 Good evening, good afternoon, good evening, whatever it is, in this ambiguous moment. Welcome to New America. My name is Mark Schmidt. I'm the Director of the Political Reform Program here, and I'm pleased to welcome all of you to this discussion with Yasha Munk, who is, among other things, a senior fellow in our program, and I'll tell you the other things in a minute. This is going to be a discussion starting from maybe extending to other topics of Yasha's book, The Age of Responsibility, Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State, which is really both a book of political theory, intellectual history, and really policy history about the way we've thought about the idea of personal responsibility in a lot of different contexts in recent years in the United States and internationally. Yasha is a lecturer in government at Harvard, a fellow at the Transatlantic Academy at the German Marshall Fund, as well as a senior fellow in our program, and previously was a fellow in New America's fellowship program, distinctions that maybe are more important internally. He also writes a weekly column for Slate, a monthly column for CNN, and he's a regular contributor to Deitzite in Germany, and he's currently working on his third book, which argues that liberal democracy is splitting into two forms of regimes, illiberal democracy, which is democracy without rights, and undemocratic liberalism or rights without democracy, and I hope that in this conversation we can link some of the conversation about personal responsibility with those other concerns. He's also been working with Tony Blair on a project to respond to the challenges of illiberal democracy and illiberal populism around the world. I first met Yasha about three years ago. We had lunch outside up on 17th Street, and I remember him describing two of the things he was working on at the time. One was this project on personal responsibility, and the other was beginning to think about illiberal democracy and the threats to democracy, and I remember, from my own perspective, being able to connect strongly with the story about politics of responsibility and how that had played out, and feeling like the second topic was kind of interesting, but maybe not necessarily as relevant in the U.S. context, but that was three years ago, so here we are. Yasha's insights have been really extraordinarily useful, and I think extraordinarily widely recognized in the last six or eight months. I don't know what that coincides with, but again, that's where it is. I think we'll do what we often do here. Yasha will talk a little bit about the book, a little last minute PowerPoint that we let him do, and I'll get the conversation going, then we'll open it up, and then we'll have a little food afterwards, and we hope you'll all stick around, and while you stick around, you can also join in celebrating the fact that Yasha has recently become a U.S. citizen, something he's written about, and we're all really excited about. My own family is rapidly, some of my family members are reclaiming German citizenship. To the extent they're eligible, Yasha's moving in the other direction, so we're happy to see that as well. Why don't you take it away? I'm glad to be sort of on brand, New America, I'm a New American, that's great. I can't believe that it's only been three years since I first met Mark, in part because I feel like our intellectual friendship and more broadly my affiliation with this place has reshaped me a lot in the last three years, and in part because it feels like the days when I had to sort of fight to explain why it is that the rise of populism, the crisis of liberal democracy might matter to the United States, seems so far away like from a different lifetime. It's kind of scary to think that it was three years ago that it was the case. There's a lot of last-minute things here, I actually hadn't held a copy of my book in my hands until three minutes ago, so it looks very good, doesn't it? I'm not sure that I'll speak as if he's asking about the content now. The other great thing about New America is that it has a real can-do attitude down to the fact that John let me have a PowerPoint that I sprang on him five minutes ago, so something that most people would not let you do. So I just want to talk a little bit in outline some of the themes of the book. It's a book that I think has lots of different themes actually, lots of different strands. It's a sort of pretty broad-based rumination on the way we think about personal responsibility, the kind of demands we make of citizens, especially if they want to lay some kind of claim on collective assistance, and so it engages day-to-day politics, political rhetoric, but also pop culture around personal responsibility and also sort of intellectual history and analytical philosophies, so the different chapters really engage with quite different parts of the debate and therefore have quite different styles, but I want to lay just a couple of them out here, and the sort of underlying motivation of this is that I think what we mean by responsibility has really changed over the course of 40 or 50 years. When you go back, I became a citizen at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, when you go back to what Kennedy Sadden is in oral speech, it's asked not what the country can do for you, ask what you can do for the country, and more broadly, as Danny Rogers argues, there was a sort of Cold War emphasis on responsibility to serve the state, to actually preserve your democracy by doing something for it, and so one way of thinking about this is that people had a kind of conception of responsibility as duty, but what we meant when we talked about responsibility was in part a duty that went beyond your individual self towards your community, your family, your town, your state, and indeed your country, and then over time that changed, and one of the hallmarks of this change is the kind of way in which Bill Clinton started to talk about responsibility. You saw this shift earlier with Ronald Reagan and people like Margaret Thatcher, but it was quickly taken up by figures like Bill Clinton as well. So this is what he said when he announced the plus responsibility in Work Opportunity Act, welfare reform, we must do what a market does best, offer more opportunity to all, and demand responsibility from all. It is time to break the bad habit of expecting something for nothing from our government or from each other, and so here responsibility starts to be the kind of thing that that you have to live up to if you want to preserve your claim to various welfare benefits, and it's very interesting that the welfare reform which essentially makes continued assistance from the state conditional on your good behavior was called the personal responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, and so what I argue in the book is that this is really a form of responsibility as accountability, that you're no longer thinking of responsibility as an outward looking duty, but your responsibility now has just become that you have to make the kinds of choices which mean that you earn enough money, you can acquit yourself of your own life. That's what it means to be a responsible person. If you fail to live up to your personal responsibility, it's because you failed to do that. And so I argue that there's this sort of responsibility framework which actually becomes accepted not just by the political right, but also by large swaths of a political left, both in day to day politics and even in political philosophy, even when you look at things like the so-called lack of the deterrence, and it's essentially to ask a pretty simple question, are you responsible for a bad outcome? Are you responsible for being in a state of need? And if the answer is yes, when you claim to public assistance is lessened or diminished, but if the answer is no, then it might be preserved. So are you poor because you're disabled, you had a car accident? Well, in that case, we're gonna keep helping you. But are you disabled because you dropped out of high school? Well, in that case, we don't really owe you anything. And it's a defining feature of the left that they tend to accept that normative framework now and then quibble with the empirical description. So rather than saying, no, we disagree with this normatively, they tend to say, yeah, that's right. If it's your own thought that you're in a state of need, we owe you less. But as a matter of fact, that's not true of most people. Most people are sort of victims of structure and so on. So the problem is not that the normative assumption here is wrong. The problem is that most people aren't in fact responsible for being in a state of need. And so you see this being taken up not only in the United States, but also by people from Gerhard Schröder to Nicolaus Achkusi to Donald Tusk to Angela Merkel to Matteo Renzi in various countries. You have cognates of personal responsibility, like responsibility personnel, responsibility to individual, eigenverantwortung, really becoming very influential in the politics of lots of different countries. Now I want to argue that it's not only in political rhetoric that this kind of shift of how we think about responsibility starts to have a real influence. It actually starts to reshape what the welfare state looks like as well. So there's a debate in the academic literature about how resilient the welfare state is. And on one view, poor Pearson argues that these sort of seemingly irresistible forces that were undermining the welfare state met immovable obstacles. But once you have a particular welfare program, people are so attached to it, that it becomes pretty impossible to get rid of. And so despite Ronald Reagan, despite Margaret Thatcher and all of those kinds of forces, you don't really see a retrenchment of a welfare state. And on the other side, you have the arguments of people like Jacob Hacker, who say that no, there is actually a subtle erosion of a welfare state because you don't see a response to new kind of social risks. Because sometimes, you know, there's a particular sum that you get, but that sum isn't adjusted for 20 years. So because of inflation, it goes away. Because of all these other kinds of mechanisms, you slowly over time get a real erosion away from a real welfare state. And what I want to argue is that this sort of inconclusive debate in the scholarly literature can be solved when you think about it, look at it from the perspective of responsibility and distinguish between what are called responsibility tracking and responsibility buffering elements of a welfare state. So responsibility tracking element is one that says if you make the right choices, if you behave in a good way, then we're going to reward you, then you're going to get something, whereas if you act badly, then we don't owe you anything, right? Whereas the responsibility buffering elements of a welfare state are ones that are unconditional, let's say, even if you've messed up, even if it's your own thought that you're in a state of need, we're going to help you. And it seems to me that responsibility buffering institutions have been eroded. So we see the real rise of conditionality across the welfare state, not just the emblematic move from welfare to work there in the United States, but also the rise of conditionality in forms of public housing, and lots of other areas of social provision both in the United States and in Western Europe. And you also see it with pensions, where you used to have to find benefit pensions as long as you have a decent job for most of your life, you're going to have a good pension because the job comes with a particular set pension. Now, a lot of it is tax incentives. It depends on how much you save, it depends on whether you invest your money wisely. So the pension system too has become more responsibility tracking than it used to be. The responsibility buffering element of it has been eroded. And at the same time, you see the rise of new kinds of responsibility tracking institutions. And the best example of that is the earned income tax credit, a huge redistributive social program added since the 1990s. But you only get it if you actually work and you do a number of other things. And its spirit is sort of quite nicely encapsulated in this sort of little crest that somebody made up of the earned income tax credit, which says, earn it, keep it, save it. So it is a redistributive social program that it is very much in the spirit of responsibility tracking. You only get access to it if you are making virtuous choices. Now, I'm arguing in the book that there's two big things wrong with this kind of responsibility framework. This gets two big things wrong. The first is that it leads us to underestimate our reasons to help other people even if they've acted irresponsibly. So I recognize that some amount of moral accountability is legitimate. That is absolutely fine. From one perspective to say that we owe people to some degree something when it's not their fault and perhaps we owe them less if it is their fault, but we're in a state of need. But there's all kinds of other considerations as well. And because it becomes so obsessed with individual responsibility, we've sort of started to lose those out of sight. So one thing that matters is simply charity. We don't want to let people die in the streets. We think that we should be responsive to their suffering. Another is that often the systemic effects of holding people accountable might be very bad. So for example, if losing your job means because you've taken drugs or something to lose your job and so you don't get any access to social assistance, if that also means that you're going to lose your car and it makes it impossible for you to find a new job because you can't travel to job interviews, you can't travel to your work, then this is simply counter productive. It's not helping economic productivity and it's not saving the community any money in the long run. And so there are simply utilitarian considerations for why we shouldn't always responsibility track to a full degree. So I think we're starting to lose those kinds of considerations out of sight when we just focus on the sort of moral philosophy of it, the moral reasons of it. But I also think that there's a second problem, which is that it leads us to frame all kinds of debates in terms of responsibility, even when they really shouldn't be about those questions. And I want to say a little bit more about that here. So you've seen the rise of the last 20 years of something that's called sort of new welfare bureaucracy. And that often asks pretty narrow questions. When you're going to see at the street level of bureaucrat now in order to get your welfare check, it's they're likely to ask, basically a version of are you at fault for being in need? Can you demonstrate to me that it's not your own fault that you're in need of assistance? But that often leads to bad outcomes. It's actually not very effective at reintegrating people in the job market. We've seen an example in England, where instead of asking people, what have you done in the last months in order to find the job? And was it your fault that you lost the job in the first place? We retrained workers at a job center to ask, what are you planning to do in the next month in order to find the job? And how can we assist you in that undertaking? And the effect was pretty significant. A lot more people found a job, and actually people working in the job centers ended up enjoying the work a lot more, finding it a lot more meaningful. So I think we should have much more perspective rather than retrospective considerations. The second bad thing about this new welfare state bureaucracy is that it treats the unfortunate with disrespect. That even if you really haven't done anything to be responsible for being in a bad state, you now have to go through this sort of humiliating process of proving that it wasn't your fault. And that in itself is a form of disrespect. And further leads to a sort of welfare state paradox, where because it is such a harrowing complicated experience, some of the people who are actually deserving of help, who haven't done anything wrong, end up opting out of the welfare system and not applying for particular benefits that presumably we want them to have. Right? Because when we're setting up a system to example to give people access to food stamps, we actually want them to get access to food stamps because the whole idea is that they might otherwise starve or the children might otherwise suffer. But because we've made the experience of getting them so humiliating in many cases, you end up with lots of people who are eligible, even on the quite punitive conception responsibility for those kind of benefits, not gaining access to them. And finally, this is a very important point, I think, is that it casts even those who we help as our social inferior. To me, ultimately, one of the questions about the welfare state is how we can preserve the society of equals, not a society where everybody has materially the same amount of money, but a society in which we can look upon each other as social equals. And I think the problem with the welfare system, the left version of it, which is to say, well, we give people money when we're really in need of help. We think that it's not their fault, right? Like we recognize that we only give people something when it's for something beyond their control. But as a result, we're going to argue that it's beyond everybody's control, that all of the sort of lower classes essentially are just there's nothing they can do to have more agency in their lives. Then even as we give them welfare benefits, we treat them as our social inferior. We say, well, here have some material benefits, because really there's nothing you could possibly do to have agency in your life. There's no real skills you have. We're sort of sorry, right? And I don't think that that's actually enabling you to serve one of the main purposes of a welfare state, which is not only to stop people from starving, but to preserve some amount of social equality, a sense that we have fellow citizens. So at the end of the book, I build a positive account of responsibility, and I'm only going to tease it very briefly here, but just to say a couple of things about it. First of all, I think we have to remember the reasons why responsibility can be a positive notion, why people actually seek out responsibility, why responsibility doesn't just have to be a punitive kind of idea that we spring on people and fail to live up to your responsibility as bad consequences, but why most people want forms of responsibility in their lives. So first people value responsibility because it gives them a sense of their own agency. It means that they feel they have control of their own lives. They can master their own life plans. Secondly, it's very important to people to be seen as an agent. It's not just feeling that you have your life under control, it's also that you don't want to live in a society where other people think of you as somebody who's incapable of forms of agency. And thirdly, one of the things we overlook when we have this very narrow conception of responsibility is that it's really important to many people to take on responsibility for others, but a huge part of people's social and cultural identity is that they are parents, caregivers, that they care for their romantic partners, that they're pet owners, that they have responsibility for political and artistic projects and all of this should be part of a wider notion of what responsibility means and it's been defined out of existence in the kind of way we talk about it. Second, it underwrites relationships like friendship and co-citizenship. We can't really think of other people as real co-citizens and as we think of them as responsible people who are capable of real agency and and relatedly as I've been saying it allows us to see them as real equals rather than people who are simply deserving of our compassion who we help from a sort of superior point of view. Now just a couple of thoughts about how this relates to public policy. I think that instead of starting from the assumption that people want to shirk away from the responsibility, that they want to sit at home and do nothing and the way we should think about responsibility is to ensure that we give them incentives that they have to live up to this external constraint we should recognize that most people actually seek out responsibility because if we understand responsibility in the right way it's something that's really important to people crucial to the life conception. But many like the material and educational preconditions for living up to the kind of responsibility that we're talking about. So instead we should think about how to increase people's access to education and how to ensure for example that they do have that car to get the job interview and so on. And so I think that institutions should think of themselves not just incentivizing people to have responsibility in punishing them when they don't but they should think of themselves as reforming the way in which we provide the preconditions through which people can exercise agency and live up to some form of responsibility. And to do this I think institutions should be forward-looking rather than backward looking so they should make an assessment of how in individual cases you can partner with citizens in order to give them more agency in order to empower them rather than just saying have you made bad choices in the past and if so we have to punish you for them. We have to think about how to build skills and partner with people to build skills and we have to get away from the punitive conception of responsibility that's really operationalized in the way the welfare state now works. So again this is just a teaser of some of the sort of different themes in the book and I'm sure Mark is going to push me in 17 other and more interesting directions. But yeah thank you very much. They went to sit there. All right thank you. Swap beers. Thank you this is great and for a 20-minute PowerPoint that was very impressive. I mean for a one you produced quickly which I don't think you did in the back of the video. Yeah yeah yeah. This is great I um to me I can't help put this in the context of my own experience which a lot of my you know work when I was younger involved the welfare reform in in in 1996 when I was working on the hill and largely you know working working for a senator who opposed it and doing all kinds of things to try to slow that down or improve it. And one thing that struck me in revisiting that period where there was a very rich theory of personal responsibility that actually kind of informed everybody like there were things that you didn't it was very hard to say look a lot of people really need support whether they're working or not. That was really that was not something that even the more liberal opponents of the bill were quite ready to say. And I sometimes I feel like I've been spun around in the you know either either I'm getting very very old or I got spun around very quickly to find myself in a world where we're now talking about things like universal basic income which really takes you quite far away from personal responsibility in the other direction or you also wrote a bit about the politics of crime in the book and and the responsibility lens there and that's turned around a little bit although of course at the same time the more dominant political theme whether reflected for example in Paul Ryan's approach is seems like doubling down on responsibility but without necessarily quite as much theory behind it you know. So maybe if you can kind of reflect on why some of that seems to be why we seem to be on some level moving away from at least if that may be more at the elite liberal level or the the elite centrist level in some ways moving away from the personal responsibility framework. Yeah I mean I I wonder to what degree the universal basic income really does move away from it. There's a couple of reasons for thinking that it might not. One is sort of relatively obstruous and philosophical I mean you know Philippe from Paris who who is one of the first big philosophical advocates of universal basic income is actually like a egalitarian and like the towns of these sort of very weird people who are right about in the book who's never heard of them before you probably shouldn't hear of them ever. Too late now. Too late now but the basic idea is that they think look it's perfectly fine for it to be a lot of inequality in society but you should you should you know all inequalities have to be sort of because of people's choices in some kind of level right. And so some of the people from Paris basically thinks that our personal attributes don't go very very deep that to a large extent we're not in control of our own fate and so therefore we should help everybody precisely because there's nothing they can do right and there is a political dimension of this as well. When you think about universal basic income it is a weird kind of idea where it's basically saying well look we're going to live in a world of automation that's going to take away 50% of jobs right. So there's going to be mass unemployment. Most of those people just not going to be capable of getting a job so let's buy them off by giving them a universal basic income. So I actually you know in my kind of scheme of things I don't think that universal basic income does say we give up on personal responsibility. I think it says the bulk of the population which is not going to be capable of doing any really productive work when they have to produce compete with machines are going to get enough to live because hey there's nothing they can do they can't get a real job right. And then the rest of the population however many it'll shake out to be the 10 percent of a 5 percent of a 30 percent they get to have a great life because they're you know highly creative whatever people they're going to be really affluent we have this two-class society right. So actually I think there is you can buy all of the stuff that the advocates of personal responsibility buy and have an account of the economy that makes you embrace universal basic income and that's one reason why I'm skeptical of universal basic income precisely because a you can sort of argue towards it from any ideological standpoint which is a little hard right but b because it means it actually is giving up on empowering people and giving the meaningful jobs and so on it's saying here you're not going to have a meaningful job you're not going to have something that really gives you an important thing to do in the world so have a little bit of money to shut you up. Right I guess so in other words where one of the one of the one of the critiques of the kind of social contract as it's evolved that that we've talked about here is the degree to which it over relied on work as a element of the social economy whether it's and not limited welfare per se is a relatively small percent of the population but EITC and other and you know expansions of Medicaid and things like that really were very dependent on work I've always felt like that dependence on work was almost synonymous with personal responsibility and you're basically saying that they could sort of be separated if you if you instead if you move from 1996 or 97 where we say hey there's a job for everybody if they want it to a world where you say maybe there isn't you still have the same conception of human obligation that's it that's it so this is a broader feature of this odd conception of personal responsibility right where where to go back from very brief I promise moment to political philosophy basically are people like Jerry Cohen who's sort of you know a left Marxist at some point saying well look you know how great inequalities are permitted in the world depends on whether or not people actually have a free will essentially right if you don't have a free will you are not allowed to have any kind of inequality right because at that point known equality is a result of people's actual choices and so on and any inequality is unjust whereas if you do have free will and actually a lot of inequality stem from people's choices but it's fine for that to be billionaires and for it to be really poor people right and that to me I mean the fact that that you arrive at that point is an indication that the premise is deeply deeply wrong right that that way of thinking about why we care for about inequality in the first place is absurd you want to live in a society in which all citizens have a decent life in which we treat each other with respect and can recognize each other as social equals and in which we have some amount of economic dynamism right and and and how to reconcile these difficult to reconcile goals should not depend either on well this guy is you know in need right now let's dig back into his high school record to see whether this is thought that he dropped out of high school or not nor should it be dependent on your metaphysical notions or free will I think you know bringing that down to the ground a little bit I think this is one of the strongest points in your book is that that that sort of a theory that kind of makes sense in political theory that your you know choices you make based on options should kind of come back to you and not necessarily more than choices based on you know simply rub like a genetic characteristic or or something like that and how that in in reality that's a very tough distinction I mean I think about for example people who make the option to choose a particular educational path that's that's that's not the right choice for them and there but they were sold on that or whatever do we you know do you do you write that offer do you hold people do you lock people down on the consequences of that choice or that that the death they've accrued or whatever thinking about something a lot of folks here work on I mean and that leads I think another interest you know a very interesting part of your argument is really the sense of mutuality of responsibility that it is a real deal for the state to hold up its end of that of that bargain and I think again in the welfare context I was always I always thought if there was one strong argument for the kind of structures that we talked about in welfare reform and Jason DeParle who's been a fellow here has written a book a lot about this if there was one strong argument it was you actually need to give those bureaucracies a kick in the butt to actually do something for people like without that sense of mutual responsibility they would happily stamp that $200 check that really wasn't helping anybody but you know maybe you could force them to create a system where they would actually spend time figure out what's a path to you know a different level of capacity for people I don't know I think that played out well made maybe like three counties in this country you know I don't think that's a universal truth but I think it was I think that idea of mutuality was was there and was important maybe say a little bit about about that yeah I mean I think what you're saying sort of brings out why I'm disenchanted with both the standard right wing orthodoxy and actually some left wing orthodoxy on this question right where the right wing orthodoxy but welfare status you know is making people lazy and immoral and it's a drag on our economic growth so what we need to do is to give people a kick in the butt and then they'll like finally like become entrepreneurial again and try harder and battle like make them wealthier and you know the economy go better and there's very little evidence of that actually happens and what it certainly does do is to spread a lot of suffering on the other side though I think there is you know a real left-wing complacency about aspects of a welfare state and about you know communities and and families and regions I mean it's not just in the United States when you think of parts of the north of England or certain parts of Germany where whether it's just a whole million years that basically have been dependent on the welfare state for much of a lives it's likely that children and grandchildren will be as well and we're sort of okay with that because they're not starving and you know they like have a state subsidized one to have bedroom apartments so you know things are fine and I think that that you know the first doesn't take seriously the moral claims of people who are in need but the second doesn't take seriously you know their potential actually it's to say that you're very comfortable with perpetuating them in a form of at best second class citizenship right and so I'm trying to think about like shifting the starting point by saying that people want to have agency in their lives want to have control over the lives we want to feel that there's something that they can aim towards and refocusing the policy question that way doesn't give you the answers right I mean how to actually help them break out of that cycle is incredibly difficult and complicated and I don't claim to have the answers to that but at least it sort of pushes away the debris that's there's a famous quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein that actually moral philosophy is negative that that moral philosophy is never about what you should do it's about clearing up people's misconceptions and and I actually for the best reason I don't love the quote but but I but it's I'm just realizing with first time I'm thinking this but it sort of applies to this book but I you know I do have a positive account towards the end of the book but most of what it's trying to do is to say we have this really pernicious notion of personal responsibility and it's stopping us from even seeing what the challenge is in the right way and so I'm trying to sort of clear away the debris well you certainly did that I guess my last question then we'll open it up is something I don't think you've addressed and I think a lot of people would say you know blah blah personal responsibility it's kind of all a racial code and you know we're coding certain categories of people obviously as lacking this thing and others as having it and that that kind of brings us into the present and that sense of others are getting stuff and we're not can you you know put that gloss back on I know political theory doesn't work very well with that concept but well it should well I mean what I would say is that that is right in the United States it's a really huge part of the debate I think it's less obviously true in various European countries and yet you end up with a pretty similar notion of personal responsibility doing a lot of work in the political context right so I think this idea that we only owe something to people if they've ticked all the boxes and they've done everything right is similar in Europe and United States and then there's obviously huge social determinants of who gets seen as doing the right thing and this is a huge cost of being willing to embrace personal responsibility stuff that and I do talk about that in the book that sort of you know if you construct the most subtle and intricate notion of what personal responsibility consists in then it might end up being relatively plausible that that perhaps we should judge people by that but then you look at the way in which it's operationalized the way in which it actually lives in political discourse in the way that actual street level bureaucrats end up making decisions on particular cases and of course it's not that kind of subtle notion both because of the real world constraints of bureaucracy and how talented the people that will grant them a lot how much time they have but also because of informational constraints we can't look into people's souls we don't have all of their back history we have a couple of documents and then we have to make a call and that obviously opens the door for all kinds of prejudice and discrimination so what does it end up have meaning when you say hey bureaucrat go and decide with this person gets food stamps depending on whether you think that they've lived up to the personal responsibility or not when the United States often it means you know you walk in and you're white and you're perhaps a little bit more educated and you know how to speak to a bureaucrat in their own language and you might be fine and you walk in and you're an ethnic minority and perhaps you didn't finish high school and you don't stand a chance right I was a colleague of ours was telling me a story from she'd spent a week or so in Jackson Mississippi recently and this hasn't gotten very much attention but the state of Mississippi has required everybody who's receiving whether it's temporary assistance for needy families or Medicaid or food stamps to reapply completely through a privatized system and do it all within 10 days and if they don't reapply and qualify re-qualify within 10 days they're you know good example of how it plays out in practice and of course the welfare benefits there are something like $140 a month so it's naughty but not much to get to but well well anyway I think that's a great way of combining those ideas I think we'd like to you know open it up to questions ideally questions but you know comments short comments are okay sometimes in the very back and wait for the microphone and just say who you are if you can Hi my name is Tim Azarch I was just thinking about your comment that universal basic income effectively is a form of appeasement to say you're never going to have any meaningful employment and therefore we're just going to give you some money to shut you up but I think you're you're conflating meaningful employment with employment that makes a reasonable amount of money they're not necessarily the same thing and one could argue that in fact universal basic income empowers people to do something meaningful with their lives because they're not they don't have to you know work as a Walmart greeter just to make ends meet yeah I mean look I think universal basic income it all depends on how much money you're going to give people and whether you abolish all our social services once you do right I mean if universal basic income is two thousand bucks a month and you know you still have Medicaid and Medicare and all of those kinds of things then it does empower people not to take bad jobs and perhaps it does mean that the economy has to sort of reject itself where you know really unpleasant labor you know actually have to pay really well right even if it's not very productive because that's just like and perhaps like it also increases the incentive to like develop a great machine to do these unpleasant jobs and that's good too right like great people don't have to do the unpleasant jobs and so it's just sort of like leads to this utopia where people can choose how they spend the time and then improves the economy and so on right I just sort of you know to give people that much money on UBI is actually a huge economic drag right and so I think there's going to be downward pressure from that I also think that there's a huge political problem here that the people who do have relatively lucrative jobs are going to be the people who obviously pay most of the UBI through taxes and so since they will tend to be most politically powerful and connected since they're much wealthier and so on I think there'll be a very very strong coalition to reduce the amount of UBI over time and so my fear is that what UBI turns into over time is really just the bare minimum to live right and at that point I don't know that it empowers people that much to say I'm not going to do a bad job because they'll still want a little bit of extra money and so on right so it depends a little bit on your political imagination of how UBI plays out in practice and a little schedule of that let me say one other thing which relates more to the next book I'm writing about liberal democracy and so on and the crisis we're seeing I don't think UBI would help to alleviate the populist pressure because when you look at who votes for populists it's not necessarily the very poorest people in society it is often people at the lower middle who thought that they would be given the American dream or whatever the French dream and they thought that they would do better than the parents that they would have really great lives and then they've seen economic stagnation they've seen some economic insecurity and so on and they're really afraid of social decline they're afraid of winding up at the bottom wrong and perhaps you can take away some of that anxiety because you know that you're not existentially threatened but you always have sort of some amount of money but I don't think that's what they want I think what they want is you know a middle class existence that goes beyond what UBI is ever likely to offer them and so giving them UBI is not going to stop them from voting for for people like Donald Trump in fact it might just make more salient the idea that it's people in their position who sort of fall through the crags who are not getting that much help while a lot is given to the people below them I just just had one thing that I thought Yasha I think one an argument for some form of UBI or even the more limited form that is a child allowance is that it is it is a way to respect and acknowledge the work that people do in their own family and that's not market you know that's not paid in the marketplace and I think that's something we've the idea that we're getting a little closer to that to acknowledging that seems to be of some value even if we never quite quite do get there that seems fair to me and I think the idea of a child allowance is quite different actually and that's all kind of what a most European country have a child allowance and I think any form of UBI to you know even like a minor tweak becomes a major philosophical or major difference of practice in the back row again yes sir my name is Kami Bhatt I'm at the Pakistan inspector and in the on the same topic speaker Newt Gengert gave a talk at the Heritage Foundation couple of months ago and he said President Donald Trump personally knows some people who depend on Medicaid and in in the in the result I mean looking at that statement it's one could raise a question that if we intentionally let this healthcare reform fail if we did it do you think that he is encouraging those people he knows personally and they are depending on Medicaid even though they work very hard or he is kind of playing game with the system thanks I I don't know I sorry I I don't know if Donald Trump knows somebody personally who who's on Medicaid I don't know how that plays into into this idea I mean what I will say is that you know the sort of red obvious point that that that Donald Trump did get some support in part because he changed the sort of Orthodox Republican language about this that he did not play into the sort of right wing version of personal responsibility discourse but said look there's something where we owe to some people irrespective of what kind of decisions they've made that you know we should give people we should give everybody health insurance not just the people who hold on a good job and the way he's been governing actually has not been that right so there's a huge difference there sort of by and large people tend to have sort of somewhat socially soft rhetoric and then sometimes a little tougher policy or rather than it's been the other way around so it's been sort of striking the degree to which you know he veered from that orthodoxy in the campaign but he really hasn't veered from it in how he's been governing thank you my name is Alana Tsarvel I work in development assistance so I'm going to start with UBI and go into philosophy and ask you to to pick your brain a little bit so I don't think UBI is that realistic I mean I haven't done a lot of too in-depth reading but I think again maybe it'll be piloted in some countries maybe the Swedes etc but I think if the world economy takes a downturn it'll go south it's definitely not gonna you know be spread in the Middle East and other countries etc so I was hoping you could talk about the reality of that but I think looking forward into the issues of populism and democracy and the reason why Bernie let's say was popular and the reasons that Trump got elected there's been a lot also written about the issues of capitalism and where it's been failing and so if you could talk more about you know the weaknesses and where you see reforms potentially because I think that's going to be the future thank you I mean to me the the statement of capitalism has been failing is a little overboard right I mean when you look at the last 20 25 years you've seen a billion people lifted out of poverty worldwide you've seen actually a phenomenal spread of of wealth and skill and and decent human life across the world and it's very much capitalism globalization that's done that you've also seen the sort of famous elephant graph which means that you know around the 90th percentile of the income distribution worldwide so people who are in the global scheme of things pretty well off doing very very badly and those happen to be you know no middle-class voters in Michigan so so I think there's real problems there and I think there's a real problem that since the 2008 financial crisis nearly all of the gains from growth have gone to the very richest people so I don't think it's about you know capitalism is failing capitalism is only ever worked because it was embedded in a political framework and what we have to reform is the way in which we harness the power of capitalism in order to ensure that everybody gets to share in its benefits and I think that diffuses the language that's a more helpful way of thinking about it right and and that's the same you know one one point that's in the subterranean some of the stuff I've been talking about with personal responsibility is that but one of the big assumptions here is that it's sort of are you deserving or are you not deserving I think that's just the wrong way of thinking about the economy the right way of thinking about the economy is that it's a social construct that we've built together that doesn't mean that we can invent it to be whatever it is right and there's some things that work and some things that don't work there's real constraints but the question is how do we want to set this political invention the social construct up in such a way that it benefits the most people that its rewards are distributed most justly now we have to pay attention to political dynamism and to to efficiency there right so taxing people at 100% if they earn 400,000 euros or more as Mr. Jean-Luc Mélenchon is suggesting in France is a non-starter because it would destroy the wealth that you're trying to distribute but you also do have to think about okay how how do you actually create the kind of society you want and that's a kind of shift in perspective what I'm trying to make I think in a lot of the debate about responsibility the idea is okay here's a moral notion of responsibility then let's assess who's responsible and who's not responsible reward or punish them and then we'll see how it shakes out instead I think we should say well what's the goal of things like the welfare state in the first place why do we want to have a market economy and it's in order to have economic dynamism to have a lot of wealth but also to reduce suffering and have some amount of social equality and then you ask okay what kind of policies do you need in order to achieve that and that's a perspective that we should get into to have us just a piggyback on that I think it's problematic to compare the European welfare system with the American because the American kind of emphasis on responsibility has really been a way of not doing any kind of public policy to make sure that people have chances when they're born I mean if you're born in a situation where you think that nothing you do makes a difference you get a poor education your parents can't find jobs that's very different than in the European system where they accept some kind of class structure and that you have to mitigate the worst effects of that so I just wonder if you can comment on that yeah I mean so I think that sort of thinking about the distinction between responsibility tracking and responsibility buffering elements of a welfare state you know Europe was more responsibility buffering 20 years ago and it's more responsible than the United States and it's more responsibility buffering the United States today so there is a distinction there European societies do do more in order to try and equalize people's life chances and so on not always as effectively as we might want to think from the last 20 years however both sets of countries have moved towards being more responsibility tracking and less responsibility buffering so both in Europe and the United States all of the reforms over the last 20, 30 years have actually looked pretty similar and have moved in a very similar direction so yes even today European societies do a little bit more than that but I think the way in which the language of personal responsibility has reshaped for welfare state and has reduced the degree to which it buffers people from those kind of circumstances has increased in both places so I know you did this in the original talk but just by responsibility buffering you mean kind of insulating ensuring protecting people from consequences whether they're the consequences of their own choices like regardless of the cause in their own choice so one way of being of responsibility buffering institutions is the sort of net for the social safety net right right that like whatever you do you fall whether it's your own for it or not like you fall into the net and the net is there right where's responsibility tracking institutions are sort of saying well why are you falling you know like let's let's get out of the net to a whole all right I think we have time for a few more fuzz this is awesome I want to extend I'm fuzz with new America I want to extend this thinking and do a thing that I've been thinking about a little bit more lately is playing off her point schools right so we have the mortgage interest tax deduction in America which is flows from one of these a tangential thought of build community be responsible then we've extended that to how we fund schools which therefore has burdened children with this notion that your schools are more are better because you're more responsible community that seems weird to sort of project this onto children who have no agency for their own responsibility right is that a fair assumption to make yeah I mean I think the sort of the funding system for schools in the United States is one of the most screwed up things about my new country I don't think there's another country I'm aware of where schools are funded at such a local level so I mean in Germany there are city schools and state schools where city schools are funded by the local town and state schools are funded by you know the barrier and you know and so on and so they may wind up being some differences there right but since it's not at the level of neighborhood and since all cities are sort of more socially mixed than like individual neighborhoods within them you really don't get anything close to that kind of distinction you still end up you know having catchment areas which are less strict than they are in the states but which do mean that sort of like you know if you're in a fancy neighborhood you the school is going to be better but it's not that it has sort of a completely different supply of teachers and like a much fancier building it's just that because the students are sort of for more advantage backgrounds and so on you know the school ends up being better but it's a much less pernicious effect yeah and so obviously look I mean like one way of bringing this back to my argument is to say that one of the pernicious things about responsibility language is that it's just sort of you know I think actually ends up asking the wrong question right like on the one side there's the danger of holding somebody accountable for a fact that they're like dropped out of high school but it's really difficult to factor in well they'd gone to a better high school then perhaps we wouldn't have dropped out like how is a bureaucrat going to factor that in but not right and then it might say okay look you know like your own thought will you've achieved something or not when there's obviously such deep complicated things in society that have driven that so so I just think it's the wrong question right the right question to ask is not is it the thought of people in poor neighborhoods that we're not doing better the right question to ask is how can we improve those neighborhoods how can we increase the chances of children in those neighborhoods the question of whether or not it's somehow their own thought is actually really tangential to this right like even if you're outraged by this I think the the tendency in the current the way we think about politics at the moment is to say well actually it's not the thought so therefore but whatever it was the thought it doesn't matter we would still have very good reason to try and improve their lives and give them a better education I just think the question shouldn't be as central as it is I think Fuzz's question the beginning of Fuzz's question makes me think there's an underlying thing here which is so Fuzz says for example we have the mortgage introduction and the idea behind that is like build community and home ownership and so forth and some of that comes to the question of the relationship between ideas and policy like you could certainly tell that story and you could also tell the story that you know the real estate lobbyists got a tax break you know and sometimes we impose these narratives on to things that are really simple power politics that happened in 1945 or something like that with something to be aware of and then in the in the back there we'll just do a couple more and wrap up so we have time for for the food and drink Wade Jacobi the Transatlantic Academy Yasha I wanted to ask you about the compliments to the welfare state in both Europe and America of course the state works with other actors unions and employer associations churches religions how much do you think these other organizations have also made the same mental philosophical transformation that the state has made did they did they did they bring these ideas to the state from some religious orientation did they or maybe it's the opposite maybe while the state changed its tune some of these organizations have kept to a more old-fashioned notion of responsibility just curious how you see that playing out that's very interesting you know it's an interesting thing that I mean sort of to to preface it a little even more broadly there's just a shift in how people think about this right so so when you look for world value survey data you know the amount of people who judge somebody for being alcoholic the number of people judge somebody for having an affair we tend to think we'll become more sort of sexually permissive over time in society on this particular metric we're not the amount of people who judge people for being drug addicts has really gone up over 30 or 40 years right um 40 years ago people actually didn't say that that that you know they wouldn't want to have that kind of person as a neighbor or or things like that then then they do now right so there's an interesting development there and then there's a question about how far it's expressed in civil society and I've never quite thought about this question systematically so I'm speculating a little bit here I think it's a really obvious way of thinking to a compliment of the argument but I think for some anecdotal evidence that there's been a similar shift rather than a countervailing one right so when you think of homeless shelters I think a lot of them now have moved to a philosophy where first of all they're very very strict on kicking people out and they misbehave in any way but also they require increasingly I think and perhaps somebody can correct me if I'm wrong for for residents to raise part of the money in order to stay at it and it's not just the financial consideration that we need sort of a 15 bucks over 10 bucks that the residents will pay per night in order to stay there but it's very much thought of as being a sort of like well that way they have to go out and they have to do something and rather than this sort of encouraging indolence it is their way of having a you know form of responsibility in in helping to sustain the the the the the shelter and sort of you know learn the skills to move out of it right and and there's a real question about that I mean is the best use of somebody who's in that dire life situation trying to raise the 10 or 15 bucks for the shelter or you know are there ways of partnering with them in a way that actually doesn't power them to move out of the shelter eventually much better you know I have limited experience in that field so I don't want to prejudge it that but it seems to me that that there could at least be a case and I'll look into it that there's been a similar development there I think there was a question in the middle here and the woman in the gray jacket Hi Ann Yeoman now I have like three questions just picking up on your last comment earlier in in your presentation you had used the term agency and then we're talking about responsibility and there's sort of various ways of thinking about sort of the same thing I was at a conference a few months ago about college promise programs and there was a big push to make community college if not all college free and so forth one of the researchers there presented some interesting results from from some of her studies so we know that very often students who work a lot while they're in school don't tend to complete tend to drop out takes them a longer however in her discussions with students about you know would they like to have free college so they didn't have to work the answer was mostly no they liked work they gave them a sense of value as a role of status this kind of thing so where this is taking me is it seems to be that the paid work is the cypher for which we don't have an alternative for our worth and this really plays out historically in the value that was placed on women's work in the home on volunteerism those things didn't count as a work in the same sense and so if you think about a universal income or you think about some other kind of a minimum which would allow people to do things that are essential and useful but we we don't have the respect for that and so I'm just kind of interested you might connect those threads a little bit yeah I mean certainly I think that you know precisely for the reasons that you said that is one additional unjust an additional way in which the reticle personal responsibility ends up reinforcing unjust social practices that if you have free children and you're taking care of them that doesn't count as somehow living up to your personal responsibility you know whereas if you work a lower job in the world but you know that does and that seems to be a sort of strange that seems to be misaligned right now I don't know exactly how to address that from from within personal responsibility right I think it's it's again a question of how do we we think what is socially useful work and to what degree do we value different kinds of activities and then how do we structure our economy around them and so for me this is another example of how when we get away from the notion of personal responsibility the kind of questions we wind up asking are more helpful right when we think about stuff like care work from the perspective of personal responsibility we're drawn to questions like well how should we factor in you know that somebody chose to have children right is somebody irresponsible if they have children even for the poor right and then there's some people say yes you know and other people say no that's outrageous and I just think that's the wrong conversation to be having right we should actually thinking of bigger picture things about how to structure social reproduction in a society where we clearly want to encourage people to have children at some kind of level but we also want to make sure that they have a material preconditions to look after the children and have empowered lives and I just don't think that the notion of personal responsibility is nearly as helpful in having that conversation as it would seem given the level of attention we pay to it in both let's go to them great wonderful do you want to have any last word I know there's some other people have questions but we'll have yeah perhaps just one last word about the connection of all of this to you know my new book project about the crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of populism which I know you are pushing me about a little bit before we we took a stage you know I do think that we haven't developed vision for how to give people meaningful lives in which they feel like the control of their fate this is something that's dropped out of the conversation both on the left and on the right and I think that's something to do with the dominance of this kind of mistaken form of responsibility that I've been talking about and I do think that that has a lot to do with why people are attracted to populists I do think that there is something about this particular political moment where people are saying I don't feel like my life is getting much better I'm worried that my kid's life is going to be worse than mine I feel subject to these huge forces in the world and all the politicians can tell me is sort of getting your bike and pull up your socks right and so solving the piece of the puzzle that's about you know not just the welfare state but more broadly you know a political economy that actually does something for most people and giving them the feeling that they're in control of their lives so they have some kind of real agency about how they spend the time where they'll end up in life is going to help alleviate some of the anger that has caused things like the election of Donald Trump so the link is sort of it's not straightforward and these two projects certainly are sort of separate projects but I do think that thinking through the questions that I deal with in this book are precondition in order to design the kind of policies we'll need to quell the anger that helps to explain Trump and populism they're wonderful well I think we all agree that at the very least you've lived up to the Wittgenstein quote of like you know breaking up misconceptions and possibly go on much further than that so thank you all for joining us for this conversation and thank you Yasha for this wonderful book as well as your comments they've turned on the music so we're done