Nick Hanauer:

Legislatures around the country and the Supreme Court are making participation harder, not easier.

Goldy:

Participation in, not just in the economy, but in the democracy.

Nick Hanauer:

But in the democracy. Right.

john a. powell:

You’re seeing a process of “othering,” devaluing human beings. And the solution to it is belonging.

Goldy:

Inclusion is kind of something that happens to you, like, “Okay-

Nick Hanauer:

We’re going to-

Goldy:

… you can be included.”

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

Goldy:

Whereas belonging is something that we do together.

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:

Contrary to what you may have learned in your Econ 101 textbook, we believe that diversity and inclusion are actually primary drivers of economic growth and prosperity. But unfortunately, while this is a pretty diverse country, Nick, we’re not really all that inclusive.

Nick Hanauer:

No, we are not at all. And it’s in many ways, getting worse, not better. Concentrations of power at the top are increasing, not decreasing. Both legislatures around the country and the Supreme Court, in particular, are making participation harder, not easier.

Goldy:

Participation in not just in the economy, but in the democracy-

Nick Hanauer:

In the democracy, right.

Goldy:

… and in civil society.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right. And obviously this is, in many ways, going in the wrong direction, but it is the consequence of decades of momentum created by neoliberal economic policy and the increasing radicalization of an increasingly racist and existentially threatened right wing.

But today we get to talk to a really super interesting person who’s on the other side of that argument, on our side, john a. powell is the director of The Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, and he’s an internationally-recognized expert in the area of civil rights, civil liberty, structural racism, housing, poverty, and democracy.

And I think this is going to be a really interesting podcast that will delve deeply into the philosophical underpinnings of the wrong way of thinking about it and the right way of thinking about how to build a high functioning society and democracy.

john a. powell:

My name is john powell. I’m a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the Director of The Othering & Belonging Institute. And I teach in the law school, African American studies and ethnic studies. And we promote the idea of belonging through the lens of target universalism and bridging.

Nick Hanauer:

So john, start off by telling us what The Othering & Belonging Institute is and what you guys do?

john a. powell:

Oh, we do a lot of things. We’re a fairly good sized, we have about 120 professors, and depending on how you count it, about 70 staff. We have 10 staff in Europe. We do research from top to bottom, I think we have at least one, maybe two Nobel laureates affiliated with the Institute.

We work with grassroots organizers, we work with churches, we work with some of the largest companies in the world. We work with hundreds of governments, and we do everything from original research, to implementation, to evaluation, to helping people frame things. We work on the mind science area.

So as you might imagine, the framework of Othering & Belonging initially was the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. And I should add that one of the clusters, we have seven clusters, the professors cluster around certain things, and one of them is economics and also around populations. So we really cover the waterfront, which makes it hard. When you do everything, it’s hard to give a particular example, but-

Nick Hanauer:

But there must be a through-line?

john a. powell:

Yeah, the through-line is belonging. So we feel that the world is organized largely around some groups being considered not full people, not full citizens, not full members, to be exploited, to be used. And that takes on different forms. It takes on the form of race sometimes. It takes on a form of disability sometimes. It could take on a combination of that. It takes on, and we’re looking at it right now, with the Supreme Court in terms of gender, who gets the right to vote, whose voice count.

So we think about that, if you think about that in terms of this country, you’d come to the history of enslavement, the taking of Native American land, immigration. All of those things are expressions of saying, “Certain groups of people don’t belong.” That expression also constitute some sense of the group that apparently does belong.

Folks, so we can talk about each one of those separately, and we have, but we also think the through-line is that you’re seeing a process of othering, devaluing human beings, and the solution to it is belonging, belonging in terms of economy, in terms of health, in terms of schools, in terms of civic participation, in terms of money. What would a really beside this thriving and people’s worth as peoples and participants look like?

Nick Hanauer:

One of my favorite examples of that by you, “Makers and takers.”

john a. powell:

Yes. I think those people, Romney talked about that.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. Well, and Paul Ryan, right?

john a. powell:

Right. Right.

Nick Hanauer:

It’s the sort of canonical expression of neoliberalism or trickle-down economics. Right? There’s a few people at the top that are worthy-

john a. powell:

Right.

Nick Hanauer:

… and everybody else is a, you know, is-

john a. powell:

Or Reagan’s saying of “The truly deserving poor.”

Nick Hanauer:

Yes.

john a. powell:

That sounded like some people are deserving and some not, and we get, we get to decide who they are.

Nick Hanauer:

Right. Right. And we’re excited to talk to you because we believe that in Orthodox economic theory and its sort of weaponized ideological expression, neoliberalism, or market fundamentalism or whatever you call it, is largely a protection racket for the rich, it’s a narrative designed by and for people at the top to exclude the participation of most people.

john a. powell:

I think that’s right. I would maybe even broaden it a little bit because in some fashion, one could argue that the current version of neo-economics, neoliberalism, and coming out of really the seventies and eighties.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

john a. powell:

But before that, even then the economy was not really structured for people to fully participate and to have what they need to thrive. And some could argue now, partially through the work of Trump and others, we’re experiencing kind of ethnic nationalism, but also economic nationalism. So I just want to make clear to your listeners that there are many different ways of arranging economies so it doesn’t work.

And neoliberalism is just one expression.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

john a. powell:

And it’s-

Nick Hanauer:

Racism and sexism or other expressions.

john a. powell:

Yeah, or sort of rank nationalism, right? It’s like where you had protectionism and just trying to protect your part of the world. Colonialism. And one thing that’s interesting is that after World War II, the English went mad at the United States because the United States wouldn’t help England hold onto its colonies. And the United States’ notion was, “No, you’re going to open up market so we can take them.”

But it was, it was a colonial market before World War II, not neoliberal, but it still was not serving people.

Goldy:

I mean, we talk a lot about diversity and inclusion from a kind of abstract economic perspective, how it’s in, how they drive growth. And of course, America is very diverse. It’s not nearly as inclusive as it is diverse. Are things getting worse? I mean, what is the state of affairs in terms of belonging and othering in the US today?

john a. powell:

Well, I think we’re moving in multiple directions at the same time. We’re in a lot of turmoil. Some people talk about inflection point, certainly since the pandemic. Obviously the Supreme Court threatening to overturn Roe V. Wade, they’ve already overturned voting. They overturned money in terms of the political discourse, with Citizens United.

The governor of Texas just announced that maybe all children shouldn’t have a right to public education. So the right wing, they’re not conservatives. We talk, they’re not conservative, they have a radical right wing agenda. That’s rooted on racial and ethnic nationalism. And they’re gaining some steam. They’re not a majority, and majority should count in the democracy. If we had a democracy, we don’t really have a democracy.

But at the same time, you have a large number of people really for the first time thinking about, “What does equality and equity and even belonging really means?” You know, we had the largest set of demonstrations in support of some concept of equality, racial equality, and beyond after George Floyd’s death, there was unprecedented.

So I think it’s too easy to sort of look at one part of that and say, “We lost,” or the other part of that and say, “We won.” We are in the middle of a pitch fight. And important thing is to be in that fight and understand what we’re fighting for and what we’re fighting against.

Goldy:

We’ll get to it a little further when we talk about your notion of targeted universalism, but in terms of outcomes, what would you say? What would belonging and inclusion look like? From an economic perspective in particular, but broadly as well?

john a. powell:

Well, a few things. I wrote a piece several years ago looking at poverty, and I basically, said “Poverty is not simply lack of stuff,” especially in the United States. It’s lack of belonging. It’s lack of belonging. It’s saying, “Society doesn’t regard you as a full member.” And that shows up in economic terms and working terms and working condition terms, it also shows up in terms of voice.

Joseph Stiglitz in one of his, recent books argued that our economic crisis is really a political crisis. We have to think about who is structuring our tax codes, who’s structuring property, these are political questions that in some sense precede economic questions. And we used to talk about political economy, and partially as a result of liberalism, we think of the economy as a freestanding thing, or as this was this sort of market, market fundamentalism, which is not.

And the country has grown. The promise with neoliberalism and globalization, the way it took shape was that we grow the economy and everybody would be better off. Half of that was apparently true, that as the size of the economy since the 1970s, depending on how you count it, is three or four times larger, but people are not three or four times better off unless you’re Elon Musk or unless you’re head of Amazon, unless you’re head of, so one of these large companies.

So we’ve seen more wealth come into society and even the world, that are being concentrated in fewer and fewer people. And what they’re doing with that wealth is actually using it in large part to structure systems to perpetuate it and continue to protect themselves. The point is that the idea of a democracy and the idea of belonging go hand in hand. Belonging is more than inclusion.

Inclusion is you’re joining something that’s part, that belonged to someone else. You’re a guest. You get to join a company, you get to join a school, but the rules, the norms, the structure has been set by someone else. That’s inclusion. I give an example. It’s like, if I give a party, all of you are invited, but it’s my music, my friends, my food. Don’t come in messing with the furniture. That’s not your job. Just come in and have a good time and then leave. That’s inclusion.

Belonging is that it’s not my party. It’s not your party. It’s our party. And so this fight even like, who does the country belong to? Who does the planet belong to? It doesn’t belong to, it shouldn’t belong to the billionaires and multi-billionaires. It shouldn’t belong to one racial or ethnic group. It belongs to all of us and we get to co-create it. So the watch word is co-create. Co-create is another word for a strong democracy that we get to actually, and it’s not formalized in the sense of every four years, we have a ritual of voting for two candidates off the time, neither of which do we like.

The whole structure of our democracy is actually structured not to be a democracy, it’s structured at best be a Republic and even worse than that. So belonging would actually say, “Hm. I mean, think about this. We say you could change the constitution, but we make it virtually impossible.” So you can change it. It’s like, if you can get 100% percent of the votes, you can do whatever you want to. But you’re never going to get 100% of the votes. So we created these mechanisms so that in theory, we can make some changes in the country. But it’s virtually, it’s extremely difficult. It’s the way of protecting the elites.

And then the last example I’ll give is Citizens United. Citizens United is an interesting case. And it goes back to, really, the 1900s. Because corporations were part of government when the country first started, they were not independent. And it was a famous case, I think the Charles River case where companies basically said, “They should no longer be under the heel of government, they should be independent.”

And it was very controversial. Because even then corporations had a lot of power. And the court agreed with corporations, but the Faustian deal was, they can amass independence and wealth, but they can’t use their independence and wealth to infect politics. There’s a wall between corporations and politics, and that wall crumbled starting late in the 19th century, but then with Citizens United, we devastated the wall.

So now you take all of that wealth, power, and money, and you allow it to really distort our economy. And an article I wrote, I basically say when corporations are in the same sphere as citizens, then citizens don’t belong. They push citizens out of the sphere. People are beholden to the organizations of corporations of power.

Goldy:

Right? And a great example from the news is Boeing. I think just announced yesterday that it was moving its headquarters formerly from Seattle to Chicago, and now to the Washington D.C. area, because that’s really what it’s in the business of, is influencing Congress.

Nick Hanauer:

Exactly. So it moved from a place where it was centered on engineering…

Goldy:

Right here.

Nick Hanauer:

… to a place where here, in Seattle, to a place where it was centered on accounting and finance, Chicago, to a place where it’s going to be centered on lobbying and manipulating the political process.

John a. powell:

Right. Right.

Nick Hanauer:

And-

Goldy:

Because that’s-

Nick Hanauer:

… it is, yes-

Goldy:

… its core business.

Nick Hanauer:

… yeah.

Goldy:

It, management perceives that as its core business.

Nick Hanauer:

Not making super high-quality products.

john a. powell:

Well, think about Elon Musk, right? California said they’re regulating the Tesla factories under COVID, and among other things, asked him to pay some taxes, he’s the richest man in the world. He has a temper tantrum, he says, “I’m taking my company to Texas.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

john a. powell:

And where they’re giving me money, they said they won’t regulate me.” When Amazon tried to build a place in New York, actually it had a beauty contest. It said, “Cities, governments all over the country, tell me what you will give me if I move my business to your place, tell me what you will give me.” One of the things he asked for was a heliport where so he could fly his helicopter in and out here. Here again, one of the richest people in the world, to go back and forth between he and Elon, and what he’s asking, “What are you going to give me?”

You know, “Not what I’m going to contribute to society?” And at the end of the day, he decided not to move to New York because they wouldn’t give him enough. And people are desperate. They need jobs, they need healthcare. And that becomes the promise. So, our society is so distorted, is so misaligned. And that alignment, the glue to that alignment, is largely racial anxiety. So why are all these people who need jobs following Trump and following the right wing, when from an economic perspective, it’s very clear. They don’t reflect the economic interest.

Nick Hanauer:

So, the thing that we are really focused on in this podcast and in our work, John, is the way in which in particular neoclassical economics has both passed its self off as this set of immutable scientific ideas that are essentially expressions of laws of nature. But that if you take them seriously, the only thing that can happen is that the rich will get richer and everyone else will get poor, that the powerful will become ever more powerful, and everyone else will become weaker.

Down to things as simple as conceiving of the economy as a Pareto-optimal equilibrium. Right? Like if there was ever an idea that was better suited to protect the interests of the status quo, I don’t know what it is, right?

john a. powell:

Yeah.

Nick Hanauer:

Because if it’s a Pareto-optimal equilibrium where any exogenous shock decreases welfare for everyone, well then we should pretty much leave everything else alone. Right? By definition. And I’m just so fascinated by the way in which that framework of thought intersects with your institute’s thinking.

john a. powell:

I oftentimes look at things as like, when something is obvious and we’re not doing it or we’re ignoring it, we have to look more deeply. It’s like I stick my hand in fire burns, and I stick it back and then it burns again. I stick it back and say, “Wait a minute, John, what are you doing? Don’t you know it burns?” “Obviously I know it burns. I’m getting burned.” “Why are you doing it then?”

And I think that since our founding, and, frankly, W.E.B. Du Bois talked about it, he said, “We traded in our democracy for basically white supremacy.” And he said, “What many people got, many whites got, was psychological wage.” David Roediger wrote a book called The Wages of Whiteness. And do we see time and time again at different critical times during the Progressive movement during, there were efforts to actually break this down many times.

And what the elites were always able to do was to turn it back in part based on racial resentment and hostility. When Truman was in The White House, he proposed a universal healthcare plan, and the whole country was suffering from lack of healthcare. We had just come out of World War II. He had the votes to get it passed. And then someone asked him at the last moment, if we have universal healthcare, will the hospitals be integrated? Truman said, “Yes.” They turned it down.

And when I said, “They turned it down,” it was obviously Congress, but the American, white Americans by and large, especially in the South supported it, is that, “We would rather go without healthcare than to share a hospital with a racial other.” And so if you look, think about all the demonstrations, if you don’t, if we hold Occupy in a band for a moment, we have demonstrations about wearing face masks. We’ve had demonstrations about police killings. We’ve had demonstrations about integrating neighborhoods, try to build low income housing in the neighborhood.

We’ve had demonstrations about immigrants, five immigrants who want to come to the country. We’ve had on and on, almost no demonstrations about the economy. Certainly not at a national level. We have a factory goes on strike, that’s it. And then we have laws, right? Saying, “If there’s a strike, there can’t be a secondary strike.” There can’t be, you can’t really join in. I mean, so people feel the economy on one hand, but the kind of sustained movement that…

I mean, we just had an insurrection on January 6th, people storming The Capitol. What are they asking for? They’re asking that Trump stay in as President. They’re asking that our democracy, we just get rid of our democracy, “Send it away.” You know? So, part of the thing that’s happening, and we, this is what I mean, the glue that holds this country together, that holds this rotten deal together, is racial resentment.

And the racial resentment, Republican party is basically almost a 50-50 party with the Democratic party. If you look at their agenda, so what’s their platform for the midterms? They said they don’t have one. They don’t need one. What they’re going to write is fear about critical race theory, fear about pedophiles, fear about immigrants coming to the country. The thing is fear, and fear is not rational.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. But it is that defining psychological determinant of whether you are liberal or conservative. That’s threat-

John a. powell:

That’s right. That’s right.

Nick Hanauer:

… that’s threat sensitivity.

john a. powell:

And it’s not just… I said it’s not rational. It’s certainly strategic, fear has been weaponized. And so, as the country sort of goes through, I mean, when you think about it’s amazing. We just finished a presidency a few years ago with the first African American President. You can think he was not… you may say he is not the best president, not the worst president, but the kind of anxiety Trump and the Republican party was able to build around it, not just his presidency, his candidacy. “He’s not a real American. He wasn’t born here.”

Really what they’re saying is, “You, by the fact that you’re black, don’t belong.” When Trump says the election was stolen, there’s a subtext to it. He doesn’t mean necessarily that people went to the ballot and stole the thing. He meant that black people turned out in record numbers, certainly in Georgia, is in of itself illegitimate. And so we have over 30 states now running around the country after the attorney general that Trump appointed said, “There’s no evidence of substantial voter fraud. So what do we do? We have to pass laws to end the voter fraud that we didn’t find.” What are they really saying?

And it’s just maddening. Right? So I think that putting these two things together, we need a different approach. And the approach we have I think keeps taking us back to the same place where we’re stuck.

Nick Hanauer:

So what is the different approach?

john a. powell:

I’m glad you asked that question. Part of the response to the question is that yes, we have to build a framework and a story and an analysis that actually is more complicated. More complicated in terms of what it takes into account of, not more complicated in terms of how we actually convince people of it. The message has to be simple. What it’s pointing to has to be more complicated, and I’ll be more specific. So yesterday I was on a panel about closing a racial wealth gap, and I’m saying, “That’s important.”

But it’s the wrong target by itself. Because what it does, it just says, “Whites are doing okay in terms of wealth, and people of color, particularly African Americans, are doing very bad.” And, implicit in that, if not explicit, that whites are the perpetrators. They’re benefiting from a system in which blacks are being subjugated. But when we, when we frame the issue in terms of the racial wealth gap, I mean, I gave the example.

I said, “If Jeff Bezos walks in here, he’s white, then, and the other white person in the room is unemployed,” the gap between whites and blacks will be huge. But not because the white guy standing next to me is doing so well. It’s because Jeff Bezos is in the room. So, there’s one story where we don’t want to look at race at all, right? And that’s, the other story is that we look at it in categorical terms.

And the population that’s white is distributed and very heterogeneous. And the same is true if the population is black. And so instead of just white and black, we have to look at the complexity that peoples’ lives. And in that complexity be willing to say, “We are concerned about all those people suffering,” and no, we’re not equating the suffering. We’re not saying that every group suffers the same as the other group, but every group does suffer. Wherever they’re suffering, we will actually deal with.

And which means we do care about the white single mom in the suburbs. I mean, I had this conversation with some of the leadership, SCIU saying, she got to show up in the story. She’s a large part of your base, but you’re not really talking to her. And 30-plus percent of SCIU’s base supported Trump. And most of them are white. And it’s like, why? Because Trump’s talking to him. He’s lying to him, but you’re not really talking to him. You’re lumping them with Elon Musk. You’re lumping them with Trump.

So that’s the more complicated story, we have to, we have to be willing to say, “Okay, I can’t pay my rent.” He said, “Yeah, but I’m homeless.” Okay. We’re both screwed. It’s not that mine not being paying my rent is of no consequence because you’re homeless. And that’s what we do a lot of times, it’s like, we tell my story, Bob Marley’s talks about “Every man thinks his burden is the heaviest. We don’t want to hear about other peoples’ burdens.” And I think that’s the complicated story we have to tell.

Nick Hanauer:

So to be clear, when you’re suppressing wages, as we have in this country for the last 40 years, you are advantaged by the fact that the people whose wages you are suppressing are people of color who have the least economic power in the society, which makes it easier and easier to suppress their wages.

john a. powell:

Right. I agree. And the thing is, some of it’s intentional, some of it’s not. Some of it’s, I mean, for example, if you say I teach at Berkeley, I have most of my students… I have very few black students. And Berkeley is constantly saying, “We want more diverse student population and particularly blacks, why don’t we get them?” Well, we get students when they’re 18 or 22 years old, they’ve been through a whole system.

When the COVID hit, we did a lot of research on COVID. We were, we pushed Michigan to be the first state to desegregate the data. And everyone was saying, “COVID is an equal opportunity disease,” I said, “That would be unique in the history of this country.” Not because someone was saying, “Let’s make COVID really attack Native Americans and blacks,” but because people are situated differently, when you push things through the system, it would distribute it in different ways.

So Michigan desegregated the data and almost was shocked that the incidence of getting COVID and the incidence of getting treatment and the incidence of dying at every stage, there was a huge racial gap. And from my perspective, it wasn’t an intentional response. It was basically the structures in place, and the structure does most of the work now.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, it was the, it was the inevitable outcome of the structure of the society.

john a. powell:

Right. Right.

Nick Hanauer:

So let’s talk about one of your approaches to realities like this, which is targeted universalism, which is a different way of thinking about policy. If you could explain in general what targeted universalism is, and use that example with COVID and the disparate health outcomes, how one might apply it towards addressing that.

John a. powell:

So the idea of targeting universalism is that you have a universal goal that’s not picked to any particular population. You say, “We need healthy society, people need certain things. Everybody needs to have good healthcare. Everybody needs to have good schools. We want people to thrive. We want people to have,” in terms of the conversation I had yesterday, how much wealth does a family need to have economic security?

Just have the economists cut up that number. And they’ll say, “You certainly need three or four months to be able to be unemployed and to be able to survive. You certainly need to be able to, with the cost of school and health to get sick and pay for education.” So, come up with a number, whatever it is, we can come up with that number. So that’s, that can be in this case, be the universal. Every family should have this amount of wealth, this amount of cushion.

And then you say, that’s the universal, how do we get families there? Which group is already there? It’s likely that for the most part, no group is there. Whites are not going to be there, blacks are not going to be there. Native Americans not going to be there, Asians. The point is is that then you say, “What would it take for group A to get there?” That’s the targeted part, because targeted is based on how people are actually situated.

You’re saying, “People are situated in different structures and are situated in different places in relation to that universal. How do we get them there?” So then the strategies become targeted based on people’s situatedness. And the goal is to get every group, not just the most marginal group, and not the most favorite group. The goal is to get everybody to that universal, but recognizing that you can use different strategies to get them there.

I mean, think about something like ESL in school. We, we have ESL in school. Now English is a second language. So students can start learning instructions in their own language and eventually switch over to English. When that case first came to the court, it literally went to the Supreme Court because the idea was, “No, we’re going to treat everybody the same.”

Or think about something like the American Disability Act. The idea that someone comes to an escalator trying to get from the second floor to the third floor, and they’re in a wheelchair. One response is, don’t treat, “Treat everybody the same.” And that was our concept of equality until really the 1970s. To the extent that we had a concept of equality. It’s like, I don’t see race. I don’t see ethnicity. I don’t see, I just see a human being. I don’t see any, I don’t see the person’s condition.

And so targeted universalism says, “We actually want to address that.” Equity sort of saw the difference, but then it used the favorite group as the target. And oftentimes, as you suggested, the favorite group or what’s called the favorite group is actually not doing very well. So white men, which was the default favorite group, their income has been relatively static for 40 years. So is that what I want? Do they have what they need? No. They may still have more than what their woman counterpart have or more than their black counterpart, their white men, but they don’t have enough.

So targeted universalism takes the sort of competition over scarce resources between groups and say, “We all deserve X.” That’s the universal. And we’re in different relationship to that X, so we’ll have different strategies. But not because you’re white, not because you’re a man, not because you’re… It’s because of how you’re situated in relationship to these universals.

Nick Hanauer:

It’s interesting because kind of implicit in the conversation about targeted universalism is the acknowledgement that many of our existing policies aren’t really outcome oriented.

john a. powell:

That’s right. That’s right. That’s exactly right. It’s very outcome oriented. It’s like, because we’ll say, “Well, we gave the school an extra 5%, and what happened?” An educator will tell you that “Probably the most single most important thing in terms of schools is the teacher.” And for high poverty schools, 5% not going to hire you qualified teachers. And so even teachers, that’s an input and of itself, we ought look at the outcome. The goal is to give people the outcome and we’re agnostic about the best way to do that.

Nick Hanauer:

I know we’ve gone over time, but we have a couple final questions for you, which we pose to a lot of our guests. The first is the benevolent dictator question. No economic or political constraints. What would you do? What would you prioritize? What would you do to prioritize building a more belonging and inclusion in our economy?

john a. powell:

So it’s a great question. And of course I start off with, there’s no such thing as a benevolent dictator, it’s a contradiction.

Nick Hanauer:

Right. Right.

john a. powell:

Right? And so-

Nick Hanauer:

We know.

john a. powell:

Yeah.

Nick Hanauer:

We know.

john a. powell:

So the thing is, and Amartya Sen, the economist from India, he talks about this, right? He said, “What do people need?” He doesn’t use the word belong, it’s the same concept. He said, “What do people need to effectively participate in their society?” And I wrote a piece which I said, “The first good in a society, the primary good in society is not money, is not free speech, it’s not health. The first good is membership because members then decide what all the other goods are. Members set the terms of how the society will operate.”

So having a real democracy, having a, not just, again, where you perform something every two or four years, but where you can actually structure society, and to your point that you made earlier, is outcome oriented. We want to make sure that everyone can participate. Everyone. And that no participation is so extreme, I mean, if you go back and read stuff about our country was coming together, the quote unquote “founders” was very concerned about over concentration of power, even as powerful people. Well we’re there.

Power is extremely concentrated. And so I would say the whole economy has to work for people. John Rawls talked about this in Theory of Justice, “How do you organize an economy where the ultimate goal is not how much money you make, it is, how do you serve the people?” And if you can serve the people who make money, go for it. But if it means you can’t make money and serve the people, you don’t get to make money. The penultimate value is service to the people, and I would use “Extend it to the planet.”

And things like inheritance tax and stuff like that, I mean, I start off from a position that all wealth is commonwealth. How we divide it up is up to us. It’s not up to one person, you know, no one built wealth by themselves. So how do you make wealth in service of people? And then if you see some people persistently falling behind, or persistently not being serviced, then you target that group. You don’t blame that group for not being able to do what another group has.

Nick Hanauer:

And one final question, why do you do this work?

john a. powell:

What else is there to do?

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

john a. powell:

I haven’t been sleeping the last couple of nights, worried about where our country’s headed. I want to go sleep. I have kids, I have grandkids. I care about people. I love people. And when I talk about target universalism and how targeting universalism and belonging, it’s clearly about everyone. It deals with our racial past. It deals with our gender past, but it’s a future where everyone counts.

And people are finding that when you stretch, when you can, I mean, think about the election in Florida, where they voted to change the constitution so returning citizens could vote. It got the largest single vote counted of any candidate, any issue in Florida, because it was framed in terms of, “This is for all of us. This is for all of us. It’s not just for blacks. Yes, and blacks will be disproportionately benefited. It’s not just for Latinos. It’s for all of us.” And now people are saying, “As a strategy, that works. And it’s a great one, it’s not just a strategy. I really believe everybody counts.” And so belonging is about saying, “Every human being matters.”

And we need to organize society that reflects that.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s awesome. Well, John, we could talk to you for hours, but we can’t, and you can’t. But we thank you so much for being on the show and for your work. And I hope you will join us again to explore these matters in further and deeper ways.

john a. powell:

If I may, before I, so, I appreciate the work you’re doing and why do you do it?

Nick Hanauer:

I’m with you. What else would you do?

john a. powell:

Yeah.

Nick Hanauer:

What else would you do? If you can, you should-

john a. powell:

Yeah.

Nick Hanauer:

… work on this stuff. Because nobody’s, it’s not going to take care of itself. And you know, the forces of concentrated power are like it’s getting worse fast.

john a. powell:

That’s right.

Nick Hanauer:

And-

john a. powell:

All over the world.

Nick Hanauer:

… and anybody with a brain who’s paying attention can see that top heavy structures topple over.

john a. powell:

Mm-hmm.

Nick Hanauer:

Always. They never don’t, and we’re in great danger of that happening really soon.

Goldy:

I’ve got a lot to take away from that conversation.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, absolutely. I was really struck by the distinction he drew between inclusion and belonging. I mean, how about the party example, right? Fantastic example of the difference between inclusion and belonging, but I mean I’m super sympathetic with the distinction he’s drawing.

Goldy:

Yeah. There’s I mean, part of it is definitional in terms of that particular example, that inclusion is kind of something that happens to you. Like, okay, we’re going to, you can be included. Whereas belonging is something that we, that we do together. It is more cooperative. And I think that’s an important distinction to keep in mind, it’s like saying “Toleration,” like, “Oh, religious toleration, I tolerate you having the wrong religion.”

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

Goldy:

“But I don’t welcome it.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

Goldy:

I tolerate people of different colors and races and ethnicities, but I don’t necessarily want to, that is very different than belonging. Can I just say, there’s another distinction here, and he brought up Amartya Sen. And Amartya Sen March of send. Yeah. And a March of send makes a very important distinction in his capabilities approach between human capabilities and human capital, that they’re not the same thing.

And that we often look at like, “Oh, you give somebody an education. That’s human capital in that it gives you the capability to increase your productivity and your earnings, and therefore to live a better life.” And what Amartya Sen send points out is all that is true. Human capital is important, but a capability is broader than that. Because an education also gives you just a sense of accomplishing something. It gives you the ability to participate in political debates, to be more engaged in your community in ways that are non-remunerative in an economic sense.

And I think we talk about economic inclusion and we do it in a very abstract technical sense of how that drives economic prosperity and growth. And we believe that, it’s true. It is a major driver of economic prosperity to include more people in the economy from all different backgrounds, races, perspectives, et cetera. But I think what John is pointing out to when he makes this distinction with belonging is that belonging is something that is worthwhile, gratifying, important in and of itself, absent the economic outcomes.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. No, it’s really true. The evil of neoclassical economics, right, that the worst thing about it is it denies that inclusion even matters. Right?

Goldy:

Right.

Nick Hanauer:

This whole makers and takers thing, right? That there’s this distinction between the good people who make things and everyone else who takes things, like this negative feedback loop or decreasing return system between makers and takers, rather than an increasing return system between buyers and sellers. Where the more of both we have and the more deliberate we are in creating more of both the better it will be for everybody. We’re all better off when we’re all better off. Right?

Goldy:

I think of it a little differently in terms of the neoclassical neoliberal approach. It’s not that it doesn’t say it thinks that inclusion doesn’t matter, it just thinks that the invisible hand will solve that.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right.

Goldy:

That hide it-

Nick Hanauer:

That it’ll either take care of itself or it’ll be a thing we do after we have economic growth.

Goldy:

Right. I mean, what they argue is that, well, racism is inefficient.

Nick Hanauer:

Right.

Goldy:

It just, it’s inefficient. And so a racist company is going to be less efficient than a non-racist company, and they’ll be competed out of existence, the invisible hand will solve this problem. And again, it gets to, we talk about this a lot, having cause and effect reversed.

Nick Hanauer:

Yes.

Goldy:

That, we say that “A thriving middle class is the primary cause and source of growth, not the consequence of it.” While there’s a similar thing with inclusion, the other side says that “Inclusion will be a consequence of growth.” That if-

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

Goldy:

… if we grow the economy more, rising tide and all that, more people will be included in it. And our perspective is that inclusion is actually the primary cause of growth.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. And indeed the economy has grown greatly over the last decades.

Goldy:

Right.

Nick Hanauer:

But in many ways it has not become more inclusive. In fact, it’s become more exclusive as wealth, power, and capabilities have concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.

Goldy:

And this gets to another important point that John made when we were talking about this racial resentment. That RAND report from a couple years ago highlights this, that “It is absolutely true that no demographic group has seen their incomes grow more slowly over the past 40 years than white, non-college educated men.”

Nick Hanauer:

Correct.

Goldy:

That is true. They still earn more than women and non-whites, but their incomes have grown slower. John pointed this out and the RAND report points out the data. The fact that their incomes have stagnated or even shrunk is not because non-whites and women are doing better. It’s because they have lost income to other white men.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

Goldy:

Like you, Nick.

Nick Hanauer:

At the very top-

Goldy:

… Nick.

Nick Hanauer:

… exactly.

Goldy:

In the top 1%, in the top 0.1%.

Nick Hanauer:

But it is just psychologically hard-

Goldy:

Right.

Nick Hanauer:

… to mobilize people to confront part of the in group. It is hard to whip white, non college-educated men up into a frenzy against Elon Musk-

Goldy:

Other white-

Nick Hanauer:

… and Jeff-

Goldy:

… yes.

Nick Hanauer:

… Bezos whom they worship. Right?

Goldy:

And this gets to the full name of John’s institute, it’s not The Belonging Institute, it’s The Othering & Belonging Institute.

Nick Hanauer:

Yes.

Goldy:

And what we have seen over the past few decades, and particularly in the era of Trump, is that emphasis on othering.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. Well, it was a fantastic conversation and we were really privileged to get to talk to John, and hopefully we’ll get to talk to him and his team more in the future.

Speaker 4:

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