YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert B. Reich

lines on the record: 89
first: 2018-11-07
most recent: 2018-11-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We brought it down with the Great Society, but then it sort of plateaued. So if we want to deal with that, first of all, we have to understand that some of that is inherited and we're never going to deal with it. And so one way to deal with that is to give them more money and we can redistribute. But the other thing, obviously, is to deal with the distribution of income within firms. And say, you know, maybe we should pay people more. And maybe the reason we don't is they don't have unions anymore because companies got really good about breaking unions. Or maybe we should have a higher minimum wage. Or maybe we should have mandatory paternity and maternity leave. And maybe we should have a public program of daycare that's free to people who are poor.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Personality that they inherited, you'd be surprised how heritable personality traits are. And the third thing is the upbringing, particularly their early years. I'm talking about zero to four. All those matter a lot in terms of your success in education and your success, therefore, in life. And we can't, unless we take all children away from their parents when they're born and send them to state schools, we can't equalize that. So we can't say that all that matters is equality of opportunity, and that's what we need to work on. We can work on that more than we have. And we can make it more equal, but we can't rely on that. And at some point, we need to say if you're uncomfortable with the inequality of the distribution of income, you have to deal with that directly. So that's one thing I wanted to lay on the table here, because that's one of those other ideas that we embrace that's wrong.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's a lot of misallocation that goes on in this process. So let me start with one concept, which is we used to say, and this is another thing that the market fundamentalists say, look, we shouldn't worry about inequality of income. All that matters is equality of opportunity. And that sounds very American, right? And we all sort of like that thing. But you know, the truth is that you can't have equality of opportunity. Now, I'm not going to get all social sciencey on you, but let me just say that what we know from social science is if you take any two random people out in the street and you compare what they make, The difference in what they make, more than half of it can be explained by the fact of who their parents were. And that is the genes that they inherited.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then in the middle, you have lots of people, these people in the middle, who know ones at the top, they lean into the future, the ones at the bottom are terrified of the future and should be. The ones in the middle want to lean into the future and yet know it's terrifying. And so we're not pulling them up into, at least the top isn't pulling them up. And they know for their children they've got to get better education, but they're also let down by the education system. They're also let down by the nutritional system, all kinds of things.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then at the very bottom, they do actually. I know a lot of they do a lot of things with the money. One of these moguls I was at their house and they have their kid has seven playhouses. Any of which I'd live in. You know what I mean? So they're all different one's modern, one's country, one's, I was sort of like seven. Like, why seven? Like, why not six or four? So they have plenty to do with their money. But they did employ people to build them, I guess. So you have people at the very top. And then at the very bottom, you have people sort of mired in drug addiction, the education system has let them down. Nutritional problem, nutritional problems are very significant in terms of lack of early education, jobs that aren't They either don't want to do or can't do because of the drug addiction”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or giving them equity. The top 20, you know, the last 20 years have been very good for Karis Wisher. They've been very good for Steve Perlstein. There's a lot of people, there's lawyers and doctors and engineers. It's been very good for 10, 15, 20% of the population. It's not just the CEOs. And they've been not so good for a lot. And that gap has widened. And as I say, the people in St. Louis have not done very well vis- ⁇-vis the people in San Francisco.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you want to be the platform for all sellers, in which case you can be in that business, or you can be in the book business and whatever else you think you're selling? But you can't be the retailer who hosts all the other retailers. So decide which business or we'll break it up. You know, we broke up Standard Oil. We could break up Amazon that way.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we might say to Amazon if you wanted to be take aggressive antitrust is to say, look, you can run your own platform to sell your own things, but you can't also run the platform for all the other sellers to run. You have to decide what business you want to be on.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think we need to get to that. But for one thing, one of the things that government does when they do regulate is to regulate the prices. So what's the price of Google? There is no price. So the economics of these things are so different that we want to be careful about it. We don't want to use the old tools to bring it to economy.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are like semi trailer trucks going down a three lane highway, and no one can get past them. And they're not competing with each other and their monopolies, but it's hard to imagine the government being able to regulate any one of them.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but you were. And you did a fair to middling job. No, I'm kidding. No, no, you did a good job in the business section of the Washington Post. And we covered the Microsoft job, part of the time there, and had Bill Gates in a number of times. And that was the big monopoly trial. Now each of these companies, and we'll get back to the solutions we need for these problems you're talking about, but each of these companies now, Amazon, Facebook, Google. I'm going to just use those three because Apple's off to the side and there's plenty, you know, I mean, they're not. They don't have the same kind of market power. But each of those, to me, is they're like, and you could sort of add Netflix in there a little bit kind of, but not really because there's all of Hollywood.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, it's not serum monopoly. It's an interesting thing because you may not notice, but I was a young, young, young reporter at the Washington Post, and Steve was my boss. He doesn't even remember being my boss, but he was.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we should have said that to Facebook and Google a long time ago. And if we had, I think we would have more competitiveness going on, more challenges. The challenges are not a company that does A challenges, the monopolist who does A, the challenge is a company who does B has a total different approach to solving problem challenges.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These natural monopolies to maybe make sure that they don't prevent the next challenger from their monopoly from coming along. So, for example, bad idea to let Facebook buy Instagram. Instagram might have challenged Facebook, might have been the news Facebook. We didn't know that at the time, maybe they did, but we didn't know that at the time. But when one of these companies comes along to me, at least the number one step is to say, you know what, you can't buy anyone anymore.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not just that, they earn rents, they earn rents, they are to some degree natural monopolies, and they won their monopoly in most cases fair and square, but they are natural monopolies. The world doesn't really want 18 different social media networks because then you can't necessarily talk to whoever you want to talk to. The world actually doesn't want a million different search engines. They want one that benefits from the fact that everyone goes through it and the machine learns every time you make a search and it becomes a better search engine. These things are for economic reasons naturally monopolies. In the old days, back in the 19th century and early 20th century, we regulated them. We said, okay, the electric company, we're going to regulate your profit and your prices. I think we've learned that we don't have to do that all the time, although now we're thinking maybe we need to do something about”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, they have the attitude, as I said, that if I can hire a secretary for less or any other frontline employee, then I'm going to do that and they don't deserve to essentially enjoy productivity gains that we realize. They don't deserve to enjoy the fact that we had a great year That all that money goes to the shareholder, maximizing shareholder value. That's the big curse. That's what's changed since the 1980s is this mantra of maximizing shareholder value. You know, you take someone like Jeff Bezos. Right.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's hard to change because it's largely cultural. I mean, again, it's largely stems from bad ideas. There isn't good competition in that market. So I don't know whether you change it, frankly. It's not the biggest problem in the world, but I think you change it by if you ask people, they think it's ridiculous. And if you ask the big shareholders, they don't think it's ridiculous. And it's only when big shareholders begin to think that it's ridiculous that it will stop. But I do have one proposal in the book, which is this. There are certain tax treatments for paying basically bonuses and stock options and unrestricted stock to executives. We might say, okay, you can continue to have that favorable stock treatment.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Believe me, Steve Schwartzmann thinks that only he can run the Blackstone Group, except that people are starting things that are as successful as his all the time who don't have his experience and don't pay themselves that much. And they seem to do very well. It's just not true, as you say, that there's only one Messiah here, and I've got it. And it is the sort of arrogance of the people at the top that they think that they're basically irreplaceable.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they don't ask that question. They don't think of it that way. They think of, okay, what do the other CEOs have? And our company is a certainly above average company, so he should get paid above average. Well, if everyone has to be paid above average, then the average just keeps moving up. It's the Lake Wolbagon problem. Right. And they don't think about it. And they also say, well, this person is so important. The whole company depends upon him where there's no other person who's so important. Well, anyone who works in companies knows that actually there's a lot of people who are important in the company. And there's only so much”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it's a market that is not a competitive market. Most other markets, you know, I'm an engineer or I'm a journalist, okay, I get paid as much as I can get them to pay me, and when do they stop raising my pay when they think they can get someone as good or almost as good for something less? That's not the way CEO pay is set. It's not like the board of directors says, well, I don't know, can we get someone as good or almost as good as Larry Ellison for half as much? The answer to that is, of course you could.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, no, I get that. So we're talking about CEO salaries because there's a few CEO salaries that are pretty high here, like Larry Ellison. I'm thinking there's some others who always end up in the top ranks. But so you're talking, first of all, it's the CEO salary problem. And we'll get to the unions in a second. Those have gotten out of line comparatively with the whole company, essentially, is what you're saying, which is an old thing. People are always been concerned about that.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so let's talk about the CEO salary, which is always a hot topic for journalists. They love putting the lists up, they're ridiculous, and then whether they earned that, whether they deserve that. Like you're saying Jeff Bezos may deserve that $164 billion because he's created all this value. I”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So where you live and what kind of company and industry you work in is the kind of equality that we've had in the last 10 or 15 years. It's called Within Group Inequality as to Between Group Inequality.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's the source of a lot of the inequality in the country. Now, I want to say that that was the source of a lot of inequality up to about 2005. Since then, the character of the inequality has changed. The inequality between people who live in San Francisco and people who live in St. Louis, between the companies that are located here and the companies that are located in St. Louis. So the gap that's widened since 2005 is between just to give an example the Secretary here and the secretary there or the chief executive here and the chief executives. Right.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that's different than a company like Caterpillar. Which is doing very well, earning good profits, not the kind that you earn out here, but good profits is paying its executives high and is trying to crush its union. That's different to me. In the old days, real old days, people may remember there was this company that was the leading tech company, IBM. Secretaries at IBM got paid twice as much as secretaries elsewhere. The people who ran IBM didn't run it and say, you know what, our company is doing great, but we're only going to pay our secretaries and janitors what they're paid in every other firm. And if they don't like it, we'll hire somebody else. They didn't say that. That's the way a lot of companies behave today, the way I just described, even though they're doing well.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're local, some of which are popular these days, some are not. Google, Facebook. I don't think anyone would say that the super profits that they earn, we can talk about that, why they have super profits, but they do. And they do share them with their employees, and they do treat them well. And they don't overcharge their customers. It's a little hard to figure out who their customers are. Okay, they don't overcharge their customers and in many ways they're good corporate citizens. So it's a little hard to get for me to get all upset about those companies putting aside.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Does Jeff Bezos deserve 164 billion? Well, you know, an economic sense he did. And he did create something that created a lot of value for a lot of other people. And I'm not just talking about his shareholders. I'm talking about all the people that bought stuff from him at a cheaper price. His firm has been productivity enhancing. And I don't feel so bad about the fact that he's rich. I don't feel so bad that J.K. Rowling is one of the richest people in England. I mean, you know, she wrote books. People wanted to buy her books. It's a pretty simple transaction. But you have to ask in a lot of companies when there's a pile of money that's profits, you have to say who deserves those profits. And should it all go to the shareholders and the executives or should it be shared more widely with the company? You've got companies here.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay. I want to talk about that why, but okay, so what you have these things in place, the main thing that you wrote about was income inequality, the differences between us, Steve Schwartzmann, or anyone else. And I do want to bring in tech people, because that's a different kind of...”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“in order to increase your consumption, not your investment, but your consumption, which is what we do, and we do it year after year after year, you can have a pretty good economy going, but it's fake. It's a mirage. You can't keep doing that forever, and we get all these bubbles. We had a bubbles in the 80s, S&L. We had the tech and telecom in 2000. We also had the Asian financial crisis, and we had 2008. Each of these is a bubble, and then it bursts, and then a bubble, and it bursts. And when the bubble is full, the economy looks great. And then when it bursts, everyone realizes it was a mirage.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so his salary grows. So I'm not sure. I love all those statistics. I agree with them all or that they're all that accurate. But over the long term, there's something going on that isn't all that positive. And the fact that the inequality is so much is one indication. Another indication is a lot of, look, if you're a country that borrows 750 billion dollars a year from the rest of the world,”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They did make our economy much more competitive, and we are very competitive economy. But what I'm suggesting is now we need to make a correction, as we did in the mid-1980s, we now need to make another correction and let the pendulum swing a little bit back.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who earned $800 million last year as head of a thing called the Blackstone Group? Equity firm He doesn't deserve 100 million. And the reason he earns 800 million doesn't reflect his economic contribution. All he does is buy and sell companies and financial assets. That's a reflection of a lot of rules and norms and laws that we've set up that structure our economy. And he's the beneficiary of those.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You stop being sympathetic with each other, and companies and societies don't work better that way. It turns out that there isn't an absolute trade-off between growth and fairness. There is, you know, if you're on one side of the sweet spot, if you're like France and you have too much regulation and too much equality, you may have a trade-off. But we're on the other side. And we were on the side where we have so much inequality that it's caused political dysfunction and polarization and government dysfunction. People don't trust each other as much. They don't cooperate as much in the private sector as well as in the public sector. And societies don't work better that way and economies don't work better that way. So these ideas that we embrace, for example, that the market income, your market income, that the one I used like to use, it's not a West Coast example, is an East Coast example, Steve Schwartzmann.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Michael Douglas thing, but you know that the capitalist system works whenever one pursues his own self-interest, maximizes his own income, and as if by magic the invisible hand somehow makes us all better off. The second thing that we embrace is the idea that market incomes, what we earn in the marketplace, was a good objective measure of our contribution. And so it was just, and they deserve that, and people shouldn't take it away from that. The third idea that we embraced is that there's some sort of trade-off, that if we made our system fairer than it is now, that somehow we'd make the pie grow smaller. And another idea, well, those are the three. And it turns out that they're wrong. That we can't, if you'd get too greedy and you stop learning how to cooperate with each other.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the cause of that was globalization primarily some tech, but mostly was globalization. We had a closed economy, and all of a sudden people were buying foreign cars and foreign made everything. And this was before China, by the way. This is Japan. Philippines, that's Korea, that sort of thing. So we did some things that were necessary, and they worked. But in order to do that, we sort of embraced some ideas. And this is in some ways a book about ideas. And the ideas we embrace look like they were good, and they were useful, but they were wrong. What were the ideas? Greed was good.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I don't think we should. I think we should look what happened in the 1980s is that our economy became very uncompetitive. This is sort of before much of Silicon Valley, just getting going. Much of our economy had become uncompetitive, and there was, I don't know whether you remember, but there were these competitiveness commissions, and we were falling behind Japan and Germany. And people wondered whether we were going to become like Britain. And we'd gotten fat and happy, and we needed to make some changes, and we needed to become a little more lean and mean.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Secondly, because it's a long term look at the kind of capitalism that we've had in this country for the last 30 years and has been developing for the last 30 years. And there's been sort of an erosion of certain norms and laws and regulations that I think in the long run will make our kind of capitalism the kind that people won't want to have. And if we don't change it, we're going to do less well than some of our economic competitors abroad.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody, thank you for coming on this beautiful day. I would be having oysters right now across the street if I were you. Anyway, I'm Kara Swisher. I run a site called Rico, which is a tech site here in San Francisco and do some columns from the New York Times and things, and I write a lot about these issues that Steve has covered. So we're going to talk a little bit about the book and also about how it relates a little bit because we're in San Francisco to income inequality and other issues that are here, UBI and things like that. So I first want to start, Steve, give everybody a sense of what you are trying to get through with this book because we are at record unemployment, stock market highs, economy is booming.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, editor at large of Rico. You may know me as someone who loves the free market, but in my spare time I talk tech and you're listening to Rico Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today we're going to play an interview I did with Stephen Perlstein, a Washington Post economics columnist and a professor of public affairs at George Mason University. He was also one of my first bosses. He's the author of a new book called Can American Capitalism Survive. He survived my tenure at the Washington Post. Why greed is not good, opportunity is not equal and fairness won't make us poor. Wow, that's a long thing. It was a really fascinating interview and it was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Let's take a listen.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT