Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words Nicholas Kristof And Sher

CSPAN2 After Words Nicholas Kristof And Sheryl WuDunn Tightrope July 13, 2024

Small rural town in oregon and i just ponder how in your professional career, youre traveling the world and living in a different environment completely but you have reported on World Affairs from all kinds of different reactions and some of the worst tragedies in the planet but you chose to focus on a small town in oregon, why . We were running around and covering mandatory crises and we would go back to my beloved hometown where my mom is still on the family farm and we saw humanitarian crisis unfolding there. A quarter of the kids who were on my old Number Six School bus were on drugs and alcohol and suicide and carol and i tried to process that in the kids who got on the bus right after me where the kids and their sisters and smart talented kids, farland died of drug and alcohol abuse, zealand died in a house fire when he was drunk and farland blew himself up cooking meth and regina died from hepatitis from drug use. For a while we wondered is this something about yamhill, we realized this is a National Problem that we have deaths of despair, the Life Expectancy is falling for three years in a row in america and union hill in my old bus to which to see the pain across america. Use all this through the lens of returning home and i think it almost could have been entitled School Bus Number six, so many stories are drawn from the friends that you had growing up there and expanding from there. And surely you grow up in an hunt, upper west side, thats a whole different world and i am early in your relationship, you got to see yamhill insult unfolding, how did the lens for which you saw differ from what nick was saying. I dont think you can get further from yamhill in manhattan, a up on the upper west side, it was smack in the middle of the urban world so when i first approached yamhill i was like what are these people like i was basically like we think of whats going on right now as a tale of two americas, on the top deck of a vote there is a party in the bottom deck is where the hole in the hole is happening in all these people are struggling to try to figure out what to do and how to stay afloat. So i think manhattan in many ways, the people of manhattan, many of them are in the party and they just dont know what is going on in the lower deck so for me it took a while, when they started learning in meeting these people and learning about the background and talking to them i realized they are very complicated human beings and the stories that we learned about their household and their background and the journeys that they took were so alarming and so heartbreaking that we could not help until the rest of the world. So used an analogy of the ship in the upper deck in the lower deck and whats going down below, your book uses another analogy in the title type wrote in some of my speeches and in congress they talk about a wide solid path for families to thrive in here its not just a narrow path but a tightrope. What are you conveying by that. Absolutely, the whole point, for those of us who are in the uppermiddleclass and above who are very well educated and at least graduated from high school and college, we have a pack, fairly wide path ahead of us, if we fall we can pick ourselves up. But many of these people, especially people in the m hill and the towns around america, people are walking on a tightrope in one miss and they fall, there is no safety net. The falling into a childs him that you describe in this book as involving drugs, alcohol, Domestic Violence, suicide, its a pretty oblique picture and theres a dynamic that you wrestle with and is his personal responsibility and do they need to walk the tightrope better or is it their fault they got into a tightrope instead of a nice path. Personal responsibility versus collective responsibility. What have you concluded. Personal responsibility is absolutely real, i think we can make the case that progressives like myself dont fully appreciate the personal responsibility israel, one has to give agency to people. But i think over the last 50 years, we have vastly overdone it and it would be obsessed with the personal responsibility narrative, blaming the people who fall off the tightrope for the catastrophes that follow. At this point you can predict this inaccuracy, the outcomes of a newborn infant and when you can do that, its not because the infant is making bad choices or showing your responsibility, my only to have a personal responsibility conversation, lets also have the conversation about our collective responsibility to help the people who are on my bus number six, theres so many ways we can help them and benefit them and society. Paul ryan who you quote, in our country they do not determine the outcome of your life and in the book you introduce the term or you share this term of Adverse Childhood Experiences and what youre basically saying if you have collected childhood experiences, your odds of succeeding drop dramatically which you prochain as the odds of being in poverty increased substantially. So explain this childhood adversity really impact your life. A pretty well documented by scientists who have into lazy situations. Many of us have an adverse childhood experience. P and skip divorce, theres a big move from one state to the next that is somatic but when you start piling up six, seven, eight or even three or four, that can have a really traumatic experience, partly depending upon the age of the child and specifically if the child is between 0 5, that is when the brain is developing at the most rapid pace for the rest of the persons life. That is when the brain develops quickly, we think of children being really resilient. But theyre not as resilient as we think. In fact when they were stressed in the house, violence, yelling, abuse, that creates stress and the baby and that means that the hormone is coursing through the brain and as the brain is growing, its what impacts the development of the brain architecture for the little baby. If this is not corrected, the babys brain will not develop really properly. So if we can address these issues early on and there are treatments, ways of using therapy, counseling, we can put that baby, the young child onto a better course so we do not see them two decades later in poverty or drugs or dropping out of college or high school event. His thought to that, its also not just a psychological trauma and troubles. Its also health in fact people who have stacked up aces are much more likely later on in life to have heart disease, to chronic disease like diabetes, that is a huge cost on society as well. To add something, thinking about the personal responsibly narrative as a mention, we call the success sequence that conservatives mention, it is true if somebody does three things, they largely avoid property and graduate from high school and if they get a fulltime job then they have kids that only 2 live in poverty and if they get into the 79 live in poverty. Clearly those involve an element of bad choices and personal responsibly. But they also reflect what we as a society do. One reason so americans kids have sex as American Kids but we as a society do not make education available and dont make Birth Control available. Our High School Graduation rates are substantially lower than those in many other oecd countries because we dont place the same premium, there certainly ways that we can shift it and not that American Kids are dumber than others or less diligent. So i think this obsession has neglected the public side of the equation and the policy side of the equation. The odds are stacked against folks who are raised with these various stressors and childhood, i wanted to go back for a moment to your conversation of how the brain is actually rewired and in what ways is the rewiring compromise one success in adulthood. A lot of it has to do with the development of the brain architecture. The cortisol is a stressor hormone, most of us as adults, happens for a little bit and goes away and slows right through us. Because of the babys brain is developing so rapidly and also so young, its much more fragile than we think that it really does impair the development. So does it make the kids more successful to addiction and less able to have if you will a committed relationship or just multiple effects. Multiple effects, they do show later on that all of these things that you talk about also more likely to not graduate from high school, more likely to have suffer from adhd, a number of elements that make it harder for the child growing up to actually succeed, that is why pediatricians are so focused on trying to address in california and the new Surgeon General there. They say from the university of oregon that the cortisol, one thing it does it prepares children for a violent turbulent dangerous environment and it puts them there on a hairtrigger response in one consequence is that it makes it harder to concentrate on the blackboard because they are being trained to look for potential threats behind them so that seems to be one pathway in which the cortisol impairs education and concentration. I believe in the book that you note Warren Buffett with the ovarian lottery and i heard him speak about how he was born under different circumstances he would not be a multibillionaire both because of the infrastructure to others establishment but the circumstances of the path to do well. So it is disturbing that in so many ways the United States as a developed country seems to be doing a poor job than other democracies, other republics that could have similar problems and you note for 39th and cleaning Drinking Water and 40th and traumatology and 61st on High School Enrollment and we suffer more stress than the average person in venezuela in her Life Expectancy is dropping. So heres the United States with our Congress Working on these issues, the state legislatures working on these issues, the county, how is it that were having horrific outcomes. It doesnt tell it to america, on the one hand we have Economic Statistics showing us gdp doing well, stock market is rocky hi and so we look at these measures and inflation is low and we look at these and they were doing well. But then if you peel behind the statistics, they look at other broader statistics and you can see that is not the full picture. A lot of men for instance dropped out of the workforce and they will not even be counted and these men may be selfmedicating and been out of jobs for a while and dont have the confidence to jump back in and we interviewed a number of them in yamhill and we know that is what is happening, they are not even looking so they would not be counted as looking. If you look at the Life Expectancy statistics as nick mentioned, that is another broader measure and its because of the deaths of despair which are three types of deaths of despair which are characterized by two economists at princeton and they looked at the census data and saw the death of despair was deaths related to alcoholism, death related to Drug Overdose and death from suicide brought record height to assay rate since world war ii. And they dropped a little bit with the Drug Overdose in 2018 so that is a good sign but its still 67000 68000 who died from Drug Overdose, not a small figure. That ways on the entire nation, the average Life Expectancy. Its pretty dramatic. Were seen a very dramatic to pave a good road and the outcomes. But why is the United States not doing a better job in getting people off onto a solid paved road. I think that this is a 50 year course that the u. S. Took in the strategy in 1968 and the tendency to stigmatize in Human Capital and benefit programs on the basis that were africanamerican to benefit and under and investment in Human Capital and benefits across the u. S. I think it also relates to president reagans narrowed were government can do no good and is part of the problem. And its a glorification of business taking of power from labor unions through corporations, coupled with the war on drugs, mass incarceration, i think i a few f these came together until the 1970s the u. S. Was in line whether the median. Since 1970s the other countries surpass us and i think the root causes and underinvestment in american and capital citizens. Developed countries similar to our own. Let me throughout a thought, i see this through the lens of trying to change policy and the government. What i am seeing is that our institution have been changing in a way that create power for the powerful, we do touch on this in the book, we know at one point when you have high wealth divisions, the wealthy then have disproportionate political power which leads to rules that benefit the wealthy and if we think about America Today and the inequality that we are seeing between the rich and the poor, were at a very high ratio compared to these other countries. So is it possible that the inequality and wealth is influencing the political system in ways that is preventing us from investing the resources on the fundamentals that paid the path for success to ordinary families. I think thats exactly right that you create an inequality that self perpetuates through the mechanism of economic power turning into political power, its a little bit similar what happened in the gilded age in American History and i hope so because of course then progressive followed. It took a Great Depression, it took a world war and so thats a little scary that it took that intervention to put us on a path where for the three decades after world war ii we had an investment in programs that really did lift up the middle class, not everyone, discriminations are still rampant but we made some progress in that realm as well, in order to implement the very similar policy proposals that we will get to in a moment, do we need to change the structure of political power. I do think that we need more enlightenment when it comes to the segment of society in a thinker being totally ignored, partly because everybody can point to the high gdp and nobody needs to change anything, on average its going well but if jeff bezos walks into a room of 100 people on average everybody will have a higher level of wealth it does not make any difference who are not jeff bezos. Thats a problem, recognizing that there is a need to lift up all americans and i think also its important maybe it helps policymakers to recognize if the u. S. Wants to compete against the rest of the world, other countries like china and india with a billion plus people power, we dont have the people power especially failed must enter much less if we dont lift up americans and have as Many Americans as possible and have full potential to be productive and innovative and bring america back to number one. I know my parents really talked about the sense of unity coming out of world war ii and they relayed how in their lifetime they experienced this, my mother came from an extraordinary level of poverty, her mother with her first three children, lost the three children to the county in the middle the Great Depression and lived in a boxcar, who can imagine my grandmother realizing that her grandson might serve in the u. S. Senate. Extraordinarily change for the both sides of the family. But you describe in the book how the community of yamhill saw much of the impact of moving forward during the years and how in roughly the mid70s started to stall out and decline. What happened in the mid70s and started to drive the reversal. First of all i think many people in the ml and probably in your hometown would attribute their past success to rugged individualism and theres certainly a lot of that. But frankly, historically it was also a certain amount of brilliant government plans, the reason people came to places like yamhill was the homestead programs. They transform places like yamhill, the g. I. Bill of rights likewise. Those programs to invest in and people in community certainly helped and when things potentially the root cause of things going downhill was good jobs going away. Because local employer was a glove factory, and close down and there were new jobs that came in but the people who had worked at the glove factory were not able to get those new jobs, men in particular felt the loss of jobs, not only a monetary sense but psychologically as well, local institutions like churches were not able to handle the trauma, people self medicated, they got criminal records which made them less employable and less marriageab marriageable, the Family Structure collapsed quickly and had been very tightknit, unraveled quickly. So you have the right manufacturing, you had gloves and you have the consequences you mentioned the bill of rights and the Mortgage Program for veterans returning and being able to buy houston have equity in savings and i think youre absolutely right about jobs being critical to the strain of a family. It does give structure, it gives dignity and gives resources. When youre unemployed, bad things start to happen, weve seen this in towns across oregon and for example lumber town loses the sawmill and you see some people move out right away, you see others who dwell in Domestic Violence of alcoholism and drug use increase. Jobs are critical. I think in yamhill and a lot of White Communities around the u. S. And back in the 1990s there are lot of comments made about African American communities that were struggling at the time and here is a sin to money is talk about how the problem with black culture was a byword for deadbeat dads or people making bad choices, meanwhile the harvard at sociologist said its about jobs leaving. He was exactly right, when jobs left they left appalachia, maine, when they left parts of ohio

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