Transcription
For this episode of The Wolf-Krugman Exchange, I have a big question for you. Do men, in particular in America, have an economic problem? Yes, there's something really has gone wrong for American men of prime working age. There's a contributing factor to a lot of demoralisation, especially among those with lower education levels, and certainly is a factor in political radicalisation. It's a kind of bitter irony that Trump's Maga agenda won't help these people at all, but it plays to them. Well, we're going to talk about that, of course. And it is worth stressing a lot of this can be seen in other developed countries, certainly here in Britain. Perhaps not so extreme because the political expression is not so extreme. But it is a wider phenomenon, just America. We'll come to that later.
So welcome to the second episode of this series of The Wolf-Krugman Exchange here on the Economics Show, where Paul and I are taking stock of the first year of Donald Trump's second term in office, and where he's taking the economy and democracy in America, but also elsewhere in the world. Last week, we talked about the state of the American economy and the vibe session, where even though the economy looks OK on the surface, people feel bad about it. And today, Trump's promises that he can bring back a masculine economy. It's at the heart of the Maga movement, but is he delivering? And we're also looking at another populist, a real one on the other end of the political spectrum, Zohran Mamdani, mayor-elect of New York. And if you listen to President Trump, a 100 per cent Communist lunatic.
So Paul, who is Maga man? Is he real? Do men in America have a genuine and legitimate economic grievance? Yes, it's really clear that something has gone wrong for the economic role of men, in America and actually you can see elements of this across the western world. You can see it in raw numbers. If you go back 60 years, men in their prime years - I guess I'm Miss Jean Brodie. I'm no longer in my prime. But the 25 to 54, essentially all of them were in the workforce. They were either employed or actively looking for jobs, 97.5 per cent. For all men in that age range now that number is now under 90 per cent which is, most men are in the labour force but there's a significant number who are not, which was not the case. And it's very education-linked. So if we look at non-college men, we're now up to 1 in 6, maybe more than that, are just not in the labour force. You could say that there are ways in which that could be OK. But the reality is, given our societies as they are, given our expectations, it's not OK. It means that there's a lot of men who are, basically, on the outs. And that's a real problem.
I think it's perhaps worth considering at this point the other gender, whose story over that period that you describe is really pretty dramatically different. That's, as it were, the other side of this extraordinary economic change, isn't it? You mean, are we talking about women? Yeah, we're talking about women. Yeah, most prime age women have been in the labour force since the end of the 1970s. So this is actually not that new a phenomenon. But they've continued to rise. So overall, prime age labour force participation is about the same now as it was 25 years ago. But that's men down, and women up. And then if you look inside that, there is particularly if we're looking at... since this education is another critical variable here - there's been a real divergence there with women now accounting for the majority of people graduating college. So this is a - and I hope we get to it - a really tremendous change in what women do with a college degree that is transformational in ways that I think are, on the whole, a great positive thing for humanity, but not necessarily sitting that easily with a lot of men.
Yes, this is, I think, as you say, it's a longer term change. I looked at some statistics for America, and Britain is very similar. And back in the early '50s, a little over 30 per cent of prime age women were in work. This got up to about 70 per cent about 25 years ago. It hasn't gone up much since then. It's a little above that. I think about 75 per cent. But still, that is a revolution in the sense that the great majority of women are now working. They are the majority of university graduates. And I discovered, which I hadn't expected, that now, obviously this is a relatively recent, close to a third of all STEM graduates are women. So it's not just that women are doing the traditional service caring jobs. It's something bigger than that. So a lot of men, and particularly the ones who are not getting to university, not getting these good jobs, and they seem to be the focus of it, very, very aggrieved.
Yeah, I recently sort of did a deep dive into the work of Claudia Goldin, who won the Nobel a couple of years ago for her work on women in the workforce. And as she says, underneath those aggregate numbers of women working, there was another revolution, which really wasn't complete until the '90s, which is that women going to college did so for different reasons than in the past. But somewhere, really, between the late '70s and the early '90s, women began to seek careers. They began to treat college the way that men always had, as a way to establish a position. They began to think of having lives with careers. And although the discrimination and glass ceilings, those are still very much real, a number have succeeded. So we actually have a situation where the position of women in the economy on the whole has expanded. It's not been great for all of them, but has expanded. And the position of men in the labour force, again, has been OK for some of us, but has gotten worse, or at least in terms of status, prestige, sense of well-being, has gone downhill. All of this is real. Now, the political response to it is often quite horrifying, but there's no question that something really did happen.
So before we consider the politics of all this, just think a bit about the causes. There seem to me, obviously, a crucial element is simply women are getting educated, and it's taken quite a while to have the impact. You might have said it should have happened earlier, but this was a big change. And so they're now able to do lots of jobs that men used to be thought of as they're the sort of thing they did. But there's something else, some other things going on, it seems to me. The most obvious advantage in a labour force that men have is that they're physically stronger. And we tend to forget. I remember this in my childhood, even more 100 years ago, how many jobs required a huge physical effort. And those jobs have basically disappeared. And that's, among other things, linked to the shift from industry, manufacturing, that sort of building, construction to services. We have a completely different sort of economy. And in a way that alone will obviously have some effect in this shift. Then there are, of course, social changes, ideological changes about equal roles of men and women. If you add that together, it is both an economic and a social revolution, isn't it?
Yeah, let me add that an important dimension of this is also regional. If you look at not just our men not working who are in an age range where we think they should be working, or they think they should be working, it tends to be relatively geographically differentiated. Let's put it that way, that if the places in the United States where men are not working are the eastern heartland, or greater Appalachia, or whatever. It's the mining industrial belt that has really been stranded. There was just a transformation in the geography of the economy that began about 1990 or a little earlier, in which employment opportunity increasingly shifted to highly educated big cities stranding a lot of the heartland. And that's where a lot of men, the jobs that they used to do disappeared. And you add to that - and this is part of a broader shift in the economy, but it's especially apparent if you look at it there, that you look at what kind of jobs remain. So I've done some work. West Virginia is kind of where everything is at its maximum for that. West Virginia still thinks of itself as a coal mining state, but there are almost no coal miners left. It's what they think they ought to be doing, but they haven't been doing for decades. Where are the jobs in West Virginia? Well, a lot of them are in healthcare and social services, a lot of them actually paid for by Washington because of Medicare, and Social Security and so on. And the jobs that have been on the ascendant, the jobs that have preserved and even expanded in a place like that are jobs that have traditionally been female-coded. They're jobs that don't require upper body strength, that men could be doing those jobs. There's no good reason why there couldn't be a lot of male nurses. If you think of what is the representative job in the modern economy, it's actually a nurse. But it's not part of the culture. Our culture has adapted to the change in the economy, and this is now a multi-decade issue.
Well, the interesting point - I don't need to go into all the detail - is the story is really very similar in the areas I know about in Britain and elsewhere, what happened to mining communities, old shipbuilding communities, the sorts of jobs in these areas which are generally in economic decline, very heavily supplied by and financed by government. Very similar stories. The same, as I understand it, is true in the old Ruhrgebiet in Germany, former East Germany, lots of parts of France. So it is, as you say, very general phenomenon that this has had ideological effects. And this is where we get to the Maga movement. So what seems to be coming forward in America that's obviously ahead of us in this, is a sort of political movement which doesn't emphasise adapting to this. On the contrary, it sort of doubles down on resisting it, on saying that somehow or other, in some hocus pocus way, the politicians will bring all that back. In a way, that's what Brexit promised, though it was never that explicit. The old times would come back. And I see that as what Nigel Farage is selling now. But Donald Trump really got there first. And in the process - and this is the second really fascinating aspect - the ideologies of young men and women, middle aged, particularly young men and women, seem to have diverged. So women and young women are much more liberal, pro-government. It's as though they live in two different universes. When I was a child, women tended to be more conservative because they were more attached to the idea of preserving the family. It's really a fascinating change. So this has had not only profound economic roots and social consequences. It seems to be getting to the heart of our politics.
Yeah. Now, I'm not actually sure that the United States is out there ahead, or behind, or wherever it is we're heading, of everybody. If we look at former East Germany, which is very much the same syndrome, old industrial region, the jobs are gone, a lot of men not working. And a lot of men voting for the AfD, which is a more or less straight neo-Nazi. There's also an issue, which I think is why don't people leave these declining regions? And there are a bunch of reasons, and it is difficult. But one of the things one does see, at least in some countries, and I believe, although it's less clear in the United States, is that women, among other things, are more willing to pick up and move to where the opportunities are, so that in some place like the former DDR, you have an excess of young men over young women. You can imagine that that has a serious radicalising effect, that there's a... Let's be blunt. There's a strong incel component, involuntary celibate component, to some of the political radicalism out there. Altogether, it's a really ugly picture. And it's not just because something went wrong in people's minds. It's because circumstances changed in ways that have messed with people's minds.
Obviously, if you look at the voting, there's a strong, masculine bias towards the new right, or whatever you call it, the alt right, the Trumpian right. And this is, again, very much clear, as you rightly pointed out, in other places around the developed world. So when you've got these populist, quote unquote, people like Trump, who's promising to bring back industrial jobs by protection, bring back coal mining by banning the word 'climate change,' and meanwhile, actually slashing taxes for the tech industry and cryptocurrency, which will offer these men absolutely nothing, as far as I can see. Can that politics be sustained when it is so it's obviously failing and will fail completely? It won't deliver what is being promised. Policies or facts on the ground matter. Obviously, we wouldn't be having this kind of discussion if there weren't real, real reasons for men to be upset. And the question is, does a performative politics that makes a big show of caring about the fact that they're upset and going after immigrants, whoever that are supposed to be responsible for their problems, can that politics be sustained, even if it doesn't work? And the answer is, I'm not as optimistic on that as one might be. It's true that it can't... it's not going to work. The arithmetic just says that even if the United States imposed prohibitive tariffs, wiped out trade, and therefore wiped out the trade deficit, we would go from something like 8 per cent of employment in manufacturers back up to all of 10 per cent. The 35 per cent we used to have isn't coming back. But does anger as a policy, does blaming other people, does that work politically, even if it doesn't deliver results? And the United States, we have this long history of the Jim Crow South, where politics of prejudice and hatred dominated for generations, despite the fact that they left the region as poor as ever. So I'm not 100 per cent sure.
Now, the truth is that this Maga man is maybe... that's a minority of the population. The people who are going to vote for Trump or a Trump-like figure no matter what are not an electoral majority. And the reason that Trump is in office right now is that a lot of other people actually believed his promises to bring prices down. And they are already... we can see in off-year elections, they're already swinging hard the other way. So this is not a permanent condition. But on the other hand, if you have a large fundamentally anti-democratic, anti rule of law segment of the voting population, that is going to be a concern. An important element here, because it gets to the heart of this, is the distinction between what I think of as conservatism in the old British tradition, which is adaptive, realistic in a sense, Burkean, and reaction. And what we're discussing here in the fairly crude sense is reactionary. That is to say, they want to recreate an economic and social order which was disappearing already half a century ago and has accelerated greatly with the deindustrialisation, the move to a very new sort of economy dominated by highly skilled people, educated people, and so forth. And it's also socially reactionary because it's clearly wanting to restore, it seems to me, the hierarchical position of men vis a vis women of half a century or so ago. And if you hold such reactionary beliefs, and it's clearly just so obvious how powerful this is, that's almost a religion. You want to go back to the past. You want to live in a place most of them never lived in. Their fathers or grandfathers might have done. And if you want that badly enough, and you believe that will solve all your problems, and you're prepared to elect people who promise it, it may not matter that you don't get it. It's your side is still throwing its weight around. That gets really frightening.
I really hate the populist stuff, the use of the word 'populist,' because mostly it really isn't, or at least not for the people. But anyway, but call it populism, if you like. That past is largely imaginary. It's a way that only a few people actually lived, even in the good old days. If you want to think of what America in the '50s was like, there was a lot less Ozzie and Harriet and a lot more Grapes of Wrath than people have in their image of what it was like. But it certainly it's not restorable. Even go back to the coal miners. What got rid of coal mining? It wasn't the environmentalists. Almost all the coal mining jobs were gone before pro-green energy policies even began. What really made it go away was replacement of traditional coal mining by mountaintop removal. You just use high explosives to blow the tops off mountains, and you don't need very many miners any more. And they're not going to force an end to that kind of technology. It's undeliverable. But again, feeling that there's somebody to be angry at can sustain a movement for a long time, even if it doesn't deliver a better life. In Britain, by the way, what really got rid of coal was gas. Yeah. I remember the gas revolution of the '60s. And then it was North Sea gas, and now it comes from other places. But coal is just a ridiculous way to fuel anything. So technology overthrew it, and actually it's technology again. One of the things that I find most amusing or interesting is that the Republicans... this movement is being supported for pretty obvious reasons by the people who are promoting radical technological revolutions, really radical ones of varying kinds, which are certainly not going to solve any of these problems.
So let's get back to that. If you were thinking of it from your side of the political firmament, what would be the right way to deal with the problems Maga man has? Even if you can't get most of them, all of them to shift, well, you might be able to get some of them. Part of the answer is that the Maga right is helping to do the job for us. People may say, oh, I hate liberals. But then take away their health insurance, which is about to happen on a large scale to millions of people in the United States now, basically, by the end of this month, that can remind them that, hey, these people are not on your side. To the extent we have this problem of left-behind regions, you can try to do place-based policies that try to support employment in left-behind locations. That is actually, unfortunately, those kinds of things don't have a great track record historically, but they're worth trying. And the Biden administration was trying, and that's been dismantled by Trump. But maybe we can do it again. We can do things like... again, this is very American, but free community college. Letting people get that extra bit of education that gives them more of an entree to the 21st century economy. That's well within the realm of things that we could be doing and should be doing. We don't really know what the impact of AI is going to be. It does look as if the last things to be affected by it are quite a few jobs that have required a college education are actually probably on the line. But quite a few skilled manual jobs are not. It's going to be quite a while before we can have robot plumbers and carpenters. So vocational education, trade schools, are something that can be done. I think if we're looking for a single magic bullet, silver bullet, magic, whatever, that will make the whole thing go away, that's not going to work. There is no one button to push. Trump thinks it's terrorists, but that isn't it. But to basically try a bunch of stuff. And I would say do as much as you can to show it, to say, look. Message we care. That's an old George H.W. Bush trope, which you probably wouldn't get. But don't read your own stage directions, but actually do try to show that you care.
Now, I don't have a whole lot of hope. If you ask American liberals, what's your vision beyond any realistic hope, but the social democratic state you'd love to have, they would point to Denmark, with strong unions, and high minimum wages, and generous social benefits. And Denmark has a strong nativist political movement. So there are no easy answers. There is no European country, certainly not Britain, which is proposing - nor would any party survive if it did - to remove healthcare from a significant part of the population, particularly the poorer part of the population. The country will be overthrown. The government will be overthrown, and it certainly wouldn't be elected. That's pretty clear. Nobody's discussing that. And yet we clearly have similar political problems. Deindustrialisation has had similar sorts of effects. Then there's another thing that I've been very struck by. There's a very strong view in the British centre-left that our biggest problem is that our government and governance is too centralised. The local authorities just aren't free enough to do anything. But then you look at America, and, well, you are a federal system. And you have often very powerful city governments. So people can do things. Admittedly, it's difficult, but they can raise taxes. They can pursue different policies. But that doesn't seem to have helped America deal with these problems, certainly not at the political level. So the conclusion I reach is the stage we are at in terms of our economic and social development. You throw in ageing and other things. It's just very difficult to fix these problems.
In the United States, actually, local control is in many ways exacerbating our problems. Above all, it's generally local governments that block.. that make it extremely difficult to build housing. And so we have a huge problem, as does the UK, as does quite a lot of Europe, of housing affordability. If you're a township in New Jersey, you kind of have an interest. Your upper middle class residents don't want to allow any construction of apartment buildings where lower income people might live. And everybody else has that attitude. And yet, where are they going to live? And what we're starting to see in some places, California, and some stuff in New York City, by the way, which we may... I know we're going to come to Mamdani. But we actually need more centralised control. We have the state of California intervening to prevent localities from doing as much as they have been doing to block housing construction. So no, it's not a simple... there are no easy answers here. Give me ideal policies anyplace, United States, Germany, and ask, what would you do for the left-behind regions? And the answer is, well, more than we're doing. But how much hope do I really have that it would turn around? Not a whole lot. In our case, it's quite revealing that one of the areas where there is local control is building. And this government is trying to override it. And people at the locality level, as it were, don't want thousands or tens of thousands of new houses built in their nice green fields. And so the politics are the same. There we are. Let's pause for a quick break now. And when we come back, Paul, I want to ask you about Zohran Mamdani, the newly elected, left-leaning Democrat mayor of New York, and whether his economic agenda offers an alternative that appeals to traditional Maga voters, and also whether he represents the future of the Democrats. Generative AI is here to stay, and the transformation of the global information ecosystem is happening now. ProRata's suite of innovative AI solutions is igniting that change with a revolutionary model that gives content the respect it deserves, while promoting a sustainable and trustworthy information ecosystem. Because when AI uses content, its creators deserve credit. Discover the future of fair and transparent content use in AI search at prorata.ai.
So, Paul, Zohran Mamdani. To some people, he's a hero. To President Trump, he's a raging Communist. What do you make of Mamdani? Well, he calls himself a Democratic Socialist, although there's very little of what real socialists would call socialism in his platform or in that of the Democratic Socialists of America. He's not calling for seizing the commanding heights of production. I think there are a couple of things to say. First of all, one thing that really does matter, Mamdani is clearly a brilliant politician. He just has a talent. He does not come across as a screaming radical. He comes across as an articulate guy who relates to your problems. I think that was... the attempts to portray him a raving Communist worked to his advantage, because so obviously he is not. And mayors of New York City have very limited ability to do stuff. Even within the city government, the mayor is not a CEO. There's a city council, and it is hard to get stuff accomplished. And there are local authorities within the city. So he's not going to radically change New York City, even if he wanted to. The things he is... and a lot is subject to the state, by the way. So lots of things he just cannot do without approval of the state and the rest of New York State. It's not New York City. New York City is a completely unique political universe within the United States. He's proposing some things that are arguably are good. There really is a case for making buses free, if you can actually find the money, which is a big problem. He's talking about rent control, but it's actually very limited. He's actually only talking about freezing rents on apartments that are already rent controlled. So it's actually a much, much more limited policy. Probably would not do a whole lot of harm. And he's talking about opening city-run grocery stores in food deserts, which do exist within the city of New York. There are a number of US states where all of the liquor stores are run by the state government. They do OK, and nobody thinks of them as Communist workers, dictatorship of the working class. So it's a fairly modest agenda. And in some ways, I'm talking on too much because I live there. But in some ways, the most important thing that happened may not have been the election of Mamdani, who will try to do some good things, but also that there were several measures passed that will make it easier to build new housing in New York City. And that's likely to have a bigger impact on affordability than anything else.
So let's look at this affordability agenda more broadly, because that's clearly something that concerns the right and left. Is that an agenda that you think the Democrats should now be seizing? Could that work politically and work actually at the policy level? And if so, how, outside New York, or even for the reasons you've outlined inside New York? This is a nice aspiration. But the truth, of course, is at least from the outside point of view, America is a very rich country. People lead, on the whole, very... have very high standards of living. To the extent there's a poverty problem, it's to my mind, mainly, a distributional problem. That means you have to tax somebody and distribute it elsewhere. And it's not just about overall affordability. So how do you see that idea playing politically and in policy terms? The place where we really could and should make a huge difference is housing. The United States, like Britain, housing has gotten very expensive. It has gotten expensive, not because it's expensive to build housing, but because you're not allowed to. Yeah. And there's an interesting development there, which is that in the United States, the housing affordability issue used to be a kind of a blue state issue. It is really very, very hard to get permission to build in California, or New York, or New Jersey. And it wasn't in Georgia or Texas, because you could just... there were not a whole lot of restrictions on building single family houses. And so some place like Atlanta would just keep on sprawling further and further. But in the last 10 years, what seems to have happened is that we've reached the limits of sprawl, that a place like Atlanta, at this point the line is every place in Atlanta is at least an hour from Atlanta. The distances are too great. The traffic is too bad. And what Atlanta needs to do is what New York needs to do, which is to build more densely, to build up. And that is something that, in fact, in Georgia, you cannot do for the most part. There are, in fact, a lot of restrictions on building multi-family dwellings and building multi-story dwellings. So this is now a nationwide problem that the restrictions on construction are keeping housing unaffordable. And that's a really big deal. Even if you say, well, look, wages have risen by more than the consumer price index, that can be true, and at the same time, young people can't afford the downpayment on a house, which is also very much true now. And that has all kinds of social effects. It's seen as a betrayal. Maybe we shouldn't be this way, but the fact of the matter is that people who... young people who see no realistic prospect of ever owning a home do seem to have real social issues in a way that people who do have that prospect don't. So in terms of policy, that's the overwhelming lever. There are other things you can do which may be very important politically, but that's the big policy thing. In terms of the politics, I think there's a real opportunity, which is to go after people who are making your life less affordable. The cutting edge right there, right now, is actually data centres and electricity. When OpenAI, or Google, or - god help us - Elon Musk's xAI, when they want to build a new data centre, they want to hook into the grid, but the grid doesn't have enough capacity. And it costs a lot of money to build that capacity, so rates go up on everybody. And an affordability agenda that says, no, you don't get to do that. If you want to place additional demands on a supply-constrained grid, then you have to pay the extra cost. That, I think, is a genuine populist issue that probably can get significant traction.
Can you just come back to your policy discussion earlier? Because I think it's very interesting. And since you noted for your work on economic geography, it fits in there. I mean, if you look at... let's take the Tokyo conurbation. Incredibly huge. Not lots of high rises, incredibly large number of people. But what they have, and it's true, also, increasingly, in China, interestingly, is absolutely first rate public transport. So you can get from anywhere to... in theory, it should be possible for a very large area with modern technology to have subways and trains, which will move people over really pretty long distances very, very quickly. And having everybody sit in a traffic jam to get to work drives me sort of crazy. So you could say that it's not so simple, of course. But the modern city is technically possible if you use modern technology, which people in East Asia are pretty used to doing it. Indeed, some of the European cities are, too. Isn't that part of the problem that you want to build houses, but you want them to build them on the American suburban model? And the American suburban model is spectacularly inefficient in getting people from the places they live to where they need to go to work. Yeah. And by the way, Tokyo is not a city of high rises, but it's a city of six-story buildings. Yes, no, no. This is really often... I agree. Of course, they don't live in houses everywhere. Of course. You do have to move into... you can't have the single family occupation dwelling on that scale. Absolutely. And a combination of relatively not super dense, but again, six-storey buildings can get you a lot of people. And public transit. Let me give a plug for New York, which has lots of problems. But one thing that New York that is almost nonexistent elsewhere is the four track subway system, local and express trains. Yes. So the express trains stop every three or four local stops, which means that they are remarkably fast. And it is kind of... New York and Atlanta are at opposite ends of the spectrum. And in practise, it's easier for people to get where they want to go in New York than it is in Atlanta. Because although we have this enormous population density, and traffic moves very slowly, the subways are available. And the subways are ugly, but relatively efficient. And there's a circularity there, by the way. You can't support public transit unless you have sufficient density. But then if you have public transit then the incentive to live in the relatively dense areas that have good access to public transit is there. So the missing thing in New York, it's kind of a hub and spoke system, where often to get from one part of... to get from Queens to Brooklyn, you need to go into Manhattan and then out again, unless you take the bus. And this is where Mamdani, he's talking about free buses, but also dedicated bus lanes. It may be that the biggest thing he can do, realistically, is actually improve bus service in New York City. And that is the way to make it go away. Now, liberalising construction works. We have case studies a couple of places in the US, but we can really see it. Of all things, Auckland, New Zeal,and has been a poster child for the success of... New Zealand still has expensive housing, believe it or not. You would think that just push some of the sheep out of the way. But New Zealand has expensive housing. But they've made substantial progress, and above all, in Auckland, which has really allowed construction in a way that we should be doing in major cities around the world.
It seems to me, just to bring this to a head, there are two strategies for the broad centre-left, maybe even part of the centre-right. One is to focus on what I think this new book co-authored by Ezra Klein calls abundance. Namely, we've got technological possibilities, and we've been talking about some of them, new and clean energy. All of us said, everybody can have more. We don't need to talk about redistribution. We can just run the system better in the interests of everybody. It won't be perfect, but you will feel more optimistic about the future. And the other is, we've got this huge predatory oligarchy, which is grotesquely rich, paying clearly inadequate taxes, getting in the way of the functioning of our politics, and we've got to strip them down to size, or the progressive movement of the early 20th century. Now, if you were advising a politician which way to go, or should it be both, which would you say? I would say definitely both. You can simultaneously have a... I'm not sure that I like 'abundancies,' but you can say we have an affordability agenda. And that will involve a lot of reforms, and we're going to make it easier to get stuff done and get stuff built. And also, some of it's going to cost money, and the oligarchs should pay for it. I don't see that that's a problem. Particularly, the people who say, oh, that'll sound too leftwing, one of the things I've been learning from serious political analysts is that leftwing, rightwing, it's a real thing. There's a real policy dimension, and it's certainly a dimension that exists in the minds of talking heads. But voters don't actually think that way. Voters, if you say, I have an agenda that's going to make these filthy rich guys who are ripping you off pay, and who are going to build more and make your life better, why not? So the possibility - let's be optimistic - is that the failure of the current reactionary right programme to deliver to the people who are, in many cases, completely understandably disappointed and frustrated with what's happening, might open up the possibility of more rational reformism, what I called in my book a 'new' New Deal 'whatever you like.' And maybe the politics will start looking sane again.
Well, that's going to take a while. The trouble is - and I think this may bring us back to the question of Maga man, because there are multiple types of Maga men. It's not just working-class men who find that their economic opportunities have gone away. There's a lot of relatively affluent, relatively educated people who are also quite, for whatever reason, quite bitter, angry. You would find it hard. I think if you went to a group of working-class Trump supporters, you wouldn't hear anything nearly as unhinged and anti-democratic as what we're hearing from people like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. So the tech bros have their own reasons for not wanting kind of amicable, 'let's work together and solve our problems' polity. And of course, they have the money to keep us from having that kind of polity. So this is not going to be easy, no matter what you do. I'm not expecting to be able to flip open my computer for the morning's news without a sense of dread for the rest of my lifetime.
I think that's right, and I think the core here is, we've got back to many of the big debates of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When I listen to them, I think social Darwinism. That's essentially who they are. They're social Darwinists. There are some people who go back, who seem to think that monarchy was the ultimate governing system. Some of them are the same people. Now, when you're dealing with ideologies like that, well, yes, it's very difficult to imagine any way of getting agreement, or even ability to operate in the same political system with them. But I don't think the majority of the people can be persuaded that social Darwinism is the future, because the truth is the social Darwinists think most of those people are for the scrapheap. And by the way, these social Darwinists or neo-monarchists are alarming. It's terrifying to think that people with that kind of mindset have so much money and power. But on the other hand, they're a foil. I don't know what an appropriately 21st century sounding version of malefactors of great wealth would be. But the progressives of an earlier era used the robber barons as an effective political foil. And I don't see.. And somebody should be able to do it.
Yeah. I think this has been a very interesting, to me fascinating discussion of some very deep things that are going on in our societies. And I'd like to leave with this hope that Maga man, as it were, the working-class people, will realise that what they're being offered on the right is a fraud. And somebody will make that work, as FDR so obviously did in the middle of the 20th century. So we're going to turn next week to something else. We're going to look at America's great geopolitical rival, China. Also going to try to talk about Europe a bit. So the question, of course, is... and I wonder what you feel about it. Has China already won the economic war with the US? What do you think? I think, probably, yes. I hate to say that, but we would have to turn things around very fast in the United States. And while I'm not a doomer, I think we're going to be playing catch-up, I think, for a long time. And I have more to say, of course, on the future of the EU. I've been writing a lot about that recently. And it is in really challenging times, made so clear by what's just happening as we're talking about Ukraine. Indeed. So much. Well, I can go on. I'm more optimistic about Europe than most Europeans are. I think there's a lot of strengths in Europe that are not fully appreciated. But on the other hand, there's a lot of learned helplessness in Europe, as well. And how to overcome that is going to be a really big issue for the future of the world. So may I ask you, what's your cultural coda for the week? There's a beautiful, beautiful duet, quite old now. But originally Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, although Gabriel's done it with some others: 'Don't Give Up.' And although the lyrics are a little bit less explicit, clearly, it's about a man who's lost a job and can't find another. And it's all about the frustrations of someone who is feeling that he somehow can't break through in a society that is not offering opportunities. I'm going to go for pop music again. Well, it's not really pop music. One of my favourite poets, song makers, Leonard Cohen. And I'm going to go with 'Democracy is Coming to the USA,' which is actually a very fine song and seems the appropriately aspirational at this moment. Leonard Cohen is always good. As somebody once said, nobody on Earth can't sing the way Leonard Cohen can't sing. It's a wonderful statement. And the lyrics are pretty good, too. Until next week. Talk to you again next week.