← The Gray Area with Sean Illing
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- [00:00]
Sean Ellet
AI had the time of my life a I never felt this way before.
- [00:10]
Commercial Voice 1
From building timelines to assigning the right.
- [00:12]
Mark Dunkelman
People and even spotting risks across dozens of projects, Monday Sidekick knows your business.
- [00:17]
Commercial Voice 1
Thinks ahead, and takes action.
- [00:19]
Mark Dunkelman
One click on the star and consider it done.
- [00:22]
Sean Ellet
And I owe it all to you.
- [00:25]
Mark Dunkelman
Try Monday Sidekick AI you'll love to use on Monday.com ready to relax in.
- [00:32]
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- [01:02]
Sean Ellet
America is full of contradictions. We love freedom, we love individuality, but we also celebrate collective projects and national purpose. We've got Jefferson's faith in the people. Well, some people on one side, and Hamilton's faith in the state on the other. When the country has been at its best best, when we've actually built things, it's because we lived somewhere in the middle of those dueling impulses. Today, to put it mildly, we are not at our best as a country. We're too dysfunctional to reliably keep the government open, and we can't build or really do anything at scale. So what happened? Why does nothing seem to work anymore? I'm Sean Ellet, and this is the gray area. Today's guest is Mark Dunkelman, author of why Nothing who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back. Dunkelman argues that we've lost our balance between the Hamiltonian drive to build and the Jeffersonian drive to resist power. And because of that, we are stuck in a political cul de sac. We no longer trust institutions enough to act collectively, but we still expect them to solve problems. So I invited Mark on the show to talk about how we got here and what we can do to fix it. Mark Dunkelman, welcome to the show.
- [02:47]
Mark Dunkelman
Thrilled to be here. Thanks.
- [02:48]
Sean Ellet
Let's talk about your book, the title of which is why Nothing Works. Are you making the case here that America, our. Our beloved country, is broken? That's quite the accusation, sir.
- [03:02]
Mark Dunkelman
Well, yeah, I think that broadly, I'm trying to connect with people who feel frustrated that a country that used to be able to do a lot of big things now seems incapable of doing even the mundane, and that that feels. Feels like it's indicative of some larger wrongness with what's happening in America today.
- [03:30]
Sean Ellet
So any democracy has to do a couple of things at the same time. Right? Citizens have to have a say in. In the decisions that impact their lives, and government has to be empowered to do big, consequential things. And you argue this tension is baked uneasily into progressive thought. And really, it goes all the way back to the founding of the country. So just. Just say a bit about that and why Hamilton and Jefferson are the two faces of this tension.
- [04:03]
Mark Dunkelman
Yeah. So right from the beginning of the nation's story, America is betwixt and between two impulses. And one of those impulses which you see in the founding document, the Declaration of Independence, is one that is really frightened of centralized power. And Jefferson writes that document, and it's born from an impulse to say there is some big bureaucracy that is far away that is coercing us to do things that we don't want to do, and that the thing that would save us would be freedom from that. So that's what the Declaration of Independence is. And when the Founders created independence for us, they created a system under the Articles of Confederation. And the Articles were a system that created real chaos. Right. We had independent states in order to have a national government that didn't have an executive branch. All the states basically had veto power over anything. It was like a government run entirely by filibuster, but filibuster by any given state. A single senator could filibuster anything. And within a decade, people realized that this sort of antithesis of old British colonial rule, which was too centralized, was the opposite, which was our rule under the Articles, was too chaotic. Power was too dispersed and too spread for government to actually run effectively. There was too much chaos. And so the Founders tried to find a medium, which was the Constitution, which was their second structure of government, which was sort of in between, meaning that Hamilton, and Hamilton was sort of played a larger role in the construction of the Constitution and probably would have taken it further had it not been for some moderated influence influences. But his idea is we need to bring back power to a centralized authority that will be able to make choices. That in a pluralistic society with different voices wanting different things and people having different values and ideas, what you need is to empower some centralized decision maker to make good decisions in the public interest.
- [06:22]
Sean Ellet
This tension between liberty and authority, which is really what we're talking about, that's always been a challenge for democracies everywhere. There's nothing new there, is there something unique about America's cultural aversion to power.
- [06:37]
Mark Dunkelman
Especially State power in every group of humans. You have to figure out some sort of a system for dealing with disagreement. And I don't think that's a uniquely American problem. I do think that America is. Has a system that is uniquely designed to be able to vacillate between maybe a little bit too much authoritarianism, as we had probably in the middle of the 20th century, and a little bit too much chaos, as we have today and we've had in other periods in American history. And we've come to sort of in the sense that things are. Go from one extreme to the other. I think we're at one particular extreme now, and we're probably headed back.
- [07:28]
Sean Ellet
So the, you know, the distrust is always there in the background, and then the. The pendulum of distrust has swung a little too aggressively, and now we are where we are.
- [07:38]
Mark Dunkelman
Right.
- [07:38]
Sean Ellet
But all this distrust of power, it didn't emerge out of a vacuum, right? I mean, there's, you know, the institutional racism and Vietnam and Watergate and the glut of pollution and all the corruption and captured regulators over the years. I mean, we just don't have a lot of faith in our institutions. And if we're honest, it's because they haven't been all that trustworthy in many cases. Which is just a long way of asking if the current predicament is less about distrust and more about the public justifiably losing confidence in government.
- [08:12]
Mark Dunkelman
You're absolutely right. We go through these periods in history where we have real frustration that nothing is getting done. At the turn of the 20th century, there's sort of a notion that power is dispersed among political machines, and that if you want to get something done, it's easier to get something done at the parochial level by knowing your local ward politician who can maybe get your ne' er do well, brother in law a job in the sanitation department than it is to build a good sanitation system. Politics is sort of a game of localism and parochialism. So you can't do big things. And so those are moments where we are looking for a move towards a more Hamiltonian approach. Then there are the opposite moments. There are moments where we see strong centralized institutions that look oppressive. That's what was happening right around the revolution, where we saw taxation without representation. So we wanted to push, in a Jeffersonian sense, power back down to localities. That's exactly what we saw in the 50s and 60s, where we saw powerful institutions of all sorts doing things that we didn't like. We saw the industrial machine pumping out cars that were unsafe at any Speed. As Ralph Nader pointed out, we saw the agricultural establishment putting out groceries that had DDT in them, so women were burying children with terrible birth defects. We saw Robert McNamara, who was sort of a quintessential vision of the establishment, sending kids off to Vietnam to be slaughtered in a quagmire. We saw bosses like Richard Daly in Chicago segregating the city purposefully using urban renewal. In all of these cases, power was so centralized that people said, no, no, no, no, no. This Hamiltonian way of governing is corrupt, and we need to push power back down.
- [10:23]
Sean Ellet
What would you say is the window of time when we. I say we. The country struck the ideal balance between these two poles. When did we get this right? And what did we do during that window that's worth remembering?
- [10:39]
Mark Dunkelman
It is hard not to look at the TVA and not gawk, say what that is. The Tennessee Valley Authority was a bureaucracy set up in the very early years of the New Deal. The Upper south at that point in history was flyover country. Before we used that term, it was forgotten. Most of the countries had electricity. Most of the country had washers and dryers and washing machines. But the Upper south had sort of been left behind, and people were sick and people were impoverished and the soil had been eroded by years of logging, and people were living hand to mouth. And the private power companies that were organized into trusts under the name Commonwealth and Southern had no interest in building the poles and wires to these poor farmers because they didn't think the farmers had enough money to justify the expense. And so they lived in perpetual poverty. And when Franklin Roosevelt was elected president, he decided that he was going to use public assets to finally build power to these communities. And he was going to empower a lawyer to make the Upper South a fiefdom through the Tennessee Valley Authority. And the Tennessee Valley Authority would have just an immense amount of power to dam rivers, to reforest whole sides of mountains, to build electrical plants, to build the wires, to sell subsidized appliances to the people who live there. And in, like, in an incredibly short period of time, this entire region of the country, roughly the size of England, was powered up. It was not a perfect institution. There was, of course, enormous environmental consequences of damming rivers and building all of this stuff. It was done by federal workers who were segregated. Like they lived in encampments that were. Some were white and some were black. I mean, like, there are all sorts of problematic elements to the. I quote, unquote, problematic elements to the tva. Like, it was by no means a Panacea, but for the bang, for the buck. The sort of notion that in a place where the private sector had failed or had no interest in serving a population that was really suffering, here was government doing enormous good at incredible speed, at vast scale.
- [13:33]
Sean Ellet
What would be like an analogous project today, like something on that scale today that we ought to do, A lot of people wish that we could do, but we simply cannot.
- [13:45]
Mark Dunkelman
We have within our grasp the technology to basically replace all fossil fuel generation and erect clean energy.
- [13:54]
Sean Ellet
We have that tech.
- [13:55]
Mark Dunkelman
We have that tech. We've got batteries, we've got wires, we've got. It's all there. But you can't build the transmission lines today because from one place to the next, everyone's got an objection to that line going across this forest, through this town, near this school. Everyone's got an objection. And moreover, since the TVA was created in the 1930s, we've created a whole legal regime designed to protect incumbents against, you know, insurgent new technologies and whatnot. So, like, there are all sorts of reasons that we can't do it. Same with high speed rail, right? There are all sorts of things that we. Big projects akin to the tva that you would want to do today if you had no sorts of restrictions. But to your point, you know, at the beginning of the Biden administration, the Biden administration put into the bipartisan infrastructure law $7.5 billion to put electric vehicle chargers again. And this is very much like the tva. The problem for the electric vehicle industry. They realized if you want to drive to grandma's house on Thanksgiving, you don't want to drive an electric vehicle because you're afraid that somewhere on that long journey you're going to get stuck without a charge and there's not going to be an EV charger. And the reason that there's no EV charger there is because there's no actual financial incentive for a company to put an EV charger there because there aren't enough EVs. Right? You're sort of in a catch 22. You wouldn't build one there because there aren't enough EVs to charge there. And so not enough people purchase EVs because there isn't an EV charger there. So the Biden administration's thought to themselves, we will break this cycle by subsidizing the construction of EV chargers in the places where they need to be so that people aren't afraid of what they called range anxiety. It was the right idea. So they had to throw the money through formulas to state highway departments. Well, state highway departments have never done this kind of work before. Right. They know how to pave roads and to build bridges and whatnot, but they don't know how to build EV chargers. And they then have to build. Build a system by which they can figure out where the EV chargers are allowed to go. The states then have to figure out who can bid on the projects. They have to go through a whole siting process. Once they've cited the place, they have to. They have to negotiate leases with the places that are going to host the EV chargers. Then after all of that is done, they have to figure out how to get the local utilities to control the power, how to get the power to the actual EV chargers. And no one has leverage over those utilities, certainly not the federal government or the state. So through all of this, at the end of the three years between which the bipartisan infrastructure law passes and Biden leaves office, $7.5 billion, 58 charges around the country have been opened, like, that's for Democrats, a political disaster and a reflection not of bad management on the part of the federal government or like ill intentions or laziness or anything, but of a different system.
- [17:22]
Sean Ellet
That is an insane situation to be in. Yeah, Progressives are the ones who are supposed to believe in the power of government to do big and good things. So how did the pendulum flip in the 60s and 70s? How did the priorities shift?
- [17:39]
Mark Dunkelman
So let's just go back to this book that was really the beginning of my book, which is, I'm sure for many of your listeners, sort of a formative text, which is the Power Broker by Robert Caro, which wins the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. And it's a book about Robert Moses, who was the most powerful man in New York city from the 1930s through the 1960s and built almost everything that you and I know about New York City, right? He built Lincoln center and the UN and lots of the highways that you've driven on when you've come in and out of the airports, Lots of housing, lots of infrastructure. And the most famous chapter of that book is called One Mile, and it's a chapter about his decision to build the Cross Bronx Expressway across the South Bronx. It's a project that everyone in New York City who lives in the South Bronx or represents people in the South Bronx is wildly against. The mayor of New York City is wildly against it. But Robert Moses is so powerful and has wears so many hats and is so deft at understanding the politics and understanding how to maneuver things that he turns a completely deaf ear to the people who live in the East Tremont neighborhood of the South Bronx who are asking him just to move the highway a couple of blocks to the south so that he doesn't have to displace just thousands of people in these various apartment houses. And he just doesn't care, doesn't pay attention, just does it. And the sort of notion that the Bronx becomes an urban wasteland is born really from this highway, from this decision to drive this trench through this vibrant working class portion of the city. And people see Robert Moses do this, and they see the power of this establishment figure doing what he will, despite all these people pushing against him.
- [19:45]
Sean Ellet
Progressive, no democratic checks.
- [19:48]
Mark Dunkelman
And they say to themselves, we are going to put checks and balances on this centralized form of democratic government. So we are going to create environmental reviews and we're going to create reviews based on historic preservation. And we're going to create new mandates that there be community input and community consultation. And we're going to create new rights of action so that people can sue if X and Y are happening. And we're going to make sure that there aren't disparate impacts on underrepresented minorities. And we're going to. There are going to be a whole series of different kinds of protections. And the upshot is that it just becomes much more difficult for someone like Robert Moses, if they had Moses like intentions, to do things like Robert Moses did them.
- [20:51]
Sean Ellet
It's a totally rational, reasonable reaction to government abuse and central authority coming in and bulldozing people's lives without any input at all. It was the appropriate response. Right, but your point is that that sort of planted the seeds and shifted the attitude of progressivism away from government as this machine is, this organism that can do good for people into a menace that had to be checked.
- [21:20]
Mark Dunkelman
That's exactly right. The opening question of my book is why was it in the 1950s that no one could say no to Robert Moses when he built the Cross Bronx? And then 50 years later, new York City is left with Penn Station, which is the Western hemisphere's most traffic transit hub. More people go through Penn Station every day than live in the city of Baltimore. And yet it is, at the time of my writing, just a complete disaster. You know, it's sort of a rat pit, a rat warren of long hallways and dank and disgusting. And people have been talking for decades about making it better and it can't happen. Too many people have the ability to say no. And by design, progressives have made it very hard to make change. And that is because we were afraid that there would be Robert Moses fakers doing terrible things. So we made it very hard for anyone to do good things.
- [22:31]
Sean Ellet
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Claire White
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- [26:59]
Mark Dunkelman
Yes.
- [27:00]
Sean Ellet
And I mean the book is sort of aimed at progressives. Yep. I'm sure a lot of people on the left would listen and think it's a. Well, it's a little strange to blame all the dysfunction and all the bottlenecks just on progressive reforms. Right. And I wouldn't dispute what you're saying about the procedural constraints. It's all true and it's a problem. I'm just saying a lot of what the GOP has done, certainly since the 80s, especially with with Reaganism, a lot of that has been aimed at breaking the government intentionally so as to reproach it for being incompetent. And that's also a part of the story. No, I think it is.
- [27:37]
Mark Dunkelman
I think that that that part of the story though, has become so enmeshed in our progressive thinking that it's given us a pass so that we aren't ourselves self critical about our own role. Meaning that it's very easy now when Government fails to say, ugh, well, that's because of Reagan and deregulation, or saying it's just the corporations or sort of these sort of loose, loose blame game kind of casting aspersions. When, like, you can trace back the changes and the frustrations at things that we've done, not only does it sort of absolve us of our culpability in what's happening, it also is a sort of hopeless way of thinking about the world. Too many people aren't thinking, what are the things that we can do when we are in power to make it so that government works more effectively, so that people have more faith that they can empower the government to do more. Like, if your experience with government is positive, if you're seeing that government is effectively solving problems, you're going to be much more comfortable with a party who says, I think government is going to be a better tool to solve this endemic problem in our society than the private market. You know, we as progressives have pretty audacious goals for government, right? Like we're looking at an education system that too often fails. We want government to solve that problem. We've got all sorts of challenges of inequality and racial injustice. Like all things that we think government is the best tool to use in many cases to solve. And yet the things where government already has a full mandate, it doesn't seem to do a good job. And if our political pitch is let government cook, then let's make sure that it's doing its job so that we can point to successes.
- [29:55]
Sean Ellet
What are the policies, what are the laws right now that maybe have their roots in the, in the necessary reforms of the 60s and 70s that are jamming up progress the most, that are getting in the way of building the most? Is it environmental regulation? Is it zoning laws? You know what comes to mind first?
- [30:15]
Mark Dunkelman
Yeah, I mean, it is all of the above in many cases. It is the jurisprudence behind it all. It's the way that these laws are interpreted. So the law that many of my peers who are in the sort of world that I'm in, there's sort of a group of us that are all sort of writing around these issues in this world. People bring up this law of the National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA, which was passed in 1970. I mean, it was, it's a very strange law. It was a law passed at the time simply to require that the engineers who were building highways kibbets about whether there were alternatives to the routes that they were choosing that had fewer environmental impacts. But the way that the law and the jurisprudence played out was that the requirement that they study the or look at the alternatives allowed. Lawyers determined to see the alternative route was used or the original route was not actually pursued were able to say they did not sufficiently study to the nth degree the environmental implications of the route that they've chosen. And judges chose to say, I agree that the study was not sufficiently thorough. And so now what was supposed to be a 50 page study looking at, you know, that's what they imagined when they passed NEPA in 1970, was that it was not going to be a particularly onerous burden. Now a NEPA study is thousands and thousands and thousands of pages because the people who are proposing to do the project, which has some sort of federal subsidy or has some federal nexus, need to anticipate what all those who object to the study will say. And the question is not whether or not the project actually has an impact. The question is whether the, the study has in fact addressed the potential for an impact. But the truth is that NEPA is just one among dozens and dozens of a very complex litany of rules and procedures that are part of this sort of game, this sort of edifice.
- [32:39]
Sean Ellet
What they all have in common, all these kinds of laws is they replace the top down tyranny or the top down authoritarianism with a kind of bottom up obstructionism. Would you say our housing crisis is mostly a result of policy choices and legal structures? Have we engineered the housing crisis? Is that why we can't build?
- [33:14]
Mark Dunkelman
Absolutely. We've got the land and we've got the resources. We have the know how and we know how to build house, and we've done before. But the people who have purchased homes, they made those homes their nest eggs. They want to live in certain sorts of communities. They don't want their investments to be imperiled by changes in the character of their communities. They have real reasons not to want a new project to be built there. And frankly, you know, there are renters who are enjoying the lifestyle that they live at the current rent and are worried about gentrification in the neighborhood, who have similar aversion to new residents who may raise, may have the effect of raising the rent. Like no one wants change. Everyone wants more housing theoretically in the broader region, but nobody wants it nearby them in a way that will. Just over there, just over there, just over there. And that is, and that is all, you know, to the point that you asked that we have replaced the top down with sort of a bottom up tyranny. I think that there's something else going on here. The thing that Robert Moses had probably too much of was that he had discretion, that he could look at a problem and see all of the different ins and outs, good and bad. And then maybe he cared about this thing and not that thing. Certainly he did. He wanted to build stuff and he didn't really care about the people who lived in the neighborhood. He did not have the values that you and I would have wanted him to have in many cases. But like, in the end, he could make the decision that he cared more about mobility than he did about green space. Like those are two things that are valuable generally to society. And he could decide which one. We have within progressivism a dream, almost a fantasy that you can set up a process, a deliberative process, a communal process whereby everybody will speak and everyone will hear everyone else's argument. And by the end of the process, everyone will be bought into the solution. Like if you read white papers from transportation think tanks going back the last 20, 30 years, almost always the number one recommendation is involve the community sooner. And. And that comes from a good place. It comes from this sort of idea that in too many cases, back in the 40s and 50s, even into the 60s, people were shut out. That like suddenly you'd be sitting there eating breakfast and the backhoes would suddenly arrive in your neighborhood and nobody even knew. And suddenly. Right, like a highway was being born across the street. And now that can't happen. But the trust, I just want to say.
- [36:28]
Sean Ellet
Which is bullshit, right? That is bullshit. And it should have been stopped. The point is not that this is all a terrible idea, it's that it was necessary. But maybe the instinct has outlived its utility. And now we've got.
- [36:40]
Mark Dunkelman
The point is now that you need to have some process where people do know and they're able to throw out their objections, they're able to put their input in. But that at the end of the day, you can't have an endless process. Someone needs to be able to have the decision.
- [36:54]
Sean Ellet
Someone has to decide who decides which trade offs are acceptable and which aren't, right?
- [36:59]
Mark Dunkelman
Government. Right? Someone inside the government. This is the element. I don't have a simple solution to you. I can say to you that during the era of Moses reign, there were what were called Moses men. These were the people that worked for Moses and they worked for the government. They worked for the Triboro Transportation Authority or his housing authority or whatever it was. And they worked at some discount from what they would have made in the private sector. And they were powerful men and they stayed in those positions for long periods of time. And when they retired, they showed their grandchildren the fact that they built that playground or they were part of the team that designed that bridge and they were proud of it. And that if you are today a public servant who gets out of college and says, I want to work on the environment for my life and I'm going to do the same thing, I'm going to spend my life inside the bowels of the Environmental Protection Agency or the Army Corps of Engineers or whatever it is, your experience is not the same. Right? You go and you spend your time thinking about how am I going to make sure that we follow this rule to a T? And I don't want to anger this member of Congress and I don't want to be on the wrong side of this. And I'm worried about us getting sued by a private actor if we make this and you spend your time trying to follow all these rules to a T. By the end, you realize you've been there for 20 years and you actually haven't made progress on the very issue that you entered government to do. We need to make it so that these people have a requirement not to be as oblivious to public concern as Robert Moses was, but that they do have some discretion to make decisions in the public interest. That is the thing that we as progressives need to be working on, figuring out what that balance is and how that would actually effectively work.
- [39:11]
Sean Ellet
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- [41:57]
Commercial Voice 1
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- [42:50]
Sean Ellet
Obama's Recovery act triggered over 192,000 NEPA reviews. I mean, I get that not every project can be shovel ready, but my God, I mean that that's crazy. California's been trying to build a high speed rail between Frisco and LA for years and has basically nothing to show for it because every study leads to another lawsuit and every lawsuit leads to another review and no one has the authority to just say, we're fucking doing this.
- [43:20]
Mark Dunkelman
Yeah, the dream we have is that if you do enough studies, you'll get everyone's buy in. But like, that's not the case.
- [43:30]
Sean Ellet
So what's the model, Mark?
- [43:31]
Mark Dunkelman
We need to be able to make hard choices between hard things, between beautiful green land and housing, between, you know, if you're going to do LA to San Francisco, you're going to have to go through hot, you know, high value neighborhoods with straight track lines, right? Like we've got. Progressives are going to have to empower bureaucrats probably in the executive branch to make hard decisions that voters aren't going to like who are going to be affected by them. And so broadly speaking, you ask what the solution is. It is creating systems where everyone has a voice, unlike the Robert Moses days where almost no one had a voice but no one has a veto, which almost everyone has today, where we have a system whereby nobody's concern goes unheard. But by the same token, if you don't like the decision, you don't automatically have some avenue to be able to, to upend the process and hold it in abeyance. And so how that works within the, within the sort of provisions of current law, I think we're still working on that. I think that that is sort of the next challenge for thinkers within progressive policymaking is how do we create systems where people feel, even when their neighborhood is, is affected by a big government decision for the good of the whole region, that they haven't been completely left behind?
- [45:02]
Sean Ellet
Do you see a solution to the problem of just the collapse of trust in government and public institutions? I mean, that's sort of the whole game here, right? I mean, you have to have a certain level of trust as a precondition for doing anything significant collectively, and you know it. We should say in the early 60s, four out of five Americans trusted Washington to, quote, do what's right in your book. And in 2022, that figure is now one out of five. That's bad, dude, real bad. And I don't, and I guess the question is, even if we do get a high functioning government that delivers, will that translate to a shift in how people perceive it?
- [45:41]
Mark Dunkelman
So this is sort of, this is actually the most miraculous part of American democracy to me is that, you know, if you woke up in the early 20th century with how incompetent government was at that point, like there's some crazy stories of the incompetence of American government at the turn of the 20th century. If you ever worked in Congress, when you introduce a bill, you can introduce a public bill or a private bill. And most people don't even know what a private bill is. But private bills were there because at that time, members of Congress were introducing private bills to include people into the pension system for the Civil War. So, like, it's 1905, the Civil War has been over for 40 years, and they are adding people to the pension rolls in private bills. I mean, just completely corrupt, right? Like, like, like, who would trust government that was just like, nakedly corrupt like that, right? And like, you couldn't imagine ever at that moment that you're going to trust government with big powerful institutions that are going to do the kinds of things that David Lilienthal or Robert Moses are going to do 50 years hence. And yet we get from that period to the Robert Moses period. You just couldn't imagine Robert Moses in 1905, and yet there he is in 1955 doing the one mile in the South Bronx in the moment that Robert Moses is doing that in 1955, when he's so powerful that even the mayor of New York can't stand up against him to stop him from doing this horrible thing in the South Bronx. And, you know, Richard Daly is something. Doing something similar in Chicago. And there are bosses all over, all over the country. You know, these establishment figures are doing things and like, it just feels as though there's an establishment that is absolutely in control of the country and that, you know, the kids marched in the streets are completely powerless to stop them from sending them off to Vietnam and polluting the country and doing whatever they want. That there's an elite establishment that is absolutely impervious to any influence. Like, you couldn't have imagined the situation that we're in today where, like, I don't know, the establishment just seems, you know, like nothing can get done. Like, you can't build a bridge, right? Like, we go from these extremes in American history that where you're at a period where, you know, as you say, like, right now, trust is so low, how are we ever going to re. Establish it? Things will change. And like, it's almost impossible to imagine. I have faith that if government begins doing small things well, that people will begin to see the value in having public institutions that are effective. And if they see public institutions that are effective, they will say, listen, I think this is better than what the private sector is producing. Will it happen? I don't know. But it does seem to me that like the sort of sense that we're wallowing right now in dysfunction and that will last forever is proven by history not to be right. And like I'm actually fairly bullish that like the spirit of American entrepreneurialism and innovation and wanting to make things better and seeing problems and wanting to solve them that like that will re emerge.
- [48:58]
Sean Ellet
I'll leave it right there. This is a lot of fun. I'm not a policy wonk by any stretch of the imagination, but I really enjoyed reading it. I learned a lot and it, it does a really good job of moving from sort of theory to abstract and, and not just making kind of big picture arguments, but also getting like very specific about what can be done, what should be done to fix this mess. And I feel smarter after having read it. So thank you for that.
- [49:25]
Mark Dunkelman
Thanks for having me on. This is a big treat for me.
- [49:27]
Sean Ellet
Once again. The book is called why Nothing Works. Mark Dunkelman thank you sir. All right, my friends, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I certainly learned a lot and I am sure that you did too. But as always, we want to know what you think. So drop us the line at the gray area@box.com or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1.1-800-214-5749. Please also rate Review subscribe to the Podcast it helps our show grow. This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala, Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. New episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays. Listen and subscribe. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know. This episode was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. VOX had full discretion over the content of this recording.
- [50:48]
Mark Dunkelman
Sam.