Biden's Pro-Union Presidency Isn't Good Enough for Union Members

towards Utopia. The way he tells it, you can understand most of what's happened in the world in the past hundred and fifty years or so with the help of just two central European thinkers and one near universal human trait, fear of freeloading or muching. He and I had a long conversation about all of that recently, which you can hear in a few minutes. But first we look at one of the many factors that have made the upcoming US mid To so hard to call President Biden's hot

and cold relationship with the labor unions. Bloomberg US Economy reported. Molly Smith has the story much of which was reported by her colleague Katy Dmitrieva in the union stronghold of McComb County, Michigan. That's what juniors are about, my view, by providing dignity and respect for people from bust their neck. That's why I created the White House Task Force on Worker Organization Empowerment to make sure the choice to join

a union belongs to workers alone. When President Joe Biden came into office, he promised to be the most pro union president in US history, and he takes a lot of boxes. In his first two years, he's been vocal about the importance of unions. He started a labor task Force and adopted many of its proposals, and most recently, his labor chief Marty Walsh, helped secure a deal for

railway workers threatening to strike. But several important policies, like a higher federal minimum wage and laws that would make it easier for workers to unionize, were abandoned or remain

stuck in Congress. Democrats labor record under Biden will be one of the many things that American workers will weigh as they vote in the midterm elections in November, and too often workers have been uninspired by the president and his sympathetic ear in Macomb County, Michigan, historical auto union stronghold, and the sight of a renewed organizing drive among service sector workers, things don't look good for Democrats. Here's Alyssa Cokeley,

a worker at Starbucks in McComb. I think when it comes to labor, it's been all very for show like performative a little bit. Coakeley led a campaign to unionize her cafe where she's a shift supervisor. While they were successful, she and her colleagues say the company is dragging its feet in bargaining. In other words, it's not really any

easier to unionize under Biden than previous presidents. Um like I know, like recently he invited like a Starbucks worker, like an Amazon worker to the White House, and it was like, okay, that's cool that you got to meet with them, but it's like, what or are you doing for for us? Showing support only goes so far. Union membership has declined for decades. In the nineties, one in five U S workers was part of a union. Today

it's one in ten. The a f l C i OH, the country's largest labor union, has promised to grow union ranks by one million workers over the next decade. Government policies could prove decisive for whether or not that happens. I think the general consensus in industry is that unions create conflict between employees and employers. That was William mackenzie, CEO of Left Coast, a cannabis company in Michigan, and I think that the opposite can be true if an

employer supports a union the organizing of a workforce. So by supporting the workers, supporting the union, making them feel supported, we really wind up with a situation where we don't have any turnover. The overall consensus is that we care about our employees, and the employees appreciate that. One thing workers want to see is holding companies accountable. The government's enforcement arm, the National Labor Relations Board, remains chronically underfunded

even under Biden. That means fewer people to investigate companies like Starbucks and fewer people to help workers unionize. In McComb, that's important for workers like Mike Davison. He helped unionize his cannabis retails to or only the second in the state of Michigan. The n l RB was instrumental for them. Staff answered questions, hosted the vote, and are now looking into a complaint filed by workers against the company at

another location for coercive statements. Overall, though, Davison wants to see the president focus more on workers and do it sooner rather than later. And honestly, I'm not gonna wait for somebody in a big white house to help me. I'm going to do it right now. I would love a pro union candidate. I love there beat a lot more focus politically on workers, the working class, the people who show up to their job do work, as opposed to, you know, benefiting the employer class that hires people and

makes money from them. There's enough people looking out for them. They have their steak, they have their money, they have their security. I need someone looking out for me. M many listeners to this podcast will already know the economic historian and commentator Bradford DeLong, professor of economics at the University of California in Berkeley, an author of the long running popular Grasping Reality blog, which I see is now

a sub Stack newsletter. So I'm delighted to be able to talk to him about his new book, Slouching Towards Utopia. Brad thanks so much for coming on Stephanomics. Um, it's my great pleasure to be here. Although in this metaverse age here is something that's brought with complications slouching towards utopia. Is it's a history of the twentieth century that I would say speaks very directly to today's generation of politicians

and economists. Not is because you've actually lengthened the century to include most of them, because your twentieth century extends from eighteen seventy to I mean, there's a lot to talk about in your book, but I guess we should start by asking you to explain briefly why you think

that period marks a discreete period of economic history. Because before eighteen seventy, our global rate of technological progress was less than a quarter of what it has been eighteen seventy, which meant that before eighteen seventy, there was zero chance that humanity would ever be able to bake a sufficiently large economic pie so that everyone could even possibly have enough.

You know, Thus, governance before eighteen seventy is how does an elite manage to run a force and fraud com game on the rest of humanity so they at least can have enough. But after eighteen seventy we have the possibility of having a truly human world, of baking a

sufficiently large economic pie. And then all we have after that are the minor problems of figuring out how to slice the pie, how to equitably distribute things, and then how to taste the pot, you know, how to use our immense wealth and technological powers to enable us all to live lives wisely. And well, you make the claim that eighteen seventy is the hinge of global economic history, and that's obviously on the basis of what you just said.

But why um, Because that's when the last three institutions needed to support economic growth that more than two percent per year, economic growth that doubles humanities technical competence every generation. Economic growth that makes us potentially twice as rich as our parents were, and does that over and over and

over again. That's when the last three things fall into place. Um. And so the doubling time of humanities technological progress is no longer measured in millennia or unreds of years, or even in the two hundred years it would have taken to double humanities technological competence during the Industrial Revolution, But it happens every single generation, and then it happens again at again, And you say yourself that if you're focused on different aspects of history, you've probably come up with

different dates. And we know that sort of famously, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsborn focused on geopolitics, and then that led him to shorten his twentieth century when he wrote about it from nineteen fourteen to nine. Now, as we as we've gathered, your focus is on the economic and technological upheavals in this century, and you have got some great facts to drive that home, basically that there has been as much or more technological advanced since eighteen seventy

as in all the years before that. But one one point that comes through again and again I found reading the book is that our politics are political institutions have not been good at keeping up with that degree of economic upheaval in some way. How could they whatever institutions for society we had a generation to go, Even if they worked then, they won't fit the economy now. And whatever we managed to cobble together now, it won't fit

the economy in a generation. And so it's frantic attempts to cobble together on the fly, a society that sort of works and kind of holds together. You know, that's I think the big story of political economy since eighteen seventy. There's a sort of dialectic running through your book. But between the two contrasting theories of actually two central European thinkers, the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayak and the less well known but I agree with you, I think underrated Hungarian

philosopher Carl Polani. So so tell us about that. Why do those two thinkers help us understand that dynamic you

just talked about. Friedrich van Hyaku was an absolute genius, was the first person to see that if you properly set up the market so you align prices with social values, then the market is uniquely great as a crowd sourcing mechanism for mobilizing human injuruity, you know, instead of having a few people at the top issuing orders, or a bureaucracy following standard procedures um, in which case the only brain power that's really applied in a bureaucracy is that

of those who set up the system. With a market, you are crowdsourcing everyone's human brain and asking everyone what can you think of to do to help the situation along, And thus you pushed out the power to act to the periphery of the society where the information is, you know, because I'm god knows what the people at the center um actually believe what is actually going on out there

in the real world. And you also solve the problem of having the people who are actually doing the work doing what they're supposed to, because if things are properly aligned, then they make a great deal of money and have social power as a result, if they in fact do the things that advanced social values in general. UM. So Friedrich von Hayek was great. He saw this. He also very strongly believed to the day he died, that that's all the market can do, right. It can't do anything

like social justice um. And if we ask it to do social justice, we destroy its ability um to do the market to do to create the wealth the market can um and put us all on the road to servedom. So have Freedrich von Hayek, who basically says, the market can be great, and we have to worship it. You know, the market giveth, the market taketh away. Blessed be the name of the market. Um, that's all we can do.

We've got to accept that's the best we can do. Um. But Carl Polani said, wait a minute, that doesn't work. You have a market society, and that dissolves every single form of social power other than wealth. That means that there are no rights that are respected except for property rights, and the only property rights that are worth anything are those that may help you make things for which the rich have a serious jones, you know, and people who simply will not stand for that. You're going to get

a very powerful reaction. It may be smart, it may be stupid, it may be genocidal, it may be benevolent, but that an attempt to impose the Van Hyaki in market view of the world will blow up and explode. And indeed, a huge amount of the politics m of the world since eighteteen seventy has been various people for whom the market is good saying we should definitely expand its role, and all kinds of counter reactions of one

sort or another. And it's a frame in which you can make a good deal of sense of a huge amount of stuff that's been going on since eighteen seventy. I noticed the review in the economist of your book was titled titled money Can't Buy You Love? I mean, is that basically the conclusion of the long century? We look at all that technological change, and then we look at the state of our politics, the state of our contentment around the world, this lack of correlation between the

level of income and happiness. Do you think that? Is that that the economist has grasped the fundamental point of your book? I do, I do, I do. The thing that astonishes me is I suppose how narrow and uneven our progress is that we've managed to boost human life expectancy from twenty five years to seventy years or so, and by and large spread that throughout the entire globe um.

But then we also, although we have a huge world, the world with twelve thousand dollars per years, so as average income per capita um, it's extraordinarily unequally distributed around the world. Our ability to produce, even though it's mighty,

the distribution is absolutely stunning the awful. Though we've solved the problem of public health to a great degree, we've solved the problem of producing enough, we definitely have not solved the problem of slicing of equitably distributing it either around the world or within this country, since I can go outside the door of my extremely nice house here in Berkeley, California, and all I have to do is

walk a mile to find someone living in a box. Right. Um. And then of course the problem of actually utilizing it, of taking wealth and using it to create a good life for yourself, rather than a life in which um, for some reason, of what you thought would make you happy does not UM, and in which you're the technological powers, the ability to manipulate nature and command the attention and assistance of others that you have is just more rope

with which you can hang yourself in some particularly, And it's that extraordinary disjunction. Um, when people back in the past thought the big problem was the one of production, and once you would solve that, everything would be fine. You know that strikes me as most interesting and most

terrible about the long twentieth century. I should say to anyone listening, I mean, there's what you've just said, But also from reading the book, I mean, you absolutely succeed in having very interesting nuggets as well as a driving narrative on pretty much every page. But that the one

example that you mentioned Herbert Hoover. I had no idea that he had this whole other history um in China taking over various my im crucial bits of the mining industry in in in China before and where he'd come from. What was he son of a blacksmith or the blacksmith and l and Iowa. Yes, as one of my ex roommates said, come for the ad for the high foluting abstract political economy theory, stay for the Herbert Hoover gossip.

If technology is to some extent driving the upheaval and the or the challenges to the political system, there's also a human nature piece that you identify. And what I thought was a pretty crucial observation towards the end of the book which were used, which is really comes down to the fear of Moocha's being a sort of driving

source of instability. And you say humans, at least we humans see society as a network of reciprocal gift exchange relationships, and as a general principle, we agree that all of us do much better if we do things for one another, rather than requiring that individuals do everything for themselves. We don't always want to be the receiver we don't always want to be the giver, and we tend to disapprove whenever we see a situation where we think someone is

following a strategy of always being a receiver. And I guess the summary of that is fear of mooching. So that did that was very resonant to me. I mean, that did seem to me a fundamental issue which has perhaps been exacerbated by technological change. Yes, and I am, in fact I think they stall this from the wonderful Paul cy Bright, who has an excellent book called In the Company of Strangers, you know, which makes this point

among others. But there is an extremely strong sense that, at least those of us whose cultures bring the Indo European part of the tree, that the idea of a guest and a host and reciprocal obligations between them is

very very very strong, um. And that means that, you know, um, that we are very strongly committed to not just think that people deserve things, that we deserve things based on how we have we have acted and how we are, you know, but that other people deserve things based on how they have acted, you know, and how they are, and especially that other people do not should not have

more than they deserve. For example, they're surprising fuss in the past two weeks over what is a small um shift in America's resources that moves thirty five billion dollars a year from the federal government to people with student loan balances. We have Ted Cruz. They're saying that it's an absolute offense to give ten thousand dollars to you know,

a slacker barista who majored in lesbian dance therapy. You know, now, look, I mean Ted Cruz is does is in fact a second generation Cuban Canadian American immigrant who has kind of clawed himself up from a position of substantial social disadvantage to a position of wealth and eminence. Um and he maneuver, but he maneuvers in a world in which there are

also people like me. And my grandfather was at one time the richest man between Tampa and Orlando and hired the engineers who created and owned the patent for the technology for taking sulfur out of natural gas, so you can use natural gas without making your house smell like the pit of hell um And from him, I've gotten ten thousand dollars a year, not once, but it's correctively

every single year of my life. Um, And is Ted Cruz incredibly angry with me because by now I have gotten sixty two times what the mythical slacker barista who edred and lesbian dance therapy at Sarah Lawrence. God, you know, no,

he isn't mad at all. It's interesting because one of the what I was one of the things I was going to say was that possibly the other bit of human nature that you're battling with often when you have the kind of mindset that you have when you look at the world today and the desire for greater, more equal, equal distribution of income and power, is you're almost always

also battling with people's desire to help their kids. And that is a basic human desire that it gets in the way of otherwise quite obviously sensible taxes on capital and wealth and indeed on the heritance that you just talked about. Even when it's attacks on wealth that is affecting a very small percentage, the fear that it will interfere with people's efforts to improve the lives of their kids and give them an upper hand is a pretty

potent political force. Yeah, I don't know. I mean I I have had a debate with my friend Glenn Huggard you over this at the Baker Center in Texas a while ago, you know, And I was pointing out to him that on talking for I was strongly advocating a return of the inheritance tax um, and I used Glenn is an example, saying that the oss is a longtime consultant, and as dean of Columbia's Business School, he's rather rich, and yet his parents have lots of other educational um

and kind of educational and cultural advantages, and he has raised his children very well for success in this world, and so why should they also get, you know, the privilege of a substantial inheritance from Glenn when there are people for whom, you know, single mothers, for whom an extra forty dollars so they can take their kids out

to McDonald's one extra time would be worthwhile. And Glenn's reactions ruck me as very interesting, and it was you know, yes, that the cultural capital that you contribute to your children by how you raised them is overwhelmingly by far the most important part of what you do. Um. So then financial inheritances are kind of a second or third order thing, and we shouldn't worry about them and shouldn't text them. But then if they're not important, then it doesn't matter

so much to text them. And you know, I'm glad it's not dumb, but still you can see, UM, you can see his mind trying to cling to not reaching the conclusion that he ought to be in favor of inheritance tances because if he were in favor of them, he would in some way failing to failing his duty to his kids. UM. And yeah, you know we are we are network, a network species UM, structured in guest

host gift exchange relationships. And we are a emily species, you know, structured across time and who is related to who? You know? So much so that we find it very hard to assemble a large scale political organization without turning it into some kind of fictitious kinship, you know organization. UM. That gives us hope, right because right now our economy is so complex and so complicated that we really are engaged in a gift exchange relationship UM with the people

ten thousand miles away. Right there is someone whose house is underwater in Pakistan right now, who probably did something we have wove the wool that could have been in the carpet that my feet are now resting up, you know. And we also are extremely closely related. Right I'm told there's more genetic diversity in a single baboon troop than in the entire human race as of now. So we ought to be able to turn these things towards your

mutual benefit and social solidarity. Um, yet we have a hard time doing so, and it seems that we've if we need some kind of mutual respect to carve out a different direction, we're we're quite far away from that.

If if more, if we increasingly feel we're surrounded by mucha's yes, yes, yes, or we're we're fear, we fear that we are so briefly point to us some sort of straws in the wind or chinks of light where people have actually are recognizing that where you think there's signs of of of hope, that we could be moving in a better direction in some parts of the world, some or some battle. The incredible, um incredible technological competence

of humanity today absolutely astonishes me. And the extraordinarily fall in the price of renewable energy, you know, that has happened in the past fifteen years gives me enormous hope. You know that it is twenty nine years ago. You know, I was tramping through the halls of the Capitol Building, UM, trying to help carrying spears for Larry Summers and others as they tried to lobby and hold the Democratic Coalition together for the Clinton Reconciliation Bill, including the BTU tax.

But we got within one vote of getting the BTU tax in. And back then we strongly believed, I strongly believed that you needed not just a characteristic in order to deal with global warming. You know that it was going to be nasty and expensive to shift the economy away to a less energy intensive configuration, simply because all the stored sunlight in coal and oil is such a great way of accessing solar power, albeit the solar power of the sun from half a billion years ago, UM,

And that there really was going to be no substitute. Well, lo and behold, now there is. And now we don't need the stick. All we need is the carrot. All we need is a little bit of subsidies to make investments that make sense on their own, and we can move extremely rapidly to keep ourselves from cooking the planet much more. You know that gives enormous hope. Another good straw on the wind from the Steve Jobs archive. Um, you know a email Steve Job sent to himself in

two thousand and ten. Um, that begins, I grow little of the food I eat of the little I do grow. I do not breed or perfect the seeds. I do not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language I did not invent or refined. I did not discover the mathematics I use. I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or they just

like um. And you know, here is Steve, who, in the libertarian iconography is one of the great heroes, you know, one of the job creators, one of the John Galts, who, by his sheer brain and force of personality, you know, accomplished huge amounts of stuff. Um, you know, one of the bosses who deserves to have as much as possible. You know. And he did not view it this way.

He recognized that he was just you know that he was indeed standing on the shoulders of giants, as Sir Isaac who put it and without the giants on whose shoulders he was standing on, he was unable to do pretty much, and he would have not have been able

to do anything. And the fact that we have that consciousness, that we have that powers that can we can bring out the sides of our fear and of what otherwise comes out as fear and suspicion of others getting above themselves is I does I think provide great cause for hope. Brad DeLong, thanks very much. That's it for Stephonomics next week, more on the US and maybe Brazil too, who knows. But check out the Bloomberg News website for a lot more economic news and views on the global economy, and

follow at economics on Twitter. This episode was produced by Summer Sadi Yang Yang and Magnus Henrickson. Special thanks to Bradford DeLong, Cata Dmitrieva, and Molly Smith. Mike Sasso is the executive producer of Stephanomics