Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

because yes, our economy, like every economy, is a political economy, continually shaped both by the available technologies and by the changing political and cultural climate.

If and when “machines make human labor superfluous, we would have vast aggregate wealth,” the MIT economist David Autor has written, “but a serious challenge in determining who owns it and how to share it. Our chief economic problem will be one of distribution, not scarcity.”

The Taiwan-based company Foxconn is by far the largest manufacturer of consumer electronics on Earth—TVs, gaming consoles, iPhones, iPads, Kindles—in factories all over the developing world. And its chairman said at Davos in 2019 that Foxconn intended to replace 80 percent of its 1 million employees with robots during the 2020s.

Of his coinage useless class for the eventual majority of humankind, all those whom AI will make economically obsolete, Harari says he chose this very upsetting term…to highlight the fact that we are talking about useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system, not from a moral viewpoint….I’m aware that these kinds of forecasts have been around…from the beginning of the [first] industrial revolution and they never came true so far. It’s basically the boy who cried wolf. But in the original story of the boy who cried wolf, in the end, the wolf actually comes, and I think that is true this time.

Two basic goals will seem contradictory: we want everyone with talent or passion for their work to keep working, and all employees to be treated with fairness and respect now, but for the long term we need to start making self-respect and usefulness more independent of employment, to educate and enable and encourage Americans to be and feel engaged and useful and respected regardless of how they receive their fair share of the national wealth.

We have been expressly evolved…for the purpose of solving the economic problem. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose….Thus for the first time since his creation, man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, to live wisely and agreeably and well….[T]here is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person…to occupy himself.

The average Nordic person generates less economic output than the average American, 15 percent less in Denmark and Sweden—but they get more of the wealth they generate, on average. Moreover, Paul Krugman says analysis of those differences between our economy and theirs shows that “much of the gap represents a choice” and “in the case of Denmark, all of it.” That is, they work a little less on purpose.*5 Between laws requiring employers to give everyone five weeks for vacation and a year of paid leave to new parents, as well as the general cultural sanity concerning work, the average Nordic spends 20 percent less time on the job than the average American, giving them three to four hundred extra hours each year to do whatever they please. Since they don’t rack up college debt or pay onerous amounts for healthcare, they’re also able to put more away: the Danes save money at a rate more than three times that of Americans. They systematically chill and systematically share, embracing the inevitable new on the road to the future. Alas, we are not Denmark. Yet.

The axioms adopted around 1980—market value is the only value, keep democracy out of economics, government is useless or worse, nothing but thoughts and prayers for the victims—can and must be undone, the political economy renovated, new technologies properly embraced in order to start solving the economic problem for everybody.

China achieved its phenomenal growth by sticking with its undemocratic political system but swapping dysfunctional, decadent command-and-control economics for a state-guided market economy—“socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Here and now in America, we need to stick with (and seriously reform) our political system, but to swap our dysfunctional, decadent out-of-whack capitalism for a much more democratic and sustainable one—capitalism with American social democratic characteristics.

“Only a crisis—actual,” like in the 1930s, “or perceived,” like in the 1970s—“produces real change.” Note the tell: a perceived crisis will do. “When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around,” so you have “to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

Can enough Americans be persuaded that large changes, in some cases scary changes, are necessary to restore a fairer balance of political and economic power? Will they understand that some kind of organized labor renaissance is one of the essential changes? Can people be convinced to trust the government to do much of what needs doing? Will Democrats stop cowering? Are universal basic incomes nuts or inevitable?

However, that the government became overgrown and overweight is a myth, because it has simply grown along with the economy.

Our chronic, festering antigovernment feelings of the last four decades are like the unhappiness in a bad marriage—a marriage where divorce is impossible, yet one party to the marriage, in this case the Republicans, has become invested in keeping it unhappy. Fixing America requires reminding Americans how much they depend on government already and convincing them to give it a chance to return to its glory days, to prove it’s the only possible provider of solutions to some problems, especially the messed-up political economy and climate. Ask what you can do for your country, John Kennedy famously said at his inauguration, and these days the first thing to do for your country is ask and know and tell other people what your country can do for you and does already.

Most people don’t realize, for instance, that for more than a half-century, the U.S. government and its funding have been the indispensable investor in new U.S. technology, essential to the development of everything from solar-energy technologies to Tesla, and from computer touch screens to most of the most innovative pharmaceuticals. Instead, as the economist and innovation specialist Mariana Mazzucato explains, “the dominant view, which originated in the backlash against government in the 1980s, fundamentally affects how our government sees itself: hesitant, cautious, careful not to overstep in case it should be accused of crowding out innovation, or accused of favoritism, ‘picking winners.’ ” Moreover, the government-funded private winners get almost all the public credit and the profits, while the government takes financial losses and gets the political blame for the inevitable losers—in other words, Mazzucato writes, “risks in the innovation economy are socialized, while the rewards are privatized.”

“America today is not a center-right country,” the Princeton sociologist Paul Starr wrote in 2018, but rather “a country with a center-right economic elite” that has dominated both political parties for a long time, “and a polarized electorate torn between parties on the far right and center left.”

On that basic question of how much economic inequality Americans consider fair, people really are further to the left than either conventional wisdom or they themselves realize. In fact, most of them are socialists, by the standard Republican reckoning. One of the many ways we know this is an ingenious and elaborate survey of a randomized sample of 5,522 Americans conducted by the Duke psychology professor Dan Ariely and the Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton—in 2005, before economic inequality became a prime national issue. For starters, they found that Americans were unaware of the extent of U.S. inequality. They asked the respondents, how much of our wealth is owned by the richest fifth? The average estimate was 59 percent; the correct answer then was 84 percent. (In a survey around the same time conducted by the University of Connecticut, the respondents’ median estimate of the income of a “CEO of a large national corporation” was $500,000, when in fact it was about $12 million.) Ariely and Norton then asked each member of their sample to create their own ideal distribution for the United States, to decide how much of the total wealth each fifth of the citizenry ought to own. On average, people gave a larger share to those in the bottom half and a smaller share to the top fifth than either actually has, and Republicans were nearly as egalitarian as Democrats. Then everybody was shown pie charts of the distributions of money in two hypothetical countries—w...

And three different polls in 2019, by The New York Times and Politico, asked people what they thought of proposals to impose a wealth tax on the extremely rich—a tax of 2 percent a year on all wealth between $50 million and $1 billion, 3 percent a year on everything over $1 billion. All three polls found that nearly two-thirds of Americans are in favor of such wealth taxes—including large majorities of Republicans.

If more Americans were to learn of the large body of research showing that higher inequality in rich countries isn’t just unfair but actually slows down economic growth—by a fifth since the 1980s, according to a 2014 study by the OECD—the remarkably strong support for Robin Hoodism might get even stronger.

You don’t need a theory of the perfect shoe to feel where your shoe pinches, and you don’t need a theory of perfect justice to grasp the injustice of the boot on your neck. We can make real headway toward a better society by spotting and rectifying the most obvious and egregious injustices. We don’t need to know what awaits on the mountain’s summit as long as we can tell the difference between “down” and “up.”

Permit me to repeat: forty years ago in a Wall Street Journal column, the pioneering modern right-wing intellectual announced a main part of that cynical plan, presenting it as a defining fuck-you-chumps feature of the conservatives’ new approach: if tax cuts for the rich and big business “leave us with a fiscal problem,” Irving Kristol wrote, again with a smile, mammoth government debt is fine, because from now on “the neoconservative” would force “his opponents to tidy up afterwards.”

conservative the way conservatives used to be. As college-educated professionals became a more and more important Democratic constituency, the general reluctance on the left to try anything too crazy also grew. In the 1970s and ’80s that was understandable, but the left learned the lesson too well, and by the ’90s it became a very bad habit, especially unattractive as a default posture among the liberal well-to-do—restraint helping out the less-lucky majority but reckless on big business and the rich getting their way.

Watch: if Democrats get more power in Washington anytime soon, there will be a new Republican outbreak of mock fiscal panic and insistence on restraint—hysterical in both senses, overwrought as well as darkly funny. It’s past time to resist that trap, to dial back the excessive liberal aversion to risk, where habitual fear of political counterreaction to transformative new policies and programs prevents them from even having a chance at getting popular and enacted. Knee-jerk centrism, splitting the difference from the get-go between themselves and the official right, with the goal of upsetting nobody very much, has been a terrible Democratic reflex on economics.

old-fashioned default bipartisanship is impossible when one of the two parties is cuckoo or operating in bad faith or both.

Running a society well and fairly requires optimizing more than maximizing, going for the greatest happiness of the greatest number and the smallest possible number being screwed. Single-minded maximization of any one thing turns into crazed binary thinking—maximum profits are everything, regulations are all bad or all good (as it also tends to do for individuals: never apologize, constantly apologize, practice celibacy, practice promiscuity, eat as much as possible, starve yourself, and so on). Before the 1970s and ’80s, back when corporate CEOs were still supposed to worry about their employees and communities and the public good as well as the price of their stock, that was optimization.

The new Washington think tank that I mentioned a few pages ago is the Niskanen Center, and the thinkers there would remodel our economy along the lines of the Nordic social democracies. So…socialist? Not exactly—it was created by apostate defectors from Charles Koch’s libertarian Cato Institute. “Markets are not just the natural and spontaneous consequence of government inaction,” its 2018 manifesto explained. Remember: the economic right’s great confidence trick in the 1980s was to redesign and reengineer the economy to privilege the rich and business—and then to insist that a market economy is like a precious unchangeable piece of nature, neither designed nor engineered.

Shortly after Tussing became an Alaskan, North America’s largest deposit of oil was discovered on the North Slope, and oil companies paid the state of Alaska the equivalent of $6.5 billion up front to start drilling, with royalties to follow. The good-looking young Alaska professor, when asked by a reporter how the oil money should be used, said, “The only way to guarantee that the money does any good to most of us is to hand it out to the people.” The new Republican governor agreed, and after personally getting Milton Friedman’s okay, he made it his main political project to amend the state constitution to put a quarter of the state’s oil revenues into a dedicated fund, the Alaska Permanent Fund, then send a dividend check every year to every resident of Alaska, including children. Free money for everyone, no strings attached! Just as the new plan was being finalized, the governor visited China and met with Premier Zhou Enlai, who was just beginning the struggle to move his country’s economic system away from dead-end Communism. “You Alaskans,” Zhou told him, “are more socialistic than we are!” The annual Alaska dividend varies each year, depending on how the fund’s $66 billion worth of investments perform—it was $1,600 per person in 2019 and 2018, or $6,400 each year for a family of four, but it has occasionally reached the equivalent of nearly $3,000 per person and rarely dipped below $1,000. In 2007 another Republican governor got the legislature to pass an even higher...

It has worked out fine for Alaskans. According to the academic research, their modest universal no-strings cash entitlement hasn’t made them work less, although it has made more people who hadn’t worked take part-time jobs, especially women, apparently because the dividend helps them afford childcare. It also seems to make for better nutrition, with fewer underweight newborns and fewer obese toddlers, especially among the poor, and it has lifted a third of Alaska’s officially poor rural Native citizens above the poverty line. The effect on overall inequality is unclear, but in the early 1980s Alaska had the highest income inequality of any state in America, and now it has about the lowest.

Stuart Stevens, a strategist for four of the five previous GOP presidential nominees but now a fierce apostate, wrote that “those of us in the Republican Party built this moment,” because “the failures of the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis can be traced directly to some of the toxic fantasies now dear to the Republican Party….Government is bad. Establishment experts are overrated or just plain wrong. Science is suspect.” He could have also listed Believe in our perfect mythical yesteryear, All hail big business, Short-term profits are everything, Inequality’s not so bad, Universal healthcare is tyranny, Liberty equals selfishness, Co-opt liberals, and Entitled to our own facts as operating principles of the Republican Party and the right.

Entitled to our own facts. That systematic spread of coronavirus misinformation by Trump and the right through the first pandemic winter couldn’t have happened without the creation in the late 1980s (Rush Limbaugh) and ’90s (Fox News) of big-time right-wing mass media. Their continuous erasure of distinctions between fact and opinion has always served the propaganda purposes of the political party most devoted to serving the interests of big business and investors, and during the COVID-19 crises—Reopen now—they attempted to serve those interests directly.

As the number of newly unemployed Americans reached 10 million on its way toward 30 million, a group of prominent Republican senators threatened to keep the first big economic recovery bill from passing quickly because making those millions of citizens financially whole for a few months might give the lazy “doctors [and] nurses” among them a “strong incentive…to [try to] be laid off instead of going to work.”

“I call these people warriors, and I’m actually calling now…the nation, warriors. You have to be warriors,” by which he meant, of course, be willing to be killed by COVID-19, fallen soldiers for American capitalism.

Radical reforms—reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades—will need to be put on the table….Redistribution will again be on the agenda….Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.

“Our business is not to lay aside the dream,” Lippmann explained, “but to make it plausible. Drag dreams out into the light of day, show their sources, compare them with fact, transform them to possibilities…a dream…with a sense of the possible.”

His wife, Rachel Whetstone, is another perfect minor character: the upper-class