economy based on ideological fantasy rather than what works i think the military right now is like we're the biggest military in the world what are we going to do with 10% more like then it goes back to fear and i did that if you throw more money at the military we will be safer and it's like what are we not say from and in my experience it's white men with guns and male violence generally and the opium epidemic and health crises in climate change and stuff and that's when the i find interesting is that this kind of bait and switch fear game, but the nea, i know will be a great symbolic victory and it's also about the people being crushed that's me, possibly you all although not nearly as pencil necked. so, you know, it may or may not

happen, but it's also something republicans have wanted to do for a long time and now they are trying to live out their fantasies and their fantasies are mostly destruction as we make you go watch this and other programs on my netbook tv.org. >> welcome to the commonwealth club. i'm chair of the humanities forum. i would like to welcome our live audience here in san francisco and also are c-span audience today. ..

.... .... >> we have some of us who as teddy roosevelt once said we are in the arena. our face is covered with dust, blood and sweat and then he said you have out of the way up in their ivory towers the academics who are watching the battlefield

and then when the battle is over they come down on to the battlefield and shoot the wounded. and then he proceeded to say we have three expert marksman on our panel. i will have to shoot a couple people here not in the audience but in history. my co-author and i, gordon loyd and i like to go back to come back. woo we like to go back into the history to see what we can learn and bring tat back to policy today.

we spend time in the good deal and one of the speeches in good day was delivered here 85 years ago. i will be responding and a little late who what roosevelt said here at the commonwealth that day. when i would ask my mother about her sports teams she would say they are up and down, they are up and down. and i thought that is true of rugged individualism. it has had enemies over the years. particularly during the progressive era. there was an economic critique and that continues through today and i would say there has been a

critique of rugged individuals. and we will look at those. it has ups and downs and people would say it is alive and people who would say it is dead. we offer you at the beginning of our book, this matrix where you can decide yourself where you would place rugged individualism. would you say it was dead or alive and wherever you place it would you say that is a good thing or bad thing. president obama referred to rugal individualism as part of america's psyche but felt it was a largely a bad thing. and then i would say dr. loyd and i believe rugged individualism is only alive if barely and it is good it is alive and would be good if more robust. there have been different people

in history and today who are in different places on the chart. we in the book sort of address this in two different ways. we try looking at the political realm and what that has done for and against the idea of rugged individualism and we look at the int intellectual ideas. let me try this again. take off my giant watch to keep track of thierm and go back a moment in history. individualism was very much planted i would say inamerica's dna at the founding. chesterton said america was the only nation founded on part of a creed and part of the creed of america's founding was individualims. i would say if there is nothing else you remember about individualism this describes it

right here. the founders of this country no longer wanted to important decisions about their lives to be made by churches or kings or queens or the social class end of which you were born but they wanted to make the key decisions of their own lives as individuals. that was the founding idea, if you will, of rugged individu individualism. we want a country where we are free to make the key decisions about our lives. so the declaration of independence talks about individual rights. how king george abused people's individual rights and that was the purpose of founding this country was so people could pursue life, liberty, happiness. and the constitution sort of its

companion document, if you will, very much drafted toward protecting individualism. i speak in part of the first ten amendments, the bill of rights. which is a list of individual rights that the drafters of the constitution thought and needed to be protected mostly from the dangers of their own government but there are parts in the main body that are about protecting the individual rights. there are balances of power, separations of power, all to keep the government or majority actions from getting together and taking away people's individual's right. stated in the declaration, guaranteed in the constitution and now entering its golden era of rugal individualism on the american frontier. and the american frontier is not just a place. it is not just a location. a geographical place.

but it was a whole spirit and ethos of the time. so a journalist who came to the country in the 1800s and wrote about democracy in america wrote about the variability of land, the vast expanse that allows people to find elbow room and relocate when they want to is part of what makes democracy work and allows individualism to flourish. we felt that this expansion, this wilderness he had in america was part of democracy itself. an academic at the university of wisconsin, fredrick jackson turner, wrote quite a bit about the american frontier and in particular, 1893, he wrote the frontier thesis and he said america is not just different by reason of geography but it is a

whole wilderness ethos that has grown up in america. people gathering together fishing, hunting and building their own houses fosters a sense of rugged individualism. we did not use the phrase as i will share in just a moment. i make a note here that the frontier did include, however, collaboration. sometimes people say well, you know, they were not really rugged individuals because they had wagon trains and they built huts together and collaborated and that is absolutely the case. but i think the key is rugged individualism means that you have the freedom to join these groups. theywere not mandated to build each other huts. but these are things people consented and wanted to do and saw value to do. i would not make the mistake

saying rugged individuals never collaborate and we will talk about that more when we come to america today. talk about hay day, the wilderness and daniel boon wanted more hay day. rugged individuals came under attack from those progressives. in 1890, if you want to put a date on it, the american census bureau, the u.s. census bureau, said it would no longer count migration to the west. that we had reached the pacific ocean and that was the end of the migration west so we are no longer going to keep track of that. the frontier was in effect closed dow in 1809 according to the census bureau. so the argument of the progressives was this is going to create a change in our

country. it is not necessary for us to band together and live in cities and we will have to have more government and regulations if we are going to live together this way. in fact, we will need to look to europe more as an example because europe has been living with limits and boundaries much longer than we have. and then the attacks became more focused. charles beard wrote an essay called the myth of rugged american individualism. i say president obama must be channeling his inner charles beard when he said you didn't really build that. you didn't build the roads and infrastructure that was needed. and the reaction was i did pay the taxes that built those and that should count for something. but his central point was government really builds a lot of what you need. that was the argument charles

beard made. he said business people want a lot of government help and makes a list of 15-20 things business people wanted. bridges, canals and railroads and so forth. he calls it the myth of rugged individualism. another educational professor, called it ragged individualism: he said thank goodness. we have reached the end of the frontier and move to the west because we can get rid of this ragged individual which has been a curse on our society. in that same time frame, rugged individualism had some defenders. ironically, the person who coined the term was herbert hoover. i think if you read the essay i mentioned about the frontier

thesis my fredrick jackson turner, he should have named it. he described it in great detail. it was left to herbert hoover to call the american system as he said a system of rugged individualism. this was important to hoover because if you remember your history, hoover had spent most of his career up to that point as a mining engineer in various countries around the world. especially during and after world war i, he led major food relief efforts in europe especially belgium. he was a national hero in belgium because he saved them from starvation. when hoover came back from europe, he said i am really glad to be back in america because over in europe they are taking on all of these various forms of totalitarianism.

they are becoming socialists, fascist, communists, and all these collective totalitarian ideas and he said i am glad to be back in america where we have the american system of rugged individualism. then he would say this is not a laws affair because people have an opportunity to enjoy their individualism. so hoover coined the term rugged individualism. then the new deal, franklin roosevelt's new deal, became i would say a near death experience for individualims because roosevelt felt part of the problem and indeed part of

the economic problem he thought that was causing the great depression was rugged individ l individualism. business people, the economic types on wall street and new york who ran the businesses out of their own selfishness. so, herbert hoover said when roosevelt and hoover ran for president in 1932, he rightly said i think this isn't a contest between two men but between two governments. roosevelt wants to move away from individualism and wants a different system. there is -- his new deal is a different system. and the american system versus the new deal. the new deal was more central government planning, emergency measures, government growth, all

of this was part of the new deal roosevelt would bring along. the way gordon and i characterize it is forgotten man and the rugged individualism. those are two cartoon characters that capture the debate. roosevelt would say he need to replace this. we have turned our back on all time for rugged individualism and we are focusing on the forgotten man as the focus for policy.

we argued the new dime is the paradigm for the economic policy today. we live under the new deal. interesting, in the 1920s, you had a series of presidents who try to roll back the government growth called by world war one. eisenhower did not roll back the new deal measures and other presidents began to grow on it.

we talk about the great society revolution and the reagan revolution. lbj's great society where if possible we wanted to out roosevelt roosevelt. roosevelt was his mentor. one time we stopped at a campaign stop he said we are for a lot of things and against mighty few and that is a summary of lbj and the great society. we wanted to attack poverty, improve education, improve the cities, improve rural areas and wanted government very actively

improving our great society in every possible way. when he made the changes he did for health care to seniors, he nevertheless left room at the table for rugged individualism. under lbj's health care he added a safety net if you will medicaid and medicare for seniors who would need it. for others, but he had if your employer provides health insurance or you want to take care of you our own you can but we will create a safety net for those not rugged and who are not able to do that. we hold that up as a bit of a model. there is room at the table for both the forgotten man and the rugged individual. wouldn't we want to leave room at the policy table for both of these important icons of our history.

as i say, even lbj in this grandose did that. then the reagan regulation did a lot but rhetorically it didn't turn back the government as much as you would like. he moved policy and money from the federal government to state government in many ways but it was a rhetorical victory than anything. we have philosophical debates particularly in the realm of economics. i will skip forward to this debate today. the economists are still debating rugal individualism

versus the forgotten man today. today's version of it, if you will, i skipped over michael freedman and others from the 1960s and '70s but it is really led by income inequality which president obama called the defining challenge of our time. one of the things we think happens in our society today is that intellectuals come up on a problem they write about or talk about and then policy people grab ahold of that a. al gore and climate change is one of them. he went on the road talking about it and it became domestic and international policy and i

would say that is what is happening today on the economic side. thomas and his capitol of the 21st century income in inequality is becoming the latest version of should we do away with rugged individualism and move toward a collective set of ideas. he argues it is a bold book if you are not read it. it is maybe a little thicker than what you might want to tackleal. more education is not the solution for the forgotten man. we have to have income redistribution. the only fair distributor of money is the federal government and he argues the federal government should be spending more like 50% of our gross domestic product rather than 25-35 percent it spends now. it is a radical set of social ideas saying that really in fairness to take care of the

forgotten man education is not enough, safety nets are not enough, we need to redistribute money and the federal government needs more control of that. the second critique of rugged individualism comes from the realm of sociology. they argue what we always feared. individualism could become selfishness in america. people could withdraw from civic lights. they both argue that is what is happening. people are bowling alone and other forms of civic participation are going away and that needs to be re-dressed.

my own view would be and we point this out in our book that really there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. there is plenty of evidence that america is still the most philanthropic and generous country in the world. it is still the country that generates more churches, non-profits, social organizations than any other country in the world. i don't belong to a bowling league but i belong to other things. it may be the forms have changed. americans might be anti status but they are not really selfish. it may be americans don't like the government telling them what

to do with their time and money but they are not really selfish and general with their time. we have lots of policy debates today. one that still goes on about obama. the tough thing about obamacare is individual case. it was really based entirely upon the forgotten man. there is no room left for the individual. i remember when both friends, neither who is terribly political, each called me up and said dad, our health care was just declaired illegal and he said why is that? and they said it doesn't include pregnancy care but we are not planning to get pregnant.

and here is a case of individualism loosing out, if you will, in the policy realm. we close the book with hope for the future. it is good to have hope. i remember a bumper sticker there is no hope and in smaller letters but i could be wrong. we close our book with reasons to be pessimistic about vinyl individualism and optimistic. the political climate doesn't seem to be helpful to individualism. it seems to us that individual liberty has become a little bit of an obstraction.

this is especially through with liberalism. there is examples where individual liberty appears to be more pragmatic. i think individual liberty has become a little bit of an abstraction. and i think a further problem and i say this as a former college professor, but it is sort of the coddle of young people, if you will today. the so-called helicopter parents woo are very real. i have talked to lot of them. and we see the need for safe spaces or the need to avoid

microaggression or trigger words. we are developing people who are sensitive and the idea of individualism is not much encouraged for them. reasons to be optimistic. gordon and i think that we are entering new frontiers. immigrants with interested in rugged individualism. they want to start businesses and build a better life for their children. in many of the immigrants communities, we see people who

are really engaged in and interested in the individualism offered here. the question that will arise in our q&a period but what does donald trump mean for individualism. and like anyone else, i can only say we are not sure. do you remember the very first tweet, we have to study presidential addresses but presidential tweets, the president's first tweet was about the forgotten men and women, he said, who have been hurt won't be forgotten again.

roosevelt's forgotten men were the idea big business was running over people and the common man, if you will, needed the power of the federal government to check the power of big business and allow the forgotten man to have that protection. we think trump's forgotten men and women are a little different. that is the forgotten man donald trump is concerned about. the forgotten men and women who are not being well cared for. is trump interested in more individu

individualism or big government colle collectivism? we see a little hope for the future because young people are living on very different frontiers if you will. i have three children in their 30s who all spend more time on their own in their own rooms than i did. interesting they are connected to other people with various aps and tools at their disposal. this life of network individualism they seem to be more interested in this. the second hopeful aspect of the new frontier we see is on the business side, young people seem more interested in doing their

own thing than in joining the big new york company and working there for 50 years and retiring. to do something on the social side of their lives and very different from the old business school aspirations of move to new york and join a big company or big investment firm. so we see on both social media lives and greater interest. we don't know how well that will translate to their political lives because they say they want more individualisms but we have crazy pools saying young people are more and more interested in socialism. there is a little disconnect it seems between individualism lives and the political simss that protect that and an

interesting socialism. at the end, we turn to the bible. revelation chapter 3 and verse 2 where the writer is addressing churches that are dying and the author says that his advice to them is to awaken and strengthen what remains. that is the conclusion of our book. we need to awaken to the value of rugged individualism and find ways to strengthen it, to identify these liberty moments when our liberty is being challenged, to guard the constitutional protections and checks and balances and not to do away with them and we especially thing we need more civic education. when young people don't know who their senator is and think judge judy is on the supreme court, clearly if we are going to have a system of individualism that

protects the public we need more civic education. businesses have changed, social groups changed into more nimble networks and will government change? it is hard to see the government turning into something smaller. at the end of the day, we have a modest idea and as soon as doesn't rugged individualism deserve a seat at the policy table. i am in favor of a safety net. herbert hoover was in favor of equality of opportunity.

needness to say, i could go on. there is nothing worse than an author talking about his own book. i remember the essay the third grader was asked to write on the subject of socretes and wrote sentence number one he was a philosoph philosopher, he talked a lot, they poisoned him. i think it is always good to remember that. if you are the public speaker you can go on. >> one thing that is renewed over and over and in the early '60s, john kennedy called it the

new frontier and said we have to reinforce the equality opportunity of it. didn't have much time to do work on that and lyndon johnson took over. but the hollywood must have taken up on the imagery because the movie how the west was won came out with the stars and it was a way of mythology. when i was ten we went to houston, texas for a conference. they showed this on a huge screen in houston. everything in houston was huge. but there was a scene where jimmy stuart takes a barrel of gun powder into the crowd and it all explodes. the barrel is thrown into a fire, a huge explosion and the entire screen goes blank.

turns out lightning struck the building at the moment the scene was. so the whole audience of a thousand people was very dramatic. >> i think it is very true that rugged individualism is most encouragedand hospitalable with the west. but the west isn't the only frontier. john kennedy pointed to space as one example of a new frontier. and i saw the movie "hidden figures" about rugged

individuals who worked hard to make it work. in the end, although they thought they had the new idea. we think social media presents new ideas for young people and the world of work is an idea. >> cleary, individualism is a minority position so what do you think of different parts of american history, what percentage of the american population prefer rugged individualism to being taken

care of? in general, what would you think the percentage of people that engaged it it in it were? >> i would say when you survey people, poorer people are more in favor of this. they don't want to close off the opportunity they would benefit from that system. there is evidence that people like the freedom of opportunity, if you will, that you have in the system like the system of rugged individualism. what we are experiencing in our society, is once you have given people more than a safety net,

but a guarantee of something like health care then their opinion changes. obamacare was very unpopular until recently when it appeared it might go away. it is a current debate today. i think there is a middle ground where you can create a safety net and leave the opportunity. it has been eaten up by exceptions and hasn't worked as intend intended. that is our plea: can we find

policy to visit the rugged man and the individual man? >> that is very interesting. it seems to me a little bit that communist behavior in totalitarian states especially russia was during the depression and that is what welded the capitalism which is more stable and a combination of the two ideas. it takes care of society in different ways. >> to me that is an accurate read of history. it is consta constantly finding the right balance. elections are corrective

mechanisms. some of the early new deal initiatives were stopped by the early court and we had to go back to the drawing board. who would like to ask the first question? >> i have two quick questions. the first is you talk a lot about equal opportunity is an important part of the system where rugged individualism exists. can you talk about why there is an inequality of outcomes in society. is it a problem that rugged

individualism that has gone too far to create this inequality in outcomes where people are poor and essentially are not able to rise in social status and incomes and the second question is about what type of welfare system you would design to essentially have principles of individualism deeply integrated into that welfare system. as you know a lot of people have been left out in this economy and we have the labor force participation rates that are abyssml.

if we want people have a decent quality of life there has to be a welfare system in place. i agree welfare through disability is not working for these people. >> wow. if i could answer that i should be president probably. but you are addressing your first question. i will say in the inequality debate we are having these days we are missing a couple key points. the debate is a liting distorted if i may say. i remember taking a religion

class at stanford and the professor said heresy isn't the untruth but the overtruth. one heresy is difficult to clarify and that is to me the really important data would not be so much the inequality of incomes, if you will, but the income mobility. the income mobility possibilities in this country have been very high historically. the last one showed it was pretty good but dated.

so i think it would be good to understand more. i could get more behind income mobility than i could get behind outcomes making the same kind of income or salary. a second part of the debate that is distorted or lost is the problem is not at the upper 1% level. it is the bill gates and basketball stars and others that have distorted the charts. and of course, i mean, addressing that is problematic.

that is a part of the debate we don't have enough information about. i would love to see the income inequality debate a little sharper and a little clearer and focus on things we can really do. your next question is harder. if i were the czar of welfare and i think this addresses both people who have been in poverty for a long time and the newer members of the frustrated economic class that came out and surprised everybody and voted for trump in the rust belt and that is education is i think a fee can you.

by that, i don't just mean the quality of k-12 public education although that is part of it. and i couldn't be more conservative, i am not in favor of testing and all that. but we don't have the incentive for training people. we actually at the moment have a tax system that disincentivizes training. this is a more promising approach than others we have tried. it is a tough question and i don't claim to have all the answers. >> thank you for your talk. i am from south korea and always have this question that is rugged individualism you said it is like american media and does it work in other countries?

i used to train with u.s. marines and they were un -- republican and i feel like asia, for example, japan, has king and queen. and south korea is becoming a more socialist country because of the election we had two weeks ago. i believe it is not quite working in other countries and what do you think about that? >> i would say as someone who wants said that it is not so much it has been tried and failed but it hasn't been tried a lot.

one thing i think is interesting is a question of how could you build a greenhouse that would let democracy sprout and grow faster. well it is hard to do if you go into a country that is land locked and has a powerful economic system. of course, the morning i am trying to give is the herbert

warning so it can be nurtured and take care of other medians we need. >> can i quickly follow-up. what i was trying to ask with my first question about inequality of outcomes was more along the lines you were talking ability which is essentially mobility. what i am wondering is, is the

reason why, and this might be just a perception but i don't believe it is but mobility is extremely low among particularly african-american and poor communities and is this because of inexcess of rugged individualism where a certain group co-opted power to set-up a system where they are able to thrive or is the story more of some of rugged individualisms. can it create a system where there is a lot of money and power is concentrated? is there a need for every once in a while for the rugged individualist to be cut down to size so everyone can have that opportunity again?

>> i would say the answer is yes. in any kind of mixed system if you will or hybrid system you can have heresy, you can have one side or another of equation. i personally doubt that is the explanation for our inability to address problems of poverty. if that is correct, it is a super wealthy and that is not really stopping us in doing things in other places. the kind of people who can afford to go to the warriors game tonight are probably not draining money from the inner city. i think it is probably more we haven't come up with good solutions to problems of poverty.

hoover said we have equality of opportunity and i would say it is tougher to get now than it was in herbert hoover's day. if i wanted to boost rugged individualism, i think i would have to work on equality of opportunity for that hybrid to work. i think i am responsible for that. >> david, from personal experience or the book, can you address if you have seen correlation, or anti-correlation between maybe the strength of organized religion in the u.s. and rugged individualism. it would seem like religion encourages more interdependence and community. but a look at history might see that when organized religion was strongest in the u.s. that is when rugged individualism thrived. any correlation or thoughts there? >> we certainly argue in the

book that one of the roots if you will or part of the dna was religion, specifically christianity, and in that time, specifically a certain form of protestant christianity this was part of the dna in the country. a key part is man's individual accountability to god. that sure, you can elect or consent to join a search. we will not have state churches that everybody has to join or follow but in america you have freedom of religion, you could join a church by your own consent or not. if you join by your own consent you accept community activity but that is your own choice and decision. ultimately, religion in america has been more about man and women's individual

accountability to god. we think that is a strengthening if you will of individualism and has been a good thing generally and may be one of our challenges today. >> hi, i actually have like 18 questions to ask you but i will -- >> is our time about up, george? how do you see the psychological elements of rugged individualism existing in the turmoil we are seeing in washington where we have that individualistic president who is not being responsive to the checks and balances that were created i

think the example you give is very good and do we need obamacare as a man dated policy and i would imagine otherwise they may have left that out. but at the same time, it should probably be legal insurance companies to deny pregnancy care to women. there is another half to the whole. so individualism could exist and be helpful today. >> dr. loyd and i are work on my third back and the working title is how did public policy become war and not deliberation? that is why we describe what is going on in washington. it has become about winning and war. our current president is

encouraging that further. i would say congress has not been helpful. it takes a powder whenever there is big things to be done. i was working in d.c. a couple years ago when it looked like we will have a debate about what we should do in congress and syria. i not we will come together and deliver about this. what did congress do? they declared an early holiday to go home and campaign so they would not have to take any hard votes before the election and one of the congress men said in effect to the president just bomb the place and tell us about it later. you know, this is our system of checks and balances. i think the system has been broken for along time. and i think to restore any since of deliberation about the government we need to be strengthening that and i would love to see congress, even a republican congress, stand up

and say no to the president if he has bad ideas and sit down and work out better ideas. one thing you can say in favor of the current president is he does seem willing to negotiate and try to find a deal, if you will. so maybe they can take advantage of that. but, good question and i think big problem. >> yes, sir? >> just as a follow-up, the economists have a good explanation. they actually say that we have heavy -- and then we have bold captain.

gordon and i will have solutions in our next book. >> thank you very much. .... completely different. all across the board, as adults,