What does it take for someone to act in the interest of others? What constitutes trust in general, and trust in government in particular? Margaret Levi, a professor of political and behavioral sciences, shares her research on how people can be persuaded to act in the interest of others if they don’t already want to. The conversation covers vaccines, unions, citizen confidence in government, and a lot more.
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Margaret Levi is the Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), Professor of Political Science, and Senior Fellow of the Woods Institute, Stanford University. She is Jere L. Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. One of her most recent books, In the Interest of Others (Princeton, 2013), co-authored with John Ahlquist, explores how organizations provoke member willingness to act beyond material interest. In other work, she investigates the conditions under which people come to believe their governments are legitimate and the consequences of those beliefs for compliance, consent, and the rule of law.
Twitter: @margaretlevi
Margaret Levi: Citizen confidence in government – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBbq7izCslU&ab_channel=WZBlive
In the Interest of Others: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691158563/in-the-interest-of-others
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com/
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Nick Hanauer:
Trust is eroding in the United States of America, and to a certain extent, around the world.
Margaret Levi:
We have to create whole new mechanisms in terms of communicating what’s going on, hearing where people are coming from.
Goldy:
If you don’t feel like you’re being treated justly, reciprocally, you can’t trust other people. If you can’t trust them, you can’t cooperate, it all comes down to trust.
Speaker 3:
From the home offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer. The best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.
Nick Hanauer:
I’m Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
David Goldstein:
I’m David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures.
Nick Hanauer:
Goldie, I cannot wait to talk to our guest today, our friend Margaret Levi, who has been both so influential and so helpful in our work on re-imagining economics. And she runs the Center for Advanced Study and Behavioral Studies at Stanford and hosted Eric Veinocker and I and you there right as COVID was beginning, to analyze the book that Eric and I are continuing to try to write. But before we get to that conversation, we’ve got a couple of housekeeping things including, gasp, by the way, my kids are thrilled about this, I am actually on TikTok now as @realhanauer. And I must say, it has been super fun to begin to put some videos in economics up on TikTok. It’s not fun to make the videos, but it’s super fun to see the reactions from people on TikTok. It’s challenging and interesting and fun.
David Goldstein:
Yeah, I’m not on TikTok, Nick, because I’m an old fuddy duddy who doesn’t want to put that Chinese spyware on my phone. But I hear you’re a natural at it. That’s what everybody tells me.
Nick Hanauer:
Okay.
David Goldstein:
Other housekeeping, I’ve mentioned this before, Civic Ventures now has a weekly newsletter, the Pitch. I’m sure you’re reading it every week, Nick. It’s got the latest economic data, news and analysis and, as always, there is a link to sign up and receive the Pitch. Just go to our show notes.
And also there’s this really cool conference coming up. It’s called Econ Con. Our friends at the Groundwork Collaborative, along with a bunch of other excellent organizations are putting on a virtual gathering that is absolutely free. Free, that should be attractive to homo economicus, at least, and it’s open to the public.
Nick Hanauer:
It should be super interesting. Convening experts and organizers and advocates from across the country to examine what it will take to build an economy that works for all of us. It’s October 6 and 7 and everyone listening should go. We’re going.
David Goldstein:
We’ll be there. We’ll have a virtual booth and you can go to econcon.com to reserve your spot. And if that’s too hard to figure out, again, there’s a link in our show notes.
Nick Hanauer:
Absolutely. So let’s get back to the subject at hand and our conversation with Margaret about trust in human societies. And to be clear, humanity is a successful species because we’re fundamentally collaborative and cooperative.
David Goldstein:
And we’ve talked about this a lot. It’s one of the secrets to our success is our ability to cooperate at scale. No other species does that, this ability to cooperate with complete strangers, sometimes, at scale. That’s how we’ve dominated the planet.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. But obviously trust is eroding in the United States of America, and to a certain extent, around the world. And we’re watching this unfold in real time so it’ll be super interesting to talk to somebody who’s devoted a career to studying trust and cooperation and trying to tease apart the dynamics of what it takes to get people to be more cooperative, even if they might not want to be initially and what kind of institutional arrangements and institutions it takes to get that done. So I’m super excited to talk to our friend, Margaret Levy.
Margaret Levi:
Hi, I’m Margaret Levi, professor of political science at Stanford and, more importantly, director of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. And I’m the author of several books, but two of relevance now are In The Interest of Others, with John Ahlquist and A Moral Political Economy with Federica Carugati.
Nick Hanauer:
And Margaret, it’s so fun to have you here as a fellow traveler and I’m about a quarter of the way through your latest book, which you were so kind to give me. But your interest in cooperation and trust and our view that it is effectively the source of prosperity in human societies creates a super cool convergence. So what I’d like to know is how did you come to focus on trust and cooperation as the focus of your research?
Margaret Levi:
Well it’s actually been the focus of my research since I was a graduate student. My dissertation was originally called Conflict and Collusion. And I was really interested in the conditions under which people cooperate with each other, comply with government policies or don’t, what causes the kinds of behaviors that are absolutely critical to understanding a good society. And that led me to think about those issues in a whole variety of settings. So I started by thinking about compliance and what I called quasi-voluntary compliance, which was really where people have to comply, like paying taxes. But where a more effective state in one in which state, in multiple sense, is one in which people prefer to comply because they think it’s the right thing to do, they think they’re getting what they should from the government and then they’re willing to give some of their cooperation, even in extractive terms and returned.
I went on to think about conditions under which people are asked to comply where they’re really making very costly sacrifices and where they’re volunteering. So it’s not coerced as the backdrop to it, but volunteering. And that led me to look at military service and the conditions under which people are willing to agree, volunteer and sign up, to engage in military service in six democracies over 200 years was what the investigation was about. And also the conditions under which they weren’t willing to volunteer. Why the Francophone in Quebec were so different from the Anglophones in Canadoring during both World War I and World War II. Why we saw a rise and then a decline and then a rise again in conscientious objection.
So those kinds of issues were very deep in my psyche and that led me, ultimately, to a big project that the Russel Sage Foundation supported. I was one of the leagues with a sociologist who’s a social psychologist, Karen Cook, and a philosopher now deceased, Russel Harding, in thinking about cooperation and trust and the conditions under which those occur and what they actually do for our society. And that was multiple disciplines involved, multiple issues. So that’s really the background to the work I’ve been doing.
Nick Hanauer:
So I have about 10,000 questions. First, what was the difference between French and English people in Canada in terms of … I have no idea. What happened?
Margaret Levi:
Well it’s a very interesting story and one that’s actually generalizable to many, many other societies. So the Francophone, let’s say the people from Quebec. Quebec and Ontario are easy to compare. The Francophone in Quebec, which is the dominant group in Quebec, felt like the government of Canada had not delivered on the promises that it had made when confederation occurred in the 19th century. And one of promises included that all schools would be dual language, that the Francophone would have equal citizenship rights and equal security in a variety of ways of the Anglophones and they felt that they had not received that. There was also something in the Articles of Confederation that said that Canada should not go to war unless it was actually attacked. It could not ask for people to engage in military service. And even though the Anglophones in Ontario said Britain’s under attack, so therefore we are, the Francophone differed with that. The Quebec said wait a minute, Britain’s Britain. And they said, “Well, the French are under attack,” said the anglophones. And the Qua said, “The French left us on the ice floats in the 18th century and then changed their religion and had a revolution.” Is Canada under attack?
And so you saw a refusal to volunteer for military service. You saw the priests in the pulpits on Sunday saying don’t do this. You saw the ministers in the pulpit in Ontario saying we’ve got to go to war. There was just a whole different social script being acted out in the two provinces. And you can think of many countries in the world, and many populations, where the ethnic groups, or the south and the north in the US, have very different views about how the federal government has treated them.
Nick Hanauer:
Yes, exactly. Oh my gosh, there’s so much to talk about. Can you describe a little bit how the state of the art has changed over the course of your career in terms of our perspective on both the value and sources of trust and cooperation in human societies?
David Goldstein:
Add in, it’s relation to economics.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Margaret Levi:
Right.
Nick Hanauer:
I realize that’s a hard question.
Margaret Levi:
It is a hard question but it’s not as difficult as you think. One of the things we did with the big trust project that I helped to run is we did have people, as I said, from multiple disciplines, including a lot of economists. And for economists, with a couple of exceptions, I can think of Ken Arrow as one of the important exceptions, trust plays very little role in what goes on. It’s contractual, it’s transactional, it’s our interest being mutually served so that the role of trust and cooperation is relatively small.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. If you assume homo economicus, you don’t need trust.
Margaret Levi:
Exactly.
Nick Hanauer:
Trust disappears.
Margaret Levi:
That’s right. And it’s all about people having interests that converge. And what we found, and what increasingly a number of economists found, is that something like trust is absolutely critical to many of the things that we see going on. I think a crucial person in this was actually a sociologist, James Coleman, who’s probably most famous for busing. But he was a sociologist who worked very closely with Gary Becker, they ran a seminar together. He had a very economist way of thinking about things and he looked at a lot of different kinds of contractual relationships and saw that behind them were trust. That often what corporate elites did was shake hands on a deal. They had to basically have some confidence in each other. And now Games Theory helps us to understand that. And again, you can still use a kind of homo economicus model, and I’m going to challenge that in a minute. Because if you’re in a long term relationship with somebody, it often makes more sense to cooperate than to defect, even from a homo economicus perspective.
Nick Hanauer:
Correct.
Margaret Levi:
The problem is that there’s lots of conditions where those long term arrangements don’t work, or where people are engaging in pro-social behavior and, as it were, trusting behavior that can’t be explained by anything that an economic model provides. And so one of the things that we were looking at in this project was what those conditions were. Where would an economic model work and where did it not work? And where it worked best, in some sense, were places where people got conned, which was not what economists hoped. Those were the kinds of long term relationships where at the end somebody defected, right? You got the little old lady to believe that you were a great guy and then she gave you all her money and then you defected.
David Goldstein:
Right. So that’s where the con in econ comes from.
Margaret Levi:
Right. That’s a way to think about it. I like that. I might use that in the future if that’s okay, Goldie.
David Goldstein:
Feel free. My gift.
Margaret Levi:
So we were looking at all kinds of, or several of us, were interested in conditions under which either you didn’t need trust where cooperation occurred without trust, because of either mutual relationships and deep connections that existed, where maybe trust was the bond but it was so much deeper than that. It wasn’t like you were engaging in a cognitive decision about whether to have confidence in this person or not. They were part of your family, you knew they had your interest at heart. Trust seemed like a very thin word to be describing what was going on, because trust tends to have this context of the economist.
And so we began to think about the kinds of conditions in which cooperation exists without that narrow notion of trust. Where it really has to do with the fact that we feel connected in a whole variety of ways that lead us to have confidence in each other and to act together and often to engage in pro-social behavior that can’t be accounted for by a homo economicus model. That was long winded but hopefully it got to something of what you were asking.
Nick Hanauer:
And just to fast forward from when you started your career to today, I think it’s safe to say that the last decades of social science research have demonstrated, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that homo economicus does not describe actual human behavior. That in fact, people evolved over millions of years to be other regarding and intuitively moral and reciprocating.
David Goldstein:
And not particularly rational.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
Margaret Levi:
I think there are two things there that I want to emphasize. I don’t know if we’ve proved that they’re intuitively moral, Nick, we have multiple moralities, for sure. But what we have shown is that one, people are very social. They’re not individualistic and they’re looking for connections and they’re looking for approval, they’re looking for being good people in terms of others. So reciprocation is incredibly, in reciprocity, is an incredibly important piece of the story. But we’ve also learned, and certainly learned, Goldie, that they’re not rational. That they’re persuaded by, or affected by, not just emotions but by heuristics that can’t be accounted for by any form of homo economicus rationality, all kinds of things that affect our decision making.
But that being said, there are instances where homo economicus, in some sense, works. I mean there are conditions where, clearly, people want to feel that their interests are being served. They certainly care about economics. They certainly care about their well being.
So in the book In The Interest of Others, what we saw was a very interesting case because we were looking for the Long Shore worker’s unions on the west coast of the US and in Australia and other transport sector unions, including the East Coast Long Shore workers. And we started with unions because, John Ahlquist and I, because unions are a place where they’re formed, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world, really to serve economist ends, right? It’s very much about ensuring that people get decent pay, decent benefits, some job security, very narrow economist ends that fit with homo economicus. But we discovered that if you shift the governance arrangements among unions, as the west coast Long Shore workers and the Australians did, so that you reward behavior and encourage people to learn about the world, to think about others who can never reciprocate, so reciprocity isn’t even an issue, you can actually encourage all kinds of costly behavior. Costly to the individual that goes against everything homo economicus says. Costly behavior that could lead to jail time, to loss of wages, even to bodily harm and death, to close the ports, to refuse to load goods, to engage in other actions on behalf of very distant others who can never reciprocate. We call that the creation of an expanded unity of fate in which you see that your destiny in entwined with others. And that are very far away, it’s not just your family.
So that is not at all consistent with homo economicus. Does it require trust? Yes, it requires trust and it certainly requires cooperation but it requires trust in this broader sense that you feel this social connectedness with others and therefore feel you can cooperate with them to work together and to work with others who you’ll never see to make the world a better place.
Nick Hanauer:
Is that group level trust a behavioral shortcut for humans? That now we don’t have to worry about do I trust this individual? Do I trust this individual? Oh I’m part of this group, I can trust the whole group?
Margaret Levi:
Yeah. It is. That’s very perceptive. It is a shortcut but it’s not an easy shortcut because it requires a bunch of governance arrangements for the organization, or a bunch of norms and rules that are instantiated in the group that enable that to happen. It doesn’t just happen. It requires some capacity to organize people or to create a kind of communication that enables people to recognize others who share this kind of, if you will, intuition, desire, proclivity.
Nick Hanauer:
So it’s difficult to create. Once created, how fragile is it?
Margaret Levi:
It’s not necessarily fragile but it requires work to sustain it. And I think that’s an important … When we were looking at the unions, we thought of them as not only a very good example of something that was created to be economist, but also there are many governments. And we can think of all kinds of examples, I think, of the environmental movement and Bun berg and what she’s been able to do in bringing people together and to really create an expanded community of fate but it is a very fragile thing in that it’s a movement. It’s a mobilization. It’s not really an ongoing organization or process.
If you really want a government that’s able to do that, that takes a lot of care and feeding. And it can be sustained but you have to really be attentive that the kinds of rules that we are primarily concerned with here are ones that provide, in this day of COVID and the anti-taxers it’s almost impossible to achieve, but provide a kind of credible information. And information, what makes that information credible, is that there is a situation which people can argue about it in a relatively civil way, challenge it, get challenge back, so that there begins to be some consensus about what is true and not true. I can provide concrete examples of that from the unions but let me go on with some of the other rules and come back to that if we need to.
And the other rule that I think is really, really critical here is the participatory democracy. So the decisions about engaging in costly actions in which everybody, in principle, is supposed to engage, are done by a vote. But not just a vote in which there’s been no deliberation or conversation, and not just a request by the leadership to do this and then you have a plebiscite. It’s really a vote where you believe that if I lose this one I still could win another one and we’ve discussed it and you go along with the outcome of it and then you act in a particular way. So a kind of process of making information credible and a process of a real, participatory democracy.
And then the third piece is really holding the leadership accountable. Union, like a government, has to deliver to it’s citizens, to it’s members. So the government, or the leadership in the union, has to actually be able to deliver the goods. And if they can’t, they have to be accountable for that so there have to be relatively not just a periodic election every four years that, goodness knows. But that there is constant, there’s an easy capacity to recall, there’s an easy way to challenge the leadership, to vote them down on a whole variety of things. So it’s a complicated process that can lead to spectacular outcomes but is both hard to create and hard to sustain. But not fragile.
Nick Hanauer:
Okay. You’re making me anxious about the state of current affairs in the United States.
Margaret Levi:
Yes. I’m always anxious.
Nick Hanauer:
So let’s talk about the current state of affairs. Obviously, trust has broken down in the United States in a profound way. And there’s this almost surreal thing playing out where people will literally die rather than believe the consensus scientific opinion. And if that’s not a sign that trust is broken down, I don’t know what could be. It is astounding. Facebook, of course, is a plague on the world, but I don’t think it’s all Facebook’s fault. What’s contributing to that-
Margaret Levi:
Let me just remind you that McCarthyism existed in this country and there was no Facebook then.
David Goldstein:
Right, exactly.
Margaret Levi:
We have been plagued by conspiracy theories. The history of the United States, the history of many countries, there have always been groups that sometimes reach majority, or close to majority, who have believed in the oddest things, from any scientific premise or reality check. So we really have to understand this at a deeper level than social media, which contributes, for sure and might augment and amplify it, but is hardly the deepest source of the problem. It’s an actor in it, it’s in a better but it’s not the cause.
David Goldstein:
Correct.
Margaret Levi:
And so this gets back to a little bit of what we were talking about before about how we have learned how people are not rational. That they form beliefs that are not based on anything that we, you, the three of us talking here might consider evidence. But for them it is evidence and for them it is a very strongly held belief. So the real issue, I think, confronting social science, but even more importantly confronting the world, is to understand not just the sources of those beliefs, about which we have some information. But the much harder and much more intractable problem of how to change those beliefs.
I’m part of a group called the, the acronym is SEAN and it was created by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation. And it’s Societal Experts Action Network. And it’s really how to bring the social sciences into the discussion of COVID issues, a lot of the issues you were just raising, the anti-maskers, the anti-vaxers, how to create equity in the distribution of resources for combating the disease, et cetera. The kinds of questions social sciences actually have something to say about. And I’m telling this story because the thing I was most struck with at the beginning of our discussions at SEAN was how the public health people had such a top down view of messaging. They sort of understand that African Americans might resist the vaccines because of their distrust based on how they’ve been the subject of experiments, problematic experiments. But they didn’t really recognize the diversity of beliefs that were out there. And so they had this silly messaging, from my perspective, in terms of how to reach public.
Now if we start the vaccine with our scientific community not understanding that there is a diverse public out there that is developing these really weird views that have to be confronted in multiply different ways, we’re not going to overcome that problem of distrust or that problem of distorted beliefs. So I think it’s an incredibly difficult problem, as we’re seeing. And people seem to get hardened in their views and we see politicians supporting that.
So how do we change that? That’s really the big question. And I do think it comes back to one of the things that John Ahlquist and I learned in writing In The Interest of Others, that we have to create whole new mechanisms. That really we have only begun to imagine in terms of communicating what’s going on, hearing where people are coming from about those issues, why they think that this vaccine or this mask is a problem. Understanding that there are competing values here, that some people seem to think that this defines liberty and that’s a greater value to them than the health of others. And then trying to start from there.
There’ve been a couple of wonderful books written in the last couple of years, not so much about the vaccine but about why the tea party arose or Trumpism arose, that are really ethnographic studies in the communities that bought into these views where they clearly were benefiting from government, or could’ve benefited from government and refused to. And beginning to understand and unpack where people are actually coming from is a critical piece to this story. There’s not going to be a one size fits all solution in the sense of one story will fit for everybody. But a process that really allows people to present how they feel and why they feel that way and feel understood by others, and then to create a way in which the challenge can go on is a really crucial part of this.
Some of my colleagues at Stanford, Jim Fishgan and others, have been engaging in deliberative democracy processes that have, or deliberative discussion processes, sorry, that have really allowed republicans of the most extreme sort, and democrats of the most extreme sort, to come together and begin to talk to each other. And I think we need to do more of that and find new ways to do that.
David Goldstein:
You know it strikes me, though, that this anti-vax, anti-mask sentiment isn’t entirely organic. It seems to be intentionally provoked by the republican leadership. We have a two party system right now in which one party seems to be actively trying to destroy trust in government and in their mission to dismantle democracy. That certainly is one of the side benefits to Republicans in Texas and what they just did with their new abortion law that encourages people to be vigilantes and rewards them for trying to rat out their neighbors. How do you have a high trust society when your neighbor is going through your garbage can looking for evidence that you might’ve had an abortion?
Margaret Levi:
I know, that’s just terrible. And then rewarding them $10,000 for taking that evidence. Just awful. As you know as well as I do, and Nick’s writing about this right now, is that this has been going on for a long time and this is, hopefully, the culmination of it and we’ll maybe even see a turning point. That would be the optimistic view. But there has been a concerted effort for many, many years, which we’re seeing paying off now with the republicans in control of legislatures, even more than Congress. And leading to a supreme court that is more conservative than any that we’ve experienced in our lifetime for sure. So yes, it’s a very disturbing anti-government. We’re destroying confidence in the capacity of government to deliver or reasons to even believe that government should be delivering things. Even undermining the demand for government to be what a government should be. It’s very disturbing, no question about that. And there’s no question that the republican party, and others, are contributing to that. I wouldn’t leave out some of the foreign actors in all of this who are also trying to create havoc and trouble within the United States.
Nick Hanauer:
With our remaining time, can you be a little bit more prescriptive? We often ask the benevolent dictator question. If you were in charge and wanted to increase trust in the United States, what would you do? What are we doing wrong and what would you do differently?
Margaret Levi:
Well, I think there are two levels to answer that question. One is actually more of a lasting met by President Biden, somewhat to my surprise.
Nick Hanauer:
To everyone’s surprise.
Margaret Levi:
But to my pleasure. I mean, it really is stepping up to the plate and showing that governments can and will act to help people and that it can and will deliver. I mean we have to regain confidence in government, even those of us who want to believe in government need to regain confidence in government because it’s been so undermined. Now, hopefully his window to do that will be expanded and extended, but he’s doing the right things. [inaudible 00:34:34] is doing the right things to try to re-engage trust in the government. But it also has to happen at the local level and that’s where we have fallen down as much as we have at the national level.
So my prescription at the local level would be to do what some organizations have done, including to some extent Civic Ventures which is to really focus on a number of local governments and local policies and local programs to try to re-institute trust at the local level so that we can elect city council people, state legislators who actually make people believe that democracy can work. That mobilization will matter.
I’m hopeful. I always like to see the brighter side of things, that things as terrible as what’s going on in Texas right now may get people onto the streets. And even more importantly, into the voting booths to try to transform the legislatures of their states and their cities. I mean we’re going to see some really disastrous things happen in some of these states that are acting in these bizarre, from our perspective, ways. And very problematic ways. They’re going to really have trouble building up the kind of economic relationships that are built on cooperation and on purpose, that is increasingly the norm in corporations and in firms and in businesses. If neighbors can’t trust neighbors, they’re not going to be able to engage in the kinds of practices that lead to a healthy society, either economically or in terms of civics.
David Goldstein:
You know, I haven’t seen it but I bet you if you look at a map you could correlate vaccination rates with economic performance.
Margaret Levi:
I have seen those maps, Goldie, I can. But they’re correlations. So it’s partially that people who are in low performing economic areas are also anti-taxers, as opposed to the anti-vaxing is causing low economic performance.
David Goldstein:
Right. And I think that you don’t get a high functioning economy without a high functioning government, and that requires trusting government. And if you don’t have trust in government, I think you see that correlation with the low vaccination rates.
Margaret Levi:
One of the things, and you know this because you both have written about this and talked about this, but part of what makes trust unravel is by undermining government or undermining the medical facilities. The anti-masking and the anti-vaxing is just putting this huge load so they can’t deliver as well. That further undermines confidence in government. So the republican strategy is working. So we have to put resources into the places. This is a strong prescription. We actually can’t just say they’ll fall apart, good on them. If we want to change this, we have to put resources there that really build up the government capacity so that people have confidence in government once again. And that is the Biden strategy.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, which I think is the right strategy. Are there any other prescriptions we’ve missed?
Margaret Levi:
Well I do think we have to … I mean I guess a prescription, which is not … There’s just got to be a lot of experiment. I mean we have to leave the door open. Some of the experiments that are going on right now, like the Texas ones, we don’t want. But there’ve got to be a lot of different ways … I think we’re in a very important inflection point in this country. I think we all do where what we think of as democracy could really fall apart, what we think of as an economy that provides reasonable equity, equality and well being really is falling apart could fall apart farther. And we don’t have a clear solution. So I think that we need to have lots of different experiments going on, and this is where having a federal system could be to our advantage if it’s used properly. So I think it’s worth looking at different ways to have voting systems, to look at different ways to create small businesses and support for that kind of enterprise. And we’re beginning to see some of that but we’ve got to give it more attention and we’ve got to really play those things up.
Seattle’s a great example of this where what you did with the $15 minimum wage is a fantastic experiment that’s now affecting many, many other places. But it started locally. Not just in Seattle but in a very few places and then spreads. So we need more of those kinds of experiments and then we need to amplify them, the ones that work.
David Goldstein:
Nick, you want to ask the final question?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. The final question is always why do you do this work?
Margaret Levi:
I was born to do this work. I mean I’ve been marching for civil rights since I was five years old.
Nick Hanauer:
Good for you.
Margaret Levi:
My mother had my sister and me dress up in identical, really to our embarrassment, outfits to show that middle class white people were there at the front lines with African Americans. It’s always been part, it’s part of my DNA to think that we can make this world a better place and that we have to fight and look for solutions. And so as I thought about my own, as I grew up and thought about my own capacities, it became very apparent that where I could really make a difference was occasionally on the front lines, but I was not going to be Rosa Luxemburg. I had a better chance at being Frances Perkins and really looking at the world the way it is and trying to understand it and to come up with policies, programs, ideas, the social science that would feed the kinds of programs and policies and practices that need to happen.
Nick Hanauer:
I love it. That’s such a great answer.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, Margaret, thank you so much for coming. We did not get to talk about your work on A Moral Political Economy but I hope you will come back and talk about that next time.
Margaret Levi:
I would love to.
Nick Hanauer:
Okay. All right.
Margaret Levi:
Okay. Thank you.
Nick Hanauer:
Thank you so much.
Margaret Levi:
Bye.
Nick Hanauer:
You know one of the things I take away from our conversation with Margaret about trust in human societies is that it’s not that easy, sadly. It actually takes a lot of work and energy and good will and capable institutional arrangements to generate that trust.
David Goldstein:
And effort and intent.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. And, as she was talking, I really feel strongly, and I know, we set up this goddamn podcast for this reason, which is that at the heart, I believe, of the mistrust that we have in our society has been the way in which neoliberal economic policy basically, because those policies enriched the few in this really obvious way and eroded the economic and social security of most people, that had a huge impact on how people feel about government. It’s just objectively true that for most citizens, they just got screwed over the last four years and it’s pretty hard to feel good about a government, by the way, run by politicians from both parties, who did that. That’s the hard truth.
Nick Hanauer:
Anyway, it was a fascinating conversation with Margaret and I can’t wait to have her back to talk about her new book. But in the meantime, for you Pitchfork Economic listeners, don’t forget to register for Econ Con. You’ll love it.
David Goldstein:
If you want more fascinating conversations, register for Econ Con. There’s a link in our show notes and we hope to see you all there.
Nick Hanauer:
In the next episode of Pitchfork Economics, we’re going to do a really fun thing, which is to talk to restaurant owner Mark Bucher from Washington, DC about the wage crisis we face as opposed to the staffing crisis so many people think we have.
Speaker 3:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at [inaudible 00:46:52] Nick Hanauer. Follow our writing on Medium at Civic Skunk Works and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram at Pitchfork Economics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.