Billionaires have looted economies, hidden from tax bills, and destabilized democracies for decades. But the subset of billionaires who make a show of pretending to be good citizens have to be the worst among them. They’re called “Davos Man” and according to New York Times Global Economics Correspondent Peter Goodman, they’re devouring the world we live in.
Peter S. Goodman is the Global Economics Correspondent at the New York Times. He is a two-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. His new book Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World is available now.
Twitter: @petersgoodman
Further reading:
Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/davos-man-peter-s-goodman?variant=39325320282146
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com/
Twitter: @PitchforkEcon
Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics
Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer
Nick Hanauer:
The concentration of wealth that is reflected in Davos and the way in which that wealth and power is defended is at the heart of the collapse of democratic norms
Peter Goodman:
Davos Man will tell us that he has all of our best interests at heart, that there are win-win solutions to every problem. This is an elaborate prophylactic against fair distribution of wealth
David Goldstein:
Davos Man? He is “The Man”
Speaker 3:
From the home offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle. This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.
Nick Hanauer:
I’m Nick Hanauer founder of Civic Ventures.
David Goldstein:
I’m David Goldstein, Senior Fellow at Civic Ventures. So, Nick, have you ever been to Davos?
Nick Hanauer:
I have not. I used to feel bad about that, but now I’m happy.
David Goldstein:
But you know a lot of those guys.
Nick Hanauer:
I do.
David Goldstein:
So you’ve palled around with some of them.
Nick Hanauer:
Oh, yeah.
David Goldstein:
Yeah. So you’ve got some firsthand experience with what this episode’s guest, Peter Goodman, calls Davos Man.
Nick Hanauer:
I do, I do. I think it’s a really interesting contribution in a way to go beyond characterizing the rich simply as the rich. But I do think he’s really onto something with the way in which he describes Davos Man as this sort of, a subset of the wealthiest people who are in many ways above and beyond national boundaries. Sort of operate globally, defending institutions and power that exists effectively outside of the sort of normal governance.
David Goldstein:
Right. The interesting thing is it reminds me of this expression from the ’70s the ’80s where people refer to “The Man.” They’d blame it on The Man. And we all knew there was no actual man, but the world operated that way. And what you have with Davos Man, he is The Man. It’s not a conspiracy, but in effect operates as a conspiracy, because these are the people that rule the world.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. So the basic thesis of this book, Davos Man, I think is largely correct, which is that the concentration of wealth that is reflected in Davos, and the people who attend it and the way in which that wealth and power is defended is at the heart of the collapse of democratic norms and the increase in polarization that we find around the Western world. But what I’m really interested in talking to him about and trying to tease out is like really who’s at fault? Is it Davos Man himself? Or is it the economics profession that enabled all of this terrible behavior? I mean, it’ll be really interesting to get his perspective on that.
And you know, for those who don’t know, Davos every year is convened in this tiny town in Switzerland. And it’s basically a club for super rich, super powerful people from around the world who get together for a few days and hob knob, and generally try to persuade themselves that what they’re doing is great and righteous and figure out how to do more of it. There is, of course, a patina of self-sacrifice and the greater good that folks try to paint this thing with. But I think that what Peter’s going to tell us is all of that is kind of a lie and I tend to agree. That if there’s one principle that you can abstract from thousands of years of human history, it is that ordinary people cannot rely on the kindness of the rich and the powerful to create a just and stable and secure world.
Peter Goodman:
I’m Peter Goodman. I’m the global economic correspondent for the New York Times. And I’m the author of Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World,
Nick Hanauer:
We love it.
Peter Goodman:
Oh, I thought it would be up your alley.
David Goldstein:
So, Peter, tell me why rich guys like Nick are such villains.
Peter Goodman:
You know, look, it’s not that every billionaire is a bad guy. The point of this book is not to demonize billionaires or even wealthy people. It’s to note that we should not be outsourcing the solution of life’s problems to billionaires and expecting that, through stakeholder capitalism or philanthropy or whatever idea they cook up next in their public relations laboratory, we can just simply dismantle government and forget about progressive taxation and regulation. And just assume that people like Larry Fink and Jamie Dimon and Marc Benioff will take care of climate change and social justice.
You know, we have to understand that the world that we’re living in is extremely unequal, and not by accident, because of the subject of my book. Which is this systematic bottom up transfer of wealth that’s played out, not just in the United States, though, notably so, but throughout most of the developed world.
Nick Hanauer:
A couple of follow up questions. So first, why did you call it Davos Man? And where’s that term come from? And what’s the difference that you’re trying to highlight between just rich people and Davos Man?
Peter Goodman:
Sure. So Davos Man is this term that was coined by the political scientist, Samuel Huntington back in 2004. And he was using it to describe people who go to the World Economic Forum in Davos, this annual gathering of the most powerful people on earth. These are billionaires, heads of state, the odd celebrities. It’s a place where billionaires go to meet in secret rooms where they’re not bothered by SEC disclosure or journalists or other annoyances. Essentially, as one former forum executive put it to me, “Write the rules for the rest of us.” And I’d been going to the forum for a decade. And I came to see the people who go to Davos as a unique subset of the ultra wealthy, in that Davos convenes under this mantra, “Committed to improving the state of the world,” which is this wonderful phrase to describe a gathering that is full of the ultimate beneficiaries for the status quo.
And I came to see that this was not an accident, that this was carefully engineered. The Davos, and what I’ve come to call Davos Man thinking, this idea that when we organize the rules of our economies to send more wealth to the people who’ve already got most of it, somehow through the magic of trickle down, we’ll all benefit. And that’s unique to Davos Man. This is the differentiator between the everyday billionaire and Davos Man.
Davos Man will tell us that he has all of our best interests at heart, that there are win-win solutions to every problem. And win-win is a great way of avoiding sacrifice. This is an elaborate prophylactic against fair distribution of wealth against progressive taxation, regulation and antitrust enforcement.
David Goldstein:
Do they believe it or is it just PR?
Peter Goodman:
Well, I think part of the magic is that they’re really good at believing it. I think Davos Man as a species is extremely good at crafting a narrative that leads to a useful place. All I can go by is how they behave. I mean, look at Marc Benioff, the billionaire CEO of Salesforce, the Silicon Valley tech company, who last year at virtual Davos, they couldn’t meet in person because the pandemic, actually said, “CEOs are the real heroes of the pandemic.”
I mean, he wasn’t talking about frontline medical workers. He wasn’t talking about the people delivering our packages or processing our food. Working in slaughterhouses, having to put their own health on the line so the rest of us can eat. He was talking about CEOs and he underscored this. This wasn’t like some sort of gaffe, he said it multiple times. And he said, “Listen, government did not save you. We saved you. And we did it, not for profit, but just to save the world.” I think when you spend time, as I have, with people like Benioff you get the feeling that they’re really quite proud of what it is they’ve done.
I mean, Benioff goes on about how in the first wave of the pandemic, he pulled strings in China to find 50 million pieces of PPE. We’re talking face masks and protective gowns. And he brought them to frontline medical workers in the states. And let’s pause and say thanks for that, that probably did save lives. But let’s also pause and ask, why are we dependent upon the largesse of a tech bro in the middle of the worst pandemic, in a century to outfit our frontline medical workers in what’s supposed to be the richest country in the world?
And part of the reason is that people like Marc Benioff have either pointed at their philanthropy, while they’re quietly members of the Business Roundtable, this lobbying organization, the US Chamber of Commerce. These are the organizations that have delivered the massive tax cuts through which Salesforce itself has paid the modest sum of zero in federal taxes twice in the last several years. That’s part of why the system is so starved of resources and why billionaires like Benioff can sort of swoop in like White Knights.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. I think you’re dead right. And that is sort of an embarrassing claim to make. So do you think, I mean, you’ve been at this for a pretty long time, as have I, do you think these viewpoints have evolved or changed over the last 10 or 20 years? Do you think it’s different today than it was?
Peter Goodman:
Well, the packaging’s certainly different. Yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
You think so?
Peter Goodman:
Well, I mean, I don’t think the substance of how companies are running is terribly different. I mean, there’s certainly a lot of rhetoric that’s different, right? I mean, cultures change. I mean, CEOs are aware of Black Lives Matter. They’re aware that they better at least look like they’re taking diversity and hiring seriously or they do run the risk of getting criticism that can hurt their brand, they can make it hard to recruit. I mean, that part’s real.
But if we look at how they’ve actually run their companies, I think it’s pretty clear that… You know I spent a lot of time in the book on this thing stakeholder capitalism. This idea first cooked up by Klaus Schwab, who’s the founder of the World Economic Forum. Benioff is a big celebrator of stakeholder capitalism. So is Larry Fink, who I know you guys have talked about. This is the founder of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management company. This is a company that literally manages 10 trillion dollars in wealth.
And they will tell you that, oh, Milton Friedmanism is behind us now. Companies are no longer just organized to send returns to shareholders. It’s all about catering to stakeholders, this magic word for Davos Man. And stakeholders are labor, never labor unions, it’s always on Davos Man’s terms, but labor, local communities, social issues. But with a lot of fanfare in the summer of 2019, the Business Roundtable, then headed by Jamie Dimon, who’s one of my five primary characters in the book, actually got 180 some odd CEOs to sign this new statement of a purpose of a corporation. And they got lots of credulous writers to proclaim that this was this huge transformation in capitalism. Stakeholder capitalism is with us. Well, the pandemic is really the first serious test of these principles and whether they’re real.
I spent a lot of time on this in the book. Jeff Bezos signs the statement of a purpose of a corporation and he leaves his warehouse workers laboring in the first wave of the pandemic with no protective gear. He fires the head of a labor movement who demands that the plant in Staten Island, New York be shut down until they can get a handle on how many COVID cases there are. And then of course, Bezos blasts themself into space in the middle of the pandemic to the tune of five billion dollars, at a time when most of humanity doesn’t even have vaccines, we supposedly can’t afford to pay them.
There are countless other examples and research has actually been done showing that companies that signed the stakeholder capitalism pledge actually performed worse on a whole series of indicators. On workplace standards, compensation, diversity. They performed worse than companies that didn’t even sign the pledge. And none of the companies that signed the pledge bothered to get board approval, except for JP Morgan Chase, which seems like a pretty good indicator that they’re not taking it all that seriously.
So I think the terms of engagement with the public have changed and will continue to change because companies have to think about their brands. But at the end of the day we should not have any illusions about it. CEOs of publicly traded companies feel a strong fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits for their shareholders. That’s the special stakeholder in all this, the shareholder.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, for sure. And themselves. And I couldn’t agree with you more that that stakeholder capitalism thing that the Roundtable did was virtually meaningless. That in the absence of laws and regulations that require companies to pay their workers enough to get by without food stamps, and require them to pay taxes, and require them to do all of the things that enable functioning democracy to thrive. It’s all a PR stunt and that’s it.
David Goldstein:
And during the pandemic, Nick, require companies to provide paid sick leave, require companies provide safe working place, to provide protective gear, et cetera. You know here in Seattle, our city council did a lot of that stuff, but it wasn’t the companies who did it on their own.
Nick Hanauer:
Right, for sure.
David Goldstein:
All of that extra pay that went to grocery workers and delivery drivers and so forth, that was mandated by ordinance. And if not for that, it never would’ve happened.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Our podcast is dedicated to economics.
Peter Goodman:
Right.
Nick Hanauer:
And I’m particularly interested in what you call the cosmic lie. Which I believe that we have analyzed in great depth over last couple of years, which is largely the neoliberal proposition that when the rich get richer, that’s good for the economy. And when the poor get richer, that’s bad for the economy.
Peter Goodman:
Right.
Nick Hanauer:
Basically, that anything that helps rich people increase their wealth or their profits will magically increase economic growth and GDP and all sorts of good things. And anything we do to improve the lives of ordinary people will increase the federal deficit and bankrupt our great country. Basically that’s the construct of neoliberalism embedded in neoclassical economics. And so I guess for my own part, I’d just be interested in how you think about this. I think your analysis is largely correct that billionaires are eating the world. That the concentration of wealth that the West has both enabled and allowed, is at the core of the crisis in democracy and civility and stability that we face.
But it was really from our point of view the economics, the professional economics profession, that was at the core of this catastrophe, because they gave everyone permission to believe this nonsense. People need to believe that what they’re doing is morally righteous and just and appropriate. And so people make up these stories, these narratives, to self-justify. And that characteristic is not something we are likely to be able to extinguish from humanity. But it was the clowns in the universities that gave legitimacy to all this nonsense.
So anyway, I actually do know some of these guys. And make no mistake, they tend to be pathologically ambitious, predominantly selfish people. But we just are going to always have a bunch of those people in our society. What’s super frustrating is the degree to which the economics profession hijacked these conversations in ways that made even people on the so-called left buy into it.
David Goldstein:
So I guess if there’s a question here, Nick, it’s how much of the blame falls on the sociopathic billionaires and how much of it on the economists who shilled for them?
Peter Goodman:
Well, I don’t think they can be separated exactly. I think, Nick, you make a really important point. I mean, I focus in the book on people like Robert Bork, who sold us this idea, it was once a wacko idea, it became a mainstream idea. And to your point, embraced not just by Republican administrations, like Reagan and the two Bushes, but by Clinton, and to a certain extent, Obama.
Nick Hanauer:
100%
Peter Goodman:
So long as the consumer isn’t paying higher prices for something, than no harm, no foul. Any merger is good because it gives us more scale.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s efficient.
Peter Goodman:
It’s efficient. Right, exactly. But I guess the point of my book is to say that none of this stuff happens in a vacuum. I think it’s pretty familiar. I mean, I’ve had some criticism of the book from people saying, well, why are you picking on the billionaires? Isn’t it the fault of the government? Well, okay, don’t the billionaires have a little bit of influence over who’s pulling the levers of government? I mean, the campaign finance is enormous.
I think less understood is the point that you’re making. But I think that academics themselves, I mean, we know that people like Glenn Hubbard and Columbia have had their research financed by right wing groups-
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, for sure.
Peter Goodman:
… that are directly interested in serving corporate constituents with the deregulatory and tax cutting pack. I mean, the American Enterprise Institute, supposedly this think tank in Washington, I mean, it’s a funnel for Davos Man to essentially perpetuate the cosmic lie. And so it’s not an accident that the academics who are the ones who are saying, “Hey, everything’s going to be great if we just give more money to rich people,” are the ones who end up with the biggest bullhorn and then they have the greatest influence.
And then I think to your point, that intersects with the idea that we all want to narrative where we’re not nanny-state-loving Europeans. We’re swashbuckling capitalists on the frontier. If you didn’t do well like Jeff Bezos, you must not have tried hard enough, but let’s not pollute our system with just looking after the losers, let’s celebrate the winners. And I think there’s something deeply American about that.
But, again, it’s not an accident that this goes back to the end of the Second World War, the Cold War, that big business managed to, and Davos Man, insinuated this idea that, hey, business is how we defeated communism. So let’s celebrate business as the force for liberation from all problems.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about the personalities that drove this narrative, who is the center of this story?
Peter Goodman:
Well, I’ve got these five primary characters, some of whom we’ve [crosstalk 00:20:46].
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, but the secondary characters are quite interesting. What do you call, supporting cast?
Peter Goodman:
The Davos Man enablers. People-
Nick Hanauer:
Enablers, right.
Peter Goodman:
Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, who sells his presidency to the public as this we’re done with the cynicism of the primary parties on the right and the left. This is a people’s movement. It’s really a vessel funded by Davos Man, like Bernard Arnault, the CEO behind Louis Vuitton, a bunch of investment bankers at BNP Paribas, the global financial establishment, including Larry Fink. They embrace him as guy who’s going to make France friendly to business. And Macron makes the disastrous choice to cut wealth taxes at the same time that he increases gas taxes. Americans who go to places like Paris as tourists may be surprised to learn that France is actually a lot more like the US than we think. And most people depend upon their cars to get to work, to get their kids to school. And so this has just disastrous consequences. People are furious.
This is where the Yellow Vest Movement comes from. And the Yellow Vest Movement is somewhat complicated, but it overlaps with the extreme right, the national front headed by Marine Le Pen, demonizing immigrants. Essentially diverting attention from the reality that France’s problems, like most problems in most developed economies, is the story that I’m telling. It’s this pillaging over decades in plain view, by Davos men, who’ve managed to essentially dismantle public spending and transfer the proceeds to themselves. But on the surface is always something like, oh, a bunch of people have shown up who don’t speak French or Swedish or Italian or whatever from some other country, and political opportunists come along and blame them for problems that are really much deeper problems that reflect scarcity.
Nick Hanauer:
Let’s talk for a minute about, I think you make a really important point about fooling the public into believing that public problems will be best solved by private interests. And the degree to which philanthropy plays a role in green-washing bad behavior.
Peter Goodman:
Right.
Nick Hanauer:
Right. Like, so can you talk about that a little bit?
Peter Goodman:
Well, there have been multiple moments that I’ve seen at Davos over the years. There was one famously where Michael Dell was on this panel back in, I think, 2018. And he said, in response to a question on a panel, “Hey, why should I give my money to the government? The government is just dysfunctional and inefficient, and I can do much better just by running my philanthropic empire.”
It turns out his philanthropy that year, depending on how you measure it, is less than one percent of his income for the year. I mean, if there’d been a wealth tax, any sort of a wealth tax proposed, whether you like the Sanders one or the Warren one, or your own version, would’ve collected a whole lot more. And of course, he then says, “Well, we don’t need higher tax rates. Higher tax rates would just be destructive toward innovation and America could never grow with tax rates of 70%, the way they have in some Nordic countries.” And, of course, there’s this MIT economist acceded to [inaudible 00:24:17] says, “Well, actually, we have that in America and America grew just fine.” And this is actually used.
Nick Hanauer:
Faster, actually.
Peter Goodman:
Yeah, right.
Peter Goodman:
And this is actually-
Nick Hanauer:
It was news. News to… I’m often struck by how little understanding of these issues these folks have. Like in general, these are very, very smart people, but they do not think deeply about public policy.
Peter Goodman:
Right.
Nick Hanauer:
Or understand this stuff very well. To be clear, Jeff Bezos is very smart. So is Michael Dell and Marc Benioff, they’re very bright guys. But it is often remarkable how detached these folks are from the underlying dynamics, which have made them wealthy.
Peter Goodman:
It’s even more dangerous than ignorance. I mean, if we go back to the robber barons who they liked to put their names on buildings, we got Carnegie Hall, we got university campuses. But by and large, for them, lots of wealth was an end in itself. They were happy to live behind this secure perimeter. Whereas this species that I’m calling Davos Man, I mean, they’re seeking our adulation on a whole different level as a way of fending off accountability. It’s like a preemptive against us actually using our democracies to have a say over how wealth is distributed. To have a say over rules in the marketplace, so we’re not just suffering monopolies.
So take somebody like Steve Schwarzman, right? I mean, he’s the private equity magnate, he’s worth 35 or 36 billion depending upon the day. And he vacuums up foreclosed homes after the great financial crisis and the great recession in the states. And he’s not simply content to like flip these homes for a huge profit and say you’re welcome to the shareholders. I mean, he actually writes in his memoir, and I’ve heard him in public speeches, go on and on about, “Oh, this wasn’t about the money, this was an act of civic virtue. I went into communities where giant weeds were overgrowing houses and there were rodent infestations. And we fixed up these communities and slapped paint on houses.” It’s like you can almost hear the soundtrack for a soothing life insurance commercial with an adorable golden retriever puppy romping on some lawn.
I mean, the truth is, he creates this subsidiary called Invitation Homes, which is an invitation for huge numbers of people to pay exorbitant rents. He invites them to sit on hold for several hours because suddenly maintenance has become automated and good luck if your dishwasher breaks, or even if you have like a plumbing emergency. And this is a flat-on catastrophe, where his wealth is coming at the direct expense of housing.
And yet, I tell the story in the book of how he provokes the ire of the UN Special Rapporteur for housing and human rights, who accuses Schwarzman, and his company Blackstone, of creating a grave shortage of affordable housing around the world. And their response to this is, “No, no, no, we’re not the problem. We’re the solution, we’re providing affordable housing.” And that’s the trick that these guys pull off again and again, in fending off accountability,
David Goldstein:
Literal and figurative rent seeking is the solution.
Peter Goodman:
Right.
Nick Hanauer:
This is the oldest trick in the elite playbook, which is to use pro-social arguments for anti-social lens.
Peter Goodman:
Right.
Nick Hanauer:
It works like a charm and has for thousands of years.
David Goldstein:
So what’s the solution, Peter? One of the things you point out in the book is how really profoundly undemocratic Davos Man is, both in terms of their outlook and the consequences. But we’re going to make you, we’re going to go with the undemocratic route here, and make you benevolent dictator.
Peter Goodman:
I’m the philosopher king. Well, I mean the philosopher king immediately abdicates to the people. I mean, we need what we already had. We don’t need a revolution. We don’t need some sort of utopian flight of fancy. We need what we already had. We need progressive taxation, we need real antitrust enforcement, we need rules that allow labor movements to organize so that working people can get their slice of the pie. If we had those three things, we’d be able to solve a lot.
And some people say, “Where does that exist?” That exists to a large extent in the Nordic countries. And it existed in the United States from the end of the Second World War till the late ’70s. And I don’t have some sort of fetish for the ’60s or ’70s. I don’t want a time machine backwards. We’ve made tremendous social progress that we ought to hang onto. We don’t want to go back to the time of Jim Crow and the Vietnam War. But we do want one element of that time, which is wage gains that are reflective of productivity gains, and that flow from a process of collective bargaining.
So it’s not just like, oh, we have labor shortages, let’s pay one time signing bonuses to truck drivers who will jump ship. While there’s no guarantee that when we get back to something like what we’ve had in recent decades, anybody will keep what they’ve got. We don’t need discretionary bonuses. We need a process of collective bargaining. That all sounds very simple to say. And it would be pretty simple, except for the fact that our democracy is essentially controlled by the people who don’t want to sacrifice. That is a formidable problem. It’s the central problem of our time.
David Goldstein:
So getting money out of politics is a big part of the solution?
Peter Goodman:
Yeah, for sure. And understanding that we’ve been sold this false binary. This idea that we either have the status quo with all the stuff we love, cell phones and apps and Google and central air conditioning and lots of food on the shelves, vaccines against things like COVID. Or we monkey with that, and then we might as well be Venezuela. This is this false binary idea that Davos Man sells us to prevent us from actually using our democracy.
David Goldstein:
So, so there’s a lot of ridicule in your use of the term Davos Man. How important is ridicule in combating him?
Peter Goodman:
I mean, there’s a certain amount of ridicule because like this stuff is titillating, right? I mean, I’ve been to Davos and watched billionaires submit to the Syrian refugee experience where they’re blindfolded and led around in the dark, while someone’s hollering at them, demanding papers in some language they don’t understand. And then they go off to the Google party or Marc Benioff’s bash, Hawaii-themed, with the Blackeye Peas flown in for a performance, eating truffles and caviar. I mean, all that stuff is absurd and people should be aware of it.
But what I’m really trying to provoke is a sense of outrage, right? I mean, I read a lot of stories. I’m generally a sort of bottom up journalist. So I write from the vantage point of working people, the people like Christian Smalls, this guy who was fired at the Amazon warehouse for supposedly violating quarantine, but he wanted everyone to be quarantined. And people will sometimes say to me like, “Oh, your story was so sad.” To which I find myself saying, “No, no, no, it’s not sad. It’s outrageous.” This is something that’s been taken from us. We’ve had a democracy that was much more vibrant than it is now, where you could have a conversation about sacrifice.
I mean, if the average person understands that their needs, their ability to support their family to middle class standard is a sham, that doesn’t operate anymore. And they can see that the Davos Man billionaires are not sacrificing at all, and are in fact perpetually arguing that every solution can be solved without their sacrificing. How do we deal with something really serious? Like coal miners in West Virginia? Where we do have to say to them, “Hey, sorry, your way of making a living that doesn’t fit into the future, you’re going to have to do something else.” How is that person supposed to have any faith that there’s going to be some help transitioning to something else, that their family will have healthcare, housing? We now live in a time where whatever you’ve got, you are just going to hang on to it with all your might in America, because you understand that any change is potentially malignant and nobody’s going to help you and nobody’s sacrificing.
So unless we restore greater economic opportunity, and unless the people at the top do have to sacrifice for the greater good, then no one will. And then we can’t talk about anything.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, absolutely. What we’ve argued for a long time is that in a society where a few people are winning and everybody else is losing, and it’s really, really obvious, that shreds the reciprocity norms that make social cohesion and democracy possible.
Peter Goodman:
Totally.
Nick Hanauer:
And people do things, like they go to the Capitol and try and burn it down.
Peter Goodman:
Or they don’t take vaccines when we’re hoarding them and depriving the rest of the humanity of vaccines. And we’re not even taking them ourselves, because people think it’s a Bill Gates conspiracy, or a computer chip from the government. I mean, we don’t know how people will respond when huge numbers of people are effectively kicked out of the economy and it’s not functional for them, but we know it’s not going to be good.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Correct. Correct. We know that for a fact. So one final question, why do you do this work?
Peter Goodman:
I do this work because it’s just crucial that we make the connections between lots of stories that seem siloed, but that are all part of a collective whole. I mean, I’m a believer that journalism is vital, it’s a vital part of change. You can’t have productive democracy that’s truly representative unless we got information. I don’t have any illusions that somehow any one piece of journalism is transformative, but, hey, I’m trying to be on the right side of history.
Nick Hanauer:
There you go.
David Goldstein:
Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter whether you think journalism is vital. It only matters if Davos Man thinks journalism is vital since he owns it all.
Peter Goodman:
Well, he owns more and more of it. And that is alarming.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, Peter, thank you so much for being with us. It’s a fascinating book. It’s a true book and we wish you the best of luck with it.
Peter Goodman:
Hey, thank you guys so much. I’m a longtime listener, first time caller so it’s exciting to be on your pod. I listened to it quite a bit as I was doing the research for the book,
Nick Hanauer:
You know, Goldy, I think that was a really interesting conversation. And I think the book is an important contribution. But I guess my core viewpoint, which hasn’t really changed, is that you are not going to persuade this group of people, or the group of people that follows them, to change their behavior in ways that will make laws and regulations unnecessary. I think it’s really important to call these folks out, but the idea that they are going to be helpful in sort of reimagining a world or a policy framework that is more equitable and more sustainable and more just, is just a fool’s errand, right?
Like Jamie Dimon is not going to be helpful. Jeff Bezos is not going to be helpful. And to depend on them to do the right thing it’s just insanely naïve. That’s the bad news. The good news is that for everyone of them, there’s like 10,000 ordinary people. And in democracy, you ought to be able to pass the laws that are necessary to ensure that the economy fairly distributes the value it creates.
David Goldstein:
And that explains why, Nick, they’re so busy trying to dismantle democracy. You raised a question in the intro, and I think during the interview as well, of who’s real, how much do we blame the billionaires and how much do we blame the economists who are shilling for them? And my take on this, Nick, is, of course they can’t be successful without the people spinning the narratives that maintain the fiction that keeps them into control. And as we know, it’s all a fiction. The economy, everything, it’s the stories we tell ourselves.
But I want to make the point that they have a choice here, that Davos Man has a choice. They are spending their money hiring people to spin the narratives that serve their own self-interests. And to your credit, Nick, you are not. You are paying me, you literally hired me to do the opposite. To help you build a narrative that works against your short term economic interest, that works in the interest of average working people. And so everybody that goes to Davos could be doing exactly what you are doing. And very few of them are.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, no, it’s true.
David Goldstein:
That they’ve made the choice to spin that trickle down narrative, to spin that narrative of them as philanthropic heroes. And you’ve made the choice to do the opposite. And so I think the blame in the end is on the people with the money, not the economist that they hire. There’s always a hired gun out there. You can always hire people to do your bidding, but they’re hiring people to do a specific bidding and they’re paying them very, very well. If there was more money on our side of the story, we’d be a little more successful.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. I mean, you make a good point, Goldy. And having spent a bunch of time advocating for the stuff that we advocate for, with this group of people, it is dispiriting how often they’re a 100% with you on saving the middle class or whatever it is, until you get to the part where they have to pay their workers more or pay more taxes.
David Goldstein:
Yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
Until there’s actual trade-offs and then it’s like, oh no, no, no, no, no. That’s a bridge too far.
David Goldstein:
Yeah. I will, though, I will close, Nick. I will be gracious and close and say one thing in defense of people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. And that is, I don’t mind launching them into space, it’s just the return trip that troubles me.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s a wonderful place to end.
Speaker 3:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at Civic Action and Nick Hanauer. Follow our writing on medium at Civic Skunkworks and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram at Pitchfork Economics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.