November 23, 2023 • 46 mins
Have you achieved the American Dream? Actually–how do you even define the American Dream? Sometimes it can feel like that phrase is meaningless and politicized but that idea is such a cornerstone of what makes us the United States. It’s foundational, but it can sometimes feel like it’s falling apart.
Enter David Leonhardt’s new book–he’s a columnist at the New York Times and heads their The Morning newsletter. In the book, Ours Was the Shining Future, he sets out to quantify the American Dream and tell a story of how it’s changed over the last few decades. And for those who might feel intimidated by economics, Leonhardt’s book might just be the perfect entry point: the personal narratives of the people who shaped our history bring this book from the theoretical to the concrete.
This insightful, comprehensive, human book provides a perfect jumping off point to examine the long, imperfect story of our ongoing project as Americans, striving to realize the promises of democracy and capitalism–and all the successes and failures along the way so far. We can learn from the past, and David, armed with data but also with compassion and optimism, is an excellent guide.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hi, everyone, I'm Kitty Kuric, And this is next question.
What pops into your head when I say the American dream?
Have you achieved it? Did your parents? How would you
know if you did? Perhaps no other concept is more
iconically American than this idea that if you work hard,
(00:27):
you can make it, whatever that means to you. But
in recent years, it seems like the one thing most
people can agree on is that the American dream is
getting harder and harder to achieve. But what we can
agree on is why so thank goodness for David Leonhardt.
You may know him from his column at the New
York Times, where he also runs the morning newsletter, which
(00:48):
I read every day. His new book, ours was The
Shining Future, aims to identify what's gone wrong to make
the American dreams slip out of reach for so many.
David has really done his research. His analysis of how
our modern economy came to be as fascinating and illuminating,
and it's so accessible because he lays all this out
(01:10):
using the personal stories of the politicians, activists, and regular
old people who shape the last one hundred years or
so of America's sense of itself as a place where
anyone can make it. As you'll hear in our interview,
David is an optimist. He has a couple of diagnoses
for both the political right, perhaps even more so for
(01:32):
his fellow progressives on the left. But what pulses through
David's book is the hope that comes from understanding how
we got here so we can actually chart our path forward. Hi,
David Leonhard, how are you.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
I've good, Katie. Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
I'm really excited to talk to you about your book.
I'm a big fan of your work, and like everyone else,
i read your morning newsletter right after I read my own,
so I feel like I'm in touch with you on
a daily basis. But I'm fascinated by your latest book
called ours was the Shining Future, And gosh, where do
(02:17):
I start? I think I'm always interested in the germ
of the idea, the why of this book. I'm sure
you're reporting through the years. You've been at the New
York Times for what twenty four years? Yeah, covering big issues,
primarily domestic ones. So where did the germ for this
book come from? David?
Speaker 2 (02:36):
The main thing that I've written about Katie in my
time at the Times has been the economy. And I've
written a lot about people's frustrations with the American economy,
the idea that it isn't delivering what they wanted to deliver.
There's this amazing thing now in which even when the
economy is growing and the unemployment rate is relatively low,
Americans say that they're not that happy with the economy.
(02:58):
Now's a good example of exactly that phenomenon. And what
I decided I really wanted to unpack was how did
we get here? And I wanted to tell a story
about how we ended up with an economy that feels
disappointing to so many people. And so that's what I've
set out to do. It's really a book written for
people who who want to understand the economy and are
(03:18):
really smart, and who also feel like, hey, you know what,
the way it's talked about a lot in the media, frankly,
is just too technical and it's hard to follow. And
that's what I want to do. And I wanted to
explain both how we've ended up here and frankly, as
you know this, I'm an optimist by nature, and so
even with all these problems, I also wanted to explain
(03:39):
how is it we could end up in a better
place than we're in today.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
I love someone who breaks it down. I am your
target market to a t I hope I'm smart. I'm
certainly curious, but sometimes economic reporting does feel too abstract
to me. So I really appreciate someone who can connect
the dots and identify macro trends because I'm fascinated too,
(04:07):
like you are, David, Like how did we get here?
What were the forces socioeconomic forces in particular, that led
us to this moment? And I have to say, as
I looked at your book, I really looked at it
in terms of my own life, because not that it's
all about me, but I was born in nineteen fifty seven.
(04:29):
I am certainly the beneficiary of what is traditionally known
as the American dream. Born to parents who my mom
didn't work. My dad made a modest salary, although he
was highly intelligent and focused on education for his kids.
His priority was to send us to good schools so
(04:50):
we could advance our status in life. I think for
my sisters, maybe to marry somebody who was very successful,
but actually my dad really wanted my older sisters to
have a job and to contribute to society. And my
sister Emily was ten years older than I and my
sister Kiki seven years older, so he was really a
(05:12):
man ahead of his time in some ways. But I
mentioned that because I feel like I really benefited from
the notion of upward mobility, and I think I got in.
I think I was born in the nick of time,
honestly from what you describe in your book, which is
from World War Two to the seventies and eighties, kind
(05:34):
of what was the economic environment and then how things
started to change in the seventies and eighties, But they
didn't change in a way that it impacted me, because
I graduated from college in nineteen seventy nine and I
was and I think all the kids in our family
were able to make a better living than my dad did.
(05:59):
And that's not just say we had a wonderful childhood
and I wouldn't trade it for anything, but we were
the typical examples of doing better than your parents, right, Yes,
So I'd love you to kind of break down and
kind of give us the cliff notes of what happened
(06:19):
not only over the last forty years, but what happened
before that, and how things seemed to change.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
One of the really nice things for me in going
around and starting to talk about my book is hearing
people's own stories of the American dream, their personal stories.
I tell my own personal story, my family's at the
start of the book, and so I love hearing other people's. So, yes, look,
you captured it in your personal story. And I'll put
some numbers around that. So, an American child born in
(06:47):
nineteen forty had a ninety two percent chance of growing
up to have a higher household income as an adult
than their parents did. And that is the entire society, right,
every racial group, ninety two percent. That's a virtual guarantee. Right.
That means even people who got quite ill or who
(07:08):
were laid off at some point in their life still
grew up to make more money than their parents did
ninety two percent. And so how did we get there?
And I think it is very important to say that
we're talking about the forties, the fifties, and the sixties.
These are decades with horrible racism, horrible sexism, really bad
religious bigotry as well. And so it's not that we
(07:29):
want to go back to the society that we had then,
But even for groups that were experiencing really vicious discrimination.
This progress applied so in the forties and fifties, even
before the great victories of the civil rights movement, the
white black pay gap shrunk and the white black life
expectancy gap shrunk. And the reason is because we were
(07:53):
building the society that was basically bottom up or middle
out prosperity, in which we were build holding a society
in which people were able to get jobs even if
they didn't have a college degree, that allowed them to
enjoy really good standard of living. And the word I
use to describe what we had is democratic capitalism, small
(08:14):
d democratic capitalism. Look, I really believe the evidence shows
that capitalism is the best system for organizing a society.
The Soviet Union didn't work, Cuba doesn't work right, South
Korea Lorks much better than North Korea. China got prosperous
after it moved toward capitalism and away from communism. But
not every form of capitalism works equally well. And a
(08:35):
kind of rough and tumble form of capitalism where we
have taxes really low and we don't have regulations and
workers can't join unions, just works much less well than
democratic capitalism, where we're investing in the future, and ordinary
people are able to form grassroots organizations and advocate for themselves.
And that's really what we had in the forties and
(08:55):
the fifties and the sixties.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Can you describe a little bit more, kind of unraveled
the term democratic capitalism, a little bit more for us
versus sort of unfettered capitalism.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Yes. So I think one of the things to know
about capitalism is both that it's superior to the alternatives,
but it also has a predictable set of excesses and problems. Right,
Capitalism on its own doesn't solve climate change. Capitalism on
its own doesn't tend to build schools where kids can go,
or roads for us to travel on. And capitalism on
its own tends to lead to rising inequality. And so
(09:30):
what you really need is a government to intervene and
do things like invest in the future, building big roads
and building airports, building schools for people. If you don't
have the government involved and workers can't join labor unions,
I think we've sort of lost sight of just how
important labor unions are.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Yeah, I want to get into that.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
And so that's a great example. If the government isn't
involved to make sure that blue collar workers can join
labor unions. Businesses can pretty easily get rid of labor
unions and labor unions for all their flaws, and they
are flawed. I've been in a labor union. I've been
a manager at The New York Times who's managed unionized employees.
I'm well aware of their flaws. But corporations have their
flaws too, And if we have corporations with our unions,
we end up with this really unbalanced society. And so,
(10:12):
to me, democratic capitalism is a system in which we
acknowledge both the phenomenal strengths of capitalism and also the
ways in which, left to its own devices, it doesn't
tend to produce living standards that rise rapidly for most people.
And just the simplest way to think about this is
for the bottom ninety nine percent of the income distribution,
(10:33):
wage growth was faster in the forties, fifties, and sixties
than it's been since the nineteen eighties. So really, for
most people, since we've moved to this more bare knuckle
form of capitalism in the eighties, income growth has just
been much more disappointing.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
You describe what was happening in the forties, fifties, and sixties.
But let's talk about when it all started to go bad,
and that was in the seventies and eighties, and you
trace a number of societal forces that came together to
create a lot of inequality and to really result in
(11:08):
a realignment of what had been traditional political parties. Can
you talk about that?
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Yes, I mean the sixties and seventies was a time
of really just phenomenal chaos, as people who lived through
it can remember. I mean, we had the crime rate
really start to rise in the early sixties. And I
want to say something important here, which is the mainstream media,
which you and I are both part of of the time,
and the left half of the political spectrum, basically denied
(11:37):
that rising crime was a problem. And they were wrong
about that rise in crime really was a problem in
the sixties and seventies.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Why do you think they denied it? Why do you
think they underplayed it?
Speaker 2 (11:48):
I think there is an instinct among liberals to say
that poverty is that economics are the root cause of everything.
And I understand that instinct. I've just written a book
about economic history, and so the idea that crime was
rising in the nineteen sixties, when the economy was still
very good, and thus it couldn't be just because of economics.
(12:09):
Meete people uncomfortable. So LBJ said, Hey, the way to
deal with rising crime is let's pass my war on
poverty and that I'll deal with it, Whereas in fact
it was a much more complex set of reasons why
crime was rising. It was basically people were coming to
question the society in all kinds of ways. Think about
the early sixties. It's SDS, it's in the Republican Party,
it's Barry Goldwater. People were saying, wait a second, something
(12:32):
about this post war situation feels a little off to us,
And it wasn't really about the economy, which was still
doing quite well. So crime starts to rise. In the sixties,
we have the Vietnam War, we have the assassination of
multiple prominent political figures, we have Watergate, and then in
the mid seventies we have this really terrible economic crisis,
mostly because of foreign reasons, the oil embargo. But Americans
(12:55):
looked around and they said, wow, society just is kind
of breaking down. And I completely understand why. People looked
at the government and they basically said, maybe that's the problem.
Maybe we just need a lot less government. And I
actually in the book, I try to describe sympathetically the
conservative movement that said, hey, if we have a lot
less government, all our problems will be solved. One of
(13:15):
the characters in my book is Robert Bork, who's famous
as a Supreme Court nominee, but is an incredibly important
economic thinker in the Reagan movement, more important than many
people realize. And I try to tell his story in
a way that let's readers understand why he came to
those views. But let's also be honest that that Robert
Bork revolution in economic policy made a lot of promises
(13:38):
about how great things would be if we only got
government out of the way. They said, living standards would
rise for everyone, we would all become more prosperous. And
the United States did move more toward a form of
rough and tumble capitalism than a lot of other countries,
and yet our results have been so disappointing. I mean, Katie,
the first chart in my book shows life expectancy in
(13:58):
every rich country. In nineteen eighty the United States had
a normal life expectancy for a rich country. For the
last fifteen years or so, We've had the single worst
life expectancy of any rich country in the world. We've
got to try something else.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
After this break, David breaks down how trickle down economics
worked and didn't work the way Republicans hoped, and the
surprising ways it's affected how long we live here in
the US. If you want to get smarter every morning
with a breakdown of the news and fascinating takes on
health and wellness and pop culture, sign up for our
(14:37):
daily newsletter, Wake Up Call by going to Katiecuric dot com.
Now back to my conversation with David Leonhardt. Well, connect
those dots. I mean, Reagan was trickled down economics, less regulation,
(14:58):
All kinds of things were happening right in the eighties,
and this sort of individualism almost iron ran kind of
attitude about wealth, right, So what were the ramifications of that?
Speaker 2 (15:12):
So there were certainly things that the Reagan administration didn't change,
and I know conservatives sometimes look back and say, well,
wait a second, he didn't get rid of Medicare and
Social Security. That's true, but he changed so much. I mean,
tax rates when he came into office were up, with
the top tax rate up around seventy percent, it's never
again been so high. It's sort of fluctuated in the thirties,
depending on whether we have a Republican or Democratic president.
(15:35):
He really unwound regulation in a lot of ways. He
allowed companies. This was Bork's biggest involvement. He allowed companies
to become so so much larger. The government stopped doing
so much antitrust. And the theory was, if only we
just let the market work, everyone will benefit.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Well, that's trickle down economics, right, which David Stockman ended
up disavowing.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
That is trickle down economics. And look, it was a
theory and it had a argument behind it. And now
more than forty years later, we can look at the results.
And I know that true believers of the Reagan Revolution
will say, well, that's because we never fully tried it.
But that, to me is a little bit like Marxists
who say communism work if only we actually tried it. Like,
(16:17):
we moved a long way towards the vision Reagan wanted,
and the results we've gotten since nineteen eighty for very
affluent people have been great. They've been great for stock
prices and top incomes, and for the vast majority of Americans,
they've been less good than they used to be, and
I think it's important to reflect on that.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
How does that directly impact life expectancy? Connect those dots
for me, David, Yes.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Thank you for that question. So what we know is
that life expectancy has really diverged by class. So it's
really diverged by whether you have a four year degree
or whether you don't. For people with a four year
college degree, the life expectancy trends are actually still pretty good.
I mean, COVID was variable for everyone, but that's true
(17:01):
around the world. The life expectancy trends for Americans with
a college degree have still been pretty good. The damning
statistic I told you about how the US now has
the lowest life expectancy of a high income country is
overwhelmingly driven by people without a four year college degree.
The causal mechanisms are really complex, but I also think
it's not that hard to understand the big picture. We
(17:22):
also know that the income gap between people with a
college degree and people without one has grown enormously. We
know people without a college degree are much less likely
to be in households where children are growing up with
two parents. We know they're much less likely to be
able to go to college and to finish college their children,
not just them. And so I think what we've ended
(17:42):
up with is we've ended up with this that we
have ended up with this kind of laissez faari society
in which not only has income inequality increased, but we've
lost a lot of the institutions churches, labor unions, community institutions,
employers that came to a town and would be there
for decades, that helped people build good and improving lives,
(18:05):
and that has had a whole set of both economic
and social causes that have been very damaging.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
All these things resulted in a political realignment with many
Democrats becoming Republicans, and there were a lot of reasons
for that as well, But can you explain some of
the factors.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
If I could ask conservatives and Republicans to be self reflective,
I would say, please look at these results since nineteen
eighty with an open mind and ask what's worked and
what happened. And I want to say there are a
whole bunch of conservatives who are actually doing that. Even
some members of Congress and a bunch of conservative intellectuals
were saying we need to go in a different direction.
I talk about them in the book. If I could
(18:47):
ask Democrats to be a little bit self reflective, I
would say, ask yourself, why is it that the Democratic
Party has increasingly become the party of relatively well off professionals,
And ask yourself, why is it that so many working
class people look at the Democratic Party and say that
party isn't my party. I feel like they talk down
(19:07):
to me. Historically, Democrats have reacted to this by saying, well,
it's mostly about racism, and look, it is partly about racism, right.
Donald Trump has said a lot of racist things. The
Republican Party at times has really used race baiting stereotypes.
I want to be very clear about that. But I
think progressives make a big mistake when they say the
(19:30):
only reason anyone could ever not vote for US is
because they're ignorant or because they're bigoted. I think that's
both really bad political strategy to tell people that you
need to vote for US or where you're ignorant. I also
think it's empirically wrong when you look at a whole
set of issues. College graduates and working class people have
different views on a whole bunch of things. It's not
(19:51):
just about race, And I think the clearest evidence of
this has probably come in the last five years when
we have seen Latinos, Asian Americans, and although the numbers
are small, they're noticeable in the data, Black Americans, particularly
working class people of all these groups shift away from
the Democratic Party. And I would really encourage Liberals and
(20:12):
Democrats to ask themselves, why is it that we're struggling
so much to get working class votes, Why is it
that increasingly true among Latinos and Asian Americans? And why
is it that there are you know, twenty states in
this country North Carolina, Florida, Texas where we basically can
ever win an election. I don't think it's just that
Republicans are cheating or they're doing these things. I think
(20:35):
that the Democratic Party has sent a message that it's
the party of educated people in a way that is
off putting to many other people.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
Yeah. A perfect example, I think is probably one of
the biggest mistakes of the Hillary Clinton campaign, and that
was when she said this.
Speaker 3 (20:52):
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you can put
half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket
of deplorables. Right, the races, sex is homophobic, xenophobic, islamophobic,
(21:15):
you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that
and he has lifted them up.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
I can't blame people for being insulted, and you can't
tar any huge group of Americans with such a big brush.
And I think it completely ignored the economic circumstances that
they were in for reasons it had nothing to do
with race. That was because we shifted from an industrial
(21:47):
to a technological society. The fact that manufacturing had dried up,
these cities had become, you know, just shadows of their
former selves. So I don't blame people well for being
highly offended by that comment.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
No, I agree, And it's just part of a much
larger pattern. Right, that's maybe the clearest expression of it.
But you know, there was a study of Texas after
the twenty twenty election to try to determine why Latino
voters moved toward the Republican Party, who was done by
a progressive group, and one of the things that they
pointed out was a lot of Latinos in Texas were
(22:23):
uncomfortable with the immigration system right now. They were worried
about border security. That doesn't fit the democratic narrative, right
of how we're supposed to think of immigration. Another thing
that people were concerned about is they really wanted the
economy to reopen once vaccines were available, and they were
unhappy with the idea that we were going to have
these extended shutdowns. That's another thing where I think sort
(22:43):
of a lot of Democrats and a lot of college
graduates said, the only way you can be in favor
of reopening is if you don't understand science. And I
think it's more complicated than that.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
Do you think some of this is because of the
evaporation of the sensible middle and the inability to compromise
between these two very polarized parties.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
I do, and I've spent a lot of time looking
at polling data, and I talk about it in the book.
I think there is a middle in this country, the
political middle. And it's what it's interesting is it's not
on the middle of every issue. It's actually left of
center on economics. So the middle of this country is
in favor of a higher minimum wage, and they're in
favor of expanding medicaid, and they like labor unions, not
(23:26):
every union, but they believe that people should be able.
But they're well to the right of where the Democratic
Party is on a lot of social issues. We can
say they're in the middle, or they're a little right
of center. I don't know what it is, but put
it this way, they're not as far left as where
the Democratic Party is. And so a lot of those
voters look at the two parties and they kind of
struggle to see themselves in either one.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Especially when they say sort of young liberals. I think
that have really pulled the party further to the left
and at a pace that I think may feel too
fast for older Americans, even liberal one.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Yes, and look, part of the reason Joe Biden got
the nomination and became the president is because one of
the more moderate sections of the Democratic Party are black voters.
And the way the calendar worked the South Carolina primary,
which is overwhelmingly black voters, came in this moment where
it wasn't clear what's going to happen, and black voters
flocked to Joe Biden right. Which is a reminder that
(24:21):
a lot of what we hear on social media, on
university campuses, again sometimes in the media is a version
of liberalism that is more upscale than actually the way
many people are. To put a fine point on it.
I think the Democratic Party would probably solve some of
its problems if it spent more time listening to voters
(24:43):
of color who have community college degrees or who don't
have a college degree, and less time listening to white
voters who have graduate degrees. And white voters with graduate
degrees really drive not only white voters, but white voters
with graduate degrees holing shit are disproportionately in sort of
influential jobs in the progressive atmosphere.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
I've always wondered why Democrats don't talk more directly to
working class voters that their outreach seems to be. I mean,
maybe I'm wrong. I don't obviously know every strategy that's
being employed, but I do feel, and maybe it's not
covered enough, that there does seem to be a disconnect
between blue collar voters and Democrats that is really surprising.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
So one of the things that I enjoyed doing this book.
In this book was taking people whose names are well known,
but telling you parts of their stories that are not
well known. And I mentioned Robert Bork about that, But
another person who I talk about who I think his
legacy is aged better than Robert Bork's is Robert F. Kennedy,
the original one, not the junior. And when he ran
for president in nineteen sixty eight, there were a lot
(25:55):
of people who the Democratic Party was starting to have
this development of the kind of more elite, very socially liberal,
and people told RFK, don't talk about crime, and he said, no,
I'm going to talk about crime. I know that Richard
Nixon and George Wallace are demograguing crime and they're talking
about it in ways that are meant to spark racism.
But people's concerns about crime are legitimate, and Kennedy ran
(26:18):
this campaign in which he made law and order central
to his campaign. Journalists said, where is the great liberal
Robert Kennedy because of the way he was talking about crime.
He talked about Vietnam and actually very nuanced ways, because
he understood that many Americans were unhappy with Vietnam, but
also many working class people were frustrated that their kids
had gone to fight. And the reason why I think
(26:38):
he's important is Robert Kennedy didn't try to win working
class votes by telling people, hey, just vote on economic policy,
ignore my social policy. He treated working class voters with
respect on both social policy and economic policy, and I
think part of what modern Democrats should be reflective on
(26:59):
is you can't just tell people don't vote against your
economic interests. I mean, Katie, you and I know that
the fanciest parts of New York City and all these
resort towns, they vote Democratic. They're voting against their economic interests, right,
They're voting to raise their own taxes. So lots of
people vote against their economic interests. And I think Democrats
lose working class voters when they say, hey, let's just
(27:22):
ignore social policy and just talk about taxes. And RFK
didn't do that.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Let's go back to unions real quick, David, because they
were thriving. What happened to unions? It was it deregulation.
Was this these new attitudes about capitalism? How did unions
kind of fall apart? Did they overreach?
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yes? They did. They did overreach, and they and a
lot of union leaders actually cared less about continuing to
build a movement and cared more just about their own
immediate members and didn't understand that if they cared only
about their immediate members rather than attracting new union members,
eventually the labor movement would shrivel, which is exactly what happened.
So absolutely, union leaders overreached. I tell some of that
(28:07):
story in the book. They deserve significantly. It's also the
case that the government became quite hostile to labor unions.
And if you don't have the government playing referee, if
you just have kind of corporations and workers out there,
If it's a question between can a single corporation prevent
a bunch of individual workers from joining a union, the
(28:29):
answer is almost always yes. I mean, look what Starbucks
has done recently. When people organize at a shop, Starbucks
somehow finds lots of little violations among the people who
decided to join a union and schedules them with really
bad shifts or you know, says we need to let
you go. And so there are lots of ways for companies,
sometimes within the rules, to make sure that unions don't form.
(28:51):
And the government basically stopped playing a version of an
impartial referee or judge and really let corporations shrink unions.
And that's what happened.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
Well, union's overreached, But I think it's important to point
out that corporations got greedy, yes, right, I mean that
was a big factor too. They didn't want to pay
people necessarily fair wages. They wanted to make sure their
quarterly profits were good for their shareholders. I mean, the
whole balance of power really shifted.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
It did. And you know, when you talk about greed,
that's really a form of culture. And culture is hard
to talk about because it's imorphous, right, It's people's attitudes,
and you can't necessarily pass a bill that changes the culture.
But I really emphasized the importance of culture in the
book because I don't think the corporate executives of the
(29:42):
past were any morally superior to the corporate executives today,
but they did behave differently because the culture was different.
I mean, Mitt Romney's dad, George Romney, was the CEO
of a car company in Detroit, and it hit so
many of its benchmarks that he was due a huge bonus.
And he went to the board and he said, I
think this is unseemly. I don't think it's healthy for
(30:05):
our country or our company to have me making so
much more than any workers. Will you please take back
this bonus? I mean, my goodness, can.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
You imagine any of the corporate CEOs who are making
hundreds of millions of dollars today? Saying their salaries were unseemly.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Yeah. I mean, it's just and again, it's not that
he was. It's not that he's inherently a better person.
It's that he lived in a different culture, a less selfish.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
He sounds like a better person to me.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
That's fair. But so I would say it is at
least in part that he lived in a less selfish,
and let's be honest here, more patriotic and communitarian culture,
and he reflected those values in his behavior.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
We'll be right back with David Leonhardt.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
One.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
If you'd loved listening to Kelly Corrigan in my recent
conversation with David Brooks, you'll definitely love her podcast, Kelly
Corrigan wonders. Kelly has this every woman wisdom that people
just gravitate to. Oprah Magazine calls her the voice of
a generation. Huffington Post calls her the poet laureate of
the ordinary. You might know her books about family life.
(31:23):
All four were New York Times bestsellers. I met her
when she was a guest on The Today Show almost
twenty years ago, and we've stayed in touch ever since.
On her show, Kelly wonders about family ties, our deepest
ambitions and how to be useful with people like Brian Stevenson,
Anna Quinlan, Jenny Wallace, Neil Katilla, Claire Danes, and Kate Bohler.
(31:47):
I saw somewhere that someone said she's like a cross
between Tina Fey and Krista Tippett. So jump on board,
tune into Kelly Corrigan Wonders. I'd say you might as
well subscribe. Actually, wherever you're listening to this podcast, we're
(32:09):
back with David Leonhart. I want to talk about that
communitarian culture, because I know that's something you address in
the book as well. But I want to finish the
union conversation so they start to weaken. I think is
PAPCO one of the big turning points during the I
hate to keep pointing a finger at the late Ronald Reagan,
(32:29):
but the air traffic controllers that was a huge inflection point,
wasn't it in terms of union power and muscle?
Speaker 2 (32:36):
Yes, And it's actually I think it's an important example.
So Ronald Reagan comes to office. The air traffic controllers
who indorsed Ronald Reagan, which is fascinating, perhaps feeling empowered
because they had endorsed this new president and most unions
obviously had not made just unbelievable demands really in terms
of wage increases and in terms of being able to
(32:58):
take time off. I walk through some of them in
the book. It just in terms of you look at
them and you're like, WHOA, that's too much. And Ronald
Reagan said, if you go on strike, I'll fire you.
And the air traffic controllers didn't believe it, and they
went on strike and he fired them, And so they
do deserve some blame in that story. But the message
that it sent, which was before a lot of companies
(33:21):
pushed back against unions, often very hard, but once unions formed,
they didn't try to destroy them, typically at their own
company or through government policy. And Reagan's policy was basically
a version of hey, the gloves are off in a
way that they weren't under Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon
and previous Republicans. And it's not simply trying to restrain
(33:42):
unions from expanding into new regions or it restrained their
wage increases. It's fine to go after them and really
try to eliminate them. And that's what happened in a
lot of industries is as well as globalization, but the
cultural change was vital.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Well, let's talk about globalization and how that impacted unions
as well. Well, they just lost some of their power
because the world became flatter, as Tom Friedman would say, right.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
Yes, they did. So that's interesting. That's definitely the case
from the past. Weirdly, I think though, that might be
reason to believe that unions can play a bigger role
going forward than they have over the last fifty years.
It's certainly the case that if a factory wants to
avoid being unionized, it can move to another state or
another country. But let's think about how our economy has changed.
(34:28):
So much more of it is now service businesses. A
hospital can't move in the same way that a factory can.
A warehouse that is serving a particular region for online
orders can't move in the same way that a factory can.
A restaurant can't, and so unions have a lot of
challenges today. The law is still really stacked against them,
(34:49):
and I don't think we'll see a resurgence in unions
until we see some legal changes the same way we've
recently seen legal changes in healthcare and legal changes in
other ways climate policy. I think it will take changes
in the law. But if you got those changes in
the law, I do really think you could imagine more
of the workforce being unionized because we're now moving away
(35:10):
from manufacturing and we're moving toward businesses that are inherently
local and thus the business camp so easily simply pick
up and move.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
But aren't we seeing the pendulum swing slightly already, David?
In terms of some of the activities we've seen at Amazon,
for example, Hollywood ongoing you aw strike and fast food
workers and the minimum wage, it does seem like there's
something in the atmosphere.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
I think there absolutely is. I think everything you said
is right, and the only thing I would tack on
with apologies for being repetitive, is I don't think it
will last without some changes in the law because at
a lot of these companies where the workers are expressing interest,
they ultimately fail before unions because it's still too easy
for companies to vent them from doing so.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
So where do we go from here? I guess the
question is, David, you know you use the past tense
in your title. I think intentionally it's ours was the
Shining Future. Now it's based on something Mary Anton and
immigration rights advocate wrote at the turn of the century,
mine is the Shining Future. So you know, you started
(36:23):
this conversation by saying you were an optimist. So how
do we get out of this mess? How do we
restore some equilibrium and honestly some equality to people because
income inequality is just so outrageous in this country.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
It is, and you know, the white black wage gap
is is almost as large as it was when Harry
Truman was president, and so all forms of inequality are
just really, really quite outrageous. Yeah, you're right. The title
is ours was the Shining Future. If I had a
longer title, maybe it would be ours was the Shining Future,
and it could be again.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
But that's not colin.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
Yeah, but so I love that question. Here to me
is the reason to have optimism, not that we will
get over our problems, but that we can get over
our problems. I know that many people think that our
system is rigged, that our democracy doesn't work, and I
actually agree in certain ways it's rigged and our democracy don't.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Well, I've heard you talk about upward mobility and how
it's really declined, and you know, I think their statistics
about forty plus percent of people never leave their socioeconomic
group they were born in. So you know, they're not
like the current kids. They're not climbing up, they're staying down.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
Yes, and so inequality, it's just it's really really high.
What I would ask people to reflect on is how
has this country changed before, not just in the long
ago past, but I'll get to this, but also fairly recently.
And I think it's almost always changed through grassroots political movements.
Usually grassroots political movements that seemed like the odds were
(38:04):
too long when they began. So how did the union
movement in this country begin? It began, the modern one
began in the nineteen thirties when unions lost every fight
that they had fought for years and years and years,
and then we were in the depression, and it won
because people like a. Philip Randolph and others kept fighting
and not only persuaded workers to join unions, but persuaded
(38:25):
the federal government to change the law. That's the lesson
of the labor movement that shortened hours and helped build
the middle class. It's also the lesson of the civil
rights movement. We look back on the civil rights movement
as a glorious victory, as we should, but it didn't
feel that way in the moment to a lot of organizers.
It felt like defeat after defeat after defeat, and then
a little bit of progress. But they kept at it.
(38:47):
And what they did was they tried to shape public opinion,
and they built these grassroots movements and they changed the law.
And I think that's the lesson of the labor movement,
the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the disability rights movement.
If someone saying wait a second, or all of his
examples coming from the political left, I actually think it's
the lesson of the anti abortion movement fifty years ago.
(39:08):
They were furious about Roe v. Wade, and so what
did they do. They organized, and they won local elections,
and they basically took over the Republican Party and they
were able to appoint judges who are friendly to them.
Whether you celebrate these changes or abhor them, this is
how our country changes. And I think we've gotten a
little distracted from the material living standards of most people.
(39:30):
We don't really have large grassroots movements that are focused
on improving their lives. And I still really believe that
if those movements come together, the biggest lesson of history
is not that our society is irrevocably broken, but that
we haven't done the things that we need to do
to fix it. And American democracy, for all the challenges
(39:51):
to it, and I do not want to minimize the
authoritarian challenges to American democracy right now, for all of
the challenges to American democracy, it's still has the tools
to build a much better society. And indeed, the only
way we've built a better society in the past is
through those democratic tools.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
But you talk about establishing a communitarian sensibility, what is
that and does that have to be hand in hand
with some of these grassroots movements?
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Yes, I think the good news is that it probably
would go hand in hand.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
What is it exactly?
Speaker 2 (40:29):
It's the idea that I care deeply about the people
in my community, and not just in a sort of
ephemeral way. I care about them. They are a priority
to me, even maybe before other parts of the world.
And I know that's a kind of controversial thing to say,
particularly maybe on the left. But if you had corporate
(40:51):
executives who said, you know what, I'm not neutral about
whether I'm going to save jobs in my own town
or move jobs to another town or another country. That
is the kind of thing that the corporate executives in
the past felt. They said, you know what, I'm not
going to leave Milwaukee. I'm going to build a beautiful
theater in Milwaukee because I care about Milwaukee. I'm not
neutral about my own community. And I really do think
(41:15):
I don't know the exact way we get back to that,
but I really do think a certain amount of communitarianism
and patriotism, the idea that hey, we're all in this together.
We care about other parts of the world, but we're
Americans and we care about this and we're going to
fix our country, Americans of all races and all religions
and all different parts of the world. That kind of
communitarianism is different from oh, we're agnostic about whether this
(41:39):
job is in the United States or not in the
United States. It's a different culture.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
But given the polarization, and I'm so tired of that word, David,
but given how vitriolic our civil discourse has become, how
we've been our social fabric has been shredded. As David
Brooks often talks about, I mean, how do you even
start doing that?
Speaker 2 (42:04):
It's incredibly difficult. Surely I won't be the one who's
able to solve it. I would just remind people that
there are people in our past who've looked at even
steeper odds and didn't give up, but said, all we
can do is try to make this a better country.
I mean, I mentioned a Philip Randolph before he built
the first meaningful union of black employees in the United
(42:24):
States in the nineteen thirties, right, and then he faced
down FDR when FDR told him to cancel a march
meant to integrate wartime factories. And so our country has
faced these incredibly long odds for certain groups before, and
what they've done is they've found ways to organize, and
they've found ways to be incredibly strategic, sometimes ruthlessly strategic.
(42:47):
Here's what we're going to do to make this a
better country. It's not guaranteed to succeed, but I don't
really know what the alternative is for us to get
out of these problems that we have today.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
And I think really strong leaders that can help inspire
people to do all the things you're talking about, strong
leadership at the national, state, and local level.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
Yeah, and look, many people lament just how old our
political leaders are not just the president, not just the
likely nominee from the other party, but the leaders in Congress.
And that's true. It's somewhat bizarre how old our political
leaders are. You can look at that, though, and say
there is an opportunity They're not going to be around
(43:29):
that much longer in the grand sweep of things, and
we really do need new leaders, right We need people
who can come forward and express fresh visions of what
inspires America.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Well, hopefully people will read this book and can have
a blueprint of how to, I think repair some of
the deep wounds and the setbacks that need resetting in
our society and in our culture. I think if I
reviewed this book, I would say imminently readable, highly accessible,
(44:01):
and ultimately inspiring.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
Thank you, Katie, I really appreciate. I hope people read
the book too.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
I think they will, and don't be afraid of it, everybody.
It's very easy to digest and understand, even for someone
like me whose eyes glaze over when I read a
lot of economic stories, because I think telling the stories
of people behind the trends and really understanding their role
(44:27):
makes it a lot more fun. And plus it just
explains so much, and so if anyone wants to understand
where we are today, you really do need to understand
our past, and David does an excellent job of explaining it.
So thank you, David.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
Thank you. You are as I've told you before, you
are my favorite interviewer in the whole country. So to
come on and be interviewed by you is a tremendous thrill.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
That's such a nice thing to say, because you talk
to a lot of smart people, So thank you very
much for that compliment.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
Absolutely, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
Thanks for listening everyone. If you have a question for me,
a subject you want us to cover, or you want
to share your thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world,
reach out. You can leave a short message at six
h nine five point two five five five, or you
can send me a DM on Instagram. I would love
to hear from you. Next Question is a production of
(45:30):
iHeartMedia and Katie Kuric Media. The executive producers are Me,
Katie Kuric, and Courtney Ltz. Our supervising producer is Ryan Martz,
and our producers are Adriana Fazzio and Meredith Barnes. Julian
Weller composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode,
(45:50):
or to sign up for my newsletter wake Up Call,
go to the description in the podcast app, or visit
us at Katiecuric dot com. You can also find me
on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hi, everyone, I'm Kitty Kuric, And this is next question.
What pops into your head when I say the American dream?
Have you achieved it? Did your parents? How would you
know if you did? Perhaps no other concept is more
iconically American than this idea that if you work hard,
(00:27):
you can make it, whatever that means to you. But
in recent years, it seems like the one thing most
people can agree on is that the American dream is
getting harder and harder to achieve. But what we can
agree on is why so thank goodness for David Leonhardt.
You may know him from his column at the New
York Times, where he also runs the morning newsletter, which
(00:48):
I read every day. His new book, ours was The
Shining Future, aims to identify what's gone wrong to make
the American dreams slip out of reach for so many.
David has really done his research. His analysis of how
our modern economy came to be as fascinating and illuminating,
and it's so accessible because he lays all this out
(01:10):
using the personal stories of the politicians, activists, and regular
old people who shape the last one hundred years or
so of America's sense of itself as a place where
anyone can make it. As you'll hear in our interview,
David is an optimist. He has a couple of diagnoses
for both the political right, perhaps even more so for
(01:32):
his fellow progressives on the left. But what pulses through
David's book is the hope that comes from understanding how
we got here so we can actually chart our path forward. Hi,
David Leonhard, how are you.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
I've good, Katie. Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
I'm really excited to talk to you about your book.
I'm a big fan of your work, and like everyone else,
i read your morning newsletter right after I read my own,
so I feel like I'm in touch with you on
a daily basis. But I'm fascinated by your latest book
called ours was the Shining Future, And gosh, where do
(02:17):
I start? I think I'm always interested in the germ
of the idea, the why of this book. I'm sure
you're reporting through the years. You've been at the New
York Times for what twenty four years? Yeah, covering big issues,
primarily domestic ones. So where did the germ for this
book come from? David?
Speaker 2 (02:36):
The main thing that I've written about Katie in my
time at the Times has been the economy. And I've
written a lot about people's frustrations with the American economy,
the idea that it isn't delivering what they wanted to deliver.
There's this amazing thing now in which even when the
economy is growing and the unemployment rate is relatively low,
Americans say that they're not that happy with the economy.
(02:58):
Now's a good example of exactly that phenomenon. And what
I decided I really wanted to unpack was how did
we get here? And I wanted to tell a story
about how we ended up with an economy that feels
disappointing to so many people. And so that's what I've
set out to do. It's really a book written for
people who who want to understand the economy and are
(03:18):
really smart, and who also feel like, hey, you know what,
the way it's talked about a lot in the media, frankly,
is just too technical and it's hard to follow. And
that's what I want to do. And I wanted to
explain both how we've ended up here and frankly, as
you know this, I'm an optimist by nature, and so
even with all these problems, I also wanted to explain
(03:39):
how is it we could end up in a better
place than we're in today.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
I love someone who breaks it down. I am your
target market to a t I hope I'm smart. I'm
certainly curious, but sometimes economic reporting does feel too abstract
to me. So I really appreciate someone who can connect
the dots and identify macro trends because I'm fascinated too,
(04:07):
like you are, David, Like how did we get here?
What were the forces socioeconomic forces in particular, that led
us to this moment? And I have to say, as
I looked at your book, I really looked at it
in terms of my own life, because not that it's
all about me, but I was born in nineteen fifty seven.
(04:29):
I am certainly the beneficiary of what is traditionally known
as the American dream. Born to parents who my mom
didn't work. My dad made a modest salary, although he
was highly intelligent and focused on education for his kids.
His priority was to send us to good schools so
(04:50):
we could advance our status in life. I think for
my sisters, maybe to marry somebody who was very successful,
but actually my dad really wanted my older sisters to
have a job and to contribute to society. And my
sister Emily was ten years older than I and my
sister Kiki seven years older, so he was really a
(05:12):
man ahead of his time in some ways. But I
mentioned that because I feel like I really benefited from
the notion of upward mobility, and I think I got in.
I think I was born in the nick of time,
honestly from what you describe in your book, which is
from World War Two to the seventies and eighties, kind
(05:34):
of what was the economic environment and then how things
started to change in the seventies and eighties, But they
didn't change in a way that it impacted me, because
I graduated from college in nineteen seventy nine and I
was and I think all the kids in our family
were able to make a better living than my dad did.
(05:59):
And that's not just say we had a wonderful childhood
and I wouldn't trade it for anything, but we were
the typical examples of doing better than your parents, right, Yes,
So I'd love you to kind of break down and
kind of give us the cliff notes of what happened
(06:19):
not only over the last forty years, but what happened
before that, and how things seemed to change.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
One of the really nice things for me in going
around and starting to talk about my book is hearing
people's own stories of the American dream, their personal stories.
I tell my own personal story, my family's at the
start of the book, and so I love hearing other people's. So, yes, look,
you captured it in your personal story. And I'll put
some numbers around that. So, an American child born in
(06:47):
nineteen forty had a ninety two percent chance of growing
up to have a higher household income as an adult
than their parents did. And that is the entire society, right,
every racial group, ninety two percent. That's a virtual guarantee. Right.
That means even people who got quite ill or who
(07:08):
were laid off at some point in their life still
grew up to make more money than their parents did
ninety two percent. And so how did we get there?
And I think it is very important to say that
we're talking about the forties, the fifties, and the sixties.
These are decades with horrible racism, horrible sexism, really bad
religious bigotry as well. And so it's not that we
(07:29):
want to go back to the society that we had then,
But even for groups that were experiencing really vicious discrimination.
This progress applied so in the forties and fifties, even
before the great victories of the civil rights movement, the
white black pay gap shrunk and the white black life
expectancy gap shrunk. And the reason is because we were
(07:53):
building the society that was basically bottom up or middle
out prosperity, in which we were build holding a society
in which people were able to get jobs even if
they didn't have a college degree, that allowed them to
enjoy really good standard of living. And the word I
use to describe what we had is democratic capitalism, small
(08:14):
d democratic capitalism. Look, I really believe the evidence shows
that capitalism is the best system for organizing a society.
The Soviet Union didn't work, Cuba doesn't work right, South
Korea Lorks much better than North Korea. China got prosperous
after it moved toward capitalism and away from communism. But
not every form of capitalism works equally well. And a
(08:35):
kind of rough and tumble form of capitalism where we
have taxes really low and we don't have regulations and
workers can't join unions, just works much less well than
democratic capitalism, where we're investing in the future, and ordinary
people are able to form grassroots organizations and advocate for themselves.
And that's really what we had in the forties and
(08:55):
the fifties and the sixties.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Can you describe a little bit more, kind of unraveled
the term democratic capitalism, a little bit more for us
versus sort of unfettered capitalism.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Yes. So I think one of the things to know
about capitalism is both that it's superior to the alternatives,
but it also has a predictable set of excesses and problems. Right,
Capitalism on its own doesn't solve climate change. Capitalism on
its own doesn't tend to build schools where kids can go,
or roads for us to travel on. And capitalism on
its own tends to lead to rising inequality. And so
(09:30):
what you really need is a government to intervene and
do things like invest in the future, building big roads
and building airports, building schools for people. If you don't
have the government involved and workers can't join labor unions,
I think we've sort of lost sight of just how
important labor unions are.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Yeah, I want to get into that.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
And so that's a great example. If the government isn't
involved to make sure that blue collar workers can join
labor unions. Businesses can pretty easily get rid of labor
unions and labor unions for all their flaws, and they
are flawed. I've been in a labor union. I've been
a manager at The New York Times who's managed unionized employees.
I'm well aware of their flaws. But corporations have their
flaws too, And if we have corporations with our unions,
we end up with this really unbalanced society. And so,
(10:12):
to me, democratic capitalism is a system in which we
acknowledge both the phenomenal strengths of capitalism and also the
ways in which, left to its own devices, it doesn't
tend to produce living standards that rise rapidly for most people.
And just the simplest way to think about this is
for the bottom ninety nine percent of the income distribution,
(10:33):
wage growth was faster in the forties, fifties, and sixties
than it's been since the nineteen eighties. So really, for
most people, since we've moved to this more bare knuckle
form of capitalism in the eighties, income growth has just
been much more disappointing.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
You describe what was happening in the forties, fifties, and sixties.
But let's talk about when it all started to go bad,
and that was in the seventies and eighties, and you
trace a number of societal forces that came together to
create a lot of inequality and to really result in
(11:08):
a realignment of what had been traditional political parties. Can
you talk about that?
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Yes, I mean the sixties and seventies was a time
of really just phenomenal chaos, as people who lived through
it can remember. I mean, we had the crime rate
really start to rise in the early sixties. And I
want to say something important here, which is the mainstream media,
which you and I are both part of of the time,
and the left half of the political spectrum, basically denied
(11:37):
that rising crime was a problem. And they were wrong
about that rise in crime really was a problem in
the sixties and seventies.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Why do you think they denied it? Why do you
think they underplayed it?
Speaker 2 (11:48):
I think there is an instinct among liberals to say
that poverty is that economics are the root cause of everything.
And I understand that instinct. I've just written a book
about economic history, and so the idea that crime was
rising in the nineteen sixties, when the economy was still
very good, and thus it couldn't be just because of economics.
(12:09):
Meete people uncomfortable. So LBJ said, Hey, the way to
deal with rising crime is let's pass my war on
poverty and that I'll deal with it, Whereas in fact
it was a much more complex set of reasons why
crime was rising. It was basically people were coming to
question the society in all kinds of ways. Think about
the early sixties. It's SDS, it's in the Republican Party,
it's Barry Goldwater. People were saying, wait a second, something
(12:32):
about this post war situation feels a little off to us,
And it wasn't really about the economy, which was still
doing quite well. So crime starts to rise. In the sixties,
we have the Vietnam War, we have the assassination of
multiple prominent political figures, we have Watergate, and then in
the mid seventies we have this really terrible economic crisis,
mostly because of foreign reasons, the oil embargo. But Americans
(12:55):
looked around and they said, wow, society just is kind
of breaking down. And I completely understand why. People looked
at the government and they basically said, maybe that's the problem.
Maybe we just need a lot less government. And I
actually in the book, I try to describe sympathetically the
conservative movement that said, hey, if we have a lot
less government, all our problems will be solved. One of
(13:15):
the characters in my book is Robert Bork, who's famous
as a Supreme Court nominee, but is an incredibly important
economic thinker in the Reagan movement, more important than many
people realize. And I try to tell his story in
a way that let's readers understand why he came to
those views. But let's also be honest that that Robert
Bork revolution in economic policy made a lot of promises
(13:38):
about how great things would be if we only got
government out of the way. They said, living standards would
rise for everyone, we would all become more prosperous. And
the United States did move more toward a form of
rough and tumble capitalism than a lot of other countries,
and yet our results have been so disappointing. I mean, Katie,
the first chart in my book shows life expectancy in
(13:58):
every rich country. In nineteen eighty the United States had
a normal life expectancy for a rich country. For the
last fifteen years or so, We've had the single worst
life expectancy of any rich country in the world. We've
got to try something else.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
After this break, David breaks down how trickle down economics
worked and didn't work the way Republicans hoped, and the
surprising ways it's affected how long we live here in
the US. If you want to get smarter every morning
with a breakdown of the news and fascinating takes on
health and wellness and pop culture, sign up for our
(14:37):
daily newsletter, Wake Up Call by going to Katiecuric dot com.
Now back to my conversation with David Leonhardt. Well, connect
those dots. I mean, Reagan was trickled down economics, less regulation,
(14:58):
All kinds of things were happening right in the eighties,
and this sort of individualism almost iron ran kind of
attitude about wealth, right, So what were the ramifications of that?
Speaker 2 (15:12):
So there were certainly things that the Reagan administration didn't change,
and I know conservatives sometimes look back and say, well,
wait a second, he didn't get rid of Medicare and
Social Security. That's true, but he changed so much. I mean,
tax rates when he came into office were up, with
the top tax rate up around seventy percent, it's never
again been so high. It's sort of fluctuated in the thirties,
depending on whether we have a Republican or Democratic president.
(15:35):
He really unwound regulation in a lot of ways. He
allowed companies. This was Bork's biggest involvement. He allowed companies
to become so so much larger. The government stopped doing
so much antitrust. And the theory was, if only we
just let the market work, everyone will benefit.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Well, that's trickle down economics, right, which David Stockman ended
up disavowing.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
That is trickle down economics. And look, it was a
theory and it had a argument behind it. And now
more than forty years later, we can look at the results.
And I know that true believers of the Reagan Revolution
will say, well, that's because we never fully tried it.
But that, to me is a little bit like Marxists
who say communism work if only we actually tried it. Like,
(16:17):
we moved a long way towards the vision Reagan wanted,
and the results we've gotten since nineteen eighty for very
affluent people have been great. They've been great for stock
prices and top incomes, and for the vast majority of Americans,
they've been less good than they used to be, and
I think it's important to reflect on that.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
How does that directly impact life expectancy? Connect those dots
for me, David, Yes.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Thank you for that question. So what we know is
that life expectancy has really diverged by class. So it's
really diverged by whether you have a four year degree
or whether you don't. For people with a four year
college degree, the life expectancy trends are actually still pretty good.
I mean, COVID was variable for everyone, but that's true
(17:01):
around the world. The life expectancy trends for Americans with
a college degree have still been pretty good. The damning
statistic I told you about how the US now has
the lowest life expectancy of a high income country is
overwhelmingly driven by people without a four year college degree.
The causal mechanisms are really complex, but I also think
it's not that hard to understand the big picture. We
(17:22):
also know that the income gap between people with a
college degree and people without one has grown enormously. We
know people without a college degree are much less likely
to be in households where children are growing up with
two parents. We know they're much less likely to be
able to go to college and to finish college their children,
not just them. And so I think what we've ended
(17:42):
up with is we've ended up with this that we
have ended up with this kind of laissez faari society
in which not only has income inequality increased, but we've
lost a lot of the institutions churches, labor unions, community institutions,
employers that came to a town and would be there
for decades, that helped people build good and improving lives,
(18:05):
and that has had a whole set of both economic
and social causes that have been very damaging.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
All these things resulted in a political realignment with many
Democrats becoming Republicans, and there were a lot of reasons
for that as well, But can you explain some of
the factors.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
If I could ask conservatives and Republicans to be self reflective,
I would say, please look at these results since nineteen
eighty with an open mind and ask what's worked and
what happened. And I want to say there are a
whole bunch of conservatives who are actually doing that. Even
some members of Congress and a bunch of conservative intellectuals
were saying we need to go in a different direction.
I talk about them in the book. If I could
(18:47):
ask Democrats to be a little bit self reflective, I
would say, ask yourself, why is it that the Democratic
Party has increasingly become the party of relatively well off professionals,
And ask yourself, why is it that so many working
class people look at the Democratic Party and say that
party isn't my party. I feel like they talk down
(19:07):
to me. Historically, Democrats have reacted to this by saying, well,
it's mostly about racism, and look, it is partly about racism, right.
Donald Trump has said a lot of racist things. The
Republican Party at times has really used race baiting stereotypes.
I want to be very clear about that. But I
think progressives make a big mistake when they say the
(19:30):
only reason anyone could ever not vote for US is
because they're ignorant or because they're bigoted. I think that's
both really bad political strategy to tell people that you
need to vote for US or where you're ignorant. I also
think it's empirically wrong when you look at a whole
set of issues. College graduates and working class people have
different views on a whole bunch of things. It's not
(19:51):
just about race, And I think the clearest evidence of
this has probably come in the last five years when
we have seen Latinos, Asian Americans, and although the numbers
are small, they're noticeable in the data, Black Americans, particularly
working class people of all these groups shift away from
the Democratic Party. And I would really encourage Liberals and
(20:12):
Democrats to ask themselves, why is it that we're struggling
so much to get working class votes, Why is it
that increasingly true among Latinos and Asian Americans? And why
is it that there are you know, twenty states in
this country North Carolina, Florida, Texas where we basically can
ever win an election. I don't think it's just that
Republicans are cheating or they're doing these things. I think
(20:35):
that the Democratic Party has sent a message that it's
the party of educated people in a way that is
off putting to many other people.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
Yeah. A perfect example, I think is probably one of
the biggest mistakes of the Hillary Clinton campaign, and that
was when she said this.
Speaker 3 (20:52):
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you can put
half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket
of deplorables. Right, the races, sex is homophobic, xenophobic, islamophobic,
(21:15):
you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that
and he has lifted them up.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
I can't blame people for being insulted, and you can't
tar any huge group of Americans with such a big brush.
And I think it completely ignored the economic circumstances that
they were in for reasons it had nothing to do
with race. That was because we shifted from an industrial
(21:47):
to a technological society. The fact that manufacturing had dried up,
these cities had become, you know, just shadows of their
former selves. So I don't blame people well for being
highly offended by that comment.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
No, I agree, And it's just part of a much
larger pattern. Right, that's maybe the clearest expression of it.
But you know, there was a study of Texas after
the twenty twenty election to try to determine why Latino
voters moved toward the Republican Party, who was done by
a progressive group, and one of the things that they
pointed out was a lot of Latinos in Texas were
(22:23):
uncomfortable with the immigration system right now. They were worried
about border security. That doesn't fit the democratic narrative, right
of how we're supposed to think of immigration. Another thing
that people were concerned about is they really wanted the
economy to reopen once vaccines were available, and they were
unhappy with the idea that we were going to have
these extended shutdowns. That's another thing where I think sort
(22:43):
of a lot of Democrats and a lot of college
graduates said, the only way you can be in favor
of reopening is if you don't understand science. And I
think it's more complicated than that.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
Do you think some of this is because of the
evaporation of the sensible middle and the inability to compromise
between these two very polarized parties.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
I do, and I've spent a lot of time looking
at polling data, and I talk about it in the book.
I think there is a middle in this country, the
political middle. And it's what it's interesting is it's not
on the middle of every issue. It's actually left of
center on economics. So the middle of this country is
in favor of a higher minimum wage, and they're in
favor of expanding medicaid, and they like labor unions, not
(23:26):
every union, but they believe that people should be able.
But they're well to the right of where the Democratic
Party is on a lot of social issues. We can
say they're in the middle, or they're a little right
of center. I don't know what it is, but put
it this way, they're not as far left as where
the Democratic Party is. And so a lot of those
voters look at the two parties and they kind of
struggle to see themselves in either one.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Especially when they say sort of young liberals. I think
that have really pulled the party further to the left
and at a pace that I think may feel too
fast for older Americans, even liberal one.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Yes, and look, part of the reason Joe Biden got
the nomination and became the president is because one of
the more moderate sections of the Democratic Party are black voters.
And the way the calendar worked the South Carolina primary,
which is overwhelmingly black voters, came in this moment where
it wasn't clear what's going to happen, and black voters
flocked to Joe Biden right. Which is a reminder that
(24:21):
a lot of what we hear on social media, on
university campuses, again sometimes in the media is a version
of liberalism that is more upscale than actually the way
many people are. To put a fine point on it.
I think the Democratic Party would probably solve some of
its problems if it spent more time listening to voters
(24:43):
of color who have community college degrees or who don't
have a college degree, and less time listening to white
voters who have graduate degrees. And white voters with graduate
degrees really drive not only white voters, but white voters
with graduate degrees holing shit are disproportionately in sort of
influential jobs in the progressive atmosphere.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
I've always wondered why Democrats don't talk more directly to
working class voters that their outreach seems to be. I mean,
maybe I'm wrong. I don't obviously know every strategy that's
being employed, but I do feel, and maybe it's not
covered enough, that there does seem to be a disconnect
between blue collar voters and Democrats that is really surprising.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
So one of the things that I enjoyed doing this book.
In this book was taking people whose names are well known,
but telling you parts of their stories that are not
well known. And I mentioned Robert Bork about that, But
another person who I talk about who I think his
legacy is aged better than Robert Bork's is Robert F. Kennedy,
the original one, not the junior. And when he ran
for president in nineteen sixty eight, there were a lot
(25:55):
of people who the Democratic Party was starting to have
this development of the kind of more elite, very socially liberal,
and people told RFK, don't talk about crime, and he said, no,
I'm going to talk about crime. I know that Richard
Nixon and George Wallace are demograguing crime and they're talking
about it in ways that are meant to spark racism.
But people's concerns about crime are legitimate, and Kennedy ran
(26:18):
this campaign in which he made law and order central
to his campaign. Journalists said, where is the great liberal
Robert Kennedy because of the way he was talking about crime.
He talked about Vietnam and actually very nuanced ways, because
he understood that many Americans were unhappy with Vietnam, but
also many working class people were frustrated that their kids
had gone to fight. And the reason why I think
(26:38):
he's important is Robert Kennedy didn't try to win working
class votes by telling people, hey, just vote on economic policy,
ignore my social policy. He treated working class voters with
respect on both social policy and economic policy, and I
think part of what modern Democrats should be reflective on
(26:59):
is you can't just tell people don't vote against your
economic interests. I mean, Katie, you and I know that
the fanciest parts of New York City and all these
resort towns, they vote Democratic. They're voting against their economic interests, right,
They're voting to raise their own taxes. So lots of
people vote against their economic interests. And I think Democrats
lose working class voters when they say, hey, let's just
(27:22):
ignore social policy and just talk about taxes. And RFK
didn't do that.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Let's go back to unions real quick, David, because they
were thriving. What happened to unions? It was it deregulation.
Was this these new attitudes about capitalism? How did unions
kind of fall apart? Did they overreach?
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yes? They did. They did overreach, and they and a
lot of union leaders actually cared less about continuing to
build a movement and cared more just about their own
immediate members and didn't understand that if they cared only
about their immediate members rather than attracting new union members,
eventually the labor movement would shrivel, which is exactly what happened.
So absolutely, union leaders overreached. I tell some of that
(28:07):
story in the book. They deserve significantly. It's also the
case that the government became quite hostile to labor unions.
And if you don't have the government playing referee, if
you just have kind of corporations and workers out there,
If it's a question between can a single corporation prevent
a bunch of individual workers from joining a union, the
(28:29):
answer is almost always yes. I mean, look what Starbucks
has done recently. When people organize at a shop, Starbucks
somehow finds lots of little violations among the people who
decided to join a union and schedules them with really
bad shifts or you know, says we need to let
you go. And so there are lots of ways for companies,
sometimes within the rules, to make sure that unions don't form.
(28:51):
And the government basically stopped playing a version of an
impartial referee or judge and really let corporations shrink unions.
And that's what happened.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
Well, union's overreached, But I think it's important to point
out that corporations got greedy, yes, right, I mean that
was a big factor too. They didn't want to pay
people necessarily fair wages. They wanted to make sure their
quarterly profits were good for their shareholders. I mean, the
whole balance of power really shifted.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
It did. And you know, when you talk about greed,
that's really a form of culture. And culture is hard
to talk about because it's imorphous, right, It's people's attitudes,
and you can't necessarily pass a bill that changes the culture.
But I really emphasized the importance of culture in the
book because I don't think the corporate executives of the
(29:42):
past were any morally superior to the corporate executives today,
but they did behave differently because the culture was different.
I mean, Mitt Romney's dad, George Romney, was the CEO
of a car company in Detroit, and it hit so
many of its benchmarks that he was due a huge bonus.
And he went to the board and he said, I
think this is unseemly. I don't think it's healthy for
(30:05):
our country or our company to have me making so
much more than any workers. Will you please take back
this bonus? I mean, my goodness, can.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
You imagine any of the corporate CEOs who are making
hundreds of millions of dollars today? Saying their salaries were unseemly.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Yeah. I mean, it's just and again, it's not that
he was. It's not that he's inherently a better person.
It's that he lived in a different culture, a less selfish.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
He sounds like a better person to me.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
That's fair. But so I would say it is at
least in part that he lived in a less selfish,
and let's be honest here, more patriotic and communitarian culture,
and he reflected those values in his behavior.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
We'll be right back with David Leonhardt.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
One.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
If you'd loved listening to Kelly Corrigan in my recent
conversation with David Brooks, you'll definitely love her podcast, Kelly
Corrigan wonders. Kelly has this every woman wisdom that people
just gravitate to. Oprah Magazine calls her the voice of
a generation. Huffington Post calls her the poet laureate of
the ordinary. You might know her books about family life.
(31:23):
All four were New York Times bestsellers. I met her
when she was a guest on The Today Show almost
twenty years ago, and we've stayed in touch ever since.
On her show, Kelly wonders about family ties, our deepest
ambitions and how to be useful with people like Brian Stevenson,
Anna Quinlan, Jenny Wallace, Neil Katilla, Claire Danes, and Kate Bohler.
(31:47):
I saw somewhere that someone said she's like a cross
between Tina Fey and Krista Tippett. So jump on board,
tune into Kelly Corrigan Wonders. I'd say you might as
well subscribe. Actually, wherever you're listening to this podcast, we're
(32:09):
back with David Leonhart. I want to talk about that
communitarian culture, because I know that's something you address in
the book as well. But I want to finish the
union conversation so they start to weaken. I think is
PAPCO one of the big turning points during the I
hate to keep pointing a finger at the late Ronald Reagan,
(32:29):
but the air traffic controllers that was a huge inflection point,
wasn't it in terms of union power and muscle?
Speaker 2 (32:36):
Yes, And it's actually I think it's an important example.
So Ronald Reagan comes to office. The air traffic controllers
who indorsed Ronald Reagan, which is fascinating, perhaps feeling empowered
because they had endorsed this new president and most unions
obviously had not made just unbelievable demands really in terms
of wage increases and in terms of being able to
(32:58):
take time off. I walk through some of them in
the book. It just in terms of you look at
them and you're like, WHOA, that's too much. And Ronald
Reagan said, if you go on strike, I'll fire you.
And the air traffic controllers didn't believe it, and they
went on strike and he fired them, And so they
do deserve some blame in that story. But the message
that it sent, which was before a lot of companies
(33:21):
pushed back against unions, often very hard, but once unions formed,
they didn't try to destroy them, typically at their own
company or through government policy. And Reagan's policy was basically
a version of hey, the gloves are off in a
way that they weren't under Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon
and previous Republicans. And it's not simply trying to restrain
(33:42):
unions from expanding into new regions or it restrained their
wage increases. It's fine to go after them and really
try to eliminate them. And that's what happened in a
lot of industries is as well as globalization, but the
cultural change was vital.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Well, let's talk about globalization and how that impacted unions
as well. Well, they just lost some of their power
because the world became flatter, as Tom Friedman would say, right.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
Yes, they did. So that's interesting. That's definitely the case
from the past. Weirdly, I think though, that might be
reason to believe that unions can play a bigger role
going forward than they have over the last fifty years.
It's certainly the case that if a factory wants to
avoid being unionized, it can move to another state or
another country. But let's think about how our economy has changed.
(34:28):
So much more of it is now service businesses. A
hospital can't move in the same way that a factory can.
A warehouse that is serving a particular region for online
orders can't move in the same way that a factory can.
A restaurant can't, and so unions have a lot of
challenges today. The law is still really stacked against them,
(34:49):
and I don't think we'll see a resurgence in unions
until we see some legal changes the same way we've
recently seen legal changes in healthcare and legal changes in
other ways climate policy. I think it will take changes
in the law. But if you got those changes in
the law, I do really think you could imagine more
of the workforce being unionized because we're now moving away
(35:10):
from manufacturing and we're moving toward businesses that are inherently
local and thus the business camp so easily simply pick
up and move.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
But aren't we seeing the pendulum swing slightly already, David?
In terms of some of the activities we've seen at Amazon,
for example, Hollywood ongoing you aw strike and fast food
workers and the minimum wage, it does seem like there's
something in the atmosphere.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
I think there absolutely is. I think everything you said
is right, and the only thing I would tack on
with apologies for being repetitive, is I don't think it
will last without some changes in the law because at
a lot of these companies where the workers are expressing interest,
they ultimately fail before unions because it's still too easy
for companies to vent them from doing so.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
So where do we go from here? I guess the
question is, David, you know you use the past tense
in your title. I think intentionally it's ours was the
Shining Future. Now it's based on something Mary Anton and
immigration rights advocate wrote at the turn of the century,
mine is the Shining Future. So you know, you started
(36:23):
this conversation by saying you were an optimist. So how
do we get out of this mess? How do we
restore some equilibrium and honestly some equality to people because
income inequality is just so outrageous in this country.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
It is, and you know, the white black wage gap
is is almost as large as it was when Harry
Truman was president, and so all forms of inequality are
just really, really quite outrageous. Yeah, you're right. The title
is ours was the Shining Future. If I had a
longer title, maybe it would be ours was the Shining Future,
and it could be again.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
But that's not colin.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
Yeah, but so I love that question. Here to me
is the reason to have optimism, not that we will
get over our problems, but that we can get over
our problems. I know that many people think that our
system is rigged, that our democracy doesn't work, and I
actually agree in certain ways it's rigged and our democracy don't.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Well, I've heard you talk about upward mobility and how
it's really declined, and you know, I think their statistics
about forty plus percent of people never leave their socioeconomic
group they were born in. So you know, they're not
like the current kids. They're not climbing up, they're staying down.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
Yes, and so inequality, it's just it's really really high.
What I would ask people to reflect on is how
has this country changed before, not just in the long
ago past, but I'll get to this, but also fairly recently.
And I think it's almost always changed through grassroots political movements.
Usually grassroots political movements that seemed like the odds were
(38:04):
too long when they began. So how did the union
movement in this country begin? It began, the modern one
began in the nineteen thirties when unions lost every fight
that they had fought for years and years and years,
and then we were in the depression, and it won
because people like a. Philip Randolph and others kept fighting
and not only persuaded workers to join unions, but persuaded
(38:25):
the federal government to change the law. That's the lesson
of the labor movement that shortened hours and helped build
the middle class. It's also the lesson of the civil
rights movement. We look back on the civil rights movement
as a glorious victory, as we should, but it didn't
feel that way in the moment to a lot of organizers.
It felt like defeat after defeat after defeat, and then
a little bit of progress. But they kept at it.
(38:47):
And what they did was they tried to shape public opinion,
and they built these grassroots movements and they changed the law.
And I think that's the lesson of the labor movement,
the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the disability rights movement.
If someone saying wait a second, or all of his
examples coming from the political left, I actually think it's
the lesson of the anti abortion movement fifty years ago.
(39:08):
They were furious about Roe v. Wade, and so what
did they do. They organized, and they won local elections,
and they basically took over the Republican Party and they
were able to appoint judges who are friendly to them.
Whether you celebrate these changes or abhor them, this is
how our country changes. And I think we've gotten a
little distracted from the material living standards of most people.
(39:30):
We don't really have large grassroots movements that are focused
on improving their lives. And I still really believe that
if those movements come together, the biggest lesson of history
is not that our society is irrevocably broken, but that
we haven't done the things that we need to do
to fix it. And American democracy, for all the challenges
(39:51):
to it, and I do not want to minimize the
authoritarian challenges to American democracy right now, for all of
the challenges to American democracy, it's still has the tools
to build a much better society. And indeed, the only
way we've built a better society in the past is
through those democratic tools.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
But you talk about establishing a communitarian sensibility, what is
that and does that have to be hand in hand
with some of these grassroots movements?
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Yes, I think the good news is that it probably
would go hand in hand.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
What is it exactly?
Speaker 2 (40:29):
It's the idea that I care deeply about the people
in my community, and not just in a sort of
ephemeral way. I care about them. They are a priority
to me, even maybe before other parts of the world.
And I know that's a kind of controversial thing to say,
particularly maybe on the left. But if you had corporate
(40:51):
executives who said, you know what, I'm not neutral about
whether I'm going to save jobs in my own town
or move jobs to another town or another country. That
is the kind of thing that the corporate executives in
the past felt. They said, you know what, I'm not
going to leave Milwaukee. I'm going to build a beautiful
theater in Milwaukee because I care about Milwaukee. I'm not
neutral about my own community. And I really do think
(41:15):
I don't know the exact way we get back to that,
but I really do think a certain amount of communitarianism
and patriotism, the idea that hey, we're all in this together.
We care about other parts of the world, but we're
Americans and we care about this and we're going to
fix our country, Americans of all races and all religions
and all different parts of the world. That kind of
communitarianism is different from oh, we're agnostic about whether this
(41:39):
job is in the United States or not in the
United States. It's a different culture.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
But given the polarization, and I'm so tired of that word, David,
but given how vitriolic our civil discourse has become, how
we've been our social fabric has been shredded. As David
Brooks often talks about, I mean, how do you even
start doing that?
Speaker 2 (42:04):
It's incredibly difficult. Surely I won't be the one who's
able to solve it. I would just remind people that
there are people in our past who've looked at even
steeper odds and didn't give up, but said, all we
can do is try to make this a better country.
I mean, I mentioned a Philip Randolph before he built
the first meaningful union of black employees in the United
(42:24):
States in the nineteen thirties, right, and then he faced
down FDR when FDR told him to cancel a march
meant to integrate wartime factories. And so our country has
faced these incredibly long odds for certain groups before, and
what they've done is they've found ways to organize, and
they've found ways to be incredibly strategic, sometimes ruthlessly strategic.
(42:47):
Here's what we're going to do to make this a
better country. It's not guaranteed to succeed, but I don't
really know what the alternative is for us to get
out of these problems that we have today.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
And I think really strong leaders that can help inspire
people to do all the things you're talking about, strong
leadership at the national, state, and local level.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
Yeah, and look, many people lament just how old our
political leaders are not just the president, not just the
likely nominee from the other party, but the leaders in Congress.
And that's true. It's somewhat bizarre how old our political
leaders are. You can look at that, though, and say
there is an opportunity They're not going to be around
(43:29):
that much longer in the grand sweep of things, and
we really do need new leaders, right We need people
who can come forward and express fresh visions of what
inspires America.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Well, hopefully people will read this book and can have
a blueprint of how to, I think repair some of
the deep wounds and the setbacks that need resetting in
our society and in our culture. I think if I
reviewed this book, I would say imminently readable, highly accessible,
(44:01):
and ultimately inspiring.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
Thank you, Katie, I really appreciate. I hope people read
the book too.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
I think they will, and don't be afraid of it, everybody.
It's very easy to digest and understand, even for someone
like me whose eyes glaze over when I read a
lot of economic stories, because I think telling the stories
of people behind the trends and really understanding their role
(44:27):
makes it a lot more fun. And plus it just
explains so much, and so if anyone wants to understand
where we are today, you really do need to understand
our past, and David does an excellent job of explaining it.
So thank you, David.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
Thank you. You are as I've told you before, you
are my favorite interviewer in the whole country. So to
come on and be interviewed by you is a tremendous thrill.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
That's such a nice thing to say, because you talk
to a lot of smart people, So thank you very
much for that compliment.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
Absolutely, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
Thanks for listening everyone. If you have a question for me,
a subject you want us to cover, or you want
to share your thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world,
reach out. You can leave a short message at six
h nine five point two five five five, or you
can send me a DM on Instagram. I would love
to hear from you. Next Question is a production of
(45:30):
iHeartMedia and Katie Kuric Media. The executive producers are Me,
Katie Kuric, and Courtney Ltz. Our supervising producer is Ryan Martz,
and our producers are Adriana Fazzio and Meredith Barnes. Julian
Weller composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode,
(45:50):
or to sign up for my newsletter wake Up Call,
go to the description in the podcast app, or visit
us at Katiecuric dot com. You can also find me
on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Katie Couric
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.