good evening from los angeles. i'm tavis smiley. tonight our conversation with "the new york times" bestselling author and two time pulitzer winner nicholas kristof. written about poverty, war, equality, women and children. his current book, collaborated with his wife, sheryl wudunp. "a path appears." one of the best and most effective uses of our money, time, and energy as we look toward making the world a better place to live and work. we're glad you joined us. a conversation with nicholas kristof, coming up right now. ♪

penned by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. ♪ every week, a columnist for "the new york times." nicholas kristof delves deeply into the issue of our day, reporting on poverty, equality, conflict zones and of course the rights of women and children both in this country and abroad. a new work about to be published

"a path appears" co-written with his wife, sheryl wudunn. good to have you on this program. >> good to be on. >> i want to jump into this in a second after i ask what you expect i'll ask about. recently you did a couple columns that got the attention of the nation. your columns tend to do that. these two were about what happens when white folk just don't get it. about racial issues in this country. why did you decide to write that? and tell me more, then, about the response you received. >> well, i mean, i'm enormously concerned with opportunity gaps in this country, and i think that there are an awful lot of people in this country who just don't want to talk about anything involving race, and who don't want to address some of those gaps because they see them as having racial overtones. and i wrote initially about unconscious bias and the way

often the problem is not, you know, all-out racists who perceives blacks as being unequal but well-meaning people who have unconscious biases they're completely unaware of but translate into hiring decisions, all kinds of things. then the feedback i got, i grou just found really dispiriting. i write for the "the new york times," have i would have thought a disproportionately open minded audience. there are so many people who see in particular young black men as kind of predators to be written off, and didn't want to have this conversation. and i think that it's -- at the end of the day, you know, straight people have to talk about gay rights. men have to talk about gender. and white people have to begin to try to erase some of these biases in the white community. and within the white world,

there's all this talk all the time about more personal responsible in the black community. and absolutely. we also need, though, more personal responsibility in the white community for the kind of structural inequities that exist in hiring, in the criminal justice system all over, and we have to have that conversation. >> does that suggest to you, then, that nothing good is going to come of ferguson, missouri, if people aren't ready to have that conversation? >> i think that any of these episodes that get people talking will grudgingly have an effect. and you see that in polling about people by age, and, you know, clearly we've come a long way, but i don't think that especially the white community appreciates how much distance we have left to go, and i think they see kind of barriers gone, and think, okay, kind of problem solved, let's move on. and, boy, it is so much more

complicated than that, and i think anything we can do to get people talking is going to help chip away at that, but it's going to be a long process. >> how do yo juxtapose the kinds of ugly responses that you received to receiving those responses in the era of barack obama? i mean, it's one thing to have gotten those responses, you get my point, 30, 40 years ago. >> absolutely. >> how do you process getting those responses in the era of the first black president? >> i think so some degree it's a backlash, and in the long run, i think that the election of a black president is going to be good for racial equity in this country, but i think it also, it does great a backlash and a resentment, and i think that that may feed some of that kind of antagonism that we see. you know, and the progress is stunning. what we -- the place we have yet to go is equally -- two figures that really just kind of strike me the most, nag at me the most,

that the u.s. now incarcerates a higher proportion of its black population than south africa did under apartheid, and the white/black wealth gap in the u.s. up about 18 times is higher than the black/white gap in apartheid south africa of about 15 times. as long as you have those kind of gaps, then we can't really talk about this as a land of opportunity. >> in his new book "a path appea appears" which i'll come to in a second here, there are suggestions of how we can be better global citizens. we'll, again, come to that in a second. on this issue of race, and what black people need to understand to really address this issue, what were you suggesting in columns 1 and 2 that they could do if they're truly interested in getting it? >> i think a starting -- i mean, actually very much it goes to the kind of issues we talk about in "a path appears" because i

think the time when we want to try to have an intervention or make a difference is not when you have a black teenager being stopped by a suspicious white cop on the street. you need to change courses of people all along create opportunity all along, and, you know, education is generally the place, the escalator to create opportunity. in this country, the escalator is broken for those who need it most, and that is a lot of young kids in inner city, also, frankly, a lot of white kids. working class white kids don't have that equal shake. there's a real opportunity gap in this country and one element of that is race, but a lot of that is class as well. >> how would you grade america as a nation? how would you grade our fellow citizens in how we're doing at being global citizens? are we getting a passing grade? are we getting a failing grade? a pretty good grade? when it comes to the role we

play in the world? >> there have been some studies looking at kind of how philanthropic different countries are and the u.s. does well by that regard. the united states tends to do somewhat less well as a proportion of international humanitarian aid that we provide. but on the other hand, we are relatively open in terms of immigration. we provide a certain amount of immigration which provides people the chance to send remittences back. and private donations in this country to people in need of money abroad tend to be quite high. so australia comes across as number one in kind of the rankings over ten years, but the u.s. is near the top, in the top five countries. so i'd say overall we do pretty well, but the problem is that whether it's, you know, aid at home or aid abroad, about 2/3 of americans donate to charity, but we all know that often it's not very effective. helping people is harder than it looks. and that was essentially why

sheryl and i wrote the book because we think there's so many very well-meaning people out there who want to help, who want to help other people and also want that fulfillment that you get. and they, you know, we thought we could provide some sort of a handbook about how to make a difference. >> before i talk about how we can create a better model for people to do what they really want to do in their hearts, let me respectfully challenge the whole thesis of the text. the whole thesis. i want to get your reaction. >> absolutely. >> get your response. if i said to you, nick, with all due respect to you and sheryl, it's not about philanthropy, it's about justice. charity and justice are two very different things. that we are a sound society when it comes to charity. we love to support each other. when you seize major crises happen, americans with money to help out a particular crisis. so our problem is not one of charity or philanthropy. it's one of justice. those are two different things. >> i guess i would say it's not -- they're not in opposition to each other. we need both. and that, you know, we absolutely need government

programs, for example. you wouldn't think of building a highway system by having individuals go out and try to, you know, build one for the highway. you need government initiatives. and the same way you need government initiatives to try to create poverty. on the other hand, there are real needs out there the government is not going to solve right now, and there are people, i mean, we can all do things that help provide that opportunity. i'm, you know, i'm here partly, my dad was an east european refugee, and he was -- he fled romania and made his way to france and, you knows, it was important for the u.s. and other countries to try to address the global refugee problem, but the reason i'm here is that there was a church in portland, oregon, and a couple of people there who sponsored his way to come to america. and so i think it -- you know, i think you need both. >> is the real problem that you and sheryl are trying to get at in the text, is the real problem the apparatus, the structure of the model we have for trying to do good in this country and the

world? if it's not the model, what's the problem? >> sure. the problem is essentially lack of opportunity. and we all know about inequality in this country. there's obviously a profound problem when the top 1% of the country own more than the bottom 09 95%. the inequity of opportunity. it is so clear there are kids out there who don't have anything like the chance at the starting line as so many others. and there are ways we can create greater equity. and the only thing i've ever seen polling at 97% in this country is there should be more equalized economic opportunity. people disagree with transfer payments, disagree with all kinds of solutions but they agree that there should be more equal economic chance at life. >> there's a disconnect because every poll, survey study i read, when i read your column which i never miss, that data comes through loud and clear, yet

somewhere in the process, there's a disconnect between what the american people think and what the american people do. i'm not naive in terms of the fact that congress is a very different entity, they've got their own way of not doing things as it were. but how do you explain the disconnect between what we want to do and what our elected leaders never get around to doing? >> i think there are two aspects of that disconnect. one is people across the country as a whole are much more concerned with inequality of opportunity than inequality of outcomes, and the middle and the right in particular are less concerned with the outcomes issue and much more concerned with opportunity. so i think we -- i think that often those of us who are more on the liberal side of the spectrum would maybe do better talking less about inequality and more about opportunity. and the other thing is that i think that there's a frustration out there. people don't know how to make a difference. and they think it's incredibly sad when they see kids out there who don't get a shot at life, but they think it's kind of

hopeless. and in fact, one of the messages of "a path appears" is that in the last 20 years we have real evidence-based programs about how to make a difference. how to create that opportunity. and these are rigorously tested programs. tested the way a pharmaceutical trial is. and they save money because if you invest a little more now in these kids, you know, you're spending less on prisons down the road. >> give me a couple of examples, couple of your personal favorites that point toward the fact we can, in fact, create opportunity. >> sure. i'd say one of the great old lessons, again, of the last 20 years is one of the reasons our efforts fail is we intervene too late. and, you know, it is so much easier to try to help a 6-month-old child or a 6 -year-old child than it is a 16-year-old troubled kid. and there was one of the most remarkable programs in the country, which is unsung, called

the nurse family partnership started by a guy named david who was originally working with troubled 4-year-olds in a high-poverty community. and he realized that for those kids, even starting at 4 was too late because some of them -- so many of them were so traumatized, so abused. and so he started a program to work with pregnant women and then up until when that child was 2. and it's, you know, this is at-risk moms, often teenage moms, going to be single moms and it seems like during pregnancy try not to drink, try not to use drugs. after birth, talk to your child. read to your child. reduce exposure to lead paint. hug your child. you know, maternal attachment at age 3 1/2 is a better predictor of high school graduation than i.q. is. there's so many of these kinds of things that don't cost a lot of money, and, you know, at the end of the day, most moms and dads, they want to be good moms

and dads, but it's an incredibly hard job when you are stressed out, when you are poor, when, you know, your life is in chaos, and giving them some of the tools to be better parents, to wit l whittle away at the parenting gap gives the kids a much better starting point in life. >> there's not a quantum leap one has to make intellectually, it seems to me, for why our society doesn't treat women the way that it should. the obvious answer is patriarchy is still alive and well. we've got to work on that and do better about that. you and sheryl are doing wonderful work on, you know, women's issues. what i don't understand, and i'm not naive in asking this, what i don't understand, though, is how it is that both the left and the right, everybody talks about children. everybody says they want to help children. i don't care who you are. it's always about, you know, the children. everybody -- children are our future. how is it that we can say with our mouths, profess to all love and value children, and yet that

never seems to play itself out as it should vis-a-vis our public policy? >> i think the part of that is voting. >> right. >> you know, seniors vote. and that is why we have, you know, medicare since presidethe for seniors and didn't have a national health care program for children even though it's a lot more cost effective to deal with children than with seniors. so i think part of it is a function of voting. and i think that part of it was a misunderstanding, and a sense that children are resilient. so, okay, even if there are problems, you know, infinitely plastic, well, we can solve those problems in school. and one of the lessons of the last couple decades is that is not true, and what kids need most in those early years, as their brains are being developed, is nurturing and support and love. you know, even things like being read to. so many kids in this country

grow up in homes without a single children's book. kids books are pretty cheap. there's a wonderful program called reach out and read in which doctors encourage during their visits, they give out free books. they kind of prescribe the mom to read to the child bedtime stories. it increases the number of stories those kids are read to hugely. the result is those kids, when they start school, they have much bigger vocabularies, they enjoy reading more. it costs $20 per year per child. it's crazy that we don't expand that on a broader scale. and i think it's kind of a lack of appreciation of what can be done. >> let me jump from public policy to the life we live as individual fellow citizens. you attacked this issue head-on in the text. that is this notion, that so many, again, americans have that they don't have the resources to do good in the world even though they want to. so we'll leave that to bill gates. we'll leave that to warren buffett. we'll leave that to whomever it might be. leave it to government.

i'd like to help, and i just don't have the resources, and you all take that issue head-on. >> absolutely. you know, when you ask americans who do not contribute to charity why you don't, the reason they tend to cite in polls is, well, i don't have the money to do so, but in fact, there's no correlation between incomes or wealth and whether people contribute. and in fact, the bottom 20% of people in america, by income, contribute a higher share of their incomes to charity than the top 20%. even though they have so many fewer resources and get less of a tax deduction for doing so. so, i guess -- you know, it's also -- it's not just about helping others. there is tremendous satisfaction, fulfillment we get from trying to attach ourselves to a cause larger than ourselves. and i guess the other thing i would say is quite apart from writing checks, there are things we can do in terms of advocacy, for better public policy. and in terms of volunteering. even just being alert to the people around you.

one of our favorite stories in that book involves a kid who grew up in the south, he went to segregated schools and got in -- in teenage years he was beginning to get in trouble, shop lifting, this kind of thing. he didn't want to read books. he happened to be in the school library one time and saw a book with a woman, a risque cover, and he, wow, that looks kind of cool. and, but he didn't want to be seen reading a book, so he didn't check it out. he just stole it. and he went home, he read it, and it was a great book. so he returned it after reading it. put it back on the shelf and noticed there was another book by the same author. and so he looked around, he stole that one, too. read it. this happened four times. and it kind of transformed his life. and he became a reader. he went to college. he went to law school. he became a civil rights leader. became the judge. and years later, he went back to the school for reunion, and the

school librarian, he told the school librarian how much he owed to these books, and she said that she had seen him stealing that first book. and at first she was going to call him out, then she realized that he was a tough guy, he didn't want to be seen checking the book out. and so she let him steal that book and then she drove an hour and a half to the nearest city to buy from her own money another book by the author to put in its place in hopes that the bright troubled kid would keep on reading. we all have these chances to influence people around us, and it's just kind of a question of whether we're going to point fingers or offer a helping hand. >> it's a great story. let me go back to something you said, about that wonderful story, which is this notion, this reality, in fact, that americans are at the bottom give more than americans at the top. how do you read that? what do you make of that?

that reality, in fact, exists. >> i think it is a reflection partly of a -- i don't know how to say this politely, but kind of a selfishness among some of those who have made it. and i think it is reflected not only in, sometimes reluctant to be generous, but also in a tendency to blame the poor for being poor, to see it as a moral failing rather than economic failing. one of the big differences in attitudes between the top 1% and the population as a whole is attitude toward public education and the top 1% are much less enthusiastic about spending for public education. and that, you know, how one can live in this country and not want to invest in that escalator of opportunity to create more opportunity for so many others,

to build up a country, kind of mystifies me, so i think there is -- i think there is a real selfishness and a myopia among people who have made it who think, look, you know, look how great, you know, i worked hard, i went to school, i studied hard, i'm honest and, you know, those other people should do the same thing, too, without beginning to appreciate that they were often born on third base and, you know, congratulating themselves on hitting a triple. >> that's the point. that's the point that warren buffett makes. he says all the time that the greatest piece of his success was he was born in the united states. >> absolutely. >> you can't take credit for that. he happened to be born in the united states. >> he won the lottery of birth. i think we think of poverty too often in terms of income, and it's not. you can have a low-income family where a kid has a terrific opportunity, but i think a much better predictor of a child's

success is not the family income, it's the number of children's books in that house. whether that child is read to. whether that child is getting that kind of emotional support. and there are a lot of kids that don't get that investment. we can help those parents do that. >> what do we do when philanthropy goes wrong? i had a guest on this program, you've written about this, there are individuals and organizations who are well intentioned but the way they're spending their money, the kind of politics connected to the money that they spend in this country, and certainly in africa and other parts of the underdeveloped world, they end up -- >> yeah. absolutely. i mean, helping people is harder than it looks. >> uh-huh. >> there are a lot of initiatives that don't -- that don't achieve the results that hoped for. i think that one of the advantages that we have now compared to -- you know, a generation ago, people, come december, people would pull out

their checkbook and write a check. these days, one can see it as kind of an investment, and there is information out there. there are randomized control trials that give you a sense of what the return is going to be on your investment in a charity, if you will. and i think, you know, there are going to be some of those investments that are going to go wrong just as there are going to be some investments in a stock that are going to go wrong, but on the whole, i think the returns are -- we can now have much better sense of how to get good returns than we used to. >> why is it you're so hopeful americans will continue down this path of giving and becoming better global citizens when i could argue if i had the time for the sake of argument that we may be becoming more nativist into the future? >> i think there is a risk that we could go either way, but one reason i'm optimistic is that the returns to one's self of engaging in a cause larger than yourself are so enormous, and

there is a selfish reason to be selfless, if you will. happiness, fulfillment. i think there's a really yearning on the part of so many americans from for that kind of satisfaction if they can figure out how to do it right. >> must-read copy every week in the "the new york times." new book out, "a path appears" written by nicholas kristof and wife, sheryl wudunn. great to you on the program. give our best to sheryl. >> i will. >> that's our show tonight. as always, keep the faith. for more information on today's show, visit tavissmiley@pbs.org. i'm tavis smiley. join me next time as we take a deep dive into what's grabbing the country's attention in the coming week. that's next time. we'll see you then. ♪

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