Solidarity: A World-Changing Idea

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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 today with the old friend Leah Hunt Hendricks and hopefully a new friend, Astra Taylor, who’s worked together and they’ve written a book called Solidarity and the subtitle, the Past, the Present, and Future of a World Changing Idea. Thank you both for joining me today.

Leah Hunt-Hendrix:

Thanks for having us. It’s great to be here.

Astra Taylor:

Yeah, glad to be here.

Rob Johnson:

This is what I would call right at… - my name’s Robert Johnson - so I’ll say it’s right at the crossroads of our organization and evolution of society. When I read this book, it echoed a great deal with the challenge that sits before us that has been raised by the famous writer for the Financial Times, Martin Wolf, in his book, the Crisis of Capitalist Democracy is about what can happen with reference to Nazi Germany if we don’t address and solve these problems in a healthy and constructive way. I also mentioned that I’m working with David Smick and some others, Barry Levinson, Michael Douglas and others on a film called America’s Burning. Is this the second Civil War? I wish when we were cutting the film, I could have brought you two doctors in to prescribe remedies, but maybe there’ll be some subsequent editions of the film because you have an awful lot to say. So let’s turn from my enthusiasm to your illumination. Leah, I always ask, what inspired you to write this book? What did you see? And each of you can address that challenge, but what is it that woke you to the challenge in the morning? You said, I got to do this.

Leah Hunt-Hendrix:

Yeah. Well, I’ve always been interested in how large scale social change happens. How do you get really big social transformations? And as you said, we are in a time of a lot of crisis, economic crisis, oligarchy basically a climate crisis, a crisis of democracy. And so thinking about how do we really find a path forward? How do we be constructive in this moment? And so for me, I started thinking about this when I was in graduate school. I was studying political philosophy. I was in a program called Religion Ethics and Politics, so an interdisciplinary program. And in political philosophy, you think a lot about justice and freedom and these different kind of values or ideals that should provide the basis for how we live together. But in a lot of spaces of people who are working together to create social change, solidarity is a key word that people use and there’s not a lot written about it.

And so I started to explore the history of the concept and at the same time I started to get involved in political activity just locally around my university. It was the time of the Iraq War, so there were anti-war protests going on. There was also just some living wage campaigns. And then when I was in graduate school, occupy Wall Street started and I by that time had become really concerned about economic inequality being kind of a key problem that impacts all of our other problems because economic power is sort of fungible with political power. And so when we have such a huge divide economically, it threatens democracy, it undermines our democracy, and then we can’t really take action on other issues like racial justice, economic justice, I mean climate justice. So I became involved in Occupy Wall Street and began thinking a lot about how social movements work and the fundamental ingredient for a social movement is solidarity.

But I think solidarity is also the fundamental ingredient for democracy and for a healthy society. So this concept has a lot in it and I think is really key, but it’s been really understudied and under theorized. So Astra and I had known each other since Occupy and was, we started writing together, we wrote a little bit together in the mid 20, I think 20 14, 15, about democracy and technology as we were seeing tech companies become more and more consolidated and powerful. And then an Astra had written a book on the internet. And then in 2019 we book, sorry, we wrote an article in the Republic on the concept of solidarity. And then it was during Covid in 2020 when we were like, actually we got approached by a publisher, but we thought this really does need to be a book. And it’s kind of amazing that this book hasn’t been written yet, but we need a book out there that can be a resource for people who want to unpack this concept. And I think we don’t claim to finish the job. I think there’s so much to it that I hope other people and scholars build on it.

But yeah, I think the book is a resource and I hope it’s helpful for people.

Rob Johnson:

Yeah. Well, I didn’t do a deep dive. I wanted you to paint the picture, but I’m aware that you’ve been very involved in the leadership of organizations around these themes, like the Quincy Institute in its relationship to foreign policy. And we’ll talk about what does we mean across nations before the end of this podcast, but you have a group called, was it Solitaire? Solitaire.

Solidaire. Okay. And then I remember Way to Win. And so how would I say, you haven’t been thinking in your, how do I say, in your closet or in your private room, you’ve been out exploring with people and I’m sure that’s helped evolve the kind of things that I’m excited to see. My Young Scholars Initiative. We have 22,000 people around the world now in the Young Scholars Initiative, and I really hope this podcast and your book can be a catalyst to their converging with the agendas that you’ve created. Oster, how about yourself? I remember I saw there was an earlier book that you wrote essentially about is there a democracy or I can’t remember the exact title, but it feels to me like you’ve been what you might call circling around and exploring in this realm yourself.

Astra Taylor:

Indeed. I mean, before Occupy Wall Street, I was mostly a writer and I was making documentary films that were philosophical, so rather unpopular genre, but dealing with philosophical themes. And so I actually, I did write a book about democracy called Democracy may not exist but will miss it when it’s gone. But like Leah, I’m someone who doesn’t just theorize. I’m always interested in how we put the ideas and principles we care about into practice. So where Leah has spent so much time building these powerful organizations of donors like Way to Win and Solidaire, I have been organizing with debtors in building the first debtors union. It’s called the Debt Collective. And it is something that has its roots in Occupy Wall Street. And I think that the fact that we have experience of organizing has made our theorizing stronger. So this is a book that doesn’t just lay out all of the problems of the world and then in the final conclusions say, here are the five policies we could do that would fix everything.

It tries to provide more of a map of how do you actually get those things that we know we need a more representative democracy, a more egalitarian economy, ecological sustainability, a world that is not based on racial and gender domination. And we think solidarity is actually the key. We think of solidarity as a means and an end. So it is both how we build power together and also our purpose, what it describes a kind of society. We’re trying to build a more solidaristic society where people feel bonded to each other because we think that really is a precursor of democracy. If we don’t have solidarity, if we don’t have strong relationships across difference, we’re actually never going to have an equitable stable society. So we’ve really drunk our own Kool-Aid writing this. I think Lee and I were solidarity to begin with, but now we’re real solidarity boosters and we think it really does deserve to be up there. And the kind of pantheon of important democratic concepts, solidarity is as important as equality, as important as freedom, as important as justice. And we wish it was talked about and enacted just as much.

Rob Johnson:

Yeah, one of the board members of the Institute for New Economic Thinking is John Powell at Berkeley who runs a thing called the Othering and Belonging Institute.

Astra Taylor:

I just spoke there. I just spoke at the conference.

Rob Johnson:

He and I we’re both from Detroit, so we have been working for a long time together. And he was involved with my spouse’s group who worked on these issues that, but John often emphasized, I’ve been to many different events and panels and so forth where the word solidarity implies what you might call a connected identity and how we get away from othering and to belonging. I remember of some passages in books or articles that I’ve studied by each of you where there is a time when people use identity to create others, to create a small group that huddle around each other, that which you might call narrows rather than enlarges. What is considered legitimate for all members of society to have, and I guess what I might call the ingredient is egotism and fear that creates, that yearning, that desire to get away from togetherness.

I’m always reminded of the famous, they used to call it the shortest speech, the shortest poem in the world by Muhammad Ali at the Harvard commencement where he got off the stage and he said, Ali, what’s your poem? And he said, me, we. And somebody said, that’s like the pendulum between me and and I said, well, it depends on whether there’s an H and we, because if it’s me, we, it’s about egocentricity. If it’s me, we, it’s about those dilemmas which your book is about. And I don’t know, I’ve seen people make short snapshots and films suggesting each side. On the other hand, I recall Muhammad Ali being a very publicly aware and generous global citizen who set a very good example regardless of what happened in that speech. But how do you see how people use identity and what constitutes a community in evil ways as well as good ways? How can you help us go a little deeper and understand that

Leah Hunt-Hendrix:

Part of what it is to be human is to try to understand yourself and understand your own identity and who you belong to and who you don’t, and to find community. So all of that is really natural, but it can happen in ways that can be exclusionary and othering or in ways that can be inclusive and widening the circle of belonging. We think of solidarity as we identify two ways of thinking about solidarity. It can be transformative where you see yourself as part of a group that is moving together towards a more inclusive and transformative horizon, or it can be reactionary closing in really focused on narrowing the group and excluding those who are different in a way that can actually be annihilating of others and can become really violent. So this is like white supremacist solidarity. There’s ruling class solidarity. We see all the time in a lot of lobbying around tax breaks and other corporate benefits. There’s misogynistic anti-women solidarity. So we want to really be clear about that distinction and see this as kind of a framework to use to identify when solidarity goes awry, and then how it can be more constructive.

Rob Johnson:

I was going to say, Astra, there’s a parable that people often say a rising tide raises all boats. And so the idea that you let the elite do what they want with technology, innovation and so forth, and it will create something that, how do I say, makes us all better off. I see that sometimes used as justification for otherness to keep people as though they are attacks on the dynamism. But I also see an awful lot of time where the rising tide takes one boat and doesn’t take a lot of boats with it.

Astra Taylor:

Well, rising tide has a very different meaning in this era of climate change, doesn’t it? Rising tides threaten vulnerable communities, and we all know that it’s the poorest who are going to suffer the most from climate change, the people who are least responsible for the carbon emissions. And we know that there are a lot of profiteers ready to take advantage of rising tides. So I think part of what the idea though, if we give it kind of try to take it on its own terms, part of the idea is that other, the majority of people are just passive, leave it to this group of entrepreneurs, elites who are driving change, driving innovation, and then it’s a kind of technocratic, not very democratic view. And so I think Leah and I are trying to present a very different conception, which is, and it’s not just a moral one. We’re not just saying, well, we’re against that view because it leaves people out or kind of devalues their contribution.

But because we actually think small democratic, solid heuristic engagement from lots of people makes us all better off in the end and that it makes our social fabric more resilient when people are invested in social systems and policies, they’re more likely to be protected and less vulnerable to attack and roll back. And so we think solidarity has, it pays lots of dividends in many ways. On the identity front, I do just want to say we’re also challenging the common division between attention to economics and attention to identity, right? Well, should we have a material analysis or should we have identity politics? And our view is they’re just so intermeshed that we can’t ignore that people have identities. We all have identities when some of them are about our race and our gender and our nationality. And some are what kind of music we like, what kind of food we eat. This is just part of what it means to be human.

But solidarity is a way of acknowledging that, but also transcending them. So it tries to extend us transformative solidarity, the good kind of solidarity is a way of expanding us behind our identities, building new ones, building bridges without denying the fact that we are individuals who came up in a certain context and think about ourselves in certain ways. So we think it’s a useful concept to kind of get out of that debate, which we don’t think is really going anywhere particularly constructive. And as organizers, and again, this is Leah and I working hard to organize, whether it’s our debtors or donors, you have to speak on the terms that you have to speak to people in terms that resonate with their lives. You can’t ignore the fact that we all have our stories. We just want to help people weave together stories that are bigger, more connecting, less othering, so that we can do things together that we can’t do on our own.

Leah Hunt-Hendrix:

If I could add one thing to what Astra was saying, a lot of times the polarization conversations lead to sort of a feeling of like, well, gosh, if we could just all get along. And there is a lot of research on how fear drives people into their smaller groups, but this is why this question is a political one and heads right into public policy. And it’s a problem when the polarization conversations don’t go there and stay in the realm of psychology because people’s fear partly has to do with the fact that we don’t have a strong safety net. There are reasons to be fearful when the bottom might fall out from underneath you when if you get sick, you might end up losing your job, you have no healthcare. That is a scary time. And so that’s why we really, like Astro was saying, we really try to tie the conversation about group identity into questions of political science and public policy and questions of what kind of social services, social provisions do we need healthcare for everyone? We need affordable housing, we need education that doesn’t drive people into debt. And so when the polarization conversations stop at psychology, I think that becomes a problem.

Rob Johnson:

I think this notion of economics is also what you might call treacherous in that if you presume that the market is a catalyst to commodities and there are no side effects, what we might call public goods or externalities, then you want to keep your hands off and let the market go. But if the externalities, particularly negative ones are pervasive, then you need to do things like you said, almost like a universal basic income. We got to create a floor for everybody. But there are now episodes of what I call positive externalities. And what I’m thinking about is go to the global south and build all kinds of things that create energy production with renewables rather than fossil fuels. That’s going to affect, as you mentioned, the rising tide and the shorelines that’s going to affect the quality of the atmosphere and climate and food and everything else for everyone. So we’re not in a place where we can turn our back on the side effects and pretend that the market marshals, all of them adequately. They aren’t an exception. As I always tease and say, they aren’t a footnote in chapter 37 of the economics texts. They’re a central chapter of the next edition of Economics 1 0 1.

Leah Hunt-Hendrix:

We have to be aware though of the importance of democratic participation as we’re thinking about economic expansion and positive externalities as well. So even in building renewables, there are instances where there are corporate land grabs that are part of the process of erecting new wind turbines, for example. So community participation I think is always key and needs to be one of the factors in addition to creating an environmentally sustainable future as we think about solutions,

Rob Johnson:

And I can imagine growing up in Detroit where you say, well, we got to go build some stuff in Kenya, and I’m thinking, we got to rebuild the public schools. We’ve just gotten smashed by automation, machine learning and physical labor doesn’t work anymore. Where are the community colleges? Where’s the retraining and so forth. In other words, you can put one externality against another and the justice within your society hangs in the balance. So these conflicts are not, how would I say, easily resolvable because people are negligible and when they wake up, when they actually wake up, they see dilemmas all over the place. And the question I think that you raise in your book solidarity is how do we become the architects of the bridges and choose the priorities together as opposed to having what you might call the incentive system, which controls the politics, be guided by a very narrow group. I always tell people that the Inet theme song draws on Bob Dylan’s one too many mornings, but I changed the lyric to three too many markets, a market for media scrutiny, a market for college endowments for expertise, and a market for politician survival means that the democratic system we have that’s supposed to give moral legitimacy to capitalism now has its own structural flaws. And we’ve got a lot of work to do to create that broader representation that looks to me like the North star that your book is creating,

Astra Taylor:

Describing the situation you just laid out, right? These toxic markets, what they’re doing isn’t just furthering inequality, which is bad enough because of the concentration of power and the fact that it leaves so many people out and so many people are struggling without a safety net, but it actively attack solidarity. And so this is a core chapter in the book, a chapter called Divide and Conquer. Major investments are being made in undermining solidarity in order to shore up corporate wealth, in order to purchase politicians and the like. And I think it’s important to name that and to actually study it because we have to understand the terrain that we’re working on.

The core capitalist principle of competition is antagonistic to solidarity in many ways. And certainly the idea that we are mainly consumers in this society as opposed to citizens or community members as a challenge to solidarity. But it goes much deeper than that. We’re seeing corporate America invest in litigation going up to the Supreme Court that literally attacks the basis of the administrative state. We’re seeing attacks on what was already a kind of anti-labor, labor law regime. So we’ve got some big structural problems, and I think it’s important to just say it’s not just that they allowing a small number of people to amass wealth and power, but there’s again this very clear and deliberate and well-funded attack on solidarity that attempts to make people feel that they have no choice but to kind of hold on to their hold onto their reactionary identities to protect what they have because there’s such an atmosphere of scarcity.

Rob Johnson:

Well, it would seem to me if we have a very narrow center of power that many people would be tempted to try to join their club for their own security, not because it’s what you might call conceptually valid, but because it gets them inside the fort instead of out in the battlefield. And so you can have what you might call fear-based adverse incentives. Another place I’d like to ask you a question about in this same realm is the nature of education. I’ve done a little bit of work with Pope Francis and his group called TI Scholarly Encounters, and they’ve talked about how elites don’t believe in democracy because so few people, about 8% of the people on planet Earth get a college degree. And they talk about how much education is very alienating to people in the global south because unlike what we used to call civics before, people demonized government.

Econo civics isn’t taught. You’re taught how to be an input to production. You’re taught how to become a part of a system that involves an obedience rather than being what you might call a architect of a collective realm. And I would say just from my own experience, people like Homer, Dante and Shakespeare can help you become sensitive to the dilemmas and accounting and business administration is just a whole different set of skills. How would you structure education to evolve people to the consciousness where your book solidarity becomes what you might call the recipe for the meal we’re all going to eat?

Astra Taylor:

Well, that question really strikes close to home for me because much of the organizing I do with the debt collective is focused precisely on the question of public education and education is a democratic good. So we have been leading the fight for student debt relief and engaged in much of the policy research that led to the 140 plus billion dollars of debt relief. The Biden administration has delivered. Of course, we had a major setback with the Supreme Court, which invoked this sort of bogus new legal theory, the major questions, doctrine to arrogate power to themselves and challenge that first iteration of relief. But we’ve always coupled the demand for debt cancellation with the call for free college. And by free we mean not just free as in price, but free as in liberating, free as in accessible to anyone who wants it. Because we live in a complex society and people need to have a chance to be curious and to learn and to explore.

And of course, we don’t think that a college degree should be a prerequisite of a living wage or a dignified life, but that it’s something that should be on the table for people and should not be reduced to just mere job training or career advancement that it should have that sort of humanities and enhancing expansive element you just described. So I think this is actually quite an important fight. And if we actually look at the history of student debt, it was imposed initially by Ronald Reagan in the 1960s when he was governor, to suppress the solidarity that was being forged by student protestors on the University of Berkeley campus because they were fighting for civil rights and resisting the Vietnam War and actually fighting for free speech. And he famously said, let’s make them pay. They’ll think twice about carrying a picket sign if there’s a cost.

And certainly the idea of intellectual proletariat is scary to some people in this world, and I think we see the stakes of this fight. The last thing I’ll say right now, we see the stakes of this fight with the rightwing attacks on higher education, and they are grabbing every opportunity to make seem like higher education is a destructive force. And the goal is to roll back funding, roll back academic freedom to get rid of tenure and to reduce colleges and universities to nothing but vocational training in business schools. And they’re doing this because universities, they’re imperfect. We could lay out what’s wrong with them, but ultimately they are sites where people encounter ideas, they encounter people who are different from them, they expand their horizons, they learn about science, and this is threatening to authoritarians today. And I think we really need to push back on that agenda really vigorously because I think public education, it’s just it’s ground that we cannot afford to lose. And the Wright is saying very, very clearly, I’m thinking of people like Leonard, Leo and others. We did our long march through the judicial system. We’ve captured the courts and institutions of higher learning are next, and we really can’t let that domino fall if we care about democracy and solidarity.

Leah Hunt-Hendrix:

It reminds me too of Benedict Anderson’s book on imagined communities where he writes about how it is that in a nation, for example, in America where it’s a huge nation, we don’t know everyone, so how do we develop this sense of what it is to be American? And he talks about the role of media and education and creating a shared sense of a shared framework for knowledge, and that that’s part of what it is to have a shared identity. And so in terms of building solidarity on a large scale, public education is so key and the dismantling of public education and media and putting us into narrower, narrower lows is just pulling apart the fabric of society. So just agree it’s such a key fight.

Rob Johnson:

I’m reminded in part from reading your book of the very powerful work of ail Durheim. There is a woman at Berkeley whose name is Ann s Swidler, and she has a course Introduction to Sociology that’s about 20 lectures. It’s all free online. The famous Nobel laureate George Aof, whose son Robert Aof, is now a professor at Warwick University, tenured professor, and his wife is Janet Yellen, the treasury secretary. They turned me on their family years ago, turned me on to Anne s Swr. And the idea that he and I call the metaphor he calls religion is really, really applicable in many places to what constitutes a collective agreed of vision to goodness. And at some level, the feedback comes back to us. The results do. And one of the things that I find haunting, and I learned this from their course, economists talk about preferences and then they have what’s called a utility function.

They get a demand function, they put their demand function into the market and the market serves them. But what happens when the outcomes of what the market is doing feedback into their preferences, then it’s not a one-way street of what I want and being served. It’s how what I want is being affected by the outcomes and the haunting nature of choosing education, accounting, and business administration rather than humanities is a survival tactic. And Robert Ackoff and his father and a woman named Rachel Creton, who I believe is at Duke University where Leah, I recall you, that’s where you were an undergraduate, they wrote a book called Identity Economics, and it’s about how the whole deck is scrambled in what we will call normative welfare legitimacy, that I see people on the conservative side citing with great conviction and they’re showing you all kinds of dilemmas.

And they’ve done some fascinating subsequent research or colleagues that inspired by their book on things like how the voting rights and Civil Rights Act affected how the society was structured and things like, I remember James Baldwin writing when Dr. King was murdered about, and I’ll use my own terminology, how you say, the war on poverty turned into the war on drugs, and we started building up prisons and all kinds of things related to fear of social discord. But this, how would I say, more textured energy that comes from like swr sociology really gives what you might call raises questions for us, but makes what I think is the vision of the end game of your book, essential to contemplate and explore with courage, not with conformity. And I’m worried that our education system is not inspiring or creating the catalytics to becoming citizens in that holistic way that you guys, how I say advocate for in these talks and in the book, how do we turn the education system here and around the world to a place which you might call its public good authority is invigorated, enhanced, not fomented just by bitterness, but like I said earlier, becomes a new north star, a new navigational approach to social organization.

It feels to a lot of people right now, we’re in a very, very dangerous place. The horizon of the next 20 years, years, I have four children, three grandchildren. What am I doing for them? Leah, what role do you see the arts playing in education?

Leah Hunt-Hendrix:

I think that this is a key issue and things like this only change when there’s really organized, an organized plan, an organized movement to transform policy around this. We’ve seen a lot of organization on the other side to create charter schools and change school curricula, and we need to build that on our side. And I think that the debt collective that Astra is involved in is a key tip of the spear on that. But we need really a mass movement around this. And I think you’re right that the arts play a really important part. I know that Max Frost is one of the congressmen in the house, and he is planning on moving forward legislation to create more public funding for the arts. So that’s a step, but I totally agree this is a key issue in kind of rebuilding our social fabric.

Rob Johnson:

But I think this question of how we nourish the mind and the spirit and the courage and the intellect together is a very important one. And well,

Astra Taylor:

It relates though to the famous Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I mean people, which isn’t to say that people can’t have a life of the mind and appreciate art when they’re struggling economically, but I do think that when we provide for those lower rungs of the pyramid, as Albert [Abraham] Maslow laid out, so food, shelter, security, people are in a better state to not just take in ideas, but also to be open-minded and tolerant of things that might otherwise feel threatening to them. So I think it’s, when we’re talking about education, my instinct is to push us back to the political economy, what’s actually happening? How are our schools, even our supposedly public schools actually funded? How does that create structures of egalitarianism? Because public education in the United States is very paradoxical. It both increases inequality and ameliorates it for some folks. And I think if we could get the funding sorted out and make it so that people can actually become educated without mortgaging their futures and holding a lifetime of debt in terms of college degrees and the like, and if we could create that breathing room for people, I think we’d be better off.

And so there’s some, I feel too much attention to other aspects of higher education. They’re kind of sensationalist and not representative of the experiences. The vast majority of folks, especially working class folks have in this country. Again, because most people don’t go to Ivy League schools, they go to community colleges or state schools or for-profit colleges and for people, the real urgent question is economic. It’s material.

Rob Johnson:

Yeah, I think, how would I say the idea that an elite education is a survival path is probably going to be scary in the world of AI because artificial intelligence can replace some of the things that you might call white collar service workers have been doing. And okay, if you’d gone to college for free and you got to shift gears, that’s one thing. What happens if you have $300,000 as student debt when you find out that your skills have just been devalued? So I think there’s a whole lot on the horizon here. And I don’t want to just propagate fear. I think the potential of AI and things is wonderful, but how it gets deployed, Floyd, how it gets diffused and how transformational assistance nourishes all of us benefiting is a very important challenge.

Leah Hunt-Hendrix:

I think that we are heading into a new economy, and it’s either going to be more consolidated than it’s ever been, especially when you look at how it’s the already biggest tech companies that are developing the generative ai, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft. And so either that power is going to get even more concentrated, or if we build strong social movements that have an emphasis on democratization and on redistribution, then I think there’s a chance of moving towards an economy that’s more like the one that Natalie Foster has written about in her book called The Guarantee, which outlines a number of guarantees. It’s not like should we have a UBI or Universal Healthcare or universal free education, we should have all of these things. We are entering into an economy that’s highly productive and there is enough to provide these basic guarantees for every citizen. And to me, it’s like that’s what it means to live in a civilized country. That’s what we should be aspiring to, not a kind of winner take all economy. So I think that that needs to be the political horizon that we’re moving towards, especially in the context of ai.

Astra Taylor:

And the question is always who owns the ai? I mean, that’s really it, right? And how do we, again, it is about the, not necessarily just the technology itself, but the political economy it’s embedded in and what it’s being used for. I mean, Karl Marx famously said that machines are, I think the quote is a powerful tools for suppressing strikes. I mean, so it’s like are you building technology designed to de-skill labor and make humans obsolete? Are you designing tools that enhance our capacities and help us become more creative, help us become more sustainable? Are you making AI that makes public transit more efficient and swift and pleasurable for people? Or are you basically thinking, oh, how can I disrupt the trucking industry to lay a bunch of people off and keep prices down? So these are the questions, and solidarity really is essential to addressing them because people need to build power together to be able to push back.

Rob Johnson:

One of the things that I enjoyed in preparing for this was an interview with UL in the Inc. About your new book, because his book Winner take All Philanthropy and then the Persuaders is diagnosis in remedies about how should we manage the public good, who gets to decide what the public good looks like and how it’s to be shaped and implemented is a very important question. And I admired his insights and courage in that work, and that was nice to see all of you working together.

Leah Hunt-Hendrix:

I love his work. I think his diagnosis of a lot of philanthropy and social entrepreneurship is right on. And then the persuaders looks at people who are organizing their communities towards solutions. And we offer a framework for thinking about where this is going, what we call it, the solidarity state. And we offer that so that as we begin to think about policy solutions, we include policies that have positive feedback loops in terms of how they reinforce the fact that we are not just individuals or entrepreneurs or atomized consumers, but we’re people in society and communities and we are really interdependent. And so there are policies that can reinforce that. And one of the examples that we looked to is the community action programs of the 1960s LBJs War on Poverty. They provided funding for local communities to organize and to address local problems together to identify what they were facing and how to create solutions at the local level.

And that was through public funding. And that is so important because as ADAS talks about, and we talk about philanthropy right now, is sort of doing that work of funding community organizations to some extent, but that funding is fickle. There’s not enough of it, and it comes and goes, and sometimes it kind of pushes organizations into the direction that the donor wants them to go in. So the idea of reviving some of those programs, which still exists, but some of those still exist, but in a very bare bones way. But Headstart came out of this, the AmeriCorps Vista came out of this, a lot of meal programs, summer youth programs. So there’s an example from American history. This is not imported from Scandinavia, but it was an example that worked and it, but it was dismantled by first Nixon began to undermine it, and then Reagan really began to take it apart. So we think this idea of a solidarity state could provide a framework for thinking about what are the other policies that would help us, especially again in the context of AI and our changing economy. How do we think about what holds us together? And I think as you brought up education and that that’s going to be really key, but also perhaps a job guarantee, if not a UBI, some kind of provision for everyone to feel like the bottom is not going to fall out from underneath them, and that they can continue to be a productive and a productive and agent, adjunctive agent, full participant in society.

Rob Johnson:

I was going to say, I had a very interesting experience around the end of 2017 where a New York Times reporter who was based in London named Peter Goodman, came to the Swedish Consulate and he gave a talk, and he later wrote this up called Why the Swedes Love Robots? And what he was saying was in part, his impression was that Donald Trump had been elected because people had felt they had been so abused and displaced by technological change, and he was going to stop that. But what Peter went on and said is when you discover something like AI or robots in Sweden, everybody says, hooray. What economists call the production possibilities just improved, but they all believed they’re going to get their pension, their children’s education and their healthcare and retraining. And the question he raised was, America used to be considered the most dynamic economy because of its supply side flexibility and Europe was sclerotic.

But now, given the breakdown in politics, was the basis what I might call kind of a meta UBI making people feel like they were going to be participants on that rising tide rather than afraid of it, and would America bogg down and fall behind? And I thought it was an amazing speech for a young reporter to put it together that coherently. He wrote it up on New Year’s Eve in the New York Times a 2017, the synopsis of this as an article, and I feel like I always say there are smoke signals, but you guys have really made it crystallized. This book is a more inspiring, deep, broad illumination of the challenge than I I’ve read before.

Astra Taylor:

Thank you. What you just described is really fascinating, and I think that we have to also give American people credit that they’re skeptical that they’ll see the benefits because they probably won’t. I mean, we’ve seen the working class is not reaping the rewards of productivity gains over recent decades, so their suspicion and dubiousness is correct. The question is how we change that so they can respond in a different way. To Leah’s point about the solidarity state, I just want to say that one point we’re making that I think is our novel point is that it’s not just enough to have policies that do create a safety net and advance economic redistribution. We have to weave in attention to the psychological and to the relational to help people feel more connected and more trusting and more invested in social policy and in each other, because that’s going to make people less fearful.

And I think it’s also going to make our policies more resilient when there is pushback. So I think that’s where both liberals in the left have kind of failed. We’ve talked a lot about economics and how we could tweak the tax code or provide this or that public good without really thinking about, okay, well, how can we also structure them so that they’re participatory and so that they actually create solidarity is one of their benefits. This sense that we really are interdependent and none of us are self-made or autonomous, and that we all have a stake in protecting these vital social goods.

Rob Johnson:

I think I’ll use a story from my early in my career. When I first started working on the Republican Senate Budget Committee, the majority leader was Bob Dole, and years later, Pete Doci said, everything’s changed. But we were all part of a team trying to run a country, not part of a tribe at war with the R’s and D’s and all this kind of stuff. But Dole said to me on the floor, well, you are an economist and you’ve worked in all of this. What do you think we need to do to create budget, discipline, and dynamic productivity? And I said, I have two suggestions. All the media companies should have to create an election time, public service, announcements, radio, television, and so forth, because politicians have to raise money like they’re selling soap. And I said, and the second thing is, you should have the taxpayer pay for the costs of public running for an election rather than having incumbents and challengers needing to raise money to campaign.

And Dole said, that’s a great idea. The only problem is I couldn’t even get 13 votes out of a hundred in the Senate because incumbents know they have an advantage because they can sell policy. And I was a 26-year-old kid at the time. I was like, whoa. But the idea that politics has to rise to the what might call vision you have created has to also acknowledge that politicians in my old Bob Dylan song, that one too many market analogy of needing to raise a lot of money to survive is an obstacle to what you might call the breadth of courageous imagination that our legislatures can offer us.

Leah Hunt-Hendrix:

Well, and it’s why we can’t just rely on fancy policy proposals or brilliant ideas to kind of get us by. We really do need to build strong social movements. And I think that’s part of the core of the book is saying that we’ve got people, a lot of people share the concerns that we’re talking about here, and we can build power, collective power together. And the issue of democracy reform and public financing of elections is a great example. And in the past couple of election cycles, there’s been some movement on that. In 2020 when Biden was elected in 2021, HR one and S one, the first bill that was brought to the house and Senate was a big democracy reform package that included some public financing and expansion of voting rights. It didn’t pass because Manchin and cinema were the holdouts. It passed the house, got 48 votes in the Senate, but it’s going to be on the beginning of the, if Biden wins again this cycle, this will be again, the priority legislation. And that’s because of decades of really hard work of a lot of organizations, a lot of people who see this as a priority.

If we can win this election, it’s going to be time for a lot of outside advocacy and demand and participation to across the country, people demanding that this legislation get passed. That’s the only way it will happen. But these things can take a long time, but I feel like we’re fundamentally hopeful that things can change. There’s a lot of scary things on the horizon, but this has been the case many times before in the past. And some of our thinking on this book comes from reading about the industrial revolution and just what significant transformations were happening in that time. But we built the labor movement, we built new ways of working together, built the welfare state, created new visions for how to organize society, and we can do that again, but it takes that work on a strong vision and then a lot of work to build collective power and a lot of strategy. It’s not easy, but it is possible. And I’m actually excited about, there’s so many good things already happening, and yeah, I am excited about what we can do together.

Astra Taylor:

Great, Astra. Well, I love what Leah said, obviously that’s why I wrote a book with her. But it does require that we collaborate from wherever we happen to sit, and we are influenced in this book. Our conception of solidarity is influenced by the labor movement, which brought a fighting spirit, a kind of class conscious spirit to solidarity, but also these thinkers in the late 18 hundreds and early 19 hundreds called the ISTs who were connected to meal Durkheim and some philosophers and statesmen in France who saw solidarity from a kind of upper class perspective and argued for changes to the economy that would benefit everyone, that would create more egalitarian conditions and investment in public finance and worker cooperatives and the like, because they saw their self-interest as embedded wellbeing of the larger whole. They saw themselves as having a stake in the common good. So I think that’s really important. We have to build bonds of solidarity across difference, and that’s race and gender and taste, but also class. You’ve been quoting Bob Dylan, so maybe I’ll end with a quote from John Lennon. He said, you think you’re so clever and classless and free. You see yourself as an individual, right? But actually we’re not. We’re all part of the economy, and we’re actually not free on our own. We’re only free with each other.

Rob Johnson:

Yes. Well, in closing, I want to share with the world some of what is making me grin today. Years ago in understanding relationships, I read a book by a man named Harville Hendricks, who I later learned a gathering with Harry Belafonte and Cornell West and yourself on the Upper West Side was your father. And I had read his work. And so I’m understanding today the psychology that comes together with the social science and I think takes you higher and ostra. When I grew up playing hockey around the border and going through the Windsor Tunnel or sailing across to Bell River, across Lake St. Clair, I used to always ask my dad, why is it that I think the Canadian people are wiser than the Americans? And I felt like there was a wholeness and an awareness there. And I watched things like auto executives who were sailing friends of mine telling me they were going to move plants to Ontario because the state paid for healthcare for all the people.

And so they could give a higher wage or get more profit or whatever, because the state provided the platform. So why would I come to this reading and I come to this conversation today? I’m thinking about emotion design, what you might call EQ and iq, and both of you from your history, from your insights and what I read in this book are outstanding. And I want to add one other ingredient This, a book from a man from Sausalito, California named Gerald Jamalski. The name of his book is Love is Letting Go of Fear. And it’s about how unlocking fear allows us to work together. And I think that you are both not only saying we have to come together, what was the old Youngblood son? Get together, try and love one another. Right now, Diana Ross, reach out and touch somebody’s hand. But Marvin Gaye is saying, what’s going on? And you’re not just diagnosing it. You’re coming up with an answer about how to let go of fear and work together. And I want to thank you both. I think you are making a tremendous contribution to the vision of what we need in our future.

Astra Taylor:

Thank you so much. Thank you

Leah Hunt-Hendrix:

So much. That means a lot. It’s really great to be talking with you.

Rob Johnson:

Thank you both. And check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at ineteconomics.org.