 Welcome to economics and beyond. I'm Rob Johnson president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with Evan Osnos, a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine and the author of The Age of Ambition, a book about China that won the National Book Award in 2014. We're here to talk about a number of things, including the fact that each of us spent substantial time in our life in Greenwich, Connecticut and Evan has a new article in the New Yorker that talks about how Donald Trump, how would I say? Inspired Greenwich, Connecticut to change from what we might call the noblesse oblige years that are associated with the Bush family to the present. Evan, thanks for joining me today. My pleasure, Rob. It's great to be with you. Thanks. So we're talking here on the 20th of May, 2020, and we're talking in the context of a pandemic. We're talking in the context where many people think that the distress we're experiencing is something that none really could have foreseen, though there may be a few scientists who would argue with that. But it's a dreadful disorientation of society and the notion or comfort of legitimacy. What I would say is the recipe book we had all been living with got thrown out the window by these events, and I'm curious what you're seeing, what gives you heartburn, what good actions and what prospect for change there are out there and just your picture. Where are we and where are we going? Well, you know, I am like so many people right now. I've been, I think, horrified and chastened and sort of humbled by how fast we went from a period of normalcy and know the world that we all recognize and that we all inhabit every day to something that feels to all of us everywhere, completely alien, and here we are confined to our houses. You know, here I am at home. But also, of course, feeling immensely fortunate, you know, my family is, for the moment, healthy and safe, and I think I am struck by how much this moment has been a moment that reveals, you know, there is that phenomenon when you go through a crisis like this, that this peeled away some of the covering, some of the kind of political bunting that sometimes covers up the weak points in our society and our politics and our relationships with each other, and what we've seen is it's become a cliche, but it is worth reminding ourselves. I mean, the vulnerabilities of people in our society who don't have the ways to fortify their livelihoods or to recede inside of, I know, a cone of protection at a moment like this. Look, I'm a lucky guy. I can do my job from a lot of different places and mercifully, there are people who still want to read what I have to write, but the cushion of stability and comfort and the fragility surrounding it has become just immediately apparent, I think, to people. And I also find that, and this may sound counterintuitive, I find that a source of hope, because in some ways, you know, we were, as a country, I think, in so many ways, we were listing towards this state of greater inequality, of enormous protection and stability for some people, and tremendous vulnerability and instability for others. And what this crisis has revealed is the depth of those disparities. But it is now front and center, front page news every day that there are demographic slices of the country, whether we're talking about African Americans who are suffering from the virus at much higher rates than whites or other segments of the population, they're just hugely vulnerable. And that is now an inescapable fact of the day-to-day commerce of politics and the economy. And that is progress, because it actually means that this is putting the issue where it needs to be, which is at the center of the action. So I find that, I think that can be a centering moment for our politics, even if it feels like a moment of such extremes. Well, I had a wonderful talk yesterday with the former NBA legend Isaiah Thomas, and he was talking about the inspiration of Muhammad Ali. And I will repeat what we discussed yesterday that in the Guinness Book of World Records, the shortest poem in history was articulated from the stage at Harvard by Muhammad Ali. He was getting off the stage and somebody in the audience said, Ali, what about a poem? He got back up on stage and he looked at the audience and he said, me, we. Right now, we're living in the awareness of we after a heck of a lot of focus on me. And I think this is, you got, you underscored exactly where the turning point in, which am I called defining success and defining purpose, have to evolve, have to come from if we're going to get things back together and on a healthy trajectory. Yeah, well, you and I are both in some ways aficionados of the Ali tradition. I mean, I just, both, you know, his capacity to summon the moment, but also that is exactly where we are as a people, as a country, as a community. We are having an active discussion about the boundaries of our, call it our moral universe. Who are we connected to? Who are we obligated to? Who are we responsible for? And how do my actions impact your life? And that kind of conversation, which is sometimes submerged within the daily, you know, cut and thrust politics, is now, that's what the virus has shown us. And that is, that is, if we can summon the energy to make something productive of it, that's useful to us, because there is no disguising the fact that we are now all of us embedded in, you know, I think it was King called it, you know, the fabric of mutuality that we were all of us connected in this kind of interdependence. And this is reminded us of it. Yeah, well, and I'm seeing some very affluent people rising to this challenge. I watched a video of an interview with Mark Cuban the other day. I've seen some of the recent acts, and they're not surprising to me because he was my neighbor and close friend for many years, Ray Dalio and Greenwich, who I know was also part of the article that you wrote for the May 11th issue of The New Yorker. But I guess, so I can see wonderful people. Paul Tudor Jones has done some amazing things, and he was another neighbor of mine in Connecticut. So I'm not trying to demonize people, but I read your story and I'm looking at the kind of way of believing and I'm always reminded by my theological friends, money is not the root of all evil. But the love of money might well be. And I thought Bob Dylan captured this beautifully in his song, Masters of War, where the second to last verse he says, let me ask you one question, is your money that good? Will it buy you forgiveness? Do you think that it could? I think you will find when your death takes its toll, all the money you made will never buy back your soul. Well, in the world of we, I'm curious how you think that lyric would go down in Greenwich, Connecticut right now. So I'll tell you, I'll tell people where I come from on this question. And how I think about money and places like Greenwich. To announce my priors here, I am a proud son of Greenwich, Connecticut. My great grandparents moved to Greenwich in 1937. They were Midwesterners from Chicago and they bought a house there and it kind of passed down through the generations and then we moved there in the mid 80s and I was a kid and I had, I just grew up in this place of extraordinary almost kind of uncountable advantages. I went to a public school that had everything I could possibly ever want. It's just a tremendous place to be a kid and it was to win a kind of cosmic lottery. And part of growing up in Greenwich was this awareness of a certain, obviously a sense of abundance, I mean to put it in numerical terms. This is a, as a metropolitan area, the Southern Connecticut is the richest metropolitan area in the country. In 2016 it was ahead of San Francisco, Midland, Texas, you name it. And for a long time that abundance, that money was situated in a, call it a kind of set of interlocking ideas about citizenship and responsibility. And that, you know, when you had that, when you had those resources that that came with a sense of commitment to helping people who didn't have those resources. I mean, it's, this is baked into the old idea of no bless oblige and there was a lot of problems with that. I mean, let's state the obvious here, that part of the reason why people turned ultimately against the WASP ascendancy was because the WASPs were exclusionary, they were keeping out minorities and people from outside that community, from controlling powerful institutions in America. So nobody is mourning the end of that age by any means. And that's important to point very clearly, that this is, and I should say in our own personal terms, you know, my family was a kind of mix, right? We had the WASPs on my mom's side and then my father's family is Jewish. And in some ways, you know, the father's side of the family wouldn't have been all that welcome to Greenwich for a long time. And those conditions have changed over the years. It's a place that is in many ways much more, those kinds of discriminations are not as apparent. They're not there in quite the same degree. Nobody pretends that they've disappeared, but they're just not there in the way they were. And yet something has fundamentally changed in the way that money fits into our understandings of ourselves as citizens. What do we actually need to? What do we owe others? And I was struck as I went back and looked at the history of taking one thread, looking at the way that the Republican Party in town talks about these kinds of questions. And to give you just one example, you know, the town was very closely associated with the Bush family, as you mentioned. And the Bush family, going back to the grandfather of George W. Bush, Prescott Bush, he was the guy who ran the local, who was the moderator of the local town council, the representative town meeting. He then went on, became a U.S. senator. And he was always to the left of his party. He was a classic country club republic, Rockefeller Republic. He believed in being, he was a fiscal conservative, but he believed that you should spend money when you need to to invest in things like science, education, defense. And as he said, once famously on the floor of the Senate, he sort of beseeched his fellow senators. He said, we need to spend money, even if it means raising taxes, in order to make sure that we're fortifying the essential services that make this country what it is. I'm paraphrasing. Now, that idea really was at the heart of what made Greenwich tick politically for all of my growing up. And I think for a lot of people, it's how we still imagine that country club republican character cliche. And something has changed. And today, in Greenwich, just to round out this point, the reason why I got interested in this subject at all is that when Donald Trump emerged as a political candidate in 2015, he was not an obvious fit for Greenwich. In fact, you know, people made fun of him. They said, look, we remember when he owed a house in town and he has nothing to do with us here. And they would piece in the local paper where somebody said, you know, he's vulgar and he's ill mannered and he's not our kind of guy. And then when the primary was held in 2016, Donald Trump won the Republican primary in Greenwich and not just in Greenwich, he won in 20 out of 23 of the towns and cities in Fairfield County. And I realized something profound had evolved, something had changed in the nature of the Republican idea in my part of the country. And I needed to understand what had happened. And that was the beginning of this search, this inquiry. And it led me down a long road talking to a lot of people to try to understand what changed. But something profound did change in how people think about the role of money in their lives and in their sense of their commitment to others. I had done some work teaching at the Union Theological Seminary where I co-taught a course for a couple of years with Serene Jones, who's the director. And we had a wonderful guest. We used to do panels and we'd bring in economists to talk with theologians and philosophers in a series of seminars that I net sponsored. We called them economics and theology. I used to call it means and ends in my own kind of shorthand. But one of the guests was a lady named Catherine Tanner, who I believe, I think she's now at University of Chicago, but I think she was at Yale in those days. And she wrote a book that was called The Economy of Grace. And it really shook me when I heard her on stage and I had a copy of this book because she told the story of how what I'll call the era of no bless oblige or what I think you referred to as the Rockefeller Republicans were in a place where they viewed their good fortune as a responsibility and their good fortune required of them to be stewards of a society. And what Catherine described in this book was something that was quite eerie and she she spoke of on stage was how, which you might call the arrows of causality and action got reversed. Instead of saying God has given me good fortune and I have a responsibility to humanity, nature, mankind. They said, I got rich. I'm one of the chosen ones. And God has picked me and I am legitimate and could do whatever I want. And I found that kind of haunting because myself living in Belle Haven, but having grown up in Detroit, I found a sense of I always tell the story when Robert McNamara lived in my community and was the head of Ford Motor Company. They asked him, why do you make 14 times as much as your average worker? And he said, anything more would be obscene. And I sat around the pool in the Newt Gingrich era of 94, 95. And everybody acted like if you didn't, and at this time, CEOs were making 280 to 350 times what their average worker made. And sitting around that pool, there are a lot of CEOs and or people on the way to be in CEOs, or people on the way to be in CEOs, they're in the neighborhood. And the kind of ethic was you're weak, you're sissy if you don't go for it and get that kind of money for yourself. So I think you probably grew up in Greenwich and saw a little more of the no bless oblige baseline that became transformed. When I entered there in early 1993, I think it was already accelerating. But it is interesting what you do in your article, which is Donald Trump would have been considered an outcast kind of unsavory in the Greenwich that I lived in, even though it was getting rarer. And you're talking about them coming around, which is, how would I say, that's ominous, I think. And it's a reflection of this broader cultural change. And that's really one of the things that comes through so clearly and what you're describing, Robin, I think what I sensed and have watched, I sensed over the last 30 years or so growing up there and then to today is a change in the norms in the cultural expectations that one has of each other in a community. I'll give you an example. So back in the 80s and the 90s, it was, and earlier, really in the 70s and 60s, it was the richest people in town, as one of my friends put it, used to dress like gardeners. It was, you kept things submerged. It was, and there's a bit of artifice in that. It was people, it was a bit of an affected sense of threadbare nobility, but it was at least a reflection of an idea that one should not be ostentatious in the way that you think about your money. And there was an old story people always have told, it's true, I talked to a friend yesterday who remembers this, that Morgan Stanley, senior executives used to compete to see who could wear the cheapest wristwatch. And then you began to see that the polarities on how we think about money and the reflection of it and the manifestations of it just began to change. And I saw this in a very subtle way, but in many ways a telling way in the kinds of, in the kinds of stone walls that people used to have in Greenwich. I, we all remember these old New England farmers' walls that run all over. These are the Robert Frost lines of gray that run from, you know, Maine down to, to the southern tip of Connecticut. And what you began to see over the course of the late 90s, really when we were beginning to, it was a much greater wealth was coming into Greenwich at the time. It was, in some ways, it was an echo, obviously, of a booming stock market. But you began to see it show up physically on the terrain because instead of building these small farmers' walls, people started building these tall, mortared, six foot walls. And they became known actually in the trade and the stone masons around the area started to call them the Greenwich walls because they began in Greenwich. And you began to see the towns in the area, Westchester County and some of the surrounding municipalities started to pass these rules and rewrite their zoning laws to prevent these walls from coming into the community. They sort of treated them like an invasive species. And it's because in many ways those walls were the reflection of an idea. And I think that idea, that sense that it was both a reflection of power and status, but also, and this turned out to be hugely prescient, it was also a reflection of a kind of seclusion, a desire to receive, to, to retreat within ourselves and within the confines of a space we control. You know, that was, I think, a precursor of a political moment that we now inhabit. I mean, to draw the metaphor to its most obvious, sort of, you know, obvious conclusion, we have a president who got to the White House on the promise of building a wall, a physical construction that would, as he imagined it, you know, wall off the United States from its connections to the rest of the world and from the threats that he perceived originating abroad. That's the, the ultimate reflection, the ultimate outgrowth and the sort of destination of this phenomenon that we began to see on the most local level 20 years ago in the birth of Greenwich Walls. And that's where I see the connection between that local culture, the local political ecosystem and what we do. Well, you can see there's a lot of work and INET has funded some of it, kind of, resonates with the work of Anne Case and Angus Deaton on the diseases of despair. But where we've gone at INET is people like Shannon Monat and others have done research which correlates the geography of the diseases of despair with the places that were disrupted with, by for instance, austere state and local budgets, the influx of globalization, automation and machine learning. And what you see is where what I'll call the disruptors have been violent. You see the despair. And you see in the United States, the places where Donald Trump was most successful, say, relative to Mitt Romney against Obama or the last time there were two challengers, it was George W. Bush versus Al Gore in 2000. And so the and then if you look, by the way, around the world, the leave campaign in Brexit had an awful lot to do with the austere budgets outside of London and the fortification of London with all the public resources or the role of automation and job displacement in Germany and the rise of the AFD or the rise of Marie Le Pen. So this, what I'll call nationalistic wall building, defensive, despairing kind of politics is very highly correlated with economic outcomes and perhaps correlated with the kind of work like the philosopher Michael Sandel is doing right now on the what he calls the tyranny of meritocracy, whereby elites in service of the concentrated wealth and power are justifying that concentration of wealth and power. And because they are considered the most educated at the top of the meritocracy, this is somehow, which you may call so correlated with wisdom or truth. And I sense this kind of despairing is intermixed with this unmindfulness or the intoxication, what I refer to as the love of money and how we break out of that cycle. I don't know, maybe this pandemic has a silver lining in that it shakes up that kind of mindset, though I'll cite your journalistic peer, Jesse Eisinger at ProPublica, who produced a very ominous article, I think it was about a week or a May 10th, the bailout is working hyphen for the rich. So we may have some more despondency, we may have some more distrust in governance about the distributional kind of outcomes once they're diagnosed, like we had after 2008, where Joe Stiglitz said the polluters got paid, where state and local communities couldn't get the Federal Reserve to buy their bonds, so they had to close police department schools, not repair infrastructure, while the toxic financial instruments were be added to the Fed's balance sheet. And the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker used to say, the Federal Reserve cannot be in the business of picking winners, or it will become publicly controversial and it will lose its independence. Now I think we're in that conflict now. Yeah, you raise such an important point. The depths of despair, which is on a lot of our minds these days because of the book that Deaton in Case published, I am very fortunate in a way to have lived in a few different places in the country that have very, very different experiences of the last 30 or 40 years, one of them being Greenwich. I also worked my very first job out of college in 1999 was in a little town in West Virginia, Clarksburg, West Virginia, worked as a newspaper photographer at the Clarksburg Expone Intelligent. And what is so striking about it from my perspective, West Virginia, as we all know, is in some ways the epicenter of the kinds of phenomena we're talking about, the economic dislocation of automation and globalization and the impact of dying industries like coal. And at the same time, one of the things that doesn't show up in the data that begins to, I think, explain some of how we got is, and I've been spending a lot of time in West Virginia over the last few years, which in some way is sort of like that, just spending time in the garage, is that part of the feeling of loss in West Virginia was very much a sense of the loss of that upward trajectory because it was once there. I mean, in Clarksburg, there are banners that hang around town that hung around for years, which were a memory of the fact that in 1955, I think it had been voted one of America's best-run cities. And that memory of being an object of admiration, of being a place that was on the trajectory towards success, means that then the absence of it becomes felt that much more strongly. And just to put it in very clear political terms, we all remember West Virginia was a Democratic stronghold for years and years, and it was essential to John F. Kennedy's getting of the nomination in 1960. And in 2000, West Virginia by 2000, it had flipped. And it voted West Virginia, went with George W. Bush, and it's sometimes lost to the details of history, but it's worth remembering. If George W., if Al Gore had won West Virginia in 2000, he would have won the presidency. So the change that we see today in our politics is apparent if you look in the right places and you began to see those changes in places like West Virginia and Clarksburg 20 years ago. And if I can, I'll add one other note, which I think is quite encouraging actually, quite a hopeful note in some ways about the moment we're in these days, which is that, you know, we're talking, you mentioned a moment ago exactly the COVID, the crisis, the virus has forced this political moment to a more, sort of to a crisis point, an urgency. And you see it in, right now, there's a fascinating case of unfolding in the local politics. This happens to have coincided just around the time this article came out, basically in the couple of weeks since then, that the local government in Greenwich has taken a look at the economic projections and they've said, well, you know, we're going to take a big hit on our local tax revenue, and therefore we need to make a big cut to the education budget. They proposed a $3 million cut to the Board of Education. And this is, this is huge. Just Superintendent of Schools described it as scary what the effect would be on teaching in the public schools. And instead of people kind of shrugging along and saying, okay, well, I guess that's going to be the effect. We're in an economic, you know, recession of highest order, we're going to have to just accept it. People actually have risen up and said, no, that's not okay. You know, here we are, we're in one of the most fortunate pieces of geography on the planet. We need to be able to keep investing in our public schools in a way that keeps them vibrant, attractive, and that is looking out for people who don't have another alternative. And so you've seen this really robust political response. So I think of that as a, in some ways, it's the bookend to what I describe in this piece, which was the drift into Trumpism, you know, the drift towards that seduction that he would promise has been also now met with a response where people say enough is enough. This is not okay. We're not going to keep cutting to the point that it undermines the quality of our basic commitments to the kids in our public schools. And that's quite encouraging. And I think it does show the way in which this crisis has perhaps begin to point the light towards to whatever it is that will follow. Well, I think, you know, your article helped me in part because I had lived in Greenwich, and I had come there as what you might call an employee and example of the power of financialization. Years before I had worked as the chief economist of the Senate banking committee time of the 87 stock market crash and the savings and loan bailout, which looks like a minor warm up game compared to what we've seen since then. But but the even as I worked in the hedge fund industry, my skepticism and George Soros and Stanley Druckenbiller skepticism about these complex package derivatives and so forth was was it was quite daunting to feel like the world was going that way. And there was a kind of recklessness that I guess people started to count on the central bank and the public authorities to underpin what we used to to use Iraq analogy. We used to call it the mother of all moral hazards that the more they promised to bail out the more risk and the more the financiers understood they had a one sided bet. And in part, Wall Street was extremely aggressive compared to other sectors in the economy in its financial contributions and lobbying for who should be appointed and what kind of regulations and enforcement should and laws should be put in place. So I think that we developed something that was kind of operational what economists call rent seeking in the political economy. But people then kind of got drunk on the money flows. The financial sector was not a means to growth. It was an end in itself and many people refer to it in these days as a predator, rather than as a form of efficient capital allocation and what have you. Well, I guess I kind of think about what you described in almost like religious analogy, which is it feels like we've deified the individual. It feels like we've deified the market like it's some divine creation that brings us good. And it doesn't feel like the results warrant such sacred deference. And so I'm wondering how this kind of comes unglued. I've read a book recently called The Enchantment of Mammon by a scholar at Villanova Eugene. I don't know how to pronounce his last name perfectly. And he talked about how there is always a yearning that we might call religious impulse. The question is a little bit what do you fasten it to? And I think this pressure now brings us to a point where we may have shattered those religious ideals because the inhuman consequences are now so profound, visible, evident, and severe. And I wonder, this is a long-winded entry to a question, but I'm very fond of how the music and arts together influence how people perceive things and how they think. And I remember very clearly how John F. Kennedy spoke. I think it was an Amherst College commencement about Robert Frost. It was a tribute to Robert Frost, but he essentially spoke as though the infusion into the heart and soul of the arts was essential for business leaders, government leaders, and society as a whole to maintain the sensitivity and balance that is needed to what you might call correct our course and stay on course. I am struck by there's two points in what you mentioned that really are connected to each other and resonate. One is part of the reason why the arts redeems us in a sense and draws us together as a community is because it situates us in a larger context. In a sense, what is the function of literature? The function of literature is to tell you that you are part of a larger experience, that what you are going through, your ambitions, your desperate desires for things, your sense of longing, your anxieties, your status anxiety, your competition, all of those things go back to the ancients. And when you begin to leech that piece of our society, whether it's literature or the arts, or a sense of the larger scope of our experience, well then it's very easy to begin to focus on ourselves to kind of engage in a form of, call it a sort of social narcissism, where we begin to say, well, my experience is paramount, my experience is unique, and my experience deserves to be above other people's experiences. And this then sort of leads you to this point that you mentioned a moment ago. And I think about, I thought a lot about greed in the course of the last few years, thinking about how we got into the moment. And look, to state the obvious, greed is as old as time, you know, it's one of the original sins, it's always been a problem. And what's changed and what's made it such a dramatically potent factor in contemporary life is that we've optimized the instruments for the expression. That's in some ways one of the things that changed. If I was a banker in 1955 in Greenwich, and I was a, you know, I was a member of a partnership and investment bank in which my job was basically to service clients and then eventually to sell my piece of the partnership onto the next generation and retire happy in town. That's one level of possibility for acquisition. But if you change the rules of the game, as we did quite dramatically over the course of the sort of late 60s, all the way into the 80s, and then all the way up until the advent of the financial crisis, where we made it possible for a person, an individual to take these dramatic bets and gain these windfall returns, well, it really changes the optimizing potential for how much you can do with that desire for money. And I think that's one of the things that changed was that it became, and this gets to, you know, I have Michael Stendell's book, The Tyranny of Meredith, sitting on my desk in Gally's, and he gets to the heart of this question, which is exactly that, which is, you know, in some ways we created an apparatus, an intellectual infrastructure, and then a technical infrastructure in the economy that allows us to justify the boundless pursuit of the thing we want to pursue. And what we lose in that is a sense of the reminder of our mutuality, a sense of our interdependence, and a sense that what I do in my life, even if I'm pursuing it to my maximalist desire, has a tremendous impact on the life of people who I may never even meet. And that fact that in some ways the sort of blind interdependence of our time has become for me a real organizing principle for how I think about our vulnerabilities and how we got into this moment. One of the people I've gotten to know over the years who's been very curious about where ideas come from and where they, how would I say, resonate across different eras and times is Bill Moyers. And Bill, as you know, has done some serious documentary work on the life and thoughts of Joseph Campbell. And Campbell, when talking about heroism and what I'm thinking here is who are the people that are going to rise to the occasion and help societies to turn the corner into a healthy and constructive next dimension or next trajectory. Because it's often the case, as one of my favorite philosophers, Stephen Thulman often says, when people see the fault lines in the system is usually in the midst of a crisis and the fear causes them to lurch back to the familiar rather than forward to a healthier place. So the heroic lines that I excavated from thinking and looking at Campbell were two or three little passages that I'd like to share with you. The first he says is the cove that you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek. A hero is someone who's given his or her life to something bigger than one than oneself. But when I think about your work, and I think about the ways in which you and I have interacted, including we've had a very vivid discussion a few years ago about how elites were thinking about how to evacuate the country in the event of an emergency or getting a private airstrip and a piece of land in New Zealand or something like that. And at one level, I didn't view that at the time, because I've got a lot of very affluent friends. I didn't view that as shortsighted or greedy, because I viewed that as really frightening, because those people with all those resources and all that power didn't think they could change the system. And my friend Ray Dalio and neighbor, and I talked about this at some length, both before and after you and I worked together in relation to your article where you quoted me. But the idea of how do you rise to the occasion now? It reminds me of the third thing that I read this morning about Campbell when I was thinking of talking with you. And he said, the first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside and there to clarify the difficulties, eradicate them and their effect on his own case, give battle to the nursery demons of his local culture and then break through to the undistorted direct experience and assimilation of what Carl Jung called the archetypal images. And that journey, that piercing through things, that going to the core of your own upbringing and the discord between that noblesse oblige Greenwich and the Trump-attacted Greenwich that you portray made me think you were on Campbell's nomination list for the light you're shedding at disjunction. Well, I am struck by the fact these days that writing is about the farthest thing a person can do from being helpful in this world. But we all try to do our own way of making sense of it. But I think this crisis, this moment has in some ways done us a great service by reminding us of what genuine heroism looks like. And it is a real mercy that we look out our windows these days and we cheer for people who are putting themselves at risk to help others. We weren't doing that 365 of the previous days. And that is something that lingers with us. And it takes work though. It's not something that we'll do just naturally. And I'm thinking a lot these days about we all remember after 9-11 that we carried with us for a brief period some of that sense of unity and togetherness that felt redeeming. And then it somehow leached away. And in its more malevolent form it actually took on elements of fear-mongering. And we became a more fearful place of the outside world as a result of 9-11. And I think one of the challenges before us in the years to come after this is how do we take that tremendous sense of pride we have in the best among us, the doctors and the nurses and the people who are delivering our groceries, and how do we translate that into action and into something of self-sacrifice. Because otherwise it just becomes a memory and it doesn't become a reflection of who we are. And that's where leadership matters. And we will, I think we're coming up on a moment in a few months in fact this fall when we're all going to be looking to say who are the leaders who can articulate that energy for us and put it into action in to go. And that's going to be the measure of this moment. That's the test of how we actually did as a society and how we came through this. You know, where will trust and faith in leadership reside? And I think there are, you know, many people talk about the COVID pandemic, something like an alien invasion and that we're in an era that's somewhat like war preparation. And they hark back to Roosevelt preparing for World War II. But one of the daunting elements of that vision is that Roosevelt through the New Deal had gained credibility in representing a broader base of society. Not perfect. African Americans were left behind the door most certainly. But compared to the depression that he inherited in 1932, things started to turn for the better. And he, which you might call earned the license to lead. Yeah. In the aftermath of 2008, when we've had the house changed to Republican leadership, then the Senate, then Donald Trump elected all kinds of cynicism related to that bailout, Tea Party, Occupy, both left and right. And now the bailout we have going on before us, it's sometimes hard to imagine who people are going to put their faith into. But though, how would I say there's a bit of a call to action now that I think it's necessary and it's not just within countries. It's across countries because looming on the horizon is climate change. And I'm curious in kind of your sense, you've written a wonderful book, Age of Ambition on China. You're very sensitive in many of the articles you've written subsequent to that book. And I do a lot of work in China, but you're right at the top of the awareness that I see. How are we going to reverse the course of the deterioration in US-China relations? The blame game going on right now, where if you listen to the administration, somehow the complicity of the Obama administration and their interest in multilateral cooperation, plus the Chinese, there's what produced this pandemic. They're selling that kind of fear. I don't know where elements of truth are. I'm not making an argument, but we and China and India have to collaborate vis-a-vis climate change in the next 20 years. How do we get to that place? How do you see US-China relations evolving? Well, it is worth acknowledging where we are at the moment, which is at a very, very dangerous moment. We are at the worst point in the relationship between the United States and China that we've seen since Nixon went to Beijing in 1972. Things are at the lowest point in terms of trust and in a sense of a shared future. And it's quite dramatic to people who are in the China analysis business, as I am, to see how things have changed. I mean, take your mind back just for a moment to the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Here we were right about the financial crisis had not yet fully descended upon us. And here we're seeing the emergence of a culture, of a country that had been, in 1979, one of the poorest places on Earth. It's poorer than North Korea. And here it is now putting on this extravaganza that in a sense kind of signaled its arrival as a country. And then you had this period, and we had a period from 2008 up until about 2016, in which we were kind of living in denial. And some of that was, we were living in denial of the fact that China was breaking the rules in serious ways. I mean, it was breaking the rules on its own turf when it came to its treatment of dissidents or of minorities in Xinjiang or eventually its treatment of territory like Hong Kong. And it was breaking international rules. It was stealing intellectual property. It was also not adhering to the kind of trade agreements that it had agreed to under the WTO. So there was this long delayed sense of, well, we were waiting for, we sort of were waiting for the day when China would wake up and say, okay, now it's rich enough that it's going to start following these rules. And that didn't happen. And as a result, and I'm kind of quoting a friend of mine, a US diplomat who works on these issues, he said, we were too late in recognizing China's full strength, and then we overreacted to it. And that's where we are today, which is that there was pressure on both the right and the left to be tougher on China. But in some ways, the Trump administration, which is really operating from a pretty hobbled capacity when it comes to dealing with these issues, it just simply doesn't have the expertise and the personnel to negotiate a hard problem like the US-China relationship. It has resorted to these very blunt instruments. That's why we saw the trade war, which ended up costing American households about $1,300 per household. Let's remind ourselves, these are tariffs were being paid by American consumers. And ultimately, you now have the tension stretching all the way through matters of public health, like coronavirus. But here's the reason why I am fundamentally optimistic is that China, as tempting as it is these days to see China as just the natural successor to the Soviet Union, it's the new Cold War. We see that on half the magazine covers that come out every week. It is not the Cold War in the simplest sense. This is not the Soviet Union, which was, let's remember, ideologically determined to see the destruction of the United States. It was baked into its existentialist idea was that in order for the Soviet model to prevail, the United States had to fail. Nobody who knows China seriously, who studies it even in sort of the most hawkish ends of the American analysis community, believes that the Chinese Communist Party believes that in order for it to succeed, the United States has to fail. Now, what it does believe is that the United States will seek to contain it. That's a difference. That contain does not mean vanquish. And what we have to figure out and what we have to accommodate ourselves to is the idea that we are not in any way going to blandly allow the Chinese authoritarian model to become the new modus operandus of the world. That's just not what's going to happen. We are going to contest it. We must contest it. But for us to pretend that we are going to somehow push China into the past is a delusion. And it is also not a way for us to address the biggest problem to them. That's climate change. Let's be blunt. And the reason why China is actually making a substantive contribution to addressing climate change is not out of the goodness of its heart. It's not because it thinks that this is going to make the Europeans treat them nicely. It's because from the Chinese Communist Party's perspective, climate change is a political risk. China has more people at risk of being displaced by rising sea levels than Bangladesh. It is the single largest potential, call it a victim of climate change impact on sheer numerical scale of anywhere on the planet because it has one quarter of humanity under its control. So as we think about life after, we'll call it life after this political moment, whether that is starting in 2021 or four years after that, it's going to be up to the United States to figure out how do you take what China needs to do, what China's own interest is telling, which is to continue to address climate change and how do you also say we're able to hold two thoughts in our head at the same time. We can fight them on issues when it matters, like intellectual property theft, like protecting the rights of its own citizens. And at the same time, we can collaborate on issues like climate change and of course now what we all know so urgently necessary, which is matters of public help. Those two ideas can inhabit our heads at the same time. And that's going to be the task for political leadership in the future. I think what you say is very, how would I say, sober and necessary and how would I, I hope that you will be inspired to write and provide that guiding light at a time when so many people are using current events to miss the point or to, and in the case of climate change, I think the problem is the gestation period for getting it right is probably measured in like 12 to 20 years. Yeah. And if you wait 11 of those years and then get started, you're not going to get there. So it's not as if we have the kind of all hands on deck alert like the pandemic to force a drastic change in action. We have to foresee that and we have to overcome those kind of suspicions and resistances. You probably know Orville Shell, who's written a lot about China, but his book Wealth and Power was written with a co-author. I think it was John Dury, I think it was his name. Yeah. And he talked in that book about how the Chinese had suffered humiliation from the opium war and the Japanese invasion and how the Americans are terrified of being displaced as the world's number one and leader, not just in size of economy, but as what you might call the fulcrum of the world system and how this pretended a very difficult time because the reinvigoration of dignity, the erasing of the wounds in China and the, how do I say, defensiveness or fearfulness of the United States presented very, very profound psychological challenges for the leaders and throughout the body politic in both countries. And now we're at this place that the clock is running and demands cooperation. And I just hope, I hope we can see it how they show. Yeah. Yeah. And in so many ways, you know, we're, at this moment, we're not doing that. You know, what we're doing is kind of short term political gain, we're, you know, banging each other up on both sides. The Chinese, if you watch Chinese news or read what they're writing, you know, they're going after the United States. And we're going after them, obviously, Donald Trump sees a pathway to reelection. That's a luxury that we really don't have. And I think one of the things that we're beginning to see, I'm now spending time looking, I'm writing about the November election, when you start looking into the data on how people, particularly young people, are voting, it's a reason for some encouragement, because they've already begun to look over the horizon to say, who is the, who are the kinds of leaders that are going to be able to, to, to recognize these challenges and not operate entirely in a shortest possible political time. So that is going to be what's necessary, because at the moment, we're, we're caught up in a, in a cycle of responding to our own domestic political anxieties. And that doesn't lead us to solutions. Well, Evan, I must say, I've often been inspired by our conversations, and I've been inspired by your writing, both in the books, and, and I know you're working on a new one about the wild world in which we live. And I look forward to seeing that. But as I kind of, we draw to a close here, as I was listening to you came back into my mind, a passage from a Leonard Cohen song. And it's the name of the song is Anthem. But the passage that reminds me of you and the powerful work you do, and you know your father's a friend of mine, and he and I share a certain joy in talking about you, and all that you are striving to do in achieving. So in honor of you and your father, I'll cite Leonard Cohen, ring the bells that still can ring. Forget the perfect offering. There's a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. And you are such a promising and vital and accomplished mind. As a young person, when I think about what constitutes faith in the future, and I ask myself what's going to help the light get in. I see, I see your image and I see the cover of your books in that view. And I appreciate it. And I'm grateful for the chance to chat today. And I will tell you one thing, which is, you know, your reference to Leonard Cohen, it couldn't be more perfect. And I will add that when I look for that kind of inspiration for that moment, where I see we were sort of at the bottom of the well here these days, it happens to be that my four year old son, who is a guitar fanatic, the first thing he has decided to learn at the age of four is Leonard Cohen's hallelujah. And so when I hear him up there banging away on his guitar, he's not got up, he's still working on the details. He doesn't have his chords there. But he heard something in there that sang to him. And when I look at his face, and I think about the world that he's going to inherit from all of us, that's what forces me back to the work. And this said, we have so much work, hard work to do before we give a world that our children deserve. And that's the project before us. And thank you for the chance today to be able to talk about it. Well, I hope I can inspire you to come and join me for another episode a little bit further down the track as things unfold. Obviously, as your book comes to fruition as the November election approaches, and as we need to re-inspire U.S.-China cooperation. But for now, just want to thank you for today, and we'll see you again soon. My pleasure. And check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at InetEconomics.org.