i and the other trustees of common good are hosting this event for philip common good is an organization probably started 25 years ago i don't remember but i have been on the trustee for for a long and it's a it supports you know philip and philip's causes and these books are big events for common good philip for those who know him and i'm sure many of you do does everything with enthusiasm and passion for those of us who around philip it's sometimes exhausting, but it's always some we always learn something in our lives are enriched by it. there there are several in this room i know would say the same thing philip you know started

he's had a career as a brilliant appellate lawyer which is where i first knew him. he then built a law firm in new from scratch and it was successful and that was that's a big event. but he got bored, decided he needed a new challenge and so he decided to fix the government and legal system in america somehow this anybody would do that. this is his seventh book, maybe his important but all of them had important effects. common good has done other things that philip has led not in books that had been very powerful in some of our agency views but with i need to this is philip if you don't know just be sure you know and charlotte howard who is next to will introduce herself but. she's the perfect questioner for philip because she's been doing that for most of her life. you don't know.

thanks to everybody for being here. i'm charlotte howard my official capacity is i'm executive editor of the economist, but more i am philip second daughter, one of four. and you might think that by asking a child to do q and a, you're hoping for some softball questions. but he has 41 years of evidence to the contrary. so prepare for a roasting. i'm in this room and on television, which is c-span was filming here and look forward to a conversation. so this is your seventh book? i very well. you writing your first book in our living room. this book comes at a time when we have all kinds of things happening. one could describe in hyperbolic terms and still seem understated. we have wars in the middle east, have an ongoing war. ukraine, america's power on the

global is being challenged by china. we have democracy that is, in my view, being threatened, a way that we haven't seen in many years. so why book now? i i'm going to quote neil ferguson, you can't be strong if you're not strong home at home and i think putin and xi jinping and are just, you know, dying with laughter at our many forms of self-destruction over our incredibly strong society. and so we need to figure out how to make democracy strong again and to have government trust it again and to make people feel that they're of the society instead of enemies of half of society. and that's the reason i wrote book. so can you for those the people in the room have not yet read it and it's brief i really recommend that everybody you can

read it in two days tops and it's as each sentence packs a real punch but for those who haven't read it can you give brief synopsis of your argument what are is is it two of the main problems plaguing american domestic society, ineffective government, broad alienation, stem in large part from legal and governing systems that are designed to disempower people in their daily choices for the noblest of reasons, we reinvented the way govern, not our goals, how we govern after the 1960s to try to avoid any more abuses and the was in an effort to to guarantee to guarantee that there would be no abuse and failure. we guaranteed that there could be no success. and we need to pull back and restore what i think was the

foundational principle of our which is a democratic society where people are elected, they're given a authority to take responsibility. they're accountable for how they do. but their job is not to be robots complying with the rules. their job is to use their judgment and take responsibility in the old fashioned way. and we don't at any level of society. so teachers lost the authority to maintain control of the classroom. principals find impossible to get rid of a bad teacher. doctors and nurses spend half their day filling out forms. the government can't, give a permit for, say, a transmission that everybody agrees needs to get built because environmental review a good idea in the abstract and if executed properly has turned into this process of no pebble left unturned and then in daily life people increasingly find themselves suffocated by all

kinds of you don't tell a joke in the office have you been training businesses don't give job references because somebody might get mad and sue you. and so have this this culture within business where. it's like there's a big red blinking sign saying don't be yourself you know, it's it's a it's really in port and spontaneity which had our thought was the most elemental aspect of freedom. spontaneity has died in the workplace. we've been trained it's been trained out of it. we're told not to be spending. so so that's a and we need to create a legal that gives back to people their so it's only because the question of agency particularly at this time when so many things seem out of control can almost seem like a scary concept. so i think the one hand you have this broad distrust of anyone

right and there are also distrust of institutions so their distrust of other individuals. and then you look at the polling on institutional distrust. it's so alarming across really every segment of american life from congress to the presidency. i was really struck by the data on the judicial system, which has taken an nosedive in recent decades previously the courts were somewhat immune from this broader trend. so how does what you're describing fit into that broad culture of distrust really important question in really hard to get back actually but you need a vision which i'm trying to provide were at least in part provide with this book. but you also need leaders moral authority, you know, in so name name the people in public life today who have moral authority. i mean so it's i was with jonathan rauch brookings yesterday has written a lot about institution in such a so i talk a lot about institutions in

the book people's freedom in large part within institutions and whether it's through business the university and such and and their freedom depends on a mutual trust of standards of performance and values of the institution cooperation being a nice person, you know, all sorts of things that need to be enforced by people who in charge of the institution. and if you actually disempower our people who are running the institution from making judgments about, who's doing a good job and who's not and all that sort of stuff, it's the trust level dissipates enormously. and so what's happened in america at many levels is institutions have become comply arts machines. you know, you go see the doctor, you go to the hospital you know, you're being told things just because the rules say you have to tell there was a well, well-known pediatrician in

charlotte, north carolina. you talking about how the practice had changed during his career as a pediatrician? very you know, he's head of the north carolina medical association. so he said, well, we should be we don't actually speak our minds because you wouldn't want to say something that might used against, you know. you're taking care of children. you so so you have this kind of defensiveness that this would leak in society and. i think it makes everybody. people when people are not the truth people when they're choosing their words. so neuroni writes about this and. it's say you can't have actually an organization that's trustworthy if people are scared to be themselves and if they make a mistake to apologize. so when you talk about so much of what you say rings true, but it also intersects with other

really trends that are troubling in american society, i and i can't really fit them together. so, you know, trust depends on facts and an of what's true. so does what you're describing fit in with some of the broader issues that we have around just absolutely divergent narratives within a given institution right there was a really good column the other day jonathan chait in york magazine about how republicans only have themselves to blame for the fact that the trump kind of lapping the field again, because didn't push back at him when he said the election was stolen. it's just it's not a fact, a lie. and no one pushed back at him. and so so you can't possibly have a society, a healthy democracy, when people when there's no basis of common fact. and so so have to not simply the person they also have to fight

the of lies. and that includes think using every tool in our arsenal know media appointments and all of that. just you once you lose lose your foundation of facts and you know if you haven't reread 1984 lately it's all about that it's about just it doesn't matter true what we say why it is black white, black it's why you know so yeah so there's this funny thing that's happening that's on a very, very micro level, which is a lot of what this book is about. it feels like almost a catalog of macroeconomy choices that people are making throughout the and then that's overlaid with some of these very, very large cultural, i think across american culture and politics. but one thing that's interesting in thinking about the micro is piecing together how these kind of things that seem a little

bitty actually completely impede our ability as a country to pursue major national priorities. i used to be an energy reporter, so i see this much in climate, but i wonder if there's specific examples because it's helpful ground the discussion kind of in the here and now of what are tangible ways in you see this preventing american americans with very good intentions from doing actually what needs to be done. it's a great question. for the big things to happen. people need to see that things can happen, you know, because it all depends to some level, say, climate change or mutual that you're not going to squander money on ridiculous theories or something. so so there has to be some kind of elusive and sort of connection between ability to run a school or to or do or to figure out how to deal with the homeless people, the neighborhood and all of the things we're not doing. you know, and the big things we

need to i mean, climate change involves, it seems to me, to different, very kinds of two different kinds of choices. one, it involves the ability simply to make choices is like a built in transmission line, which we don't even have the authority to do. that's what i'm writing about. it also involves a value judgment about. it involves redirecting social resources to towards towards climate. i mean, going to cost a lot of money to do some of the things we need to do with climate. so, so in order make that value judgment and elect a leader who will do that. i think there needs to be some confidence that that the government deliver. and if it isn't working out that it can adapt. right. i think that that's key to it is that people feel like they have many decades of watching the government, you know, particularly within the republican party and watching government fail and fail again. and without what talking about is very in the weeds reform in

some ways to pull back the laws that government will continue being ineffective. yes and just to be clear, what i'm talking about is not deregulate. i mean, there is a lot of really stupid regulation that probably needs to get changed or eliminated, but it's not deregulation. it's about making regulation work. so to that. so donald trump has this whole operation which people may be of so that he can really hit the ground running next year should he be elected, that the people within cabinet will be prevented. they have plans that they can implement and. one of the more aggressive plans is for civil service. and you've written a lot about civil service and this is the most dramatic service reform probably we see in 50 years. so to what extent do do his ideas as they have been outlined, solve or compel the problem? first of all, it's my fault. i wrote an essay a review article five years ago arguing

that the civil service reform act and key places was unconstitutional because article two of the constitution gives the president power to decide who who should work for it. and that essay radical at the time there were this six months, everybody accepted it. the trump administration called me and said, would you like to work on civil reform? and i gracefully declined. and and so he came up this idea that would replace he would make all the top senior civil servants basically politically accountable and and and there does need to be more political accountability. there has to be. and in my view, however his idea is simply say, you're fired if somebody doesn't do exactly what he wants, what's needed to make government is not the putting. so executive control over the top people. it's giving executive control to those people over the people underneath them. so the dysfunction of government

is the inability of the 14th and 15th to manage to manage their departments. i mean, there lots of dedicated, really smart who work in the federal government delegated their lives to, you know, you name it health the weather department or whatever and it and they're the biggest fans of the stuff i'm talking about because i'm about giving the authority to manage their departments. so trump sort of has it backwards. i'm working with francis and don kettle and some others, and we're going to have a workshop in two months on redesigning the civil services in a way that actually does restore accountability. but much more importantly restores manageability to the government. so i want to ask you about something that i remain confused about and you, and i'm sure other lawyers in the room could help me understand it, which is we had this argument in the supreme court last week on the chevron case, which is, you know, i think over 90, something like that, as many supreme court

supreme courts that have relied on chevron as as precedent and 17,000, i think, in lower. right. so there's a very well-established case which is about the executive branch's ability to interpret congress's intent in statute and that power risks primarily with executive branch or with the judiciary. and that really is about, you know, in the weeds of once you have statute, how does it then effectuated into law and i was covering the affordable care act at the time it was being implemented and i went through, you know, thousands and thousands of pages, regulatory guidance, proposed rulemaking, all that stuff and those details really, really matter to, you know, microwaves in in ways that you describe your book. so how if the supreme court overturned chevron, what would would it be a huge deal? not as big as i think it would be. well, i think they will overturn i think it will be on a of 1 to 10. i think the impact be a three.

and and the reason won't be much impact because because chevron is about deciding whether the agency makes the interpretive decision or a court can make the interpretive that actually the agency will make the interpretive decision. the question is whether the court in reviewing has to give a presumption to the agency and whereas what i'm writing about here is nobody can make a decision at all. you know, you can't get a permit, you can't maintain, you can try and document no decision. so it's chevron's deciding who should make the decision. my as a lawyer tells me that when there is an interpretive issue, even people with different ideologies, tend to land in the practical place. in other words, they go. so i think it will make a difference, but i don't think it will be a tectonic difference. i so i'm not a lawyer, but i

like to assert opinion arbitrarily and i think it's more like a six because particular with the makeup of this court and i think that's probably why you see, that's part of the reason why you've seen erosion in trust in the court is that there is a sense that justices are deciding based on their personal preferences rather than what is just reasonable. the most notable display, this, which i thought was very silly during oral arguments, is justice gorsuch i probably shouldn't say in a room of people who work for the supreme court are here before the supreme court, but he was talking about, you know, there's a lot of judicial modesty in changing being able to change your mind saying says this powerful life appointed supreme court clerk who supreme court justice but anyway, we'll see how. it plays out. okay. let me just modify my there will be high issues where will make the difference. yes the front page issues the chevron decision will make a

difference in 98% of all the nation's fees. do i think it will make almost no difference. okay. so moving on, because i want to leave time for other people to ask questions. one thing that you hear businesses say and again and increasingly governments say again, again is we want all of our decisions to be informed by data, want data driven decisions. they've been talking about this for a long time, but they finally have become better at deploying data to inform public policy in big ways and in small ways. and then now we have generative ai, which is set to completely transform the inputs into decision making on an organizational level. so what is the role for human in a world in these types of decisions that you're describing and human authority in a world where a.i. is increasingly deployed as a tool, either alongside or instead of humans judgment? very good question. i data is incredibly and largely

ignored by. congress in its oversight of the laws. you look at cbo reports all the time. you know the you know, 25 job training programs, not one piece of evidence that they do any things like that. i mean, so so watching ten is it's a place that has ignored data, you know, for years. so it's an important tool but data and metrics in general can take a life of their own just like rules. so they have to be applied in context and they have to be applied with the values of whoever has responsibility. hey, ai is is data exponential? you know, it's actually giving you proposals of how to do things and but ai doesn't values that can trust and and i can't. i can't take into account all the different trade offs to trial and error, you know, all

the many things that are needed to make something successful and make people feel good about themselves, about what government is doing, including own agency. you can't just say, okay, we're going to do whatever it says. and people, you know, be like brave new world or, you know, if people have no role whatsoever. so, so heaven help us if a.i. is let loose without people in charge it with the job of their values to figure out what a.i. does. i mean, it's just really it's a powerful tool. but but i can't conceive of a situation where where the tool can supplant the sense of of of right and wrong and proportion that that that's important in all choices. you know, the we sort of this.

but the human accomplishment is incredibly it is really to be a good waiter. you have to have there's a book written this by the mind it where you have to have a high emotional quality that figure out what people's needs are. you've got to play that back and forth. it's really it's hard. it's it's almost impossible both to be a good teacher. i mean, a teacher, you've got to engage the emotions, the attention of the students. there is a great book called the moral life of schools by some people at the university of chicago, where they four weeks in a classroom. they talked about little choices that people make the teachers make that enabled them to get to trust in the attention of their students and. all these systems mean. so the conclusion this book is, is that we're suffering from system failure all the craziness that's going on domestically or to me are symptoms of failure where people people don't feel

free to do what i think is right. we can't run the schools. we can't run the government. and we need to have a national over over that. and what's needed to to to fix it because life is too complicated to extrude it through the system, through the eye of a legal needle for every daily. okay. do have i have other questions to ask you but anyone in the room have questions they'd like to pose. and we have someone with a microphone. so if you just wait. yes yes, yes. if you pass first to the man in the glasses and then to this gentleman. yes professor abner green, out your gratitude for him. i've known philip for a long time. i want to ask you about the question in the in the education sector. i asked you to drill down a little bit on this. you talk here and then your book about, the need to empower institutions. but in let's just say in public, there can be sort of a nesting of of authority from the state board of education to the local school to the principal to the

teacher in the classroom. it's one thing to say the teacher in, the classroom should have, you know, within the curriculum that said a lot of authority it could be another thing to say the principal or the school board should have more of that authority how would you come out on that kind of question? you know, i think these corrals is how i think of organizational structures in law itself. it's a corral. you have principles and values and then people are free that, you know, the teacher is free within that corral of whatever the curriculum and all that kind of stuff i think school boards and there's a lot of data on this are not so great at managing schools so so so i think in designing a structure for schools you need to have more authority for teachers a lot more authority for for principals need to have checks and balances like teacher parent committee to make sure that a that a proposed terminate is a

done for ulterior purposes, you know, that sort of thing. but school should probably be more along the lines of picking principal and, you know, setting budgets and that sort thing. they shouldn't be involved in the managed because it gets too politicized. you don't think the state legislature should be setting granular curriculum? i they should actually set. the curriculum. no, no, of course they shouldn't. and i mean, you know and there should be and, you know, and there should be a lot. but there should be a lot more community in all of this, not state legislative, but community input. michael meyers on the president, new york civil rights coalition. my question is related, is there anything in this book on the campus, the restriction, the limitations on campus, free speech, particularly in terms of how there are regulations and laws that restrict students free

speech. and the three presidents, including the president of harvard president of university of pennsylvania. they got hoisted on their own petard because they couldn't speak freely in answers to. a house members question. right. i heard about that. yeah. my to you is, what do we do about free speech rights on the campus? okay, great. everybody. it's a great question. and i'll sort of answer it the same way, which it a university needs to have a value structure, you know, academic excellence, including free speech. but i don't think first amendment in my view and it shouldn't necessarily be first amendment free speech, it should be. i don't think people should be able to stand on so soapbox and say death to whatever. i mean it's just beyond the, in my view, bounds of civility of the university. i think all those situations are examples of breakdown of institutional authority, where the people running the institutions didn't actually

enforce the guidelines that protect everyone's speech. harassment should be tolerated. those people should be suspended. you know, and the irony, of course, is in the name of freedom, the activist take away everybody's free speech. there's no free speech. you know, you beat your foot. you'd be a fool to say what you really think can happen. so. so that's a breakdown of institutional authority. and and i think the universities are getting it back. i mean, this is hopefully the nadir of that situation. we have one, two and three. thank you. jonathan. yeah. they've got a freedom in the pen. jonathan freed and pen america work on free speech issues on campus and so it very much relates to this. so one of the ideas that circulating a lot now is that the answer to the problem with public institutions schools in, universities in particular and other agencies is this idea of political neutrality that is

very interesting. right. the notion that the university itself itself, an institution, ought to be neutral on all political issues of the day, on academic department, ought not to take any kind of political stance or position and is on one hand being pushed by an act like an effort, quite literally to suppress. but on other hand, by an effort to stop some suppression right to allow more speech. and i would be really curious to hear how you think about what talking about here in terms of values and the importance of of judgments by, you know, people are in positions, but accountability and how that squares with some of these proposals to kind of mandate even state legislature mandating that neutrality in institutions. yeah, i don't think there's any such thing as political neutrality. i mean, i think every every judgment involving it all evolves has some political aspect to it's what you believe,

how you're going to run the institution and such. so so i think a principle of a university accepting a wide range of political viewpoints maybe even encouraging that among your faculty which they don't seem to do. but but but but i think neutral ality is to, you know, all these kind of quick fix phrases, you know, like zero tolerance rules for schools we're not going to tolerate guns or some first graders suspended for bringing a little toy gun. you know, i mean, you know, everything involved, application of judgment and university cannot be run value free. and that will inevitably have some political ramification. and and in my view universities can decide where that is within reason for themselves. hi, mr. howard.

mr. howard's known me my entire life, quite literally. i'm going back to early in the conversation where you talk about trust. and i'd like to focus on media and news for a moment, because what we're talking about is rebuilding institutions. and with consolidation, news media as well as the withering away local print media, our ability to communicate and create trust in communities, is dying on the vine. and so how can we either rebuild that reconstitute? i mean i'm not sure how we get there, because if everything from universal disney or, quite frankly, the new york times, there is no local accountability. right. it is a very good question. i think there are two problems. one, there is a consolidation of big media. it is lose for newspapers and are a challenging business model because advertising is sort of largely disappeared. but, you know, the problem is

not just that there's a consolidate is that there is a balkanization. so now what you have is for four nuts on either side. you know, you have media that only talks to you know, they're all their echo chambers and there are entire, you know, universes of millions of of certifiable, you know, in these little pods and they convinced themselves that a fact is not a fact. and and i think that's a serious problem. i don't. i don't know what the answer is, other than to create a framework where people where we get public leaders who aspire to moral authority, who most people trust. i would have thought the answer is subscriptions to economist. but we have our no. just here.

yeah. unfortunately, you don't have a magic wand to implement all of the framework for this flourishing society. i mean, how do? you know. well, because i've known you for a long time. okay, there you are. so he was far ahead of me in the law school class. way far ahead. so you don't have the magic wand. so how what is the timeline for implementing this framework for convincing folks to implement this framework? and is it too late? first of all, it's never it's never too to try. secondly, you know, the change happens in ways that nobody can predict. it's in the nature of the change that the political scientists who study change, talk about, punctuate that equilibrium. things go along for a long time, then it falls off a cliff for reasons you know, because upton

sinclair, a book about how discussing the meatpacking plants are and we get the we get the progressive era. so i think what's needed now is something the equivalent of the progressive era, which a doctrine of, let's say, fair that everybody took granted and the courts all embraced the fact. and in one decade it was gone. so to the the order the only order i can think of, which is not the only order is is to try to make system change system failure in system overhaul a part of the 2024 debates just get it in the public you know get that i'm not necessarily for a third party candidate but i'm for the threat of a third party candidate because maybe can talk about this, you know, and get some attention for it. and then if you ever were able to build up the momentum to to to do change the way it happen, you could never get congress to

rewrite 250 million worth. you would do you had versions, base closing commissions or simpson-bowles. you get experts. i volunteered to run for free who would rewrite area by area. the the regulatory structures based on a more of a constitu principle of goals principles and allocations of responsible living. you do it one more one and subjected to give it to congress for up or down votes. and that's the only way you've ever had big change the way napoleon did. it's the way the uniform commercial code was more or less in this country in the fifties the way justinian did it, you know, 1500 years ago. so bismarck, you know, so when the law has a tendency to become a mess because, it just grows on itself. and that's happened in this country for 50 years. it's really it would take 10,000 lifetimes to straighten the tango. i actually think it is legally

impossible to give a permanent for a transmission line. there's so many conflicting statue and laws and so many layers of jurisdiction and so so we need to replace it draconian. i think we cannot be led out of this crisis because you elect whoever want to elect mother theresa tocqueville, you know, whoever into the white house, their feet are stuck in 150 million words of legal. so that they have no authority to do this. you have to change the structure. okay. last question. okay nick gillespie with reason magazine. phil i love the book. i think it's not only your shortest that you're best question for you, though. but is it really good? well, you know, it's all relevant on the state. you know, the four biggest states are california, new york, florida and texas, california

and new york. democratic majority or super texas and florida are republican majority held. people are leaving places like new york and california in droves to to texas and florida. and yet, i think particularly a new york perspective, from a libertarian perspective, which i share, i see some things there that are good and other things that are atrocious. but are those models of governance that actually fit into your concept of giving people more meaningful choices, their life, more accountability politically? are they, you know, an alternative or a vision of, a flourishing society? it's interesting. so, you know, i'm not an expert in florida or texas law clearly don't have the level of taxes or the or the kind of of bureaucratic tangle that that that affects states like california and new york. so so that's good.

but don't nor do they have great schools, you know, and lotteries so that they still suffer from what i'll call this philosophy problem. you know, you still even in those states to to create systems that are that are rooted in on the solid foundation of human responsibility, in which people are accountable. and you still have a lack of accountability in in those systems. so there models. there are a few i talk about in the book, but not that many because this problem that we've built into ourself, you know, just like we've we've, you know, every time there's a complication in we write another regulation in law of straighten out the complication which creates a new complication. so this is, you know, literally impenetrable. so we just have to, again, not like any addict, we have to acknowledge the problem. right. and the is that