We’re continuing to celebrate our 100th episode this week with another compilation — the best of the benevolent dictator question. What would you do to fix the world’s most intractable problems if you had no restraints? Our guests from over the last two years weigh in.
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Goldy:
Hey, Nick. How do I describe you?
Nick:
You’re a benevolent plutocratic overlord.
Goldy:
As such Nick, you have been the inspiration for one of our favorite questions to ask our guests.
Nick:
That’s right.
Goldy:
Which is the benevolent dictator question.
Nick:
Dictator question, yeah.
Goldy:
What would you do if you had no political or economic constraints to solve a problem? And in celebration of our 100th episode today, we are doing a special episode, which is a best of our benevolent dictator answers.
Nick:
Yeah, that should be interesting.
Joe Stiglitz:
I’m Joe Stiglitz, a university professor at Columbia University and my book, People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent, just got issued in paperback.
Goldy:
If you were a benevolent dictator, would you just make the states whole?
Joe Stiglitz:
Yes. We had a program that I argued back in 2008 and I would do the same now. Where basically the federal government says, “We will make up for the loss of revenue as a result of this economic downturn, plus your additional expenditures for dealing with unemployment and the healthcare associated with COVID-19. We’re not giving you a free ride. You may have had problems with your pension funds in the past, that’s your problem. But we will take care of you because we, the federal government, didn’t succeed in maintaining the economy at full employment. We are ultimately responsible for that and we didn’t do what we should have stopped the spread of the disease.” And so you’re confronting that problem. So if I were a benevolent dictator, that’s precisely what I would do.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:
My name is Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. I am a physician, epidemiologist and progressive activist. Just wrote a book called Healing Politics: A Doctor’s Journey Into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic.
Nick:
One of the questions we love to ask is the benevolent dictator question. If you were in charge of America’s healthcare system, politics aside, what are the top three things you would do?
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:
Look, I think the big three for me are, number one, we would pass Medicare For All, because I think it addresses so many of the inefficiencies in the healthcare system as it stands. It provides every single person healthcare, and it reduces the overall cost and also the increasing rate of cost in our society. That’s number one. Number two though, I would massively invest in public health. In fact, I would put Medicare For All under the public health infrastructure in this country, because the best single thing we can do is prevent someone from getting sick in the first place. And we spend so little on public health in our society, and it shows, right, we’re in the midst of a global pandemic. And our public health apparatus was caught flat-footed, in large part because we have a president who is an incompetent buffoon, but also because the institutions themselves aren’t geared to take the reins when they need to.
And then the third thing I would do is, I would really seek to reintegrate aspects of healthcare that I think we have wrongly cut away from the healthcare conversation. Things like dental coverage, and mental health coverage, and long-term services and support coverage, because those are critical public health and healthcare services that ought to be negotiated in the same package of goods.
Goldy:
I’d vote for you, for benevolent dictator.
Nick:
Me too.
Joelle Gamble:
My name is Joelle Gamble. I’m a Principal on the Re-imagining Capitalism team at Omidyar Network.
Jessyn:
If you were able to wave a wand, and sometimes we say if you were a benevolent dictator, what would the world look like? What might you do first? Or what suite of things might you do to really get to this place where we are re-imagining capitalism and the economy?
Joelle Gamble:
I believe that democracy is one of the biggest enemies of neo-liberalism.
Jessyn:
Awesome.
Joelle Gamble:
I’ll have to say this, as a benevolent dictator, to say I would make things more democratic, but that’s essentially what I would want to do, right? When more folks have access to the ballot box, when there’s less influence of money in politics. When we have public agendas that are accountable, the people they’re meant to serve, we’re going to get better outcomes and neo-liberalism will not be maintained because neo-liberalism is essentially designed to uphold the interests of capital. And in addition to some of the more traditional democracy reform policies that I think are really, really important to making any public agenda around economics work, I also would make sure that frankly, every worker has access to representation and a way to build power. Because worker power and worker voice is about democracy fundamentally. So I would want to make sure that every worker has a union or access to some other organization at their work site.
I think we should be thinking a lot more about sector and industry wide bargaining, considering how much the economy has changed. And we have some of that infrastructure already with some states having wage boards that they could activate. We can also think about how the recovery itself is being dealt with sector by sector, with the airline industry being a great example in which union leaders, particularly Sara Nelson, did great job of getting worker voice baked into that relief package. And then on top of that, making sure people have the right to strike. They have the ability to use their power collectively to leverage their power against their employers, because that is, I think, a very important point that democracy isn’t just about voice in the traditional sense of saying, “This is my opinion, this is my preference.” It’s also about having power to influence economic and political outcomes, and voice without bite doesn’t get you very far. So I think that-
Jessyn:
Organizing, organizing, organizing.
Joelle Gamble:
Exactly.
Suresh Naidu:
My name is Suresh Naidu, I’m a Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Columbia University. I’m a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and I work basically on the history of labor markets from American slavery to Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Nick:
So if you were a benevolent dictator in charge of the world, what would you do [crosstalk 00:07:10]?
Goldy:
[crosstalk 00:07:10] political constraints.
Suresh Naidu:
I’d deal with climate change. I mean, it’s like a no brainer, right?
Nick:
So you’re telling us, “You’re working on the wrong issue.”
Suresh Naidu:
Yeah, I have my hook. But it’s true that I’m not an idiot, come on. It’s like, the writing’s on the wall, just even forget about preventing climate change. It’s too late, we’re here. But the large scale adaptation program that we need for planet earth so that we can keep it livable. It’s just, yeah, that would be … and that would also create a ton of jobs and raise wages a lot. So that’s my global green new deal.
Nick:
That’s a good answer. That’s an excellent answer.
Benga Ajilore:
My name is Benga Ajilore, I’m a Senior Economist at the Center for American Progress. I actually have a simple answer to this question. Universal broadband. Every home have high high-speed internet. And what that would do is solve a lot of problems, especially that we’ve seen in this pandemic. So we think about remote work and working from home. A lot of places can’t do that. We think about remote education, which we’re probably going to have to do this fall at schools, and a lot of kids don’t have access to that. But if we had universal broadband, that money could be spent elsewhere. And then when you talk about Amazon’s not going to go, or this is not going to go to rural communities. If we have the universal broadband, then people may want to go there because there’s lower cost of living. Might be smaller, but if you don’t have that broadband.
Nick:
It’s impossible.
Benga Ajilore:
It’s going to be impossible. So I think a universal broadband, having every home with speed internet would be a great start to solving a lot of the problems that we have.
Kate Bahn:
My name is Kate Bahn. I’m the Director of Labor Market Policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, which is a think tank in Washington, DC where we investigate the causes and consequences of inequality.
Jessyn:
So one of our favorite questions that we always like to ask is, if you were a benevolent dictator and you could wave a magic wand, what would you do? And I want to put a two part question, what would you do right now to alleviate some of the crisis that families are facing? And what would you do when the pandemic is over?
Kate Bahn:
That’s a really good question, because there are two very different answers I think. Right now everyone needs to be working less. I’ve sort of become, as people who are lucky enough to have jobs working at home or working all the time, people who go to jobs where they have to have face to face interaction are at really high risk. I just feel like we should have everyone be working less than they’re currently working. And that would also help with these caregiving needs. So that would require some sort of income support for families. So as a benevolent dictator I would try to give people more income support just to be able to facilitate lower work hours for people.
What I would do in a post-pandemic world is I think every caregiver should be paid $100,000 a year. It’s a huge amount of money compared to what they’re paid now. I mean, they’re now paid about $12 an hour. Or a teacher might be paid something like $50,000. But I think that caregivers should be paid $100,000 a year. We should put our money towards getting those salaries to caregivers. And I think that would have a huge impact, multiplicative impacts both immediately for aggregate demand and for like long-term, developing our society.
Mike Konczal:
My name’s Mike Konczal, I’m a Director at the Roosevelt Institute where I work on post neoliberal economic thought and inequality and unemployment, and the author of the forthcoming book, Freedom From the Market, out next February from New Press.
Goldy:
We’re going to appoint you benevolent dictator, as opposed to the malevolent dictator we have at the moment. What would you do to address this economic crisis?
Mike Konczal:
Abolish the Senate, probably.
Goldy:
Yeah go for the electoral college, too.
Mike Konczal:
Yeah, that’s actually like the most-
Nick:
Throw them all to the lions.
Mike Konczal:
Not to the lions, benevolence. They’d have like make-work jobs, probably like a rubber room kind of thing. I honestly think an open-ended program. So first of all, we should have gone more of the Denmark program, which I’ll explain is basically the federal government should have backstop payrolls for the entire country. That kind of system is a lot easier to execute if you have a solid union infrastructure in place. If people are part of unions. Denmark could do that very rapidly, and you’re going to see Denmark have this amazing recovery because in a very real sense, labor, capital and the government can like sit down as three people or three sets of people at a table.
And just say like, “Okay, what are we going to do about the labor question for the next six months?” And they can come up with a rational solution and figure out how to split who’s going to do what. We don’t have that, we don’t have strong unions unfortunately. We have state governments, which are often very hostile to action. And as such, you have this very messy program of trying to help out small businesses through the banks, which are diverting the money to larger customers of themselves, it’s a total mess.
Goldy:
Of course they are.
Mike Konczal:
Of course they are. It was so obvious at the beginning and it’s underfunded. They’re trying to do it on the cheap, so that makes it even messier. We should have done something big like that, and I was not vocal enough about it. And it’s only later that I understood the extent that we would need it. But it is what it is, and it’s not too late to do it now. Is one, and the second is just an open-ended commitment to the states and to people through unemployment insurance, and to everyday people who don’t work through basic income. Open-ended until the recession’s over. And that’s not a hard trigger to do, it’s not like magic. You can just say, “Until unemployment’s 5% again.” I think that would have taken care of a lot of the problems and allowed us to really focus on taking care of the sick and trying to find a way to deal with this pandemic, rather than throwing everyone to the lions, as it were, trying to fend for themselves in this economy.
Elizabeth Anderson:
I’m Elizabeth Anderson, I’m a John Dewey distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I recently wrote a book called Private Government: How Employers Rule our Lives and Why We Don’t Talk About It.
Goldy:
I know you’re a philosopher as opposed to a policymaker, but if we appointed you benevolent dictator with absolute power, no political constraints whatsoever. What might you do to make a freer world for the typical worker?
Elizabeth Anderson:
One thing would be to empower workers within the firm, and doesn’t necessarily mean that you have full democracy within the firm. But I think we should be tinkering with various models of co-determination, and strengthen those models. But here’s the second thing that I think would be worth doing. And that is enhancing people’s access to property, to capital. Right now, our inheritance lays … billionaires just pass the billions down to their kids, virtually without constraint. But there’s no real good reason for that. We could rewrite the inheritance rules so that most of it just gets redistributed as capital grants to ordinary people. A couple of decades ago, Bruce Ackerman costed this out, and that was already like 20 or 30 years ago. And he figured you could give everyone a universal capital grant of $80,000, and I think that was around 1990 dollars, on a much smaller economy.
Imagine what that would be today, it would be a big hunk of change. And one of the things we know now is that people’s prospects are very heavily dependent, not just on their income flows at the moment, but on whether they have a fall back position. That is some savings, some capital. It makes a vast difference in people’s wellbeing. Imagine if every kid got a capital grant, right, so that they could start out in life with some decent level of security. That would be pretty remarkable. And let me point out that the original architect of such proposal with another great hero of mine, Tom Payne, the great American revolutionary, actually proposed universal stakeholder grants for all young adults starting off in life that would be collected from essentially property taxes or inheritance taxes on lands, which is the main [inaudible 00:16:05] property in those days.
Thomas Friedman:
My name’s Thomas Friedman, and I’m the Foreign Affairs Columnist for the New York Times and the author most recently of Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Acceleration.
Nick:
So Tom you’re a wise man, and we love to put the benevolent dictator question to our guests. Which is, if you were in charge of the world. Yeah, I realize we’re putting you on the spot, but what are the high points of what you would do?
Thomas Friedman:
Well, it’s a very good question. I mean, one is I would absolutely guarantee a minimum income for every person on the planet. Again, we get to wish … it’s global, right?
Goldy:
Sure.
Thomas Friedman:
Yeah. I would guarantee minimum income, some kind of minimum access to either telemedicine or actual medicine if we’re talking about the whole planet. And I would radically incentivize a green revolution. I would basically declare that we are not going to engage in a moon race to see who can be the first to reach the moon. We’re going to have an earth race to see who could invent and scale the green technologies fastest, so men and women can live here sustainably on earth. But those would be I think my three starting things.
Trevon Logan:
I’m Trevon Logan, Professor of Economics and Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at the Ohio State University, and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Nick:
So one of the questions we always ask our guests is, if you were a benevolent dictator what would you do?
Trevon Logan:
I have been on board with the belief that reparations is one way of helping to at least start to think about the long term effects of some of these racial inequality issues. So I would be on board, if I was a benevolent dictator, of forming and implementing a racial reparations program to address the systemic and structural and historical inequality that we have seen by race in this country. I would also move towards a system of accessible healthcare for everyone, but also ensuring that that healthcare was of high quality and culturally competent, which I think is equally important. Access to something that is not fit for you or welcoming to you is not access at all. Those would be two of the things that I would move on very quickly.
Matt Stoller:
My name is Matt Stoller, I’m the Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project, and I have a book out called Goliath: the 100 Year War Between Monopoly, Power and Democracy. I think what you have to do is, I would break up the fed. So I would take the fed and I would say part of you is going to handle monetary policy, which is to say the terms of borrowing and lending in the economy. And that’s just like the amount of money, printing money or not printing money. And then the other piece I would say is the part of the fed that’s dealing with the real economy, like structuring businesses, which is to say a lot of the bailout programs. I would put that in a separate agency, a planning agency, which we had, the reconstruction finance corporation.
And I would make that much more deliberate about choosing what industries we want to sustain and what new ones we want to create. And then I would obviously put constraints on private equity and essentially force them to focus only on investing in producing better underlying goods and services, as opposed to a lot of the predatory stuff that they’re doing now. But fundamentally, the problem that we have is we’re in a planned economy, but it’s Donald Trump’s planned economy. And he’s not solving the key problem. And the key problem is there’s about 20% of the economy, about economic activity, that we were doing before the pandemic, that we’re not doing now. And that isn’t productive to do now, like it doesn’t make sense to have a bar open right now. It doesn’t make sense to have a travel industry ,and so on and so forth.
But there is a bunch of stuff we need to be doing that we’re not doing. Like we need to do testing and tracing, we also need to do things like manufacturing medicines here. There’s a bunch of things that we need to be doing for social ends that we’re not. And the way that you traditionally get a bunch of people and assets to stop doing something that’s unproductive and to start doing something that’s productive is through the financial markets and through bankruptcy. And that’s what a financial system in a capitalist society is good at, it’s flexible. And the fact that we’ve destroyed that system, by basically not allowing bankruptcy anymore and just having the fed sort of bail out these institutions, is preventing that shift from unproductive activities to productive activities. And there are ways to make that shift really brutal.
You can do it through deflation and mass bankruptcies and unemployment, and it can be horrific. And there are ways to make that shift easy. You just have the government do the transition and just wipe out people who have capital that isn’t real. And you basically have a modified form of bankruptcy and you have government lending. That often happens in wartime when everybody just is like, “Okay, yeah, we do need public leadership to meet this threat.” But that’s the fundamental problem that we have to get to. So I want people to be in more of a governing mindset and recognize that we can make these deliberate decisions. And instead of saying, “What can we preserve?” Like the way that people are talking about the post office. They’re saying, “We need to save the post office.”
Why do we think about the post office we need in the pandemic? So in Taiwan, the post office is a logistics delivery agency of medical supplies and masks for people who need it. We have such a logistics system, it is called the post office. Instead of saying, “Let’s save the post office,” why don’t we say, “Let’s use the post office to do the things that we need to do in this pandemic. And in the process, they will be fully financed. But it will not be because we like the post office, and we like the ads on TV and people like getting mail. It will be because it is doing something useful that we need to have done.” That’s the mindset that we need to get into, which is what do we need to do to structure the society that we want?
And then, what are the means to get there? And I think that one of the problems that we have with both Democrats and Republicans, although I’m going to focus on Democrats, because I’m a troll of the Democrats, is that they really are just focusing on the means of making sure that sad, poor victims have income and that their random bureaucratic programs get funded. They don’t have any broader social ends in mind. They don’t think that far ahead. And so that’s he basic problem, is we need to think about what kind of society we want and then structure means to get there. That’s what you do, ends first.
Goldy:
We hope you enjoyed this special benevolent dictator episode of Pitchfork Economics, and thank you for joining us in celebrating our 100th episode. From me and my benevolent dictator, Nick Hanauer, we want to thank all of our guests for being on the podcast and of course, thanks to you for listening. And on to the next 100 episodes.
Annie:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show make sure to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at Civic Action and Nick Hanauer. Follow our writing on Medium at Civic Skunk Works, and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram @pitchforkconomics. As always from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.