Amazon and Inequality

numbers are striking. In twenty twenty, the company saw a nearly two hundred percent rise in profits and its sales rose over thirty percent. For the first time, the company employed more than a million workers global. It can be a real challenge to understand the rise and impact act of a company so big and with so much power, But today we have someone here to help us. Alec McGillis is an award winning journalist who covers politics and government for Pro Publica. He's the author of the new

book Fulfillment, Winning and Losing in One Click America. It's a book about Amazon, and it's also a book about much more than Amazon. It's a book that's meant to be about the ways Amazon symbolizes and embodies many of the trends in the United States that have led to growing inequality between rich people and poor people, and importantly between richer and poorer geographical regions and even richer and

poor cities in close juxtaposition to each other. It's a book that sets out to transcend its own subject, a tall order for any book, and we have Alec McGillis here to talk about it with us. Alex, thank you so much for being here in congratulations on your very bold an ambitious new book fulfillment. I want to begin by asking you, how did you get the idea to write a book that is both about Amazon and not

about Amazon? What road led you to this conception. The road started really not with Amazon at all, but with this, you know, this issue of regional inequality, these disparities that I would see when I was going around the country as a national reporter. I would go to the Midwest, you know, or Appalacha or whatever it might be. In

these sort of great recession years. That's when I really started doing that kind of serious national reporting and just being so struck by these disparities, these cities out in the Midwest that were just really reeling during the recession. Then you'd come back to Washington and you see this incredible prosperity on display and this total disconnect really with

what was going on elsewhere in the country. And it kind of drove me crazy, just the complacency that you'd see in Washington, no real notion of just how bad

things have gotten out there. And I saw it again when I moved back up to Baltimore where I live now, and just seeing in those forty miles between Baltimore and Washington, just how huge the disparity was growing over wider and wanting to write about that, and then after Trump got elected, realizing just how big the political fallout from these divides was, but then finally decided to write about it through the frame of Amazon shows that as my frame, and shows

it as the frame for two reasons. One, the company is now so ubiquitous that it's just a very kind of handy way to take you around the country because it's everywhere now in our life, so it's just a good thread to sort of show who we are now as a country. But more importantly, it was a good frame because it itself helps to explain the problem. The tech giants are a big reason for these these regional inequalities, because the regional inequality is based partly in economic concentration.

The concentration of our economy in just a handful of companies has driven a lot of this concentration of wealth in certain places. Let me ask you first a historical question and an economic question about this place you started the regional inequalities. So when I think in a non scientific way about the history of regional inequality and disparity of wealth in the United States, my first instinct is to say, that's almost baked into the history of the country.

You know. I think of the fight over ratifying the Constitution in seventeen eighty nine, huge geographic difference in desire to ratify, reflecting huge disparities in wealth between small farmers in the interior and growing merchant class closer to the coasts. Tell me whether you see the geographical disparity in wealth that you're seeing now as in some way different in kind than the kinds of disparities that we saw in the United States at other moments when our economy was

shifting to a new kind of economy. I see it it's different both in degree and kind. For starters, while we've always have had wealthier and poorer places in the country, of course, the gaps have just gotten a lot bigger, just the way that the gaps have gotten lot bigger on the income ladder between you the one percent and

nine nine percent, so have the regional gaps gotten bigger. So, for instance, as recently as nineteen eighty, there were only certain small parts of our country that had median income that was twenty percent or greater than the average, or twenty percent or lower than the than the average. Most of the country kind of clustered close to the median. Now huge swaths of the country are above that plus twenty percent line or below twenty percent and below the average.

So just great growth at the extremes of wealthier and poorer regions. But I also see it as different in kind. What has happened and has a lot to do with sort of tech dominated economy. What's happened is that the tech economy encourages agglomeration of prosperity and dynamism, and in a way that did not happen during this sort of the manufacturing heavy on me that we had for most

of the twentieth century. In a manufacturing economy, one stable way of thinking about it is that once you come up with a given advance, say the steelmaking process, you could take that technology that advance anywhere that had the manpower in the national resources and the transportation links, and you could build a steel mill. And and that's so you had those all over all across the Northeast in the Midwest. The tech economy is different. The value lies

entirely in the almost entirely in the initial innovation. It's all about coming up with the advances, creating the software, creating the app, whatever it might be. And and so it's all about having the human capital to prove that innovation. And those innovations come often through proximity, through the proximity of having all those great minds together with each other and with a great end with a capital to fund

their work. That's how you end up with sort of the growth of clusters, like like a Silicon valley, where despite the incredible expense of living there and doing business there, you know, in the sort of dystopian levels of wealth and congestion and kind of unaffordability of those places, they still exert a pull because you sort of feel like you need to be there and TB in the mix, and so you end up within a conglomeration of wealth sort that we really on levels that we have not

had before. It really is a new kind of thing. Well, we feel like we've always had wealth here and poor cities. In fact, what we're dealing with now is on a different scale. That leads to my second question about the agglomeration thing, which is that when it comes to I don't know, let's say a social media company that in raw numbers doesn't have that many employees, but it's super rich, there is some sort of human capital feature. Amazon in a way seems like a different kind of company in

that it's not primarily just based on its technology. It has technology. Businesses are that probably do benefit from this. But with respect to a lot of what Amazon does, it is capable of being less agglomerated. It is capable of being more for far flung and more distributed. So I wonder about how you see Amazon itself fitting into that model that you're describing, the model where agglomeration of people and putting them near each other has made some

places super rich as opposed to other places. I see Amazon a very much as actually as fitting into that model makes the Amazon different than of Google or Facebook is that it has a mass workforce that is in the warehouses, that is in the fulfillment centers, and is doing the actual physical work of delivering these physical products.

Which is what made it so appealing for me to use them as my frame, is that you actually have a physical manifestation of the company and all the sort reforms out around the country in a way that Google and Facebook do not. There's just a landscape and ecosystem to writing on Amazon that they lack. But as far as the actual headquarters operate of Amazon, it is very

much a classic case of aglamoration. The reason why Jeff Bezos chose Seattle early on to locate his company was partly because there were tax advantages to doing so, to putting the company in Seattle not in California, but also because Microsoft was already in Seattle and he knew there was a workforce, a skilled tech workforce there that he could draw on in building his company and just as

now in setting out to build his second headquarters. Because Amazon was outgrowing Seattle with forty five thousand tech employees, crammed into crammed into the city. They need a new home, and what city do they choose for their new home? But Washing Union, DC, a city that also has a large skilled tech heavy workforce as a result of all those IT contractors in the DC area that they could draw off of. And then you look at the other their smaller satellite offices of several house in each and

those are all in the tech capital. So you Boston now is just they're just announced that they're going to expand to Boston up to about seven thousand salary tech types in Boston, New York's second headquarters in New York, they're getting several thousand more theirs. You got a bunch in the Bay Area, they got a bunch in Austin. So it's very much a case of them putting those people in the places where there are a lot others

of those people. One of the really beautiful things about the book is the way that you go out to these fulfilming centers all over the country and tell at a very human level. The reader really gets the feeling of getting to know a little bit about the people whom you've interviewed, and you've really gotten to know them in depth, who are experiencing the effects of Amazon's economic power, That is, they are dealing with the reality that they

don't have much negotiating power of their own. Visavi, this huge employer who may ultimately be the only really available employer in town, or the only employer at scale in town. And you show compellingly that the company exercises that economic power with respect to wages, with respect to hours, with respect to work conditions, and you humanize that. And I think that's tremendously powerful and a great contributions of the book. As I read those descriptions, the thought that kept running

through my mind was this is all terribly upsetting. But isn't it always very upsetting when one sees the operation of capitalism in practice? You know, if we were looking at other industries that were not as much in the news, that we weren't as reliant on, wouldn't we also see those with economic power I mean capital, That is to say, when capital is able to do it exercising all the power that it can exercise to try to pay as workers as little as possible and extract as much at

work as possible from them. I'm not saying that's Okay, you know, and that is obviously part of the history of why capital it has struggled with labor for the last one hundred and eight or so years so intensely. But is there something about this struggle that's really distinctive? Were different in that way other than the fact that

Amazon's really darned powerful. I've thought a lot about this, and I and the chapter where I kind of take this on at its core iss the chapter on the extraordinary transformation of a place outside Baltimore called Sparrow's Point, which it's peninsula just southeast of the city, and it was the home to the largest steel plant in the world, Betheheim Steel Plant, that had at its peak about thirty thousand people working. There's a huge company town like right

adjacent to the steel millages. It's vast industrial works. When things started out there in the early twentieth century, it was indeed very brutal place. It was just you had incredibly low paid workforce with unbelievably rough hours. Two days off a year, two holidays off year, Christmas and July fourth.

They were making about a dollar a day doing incredibly dangerous work, incredibly demanding conditions, and no say on the job, and you ended up finally, of course, over the next few decades with an improvement of conditions, thanks heavily to the fact that they got organized, And so you ended up with those jobs becoming for the latter part of

the twentieth century much better paid. Jobs that were still very treacherous, very dangerous, very challenging, but the middle class jobs you could support a family on where they had much more say on the job, jobs that made good money and found to some degree purposeful. That mail has now been wiped completely off the face of the earth, declined steadily, relentlessly until the Foundly went out of business

in twenty twelve. Has been wiped off the face of the map, and it's been replaced by a logistics park which includes a two Amazon warehouses. And I actually found a man who worked at the wheel for thirty years and now went to work at the warehouse, making way less money and feeling much less purpose in sensive camaraderie on the job. And and so I I do think that, of course, you know, anytime I can think of job, other sorts of jobs now that if we look closely

at them, with seem pretty bleak and horrific. I think, you know, for instance, what we've learned about the meat packing plants during in the age of COVID and just what reality is like there is bleaker yet then, of course, than what we see in the warehouses now. But if we compare the warehouses with what has come before them, a sort of a mass workplace, a place where where the average American worker looking for a job can expect to go to work that is now has now increasingly

become one of these warehouses. They're so ubiquitous, they're they're so huge, they're so rapidly growing. They are in a way now the mass workplace of our country. And if you compare them to what became before them at a place like Sparrow's Point a mill, where workers were making far more than they're making now in these warehouses, and you know, have had more sense of a meaning and

purpose in their daily life. Or if you compare them to the retail experience that these warehouses have in some sense sort of replaced the experience of the department store clerk that's been sort of wiped out by the e commerce revolution, I'm not sure that we would say that necessarily that the warehouse experience is no bleaker than those

things that replaced. I would say that both of those other experiences had some kind of a level of better working conditions conceivably and also more of a sense of basic humanity and connectiveness than what is now on offer in the vast windowless warehouse. The root causes of that transformation seemed to me to be two, and I want to ask you about both of them. They're both addressed, i would say, obliquely in your book, but not centrally.

One is globalization, which is what brought down the American steel mill. It just became much less expensive to produce steel in other places around the world. And the second is and that of course is repeated across a wide range of construction industries. And the other is unionization. Right when the Sparrows Point Steel plant was at its worst,

it's because there weren't yet unions there. And then with the growth and the rise of unions towards their peak in the middle of the twentieth century in the US, the jobs got quote unquote better in the sense that conditions improved and pay improved. And then with the decline of unions, which of course is linked in some ways to globalization too. They're not totally independent of each other.

Those jobs, as you say, disappeared through as it were, no fault of Amazons, right, and then the idea of what they get replaced with. Yes, it's connected to the e commerce revolution, but in the end, the core point is that the stuff that we buy and sell isn't any more made in the United States, never will be, so I wonder. And unions have also been very much in the news because of efforts in Alabama to unionize

parts of Amazon. So I wonder if you just reflect on those forces, you know, the global press, which is what rid of those quote unquote good jobs, and then the unionization, which may be a partial solution, but even by your account, doesn't sound like a total solution. It sounds like those jobs in the warehouses would still be pretty bleak, to use your word, even if they were unionized and had better conditions and paid better. If the warehouse has got unionized in years to come, it would

be a really big deal. I do believe it would be. It would serve to some degree to kind of term the arc of history and a couple notches forward again, so that in a place like Sparrows point where you now are back to kind of square one, with a non unionized workforce working really demanding job pay less than what they're owed, with very little say on the job.

If you could then kind of lift those jobs up to something that's supported a more sort of stable middle class kind of existence, with some more sense of voice and respect and dignity on dignity on a job if they if they pull us off. So it really is a big deal. I mean, if you absolutely can see,

um this the spreading to other warehouses. And the fact is that as difficult it is to unionize in this day and time, and as aggressively as Amazon has fought it, the warehouses are actually relatively well suited to unionization in a way that too many other forms of our certain

contemporary work are not. You know, it's it's really hard to unionize the gig workers, the uber drivers, that it exists outside of kind of a normal employment kind of realm, Whereas whereas the warehouses, you've got thousands of people in one place, and so you you you could see it spreading and that's why, um, you know, it's also not inconceivable that Amazon is going to be so worried about the spread that there's people who floated the prospect that

they might shut this place down if it were about yes, that that's how that's how much of a threat who would be to them for this to become a president, and that they would want to do anything possible to to just just just quash it. So the stakes really

are are quite large. But but as for the larger forces, this is something that the Amazon talked a lot about when I was discussing the book with them, and they said, you know, look, these are all these are all larger forces at work here that have kind of brought us to this point technology globalization, where we just happened to be the company that's that's kind of come to fill this this slot. And if it wasn't us, some company called something else doing what we're doing now, and it

just happens to be us. And and that's true to some extent. But I think there's a tendency among a lot of us to kind of especially a lot including a lot of like sort of liberal wrong types, to kind of often to sort of ascribe too much, to sort of grant systemic structural forces and leave personal and corporate responsibility out of the picture. I mean, there are choices that the company has made over the years that

have made these Some of these problems especially acute. The things that described in the book, the the aggressiveness with which the company has from its very founding pursued tax

avoidance at all different levels. The the extremity of it of the demands, the production demands in the warehouses, the fact that it has that a further exacerbated regional inequality by choosing to put the big second headquarters in the richest city in America, Washington, DC, instead of seeing this as an opportunity to somehow spread spread the wealth a little bit by putting the company in the Saint Louis

or Cleveland. These are all choices that the company made, and so I do think absolutely there are larger structural forces at work. In the book is not intended to somehow hold the Amazon Singly responsible for everything about the way we live and we are today. The company's partly is probably, as I said, the outset also an expression, a symptom of metaphor first sort of who we are now. But it is also partly an explanation and a cause

We'll be right back. One of the pairings that you do a great job of highlighting in the book is the Washington, DC, with its tremendous economic growth in recent decades versus Baltimore just a short distance away. And you've written both for the for the Baltimore Sun and for the Washington Post, so you're ideally qualified to write about this. And you say that the disparity between the two is sort of like their different worlds, which I agree with entirely.

You also say that it's unprecedented. And I sort of wondered about the unprecedented part because I immediately thought of Newark, New Jersey, and New York, New York, which I'm not sure. I mean, obviously, new works a lot smaller than New York, but they're pretty darned close together. And you know, Newark once had a thriving middle class and then didn't. And the disparity is really extraordinary because parts of New York are among the poorest places in the United States. Of course,

so are some parts of New York City itself. Could also argue that, you know, East New York, taken as its own city, is extraordinarily disparate in its poverty relative to the unimaginable wealth of Manhattan, and you know, you can almost see one from the other. That's that's how close they are to each other. And it made me wonder again if this kind of just tremendous wealth disparity isn't kind of cooked into capitalism, or cooked into American capitalism,

and maybe in a certain way long has been. That's not to excuse it. You know, it could be just as bad if it's been going on all the time. I mean, that'd be sort of like saying that, you know, racial injustice in the United States today is unpresented. It isn't. We've had racial injustice of an even more extreme form throughout most of our history. It still makes the irracial

injustice we have really evil. So it's not that if something has been around for a long time that excuses it, And I don't mean to be suggesting that it would. It just made me wonder about the rich get rich or poor get poorer elements that are built into capitalism itself.

With the small exception of that period in the middle of the twenty century, when because of unionization and the results of World War two, roughly speaking, in a rapidly growing economy, we got something like the burgeoning middle class that we now like to think back on as almost an idealized moment. I think it is different though, what

we have now. I think there's something especially stark about two having two actual cities of actually quite similar scale sitting side by side that are now unrecognizably different prospects and prosperity to actual cities that with actual downtowns and similar full urban structures of relatively similar weight, much different than the New York New York example, which yes, of course that's always been a very very stark juxtaposition, but it was very much also apple and Oranges, just in

terms of scale. But to have two cities that where not so long ago one was even was actually larger than the other. Despite the fact that Washington was that was the national capital, Baltimore actually was in some ways still more of a quote real city with actual much larger population, more more sort of the more of the trappings of a real city. You know, it was the place you went to see baseball, and there was there

wasn't even baseball and Washington, DC. And so now to have those two cities that had once been a relatively similar scale now just be so unrecognizable different to the point where I experience a kind of dizziness when I go to Washington, DC, that the atmospheric pressure is so different between the two cities. It's just it's mind boggling. If you've spent you know, a day in DC or you're just living there, and then you come take the

train after forty miles to Baltimore. It takes less than an hour, and you get off a train and you're in a city like you're It's not like you've just come to some outlying neighborhood. You're in a coherent city that's been around for a couple of centuries, and with all that sort of design of a regular city and feel of regular city, except that there are there's something wildly different. There's just so much less energy, so many

fewer people, incredibly lesser wealth. You know, we're home to the I keep, you know, in the book, I talk a lot about the homes, but the fact that we are, that you have one city where where that is experiencing a massive affordability crisis, and where we're twenty by one serious count, twenty thousand black people have been displaced just less a dozen years or so, and where your average rowhouse townhouse now costs you know, seven eight nine hundred

thousand dollars, if not more, and just up the road you we are demolishing by the hundreds um rowhouses that were in their day, you know, arguably even nicer than the ones that were there. They are so expensive now in DC. There's something deeply out of whack about that and kind of kind of broken in a way that I do think is new in its darkness. I don't disagree with your description at all. I think it's you know,

it's cogent and accurate. Why isn't the takeaway here that sort of DC saved itself from the fate of Baltimore. I mean, when I read your book, I get a sense of almost you know, astonishment that DC became a city with industry, right that the old DC didn't really have an industry. It had the government, but no one was making much money in the government. And DC managed to achieve a kind of much higher degree of economic vitality in this period. As Baltimore essentially continued to decline.

It never fell off a cliff, but it continued to decline in a pretty steady way. Other than the fact of the disparity, which I don't dispute at all. Why isn't that actually a happy story for DC, even if it's an unhappy story for Baltimore, Because I think you're undercounting the costs of the hyper prosperity. I think you're undercounting the cost of displacement. I think undercounting the cost

of the unaffordability. What the book argue is that this imbalance is not healthy for either kind of city to hap things be this out of whack, That there actually is such a thing as a happy middle and that week, and that the happy middle has been lost in a lot of these places, and that we'd be better off. Both sorts of places would be better off if they're a little bit closer to that medium, if there was

a greater balance across the board. This reminds me a little bit of the argument you hear on the on the flip side, which is you hear in places like Baltimore where people people worry about, well, gosh, if we're you know, if we're going to if we were to get if the Amazon had set up shop here, or if if you're if we're going to get this or that company here, we're going to be we're going to end up with, you know, wild gentrification and unaffordability and

all that. What that missus is scale if Baltimore, places like Baltimore has so much, so much plight, now so much capacity to spare one hundred populations that are hundreds of thousands, blow there, blow their peak, that the situation has gone so out of whack that that in fact, you could have so much, so much growth and additional vitality in a city like the Baltimore, Saint Louis or Cleveland before before one's got anywhere close to a real problem.

And because that that's just how extremes the situation has gone. The book argues or not argues, reports shows that that what has happened in cities like DC and Seattle, it comes with real costs, that the displacement, that the change of character in these cities, that political poison has even crept in. And I describe in Seattle around the whole fight over raising taxes on Amazon to try to deal with the house and homelessness problem. I think it's it

takes a certain level of um. One has to look past a lot to believe that what's going on right now in places like the Bay Area, in Seattle, in New York and DC is all a happy story of uplifting prosperity without any serious downsides. Again, I don't mean to be saying that suddenly the presence of the very rich is always good. Far far from it, just that we don't necessarily have an obvious example in the US

of the happy middle that you're describing. Do you have in mind, you know, here's a place where that happy middle works, whether it's in the United States or in another country. I do. I think there's some places that are somewhat gets someone closer to the middle. I would say that Philadelphia is somewhat closer to being in that range, and obviously all sorts of problems still experiencing them right now,

horrific regression and violent crime. I would say that that Chicago, to some degree have it something closer to the middle. There are cities in the Midwest, in the interior of the country that have become some of the few successful kind of you know, deacons in Middle America, like a Columbus, that are but are at risk now of becoming almost

their own kind of winter. Take all cities in their regions where you're seeing enormous disparities kind of growing between them and the smaller cities kind of around them in their region, but that are still somewhat of a balance of prosperity and accessibility right now. Gosh, maybe a Denver like I think Denver, it strikes me as a place that is managed to be successful without yet becoming a completely suffering yet from from the worst effects of hyper prosperity.

But you really, you do have to, you have to look for them. Most places I think of really tend to to fall into one or the other. And again, it's not that growth is bad. It's not. And I guess that's why I get so frustrated when I hear people in Baltimore warning about learning about the effects of growth in a place that so desperately needs it and

that can so easily accommodate it. But it's all about scale, and there's just there's no question that a place like DC has is experiencing effects of a kind of hyper prosperity that is going to get even more extreme now that you've got twenty five thousand more of these these well paying jobs that are going to be coming in in the coming years, just billions more invested across the river there in Crystal City, and and and that there would have been it would have probably been better for

both sorts of places if that kind of investment had had ended up elsewhere. But that's as Amazon sees it, that's not how things work. Your book does a really extraordinary job of telling the story of bipolar distributions of wealth and of opportunity. What do you see as your intended audience, because you could imagine it being sort of like in the Upton Sinclair tradition, you know, of his

description of the horror of meat packing plants. You know, when he was writing, Sinclair famously said that he was he was actually trying to turn people into socialists, but instead what he got was food, you know, processing reform. But that is a kind of book which was clearly intended to make people sit up and take notice and

do something different as a consequence. And there's another kind of reporting that I think is trying to capture the psychegeist, you know, say, where we are as a country right now, so that when astarians look back, or when we look at ourselves in the mirror, we get some sense of who we are as a country. If those are sort of two poles, you know, the book that's designed reportage to draw people's attention to an ill and seek to

fix it. And a work which could be a work of literature effiction or non infiction, that's designed really to explain the world to us. Where on that continuum, if that is a fair continuum, do you see your own

book falling. That's a very well described spectrum. And I would say somewhere in the middle, to the extent that the book seeks some kind of a sinclear like policy correction, policy reform, policy answer, you know, implicitly, you know, suggests that one way to deal with this regional concentration of wealth is to deal with the economic concentration of so many sectors of the economy in certain companies, and that the book makes an implicit case for an antitrust, for

a new approach to antitrust, basically by bringing to bear the regional element to it, showing that this economic concentration that we're now experiencing not only distorts markets in ways that are not healthy and that the economists and the sharp any trust legal minds are now explaining to us, but also has a regional effect and contributes to our regional disparities that have been so kind of unhealthy for

a country and our politics. So it points when in that direction in a servemplicit way, But then it also definitely was meant to sort of describe who we've become as a country, and definitely to have some kind of an effect on the general consciousness of what I used to I would describe as your average center left, middle upper middle class liberal consumer who probably uses Amazon quite a lot, has used it even more this past year during the pandemic, and probably has not thought all that much,

you know, about what lies behind the one click. To not only get that reader to think more about what lies behind the one click in terms of the warehouses and the drivers and the cardboard makers that supply chain that's that's bringing the box to them, but just to get them to think more generally about the country as a whole. I have a lot of my reporting the last few years has been has been an attempt to kind of bridge these disparate worlds that you know, have

gotten so starkly removed from each other. And I traveled between them a lot, and I like to kind of bring news of one to the other and and I do believe that that that there's a real basic purpose served in building empathy or the potential for empathy. And I'll say that I have I felt this purpose all the more strongly this past year because I have been astonished by the the alacrity with which a lot of people did embrace the one click life during the past year.

That's sort of hunkering down um and sealing ourselves off, which was of course at the behest of the recommendation of our public health authorities. But there was a wholesale nature of the embrace, the alacrity of the embrace, and the extent to which we may not be willing to really to to move on from it now, even as

as conditions gradually improve. One hope of the book is that it will help to to get us to re engage somewhat in the physical world around us and the world of our of the places we live, our communities, not just you know, not just in terms of using local businesses, returning to the physical world around us in all of its forms, whether it's you know, a theater or you know, just getting out of getting back out of our homes and into physical world, showing the sort

of the cost of going full digital, of going full one click, of isolating ourselves and becoming people who please sit the computer and seagull our fulfillment online and then get our wishes delivered in the box on that lands on the porch of the stew I mean, I'm squarely

in that target audience, I will say. I mean I was somebody who you know, it's not that I never used Amazon before, but I made a point of always shopping at my local bookshop and shopping at my local grocery store and not even the big box, you know. And and then you know, COVID simply had the effect of, you know, making us change the calculus. I mean, these moment to moment decisions have I think defaulted us somewhat rationally,

as you say, to the convenience structure of Amazon. So you know, I share profoundly your wish for us to re engage with the world, but I also under you know, what this last year would have been like if there hadn't been that default option. I mean, yes, there are things we didn't absolutely need. You know, I know lots of people who grew beard. You know, we don't need to you know, we don't need to buy daving cream,

and you know, maybe it would. It's perfectly reasonable to wait weeks or months for a book to come rather than to have the book come quickly. So it's not that I'm claiming that these consumer creature comforts are somehow my inborn right there aren't. They're not anybody's. But I do think that in a way Amazon has entered into our consciousnesses in the last year, in a way that is, as you say, genuinely transformative. And I guess my last

question for you is what is the route back? I mean, raising people's consciousness is good, and I definitely had the experience in reading your book of thinking listen, don't just order, think about the supply chain engage. And I have been thinking about that since I read the book. But I also have to admit to myself that I still haven't stopped, as a consequence, from clicking the button rather than going to the to the brick and mortar store, at least

at this stage in the pandemic. So how do you think about that transformation of action in relationship to the change in consciousness. Well, I would hope that that as more time goes on and as conditions further improved that someone like you would be more likely to actually get back out of the house and to think harder about it. I do, like I said before, I do believe that we all have agency, and I'm not I'm not absolutist about this. I using Amazon when I have to sort

of a last resort thing. But it's all about moderation. It's all about again, it's about scale. It's not all all or nothing. It's it's the degree to which to which we do things. There's there's it's a spectrum and to the point about how things would have been without them without What that supposes, I think is that things might have been actually, you know, somehow vastly worse if we had to go out out of the house to

fill our basic needs. I think what that also overlooks is the fact that while we were doing this, living in this way, we were of course relying and you were you were relying on a whole lot of people who did not have the benefit that you did of

staying home and ordering your shaving cream in. There were people who there were people who are bringing that to you, yes, and this book is about those people, but it's mostly directed at the people who were who were ordering a shaving cream, and it's and it's sort of showing you the whole world of all those people who all along we're in the warehouses, whether the person nexts them in COVID and so this, yes, this book is about what was happening this past year, well all of us were

ordering our shaving cream online. Thank you for the thoughtful conversation and for the extremely thought provoking a book and very beautifully written and engaging. Thank you so much. Thank you. Reading Fulfillment and listening to Alec McGillis was a rich and a fascinating experience that affected me both emotionally and intellectually.

I will just tell you you couldn't read a book like this and have a heart and not be affected by the powerful stories of individuals who take a job in an Amazon warehouse because it's the only job that's available to them and in some cases even seem to cross the boundary of what we would like to think of as just working conditions in a country like the United States that is, on the whole, a well off

country in the world. To read these stories is therefore to appreciate the tremendous good fortune of those of us who are able to click the Amazon button to order products rather than to have to do the heavy lifting literally in many cases, of getting those products out of their warehouses and to us as the people who are consumers.

At the same time, the book emphasizes the tremendous wealth gap that has emerged regionally and between different cities, and that in turn raises a problem that is more than emotional, that is also intellectual, and a question about how power should be distributed in our society. The book and the conversation made me think more seriously than I had before about the question of whether it's okay or not that some places are getting very, very rich as other places

are getting very poor. Notice that that's a slightly different question than wealth disparities between individuals. When it comes to wealth disparities between places, we're talking about whole ecosystems that manage to rise through the advantages of attracting people who can earn a lot of money, and that create with that rise, real forms of displacement and challenge for people

who have traditionally lived in those communities. Meanwhile, there are other communities that fail to benefit from the newly emerging economy, and those places end up getting poorer. Should we be designing our country, Should we be designing our political institutions in such a way as to enhance the equality between geographical areas. This is a very challenging policy question, one which I do not purport to be able to answer myself, and one that, to be fair, Alec McGillis himself does

not fully take on in fulfillment. He wants us to ask that question and to feel that question, and he has an implicit answer, which is that we ought to do things differently without giving us a detailed analysis of what we actually should be doing differently. And that's certainly fine. It's a lot to ask of any book that it both tell the story of our times and tell us

what we ought to be doing differently. In the conversation that we had, Alec made the point that there were individual decisions at the level of agency of the corporation that Amazon might have done that might have spread the well to a greater degree. But even had Amazon taken those decisions, there's no question that one company alone could not have reversed the very substantial differences in distribution that

exists geographically in the country. With respect to wealth. Power to make decisions like that comes from a wide range of different factors. It includes the incentives that local governments are prepared to provide. It includes the path dependent developments of different regions based on the educational institutions they have, based on who ends up living there. And it has to do as well with the very complex policy decisions governing real estate, infrastructure, and indeed the history of the

United States going back centuries. I hope you'll read Fulfillment, not because it has all the answers, but because it deepens the questions that we ought to be asking around the distribution of power by geography and wealth in the United States today. Until the next time I speak to you, be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mo Laboard, our engineer is Martin Gonzalez, and our shore runner is

Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Skerra at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia, Jean Coott, Heather Fain, Carl mcliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at bloomberg dot com slash Feldman.

To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you liked what you heard today, please write a review or tell a French. This is deep background