 This is intense, so we're gonna try to project. Can you guys in the back here? We're okay, we're beautiful. I got a really big mouth, so I think it'll be all right. Chris does TV, he has a big mouth, so I think we'll do all right between the two of us. First, as always with programs like this, I have to go through my thank yous. This would not be possible without Simmons. When I was lucky enough to be invited through the MLK Professor and Scholars Program, Dr. Martin Luther King Professor and Scholars Program, I got to nail that. I didn't know where I was gonna live in Cambridge and Simmons was nice enough to put a roof over my head, so this is really, really important, so I gotta thank them right off the bat. Gotta thank the Writing and the Humanistic Studies Program where I have been so lucky to teach and just blessed to interact with the hardest working students I have ever met in my life. I tell them all the time, I don't remember what I was doing when I was 19. I wasn't doing what they told me. So that's it, I mean, it's just been a blessing to be here. I gotta thank the Knight, I gotta make sure I get this right. The Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program for helping us get Chris here who is sitting with us right now. And finally, of course, gotta thank the Dr. Martin Luther King Scholars and Professors Program. I think I nailed that. I think I got all this out of the way. This is very important. Ritual in academia, and I'm trying to do my best to get it. So onto the Knight's Program. When we started thinking about programming at Simmons, there was no one who I wanted to bring here more than Chris Hayes who's sitting next to me here. Chris is obviously here for his book, Twilight of the Elites. And the best thing I can tell you about Twilight of the Elites as far as I'm concerned is, if you read enough political coverage coming out of Washington, it's a thing that opinion writers like to do where they say, well, I'm not coming from the left. I'm not coming from the right. The answer somehow lies in that Tom Friedman's middle. And you take a guy like me who's African-American and also kind of a civil war buff and big on the abolitionists. I know sometimes extremists are really, really right. They're just right. You know what I mean? There's no middle grill. Sometimes they're right. So that just totally burns me up. It was one of my pet peeves in journalism. And just, you know, in Washington politics, period. And yet every once in a while, every once in a while, there's a critique that cuts right across left and right. And Chris Hayes' book, Twilight of the Elites, I really feel like, is that critique? But as opposed to finding that middle ground book between left and right, Chris just went to a fourth dimension. And he's talking about something that's, you know, not in the middle, but somehow applies to both the left and right. And that is this notion of meritocracy. And I'll just speak as a Pinko Commie, being the Pinko Commie that I am. I won't speak for right-wingers, but I will say that as someone who, the civil rights movement had a huge influence on, who the black freedom struggle had a huge influence on, this whole notion of the right to compete, of this whole Lincoln-esque idea that those of us who are in America have the right to rise as far as our talents will take us, it undergrads the entire struggle of my life, of my people and my history. Chris in his book is saying that there's something wrong with that, but there might be something wrong with that. The whole idea of the meritocracy. And so I just wanna start this conversation off with this beautiful quote, which I think encapsulates a good part of his book. The iron law of meritocracy states that eventually the inequality produced by a meritocratic system will grow large enough to subvert the mechanisms of mobility. Unequal outcomes make equal opportunity impossible. The principle of deference will come to overwhelm the principle of mobility. Those who are able to climb up the ladder and will find ways to pull it up after them or to selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies, kin to scramble up. In other words, who so ever says meritocracy says oligarchy. Chris, you wanna explain that to me? Well, first of all, thank you. Thanks for everyone for coming out. Thank you for your patience. I'm sorry that if it was a little bit of a cluster flock outside. Flock? Yes, I'm used to television, so I get that. I said that in the air once, and I heard my producer's gasp in my ear. I said, flock, I said flock! Don't worry! I got it, I got it, I got it. And thank you, so thanks everyone for having me, and thank you, Tana Hasee, for having me up, and thanks for the very kind words about the book. So that section is actually, there's a context for that quote, but maybe it might be helpful. And it's a fascinating, fascinating social theorist who I stumbled upon in working on the book and who has been a bit lost, I think, to history. His name is Robert Michels. People familiar with Robert Michels were on the camp. Yeah. See? Not many. And I'd never heard of a guy before. He was a German, he was a star student of Weber's, and he was a lefty. At a time when there was this roiling upheaval of democratic revolutions spanning across Europe, and he was very active with the Social Democratic Party in Germany, and then he got tired with them, and he moved to the kind of more anarcho-syndrome and a more anarcho-syndicalist lefties. And he writes this book in 1915 called Political Parties, in which he basically takes upon this problem. He says, here's this weird thing about the way German politics work. The parties of the right, which are anti-democratic in their ideological commitments, and are hierarchical in how they believe the world should be ordered, it is not surprising that they are hierarchical, that they are anti-democratic. But the parties of the German left that believe in democracy and believe in sort of bottom-up governance, yet they do not reflect that in their structure. They are every bit as hierarchical and as captured by a small elite as the right-wing parties, and why is that? And he coins this term in the book Political Parties, which I am sort of paying some tribute to, called the Iron Law of oligarchy. And what he says is oligarchy is inherent in any system of organization. That essentially any system of organization, no matter how intense the democratic aspirations of it, need to, for pure logistical reasons, concentrate certain purposes, certain tasks in a small amount of people, right? And if you have ever worked in a group setting, you see how this works, right? Everyone, this has some resonance, right? Someone is the one who's like, oh, I'll do that. Oh yes, I'll put the schedule together, right? And the person who controls the schedule controls the destiny of the organization, right? The person that controls the party press, the person that is the person who opens up the union hall, right, and lords over the union hall hours. And so there's this concentration, he says, he basically says, this is an inevitable Iron Law of human organization. Whoever says organization says oligarchy. Now, from the perspective of the democratic left, this is an incredibly depressing conclusion. Because it basically says, it doesn't matter your utopian schemes for genuine diffusion of power in your trade labor associations, you will end up recreating oligarchy no matter what you do. And at the end of the book, there's this very beautiful passage where he basically says, so what do we do with this conclusion I've come to you that this is all, we're all screwed? And he basically says, well, he says democracy, democracy can be compared to the following fable, which is an old man who tells his peasant sons that he has buried treasure on their land and then dies. And the three sons search the land for that treasure and they plow the fields and they dig up everything looking for that treasure and they never find it because the treasure does not exist. But in plowing the fields, they increase the fertility of the soil and secure for themselves a relative well-being. Democracy, Michelle says, is the treasure we may never find but with the struggle to achieve it will produce for us a relative bounty? See, I have a problem with that. It's still alive though. Right. I mean, it's still alive. I mean, how do we go out and pitch that and say, well, you know, this is a lie, but good things come from the lie. So, Michelle basically is with you because after he writes that, he decides that the only way to genuinely channel something that looks like mass opinion democracy is through the figurehead of a single charismatic leader, Benito Mussolini, and he becomes a fascist. He is the right way of that right now. He basically throws in the towel and becomes a fascist, literally. This is very depressing for the lack. Yes, so the parallel here, I think to meritocracy, right, is is there some, so basically I'm saying in the book that the setup where we say we're gonna neatly divide a quality of opportunity and a quality of outcome, right? This is our sort of framework that we're not gonna say, oh, everyone gets the same income or everyone gets some basic bedrock set of rights, economic rights, not civil rights, that basically we're gonna have this level playing field and people could compete in sort of the chip's fall where they may, that that is going to lead to oligarchy. That system will become corrupted because the people that win in that system, those equality of outcomes will subvert the attempts to provide a quality of opportunity. And then the question becomes which gets to the really profound core of this is, is the system redeemable, right? Do you end up in the same place with respect to meritocracy if you buy my analysis that Michelle's ended up with respect to democracy in his first incarnation or where Michelle's ended up with democracy in his second incarnation? So I think to make this really, really concrete, again, as a Pinko, call me Islamo fascist, who are plotting the end and taking your guns and whatever else I can get my hands on. The most racing aspect of the book actually for me was you get into this point where Chris is outlining basically, it's almost like a genealogy, I would say, of the Obama administration. And you can basically throw a pebble and hit a millionaire. To the extent that it's almost hard to evade the conclusion that you have to be a millionaire to work here. I mean, you're going through Jesus that. The quote is too long. I won't, you know, read it out loud. How do we feel about that? How are we supposed to, I mean, these are supposed to be your progressives. I mean, where does that leave us? I think it leaves us in a bad place. And I think one of the things that passage you're talking about where I just read. I'm sorry, can I just walk that back a little bit, Chris? How do we even get into a situation where it seems like to work, you know, at any sort of senior position in the Obama White House, you have to be wealthy. How do we even do that? So we get there because there is a kind of circular economy around different kinds of power in which one form can be traded for others. So if you think about power, the categories I, and again, if there's any actual genuine social scientists in the audience, and I suspect there are, just, you know, excuse the kind of amateur grappling that I'm doing here. I'm like, slightly embarrassed in front of academic audiences who have fought about this for hundreds of years, but so just forgive me, my little like kitchen hobby sociology here. So the three types of power I talk about in the book is money, platform and networks. And platform is roughly how many people you can reach. Networks is who do you know and money is how much money do you have. And I think one of the things we see and I saw in reporting for Washington is how easily one who does not have money can monetize one's networks. And how much one who does have money can purchase access to those networks. Now we call this, we have a shortcut for that term called the revolving door. And we think of it as something that this bad thing that nefarious people do, but it's actually just the fact of the matter of the nature of elite connections at a certain level, which is that if you have enough connections and you're not making a lot of money at a certain point, you're doing something wrong, right? So when Robert Gibbs leads the White House, right? Who, someone who has worked as the press secretary and wasn't a millionaire, right? The question just becomes, where will his payout be? And the thing that he is selling, the payout is in exchange for the network power that he has. Similarly, if you are an oil company who wants to rig some certain piece of legislation, what you do is you pay money to have access to the networks. Who are you paying, Chris? You're paying lobbying firms and law firms. So what you see is that if you have these different... It gives us giving access to who, is you can talk to the president, is it that simple and crude or what is it like? How does it work? So there's a study done, here's a great example of this, to actually bring in some genuinely rigorous social science. There was an amazing study done and it looked at staffers who had left the hill, okay? Who went to work at lobbying firms and it looked at their salaries. And it looked at, it was a discontinuity study, it looked at what happened to their salaries after their former boss, who was a chairman of a committee, left the chair. And their salaries go down. So what are we to conclude there? That they are being paid for access to the chair of the committee. And when they no longer have access to the chair of the committee, but just a member of the committee, the market, the labor market, prices that in accordingly. So that's the way it works. I mean, that's a very like concrete example of what this looks like. And what you see is at the sort of height, the highest echelons of this, that there's this just easy movement and you've been to Aspen. You and I were talking about this on the walk over here, right? Like the Aspen Ideas Festival. You can give me in trouble. All right. Well, no, because it's just a sociological fact that you basically have this very easy traffic between different elite centers of power. And so, I just want to clarify this point too, because one of the things that I, the Atlantic, my employer does an Aspen Ideas Festival every year. And one of the things that I did not know having toiled away as a writer at that point about 12 years from the first time I went is that people who are rich will pay to be in the vicinity of people who are smart. Like, I'd like to read Chris's book. I'm not gonna pay $7,000 to have. I love Chris too. That happens. It was a total shock to me. And that in some ways is the most benign version of this, right? Because that's actually just like, that's actually just kind of purchasing a consumption good, which is like, I like to be around people saying interesting things. And stuff that I kind of believe if you're having dinner with that person, it can't, I mean, Right, that's where you get to this. And, you know, getting, thinking about this rigorously, I think is difficult. What you end up with in a situation is the proximity that a member, a given member of the elite has to other members of the elite, and this is almost definitional, but I'll say it anyway, is so much closer than they have to the masses, right? And this funneling effect acts on people who even come from the most community organizer and small d democratic backgrounds, right? So when you look at who is around Barack Obama, the former community organizer, it's, you know, Rahm Manuel, who was a fundraiser from Mayor Daley, went to the White House, uses White House Connections to have a cash out at an investment banking firm where he made $16 million in one year, putting together a deal. Now the guy had no finance background. There's no reason to hire him for a finance job, right? The only thing that he had was he'd been in the White House for years. He goes, he cashes out, he makes all this money. Then he, you know, goes back into public services, runs for Congress, Chief of Staff David Axelrod, who I have a lot of admiration for as political thinker, but is a multimillionaire from this, you know, firm he has, you know, Larry Summers was making, what was he making? Like $100,000 a week from D.E. Shaw for like essentially just to like throw a few emails their way once in a while. Those, these payouts are very, they're very insidiously corrupting, right? Because everybody, the point is that, these are not quote unquote, bad people. They're not bad people and whether they are bad or not is sort of beside the point. The point is that every, you will end up in the 1%. Right, right. That's how it works. That's how it works, right? So one of the reasons I saw, and I signed Chris's book to my kids in my class and the main reason I wanted them to read this is, MIT is one of the largest breeders of the elite. And so I love MIT, but it's true. I'm sure you guys are very proud of that. It's probably part of the pitch, right? And Cambridge itself. Totally. I mean, I got, when I put this on the blog, first comment is really ironic. Right. That you're gonna have this in Cambridge to talk about the elite, but I thought what better place to have it, you know? You take it right here. And so one of the points that you make in your book is that this sort of, can I call it almost, incestuous relationship when you're around the same people over and over again, it actually creates a worse elite. Then one of the points you're making is, can I say we're going to have an elite, right? Am I right about that? And you are invested in us having a high quality elite and that this sort of relationship deludes that. So I wanted you to talk some about that. I heard of all people, David Frum, made this point on morning, Joe, David Frum. You know, Frum is coming from the right. And he said, look, we're all on TV. What are we talking about? We're talking about the deficit, right? This means a lot to us, you know, all of us, we don't have to worry about our health insurance. We're fine. Are we talking about poverty? Why are we? Yeah, so there's a, I'm not quite sure. Let me say that I'm not quite sure. I think there's some ambiguity in the book and it's an ambiguity that reviewers have picked up on. Between my commitment to getting rid of the elite or my commitment to improving it. David Brooks thinks I'm a Jacobin, basically. So he literally called me a Jacobin, it's called. But you'll take that, David Brooks. Yeah, and in a really sort of wonderful and scathing review in a lefty publication, New Inquiry, a guy named Fred DeBorah was a fantastic writer, basically accused me of being David Brooks. Right. By Washington logic, that means you're right. Right, that's right, exactly. I'm getting it from both sides. That's exactly. So I think there's some ambiguity and I think, yes, I think the. But where are you then? I mean, have you not figured this out? I mean, where are you, are you a Jacobin? I really go back and forth. Like, I do think that there's some unsettled ambiguity on this and part of this is the complicated emotional, psychological fact of the fact that I am produced by these institutions, right? So, you know, it drives me crazy. Like I was, I remember being at an event at Heritage where Dick Armee, Dick Armee, in a 10 gallon cowboy hat and cowboy boots, literally, like, I am one of you costume. Top was railing about the elite. And it's like, bro, who are you kidding? And so, I guess I want to be very explicit about the fact that I was produced by these meritocratic institutions and there is some vestigial affection for them that comes that is the sort of affection of familial knowledge. But I do think that the current system of meritocracy and the accelerating radical inequality of producers, when we talk about it, our critique, particularly on the left, tends to be a critique about why it's bad for people on the bottom of the social hierarchy, right? Which is that, you know, we don't care, we don't do anything about poverty and it's unjust and we have stagnating wages and declining personal incomes and I can list off the statistics for a while. And the argument the book makes is that one of the worst things about it is that it makes the people on the top worse because it produces psychological pathologies that are very destructive and it malforms people and it also produces cognitive blind spots. The best example of this to me is the Federal Reserve and the Housing Bubble. And the term I use in the book to talk about it is social distance. So around, there's a place I talk about in the book called the Center for Responsible Lending in Raleigh Durham and they do work around predatory lending and they had this experience in which the founder, they basically are also community finance groups, they make loans. The founder had this experience where a guy walks in, walks in in 2002 or 2003 and basically says, I'm going to lose my home that I've owned outright. This guy's a widower with a daughter, lost his wife and had a second home equity loan at a teaser rate. You guys are familiar with how this sort of con worked, right? Teaser rate, balloon payment, when the balloon payment comes, which is when the rate goes up, you can't afford it, but as long as home prices keep going up, you can refinance at that moment, which seems like a good deal except every refinance comes with fees and those fees are actually getting at the equity. So every refinance is stripping equity and if you go through for refinancing on a house that's worth $40,000 in a working class neighborhood in Raleigh Durham, it just takes for refinancing until there's no equity in the house left and you're going to get foreclosed on. And he says, I'm basically losing my home and several responsible lending starts looking at this and they're like, oh my God, the mortgage market is bananas and they start writing papers along with the Greenlining Institute saying the mortgage market is totally fraudulent, destructive, predatory, gonna blow up, gonna blow up, gonna blow up. Meanwhile, Allen Greenspan, things seem totally fine in the mortgage market and Bernanke, things are totally fine in the mortgage market and to me, the illustration of this is that no amount of charts and graphs presented to you in an airless boardroom about the mortgage market is going to affect you the way that the guy showing up in your office in tears because he's going to lose his home and that he and his daughter live in is going to affect you. And to the extent that we create an elite who can exist entirely in a world in which they will never pass a foreclosed home in their neighborhood then foreclosure won't be dealt with. So one of the things that I like about the book I enjoy is we obviously are spending a lot of time talking about politics you know, we'll spend more time talking about it but you can see actually Bruns out way beyond that Chris has a whole chapter on baseball and the steroid scandal and what that means, the Catholic Church where's the mechanism by which something that you're analyzing in a government filters out into the entire culture into baseball, into the Catholic Church where's the commonality, where's the threat? So I think there's two commonalities so in the case of the Catholic Church I think the commonality is and I'm sorry, were you raised Catholic? I was, not only was I raised Catholic actually so my father was a Jesuit seminary okay I don't even want to begin to interpret that guy I'm sorry The worst part is I went through the whole world He was running all over it It was like a wave My father was a my father was a Jesuit seminarian and met my mom in the Bronx when he was at Fordham University with his Jesuit cohort who had rented an apartment in the floor above the apartment that my mom, her two sisters and her family had grown up in on Marion Avenue in the Bronx and he was at that point had become very radicalized and was doing a lot of community organizing I think he says, his story to this day was that he was going to leave the priesthood he was thinking of leaving before he met my mom but that pushed him over so yeah, I grew up in the church and had very conflicted feelings about the church so I guess let me say two things one is the story of the church is not a story about meritocracy because Lord knows the Catholic Church is not a meritocracy and does not pretend to be you know, it's an ancient patriarchy and in fact the model for a patriarchy like it is the the or a patriarchy and but to me when you look at the Catholic Church and the Catholic Church scandal the scandal is not that there were pedophiles in the priesthood any sufficiently large population of men particularly will have predators the scandal is not even to be totally honest or that this massive institution covered up the crimes of the people in it because as much as one would expect better of a religious institution institutional prerogatives of self-preservation are intense the scandal is the fact that the bishops would be told about these predators and not just take them away from the kids that they would transfer them or whatever they would continue to put them in places they could have just found somewhere for them to go that they never saw another kid again and there's this a really amazing moment in which in a Times article that I quote in the piece that captures this which is a Belgian sex abuse survivor with his uncle the priest who abused him in a room in a meeting with the bishop the three of them and the survivor is filled with rage and hurt and he is being told by the bishop not to report the crime because his uncle is very close to retirement anyway so just kind of let him go off the sunset in peace and the victim the survivor says why do you feel sorry for him and not me why is the empathy directed towards the predator and not to the preyed upon and that is that when you drill down past everything in the church you get to this fundamental question and the answer to it I think inevitably is social distance it is the inevitable consequence of creating what is quite literally again the model of a causative elite who do not have the empathic ability to put themselves in the shoes of the parent who is sending their child off to church and to parochial school and the inevitable consequence of that level of social distance is genuine evil genuine evil now that's the church in the case of baseball the connection is something else and it has to do with meritocracies maybe I'll talk about that and then I'll shut up for a little bit I'm talking a lot just interrupt me Chris usually I've been lucky enough to be on Chris's show and so he usually gets to interview me I'm kind of relishing having him have to carry this but no I do I do one thing we can't stop at the Catholic church because the one commonality I do see there is a kind of callousness to people whom you are not around and Chris I'm sorry I can't remember this but do you take on the press at all in this book a little bit I talk but they're not they don't become a huge focus but I do think the fact that the kind of professionalization of journalism and the kind of class reproduction of the internship program has the same effect has the same effect just a quick note one of the I constantly constantly I'm studying French I want to say I love that I love that you're studying French favorite things one of the things that happens is always it's very nice that you're at the Atlantic how do you do that and why is this happening at other places why is the press away why is it and what happens is kind of this notion of a conspiracy theory or whatever they want to keep us out in fact it's just well it's just well especially at the magazine you have to take an internship those internships until relatively recently until relatively recently when I paid you had to have certain back as there's only a certain sort of person who can live in New York City for a year summer whatever and not you know take a take a paycheck the New York Times I think this is less so now but somebody was just talking to me about this yesterday used to specifically draw basically from the Ivy League so there was a whole connection so the angle the pathways in are just so narrow and if you were like me I got lucky but if you're like me if you're a kid who grew up in West Baltimore went to public school went to college God forbid you dropped out of college like I did you tend not to even know where to begin where to start where to go and the reason why I think this has a relation to your book is because what you end up is a group of people who may well know each other from college if they don't know each other from college they come from a particular social class they have that sort of commonality there if you're doing White House reporting they're around each other constantly and this is the front of which we get our politics and I just you know you talk about social distance I mean I have a lot of social closeness to the president to the people who are around the president to powerful people to this whole class of millionaires that you're talking about have very little social intimacy to God for the poor people working people whatever and you're not going to live around I don't live there so that's spot on I think it's pernicious and I think the very people who would be a check on this are in fact part of it particularly in our political culture yes although the one thing I would say to push back on that is I do think and this is going to sound maybe naively romantic but I do think that reporting done correctly is one of the few ways to attack head on the problem of social distance because a genuinely good reporter really does listen first and I think the thing that I love most about being a reporter the thing I love most about being a reporter now although I don't get to do as much reporting as I used to would be that I could go into worlds that I didn't have any social connection to and just go there and ask people what's going on and try to as faithfully as possible tease out what was going on and so good reporting is actually one of the ways that we should that we can bridge it or at least we can try to deal with this problem but the the specific class origins in the American press is a huge but what happens if we end up listening to the same people over years over and over again then you get what we got then you get what we got and I think that's what I mean by what we got was Iraq reporting, housing bubble reporting and there's this capture problem there's this cognitive capture problem which is that if you spend all your time reporting on people on Wall Street like they're not idiots the people on Wall Street some of them are actually some of them really are but a lot of them are, they're extremely smart people and if you just spend all your time talking to them like it just chips away they start to sound persuasive like there are the question is who are you close to and who are you distant from what are the things I want to ask you about I'm going to tell a personal story and I should not tell this but I'm going to I'm going to write about this one day with money, my money tax money if you decide and I hope some of you in this room will decide, if you decide that you want to be a writer of any sort no matter what you come from you will find that movement across tax brackets through a series of years is not an uncommon experience so if you're like me I have years when you made a thousand dollars that year that's just what happened the dream is that you'll practice it well and maybe you make a stable living and things get better, things get better I have been lucky enough that things got a little better they got better enough that I looked at my taxes differently now I didn't say I don't want to pay taxes but what it did do was it put into relief in a way that it cut what Mitt Romney's tax rate actually was and what he really was doing in a way that I just couldn't understand on those years I made 1,000, 2,000, even 10,000, 20,000 I just couldn't understand it until I saw it and I think one of the most interesting things is the people who are most likely to be critical I actually like you actually come from the institutions of Maritime they come from it, they are of the elite Malcolm X has this speech Malcolm X but I always think it's dead wrong we tried to contrast the field slave and the house slave he didn't say slave, he used a totally different word that we won't use here at MIT you can google it you can google it right but the notion is that somehow if you were in the field, if you were down you somehow have, you know, you are better able to critique what it is and so I guess I want to this is interesting right this is exactly the same insight, the kind of distance yes, yes, except proximity allows you to see things too maybe you couldn't see a distance either well, so that's, you know I always tell people, the Haitian Revolution most successful, I think the only successful slave rebellion, certainly in the western hemisphere was led by Tussaud well treated slave, very, very educated Natana, when they interviewed they said I was very well treated Gemma Visi plotted this giant slave rebellion South Carolina, it was free African-American people would go totally in the well, so that, I mean, there's two things I'd say here, one is there's a chapter in the book which is about how we get the knowledge we get and I do think that I talk about these kind of three shortcuts, characteristics that we use to figure out what we know and one of them is proximity one of them, what's one of our rules of thumb which is you want to hear it from someone as close to the source as possible right, so it's like and one of the crushing and devastating betrayals of the failed decade as I call in the book, is that that proved to be a pretty crappy way to learn about the world because a lot of the people who were closest to the manufacturing of the Death Star machine that was the securitization machinery of Wall Street were the most blind to its consequences and the people at the periphery were the ones who saw it first and it's also true about the people who had quote the best access to reporting on intelligence in Iraq right, the people with the closest proximity but then this question about a radicalized sector that is very close to the people at the top, I think is very right on and it's something I write in the book and also have taken some flak for is the idea that in some ways the most radicalized class in America over the last 10 years is the upper middle class and not because they have it worse because they don't but because the the experience of deindustrialization and poverty that was the norm in the 80s and 90s although sort of lifts a little bit in the 90s meant that and this is people things people told me in the west side of Chicago or in San Antonio or in New Orleans that like yeah the last decade was bad but so were the 90s and so were the 80s right the people I think who feel the last decade as a kind of radical disjuncture and discontinuity and betrayal the most are the people who do have a relative amount of privilege who are, who had faith in the system that is now repaying them with crisis and I do think that that is a predicate for radicalization. Yeah I think also the other thing is we can't discount I think the notion that and this is you know coming out of this whole idea of radicalizing if you were rich you necessarily worked hard it's just true you necessarily worked hard and then all sorts of moral judgments come totally with that and if you have no direct access to rich people it's very easy to buy that yourself and to you know internalize that even as you may be critiquing it I just be going for myself I'll say that once you get close to it it is shocking how human people actually are. Oh absolutely and one of the things that's really fascinating about this our elite and the meritocratic elite different from other elites is that because the story of elite formation is a story of overcoming and a story of social mobility that people are then as almost a kind of ritual of entrance into the elite to construct for themselves their own story of overcoming their own story of mobility even when manifestly ridiculous. So the best example is just Mitt Romney who got up at a presidential debate and it was a primary debate not in the general and basically said look you know I could have inherited the car company but I struck out on my own these are his terms struck out on his own he came here to Cambridge where he went to Harvard Law School Harvard Business School and and then he and then and and Romney gave this notorious interview to the Boston Globe actually I think it wasn't during this campaign although he surfaced where she talked about their years in BYU and the hardship they faced in which he talks about stapling squares of carpet sample to the floor and when times got tough having to sell some of Mitt Romney's inherited stock to make ends meet now that's yeah that's ridiculous you can laugh that's ridiculous but it's very genuinely felt and I think one of the things that is one of the kind of psychopathologies I think that the current meritocratically produces is that because we have what I call the book Fractal Inequality which is everyone always has someone just above them who's making more money or has more status and that goes on like a kind of M.C. Escher drawing ever upwards and what you're saying by a fact like the fact actually increases too exactly that basically the relationship like the one percent has the same relationship to the top tenth of one percent as the top tenth of one percent has to the top hundredth of one percent which is that the distribution skews and skews like that well from your perspective like that and so what that does is you never feel you always feel under siege you never feel there is no space even for something that would look like so bleach because even though you are an overlord you are convinced you are a scrappy underdog and this is true of people like if you ever read a Roger Ailes profile this is one of the most powerful people in America and he genuinely thinks that like he is under siege that there's some elites somewhere out there like if anyone is an elite it's Roger Ailes right so two questions and then I think we should talk about that okay okay all right I'm just going to filibuster I have my memoir here which I will be getting read you guys should all read it it's great so one of the things I wonder is how much of this is about what the American idea is of being rich of making it and I think again speaking from my own experience looking at how it's projected out to us of work which actually never I don't think really happens you know if I may give some credit it was a profile in New York maybe about two months ago the billionaires were going after Obama and the guy was basically illustrating the pathology you just outlined now just to take his defense because he's waking up at like five in the morning you know he's at the office all night he's working and his ideas I work hard you know and I wonder if that has you know something to do with the inability to see himself as having done it totally I mean like he's not royalty in his mind I'm not you know Prince Charles this is true and this partly this has to do with a really interesting political economic fact which is about the nature of the 1% moving from essentially a rentier class to a wage earning class right so like the people at hedge funds who are in the 1% you know they are that's their wage I mean they call it carried interest but it's not really that's their wage they pay 15% on it but they're not a lot of them are not the idle rich as we would think of them right because and I think Americans our relationship to work and working hard I think is a very under interrogated thing you know it's really fascinating to go back and read political and economic theorists in a late 19th century around the dust revolution Keynes wrote about this as recently the 30s and the Jetsons go back and watch the Jetsons there was a broad consensus for a long period in intellectual history that the problem humans would face is what to do with all their leisure time because obviously the surplus of capitalism and technology would produce everything we needed without having to work and in the Jetsons they work like 7 hours a week George works like 7 hours a week of course there's no feminist revolution in the future of the Jetsons either obviously it's very but and Marx has this very beautiful passage I think it's in capital when he writes about he writes about his ideal being essentially in a weird way the kind of abolition of work and the full flourishing of humanity in which every man could be a fisher in the morning and a poet in the afternoon as his soul so desires that you would work a little and then you'd maybe do like your watercolors and you would and it's funny that that seems ridiculous to us now that that was actually the chief aspiration for so much of the intellectual history the development of capitalism was that the thing that this was all driving towards freedom from work and now we just realize that's ridiculous and in fact we're just all working more and there are other places where in Europe for instance they have taken much more of a leisure they have made the choice essentially to take that surplus in leisure and I don't want to like I mean obviously like I work very hard and I think there's great dignity in working hard you know this economist said to me once something that has haunted me ever since where he said time is the only resource they're never making anymore of and he said you could always not always but he says you can borrow money and you can't borrow time and you know not to get too morbid here but like this is all we got at least from my particular world view I'm sure people in the audience don't think that but from where I said like this is what we have and you know I think everyone deserves the right to both fulfilling work work that genuinely has both dignity that pays them a good wage but also like dignity and wages are only part of it because happiness comes from doing something that brings the fulfillment that there is some connection between effort and reward that you are seen as a full person that your ideas and inputs are a manifestation in some sense of who you are and now I'm sounding preposterously utopian but I think that everyone deserves that you know who does watercolors fun fact do you notice I know two people that do watercolors Paul Bremmer Paul Bremmer does a watercolors has a website Paul Bremmer said I'm done and now George W. Bush is doing that are you serious I'll resist a kind of out out down spot joke you know I think also I just want to go back to that Mitt Romney story you told because I think one of the things that people do not understand this is very very hard to get across to people is even if Mitt had no money at all even if Mitt really did strike out on his own got no help had to sell all of his stock options as an African-American when they study race they always want to compare income so they say his white family over here is making this this black family is making over this the black family still acts fully as something cultural but there's no sense of social network totally Mitt Romney knows people hope that Mitchell Jenkins does not you know I mean he has connections that you know this guy over here it doesn't matter like you can strip them naked you can take everything from them he's going to be able to call somebody another person over here how do we put that into our political dialogue there's no sense of that at all no there's zero sense of that and the reason there's zero sense of that is because we have this kind of formalistic vision of a quality of opportunity this formalistic vision is the level playing field right and the level playing field just writes out and erases so much and it erases it just doesn't there is no conversation about privilege in mainstream American discourse right there's a kind of like wrong it's like shaming or like to even bring up because all we will what we will talk about is its inverse which is disadvantage right right right which is less dangerous so we will talk about disadvantaged youth right we will talk about poor schools and poor kids and isn't it so poor that they're so poor right and what can we do how can we bust the teachers union so that they can do better on their tests I'm letting my politics show there a little bit it's a complicated issue I will grant I mean again to show how this overlaps with race one of the things I always think about is throughout the campaign Obama show what's your birth certificate show me your college grade show me that show me that and it would have went on and on and on no doubt Mitt Romney is from a neighborhood in Detroit called Palma Woods I had the deep pleasure of reporting on Palma Woods in Detroit he was born there in I think 1947 Mitt Romney was born into segregation if you look at the deeds on the houses from Palma Woods from that period they say no black people here there might be no Jews too but definitely no black people here who do not work here they made an exemption from this who do not work here he was born into a right to not have to compete into a broad affirmative action across the city across the side on every level nobody looks at Mitt Romney and says well show us how you got here no sort of inverse critique of that at all one last question and then I want to open it up for the audience I want to challenge you on something that I think about all the time I'm not going to do that you know what I want to do this is your audience this is the elite we have a lot of MIT kids especially to the front what's their responsibility that's a great question this again this sounds I'm doing that thing where I'm critiquing what I'm going to say before I say it so maybe I'll just say it I'm like writing the critique of it before I say it you have an obligation if you have privilege to do something that is going to make the world more just and equitable you have a moral obligation to do that I believe that with every fiber of my being and I think part of the insidiousness of this kind of meritocratic rat race is you convince yourself that you're just another striver and like you got to get on your grind and get on your hustle and win this kind of race and I think that the system we have cultivates that instinct and kills the instinct in people that you genuinely if you have won the birth lottery enough to be granted privilege and that privilege I mean in a broad Rawlsian sense which is to say the privilege of having a quick mind or the privilege of testing well or the privilege of having a compelling personality very very good at doing math along with the privilege of the color of your skin the privilege of the neighborhood you grew up in and the privilege of the educational endowment that you were granted all of those privileges confer a genuine moral duty and responsibility to do something to make the world more just I just saw the new Spider-Man movie this weekend great power great responsibility great power let's open it up for some questions I beg of you to stay to questions think about it like this the more questions you ask as opposed to statements the more people in this room can get in questions so let's be fair to everybody I saw a hand all the way in the back with the glass there you go yes you alright so I got to cut the line down to a question thank you so Tom Rick writes the book The Generals he talks about how generals are never really replaced or fired yes why is that relevant how can we move away from where we are as a political just the culture that we live in now where even when there is a problem general having a zipper problem we're fawning over and fawning over his arrows the late misogyny aside how can we get to a point where we are able to criticize the military without appearing un-American well that's a great question the context for this broadly is the fact that the military is the most trusted institution in American life congress the least trusted military the most trusted it's the only institution that's gained trust in the general social survey and Pew and Gallup surveys over the course of the failed decade and there's a few reasons for that despite the wars right oh yeah very much despite the wars and I think because of the wars actually because I think people A rightly don't hold the military responsible for entrance into the wars B there are certain logistical within the framework of what the military is asked to do that they seem to do very well and then I think there's a certain societal guilt and pathos built in around the fact that we have basically asked one percent of the population to shoulder the entire burden of 11 years of war while basically everyone else gets off except for of course the people in there that one percent's lives Chris did you endorse the draft in your book? no although I toyed with that why didn't you endorse the draft? oh god I think it's such a hard call I basically worry about just the unintended consequence of we think I think the left version for the draft is that it creates this accountability that will make us think twice the other idea is that doesn't it decrease social distance? it does I mean nothing decreases social distance and in fact there's a reason that the social democracies of Europe all have almost all of them have compulsory service and I do think that there's something to be said for compulsory service there's basically nothing in American life that we all do together anymore and I think there's I guess watch Sun and I football but but so in terms of the patreous thing right? Ta-Nehisi and I have been talking about this all day and I have a lot of set of complicated feelings about it one I think it does reveal that there was a lot of myth making and that there's been a lot of of because I think there's this kind of panumbra of guilt around the wars we've been waging and the distance that civilian society has from military society that's manifested itself in this way of talking about the military that could almost be the way I compare it is the way that like you're slightly racially unenlightened white grandparents Asian people as like really good at math which is like complimentary but also like condescending and reductive and doesn't fully grok the fact that you're talking about millions of people the United States Armed Forces is 1.5 million people I think there's some real scoundrels and some totally incredible saintly people and a lot of things in between and some people who can be both from one minute to the next and I think in some ways the most complex writing about that have come from people within the services themselves I mean you want to hear critiques of the military and the military bureaucracy just like talk to a private first class and I think in some ways it is a product I think some of the some of the sort of weird reductive that we talk about the military not as the tremendously complex institution it is has to do with that distance you know when when people are writing catch-22 and the naked and the dead you know they served in World War II and everyone of that generation served in World War II and basically in Kurt Vonnegut so all of this stuff comes out of a society in which there's just much more than a meshed there's much less distance and I say this is someone who's you know I didn't serve basically no one in my family has it is it is distant to me I've done some reporting on it there's a portion of the book about it but I think that like lack of intimacy and particularly and I think it's really dangerous because it has allowed us to basically have war and perpetuity without ever having to live up to that without ever having to be accountable for it and particularly now as we move towards war and perpetuity enacted by robots that further takes us off the hook which is like this is the ultimate social distance this is the ultimate social distance is between you and a drone circling overhead of Waziristan and that I think is even more dangerous now it's a net improvement in terms of the lives of our fellow citizens on the line to who we owe a tremendous amount of fidelity and respect as fellow citizens that we through the democratic process have directed to take on the horror of war but to the degree that we remove ourselves even further in this next iteration of warmaking from closeness to what it means to be at war we're going to do ourselves to service and do bad things in the world how do women fit into this into what specifically into this meritocracy are they their own distinct meritocracy are they a distinct part of the meritocracy I guess specifically I'm concerned so I think I think basically you know both the changes in the political economy and second wave feminism were part we're happening at the moment when this kind of meritocratic vision really was forged and it's true about women and it's also true I think racially that the systems ideals are far more broad minded than the reality of the implementation so the official line is gay or straight black or white or Latino man or woman we all compete on the level playing field but of course that's not actually how it works out now there are some ways in which the adoption of that model in terms of things like women workforce participation graduation from law and in legal and medical professions have made tremendous gains median incomes particularly for educated women have gone up quite considerably but you know corporate boards are absurd there's you know there's something like I want to say in the Fortune 500 there's like six women CEOs you know it's insane and to me it's part of the natural networks of kind of associative patronage that subvert the meritocracy we just went through an election where we had a abortion was you know obviously a high button issue I guess no one will decide to run on rape anymore how could there be a bad bad idea stunned I wonder where that fits in at all is there a meritocratic pro-choice argument about economic fairness competition yeah I mean my politics on it are incredibly uncreated in the sense that I just completely wholeheartedly by the feminist argument for choice as autonomy, self-determination and and I think that the I think what was interesting is that the conversation around choice and birth control and we should be very rigorous and specific when we talk about choice because I think particularly people on the left can lose sight of the fact that the gender breakdown on choice is really not what you would think if you're a liberal pro-choicer like there isn't the huge gap between men and women on this issue that one would think there's also not the generational gap you would think in fact people under 35 tend to be a little more pro-life and I think we have a bunch of kind of assumptions about public opinion and the broadest truth you can say about public opinion towards abortion is that it is a total self-contradictory mess that people will be all over the place depending on how you ask the question that basically the default is abortions are bad and they should be they should abortions are bad we shouldn't have them except in the cases of rape, incest, someone I know, myself my wife my wife, my sister so my girlfriend definitely yes no that's totally that is basically but I do think that and to sort of respond about the rhetoric and also your question because I do think that part of the potency of the radicalization that happened I think among certain women that I know particularly and women broadly I think of the electorate around these issues was seeing in real time the distance between our rhetoric about gender equity and the reality of the vestigial force of patriarchy that like it's just clear for all our talk about the fact that we have a level playing field there's going to be 20 female senators which is a record out of a body of 100 that's ridiculous the US ranks in female elected representatives the US ranks somewhere like 135 it's behind like it's right around like Azerbaijan I want to say like and which is not to like diss Azerbaijan I don't know enough about the internal politics of Azerbaijan many many you know many nations have requirements for female representation just written into the constitution particularly in the kind of sort of post-colonial age of newer constitutions and I think that seeing the distance between the rhetoric we have which is that like it's all equal and it's open to everyone and the fact of that the fact that the power in this country is just continues to be wielded overwhelmingly like men by men was part of the potency of the backlash that I think some of this rhetoric caused how about gentlemen right here with the glasses yes you know you right here yes I'm pointing at you I have a question that concerns oil and climate change yes how this fits into our society I think it enables those people at the top to get where they are and we've lost the social distance in this question is from the support structure that we've separated ourselves from oil is enabled we're eating oil right and climate change is probably going to cause it to crunch right in on so I just I want to put that yeah I mean we have the same relationship to our energy production that I think we and I'm talking we probably you know Americans in general have to the wars we fight which is that it happens somewhere else and it's done by someone else and then I turn on my light I don't know I mean now what's fascinating about fracking is that it's actually destroying that it's not happening somewhere else it's happening in your backyard and turns out people don't like that you know I think I'm not sure I'm reading a book called carbon democracy which is a fascinating book by professor Columbia on kind of the way in which America is structured by its energy extraction I'm not sure I can I have thought through the relationship between the books critique about meritocracy and elites and our system of energy production but I do think we are incredibly removed from it and I think that removal allows us to basically let a lot of terrible things happen because we don't see them and that's particularly true of coal not just in mountaintop removal in West Virginia which you know I've never been to West well I have been to West Virginia but a lot of people have never been to West Virginia and you know they gotta do what they gotta do but also just in terms of what coal does to us humans kills people and then of course the ultimate abstraction which is the fact we're warming the planet you know to me this is the single most important issue by a lot of factors and the abstractness is a huge problem for solving it politically climate advocates have been fighting polling recently which is very heartening polling which is that after a long period of decline in the public's interest in the issue in the long period of decline and by long I mean about 8-10 years in which less and less people were saying that humans were warming the planet those trends have reversed themselves and I actually think the freak weather we've seen and the weather catastrophes have had a real effect but the problem is that the people who are saying that are still just telling some pollster something and the only things that matter in public opinion are the things you're willing to fight with your relatives over Thanksgiving dinner the things that get your cheeks flush are the things that matter in American politics and everything else is just left to the special interests to wrestle out behind closed doors so the only way to solve this is that there's gotta be some group of citizens that care about it enough that it does make their cheeks flush they will argue with their relatives at the Thanksgiving table and I've gone from my thinking about this politically that the project is fundamentally a persuasion project to a project of being essentially a mobilization project that it's not about persuasion it's about mobilizing the people that have the disposition or instinct to get radicalized on the issue which is what we need we need people to be radicalized on the issue to get them over that barrier to get radicalized because that's the only way it's gonna get solved another question right here in the front the issue I'm gonna go back to the social distance and do anything you were talking about because I mean I don't know it's just proximity that's the issue I mean things like the Stanford prison experiments show that as humans beings we have an amazing capacity to distance ourselves from others and see them as completely different to us and lose all empathy and so I mean I don't know if it's the case that people on Wall Street didn't know that people were losing their homes and that global mortgages it's just that under their value system they didn't care and so if it's not just proximity that's gonna help how do we make ourselves more empathetic? You stumped them! Yeah I guess I I guess I think that so I guess I'm pretty romantic in this and that I do think that some proximity will help I think people are all things being equal right CP if we have everything else constant I think more more involvement more exposure will make people more empathetic and you know there's places where we see this in action right in politics like there's been some studies of public opinion toward immigration right and the places where you're finding the most virulent anti-immigrant sentiment are places that are just being exposed to mass immigration exposed to it for a long time don't have it so there is some idea in which I think and again maybe this is hopeful because I'm not sure we can engineer mass empathy I think the best we can do is just hold people at the top accountable enough and force them to reckon with everyone else enough that we kind of preserve the ethos of democracy right here in the back you just to you know the contrasting was brought up but another big issue is probably more relevant from a policy perspective is the fiscal flip slope or whatever it's the austerity phase in exactly whatever you want to call it obviously progressives are pretty happy with the election results but just from both of you in terms of what you're hearing are you both of you concerned that the administration is going to be and eager to make a deal as they were last year that you know what are your both your just general thoughts about what we're facing in terms of safety net programs at a risk and what's coming down the path over the next several weeks can I speak first I don't want to go after you no please I visited this guy at lunch and I was just kind of like okay I just hope I just really really hope like where all of them is this natural thing to buy this whole people broke right if you were broke now they're saying you know clearly they'll make a good that scares the hell out of me I mean it just really really scares the hell out of that somehow I think he believes too much in his persuasive power and I think on the left in general there's too much belief in the power of reason the believer in reason but the notion that I will craft a better what did he say before the debt ceiling somebody asked him about the debt ceiling Mark Amador asked him Mark Amador asked him in the first press conference after the midterms this debt ceiling thing is going to happen he said well I think now that they have to govern they're going to be they're going to be different they're going to be responsible and he said John Bainer would never do that John Bainer doesn't want to endanger America sorry yeah look I'm concerned I mean I'm concerned first of all I think the entire framing the discussion is crazy and you know I've ranted I don't I mean I don't want to belabor this point because I like ranted about this on my show this weekend but first of all Washington uses the word deficit and debt they're running a linguistic hustle on America in which they say something that doesn't mean what they say it means what the debt means in Washington is things I don't like or policies I don't like that's it every time you hear someone talk about the deficit replace it with policies I don't like because everyone's just trying to use this leverage to take the knife to whatever their and that's true I think on both sides right I mean like the reason we have to raise taxes on the wealthy is because of the deficit and debt well sort of I mean it's about 50 billion dollars a year which isn't nothing but it's in the overall scheme of things not enough now I think we need to raise taxes on the wealthy for a million different reasons but so I think there's just what infuriates me is that this is a disingenuous conversation it's having and it's have it's a conversation that over the course of it has managed to move remarkably even to the right it just keeps getting dragged to the right about what is the negotiating tent pole like what's the center around we're gonna have the conversation and the thing that drives me the craziest is that there is no conversation in Washington about mass unemployment we are lighting people's lives on fire we are literally someone a woman got up at the microphone last night when I was in Miami she said I'm 24 years old I graduated from the new school I've been out of work for a year I can't try and find a job what can you tell me and I said we're failing we are failing you and we're not just failing you from some moral perspective we are literally taking the thing that you have which is your productive capacity and we are lighting it on fire we are putting dynamite around it and blowing it up and people talk about waste government waste wasteful spending we're wasting this we're wasting that we are wasting people's lives we are wasting people's lives mass unemployment is a massive waste it's a waste of productive capacity it is like you walk down the street here with a sledge hammer and just started breaking people's windows that is what we're doing right now and no one in Washington seems to care we're going to talk about how we're going to reduce our deficit projections in the out years to 2025 and maybe we'll make these and meanwhile on and on and on and on and on it goes and it's just it's infuriating and it comes back to the point that you made the point that David from me as soon as unemployment reduced amongst the people at the top as soon as the fever of the crisis had broken as soon as it wasn't the case that everyone even in law firms new folks that were getting laid off everyone stopped caring about unemployment I just want to challenge you just a little bit we heard about it a lot in the campaign right and the unemployment number comes out and this is good news for me so I just so what do you make of it? Do you have a serious conversation or we heard a lot about the well we heard about the number but we didn't hear much about the problem and we also just didn't hear there was no you know Barack Obama proposed a piece of legislation that would create about a million jobs called the American Jobs Act before Congress addressed a joint session of Congress did Barack Obama say the words the American Jobs Act once in his three debates this was a piece of legislation that would have put people back to work that the Republicans killed that just never appeared we have time for one more question and then I want to make sure we get books on how about right here in the front please so having just come out of the college admissions process I wanted to ask about something that's close to my heart and I wanted to know what your thoughts are on affirmative action so you mentioned social distance several times and one of the arguments in favor of affirmative action is that it decreases this gap and increases proximity and so do you think that such a program is completely incompatible with meritocracy or do they go hand in hand? So it's a great question about in case you guys didn't hear up there about affirmative action and meritocracy and their compatibility so I'm a big supporter of affirmative action in fact I'm a supporter of like incredibly aggressive affirmative action and I'll speak for how we conduct our shows every weekend which is that we just cap the amount of white men that could be on the show it's just the most crude format we just say no more than two white men basically and sometimes here and there will make allowances or exceptions I don't count myself fair point you got me so I think I have a lot of thoughts about this I'm sorry this is very important here at MIT which is really at least challenged my thoughts on affirmative action and that is and I think we talked about this earlier today one of my great thoughts not great in terms of quality a great term that keeps banging in the head that we ask different sectors of our society from our school system from our housing policy to answer for the fact that we had white supremacist policies in this country up until the mid 1960s so within the living memory of a great deal of people and yet there are people here a lot on here at MIT there's a suit right now in the school system in New York City you wrote about Hunter who were not a part of that who were being penalized for many of them asian asian-american you talked about social distance it's been a real education for me to come here and to actually talk to somebody who would be penalized in that sort of way I wonder what you make of it it's a thornier problem that it looks from afar if we're going to talk in the crassest terms of racial classification which I hate to do because racial classification is problematic and socially constructed etc but asian-americans are the big losers of any regime of vernive action it's just a empirical fact it means a thing we need the great argument from the marital cratic-american argument is this is what we want the guy who's gonna the woman who's gonna work hard study da da da but here's the thing that we need to do I think we need to unpack about the terms of the debate one is the e is with which we know what merit is or what it looks like or that can be diagnosed or it can be defined or it can be named in this neat way whether that's testing achievement grades etc so that's one thing that merit is something that it's got this kind of tautological quality to it but when you start to interrogate it it's a much messier concept when you throw it around A, B my main feeling about this is that the hydraulic pressure that's happening way way way up the waterfall is the problem which is to say the way that we have conceived of American life is this kind of dystopic, iterative tournament style competition like a never ending March Madness in which everybody is constantly pitted off against each other in these brackets going down to get to the B the little select winner who hoists the trophy at the end and the hoist the trophy at the end is the trophy is a remunerative job and a fulfilling life and the broad vision of the left for years is that everybody gets a trophy seriously everyone should have a fulfilling life fulfilling work and be able to afford a modicum of comfort in the one of the wealthiest societies ever produced in human life and so as long as we keep conceiving in these tournament terms in which there's this scarce commodity of educational attainment that everyone's fighting for then we're going to have these very ugly tradeoffs and then the question is well how do you operationalize that and that's a broader question but I think the first thing to do is just like really question the kind of funnelling issue in the narrow policy standpoint I think that I'm a huge believer in affirmative action and again for a bunch of uncreative reasons both in terms of diversity both in terms of historical historical reasons which I think are important even though the historical argument for affirmative action has been completely jurisprudentially jettisoned in the cases that have come before the court it's basically been jettisoned in the most recent case and now has left the constitutional justification for it hanging by a very very thin threat and we might not have affirmative action much longer that's what it's looking like this was so great thank you guys thank you thank you thank you thank you