#205 — The Failure of Meritocracy
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Summary
Daniel Markovitz's new book, The Meritocracy Trap, argues that the notion of meritocracy is flawed, and that any socioeconomic reward is based on a flawed notion of "self-made" rather than on "earned" wealth. In this episode, I speak with Daniel about why this is a problem that needs to be addressed, and how to fix it, and why it's time to move away from meritocracy and toward a new kind of caste system of "caste system" that rewards meritocracy but denies opportunity to people who are talented but don't succeed because they weren't given the right opportunities. The meritocracy Trap is a book that challenges the idea that there is a "right" way to achieve a meritocracy, and argues that there's no such thing as a meritocratic system at all. And that's why meritocracy should be replaced by a caste system, because meritocracy itself is unjust and unjustifies itself by being based on the notion that everyone should be given the same opportunities and a fair shot at the same things as everyone else. If you want to know how meritocracy works, then you need to start with the core problem, which is that there are no more talented people than there are talented people who succeed, because they don't have to be talented enough to succeed because of their meritocracies, because there are more talented than they were given enough opportunities to be given them the same chance to succeed. This is a conversation whose time has come and is overdue to be had, not a conversation that has come too soon, and needs to come to terms with the problem it needs to start. And so, I'll let you know what that means, and what it means, because it's come too late, and it's coming too late to get a chance to make sense of the problem, and too late too soon to start making sense of it and that it's a problem too late in the first place a problem whose time is now too late. Thanks for listening to the Making Sense Podcast? by Sam Harris Subscribe to The Making Sense by making sense? by clicking here to get access to the full episode by becoming a supporter of the podcast and getting access to future episodes of the show, and more episodes, and a discount on future episodes on the next one coming soon, coming soon so you won't want to miss it? and as always, I never want money be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast?
Transcript
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Okay, well, today is a deep dive into wealth inequality and the underlying problem of our
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Wealth inequality is something that I've been worried about for quite some time.
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I think I first started speaking and writing about it in 2010, about a year or so after
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I think the first was a New Year's resolution for the rich, and then how rich is too rich.
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And it's come up a few times on the podcast before.
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I never really questioned the norm of meritocracy, however.
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And I haven't really thought much about the way our system of higher education has become
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Today I'm speaking with Daniel Markovitz, and his book is The Meritocracy Trap, How America's
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Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite.
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And Daniel is a professor of law at Yale, and as you'll hear, he's thought a lot about these
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We talk about the nature of inequality in the U.S., the disappearance of the leisure class,
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the way the rich now tend to work harder, at least as measured by time, than anyone else,
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the difference between labor and capital as sources of inequality.
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We talk about the shrinking middle class, the attendant deaths of despair in the U.S., we
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talk about the different social norms among the elites and the working class, things like
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We talk about the flawed notion of being self-made, and the illusion that anyone has earned their
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And we consider Daniel's proposal for a one-time wealth tax as a way of responding to the COVID-19
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You might find it a little dense, certainly in the beginning, but I thought the conversation
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Looking back on my old blog posts of 10 years ago, and I noticed that in talking about the
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consequences of automation and growing wealth inequality and people's resistance to redistribution,
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I asked the rhetorical question, would anyone want to live in a country that has just minted
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its first trillionaire and there's 30% unemployment?
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At the moment, that outcome is absolutely foreseeable.
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We've certainly been pushed within range of that possibility by this pandemic.
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So, that's just to say, this is a conversation whose time has come.
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So, you've written this fairly incendiary book, The Meritocracy Trap, and you also wrote
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an op-ed in the New York Times recently that I want to talk about that is especially pitched
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to this moment, but I really want to run through your entire argument here because it has the
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virtues of being both quite consequential, you know, whether right or wrong, whatever we decide
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about your argument, the consequences are enormous, and it's highly counterintuitive.
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But you've written a book really against this notion of meritocracy, and it's interesting.
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This word was originally coined in a somewhat ironic or derogatory vein, but it was very
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soon thereafter rechristened as an obvious norm.
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And so, when we hear about meritocracy, you know, really for my entire lifetime, there's
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The problem has always been that we haven't actually achieved it, and the problem is that
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there are people who are every bit as talented as the people who succeed, but they don't succeed
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because they weren't given the right opportunities.
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But you're arguing that the very norm of achieving a meritocracy is somehow flawed, and that any
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socioeconomic reward that's based on this notion of merit is itself unjust and is leading
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So, perhaps let's just start with this core claim.
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In what sense is meritocracy itself and the notion of merit itself the problem?
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So, let's start just by giving a quick and intuitive definition of what a meritocracy is.
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It's when people get ahead based on their own accomplishments rather than on, say, their
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parents' social class or their race or their gender.
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And as you suggested a moment ago, it's very hard to object to that idea.
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It seems like that idea would give a society a capable and competent and engaged elite, and
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it seems like that idea would give everybody a fair shot at success.
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And the early meritocrats, especially in the United States in the 1960s, and we can talk
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about them in a little more detail later, very much embraced that thought.
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They thought that meritocracy was a way of breaking established caste orders surrounding
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And for a while, meritocracy did function in that way, because natural talent is not the
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But then what happened is that the elite that was made by meritocracy, the people who themselves
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got ahead by being really good at tests, really good at school, really hardworking, accomplishing
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a lot, turned out to be incredibly good at training their children and to have an immense
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appetite for investing in their children's education.
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And they now so dramatically out-train and out-educate everybody else in society that not just poor families,
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And because education works, it now turns out that the people who, in this technical sense,
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accomplish the most, who have the highest test scores, the best grades, are the same as the
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children of the rich meritocrats of the previous generation.
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And so in this way, what meritocracy has done is it was invented as the handmaiden of equality
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of opportunity, but it's become an enormous obstacle to opportunity in the United States today.
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I want to get into the problem specific to higher education and then the process by which
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people seek to get into elite institutions, because that really is at the center of the
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But before we get there, let's just talk about the nature of inequality.
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I mean, just what is the status quo at this point?
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I mean, I know this is a global problem, but within the U.S., you point out that we have
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a kind of inequality that more resembles that found in a country like India than in a country
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So give us a picture of what inequality is like at this point.
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So we have two trends happening in the U.S. at the same time.
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And I think one of the things that made the book controversial is that it emphasizes both
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There's a lot of poverty in the U.S., and if you have my private politics, it's morally
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There's more poverty than in other rich countries.
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But although I think it's perfectly reasonable to think that poverty is the most morally pressing
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economic issue of the age, it's not the distinctive one.
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So the poverty rate in the United States today, depending on how you measure it, is between a
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And 1960 is thought of by the left and the right both as a period of shared prosperity.
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But poverty then was much, much deeper and wider than it is today.
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At the same time as we have falling poverty in this country, we also have rising concentrated
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And the richest 1% of households in America today take home about twice as big a share
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So you have both falling poverty and rising wealth.
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And inequality has moved, as it were, up the income scale so that there is now more economic
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inequality within the richest 5% of the population than in the population as a whole.
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That is to say, the shrinking gap between the middle class and the poor dampens overall inequality
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compared to the massively rising gap between the merely rich and the super rich.
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And then there's one other thing that's going on that is also controversial or that I claim
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is going on that's controversial, which is that the sources of the very top incomes have
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So that by my calculation today, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the total income of the
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top 1% doesn't come from capital, but rather comes from labor, so that the rich have become
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the working rich or a superordinate working class.
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Whereas for most of human history, if you wanted to know how poor a person was, you would
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Whereas today, if you want to know how rich a person is, you ask how hard or how long they
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And that's also transformed the ideology of inequality in, I think, very damaging ways.
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Yeah, there are many interesting distinctions in there.
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So let's just take this one piece of the issue between disparities in work and in capital.
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So your claim here is somewhat at odds with the much-celebrated thesis of Thomas Piketty, right,
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that he published this book that everyone bought and I imagine few read a few years ago, where
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he was arguing that because the gains that accrue to capital increase at a greater rate than those
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that accrue to labor, the real driver of wealth inequality in first world societies, he wasn't
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focused exclusively on the U.S., is the distinction between people who have capital, right, who have
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investments and, you know, are therefore making money on their stock portfolio, say, and everyone
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else who has to work for a living, you know, at any salary.
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But you're saying that the truly rich here, first of all, they're not merely a leisure class.
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I mean, this is not an episode of Downton Abbey we're living through.
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They work harder, as measured in just time, than basically anyone else.
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And that is the source of the most excruciating inequality, in this case, in the top, essentially
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So let's talk just separately, briefly, about labor hours and then about the sources of income.
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So in 1979, if you were in the top fifth of the hourly wage distribution, you were about
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two-thirds as likely as someone in the bottom fifth to work over 50 hours a week.
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By 2006, if you were in the top fifth, you were more than twice as likely as someone in
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So in the roughly 30 years at the end of the last millennium, the relationship between high
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It used to be the low-paid worked the long hours, and by 2006, the high-paid worked the
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And if you look at finer slices, between about 1940 and about 2010, the top 1% added, roughly
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speaking, six to eight hours a week to its average workweek, whereas the bottom 60% lost
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maybe eight hours a week from its average workweek.
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So that's a shift of hours worked away from the bottom 60% to the top 1% of 16 hours a
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And I want to be clear, and I hope we come back to this, the reason why the middle and
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working class aren't working such long hours is not that they're lazy and don't want to
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It's that the labor market has been restructured so there aren't enough jobs.
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And even during our recent period of very low unemployment, we've also had very low labor
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So that it's true that not many people have been seeking work and not getting it, but many
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It's what sociologists of work call the time divide.
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Then there's a separate story about where the rich get their income from.
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And this is the point at which, as you suggested, Piketty's and my analyses depart.
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Now, it's important to understand that both his effect and my effect could be going on at
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And that they'd compete only, as it were, on the margin of explanation.
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So it could both be that those with capital are getting richer and also that those with super
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And the question is just which of these effects dominates the other in explaining the overall
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And it's important, actually, to read Piketty's book because Piketty himself makes quite clear
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that in the United States, in contradistinction to Western Europe, until 2000, until 2000, top
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And the only place at which we disagree is what happened since 2000.
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And we disagree there for two reasons, principally.
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And I'm going to try to put the disagreement in a way that tries to be fair as between us.
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And if we want to get into it, we can get into it.
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But one question is, how should one categorize the income of the very highest paid workers
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So these are CEOs, top executives, hedge fund people, investment bankers.
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Piketty inclines to categorize some portion of their income as capital rather than labor.
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The reason why Piketty views their income as capital income is that he thinks, in effect,
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And it's important to understand how much income there is here.
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So in a recent year, the five highest paid employees of the S&P 1500, so 7,500 workers
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overall, captured income equal to 10% of the total profits of the S&P 1500.
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So these people are capturing quantities of income that matter macroeconomically.
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I think of it as labor income because these are people who bring nothing but their own labor
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The hedge fund people don't own the assets that they invest.
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Instead, what they do is they sell their skills.
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And I have a story about technological change that tries to explain why it is that,
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counterintuitively, we've created an economy in which those skills could be incredibly valuable.
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The other big source of difference is that I treat certain categories of pass-through income,
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so this is income earned by people who own their own businesses,
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This is income captured by people who invent things, start big companies, and have founder
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shares as labor income, whereas Piketty treats it as capital income.
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I again believe it's labor income because I think, once again, what these people are contributing
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to the economic value of their ventures is their own ideas, their own work, their own labor.
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And depending on how you look at the balance of these things, you get from Piketty's number,
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which is that the top 1% get roughly half of their, little under half of their income from labor,
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to my number, which is that the top 1% get between two-thirds and three-quarters of their income
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That's a material difference, but just to close this out,
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the most striking difference is between either Piketty's estimate and mine, so either half
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or three-quarters, and what was true in, say, 1910, when the top 1% would have gotten a sixth
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or an eighth of its income from labor, or even 1960, the top 1% would have gotten a quarter
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Well, maybe it's a distinction without a real difference, because the different norms around
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work and time spent working are unaffected by how you class the source of income.
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So you take somebody like, I don't know, Mark Zuckerberg.
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I know many people know him, but I have no inside knowledge of his work habits.
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But I would bet a fair amount of money that he works considerably more than a 40-hour
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And also, his wealth is born not principally of his salary, whatever it is.
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Yeah, it is nominal compared to his actual wealth.
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And so he's making money based on the fact that he owns whatever it is, 20% of Facebook.
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And so that's, you know, you could call that capital, or you could call that the returns
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But the reality is, he's almost certainly a workaholic, and therefore, very likely believes
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He created a, whatever you think of Facebook, an enormously influential piece of technology
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that has attracted the attention of half of humanity.
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And he's, you know, part of the system you're describing in terms of the advantages accruing
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I mean, he stepped off that hamster wheel pretty early.
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He got to Harvard and then dropped out to start Facebook.
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I mean, although I guess you would probably view much of the success we see in Silicon
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Valley to be a bit of a sideshow to your main thesis, right?
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Because you're more talking about people who go the whole route through the academy and
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come out and work for Goldman Sachs or in some context like that, where they're not reaping
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these outside rewards based on their winner-take-all, one-off, brilliant idea.
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They're actually part of a much larger system of credentialing and social signaling that becomes
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this so-called meritocracy, where people are grinding away for, again, very long hours.
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But I would imagine in the case of someone like Zuckerberg or any other founder like him
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who's getting very rich, they may wish they didn't feel the need to work as much as they
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But many of these people are doing what they love or what they're addicted to.
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They're not somebody who's several rungs from the top at a place like Goldman Sachs, just
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being ground down by 90-hour work weeks because that's the way the machine runs.
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So is there a distinction to make there, or is this basically that these are the same group
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Yeah, no, I think there is a distinction to make there.
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Now, of course, there are lots of people now who go to work at Google or Facebook or Apple
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or venture capital firms in Silicon Valley who are also working on other people's projects
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But your underlying suggestion about someone like Zuckerberg does generalize so that in
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1984, for example, purely inherited fortunes outweighed self-made fortunes in the Forbes 400
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by 10 to 1, but today self-made fortunes outnumber the inherited ones so that we've reversed even
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Now, self-made is a term of art, obviously, but it's different from being Zuckerberg from
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being, say, one of the Koch brothers who inherited from their parents.
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It's—I do think that there is an important political, psychological difference between
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my view and Piketty's, and this, I think, also accounts for some of the controversy surrounding
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The capital-intensive account of rising inequality focuses the blame for an inequality that most
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people think is a bad idea at a group of people and a threshold wealth and a social position
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that is different from the group of people who are the book's natural audience.
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So the people who read Piketty are university professors, elite journalists, management consultants,
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lawyers, doctors, the broad-reading elite, and Piketty's story absolves them of responsibility
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for inequality, whereas my story says that them, namely me, us, and the institutions that
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we serve and that have made us are at the very core of the machine that is producing more and more
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inequality and blocking middle- and working-class people from opportunity.
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And I don't know if that's a virtue or not of the theory, but it does explain why there's a way in which
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a story like the capital story is quite comfortable for the elite left, whereas a story like my story
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Yeah, that's interesting. And it's interesting to consider where these various tiers economically
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should be drawn. I guess they could also be region-specific. I mean, what do you consider
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middle class? What does the field consider middle class in general? And then how do you think about
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middle class in a city like Manhattan or San Francisco?
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Yeah, I think that's a good question. And it actually is a complicated sort of conceptual
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question, and actually turns out to be a very complicated flat empirical question. So that often
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people think of people as middle class as those between something like the 40th and the 80th percentile
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of the income distribution. But of course, that varies by city and by region, and what it takes
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to lead a certain kind of lifestyle varies very much by city. The practical or data complication there
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is that there are lots of things in a city like New York or San Francisco that are obviously much,
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much more expensive than elsewhere. Housing is a big example. Of course, private schools are another
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big example. But then there are other features of elite or even upper middle class life that are
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actually cheaper in New York City than elsewhere. So certain kinds of foods, certain kinds of
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entertainment, certain kinds of restaurants are actually cheaper or easier to get in New York than
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elsewhere. So it becomes quite complicated to figure out exactly what lifestyle bundle and at what price
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it takes to be in the middle class or above the middle class socioeconomically. I tend to focus
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on the top 1% and then the 4% that surrounds them in the sense that these are the 4% or the group that
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credibly can claim it might one day be in the 1%. And so that's the group that I'm focusing the analysis
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on. And that's partly driven by the fact that that's where almost all of the income growth in America
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has happened over the past 30 years. So it makes sense to look at this narrow slice, although in
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another sense, it's a very narrow slice. And focusing on them ignores distinctions between
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somebody who's making $150,000 a year and somebody who's making $85,000 a year. Both are above median
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household income, but they're in very different positions and neither of them is close to the 1%.
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Right. Right. I think we should at some point drill down on the difference between the merely rich and
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the super rich because those orders of magnitude are counterintuitive for people. And it's just
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interesting to think about the significance of that kind of wealth stratification. It's odd to be
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focused merely on the top 1%, but it's, you know, the difference between the 0.01% and the merely 1%
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is so enormous at this point that you're not at all talking about the same thing. I mean, maybe we'll
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save that for when we talk about your op-ed in the New York Times, calling for a one-time wealth tax,
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because that's interesting. So is there more to say about the middle class here? You know, from
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hearing your argument, it seems that the middle class is in some ways the hardest hit here. And I guess
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in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, there's additional concern that, you know, when we
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surface from all of this, the middle class might scarcely even exist. What are your thoughts about
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the middle class before we focus on the problems of wealth?
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Yeah. So there's a sort of a straight empirical economic phenomenon, which is very striking,
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which is if you ask about children's odds of becoming richer than their parents. So this idea
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of sort of economic growth within the family lineage, that each generation is better off than
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the one before. For the kids that were born in 1940, basically all of them were going to end up
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richer than their parents. You had to get to roughly the 95th percentile of the income distribution.
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Before children were not almost certain to become richer than their parents.
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But for the group born in 1980, really only the poorest were certain to be richer than their
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parents. And if you look at the drop in the chance of getting richer than your parents, so by how much
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did that chance fall between 1940 and 1980, it fell by the most between the 30th and the 90th percentile
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of the income distribution. So the broad middle class, if you think of people below the 30th percentile
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as roughly speaking the poor, and people above the 90th as roughly speaking the rich,
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the broad middle class had the biggest drop-off in its odds of becoming richer than its parents,
00:29:16.780
so that the sort of future-looking hope of the economy moved away from the middle class.
00:29:22.900
And at the same time, the charismatic center of the economy and the culture
00:29:29.900
moved away from the middle class. And this is not a flat economic phenomenon. This has to do with
00:29:38.040
how much housing costs. It used to be that a house in a really, really fancy neighborhood
00:29:43.660
would cost maybe two or three times what an average house would cost. Now it costs 20 or 30 times what
00:29:52.000
an average house costs. It used to be that in America, the most expensive car you could buy was
00:29:56.920
a Cadillac. It cost twice what a Chevy cost. Now there are lots of cars that cost 10 or 20 times
00:30:04.040
what the median car costs. The same is true for kitchen appliances. The same is true for meals out,
00:30:12.300
for bottles of wine, for which supermarket you shop at. It used to be everybody shopped at Safeway.
00:30:19.280
Now you can shop at Whole Foods or you can shop at Walmart, and they have very different feels, looks,
00:30:28.200
and products. One thing I looked into, the French Laundry, the California fancy restaurant,
00:30:35.060
and Taco Bell don't have a single ingredient in common.
00:30:40.480
Not even the salt. Not even the salt. What you're getting is a stratification of all parts of life
00:30:48.460
around this income divide. The part of life that captures the attention of the culture of the media
00:30:57.140
is the rich part, whereas it used to be the part of life that captured the attention of the culture
00:31:02.780
was the middle class part. And so that's another kind of demotion, now a sort of sociological,
00:31:09.120
cultural, psychological demotion for the same group that has taken the biggest hit in its economic
00:31:14.520
opportunities. And that's extremely damaging to flourishing and to politics.
00:31:21.140
Well, much of this is relative, of course, because as you point out, there's less poverty than there's ever been.
00:31:30.620
Right. And when you look at what the average lower middle class or even, you know, slightly below that person has access to
00:31:42.520
compared to, you know, what previous generations had, I mean, you just take something like a smartphone, right?
00:31:49.040
Well, it's just, this is a piece of magic if you brought it back to the, even in the late 20th century, right?
00:31:58.460
I mean, it's just, this is, you're walking around with something in your pocket that not even the president of the United States
00:32:07.820
And I'm sure there are some technocrats or, you know, techno-utopians who would say there's nothing wrong with growing inequality per se
00:32:19.280
as long as the floor is rising for everyone. And there's some sign that the floor is rising for everyone.
00:32:29.240
Well, I think the first thing I say is that there's a sense in which what you say is even more true than your example suggests,
00:32:35.980
like the smartphone, you know, I don't know, did you ever drive a Chrysler K car?
00:32:44.000
No. So, you know, a car in the 1980s, those were terrible cars.
00:32:54.380
It's safe, it's quiet, it's powerful, it's comfortable in a way in which almost no consumer good from 40, 50 years ago was.
00:33:02.940
And so it's not just new inventions, it's familiar things have become a lot better.
00:33:06.760
On the other hand, even though it is true that poverty is down and that middle-class consumption has continued to rise,
00:33:15.660
it's also true that other forms or markers of human flourishing have not been rising.
00:33:21.820
So if you think of Anne Case's and Angus Deaton's demographic work on the fact that there is rising mortality and falling life expectancy in middle-class Americans,
00:33:35.300
We have falling life expectancy in a group, a large group of the population, without war, without economic collapse,
00:33:49.040
and until six weeks ago, without epidemic disease.
00:33:56.500
And the causes of the falling life expectancy are overwhelmingly overdose, addiction, suicide, smoking, heart disease,
00:34:13.300
They're forms of direct or indirect self-harm, really.
00:34:16.820
And the reason for that, I think, is that this goes back to the meritocracy point that we started with.
00:34:25.680
We've constructed a social and economic order with massive structural exclusion.
00:34:32.220
The reason it's hard to get ahead as a middle-class child or adult in America today
00:34:36.480
is that the system is rigged against you, the education system is rigged against you as a child
00:34:43.140
The labor market requires you to have fancy training and fancy degrees that you can't afford to get.
00:34:49.360
And then meritocracy recharacterizes this structural exclusion as an individual failure to measure up.
00:34:57.360
It then says, and by the way, the reason you haven't gotten ahead is that you weren't good enough.
00:35:03.240
And so the layering of this sort of profound moral insult on top of an economic injury
00:35:10.720
produces then the forms of self-harm that reduce life expectancy.
00:35:17.300
And the reduced life expectancy, which really is demographically unprecedented,
00:35:21.060
it just doesn't happen that you have lower life expectancy without war, disease, economic collapse,
00:35:28.800
shows just how damaging this form of exclusion and inequality really is.
00:35:35.900
And no amount of stories of better consumer goods or cell phones or even more square feet per person in housing
00:35:47.700
can make up for the harms done by that set of structural exclusions and moral insults.
00:35:55.360
Yeah, there are many differences in, just take this health distinction between the wealthy and even the middle class.
00:36:05.580
I think at some point you say that the life expectancy difference between the 1% and the middle class
00:36:11.660
exceeds what would be true if we cured cancer, which is a fairly arresting idea.
00:36:19.660
And there's just, there's so many other sociological differences in these cohorts.
00:36:25.180
I mean, you look at the rate of divorce or, you know, having children out of wedlock.
00:36:29.720
All of those things have enormous consequences too.
00:36:32.760
I mean, you know, divorce and having a child out of wedlock,
00:36:36.440
these are variables that are almost synonymous with economic hardship.
00:36:41.400
At minimum, a serious economic penalty and also an opportunity penalty with respect to the kids
00:36:48.960
and their ability to go to good schools and all the rest.
00:36:53.920
How else do you think about the difference in, there's a kind of a non-virtuous or virtuous,
00:37:00.300
depending on whether you're benefiting from it, cycle here.
00:37:03.000
Once things are going well, you know, everything tends to be going better.
00:37:07.400
However, how else do you think about the difference between the elites,
00:37:11.700
as I think you tend to call them, and everyone else?
00:37:15.140
Yeah, let me just say, first of all, the effects that you're describing are sort of so enormous
00:37:21.700
that if you don't look twice, you don't believe they're real.
00:37:25.760
So, you know, in 1970, out-of-marriage births accounted for less than 10% of the births to women
00:37:37.400
But today, women with a high school education or less, so without college degrees,
00:37:43.380
that's two-thirds of women, have over 50% of their children outside of marriage.
00:37:48.680
Whereas women with a college education or more have only 3% of their children outside of marriage.
00:37:59.900
And I think the way I think about it is that life in capitalism,
00:38:09.460
and particularly life in a meritocracy, is hard.
00:38:14.340
It's a constant struggle in competition with others.
00:38:18.320
No institution or person gives you the basic things that you need to flourish without your
00:38:29.800
And that means that success under those circumstances requires enormous amounts of support early in life
00:38:52.580
And that means that grown-ups who are struggling themselves are not in a good position
00:38:59.740
to provide the advantages for their children that the children will need to compete in the next generation.
00:39:06.580
Whereas grown-ups who have abundance themselves are in a much, much better position to do it.
00:39:13.680
And that explains how inequality that in some sense looks like it's narrowly economic based on income or wealth
00:39:23.680
can become comprehensive, can reach into family structure, childbearing.
00:39:37.960
You know, 80 years ago, prosperous was a euphemism for comfortably overweight.
00:39:45.260
Whereas today, the rich are almost exclusively extremely fit because they pay trainers and gyms to exercise.
00:39:55.060
Whereas the obesity epidemic that this country faces is overwhelmingly concentrated in the middle and working classes.
00:40:11.620
And so this is a way in which economic inequality can inscribe itself even in the bodies of the rich and the poor.
00:40:17.980
And it's extremely damaging to our broader social order.
00:40:22.220
Yeah, so on some level, there's changing norms here, which are also part of the problem.
00:40:34.700
It once was the case that you could be obese and smoke a cigar and you're the caricature of a rich guy.
00:40:42.280
Now, if your midlife crisis entails training for an Ironman competition, you're the caricature of the super-driven CEO, i.e. rich guy.
00:40:55.300
But that's, you know, the money can be constant there.
00:41:03.640
And also, I guess, I don't know the explanation for the change in out-of-wedlock birth.
00:41:08.840
But again, that's also another kind of norm here around sexuality, which it seems to me could at least be orthogonal to changes in objective economic circumstance and opportunity.
00:41:25.660
I think, in fact, they're not in the following sense.
00:41:31.060
If you live in an aristocratic system in which breeding itself, birthright, is sufficient to secure the success of children and keep the family dynasty going,
00:41:43.820
it doesn't matter very much how the aristocratic adults raise their children or spend their time, because their children will be privileged.
00:41:54.520
But in a meritocracy, one of the most important productive activities is training children.
00:42:04.240
And so one of the reasons why elite families live these hyper-conservative lives, although their official ideology around sex is one of great liberalism,
00:42:14.160
is that they realize that the success of their children depends on an orderly, work-driven, training-driven domestic space.
00:42:26.860
And so they produce it, and it has actually very bad gender effects within the rich families,
00:42:32.660
which is that rich women earn much, much less than their rich male partners,
00:42:39.500
even though the official gender ideology of the elite is one of economic equality between men and women.
00:42:45.680
On the other hand, the jobs that have been most attacked, most aggressively destroyed by the transformations in the labor market
00:42:56.880
that accompany this kind of inequality are the jobs that traditionally middle-class and working-class men did.
00:43:04.960
And so working-class and middle-class men have had their earning power most harmed
00:43:10.220
and their social status most harmed by these transformations in work and labor.
00:43:15.180
So that now, if you survey working-class families and households,
00:43:21.120
they say that it is important that husbands out-earn wives or that men out-earn women.
00:43:27.620
But in fact, in the bottom third of the income distribution, women out-earn men in households.
00:43:32.840
And this dramatically undermines the sort of ideology of marriage and domestic life
00:43:40.560
because, again, in a gender hierarchical society, this makes it hard to find marriageable men.
00:43:48.680
It makes men uncomfortable in households with wives who earn more.
00:43:53.080
And so when you overlay the form of inequality that we're seeing,
00:43:57.280
the economic inequality that we're seeing, on a gender hierarchy,
00:44:04.880
and the breakdown of the traditional family outside of the elite.
00:44:09.260
And obviously, a lot of other things are going on at the same time,
00:44:11.840
and it would be crazy to try to reduce so complicated phenomena to this one line of explanation.
00:44:17.200
But it's not that the economic story has nothing to say about these wide social ramifications.
00:44:26.680
So it seems to me we have a growing problem of social solidarity here,
00:44:32.680
and this has political implications that are increasingly painful.
00:44:37.020
And for me, just in private conversations in response to your recent op-ed on a wealth tax,
00:44:43.480
this was born home because, as you say in several places throughout your book,
00:44:49.200
the elite think of themselves as self-made, right?
00:44:52.860
I mean, now they're not, you know, by and large,
00:44:54.980
they're not people who just inherited their wealth from their grandfather,
00:45:00.820
These are people who got really busy very early
00:45:04.220
and have stayed busy up until about 30 seconds ago,
00:45:10.500
And they have had lives, in many cases, even most,
00:45:15.420
that, you know, by any measure have to be objectively granted as stressful,
00:45:22.200
And so they are more resistant to redistribution
00:45:27.880
and any kind of ethical argument about its necessity or basic decency
00:45:35.860
And so I remember, so you wrote this op-ed in the New York Times
00:45:41.580
and you argued that we need a one-time wealth tax.
00:45:45.400
Maybe just give me the potted version of that argument,
00:45:48.480
and then I can tell you what it was like to try to represent that in my world.
00:45:53.520
So, you know, the pandemic is a systemic attack
00:46:16.360
and to keep their jobs in the face of social isolation.
00:46:32.460
and it's not so nice to be at home all the time.
00:46:46.540
We have workers who were previously called low-skilled
00:48:07.640
And what's the significance of it being one time
00:48:26.980
that would incentivize the offshoring of wealth
00:49:08.060
And so those are very different kinds of principles.