Gas prices have reached record highs in the United States. Is inflation actually to blame, or is it the greed of Big Oil, which is enjoying record profits? Congressman Ro Khanna walks us through his proposal for a Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax, which he says will help curb profiteering while reducing gas prices.
Congressman Ro Khanna represents California’s 17th Congressional District. He’s the author of Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us.
Twitter: @RoKhanna
Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax would protect consumers from giant oil companies taking advantage of world events to jack up prices https://khanna.house.gov/media/press-releases/release-gasoline-prices-sky-high-khanna-whitehouse-announce-curb-big-oil
Dignity in a Digital Age https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Dignity-in-a-Digital-Age/Ro-Khanna/9781982163341
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com
Twitter: @PitchforkEcon
Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics
Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer
Nick:
Gas prices are a super hot topic at the moment because they’ve reached record highs and one of the reasons they’ve reached record highs is that oil corporate profits are at a record high because these guys are just gouging people.
Ro Khanna:
Inflation isn’t being borne equally. It’s not being borne equally by the corporation of the worker. It’s all falling on workers in the middle class.
Goldy:
Inflation is a global phenomenon.
Ro Khanna:
Right.
Goldy:
It’s happening whether you did stimulus or whether you didn’t.
Speaker 4:
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.
Goldy:
We get a lot of emails coming into the podcast and they are overwhelmingly positive but sometimes we get a few negative even angry ones.
Nick:
Yeah.
Goldy:
And one of the themes we’ve heard recently, Nick, is that we promised somehow, I’ll say you promised since your name is on this podcast, it’s not just me, that we weren’t going to get inflation. And yet, here we are. We have the first real inflation in maybe 30, 40 years.
Nick:
Yeah and that’s probably a fair criticism, Goldy, to a certain extent although I don’t think we said that we were not going to get inflation. We said more precisely that the stimulus checks that went to middle class people was not going to cause inflation.
Goldy:
Right.
Nick:
And I maintain that in the absence of the disruption of the global supply chains and the reverberating effects that that had throughout the economy, those stimulus checks would in fact, not have created … If it had created inflation, it would’ve been half a percent or something like that, certainly not the 7% or 8% that we’re currently experiencing and I continue to maintain that the vast majority of the inflation that American consumers are experiencing is a consequence of the disruption of global supply chains and among other things, the opening that creates for corporations to increase profits too.
And again, the increases in prices are not solely a product of effectively price gouging that’s taking place, which is what these disruptions have enabled the corporate CEOs to engage in but it is part of it. And the other part of it is just the simple reality of supply and demand. If you desperately need a new car because your old one is broken, you will pay a premium if there are very few available and they’re just less available because there are fewer parts available and companies across the spectrum are having an incredibly difficult time sourcing these parts and getting their products made and it’s just the reality.
Goldy:
Right. And there’s evidence, Nick, to support your assertion that we can’t blame this on the stimulus.
Nick:
Yeah.
Goldy:
And that is we have, going on, what economists would call a real-life difference-indifference experiment. Not every country approached the pandemic with the same policies. The U.S. did a lot of stimulus checks. A lot of other countries did not and yet inflation is a global phenomenon.
Nick:
Right.
Goldy:
It’s happening whether you did stimulus or whether you didn’t.
Nick:
Right.
Goldy:
All around the country, maybe it’s a half a point higher here than it is in Europe but Europe is still seeing the same type of inflation we are seeing. Japan is seeing this type of inflation. I understand China … It’s hard to trust any of the economic figures coming out of China.
Nick:
Right.
Goldy:
But the real number that came out of China is how slow their growth is compared to where it’s been in the past and that is largely where you see so much coming out of the Chinese economy, that’s largely where the supply shock is coming.
Nick:
That’s right.
Goldy:
They create the parts that are slowing down manufacturing everywhere.
Nick:
Correct.
Goldy:
So this is what happens when you turn off the economy and then you try turning it back on. You get a lot of supply chain disruptions. I would add that I’ve been pretty vocal about this. I’m not concerned about inflation long-term. I think a lot of economists agree that what we’re seeing is a short-term shock. Having grown up in the ’70s, I remember when you had a decade of inflation and this doesn’t feel like that and I don’t think that’s where we’re heading.
Nick:
No. Yeah. I just want to make a couple of more points about inflation. The first, the other thing is that in a world where companies are not optimized around growth, they’re not optimized around investment. What they’re optimized around is near-term profits. Then, no company is operating with tons and tons of excess capacity. Right?
And so, when you have these shocks, there’s not a lot of cushion of available…
Goldy:
Right.
Nick:
…to deal with it. And so, people have to scramble if demand goes up and down and that is just all part of how we have managed the global economy, certainly the American economy, over the last decades.
And the other point I want to make about inflation and the narratives around inflation is that if there is anything in the world, you can depend on it is the trickle downers and those are largely the folks whose job it is to defend the interests of the status quo and the wealthy is that they will turn anything good that happens for middle class people into a negative. Right?
Goldy:
That’s right.
Nick:
So saying that stimulus creates inflation is the same as saying that raising wages kills jobs or that tax increases on the rich will destroy growth. It is always the same story.
Goldy:
Yes. Nick, it’s even worse because it is so explicit. What they are literally saying is giving people money just hurts the people you’re trying to help.
Nick:
Yes. Exactly. Right.
Goldy:
Unless it’s the top 1%.
Nick:
In which case it’s an…
Goldy:
Sending you money, it’s great.
Nick:
Yeah. Exactly.
Goldy:
But sending people checks is bad for them.
Nick:
Yes. Literally. That’s literally…
Goldy:
Literally bad for them.
Nick:
Yeah.
Goldy:
So by that logic, we shouldn’t pay people anything.
Nick:
Because it’s bad for them.
Goldy:
Yeah. It’ll just create inflation.
Nick:
Yeah.
Goldy:
I mean if we pay people money, they’re just going to drive up demand for stuff and force prices up and that’s bad.
Nick:
That’s right.
Goldy:
So we shouldn’t. Oh God. It is so crazy.
Nick:
But listen. But we digress because today, we get to talk to a really interesting person and an old friend, Congressman Ro Khanna who represents Silicon Valley, of all places, and we’re going to talk to him mostly about his Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax because gas prices are a super hot topic at the moment because they’ve reached record highs. And one of the reasons they’ve reached record highs is that oil corporate profits are at a record high because these guys are just gouging people and so he is going to talk to us about that.
He’s also going to talk to us about his new book, which is super interesting, Dignity In A Digital Age: Making Tech Work For All Of Us. So with that, why don’t we talk to Ro?
Ro Khanna:
I’m Ro. I represent Silicon Valley in the United States Congress, been in Congress about six years now, and I have a new book, Dignity In A Digital Age: Making Tech Work For All Of Us.
Nick:
Congressman, welcome back to the show. It’s super fun to catch up and see and hear about what your latest concerns and interests are and I know that one of them is inflation, which is a very real challenge for the majority of Americans. So let’s talk about it from your perspective what’s causing it.
Ro Khanna:
Well, inflation, as I understand it, is too much money chasing too few goods. That’s the standard definition. That means there are two things you can do to deal with inflation. You can either try to shrink the amount of money out there or you can increase the denominator. You can increase the production.
My view is that the biggest thing we ought to be doing is increasing our production in this country. A lot of the inflation was, in part, that we offshore so much of the productive capacity. We really didn’t think that we needed to be making things in this country. And if we have a massive focus on reindustrialization, on production, over the long run, that is deflationary.
Now, there are things we have to do in the short-term in terms of making sure that consumers are protected from companies that have greater market power in an inflationary environment so that they aren’t fleecing consumers. But over the long run, I would say increased production.
Goldy:
So you’re looking at the current inflation. It’s more of a supply side than a demand side issue right now.
Ro Khanna:
I’d tell you it’s both but it’s certainly largely a supply side because of the shocks of the pandemic and because of us not producing what we are capable of producing in this country. We just let so much of our industrial capacity atrophy. And then, I think to the extent that it’s demand side, in my view, it’s not the stimulus that went to working families and to the middle class or the COVID relief fund. We can argue on some of the FED policies, which is largely the cause of the monetary supply and the inflation of the stock market but I don’t think you can attribute it to the American Rescue Plan or even some the CARES act and some of the things we did under Trump.
Nick:
Yeah and I think it’s worth reminding folks that the definitive proof that it was not the actions of the Biden administration supporting middle class families that created inflation is the fact that inflation is roughly the same in the entire advanced economy world. Right? Like inflation in Europe is plus or minus the same as it is in the United States. The Biden administration policies obviously had nothing to do with that.
Ro Khanna:
Absolutely. And look, the Biden administration, no policy’s inflationary if it’s paid for and the people who’ve been opposed to paying for a lot of the policies are the Republicans. I mean the Biden administration says let’s have the billionaire tax. Let’s have higher taxes on corporations. So we’re wanting to pay for things to the extent that there is some form of deficit spending leading to the FED buying treasury bonds. That is because the Republicans have been opposed to any of the increases of taxing the rich.
Goldy:
Well, speaking of that, let’s get into your windfall profits tax. So what is that and how would that work?
Ro Khanna:
It was done in the late 1970s, early 1980s. It led, actually, to lower consumer prices and more production for the first few years. The idea is simple. You know? Right now you’ve got big oil. They’re making billions of dollars. That money is not going to the workers. It’s not even going to the executives. In many cases, it’s going to Wall Street that is demanding stock buybacks, that’s demanding dividends.
And while the American people are being fleeced at the pump, what does the tax do? It says okay, if you’re going to charge more than $66 a barrel, then you’re going to have to pay this windfall profit tax and we’re going to give that money right back to the Americans are paying for gas at the pump. And by the way, if you don’t charge it, then you don’t have to pay this tax. Now people say okay, if the oil companies don’t charge it to avoid the tax, won’t some of the retailers still be able to get some of the profit, the gas station owners? And there are about 150,000 of them and sure, not all of the savings will go to the consumers. But I rather have the savings go to the consumers and the 150,000 retailers than what’s happening now, which is all of it going to big oil shareholders.
Nick:
Do you have any sense for how much in dollars, how much the sort of windfall profits that, not just big oil, but corporations across the spectrum are making how that is contributing to inflation right now?
Ro Khanna:
I know for big oil, it’s about close to $50 billion. I do not know what the number is nationwide for all industries. It’s probably an astronomical sum.
Nick:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Goldy:
Yeah. I mean executives…
Nick:
Hundreds of billions.
Goldy:
…are boasting on their quarterly calls about how easy it is for them to boost profits by just raising prices right now.
Ro Khanna:
Yeah. I mean there are two things that have happened. One is when you have market power and we have highly concentrated industries and you have an inflationary environment, you have the ability to raise prices and no one … People keep saying oh, this is not correct economics, et cetera. No one is saying that the cause of inflation is just these corporations actions. The cause of inflation may be that you have too much money chasing too few goods. But when you have that environment, corporations have a choice and because of the concentration, they are increasing those prices on the consumer. And so, the point is inflation isn’t being born equally. It’s not being born equally by the corporation or the worker. It’s all falling on workers and the middle class because of the corporate behavior and consecration.
Nick:
So what else do you think can be done to hold oil companies and other big companies responsible for overcharging? As you know, I’m a capitalist so I’m somewhat sensitive to this. High margins is, to a certain extent, your reward in many cases or at least theoretically for making great products. Right? That people cannot get it elsewhere. Right? Like I mean, this is the goal of business is to make a product so good that no one else can make it and consumers will pay you a premium for it, that rewards you for your innovation and your quality. So, I guess, how do you draw a distinction between that kind of behavior that we want to encourage and just this sort of opportunistic gouging that’s taking place on commodities?
Ro Khanna:
Well, I think it’s because this is driven by an external crisis and an external event.
Nick:
Yeah.
Ro Khanna:
It’s why we don’t let people jack up the price for Uber rides if there’s an emergency in a city.
Nick:
Right.
Ro Khanna:
Why we don’t say that if there’s a storm that you can jack up the price for water. Well, you have here an event, the war caused by Putin and your aunt saying to Americans, be patriotic for the cause of freedom and the vast majority of Americans, Democrats and Republicans are saying yes, we need to stand up for freedom.
Nick:
But not the oil companies.
Ro Khanna:
But not the oil companies.
Nick:
Yeah. They’re only standing up for themselves.
Ro Khanna:
You know, if the oil companies had come up with some invention and they had made oil, this great oil that maybe it makes their cargo a thousand miles or something instead of 300 miles on the tank … We can debate on climate, et cetera. But then you can say okay, they have an argument. They made a better product. They’ve had innovation.
Nick:
Yeah.
Ro Khanna:
Here, they’re just benefiting from an external event. And by the way, that’s, I think, what offends America. One of my great … The plays is Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. And basically in that play, Arthur Miller shows how there’s this business guy who’s making money on the war while Americans are sacrificing their lives in World War II and it just offends people.
Nick:
Yeah.
Ro Khanna:
And I think that’s what’s offensive here is that big oil’s making money while everyone else in America is willing to sacrifice to stand with the Ukrainians.
Nick:
Yeah.
Goldy:
Do you have a plan specifically, if we were to do the windfall profits tax, what we would do with that revenue?
Ro Khanna:
Yeah. It would go back to working class and middle class folks to ease some of the burden at the pump. It turns out if it’s around $100 a barrel of oil, then it would be about $300 a quarter for most working class families.
Goldy:
And you do that as a…
Ro Khanna:
As a check.
Goldy:
Yeah.
Ro Khanna:
As a check, check straight from the government.
Goldy:
Just send a check. Okay.
Ro Khanna:
Send a check. But it’s a check that is going to people who need it, who are in the working and middle class. I think it’s under 125,000 as the bill is written.
Nick:
Well, that would make a big difference to a lot of people.
Ro Khanna:
It would. It won’t cover all of the cost increase but $300 over three months is significant.
Nick:
Yeah.
Ro Khanna:
It’s a $100 a month. That’ll cover some of the cost. I think part of the disconnect is that we’re just not out there enough. I was out in grocery stores in my district and just talking to folks and this high school teacher comes up, in Mountain View, and we have a very high cost of living area. So he’s making a decent salary for a teacher but he says you know Ro, I’m now only eating two eggs in the morning instead of three eggs because of the cost of eggs.
And so, I think that the challenge is that there are a lot of people who are middle class, working class folks who are hurting, for who a couple hundred bucks a month would make a big, big difference and where they’re not being prioritized and yet big oil and these corporations are doing terrific and making all these profits and justifying it as well, that’s the market economy. Yeah. But the market economy isn’t working for a lot of folks.
Nick:
Yeah which is the heart of why our politics are so polarized.
Ro Khanna:
Right.
Nick:
Democracy, honestly, has not delivered for most people and it’s pretty hard to try to get around that.
Goldy:
Yeah. That’s a great segue to get into talking a bit about your book because you look at the title Dignity In A Digital Age. A lot of it is about economics. A lot of it is about politics, about democracy, and how the two work together. If you could just summarize your goal in writing this book to start with, I think that’d be a great place to start.
Ro Khanna:
The goal was to say that there’s something that is fundamentally amiss with globalization and the new economy. It’s basically led to $11 trillion of piling up in my district of market cap and at the same time, you’ve had millions of jobs offshore. You’ve had de-industrialization. You’ve had communities totally left out and no sense of economic prospects, not just for people in their 50s or 60s but even for their kids where communities are talking about a brain drain in the United States of America, having to have people leave.
And you have the case of this extraordinary inequality with workers where you could win the lottery, work for one of the wealthiest companies in the world, Amazon, and still have a life where you’ve got an algorithm as a boss and not making more than $15 an hour, not the $30 you used to make in a manufacturing job. And so, how can there be a dignity and pride in this new economy when so many people, communities, workers have been left out? That’s the central thesis of the book. I propose some of the solutions that I have but really it’s to start a conversation to say we need intentionality. We need state intervention. We can’t just let the market continue to have the outcome that it’s created.
Goldy:
You know, one of the things I loved in the book was your use of the word freedom. You kind of excoriate your fellow Democrats on that. Explain where you were going.
Ro Khanna:
Well, this is where … I know we were talking beforehand about Mark [inaudible 00:21:35] and this is his central idea and his great book of development is freedom. And the basic point is what is it mean for a person to be free? It means that you can take risks, that you can live your dream, that you can do things that you want to do.
Well, one of the causes that could restrict your freedom is what if the government comes and puts you in jail or takes things from you and obviously, we want to make sure we have rights our are protected. But I think a lot of people, with the way they experience the loss of their freedom today, is not just fair that they’re going to have the government show up at their door to take things from that. It’s that they don’t have healthcare and so they can’t change their job. They can’t start a small business. They can’t take care of their kids. They don’t have childcare so they don’t have the opportunities that they want in life.
And a lot of our policies, democratic policies, are actually enabling people to have the freedom to live the life they want and we ought to talk about that. FDR certainly did in his great famous second bill of rights speech. He said we’ve got to have healthcare, education so that people can be free in America to pursue their happiness.
Goldy:
And like I said, you kind of excoriate your fellow Democrats for allowing Republicans to own the word freedom.
Ro Khanna:
Yeah. Because I think our … we’re a party that understands justice and empathy and compassion and that is all important and I think it strikes us. Okay, all this money is piling up in a few people’s hands and some people have been left down and it’s not fair. And fairness is an important value but all of our arguments are always on the axis of fairness and there’s another whole dimension to it, which is actually our policies are what’s going to unleash people’s freedom. That’s going to allow them to create things and build things and experiment and have happy family lives and build community and we never talk about that. I think that we’re just missing a whole dimension that can connect with people.
Nick:
Yeah. I think you’re absolutely right. And RO, I so appreciate you drawing out the distinction between freedom from and freedom to. Right? Obviously, there’s this very narrow conception of freedom that the right pushes, which is freedom from constraint, which largely ends up being, handing the right to exploit other people to very powerful people.
Ro Khanna:
Yeah.
Nick:
And there’s such an important distinction between that and giving people the capacity to do what they want or could be able to do. And that is what progressive economic policies do is they expand the capacity of people to do more, be more, realize more of their individual opportunities rather than being a frigging wage slave to a giant corporation with no options.
Ro Khanna:
I think this explains in so much why there’s a disconnect between sometimes entrepreneurs in the valley or others thinking of themselves as self-made and others not thinking them of themselves as self-made. On the one hand, they say look, we’re not Donald Trump. We haven’t inherited millions of dollars. We kind of built these things. We worked really hard. We took risks. So yeah. There’s this sense of being self-made. Some of them say we’re immigrants. We came to this country with very little.
But then, I think when you peel back almost any successful story even for immigrants, you’ll see, while they had this extraordinary education. Most of them didn’t worry about healthcare when they were growing up. Most of them had all of the nutrition and so it’s just that we take some of those basic things.
Nick:
And if I could just add, Ro, my experience is if you track it back to their parents, these immigrant success stories were generational in the sense that their parents were scientists or doctors or lawyers.
Ro Khanna:
Yeah or at least middle class.
Nick:
Yeah.
Ro Khanna:
At least middle class. And so, I guess the point is just give everyone the basics. Right? I mean that’s basic level progressive economics is saying. Everyone should have healthcare. Everyone should have education, nutrition, the things, that you said, make you capable of daring to take a risk.
The other thing, it’s like okay, if things that didn’t work out, if you take a risk, they don’t work out, well you’re not going to be homeless. You have other options when you have certain education or come from certain families. I think that is the essence of what progressive economics is about is giving everyone sort of those freedoms and that security.
Nick:
Yeah. No. I think you’re right. So can we zero in on the theme of technology? Obviously, one of the great challenges we face is the agglomeration effects that are going on in places like Silicon Valley and New York and Seattle and so on and so forth. Right? That these companies that are producing most of the new innovation, most of the new GDP, all that stuff tend to be concentrated in a few places and for very good reason, which is by a factor of 10, the most important thing is accessing the talent pools that can make these things possible and that is virtually impossible for a small community, a small town of 3,000 people to compete with. Right? So what do we do to bring folks who don’t live in Seattle or San Francisco along with the economy?
Ro Khanna:
So I’d say there are two things to this. One is that there are now going to be 25 million of these digital jobs and that is not just jobs in working at Google or Apple or Amazon. But it is jobs in manufacturing. It’s jobs in retail and agriculture. And the cliche is, you know Nick better than I is, every company almost has a technology aspect. And as the technology revolution has advanced, many of these jobs actually don’t require complex coding or coding at all and the new mantra in the valley is low code, no code. It just means having some basic credential and technology proficiency but not even a two-year or four-year degree.
One of the programs I’ve championed or actually we’re working with Google to do, with community colleges, is they pay … It’s a pilot program and they’re going to pay a $5,000 stipend, 18-month course with HBCUs, community colleges, and then a person is going to have an $65,000, $70,000 job at the end of it and they don’t have to leave the community to do it. I think we need to scale those type of programs in partnership with land grant universities, with community colleges, so that we build this digital middle class.
Then second, is to your broader point, but what about things that require more education, more capital? I do think COVID provides an opportunity to rethink things. When I was advocating some form of decentralization in Silicon Valley, people thought I was crazy. I sent my book to one of my venture capitalist friends. He said well, there’s nothing new. We’re doing all this now post-COVID and so it’s gone from impossible to inevitable.
Nick:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for sure. I mean it was just an extraordinarily fortunate circumstance, the intersection of the COVID pandemic with the sort of breakthrough capacity of video conferencing to connect people through Zoom or Teams or whatever it is, really does open up new possibilities.
Goldy:
Assuming these communities have…
Nick:
Broadband.
Goldy:
Affordable broadband.
Nick:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Ro Khanna:
It’s on its way thanks to president Biden. But I think it’s also how we talk about these jobs because I think we’ve mythologized them so much.
Nick:
Yeah. That’s for sure.
Ro Khanna:
I mean I have such admiration for President Obama but I heard him in some interviews and it’s like well, you can’t turn a factory worker into a coder. Well of course you can but that shouldn’t be the … because people think oh, these jobs, it’s going to require math. It’s going to try to … and this image. If you’re taking a factory worker, making him a coder, part of what I try to do in this book and I start with Alex Hughes is he’s manufacturing things. His job is actually making refrigerators but he gets this six-month course to do it so that they’re smart refrigerators. And you know what? It’s better that he’s doing that and that job is here then that job be off-shore, if he didn’t have that credential. So I think we have to start to make these jobs far more accessible and approachable than currently are and relatable to jobs that people have done in the past.
Nick:
Yeah. That’s super interesting.
Goldy:
Can I just bring up one final thing from the book? I’d like you just to talk very briefly because I know we’ve used a lot of your time. Your final chapter is titled Democratic Patriotism. Define that for us.
Ro Khanna:
Democratic patriotism is the view that it is perfectly fine to have an allegiance, an attachment to a country, to not just a country’s ideals but a country’s culture. But that culture needs to be defined democratically and should be continually redefined over time as people want it to be. I quote W.E.B. Du Bois who has this brilliant phrase. He says we all need to be equal coworkers in creating the kingdom of culture.
But on a less sort of philosophical note, I think Democrats should not shy away from a patriotic story about this country. I mean I, of course, am the son of immigrants. I was born in Philadelphia in 1976, our bicentenary, and I think that we have to be proud of the American story, of becoming, in my view, the first truly multiracial multiethnic democracy in the history of the world. It doesn’t mean we don’t acknowledge the problems, doesn’t mean we don’t acknowledge that there are a lot of fields currently left down with an economy.
But it should be with an aspiration that we want this country to succeed and we believe in this country’s values and we believe fundamentally, it’s a decent good country. I just think that’s first true to what I actually believe and I think it may help get our message across to people who may be skeptical or unwilling to listen.
Nick:
Yeah. That’s great. So let’s finish with the benevolent dictator question either about inflation or big tech policy, your choice. If you were in charge and politics wasn’t at play, what would you do in your term?
Ro Khanna:
Here’s what I would do. I’d work to reindustrialize the country. But let me give you a very specific example because I was just there and I’ll be brief. Galesburg, Illinois. Maytag factory left 5,000 jobs left. They were making, coincidentally, refrigerators there. President Obama eloquently spoke about it in his 2014 keynote speech. I went there three weeks ago. They said look, 20 years have gone. Our communities have totally not changed. It’s just gotten worse. The economy has gotten worse. Our kids are leaving.
You know what I would do? I would pick 20 of these communities across the country in west side of Chicago, black communities, white working class communities, have the president call up people like you and they call up CEOs, call up educational institution leaders and say we’re actually going to just spend a couple years revitalizing these communities. Bobby Kennedy tried that with Bedford Divestment in 1964 in Brooklyn and it actually worked quite well.
But I think one of the reasons we’re not heard is they hear me on TV say Build Back Better or infrastructure, et cetera, but their lived experience is this is not helping our lives and we’ve got to somehow actually start creating economic opportunity in these places.
Nick:
That’s fantastic. Well Ro, thank you again for being with us and for the work you do and best of luck in your endeavors.
Ro Khanna:
Thank you Nick. Thank you for the work you do. You’re a very important voice.
Goldy:
And thanks for writing this book.
Ro Khanna:
Thank you Goldy.
Nick:
Well Goldy, that was a super interesting conversation as always with Ro. He’s so smart and such a great guy and I particularly appreciate the conversation we had about the distinction between two kinds of freedom, freedom from constraint and freedom to maximize your capacity and capabilities as a human.
Goldy:
I was reluctant to pick up his book because he’s a politician and politicians write books all the time and they’re just self-promotion. But not this one. I’m not saying there isn’t any self-promotion in it because he’s a Congressman and he wrote a book. But Dignity In A Digital Age: Making Tech Work For All Of Us is incredibly thoughtful and the tip-off to that is right off the start. He has a forward by the Nobel Prize-winning economist and really philosopher Amartya Sen.
Nick:
Who’s one of our favorites.
Goldy:
And his book Development As Freedom was one of the early books that I read Nick in getting my unofficial PhD in economics here at Civic Ventures and was really influential in changing the way I thought about the economy and his whole capabilities approach.
The way I thought about that term human capital, which made me think a lot more about human capabilities. And like I said, this book, there’s a lot of policy in it. He makes a lot of proposals, which you would expect from a politician but there’s a lot of thinking that goes behind it. But also just in the broader philosophical approaches, this idea, as Sen says, development is freedom, that idea of focusing on the word freedom and why it’s important. I think it’s a really important book and I hope a lot of people go and read it.
Speaker 4:
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