Episode 190 – Billionaires As Policy Failure Factories with Cory Doctorow

Macro N Cheese – Episode 190
Billionaires As Policy Failure Factories with Cory Doctorow
September 17, 2022

 

[00:00:04.530] – Cory Doctorow [intro/music]

Most of us believe in climate change. Most of us support strong action for climate change, and most of us think that our neighbors don’t feel the way that we do. Most of us feel like there’s no point in even trying because nobody agrees with us. That’s the weirdest and best trick that the super rich played on us was to make us think that we were alone in thinking that there was something desperately wrong with our world.

[00:00:28.150] – Cory Doctorow [intro/music]

As these great fortunes grow, Piketty says, the bad ideas of rich people become more and more central to how we live our lives. And that means that our world becomes worse and worse for everyone else.

[00:01:35.110] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43.090] – Steve Grumbine

All right, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese, and I have got the opportunity to have a return guest, Cory Doctorow. Many of you have listened to him on the MMT podcast amongst all of the many publications that he puts out. For those who are not familiar with Cory Doctorow, Cory Doctorow of craphound.com is a science fiction author, activist and journalist.

He is the author of many books, most recently Radicalized and Walkaway (science fiction for adults), How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, nonfiction about monopoly and conspiracy, In Real Life, a graphic novel, and the picture book Posie the Monster Slayer. His latest book is Attack Surface, a standalone adult sequel to Little Brother, and his next nonfiction book is Chokepoint Capitalism with his co-author Rebecca Giblin about monopoly, monopsony and fairness in the creative arts labor market.

And that will be coming out from Beacon Press in 2022. I know he’s going to be touring to promote that book here shortly and, not to be overlooked, in 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and that is right up my alley. I love (the game) Warhammer 40,000, so I have a little bit of a pull to this space. How are you?

[00:03:06.730] – Doctorow

I am fine. The new book comes out at the end of September, and so I’ve been rushing to get all the pre-publication stuff done, and it’s a bit like parenthood in that you think that the race to the publication date is the big thing, and then the book comes out and that actually is when your work really starts. So I’m trying to pace myself because I know there’s a lot coming up, but generally it’s good news to have a book coming out. It’s nothing to complain about.

[00:03:32.210] – Grumbine

Absolutely. Do you want to just set the stage for it and let everybody know what it’s about?

[00:03:37.260] – Doctorow

Sure, of course. So my co-author is a very eminent copyright scholar from Australia named Rebecca Giblin. And she and I have often lamented the fact that for 40 years there has been a continuous expansion of copyright;` how long it lasts, what it covers, what kind of remedies are available to creators, and that as copyright has expanded, a lot of the collateral damage has expanded with it.

You got copyright trolls and people who abuse the copyright system to remove articles that are critical of dictators or convicted criminals from the Internet by falsely claiming copyright over them, and then using the easy takedown system to get rid of it. But despite all of those harms and despite all that expansion, the actual share of income that creators get from their labor has been in free-fall for 40 years and shows no sign of stopping.

And so, if you’re at the bottom of the hole, you’ve got to stop digging. And we sat down to look at what structural factors resulted in the declining wages for creative labor and what structural remedies could be brought to bear to address those. So beyond copyright, which at this point, broadly speaking, is the right for an artist to feel aggrieved and angry, what could we do to actually put groceries on their table?

And so we wrote this book where we tease apart a bunch of different monopolistic markets, both on the tech and entertainment side—streaming, advertising, video and studio systems, publishing, audio books, and so on— and we show what the underlying mechanism is by which these very concentrated industries are able to exert pressure over their workforce to take money away from them.

And then the second fully half of the book are these extremely shovel-ready, detailed proposals for local, state, and national governments, artists and artist groups, fans, hackers, and tinkerers and other parties who are part of the value chain. Things that they can do right now that will materially and immediately improve the living conditions of working artists. That’s the thing that we prioritize.

And we’re quite proud of the fact that one of the publishers who rejected it, rejected it because all of our solutions were systemic and none of them were individual. Because I think if there is a thing that is really a recipe for despair, it’s to tell people that the answer to systemic problems is individual action. And thus to say, if you’re still worried about climate change and you’re recycling as well as you know how to, then I guess there’s nothing else you can do… climate change must be inevitable.

And so we try to really dig into how systems produce this and how you can change them. I’ll give you a really quick example. A lot of different kinds of creative contracts include the right to audit your royalties, and so creators who have money and can hire auditors or creative associations — will sometimes hire auditors and apportion them out on a lottery basis to their members — can go and audit the books of their publisher, their label, the studio.

But those audits are usually accompanied by nondisclosure agreements. And so when you find irregularities, and we spoke to someone who found a six-figure irregularity in their contracts, those irregularities are always to the artist’s detriment, and always to the entertainment company’s favor. When you find those irregularities, you might get reimbursed for the money that was stolen from you, but you can’t tell anyone else where to look for money that’s been stolen from them.

Now, nearly all the arts industry in the world has its payments originate from one of three US states. Washington, where Amazon is, and then New York and California. If those three state legislatures were to amend their contract law statutes to prohibit nondisclosure for the results of audits that discover irregularities that produce what amounts to wage theft… So, three simple laws passed in three state legislatures. Almost every artist in the world will become richer overnight.

[00:07:41.410] – Grumbine

Wow.

[00:07:43.450] – Doctorow

That’s the idea. So it’s a bunch of stuff like that. I don’t want to call it one weird trick or solutionism or anything. Instead, it’s like we took apart the machine, we figured out how it worked, and we figured out where you could stick a monkey wrench to stop the machine. And we made diagrams and we show people how to do it.

And so the idea here is to have a book that’s not just a book that’s ten chapters of “here’s why things are screwed up.” And then the 11th chapter is “we should really do something about it. Here’s some very cursory ideas for it.” Someone called that a Chapter Eleven book when we were drafting this. Instead, it’s a book that is really, really oriented around action, around things that we can do right away.

[00:08:25.850] – Grumbine

We need a lot more of that on so many issues. Let me just say, I’m extremely excited when this book comes out. It’s already preordered, so I’m going to make sure that I get it. There’s actually, I think, a sample chapter floating out there.

[00:08:41.570] – Doctorow

There’s a funny story about that chapter.

[00:08:44.130] – Grumbine

Tell me about it.

[00:08:45.330] – Doctorow

So one of the chapters in the book is about how Audible works. Audible is Amazon’s monopoly audiobook platform. They control about 90% of the market, and they have a rule that if you are to sell through their store, you have to add their digital rights management. And the digital rights management doesn’t stop piracy. If you want to steal an Audible book, you just type its name into Google and then free download.

And pretty quickly you’ll be downloading a copy that someone’s ripped the DRM off of. But thanks to US Law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, what it does do is it prohibits competitors of Audible from making tools that let you leave Audible and join another service. Breaking DRM is a felony. Providing someone with a tool to break DRM is a felony.

It’s punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. Which means that if you own a couple of thousand dollars worth of Audible books and a creator you love says, I’ve been getting ripped off by Audible, I’m going to move to a rival service, maybe even just Google Play, maybe another big tech platform. If you want to go and follow them, you either have to maintain two separate audiobook libraries, or you have to give up all the audiobooks you’ve ever bought on Audible.

You can’t take those audiobooks with you to a rival platform, because it would mean removing the DRM. And that’s illegal. And that lock-in tool was a tool that Amazon used to start to abuse its creators. Because when creators understand that their audiences can’t follow them somewhere else, then the platform that has corralled the audience can wring greater and greater concessions.

And the hashtag to look for is #Audiblegate. There’s a scandal unwinding that documents what amounts to now hundreds of millions of dollars in wage theft from independent creators who use Audible self-serve platforms called ACX. And that’s just money that Amazon’s stolen from independent creators. And many of them are still hanging in on the platform because they’ve got nowhere else to go.

They’ll take whatever crumbs Amazon will leave them, even if they’re getting ripped off. We detail all of this and more in eye-watering detail in a chapter of the book, chapter 13. Now, we would not sell the audiobook on Audible because we won’t put Audible’s DRM on it, for reasons that I hope are very obvious. So we kickstarted an independent edition of the audiobook that kickstarter is about to finish up.

We’ve raised about $100,000 through it, we recorded an amazing audio edition. Stefan Rudnicky, who’s an incredible narrator, has won multiple Emmys, and you may know him as the voice of Ender in the Ender’s Game novels. He’s read a lot of fiction as well. Yeah, he’s just an incredible narrator. He read the book, and we presold it that way. And chapter 13 that he read is the only chapter we put on Audible, and we put it up as an Audible exclusive.

And so if you hear about our books reading a review or something, I like audiobooks. I’m going to go see if this audiobook is available in Audible. You will find an excerpt of this audiobook on Audible. Chapter 13, transparency rights, the Audible exclusive. And then you will get 35 minutes of blistering detail about how badly Audible steals from creators.

And so that’s why that chapter is available on Audible, and the only part that’s available on Audible. We thought it was quite a good stunt. I like stunt publishing.

[00:11:53.060] – Grumbine

That’s beautiful. I love it. I didn’t listen to it. I just know it’s there. So now I’m going to listen to it.

[00:11:59.710] – Doctorow

There you go.

[00:12:01.550] – Grumbine

I have to waste a credit to listen. I just can’t listen to— I have to actually buy the one chapter.

[00:12:07.860] – Doctorow

Yeah, they won’t let you give it away and they also won’t let you price it. So every person who gets it sees a different price because they have an algorithm that figures out what you’re willing to pay and charges you accordingly. And creators do not get to set their own prices.

[00:12:23.000] – Grumbine

Wow, is all I can say. Patents and copyrights hurt us for far more than just artists. We’re talking about pharmaceuticals and other technology that could save the world. I wonder if there’s a blueprint here for beyond the creators. I wonder. Well, there needs to be a crack in that code somewhere.

[00:12:42.970] – Doctorow

So our very last chapter does talk about that, because we think that the problems that are present in the creative labor markets—actually, they’re microcosms of problems in all labor markets. In some ways, creative labor markets are a little worse, just in that although no labor market is a rational market, the way the neoclassicals would like you to think of them, that one of the most irrational labor markets is the creative labor market.

We all know that joke about the kid who runs away from home and his dad finds him at the circus shoveling elephant shit and he says, “Son, come home.” And the kid has his shovel, looks at the big pile of elephant shit and says, “What? And quit show business?” The reality is that creators work at the creative arts in a way that defies all reason and all logic.

They do it because they can’t help themselves. And so this gives the intermediaries and the investors that control access to creative labor and control the creative wage a lot of negotiating leverage because there are a lot of people who will do it just because they feel like they must. And there are other professions that are like this.

You see this dynamic play out in, say, nursing or teaching, a lot of caring professions where there’s this understanding that you can treat your workforce very badly and they’ll continue to show up because they care about something else. They have a vocation. But creative labor markets are among them. And so at the end of the book we cite my old friend James Boyle who’s a great copyright scholar who’s at Duke University and Jamie has this analogy he has or maybe a parable about the coining of the term “ecology.”

Before the term ecology came along, there were like a thousand different issues but they weren’t a movement. If you cared about owls and I cared about the ozone layer it’s not obvious that we’re on the same side. Like what do charismatic nocturnal avians have to do with the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere? But then along comes the word ecology and those 1000 issues become one movement.

And there are a lot of labor markets that look like the entertainment market and there are a lot of policy realms of technical regulation, realms where all of the firms that are involved in those markets are concentrated down into between one and three companies. And those companies are able to suborn their regulator and do things that hurt us all.

There’s four shipping conglomerates that control almost all the world’s international shipping. And for years the regulators have been saying, hey guys, I know you get these great economies of scale for making your ships bigger, but eventually one of them is going to get stuck in the Suez Canal and they’ve been like, Fuck off. What do you know about shipping?

And then we all pay the price when this happens. And so there are partisans for the fight against market concentration, monopoly, excessive corporate power. There are partisans for that fight in every domain. Whether you’re someone whose bank stole your house in the foreclosure crisis and then never faced any consequences because they were too big to jail, or whether you’re a wrestling fan who’s watched all of the professional wrestling leagues dwindle from 30 to one.

Then watch the rapey billionaire who owned it, Vince McMahon, reclassify all of his performers as contractors and take away their health insurance. And now you’re giving money to your beloved wrestling stars on GoFundMe where they’re begging for pennies so they can die with dignity of their work-related injuries in their 50s.

There are so many people who have experienced the negative effects of monopoly and we are all of us in the same fight. Artists have a role to play, not least because by definition, artists have a megaphone. We make things that other people see. So we need to be part of that vanguard. But we’re not alone and we’re not unique or specially situated. There are so many different groups that need to be in this fight and that I think will be in this fight.

[00:16:33.830] – Grumbine

I want to transition out of this because this book, Chokepoint Capitalism, will be out at the end of the month and this podcast should be out just in advance of the release. So with that, I want to bring us to one of your most current things because this plays into something that we’ve been talking about now for a couple of months in trying to tie in the role of not only labor in fighting for the future that we’d like to see, because regular people have been just exactly like what you said.

We’ve been told that if you’re not recycling properly, then that’s where you need to focus. Make sure you take care of your stuff and they isolate the individual. Neoliberalism is famous for that. This is the Ayn Rand take on society and nothing gets done. And then we started thinking about the soft bigotry of low expectations and then we took it to another level where we’re looking at what I would call Great Depression thinking still ruling us, then preventing us from dreaming a better dream than seeing the possibilities of escaping climate crisis by actually taking direct, decisive action as a society as opposed to throwing their hands up.

It’s nice to see somebody devoted an entire book to problem-solving as opposed to just problem identification. I think we have a lot of experts that identify a lot of problems. Very few solutions. But your most recent article puts an exclamation on this and that is “Every Billionaire is a Factory for Producing Policy Failures: On the Attack Philanthropy of Barre Seid”.

But with this in mind, I took a Venn diagram approach to looking at this. You say we’ve got to survive climate crisis and let’s say 90% of the people go, yeah, we got to survive climate crisis. And then you say, but that means we’re going to need to get rid of SUVs. And then the next group of people fall out of the Venn diagram and now you’re down with another smaller group and then you say, we’re going to actually have to do some direct mobilization and then we lose another ten to 15%.

And then you say, you’re going to have to write to your congressperson too and you lose another 5%. Slowly you whittle yourself down to this very small group of people and we’ve already been told it’s impossible, kept in precarity and the basic needs of our lives are lost. And there are these very well-to-do bougie Democrats that are classified limousine liberal and they’re that batch of people that the minute you tell them they have to do something to save the person at the bottom, they’ve already forgotten about it because they’re looking at their 401K or their investment portfolio.

And that stuff over there was only good as long as I didn’t have to challenge the Democrat running, I can’t possibly do that. So they check out and we’re basically left with shards of a movement, people barely able to focus, worn out and tired. And the billionaires are there to influence policy and we are told what is and is not possible through the lens of these people that don’t really feel like fighting and are happy with the way things are in many ways and don’t see the world beyond their next stock option.

And although they’re not exactly alike, I read this, there’s a tie-in and I guess I want to suss out the article and the framework. What are your thoughts? Do you see this disintegration of solidarity as conditions are placed that require action? And the billionaires laugh all the way through this. They have no problem ensuring that they stay focused on exacting a price.

[00:20:24.890] – Doctorow

I think that you’re right when you analyze the costs and that there’s not really any way we get from here to a different world without trading off some stuff. We also trade in some things, so some of those things are the absence of harms, like maybe we avoid future wildfires that take away your home. Those are somewhat speculative.

We know that people have a hard time really wrapping their heads around that stuff until it’s too late. Some of it, though, is quite wonderful. Like, insulating your home and getting energy-efficient appliances sounds very boring, but it’s actually a way to enjoy a much higher quality of life. It is a material improvement to your life, it’s not a sacrifice.

Yeah, you might have to give something up in order to get it. There might have to be some economic trade offs to create the fiscal space to do the mass winterization and solarization that we need. But it’s also something that you get out the other end. And I think that when you see people who are unwilling to do things like give up their car, like, I’m not going to give up my car.

I’m not going to give up my car because I live in Los Angeles, and if I give up my car, I will be beached. And so I would happily give up my car if there was efficient rapid transit. Not least because the amount of work I don’t get done when I’m sitting in my car driving across town for a doctor’s appointment or whatever. That I could claim back.

If I could be guaranteed a seat on the subway or the bus and take out my laptop and do a little work or whatever. Would easily make it worthwhile. Like, it would be infinitely preferable to say nothing of being able to go out to a bar and stay out late and then take a bus home and not worry about how many drinks I’ve had and not have to cough up for a cab or an Uber.

All of those things are actual material improvements to our lives. And so maybe you’re chasing the wrong part of the problem. Maybe you’re chasing the part of the problem where you try to figure out how to make people not mind their sacrifices so much instead of trying to figure out how to make people anticipate the dividends.

[00:22:33.110] – Grumbine

It’s interesting you say that, because the way you start your article and this is what really got me focused on this: you say, “Louis Brandeis once said, ‘we can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.’ It’s part of long American tradition that abhors the gathering of power into just a few hands.

But, there’s a counter-tradition in American politics: the belief in the unchecked power of plutocrats and robber barons who amass great fortunes, convert them into political power and use that power to unaccountably structure the lives of millions of working people. Some Americans call this liberty.” And I think this is such a profound sentence simply because I believe that this is such a huge aspect of what you’re talking about.

To me, the idea that regular people have been beaten down to the point where they only see this very narrow view of how the world can be. But this whole concept of liberty is so overwhelming, and yet it’s not the liberty to lead a good life and to be happy, healthy and free of stress; it’s a freedom to be absolutely abused and used. What is it about Americans that love their oligarchs, our way of viewing the world that puts these people in such godlike positions, that allows them to do this? Is it just money or is there something else?

[00:24:09.350] – Doctorow

Well, I think it’s a complex phenomenon. You described earlier, neoliberal and its atomization. So the thought that you are an individual only; obviously you are an individual and so am I and our individuality matters a lot, but that there’s no political future that involves treating yourself as part of a collective or a polity, that that’s just a dead letter.

And one way that that’s sometimes described as “the state can’t run anything efficiently.” So you can’t hope for a well-run public institution that just has to be taken out of your imagination. Margaret Thatcher very famously used to say, there is no alternative, which they abbreviated down to TINA. People used to call her Tina Thatcher.

It’s the most anti-science-fictional idea that you could really express because the whole point of science fiction is imagining alternatives. And when you say there is no alternative, what you really mean is, don’t try and think of an alternative. Stop trying to think of an alternative. Live within the parameters that we have set for you.

Don’t look beyond the edge of the page to see if there isn’t some way that the parameters could be rearranged if there isn’t something that you’ve missed. And so we are told that there is no alternative. We’re told that the public institutions can’t do any good. Some public institutions are, in fact, very bad and bureaucratic. But one of the most successful banks in America is the bank of North Dakota.

It’s a public bank. It’s 100 years old. It has a better credit rating than Goldman Sachs and has a better rate of return than Morgan Stanley. So this is a public bank, bank run by state, and it’s extremely well-run. It’s the model of probity. And somehow it manages to chug along for a whole century without stealing from its customers or doing illegal foreclosures or redlining or any of those other things that those other banks say are just kind of this inevitable product of just running a bank—”can’t make an omlet without breaking eggs” business there.

So that’s part of it. I think another part of it is John Steinbeck’s famous observation that Americans see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. We all want to make our common cause with the wealthy. And then finally, I think that the way the system is structured is, most of us are barely scraping by, and then a few of us get pretty lucky or get anointed and get a big chunk, and so that’s like the person at the carney fairground who wins the big stuffed animal.

Most of us are going to lose the big stuffed animal, but so long as there’s two or three people wandering around holding giant stuffed animals, we’re all going to play the carny game. We’re all going to play the Midway game. And whether it’s Joe Rogan getting $200 million from Spotify and then everyone saying, well, how could the streaming market be rigged?

Joe Rogan just got $200 million in Spotify. Or whether it’s few people who do really well in other forms of markets or the Kardashians or what have you, they are the convincer that makes you think that maybe the system can be won if you work hard enough. And meanwhile, if your conditions are precarious enough, that you don’t want to take any risks, that you don’t want to let go of what you have because you may end up with nothing.

Think of all those people who are saying they don’t want universal Medicare because they’ve got a private health insurer that hasn’t yet become so terrible that it’s become a risk to their lives, and no one wants to let go of the vine they’re holding on to until they’ve got the next vine in their hand. How many people have you met who are in terrible relationships that only ended once they started having an affair? Because as bad as their relationship was, they wouldn’t leave it until there was another one waiting for them?

[00:28:00.810] – Intermission

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT, or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on Periscope, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.

[00:28:51.850] – Grumbine

You talk extensively about the idea that these guys create bad policy and they’re a factory for producing policy failures. Talk about what you mean by that. Where does that come from?

[00:29:06.930] – Doctorow

Well, look, all of us have dumb ideas. I have dumb ideas. You have dumb ideas. It’s like, it comes with the territory if you’re a human being. The difference is what happens when we try to put our dumb ideas into motion. Last night I tried to fix my doorbell. I made quite a mess out of it. Now we don’t have a working doorbell.

That’s a fairly minor consequence of my mistaken belief that I knew how to fix my doorbell. And we’ll figure it out. But when a billionaire decides, say as Bill Gates does, that the only way to organize a pharmaceutical research system is through strong patent rights. And therefore he goes in and convinces the Oxford team not to provide their vaccine to the public and in the public domain for manufacturers all around the world by vaccine facilities everywhere, including in the poor world, where the largest vaccine factories in the world are located, and instead to do an exclusive licensing deal with AstraZeneca, well then, what you end up with as a consequence of that is 2.5 billion people in the 125 poorest countries in the world having to wait until 2025 to get their first dose of vaccine.

And those people, not incidentally, overlap rather a lot with the people who are permanently immunocompromised because of the activism of the Gates Foundation back when there was an effort to get a WTO waiver for anti-AIDS drugs for people in poor countries. And again the Gates Foundation intervened to prevent that from happening.

And what you then, as a result, have are these pools of immunocompromised people who are unvaccinated, who keep getting reinfected and whose infections linger, which gives those infections more opportunities to mutate, which is at least a credible explanation for where the variant strains that have immune escape, and even more dangerous effects on humans, have come from.

Bill Gates constitutes an existential risk to all of us. Likewise, those people like the Kochs and other billionaires who woke up one morning and said, “my life would be miserable if climate change was real, therefore climate change isn’t real,” and then mobilized their substantial fortunes to make other people think that climate change isn’t real.

And then more insidiously, what’s really happened is that Americans consistently underestimate by about 50% how much other Americans believe in climate change and support action on it. So in fact, most of us believe in climate change, most of us support strong action for climate change and most of us think that our neighbors don’t feel the way that we do.

Most of us feel like there’s no point in even trying because nobody agrees with us. That’s the weirdest and best trick that the super-rich played on us was to make us think that we were alone in thinking that there was something desperately wrong with our world.

[00:31:55.570] – Grumbine

One of the aspects that you brought up is you referenced Piketty and I thought this was an important quote: “Piketty showed in his magisterial Capital In The 21st Century, market economies inevitably produce oligarchies unless there’s a muscular state that can strip the wealthy of the power and influence they accumulate through rent extraction and exploitation.”

And I think we’re lacking that around the world where rich, unelected people have insane power over societies globally. And I think that it’s interesting to see the vast difference in terms of how people react to one another depending upon who’s in the “in-group” and protected, and who’s in the “out-group” that’s not protected.

And I think that this fundamentally backs up into that 50-50 proposition you were talking about a second ago. There are so many people that have been left behind and there are two paths that they can go down: “we can do nice things. Let’s pull together and figure it out,” (or) “Nothing in this life can be done. We have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps,” and then they self-identify with the oppressor, the abuser— Stockholm syndrome.

Given that this is not a new phenomenon, we’ve been through serfdom in the past, what is it about today’s society that has us reverting backwards like a neo-feudal society of sorts? What do you think is creating the energy behind that? Is it just the obscene wealth inequality that allows them to do this? I can’t imagine anybody saying, “that sounds like a good idea, let’s go with it.”

[00:33:37.690] – Doctorow

Yeah. To go back to Piketty, he has an explanation for it. He says that the rate of growth in the economy, even at its greatest, is always exceeded by the rate of returns to capital. So no matter how well the economy is doing, and no matter how central your role to its improvement or its thriving is, if you didn’t start with a lot of money, you are not going to end up as rich as the people who started with a lot of money.

So an example of that—because it’s very abstract-sounding—that he gives, is a comparison that once again involves Bill Gates. So he starts with Liliane Bettencourt, richest woman in the world. She’s the heiress of the L’Oreal Fortune. Never done a day’s work in her life. Is kind of socially useless. And over the years between the founding of Microsoft and Bill Gates’ retirement, Bill Gates built the most successful company in the history of the world and saw his fortune balloon to billions.

And her fortune grew more—just sitting there doing nothing, she made more money than he did, creating the most successful company in the history of the world at the time. But then Bill Gates quit and he became an investor, which is to say he ceased doing things, and he started allocating capital to other people who were doing things.

And in the years that followed, his fortune grew by more than hers, or the fortune that he’d made, doing things. And so people who own things make more money than people who do things, all other things being equal, unless we tax capital gains, unless we have inheritance taxes, unless we have all of those other mechanisms that are used to rebalance things.

And that as these great fortunes grow, Piketty says, the bad ideas of rich people become more and more central to how we live our lives. And that means that our world becomes worse and worse for everyone else. So, for example, you might have heard about the private equity funds that are buying single-family dwellings all across the country and then turning them into rental properties and raising the rents on them.

Reducing the maintenance, lobbying for or creating precedents that lead to more streamlined eviction processes, adding service charges and so on. Basically making shelter, which is like a human right and a necessity for human thriving… into a hypermarketized asset class where the welfare of the people who live in the home is like so subsidiary to the returns to the capital that it barely gets a look-in.

And the house is mostly viewed as a literal rent-extraction machine. So there are a lot of people whose most fundamental need, apart from food and water, is being made monotonically worse with every passing day because of the bad ideas of rich people. And Piketty says if this goes on long enough, eventually your society becomes so unstable that it falls apart.

And his example is the French Revolution, but also World War I and World War II, which he attributes to this kind of wealth inequality, shows how the policies of rich people led to World War I. Specifically, it was the need of the great families of Europe to continue giving all of their children their own dynastic fortune, which is the thing that began with the age of colonial expansion, the age of imperialism.

Prior to that, there was primogeniture where only the oldest son would have a dynastic fortune because there just weren’t enough fortunes to go around. But with the discovery of these colonial lands and the conquering of these colonial lands, it was possible for about three generations to go on finding new places to conquer, new people to enslave, new land to steal, so that each child of each generation of each rich family, or each male child anyway, could start their own dynasty.

And when that ended, when they ran out of people to enslave and land to steal, then they started squabbling among themselves. And Piketty says, that’s World War I. And then World War I created all of these war debts. And the bondholders for those war debts were wealthy families, the same wealthy families that started World War I. And they refused any kind of debt relief.

As Michael Hudson says, the debts that can’t be paid won’t be paid. The need to do debt service in Weimar Germany created material shortages, which created bidding wars, which created hyperinflation, which created the circumstances in which fascism grew. And then you got World War II, which was such a catastrophic orgy of capital destruction that when the dust settled, the fortunes of the rich had been so diminished that they just couldn’t lobby as well.

They just didn’t have enough excess capital to influence policy outcomes and to trample evidence-based policies like universal healthcare, rights for workers and so on. All of these things that became a commonplace in the post-World-War II—30 glorious years, as the French call it—Les Trente Glorieuses. And he said that even so, because during the 30 glorious years we did not institute enough redistribution, our top rate of tax was too low, our inheritance taxes were too low, our capital gains taxes were too low.

And in fact, the existence of a lower capital gains rate is itself remarkable because what it says is that people should be punished for working rather than owning things. If you charge people more tax on the income they get from work than the income they get from rents, then what you’re saying is that as a society, people who own things should do better than people who do things.

And he said that because we didn’t have enough redistribution, the share of income owned by the top decile, the richest 10%, grows year by year, little by little, they amassed more and more power. And then in a moment of crisis, the oil shock of the OPEC embargo, they were able to seize power all around the world.

They were able to mobilize that excess capital that came about as a result of not having enough redistribution. And they were able to use it to elect leaders who would increase wealth inequality even more. Reagan and Thatcher and Malroni and Gerhard Schroder and then—not elected, but installed—Augusto Pinochet and other right wing dictators who all serve this project of making rich people richer.

[00:39:57.730] – Grumbine

In the article, you pull back on that even harder. “But this policy failure gigafactory, Barre Seid, founder of Triplight who became a billionaire selling power management tools for data centers and then mobilized that fortune into a dark-money juggernaut funding climate denial, abortion bans, Islamophobic propaganda and other far-right causes, including a campaign to bring back DDT”.

That’s special. And then the next part of this that I think is really important: “Seid operated in secret, using pseudonyms and cutouts, spending at least $775,000,000 between 1996 and 2018 to promote his pet causes. One of his major projects was support for the Federalist Society and its goal of packing the Supreme Court, far-right ideologues and supported forced birth, voter suppression and other authoritarian projects.

Seid calls himself a libertarian. He called this project “attack philanthropy” and it reached its zenith last month when he handed wow, $1.6 (is that billion? “Billion.”) Billion to a far-right dark-money group, the largest political donation in American history”. Let’s talk about the “Seid man,” the seed money from the Seid man.

[00:41:35.170] – Doctorow

He’s a far-right guy, self-styled libertarian. He made his money building power management tools for data centers, got lucky, probably made a good product. I don’t know. I don’t think that we have to disparage his product to disparage his politics, maybe they were great. But being good at making circuit breakers and surge protectors does not also make you great at deciding whether climate change is real.

And everyone is entitled to an opinion, and everyone is entitled to bring that opinion to the marketplace of ideas and try to argue about what is true and what isn’t and to present that to democratically-accountable lawmakers and policymakers and so on. But Seid was able to do it at a scale that none of the rest of us are able to do,  because he was able to use his money to fund think tanks and “astroturf” organizations and fringe academics and advertising campaigns and media campaigns, all in secret, in order to create a lot of the delay and confusion that we have, among other things, about climate emergency and climate change.

And in so doing, he’s probably, in the long run, responsible for millions of people dying. And that, I think, is the issue here. It’s not that having benevolent dictatorships doesn’t work well. Sometimes it just fails very badly that if we were to have a benevolent dictatorship to design circuit breakers, maybe you’d want Barre Seid to be your God king.

But if we’re going to have a benevolent dictatorship to decide whether or not we’re going to allow the planet to roast and become uninhabitable by human beings, maybe Barre Seid’s not qualified for that, like I’m not qualified for it. I do think that there’s a role for the polity to play in these expert issues. I don’t think we should just devolve everything to technocrats, but that role is to balance priorities.

Here’s an example. There’s a great guy called David Nutt who is a psychopharmacologist and was the drug Czar of the UK under the last labor government, it was under the Brown government, and Nutt was skeptical of the alcohol industry’s claims that no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t get people to stop binge-drinking.

And the UK drinks industry is dominated by two companies and by their own account, all of their profits come from unsafe binge-drinking, which they also claim to abhor. They say that they really don’t want people to binge-drink, despite the fact that if binge-drinking ended, they would no longer be in profit. And indeed, they’ve designed a bunch of self-regulated curriculum to discourage binge-drinking and have completely failed to do so despite this.

And so David designed his own curriculum and made a little double-blind experiment and found that he could develop a very good curriculum that actually worked and that actually did stop binge-drinking. Not long after that, he got fired. He got fired specifically for saying that alcohol was more dangerous than cannabis, which again was an empirical finding.

So David is quite an amazing guy and one of the things that he was charged with doing when he was running the UK drugs policy for the government was reassessing the categorization of different recreational drugs and heart drugs, narcotics and psychedelics and so on. And so he gathered an expert panel of people who really understood the psychopharmacology of drugs, the sociology of drugs, the problems of addiction and so on.

And he asked them to assign a numerical score for each of the substances that were under consideration based on how dangerous those substances were to the people who used them, to their family and to society at large. And from this, he was able to group these drugs into drugs that no matter whether you thought it was important to protect society or individuals or families, those drugs would always be thought of as dangerous.

It didn’t matter how you weighted those scores, they were always dangerous. And then there were other drugs that, again, irrespective of your preferences about who should be protected, were never all that dangerous. And then in the middle, there was a group of drugs that, depending on whose interests you thought were more important—individuals, their families or wider society—you would get a different score for those drugs.

And he went to Parliament and he said, “There is no empirical way to answer the question ‘whose safety and whose harms are more important—families, individuals or society.’ That is a political question. You have the will of the people. You were elected by people to act on their behalf. I want you to tell me what my priorities should be. And when you tell me that, I will tell you how to turn those priorities into a drug policy that actually accords with those priorities.

I’ll tell you where on the schedule these drugs should go, based on your political choice, but infused with my empirical evidence.” And that, I think, is the role that we as individuals have to play both through our leaders and through our direct participation in things like plebiscites or regulatory comments or what have you. We do have a role to play, and that role is to say which priorities there should be. And then the role of experts is to figure out how to turn those priorities into policy that actually achieves the priorities that we’ve set.

[00:46:49.090] – Grumbine

I love the way you laid that out. That was absolutely spectacular. I can’t wait for the transcripts to come up because these are million-dollar quotes. This is fantastic.

[00:46:59.010] – Doctorow

Well, thank you.

[00:47:00.610] – Grumbine

One of the followups to this that I think is interesting: liberal billionaires like George Soros, the boogeyman of the right wing, to quote Mr. Cory. Democrats have a billionaire problem too. Up and down the ticket, self-funded candidates with stupid ideas and weak campaigns are bankrupting their progressive primary rivals and their supporters in pointless races. Talk to me about that because I couldn’t agree more. But I want to hear your take.

[00:47:29.380] – Doctorow

Yeah, I think Soros. Is not one. There’s problems with Soros as well. He’s funded some projects that I’ve worked on, and he’s funded some projects that I didn’t like. And all other things being equal, I would prefer that those projects be funded by small-dollar donations from individuals. But the billionaire problem I’m thinking of when I discuss the primary challenges, the most spectacular ones, of course, were Bloomberg and Schultz, and that was the presidential level.

But up and down the ticket, you have decimillionaires. You have centimillionaires. You have even just a few, like garden variety millionaires who are standing for Democratic nominations for everything from county commissioner to state senator, state assembly, or state attorney general. And they’re not great candidates.

The reason they’re in the running is not because they come up with policies that so many people liked that they got a bunch of money from a bunch of individual donors. One day they stuck their finger up their ass and just had an idea that seemed to them to be so great that they went to the bank and took a couple of million dollars out and went and hired a bunch of people to run a campaign for them.

Bloomberg is obviously the apotheosis of this. He spent I forget how many billions, tens of billions, on a campaign that resulted in him winning the primary in American Samoa and nowhere else. But what he did do by spending all those billions of dollars was force other candidates, candidates who had broad popular support, to go to their donors over and over again to fight him in the primary challenge.

And then when the election came around, those donors had less money to give to support a candidate that actually did have the popular will. And so that’s the real reason that self-funded candidates are a problem, is not just that they exist, but actually the DCCC likes them, and the DNC likes self-funded candidates, because the DNC and the DCCC see themselves as fundraising institutions.

And if a candidate shows up with cash in hand, then that’s someone that they don’t have to use their precious resources helping to raise money, and so they can focus their fundraising firepower on some other candidates. So as far as they’re concerned, it’s a feature and not a bug, that you have some rich dilettante who’s decided that they’re going to be the Democratic Dog Catcher for East Pigs Knuckle, Arkansas.

And that means that the person who actually does have good ideas that would contribute to material improvements in the lives of voters either doesn’t get in or gets in having spent more of those voters money than they would have had to otherwise. And if the DCCC and the DNC were to discourage these candidates, there would be less of them.

Again, I’m not going to say we should tell people that they’re not welcome to run. They should be allowed to run, but they shouldn’t have the endorsement. They shouldn’t have the support of the party if all they’re going to do is act as spoilers.

[00:50:21.370] – Grumbine

I don’t disagree with you at all. I want to put a bow on this. As far as billionaires go, being a sci-fi writer and someone who looks to the future for better opportunity and better possibilities and perhaps different possibilities in general, what do you think is something that we as activists and people in general can do to bring about an end to this? Where do we fit in terms of our ability to bring about change in this way?

[00:50:51.310] – Doctorow

Well, we’re getting back to where we started with the individual and systemic problems and solutions. I think that you need to be part of a polity to make this work. You need to be part of a group. I’m not going to tell you which one to join. I joined my local Democratic Socialist because I feel like that is a group of people who are well-aligned with my values.

I probably have some disagreements with them at the margin, but there are a group of people that will work with me to try and address these problems, for example, in the Democratic Party, systemically. So here in Burbank, where I live just outside of LA, there’s a pretty good chance we’re going to have a Democratic Socialist majority on our local city council.

Which will mean, among other things, that we’ll probably accept the state money from California to bring fiber to the curb of every house in Burbank, including the places where students were in broadband-deserts during the lockdown, and were having to go to Taco Bell parking lots in order to do their homework.

So that is an immediate, profound, material improvement to the lives of people who live in Burbank, we’ll probably be able to tamp down the eviction problems that we’ve had in Burbank and do other things that really make a difference for people. And that doesn’t just make their lives better. It also gives all of us hope that we can do more. It creates momentum.

And that momentum means that we can take the time and energy and mental headspace that we get back when we’re not worried about whether our kids can do their homework and we’re not worried about whether we’re going to lose our home. We can take that mental headspace, we can take that momentum, and we can use it to build more ambitious things.

And so it doesn’t have to be the Democratic Socialists. They may align with your values, but there are lots and lots of affinity groups and mutual aid networks all over the country that are trying to pull together and do collective work instead of just becoming a more expert recycler, or someone who’s better at being funny about conservativism on Twitter, and instead, really leaning into the actual political problems and projects.

I know that for people who are galvanized by reproductive rights that this is a real moment right now. I was listening to Ryan Grimm from the Intercept this morning, interview a Democratic pollster about what’s happening with new voter registrations and the amount of women, especially young women, who are registering to vote all up and down the country, anywhere where abortion is on the ticket…

And frankly, abortion could be on the ticket everywhere because it looks like the Democrats have a good chance of keeping the Senate, expanding their majority. If we can keep them in the House, we can make every House race about abortion—then they can codify Roe into law, but they’re only going to do that if Democratic politicians are scared of their voters and feel like they owe it to them to pass it.

Otherwise, you’re just going to keep getting Nancy Pelosi endorsing candidates who are anti-abortion in primary races across the country. There’s been a couple of those that Pelosi has backed. So we really do need to lean into this collective politics, not because voting harder is going to solve our problems, but because there are specific ways in which specific kinds of voting and other activism can make specific material improvements to people’s lives.

[00:54:00.850] – Grumbine

Fair enough. With that, why don’t you tell us where we can find more of your work? I know Craphound, but tell us what’s next for Cory. I know we started this way, we’ll end it the same way.

[00:54:09.860] – Doctorow

So I write when I’m anxious, and that means that I have eight books coming out right now because it’s been a tough couple of three years. So the next one is Chokepoint Capitalism with Rebecca Giblin. Comes out in September. The one after that is a cryptocurrency heist novel called Red Team Blues that Tor Books will publish in April. I literally turned in the edits for that yesterday. It’s a kind of class warfare economics, macroeconomics, MMT, cryptocurrency heist novel sort of thing.

[00:54:39.170] – Grumbine

Nice.

[00:54:40.110] – Doctorow

And then after that, there are many other books. I’m going on the road with this book. I’m going to be touring. I’ll be in a bunch of different cities. You can keep track of all of that and also read my daily blog posts through pluralistic(dot)net. And that’s a hub where you’ll find how to read my essays as daily Twitter threads or daily Mastodon threads, or daily Tumblr posts, or daily blog posts, or as a daily surveillance-free newsletter, or as a full text RSS.

And all of those essays and blog posts are licensed Creative Commons Attribution, which means that you can take them and republish them. You can even do so commercially, so long as you attribute them to me and link back to the original.

[00:55:18.250] – Grumbine

Very good. And I think we’re going to do a lot more of that, too. So with that, thank you so much, and believe me, you have no idea how busy this gentleman is. You’re getting ready to go on the road, and you just got out of a whole bunch of stuff already. You are pretty much running from airport to airport. So I really do appreciate you taking the time to spend with us here. I really appreciate your work, sir.

[00:55:42.600] – Doctorow

Well, thank you. I appreciate yours as well. Thank you for the work you’re doing with Macro N Cheese.

[00:55:47.590] – Grumbine

That means a lot. Thank you so much. My name is Steve Grumbine, the host of Macro N Cheese. My guest, Cory Doctorow, thank you so much for joining us. We’re out of here.

[00:56:02.670] – End Credits

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.