The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Adrift: America in 100 Charts

Episode Date: September 25, 2022

We're sharing an excerpt from Scott's forthcoming book, "Adrift: America in 100 Charts." https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/713560/adrift-by-scott-galloway/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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cards, savings accounts, mortgage rates, and more. NerdWallet, finance smarter. NerdWallet Compare Incorporated. NMLS 1617539. Welcome to a special episode of the Prof G Pod. And yes, this is indeed our fifth episode of the week to drop in your feed. Sorry for that. Just to resist this feudal. We're everywhere. Remember when AOL was putting discs in cereal boxes? That's right. We're the AOL of podcasting.

Today, we're sharing the preface of my forthcoming book, Adrift, America in 100 Charts. You're welcome. What a thrill. What a thrill. We're less than a week away from the launch, so get your pre-orders in now because, well, daddy wants a bestseller. Bring it. Bring it.

By the way, Bill Maher is seriously, like, it took my book from the fourth bestselling to, like, the third. Anyways, not sure I'm bringing that up, the Maher effect. Anyways, here's an excerpt from Adrift, America in 100 Charts. Preface. Ballast. We are a nation adrift. We lack neither wind nor sail. We have no shortage of captains or gear.

Yet our mighty ship flounders in a sea of partisanship, corruption, and selfishness. Our discourse is coarse. Young people are failing to form relationships. And our brightest seek individual glory at the expense of the Commonwealth. Our institutions are decaying, and the connective tissue of society frays nearly beyond repair. On the horizon, darkness and thunder. To the west, China rises. In the east, Europe fades.

What will it take to turn this vessel before the wind and plot a course for peace and prosperity? Okay, enough with the sailing metaphors. I can't tell a mainsail from a jib, but I do know how to read a chart. There's something powerful about the visual representation of data. It reaches our instinctive ability to assess by sight

versus the intellectual exercise of reading and listening to words and data. For years now, I've been talking to people on my podcast, in business, and at NYU, where I teach about the state of America and where we're headed. Over and over, I find that data clarifies those conversations, helps me see things clear. So when I decided to collect my views on this essential question of America's sputtering progress, it seemed natural to do it with charts front and center. What the data tells me is not complicated. America is a work in progress. But it's made the most progress toward its ideals, it's become the most like itself, when it has invested in a strong middle class its ideals, it's become the most like itself when it has invested in a strong middle class. There, that's my grand economic theory. What makes me so sure about this?

The data and the story that data tells. That story begins nearly 80 years ago in the summer of 1945, the most destructive event in humanity's long history of violence came to an end. Nazi Germany collapsed in April, and in August, after the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs, Imperial Japan surrendered. Nations devastated by battle would take a generation to rebuild. The U.S. faced a different problem. Though American soil saw little combat, the war transformed the U.S. economy. The automobile industry retooled to build tanks and planes. Shipping and internal transportation were reconfigured to support armament production and transport.

Rations limited the consumption of goods ranging from gasoline to soap. In 1945, 40% of the nation's GDP was directed to the war effort. Today, we spend 3.7% of our GDP on the military. The U.S., in a deep depression before the war, had been reanimated into a purpose-built economy, Roosevelt's arsenal of democracy. With the arrival of peace, that purpose dissipated. The economy lost the customer responsible for almost half its business. Tank factories and shipping depots closed. Over the following 24 months, the U.S. military shed 10 million service members. 10 million people, mostly young men, needed jobs, homes, cars, and prospects. When the ticker tape parades finished, wages began to fall and rents began to rise.

Workers in every major industry went on strike, and a nationalist movement began bubbling up from the simmering belief that we'd overinvested abroad at the expense of domestic needs. Planners feared that the economy would return to the pre-war depression or worse. Except, that's not what happened. Instead, the arsenal democracy transformed into the engine of capitalism. The next 30 years brought record low unemployment, sustained economic growth, and widespread investment in infrastructure and R&D.

The leap forward in the human condition was breathtaking, and not just in the US. Inf breathtaking, and not just in the U.S. Infant mortality and poverty plummeted worldwide, and life expectancy and literacy skyrocketed. A global effort, largely funded and led by the U.S., eradicated smallpox, the disease that had killed 90% of indigenous Americans became the first to be eradicated by human intent. In 1969, three brave astronauts traveled 240,000 miles, note, approximately 3,600 times farther than Blue Origin's New Shepard, and an American set foot on Earth's only natural satellite. How did this happen? Much has been made of the greatest generation,

the men and women whose character was forged by the struggles of the 1930s and 40s and who are credited with building the economic colossus America, Inc. But greatness is in the agency of others. Workers joined unions to secure higher wages and safer conditions. Membership grew in organizations from the Girl Scouts to Kiwanis. Societal connective tissue grew and strengthened.

Team sports and little leagues became neighborhood fixtures and multimillion-dollar enterprises. Underlying this prosperity was robust state support. The GI Bill funded college for 2 million soldiers and home loans and small business loans for hundreds of thousands more. Truman's housing legislation expanded the government's role in building homes and financing home ownership. Eisenhower launched a 40-year project to build a national highway system at a cost of over $500 billion in today's dollars. Income taxes were progressive, the top rate was 91%, and the wealth of the biggest earners was redistributed through social programs and investments in infrastructure, education, and science. The years after World War II were an era of great innovation. The computer, the cellular phone, and the internet are all products of the post-war period. But the U.S.'s greatest innovation was not a thing.

It was a social and economic construct, the middle class. A broad, inclusive, and prosperous middle class provided capitalism something it had long lacked, ballast. Sorry, just one more nautical metaphor. Ballast is a heavy material beneath the surface, invisible, that provides stability to a boat. The more tumultuous the environment, the more important the ballast. The absence of this steadying force increases the likelihood a ship will capsize, regardless of the value of the content sitting above the surface. In the 1950s and 60s, we had ballast. The combination of wage growth, public education, economic mobility,

and an abundance of manufactured goods brought an unprecedented quality of life to millions of households. The term working class couldn't encompass the two-car garage, summer vacations, and son and soon daughter heading off to college that exemplified an American middle-class lifestyle. It was an expansive concept. The doctor, lawyer, and Madison Avenue admin lived a life of greater luxury than their factory worker countrymen, but they had more in common than ever before. The middle class represented the obliteration of class as a concept. Today, somewhere around 70% of Americans describe themselves as middle class. The U.S. still had too many poor people and a few mega-millionaires, but for a multiple-decade run in the middle of the century, one group defined the cultural and

economic narrative of the American story. And it wasn't innovators worth the GDP of a Central American nation. As a group, the middle class valued stability, believed in progress, and witnessed firsthand the possibility of widely distributed prosperity. Capitalism, which had a mixed history for all but the capitalists themselves, was proving it could, when steadied by the ballast of a broad middle class, create a rich and healthy society. Contrary to perception, the post-war middle class was not solely the province of white men. 27 million American women entered the workforce between 1950 and 1980, increasing their participation by 50%. In 1940, just 22% of Black men were in the middle class by income, compared to 38% of white men. By 1970, 68% of black men were earning a middle-class

income compared to 65% of white men. America had not overcome its founding inequities, but it had made greater progress against them than in any other period. By the 1970s, however, the nation's run of success was faltering. Access to middle-class prosperity expanded in the post-war period, but it fell short at the upper end of the middle class and beyond. High-earning professionals, including law, medicine, and senior corporate roles, remained overwhelmingly white and male. Poverty and limited opportunities persisted in communities and across generations. As economic growth slowed in the 1960s and 70s, patience for inequity wore thin, and the bonds of post-war prosperity began to fray. The limits of the civil rights movement's progress illuminated

the significant remaining obstacles standing in the way of a United States. Likewise, the dynamism and innovation of the immediate post-war era began to lose energy. Conglomerates became the rage in corporate America, a misguided effort by senior management to insulate themselves and their incomes from the risks and volatility of a capitalist, that is, competitive marketplace. The environmental costs of industrial expansion produced places such as Love Canal, a neighborhood near Niagara Falls so contaminated by industrial waste that 1,000 families had to be relocated. The arrival of superior Japanese cars on American roads revealed that our manufacturing base had lost its way,

and the nation that had saved the world for democracy found itself supporting autocrats to keep the next domino from falling. In 1980, as in 1945, fearful predictions of national demise cued a fierce debate over the future course of the American experiment. Our response to that period of national crisis, like our response to the course of the American experiment. Our response to that period of national crisis, like our response to the challenges of the post-war era, created the America we've inherited today, four decades later. This book is about that response, the America it produced, and where we may go from here. Just as in 1945 and 1980, we are once again a nation at a crossroads. We're emerging slowly from a pandemic that has killed more than a million Americans as it becomes endemic. Our exceptional technologies, computers we carry in our pockets, instant communication

with anyone around the world, bring with them exceptional externalities that our laws, tax code, and culture seem ill-equipped to handle. Marginalized voices and an entrenched white patriarchy seem to be preparing for war rather than seeking common ground. We have tremendous prosperity but little progress as more of the spoils accrue to fewer parties. These hundred charts on your PDF tell the story of how we got here and where we might head. To be clear, we're not using charts because they confer objectivity or infallibility. We have chosen data and representations of it that tell the story of America as we see it. But there is a clarity to illustrations and graphs that prose can't match. Our mission is simple. Present visuals in this PDF

that strike a chord and inspire action. Thank you. And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. What software do you use at work? The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be. The average US company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software?

How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate, and plan for the future? In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.