Ep28 -- The Great Econ Con

 A bunch of years ago when my kids were really little, we took a family trip to Buenos Aires, Argentina.  My wife had a work thing there and she'll says a cousin who runs this incredibly great bagel place called Sheikob's Bagels. If you're ever down there, check it out.  We had used miles to buy the tickets and were hoping there was some chance we might get upgraded to business class for the long flight.  As we're waiting at the gate I go up to the counter just to check on our upgrade status. There's a woman in front of me in line, like dressed to the nines. She's giving off an energy and you can just tell she's going to be trouble.  There are two agents working the counter. And we both get called up at about the same time. She goes to one agent. I go to another.  I ask if there's any chance we might get upgraded. And I kind of overhear the woman next to me, just demanding that her entire family of four be upgraded from business class to first.  The agent tells her it's unlikely the entire family will get moved to first, but she'll look into it.  And with that this woman hits a whole new level of abuse. She has platinum status. How dare they treat her this way, this kind of services, inexcusable and so on. And so on.  And I notice the guy who's helping me is shooting this woman the side eye, and he's kind of aggressively typing away at his keyboard.  He prints out new boarding passes and hands them to me. And says to me a little bit louder than necessary,  "We've been able to upgrade one of you to business class and the other three to first class." He says this in such a way that I couldn't help but conclude that he had just given me the first class upgrades that this pain-in-the-ass woman was demanding.  I didn't ask any questions. 

I just took the boarding passes and ran. Although, as I was leaving, I could hear the gate agent helping the annoying woman say, "Oh, I'm so sorry..." And then I couldn't catch the rest.  

Once we were on the plane, I settle my wife and kids into the ridiculous luxury of first class explaining to kids that this is not normal and to not get used to this.  And I went back to my seat in business, which was beyond comfortable.  But then I hear across the business class cabin, that same woman, now absolutely abusing the flight attendants as she and her family were forced to suffer the unspeakable indignity of slumming it in business class all the way to Buenos Aires.  

So this week, I want to talk a little bit about entitlement and privilege, see how they relate to our bedrock American principle of equality. And how those concepts relate to another bedrock principle. The one I started talking about last week: freedom.  Stay tuned.  

I'm Craig Boreth and this is The Great Ungaslighting, a podcast about the ways we all get conned into accepting a human-made culture that's out of sync with our human nature and how we can fight back and put the kind back into humankind.  

But first. A word about a sponsor.  

This week's episode of The Great Ungaslighting is not brought to you by Plexure. Never heard of Plexure? Well, hopefully someday soon you will. And you'll be exactly as pissed off about what they, and countless other companies like them, actually do.  Plexure is what they call a customer engagement data platform that captures, analyzes, and understands customer purchasing behavior.  They say their foundation sets the stage for Plexure's deep personalization capabilities and content solutions that make each customer feel as though they're dining or purchase experience was designed just for them.  Ooh, design just for me? Where do I sign up?  Well, if you're using the apps for McDonald's 7-Eleven, White Castle and many others, you've already signed up. And what exactly have you signed up for? Well, Plexure calls it "personalized pricing." But folks like Cory Doctorow more aptly referred to it as "surveillance pricing."  

So fun fact, you remember all that data you've provided to every online store you've ever bought anything from over the years. Remember how those stores told you they'd use the data to improve your customer experience, delivering exactly what items you want to buy when you want to buy them? Well, it turns out that companies like Plexure make that happen.  But that's not all they're personalizing.  They're also using the wonders of modern technology to change the price for what you're thinking of buying. And, shocker, even though they claim that it's a way to deliver lower prices, that's not exactly the value proposition Plexure is offering its clients. To them, Plexure is boasting that they can predict a customer's payday and then raise the prices of everything they want to buy while they're feeling flush with cash.  So next time you go online and do anything or are enticed to install an e-commerce app with some tiny discount or incentive, remember that ultimately all that data is collected for a single purpose, and it's not so you'll feel like the experience was designed just for you. It's to figure out the highest possible price that can be extracted just from you.  

And we're back.  

There's obviously a lot of talk in the news about DEI hires, reverse racism and all kinds of other grievance-inspired rants and raves. Now full disclosure. I'm a white guy, but I've got eyes and a willingness to accept obvious realities that I encounter, regardless of what they tell me about unfair advantages and disadvantages that some folks might experience.  But last I checked, it's currently 2024, right? While there's still plenty of argument about the effects of skin color in our society, at this point there can't possibly be any objective unambiguous advantages given to one group of people over another based on such superficial and long ago, debunked characteristics.  Well,  The New York Times recently ran a piece about the Apgar test, which is used to test newborns on how they're adapting to life outside the womb. 

It is the first measure that a living, breathing, human being gets. It's a 10-point scale and a newborn can get up to two points on each of five metrics.  One of the metrics is skin color.  A baby gets zero points if the skin is pale blue or completely blue with no pink areas. I think he can see where this is going.  The infant gets one point if the body is pink, but the hands and feet are blue, and two points, the top score if the infant's entire body is pink.  So in the first few minutes of life with the very first test a new human takes,  it becomes clear that whiteness is the standard. And that you have an advantage just by virtue of your skin color. And the data support this with Apgar scores being much less predictive of neonatal health for black infants than for white infants. And what that means is that healthy babies of color are more likely to be exposed to unnecessary medical interventions. Which means they're more likely to be separated from their mothers, which disrupts early bonding and breastfeeding. They're more likely to be exposed to infection in ICUs. And the parents are more likely to have the additional stress and trauma of experiencing separation from their newborn child unnecessarily.  Now I have two children and both happen to be white. Now they're teenagers, and I've had the extreme good fortune to not have to care about any of this Apgar stuff. I mean, I never even thought about it until I read the Times article last week.  But I can tell you for sure that black parents because I've heard their stories, regardless of whether they were aware of the Apgar skin color test experienced a labor and delivery medical institution very differently from the way I did.  

This kind of thing falls into the very politically charged category of white privilege.  Now how one responds to hearing the term white privilege can be very revealing, but it usually says nothing about whether or not white privilege actually exists. Spoiler alert: it definitely does. So let's break it down a little bit. And see why this is such a difficult reality for so many people to acknowledge.  First of all, it's important to realize that white privilege isn't the only privilege out there. It's probably the most politically charged, but I'd say it's not the most socially powerful. I think that position is held by wealth privilege in America or male privilege. But when lots of people hear about white privilege, they think it means that if you're white, then your life should be fabulous. 

You should hold an exalted position in our society.  So lots of white folks who are struggling believe that their struggles mean that white privilege doesn't exist. After all, they are definitely not noticing any privilege coming their way.  To those folks, I would say white privilege doesn't mean your life is guaranteed to be perfect. It just means that of all the possible ways you're getting screwed, your whiteness is not one of them.  What perks you get from your whiteness can easily be completely swamped by your underprivileged status in wealth, access to education, even whether your accent sounds smart or not to certain people.  

Another complicating factor in recognizing privilege is that it's often completely invisible.  I mean, you don't really have a control version of your life, which doesn't experience your privilege so you can compare the two.  Whatever privilege you may be experiencing just feels like what is normal.  Even for that woman on the flight to Buenos Aires, she's gotten used to traveling a certain way, so the upgrade no longer felt like a privilege. It felt like an entitlement.  And I got to say, getting upgraded on a flight is a perfect example of how quickly privileges can come to feel like entitlements for all of us, myself included.  Business class is very easy to very quickly get used to.  

And of course, it's always easier to move up the status ladder than to move down.  And it takes almost no time to acclimate to that higher status and feel that it's normal and deserved. But move down the ladder and you may never fully adjust to the stress and anxiety and even shame of being downgraded, even if it's a status level you once happily occupied before moving on up.  

So there are many categories of privilege throughout our society. They are powerful drivers of status and economic mobility. And yet they're often hard to see. And they've also been rationalized in ways that obscure the cause-and-effect relationship between the privilege and the resulting status.  I've been reading this book lately called The Quiet Coup: Neo-liberalism and the Looting of America by Mehrsa Baradaran, a law professor at UC Irvine and an expert on banking law.  You know, when you read something and it just seems to magically transform your understanding of reality in just a few sentences.  It was like in that  Danusha Lameris poem we read way back when "Small Kindnesses," when she reveals to us "the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say 'here, have my seat.' 'Go ahead, you first.' 'I like your hat.'"  Suddenly there's a reality in which fleeting temples exist. Every time we interact pleasantly with another person.  

Well, there's a paragraph in The Quiet Coup that did the same thing for me. It's early on in the introduction when Professor Baradaran writes,  "patently immoral practices like colonial subjugation, slavery, land theft. Jim Crow, segregation, and forced labor lasted so long that the theories that once justified them like divine decree no longer did the job.   Instead of addressing the injustices that racist ideology had created, often, those with the most to lose went looking for new ideologies to justify their unfair position at the top.  First Christianity, then Darwinian science, then the pseudo-scientific babble of human IQ testing. Then as was the case at the end of the 1960s,  economics.  Economics? Really?  Most of us tend to think of economics as observational,  a study of the production and distribution and consumption of goods and services. 

It's a social science after all, whose end goal should be the development and testing of theories to explain human behavior and interactions.  Now obviously many economists have ideological points of view and they get picked up by politicians and transformed into policy.  But that quote provides a sort of face-slap moment.  When it comes to neo-liberalism the economic water we've been swimming around in since the seventies,  it was less about ideologues interpreting the economic theories to suit their world outlooks and more about ideologues defining economic outcomes the way they wanted to, and then creating economic theories to suit those outcomes.  And it's hard to argue that they've been anything other than spectacularly successful.  

So, if you believe as Rick Perlstein wrote recently in The American Prospect, that "Elite status is proof of merit.  And merit is that which leads to elite status,"  then you'll basically create an economic system that defines merit as whatever it is that elites currently have.  Then that's the ideal. That's how success is defined. And anything that gets in the way of success must be eliminated. I mean, who would want to stand in the way of success even if success is only really available to those who are already privileged with those predefined attributes?  

And over the decades, this ideology has metastasized throughout the American economy. And the results are exactly as intended. Massive wealth inequality and anemic social mobility.  

BREAK

So I wanted to tie all this in with last week's discussion of freedom, especially as it relates to equality.  As I was researching the history of neo-liberalism, I came across this quote from economist Milton Friedman.  He said, "A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both."  

It's interesting that he said that in 1980, which was kind of the birth year of the neoliberal era we've been living in ever since.  You could call it the Reagan era of low taxes, low regulation, worker-unfriendly policies, and emphasis on individual negative freedom, that is freedom from interference by the government, but very little emphasis on the attainment of human potential, particularly through public institutions like education, universal healthcare and housing and environmental regulation that could ensure a healthy, sustainable environment for everyone.  You know, promoting the general welfare for ourselves and our posterity, as it says in the opening lines of that document that neo-liberals are so fond of quoting.  

So in 1980,  Friedman was probably nodding to the Soviet Union when he said a society that puts equality before freedom will get neither.  He's probably thinking about equality in Marxist terms as in, from each according to his ability to each, according to his needs.  Now that sounds pretty apocalyptic if you believe that elite status is proof of merit. And merit is that which leads to elite status.  Once you define your terms that way,  anything that messes with the system is sacrilege and will threaten the natural order of things.  

Of course, there are other ways of defining equality and freedom than the way Friedman did in 1980.  When I first began doing research for this podcast, I read Danielle Allen's book, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality.  In it, she writes,  "political philosophers have generated the view that equality and freedom are necessarily in tension with each other.  As a public, we have swallowed this argument whole. We think we are required to choose between freedom and equality.  Our choice in recent years has tipped toward freedom.  Under the general influence of libertarianism, both parties have abandoned  our declaration, they have scorned our patrimony.  If we abandon equality we lose the single bond that makes us a community, that makes us a people with the capacity to be free collectively and individually in the first place.  Her argument runs directly counter to Friedman's. 

It's not that putting equality before freedom will get us neither. It's that equality is a necessary prerequisite to freedom.  If you don't have equal rights and protection under the law, equal access to education, healthcare, housing, clean air and water, how can you possibly enjoy the positive freedom of maximizing your potential, living a fully rewarding life? How can you secure the blessings of Liberty, a right that the Constitution claims to grant to all people?  So I disagree pretty strenuously with Friedman's claim that putting equality before freedom is a bad thing.  It seems to me that if we're talking about the highest order of human freedoms, not just the freedom to do whatever you want regardless of how it affects other people, but the freedom to reach your greatest potential, then you really can't have freedom for all, unless you have equality first.  But I get it, people can disagree about their definitions of freedom and equality.  And honestly, have we ever really tried to put equality before freedom in America? It seems like Friedman is warning against even trying such a thing, else we end up in some Stalinist hellscape.  But we have implemented the second part of his statement.  After all, putting freedom before equality is the entire basis of the neo-liberalism that has dominated American economic and political life for 40 years.  So how's it working out?  Has American society, which has clearly put freedom before equality for decades, achieved a high degree of both?  I'm guessing if you ask the millions of Americans who are scared to leave their jobs, because they need the health insurance, or the half million people a year who declared bankruptcy due to medical debt,  or anyone who holds part of the $1.75 trillion in student loan debt,  they probably don't feel too free.  And how about that high degree of equality that Friedman promised? Well, if you look at the GINI coefficient, which measures the gap between the incomes of a country's richest and poorest, the US ranks roughly 106th.  If you look at the World Economic Forum's Social Mobility Index, the US ranks 27th.  And the human freedom index from the very libertarian Cato Institute only ranks the U S 17th.  Now, I'm sure they'd say that if the US wants to rise up in the ranks, we need even more neoliberal policies and less emphasis on equality.  But given their track record over the past 40 years and given that the countries above us on the list include Switzerland. Norway, Sweden, Denmark. Iceland, et cetera, it certainly doesn't look like the path to human freedom is marked by doing more of the same.  

So the question I've been asking myself over the past several years,  a question that prompted me to start this podcast in the first place:  what can we do to jolt ourselves out of this libertarian Reagan era that we've been in for over 40 years and get us into an era where there's more genuine equality of opportunity, more positive freedom for all of us to live our best possible lives?  I mean, we've been in this era for a long time.  And while it certainly doesn't feel like it right now. Eras don't last forever.  And while it's impossible to predict what will bump us into the next era it's worth contemplating.  I kind of thought that the COVID pandemic might have done it.  After all, this was something we were all susceptible to and would take a commitment of all of us toward everyone else to ultimately overcome.  But unfortunately, It seems that the pandemic didn't quite bring us together as one big happy human family. 

So if it's not something massive and global, like a pandemic, maybe it's something smaller and seemingly more innocuous.  Remember a bunch of weeks ago, I talked about how the movie Jaws changed the entire country's view of sharks and swimming in the ocean literally overnight?  While this isn't happening nearly as quickly, it does seem that our general view of tech billionaires seems to be shifting quite a bit. And while Musk and Bezos and Zuckerberg get most of the attention, one billionaire recently made the news in a way that might touch on just the right pressure points to really jolt the public's consciousness about our current era and how we might want to move on from it.  

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman recently donated $7 million to a super PAC supporting Kamala Harris.  First of all, let's not lose sight of the fact that it's legal for any one individual to support a political candidate with that much money, which is insane. Money is speech my ass.  But then as if to make it perfectly clear why he is giving so much money, Hoffman said the quiet part out loud and strongly encouraged Harris if elected to replace Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan.  Obviously money isn't just speech, it's policy-making, too. 

And this is one particular policy that gets at the heart of everything we've been talking about. The whole neoliberal enterprise of justifying some people's unfair advantage. And that is: monopolies.  You see, Lina Khan as head of the FTC has finally been enforcing America's antitrust laws and is pushing back hard on the countless monopolies that have run rampant over our economy. Throughout this Reagan era.  It's possible, when we look back on this era and finally understand what it was that ushered in the new era,  it may just be the obscene, monopoly power that so degraded our freedom and our equality that finally caused a sufficient number of Americans to say enough, it's time to do things differently.  

Well, that's it for this week. If you like this episode, please share it with anyone else you think might find it interesting.  And until next time, be kind to yourself, cut each other, some slack, and use your f$%#ing turn signal.