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Transcript
Rob Johnson:
Welcome to Economics and Beyond. I’m Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
I’m here on the podcast for the second time with Dr. Peter Temin, who is a great influence in my life as an undergraduate at MIT, and have known him and one of my other mentors, our research director, Tom Ferguson, and he have been co-authors many things. I remember particularly papers on the 1930s, ’20s and ’30s in Germany as being very, very powerful. He’s the Elisha Gray II Professor Emeritus in the economics department at MIT. He’s done a number of extraordinary books over the years, but more recently, The Vanishing Middle Class has been… How do I say? It’s almost like the talking points of INET. It’s the guiding… When you travel, you buy a folder’s guide, but when you talk about what INET’s supposed to do, you read The Vanishing Middle Class and you get you off the… At least in the Global North that tells you what to do.
He’s obviously written this new book, Never Together, about the problems of race in the United States. I remember him being a very profound speaker at our 2016 conference in my home city of Detroit, where we experienced firsthand in my upbringing, a lot of the problems and challenges that you underscore. This book is part of the studies in New Economic Thinking at Cambridge University Press, which is the INET series on what we think is at the cutting edge or the most important things to feature. So, Peter, thank you for being here and thank you for being part of our efforts to illuminate the challenges that we face.
Peter Temin:
Thank you. And I’m delighted to be here with you, Rob.
Rob Johnson:
Well, we have a lot to cover today. A lot of very, very powerfully historic, sometimes uncomfortable historical experience, but sometimes you got to take the medicine in order to heal. I’m just curious, from your inner experience, how did you become inspired to write this book? Is there an aha moment or is it just the culmination of things? You’re very good at economic history, analytic history, they’re wonderful table charts, references to historical episodes that make your point. This book is… It’s how I wish an economist was able to integrate all of these things. But I’m just curious, what triggered your setting off on this course?
Peter Temin:
Well, a couple of years ago when the American Economics Association was meeting in Atlanta, I figured who would I like to talk to. And that was Trevon Logan, a black economic historian that I like very much. And we talked and out of that talk came a paper that I wrote with Trevon, which is now up on the INET website. And then someone who knows the field said it looked very much like the outline of a book. And by that Trevon had been promoted to a time-consuming job at Ohio state. So I wrote the book on my own. So it grows out of the racial comments in The Vanishing Middle Class. And it starts with the constitution and the notion that when they said all men, that meant all white men.
Rob Johnson:
Well, I think I remember at the outset of your book.
Peter Temin:
Yeah.
Rob Johnson:
Just to create an example. I think you created something that echoed throughout the book. It was from the Statue of Liberty and a quote was, “Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless tempest-lost, to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” Now, how would I say? Practice what you preach is what comes to my mind. The old-
Peter Temin:
Right.
Rob Johnson:
… Old song by Barry White. It feels like the vision we created in America to inspire people to believe in it and follow it is not what we’ve been doing.
Peter Temin:
Right. Well, at that point it meant both European and African immigrants. And the African immigrants were slaves and the European immigrants had farms and they used these slaves to farm their grounds. So on, and that led to inequality of income. So there were two attempts to include blacks in the mainstream economy. Reconstruction followed the civil war and Lyndon Johnson’s grave, great society followed World War I and World War II, excuse me. This right. And the first one eliminated slavery, but it did not grant freedom for freedmen 40 acres and a mule. And the effects wore off by the end of the 19th century. Lyndon Johnson’s great society followed World War II, promised black voting and education, but it ended more quickly under Reagan and Clinton.
And when trade hurt rural whites in the 1990s, whites reacted badly to both [inaudible 00:07:41] and that’s because Gilded Ages increased racism. The Gilded Age followed Reconstruction. White south was secured by the 1876 Presidential Compromise. It brought the south into the US by excluding blacks. Then Jim Crow followed in the 1890s, which restricted black education and program, which lasted until World War II again. Our Gilded Age followed Johnson’s great society. Rich people do not want to pay taxes and they want to reduce services to workers, blacks, Latinos, and other poor people. They imprisoned blacks and the other poor people.
Now the Jim Crow laws… The north industrialized and expanded west, the south remained agriculture and focused on crops. Jim Crow laws segregated blacks. Southern labor markets were not linked to Northern ones and Freedmen earned less than whites. And that continues until today. Laws and lynching discouraged black voting peaked in the 1880s and continued into 1920s. A great migration started in World War I when skilled blacks went north. Southern wages fell, all Northern wages rose. So Nixon started the war on drugs. He demonized blacks who opposed Vietnam and replaced Johnson’s poverty war with his drug war.
The US now has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. [One out of] Three in black men go to prison during their lives. And drug laws are new Jim Crow laws. Blacks are 12% of population and 40% of prisoners. Incarceration is now stable in high levels, no releases or very few releases. I’ve read about a couple for COVID despite prison illnesses. Nixon’s racism is shown from the few of his top advisors. John Ehrlichman said that Nixon had two enemies, antitrust left, and the black people. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the coming news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff confirmed this. The whole problem is really the blacks.
Okay. So the US, to repeat, has 5% of the world population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. Mass incarceration is hardly mentioned in policy discussions. How many people know that one out of three African Americans men go to prison at today’s incarceration rates. These are problems that urgently need to be addressed. America was in turmoil in the ’60s through the 1980s. The urban riots spread in the late 1960s. The war on drugs started by Nixon expanded by Reagan. 1986 and 1988 laws at minimum jail terms for drug crimes. The penalty for crack cocaine was a hundred times the penalty for powder cocaine. Blacks used crack cocaine. Whites used powdered.
The Kerner commission issued in 1968… The commission clearly stated that the problems were societal. Riots were started by blacks trying for equality with whites. But Nixon created the war on drugs, crimes on individuals. He wanted to condemn blacks who oppose the Vietnam war. He wanted individual crimes to demonize blacks, which they still do, creating a new Jim Crow. That’s from Michelle Alexander’s book. Race and income were important. Race described mass incarceration incidents. Blacks are more imprisoned than whites. The differences increase with family incomes. More than three times higher for Morris blacks than white blacks.
Poor black boys are destroyed by prisons. No education, no workplace skills, unable to form families. Crime and prison are a way of life. Black men remain a permanent underclass. So rebel relief rule is narrowly nearly complete in many states. Frederick Douglas said in 1894, and these words of an escaped slave are true again now. And Stacey Abrams formed fair fight in 2019 a century later to get blacks to vote. Do we need another war to try again to desegregate our economy?
Rob Johnson:
That’s an ominous thought. So let me ask you a little bit about the chart. So it shows that among the poor, the likelihood of blacks being incarcerated is much greater. It shows among the wealthy it’s still a lot more, but it’s diminished in proportion. But the thing that’s not shown in the graph when I looked at it, is how hard it is for a black person to go from that lower level to that affluent level within a lifetime when there is incarceration, demonization, difficulty, getting jobs and difficulty getting education that’s of the quality that would allow you to move up that path. So it’s not all good news because not everybody has migrated out into the household rank of the wealthy. And that still isn’t good news there. Coming back to your thought, we have to fight another war, there was a sense.
I remember reading things about Eleanor Roosevelt after her husband died and talking to Harry Truman about these people were there defending our Republic. They deserve access to all the things. They were kept out of certain universities. They were kept out of the social security system. If they were agriculture workers, there were all kinds of things still going on, but the pressure and the consciousness of leadership was changing. So you think right now, if we went and fought a war that we could make an irreversible change, or do you think it would be just another dice bun of gestures and then a counter-reaction puts right back where we’ve been?
Peter Temin:
Yes. Well, we may be approaching another civil war because the Southern Labor Association said that there was a tremendous amount of violence in 1921. So who knows where this is all going?
Rob Johnson:
Well, in reading your book, I could see this, which you might recall, oscillation. It was almost like a pendulum. People could see things that were wrong. The famous basketball player, Isaiah Thomas, who played with the Detroit Pistons for years, I saw him on a… His wife used to… Excuse me, his daughter used to work with my wife and I saw him on a show. It was like a video show with a woman named Laura Johnson in Los Angeles. And he said, “It’s very frustrating to see the government resisting when you’re talking about human rights. But what we really need is not human rights. What we need is birthrights. If you are a human being, you get the same portfolio as everyone else.” And I thought that was a kind of how we get there is a different question, but I thought that was a very powerful sense.
And I, myself, I’ve studied a lot of how music reflects the stress in a society. And people talk about… Oh, the spirituals. My favorite writer on music is theologian, the late James Cone, who I used to interact with quite frequently at Union Theological Seminary. And he said, “The spirituals are about the afterlife. Nothing you can do in this life. But the blues are from the Jim Crow era when you are allegedly free, but you’re not free. Blues is about defiance in code in the here and now.” So they’d go in to the juke joint, knowing there were people with guns and nooses and they would sing in code. My baby left me, my baby left me. And sometimes even the boss man would say, “My baby is mean to me too.” And they’d enjoy the performance. But what they didn’t realize is the baby that left him.
The baby that was treating him bad, was code for their professional life, for working in the field for working in the cotton area. And so there was a rallying point from these different types of music that interacted with the social conditions. But what I keep seeing is, and as I read your book, I see it codified so nicely is… I won’t say nicely, that’s probably not right. It’s daunting to read, but it’s skillfully done. Is, we seem to have this urge to do the right thing as humans, to abide by the principles said of our founding documents, declaration of independence, bill of rights.
And then we don’t do it. And sometimes it’s for commercial reasons, sometimes just based on historic fear and we back off. And then we see an episode like lots of black people fighting in World War II and we back off. Then we do the civil rights movement. I remember James Baldwin being concerned when Dr. King was murdered, that the black Panthers would frighten people and create a counter-revolution, which as someone said, turn the war on poverty into the war on drugs. And you seem to bring these things to the surface over and over again, that it’s almost like an oscillating pendulum, but the fulcrums not really moving very far.
Peter Temin:
That’s right. That’s very good. And I’ve written on that. There’s a kind of equilibrium and you can derive that mathematically that says we’re in a stable position. I was helped by Bob Solow, Nobel prize winner, who I’m still in contact with at Brook Haven, so on. And there’s a PBS station special on the people going on the coming to the outcome of jail and trying desperately to get to be part of the white economy and jobs and so on. So I recommend that to everyone. And I told Bob about that and he was interested good.
Rob Johnson:
I’m grinning because Bob Solow was my faculty advisor when I was an undergraduate at MIT. And so I learned a lot from him and I’m very grateful for his support and guidance throughout my life. But when you talk about that, people emerging from prison and how to reconnect with the world. I remember something that you gave in a talk that I wanted to bring up. I do believe it’s in the book. You talked about the kinds of behavior that economists might talk about. One would be customary behavior, doing what you did yesterday. And one was, I don’t know, I’ll call it inspired behavior. And the third was subjecting yourself to command behavior.
And that the people in the prison aren’t allowed to grow that inspired behavior, that thinking about a better future, that support in regenerating. If you believe in redemption, somebody in prison might feel bad about what they did in an impulsive moment and want to learn and become a better person. And that’s not on offer, but the command behavior is fiercely there, which probably wounds and scars people that makes it harder to come out of prison and regain trust in humanity.
Peter Temin:
Yes. Well, well, professor of Freeman at Harvard calls those the black elite, which are the residue of the great society of President Johnson. And they’ve done well and have been expected. If you get education, you can fit within the kind of education you need. And when I visited my eldest child, my daughter, Liz, who was coming to visit me this afternoon as the various books on there. And she said, “Do you realize that Colin already has more books than most people have in their lifetimes?” And that’s why Pre-K Adventure, which is still in the bill, but the bill hasn’t been passed say, “Because of opposition to this, which still keeps because the unemployment has come back, the power is very cautiously working for this. So he can try and avoid a recession at the end of the inflation.” But the volatility has come for all these people that the Republican Party now embraces of violence. And so it’s very hard to know where we’re going to go from here.
Rob Johnson:
Let me explore that for just a second. Coming from Detroit, seeing the Midwest, obviously it’s a black majority city, but what I’ve also seen is what I’ll call the Trumpian reaction in outstate, Michigan, as the old saying, the rising tide raises all boats. Well, when the tide goes out, all the boats go down. And what I saw in Michigan, particularly, and it’s been vivid since George Floyd’s murder, is that these white people there are saying, “Wait a minute, the ship’s sinking on me too.” And they get, if you will, jealous that people are trying to talk about uplifting. And I don’t mean doing it. I mean, talking about uplifting black people in 400 years of woundedness, and they use the phrase reparations. And these people say, “We’re getting trashed as well.” And they are very large numbers. And so I don’t think, and you’ve talked about this and others have, I know John Paul who’s on my board at Berkeley. It is that when the economy suffers, insecurity goes up, diseases of despair go up and racial animosity goes up. The blaming of others is a disease associated with despair.
Peter Temin:
Yes. And in Flint, Michigan, a Republican or governor sent supervisors to go on who wanted to cut money. And so he went off the river from getting food, water, and had illnesses, which is still continuing for this. Their settlements going on. And they have impaired the younger blacks in Flint. So it’s a kind of Republicans doing what they wanted with the black population of Flint. And they’re now back on the river, but they haven’t had their pipes replaced even now.
Rob Johnson:
And these were lead pipes that created the toxins that created the disease. Right? I remember the Flint water crisis. And there was a woman there who’s mentioned in your book-
Peter Temin:
Right. In Berkeley.
Rob Johnson:
… Who said, “What a tragedy it is that they aren’t learning the lesson of those lead pipes and replacing them all over the country urgently.” Tolerating the poisoning in this case, particularly of black people, is just horrid. And the irony too-
Peter Temin:
[crosstalk 00:29:31] very slowly. Like the infrastructure program that Biden did pass is only slowly getting started, which you can notice by the potholes in Cambridge. So, I remind that to my class. Okay.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah. And the irony in Michigan, whether it’s Detroit Water and Sewage or Flint is you’re sitting there… When I was a kid, my dad was a sailor. When you were on Lake Huron, when I was a kid, if you were thirsty, you could take a ladle and stick it into water and drink it. The good quality fresh water in Lake Huron is plentiful and not far from Flint, Michigan. The idea that happened there is just horrific.
Peter Temin:
Yes, it is. It is horrible.
Rob Johnson:
And you could almost say because of the rivalry between Detroit and what I’ll call outstate, I wonder if the governor thought he was doing something to rally the enthusiasm by being cruel to the black people in Flint. That’s just a hypothesis. I can’t project onto the individual, but it seems awfully hideous.
Peter Temin:
Well, he was the man who reported the supervisor of Flint. So you can blame him.
Rob Johnson:
And the Detroit bankruptcy was an anomaly too, because if you have a company that goes bankrupt, it has no revenue to pay people. The state of Michigan had a tax base. So that I’ll just say women that worked in Detroit for 45 years in the Municipal Public Service had their pensions caught in half in their healthcare removed. That’s a choice. That’s not bankruptcy. That’s a distributional choice. It’s a really ugly thing that they did with the…
Peter Temin:
And it’s like mass incarceration. Nobody talks about it anymore in the policy grounds. It’s just not changing at the moment.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. I know where-
Peter Temin:
Not continuing.
Rob Johnson:
Heather Ann Thompson, who’s a professor at University of Michigan and she’s written books on Attica Prison and so forth, did some studies on when prisons were privatized and built in upstate Michigan. What happened is lots of fathers got arrested in and around Detroit and put in those prisons. And the performance in schools deteriorated because of the emotional turmoil of the children. And then teachers who were being assessed based on things like multiple-choice tests started to migrate out of Detroit because they were being penalized for something they had no control over. And so the entire social disintegration associated with accelerating the building of prisons and having them fully occupied was just ripping that culture apart. And I know that’s been true. I’ve heard similar stories about Cleveland parts of Illinois, Atlanta, and-
Peter Temin:
And many people have gone back when the prejudice got to be too much, but even there they’re put out for the prisoners, put them out for mining activities, for which famously they die often. And that’s in my book. And an illustration of that. Yes and so on. Yes. I report all of these things that have done from Freedom’s Day in Pittsburgh that made Trump reschedule his rally there to the problems elsewhere and other places where that had been done under blacks given equal rights then driven out of the city. Yes. So it’s a continual process and we’re by no means out of it today.
And people often write about prisons, often say that the incomes of blacks or the imprisonment of blacks is done by consultation with other people, and they often give the blacks. That’s to avoid the minimum sentence there. And so they give them car theft or violent activity and send them back to prison, much more the blacks than the whites. And there’s now a movement among policemen to end the traffic stops, which led one more black woman to commit suicide to end. And so let’s hope that they carry this forward on a national plane.
Rob Johnson:
I have a friend who works on a television series called Law and Order. And I went for a walk with him, his name’s Fred Berner. And he said to me that, as he studies what’s happening in society, say since the time of George Floyd’s murder, is a very deep conflictedness among people in the mid-career in law enforcement. In essence saying, and what I’ll call PTSD symptoms, are occurring because these people thought they were coming in to play a role stabilizing society. Then you have an extremely unjust society, which is in unstable, and then they feel they have to escalate. And I’ll add one other dimension. The Fred didn’t say this. The absence of gun control in America makes law enforcement officers very frightened compared to those in other countries. And so, what I’ll call meltdown emotionally of people in law enforcement who are caught in this cauldron actually tends to make them out of fear, even more aggressive.
Peter Temin:
Yes. And so we don’t know where it’s going to go yet, but it is dangerous. And so we are really very offended by it. Yes. And so we’ll see what happens. But given the inequality of income, if or when the Republicans get there, get into power, most likely at this coming election, they’ll try and turn back all of the progress that Biden has tried to think.
Rob Johnson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, let’s move from, I guess what I’ll call… I’m a doctor’s son. From diagnosis to remedy. Let’s say a bipartisan commission from the United States Congress came to you and I, and they said, “We’re really scared. The wheels are spinning off this vehicle called the United States of America. And we know we got to change course. So, Dr. Temin, what do you and Rob Johnson say is what we have to do to get back on track consistent with our founding principles and move away from this pendulum, which is what you might call a hideous equilibrium for many, many years.”
Peter Temin:
Well, the way I end my new book is that you have to promote the education of blacks, which is why the Pre-K is still part of the reconciliation bill. Let’s hope it lasts through the passage of it. Okay. And they need to give blacks the vote and make sure that they can vote so that they can express their views. And the Republicans are very fact getting the vote and reconfiguring the voting populations so that they can ensure them of getting a Republican.
Rob Johnson:
So you’re talking about gerrymandering and voter suppression activities?
Peter Temin:
Organization is opposing on them. Yes. So they have become the party of violence too. Yes. So we’ll see what happens with that.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. But education is a key and voter suppression. And then I guess I was going to ask you, because we’ve alluded to it, when a person is in prison, I understand like Jim Heckman would talk about Pre-K, teaches you how to work with other people and exists in a school and by the time you’re seven and your brain develops you are emotionally comfortable and you thrive. And all of society saves from having basically everything from prenatal nutrition to early childhood education. But what if somebody is in prison in midstream, say 26 years old and in prison, what do you do to take them out of that command behavior and have which you might call a rehabilitation or augmentation of their skills in a way where they can start to feel a confidence that they can live a better life when they leave prison? How do we put that together?
Peter Temin:
Very hard. And there are a number of private and tax-exempt organizations that try and give these prisoners a chance to reorient themselves. But the national government doesn’t do anything, but give them a close back, send them on a bus home. So that’s pointing out what you can do with the fringes, but it’s not pointing out what’s needed. And education at this point is dying at the moment in the United States because the teachers are so ill pay that you need to raise them. A few states have done so on, but the inflation is just keeping them even with the cost of living. So it’s very hard at the moment.
Rob Johnson:
So are you hopeful that we might be, because of this suffering, whether it’s climate or pandemic or racial… How would I say? Hideousness that you have documented in this book? Sometimes they say it’s darkest before dawn. Are you at all hopeful that the stress now is going to propel us into a different direction than we’ve been on say since 1970?
Peter Temin:
Well, there were lots of demonstrations against the blacks. But after that, the budgets of the police were regained. So we’re going to change, but I don’t know how quickly and so on. And unless we can tax the Republicans and Piketty has a new book saying that for that and advocating taxes, but that’s not going to come about very soon either.
Rob Johnson:
So, there may be light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s a pretty long tunnel.
Peter Temin:
Yeah. That’s what I’m saying.
Rob Johnson:
Okay. Well, Peter, I want to say to you… I mentioned at the outset that I’ve learned from you for many, many years. But I want my young scholars to understand how vital you are, how determined you are, how you’ve set yourself on a course. And it’s not what you might call hiding in the apron strings of conventional wisdom. You’ve taken a path. You’ve seen things that concern. Historically, you’ve studied them in data and you’ve elevated and illuminated a very, very painful aspect of the country in which you live. That’s what I call courage. And that’s been in short supply within academic social science for a very long time.
Peter Temin:
It has been.
Rob Johnson:
I want to applaud and I want to thank you for that because when you set that example, my young scholars can watch an episode like this, or read a book like Vanishing Middle Class or Never Together. And it gives them inspiration. And when you said to me, the tunnel’s long, I agree with you. But those young people are going to be at that end of that tunnel. And if they follow your example, I’m more optimistic.
Peter Temin:
Okay. Well, good for you. And let’s hope it turns out your way, rather my pessimistic way.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. But what I’m saying is, through your courage and your effort, ever so slightly perhaps, but you’re changing the probabilities in my direction.
Peter Temin:
Sure.
Rob Johnson:
And so actions speak louder than words and your actions are contributing to a better outcome.
Peter Temin:
Thank you very much.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Thanks for being with me today. And thank you for writing this wonderful book and challenging us all to think about… How you say, never have to go back to being never together. And we put things back together.
Peter Temin:
That was my wife who has since died, made that title. Yes. And I agree with her. Yes. So let’s hope that the book does promote your view of what’s going to happen.
Rob Johnson:
Excellent.
Peter Temin:
Okay.
Rob Johnson:
Thank you.
Peter Temin:
Okay. My pleasure.
Rob Johnson:
We’ll talk again. I’m sure you got more ideas bubbling up and I’m sure she’s looking and down on you, grinning right now for this success. So I’ll just wait for the next chapter whenever you’re ready.
Peter Temin:
Okay. Thank you.
Rob Johnson:
Thank you. Bye-bye and check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at ineteconomics.org.
