May 30, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
50:01
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I don't think that if I don't like disparities, get busy. | ||
| This is what I want to say to my fellow African-Americans. | ||
| You don't like the disparities? | ||
| You don't like the wealth gap? | ||
| Start a business. | ||
| You don't think there is enough black engineers? | ||
| OK, let's study some calculus. | ||
| Let's get some kids together. | ||
| We'll do it on the summer. | ||
| We'll have a summer camp and we'll do a boot camp on calculus. | ||
| Kid that can do the integral equation fastest will get a star on his thing and whatever, whatever. | ||
| Get busy. | ||
| Disparities don't have to be destiny. | ||
| Just because there's a disparity doesn't mean that we have to accept it as given if indeed we want better for ourselves and for our people. | ||
| But don't be looking outside of the community for society or white people or whatever to | ||
| solve that problem for you. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is a professor of economics at Brown University, | ||
| a distinguished fellow of the American Economics Association and a member of the U.S. | ||
| Council on Foreign Relations, Glenn Lowry. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
| Good to be with you. | ||
| How'd I do on the bio there? | ||
| You have quite an extensive bio. | ||
| I've got the whole thing here. | ||
| I left off like 10 things that probably could have been the lead thing. | ||
| Is that all right? | ||
| I'm a member of the American Philosophical Society. | ||
| I'm kind of proud of that because those are the guys that write, and the girls, that write the big books. | ||
| And I don't know why they included me in their number. | ||
| I haven't written any big books, but the American Philosophical Society. | ||
| All right, there you go. | ||
| So before we get to anything else, I want to ask you about that shirt, because you flashed me something right before we started, straight out of quarantine. | ||
| Are you a free man in a free country right now? | ||
| Well, I have contracted, been treated for, and recovered from COVID-19, knock on wood, thank God. | ||
| My wife bought this shirt for me. | ||
| It's kind of a play on the old hip-hop rappers straight out of Compton. | ||
| So I'm straight out of quarantine and glad to be free at last. | ||
| Free at last. | ||
| Well, actually, let's start there. | ||
| I wasn't planning on doing too much kind of COVID related stuff to you, but what do you make out of what has happened in the last year related to COVID and lockdowns? | ||
| And then I think some of that will probably get us into some of the social issues of the day, which is what you're talking about a bit more. | ||
| Treacherous waters that you're inviting me into there, Dave. | ||
| You could say the wrong thing and get canceled. | ||
| I mean, a number of things come to mind. | ||
|
unidentified
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Don't worry. | |
| Nobody's been canceled because of me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I'm a social scientist, so the first thing I think about is, what are the kinds of studies that people are going to do for years assessing what happened here? | ||
| And there are many dimensions to it. | ||
| There's the public health dimension to it. | ||
| There was a pandemic, a pathogen. | ||
| It spread in the population. | ||
| People died. | ||
| How effective were the various responses to that shutdowns, masking and stuff like that. | ||
| But I think there are also political things here. | ||
| For example, Donald Trump was hated by a lot of people. | ||
| They hung this around his neck. | ||
| Now, maybe he didn't handle it as well. | ||
| I think I'll retract the maybe. | ||
| He didn't handle it as well as he could have handled it. | ||
| OK. | ||
| On the other hand, Here was an opportunity to sink Donald Trump, and I think a lot of people seized on it. | ||
| So one of the interesting political questions to me is, how did the partisan character of American politics and the role the media plays in that affect the way that this thing was reported? | ||
| But there are many, many dimensions to it. | ||
| So the social pressure. | ||
| To conform. | ||
| You know, have you been vaccinated? | ||
| And I'm for getting vaccinated. | ||
| I've been vaccinated myself. | ||
| I'm not, you know, I'm not against being vaccinated. | ||
| Tucker Carlson, whom I follow from time to time, is on a tear about the masking stuff. | ||
| And there is a real question there. | ||
| I mean, the government is going to tell me what I have to put on my face. | ||
| That works maybe in an absolute emergency situation, but when that becomes a way of life, you have to start asking the question about individual freedom and so on. | ||
| So there's just many different pieces to it that I expect will be examined by serious people for years to come. | ||
| Yeah, was there anything that shocked you just about the general, not the media, but just the way people sort of became so hyper-partisan about a virus? | ||
| Meaning that the mask has become sort of, I'm a Democrat, the non-mask is, I'm a Republican, something like that, sort of loosely speaking. | ||
| Well, that's one aspect of it. | ||
| I mean, and you know, some people were just absolutely terrified. | ||
| I mean, they wouldn't come out of their houses. | ||
| They had their groceries, they would wipe down everything with a cloth. | ||
| And I thought that was over the top. | ||
| I thought that was excessive. | ||
| But then how do we handle risk? | ||
| Everybody is going to react to it differently. | ||
| So what I was saying to my friends was, you know, if you told me there was a one in a thousand chance that I would die if I stepped from my front door, I might stay inside for a week, maybe two weeks. | ||
| After that, I take my chances. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You know, don't impose your risk preference on me. | ||
| That was kind of my, you know, and it takes two to tango. | ||
| So if I want to have a dinner party and the people don't want to show up, what can I do? | ||
| But I did feel that there was a lot of over the top kind of overreaction, the school staying closed and whatnot. | ||
| I'm not an expert on the data about school closings, but my colleague Emily Oster is at Brown University's Economics Department. | ||
| Look her up. | ||
| She had a piece in The New Yorker about this. | ||
| She is an expert. | ||
| She's a liberal. | ||
| She's a liberal. | ||
| And they just tried to tear her apart because she said school should open up because she said the data don't justify keeping the kids away from the classroom. | ||
| You're doing more harm than you're doing good. | ||
| The cure is worse than the disease. | ||
| Where did I hear that before? | ||
| She said it. | ||
| She said it and they tried to take her head off. | ||
| So, you know, it was really it really a very interesting and very pathological situation from the way in which we made decisions as a society. | ||
| I think politics, fear, Panic, groupthink, you know, these were all at play. | ||
| What do you consider yourself politically? | ||
| Do you specifically say, I'm this, I'm that, I'm the other thing? | ||
| Because when I'm listening to you, I sense a little bit of everything, which by the way, that's probably how most people really are. | ||
| We just get hung up on the label. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So I'm registered independent. | ||
| I don't tell people how I vote. | ||
| What I was telling them during last year's presidential election is, of course I voted for Biden. | ||
| What else would you expect me to say? | ||
| And then I'd laugh and I'd say, I can't say anything else. | ||
| You still don't know who I voted for if I tell you I voted for Biden, because if I voted for the other guy, I'd never tell you I voted for him. | ||
| But I'm a conservative. | ||
| I think I just have to admit that now, you know, on a number of different dimensions. | ||
| I'm an economist and I lean neoliberal. | ||
| I lean toward open markets and free trade and letting the prices do their work. | ||
| I don't like the Green New Deal because these people want to absolutely run our economy on behalf of their vision about how the future should look. | ||
| And that terrifies me. | ||
| I think taxes are, generally speaking, too high. | ||
| I think regulation can go off and does go over the top. | ||
| And impedes our prosperity. | ||
| I think the way forward has been shown by capitalism with a C. Capitalism, not with a K, etc. | ||
| So, you know, that makes me somewhat of a conservative. | ||
| I write a lot about racial issues and I'm cutting against the grain there. | ||
| I think the country has lost its mind with this diversity and inclusion stuff. | ||
| I'm not a big fan of affirmative action. | ||
| I think reparations would be an absolute disaster for this country as well as for African-Americans. | ||
| We could talk about it. | ||
| So they call me a conservative and I'm not fighting with them about it. | ||
| Yeah, I hear you. | ||
| And I think what you just said right there sums up what most of my audience probably is at some level, whether, you know, some are maybe a little more libertarian or a little more traditionally conservative or whatever it is. | ||
| But you just gave me a great sort of lead on everything else I want to talk about because One of the things that I wanna talk about is we hear this phrase systemic racism all the time, and I've heard you talk about this. | ||
| I've read some of your stuff on this. | ||
| In some ways, we're just not all talking about the same thing when we say the phrase systemic racism. | ||
| So can you lay out maybe what you believe it to mean versus what you think some other people think it means? | ||
| Okay, in the simplest terms, here's what I think people are saying. | ||
| They're saying back in the old days of the Civil Rights Movement, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Martin Luther King and all of that, the issue was racist treatment, unequal treatment of people, discrimination in housing and jobs and credit markets and so on. | ||
| Blacks weren't treated the same. | ||
| They were discriminated against. | ||
| And the goal was equal treatment, which is why King is there saying, I have a dream that my kids will be judged by the content of their character. | ||
| He doesn't want them discriminated against. | ||
| He doesn't want them kept from voting because they're black. | ||
| He doesn't want them kept from shopping because they're black. | ||
| He wants them to be treated like anybody else. | ||
| That's the old school thing. | ||
| Systemic racism is declaring there to be a new day because guess what? | ||
| We pretty much have solved the discrimination problem. | ||
| Not completely, but just about as completely as you could solve it in a free society. | ||
| Every state has an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. | ||
| There's a ton of lawsuits that you can bring against your employer if you think you're not being treated fairly. | ||
| God help a retailer if he actually does discriminate and charge a different price to a black customer, right? | ||
| Which we would all be against, just to be very clear. | ||
| Yeah, we're against that. | ||
| That bit has been solved. | ||
| But the disparities are still there. | ||
| OK, blacks are overrepresented amongst the incarcerated, underrepresented amongst the students at a fancy college, have lower wealth holdings, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| So the disparities are there. | ||
| But the account of the disparities that black person was discriminated against is no longer very effective as an explanation. | ||
| So people are calling on larger forces, not personal one on one historical forces. | ||
| I mean, here's an example. | ||
| New Orleans floods. | ||
| Black people on average live at lower level sea level. | ||
| So they get flooded worse. | ||
| They get flooded worse because they're poor. | ||
| They get flooded worse maybe because in the history of New Orleans, I don't know anything about it specifically, but this is just a hypothetical, they were discriminated against and the high ground housing wasn't as easily, those neighborhoods weren't the real estate agents didn't show them, whatever, whatever. | ||
| They got worse jobs, you know, etc. | ||
| So they're on the low line. | ||
| So then the flood comes and they discriminate. | ||
| Now, some of us would think, you know, that's an unfortunate act of nature. | ||
| And, you know, just like if a pandemic comes and you got more comorbidities and pre-existing conditions, you're going to get a harder hit. | ||
| But it's not an act of racism, a person might say. | ||
| But the systemic racism, people want to say, oh, no, no, no, it is an act of racism. | ||
| You see that disparity? | ||
| The history of race in America is what has made that disparity happen. | ||
| Then they have their story. | ||
| In this case, the blacks are in the low-lying neighborhoods in New Orleans because of discrimination in the past and racism. | ||
| And so that's their story. | ||
| Mass incarceration is racist. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because, well, the drug laws are what they are and they wouldn't be what they are if the people who were being locked up were mostly white people and they have their accounts. | ||
| There are not enough blacks at Caltech. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because of systemic racism in the education system and so on. | ||
| So it's an effort to explain disparities in the absence of individual racist Discriminatory acts, that's how I understand it. | ||
| So I'm guessing, well, of course you know of, and probably know Thomas Sowell, but the book, Discrimination Versus Disparities, I mean, he goes into this a lot. | ||
| So what do we do about the disparity stuff? | ||
| For those that understand what you're saying, that are saying, okay, the system's not racist, meaning there are no racist laws against black people, but that want to acknowledge that these disparities exist, where do you start with the disparities? | ||
| Because we can't even get there. | ||
| Well, if you follow Thomas Sowell, I do know him not that well, although I've just joined as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, so I'm going to get to know him better. | ||
| I'll add that to the bio for next time. | ||
| I just signed on. | ||
| I haven't even been set foot on the campus yet, but I'm looking forward to it. | ||
| But if you follow Thomas Sowell, he would say it's a fool's errand to think that you're ever going to get rid of all the disparities. | ||
| He would say, look at the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia and the Philippines and Southeast Asia. | ||
| He said, look at them. | ||
| They're business people. | ||
| They are wealthier. | ||
| They are better educated. | ||
| He would say, look at the Sinhalese and the Tamil in Sri Lanka. | ||
| He would say, look at the Lebanese in West Africa. | ||
| He would say, look at the Jews pretty much everywhere. | ||
| You know, he would say, there is no absence of disparity. | ||
| The story of ethnic history is disparity. | ||
| So if you set for yourself the goal of getting rid of disparity, this puts it a little sharply, but I think it's not inaccurate. | ||
| You're buying into tyranny, because the only way to get rid of disparity is to force things to be equal when the natural state of affairs would not have things be equal. | ||
| What would getting rid of disparity in the NBA mean, or the NFL? | ||
| I mean, well, we know what it would mean. | ||
| It would mean a lot of Chinese point guards, and it would be a lot less interesting. | ||
| That's a cheap shot, I know. | ||
| I mean, that was easy for me to say. | ||
| You're going to my weakest, man. | ||
| I got a basketball right behind me. | ||
| 45 with the blown out ACL in my left knee, but that's what I'd rather be doing than this. | ||
| Okay, you were good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| But but so Saul would say don't expect that there's not going to be disparities. | ||
| I would I would agree with that. | ||
| But I would go further. | ||
| I don't think that if I don't like disparities, get busy. | ||
| This is what I want to say to to my fellow African Americans. | ||
| You don't like the disparities. | ||
| You don't like the wealth gap. | ||
| Start a business. | ||
| You don't think there's enough black engineers? | ||
| Okay, let's study some calculus. | ||
| Let's get some kids together. | ||
| We'll do it on the summer. | ||
| We'll have a summer camp and we'll do a boot camp on calculus. | ||
| Kid that can do the integral equation fastest will get a star on his thing and whatever, whatever. | ||
| Get busy. | ||
| Disparities don't have to be destiny. | ||
| Just because there's a disparity doesn't mean that we have to accept it as given if indeed we want better for ourselves and for our people. | ||
| But don't be looking outside of the community for society or white people or whatever to solve that problem for you, especially when our families are in disarray. | ||
| Especially when the behavior of some people, a few in our communities, makes life absolutely impossible for anybody else to function there because of the violence and the chaotic behavior and whatnot. | ||
| Especially when the TV can be turned off and the kid can be directed to do his homework or hers. | ||
| That's a part of the parental responsibility, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| I don't mean to be putting people down. | ||
| I just mean to say our fate, this is my argument, is substantially within our own hands. | ||
| So if you don't like the disparities, get busy. | ||
| Disparities aren't destiny. | ||
| That's a title for a book right there. | ||
| That's the next book you gotta write. | ||
| Within all that, you're talking about the family, and then, you know, Sowell also talks about how when the welfare state really kicked in in the 70s, that in essence, it blew apart the black family. | ||
| But even talking about this, people will not be kind. | ||
| Yeah, well, you got two things going. | ||
| You got feminism. | ||
| So what I mean is you have a revolution in political, social attitudes around the roles of women and about the sort of legitimacy of conventional two parent arrangements and stuff like that. | ||
| So I don't want to just put it all on the women, the sexual morality, ideas of change, you know, gay rights and stuff like that. | ||
| I mean, it's a different world than it was 50 years ago. | ||
| And that has worked against, I think, the job of mending the black family. | ||
| I put it in those terms, people will get upset. | ||
| But what I mean is, if 70% of kids, babies born to a black woman are born to a woman without a husband, this is not a healthy state of affairs for the community. | ||
| That has consequences in terms of the human development of those youngsters. | ||
| Boys need fathers, girls need fathers too. | ||
| Adolescent boys with the testosterone flowing need discipline. | ||
| They need fathers. | ||
| They need examples of what it means to live rightly as a man in the world. | ||
| In the absence of that, you're going to get the kind of chaos that you're seeing. | ||
| So you've got that, that the social liberals, the people who want to rewrite the rules, will object to invoking tradition. | ||
| in this context. | ||
| The other piece you've got is we had a war on poverty and poverty won. | ||
| That would be, you know, that's what Charles Murray said in that classic book of his, Losing Ground. | ||
| That's what Thomas Sowell is saying when he points out the ill effects of the welfare state. | ||
| And on the other side of that is the Democratic Party and the liberal political establishment and whatnot who believe that the transfers from the welfare state can do no harm. | ||
| You know, there are no incentive problems. | ||
| Now, if you tell a woman That, you know, she can get by on a not it's not a good living. | ||
| Welfare is not a good living, but it is money coming from the state. | ||
| And you think that that doesn't affect her behavior? | ||
| Well, you know, again, I'm an economist. | ||
| Of course, it does affect her behavior. | ||
| So I don't know that I want to declare war on Medicaid. | ||
| Or food stamps. | ||
| These are established programs. | ||
| There are hundreds of billions of dollars going out the federal door. | ||
| But there are families that need these benefits. | ||
| I think we've gone far enough down this road now that it's hard to imagine going back. | ||
| But if as a historical analysis, I think part of the weight has to be laid at the feet of weight of the structure of African-American family life in the year 2021. | ||
| Has to be laid at the feet of those who didn't listen when they were warned about the ill effects of transfer programs on the incentives that people had. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so speaking of those who didn't listen, you mentioned the social liberals. | ||
| Now, I'm guessing at Brown University, politically, you are an outsider. | ||
| You're surrounded by a lot of liberals, although I wouldn't say they're old school liberals at this point. | ||
| You're probably surrounded really by a bunch of leftists. | ||
| But do you find that some of your old school, socially liberal, say classical liberal colleagues, if any remain, kind of on the DL are like, yeah, Glenn, you're right about all this stuff, but you know. | ||
| You know, I don't want them showing up at my house. | ||
| Yes, not quite those words, but pretty much that attitude. | ||
| A lot of people, I mean, there's a lot of different stuff going on. | ||
| Some people are religious and they're in the closet. | ||
| They actually believe in God, they pray, you know, they read the Bible and they won't talk about it. | ||
| Some people have misgivings, they're not sure, but they know that the wind is blowing so strong in the other direction. | ||
| But I'll tell you, I've been encouraged by some of my students here at Brown, which is notorious for being an ultra liberal bastion. | ||
| And certainly we've got plenty of that. | ||
| But there are students around here who are hungry for something different. | ||
| And I found them coming to some of my classes and coming around to talk to me privately. | ||
| I'm not saying that they would have voted for Donald Trump. | ||
| They would have never done that. | ||
| You know, I'm not saying that they're pro-life. | ||
| They're not. | ||
| They're pro-choice. | ||
| They're pro-gay marriage and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| But I am saying that they find some of the concerns that I've been expressing around these issues to resonate with them. | ||
| And some of them are religious. | ||
| And they will come and they will say, and I must say, I'm not myself personally a professing Christian at this point in my life. | ||
| I used to be very strongly. | ||
| I was baptized at the age of 40. | ||
| It's a long story. | ||
| I'll tell it in my memoir. | ||
| Stay tuned. | ||
| But I'm open to people who are overt about expressing their faith, and I have deep respect for this challenge that we all face as Christians. | ||
| Sentient beings of contemplating the ultimate questions of existence and there are no easy answers to those ultimate questions So I find that in some of my students. | ||
| I'm just saying Brown is not one thing. | ||
| We have a reputation deservedly so but it's a complicated and interesting community here and I do find like minds Both amongst my colleagues and students. | ||
| Yeah, you know, even though I'll let you save that story for your memoir, but do you find that there is some sort of spiritual awakening? | ||
| I've sort of sensed that because the progressive movement has just become this secularism on steroids, government everything monster, that an awful lot of people, and I would include myself in this, who are not traditionally religious, are finding answers in different ways. | ||
| Well, I hope that's right. | ||
| I can't, you know, I just gave you my report about what's going on here at Brown. | ||
| I can't speak beyond that, but I hope that's right. | ||
| Yeah, interesting. | ||
| All right, so let's move on to some of the other things. | ||
| Well, first off, according to my paperwork here, you're black. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| Last time I checked, I was born in Chicago, 1948 on the South side. | ||
| My mother and father were also born in Chicago. | ||
| They were black, I'm black. | ||
| Okay, so as a black man that's a professor at a liberal university, I unfortunately end up having to ask all of my black guests, or I would rather say guests who happen to be black that are doing something sort of similar to what you're doing. | ||
| Can you just talk a little bit about the type of treatment you get, not from some of the good students, but just sort of, You know, from the, say, anti-racist crowd, because they're not that thrilled with you. | ||
| You know, I'm probably the wrong guy to ask. | ||
| I mean, I'm 72 years old, OK? | ||
| I know it doesn't show, but it's true. | ||
| Born in 1948. | ||
| So I'm a senior member of the community. | ||
| I've been around for a long time. | ||
| I'm a known quantity. | ||
| You know, I have the various accolades that I have. | ||
| I've had a distinguished career as a research economist. | ||
| I don't think people really tell me what they think or react to me. | ||
| It may be certain deference to my position and to my senior status. | ||
| It may be out of respect for my academic accomplishments. | ||
| I hold a chair here at Brown, etc. | ||
| I think they may whisper out of my earshot this or that, but I don't feel the chill. | ||
| Now, COVID has had an impact here because we're not coming face to face. | ||
| We're meeting through Zoom and Skype and such. | ||
| And this last year has been a year in which some of my more conservative ideas, especially about race and diversity and equity have come to a head because of the reckoning about race and the aftermath of George Floyd and all of that. | ||
| I've written pieces that have gotten a lot of positive play in conservative quarters, which I'm sure some of my colleagues despise. | ||
| But I'm not seeing them around the lunch table at the faculty club so that they can, you know, convey their contempt for me with their glare or their whatever. | ||
| So I so I don't know about the last year. | ||
| But before that, I would say it was kind of like a gentleman's agreement. | ||
| You know, Glenn is a curmudgeon. | ||
| Glenn is Glenn. | ||
| Yeah, that's where he's coming from. | ||
| He's not a bad guy. | ||
| He's all screwed up about this stuff, but that's all right. | ||
| We'll still invite him to dinner. | ||
| I don't know what's gonna happen once we get back to business as usual. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| It's kind of a funny idea for a short story. | ||
| A conservative professor who, because of lockdowns, can feel more emboldened because the colleagues aren't gonna sneer at him at the commissary or something. | ||
| Somebody ought to be working on that story. | ||
| Somebody should be. | ||
| Do you sense there's anything left? | ||
| I mean, I get you're not a Democrat. | ||
| I haven't heard you say you're a Republican, but I get you're not a Democrat. | ||
| I'm a registered independent who's, you know, playing both sides of the street, so to speak, but I'm not very happy with where the Democrats are right now. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, do you sense, is there anything left there that is in line with the ideas that you believe in, that you think is in line with the ideas of Martin Luther King? | ||
| The Democrats are nothing without the black voting 95%, 90% for their candidates. | ||
| They would lose control of everything without the South. | ||
| Biden wouldn't be president today if James Clyburn were not able to corral enough black votes in South Carolina's Democratic primary to get him out of the hole. | ||
| So here's what I see. | ||
| I'm not a professional political scientist, so you can take it for what it's worth. | ||
| They're buying black votes by waving a bloody shirt of racism. | ||
| That's what they're doing. | ||
| They're selling this idea that George Floyd's death was yet one of another, of another, of another racist state killing of Black people. | ||
| There's open season, as Ben Crump says in the title of his book, on Black people. | ||
| Now, Black people, be afraid. | ||
| Be afraid. | ||
| Be very afraid. | ||
| White racists are coming to get you. | ||
| They're in your police department. | ||
| They're right around the corner. | ||
| And we are the only thing between you and a noose around your neck. | ||
| That's what they're saying. | ||
| It's not the Georgia voting integrity law is not just Jim Crow, it's Jim Eagle. | ||
| They want to put you all in chains. | ||
| That's a quote from President Joseph Biden. | ||
| They want to put y'all back in chains. | ||
| Okay, so if black people, I speak now to African Americans, if you happen to be watching the Dave Rubin report, if you fall for this, we're fools. | ||
| If we fall for this, We are fools. | ||
| We're being led around with a ring through our noses. | ||
| So they show nothing but contempt for black people. | ||
| I'm talking about Joseph R. Biden now. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| I know my audience is with you. | ||
| And I think actually, truly, I think most of America is with you. | ||
| We just don't know where the brave voices are. | ||
| I think that's part of the problem. | ||
| I mean, you're one of them, but I think that we're living in this bravery deficit right now. | ||
| These issues, the racial conflict coming out of slavery, threatened the existence of the republic. | ||
| 600,000 people in a country of 30 million were slaughtered on the battlefields of the Civil War, the consequence of which was the emancipation of the African slaves. | ||
| Here we are now, 150 years later, and the descendants of those slaves are citizens of the freest, richest, and most powerful republic in the history of the world. | ||
| Man, Glenn, you wanna run for president? | ||
| I got it, you're 72, but come on, come on. | ||
| That's young for a president these days. | ||
| Thanks, I appreciate that. | ||
| That's not the burden I was thinking about taking up right now. | ||
| I was looking for the beach. | ||
| I was looking to put my feet up, man. | ||
| Fair enough, fair enough. | ||
| Well, can you paint a way or do you see a way out of this? | ||
| I think a lot of people sort of think we're just in this endless dissent. | ||
| We can address the things that you've addressed. | ||
| We can say, no, you guys are wrong because we have to talk about disparities instead of discrimination. | ||
| We have to define things properly. | ||
| But I think a lot of people think, oh, we just can't stop this force. | ||
| I don't know how it stops, to be honest with you. | ||
| I feel like I'm spitting in the wind, my little humble efforts. | ||
| With John McWhorter, we have a podcast, The Glenn Show, and we talk about these things and whatnot. | ||
| That's at patreon.com forward slash glenshow, two N's, one word. | ||
| You know. | ||
| We'll link to it, but I gotta get you on Locals. | ||
| That's a different topic. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| But in any case, man, I think we had a chance with the presidency of Barack Obama. | ||
| To really change the conversation and that he let us down. | ||
| We can talk about the presidency of Barack Obama. | ||
| It is many, many things. | ||
| It's not just this. | ||
| But on this portfolio, if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon. | ||
| He shouldn't have said that. | ||
| He should have said, my friend, the Gates to Police Act is stupid. | ||
| We could go through all these things. | ||
| He shouldn't have made Al Sharpton 200 times visiting the White House ambassador to black America from his administration. | ||
| He shouldn't have done that. | ||
| He should have stood for law and order when Baltimore was burning down, when Ferguson, Missouri was burning down, instead of splitting the difference and saying they have legitimate grievances. | ||
| Of course they have legitimate grievances, but it doesn't rise to the level of arson and assault on police officers and looting. | ||
| That's unforgivable. | ||
| That cannot be tolerated. | ||
| I don't care what their grievances are. | ||
| He should have said so. | ||
| He should have turned to Black America, as he tried to do a little bit during the campaign, but he beat a retreat from it and said, yeah, there's racism, but you know what? | ||
| We need to pull up our socks. | ||
| He could have found a better way of saying it. | ||
| He could have found an Obama-esque way of saying it. | ||
| We need to stand up straight with our shoulders back, as Jordan Peterson puts it. | ||
| We need to take care of our kids. | ||
| We need to get busy. | ||
| Racism is not the first or the second or the third issue confronting us. | ||
| He could have said that. | ||
| He could have shut up some of these people like Ta-Nehisi Coates. | ||
| Instead, he invites them for cozy talks, etc. | ||
| Shut them up by saying, my occupying this office, commander in chief of the most powerful military on the planet, the agenda setter for this great republic of 325 million people, Gives the lie to your talk about oppressive denial of the integrity of black bodies. | ||
| He said it in 2004, Barack Obama did. | ||
| He said, it's in my very DNA. | ||
| He's black and he's white. | ||
| We all are, metaphorically speaking. | ||
| There's only one people here, the American people. | ||
| There's only one people here. | ||
| For a variety of reasons, President Obama elected. | ||
| And it's not an easy job. | ||
| It's a hard job. | ||
| That's why I don't want it. | ||
| Thanks anyway, Dave. | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| For a variety of reasons, he elected not to take that one on. | ||
| And he's the only person who could have taken it on. | ||
| He's the only person who could have sat in the White House. | ||
| You saw what happened when Trump tried to order out the National Guard or whatever it | ||
| was he tried to do to deal, you know, and everybody goes ballistic and it's all racist | ||
| and whatnot. | ||
| Obama's the only person who could have changed that conversation by putting his racial identity and his civic responsibility on the line, not as a fealty to the black victim narrative, but as an affirmation of the possibilities of the country. | ||
| Now, it's easy for me to say this, I know, but that's what I see when I look at it in retrospect. | ||
| An opportunity was missed between 2009 and 2017. | ||
| And where we are now, I mean, I heard Michelle Obama, the former first lady, say to Gayle King at CBS Morning News the other day, That she worried that her daughters, Sasha and Malia, might be set upon by rogue police officers because they're black and they might be mistaken for somebody. | ||
| And to that, I have to say this. | ||
| I mean, I said this in my podcast. | ||
| I'll say it to you. | ||
| First of all, it's false. | ||
| It's false. | ||
| You've got to get past the Secret Service to get to those kids. | ||
| She knows it's false. | ||
| Secondly, she knows that what she said is untrue. | ||
| So what is she doing? | ||
| She's playing you, Negroes. | ||
| She's playing you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She's enacting a trope. | |
| A narrative in the service of a political program, which is to keep you on the reservation afraid that the boogeyman racist is going to come and get your children. | ||
| She's not worried about her children being harassed on Martha's Vineyard by a cop because they're black. | ||
| Instead of pushing against this narrative, which is comforting, it is a comfortable place to be if you're black. | ||
| I'm a victim. | ||
| They wouldn't let me get the Nobel Prize because I was black. | ||
| I'm an economist. | ||
| I'm a damn good economist. | ||
| I want the Nobel Prize. | ||
| I want the Nobel Prize. | ||
| They wouldn't let me have it because I'm black. | ||
|
unidentified
|
OK? | |
| That is getting old. | ||
| But we need our leaders, I'm talking about African-American leaders, to point a way A point away from that, and they're not doing it. | ||
| So let's shift a little bit back to the academic part of this, because related to all of this is the fact that academic standards are basically being obliterated right now in the name of equity, in terms of testing, in terms of, you know, what's happening at Harvard, where they're actually punishing Asian students at the admissions level. | ||
| That must, putting aside the racial part, just as an academic, as someone at a place of higher education, that must drive you crazy. | ||
| Well, I'm against it. | ||
| I signed on to the amicus brief that some economists put together to support the Asians and their lawsuit against Harvard, because I disagree with that policy. | ||
| But many of us here at the Academy are full score behind this stuff. | ||
| It breaks my heart, to be honest with you, because it's an invitation to mediocrity. | ||
| You know, it's a kind of bluff in a shell game. | ||
| Here, let me just be clear about what I'm talking about. | ||
| At the very most exclusive venues of intellectual labor, like at a Princeton University or a Brown University or MIT or a Caltech, the stuff is really hard and not everybody can do it well. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| It's hard reading Plato and figuring out what he was talking about. | ||
| It's hard doing physics. | ||
| It's hard doing advanced mathematics and chemistry and other STEM stuff like that. | ||
| That stuff is difficult. | ||
| Med school is hard. | ||
| Law school is hard. | ||
| It requires real intellectual mastery in order to be done effectively. | ||
| Now, unfortunately, a proportionate number of African-Americans have not achieved that mastery. | ||
| Now, we can go into the reasons why. | ||
| History has not been entirely kind to African-Americans. | ||
| There's blame enough to go around. | ||
| Why? | ||
| But the fact of the matter is a proportionate number relative to population of blacks. | ||
| So we're fewer in the venues where the intellectual work is difficult. | ||
| Now, there are two things you can do in the face of that. | ||
| One of them is to lower the standards so that you can increase the representation of African-Americans and call that inclusion. | ||
| The other is to grasp the nettle, bite the bullet, whatever metaphor you want, face up to the developmental deficiencies and address them. | ||
| And I mean address them from infancy. | ||
| Now, this is not laissez-faire. | ||
| I'm not saying there can be no government program. | ||
| I'm not saying don't have any education, don't have any Head Start, don't have any summer program, don't whatever. | ||
| We can talk about what the things are that need to be done. | ||
| But can we first understand what the problem is? | ||
| If our kids are testing poorly, it's because they don't know the material. | ||
| If an Asian kid from a poor family living in a two-room apartment with four siblings can ace the test, our kids can do it too! | ||
| Anybody who doesn't think so is a racist. | ||
| They have the racism of the bigotry of low expectation about black. | ||
| You write us off? | ||
| You think we're defeated by history? | ||
| You think we're infants that we can't actually perform? | ||
| We can perform. | ||
| We need to do the work. | ||
| Give us an opportunity. | ||
| Confront the deficits. | ||
| Redress them. | ||
| Keep the level of playing field. | ||
| Don't lower the bar for us, and we'll measure up in the fullness of time. | ||
| It may not happen tomorrow, and it may not happen the next day, but it'll happen in the fullness of time. | ||
| I say this as a matter of faith. | ||
| I think we made the wrong choice. | ||
| Now, I can understand in 1970, with all the rabble rousing and whatnot, and the universities had to meet the protest halfway and whatnot, and they did what they did. | ||
| But we're now in the year 2021. | ||
| We're a half century past that. | ||
| And we're laying down a predicate for how it is that we go forward. | ||
| And this, no, it's not equality. | ||
| It's equity. | ||
| Bunk is a surrender. | ||
| in the face of the problem that we face. | ||
| The problem is develop black people so that proportionately more of us exhibit the mastery requisite to being successful in these competitive venues. | ||
| Did you see what happened? | ||
| I ramble a bit, but thank you for giving me the time. | ||
| You see what happened at the Georgetown Law Center? | ||
| The Georgetown Law Center, this brouhaha from a few months ago. | ||
| ...instructor into a hot mic, not knowing that she was being recorded. | ||
| Allowed is how the poor performers in her class at the clustering at the bottom were very disproportionately black. | ||
| She said it upset her. | ||
| She didn't know what to do about it, but the black kids were not doing well. | ||
| Do you know what happened when it was revealed that she had said this? | ||
| They defined Georgetown Law as a racist institution. | ||
| The students demanded and the dean acceded to the demand that this professor be fired. | ||
| White professors were called upon to get together and issue a statement on behalf of their white privilege, taking responsibility for the poor performance of the black students in the law class. | ||
| Now, here's what I know. | ||
| Contracts, constitutional law, torts, Civil procedure. | ||
| This is what you study in law school. | ||
| That stuff is hard, man. | ||
| That stuff will make your head hurt. | ||
| Those big casebooks that you see people carrying around and stuff like that. | ||
| Writing an effective legal argument is a real skill. | ||
| What the professor was reporting is that the black kids at Georgetown, this is Georgetown, this is one of the elite law schools on the planet, disproportionately don't have that skill. | ||
| Now, you would have thought that the administration, being informed of that, would slap their foreheads and says, oh my God, let's do something to make sure that our youngsters who are of color have the skill. | ||
| No, no, they retreat behind this institutional racism stuff, and it's patronizing and condescending to blacks to do it, because what you're really saying is, we don't think you're ever gonna be able to cut it, we'll cover for you, it's okay. | ||
| So as a numbers guy and as an economist, have you ever seen an instance where equity actually raises anyone or is it literally always that the way we get equity is that you're bringing down a certain class? | ||
| Does it ever do this other thing? | ||
| Well, I'm not sure how to answer that. | ||
| I'm sure I could find examples where If I did a little bit of leveling and evening early on, the opportunities that I generated for kids would give them a chance to show what they can do, and they might not otherwise be able to get in or whatever. | ||
| But I'm hard-pressed to actually come up with an example, so I'll just answer no. | ||
| You definitely can't be president because you forthrightly answered a question that you weren't totally sure of the answer on. | ||
| You mentioned reparations before, and maybe about four months ago or so, suddenly it was a very hot conversation. | ||
| Now there's a whole bunch of other stuff going on. | ||
| So it seems to have tempered down a little bit, but we know it's gonna come back into the equation. | ||
| You're against reparations. | ||
| Can you explain why? | ||
| I mean, I think it's a clear through line to everything we've discussed, but. | ||
| I want to let you answer. | ||
| Well, it's certainly related to what I've been saying, but don't do that to our country. | ||
| Don't don't do that to our country. | ||
| So let's be specific. | ||
| You know about the Japanese who were interred by the Roosevelt administration in the Second World War and they lost their property and their businesses. | ||
| And it was a horrible thing. | ||
| Their civil liberties. | ||
| These were citizens. | ||
| Some of the many of the most of them. | ||
| So Ronald Reagan signed into law. | ||
| And I think George Herbert Walker Bush presided over the administration of a statute that recognized the harm, apologized to those people, and paid them reparations. | ||
| They got $20,000 a head. | ||
| There was $80,000 of them. | ||
| $80,000 people, $20,000 a head, that's $1.6 billion. | ||
| And the people who got paid were the ones who got dispossessed. | ||
| Not their children, not their grandchildren, not their cousins. | ||
| 20,000 ahead, 80,000 people, $1.6 billion. | ||
| So we can do that and we should have done it. | ||
| Now, you take African-Americans, we're 40 million. | ||
| I don't know what 40 acres and a mule comes to in the current day, but they tell me it's in the tens of thousands of dollars. | ||
| So let's just say $100,000 to be honest. | ||
| OK, that's four trillion dollars. | ||
| With a T. | ||
| The entire Japanese got 1.6 billion, 80,000 of them. | ||
| These people are talking about trillions of dollars being in one way or another transferred to Americans who are black. | ||
| That's a social security scale enactment of public distribution based on the race of the citizen. | ||
| That's South Africa-esque. | ||
| We don't want that for our country. | ||
| I don't say that as a black man. | ||
| I say that as an American. | ||
| We don't want that for our country. | ||
| That's not the way we do this. | ||
| Now, if we're concerned about people who are disadvantaged, we can direct ourselves to their disadvantage. | ||
| And by the way, I don't really see an argument for overlooking a disadvantaged white person on my way to helping a disadvantaged black person. | ||
| So what I think the advocates of reparation should do, easy for me to say, they're not listening to me for advice, is if they want to see more money spent on schools, if they want to see more money spent on welfare, if they want to see more money spent on education or whatever, on housing, on health care, Put the weight of their advocacy behind whatever the progressive political program is that they think is going to deliver that for themselves. | ||
| I might not support every letter of it, but that's neither here nor there. | ||
| That's for the country. | ||
| So that's one argument I have against reparations. | ||
| Please don't do that to my country. | ||
| We're already divided enough by race. | ||
| But there's another argument that I have that I think is just as important, which is the problems besetting the black poor are not going to go away. | ||
| when you enact some kind of statute like this. | ||
| I'm talking about the out of wedlock births. | ||
| I'm talking about the single parent families. | ||
| I'm talking about the poor reading and math skills. | ||
| I'm talking about the low work habits. | ||
| I'm talking about the number of people involved in a criminal activity, the people who are in the prisons and so forth and so on. | ||
| There's going to continue to be an issue in Detroit, Cleveland, St. | ||
| Louis, South Side, West Side of Chicago, et cetera, and many, many other places besides in this country. | ||
| If you sit down at a bargaining table with America and cut a deal, you cut a side deal with America for blacks on behalf of that, and you get paid whatever you get, that commodifies your claim on the country and discharges the obligation. | ||
| Now you're on your own. | ||
| Next time around, people will rightly be able to say to you, don't come to me with your belly aching about this or about that. | ||
| You have been paid. | ||
| Why would we do that? | ||
| Just from a purely tactical point of view, that's not a good play. | ||
| So it's bad for the country, and at the end of the day, even though it may not be apparent, it's also bad for black people, in my opinion. | ||
| Can I toss in one more? | ||
| I'd love to know what you think about this, that it also sort of ignores human psychology, which is that even if you did the four trillion and everyone gets a hundred grand, that the progresses of tomorrow will tell the people who accept the money, you've sold us out for that money because of what you just laid out there, that most likely the problems don't go away. | ||
| And then suddenly the progressives of 2040 will say, well, either we want more or the generation before us was just part of the evil corrupt system or something like that. | ||
| Yeah, that's probably right. | ||
| And it's probably the case that they will be able to get something out of that if the politics of the current day is still I don't know. | ||
| I mean, notwithstanding the fact that you've been paid, you'd still be able to milk the system for something | ||
| based on that kind of an argument. | ||
| I don't know, I can't think that far ahead, Dave. | ||
| Do you get sick of talking about the race thing? | ||
| Because I don't know how much you know about me specifically, but I was a progressive, I was a lefty, you know, and then really what, there were a few things that woke me up, but I would say the one thing that I really shifted on was libertarian economics. | ||
| Talking to Thomas Sowell and some of the other great libertarian and conservative economists. | ||
| So I could talk to you about economy, the economy, all day long, and that would be great, but of course, we gotta do some of this stuff. | ||
| Do you ever just, you know, when you're talking to John on the podcast, do you ever just get sick of having to do that thing? | ||
| Yeah, in fact, John and I have talked about it. | ||
| It's in the archives somewhere. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We've had a couple episodes where we've just reflected on, why don't we get out of the race business? | |
| He's a linguist, and he's a very talented and accomplished professor of linguistics, writes books about the stuff, I'm a technical economist. | ||
| I have the accolades to show and so forth and so on. | ||
| And we could live perfectly fine, quiet lives, just doing our thing. | ||
| So, yeah, we've talked about it. | ||
| I even tried it back in the day, back when I was a Reagan Republican and I was on my way to Washington and I ended up getting caught in a scandal with an extramarital affair. | ||
| I got accused of assaulting a woman, which I did not do, but it was the end of my public career for that period. | ||
| And I said, let me get out of the race business. | ||
| Let me go back. | ||
| And I published three papers in the American Economic Review in one year, which is virtually an unprecedented accomplishment, because I put my head down and just started doing my research. | ||
| It lasted for maybe three or four years. | ||
| And the next thing you knew, the events of the day kept pulling me back and pulling me back. | ||
| And I finally just stopped fighting it. | ||
| I think this is part of my calling. | ||
| It's not the whole thing, but it's a part of it. | ||
| I'm doing some stuff that relatively few people will slash can do. | ||
| And it's important. | ||
| I think it's important. | ||
| So, you know, I've kind of acquiesced to that being a part of my role. | ||
| But I like reading novels, you know, and philosophy and history and whatnot. | ||
| This is not my whole life, but it is what I'm it's the beat that I'm covering right now. | ||
| So I got one more for you, and I think I know the answer already, because you're saying a lot of this with a smile on your face and just sort of your general demeanor. | ||
| But are you hopeful that we can get through this thing and get back to some of the principles that you've talked about here that you think are the right guiding principles for this country? | ||
| You think we can get through this? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I alternate. | ||
| Sometimes I'm very pessimistic. | ||
| What's happening in our schools is absolutely fundamental. | ||
| I'm talking about K through 12. | ||
| I'm saying what we're teaching kids. | ||
| The 1619 Project, Scared the bejesus out of me. | ||
| That's the New York Times. | ||
| That's a rewriting of American history, centering it on the fact of slavery. | ||
| And I don't mind, of course, that we would teach our kids about the history of slavery in this country. | ||
| But 1776, 1787, the Constitution being ratified. | ||
| Man, that is a world historic creation of a government under the ideas of the Enlightenment with real institutions that have worked for centuries and been a beacon to the world. | ||
| You don't put 1619 next to 1776 and call it a draw. | ||
| That's throwing away the baby with the bathwater. | ||
| That's a disaster if that kind of idea gets in the heads of too many of our young people. | ||
| So I think the jury is out. | ||
| And I think the battlefield is K-12 education, critical race theory in the schools, Now, there is free speech. | ||
| We could fight about creation science. | ||
| We could fight about sex education in the schools. | ||
| So I guess we're gonna have to fight about this too. | ||
| But to me, that's ground zero. | ||
| Glenn, it's been a pleasure. | ||
| This was overdue. | ||
| I thank you for taking the time. | ||
| My pleasure, Dave. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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