← Conversations with Coleman
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. Before I get to today's guest, I want to say a few words about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It should go without saying that killing someone because of their political beliefs, even if you find those beliefs to be evil, is never justified. And if you had posed that question in the abstract a few days ago, most Americans, I think, would have agreed. But something was revealed on social media when Kirk was killed. Something very ugly, which is that a disturbing number of people disagree. A disturbing number of Americans celebrated his death, especially on left wing spaces like blue sky. To be clear, I have no doubt that if the politics of this assassination were reversed, if someone revered on the left were killed, then we'd be seeing the worst elements of the right celebrating as well. It may be that the propensity to violence is equal on both sides at this moment, or it may be that the left is worse than the right right now. I would need to see data to actually answer that question. But what's clear is that the norm against political violence of all kinds is on thin ice. We shouldn't be too alarmist, though. We saw more assassinations in the 1960s than we do today. We saw more political violence in the 1970s than we see today. And the country survived that era. But neither should we be complacent. When I was researching my book, the End of Race Politics, I read pretty much everything Martin Luther King ever wrote and said. And what struck me is just how much energy Dr. King had to spend persuading people to be nonviolent. He wasn't like, we want equal rights, but we should do it nonviolently. It was a lot more like, here's a 10, 15 minute speech laying out the affirmative philosophical case for why nonviolence is the best way to to get what we want. And he gave that speech over and over and over again because it wasn't obvious. He argued that people assume your means are the same as your ends. So if your means are violent, they'll assume your ends are violent and they'll reject your whole policy program. I think he was right about that. Over the next week or so, you will see many people condemn violence. I agree with them, of course, but you will see fewer people make the affirmative case for nonviolence. Today me and my guest are going to model how to disagree nonviolently, because my guest is Bhaskar Sankara Bhaskar was the founding editor of Jacobin magazine and now the president at the Nation magazine. He is a proud democratic socialist. In fact, he was the vice chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. Hint, I am not a socialist. He's also the author of the Socialist the Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality. In this episode, we talk about the practicality of democratic socialism. We talk about rent control. We talk about the affordability crisis in American cities. We discuss the limits of the populist left. And of course, we discuss Zoran Mamdani. So without further ado, Bhaskar Sankara.
- [03:24]
B
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com store switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new.
- [03:49]
A
Customer offer for first 3 months only.
- [03:50]
B
Speed slow after 35gb of networks busy. Taxes and fees extra.
- [03:53]
A
See mint mobile.com bhasker thanks so much for coming on my show.
- [03:57]
B
Thanks for having me.
- [03:58]
A
So before we get into some, some, some of our points of agreement and probable disagreement, I want to give my audience a sense of who are you? How did you come to be a founding editor of Jacobin? And now you're at the Nation as well, so give a little bit of your origin story for people.
- [04:16]
B
Yeah, I became a socialist at a very young age. I just turned 36 and I became a socialist when I was 17. So it's been not only all of my adult life, but, you know, more than half of my life itself. I've been on the socialist left. And it was kind of from that ideological root that I first became interested in exploring ideas and magazines and things like that. And I started Jacobin almost exactly 15 years ago, initially as an online magazine for about two months. And then after that we launched into, into print. And I recently took over, not recently, actually three years ago I took over as president of the Nation magazine. So I've kind of become by accident a specialist in magazine publishing, particularly print magazine publishing. But it was never really my intent. My intent was just to pursue politics through writing and debating.
- [05:15]
A
And I read your New York Times profile in preparation for this. And I think we have in common that our original dreams were to be basketball players and we were backed into political writing as a result of genetic bad luck.
- [05:30]
B
It's tough. I'm 56 and I really, I play pickup. Once or twice a week. And I really should play as a point guard, but I want to play as a shooting guard. I want to come off screens and pop and like Steph Curry. It's really. It's really tough. I don't have the handles like Steph Curry. I want to play like Klay Thompson and catch and shoot. I get. I get blocked a lot, so it's tough. But, you know, I persevere.
- [05:52]
A
Well, that says something about your character. So do you describe yourself as a socialist or a democratic socialist? And is that difference meaningful to you?
- [06:03]
B
Yeah, I describe myself as a democratic socialist, and I think the distinction is kind of like squares and rectangles, right? Where all squares are rectangles, if I remember that one. Right. Not all rectangles are square. So I think that the true meaning of being a socialist is to be against not only forms of economic inequality and pursue more democracy in the economic realm, but. But also to pursue it in the political realm. And I think there's a certain type of socialists who do the sort of no true Scotsman thing, saying, oh, well, all socialists are democratic socialists, otherwise they're not real socialists. But I think given the history of the 20th century and given the various forms of socialism has taken, including very dark and authoritarian forms, it's important to distinguish and foreground the front and say, first and foremost, I'm a democrat, and it's because of my belief in democracy and because of my egalitarianism that I'm also a socialist.
- [07:02]
A
Right. Do you find anything to admire in Marx's legacy or in Marx's scholarship? Because, you know, like, if you open a Econ 101 textbook at your average university, you're not really going to find a trace that a guy named Karl Marx was all that important or even existed. Whereas you'll be able to draw a pretty clear link from what you're reading to, say, Adam Smith or to economists closer to us in time, George Solow, and stuff like this. You won't find Marxian theory in the economic consensus.
- [07:40]
B
Well, I consider myself a Marxist, and for me, Marxism is a framework that helps me understand pertinent things about the world. I. I'm more than happy to say that I would drop that framework if I no longer found it useful. Whereas to me, being a democratic socialist is a moral and ethical commitment. So that kind of formed my normative core, so that I think I'll stick with until the day that I die. Marxism, I find utility in it. And I think Marxism continues to inform the bedrock of sociology and History and philosophy and many other different spheres in econ departments, it depends. We used to have departments called departments of political economy where Marx would play a bigger role than modern econ today. But I would say that Marx set about to write a critique of political economy. So he was drawing on the tools of classical economy. This is where the labor theory of value and other things that Marx is using, he wasn't so much developing his own freestanding system of economics. So I think it's perfectly compatible to be a Marxist and to use the tools of modern economics to understand something. You know, you could be a Marxist and a marginalist in my, in my mind.
- [08:59]
A
So when you say the labor theory of value, what do you find to be true or useful in that idea?
- [09:04]
B
Well, I think it's, it's less true. I don't subscribe to labor theory of value. I think it's more useful as a framework to understand something normative, which is the Marxist critique of exploitation. So the idea, for instance, that workers produce because they have no alternative under capitalism for a capitalist, and this capitalist, who owns a means of production, extracts labor from a worker who enters into this contract with the capitalist. But it's an asymmetrical kind of bond because the worker is presented with a worker starved choice and the capitalist has other options of other workers that they, they can employ. And I think the idea that workers are not paid the full fruits of their labor and that Marxist conception of surplus value being produced by workers, I think is tied to the labor theory of value. And that concept of Marxist concept of exploitation I think has value at the normative level. Whereas I don't think it's a particularly sound way to analyze the economy as a, as a whole.
- [10:18]
A
But how do you separate the two? Because it seems to me if the labor theory of value isn't true descriptively, which I'm pretty sure it isn't, then how could it then be true normatively? Because its value normatively rests on the claim that it is a true description roughly of how firms operate.
- [10:40]
B
Yeah, I think it is true that workers are not paid the full fruits of their labor. I think what often Marxists miss is that capital contributes a lot to production in and of itself, not just by virtue of ownership, but also the capitalist, for example, contributes entrepreneurially. They take entrepreneurial risks to set up new firms, which of course has value. Most capitalists produce also managerial labor and supervision and play a role evolving production processes to create more efficiency. So it's not necessarily a zero sum relationship in the way that I think a certain reading of Marxism would make people think of the relationship between capital and labor in that sense as zero sum. Where I would go further though is I think that labor can play the role that capital plays through the creation of cooperative firms and through other means of. Even if we're still operating within market economies, labor could potentially find avenues of socialized finance like through a public banking system, through self finance from cooperative firms, and also can elect management and make sure there's some sort of democratic say over management priorities with the goal of still maximizing firm profits. So in other words, I think labor can replicate the role of capital. Capital I think is still dependent on labor. And that's, I think, very much tied with a Marxist conception of this inherent antagonism between capital and labor, which I don't think is necessarily present in a lot of mainstream economics that think of labor as just one of many factors of production.
- [12:32]
A
So in theory, I could see how a co op might assume the role of managing a firm. But could it replace the capitalist role in creating a firm as entrepreneurs without simply being entrepreneurs? Without simply being capitalists?
- [12:51]
B
Yeah, I think this is actually where the question of entrepreneurial risk is, I think a really important one. So we can imagine taking existing firms that already exist on a profitable basis and converting them to co ops. And maybe you would even concede that it's possible that these firms, especially if they were subject to the same market forces, could be as efficient or potentially even more efficient. If you concede that maybe there would be less resources devoted to certain aspects of managerial supervision. If workers themselves are motivated by getting not just a base salary but also a dividend, if they're also owners of production. But the question of the creation of new firms is something I think democratic socialists have to grapple with. So it could be, for instance, that you have a model that says that the first group of workers who get funding and have an idea and bring their pitch deck, let's say in a fully socialized economy, to one of many competing public banks and say, here's our business plan. We want capital to start this up, get the chance to draft a initial operating agreement that gives them more, more resources than other workers, allows them to basically say, okay, we're going to run it this way, we're going to get X amount of the proceeds. We're going to have this amount of essentially sweat equity. But then over time it becomes a more socialized firms. So I think the actual mechanism would depend. But I do firmly believe that you need to incentivize people more than morally incentivize them materially to take risks and create new things.
- [14:30]
A
So under that model, my question would then be the public banks. What is their incentive to be to allocate capital efficiently? Do they make more money if they make better choices, better bet on better horses, as it were?
- [14:44]
B
Yeah, I think that they would be. Their goal will be to maximize returns within a certain risk profile. So you could imagine, for instance, some banks being structurally encouraged to be more conservative, other banks serving a role that might be even more related to the public bank. So right now we have public. We have different forms of public banking. We have public banks like the North Dakota public Bank. We also have like developmental banks that fund state infrastructure projects and things like that. But I think in many ways I start as a socialist from the perspective of I want to create a more egalitarian world five minutes from now. I don't want to discover, depend on any sort of leaps in consciousness or any changes in human behavior. I want to take people as they are. I want to take things that work like the current market structures that I think work fairly well in allowing for market failures in certain areas where it doesn't work well, but in general works well for the creation of commodities. And I want to figure out a way to make them more democratic and egalitarian, not only with ex post redistribution, but also before the fact. I want to, again, at a normative level, you might disagree with this goal, but I believe that firms should be more democratic in their structure and also more egalitarian in the distribution of wages. Before the fact as well.
- [16:11]
A
Yeah, I guess my big picture goal when I think about economics and human progress is that poverty is really bad and that whichever system reliably gets rid of poverty the quickest is the one I favor. Which is why I like capitalism, because I. I've seen it. The evidence is pretty clear that the introduction of market economies, you know, in, in all the natural experiments that have taken place, whether it's East Germany, West Germany, China, Taiwan, China in the 1970s when the Xiaogang village experiments start. It's just there's an overwhelming amount of evidence that free markets directly precede abundance and the end of famines and reduction in true capital P poverty of a kind. That is really the center of my moral bullseye. And this is where I get off the boat when the desire to reduce inequality becomes more important than the desire to reduce poverty per se.
- [17:23]
B
Well, I think a system like what I'm describing wouldn't necessarily lead to less economic, less dynamic Economic growth. I am a market socialist, so I don't want to spend a lot of time doing defending systems. That market socialism really emerged in critique of or even democratic socialism at a political level emerged in critique of people forget that the word Stalinism, for example, first emerged out of the critique of democratic socialists and Trotskyists and other revolutionary socialists that were critical of Stalinism. In the same way market socialism emerged out of looking at the failures of central planning. A lot of the words we even use to describe why central planning doesn't work originated from people who at least at the time considered themselves market socialists. So when we talk about soft budget constraints and all these other things, this actually emerged out of the critiques of market socialists. I would say that the narrative that you paint of the 20th century should be complicated a little. I don't disagree in the broad strokes, but it should be complicated to say that for example, Russia was or the Soviet Union was not necessarily on the developmental trajectory that it hit by default if there wasn't a revolution. That in fact, for all the political maladies that came with it, the introduction of central planning helped Russia catch up and it worked to a certain point. In the same way, China's developmental trajectory is stronger than India's developmental trajectory, which certainly wasn't a pure free market. It was kind of the worst of both worlds in many ways. But the ch Chinese investments in health and certain other infrastructure, health and education infrastructure investment helped pay the way to an opening and an opening that was very self, very state directed at a certain level. So in the same way you can look at regimes on the right like in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, that used a very heavy stuff state hand and really used a lot of planning mechanisms and combine that with targeted liberalization to accomplish growth. But I think you are right in the sense that a lot of this growth and progress happened within with an eye, a eye towards expanding markets and having a certain important role for markets. But it's been a combination of state and planning.
- [19:58]
A
So then I'm struggling a little bit to say what's the core difference between say your model of having like public banks deciding whether and how much to invest in new firms that are like owned by co ops? What is the difference in terms of the incentives and constraints for those banks compared to just a venture capital firm today doing that same task?
- [20:21]
B
I think there's not that much difference between the two. I think that part of the reason why the banks are public, not to get too much into the weeds and my conception of a fully socialist economy would be because, you know, they have to be shared custodians of the public wealth. Because in a fully socialized economy, you might have all sorts of difference just by virtue of the chance of, let's say you're involved in a firm that owns an oil rig, whereas I'm involved in a firm that produces childcare, for instance. I'm in a very labor intensive field. You're in a very capital incentive field. You might have without some sort of shared ownership between the cooperative and the public. And in this case a public bank would be custodians. You might have some inherent inequities. That's counterproductive, distorts the labor market. So even if you don't care about inequity in and of itself, the fact that it might be distorting to the labor market because everyone would be vying for the most capital intensive job in this sort of economy.
- [21:34]
A
Do you support what Trump is doing right now, saying he wants to hold the federal government to hold like a 10% stake in Intel? Because at some level this seems to be exactly what you're advocating or a cousin of it, at minimum. Right.
- [21:50]
B
I would say that I'll give one thing to Trump's credit. I believe that in the first Trump administration, he put back on the table a lot of the tools of industrial policy, including tariffs and other other things. In my view, he didn't do a lot good with those tools. A lot of his goals were counterproductive. A lot of the ways in which he used the state power were just mercurial. I think the Biden administration did a much better job with the CHIPS act and other things and in wielding industrial policy to the overall benefit of the US Economy as a whole. Now with the Trump administration, I think it's utterly counterproductive. A lot of the things he's doing, I think it's creating a very unpredictable, predictable environment for capital. Not knowing the tariff rates, not knowing what's going to happen next, not knowing how the state is going to intervene. So for me, it's not necessarily more or less state intervention is a good thing. A lot has to do with predictability and other things. And I think Trump's mercurial nature is quite bad for the US And I would say that governments on the right have used a lot of these tools successfully. They've done it in, I mentioned Taiwan, I mentioned South Korea. A lot of these governments did it under right wing military dictatorships regimes. I of course do not support governments broadly on the left. Used a lot of these, these tools, again under authoritarian regimes like, like in China, that I. That I don't support at that level, but I think used a lot of these tools successfully. On the other hand, there's been governments on the left, closer to the democratic socialist tradition, like in the Nordic countries, that really built their economy on the basis of free trade and being very selective with using certain tools like tariffs and protectionism. So for me, I don't actually think there's necessarily a moral good in protecting certain groups of capitalists and exposing certain other groups of capitalists to market pressures. I think that it's kind of an either or instance. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. Broadly, I think the Biden administration did a better job wielding those tools than Trump has thus far.
- [24:11]
A
How do you feel about billionaires?
- [24:13]
B
Well, I think that for me, the primary problem with capitalism is less distributionism. Well, I would say it is distributional in the sense that I think there are certain minimum necessities of a good life that people don't have access to right now. So I think, for example, we do need mass redistribution to make sure that people have greater opportunity to educate themselves, greater access to housing, healthcare and the basics and so on. But to me, a lot of the inherent inequalities in capitalism relates to power, including power at the point of production. To me, there's not a huge difference between the power that a worker feels at the point of production if their boss runs a few car dealerships and only takes them, you know, 700 grand a year, versus if their boss is Steve Baldmer or something like that, you know, and is a billionaire, you know, there's not a huge.
- [25:20]
A
So it should soften. Should that soften what a democratic socialist feels towards billionaires or harden what they feel towards the car dealership owner?
- [25:31]
B
Well, I think that it's primarily thinking about these relationships in terms of power rather than in some sort of arbitrary number. I think a critique of billionaires is sometimes really useful at a populous level, at the level of communicating to people the problems with inequity or just the randomness and chance that goes into the creation of some fortunes. Of course, that could be useful if your goal is to create a society with more equality of opportunity and more equality of results too. But if you're asking at an intellectual level whether I think that as a primary goal, as a policy, there should be the abolition of billionaires, I would say I think that would be an after effect of other things I advocate for rather than kind of a primary goal.
- [26:24]
A
So it would result from your favorite policies, but it wouldn't be something you pursue directly.
- [26:28]
B
Sure.
- [26:30]
A
So my problem with anti billionaire rhetoric, it seems to me like to make a cartoon analogy, if my theory of how the world works were like wolves make places really bad to live. And then I go out and I do my research and I see actually all the places where the wolves are are actually the best places to live. This is kind of a problem with my theory. Perhaps the world doesn't quite work as I think it does. So if you. Look, if billionaires really were the problem, you're not arguing this, but many people in your camp do. Billionaires are stealing money. There are many ways you can cash out that claim, but basically they're the reason that people around them are poor. They're taking too much, not giving enough. But then you notice that all the countries with the most billionaires, America being one, are the same countries where the world's poor are banging on the doors to get in. This is a problem with my model of how economies work. As a matter of fact, it tends to be the economies where it's easiest to become a billionaire. Some exceptions to that, obviously. I mean, if you become a billionaire running drugs in Mexico, that's actually bad for the total economy. It reduces investment. But if you become a billionaire under a set of rules that is broadly not totally corrupt, the types of places where it's easier to do that are also the types of places where it's easier to be a poor person, to begin as a poor person, and end the middle class, for lack of a better term. So to me, the whole socialist critique of billionaires, it seems to just totally misconceive how economics works.
- [28:15]
B
Well, I would say there's a socialist critique of capitalists rooted in some of these power relations. And then there's a broader populist critique of billionaires, if that makes sense. And sometimes I think socialists like myself will adopt certain arguments in pursuit of making some points or pursuing an agenda within capitalism, like more redistribution within capitalism. That is slightly different than our intellectual objection. But I would say that capitalists and workers are dependent on each other. I think it's an asymmetrical dependency. I think it's built with all sorts of inequities. But there's a belief that I was actually inculcated at the very beginning when I was becoming a Marxist. And it's somewhat apocryphal. This is ascribed to a million different people like Frederick Jameson and others. But I don't actually think he, he said it but it goes like the only thing worse than being exploited by capital in capitalism is not being exploited by capital. And I think in many ways that's been a lot of the truth of the 20th century and 21st century that I conceive of a world after capitalism. But I don't want to get trapped in a middle ground where we make it. We're still within capitalism, but we make it impossible for capitalists to actually accumulate wealth and actually guide production. Because then we're in the worst of both worlds. We're not far enough for socialism, but we've also kind of made it so that the current system doesn't work and then we just have immiseration of everyone.
- [29:59]
A
So in your model, how do we get to the world beyond capitalism without going through that destructive valley of worst of both worlds?
- [30:08]
B
So I think we could look at social democracy in the 20th century and even today the remnants of social democratic states in the Nordic countries and say it might not be your preferred model of capitalism. You might argue, for example, that Norway would be better off by 0.5% of GDP growth per year if they were pursuing another developmental model. Probably would, but you could argue that. But clearly it works at some level. The economy is still hungry.
- [30:34]
A
They're very good places to live, they're.
- [30:36]
B
Decent places to live. They can fund a welfare state state and even if there's an opportunity cost by certain decisions that Norway has made distributionally and otherwise, and we'll probably be on other sides of whether these decisions were good decisions, it works. And in the 20th century I think we have lots of models of social democracies figuring out alternative growth models that have worked. For example, by saying okay, we're still in Sweden, for instance, in the mid mid century they decided that they were going to build their system and this was a socialist labor union, the lo backed by Socialist party. The SAP decided they had a growth model in mind, the Ren Megner model. And this growth model would be based primarily on the lever of, not necessarily state intervention. Actually at its peak Sweden's economy only had around 11% of its economy nationalized, which was less than some countries like France in the post war period or the uk. But its lever would be centralized wage bargaining. So let's say you're in a sector with three different firms and I'll just make up names, auto firms, actually I'll say Chrysler, Ford and gm. Let's pretend in this example that Chrysler is the least efficient producer, Ford is the middle producer and GM is the most efficient producer. Of course, anyone who's ever tried to buy an American car would, would know these are kind of ridiculous examples, but they, the ELO union would set a wage, would bargain for a wage for the whole sector, but they wouldn't bargain for the wage at the level that Chrysler at the bottom could afford. They would decide to bargain for a wage that, that the middle producer, Ford in this example could afford to make. So if they were doing enterprise bargaining alone, then the GM workers would advocate for a higher wage and even that. And the Chrysler workers, afraid of their firm getting out of business, would advocate for less of a wage, but instead they did in the middle. So what that did was it encouraged the Chryslers of the world to go out of business because they couldn't afford the wages, but also it allowed the GMs of the world to use the excess profits to expand production. And obviously the state had a big role with active labor market policies to take the displaced Chrysler workers and bring them into expanding sectors or absorb them elsewhere in the economy. All this is a very long way of saying that they had this goal of high wages, a strong trade union led plan, but they tied it with a growth model that made logical sense sense and actually created an economy that was encouraged capital intensive investment and encouraged a lot of the success story that we associate with the Nordics. So I think that the social Democrats of today, your AOCs of the world, your Bernie's of the world, need to come up with a plan, a credible plan for not just redistributing things and saying socialism means more free stuff, but actually a growth model, actually saying here's our plan, here's how we're going to make the economy more wealthy and also more equal at the same time. And people like you will still disagree and you'll say actually there's this opportunity cost and there's a better developmental trajectory we could be on, but they'll at least have a coherent plan. Whereas I think the problem with a lot of people who self describe as democratic socialists today, or social democrats, or just as liberals or progressives, they often talk about the free stuff they want. I agree with them on all these things. I believe in a bigger welfare state, for the record, but they don't often tie it with a coherent developmental plan.
- [34:19]
A
So the hypothetical you sketched with Chrysler, Ford and gm, isn't there a critique of that which says, okay, I watched the whole movie. At the beginning of the movie there were three companies controlling the sector, now there's two, right? So first of all there's a market control Monopoly problem that's gone in the wrong direction. And then secondly, given how regulated this sector is, how much harder is it in this Norway hypothetical for a new car company to even enter? Because regulation, as we know, always favors the incumbents.
- [34:51]
B
So it's not necessarily highly regulated. In fact, it might actually be less regulated in many ways in the US system it does have high labor costs and that's a barrier to entry. But there's always rooms around it, there's always different roads that a company can take through having a new specialized technique or having some sort of way to enter. I mean, this actually ironically gets me on maybe, but at the margin it.
- [35:14]
A
Just makes it more attractive to start your new car company in any other country that's not Norway. Like at the margin. Right. If it has higher labor costs. And so if you do this throughout the economy, you disincentivize at the margin innovation. And that has a long term consequence too.
- [35:31]
B
So I think that often when we're talking about things at the abstract level, it becomes hard when we drill down to particulars just because, you know, if a theory could explain everything, that it wouldn't be a theory. Right. So I do think that there's other aspects to these economies that might be, might entice certain capitalists, like having a very highly skilled, highly educated workforce, having the existing infrastructure of this highly automated production, having maybe cheap energy or lots of other things that go along with putting a focus on manufacturing. And obviously this is an example I drew from the 20th century. It'll have to adapt to the new industries that are emerging in the 21st century. But I don't want to actually sound like maybe too much of a libertarian, but I do think that sometimes we overstate how natural monopolies are in some of these sectors. I actually think there will always be avenues for new entrants short of collusion between capitalists in terms of cartels or state involvement. So there is room in my mind for antitrust and things like that. But I think sometimes we overstate and overuse monopoly. But it is true that in many of these cases the socialist economic model or the economic model pushed by socialists, even if it was just doses of socialism within capitalism, actually led to greater firm concentration. And the LO trade unionists would actually say that was a good thing because it fit their model. I think in many ways good thing for them, but also a good thing for the economy as a whole. And that there are benefits to, to scale. It obviously depends on what sector, what situation, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. For example, when you have big investments to make in 5G infrastructure, to have a bigger company able to make that investments rather than a smaller one. I mean these are all particulars. We would have to look through every single case to see whether or not state action to break up monopolies are a good idea or a bad idea.
- [37:46]
A
I don't disagree. But the benefits to scale. That's an observation that there's also benefits to scale. When companies scale up in a competitive market without regulation that favors incumbents, they're still.
- [37:59]
B
This isn't a regulation though, so much as this is the nature of the.
- [38:02]
A
Labor market raising the costs.
- [38:04]
B
But this is the nature of the labor market as a result of centralized wage bargaining. So it's a little bit different than regulation because the floor is created by the bargaining power of those workers. And presumably if the firms were less profitable, the workers would have less bargaining power and the floor would lower. So it's a little more elastic than just saying, for example, even there's a minimum wage of $30. Actually ironically, European social democrats, particularly in the Nordics have always been opponents of state led minimum wages for a variety of reasons actually go a little bit beyond my expertise, but is an interesting nugget. Limu game and Doug Limu and I always tell you to customize your car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. But now we want you to feel it. Cue the emu music. Limu. Save yourself money today. Increase your wealth. Customize and save.
- [39:03]
A
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- [39:06]
B
That may have been too much feeling.
- [39:07]
A
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- [39:25]
B
We were made to help organize the competition.
- [39:28]
A
Expedia made to travel. How do you feel about unions?
- [39:33]
B
I'm a big fan of unions. You know, I think that unions allow workers to assert some sort of democratic power over production and assert certain minimums. So I think in general unions have played a positive role in conjunction with growing economies of making sure that workers kind of have a say at the table and are able to get enough of the fruits of their labor that they're able to empower themselves as consumers. And I think it's good for the economy as a whole.
- [40:09]
A
Yeah, I'm much less a fan of unions than you for a few reasons. I mean first, if you talk about public sector unions, it's like I often talk about this study by Roland Fryer at Harvard, where he was able to take over 12 of the lowest performing schools in Houston. And he got a unique opportunity basically to do whatever he wanted with them and to implement a protocol where he fired half the teachers, replaced all the principals, extended the school day. And it's been one of the most successful experiments in the recent history of, of education reform with precisely the kind of failing schools, mostly black and Hispanic kids, that are supposedly unhelpable and was able to raise test scores there and this kind of stuff. And obviously everything he did is impossible because of teachers unions, mainly because of public sector unions, which advocate obviously for themselves, not for the students. There's obviously a critique that has come mostly from the left of police, public sector unions, how it's impossible to get police reform for that reason. So there's a whole public sector, there's a way in which public sector unions make some of our nation's toughest problems just impossible to actually solve. And then the truth is, I don't know anyone that actually deals with unions in their private life who isn't extremely frustrated by them. Like, you talk to anyone in Hollywood that makes movies and they're like, my actor can't even drive, is not allowed to drive himself to the TV set. We have to pay a teamster to drive Leonardo DiCaprio to the TV set to the shooting. Even if Leonardo DiCaprio wanted to drive to, to save costs, maybe he's working on a passion project, right? I'm not allowed. The Sunset is perfect right now, but I'm not allowed to film it. I'm literally not allowed to ask my employees to film it. And we missed it, and so be it. And there's just a million examples like this. There's the obvious and juicily ironic example of Nathan Robinson, famous socialist current affairs, when his employees tried to form a worker co op, he fired all of them. And this is someone who has made a whole career advocating for unions. The second the union affects you, all of a sudden it becomes, oh, my God, unions are preventing me from getting anything done at the firm that I'm trying to run. Right? And this is an experience that I think anyone who runs a business is probably nodding their head vigorously to right now. So those would be my twin critiques of unions, public sector, private sector.
- [42:57]
B
Well, I think that. Well, first of all, I think the Nathan Robinson situation was a little bit different in the sense that it's an attempt. I don't know the details, but attempt to form a cooperative means you're going beyond the kind of right of management to manage. Right. So it's a little bit different than a classic union situation.
- [43:15]
A
Union rules are all in the same vein. They're taking certain choices away from the manager. You're not allowed to ask me to do this kind of a job. You.
- [43:23]
B
Well, I think there is a zero sum trade off. So let me first agree in that extent that a union takes certain autonomy away from employer generally. They do all operate in terms of allowing in some base level management. Asserting management's right to manage is kind of part of our NLRB framework in the US but it does mean, for example, that if your day is capped at eight hours and your week is capped at 40, and if you know you want to have someone work a little bit longer, and even if they consent to it, you would have to pay them time and a half in a, in a, in a union environment, even if they were above federal exempt overtime, exempt limits or getting paid that much, that takes certain autonomy away from an entrepreneur. It also gives more autonomy and freedom to a lot of ordinary workers who could demand that within their 40 hours they're paid a certain amount, they're paid a living wage, they're able to have eight hours to work, eight hours to sleep, and eight hours to do whatever they want. So there is a certain set of trade offs. I do think a lot of other countries you have unions, you have societies that are even more unionized in the United States and Europe, but where unions seem less disruptive or unions play a different role. They might not have the same job control that the unions in the Hollywood unions might have, but they're able to at a higher level exert certain control over setting bargaining for wages at the sectoral level or, or influencing states. So one example that people often use is Spain and France are much more unionized in the US and in Spain they're able to build high speed transit quickly and efficiently with unions at the table. But in the US we're not able to, and often we blame unions. And I think in general there is a problem of where the veto points are. If the veto points are localized and fragmented into a thousand different directions, as opposed to one big centralized veto point, it's easier to navigate and set certain rules of the road. And in many ways I think unions can be compatible with more seamless production. So if you were to ask a Swedish capitalist in 1968 whether he was better off than, let's say, a British capitalist with a far less unionized workforce in Britain, he would say yes, absolutely. Because there's less strikes and there's a more predictable pattern to industrial relations in my country than in the uk where there's less unions. But there might be more wildcat strikes and things like that. That makes it less predictable to decide when to invest or how to orient production.
- [46:25]
A
But part of the trade off is also that to stick with the example of movie making, people trying to make movies, they just, because of all these regulations, they seek other countries to do it in, which means in the long run, there are fewer movies being made, fewer jobs for those same people that are benefiting in a narrow sense from certain aspects of those same unions. Right. And so there's an element to this which is death by a thousand cuts, which is all of these policies which, which, which demand more for labor and less demand more from, from capital. Any one of them seems justifiable. I mean, some of them are insane. But like, many of them seem very reasonable. Like, yeah, like, you know, I don't want to work more than five days a week. That's like kind of a norm, international norm. I don't want to work more than a certain number of hours a day. I'm like humans. We need to sleep. I don't want every single hour of my work to be of my day to be dedicated to work. So all of these, they all seem reasonable, but then when you set them in ink, you risk a death by a thousand cuts scenario because one cut is fine. A thousand makes the economy so sluggish that, I mean, you talked about Spain. Yeah, they've got great trains. I've ridden some of those trains. The economy of Spain in general is sluggish and terrible. It's like very bad compared to the American economy. So you don't want to sleepwalk into a scenario where each idea on its own sounded okay, but at the end of it, you've got an economy that's lost all dynamism.
- [48:06]
B
So even if we can see that there's certain problems with both, with how American capitalism works as a whole, I would say there's different solutions. One solution could involve actually and ironically, given what you're saying, a greater role for unions at the sectoral level and with a seat at the table, more equal to capital, basically being able to say, we want this norms in our industry. You're saying that there's these trade offs. You're saying that you might want to move more production to Canada to avoid this or that restrictions. Let's negotiate and let's figure out the optimal solution for both labor and capital that would involve more unionization and maybe industrial relations at a higher level like you have in a lot of northern Europe. Or of course you could pursue a lower road of just saying let's cut out unions entirely. So I think even the complaints you bring up and we can test some of them and agree with some of them, I think have different solutions and some of which involve actually a greater role for unions, not a lesser role.
- [49:25]
A
Have unions taken that stance? In other words, have unions said, okay, well we realize these jobs are going to get shipped overseas unless we throw you a bone, so we're going to throw you a bone as opposed to basically trying to increase as much of the pie for themselves and their workers and then basically try to get all the fewer jobs that do exist for your guys.
- [49:54]
B
Yeah, I think that there's a lot of examples, some of which I think they've gone way too far in the 70s and 80s of unions, let's say in auto, for example, making concessions to employers and saying will accept job cuts and wage cuts in return for maintaining more employment or will institute a tearing system so new entrants to our union or this sector won't have the same benefits as existing incumbents over X amount of years of seniority. So I think at many levels unions have pursued as part of an overall strategy of sometimes working with the state too, in kind of a corporatist arrangement, concessions in pursuit of a broader economic project. Because like I said before, capital and labor within capitalism are dependent on each other. But it could be, for instance, that even things that we might see as making the US more bloated in terms of a welfare state and so on could actually unleash other parts of the economy. So for example, if U.S. employers didn't have to pay health insurance directly, but instead we had a single payer health care system or something of that model with additional measures to allow the state to use its bargaining power to reduce certain costs. You might end up at a point where it's easier for small businesses to survive in the US or it's easier for US manufacturers to survive in competition with manufacturers and other industrialized nations like Germany or South Korea, where the state plays the major role provisioning health insurance. So I think there are cases where it's not quite so zero sum between the power of unions and the power of the left and even on your terms, unleashing entrepreneurial and kind of more dynamic strains of the economy.
- [52:04]
A
Do you have a defensive public sector unions or do you, do you agree with my contentions there?
- [52:10]
B
No, I think Public sector unions can work quite, quite well. And I think if you look at the successful stories of, let's say, the way policing is done in Germany or education is done in Finland, these are sectors that are highly unionized as well. I think you.
- [52:29]
A
Although those are cases where they don't really need as drastic reform. The Finnish education system is not nearly as broken as the American education system. So the fact that they're unionized is not a big obstacle because it's not a big problem.
- [52:43]
B
I think a lot of the brokenness of the American education system is a product of American federalism and just how fragmented it is. Even the complaints you have about union impediments to certain reforms or changes or certain standards of job security is itself a product of this fragmentation. So obviously you have a system where a vital social good, a lot of it is dependent in rich areas, at least on property taxes and things like that, areas that are not getting a huge amount of federal funds but are still able to give people the best education in the world. I'm a product of K12 public schools in a suburb with a very good education system. So I do think again, we could talk about just the power of unions and let's say just unions defending bad behavior by some of their members and that being an intrinsic part of unionism, that being the primary impediment. Or we could talk about other things like the unequalness of financing of public goods or just the fact that because of other factors elsewhere in the economy, teachers are often asked to play a role teaching students that are coming to school hungry, coming to school with housing insecurity and other sorts of problems that don't exist in other countries to the same, same degree. So I think public sector unions can be part of a solution just as much as they're potential impediments in any particular case, we can imagine designing systems with unions that still achieve a lot of the goals that reformers have in those areas too.
- [54:34]
A
I think you're underrating how important it is to be able to fire incompetent staff members. Again, in like the Roland Fryer study, he's able to get math and reading scores up with African American and Hispanic students in poverty because he can fire half the staff, half the. He can fire the bad teachers. Right? He didn't have to fix the problem that some of them were coming to school hungry. It's a hard problem to fix, I agree. Can't reach into the home and so easily fix that, but he didn't have to wait for a Society to have some transformation. He just had to fire the bad teachers. And of course anyone who runs any business knows if you can't fire the less competent people, very little else will matter in terms of improving how your organization functions. It's so fundamental.
- [55:25]
B
Even in unionized workforces with extensive job security, you could fire people. You have to go through a process. You have to go through a process, progressive discipline process. A lot of times it's extremely, it's.
- [55:37]
A
But you can fire them for bad behavior. You can't just fire a teacher because they're not a very good teacher if they're meeting certain on paper requirements. Right.
- [55:47]
B
You could set clear, that's the real problem. You know, I think you could set clear benchmarks. And if people aren't reaching the benchmarks and don't take steps to improve, in any union contract, including public sector trade union contracts, there will be a progressive discipline system. Often even in non unionized workforces in the U.S. employers are hesitant about firing people. That's true in part because of how litigious America is in many ways. So I think a lot of the same again, but it's a lot worse.
- [56:24]
A
In the public sector.
- [56:24]
B
But again, we're talking about fragmentation and veto points. And I'm saying that with a stronger, clearer union movement. You, you can imagine a system in which people are fine with certain degrees of turnover because they don't wanna be burdened by low performing colleagues. As long as the new entrants are not undercutting with wages. And as long as the processes are clear and transparent.
- [56:55]
A
Yeah, again I would counter saying I went to public school and private school, half and half of my K through 12. I don't even remember an example of a teacher at my public school, my two public schools I went to being fired. Several examples at the private school of teachers being fired not because they molested a student or anything that big, just because they weren't very good. And the average, though there were some very good teachers at my public school, they're the exception to the rule and they get Christmas gifts from every parent because they're a departure from the norm that kids typically experience at public schools. Whereas private school it was much more normal to just have an excellent teacher or several every year. And so I think at the margin it's just really tough to reform. It's tough to be like pro education reform and also pro union.
- [57:47]
B
So let's think about public sector unions and their role raising the wages of public sector workers. If we want a more, let's say competent Police force. Wouldn't it be easier to get competent recruits if they're being paid $110,000 as opposed to $60,000?
- [58:04]
A
Yes.
- [58:05]
B
So in many ways what I'm saying is that for every example you give of public sector unions in the abstract being, or even a practice being impediments.
- [58:15]
A
I mean, couldn't that be done by statute? If they're government employees, can't we all decide that we want to pay teachers more because we want to attract those talented people that are going to work on McKinsey? We want to make it more attractive for them to teach our children? Do we need to empower public sector unions to do that and all that.
- [58:33]
B
Comes along with it? I think wage setting, public sector unions bargaining for wages is, if anything, more connected to market forces than legislation just setting an arbitrary mark. So that would seem to go against some of your other concerns about public sector intervention. But if there was some sort of centralized wage setting, I mean, to me that'd be in many ways more and more socialist of an intervention than even collective bargaining.
- [59:09]
A
Well, if I'm okay with public schools existing, I'm okay with the government controlling education to some degree. Once I'm already okay with that. Once I basically agree that most education K through 12 is nationalized, I have no problem with raising the salaries of teachers by statute in order to attract better talent because it's already taken out of the marketplace to a large degree.
- [59:38]
B
So we could have a system in which we had a less federalized system and a more nationalized K through 12 system to ensure more equality in which teachers were paid based on certain wage benchmarks and maybe take into account certain local conditions, but were kind of bargained. But at that point you would probably still have some sort of centralized role for the teachers to set certain basic standards. But yeah, that system could exist. And if anything, that system kind of some of the wage benchmark stuff reminds me of the Australian system to some degree. If anything, I think you're describing another type of social democracy as opposed to the American welfare state, which is like the American state as a whole, incredibly fragmented and federalized, and also American style enterprise bargaining, which is incredibly fragmented and localized too. But if anything, it sounds to me at least that you're describing a different form of social democracy as opposed to retreat from the public sector as a. As a whole.
- [60:42]
A
Yeah, I would characterize it a bit different, but let's move on for the sake of getting to other topics. So what are your thoughts on Zoran Mamdani's candidacy in New York City. Are you excited about him?
- [60:55]
B
Yeah, I think Zoran Mandani is. Is great. I think he's running a extremely relentlessly focused campaign on cost of living. And I think people want Zuran to be about a million different things on both the left and the right. But if you actually listen to the content of his speeches and what his campaign is focusing on, there's a relentless focus on cost of living, which I think is a welcome change, especially for this generation of American socialists. You know, I think all of us, a lot of us, have interesting identities and backgrounds and all sorts of eclectic traits about ourselves, but I. I like us to talk about bread and butter issues. I, in many ways, I consider myself an unhyphenated American and only go into those topics if really pressed. I think Zoran by nature wants to run that sort of campaign, even if the media and the wider world is interested with random tidbits about his background or personal life.
- [61:55]
A
So I agree with you. Cost of living is the most important issue. Cost of living and public safety. I would say, as a New Yorker, if he's all about cost of living, why is he in favor of rent control then? Because there's a huge literature on rent control. There was just a study last year that. A meta analysis of over 100 studies of rent control since World War I. And it finds obviously, yeah, rent goes down in the rent control departments, but rent goes up in the market housing because you're restricting supply. Right. And this is an extremely well studied phenomenon. There's a pretty wide consensus about it among. Among economists. And so if I'm for cost of living as a voter in New York, what I want to see is a mayor that says we're going to build a lot more housing. Perhaps we'll do housing subsidies for people that really can't afford it. Sure. But in general, the only way to bring down the price in the market is the market rentals, which is half of rentals in New York, is to build, build, build. Right.
- [62:56]
B
Well, one thing I would contest is I think there's broad consensus across the political spectrum right now on the need to construct more housing, including market rate housing. I think that's. There was broad bipartisan support for the city of yes. Proposals in New York City. And I think often the left is at the forefront of battles against the interests of local homeowners and others who want to prevent new constructions. So I think for those who have been pushing for those sort of thing before, it's worth just celebrating the change. Celebrating that I Do think there's a shift in perceptions from across the political spectrum on the question of market rate housing? I think Zoran's program includes a lot about how to make housing construction easier and faster. I think if you look at the other left or center candidates, someone like Brad Lander was responsible for the rezoning of the Gowanus area, which was one of the best recent examples we have of creating new housing in the US or in New York City, I should say. So in general, I'm all for what, whatever we can do to create more, more housing. When it comes to rent control, I think rent controls can be designed poorly or. Well, you could imagine me creating a rent control program that says, okay, you get to build a market rate, you know, housing complex and you know it's going to cost you X. X amount. This is, you know, you know, roughly what your ROI is going to be and there's going to be rent control on a portion or maybe all of that building that you're constructing, but it's only going to kick in after 25 years. Now, you can imagine that that's actually how a lot of well designed rent control programs have been built as opposed to poorly designed ones. And you can imagine some sort of like minor market distortion later. But on the offset, it's a lot less market distorting than me saying to you, you have to invest all this in housing right now and you're going to get a meager return. Even though your money could be making double digits if you just lock it in an index fund, you don't have to deal with any of the headaches. So all I'm saying is that those different varieties of rent controls me though I can see that some are extremely poorly designed.
- [65:29]
A
It's a bit like saying having 10 drinks today will give you X amount of hangover, but having two drinks in a year will give you much less of a hangover. Why? Just if you're worried about hangovers, just don't drink. In other words, your argument is less rent control, further in the future will distort the market less implicitly. You can see that rent control distorts the market and that's bad. So like, why not just not do any of it?
- [65:57]
B
Well, I think I believe in interventions into the housing market. And the interventions come in many different forms. Some even what you're describing, pumping taxpayer funds to subsidize some people's entrance into the housing market. That is a distortion. As, as well, I do think that the primary way in which we reduce costs is the construction of new housing. In my view, that construction should be both private and public. So we can look at examples like Singapore or. I keep drawing back to Sweden, but Sweden, I think is a really useful example for New York because at a time that the population of Sweden was around 9, 10 million, right now it's around 12. So roughly ballpark the size of New York City, there was a program to build 1 million housing units. And those 1 million housing units were built by the public sector in Singapore and Hong Kong and other places in which land is very scarce. The state plays a really big role constructing housing. This is obviously distorting to the market, but only in the sense that it's creating new supply, which is a downward pressure on the private market. So I'm all in favor of interventions in various forms. I do think there is, there's ways in which one could, could design better forms of rent control, but primarily I'm about building more. And I think that there has to be a role for really well designed public housing that's aimed at primarily the middle class, the middle 60% of people seeking housing and not aimed at the poor and those that would struggle to kind of pay rent and maintenance fee. Cause in fact we have stronger public programs. If we focus on that middle 60%, then we could figure out affordability programs for those kind of falling below a certain threshold.
- [67:58]
A
So if I look broadly at American cities right now or over the past 10, 20 years, it's easy for me to think of examples where policies in the DSA camp, whether that be rent control in a place like San Francisco, where there was a study in 2019 which found that it actually increased rents by 5% as modern economic theory would predict. It's easy for me to think of examples like that where a DSA policy made something worse in a major American city. We could go into defund the police too. But that's not necessarily philosophically socialist. It's just there's been a correlation of that over the past few years. It's hard for me to think of examples where like a hyper capitalist policy has destroyed a city. And so when I look at the cost of living problems in New York, the public safety problems, to look at all that and say we need to push more in a DSA direction, I see very little to justify that, that general attitude.
- [69:06]
B
Well, I think it's kind of a little amorphous to say DSA direction. I think we look concretely at the national level, what a lot of democratic socialist politicians have focused on have been issues like Medicare for all and reducing, not only increasing access to healthcare, but also reducing certain sources of health costs. And I think that's very sensible policy. I think it puts us in line with other industrial nations. When I think about broadly the DSA milieu's solution to housing, I see today at least a three pronged approach that is in favor of upzoning. So making it easier to create private supply is in favor of public housing, which is obviously more rare in the US environment for someone to mention. But that's a distinctive contribution and is favored of some stabilizations and controls. And I think as long as it's being married with supply generation, I actually don't think that in the abstract there's something wrong with stabilizations controls. I actually think it could be a healthy complement in certain ways. You're sort of a question of giving.
- [70:26]
A
With the left hand what you take away with the right hand because that's.
- [70:29]
B
A lot of exposed. Redistribution is like that too, you know.
- [70:33]
A
Well, it's just very, very well established that rent control reduces the supply of housing. Right. So if, if, if that's a concern, then why not just do basically what economists recommend, which is no price controls and if we have to do subsidies, we'll do subsidies because that's a market intervention that isn't quite as bad as, as price controls.
- [70:55]
B
So but even on this question of rent controls and stabilizations, in the example I gave, I said imagine if you were a housing developer and you knew that you were making an investment and you needed a certain return on investment and the control was built so that after a certain set amount of years the controls kicked, kicked in. To me, that might even have the benefit of encouraging more construction after that, that, that set amount of time. You know, obviously it creates a certain tier in the housing market of people who have access to this controlled housing. But to me that's no more distorting than us subsidizing a group of people of access to affordable housing through tax dollars.
- [71:44]
A
Why would that subsidize more building? I'm confused.
- [71:46]
B
Well, I mean, I think that at a certain point there will still be the kind of demand being generated in the, for more housing. You know, there's no reason why a housing development corporation that just successfully made X amount of dollars off a housing development would just stop then because they're getting less long term, 20 plus year returns on an investment they already recouped a good return on. Right.
- [72:21]
A
But once the wreck, once the rent control does kick in, all the effects of rent control are like the it's not that the only bad effects of rent control are prospective for the builder. It's also accumulates as the rent control simply exists. So for instance, you have an apartment you're paying $1,000 a month with where the market rate for that apartment would be 3,000. Right. You're never going to leave that apartment. Right. Like you. You will. That will become a golden prison for you because it's in midtown, it's in some great location. You're going to hold onto that apartment your entire life at a much higher rate than you normally would. Which means if that were a market apartment that would be on the market once every three years. Right. It would be vacated every three years and it'd be on the market increasing the supply of housing. If it's rent controlled, it'll never be on the market. Right. So that restricts the supply and still increases rent in the rest of the market. So you still get that effect.
- [73:25]
B
Regardless, advocates of rent control would say that the stability that engenders is good for communities and neighborhoods and so on. That's actually part of the design of their program. What I would say is my main concern with certain forms of rent control is if the amount being paid is too low to actually maintain properties. So I'd be on the lookout for that. I'm less concerned about these other things. I would also be on the lookout for rent controls. Whereas it's designed in such a way that it makes it less profitable to build housing. I think there's many forms of. Obviously I have a normative objection to capitalism. As a socialist, I could think of a million more capitalists that I have more of a problem with than people trying to build housing. I want it to be a clear rules of the game so they know they could go in and do this thing with as little red tape as possible and the ability to make predictable returns. All I'm saying is that it's not necessarily the case that a rent control or rent stabilizations like we have in New York City would make this impossible if we're at the same time reducing other regulatory hurdles towards building housing and if the programs are designed correctly. And I think in general, the Zohar Mamdani campaign's promises around housing is much more in sort of the pro market but redistributive sphere than I would imagine a Zoran Mamdani would be 10 years ago. So I think that's one case where I feel like the discourse or the criticism of the liberal left hasn't really caught up to where a lot of the liberal left is today on this.
- [75:21]
A
One particular issue, you may well be right. I, I assume maybe you pay attention, more attention to what Zoran says day to day than, than I do. But I've heard him on podcasts recently complaining about the level of profit that landlords make. Right. And it's like you ask him about housing, he doesn't sound like you. He sounds a lot more like someone who believes the problem with housing is that landlords are making too much money.
- [75:47]
B
So if you gave me a particular quote or soundbite that was on the.
- [75:50]
A
Derek Thompson podcast within the past few months.
- [75:52]
B
Yeah, I mean, I'd be up for thinking about or critiquing. I'm not a party line person. Even Zoran Mamdani on any one of these issues in general, I think I was describing where he is now. I think there's a host of issues. Even when he's talking about cutting red tape for small business owners like bodega owners and he's doing campaigns, there's a lot of the rhetoric that is not quite as regulatory as you would expect from Zorahdani. And maybe we're just focused on different breadcrumbs because I'm looking for an evolution and you're looking for areas where you disagree with him and whatever. Obviously there might be a confirmation bias there.
- [76:40]
A
I would be okay. I mean, socialist rhetoric is so popular. I would be okay with a mayor that packaged so packaged something that wasn't socialism in a socialist, in socialist rhetoric. But actually when it came down to it, he understands the constraints businesses face. And I, I don't know enough about Zoran to know if that is where he's evolving towards or if he's moderating what are fundamentally his instincts, which are anti capitalist, anti business, anti landlord, et cetera. So.
- [77:13]
B
Well, I think he's an egalitarian by nature. So his instincts, his, his normative instincts, I think is to, you know, to level. Right. But he's also administrating a very, or will be administrating a very complicated city that has a fixed budget and has limited opportunities to raise its own revenues. So I think that he'll face a lot of the same trade offs as any New York City mayor. I think his egalitarian instincts will come in when he decides know who's going to pay for some of the, the trade offs. And to me that's a, that's a good thing. And obviously we'll, we'll see how it works out. In, in practice, the worry would be.
- [77:51]
A
There'S about 500 to a thousand people where if they left New York City, the trash would no longer be collected because we'd have a budget shortfall and we probably don't want to do the kinds of things that are going to make them want to move to Florida and California. Which connects to my other critique of, of democratic socialism, which is it seems to me it has a big foot voting problem. Meaning if you look at the inflows and outflows of migration from American states over the past decade or two, just like every year it's 100,000 people or so leaving New York, leaving California, every year it's 100,000 people or so moving into Texas, moving to Florida. And what is this if not a kind of referendum on the direction that the left and the right are taking with respect to bread and butter issues?
- [78:47]
B
Well, I think that it is a referendum in part on the cost of housing in particular in certain blue states, including the regulatory burdens to build housing. So I would agree with you probably on that. The housing front in the case of Florida, I think Florida is trying to attract capital and almost a race to the bottom and promising lower taxes and then killing people with tolls and other kind of ways to make up the revenue shortfalls in Texas. I think the combination of pro growth economic policies plus cheap energy plus lots of of immigrant labor is really producing sustainable growth. I personally think there's a lot that a social democratic like area could offer to ordinary people in terms of if you know that the area that you're in is going to have good public schools, if you know that it's going to be safe, if you know that it's going to have public transit, if you know there's going to be good wages that compensate for the increased cost of living and other aspects. And to me, a lot of the problem with New York City really just boils down to the cost of housing and the lack of availability of housing. Our grocery prices are not out of whack, are factoring in the fact that most of us don't have to have cars and pay car insurance because of how good our public transit system, our schools are good, we're safer, obviously we could get more safe. And I'm a firm believer in well funded public safety and so on. But we're safer than a lot of big cities where we're basically on a global stage. We're like a normal big city, not like an American big city. So I think we have a lot going for us in a place like New York, the missing piece is really housing. Now I don't know the particularities of what exactly has gone wrong in California, but I would say that as far as I can, socialism, I don't think it's social. I think it's like, I think in many ways again this gets back to the worst of both worlds.
- [81:06]
A
And nimby. And nimby.
- [81:07]
B
Yeah. No, I think that nimbyism is a.
- [81:09]
A
Part of it and very high taxes, which is part of the socialist agenda.
- [81:13]
B
Well, again, I think that it's a question of is the socialist driving. It's definitely not the weather New York City. I think some of our parts of our state, it really is the weather. And also just broader economic trends of we've had de industrialization, we've had areas not able to move from one type an economy to another type of economy. And now you're seeing some of these cities revive a little bit, but you have broader structural trends. But to me, when I look at California, I don't see socialism. I see mismanagement, I see myriad bureaucracy, I see the worst of localism in the American sense. And I see a million different veto points. And I think again, this is to me, when I think of my model of social democracy on the European level, I think of clear, uniform rules, strong central states. And again, you as a capitalist might end up with a 12% profit margin instead of 14% profit margin in my social democracy, at least that stage. But it would be clear and transparent and predictable so you would know what you're getting when you're investing. I think there is a lot of distortions in the US that is intrinsic to the US and kind of defy a simple socialism versus non socialism argument. Like the role of trial lawyers in the Democratic Party coalition. Is that socialism or is that capitalism or is it neither?
- [82:50]
A
I'll leave it there. Bhaskar, thank you so much. And before you leave, tell people where they can follow you online and perhaps read more of your work.
- [82:58]
B
Well, I'm the president of the Nation magazine, so people can pick up a copy of the Nation. I'm also the founding editor of Jacobin magazine. So if you want pure unadulterated socialism, that's your home for it.
- [83:11]
A
Awesome, thank you.