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 you’ve 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 that’s 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 world—and this is very

powerful—is that other people are on top.

JOHN FULLERTON: Living systems have what are

called healthy hierarchies—so it’s not

that hierarchy is bad.

It’s 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 that’s 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 own—a little private, unaccountable

venture—do 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?

What’s 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 wouldn’t have two cars.

What interests me is also we had this idea

of the middle class as a solid thing and now

it’s 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 it’s like everyone just wants to

get into it, into the dream, the American

Dream of the middle class that’s 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 ’60s and now it’s

seven percent in the private sector.

And that’s a pretty huge drop-off.

And at the same time, you’re 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.

They’re 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

can’t take care of their children—hours

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 ‘I’ve

got a bright future.’

They no longer believe—and this is something

Mr. Trump got right even if he has no solution

and he’s making things worse on purpose—they

no longer believe in the American Dream.

And they’re 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 horizon—it

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 can’t be my fault

that I’m 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 you’re not doing so well.

They blame the other, whether it’s 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 they’ve taken

things away from me.

That’s 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 you’re telling me that

there are companies that do none of this stuff,

that pay people well, that don’t dump externalities

into the economy, that don’t cause social

problems.

If there are such companies that exist, yeah,

then once you’ve taken care of all that,

great, doing some projects to help people

is great.

But I haven’t found very many such companies

and more often than not when companies do

a lot of CSR it’s because they understand

that they’re 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 don’t need to be a mathematician

to know that we’re the losers from that

bargain.

And you look at the B Corp movement, there’s

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 it’s a great

thing but it’s fundamentally voluntary and

what this does is it means that if you’re

an already good, virtuous company you may

be motivated to get into this club.

But if you’re Exxon or Pepsi you’re not

going to be in this club.

One of the things I’d 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

they’re 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.

It’s up by two percent or something like

that so it’s substantial.

You can be looking at these job announcements

and you could be thinking: What’s wrong

with me?
Why can’t I figure it out?

Why can’t 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

we’re 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 they’ve 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 they’ve

been trained to do every day.

Now, the danger of that is that what we didn’t

realize is that our technical training for

occupations maneuvers the entire population

into the crosshairs of software.

It’s 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 it’s 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 megalomaniacs—in

fact, these are the folks who are closest

to seeing the destruction that their work

may visit upon the population and I don’t

know I think of any 9-, 10- or 11-figure individual

at the moment that I’m familiar with who

isn’t worrying about what we’re 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 it’s

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

don’t 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 I’ve got to make sure only my kids get

opportunities at school, and we’re only

going to have access to capital, that my tax

rates are going to be here at the expense

of other folks.

And that’s actually not true capitalism.

We grew as a country when people said hey,

listen, it’s important that everyone has

access to a good education.

It’s something of great importance because

that means the more people that are educated,

the more ideas, the more growth we’re going

to have and that’s what capitalism is based

on.

And I go back to art, music.

It’s what jazz is all about.

It’s an American aesthetic.

It’s freedom within form.

Yes, there’s 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 that’s what capitalism is.

There’s 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 we’re very, very far away from having

created social relations between us—a legal

framework, a way of organizing economic life—that

takes power out of the equation of civilization.

Economic surplus is essential for humanity

to develop.

If we don’t 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 there’s a few

slave owners, or feudalism, or capitalism

where you’ve 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 don’t 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

wasn’t 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
‘No, no, no.

Things are great.

Trade is good.

Trade’s great.

It’ll be perfect.

It’s going to lift everybody up.

Globalization, perfect.

It’s great.

Look, there’s a couple of bumps but no worries.

And the aggregate all will be well.’

I mean, as though anybody lives in the aggregate.

‘Tech.

Don’t worry.

Don’t worry about the fact that everything

got automated and your jobs all went to Taiwan.

Don’t worry about it.

We’ll be better off on the whole.’

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

like—work 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 they’ll

just throw some social change down from the

mountain.

Well, we have to decide in America if that’s

the kind of change we want.

But what I do know is if you project that

kind of change backwards throughout time,

we wouldn’t 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.

It’s time that we reclaim that heritage

again.