Transcript
David Frum (0:11)
Hello and welcome to episode seven of the David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at the Atlantic. My guest today will be Ambassador Susan Rice.
Interviewer/Host (0:21)
Susan Rice represented the United States at.
David Frum (0:23)
The United nations during the first Obama administration. She was National Security Advisor to President Obama and then Director of the Domestic Policy Council under President Joe Biden. Before my conversation with Ambassador Rice, I want to open the show by doing something a little different. I've often taken questions at the end of the show. This time I'm going to take a question, just one at the top of the show, and try to answer it here because I think this question is so important, such a key in the lock to all of our contemporary debates. It comes from a young viewer named Joe in Florida who's a friend of our families. And he asks, given that working class wages have been in decline for 40 years, especially for men, why would you expect anyone to sympathize with the idea of the American system with free trade? Why wouldn't they back Donald Trump, given the pressure they're under? The reason this question is so important is because it reflects an attitude that many liberal minded people have, which is where you see a grievance, where you see behavior that is self harming or harmful to others, there has to be some rational cause behind it, some material cause behind it, that when people do something destructive or self harming, they are acting out some understandable, cognizable grievance they've got that somebody could do something about. And if only we could meet that rational, material basis of their grievance, we could turn things around and put us all on a better path. That's the idea you hear from many Democratic candidates or would be candidates for 2028. Let's hear what people are saying and find some way to meet these grievances. And I do not want to dismiss that a lot of politics is about the rational. But what reactionary and fascist forces have always understood is there's plenty of irrationalism in the human being and that's a real resource. And sometimes when you have a grievance, it expresses itself in ways that sound like material grievance, but it's really not. So let me take on this point about 40 years of decline. Take it apart and see whether a better understanding can put us somewhere. Now, when people want to make the case that things have been very bad for working class America, they use certain numbers and not other numbers. Depending on the numbers you use, you get a very different story. And unfortunately, we often choose the story we want and then choose the numbers that fit the story rather than the other way around. So when people want to make the case that things have been very bad for working class America for 40 years, which takes us back to 1985, they look at a series called Hourly Wages for Non Supervisory Workers, or even Hourly Wages for Non Supervisor Production Workers. That's manufacturing people get a paycheck that is measured by the hour and who answer to some kind of supervisor. And if you look at those numbers, you see they basically rise pretty steeply for the 40 years from 1945 to the early 1980s. Then they flatten out or even go into a little bit of a decline in the 1980s, they jump up a little bit in the 1990s, then they're hit by the Great Recession and they go down again and only pick up after about 2015. So that is a story of stagnation, decline, some improvement in the 90s, some improvement in the 2010s, but basically not a very happy or healthy picture from 1985 for. For that kind of worker. The problem with looking at those numbers is those numbers describe fewer and fewer people in America. And they describe, even for those people, less and less of those people's lives. Here's a different number. If you remember that a lot of the way that people get an income in modern America is not just from their job, but also from various kinds of government benefits, the earned income tax credit, the child support from the government of various kinds of. And if you also remember that fewer and fewer of us work as non supervisory hourly workers, especially non supervisory hourly production workers. If you just look at what happens to American households, and a household can be as few as one person, that is Americans who live in some independent domicile of some kind, whether it's one person, single worker, whether it's two people, whether it's a whole family, any one of those things can be a household. What you see is that in 1985, the median American household, that is, we're not averaging in Bill Gates, we're just taking the American in the middle. That household made about 60,000 present day dollars. And 40 years later in 2025, that household made about $80,000. And it wasn't all from work, that some of it was from government benefits, but clearly a big jump from 60,000 to 80,000. Now, it's not as steep a jump as they made from 1945 to 1985. If you look at the 40 years immediately after World War II, the median did better than it did in the 40 years after World War II, from 1985 to the present. But I'm not sure you can really rationally compare those things. Remember, if you're starting in 1945, you're missing that that same person or family or group had the experience of World War II and the Depression. There had been a lot of bad times before then. And there's a big catch up that happened in the 40 years after 1945. There's also something else that was different in the 40 years after 1945. In 1945, about 17% of Americans still lived on the farm. You get big gains in efficiency when you move people from farms to cities. America did it in the 50s. Many European countries did it in the 50s and 60s. The Chinese, of course, have done it since 1990. And you get a big surge in productivity, you get a big surge in household wealth. But of course you can only do it once. People, it's not a commute. You move from farm to city. That's it. You're in the city, you're not going back to the farm. And further moves in the city. When you move from factory to office, you don't get the same bump that you get when you move from factory to farm. So the idea that 45 to 85 was the norm and 85 to 2025 has been some kind of sad falling off mistakes. A lot of what happened in 1945 and also it overlooks, yeah, it's good to be going up. But you need to remember America in 1945 was quite a poor place by today's standards. And even in 1985, it was not as affluent a country as it is now. In 1945, about a third of American households lacked indoor plumbing. And in 1985, only about 70% of American households had air conditioning, whereas now virtually everybody does. So when you're making those first steps, it's easier. The technology of indoor plumbing exists. You move people from farm to city, they get the indoor plumbing, they get a big jump in their standard of living. It's a little harder once they're already in the cities. So problem one is what we're measuring, if we look at all forms of income and not just the, the wages of a particular group of people, you see a bigger rise in incomes. And if you understand that something special happened between 45 and 85 that probably couldn't have been reproduced between 85 and 2025, no matter what, maybe you feel.