This week, Nick and Goldy welcome sociologist Nikhil Goyal to discuss his new book, Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty, which highlights the deep-rooted effects of generational poverty in America by focusing on the experiences of three young people in Kensington, Philadelphia. Their stories illustrate how systemic inequality and poor economic policies perpetuate a cycle of despair and intergenerational poverty. Goyal explains the limitations of traditional anti-poverty solutions like promoting higher educational attainment. Instead, he spotlights the need for direct cash transfers, robust public goods, and a public option for programs like healthcare, affordable housing, or even publicly owned grocery stores that directly address the causes of poverty.
Nikhil Goyal is a sociologist and former senior policy advisor on education and children for Senator Bernie Sanders on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and Committee on the Budget. He also developed a tuition-free college program for incarcerated people and correctional workers in Vermont. He is the author of the book LIVE TO SEE THE DAY: Coming of Age in American Poverty.
Twitter: @drgoyalnikhil
Further reading:
LIVE TO SEE THE DAY: Coming of Age in American Poverty
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Nick Hanauer:
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
President Joe Biden:
It’s time to build our economy from the bottom up and from the middle out, not the top down-
Nick Hanauer:
Middle-out economics is the answer.
President Joe Biden:
… because Wall Street didn’t build this country. The great middle class built this country.
Nick Hanauer:
The more the middle class thrives, the better the economy is for everyone, even rich people like me.
Speaker 3:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4:
We talk a lot on the podcast, Nick, about bad economic theory. On this episode, we’re going to talk about bad economic consequences. It’s a little bit different from what we normally do because in a way, this is a weirdly optimistic podcast because if you’re talking about changing something as deep and fundamental as the way we think and talk about the economy, you must believe that that’s possible. But we tend to… Well, we’re obviously aware and we talk about it tangentially, we tend to not spend too much time on the real life conditions on the ground. And this episode is a little different.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Yeah, we’re going to talk to Nikhil Goyal, who’s a sociologist and author whose work sheds light on some of these economic forces shaping generational poverty in America. And he has a new book out called Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty, which is… It actually follows the story of some poor kids growing up in a place I think you’ve heard of, called Philadelphia.
Speaker 4:
Yeah, I grew up in… He describes it as the poorest neighborhood in the poorest big city in the country. And we’ll get into my connection there-
Nick Hanauer:
Some of this may cut close to home for you.
Speaker 4:
Yeah, I read the book and it brought up a lot of feelings, but-
Nick Hanauer:
Maybe we’ll save that for our conversation with him-
Speaker 4:
Yeah, let’s talk to Nikhil and see how the therapy session works.
Nikhil Goyal:
Hi, my name is Nikhil Goyal. I’m the author of Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty, and I’m also a sociologist and former senior policy advisor for Senator Bernie Sanders.
Nick Hanauer:
So Nikhil, in your new book, you explore the lives of three young people in a very particular place, Kensington, Philadelphia. Oddly, one of us on this podcast is from Kensington Philadelphia, not me.
Speaker 4:
It’s me. I read the book and you start… You tell these two stories. Mostly it’s focused on the incredible poverty in the neighborhood and the struggle to get out of it, but you put that in contrast to the white flight and the surrounding affluent neighborhoods. I have deep connections to that neighborhood. My grandmother graduated from Kensington High. My mother lived the first nine years of her life there. I was born there. I spent my early childhood there across the street from the high school on Cumberland-
Nikhil Goyal:
Wow.
Speaker 4:
… and moved out to the burbs, to Lower Merion, which I think you mentioned in the book as well. So that story of this huge inequality between the families stuck in the neighborhood and the kids who grow up in these great schools that prepare them for the Ivy League, that’s me. This is part of my history-
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, it’s literally what happened to [inaudible 00:04:15].
Speaker 4:
And to give you the timing, I was born in 1963, so we moved out I think in ’67.
Nikhil Goyal:
Wow. And where did you move to after that?
Speaker 4:
To Bala Cynwyd, so I graduated from Lower Merion High School.
Nikhil Goyal:
Oh, wow. Yeah.
Speaker 4:
And eventually went to Penn, so it’s completely… You’re telling… I’m one of the bad guys-
Nikhil Goyal:
No, no-
Speaker 4:
… in this story.
Nikhil Goyal:
You’re not a bad guy. You saw-
Speaker 4:
In this story. Not by choice, but-
Nikhil Goyal:
No, but you saw both sides of the system and two vastly different neighborhoods.
Speaker 4:
Right. And to go on with it, my mother was an elementary school teacher, an art teacher in the Philadelphia district, teaching at a largely Puerto Rican school, Bache-Martin, for many years. At the same time, I was in the Lower Merion district where they literally, and I think to this day, it’s true, spent twice as much per student than they did across the city line. And I grew up just a mile from the city line, and it was apparent to me then visiting my mother’s school once or twice, how bizarre this was, the different worlds.
Nikhil Goyal:
That is incredible. Yeah. To grow up in Kensington, especially in the ’60s, I have a lot of questions for you but I imagine it was the racial strife, the changing demographics, the beginnings of deindustrialization. You got a front row seat to a radically changing city.
Speaker 4:
Yeah. I was a little kid. And then we would go back and visit. My father was a doctor. We lived above his office, which tells you how different it was. It was a cash business back then. And he continued to have that office for a number of years, and we would visit. My memory of it was white working class, that it was still predominantly Irish. There was the old Jewish couple who owned the pharmacy on the corner, and then big Irish family that owned the dry cleaners on the other corner. But we stopped going back, to be clear, as soon as my father stopped practicing there.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah-
Nikhil Goyal:
And you lived east of Front Street?
Speaker 4:
Yeah, it was right across the street from Kensington High School.
Nikhil Goyal:
Right, yeah. I mentioned that only because into the ’70s and ’80s, Front Street became this dividing line where Puerto Rican and Black families who tried to move east of Front were often harassed and beat in and terrorized if they tried to move there. But then over time, that racial wall barrier fell as more folks moved into the neighborhood over time.
Nick Hanauer:
So Nikhil, we’ve taken you a little bit off-track here. Why don’t you take a few minutes and lay out the thesis of your book and the story it tells?
Nikhil Goyal:
Sure. So I first came to Kensington in 2015. I had been friends with a guy named Andrew Frishman who runs an organization called Big Picture Learning, and I was interested in examining the high school dropout crisis. And we had a couple chats and he said, “You should go visit our school in Kensington.” And I had spent a little bit of time in Philadelphia over the years, particularly in West Philadelphia at a very cool progressive school called The Workshop School, but I’d really never been in North Philadelphia. I ended up visiting El Centro and interviewing students and parents. I thought I was going to write a story about the school, but then I went off to grad school and ended up conducting a long-term ethnography in the neighborhood, following a number of Puerto Rican and African American children and white kids in Philadelphia, and tried to trace and examine the history of educational privatization, the war on drugs, welfare reform, and other social and economic forces that underpinned these young people’s lives as well as their families.
And so the book focuses on three of them, Ryan, Giancarlos and Emmanuel, now known as [inaudible 00:08:28], and I follow them for about eight years from childhood to adulthood in the wake of these forces and histories and policies. And I also follow the lives of their mothers to tell an intergenerational count about poverty, incarceration, trauma, and other issues that are reproduced from one generation to the next. And I think what this book really tries to show is how intense and deep poverty is in a neighborhood like Kensington, the effects that it has on children, on their schooling, on their well-being and everyday lives, and then also to show the limitations of schools and changing these young people’s economic fortunes and livelihoods. So I think what I tried to do is bring together agency and structure and history and political economy to tell a larger story.
Speaker 4:
So I don’t know if you want me to go here, Nick, obviously we’re big supporters of Harris for President, but I personally hate one of her economic slogans when she talks about an opportunity economy. I hate that word. I find it an empty promise because we have this idea in this country that because you have a legal opportunity, everybody’s equal. That means your failures and successes are your own. If you could go into a bit in the book how unequal these opportunities are for these children? And it’s not just the quality of the school, some of which are terrible and/or dehumanizing, but also, even if you’re in a great school and have great mentors, how hard it is to go to school when you’re just living in this abject poverty and violence and crime?
Nikhil Goyal:
I’ll tell the story of Emmanuel. When he was growing up, he and his mother lived off of less than $10,000 a year in TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, benefits, and SSI, Supplemental Security Income. His mother was disabled. And what that meant was that they had to live literally one welfare check to the next, often living with great food insecurity, economic insecurity, dealing with evictions, going from one home to the next, oftentimes multiple times a year. The toll that poverty had on Emmanuel’s psyche, his body, his soul, it was just absolutely crushing. And then you add on to that the fact that this young person was grappling with his sexuality. At one point, he comes out as bisexual to his mother. His mother’s very deeply religious, Pentecostal Christian woman, and rejects him. And so imagine trying to deal with that on top of deep poverty and insecurity, and then trying to get to school and do well in school. Anybody in that kind of situation would almost certainly fail.
And so I think the book is most powerful in showing how those economic forces, those dehumanizing, oppressive forces weigh on children and on their educational experiences. And it was not just those issues, but gun violence and street violence also comes up very prominently in the book, particularly with Giancarlos losing his friends to gun violence. And the title of the book, Live to See The Day, comes from conversations I had with Ryan and Giancarlos and other youth when they couldn’t even imagine life after the age of 18 or 21. They thought they would be dead or incarcerated. That is a very common ordeal that children in North Philadelphia have to endure, where premature death is an omnipresent force in the lives of their friends and family.
Nick Hanauer:
As you think about the reality, the lived experience of poverty, generational poverty, and how that aligns or misaligns with our policy agenda, how do you think about that problem? Let me phrase the question just slightly differently. So obviously our policies today in the United States are insufficient to address this issue, correct?
Nikhil Goyal:
Right.
Nick Hanauer:
But do we also take the wrong approach? Like if you just took the existing programs and made them 10 times better, would that help? Or are there ways that we think we should address these issues that are just wrongheaded and ineffective, and not only should we be putting more resource into it, but we should be taking a different tact?
Nikhil Goyal:
Right. I think that’s a great question. I look at it in a few ways. One is. I’m a big believer, as Democrats are, of direct cash transfers. So for example, the expanded Child Tax Credit, we know how transformative that was when it was implemented in 2021, raising 3 million kids out of poverty, reducing economic, food, housing insecurity, and another social ills. And that is a big piece of what we need, and that includes expanding SNAP benefits and other public assistance programs. But that’s insufficient in my view. And in the book I cite the great economist Amartya Sen, who talks about the concept of capabilities and how people who live in poverty are devout of those capabilities, the building blocks, the necessities that make up a dignified life. So at the same time, we advocate for direct cash transfers. I also think we should be advocating for more robust public goods and public options, whether it’s in healthcare or in childcare, or in supermarkets.
There’s a lot of areas where I think we need to have the state directly intervene and provide some of these basic public goods. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have a private sector, but it means that there’s more sense of competition that will ultimately reduce costs and improve access. And there’s some really great work with the Economic Security Project to promote publicly owned grocery stores, particularly in food deserts. And that was a major problem and crisis that exists in many neighborhoods in this country, where people live too far away from supermarkets or the supermarkets that they do go to are too expensive or have poor produce or quality of items. So I think we need to do both at the same time so that we build up these institutions in neighborhoods, not just in poor neighborhoods, but in middle class and wealthy neighborhoods so that the people can feel the state, they can feel what government can do for them in a very tangible way.
Speaker 4:
It’s interesting. I went to Penn in the early ’80s when West Philadelphia was a bit less gentrified and there was one supermarket, and in the whole area out there despite all these people, and it was so much more expensive than the supermarkets in the suburbs just a few miles away where I grew up. And it was horrible. It was crowded and dirty and there was no service, and it seemed to be filled with food past their expiration date, but it was more expensive to be poor than it was to be an affluent suburbanite.
Nikhil Goyal:
That is a very apt observation because in many instances, the supermarkets or housing and other basic needs are more expensive than the services middle class neighborhoods. And that is a major problem because you have… It’s essentially what Matthew Desmond calls a web of exploitation, whether it’s folks in the real estate industry knowing that they can prey on poor people by jacking up rents. And they don’t want necessarily move to other neighborhoods for a variety of reasons, and so they have a captive audience that are forced to pay those rents. And it was really remarkable talking to these kids, especially the older ones who, after they left high school and were looking for housing… And they were paying 1,100, $1,200 a month for rent in very dilapidated units and where you could get probably, just a little bit… You could get better quality housing in Center City or in South Philly or West Philly, and you wouldn’t have to live in such a violent area. So that is something that I’ve definitely observed in a number of instances.
Speaker 4:
It’s odd because Philadelphia is so large, it’s not like there’s a shortage of housing in Philadelphia. It is mile after mile of row houses in all directions. And you can find… I know the distance is large. What is it, community? What keeps people in an area like Kensington when like you said, you could get much better housing for the same or a little more someplace else? It’s not like there’s jobs in Kensington.
Nikhil Goyal:
Right. Part of it is work. The drug economy is a very attractive option for a lot of young people who either don’t have a high school diploma or just have a high school diploma, and so being in close proximity to that in Kensington, I think, is why people stay. Word of mouth is a big way of how people find housing, or they have a room somewhere and I need a place to stay, and they have somebody that they know. And it comes up in the book when I learn about some of the experiences that kids had at El Centro, there’s teachers at the school that would take the kids down to Center City or the museums and cultural institutions in Philadelphia, and these kids would be so uncomfortable. I would talk to Ryan and he would go to the Philadelphia Art Museum, and they’d be walking around making jokes and causing a ruckus, and you’d have white people look at them in a funny way.
They didn’t feel like this these institutions belonged to them as citizens of the city. And so a lot of kids rarely ever travel beyond a few mile radius of their neighborhood unless say, they’re going to courts or downtown, or they’re going to see their probation officer. They don’t know what it’s like in those other areas. And so that lack of familiarity is also, I think, a reason why people just don’t leave. And I remember talking to a community advocate in Kensington, and she had a mentor in Big Brothers Big Sisters when she was younger, and that mentor took her to the ocean. She had never seen the ocean before ,or seeing New Jersey just a few miles away. And that shocked me most of all when I interviewed these kids and their friends.
Nick Hanauer:
So what did you learn by writing this book?
Nikhil Goyal:
I learned that poverty is a crime against humanity. That is the first thing I learned. I knew that poverty was bad, it’s a great social ill, but I had never seen this depth of poverty in my own country before. I’d seen it in India, people living on the streets of Calcutta and Delhi when I would visit family members in my childhood, but I had never seen this step of poverty and how crushing it is on people’s everyday lives. I also was really struck by how limited the schools were in fixing or addressing poverty. Nick, I know you’ve got some great writing on how we tend to treat education as a panacea to economic and social inequality.
And just spending a little bit of time with the graduates of schools like El Centro indicate to me how wrongheaded it is to just put all our eggs in one basket and think that if we just graduate kids, if we get them a high school diploma and we just put more funding into schools, which is necessary, that we’re going to solve this problem. And you couldn’t be more wrong on that front. And you can just see in terms of the issues that these children face once they have a diploma, the poverty, the economic insecurity, the lack of decent employment, the gun violence, that doesn’t go away, even if you have had a great education. And I noticed that very clearly when there was one day at the school and there was a shooting outside the school and a recent graduate of the school got shot and his friend was killed just across the street from the school, and it showed me the limitations of the limitations of schools and just getting kids across the finish line.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, for sure. So what should we do?
Nikhil Goyal:
I think there’s a lot that we can do, and a lot of it does require a trifecta in Washington. The federal government just has more of an ability to spend and invest in the social and economic programs that these families need. I had the really incredible opportunity to work on the Build Back Better bill when I worked for Senator Sanders on the Senate Budget Committee, and it pained me enormously when many of the programs in that bill didn’t get passed because I knew how transformative they would’ve been had they existed when Ryan and the others were children. It would immediately give them a better chance at a dignified life. And so I think resurrecting that bill in its totality would do a lot to help reduce the suffering in the Kensingtons of America, but I think we’ve got to go well beyond that if we have a chance in January, and that means building up these public goods and institutions. I would love to see publicly owned grocery stores around the country.
I’d love to see a public option in healthcare lowering the Medicare eligibility age, but also having Medicare for kids, for example, so that we have really robust and good healthcare for children. And that includes investing in dental, mental healthcare, and eye care. A lot of these kids have cavities and have never seen a doctor for their toothache. And I really make the point in a lot of my talks and presentations that the issues that children endure outside of school get carried into the classroom. They don’t go away. They affect children’s ability to learn. And one model of schools that I think have been really effective is a model called community schooling. And in Cincinnati, Ohio, for example, they have dentists and pediatricians and mental health counselors embedded within the school buildings themselves, and I think that would be a really good investment, where schools become the anchor of communities, that we bring in health and social supports, universal free school meals. Schools may not be able to fix poverty, but they will be able to reduce some of the effects of it, at least for the most vulnerable children.
Speaker 4:
Are any of these investments possible as long as we continue the incredibly inequitable funding mechanism of these schools? Because I know in Pennsylvania, the majority of the money comes from local property taxes, with the smallest percentage coming from state and federal funding, and that’s why my suburban district was able to spend twice as much per student on kids who didn’t need as much support.
Nikhil Goyal:
Absolutely. The inequitable system of how we fund public education through dominance on local property taxes is a major obstacle here. I think the state of Pennsylvania has fundamentally starved school districts like Philadelphia for generations. There has been some important work to rectify that. There’s been a school funding lawsuit that’s hopefully going to get more dollars to Philadelphia and other urban districts, but that is a structural problem. And then you also have a major issue with how taxation is done throughout the state, where you have a regressive tax system, at least with state taxes in Pennsylvania. And so I think there’s a number of areas that should be addressed.
It does obviously require leadership from democratic lawmakers, and then hopefully if they have majorities in the General Assembly, that would be great. That’s necessary to get any of these things across. But I think there’s just a lack of political imagination in this country to actually put our resources to fundamentally and fully end childhood poverty and economic insecurity. We need people to talk about this. And I think Harris has laid out some policies. I think I’m very supportive of the expanded Child Tax Credit, but people are suffering, and they shouldn’t suffer in a country as wealthy as ours. We have the resources to make sure every child lives a good life. So I’m hopeful that in November, that if we have Democrats in control, that we can begin to repair the damage and repair our society. But until then, we’ve got to start at least on the local and the state level of government.
Speaker 4:
I’m curious, one of the public goods, public options you didn’t mention when you listed them was housing-
Nikhil Goyal:
Yes, of course. Yes.
Speaker 4:
Your description of just the horrible housing conditions. And it’s interesting, most of the subjects in your book, they were never unsheltered, so they wouldn’t be falling into the homeless count, but my God, that was not adequate housing that they were living in.
Nikhil Goyal:
Oh, absolutely. And even, first of all, to get a housing voucher, Section 8 housing voucher, you have to wait on a list for years. And then if you’re lucky to get one of those spots, the housing is not necessarily habitable. And then if you do get a spot in the public housing units in the city, I’ve talked to residents who are constantly complaining of the backlog of repairs, the flooding in the units, urine and feces in the elevators that their children have to walk through, the lack of proper heating. The list goes on and on. So I think we absolutely need a major federal investment in social housing, in affordable housing for low- and middle-income people, very similar to the experiment in Red Vienna, with building housing, not just for the poor, not just segregated housing, but for all income brackets that is integrated. And there’s some great policies in Build Back Better concerning housing, but that is a absolute necessity, and people of all income brackets are feeling the pinch of unaffordable housing today.
Speaker 4:
Well, you’re preaching to the choir on that here. We’re big-
Nick Hanauer:
Big believers.
Speaker 4:
I don’t like to call it social housing, by the way. I think that’s a terrible brand. I understand that’s the term [inaudible 00:28:43]
Nikhil Goyal:
What would you prefer?
Speaker 4:
Just call it a public option.
Nikhil Goyal:
A public option, yeah.
Speaker 4:
The reason why is that social has all this baggage, the word itself, and it doesn’t actually describe it. When you say social housing, people think, well, is that a co-op? Is it a commune? Is it, whatever? But it’s really just a public option. That’s all it is.
Nikhil Goyal:
Right.
Speaker 4:
And why just hang social on that term?
Nikhil Goyal:
Yeah. But the other challenge, I think, even with the public housing terminology is also, I think, very weighted with and stigmatized as well, so I think it’s-
Speaker 4:
That’s why I don’t say public housing, I just say-
Nikhil Goyal:
A public option, yeah.
Speaker 4:
… a public option for housing. But it’s really encouraging, obviously. AOC had that piece in the New York Times. You’re really beginning to see a lot of people talk about this from a lot of different angles, a lot of… I think there’s going to be… We’re very hopeful we’re going to see some experimentation. And there’s actually a lot the federal government can do, that doesn’t even cost taxpayers, that could make a huge amount of investment available for this.
Nikhil Goyal:
Yeah. And even on at the city level, we talked about the row homes and these abandoned blocks, there’s so much the City of Philadelphia could be doing. Say they actually operate as a developer in developing some of these abandoned lots as opposed to just relying on developers to do that, it is remarkable. And right now, Kensington is being rapidly gentrified, and I’ve just seen massive changes since I started going there. And residents are going to be displaced. I would talk to residents who would be bombarded with letters and flyers from folks asking if they would sell their homes for pennies on the dollar. So those folks deserve to stay in their homes and their neighborhoods, and while we can still invest in affordable housing for folks to be there as well.
Speaker 4:
Do you think, Nick, final question?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, you bet. Did we-
Speaker 4:
I think we’ve got benevolent dictator [inaudible 00:30:56]
Nick Hanauer:
I think we got that, yeah.
Speaker 4:
We’ve got a lot of policy proposals.
Nick Hanauer:
So why do you do this work?
Nikhil Goyal:
I do this work… I write because I think these stories deserve to be told. I think whether you’re a young person or a parent or just an American citizen, I think people need to understand the problems and the suffering that exist in our country, and hopefully that will motivate them to be engaged in some capacity to address those issues. And as somebody who grew up in middle-class and then later on in affluent neighborhoods, I think I have a responsibility to help address those inequalities and crises in our country, whether it’s through my writing or my policy work or just volunteering on campaigns, hopefully to get us closer to a place where fewer Americans have to live with economic hardship.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s fantastic. Well, congratulations on the new book. Best of luck with it.
Nikhil Goyal:
Thank you so much.
Nick Hanauer:
How did it feel to talk about the old days?
Speaker 4:
Well, let’s be honest. He’s talking about Kensington in a very different era than when I lived there.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Speaker 4:
But part of the reason why it’s so bad is because people like my family left and never went back. As I mentioned, I’ve got a long family history. My maternal grandmother graduated from Kensington High School. My mother spent much of her childhood in Kensington. I spent my early childhood in Kensington, living above my father’s neighborhood doctor’s office just across the street from Kensington High School. And I remember it as being certainly not as nice as the affluent suburb that we moved to when I was a child. But my childhood memory in the ’60s is not one of utter despair and degradation. It was obviously a neighborhood on the decline. I remember trying to go through that old neighborhood, maybe in the late ’80s, trying to see if I could remember exactly where we lived, and I wasn’t sure that the building even existed anymore. It was like a war zone. Empty lots, trash thrown in lots, and so forth. It was not a place we wanted to drive through for very long.
And it’s one neighborhood in one city, but it tells a story that has taken place over and over again throughout the country, a working class neighborhood, devastated by deindustrialization, loss of jobs, that through all of the racism that’s inherent in the city, becomes this dumping ground for the poorest of the poor, essentially, in this case, a Black and Puerto Rican ghetto that is incredibly hard to get out of for all types of socioeconomic reasons. And there is this maybe majority segment of the US population who blames the poverty on the victims. And to be clear, when he tells this story of these three kids who were born into these circumstances and who are genuinely struggling to try to get out of it, who have dreams for themselves and their children, to blame the kids is just so immoral. Well, it’s impractical and it’s irrational.
I have a friend who I met through the local chapter of Drinking Liberally. He’s white, but grew up in just a poor working class neighborhood of Oakland, just in terrible circumstances, whose father was a victim of gun violence. His father was murdered, his grandfather was murdered, involved in petty crime. He grew up involved in petty crime himself. And very smart, and autodidact, just really brilliant, very well-read, and his life was saved by just a local union leader who picked him up out of a bikers bar and said, “Look, you can continue on this path and you’ll be dead by the time you’re 30, or you can come down to the union hall and I’ll get you an apprenticeship and you’ll have a good life.” And he did, and he became a merchant seaman. And it’s hard work. It pays well and it comes with a good pension and good healthcare, and it literally saved his life.
You will never find a more pro-union person in your life. But I tell this story because I don’t know that I would’ve survived that. And had we been swapped at birth and he had been brought up in this affluent suburb with all of the advantages that I had, just great public schools and the ability to go to a great university, and just not living in constant fear and stress of where you’re going to be living at the end of the month or how you’re going to feed yourself your next meal, who knows what he would have turned out to be? Because like I said, he’s clearly brilliant. You don’t teach yourself the stuff that you taught yourself without having that natural talent. And it shows you how precarious life can be and how much of it is just dumb luck, just chance.
And this is a guy who could have ended the same way his father and grandfather did if not for one person reaching out and mentoring him and bringing him into a different world. And you just wonder how much talent is wasted in this country because of how unequal and racist this nation is. And it’s sad, it’s distressing. And I know I’m coming off as this liberal stereotype here. I don’t know what to do about most of it because God knows, how do you address the racism that is clearly at the heart of this story? But man, there’s so much more we could be doing and to say that we can’t, that this is the way the world has to be, it’s just unforgivable.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, great stories, interesting book.
Speaker 4:
Yeah, and I highly recommend it. Again, the link is in the show notes. It’s Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty, and I hope you all give it a read.
Speaker 6:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to follow, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, @PitchforkEconomics. Nick’s on Twitter and Facebook as well, @NickHanauer. For more content from us, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Pitch, over on Substack. And for links to everything we just mentioned plus transcripts and more, visit our website, pitchforkeconomics.com. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.