because i don't know it's done from nefarious purposes most of the time. sometimes it is what it is done for convenience sake, done out of laziness and done out of just this is what we need, dispersible to it, like a lego please, will snap a together. it's disappointing. >> all previous afterwards are available to watch online at booktv.org. >> now on booktv and its live coverage of the brooklyn book festival. over 300 authors will speak today from stages all around the brooklyn borough hall and will be live from inside the brooklyn law school. we've got all their discussions on hate, politics, immigration,

journalism, innovation and more. the full schedule is at booktv.org. first up it's authors talking about the state of the middle class. this is live coverage on booktv on c-span2. >> good morning. i'm mary alvin fullerton, to welcome all of you to brooklyn law school today and to the reading room which you are sitting in, and it's one of the multiple sites for brooklyn book festival programs going on throughout the day. i would also like to welcome the audience of c-span's booktv which is broadcasting today's panels live here it's a particular pleasure for brooklyn law school does to host a veryl day of brooklyn book festival programming. since the fso started in 2006

it's grown by leaps and bounds each year. almost a decade ago brooklyn law school opened its doors and invited festival events inside, and we're so glad we did. each year being an integral part of the festival helps us be an integral part of the intellectual -- the goes on here in the heart of brooklyn. this is one of america's premier book festival, the largest free literary event in new york city. more than 300 authors, more than, actually i don't know, hundreds of publishers, sorry. didn't do all my research there, and thousands of readers, coming together for encounters that are spirited, engaging and thought-provoking. the authors of today's panels will consider many critical topics, and just to give you an example of a few. they will be taught but economic

inequality, about the war in journalism and will be talking about among other things migration, a a topic near and r to my heart. given the fraught times that we live in, when the very concept of truth is under fire, events such as this, the free and open exchange of ideas and questions are more important than ever. it's wonderful to see you all through this morning, and it's encouraging that thousands of people will come to the brooklyn book festival today to celebrate the importance of books and ideas, to celebrate their power was forward, to move this forward as individuals, as communities, and as a nation. enjoy the day. i know you will. and now i turn the mic over to the moderator of our first panel, neera tanden. >> thank you so much and thanks for anyone to be here.

[applause] >> my name is neera tanden. in the president and ceo of the senate from work in progress which is a progressive think tank in washington but i'm really thrilled to be here with three incredible authors who are truly contributing to our understanding and how we address the challenges and our economy today. so i'm really looking forward to this discussion. we will have discussion up here for a bit of we also want tough questions from the audience. so just to do a quick introduction. alyssa is an award-winning journalist and author of squeeze which details the soaring cost that make it nearly impossible for many if not most working families to raise their kids. andrew yang is an entrepreneur and presidential candidate who wrote the war on no people to make the case that america should adopt a universal basic income. and i'm excited about that conversation and finally nathan schneider as a professor at the

university of colorado boulder and author of everything for everyone. he believes cooperatives can transform our economy, and look into all of that. before i get started as i understand it you can get the authors books at barnes & noble nearby, and he will also be signing their books immediately after this event. so let's just dive right in. i'm going to start with you, alyssa, to actually describe how you see the economy working and, in fact, punishing working families, and why families are so squeezed today. >> well, the main causes behind the squeeze from the many people spoke to, probably spoke to rent 100 people and different families in america over four years, housing costs, the cost of college which even public

college has doubled since 1996 and private exponentially raised, and finally daycare. that's one of the more complicated ones because as we know daycare workers are not particularly well-paid. so what is behind that. and the people i spoke to were also struggled with other things. the fact that so much work is not contingent many freelance part-time or piecemeal. it's weird hours of the night sometimes, right? just in time work so they're working in the middle of the evening and thus they had haveo to something that i discovered called 24 hour day cares. that means daycare early in the morning, late at night. and i embedded myself in one of those day cares. right now 9% of daycare in per se is being held in these long hours so that just indicates what's happened to peoples labor hours.

there's pressure of the cost and the stagnating wages but then it also, the way the labor is being, the terms it is being, whatever, the way these people working hours, working how they're working, what kinds of jobs they have? great. and you, you done a lot of work both on how the economy is transform as well as particular bold idea how to address. talk about both issues, physically how you see the fraction of the workplace, the way work is changing along the lines that alissa referenced, then your get to address it. >> share. so i'm going to quit a friend of mine eric weinstein who said that we did know that capitalism was going to get eaten by its son, technology. i've been a serial entrepreneur now the last 20 years and what of this is described in terms of peoples labor arrangement, 95 --

night 4% of jobs have been temporary contract, most of which do not include full-time benefits. the reason for that as a former ceo is that it's much, much more cost efficient not try to be a full-time employee and a to the health-care benefits. i've been a ceo. i've been in that situation and that situation is to multiply itself throughout the economy with the most valuable companies in our economy are trying to do more with less. the relationship between economic growth and success and hiring lots of people in treating those people well has completely broken down. american families are feeling that in the fact that wages have not moved, the middle class is getting gutted and our political feedback mechanism has also broken down which is given as donald trump. so donald trump became president because we automated way 4 million manufacturing jobs in michigan, ohio, pennsylvania and wisconsin from 2000-2015. my friends in silicon valley

know what we're about to the same thing to millions of workers in retail, truck driving a transportation, call centers, fast food and on and on to the economy. we're going to the great economic transformation in history of the world, and no one is addressing it. if you go to d.c. and try to talk about this no one is addressing it. so my plan to help us evolve to the next days of capitalism, human centered capitalism, is to take this gdp measurement made up less than one inches ago within figures that this is a terrible management or national well-being, we should include motherhood and paired it and should not include national defense spending which of course we ignored all of that, we need to evolve to the next set of a measurement that would correspond how we're doing as a society, things like median income and wealth and quality adjusted life expectancy, mental health, substance abuse and i am a parent, i have two young boys, what of whom who is autistic and so we should be looking at childhood success which was like

alissa and the mom said to do with his crazy health care system, imagine if our economy, like companies were rewarded if we help the children succeed. at the evolution we need and the first big step is transfer the notions of work and value in this country in the best way to do that simply putting $1000 a month into the hands of the american adult, every month, and that's the first big move on put makeup in as president. the thing i i want to suggest o you all is that is that our conversations are way out of date, where decades behind. our political system is decades behind. we can also feel that insensitive and we need to accelerate both society and our government board into 2018 and 2020 as fast as we can. the reason why i am so animated and you are all here today, there are two things. why does you know this economy is not working for human beings. that's why you woke up on a sunday and decided panel. and number two, you know that

it's going to be up to us to drag, to drag our institutions for because our institutions are not designed for this. >> great. nathan, andrew offered a criticism of current day capitalism, which is the shareholder value model of companies in which the companies are basically reducing costs through labor, so reducing how much they spend each individual employee because they are entirely focused on shareholder value. your perspective is to switch that as well. so andrew offers one solution set, you offer nothing. could you describe your view of cooperative capitalism and have model of co-ops can also address this fundamental problem of capitalism, which is that is undervaluing the contributions of human beings? >> thank you. i'd like to start by quoting one

of the major co-op activist working in this country right now, ed whitfield, and he says in conversations about basic income which i think of a lot of relationship to this conversation, that he says when his ancestors demanded 40 acres and the mill, it would many of the means of production, not the means of consumption. they were demanding not just capacity to spend someone in the economy but the capacity to really control the economy, to be a part of the productive process deciding what is produced and how. also i think it's really important to recognize the way in which what we've been living the last ten years has been an accountability crisis. it's been a crisis built out of the fact that the largest come some of the largest and most powerful companies in our country were not accountable to

the people who they were claiming to serve. in this case, mortgage lenders mortgage lenders, banks and ultimately they were able to survive and even thrive while millions of people lost their homes and the jobs in this because those companies were accountable upward to wall street and investors rather than downward to the companies they serve, or to the people they served or claimed to assert. there has been to american history and the history of the industrial world as well a counter tradition, a thriving powerful tradition of cooperative enterprise, i kind of business in which the people who are using the business are its owners and have a say in governance. so this is a credit union versus a bank, credit union is a financial institution owned by the people who deposit in it.

this could be worker owned businesses. this could be actually purchasing cooperatives of small businesses, enabling small businesses to thrive like ace hardware, which enables the hardware store down the street from me to continue competing with home depot. this is a kind of economy that is shaped our world in ways that we don't appreciate. it's also a hidden consensus in our political landscape. this is something that actually the republican and democratic party platforms in 2006 were advocating. this is something that has just been advanced in the main street employee ownership act that was passed just a few weeks ago, and we have an opportunity in this moment of incredible polarization tonight around a kind of inversion of the economy back toward or maybe even for the first time toward the people who really depend on the goods

and services that we are producing. >> andrew, i wanted to ask you to respond to that. because i think one of the issues about universal basic income is, does it actually address the way capitalism is not working for people itself? it definitely addresses how the country and the social structure can basically better addressed peoples needs but it doesn't -- one of the criticism is it doesn't reorder how companies themselves work and treat employees. i think that is also a through line of all this is work as well as i would love for you to respond to that which ideas and views. >> sure. if you imagine a town of 50,000 people in missouri right now and let's think there are not that many businesses that serve them or if they are, you're like

chain restaurants, then let's say president yang comes in and passes a freedom dividend and everyone there gets $1000 a month every month and that puts an additional $600 million in purchasing power into the hands of that town every given here. do you think think the people e town are going to start new businesses? do you think they're going to consume more of the means? do think they're going to have many, many new touch .2 .2 buid itself determine in many respects what kind of institutions that you want to support? think about cooperative ownerships, like what are the odds of people coming together and saying instead of applebee's, like let's start like a co-op, farm to table. so the issue is like how can you possibly try and regulate cooperative ownership on top of this current ultra corporative system we have? that's been almost and positive. what's much more possible because capital is something we can freely control and there's

nothing stopping the owners and shareholders of a nation from declaring citizens a given. people of alaska have done for 36 years and that's a deep red state, i can service date and a look at the state gets between one and $2000 a year and it's greeting thousands of jobs and improving chilled his health and nutrition, reducing income inequality and it is wildly popular. so the issue, people at a universal basic income and say it's -- people just belike relied upon it. what they don't realize is what people need is money in the hands to build exercise their own agency and autonomy and self-determination. that's something we can make happen. it's the most realistic thing we can make happen as a society because there's nothing stopping us from doing it. as my friend andy stern said to me months ago, our government is terrible at many, many things. but it is excellent at sending large numbers of checks to large numbers of people promptly and

reliably. what we have to do is leaning to one of the few core competencies our government has demonstrated excellence at and then put purchasing power and has a people so they can stop cooperatives, so they can spend time with the children and so we can build a more human centered economy. >> i'm going to go to you, alissa. one of the issues that basically allows i think the nation's point is that allows the banks and the giant google and the giant facebook's and the giant companies that exists today, the status quo would permit for them and think the question of accountability for corporations is what is the model to change that structure? i will come back to you, andrew, for a response but i want to bring alissa into this conversation because i think your work and the book "squeezed" really demonstrates the impact of the change economy, the fact that companies

are so much more focused on shareholder value and much less focused on the experience of their employees, and invest less in the experience of their employees. i would love if you could really just share both your thinking about this conversation so far but also the experience, one of the case studies of what it's actually like for working families today. >> yes. i'm thinking why are these two things mutually exclusive? you could have some sort of universal basic income and that also something like platform cooperative is an which we try to create worker ownership. for instance, i spent time with the domestic worker who was participating in a platform cooperative. i think it was called -- it's turned into something else, up and go. and all of their own labor as a domestic worker or a cleaner, and that gave them, this app

that is now controlling a lot of domestic workers labor. it's a giant hand, that's the representation of a the task rather, a little rabbit running from it. we need to humanize this of people can own a part of their gig work. i can get some stories about this because i i spent some tie anything schoolteachers who drive uber on the side. >> after school and on weekends at a stoplight they are grading and you are like this is teaching? this is unionized? >> america 2018. >> yeah. and then about it uber had a program called teachers try to future, that they were trolling for teachers and nurses pick a nose like this last-place with a

middle class has value as as a corporate medallion that they can string around speech what the timeframe you guys think of automating subscribers way. >> with right. my friend doug rush says drivers are now research and development for uber. okay, how's everybody going to respond to like a curve industry. but the human on it. i think uber for instant or company like that, if they give the teachers who are earning sometimes 30, $30,000 a year a little bit of ownership, this is completely fanciful but if they did that was a basic income arrangement would will change the lives of one of the schoolteachers who let kids, was unable to -- >> or we could pay teachers more. >> we could just pay teachers more. you get into these interesting kinds of things and i got feedback on this like in california. teachers will be making $69,000 a year. sometimes a senior teachers do

but that's not enough in the san francisco area. there was a recent study done, there was a finding that $117,000 a year for family makee you lower income in the san francisco area. this came up after my book came out and i remember people laughing when he saw $69,000, to give me that, whatever. that's getting a select 130, and you know, how could they possibly be struggling? then you look at the economy's of the cities, which are as you would say also controlled by google and control by companies that make them unlivable and rent is unaffordable but i thought of the stories in your. as a set i better myself and 24 hour day care which was, i was there when the kids were trying to put themselves to sleep at night on these pallets. there would be little mats, 15 of them resting, like six or

seven at night. these moms, single moms often but sometimes people married parents coming late, late and had to pick the kids up. the reason that do this is there each working different jobs and the employers often make conglomerates were trying to keep them working hours than two under i think it's under 29 hours speedy 30 hours a week. >> so they didn't have to pay for health insurance. so that meant that you given jobs they were cobbling together that meant they were not seen the kids. i like in the book, it's like we work all the time for families we barely know and barely see. that was the feeling that i had and it was just, you know, spending a lot of time with people on the edge like this can many have done everything right and is filled with self blame really made me angry. >> nathan, i want you to respond to that and we talk about the difference between a company

that is a cooperative and how does it treat its workers, and the differentiation between model and what we are seeing to basically seeing the kind of private sector response to that, how families are coping with it. but if you could describe how cooperative streets are in place in a different way because they're their cooperatives that would be really helpful. >> the situation that alissa and andrew both describing is one in which the social contract has frayed. the idea of the last may be century, maybe portion of the century that wage labor would be the source of flourishing for society has really collapsed. we see this in the statistics of clarity. the jaws of the snake where productivity keeps going up and wages are just flat. they are just not keeping up with what we producing as a

society. his recovery that we're seeing is a wall street recovery, it's not going to wages. set going to income. and what this points to his ownership, is really ownership is where the wealth is going and unless we tackle, unless we come in a sense, artist of ownership, i think were not going to solve these critical problems of inequality and lack of access that we're all talking about. we need to reinvent what we mean by ownership company this cooperative tradition is one set of really awesome shoulders that we can stand on in doing that. in developing platform cooperative, helping support projects like up and go which is available here in new york for worker speech what is the difference for the employee in a company that is cooperative versus -- >> they can vary a lot.

and that particular case, and a case of cooperative home cleaning, these are worker owners who own the companies that the work for. they are setting the terms. they're setting the floor, the lowest they can be paid. they're determined determine ts that they're expecting of themselves. they are experiencing a can direct self-determination. this varies across many different kinds of cooperative spirit for instance, the business like rei, the outdoor goods, the original crowdfunding, a bunch of people, few people in seattle want to buy a nice -- from germany so they pulled my and built this cooperative. the employees are not worker owners. they are working for the customers. this can mean very different things but actually that diversity in the cooperative world i think is important because it recognizes that we

are, economic activities take different forms. sometimes the operating as consumers and sometimes at stake ownership is important sometimes we operating as workers. some special among the new online platform co-ops developing a lot of them in bit different stakeholder relationships so the workers are on the board alongside the consumers and have to work out the problems together in the boardroom. >> i think if the term produce and consume at once and that kind of relationship is actually liked very much, we are all simultaneously consuming and producing from these apps. >> andrew, i want to come back to you and ask, you have a term called digital social credit in your book, and how d.c. this concept and how did you develop it and what does it mean? >> sure. so i started something called time banking that is in effect

about 200 committed around the u.s. how many of the effort of time banking? you would have. true. so time banking system of everyone's time has value and so if i do for nathan then i get a time dollar and that i can give it to neera and she do something for me so you create a whole new budget touch point for the common for a woman's labor has some valid and ends up strengthening those communities. it was devised by edgar khan who was robert kennedy speechwriter in the '90s. time the bank has not taken off in the u.s. in part because there is some administration all and resources. i was studying the issues we were facing. there are no would think spanking americans angry and despair written. and part of it is only before. >> to spatially has fallen to 60 2.0% which is the same level as el salvador and the dominican republic and right now because of the exodus of men from the

workforce were as we hear together almost one in five american men are prime working age between 21-30 has not worked in the last 12 months. i started digging into time banking because i was trying to figure out if we actually do automate ways three half-million truck driving jobs in the country next ten years and 30% of the malls close in the next four years and mcdonald's roles at self-serve kiosk in every location in united states by 2020 which hillary said they will do, so then you need to do a few dramatic thinks to create more touch point for the economy. the first thing is we need to put buying power into the hands of every american and this is the ownership model. if you are the owner and shareholder of the company you can declare yourself a dividend and where the owners and children of this country and we can declare ourselves a dividend. but in the next thing is to great touch pointer of the one time has value and so you look at time banking and you try to rev it up.

there are many, many things that are central to human experience that are monitored market right now does not achieve proper value or any value to. nurturing children, caregiving, financial sustainability, arts and creativity, journalism increasingly, volunteering in community, showing up to a book fair. just kidding. so then the question of how to try to reinforce that activity? people putting money into give a sense is the biggest step because and people do great things just because they have the freedom. but the second things you want to try to create reinforcements and touch point to get frank a lot of unskilled and out of the house. because by the data women are fine with their idol. women are awesome and when your item you are okay. when men are idle they do not do good things. >> when women are idle they are not idle. unlike -- [laughing] >> that is well said. >> cleaning and taking care of the kids. >> the data about what idle 90%

promising, let's put it that way. it's like a progression of videogames, substance abuse, gambling and self-destruction. that's the data. the guys laughing because we know, so, and so the question, along went away saying we need to reinforce these activities. we pay lip service to it which is what we do now and then it which is continued to dwindle. number two, we start paying people might to do it. but then that ends up having really perverse outcomes in many, many respects. number three is you create a new currency and symbol, if you volunteer and the nonprofit said yes, you were here, then you get social credit. if you do something in your community, a mural, journalism, then you get the social credit and then the social credit has monetary value because president yang has made it exchangeable for dollars, but each exchanger for dollars and you get taxed on that make you said so you try to

find ways to use it that do not involve trading in for dollars. what you do? you trade with her neighbor the same with time banking system works. you trade it in for particular fenders and experiences. you can in the building this robust, positive parallel economy and social goods that is in public because we chemical ranting like i'm a 20 bucks. where you could do this with this new currency. that is who went to start pushing forward in because our communities are disintegrating from the inside out. >> andrew, if you believe in a digital social credit i guess there's a variety of options for dealing with the vanishing jobs. obviously there's universal basic income others have proposed his massive investment and jobs. we have deep social problems that capitalism isn't salty for like infrastructure, childcare, paid leave, long-term care, healthcare. and so why not actually just

have a large scale public investment in those areas that put five, 10 million people to work? other countries have experienced that. that's not a new model of capitalism. that's an existing model that plenty of other countries have experienced with. if you are willing to kind of have the government allocate value for a particular goods, why not have the government just invest? like instead of a teacher driving and uber you could just have teachers in the united states make as much as teachers in finland or south korea, and it would have to drive uber and could afford childcare. what's your response to that critique? >> i definitively you just said, neera. i have for higher teacher salary. for a massive infrastructure

investment. in a completely broken healthcare system where we spend twice as much as other industrialized countries with less results. someone said the difference between 25% and 35% is civilization and we need civilization emanate investing civilization. the only thing that i would hesitate on is that you shouldn't embark on his large-scale societal missions saying we will employ like x million people. we will explain people through infrastructure but the issue is you can't try to back into it because as someone who is running companies, like you would never send going to like, i'm going to know what number of employees i need before i know one of going to do. it's possible like if you build $3 trillion worth of of infrastructure in this country you might need 10 million people, you might need 12 laypeople. it's indeterminate but the issue is that you can't guarantee

people employment because there are many, many people, and we know this. if you have a child government bureaucracy, like its efficiency will tend to not be great. it's accountability tend not to be great and then you end up with a whole system of millions of americans working for some government bureaucracy doing work that they know it's not that valuable and will be justifying their own livelihoods because that's just what humans do. it would be much better to try and get those things done in as efficiently as possible, not saying we need 10 million people to do this. we need to get the job done. if it takes 10 million come by. if it takes 2 million come also fun. those of the 8 million people the great challenges building enough resources in communities so that people don't need to look to the government for a sense of purpose, structure or fulfillment and work. we need to broaden our vision of work and have the work that we all actually thin and want to do, in addition to a massive

public investment and all of the cuts we know we are underinvested and right now. >> great. we are going i'm going to do one more round with the fabulous authors and then i would want to ensure that we have questions on the audience. alissa, , i would ask about one particular concept that you described in your book called the motherhood advantage. obviously one of the reasons why we have discrepancy between what women and men make is because there are presumptions about mothers and how they work and how efficiently they work in the economy. so i would love for you to try to tell us how that is actually inverted. >> so to back up, there's a concept called the motherhood penalty. are the moms in this room? right. moms are paid less. they are considered incompetent

by any employee for each kid judge are paid a certain% but less statistically. so i started anything people for this book address book to the people i knew, they describe something different than the motherhood penalty. they described, they may been penalized at the workplace but they felt that after the kids they were sharper, smarter, better leaders. i stood looking at the social science and the science around this for "squeezed" and i found there was a study done by the federal bankruptcy in st. louis found that, they say 10,000 women and the found they were much more productive after the kids and they publish more. then before the kids. and then i spoke to sarah, a a scientist and better spoken i read craig kinsley is also studied this and this is a late scientist, and they both were suggesting that pregnant women and new mothers were better

thinkers, stronger, or potentially this is the case, this isn't always the case, and it was really interesting to me. i came up with this framework for, the motherhood advantage. and i just thought with all the moms that i do and how to internalize that. not just employers who i i hope read this book but also the moms who are probably reading this book if it yourself never going to work and they were thinking i'm actually going to get a sharper thinker. i'm going to be a better leader. there was a wonderful bit of scholarship on why women can sometimes be better leaders in the workplace after their kids. and that's they are leading toddlers and their leaving children and children have very different minds than we do, right? one of the terrorists i read said children's minds are open structures, and being able to deal with really irrational

things does pick very well for the workplace. it prepares you offered in with many different types of people and being flexible and using your time welcome right? like i'm writing in the intricacies of, i was in the edges of my daughters naptime, and then later when i was relieving the sitter, i would like to promote this concept so please go tell your friends, the motherhood advantage. tell your employers. >> awesome. nathan, i want you to talk a little bit about how we can kind of build this cooperative model and how it can break through. i think andrew had a slight critique which is it's hard for that model to flourish, right? it's pretty -- the experience of capitalism today which is really thriving on shareholder value.

and so how could you say we could really expand that? >> it's a question that i've been pouring my last years, it's a fun question actually. i work with a lot of folks who are starting new co-ops especially in the digital base, trying to build a new platforms to make data and work more accountable in the digital economy, and have a lot of trouble finding funding, finding financing. the pcs are not, 50 amount will not work for this because they want control. they want exponential returns. but it you are a farmer actually down the road from in colorado is one of $28 billion agricultural cooperative bank called co-bank and you can work with them and that's a financing institution that's been built in american agriculture, thanks to intentional developments built on popular movements in the late 19 come early 20th century,

those are the kinds of populace who were building other own power rather than resentment. and they developed a farm credit system that enabled cooperatives to access to capital. and then the electrical cooperatives are one of these great stories where, my grandfather was born on the beat farm in colorado with no electricity, and you grew up his entire childhood with no electricity because investor owners as an broadband today see no value in bringing services to poor farmers. so that changed when, to first a series of grassroots experience, then a new deal program that in 1936, electrification act, rural electrification act, enabled farm communities to a very low interest loans to set up their own electric companies.

these companies within a decade electrified virtual all of role america and currently bring power to more than half the landmass of the country. so when the appropriate financing is made available, at the program by the way is a revenue positive program today for the u.s. department of agriculture and has been for decades, then these kinds of models are very danceable, very buildable, very lean and capable of entering into markets that investors won't touch. if we are intentional about building the appropriate infrastructure for these kinds of businesses, you can scale these like anything else. the problem is since we live in a world in which the stories we have about how prosperity happens all involved bring in profiteers and paying a tax to the 1% or for any of us to do anything. >> i just want to say the capital incentives are very, very extremely tilted in one

direction and a partially this is not towards cooperatives from going to suggest it from the story you just gave it's going to require public or state intervention which require very different and an active governt and we currently enjoy. and i would say also that putting purchasing power into the hands of consumers would be the best way to try and supercharge cooperative movement, that this is not, i can turn up in business for a while and i friends have been working on this answers all of this great stuff and then the investors will not touch it. if you bring investors, winner take all model, that michael goodman and they will pile into that. it's unimaginable amounts of what tim pawlenty called super money thereupon into this model and then you are over being like hey, i built this club, we could just help driving uber, we can own it. it's completely washed out by like the tens of millions of dollars. public intervention, consumer

buying power through universal-based income or some other means but it will not happen based on the economics. >> i think the point nathan is making is that i don't want to put words in your mouth, that we make decisions as the country at different points to invest in, to allow cooperatives to floors, right? i think the point is we have the company that we make, right? and so it's a question -- it's hard to imagine and country where work is the basis of dignity but it could also argue that cooperatives are different and we just have to think through what ought maybe all of the above for these issues. >> i would say since i all of our patients every consistent. would you guys agree? >> yes. >> one stop thought also. both are all so things that are smaller cisco that would help families like universal pre-k. there's things that we can have

that we haven't locally that are not nationalized -- right. this is new york city rent up from 20,000 seats to something exceeds 5000 seats in two years. it complicated wildly heterogeneous place like new york could do, why can't remark there are some of the places that don't have universal pre-k and that would help parents. >> great. so i could not agree more with that answer. and so i'm going to turn it over to the audience for questions, and i will probably repeat some questions. their settlement in the back of no longer raising his hand so i will go right there. actually right behind you and then i will come to you afterwards. if you can wait for the -- [inaudible] >> i'd like to the panels opinion on this drive to get medicaid for a gun which would help everyone tremendously. but also with automation ramping

up and people losing jobs because of the automation, how does that affect our population issue? we have to meet people, not enough jobs. what do we do? >> we really need to reverse the way we regard ourselves as human beings. right now we regard ourselves apparently as economic inputs and call centers, even your question is like to make people, not enough jobs, like what are we going to do? what we have to do threat to regard ourselves the way quality companies regard their employees as assets and investments and invest in our people. our country has become the minted in terms of try to be like we can nickel and then everyone that will save money. we all end up paying the cost anyway as a society. even if you were to try to translate back into dollars and says, we are being shortsighted.

we have to start regarding people as assets. when you discern investing in our human capital. better nutrition, education, worker productivity. >> i have term, human infrastructure. stop considering bridges and lakes come things that we have to consider and start actually framing it so like using even language, like human infrastructure, we need to maintain the dignity and purity as an individual. >> we have a question of here. [inaudible] >> speaking to the mic. >> i'm sorry. i'm on the board of long other progressive coalition and one of the things they have taken on practically full-time now is the silver synodic aspect of, you

know, incentivizing workers through co-ops. what that is is, you can probably describe it better than i can, but it's about people who are ready to retire, children want nothing to do with our business but they feel very responsible to the people that came up with them and they had successful things. if they can turn it over into a cooperative, it stays in the community, the people themselves get rewarded in effect for their 30, 20, ten years of service and so on. i'd like you to talk to that, but also i would like you to talk to cleveland, you know, we tend to think that the co-op thing is like this fringe thing but there's such successful

models over the century in these areas, and you know, the importance of anchor institutions. it's the way of doing things for giving money and support that are not necessarily the typical corporate maneuver. >> nathan, you want to answer that? i think we unfortunate time for one or two more questions so will try to get them quickly and answer them quickly. >> thank you so much for bringing this up. this really is a historic opportunity that we have and the challenge where a tremendous share of small and medium-sized businesses are soon to change hands because their owners are retiring or worse. in many cases these companies are being swept up by private equity deals and the opportunity to keep those resources in the communities where value is being created is enormous and in

danger of extraction, switching from a bunch of small businesses that are supporting their communities to a bunch of subsidiaries that are supporting wall street is enormous. so you're part of many communities around the country, many municipalities as well as community groups that are really working on this challenge, and organizations like the democracy collaborative have been provided a lot of leadership on it. but right now there are lot of cities including new york city at a putting really major policy work into trying to make it easier. this new main street employee ownership act just passed as part of the latest defense authorization bill makes it easier for these kinds of conversions to access small business administration loans. we have a real opportunity to change the future and the makeup of our economy that is rooted in

our community, rooted in a play ownership. >> we have time for only one more question but i know more authors -- our office will be here and can maybe answer questions as they do books. right there. >> over here. >> this is is largely for mr. yang because you mentioned alaska earlier but the other panels can certainly respond, too. -- [inaudible] to basically create a special of fun where the government would buy up or obtained through taxes basically a bunch of stocks and pay a dividend on the stocks. millionaires and billionaires can always like propose a tax but people will be more likely if you think at some ownership over this to support it. do you think that's an effective

way of funding a ubi or not? >> on the fence of the social wealth fund. on the fan of carbon dividends. i'm a fan of data dividends. the are article is to try to gt there. one reason why i'm starting with the goal of $1000 a month is to have people visualize what that would mean an offense of households and communities that there are many approaches that could be affected. i'm huge fan of that. i will say though that right now our country unfortunately has been somewhat brainwashed into sort of like the win-win, works like to somehow make it happen so that like you don't pay because i don't want to mess with you in some way. that's something we need to get over. like that thinking is victory of the market fundamentally. we should not be daunted by say hey, guess what, you're going to be little more. i have this conversation with people in business, intact and say you have to pay a little more to keep america together.

some are very averse to that, no life in summer like that makes perfect sense because i'm a parent, i'm an american. they don't uses were, like i'm a patriot and some average pay more per on the big, big fan of those measures audible want to fall in this category can't touch anyone, can't make people pay for. >> and keep it that is a great integrate discussion. appreciate the questions, and thank you to our great authors. [applause] >> [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> you are watching booktv at c-span2. live coverage of the brooklyn book festival. that was an author discussion on the american middle class. we are live all day with events from the brooklyn law school and

right outside there's the street festival with publishers, vendors and even more authors. let's take a look. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> c-span's launch booktv 20 years ago on c-span2, and since then we've had more than 54,000 hours of programming authors and book festivals. the late christopher hitchens appeared nearly 40 times. in 2007 he was on tvs in

depth. >> the most notable, his first meeting with kgb, and found vladimir putin where you may recall the president said i looked into his eyes and i saw he was wearing a crucifix. i thought what a a great man this must be and what a friend i've got. i think the president must regret saying that by now. knowing what we know, much of what we knew then about vladimir putin here i'd like to know something by the way. someone might want to look into this. has vladimir putin ever been seen wearing the crucifix since what it is if i jumped the president is such a sucker, such asap, that that we do the trick? in which case we have a right to reconsider the idea that having a present was a person of faith is a good thing. >> you can watch this and many other booktv programs from the past 20 years online @booktv.org. type the author's name and the

workbook into the search bar at the top of the page. >> if you want to know what is going to happen to your life and to the world, probably the best book for that is the bible. but the second best book is resistance is futile. so everything that's happening, don't worry, it's covered in this book. there's been a lot of talk about unindicted co-conspirators today and i do think, i do think we have that chuck schumer in nancy pelosi for the death of molly tibbetts i think i fully and indicted co-conspirators. as for michael cohen and his plan, his offer to take a bullet for the president, i don't do any of us realize that my bullet when he met was a light spring breeze. but as is described in the book

and i do cover both manafort and michael cohen, while mucking two years and all that god is campaign finance violation for company, i'm disappointed that the president fooled around with these two floozies and did have the decency to do it in the privacy of the oval office. but the actual crucial point of the campaign finance violation issue after all of this time is, number one, if it's all true and he is guilty, oh, my gosh, he will have to pay a fine. the second point is, the crux of any campaign finance violation, which i know msnbc is not covering this. i'm not sure any of the networks, is it hasn't something to with that of dust in your normal life. i think donald trump has kind of a long history of paying

settlements, paying grifters. why isn't his settlement of trump university and unfair contribution to his campaign? the same thing and, of course, if this sort of thing were even if he did it, even if they could prove he did it exclusively because he is running for office and will was other than that he didn't care, his neighbors on all his buildings, doesn't mind if his wife finds out for his son. it has nothing to do with that. it's just the election. that were enough to win a conviction, john edwards with the executed already for what he was doing. ..

>> book tv takes hundredsof author programs through the country. here's a look at events this week . on tuesday we are at the enoch pratt free library in baltimore to hear april ryan give a first-hand account of her reporting during the trump administration. on wednesday, antonio felix will discuss her biography of elizabeth warren and belmont massachusetts. also on wednesday we are at the heritage foundation in washington dc where fox news host steve open will offer his ideas on the merits of populism and look for us at

the manhattan institute in new york city where heather mcdonald talks about identity politics on college campuses. friday at the shelter island public library in new york, andrea deboer will offer her take on the state of education reform and sunday we all live at new york city's largest tree literary event, the brooklyn festival.that's a look at what some of book tv will be covering. many of these events are open to the public. look for them to air in the near future on book tv on c-span two. >> election night 2016 was bright daylight for me in kyoto where i had just arrived for an award ceremony after a joyful and off from my colleagues at home. i was feeling pretty anxious about the bitterly divided electorate and yet, reasonably confident that appeals to fear and anger would be repudiated, although there would be a lot of difficult work ahead to bring americans together . my japanese hosts came in and out of my hotel room explaining the schedules of various ceremonial events. in the background of these conversations but in the

foreground of my mind, the election kept coming in, producing first increasing alarm, then finally both brief and a deeper fear for the country and its people and institutions. i was aware that my fear was not balanced on fair mindedness so i was part of the problem i was worried about. why the time the election result was clear, i had to go out to have my first official meeting at the offices of the in amore foundation so i dressed up and in a cheerful suit, fixed my hair and tried to express happiness and gratitude. i wanted to hug my friends but theywere far away . so late that night, the combination of political anxiety and jetlagged made sleep somewhat intermittent so i began thinking, deciding around midnight that my

previous work on emotions hadn't really gone deep enough as i examined my own fear, it gradually dawned on me that fear was the underlying issue. on nebulous and multi-formed fear diffusing american society. >> watch this and other programs online at booktv.org . >> and live coverage of the brooklyn book festival continues now starting in just a moment with a look at the impact ofart on social and political change .

[inaudible] >> good morning ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming . before starting, i am asked to tell you that books can be purchased at the barnes and noble afterwards outside and the office will be there to sign their copies. the subject of today is a question for which there is no obvious unequivocal answer. can art change society? it raises another question which is should art change society and after all, art with a message often, there's a description for bad art and there are those who say art should have no purpose beyond itself. but of course, the issue is a bit more complicated than that. sometimes, the very fact of producing a work of art is an expression of persecuted

minorities, for example is itself a political act even if it has no overt message. art can also be used by power in the ways that change society which are not always desirable . a famous example is the spark of the cultural revolution in china which was a performance of a chinese opera and i don't remember the exact contents of it but it involved a character who challenged the authority of the emperor in this place which was seen as an attack on him and this started bloodshed of many years. and propaganda of course doesn't always necessarily lead to bad art either. i would mention the films by surrogate eisenstein which were clearly communist propaganda but also great movies and a more fraught example of film that was clearly propagandistic and

that many would still regard this as an extraordinary piece of art but a very disturbing one is one that i'm sure is familiar to all of you that few peoplehave seen the whole thing which is birth of a nation . and it clearly had a galvanizing effect on kkk supporters and people of that ilk. and this really introduced my third question but before i do that i'll go through our distinguished panelists. to my right is mary schmidt campbell, an extremely distinguished academic and writer who is the narrator of the tisch school of the arts, commissioner of the new york city department of cultural affairs and lately , the author of an extraordinary book and the art of rome our beard and which has just come out, i think which is an extraordinary work. and senator lopez, i believe

not just a veteran of the brooklyn book festival but he was there from thevery beginning . the brooklyn chauvinists i believe . a very distinguished scholar and writer in the films and literature, a great essayist and a professor at columbia university . julian lucas, whose very fine, one of the finest young essayists riding in america today. i think he's written for us, the new york review of books, new york times book review and is an associate editor of web editor of the point. having gotten that out of the way, i'll talk with you mary. what is your view on the effect that birth of a nation had and what does that tell us about the relationship between art and society in politics?

>> thank you ian. birth of a nation was a groundbreaking film and ackley. it introduced all kinds of new cinematic techniques and perspectives. it was the first blockbuster film, 5 million people back in 19 15 when it was released. the president of the country, woodrow wilson screened it at the white house. and as a result of its popularity, it's reawakened an interest in membership in the ku klux klan. and it has been a fraught film ever since if any of you have seen spike lee's new film black klansman, you will see he makes ample reference to the savagery of those images. but what the is also interesting about and i will say birth of a nation was part of a larger outpouring of art that was designed to shift the narrative after the civilwar .

so it did change. it was extremely powerful. at the same time, it was part of a force that reawakened a counter narrative on the part of the new negromovement . so that you had equally as forceful, poets like langston hughes, intellectuals like you boys and writers like zora neale hurston and you have the brazenness of musicians who were inventing an entirely new art form with the development and evolution of jazz. so i see that it is a very complicated picture. it's never that art does something, it's that art can instigate a whole set of movements and counter movements . >> go ahead's counter to the question is yes, sir no? and in the 19th century there

were lots of narratives of women at the center, like anna karenina and adolfo that i think did alter the perception of women and create more of a space of freedom for them. which may have led to women's suffrage. together was much more of a literary artist and let's say harriet beecher stowe with uncle tom's cabin who wrote hunting sketches and is sometimes credited with the abolition of serfdom in russia , at least played a part, what interests me about it again you was she then went on to write two other novels. fathers and sons and a bridge into soil and in fathers and

sons, his portrait of the nihilists was a balanced one filled with ambivalence so the people who had applauded him for many hunting sketches now thought he was becoming something of a conservative turncoat which wasn't true, he was basically a liberal and then he wrote virgin soil , another wonderful book which again had a kind of idealistic revolutionary as a major character who comes to a bad end. and i think in some ways, novels like that exerted an influence in terms of skepticism, which is a force, after all. a force i identify with. and the same thing could be said about hawthorne when he wrote about essentially the book form of commune and

raise doubts about certain kinds of utopian idealism. if a work of art profoundly influences somebody who is a powerful leader, that in itself can exert, can change society and we have many bad examples of like hitler with wagner and then the promotion of many films like triumph of the will. so it's astonishing how many dictators wanted to be painted as novelists and so on. the failed artists become dictators. anyway, there can be propaganda which is art but again, propaganda is not artful. a lot of times journalism can change things very quickly.

but most journalism is not art. some of it is but most of it is not. you have an example like jacob reese's photographs and how the other half lives. he thought of himself as a journalist and it's only later in the history of art that's photographs were next to the story of art. and then there were problems with other photographers who were very committed to the left, like paul strand or the photo league photographers, taking pictures which, people who were poor or miserable which were artful so the question is did the aesthetic value of them cancel out some of their ability to generate outrage? we see again in some of the portraits of african americans in the 50s and 60s

like nothing but a man or founder that the ability to see blacks as complex and let's say not intrinsically threatening we should say, definitely i think shifted some people's minds,obviously not all . the russian supremacists are an interesting example because they were very attracted to geometry and minimalism and at the same time, they thought that their art would enhance the social revolution, be something that would support the working class. it's harder in retrospect to understand how kevin would

support theworking class , but they ran with it. so obviously up to a point where the soviet union turned socialist, very conservative so we had socialist realism and then a positive hero and proletarians and so on and most of which is fairly abysmal and reprehensible. i'll just end by saying that, but i will say that my luggage, they didn't change the world, they changed the world of advertising so they introduced a different vocabulary of design, let's say. so they didn't liberate the working classes but they changed the way we see things.

>> before we move through the history of 20th century art, i'd like vivian to comment. is there a work of art you can think of that you admire and think had a profound political effect ? >> yes and i want to go back to some subjects that mary was talking about and also to your point about the fact the photography of jacob reis was annexed to the story of art. there are a lot of extensions of what we call activism today that would be considered art in the future and to return to birth of a nation briefly, i believe it was president woodrow wilson called it history written in the lightning and he was saying this is a positive phrase about the film but i think it does the fact that one of the ways that art is political and most powerful is it controls the way that we think about the past, the way that we relate to the past and an international, political context and to

think of an contemporary counter narrative to one like birth of a nation, after the shooting in charleston, the activists newsom famously scaled the flagpole at the statehouse and took down the state flag which included the confederate flag and of course this was an act of protest but it was one that was different than i don't know, just burning a random confederate flag or pushing legislation or appearing on a talk show. it was evoking the history of american art and photography as it relates to national symbols like the soldiers raising the american flag at you ojeleye and it became a striking visualrepresentation in that tradition , but this can be patriotism as well and that this can be seen in that light. i think there's a lot of particularly in performance art, i think we will see a movement like in photography.

>> i wanted to pick up on that julian because there actually have been all movements that have been kept alive by artists who keep those ideas alive for example, during the soviet occupation of czechoslovakia and a number of other playwrights went underground and got their plays produced and those plays were about the resistance to the occupation. and although went on to become president of the czech republic . also, fugard and john conover at the market theatre in johannesburg kept alive the whole opposition to apartheid and raising it for the absurdity that it was. and you know, during you mentioned the 1950s, the consciousness that ralph ellison or james baldwin or lorraine hansberry or alvin ailey, in terms of this embodiment of expression kept alive. it was like a surge towards

the civil rightsmovement . so one other example would be senegal, he was part of the movement in paris and went on to become president of senegal when it became independent so we have lots of examples of artists who have really emboldened the consciousness of a larger population to make change. >> that raises an interesting question of the relationship between thequality of the work of art and its political impact . because the people you mentioned are all very considerable assets. it might be said, maybe i'm wrong but that history, harriet beecher stowe perhaps had more of an influence on people then baldwin at the time. and sometimes it's mediocre works of art that have the

greater political impact. there are lots of great books but probably the one thing that changed most minds was the soap opera holocaust and i think the reason for that is that people can identify with characters in a soap opera whereas 6 million people murdered isan abstraction. if you watch a soap opera you start identifying with different characters but it had little to do with the quality of the art . you think that sometimes these popular expressions, that they are more effective than things that are of greater literary or cinematic? >> most of the simple or simplistic things go down and i think that one of the resistance of true artists to , part of the divided this in

terms of being socially useful is that gifted artists are often defend a detachment,detachment may be necessary to make art . and so it's also that strong art, especially strong narrative art traffics in complexity which means that it's hard to see something as all good or all bad. and the art i practice often in the essay, there's an aspect of being unresolved in a way. so all of that training in the complexity and detachment, ambivalence makes it harder for the public simply to rise up and see it as one message.

>> i think whether or not you see it as bad art more politically effective or is most politically effective art bad? that depends on how you consider. it depends on which medium first of all and what you consider to be impact. i would argue that i think a lot of most sophisticated and complex works of art don't necessarily have an immediate perceptible impact on policy decisions or something happening in government. it's not going to unseat trump because someone writes a great american novel but they have a deeper impact in a certain way and that's because one of the most proud profound things art can do is reveal things by allowing us to name them when we might not have been able to . so that's a random example and sometimes that's not even what the artist is intending

in a particular political program. in the 19th century, balzac's human comedy was influential with a lot of the early socialists and marxists and is not because balzac was a socialist or a marxist but by depicting the reality around him, he showed a world that was governed i marketforces in a lot of ways . by the vanity of people and how they wanted to occupy for certain positions so a lot of the most profound, complex art as if you look over time a larger political impact. >> i think this notion of art is an important one in terms of quality. we would all agree that manet, picasso are quality artists and the way they represented the body was profoundly disruptive in the late 19, early 20th century

and in that era, the change that was coming about in terms of understanding reality at the level of einstein's theory of relativity was profoundly disruptive . we were rethinking how we were understanding reality and what our relationship as humans were to that reality so i think this revolution, this capacity of art to reveal the artist as a tuning fork that's picking up things in a culture and combining them in new ways. and yet you have this metaphor, combining them in new ways for us to be able to see differently i think is essential to really good art. >> the interesting thing is also how art is read of course and sometimes people can readthings that the artist hadn't intended . the most extraordinary example is in eisenstein's ivan the terrible, a film that was made to raise the

more out of the russians during world war ii and it was a film about this terrible tyrant eisenstein being a great artist couldn't help but inject cynicism and an error of ambivalence and he's not entirely an admirable figure, this tyrant and he goes slightly crazy . the second part of ivan the terrible is banned by stalin but not because stalin saw it as an attack on his destiny, stalin didn't think that ivan the terrible as depicted was despotic enough. >> to back up, it was alexander netscape before ivan the terrible was more of a rousing patriotic film and in that one which was not nearly as good a film as ivan the terrible, he did what he set out to do . >> the great danger in and fill it you mentioned earlier on dictators and art, they are often failed artists.

the great dangers in dictatorships is the borderline between art and politics disappears. in other words, dictators are usually people who see, whose vision of society is one in other work of art so everything doesn't conform to their vision has to be eliminated by murder or otherwise. >> there's an anecdote about that stalin was called to intervene and stalin said is he a great poet? and pasternak didn't know how to answer because he if he said he was a great poet, that might mean we ought to get rid of him . >> what is the work of art you most admire that also had great significance? >> let me think about that, they can answer it. let me think about thatfor a minute .

i actually can't think of a single work. i tend to think of these clusters of artists like they say, the cluster of artists in the 60s who were trying to give birth to their country, their independent country or at the late 19th century, clusters of artists who were rethinking the way we completely look at the world and to represent it or clusters of artists who in, during the civil rights movement, there's a wonderful show at the brooklyn museum and i'd suggest everyone go and see it cold soul of a nation, art in the age of black power . and if you look at the group of artists who made, some of whom made spectacular work in that era at the time when they were being called up again this but now looking back on it, we can see that these were absolutely groundbreaking works.

they were reflecting a consciousness that made it possible for us to move the dial on civil rights in this country.that includes roman or bearden. >> what about the harlem renaissance which was one of the most significant cultural movements in the 20th century? it clearly had a great effect on african-americanculture . to what extent do you think it changed that? >> one of the fascinating things about the harlem renaissance and the new negro movement is that in that period in the 20s and 30s, there was a moment when white people were coming into a black community, talking to each other, we now know that matisse was walking around and going to these cabarets. the infamous carl van becton.

>> but many others and there was a cultural demilitarized zone that allowed black and white artists, spectators to come and have an extraordinary exchange and it's kind of modeled what could be possible for this country, the kind of complexity and cross cultural collaboration that could be possible here. >> i just want to say that something also interesting is not everybody thought the same way so for instance, someone like zora neale hurston didn't always agree or you have albert murray writing pieces about james baldwin which were taking exception to it, so a lot of

the strength of these movements is that there is a spectrum of proliferation of different points of view. >> what about carl? if he's operating today, would he be accused of cultural appropriation? does he figure in your views? >> my opinions are going to be conditioned by one of my favorite books of all time which is ishmael reads mumbo-jumbo and it's a novel from the 1970s about the harlem renaissance and about this kind of cultural demilitarized zone and the kind of conceit of the novel is that black art in the 1920s and 30s, particularly dance was driving a transformation of the country and ishmael reimagines this as a spiritual virus called

just to prove that is infecting everybody, white and black, causing them to dance, destroying the norms of society and it's being fought by the adventists who are the guardians of pleasure in civilization but it's interesting because he has a figure for carlton whose name is engle von fountain and he is a kind of ambivalent figure. he's destructed both by the just grooves carriers, but i think one thing that's remarkable about the book is its sophisticated in its analysis. it's not just oh, there's bad people against black culture and good people whoare for it . there is a kind of co-op that can happen, especially when the power of art or a particular movement is embraced but neutered in a particular way or pushed toward an end that is not necessarily as transformative as it was going to be so this

vom vampton character represents that in the book. >> but a speaker who speaks for a minority who can be seen as a kind of political act in itself, some of the greatest art comes from people who do express the culture of the minority but often are not appreciated by the minority itself. philip roth was seen by many jews as bad for the jews. at the beginning of his career. i've even heard some express great loathing of seinfeld because she felt it would give a bad image of the jews. >> what are the jews without a sense of humor? [laughter] >> it happens. >> but do you think it would make you a worse artist if

you consciously think you have to sort of show your own community in a more positive light than society at large might do? >> i remember somebody telling me that they couldn't stand frank mccourt because angela's ashes represented the irish family. i think you could go down a list and find every single ethnic group and find a complaint against an artist for it. and if that's how you're judging the artwork, you're going to have a very narrow band but i think artists have to come from what they know and what they know profoundly and judging something because it's good for us or bad for us is not a helpful measure. but what is helpful is what does it reveal of us?what does it reveal of the other?

what does it reveal about our relationship to the world i think is a better way to think about it. >> i agree and off the top of my head i can think of to artists. zora neale hurston and more recently terrell walker. laurent neale hurston's work, richardwright denounced it . he denounced her work as exactly what white people want to see between sorrow and tears when in fact she was creating what most people now i think is a sophisticated and rich depiction of black life in america and richard wright had an immediate sense of what art was supposed to do and he's a brave writer as well. notalways appreciated . but he was kind of the father . >> it will be interesting having conversations with the audience until we have microphones. >> and terrell walker more

recently, i know with some of her early work she was denounced for just reproducing violence, reproducing , you're just going to make it so everybody sees and is going to think about violence being done to black bodies when they see that art but i think she's pretty effectively proven in the years sense that what she's doing is more revelatory of the american racial imaginary and expose more difficult questions and it has reinforced negative fantasies. >> any thinking artist is going to wonder in what ways he or she belongs to a tribe, an ethnic group and in what way is she different? as an individual, and isn't just somebody who can speak for the tribe. so that's all part of the job of being an artist , is to play with those gaps in a way . >> that may be a good moment to bring you all in. please, since we are being

recorded, please wait for the microphone . and, yes. the microphone is coming. >> i think it was you who suggested that the work of african-american artists, you asked a question of whether it had influence on the broader population. i know it had a greater influence on african-americans. i would suggest the opposite. that in fact, the very positive and stimulating images that were presented by those artists during that period simply reveal what black people already thought about themselves so it didn't have that much of an influence from that perspective but has greater influences on our population because they then saw images

of black people in different ways than they had been seeing in cartoons and other images and other artworks of that period. >> that's a very good point area. >> one thing is that part of what art historically for political reasons, part of the struggle has been going back to what philip was saying about the 19th century forward is this struggle of the minorities in any culture to be seen as equally human. and that producing complex art i think is someone like monk where you cannot deny the intellectualism of what he's producing. >> is that edward baloney us?

[overlapping conversation] >> when you hear that, you cannot deny the intellectualism and on a less populist note, there was a show that just ended inisrael called arab labor and the main character was an israeli palestinian . and he was, i think that the author felt somewhat embarrassed by the creation of this character but what it did was his relations with his wife, his children would prevent him from fully engaging someone you'd want to be friends with, confirmed to humans about the character and the same with women where they were considered intellectually equal to men and art was able, you cannot deny after reading it in fact

before seeing it, you're not going to intellectually say this is not equal to everything else or superior in someone like monk is redefining what music can be in the 20th century. >> would anybody like to comment west and mark. >> i think the efficacy of this art that proves that a group of people can do x or y has been overstated. especially if you consider that in a lot of cases, if people get any group of people in the united states that's ever been marginalized that it's not when they first arrived or in the public sphere, that they didn't already have sophisticated traditions, it's just that those were ignored and to me, the political efficacy of art comes less unchanging what people think about other people and less from empathy and more from giving allowing us to perceive things and

then the onus is on us to act . >> i know i'm speaking toa little cluster, i'll go over there . >> what do you think about the fact that it had the opposite effect politically that he wants? ice carries and art of show of art which led to the pentagon cracking down on their rights? >> who would like to comment west and mark when we go to the next question. we will ponder and there was somebody, yes. no, but it's coming. [inaudible] >> going back to thelonious monk, it's my understanding that department conjured a lot of jazz musicians as well as expressionistic conditions

to show how free we were in the united states so that's another case that maybe you could comment on and that is people making art and being used perhaps by various political organizations to show something to someone . >> the days the cia were sort of liberal. >> would anybody like to say something to this? >> you spoke to unforeseen consequences and that sounded very well. it's all kinds of things that you can put but i agree with julian that in naming and creating a consciousness about different states that gives it tools, but all those tools they use. >> i'd like to comment about role models and what they had to go through. a personal experience where i had my daughter and i had my female counselor, she would

be the only male. i said, i'm an engineer, she's going to be there. the institution of sexism and holding back high potential people is so ingrained into our culture, that's why the art created was tremendous. i have white male saying i have to get more involved with my daughter soshe can get what she needs . i was in green bay wisconsin and they had a research firm and i went to madison and i interviewed women in nontraditional careers at that time in the 80s and all of the medical people, they had only a couple women were supported by their fathers and they had to go and make an intervention. they had to make an intervention and make sure

that they didn't crush their daughters in thatenvironment . >> i sympathize with you completely. as a been president of selden college for the last fewyears . thank you. selden college is a black liberal arts college for women. and it produces more black women who go on to get phd's in stem fields than any other college or university in the country. so when hidden figures came out, it was a revelation, but it was a moment for us to advance more the narrative of institution that's been doing this for decades. literally for decades. so that's a very dramatic instance where it wasn't a novel, it was a nonfiction narrative that became a film of course but in fact, it

pushed that knowledge forward and we had the great pleasure of giving catherine johnson an honorary degree two years ago. [applause] >> wait for the mic. >> you talk a lot about the tenants of art which dovetails off of that is the nourishing aspect , that it nourishes and nourishes what's already in the culture so hidden figures nourished what you are talking about, the harlem renaissance nurtured theblack people in harlem . and became revelatory to the white people outside so i think nourishing andnurturing is another important aspect . >> wait for the microphone.

right there. further back. >> i work for a large institution that gives money away . and in the culture field, one thing that worries me a lot is the intersection between art and social change. as ifthere is some direct causality . i resist pressures to fund things because it is argued that some kind of form of cultural production will contribute to social change. i think of a few examples that have always agitated me such as john cole train sitting in a parking lot in long island in 1966 with a white revolutionary, trying

to press cold rainthat his music was revolutionary . and cole train resisting and saying i'm not about that, i'm about other things. the jazz clarinetist when he played klezmer music for a while in 80s, so many people pressured him. byron, to make some admission that his music was about black white conjoining when he said he just liked the music of klezmer. i'd like to talk about the politicization of art, it could come from the right or left but it alwaysleft me quite uncomfortable .>> if you ask romeo bearden if his art was political he would have said no. he was having none of it.

and i think that's probably true for a lot of individual artists if you ask them. they think i'm doing my art, i'm not trying things but i do want to comment on one thing that we haven't talked about this afternoon and that is you can talkabout individual art but also institutions that can have through the way they are organized , major change . so the studio museum in harlem which has been in existence now for 50 years. without it, there would not have been a place for many of the visual artists to have even made their work in the first place and be supported, but the fact that they've created an environment for them to be incubated, for david hammond to be there and kerry james marshall and allison and all these great people we think of as great artists today has changed the way we think of the visual arts in this country. and again, to go back to the harlem renaissance, the whole cabaret scene during the 20s and 30s changed the activation of great musicians

, so i do think there's also that institutional aspect of the way artists get supported. whether it's underground or aboveground or off the radar that also can overtime change the way we think about our culture. >> i want to put in a word of agreement with the questioner which is you know, i come from that generation where very often you would hear all art is political. you would also hear the person is political. you would hear these so often that they became meaningless platitudes and tourism's and i feel like my response to all art is political is yeah, yeah, but then i don't want to think about how that's true anymorebecause it's just too gassy a statement . >> the gentleman up there has

been waving his hand for a long time . >> i had a question about which comes first. art creating new political ideas. in the 80s i was with a nuclear disarmament and abc had something called the day after. a lot of people say that was the moment that people became interested but there was a movement in the 80s with people marching to central park and i think that hardly qualifies as bad art. are there examples one way or another of amplifying a political movement versus actually changing consciousness in a way they had before? >> anybody like to make last statements about that? >> i would say that great art doesn't necessarily have to pursue a political program, but it also should not ignore political realities and i

think a lot of art that is recognized is, well, this is really art and it's not just political is political in that it ignores political realities so i think that distinction needs to be made and i also think that when artists say i don't want my art to be seen, it's because they're conscious of the way that political forces do use their work so they might agree, partially agree with or disagree with but it doesn't mean that art doesn't have political implications and it doesn't mean that institutions that funded and promoted should not also have political goals. >> i think the panel for coming and you all for coming, the authors will be signing their books at signing table 1. barnes and noble's will be selling their books there. [applause]

>>. [inaudible]

>> that was an author discussion on the impact of art and is on social and political change. live coverage of the brooklyn book festival and if you didn't know, but tv is on facebook, twitter and instagram. follow along for behind-the-scenes videos and pictures from the festival, at book tv is our handle in moments, more authors from brooklyn . >> follow the busy time for book festivals across the country.here's a look at some that are coming up.

book tv is live from the brooklyn book fair. on saturday, look for us at the baltimore book festival which will be held at the city's inner harbor. on october 11 through the 14th, it's the wisconsin book festival at the state capital city, madison and in that same weekend it's the 30th annual southern festival of books in nashville. then later that month we are live at the texas book festival in austin. for more information about upcoming book fairs and festivals and watch our previous festival coverage, click the book fairs tab on our website, booktv.org. c-span launched book tv 20 years ago on cspan2 and since then we've covered thousands of authors and book festivals totaling more than 54,000 hours of programming. theology professor michael eric dyson has appeared on

book tv more than 25 times. in 2008 he was a guest on our monthly call in program in depth. >> he told david hammer sham i thought we could change a little bit there and a little bit here, now wehave to have a complete overhaul, a revolution of values . so that martin luther king jr. was at the nadir of his popularity, he had become a pariah the sixth and final order of martin luther king jr.'s resistance was swept away by marxism and that has defined him as a great american and as part of the pantheon of our re-founding fathers. >> watch this and many other programs from the past 20 years online at booktv.org. check theauthors name and the word book into the search bar at the top of the page . >> here's a look at the current best-selling nonfiction books according to the new york times and wall street journal. topping the bestseller list is unhinged by former white house aide omarosa.

at the top of the wall street journal's bestseller list is rachel hollis's health advice, girls wash your face. in the secondspot on the wall street journal's list is the restless wave, and memoir by the late senator john mccain . on the times list the russia hoax by greg jarrett of fox news who argues against the investigation into russian interference . in third according to the times is carol westover's recount of her childhood in the idaho mountains and her introduction to formal education at the age of 17 and in third for the journal is the russia hoax. up next for the new york times iscraig under's report on donald trump's relationship with vladimir putin and house of trump, house of putin and for the wall street journal its strength finder 2.0 by the

gallup organization and tom rath . in fifth is fox news janine piro who defends trump in liars, leaguers and liberals. in the wall street journal's list it's mark manson's list on leading a happy life.the bestseller list continues with magnolia table by joanna gaines. the new york times as the choco guide to revolution by the writers of the political podcast choco trap house. the new york times laces swedish physician hans rose ling thoughts on human progress, thoughtfulness in the seventh position. taro westover's spot on the wall street journal's list. next on the times list is astrophysicist neil degrasse tyson's book astrophysics for people in a hurry, piro's book liars, leaguers and liberals and nine is daniel siegel's aware, and on the times list, beth macy looks at the opioid epidemic in

america. wrapping up our comparison of the wall street journal and new york times bestsellers list is jordan peterson's the 12 rules for life for the journal and an attempt spot on the times list is the soul of america by john meacham that looks at critical moments in american history and how they relate to today. many of these authors have or will be appearing on book tv. watch their programs online on our website, booktv.org. >> i have a theory about why the left is so hostile. and it goes back to election day. think about all of your friends who are liberals, who about 8:00 on election evening were about to pop the champagne . hillary was going to breakthe glass ceiling, they were going to get a left-wing

supreme court justice. they were going to have policies on the left, weakness overseas, they were going to raise taxes. life was good .and two hours later, and some of you may have lived through this, seeing it in whatever room you are in, two hours later they are staring at each other, beginning to realize that not only is she not going to be president but that means that donald j trump is going to be president. i believe what happened was a traumatic event comparable to a psychosis. that the intensity and speed of the change was so great that most liberals today suffer from a political variance of ptsd. and the part of trump's genius is he to every morning and so these people who go to bed and david spent the night night trying not to think of the nightmare that is occurring and they wake up in the morning and they're about to begin a happy new day and

they see a trump to and they suddenly realize oh my god, he's still president. so they can't get over it. it's like watching groundhog day as a political film they come back to it again and again and that's a big part of why you have this extraordinary level of anger . >> watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> .. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon. it's so delightful to see so many bright, warm faces here for discussion about hate. we couldn't be happier about that. my name is brian tate and i'm really honored to moderate this conversation for the brooklyn book festival. we're going to dive in, just to set a set the tone i will simply refund the description of this panel that is in your programs and then we will get started. there be an opportunity for questions after we have a moderated conversation. the inhumanity of hate. the news is full of stories of hate, from incidents of discrimination and disrespect, to mass shootings and the riots and protests turning america into a divided country your community activists and civil

rights lawyer arjun singh sethi, the author of "american hate: survivors speak out", records the heartbreaking true stories of individuals affected by hate. peel -- please welcome arjun. [applause] >> down at her opposite in, pulitzer prize-winning journalist eli saslow, the author of "rising out of hatred", should the journey of a white supremacist leader as he evolved to disown his heritage and bigotry and hate. please welcome eli. [applause] >> and dolly chugh, author of "the person you mean to be, how good people fight bias", shows a research to effectively and respectfully confront one's own personal biases and prejudices. these authors hold up the mirror for us to see the victims and the instigators, but more