of these things and I'm Oren is is argued pretty persuasively that if you look at why unions work in in Europe especially in East Asia and if you look at how they're how they function structurally in the United States are just very different in other words the Western European model of Labor has has sort of evolved institutionally wears in a lot of ways the American model of Labor is still sort of trapped in the 1920s or 1930s and so he's proposed a whole host of reforms to effectively update American labor laws in such a way that maybe corporations would be less antagonistic towards them but certainly they would be more viable in a modern 21st century hyper globalized economy so that's that's one idea that I'm a big fan of I mean the second idea that I've become pretty pretty fascinated with is is this idea that you know we should actually learn something from the Chinese economic model over the past twenty or thirty years ago at this point about the market being independent of our our laws and our regulations and so forth you know one of the things that Chinese have done quite successfully is say you know we want to become a world leader in gene therapy we want to become a world leader in advanced manufacturing and I think there are a lot of a lot of sectors you know maybe clean energy is one where we could get on board though I think Derek would probably be on my side on a lot of the labor stuff but there are a lot of ways and this is you know I point people to Sam Han at Hammond who's the fellow within his cannon Center who's written about how America has to have a more directed Technology Policy one of the few areas where I just have a disagreement of fact is about this question of productivity I think productivity has been really stagnant since about the mid 1970s basically since the oil shock during during the end of the Reagan administration the Carter Administration sorry into the Nixon and Ford and sort of beginning of the Carter administration's and I really think that no matter how much you figure out the apportionment question the distributor the the distributive question that if you don't have real productivity growth we're in sort of a boom economy people are calling this you know fastest sustained productivity growth for a decade in a very long time we're not growing anything like we did in the 50s 60s and so forth and that and the more that you know we're at the tail end of a boom if you look at it over a 30 or 40 year period we're growing at one to two percent a year averaged out you cannot solve our distributive problems without creating a lot of social conflict unless you get those productivity numbers up and I think to do that you have to make America a leader like it used to be in in high technology sectors so those does two things I'm pretty optimistic about again either of those ideas both of them came from the right either of them would have been considered completely out of the question during a Mitt Romney presidential campaign I guess some some things that note and and I guess here we're starting to see some clear distinctions I guess there are others but I certainly don't think we have a scarcity problem or even an American productivity problem I'd say that dating back to the 50s and 60s in addition to some of the innovation that might have been taking place we also had the New Deal and post-war policies that were taking place and we were coming out of World War two but at least since the sixth set 1970s early 1970s American productivity has been growing a great deal output per worker is way up with what is problematic is real wages have been stagnant since that point you know Economic Policy Institute they have a graph that they call the what do they call it productivity pay great pay gap graph where they demonstrable ease showed us it's known as the clam graph where productivity and real worker wages lockstep and then dispersion so I think that in general the scarcity frame has constrained us a lot of ways from doing big things and take for example that last trump tax cut which was what 2.3 trillion over the next decade when he passed it that's not going to destroy the American economy it's gonna lead to more hoarding and concentration at the top and more plutocracy where those with a lot of wealth will be able to structure the rules in their favor but the American economy as measured by GDP per capita growth is not going to be destroyed by that huge deficit ballooning policy that he put forth so that deficit framing that we have Pago those are all things that are constraining us the American public power is immense and it's particularly immense when it's being used towards investing in our greatest resource which is us it's people that's not going to inflate the economy that's gonna lead to productivity games that will stimulate the economy and actually grow the economy I think we have historical precedent to suggest that that's true so if I'm thinking about big ideals another problem with scarcity frame I'll give you a quick story and I know we might be running short on time I presented baby bonds and if people respond but what about early childhood you know you're talking about wealth when the child becomes an adult and my answer is what about early childhood that's important as well so we can have a package of goods there is no silver bullet policy that's going to solve our problems but they are set of set of problems a set of goods and services that we can define you know we could talk about the right to income the right to a job the right to healthcare the right to education the right to finance the right to a credit score that's not proprietary to a private entity but has transparency through public credit scoring or some other mechanism we could think about a package of goods that people need in order to be 60 to order to thrive and be self-determining so that's what I'm talking about and that scarcity frame that says that we can't pay for it I think there's ample evidence yes we can and that and frankly we already are paying for it the question is where we're spending that money on a huge military and towards hoarding wealth to those at the top but we don't even need pay go the American monetary system would allow us to pay for the things that we want I think I'm going to open it up to a couple of questions from the audience at this point we've got a microphone here in the middle if you'd like to ask a question could you please come to the mic and just say who you are before you ask your question and then [Music] [Music] yeah so thanks to the question I think a lot of it is just is just access to capital I mean still to this day one of the things we we don't talk enough about is that one of the the core implications of the 2008-2009 financial crisis is a small business financing in primarily black neighborhoods in this country just disappear I mean it was a massive massive capital gap you need capital to do things you need capital to actually run companies especially companies that aren't yet making a profit and if you look at where their risk capital I mean meaning the capital that you don't have to pay back if you're an entrepreneur which allows you to sort of really go off and do big things it's almost all concentrated in San Francisco New York and in Massachusetts that's that's a very bad thing so I mean I think one of the solutions is you have to get more risk capital outside of those three big megacities and you know related the-the-the this question about about scarcity and I don't want to make sure you know folks aren't confusing my point my point is not that we can't afford things because of deficit financing we are the world's reserve currency and so long as the were the world's reserve currency frankly we shouldn't care that much about the deficit all of the the indicators bond markets interest rates suggest that we shouldn't care as much about that but there's a difference between scarcity when it comes to deficit financing and real sustained growth I mean the type of growth that allowed Henry Ford and Ford Motor to employ a ton of people at $5 a day and oh by the way create a product that was like very useful for people if you look at the the broad advanced economies in the world there is so little real growth happening you know we can go back and forth on how much growth is stagnated I think what is uncontroversial is that growth in the post 1970s America was lower than it was from 55 to 75 just measure 55 to 75 and then 75 to 2015 no comparison but importantly a lot of that growth was just fake if you look at basically on a decade by decade trajectory 1970s really bad decade for growth 1980s really good decade 1990s really good decade the to thousands of course because of the financial crisis really bad decade what's going on in our economy is financialization you have a lot of people there there was a really good study that came out right after the financial crisis that showed that basically all of the real wage gains were going to the financial sector like you cannot run a successful economy when you get more return from moving money from one place to another than by investing in drugs that are gonna save people's lives so I think there's a different question from scarcity economics and real growth that isn't just built basically upon moving money from New York to Beijing to London to Paris and back again thank you hi there right here my question is for both of you you mentioned a lot about how much things have gotten worse especially for workers starting and I run the mid-1970s billig until now it seems to me when I listen to things that work deregulation and the financial crisis my question then is are the struck to what extent of the struggles that we see now the result of those two things like our response to the financial crisis are you know widespread deregulation influx of reaganomics is it a government action after the crisis beforehand and what should to me go first here yeah so I mean I I think deregulation there are multiple different kinds of deregulation right so there's airline deregulation that happened mid 1970s I think you'd make a good argument that that actually made airplane cheaper airplane tickets cheaper there are more flights inflation-adjusted terms it's cheaper to buy a plane ticket today that it was in the mid 1970s there's also a financial deregulation which happened primarily and sort of the early to mid 90s and you know of course it's it's it's bills came due in in the late 2000s I tend to think that deregulation is a bit of a red herring in the sense that I don't think it was either really good or really bad in most cases I think that the financial crisis was primarily a function of financialization which again it comes from the fact that there are a lot of incentives to move money from one place to the other deregulation may have allowed more sophisticated financial instruments to come online in fact it probably did may have exacerbated the crisis I think the fundamental problem though is that you had a bunch of people with a lot of capital moving it from point A to point B and had no idea how to actually spend it I know I'm a broken record on this but real growth is different from just moving money from one place to the next and I think the financial crisis was largely that a lot of people saw they had been betting and the financial crisis was not primarily a creation of any one instrument it was a creation of bankers saying that housing prices are going to keep going up and up and open up if housing prices kept on going at two to three percent probably isn't a financial crisis so again I think it's hard to disconnect a lot of what's going on from the fact that we've basically been living in a society to my point earlier with declining institutions on the one hand and fake growth on the other but I'll show that blood Eric answer there's a great book by a colossal chiller called phishing for fools and one of the points that they make in a book is that and this is true since the beginning of I guess recorded history that the financial industry has an incentive to try to exploit an extract from consumers to take resources for themselves that that is you know finance industries do other things as well like provide liquidity and credit but that is their motivation that is a profit model that is I think with a JD is talking about as well so the arbitrage in trying to extract from people is what the finance industry does so deregulation created an environment that created that that was permissive of lack of consumer protection innovation of new of new processes and products that were better able to extract and exploit and also greater risk-taking activity in the search of myopic short-term profit so deregulation did expose our economy to the collapse that happened so I think that uh it is but you know a couple of things one is all those things happened but this is in part the nature of capital in the finance industry and I believe we notice so I you know I think if we want a long-standing program to address it it can be attacked in a couple of ways one with regulation although you have this game where you have regulation in one period the next period the financial industry will invest a lot to try to figure out ways to get around that regulation so it's a cat-and-mouse game that will go on in perpetuity but alternatively the government can also be more proactive and active and that's why in my view public banking can provide alternatives to make sure that one if the Cowboys on Wall Street want to engage in malfeasance or high risk-taking activity we're not vulnerable to that moral hazard where we have to bail them out that if indeed they get themselves into trouble they can go out of business the vulnerability is that if they go out of business the rest of America is not protected so if the public sector is more actively engaged and ensuring that there is some direct protection to consumers throughout a host of hosted domains as well as some regulation I think that that becomes the approach we should take can I interest add one more comment on that because you're you're you said your economics major is that okay so so just one point on that is is that I think we we tend to understate how much capital may be less now and then five years ago it's certainly over the past 20 or 30 years how much capital has been going into quote unquote consolidation sort of funding mergers cost-cutting ie laying a lot of people off or offshoring or outsourcing a lot of things you know to the extent that you're ever involved in the investment of capital it's I think it's much better for the soul to be investing in things that grow and that hire people as opposed to shrink and fire people so just you know one point to the business folks in the audience hi there okay but so a lot of you talked a lot about how a turkey Americans were excluded so I was wondering what your thoughts were on the 16 project we should get Nicole Hannah Jones to come to campus because I think they would go yeah and matter of fact Kirwan should figure out a way to help do that but I think the project is brilliant I think it is consistent with what I'm talking about in terms of that sobering honest conversation about what took place I think that uh you know the idea of reparations if not in this political moment at some point it might it might occur but I ultimately do think that that is what America is gonna have to do if we ever going to get beyond the race problem I think that in the interim they're there as I've been talking about Universal race-conscious programs that both by design and implementation we ensure that we don't leave people behind that we can do to make things better but ultimately recognizing that past in that history and redressing it is where we have to go to have a your religion major a better soul as a country and I think we have a last question a few members of my coworker here and this year we are writing a production on the opioid crisis in Ohio so I'm glad that both of you are here this is really for both of you if either you have an answer that would be great I'm just wondering where you think we should look in terms of research and what kinds of stories have not been told that shouldn't be told specifically about the crisis here in Ohio Oh dr. Ronnie answer briefly just to give Derrick some time to answer as well I think the story and this is maybe very self-interested of me to say but the story that I still think hasn't been told enough is of the grandparents who are actually picking up so much of the slack and this is happening a lot of course in the black community also in the white community the thing that is preventing this from becoming a full-scale full-scale just social dissolution is the fact that you have a lot of grandparents who are taking care of kids who've been orphaned either because the kids meaning the parents of the children the son or daughter of the grandparents they're dead they're in jail they're otherwise incapacitated and I would love to see more stories told about that because I think it's it's both true it gives people some sense that they're being heard but it also is at the end of the day I think pretty uplifting when you have you know 68 75 year old people who don't actually legally a know an obligation to a kid going way above and beyond to make sure that they don't totally slip through the cracks so there's the work of Angus Deaton and Ann case called deaths of despair which is making the point that a demographic of whites in Ohio's one of the communities that they look at had the perverse outcome where mortality rates started to rise and they found that it was rising in what they're calling calling the illnesses of despair I might be butchering what they call it but things like suicide alcohol abuse drug abuse etc and and obviously with the word despair they're linking it to economic condition so there's work that I've recently done with Arjumand Siddiqui treci Macmillan Cottam and William Garrity where we argued it perhaps they should think about it in terms of perceived relative status that if again I've been talking about about relative status so it's not just only absolute status that is causing perhaps some of this despair and you might ask well why isn't that mortality phenomena happening with black people well black people have been used to struggle for a very long time so to the extent that there's a shot to despair it might be baked in unfortunately this is not a good story so when people talk about resiliency that's a horrible tragic story if we're characterizing the population is being resilient because they're used to despair and on a permanent basis but that that being said the paper tries to make the point that perhaps it's perceived relative status of white people that's leading to some of these mortality increases as well that you know would trump that would trump I think pounced upon which is I'm gonna codify to property rights and whiteness again to restore your rightful place on this hierarchy so I'm saying all of that to say that ultimately again a lot of stuff that I think I've been talking about which is if we address that despair and address it in an inclusive way I think that that can mitigate all of the a lot of the social harms that we see I think that a opioid use is a product of economic despair so addressing the root cause will lead to even things that we might you might see as family values or whatever by the way I'm okay with new types of family a range of it's that emerge over time I mean the fact that we have less married households we knew that at some point in the 1950s being a single woman was basically destiny for poverty so the fact that women can go on a labor force and have greater agency to choose a divorce I don't see that as necessarily a bad thing but nonetheless with properly resourced individuals I think that they can really make choices and have positive social outcomes matter what it is that we're looking at thank you both you've given us a lot to think about and chew on and this has been a great conversation thanks to our audience as well thank you

Channel: Ohio State Center for Ethics and Human Values

Views: 1,657

Rating: 4.478261 out of 5

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Id: JsbTVIYRDrs

Length: 96min 25sec (5785 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 10 2020