Making Sense - Sam Harris - #232 — Inequality and Revolution

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:08.320 This is Sam Harris.

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00:00:47.080 Okay, well today I'm speaking with Jack Goldstone.

00:00:52.220 Jack is a sociologist and a professor of public policy at George Mason University, and he's

00:00:59.340 one of the world experts on revolutions and the social and political and economic variables

00:01:06.700 that produce them.

00:01:09.140 He focuses a lot on economic growth in a global economy and on the effects of population change

00:01:15.720 on economic growth and how all this feeds into the causes and outcomes of revolutions.

00:01:21.320 And I must say, I was very impressed with how clearly he frames these issues.

00:01:28.460 And we talk about many of the relevant variables here.

00:01:31.680 Inequality of various kinds, wealth inequality included, failures of social mobility, changes

00:01:39.160 we might make to the tax code, new norms around social responsibility that we clearly need.

00:01:44.940 I probably don't have to remind you that a few short weeks ago, we witnessed the Capitol

00:01:52.480 stormed by a mob whose diverse interests and commitments certainly included an intent to overthrow

00:02:03.260 the government of the United States.

00:02:05.900 So, talking about the prospect of revolution at this point in American history doesn't seem

00:02:14.020 as paranoid as it otherwise might.

00:02:18.940 And I'm convinced that we really need to keep all of the trends that are leading to this

00:02:24.580 level of political instability and hyper-partisanship in view.

00:02:29.160 And this conversation is an excellent place to start.

00:02:32.120 So now, without further delay, I bring you Jack Goldstone.

00:02:41.760 I am here with Jack Goldstone.

00:02:44.000 Jack, thanks for joining me.

00:02:46.000 My pleasure.

00:02:46.760 Good to talk to you.

00:02:47.840 So, before we dive into the matter at hand, how do you summarize your background?

00:02:53.480 What are your, what's been your professional and academic focus?

00:02:56.900 Well, academics would call me a sociologist, but my study is long-term social change.

00:03:04.560 I've looked at revolutions and social protests and changes of regime and government from about

00:03:11.640 1500 to the present.

00:03:14.140 And this gives you an expertise that seems excruciatingly relevant at the current moment in American life.

00:03:24.220 Really, globally, it seems relevant, but I think I want to focus on our own country here.

00:03:31.340 Well, we can go wherever in the world you'd like.

00:03:33.200 I'm happy to travel.

00:03:34.600 Yeah, yeah.

00:03:35.300 So, I've noticed that in your work.

00:03:38.240 Maybe we should start at least acknowledging the global nature of the phenomenon we're going to talk about,

00:03:45.920 and then we can talk about the American scene specifically.

00:03:49.580 But we've seen that there's been a rise of populism and anti-globalism, nativism.

00:03:57.580 There are many nouns that intersect.

00:04:00.740 There's a loss of trust in institutions.

00:04:03.720 What do we know about the sources of this kind of political instability and loss of social cohesion generally?

00:04:13.300 What are the kinds of variables you think about when you try to understand these trends?

00:04:19.680 Sure.

00:04:19.780 Well, let me give you a general and then circle around to what's happening in the globe today.

00:04:24.840 In general, across the centuries, there's a pretty persistent pattern,

00:04:29.820 and it goes back to some of the wisdom that Roman leaders shared among themselves.

00:04:34.680 And that is, when you work for honor, and the richest and most powerful members of society

00:04:41.800 try to enrich and make their society as a whole stronger, the society flourishes.

00:04:48.960 On the other hand, when the rich and powerful simply try to protect and extend their own wealth

00:04:53.460 at the expense of others, the society sooner or later collapses.

00:04:57.960 So, that's the general picture.

00:04:59.820 And you might say, well, elites know that.

00:05:02.080 Why would they do that?

00:05:03.180 But the answer is, when a country gets rich and elites are in competition with each other,

00:05:10.420 they often fall back on just kind of keeping score with how they do compared to their peers.

00:05:16.380 And they think, well, the rest of society will just go on.

00:05:19.560 It's not my problem, not my issue.

00:05:21.820 And so, then you get people trying to accumulate more and more wealth to protect it from taxation

00:05:27.740 and to prevent public services from being fully funded.

00:05:32.600 And all of that leads to the rest of society growing more and more angry

00:05:37.220 because they have a sense that they're falling behind, they're being left out.

00:05:41.740 The government no longer is watching out for them.

00:05:44.900 And so, they turn against it.

00:05:46.240 They turn against the government.

00:05:47.300 They turn against the elites.

00:05:48.260 They get angry.

00:05:49.060 And they look for ways to let that anger out, usually joining some radical or extremist movements.

00:05:54.620 So, that was a wonderful summary of a very depressing landscape.

00:06:00.760 To bring it to the U.S. context here, how much do you view Trump and the four years we've just experienced

00:06:08.860 as a mere symptom of these underlying problems and the problems themselves were evident in 2015 and before?

00:06:19.760 And how much do you view him as an exacerbator or cause of these problems?

00:06:27.540 Well, he's certainly an exacerbator.

00:06:29.440 He's not the underlying cause.

00:06:31.220 And in fact, the underlying cause, and this is why it's a global phenomenon,

00:06:36.200 has more to do with the changes in technology and society that we've seen in the last 30 years.

00:06:42.900 We've had two things happen.

00:06:45.020 One is that the big post-World War II generations, what we call the baby boom in this country, 0.99

00:06:52.060 post-war surges elsewhere,

00:06:54.460 they came of age in a time when manual labor was the key to the economy.

00:07:00.980 People made things.

00:07:02.180 They provided services.

00:07:03.340 They got wealthy or at least made stable, good incomes doing that.

00:07:09.260 And there was respect for people who made things and built things and did things with their hands.

00:07:14.080 But as the baby boom got older, they found the rug pulled out from under them.

00:07:20.120 The economy started to shift in the direction of finance, high finance, loans, credit,

00:07:27.100 management of securities, grew bigger and bigger from like 5% of the economy to 15% of the economy.

00:07:35.020 And the other thing that grew, of course, is the digital economy, which we're all familiar with and which we all enjoy.

00:07:40.900 But the digital economy doesn't employ that many people.

00:07:44.240 And it certainly doesn't give its rewards and respect to people doing manual labor.

00:07:49.800 And so for the baby boomers, the life that they expected, the respect, the dignity that they had in work, they find is disappearing. 0.68

00:07:59.180 Their communities are hurt by it.

00:08:01.360 The prospects for their children, if they can't get into university, which is increasingly expensive and difficult, have diminished.

00:08:08.340 So we've seen a slowdown in social mobility.

00:08:12.300 At the same time, we've seen a reduction in the life quality and life prospects for those, especially in kind of the smaller towns, rural areas that were the farming, manufacturing heartland.

00:08:25.320 Now, the big metro areas have continued to thrive, but the big metro areas have their own issues.

00:08:31.960 They tend to be very diverse.

00:08:33.200 They have to deal with the issues of racial justice, discrimination, managing diversity.

00:08:40.140 And that's another source of anger for those who feel that as immigrants, perhaps, or as people of color, society doesn't grant them dignity and respect either.

00:08:50.960 And so you have both on the left and the right these kind of widespread feelings that, wait a minute, all the rewards of society seem to be going to a very small group.

00:09:00.680 And they also seem to be taking over all the institutions, and they seem to be rigging everything in their favor.

00:09:07.980 And what's going to become of us?

00:09:09.780 We need someone to fight back against everything being rigged.

00:09:12.860 And that leads to the attraction of kind of the populist strong man who says, I alone can fix it.

00:09:19.240 I can be your champion.

00:09:20.360 And produces really an almost quasi-religious devotion to someone who presents themselves as a savior, as a national symbol of regeneration.

00:09:31.060 Now, Donald Trump came along and, with all the skills of a pro-wrestling television celebrity, donned the mantle of hero and was very successful in that.

00:09:43.320 But, of course, he had counterparts in other countries, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte in the Philippines, Erdogan in Turkey, Boris Johnson and the Brexit movement in the United Kingdom.

00:09:56.480 You know, the details vary, but in each case, it's not been the leading edge economically of the society that's been driving change.

00:10:07.140 It's been those who feel frustrated that they are not benefiting as much as those leading edge elites that they see.

00:10:13.940 I think you wrote in a piece that you published with Peter Turchin that, and I'm quoting you,

00:10:22.340 inequality and polarization have not been this high since the 19th century.

00:10:26.840 I think we're probably going to want to focus on wealth inequality, but what are the important measures of inequality?

00:10:33.740 Can you put some numbers to this in the U.S.?

00:10:36.120 And is there anything other than wealth inequality that is a major driver of this problem?

00:10:43.940 Well, there certainly are many inequalities besides just inequality of wealth, and inequality of wealth is probably not the most troubling.

00:10:52.600 Oh, interesting. That's great, because my assumption coming into this conversation is that wealth inequality is really the elephant in every room now.

00:11:02.100 And so, yeah, please fill in the gaps in my knowledge here.

00:11:05.040 Okay, look, we've been through this before.

00:11:07.980 We had the railroad robber barons.

00:11:10.360 We had the Rockefellers and the Carnegies build up huge amounts of wealth. 0.99

00:11:14.700 But when they did so, other parts of society were benefiting as well.

00:11:19.880 That is, the railroads and the oil industries employed lots of workers and gave them opportunities.

00:11:26.180 What we've had in the last 30 years with the rise of finance and digital fortunes is the rich getting richer while everyone else stagnates or grows very slowly indeed.

00:11:41.300 And it's more the differences in opportunity, in social mobility, in access to what I would call middle-class amenities, a safe neighborhood, good schools for your children, medical care, the ability to have a varied diet.

00:12:00.300 Those things have, even though the price of a color TV has gone way down, the price of a new automobile has gone way down, the things that are essential to quality of family life remain competitive and therefore expensive.

00:12:15.960 And in many settings, increasingly beyond the reach, both of young people and people who don't have college degree professional positions.

00:12:24.540 Now, wealth inequality harms society if those who are wealthy use that to get control of government policy and steer that wealth in ways that benefits themselves.

00:12:38.260 If they are generous with the wealth and use it to endow museums, universities, to invest in new businesses, to rehabilitate districts, then that's fine.

00:12:48.920 That's good for society.

00:12:50.040 So a lot of it has to do with how wealth is deployed and how income and opportunities are distributed.

00:12:58.380 And it's the fact that the use of private wealth and the distribution of opportunities really seems to have diminished for large portions of the population, maybe 30% to 50% in many of the advanced Western countries.

00:13:12.420 And so you have a lot of that anger, you know, the yellow vests in France, people in Chile who rioted against their government, people in Brazil who rioted at the cost of bus fare going up.

00:13:24.600 These are people who feel like they're just getting by and every imposition upon them is increasingly pushing them over the edge.

00:13:31.980 So fundamental psychological fact here, which is certainly an unhappy one, is that per people's personal judgments of well-being are generally comparative.

00:13:44.660 So that even if by any absolute measure everyone was getting better off, if the difference between the most fortunate and the least fortunate is continuing to widen, then that is seen as a source of real grievance and frustration,

00:14:04.480 even if virtually everyone has a smartphone in their pocket that not even the President of the United States could have managed to get 30 years ago.

00:14:15.660 On some level, we seem to be doomed to dissatisfaction, no matter how good things get for everyone,

00:14:24.560 if things are getting better and better and better faster for a subset of the population.

00:14:31.380 I mean, at least it seems like something like that structure is part of our legacy code.

00:14:37.480 That's a pessimistic way of looking at it.

00:14:39.960 Yes, there's always envy.

00:14:41.920 People always feel down and out if they see others doing better than themselves.

00:14:45.860 But people compare themselves mainly to other people they encounter in their own life.

00:14:52.260 So if you're living in a subdivision or an urban neighborhood,

00:14:56.580 you don't really care whether the guy living on the 70th floor of the penthouse has a gold bathtub or a porcelain bathtub.

00:15:07.240 You don't care whether he's keeping an 80-foot yacht in the harbor or a 50-foot yacht.

00:15:12.320 Those things aren't relevant to you.

00:15:14.140 What you care about is whether you're going to be able to move into a better house when you get married with room for your kids,

00:15:20.440 whether the people down the block or on just the other side of town who you see are somehow able to afford things that you can't afford anymore,

00:15:31.260 that you thought you or your parents could afford.

00:15:33.600 So you're right.

00:15:35.260 There's always a degree of comparing ourselves to others.

00:15:38.940 But it doesn't have to be the kind of, well, there will always be people richer than me, so I'm always going to be unhappy.

00:15:45.000 That's not how people are.

00:15:46.620 As long as people feel that they're getting better, that they're getting ahead in their own lives,

00:15:52.460 and that the progress that they're making is reasonable compared to most of the people they see immediately around them,

00:15:58.300 they're usually quite pleased.

00:16:00.180 Most people are not quite as prone to torment themselves with the envy of the rich as you might think.

00:16:06.440 Otherwise, there wouldn't be as much of a happy market for watching all those tales of the rich and famous.

00:16:11.540 Those are like fairy tales that people hope will come true, but they don't actually hurt people's feelings.

00:16:17.740 What hurts is if in their day-to-day lives they feel stuck,

00:16:21.400 if they feel that they can't live the way that their parents did or that they expected to do 10, 20 years ago,

00:16:28.560 and they've been working hard to get ahead, and it just hasn't happened.

00:16:32.760 So the circle of comparison is tighter than I suggested there,

00:16:38.320 but it seems like this structure travels with us at every level of success in society.

00:16:47.080 So you have billionaires who currently feel like they haven't made it financially

00:16:53.900 because they can compare themselves to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk,

00:16:57.840 and you have people who have tens of millions of dollars who feel poor by reference to billionaires.

00:17:06.560 And there's something insidious about this because, as you say,

00:17:10.560 if they were deploying their wealth in extremely pro-social and generous ways,

00:17:17.000 it wouldn't represent a kind of toxic capture of resources.

00:17:21.000 But I think if people feel they haven't made it, even when they have a billion dollars on some level,

00:17:28.040 and they're keeping score with reference to the people who have 10 or 100-fold more resources than they do,

00:17:36.620 it either erodes good norms we used to have.

00:17:41.400 You can educate me on this point.

00:17:43.280 I'm not sure how much we used to have them.

00:17:45.560 Or at least it prevents the formation of norms that we should have,

00:17:50.600 which is people should see that one of the main reasons to be wealthy

00:17:55.280 is to be able to help other people and produce the kind of society that we all want to live in, right?

00:18:02.660 And not to allow that kind of abundance to become just a magnifying glass

00:18:10.020 for the light of self-concern to be even more concentrated.

00:18:14.740 At some point, I mean, if you...

00:18:16.440 No, you've got it.

00:18:17.360 I think, you know, if we think about the elites having become more cosmopolitan

00:18:23.320 and traveling to the same conferences and the same ritzy resorts

00:18:28.500 and really being cut off in some ways from their society in which they grew up,

00:18:34.700 that's a very unfortunate thing.

00:18:36.820 Not that long ago, the rich might have lived in the fanciest part of town,

00:18:41.400 but they attended public festivals and they attended church in the same town

00:18:48.060 and in some of the same buildings and institutions

00:18:50.300 as the other people who lived in that community.

00:18:53.700 And the way the rich wanted to be remembered was as benefactors, as generous,

00:18:59.900 whatever they were in their private lives, in their public lives,

00:19:02.920 they wanted to be seen as people who were pillars of the community.

00:19:07.140 And that phrase, you know, the pillar of the community seems to have gone out of fashion.

00:19:13.100 We used to talk about it being, you know, harder for a rich man to enter heaven, right,

00:19:18.160 than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.

00:19:20.740 The religious idea was virtue and honor were to be found in helping your fellow men.

00:19:27.380 And today, I think Joe Biden actually believes in the ideal of public service.

00:19:31.600 He is more interested in making 350 million Americans better off than making himself better off.

00:19:39.300 That has diminishing returns for him, but he will go to his grave delightfully happy

00:19:45.880 if he has made all Americans better off.

00:19:49.140 Now, that's an old school ideal.

00:19:50.840 I'm glad it's back in the presidency in the United States, and I hope it can spread.

00:19:55.620 But that's what successful societies, frankly, rely on.

00:19:58.860 If the richest and most powerful turn their backs on public welfare,

00:20:04.420 then democracy doesn't make sense for people anymore,

00:20:07.580 because why should they vote for a government that ignores them

00:20:11.280 and that concentrates its benefits on the rich?

00:20:14.280 So if we want to restore and rejuvenate democracy,

00:20:17.280 we need governments that function to provide broad general benefits again,

00:20:21.700 not that simply exist to help those who have the best positions

00:20:26.400 or the most capital get even further ahead.

00:20:30.160 Well, it's interesting.

00:20:30.680 It seems that there's a tension here,

00:20:32.580 because in my lexicon, personally,

00:20:35.840 cosmopolitanism is not a pejorative term.

00:20:40.380 To think of oneself more and more as a citizen of the world,

00:20:45.100 you know, who's just open to the best ideas,

00:20:47.360 you know, whatever their provenance,

00:20:49.360 and whose circle of moral concern has extended beyond the borders of one's country

00:20:56.200 to encompass all of civilization, right,

00:20:59.320 and to feel that we should be prioritizing

00:21:02.780 certainly some of our generosity,

00:21:05.120 much of our generosity,

00:21:06.040 along the lines of greatest need, right?

00:21:09.340 So to care about what's happening,

00:21:12.200 you know, in some beleaguered place in sub-Saharan Africa

00:21:15.100 is not a misappropriation of one's compassion.

00:21:20.620 It's, in fact, it's just a recognition of, you know,

00:21:23.220 one should be more moved than one tends to be by the greatest need,

00:21:28.620 and kind of accidents of geographic distance are just that.

00:21:32.900 They don't actually have ethical import,

00:21:35.560 even though they feel they do.

00:21:36.980 And, you know, if you tell me my neighbor's daughter fell down a well,

00:21:41.060 well, then it's going to occupy all of my attention,

00:21:43.820 and you tell me that there's a genocide raging in Sudan or some other place,

00:21:48.440 and hundreds of thousands of children,

00:21:50.900 just like my neighbor's daughter, have been killed,

00:21:54.040 you know, I'm going to find that so boring

00:21:56.140 that I'm going to switch the channel when it appears on the evening news, right?

00:21:59.580 So that seems like a bug in our code rather than a feature.

00:22:03.060 So it just, it seems like

00:22:04.680 much of what you seem to have just derided,

00:22:07.960 or at least flagged as a source of political liability as cosmopolitanism,

00:22:13.600 is just an acknowledgement that so many of our problems are global now,

00:22:20.160 and that no one nation,

00:22:22.660 and so many of our opportunities are global, right?

00:22:25.660 It's just that, you know, we are, we're struggling to build a global civilization

00:22:29.480 that actually works,

00:22:31.360 and so our thinking on many points should be global,

00:22:34.020 and it's actually all to the good that we wind up going to conferences

00:22:38.360 where people from all over the world bring their best ideas and network.

00:22:43.780 And yet, one externality of that trend, it sounds like,

00:22:48.640 is the complete erosion or near-complete erosion of the very principles

00:22:54.920 that would make a single country like our own work as a democracy.

00:23:01.840 Well, I clearly hit a nerve here.

00:23:04.200 Let me try and talk about cosmopolitanism in a way that avoids,

00:23:09.480 I hope, some of these concerns about where do you do the most good.

00:23:13.240 If you have a family, and you're living in a house,

00:23:17.040 and as you say, your neighbor's daughter fell down a well,

00:23:20.540 well, of course, you're going to go help your neighbor and rescue the daughter.

00:23:25.280 That's an imperative to do.

00:23:27.480 On the other hand, let's say you hear that someone all across town,

00:23:33.640 their daughter fell in a well,

00:23:36.020 and you certainly would like to help if you didn't have any other priorities at home.

00:23:40.780 But if your own daughter is upstairs sick with a fever

00:23:44.160 and needs to be cared for,

00:23:46.300 maybe she's just gotten out of surgery or she has a very high fever,

00:23:50.000 you're not going to leave your own daughter who is sick

00:23:52.900 to go help someone else,

00:23:55.140 even if they need help,

00:23:56.960 until your own house is in order.

00:24:00.400 Now, when you asked me about different types of inequality,

00:24:02.820 I said I wasn't focused on wealth.

00:24:05.380 Let me talk about one that's really down to earth,

00:24:07.960 and that is life expectancy.

00:24:09.280 How long people live.

00:24:11.700 America, along with the United Kingdom,

00:24:14.720 was one of the only rich countries in the world

00:24:18.520 where life expectancy started going down between 2015 and 2018.

00:24:24.960 We've never had that in our history.

00:24:27.760 It indicates that our society was suffering from illness.

00:24:33.100 It was an illness of opioid addiction

00:24:34.900 and other deaths of despair,

00:24:37.520 alcoholism, suicide.

00:24:40.060 Now, I do think it's important.

00:24:41.840 We have one planet.

00:24:43.180 We have one climate.

00:24:44.180 We all have to pitch in.

00:24:45.760 I contribute money to medical charities overseas

00:24:49.660 as well as to hospitals here at home

00:24:51.740 because, you're right,

00:24:53.340 it is important to recognize we're all part of a global community.

00:24:56.440 But we cannot neglect people who are really suffering,

00:25:01.500 who are losing years of life here that they shouldn't be losing.

00:25:06.040 And as I say, that was going on even before Trump was elected.

00:25:09.940 It's part of the reason I think he was elected.

00:25:12.600 You can look at the vote for Trump against counties

00:25:15.460 that had declines in life expectancy in the prior few years,

00:25:20.180 and it's a very close match.

00:25:21.800 It's one of the best predictors of Trump kind of voting as a protest

00:25:26.620 because you're unhappy with conditions in your community and your life.

00:25:30.920 So when I say cosmopolitanism is a problem,

00:25:34.220 it's only if people say that they think their country,

00:25:40.020 the United States, is fine and we can look beyond that.

00:25:45.480 You can look beyond your own country,

00:25:47.760 but not if it blinds you to what's going on right in your own home.

00:25:51.800 And I think this is something we missed.

00:25:54.040 It really wasn't until Anne Case and Angus Deaton published their research

00:25:58.480 calling attention to the fact that life expectancy had started to go down

00:26:02.800 that it became an issue for policymakers and for the media.

00:26:07.200 It went on for years quietly in communities across America

00:26:11.140 without being appreciated.

00:26:12.760 But we could have seen the precursors of it, I believe,

00:26:15.860 by looking at changes in the distribution of income,

00:26:19.000 in the distribution of opportunity and mobility,

00:26:21.220 in what was happening to the economic base of many rural and small-town communities.

00:26:27.300 So by all means, be a cosmopolitan,

00:26:29.960 but that also means get to know parts of your own country

00:26:33.200 that you might not know as well.

00:26:35.480 We talk about flyover and coastal elites.

00:26:38.220 I find that kind of demeaning.

00:26:40.440 I spend a lot of time when I was a kid taking buses across the country,

00:26:44.120 listening to country western music.

00:26:45.580 I still like to drive when I can from the east coast to the west

00:26:49.580 and see this big, beautiful country in between

00:26:52.200 and get to know the people there.

00:26:54.240 Because those are the people, at the end of the day,

00:26:56.840 whose choices, as long as we live in a democracy,

00:26:59.700 those are the people whose voices and whose choices will make a difference

00:27:03.400 just as much as mine.

00:27:04.520 And we have to come together and find things that will make everyone better off

00:27:08.940 if we're going to keep democracy going.

00:27:11.200 Otherwise, we get into these historical cycles of selfish elites,

00:27:15.620 angry popular groups,

00:27:17.100 and the rise of populist leaders, demagogues, and mass protest.

00:27:22.200 And it gets violent.

00:27:23.100 It gets ugly.

00:27:23.720 And we've seen that.

00:27:25.200 We need to change direction.

00:27:26.300 So I guess where I want to land here in this conversation

00:27:31.120 is with some sense of what we think we should do going forward.

00:27:37.000 I mean, it seems like we have massive problems to solve,

00:27:41.240 many of which are only exacerbating the problem we're talking about.

00:27:46.020 We have to deal with the COVID pandemic, obviously,

00:27:49.620 but the COVID pandemic has ramified and worsened various forms of inequality.

00:27:56.300 In our society, certainly wealth is one.

00:27:59.340 And we've begun this conversation framing it in terms of

00:28:03.820 what the most fortunate people decide to do, essentially.

00:28:09.640 You know, we've put it in terms of philanthropy and charity.

00:28:12.420 But really, the other piece here is our tax code

00:28:16.240 and the willingness or disinclination of rich people to pay

00:28:22.060 what we might think is their fair share or more in taxes

00:28:27.080 and the degree to which they're going to fight any attempt to raise taxes.

00:28:32.320 How do you view taxation here

00:28:35.960 and any specific strategies we might use to redistribute wealth?

00:28:43.760 Here's what I think the psychological status quo is here

00:28:47.520 among fortunate, wealthy people at every level.

00:28:51.760 There's a sense that, you know, rather often the government is terrible

00:28:58.780 at what it attempts to do, right?

00:29:00.660 There's a basic cynicism that the government can ever do anything especially well.

00:29:05.540 And therefore, you tend to encounter rich people who think that there's some,

00:29:10.900 that this offers some argument for not paying more in taxes

00:29:15.460 because the money will be wasted or, you know, spent on some boondoggle.

00:29:19.940 Whereas in my view, it's really just, that's an argument for better governance.

00:29:23.840 By all means, point out all the ways in which government fails and is wasteful,

00:29:28.100 but that's not an argument at where you want to set the tax code.

00:29:32.160 It's an argument for better government.

00:29:34.900 But there is a, there's a sense that, you know, taxes are already too high.

00:29:39.940 You run into this with disconcerting frequency among rich people.

00:29:43.440 And therefore, it's only rational to want to decide to give the money

00:29:48.300 to the most effective causes oneself rather than have the government waste it.

00:29:51.860 So this is, this explains a bias for philanthropy over taxation.

00:29:56.520 But as we know, people aren't, you know, all that generous when they don't have to be,

00:30:01.760 or at least most of them are not.

00:30:02.960 And so the amount that people actually give away,

00:30:05.740 even when it's well publicized,

00:30:07.480 is a, you know, a rounding error on a rounding error of their wealth rather often.

00:30:12.920 And it's certainly not what they would be obliged to give away if we raised taxes on them.

00:30:19.900 So how do you view taxation here?

00:30:22.840 And, you know, feel free to get into any specific ideas about how to change our tax code.

00:30:29.680 Thank you for that invitation.

00:30:32.340 Most people would like to tear up the existing tax code and start over.

00:30:36.480 But let me say, from the point of view of my model,

00:30:38.960 there are actually three things that need to be kept in mind

00:30:42.420 as we try and pull our society back from the edge of extreme conflict and decay.

00:30:48.960 One is restoring people's trust that government can function and can solve problems.

00:30:54.840 The days when we looked to government to provide the interstate highway system,

00:30:59.640 to build beautiful airports, to build subways to take us to work,

00:31:03.960 to provide law and order, to provide for the national defense,

00:31:07.580 to send rockets to the moon, to develop new cures for disease.

00:31:12.720 All of these things we trusted government to do reasonably well,

00:31:16.140 and we thought they were prudent investments for the future.

00:31:18.840 But as you say, too many people now think that any dollar spent by government is wasted,

00:31:24.240 and therefore even a dollar spent on an ultra-premium whiskey for one person's consumption

00:31:30.820 is still better than letting that money be wasted by the government.

00:31:35.300 So that philosophy has to change.

00:31:38.140 We have to say, look, there are legitimate things that government can do.

00:31:42.780 And you know what?

00:31:44.040 When there's a disaster, when even a rich person's land gets flooded,

00:31:48.660 or a tornado comes, they come to the government and say,

00:31:53.080 what about restoring my property?

00:31:55.140 What about fixing this?

00:31:56.540 And so on.

00:31:57.460 So government has to be seen as having a valid role in a complex, wealthy society.

00:32:02.780 There are big problems.

00:32:03.900 COVID-19, obviously, a huge one that's hitting us in the face.

00:32:07.900 But so, too, is climate change.

00:32:09.520 As the Midwest is flooding and the California is burning and the Gulf Coast is being battered

00:32:15.280 by repeated powerful hurricanes, we can't allow those things to double or triple

00:32:19.620 and expect that quality of life will go on.

00:32:23.040 So you're right.

00:32:24.240 People have to recover a trust that government is worth funding.

00:32:28.260 Otherwise, everyone fights taxation.

00:32:30.400 The second thing is that elites have to work together to find some common ground in what

00:32:36.520 needs to be done to strengthen and improve society, as opposed to just being in competing

00:32:42.800 camps saying, this is what our group needs to do, and we don't want you to be involved,

00:32:48.800 and vice versa.

00:32:50.100 If you have Republicans and Democrats or Tories and Socialists, whatever your divisions are,

00:32:56.840 if instead of saying, yes, of course we have differences, we're human beings, but because

00:33:02.540 we're human, we have some common needs and interests, and we have to work hard to find

00:33:06.300 them, if you put that task aside and just say, I want my group to win, we go back on the

00:33:12.100 path toward, I'm not going to raise anyone's taxes because you might spend them on things

00:33:17.260 that you want, and I think that's awful.

00:33:20.240 And the other group will say, well, we're not going to raise taxes because you might spend

00:33:23.680 it on things that you want.

00:33:24.640 Instead of saying, let's have an agenda for things that we agree we need, and then find

00:33:30.120 a level of taxation that allows us to accomplish what is necessary.

00:33:34.760 So you need to have government that's trusted, you need to have elites that work together,

00:33:39.680 and then the third thing is you need people to feel the system is fair, that the taxes

00:33:43.780 that they pay are not unfair compared to the taxes that others, especially the rich pay.

00:33:49.540 One of the big problems we have with the tax system now is not the rate of taxation, but

00:33:55.800 the fact that so many assets and so much income escapes taxation altogether.

00:34:01.380 It's in offshore LLCs, it's in real estate trusts, it's in exempt inheritance trusts.

00:34:08.920 All of these things make the system unfair and give people a general hatred of taxation as just

00:34:16.520 something else that's rigged.

00:34:18.120 So we need to go back to fair enforcement, clear and understandable laws, and a system

00:34:25.540 that people believe in.

00:34:27.920 Well, let's take the first piece.

00:34:29.140 What do you think we can do?

00:34:31.420 Because there's a kind of perverse, self-fulfilling aspect to this.

00:34:36.680 What can we do to increase trust in government?

00:34:41.000 You know, there really is a pervasive sense that virtually anything that can be handled

00:34:46.360 by the private sector is better accomplished in the private sector.

00:34:50.860 There are endless numbers of invidious comparisons between private businesses that have to function

00:34:56.060 by the constraints of a market and the government, you know, simulacrums of those businesses,

00:35:01.700 right?

00:35:02.020 So you compare, you know, FedEx to the post office, say, or, you know, any business you've

00:35:07.640 ever had to deal with to the DMV, right?

00:35:09.720 So it's just, there's a sense that throwing more money at it from the government side just

00:35:15.920 gets you a business that, you know, no one would ever direct their money at if they had

00:35:20.660 a choice.

00:35:21.500 And so there's that kind of cynicism.

00:35:23.320 How do you see us rebooting from where we currently are to a time where it would just

00:35:30.580 be expected that if the government sets itself to a specific task, whether it's a space program

00:35:35.840 or a public health emergency, it's going to do a wonderful job at that task because many

00:35:44.260 of the best people are involved and it's all well-funded and it's got its priorities straight

00:35:48.580 and it's not captured by endless layers of bureaucrats who don't understand how the world

00:35:54.080 works.

00:35:54.920 How do we get to something like daylight here?

00:35:59.700 You need a few big wins.

00:36:01.660 I applaud President Joe Biden for making COVID-19 treatment and mitigation his first priority.

00:36:12.500 This is clearly a job that private industry can develop vaccines.

00:36:17.140 They're not going to distribute them.

00:36:19.080 So getting vaccines into people's arms, making them safe is a perfect example of the type of

00:36:26.500 thing public health has been doing under government since the 19th century.

00:36:31.380 And if we have a big success, I think it'll be applauded and we'll go a long way to making

00:36:35.900 people say, you know, I'm glad the government was on the job.

00:36:40.600 Now, if the government as under Donald Trump says, well, you know, government can't do things

00:36:46.360 not really our responsibility.

00:36:48.080 We'll just encourage private firms to make the vaccine and then we'll let people figure

00:36:53.880 out how to get it.

00:36:55.260 That's a disaster.

00:36:56.500 That's what we're living through now.

00:36:57.860 That's why even though the vaccines became available last fall, fewer than 5% of Americans

00:37:04.300 have benefited from them.

00:37:05.720 So we need government programs that are visible and that work.

00:37:10.100 And it's not as rare as you think.

00:37:11.920 People love Social Security.

00:37:14.480 They fought bitterly against efforts to privatize it.

00:37:17.940 Sometimes people don't realize it's a government program.

00:37:20.380 They tell government, you know, keep your hands off my Social Security.

00:37:23.120 It's mine.

00:37:24.240 Okay.

00:37:24.940 But it came to you and still does come to you through your government.

00:37:30.860 Your local government provides police protection, provides fire protection.

00:37:35.280 Your local government provides public schools.

00:37:38.080 America has always been attached to private schools.

00:37:42.600 I'm sorry, to public schools.

00:37:44.240 And the rich who feel, hey, you know, I can send my kids to private school, you know, there

00:37:48.640 tends to be a kind of let them eat cake view.

00:37:51.360 That is, if you're wealthy enough, you can have beautiful private property.

00:37:56.020 You don't need public parks.

00:37:57.680 You can afford private schools.

00:37:59.480 You don't need to pay for public schools for everybody else.

00:38:02.500 You can afford private concierge medicine.

00:38:04.860 You don't need to worry about public health.

00:38:07.780 And that kind of let them eat cake goes to what happened in Iran in the 1970s, where you

00:38:13.260 had such terrible traffic congestion that people couldn't get to work.

00:38:17.340 And instead of building more roads, the Shah's son was quoted as saying, look, if people are

00:38:22.360 unhappy with traffic congestion, you know, let them make some money and buy helicopters.

00:38:28.240 That's the attitude that led to a revolution.

00:38:30.200 Now, we're not as extreme there, but that's the end point of where elite selfishness and

00:38:36.720 lack of understanding and empathy leads.

00:38:39.400 If leaders have empathy for people, if they really do work to make government benefit, not

00:38:46.100 just this interest group or that particular minority, but really help all Americans where

00:38:52.220 all Americans need it, like with public health care, like public education.

00:38:56.900 Then we get back to people seeing government as a good thing, an important part of society.

00:39:03.040 Yeah.

00:39:03.200 I mean, this is something I'm really quite worried about now.

00:39:06.080 I've been worried about this general topic at least since 2009.

00:39:11.980 But...

00:39:12.460 No, that's good for you.

00:39:13.720 Yeah.

00:39:13.940 But under COVID, it's just, I guess, the specific case that I find alarming, you know, and I'm

00:39:23.660 not alone here, is what we've seen in California with the flight of many people in tech to other

00:39:31.700 states that just by coincidence don't have income tax, right?

00:39:35.780 So many people are going to Texas and Florida, and it's an unimpeachably rational decision

00:39:42.580 if your concern is to make an immediate change in your own quality of life and to have it

00:39:51.140 make sense on paper, right?

00:39:53.920 You know, if you're going to be essentially paid millions of dollars a year to live in

00:39:59.920 another city that you like just as well as you liked San Francisco before it was inundated

00:40:04.400 with crime and homelessness, well, then why not do that?

00:40:07.840 Why not move to Austin or Miami?

00:40:10.700 It makes sense on every level.

00:40:12.900 And yet, it's part of the very trend you sketched out in the beginning of this conversation.

00:40:18.680 I mean, it's a mini version of cosmopolitanism, the fact that you were all so deracinated that,

00:40:24.020 you know, any nice city will do.

00:40:25.640 So we're knowledge workers, we can work from anywhere, and COVID has really delivered that

00:40:31.660 lesson to everyone who was available to it.

00:40:33.980 So that what we're witnessing is just a flight of some of the most productive people in our

00:40:40.980 society and the corresponding tax base to other states that have a different tax code.

00:40:49.320 Not to get bogged down on this specific case, but I'm wondering what you think California

00:40:54.480 should do in this case, because what we're suffering from here is just the fact that

00:41:00.440 we have a tax system that can be gamed simply by crossing a border, and the barrier to doing

00:41:09.580 that is quite a bit lower than leaving the United States would be, and therefore many,

00:41:15.380 many people are doing it.

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - January 27, 2021

#232 — Inequality and Revolution

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