Good evening and welcome to Hudson Institute policy center. Im john walters, the chief operating officer and i like to welcome our audience here out of pennsylvania avenue headquarters and our cspan audience to our first ever podcast keeping, that is both live and marks the Second Season premiere of podcast of the Second Season of the realignment hosted by hudson media fellow marshall kosloff. We are proud of the realignment here at hudson. Podcast launched last year and i recommend aspersion for those of you who have been following it that you take a look at the episodes from last year, particularly the conversation with secretary of state mike pompeo, josh hawley, micah gallagher, Michael Doran and others. Its an Excellent Program partly because of the two people who put it together and their ability to bring up topics and to move the argument along. We couldnt be prouder of the work they have done and i want to thank them for that and we are happy to launch this Years Program with michael lind who is as many of you know prolific writer, more than a dozen books and cofounder of the new America Foundation with hutchens of distinguished fellow and strategy statesmanship, Walter Russell mead. Michael is a professor at lyndon b. Johnson school of Public Affairs at the university of texas, and important for two nights conversation he is the author of the new class war. The book which you can purchase, which is published today so we are here at the launch. Congratulations on the new book. There is a direct line between the new class war and the work that mike has been a been pursuing since the 90s, maybe best exemplified by his book the next american revolution, the new nationalism and the fourth american revolution. Sorry, the next american nation and new nationalism and the fourth american revolution. Whether you agree with this interpretation of western politics since world war ii is work demonstrates serious effort and solutions to the seemingly never ending cycle of clashes and shifting coalitions which is exactly what our realignment podcast seeks to explore. Also joining us is j. D. Vance who fittingly was the realignment premier guest. J. D. Of course is the author of bestselling and highly influential book hillbilly elegy, a powerful account of family, community and america. He recently cofounded narnia capital, a Venture Capital firm investing in people and technologies working to solve significant challenges. Is also a visiting fellow at aei. I have not, ive only started it, i said to michael, his book. I of course read j. D. s book which if you havent you should. Its an important discussion of a part of america that maybe some like Charles Murray which is outside the bubble of the elite chattering classes. At the beginning of michaels book he says demagogic populism is a symptom, technocratic neoliberalism is the disease. Democratic pluralism is the cure. Im not sure if that is a throwdown for this evening with a roomful of people in washington, d. C. , but we are pleased to start from that discussion and take on the issue with his help. We will take questions later in the program and you can email those two events hudson. Org and will get them to marshall to use as a get to that part of the program so please send them along. Everybody in your eye knows technically sophisticated so this will not be a problem. Without any further ado let me, please join me in welcoming michael land and j. D. Vance. [applause] one quick note. Michael would be available after the talk to sign books, so if you found this great, take a second to speak to reiterate the cavity questions, events hudson. Org. Sure you get sick of hearing a stock so i will speak for you. With that, marshall, why did you start us off. The book is called the new class war. First question, lets define terms. What is a class war . I class war is conflict among quasihereditary classes where your parentage is a a social wh a particular structure of occupations. We think we did end up meritocratic system but if you look at what it argued is the fundamental cleavage in modern transatlantic societies, which is educational, its not a matter of mere aftertax income, you are much more likely to get a diploma if one or both of the parents have diplomas which were kind of the new degrees of nobility than it in both of yor parents did not. I argue in europe as well as the United States, i think both sides of the atlantic are similar enough now to make robust generalizations. That wouldnt have been the case 40, 50 years ago but as europe has become more multiethnic, as a United States has become more secular i think theres some convergence, and what you see is arguably is widening divide, socially and politically, between the College Educated and more or less twothirds majority which does not have even a bachelors degree. Do you agree with that take . To interpret what youre saying it seems youre suggesting unlike the previous, class status has been noted by Education Matters more than income in terms of explaining like the way our society works. Yes and no. The average american was a bachelors degree has an income of about 60,000 a year. The average High School Graduate with the Higher Education is about 37,000. There is a correlation, but unlike in the past where class status was based on ownership of property, whether you were a feudal landlord and owned land or you were an ebenezer scrooge Small Business owner and you are the Owner Operator of the business, the elites in the western world today largely, their wealth and the power and their status tends to come from the position in a large bureaucratic organization. It can be a corporation, a law firm, a nonprofit. It can be the military. And access to those lucrative influential positions is largely determined by education. What you think . One of the, retorts is its not, why is it education is a great keynote of class . Michael and i were speaking talking about a plumber. A plumber could make 100,000 and get rich. Based on your own experience how do you see that cleavage in American Society . I largely agree with mike, first off let me thank you both for doing this. Next time have you on the podcast please tell me which color the couch is. [laughing] i think whats true about mikes account, i dont know i when oedipus and agree, 35 agree. What seems to be mostly true about that account is it you go to a suburb in cincinnati, ohio, and you go to a Plumbing Firm and to go to the guy who owned the firm and you go to the people who work there, then you go to the clinical staff, there is something much more similar about that group of people about their spouses, their children then there is between the city owner of the Plumbing Supply firm and a person whose majority or large shareholder at google, for example. I do think theres something about the way which Educational Status both confers but also reinforces class status the truly important in our society. Of course most people do not come across madrid people cannot earn their living off capital appreciation. There is this weird way in which what mike calls professional managerial class is sort of internally coherent even though it might not have the sort of person at the 91st the 91st pee of income scale, not the same income of the person of the 99. 9 percentile. Defined them as a class. There are different definitions, the left has the pnc, professional managerial class which refers in my mind to simply a small subsection of the managerial elite in these tend to be people in professions where you set your own hours, lawyers, doctors more in the past, podcast hosts. If you can work from home. The progressive theory is there are three classes, the working class, the professional managerial class, podcast is and professors and then capitalists and i reject this. I follow james burnham, early conservative of the 1940s who wrote the managerial revolution. He argued the independent Owner Operator who was the capitalist but also ran his own business and been superseded already by the 1920s by corporate managers but also included in the managerial class government officials, career civil servants, academics, and in a passage few people note in the managerial revolution, the uniformed military which will become more important over time as one of the most organized, long before the deep state, which he was part of because he worked for the cia a lot. I had a broader definition than a lot of people do. If you contrast it, the working class is changing its nature, part of it through loss of manufacturing on outsourcing and productivity growth. Manufacturing has shut a lot of jobs according to bureau of labor statistics all the new jobs are created in three sectors, retail and healthcare. According to the Us Government of all the top ten jobs being created in numerical terms. And from the story we are told in aspen, and actually they dont. And and they lack Bargaining Power of the kind they possessed. And theres an educational system, and you can buy the idea of Certain Industries but a war suggests a group of people that is not only looking down upon the working class but actively trying to harm them to benefit themselves. The book is not a Conspiracy Theory. I dont think there is a secret office in washington or new york or san francisco, the committee of the ruling class gets together. When power is unevenly distributed among social groups and individuals pursue their own interests, the result, there is no coordination is going to feel as though the class is doing it when it is just the result of a loss of individual actions. If you look at Public Policy from the 1990s to the present globalization, one of the things that amazes me as a student of politics all my life is the unwillingness of people to acknowledge there are trade offs with trade, immigration and investment, different groups in society, some benefit, some lose. A constant den of propaganda, free trade benefits everybody, largescale, low skill benefits for everybody. This is totally unrealistic, there are winners and losers. That is part of the war. The policy that benefits the winners is the one, the only one that is defended in public, it is taboo to discuss the views of the losers that is the kind of war. What if the institutions they depended on in the recent past, make sure it has equal Bargaining Power. Classic story, labor union, privatesector labor union participation in the late 50s, it decimated merrily globalization or right to work story. It is primarily globalization. The church, classic institution that cement workingclass social fabric and ensures workingclass participants have participation in the direction of the culture and direction of policies that influence that culture. It is family. The place workingclass children grow up, and and it dropped substantially. And all these institutions were necessary, is a meaningful stake in the society they live in. They are common it is into that. It is clear who is losing. I agree with all of this. Critics of your book have come out, you are apologizing and conflating economic anxiety, the rightwing talking point or racial resentment. You counter that in a piece in the wall street journal citing an mit study. They are hit hard by chinese import competition, most likely to support donald trump and bernie sanders. If that were the case, somebody like bernie sanders, the effort to urge talking about the economic anxiety piece demonizing racism. This populist, the yellow vest revolt in france and so on. Is the spontaneous eruption of neonazi racism which was manipulated by vladimir putin, he triggered this wave of boys from brazil, white nationalists to overthrow you tell what i think of that. That is a partisan alibi for the loss of Hillary Clinton in germany. It is not a serious story. More serious, it is about the money. It is about rising inequality. They like to have a graph, the Great Depression it goes down from the 1920s and up again but if it is just about money they have after tax redistribution and keep workingclass people checks and they will be happy. That story i tell in the new class war saving democracy from the mangerial elite it is about power, power is independent of money. Power, the ability to influence your life, to influence your society, power exists outside the narrow governmental realm, libertarians get upset at this point. There is economic power in the marketplace. You dont have the quality of Bargaining Power between most employers and most employees. There is cultural power in the media. If you dont like the offer for your children that you find on tv or in the movies, you cant just found your own movie studio or found your own social media platform. That is power. Particularly for americans, the basis of the american creed, what they call republican liberty that you could not trust concentrated power of any kind. They didnt have media or political power. Defusing power and having checks and balances is good in and of itself and we lost this with this narrative of it is all about money and if we centralize power we give you a 500 tax credit or a 2,000 tax credit every year, you should be happy. I am not a fan of what i call the craft materialistic view of economic anxiety. It is more complicated and difficult than that. Not just having a good job or decent wage, and and and every single store downtown is closed up, and finding out one of your friends, kids friends died of an Opioid Epidemic it is not economic in a strict sense, and losing power, i make this point, it is important, you have to understand what the purposes, the trump voters were motivated by, if they are just racist, they are about the trump vote. It was decline of manufacturing jobs. It was heavily related and tied to the rise of depth of despair that when you see a rise in opioidrelated deaths in a Given Community you see a significant shift from raw meat to trump in 2016. If you are focused on the fact that all these people are racist and not concerned about the fact that a member of the elite that michael lind is so concerned about actually calls in Opioid Epidemic, flooded these communities with drugs, and if we are not talking about that, we are talking about trump voters racism and just participating in a class war that the elites have already been winning for the past few decades. How do we balance the race and culture issue. They point out a true fact which is the country is changing. The countrys white majority is shrinking in the places that are most experiencing that anxiety are being cross it by economic factors. How do we handle that . The one legitimate part of the critique is the idea, a big cultural shift going on. They were not doing a good job handling it. It has to be managed, i am married to firstgeneration immigrants, we didnt belong to the same national community. They are assimilating newcomers, want people from multiple generations to feel like newcomers. One of problem with the modern immigration policy in economic terms, an important piece of the story. Unless you think about intermarriage, unless you are trying to manage and control that in a way that is good for the overall population you can inflame these cultural, racial or ethnic tension, that is true across history and society. There is no good example of a society that has absorbed a very large number of outsiders quickly and easily. You can blame it on racism and it is a fact of life, if racism is what you call you have to manage it and tap it down. And suppress it in a certain way. If they are so uncomfortable talking about culture, we stop trying to manage it, stop trying to build a unified nation out of the multiracial democracy we have. I like the multiracial democracy but brings challenges, if you are not smart about this, you, a lot of social strife which is what we have seen in america, worse than europe. Western europe is worth example in the United States is. 100 years ago in 1920, there was a deep deep political and social divide between old stock angloamerican protestants and White Americans of recent immigrant dissent or not so recent in the case of irish americans and germans. It gummed up the redistricting because of the battle between rural whites and urban ethnics. You had prohibition, a war between the catholics and protestants, you have beginnings of multiculturalism, people saying why shouldnt european immigrants speak english. Flash forward to the 1970s was the european diaspora collapsed in most of the big cities, moving very quickly. By the 1970s the average White American was part of british and partly nonbritish descent. We hear this about the rising nonwhite majority, that is counting every descendent of someone whos not a nonhispanic white, will be nonwhite for the next 200 years no matter what their other ancestry is. Richard alba and professor stephen treyoh have looked at latino rates of assimilation and intermarriage. Latinos lose spanish as the primary language and marry outside the group at the same rate that irish americans and germanamericans and polish americans do a century ago. I would go further. The supposed racial polarization of politics is greatly exaggerated. If you look at every group except africanamericans, 90 of democrats and 10 republicans the other groups are less polarized including Asian Americans and hispanic americans, nonhispanic whites, very evenly divided, that was Hillary Clinton and donald trump. It is not polarized in that sense, latinos and state politics in my home state of texas, 40 went for governor abbott. 29 voted for donald trump. If your definition of polarization is anything that is not 5050 that is polarized but not enormously polarized. That is an important part of the story. One of the criticisms of populism, people who advocate for populism, you guys are shouting at the system and dont advocate for anything. You are actually somewhat sympathetic to that view. Tell us why you think it is populists themselves are not actually good at governance. Im a critic of populism. I argue we dont want to because in a doom order between exclusive insider politics of wellconnected establishments and the occasional outsider comes in and represents protests. That is a terrible situation to be in. It is the politics of the American South between reconstruction and the civil rights revolution. You heard of the southern demagogue. When you get a condition, when much of the population is disconnected from everything and excluded from politics, youre going to get demagogues to represent them. This is dangerous. The demagogues, if you look up the southern example, if you look at latin america. In the north you find socalled white ethnic politicians in the northeast. Mayor michael curley, have you heard of him . From boston. He represented the irish americans rebelling against the angloamerican mayflower protestant power structure. They almost always fail because stacked against the outsiders, they dont have money or power of the connections. They dont have people willing to work for them who are insiders and that his career suicide. It is through dubious combination of criminality and stalinism. You have this situation, my own native texas you have two populist governess, james and Miriam Ferguson and his wife succeeded each other in the 1920s known as pa and ma ferguson. They do good things for the farmers who are frozen out but they financed themselves by selling pardons to the parents of criminals in huntsville prison. He we long in louisiana couldnt get money for his populist urgency so he went into business with Frank Costello of the chicago mafia and brought in slot machines, and it is a populist governor. And every two weeks a portion of every state employees pay was deducted. It was a chest, a box. It is at best populism introduces themes and outsiders but you need some sort of reconstruction program. If somebody has a foot in both worlds how do you navigate the professionalism needed to enact populist reforms . Are they too at odds . Michaels prescription going to an ethical actual settlement . I do think on the one hand there are specific policy ideas out there. Something im a big fan of his views on how you might reinvigorate privatesector labor union in the 21st century with all pressure that exist economically and legally to make them less confrontational, more compromising, and legal and institutional benefits to survive in 21st century hyper globalized, it is out there. I agree with the critique, most of the details of a modern populist class compromise politics, and i really worry about the political economy piece of this, going to your question about navigating various worlds. Mike and i were talking about this earlier, if you were to collect the rightwing populist people who engage with an economics paper. 40 of them are on stage right now. Then you have another 60 . There is a matter in which the institution of this town in particular were not well suited to this particular moment. I worry about the fact that we dont have enough of these sort of think tank intellectuals. And theres a lot of institution building, and i also think to build things like this we have to sketch out a general way of thinking of how to settle these issues and hopefully build institutions from there but we are pretty early on that. The sum up idea is post world war ii you had economic power and cultural power and political power. On the economic side you check corporate power, on the cultural side, i learned this reading the book you had censorship organizations fact checked hollywood. Cultural stagnation came out. Movies being financed by chinese companies, and tom cruise is going to be antijapan. Another thing that was hard for me to reconcile is those local, corrupt political strongmen in the state legislatures who on one hand we see as corrupt, the primary system, they were much better capable of checking political power in washington. Why did that whole status quo fall apart . There were Different Reasons for different realms and the realm of censorship, let me preface this by saying the working class exercised its power by veto power. It did not have the resources or expertise to come up with its own plans to strike or the threat of a strike is a veto that forces management to reconsider. The catholic legion of decency got the hollywood producers to run hollywood scripts past them in advance. They didnt write movies themselves. The local political bosses could say no to a candidate. The local political bosses were important because this was someone you could go to see in your neighborhood. If you had a problem that connected you with the state party and the national party. Many were quite corrupt. A friend of mine went in the 1960s with Bobby Kennedy giving suitcases of Walking Around money to the bottom the bronx. The only thing worse than having local party powerbrokers is not having them. When they all vanish, the party becomes a label that billionaires like tom steyer and Michael Bloomberg and donald trump have, just before coming here a few days ago i went to the website of the Democratic Party out of curiosity. My grandmother who grew up in a farm in Central Texas and her africanamerican friends after the civil rights revolution, high school educated, part of the stratus county Democratic Party, part of the precinct machinery. I went to the Democratic Party, they had a donate button, try the national and state and county which tells you something. Tells you about the structure of politics. It is a spectator sport unless you are a donor, upholster or a candidate. To finish up, a new 21stcentury classical and look like . Politically, economically and culturally . What i like is there is no victory in these wars. There is no world where conservatives win everything at liberals when everything. What does the new settlement look like . To preface that, in the new class war saving democracy from the mangerial elite i argue you want another class peace treaty. Industrial capitalism is the greatest engine of Economic Development in history. You do not want the employer class to run amok, you dont want the workingclass to be so powerful it stifles growth. If we were in a different situation where the managerial class was too week and organize labor was too powerful i would have written a different book. We need to have the functional equivalent of some of these membership organizations. In the new class war saving democracy from the mangerial elite i call them toward, the local political entity of some kind, doesnt have to reasonably old political machine, the congregation which increasingly will be secular, not necessarily a religious creed as the us becomes more secular than western europe and i used the term the guild to encompass all kinds of alternative labor organizations, the kind jd was talking about. These things will not look like the unions and churches and political machines in 1950 but they serve the same purpose mainly in pooling the numbers of workingclass people. If youre workingclass you dont have access to Financial Resources to influence society, you dont have expertise to influence policy. All you have is your members. Unless those members were organized in some kind of disciplined institutional way you lack power. Before you launch into your settlement idea, what type of mental break does this require from the baked in ideology, and the working class. I think first of all, it requires us to think about it requires us to imagine a world, effective government better than no government. It requires the willingness to acknowledge Public Policy at Different Levels might be useful in solving these problems. I do think we have undergone this weird transformation in the last 30 years. I grew up in this world reading conservative publications, being influenced by them where we made some leap from the private sector is generally the right engine to do things to the Public Sector is always the wrong way to do things. That is a pretty terrible way to think about the world when you are engaged in politics and Public Policy, surrendering before you start the conversation. My answer, i dont know i have a very good answer. I would say it probably looks like what mike just said, you have reinvigorated community institutions, media institutions at the workingclass level, some participation, whether it is church or something local and communal, you have actual worker organizations that push for their interest and advocate for their membership but i do worry. When you think about, the book is excellent and i encourage everyone to buy it and read it and engage with it. I worry that we are incapable of actually solving a lot of problems mike writes about. If i put my pessimist hat on for a little while, not that we reach this juncture 5 or 10 years ago when we start to solve things, but we undergo a 10 to 15 to 20 year period of managed decline and then hopefully we are able to follow this thing. I think theres a way in which our politics is so fundamentally broken, the institutions are broken, dont even know what Congress Actually does. It seems sort of, it is all very late Roman Republic and that really worries me. I dont know what the answer is out of that conundrum but if there is an answer, we are willing to push for, then we should be paying attention to this guy. One optimistic note. We need those. That is bleak but there is a story in the economist and philosopher adam smith had a Young Research assistant reading the newspaper one day, the bridge elite had suffered to reverse in a battle with the french somewhere. He said britain is ruined and professor smith said young man, there is a great deal of ruin in a country. More to come. To q and a, i have some Great Questions here. One of the names we talk about is donald trump. It is interesting on this podcast, political realignment sparked by the president of the United States how often we dont end of talking about it. This is one of the central questions ive seen, is trump still at the forefront of the realignment . Or has he governed for the capri trump republican, prioritize tax cuts, call for immigration, high skilled workers is what they meant here. How do you think trump within the context of the new class war . From the beginning i thought trump had less to do with mussolini and hitler than Arnold Schwarzenegger and jess even tour a. Trump and venter a tried to take over the reform party and when you get these celebrity outsider president s they have two choices. One is if they run nominally as the leader of one of the two parties in the United States, they can either govern once they are elected as conventional republicans or democrats or they can triangulate between the two. From the very beginning, trump became a republican. He had not been a republican most of his life. Evidently he was a democrat or independent but that was the fundamental strategic decision he made with the tax cut, with a lot of other things, with one exception. The exception is foreignpolicy where the president has far more discretion in domestic policy. You are much more dependent in your own party in congress and there i think he has made a difference. His george w. Bush left the country with two ongoing wars in afghanistan and iraq. Obama was elected because he was going to end the wars so he added three more in syria, libya and yemen. To date, despite the iran thing, trump has not added seems to favor theatrical displays of force as an alternative to deeper engagement, postponing it. The other area he has shown his own predilections, by bringing in robert lighthizer, very accomplished ustr who is a democrat, not a republican until he switched in 201617 so i think trump, im just inferring this from his actions, im going to write a blank check to the republicans in congress on domestic policy but i will push my priorities in foreignpolicy and particularly trade. I think the first couple years of the administration illustrated the institutional weakness weve been talking about where the apparatus of domestic policy, this is not heritage 1981 it was ready for the reagan revolution, this is a group of people who were largely blindsided, i dont think you have seen a substantial realignment and how things have gone. The political piece continues. You see the shifts, republicans in the congressional districts, theres a weird way policy hasnt quite come up to the politics. One thing i would add as a specific iteration with trade and Bob Lighthizer is the china issue, trump deserves credit for shifting the national conversation. It is tough to overstate how different the elite consensus was in 2014 relative to today. The Democratic Front runner, china is a significant problem not just economically but in the International Security sense but the credit for changing that narrative goes largely to the 2016 election. That is right. Even on the democratic stage only one candidate said he would take away the china tariffs, they vote for the trade deal with nafta. If thats not a political realignment im not sure what is. This is an interesting one. What are the least economic we should one of the least economically disruptive could be implemented to restore a more even balance of power between capital and labor. Tight labor markets. Labor naturally wants to have a sellers market, a buyers market in labor and employers want a buyers market. That is the basic that is why from the 1820s until the 1990s the American Labor movement tended to be for more restrictive immigration policies, the employer wanted looser and more generous immigration policies as the former Country Club Republicans had become the new coastal democrats or their children and grandchildren have you have seen that shift, employer perspective, even if you dont do anything else, if you have tight labor markets it is not simply immigration, it is paid vacation, early retirement, anything that makes employers compete for workers, help her garbage Bargaining Power. I was going to give an answer. The working class is better, we need to restart productivity. It has stagnated past 20 or so years and that is primarily a lack of technological innovation. Some more spending on r d so we could get back like the 50s and 60s. Next question, is incorporating workingclass research and written. Is incorporating the working class majority to western democracy, not just a similar to that saving capitalism, if fdr carried out marginal justice to ensure the system remains viable and if we do redistribute power and money, just not make the current winners, losers and current losers winners and not correct anything. I disagree with that. I agree with the fdr parallel but it was churchill in the uk after 1945, the christian democrats in german, charles they gaulle in france, you have postwar settlements and having gone to war, they had a vision at least for a while of capital and labor in a common project of they were not battling to the death. They go back to that. After they preserve the privileges after making strategic concessions to the workingclass. Joseph kennedy, the financier father of john f. Kennedy and bobby and ted kennedy was asked why he supported Franklin Roosevelt and the new deal, i would give way half my fortune to keep the other half. What do you think . As you look at the postwar and posts depression policies, and when you look at societies the refuse to engage, where it went for those guys. With political instability, to reform the best you can as opposed to assuming one group will try it out. The current information ongoing, computers, automation, social media, cumulative impact of information revolution on class war and you describe it in losing power and influence. A big tech and the internet specifically. There is a radical difference in how media are used, studies showing people on twitter are overwhelmingly collegeeducated people. The workingclass gets more of its information from oldfashioned television and podcasts. This is more the first group from radio because they are in their cars, in their jobs. I wouldnt exaggerate the role of media that much, first with television and in the internet there is a tendency to think people are terribly malleable and can be mesmerized and hypnotized by the media. This is the basis of the russian Conspiracy Theory that russian means brainwashed African Americans into not voting for hillary and visit the group into voting for trump. Norman lears all in the family came out, it was supposed to promote liberal values but most people who watched it thought archie was the hero in the whole point of the show was to make fun of the College Educated meathead. People can filter the media. I am a little more conspiratorial and worried about the modern it. When i go to a restaurant with my family and i see half of the tables, all the kids are staring at their devices and parents are staring other devices, not speaking to each other, the modern it Business Model is largely built on what is called information arbitrage. Every second you spend staring at the device as opposed to reading a book or communicating with your family is a dollar of revenue they make and they are good at making devices that make you stare at those things as long as possible. I think there is something very disturbing about the way it captures our attention, the way it makes us less productive. I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs who are worried about the effect it has on productivity, people are working 8 or 9 hours, only actually working for or 5 hours because they are so absorbed in their devices. I worry about this and i think one way of taking power from the working middle class is to hypnotize them. I dont necessarily think that is what we are doing but it is probably true or than treating cell phones is comparable to tv or some other electronic innovation. The last question we have is about education. Education transcends shared interest in stokes class division. How do we define some Equitable Society which doesnt share the same level of education . What do you think . If education is useful to people, as i pointed out earlier, arguably americans are overeducated, studies show 10 or 15 of jobs done by people with be as dont require anything more than a High School Education and so if anything it is worse for society, a sense of disconnect between their degrees, they are perfectly respectable workingclass jobs but they feel they are degraded because these are not what they expected from the degree or it is not a status that was expected. There is a version of progressivism that says professionals make more money we wake everyone a professional and everyone will make more money. To do that, if you give everyone a ba, it becomes like a High School Diploma or a ged and you get a society of don quixote. He was an aristocrat who had no money. That you dont want that kind of society. I am pretty skeptical and relate Education System works especially well. There is a debate whether elite education is signaling or Human Capital development. If you want to test that theory on the people who are the most powerful advocates go to Yale Law School which has an average class size of 200. One course where i went to school, totally administered a, the students, the donors, the people who are alumni that we should triple or quadruple the average size of yales law school class. If it is such a great education we should be giving it to as many people as possible but that deflates the value. The exclusiveness of the degree. What we are doing with modern education is social signaling. If we dont get out of that trap and spend so much money on it we are screwed. On that note. Very optimistic evening, thank you all. [applause] michael. [inaudible conversations] you are watching a special edition of booktv airing now during the week while members of congress are working in the district because of the coronavirus pandemic. Tonight and after words, New York Times magazine contributor Peggy Orenstein examines sexual culture and male masculinity. Been joined booktv now and watch over the weekend on cspan2. [applause] thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for this booktalk. Brick brick by brick building hope and opportunity for women survivors everywhere. By karen sherman. What a powerful title