 I'm David Bose and I'm pleased to welcome you all here. We're here to discuss a new book, The Age of Abundance, How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture. It also has this other line up here that says, Why the Culture Wars Made Us More Libertarian. I read this book when it was in manuscript and it is great. I kept asking for more chapters as they were being written. I found it a fascinating social, political, economic and cultural history of the past 50 or 60 years. And for me, it brings back lots of memories. If you're younger than I am, it'll fill in your cultural education about what happened in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s. And some of that actually was filling in my cultural understanding, my cultural education. There would be explanations of names and events and people that I'd sort of heard of but didn't really know much about. So part of what the book does is give you this social cultural history of the post-war era. But it also brings all of that history together at the end to a conclusion that's maybe not often heard around the Cato Institute, which is that in many ways the upheavals of the 60s and the 80s and the surrounding decades have brought us to a sort of libertarian synthesis. Not exactly what IR11 called this perfect day, but at least a pretty good day. A world of mostly open societies and mostly open economies. I've done some work recently on what I call the libertarian vote and we've found that a significant percentage of the American public votes in relatively libertarian terms, but I never thought of them as the majority. This argues that they may actually be the swing vote, the center vote and therefore a significantly influential group which has something to do with why our culture has gotten to the point that we are. It's a fascinating book and you should read it. Meanwhile, we will hear a discussion of it from the author, Brink Lindsey, who is Cato's Vice President for Research. He helps to oversee our research agenda and develop new research programs. Before he took that job, he was the founding director of Cato's Center for Trade Policy Studies, which makes the case for free trade policies in the United States and around the world. Before that, he was an attorney involved in international regulation, international trade, and also senior editor of regulation, Magazine, published here at Cato. He's the author of two previous books. One is a great discussion of globalization in the 20th century called Against the Dead Hand, The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism, and with our colleague, Dan Ikinson, he also wrote a book on anti-dumping laws. Commenting on today's talk will be David Brooks, as you know, is a columnist for the New York Times. Under their new schedule, I believe, his columns appear every Tuesday and Friday. He worked for nine years at the Wall Street Journal. He also worked at the Weekly Standard. He is now ubiquitous on government broadcasting. The news hour, all things considered, Diane Rehm, whenever you turn them on, there you will see David Brooks as the token conservative, which annoys some limited government conservatives since David is well-known for his endorsement of national greatness conservatism. But the reason he's here today, the reason he's the right person to have here today is that he is a brilliant social reporter or journalistic sociologist. He's the author of two books, Bobo's in Paradise, The New Upper Class and How They Got There, and On Paradise Drive, How We Live Now and Always Have in the Future Tents. Both of those demonstrate his ability to understand the cultural changes of the past 50 years and how they got us where we are. But for right now, please welcome the author of The Age of Abundance, Brink Lindsey. Thanks, David. It's a great pleasure to be here with you today, and it's a special pleasure to share the podium with David Brooks, whose truly wonderful book, Bobo's in Paradise, had a big influence on my thinking about the cultural fusion that has taken place over the past couple of decades. Dire warnings about rising economic insecurity are increasingly prominent these days. The litany of ills both real and imagined should be familiar to just about anyone who even casually follows the news. The outsourcing of jobs overseas, 47 million people without health insurance, a shrinking middle class, and widening inequality of income and wealth. The overall economy may be doing fine, but most Americans are failing to benefit. At least that's what Lou Dobbs at CNN and Paul Krugman at The New York Times and many others keep telling us. Well, I'm here to tell you, don't buy into the doom and gloom. There's no doubt about it, our country has plenty of problems. But of all the things we could be worried about, the general level of material welfare for middle class Americans ought to be pretty near the bottom of the list. The overall American standard of living, not just for people at the top, but for people in the middle as well, is higher and generally substantially higher than that and even the richest of other countries. And the bounty of American affluence continues to pile up. There's a popular misconception that holds that living standards have been stagnating in this country since the early 1970s. But that's simply not true. It's not even close. Let's start with the basics. Life expectancy at birth was 69 years in 1970. It's up to 76 years today as the age-adjusted death rate has plummeted more than 30%. Over the same time period, the number of Americans 25 years or older with a college or advanced degree has more than doubled from 11% to 28%. Meanwhile, the home ownership rate has increased from 63% to 69%, even as the size of the median new home has grown by nearly 60%. And Americans have been filling up those big new houses with gobs of new consumer goodies. Back in 1971, 45% of American households had clothes dryers, 19% had dishwashers, 83% had refrigerators, 32% had air conditioning, and 43% had color TVs. By the mid-1990s, all of these ownership rates had been surpassed by Americans below the poverty line. And let's not forget all the stuff that wasn't available to anybody a generation ago. Personal computers, the worldwide web, cell phones, cable and satellite TV, DVDs and iPods, airbags, anti-lock brakes, automatic teller machines, aspartame, lasik surgery, CAT scans, ultrasounds, home pregnancy tests, ibuprofen, Viagra, and on and on and on. It's simply ridiculous to claim that ordinary Americans are huddled on some howling plain of deprivation, risk, and uncertainty. Compared to whom? Compared to when? This kind of poor mouthing of our economic circumstances isn't just wrong. It's unseemly, like a tantrum thrown by a spoiled little rich kid. Our main problems today are not shortages of material goods. On the contrary, our main problems arise from our failure to fully adapt to a world in which material goods have become so plentiful. This lag shouldn't be too surprising. The fact is, before America in the years after World War II, there had never been a society in human history in which the vast majority of people were neither impoverished nor directly dependent on the vagaries of nature for their basic material needs. As the post-war boom took off, America stood revealed to something entirely new under the sun, a society in which the unprecedented development of technology and organization had effectively insulated most people from poverty and the forces of nature. In other words, we entered uncharted territory. The rest of the world is now following in our footsteps. America's achievement of mass prosperity is the leading edge of a global phenomenon. The struggle to move from poverty to plenty, from scarcity to abundance, is the drama of globalization, and that is the central drama of our times. But America has different struggles and different dramas. We reached mass prosperity six decades ago and ever since, we've been pushing farther and farther into this uncharted, unexplored territory. Our challenge is to adapt our culture, our values, and our politics to the opportunities and dangers of this new realm. At the heart of this process of adaptation has been a change in the basic orientation in the dominant culture, from a culture of overcoming scarcity to a culture of enjoying and expanding abundance. From a more rigid and repressed social system geared to achieving prosperity to a looser and more expressive one geared to taking wider advantage of prosperity's possibilities. In other words, from a culture of self-restraint to a culture of self-expression. Consumer capitalism is often derided as banal or superficial, but it has unleashed convulsive social change. The civil rights movement and the sexual revolution, environmentalism and feminism, the healthcare and fitness booms and the opening of the gay closet, the withering of censorship and the rise of a creative class of knowledge workers. All of these are the progeny of widespread prosperity. Meanwhile, just as economic dynamism has spurred cultural dynamism, cultural change has turned around and accelerated the pace of economic change. In particular, the revival of American entrepreneurship since the 1970s, most spectacularly in Silicon Valley and the rest of the IT economy, bears the unmistakable stamp of the counterculture's irreverent disdain for authority and bureaucracy. As I said, it's just plain perverse to claim that American life suffers from a lack of material bounty. The deficits we do suffer from in America today, the things we really should be worrying about, are not material but cultural. Too many Americans have not yet adapted to the cultural requirements of the age of abundance. Specifically, they lack the values, skills and habits needed to thrive in an affluent society of high productivity and proliferating choices. This problem is most acutely visible in the dysfunction and despair of the nation's underclass. Dropping out of high school, having children outside of marriage and failing to get a job, this trio of bad decisions defines and perpetuates the culture of poverty. In 2005, 12.6% of all Americans fell below the poverty line, but for those who had failed to complete high school, the figure jumped to 21.6%. That same year, 36.2% of families headed by a single female were defined as poor, compared to only 6.5% of married couple families. And only 2.8% of adults with a full-time year-round job fell below the poverty line. Another less stark cultural barrier is the one that separates those who have invested heavily in upgrading their human capital and those who have not. In today's highly complex information economy, the returns to investing in high skills have grown by leaps and bounds. Back in 1980, college graduates earned about 40% more than workers who had completed high school, and people with graduate degrees earned about 60% more. Today, the college premium is up to 60%, and the grad school premium has soared above 110%. In this new environment, children who were not raised to apply themselves and conscientiously develop their talents over the course of their lifetime are in danger of being left behind. So looking forward, we need to lift up the Americans on the bottom half of the socioeconomic scale, or rather, we need to work to establish conditions in which more of them will lift themselves up and adopt the values, habits, and skills that are the keys to taking advantage of contemporary America's staggering opportunities. We need to improve the development of human capital by injecting competition into the more abundant monopoly of state-run education. We need to end the encouragement of criminality now provided by our misguided war on drugs, and we need to facilitate assimilation into the middle class by immigrants, which means, first and foremost, liberalizing immigration and thereby reducing the number of those trapped in the dead end of illegal status. But we're handicapped in addressing these challenges by the central ideological conflict of the age of abundance. As I said before, as a matter of historical reality, the forces of economic dynamism and those of cultural dynamism have been mutually reinforcing. In politics, however, they have been locked in an adversarial relationship. This conflict in its current form dates back to the tumultuous 1960s when mass affluence triggered a mirror image pair of cultural convulsions. On the countercultural left, a romantic rebellion against order and authority of every description, and on the traditionalist right, an evangelical revival of socially and theologically conservative Protestantism. Between them, these two movements have played decisive roles in shaping America's accommodation to mass affluence. But those roles were deeply ambivalent, mixing positive elements and negative ones in roughly equal measure. The countercultural left combined genuine liberation with dangerous nihilistic excess, while the traditionalist right mixed knee-jerk reaction with wise conservation of vital cultural endowments. These two movements thus offered conflicting half truths. On the left were gathered those elements of American society most open to the new possibilities of mass affluence and most eager to explore them. In other words, the people at the forefront of pushing for civil rights and feminism and environmentalism, as well as sex, drugs, and rock and roll. At the same time, though, many on the left harbored a deep antagonism towards the institutions of capitalism and middle-class life that had created all those exciting new possibilities. On the right were the faithful defenders of capitalism and middle-class mores, but included in this group were the people most suspicious of, and hostile to, the social and cultural ferment that capitalism and middle-class mores were producing. This is the blind versus blind struggle of the cultural wars. One side attacked capitalism while rejoicing in its fruits. The other side celebrated capitalism while denouncing its fruits as poisonous. America in the age of abundance has thus been tossed and turned by ongoing and inconclusive ideological conflict. Though the country has made real strides in adapting to new social conditions, it is done so by lurching alternately leftward and rightward. And all the while, the emerging new cultural synthesis has had to contend with scorn from both sides of the ideological divide. To the chagrin of true believers on the left, the embrace of more progressive values and particular greater equality for women and minorities has been spoiled by the continued vitality of competitive, commercialized capitalism and the ascendancy of a populist patriotic conservatism in politics. And to the equivalent mortification of their counterparts on the right, the triumph of capitalism and the resilience of core middle-class values regarding work and family and nation have likewise been spoiled by the now irreversible shift towards a more secular and hedonistic culture. This conflict is still with us today in the form of the polarized politics of red America versus blue America. The good news, though, is that this polarization mostly concerns minorities of true believers and their media-talking heads rather than the bulk of ordinary Americans. Most Americans, it turns out, stand on a common ground whose coloration is not recognizably red or blue. Call it a purplish, libertarianish centrism. Or, following my commenter, call it bourgeois bohemianism. On the one hand, Americans embrace the traditional values of patriotism, law and order, the work ethic and commitment to family life. At the same time, though, they hold attitudes on race and sex that are dramatically more liberal than those that held sway a generation or two ago. Likewise, they are deeply skeptical of authority and are strongly committed to diversity and tolerance. Such an amalgamation of views is flatly inconsistent with any current definitions of ideological purity. So despite all the talk about raging culture wars, most Americans are non-beligerents. Since the 60s, American society has undergone sweeping cultural and economic changes that have pushed the country into a decidedly libertarian direction. On the cultural side, traditional attitudes about race relations, sex, the role of women in society, the role of religion in public life, the permissible limits of artistic expression, and the nature of American cultural identity have all taken a beating. The culture is now much more tolerant and pluralistic than before. Meanwhile, our economy is now much more competitive, entrepreneurial, and globalized than it was in the old days of the big government, big business, big labor triumvirate. Price controls and entry restrictions have been lifted in transportation, energy, communications, and finance. Marginal income tax rates have been slashed, trade barriers have been lowered, unionization of the private sector workforce has collapsed. The fact is, the allowable scope for competition and creative destruction in both the cultural and economic realms is far broader today than prior to the 60s. If not a libertarian era, we are surely living in a libertarianizing era. But our political categories are lagging behind the new social realities. The movements of left and right continue to be organized around discontents with the new, more libertarian synthesis. Thus, the reactionary claims of decline and fall we hear from both sides. The right wails about cultural and moral decline, while the left gnashes its teeth about economic decline. Think of the leading red meat issues for the conservative movement today. Gay marriage is destroying the American family. An invasion of illegal immigrants from Mexico threatens to overwhelm American culture. Stem cell research is leading us to a brave new world of moral atrocities. Meanwhile, on the left, we have the complaints about rising economic insecurity that I led this talk with, as well as a threesome of devil figures. First, Walmart, despite the fact that it's a huge benefactor for low-income families. Companies that outsource jobs abroad, despite the fact that such outsourcing accounts for about 3% of total layoffs. And third, the wicked plutocrats who make up the top 1% of earners in any given year, as if the money they make is being taken from somebody else. Our politics today is therefore stuck in a reactionary rut. The right remains unreconciled to irreversible cultural changes from the 60s and 70s, and the left remains unreconciled to irreversible economic changes from the 70s and 80s. Both sides, in classic reactionary fashion, long for the good old days. As I've noted before, both are pining for the 1950s. The only difference is the left wants to work there, and the right wants to go home there. To break out of this rut, we need a new, more libertarian politics that embraces the new cultural synthesis of the Age of Abundance. We need to embrace economic change and cultural change, and learn to make the best of both. Unfortunately, the current election cycle doesn't hold out much promise for providing the breakthrough we need in both Republican and Democratic fields. The leading presidential contenders are noticeably short on libertarian instincts, much less rhetoric or actual policy positions. But I don't think self-pity is the right note to end on here. It's my firm belief that the key to a clearer understanding of where we are now, and of the real and daunting changes that confront us, lies in sloughing off the fashionable cynicism and despair that typically afflict the sophisticated and well-informed. The fact is, we live in a time of immense progress and opportunity. And even better, we live in the country where, more than anywhere else, the future is being created. That future will surely be brighter if we first recognize how incredibly lucky we are. Thank you very much. Thank you, Brink. Let me just note if there are any people lurking out in the hallway that we do have seats in here, just ask somebody to allow you to slip past the aisle. And now please join me in welcoming from the New York Times David Brooks. It's good to be back at my base. I'd invite you guys over to the big government conservative think tank, but we don't have one. We call it the capital building of these days, the White House, the OMV. They're not doing it the right way, though. First, let me dispense with the flattery before I try to pick some disagreements. And like Rudy Giuliani and the Republicans, I agree with 80% of this book. In fact, I'm a big fan of this nonfiction of the 1950s and 1960s. I think the golden age of American nonfiction was between 1955 and 1965, in part because we were in an era of serious public intellectuals who weren't yet sucked into the academy. And so they were doing big books, big thinking, synthesizing a lot of different ideas without getting into narrow specialization and career building, doing the kind of books we have now which have titles like Power and Glory, Basket Weaving in 13th Century Amsterdam, sort of big title, tiny subtitle. And so this book has that kind of stimulating breadth to it and synthesizing skill, and also it's incredibly fun to read. And so if you read this book without being stimulated, you're brain dead. And while I'm praising the Cato Institute, let me just take this opportunity to say, and I've said it many times, that the Cato Unbound I think is one of the top three or four forums for debating ideas in the country today. Then let me just add an extraneous fact. This book begins with the kitchen debate that Khrushchev and Nixon had in 1950-something. I don't know when. 59. 59. And this was not a spontaneous event. This was actually organized and orchestrated by a young man who was the flak for this particular conference and this particular kitchen company. And that flak's name was William Sapphire. Bill Sapphire was working as the publicist, and he organized Khrushchev to come over and confront Nixon because he thought it would be great publicity. And he actually took the famous photograph of the two men fighting. So my former colleague, Bill Sapphire, organized that disagreement. So now, as I say, I think it's a great book, and I agree with most of it, but let me begin by picking a few fights. And one starts in history, but I think it'll lead up to the major disagreement that we may or may not have. And that brings core argument is that we move from a period of scarcity to a period of affluence, and that changed the culture. And I think that culture did change, but I don't think it was economically determined. I think America began as a nation of affluence. In 1640, in Europe, America was already known as the incredible affluent nation or the affluent part of the world. When the settlers came here in the early 18th century, they noticed two things. They noticed the incredible economic potential of the place. They saw flocks of geese that were so big they took 45 minutes to take off. They would write about the big oysters and things bigger than anything they'd ever seen. They saw the forest stretching on into infinity, and they decided two things. One, I can get really rich here, and two, God can help me do it. And it was both these moral and this economic drive that really powered the American experience, and it was based from the beginning on the idea of affluence. By 1740, I think Americans had a higher GDP per capita than Europe. By the American Revolution, Americans were taller than Europeans because their diet was so much better. So affluence is bred into the DNA of the United States, and it has shaped our culture and made us different from Europe and the rest of the world ever since, and it didn't start in 1950. As people watched the settlers cross the frontier, one of the things they noticed is they would cross perfectly good farmland because they assumed that something was even better over the next hilltop. And that was bred into the American DNA from the very beginning. There was a common theme in American literature starting with Nathaniel Hawthorne that then would move up where a landowner would lead people around the farm and say, here is my tremendous farmhouse. Here is my cattle. Here is my barn. And the visitor would say, I don't see any buildings here. And the farmholder would say, well, I haven't built them yet, but they're going to be here. And it was that mentality of seeing the present from the vantage point of the future that grew out of this sense of abundance, that life was going to continually get richer and richer and better, and that salvation would come through that. And that was the culture of the United States from the very beginning. And it's that culture that I want to highlight more than some radical change in economic conditions for America's the changed ideas because I do think that it's not the big change that created the culture wars in the 1960s or that happened in the 1950s was not America suddenly getting radically richer, but that a certain set of ideas just became more popular. And those ideas, as Brink says, were basically the ideas of Bohemia, of the romantic rebellion against capitalism, which started in Paris in the 1870s, built up gradually in Granche Village in around 1900, and then exploded to college students in the 1950s and 60s. And then the opposite idea, which was the defense of bourgeois values, which because this is an intensely religious country, took on religious form. And so to me it was the power of ideas that created the culture war that we know, and I see the culture war identically to Brink as this conflict between these two sides, this romantic Bohemian rebellion against a religious bourgeois defense. And like Brink, I agree that we had a culture war for 30 years, but it's basically over for most Americans. There might be 10% of Americans on the left, we're still finding it, and there may be 20% on the right who are still fighting it, but we've had this synthesis, and I wrote a book about bourgeois Bohemians, about people who live here in Bethesda who seem on the patina on the surface, they seem sort of Bohemian, a little counter-cultural, but they're bourgeois through and through. And that is the cultural consensus, the cultural synthesis we come to. I think politically we've reached basically a political synthesis where most Americans have come to on whether it's on abortion, where there's a big center in this country, whether it's on gay issues, where there's an increasingly big center in this country, and whether it's on things like even evolution where there's sort of a synthesis. Now where I think I begin to disagree with Brink is over the future. And I think the culture war is coming to an end and something else is going to come to the fore. And the first place, I think the future may be different from the way Brink envisions it. He sees a more libertarian future. We each see futures that look like us, basically. So you can discount our incredible egos for thinking that. But my basic reading of the culture war of the 60s and 80s was that the 60s was an individualistic culture, cultural revolution, the 80s was an individualistic economic revolution, and those two have merged. But they were both individualistic revolutions of one kind or another, breaking down big structures in favor of individualism. And I think that we've sort of overshot the mark on individualism. And if you look at younger people, I think they're much more community-oriented. If you look at philosophers, they seem to be much more community-oriented. I think there's a reversion based not so much on ideas, but simply on human nature toward tribe, toward nation, toward group. And that tribe is represented in a sense of fraternity. And that fraternity shows up politically in many ways. It shows up in the desire to make some sort of sacrifice on behalf of the war on terror, which the soldiers are doing, but the rest of us are really not doing. It shows up on some anxiety in the public over increasing inequality, which is certainly a fact. It shows up on a whole number of ranges, which is why I think Hillary Clinton and other smart politicians are not talking individualistically. Their catchphrase this election season is, we're all in this together. And I think whether it's a Republican version or a Democratic version, that we're all in this together sense is really where the polls lead and where the American culture is. The second reason where I would differ with Brink is that I think we're facing different problems in the future that don't lead toward libertarian solutions. And I'm really following the footsteps of Tyler Cowan here, who said that in the Reagan era and even in the 1960s, if you were a normal person in American 1980, you saw the Soviet Union. You saw the threat of really of a Swedish welfare state and stagnation. And your basic paradigm was that your freedom was threatened by government. And so that was the paradigm through which you saw the world and that paradigm power the Republican Revolution. But the Swedish welfare state is really not in a hegemonic force anymore. The Soviet Union is dead. And now I think what you see around the world threatening your freedom is not government, but it's these massive decentralized processes, whether it's Islamic terrorism, whether it's the technical change in society, whether it's globalization, whether it's global warming. So now the threat to your freedom doesn't come from government, it comes from insecurity. And so the paradigm I think a lot of voters have in their head is insecurity leads to freedom. Security leads to freedom. And I think that makes them a lot less hostile to government because they see government as a source of security. And they see ways to use government to enhance their freedom. And so I think that also leads to a less libertarian future. And then the third thing here, and I'm not sure whether Brinker or I disagree, and the final thing I'll mention is on the emphasis of culture. I completely agree with Brink that our fundamental problems are not economic, they're cultural, that we have lots of people in this country who do not really pay attention to economic incentives, do not follow economic incentives. There's no stronger incentive in this culture than getting a high school degree and yet 30% of high school students drop out. And that comes from a fact which Alan Greenspan talked about. He said before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russia, he thought capitalism was human nature. But after he saw what happened to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he said well maybe capitalism isn't human nature, maybe it's culture. Maybe performance in a capitalist economy depends on certain cultural predispositions. And I think we are lacking, or large parts of our society and large parts of the world are lacking those predispositions. And the question becomes can government do anything to change culture, to help change the culture in the third world, in Africa and other places, and to help change the culture here. And I think it can. Daniel Patrick Moynihan had a famous quotation where he said the central conservative truth is that culture matters most, the central liberal truth is that government can change culture. And I basically think government can, if it performs correctly, can change culture. And the one area where I think that's most germane is on the question of social mobility. Brings absolutely right that living standards are going up, that living standards in America are high, that middle class Americans are doing reasonably well even over the last 30 years. Nonetheless it is certainly true that social mobility is no higher here than in Europe, which is sort of a disgrace. And it may be true that social mobility is decreasing, that a son's income levels at adulthood are more like his father's than they were 20 or 30 years ago. And certainly we seem to be watching some sort of diminution of social mobility. If you come from a family making $96,000, your odds of getting through college are one and two. If you come from a family making $50,000, your odds are one and ten. If you come from a family making $36,000, your odds are one and seventeen. So it's a problem for a capitalist economy when the family you happen to be born into is the primary determinant of how you do in life, not your individual merit. And that's because the family shapes merit. And my favorite social science experiment that illustrates this was done by a guy named Walter Michele, who used to teach at Berkeley, now teaches at Columbia. And it's a very famous experiment that some of you probably are familiar with. He took four-year-olds, put them in a room and put a marshmallow on a table in front of them. And he's told the four-year-olds, you can eat this marshmallow now, but if you wait ten minutes, I'll come back and if you haven't eaten the marshmallow, I'll give you two marshmallows. And he sent me the videotapes of this experiment, and the fundamental truth is no four-year-old can wait ten minutes and not eat the marshmallow. But he showed me the videotapes and the kids are literally banging their heads on the table, trying to distract themselves from the marshmallow. And one of the kids he showed me, he used an Oreo this particular day, and the kid picked up the Oreo, ate out the middle, and put it back. That kid is now Speaker of the House. But the scary thing was that the kids who could wait seven or eight minutes, twenty years later, had much higher college completion rates, and thirty years later, much higher income levels than the kids who could not. The kids who could only wait two or three minutes or some kids ate the marshmallow as soon as they left the room, they had much higher incarceration rates and much higher drug and alcohol addiction problems. And that's basically because some kids had grown up and organized homes where they had developed strategies for resisting their impulses. And some kids had not, even by age four. And if you happen to have been born in that home, then school you can do. If you were born in a home where you can resist your impulses, you can do school. If you haven't been born in that home, you can't do school, because you just can't resist your impulses. Things get boring, you want to get the hell out of there. And so that's the sort of cultural predisposition that I think you need for a healthy capitalist economy. And I personally think that government can do some things to help build up the culture of people who don't happen to be born in those fortunate homes. And those things would begin with a sense that you've got to have a low tax rates and a competitive labor markets to create a dynamic society. But they would include things like preschool for kids in incredibly disorganized homes. State-funded preschool, they would include things like kids' save programs to give kids banking accounts so they'd be thinking about the future. They'd include educational reforms to give kids from disorganized homes constant contact with people they would love. And they'd include things like national service to give teenagers the world outside. I think all of those things would build up human capital. And so that may be an area where I disagree. Nonetheless, this is just a tremendously stimulating book and Brink is going to win the Nobel Prize. I'll take two minutes. All right, thank you, David. I'm going to allow Brink two minutes to respond. Just a couple of points. On the issue of America always being a country of abundance, of course that's true, or at least it started out that way. But I make the argument in the book, and you'll see if it's convincing or not, that there is a difference between agrarian abundance based on free land and natural ample resources and the kind of technological organizational abundance that we have today. It breeds different habits of mind, different values, a different way of looking at the world. Furthermore, there's the not unimportant point that between rich agrarian America and rich industrial America lay poor industrializing America. David's right that Americans were much taller than Europeans at the time of the American Revolution, but they shrank over the whole course of the 19th century as we imported poor peasants from southern and eastern Europe to man our factories. And so there was a period in which America went through what had been the normal experiences of all countries around the world, which is that most of your people are dirt poor and the change from that, I think, had important consequences. On the issue of us being more community-oriented, I think that's true. I take great stock in the social science work of political scientist Ronald Engelhardt at the University of Michigan, who's done a great job of documenting changes and attitudes in dozens of different countries around the world over a course of decades, and he finds a real strong connection between rising per capita GDP and a whole constellation of value shifts that he puts under the title of post-materialism and post-modernization. But an orientation towards quality of life and personal fulfillment and community over just acquisition and economic security is very much part of that. But I would say that the kinds of communitarianism that we see flourishing today is in the form of a bazillion different little communities, a wild proliferation of subcultures and affinity groups, not the kind of mass community of politics and bureaucracy that defined communitarianism in the 20th century. On the issue of stagnant or perhaps declining economic mobility, I can't resist, I've just blogged about this today on my blog BrinkLensie.com so you can check out my clever anticipation of David's arguments on that score. I will say something I didn't blog about, but that is that there's a sociologist Dalton Connolly who has calculated that three-quarters of the income differences in the country are attributable to income differences among siblings in the same family. And so the argument that family is destiny, I think, is true to a certain extent. That is, if you're lucky to be born to a middle-class family that's pushing you to be educated and to acquire middle-class values, that's an enormous boon and if you're not, that's really bad luck. But destiny doesn't end there. But I would say on one other point on mobility, there was this Pew Center report that came out last week that's gotten some attention, which points out that economic mobility here in the United States is lower than that in measured economic mobility, is lower than that in many Western European countries. As I explain, that's a function of how mobility is measured, I think, more than anything that's relevant to the basic question of whether we have become a class-stratified country or whether we remain open to people with talent and who are willing to work hard. I think the clearest proof that the measurements have gone awry are that if indeed there's more openness and mobility in Europe, why did the best and brightest in Europe come here rather than the flow going in the other direction? I'll leave it there and maybe we can get into big government versus small government in the Q&A. But let's hear what you have to say. Thanks. Okay, let's open this up for questions. Please wait to be called on and have a microphone brought to you. Microphones? Right here. Well, both of those. Yes, that's fine. And then hand it back. Bruce Greenberg, a breakman publishing company. Mr. Brooks, what evidence do we have that government intervention has produced positive results in improving cultural norms? For example, what's the evidence on Head Start? Well, here I'll follow James Heckman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist from University of Chicago, who points to preschool programs that he studied. The famous ones are the Perry Preschool and there's a few others he studied. But he says the quality preschool programs have had lasting and long-term effects on child achievement. You're shaking your head. Head Start is a much more complicated program. I think Head Start on balance has had very little long-term effects, but that's because there's no one thing called Head Start. There are a lot of different things called Head Start, and some of them work and a lot of them don't work because the quality of the staff is very poor. The second person I'd point to is a guy named Lawrence Harrison, who was a foreign aid worker who now teaches at Tufts, who writes especially about cultural change around the world. And he points out that cultural change never happens quickly, but if you look at countries that invest in education and things like that at reasonably high levels, within a few decades they see huge economic takeoffs and I think he points to Chile and Ireland and other countries like that. So the lesson is that cultural change rarely happens quickly and it doesn't happen obviously, but I think just pointing those two, Heckman and Harrison, people do believe it happens, and I do too. Excuse me, Phil Harvey, DKT. I'd like to raise the issue of conflict. Brink, you mentioned a continuing conflict of culture wars, left and right, red and blue, et cetera. Mr. Brooks suggests that we are approaching something more closely, we could call a synthesis, but it seems to me that conflict is not only not bad, but is absolutely essential and clearly highly desired by human beings and certainly by Americans. We go to great lengths to create unnecessary conflict and spend a lot of money promoting it. What is your view then when you suggest that a better world would have less cultural conflict, whereas I think we might end up bored to death if we get too far in that direction? We will still have the NFL. I work for the Cato Institute, so I'm the last person to be pumping for a sort of a bland mushy centrism as the end of all of our strivings. Of course, intellectual and ideological and cultural diversity is a great thing and we've got more of it than ever before. The issue is whether we have a kind of a polarization into two rival camps that I think is different from diversity of opinion and pluralism of opinion. In particular, are we divided into two camps that are basically backward-looking in their view of the world? Our politics certainly has been divided that way into this red and blue camps in which I think basically the right can't get over the fact that the 60s happened and the left can't get over the fact that the 80s happened and so they're stuck in this reactionary dissatisfaction with the status quo and they demonize each other in large part because demonizing the demos is a big no-no in a democracy but they're frustrated with this big center of the bell curve of public opinion that doesn't buy their sky-is-falling rhetoric on the cultural side or economic side. So this kind of polarization based on a kind of a reactionary failure to get over spilt milk I think is unhealthy and I have the sense with David that it's fading. I guess I would just echo that we're going to have conflict because we are human beings and we, what the scientists call pseudo-speciate, if we divided this room in half and we said you people are different from you people, within about a month of living with each other, you'd hate each other because that's who we are. But the conflicts do change. One thing I meant to mention in my opening remarks and this backs up brings theory of how the basic culture has changed and has changed our politics is that the demographic voting patterns of red America and blue America are very different. That in red America the richer you are, the more you're likely to vote Republican. In blue America income makes very little difference how you vote and in a state like Connecticut income is totally unrelated to voting patterns and that's because people in Connecticut are extremely rich and have moved on to post materialist ways of voting and so they're having a different set of conflicts than I think the people in red America are having or than Karl Marx inhabitant. I would just say and I feel like mentioning Tony Blair who made the point that the old conflicts were left and right but the new conflict is really between open and closed between people who believe in an open economy, open borders, open competition and people who fear or do not believe in open borders, open competition, open trade and that would be a new sort of conflict which would cut across our current political alignment. So we're going to have conflicts, the question is how do they evolve and do they reflect the real problems? Back there in the aisle. Thanks. Thank you. Brink, Bob Capose from freeliberal.com. Do you in your book or could you address here for us the difference between abundance and happiness? For instance, at least in my observation anecdotally and I think a lot of people share this, we have perhaps a situation, we've developed a situation where perhaps you might view it as the diminishing marginal utility of abundance is really a tantamount to a numbification of America. I mean, how many more DVD players and Teavos do you really quote unquote need and the increased use of antidepressants and the need to go on Caribbean holidays four times a year, et cetera, et cetera. Is this really something that we should be celebrating or is this perhaps an indication that something's gone terribly wrong? We should be celebrating. The happiest people in the world are the richest people in the world. If you look at the countries that there's a big cottage industry these days of happiness research and let me first of all plug my colleague Will Wilkinson who just last month or so published a Cato policy analysis on happiness research, I think it's really first rate, excellent and sizeth. We also hosted a Cato Unbound forum on happiness a month or two ago. You can check that out. So we dove quite deeply into these issues. But bottom line, the results of happiness research which should be taken with several shakers of salt show that self-reported life satisfaction is much higher in the country most afflicted by all the banalities and evils of consumerism much higher than it is in countries where people are poor and worried about losing kinfolks to disease and terrible things like that. There is a well-reported, much-discussed disconnect between the slope of rising per capita GDP and the slope of rising self-reported happiness. Part of this is math. If you have per capita GDP that can go on forever and you have happiness on a scale of 1 to 4 or 1 to 10 you're going to see diminishing returns of happiness to increases in per capita GDP just as a matter of mathematical necessity. I think just to make one additional point on the score the fact is that we do have limits on how happy we can be. If we can't go around in a sort of a stupefied bliss out 24 hours a day, it's just not adaptive, right? If the dwellers on the African savanna were just blissfully happy for the rest of their lives after eating one meal, they wouldn't have gone out and gotten the next meal. So we are hardwired to have our pleasures be relatively fleeting. What we have done with our incredible riches is maintain a very high level of happiness in the ongoing process of economic growth and I think that's a great thing. Okay, right here and while we're waiting up there. Lisa? Yes, you can go ahead and hand it to her. Okay, it's there, you can go first. David Brooks, may I invite you to revisit the confidence that you seem to place on the public sector in bringing about the lessons of deferred satisfaction amongst the lower class families. How can we sense that those politicians that get into office in our bureaucrats will in fact themselves practice a deferred satisfaction? I think we do know that from government we can expect unexpected consequences. On the other hand, we do have this ubiquitous private sector such as the Sunday schools that do teach deferred satisfaction yourself in favor of your neighbor and the Boy Scouts that teach honor and loyalty, those kind of attributes that affect the culture. Would you have something to say for influence of the private sector? Well, I confess when I go up to Capitol Hill and interview members of the Senate in the house, I deferred gratification is not the first thing that comes to my mind when I talk to those people. Nonetheless, I think it is clear to make clear what is the basement, what is the foundation of human capital development and I personally, I'm all for Sunday school unless I happen to be going to it, but I don't think it's preaching and I think the study on abstinence education was recently clear, preaching to people I think has some effect, that's our job, we preach to people so we hope it has some effect, but the main effect in changing behavior and changing the way children's minds work is to have someone they love be with them all the time and to organize their home so that their decisions have long range consequences and there are programs and these are government programs I'm all for the private programs but these are government programs that basically send nurses and older women basically into the homes of disorganized households and these programs do show results and that's because if you go into these households it's not that the parents don't read to the kids there are no books, they don't even know what a book is these kids and these programs send a regular stable presence into the home and create a permanent relationship with the child and as we know emotion is what activates learning and these programs actually do have measurable results and the problem of course is it takes 20 or 30 years to play out but if you ask yourself what caused some sort of development in your own life it's a stable presence and so I don't support government programs to give a stable presence in the lives of middle class kids that's better but for kids who don't have it then I think government actually can effectively step in Ok, in the back and then here Yes, my name is Martin Wooster a question for Mr. Lindsey if America is becoming more libertarianish then why is government constantly becoming bigger, more powerful and more nannyish? Well it's not constantly becoming that way on all dimensions we have had I think dramatic libertarian reforms in the cultural sphere on civil liberties on censorship, on gay rights and we have had enormously important market-oriented libertarian economic reforms as I mentioned the wholesale elimination of economic regulation, price and entry controls the move from a world of 90% tax rates to tax rates in the 40s today globalization, the reduction of tariff rates and other non-tariff barriers so I think we have relative to the 1960s made giant leaps in a libertarian direction by no means though to the extent that would please the folks with very high standards here at the Cato Institute we still have a love affair with big government there's great popularity for a lot of big spending programs we have very deep widespread public misunderstandings of how economics works and therefore a mistrust of the market just in September of last year there was a poll in which 42% of Americans said that the recent decline in gas prices had been engineered by the Bush administration that they had pushed the gas prices up over the summer so that they could fall in time for the election people who subscribe to that kind of conspiracy theorizing are not the kind of people who are going to sort of naturally cotton to the spontaneous order of 200 proof pro-market policies but we're making progress but Brink isn't it nonetheless true that the richer a country is the more likely it is to have a big government isn't there a pretty strong correlation between these two things? I think that the more productive your economy is the bigger a government you can afford and so one of the sort of dark lining to the silver cloud that we took away from the experience of the 70s and 80s is that libertarians and free market folks had been warning that we had a two interventionist economy and two big government and it was going to cause complete collapse and in the 70s those warnings looked like they were coming true but what happened was instead of a total collapse we made enough economic reforms to put the great capitalist growth engine back in pretty good working order so that we can afford a lot of dead weight and so we I don't think that there is I think there is a sort of an equilibrium with a pretty big size government and it's hard to chip away at it and so the kind of rhetoric and kinds of policies that worked politically in 1981 when Ronald Reagan came into office are just different because we've become victims of our own success that doesn't mean I think though that we are doomed to ever expanding government or that we are doomed to think that social policies concocted in the 1930s are the final word in how to deal with old age and medical care David I want to ask you a point of clarification on that I'm thinking that when you say the richer a country is the bigger its government you mean among developed economic democracies right because if you looked at the economic freedom of the world index and you took the 20% and you divided into quintiles of economic freedom clearly those quintiles track GDP and so the richer the country is in fact the more economic freedom it has would seem to be the conclusion from that It's true I hadn't thought about it I've seen both charts though and the other chart does seem to hold true as well and it is certainly true that where I live in Bethesda which is a highly affluent place my neighbors are not libertarians I think it depends on government spending on everything you can possibly imagine It depends on how you define big government if big government is interfering with market mechanisms then the rich countries are the ones in which market mechanisms have the freest play institutionally and from a policy perspective but when it comes to redistributing some of that income then clearly the richer you are the more you can afford to redistribute some of it but that doesn't mean that's the best way to do it it doesn't mean that a progressively better educated more sophisticated electorate is going to always be satisfied with programs that were concocted again now 70 something years ago That doesn't lead to libertarianism it leads to my saint Hamiltonianism a belief in limited but energetic government as I say we all think the future looks like us well except the libertarian Jeremiah's that we frequently have here who think the future looks exactly the opposite of us but in this case that's probably right here Bill Niskan and Kato I'm surprised that neither of you addressed the major potential new source of conflict and that is between generations 30 years from now American workers will pay marginal tax rates of 10 or 20 percentage points higher than they do now in order to pay for promises that American politicians have already made to the future retirees that is a big source of potential conflict that we've never had before and it is not clear how the American political system is going to sort that out I think in my book I talk a lot about another generation gap the cultural generation gap between the depression World War II generation and the baby boomers and that was an enormous one but you're right that the sort of policy generation gap based on the long run financial unsustainability of our entitlement commitments is a train wreck that we can see coming ever closer to occurring here I think is another reason why ultimately the future lies with not necessarily radical libertarian changes but with ongoing process of libertarian inspired reform which is that our current programs don't work and they're going to blow up and unless we can reconfigure them and reimagine the kinds of commitments we make and rely much more on individual initiative to save during the working life for the cost of retirement we're going to go bankrupt so in the medium term that may ultimately lead to a bigger government because as the baby boomers retire the costs of paying for at least some portion of those commitments rises and tax rates may increase to cover some of that but I think over the long term it means a reconceptualization of these commitments and I think moving in a direction that's more dependent upon individual initiative and less dependent upon monopoly one-size-fits-all top-down programs In my interviews with politicians I often ask them how can we shift the burden from the affluent the tax burden from struggling families to the affluent elderly and they dodge the question with great alacrity the only one person who hasn't dodged and who I've seen speak about this in public is Fred Thompson actually in his speeches this year he says if you ask senior citizens to share a burden so that the younger generation can have a welfare state or entitlements that they can actually afford his claim is that people over 65 would be glad to make that sacrifice and he's going to try to test that theory in the election I suspect in about a week he's going to have little old ladies chasing him out of parking lots a la Dan Rostinkowski from a few years ago but I'd be curious to hear my view is that the way to trick seniors into paying more of their fair share of the burden is a consumption tax which wouldn't aggressively address their income at least up front but would subtly take away would shift the burden a little okay back there and then right here in front of the camera hi Matt Bannick my question is for Mr. Brooks on the point that government used to be the main threat to our freedoms or at least the main perceived threat to our freedoms but now it's insecure it is the main threat and even if you're right about that it doesn't necessarily seem to follow that lack of government is the solution to this new threat to our freedoms and even in the examples you cite quite the opposite it seems to me is that government is the main cause of these insecurities as bin Laden tells us as any Muslim fundamentalists we've heard from tells us it's American foreign policy bungles in the Middle East that has caused us to be a target of these decentralized networks of terror so my question for you is does it bother you that the tendency of government to have unforeseen and unintended negative consequences of you play Ron Paul I should play Rudy Giuliani like Rudy I fundamentally disagree that bin Laden attacked us because of American policies obviously it's a much more complicated issue than a play down in that presidential debate but nonetheless I think among the reasons that Islamic fundamentalists attack us American policy toward Israel or whatever you want to call it is a second or third order effect the Islamic radicals who read this guy Kutub he came here he came to a church social in Missouri saw men and women dancing together and decided he hated America and so he's the major ideological influence on a lot of the terrorists and so I think those are not generated solely by American foreign policy and then the other issues I don't think are created by government either the leap to an information age economy unless you believe Al Gore that wasn't created by government neither is the effects of globalization the rise of Chinese and Indian workers so I don't think government is responsible for those things that doesn't mean I'm a Hamiltonian I'm not a new deal liberal it seems to me the argument is over how we're going to address these problems and I do think the reason that government has increased its spending since Gingrich really is because even Republicans who have to answer to the American people need to provide some sort of positive agenda and it can either be a new deal status agenda or it can be a positive agenda that creates maximum freedom and choice which should be the Republican agenda but it should not be we're not going to help you solve your problems let me just address this broader issue of the politics of insecurity and I think it goes to answering a kind of a puzzle I'm thought of as a kind of a squishy moderate libertarian at least by Kato's standards and David's thought of as a kind of squishy moderate conservative by right wing standards and so it really isn't surprising that if the two of us sit down and chat about specific public policy issues we can either agree on that a lot or split the difference and come up with something that both of us would think would be a big improvement over the status quo and yet why do we sound so different why does it sound like we want to take the country into two totally different directions and I think it has to do a lot with political rhetoric and political vision and specifically with David's idea that we need a politics of insecurity a politics based on fear and based on worrying about the future and based on therefore repairing to the to the warm and comforting bosom of authority that's going to take care of us and I think boy we just been through six years of that and we are sick of it we don't need a politics of fear and I don't think it suits the direction in which this country is heading a generation that spent its toddler years watching the Rugrats and then spent its childhood and teenage years watching Simpsons and now in college is watching John Stewart and Stephen Colbert this is a generation that has anti-authoritarianism in its DNA and the idea that it is going to respond to some sort of great leader and national greatness I think is just completely off base what we ought to have is a politics of self confidence and hope that we are a great country we are the richest country in the world we're getting richer, things are getting better of course there are problems but our system contains within it the answers to the problems that arise that to me seems like a much more attractive kind of politics and one much more in sync with where the country is headed thank you I'm glad we're still going to have the NFL we may have to pay a lot of money to watch it down the road but thank you for saying that I'm going to address this question to both Mr. Lindsey and Mr. Brooks I will preface it by saying Mr. Lindsey what you're presenting sounds to me too much like the colonization or Stepford Wives of America and that bothers me I do not think the government Mr. Brooks is the answer and yes Head Start does work because I've worked with the program for many years and it's very good getting to the political issues because I think that's very important as we look down the road to what's going to happen in our country I think there are more independent minded voters and thinkers today than folks here want to address and I don't just mean here the Cato Institute but here in DC and I think if you look towards the Midwest and the West Coast there are more people who are thinking independently and don't like either parties so I just like your comments on what you think about the Unity 08 movement that is beginning to move up and looking at finding bipartisan candidates to run for president and other offices and could we have a third party spring up shortly thank you well if I left the impression that I see a vision of a kind of a cloned Stepford Wives kind of America boy I've not communicated very well because I think in my book I portray a completely opposite kind of dynamic going on that we are in an age of just incredible cultural speciation as David put it but in a nice way where we belong to a whole bunch of different subcultures and affinity groups and communities and we are ever more able to develop our own individuality based on the proliferating choices that wealth creation gives us and that's a great thing as to the Unity 08 movement I think kind of split the difference centrism is never very appealing and it's never the answer the answer is to transcend the deadlocks that you have not to try to split the difference between them what we need I think is not just a little from column A and a little from column B but a new kind of political vision and rhetoric that I of course think ought to be emphasizing the libertarian aspects of American political culture I do think that the Unity 08 and what's going on in the republican and democratic fields suggests that although my hopes for a more explicitly libertarian politics aren't on the horizon we do seem to be drifting away from the just cartoonish hostility levels of red versus blue that we've had in recent years on the republican side most obviously we don't have any of the leading contenders that really fits very well with the red meat agenda of the red state base and on the democratic side the two leading candidates Clinton and Obama are striving very hard to portray themselves as moderates and centrists and to the dissatisfaction of the true believers in the net roots and blue state base so I think we're drifting away from this kind of polarization but where we're going who knows I'm also suspicious of the the center that has no ideas I tell centrists the reason you guys lose all the time is because if you go to a conservative dinner there are think tankers with ideas you go to a liberal dinner, there are academics with ideas you go to a centrist dinner, it's all lobbyists they have no ideas at all and so a center that just sort of drifts in between is just a social position it's not an intellectual position and so I'm always suspicious of Unity 08 and things like that in part because I was in Israel recently and Kadima was a third party, a third centrist party if you create a new third centrist party you happen to lose your leader then you have nothing, you have no roots to the country you have no issue, you're just floating out there and you're totally immobilized so I'm suspicious of third parties for that reason nonetheless I will say that having I suspect that immigration reform is going to fail social security reform failed it does seem we are in a position without one dominant majority that can push through legislation of good or bad and we're without a center and so that does create a kind of immobilization that probably is not good especially with problems like the entitlements problem rolling down the hallway and so I do think you do need some sort of I mean we do need some sort of realignment to get things moving and I would just say and this is in response to the idea that I'm doing a politics of fear let me do 15 seconds on what the Hamiltonianism is all about it's not about fear it's giving people the tools to compete in a capitalist economy I mean it is a fact that only 70% of kids graduate from high school it is a fact that our college completion rates have barely gone up in 25% it's a fact that while the world is awash in financial capital the United States is not awash in human capital and that if one of the things we have to work on is getting people to respond to incentives and bringing them the tools to do that and that's not a politics of fear it's a politics of helping people take advantage of the opportunities so it's rival optimism let me just say one more thing about the sort of the bland centrism I do think that there are times when a period of bland centrism works politically we had it in the 50s where after roiling ideological conflict over the role of government in the economy we had arrived at the end of World War II with some kind of compromise that is the market economy remained but we had a big overlay of big government and both sides decided that was good enough for the time being and so we had all these sort of new consensus and Daniel Bell wrote the book The End of Ideology and we had the kind of Eisenhower era where the liberals were consensus managerial not radicals and the conservatives were content to basically mine the New Deal store it's possible I think that we are today in the equivalent of the post class war breathing period we may now be in the post-culture war breathing period where we've gotten to this what I argue to be kind of libertarian tie between the forces of the left and the forces of the right and we may create political opportunities for people who tap into our exhaustion with that kind of conflict but I agree completely with David that these are just sort of breathing spells because they don't have any ideas behind them they can't really push the country in any particular direction