and welcome back to the big picture i'm sam sacks in for tom hartman in this half hour we'll take another look at a recent conversations with great minds that tom conducted with m.s.n. b.c. host and author chris hayes hayes is the author of the new book twilight of the elites which examines how the ruling class in america has utterly failed the rest of us over the last few decades culminating in a series of disasters from the security failures of nine eleven to the pointless wars in the middle east to the financial collapse of two thousand and eight and not only does hayes point out the problems of the elites in this conversation he also gives us some insight on what we can do about it some worth while advice that we all need to listen to so here it is tom's conversations with great minds with chris

hayes. conversations with great minds i'm joined by chris hayes chris is a political commentator and host of up with chris hayes which airs saturday and sunday mornings on m s n b c is also the editor at large of the nation magazine and writes on issues central to the progressive community including what is heard in the democratic party and how the labor movement is changing chris is a graduate of brown university with a bachelor's degree in philosophy he's also the author of the critically acclaimed newly released book twilight of the elites america after meritocracy chris joins me now from our new york city studios chris welcome. oh it's great to be here tom thanks for having me great to have you with us chris before we get to the book i'm curious about you what got you into politics what what what is the core of your passion for these topics and how did you get to where you are. you know i grew up

in the bronx my father was a community organizer my mom was an educator she taught in the south bronx and you know i was very lucky to grow up in a world you know my parents were very working class middle class but i was surrounded by a community of folks that were working in the bronx particularly in a period in the seventy's and eighty's where things were really rough in the borough and a lot of organizers people doing social justice work people coming out of very specific catholic social justice tradition my father had been a jesuit seminarian actually for seven years and never made the final vows he that he left to become a community organizer so my brother who the younger brother we were both just raised in this mill you in which we talked about political issues we talked about public life we debated things or the dinner table and we had adults who were who were model always modeling. work that they were pursuing because they thought it

was going to make the world a more just and humane place that's the extraordinary. book meritocracy how do you define meritocracy for the purposes of this book. yeah so mary meritocracy is the name that we give to the most recent incarnation of a very old american idea i mean if you go back to tocqueville and writers throughout the history of american republic you know there was always a sense in which the american dream right was the idea that a country founded without the legacy of feudalism and on the backs of slaves we should note for for for free white people would be a place in which you could rise from any station to as far as your talents would take you and meritocracy is the version of that the name we give to the both of the dream we have of that is a social model and the set of institutions we've we've created to produce a system in which we say we will not bar entry into the highest echelons of american life based on race or class or gender or creed or sexual orientation we're

. going to have everyone compete on the even playing field and that sort through who are the most industrious and bright and talented and select down to them and they'll go to harvard law school and they'll be president united states and they'll run the major banks and barack obama is is a testament to that system and things about that system better noble and admirable which is to say it is only under the vision a meritocracy in the history of american republic that barack obama with his background and his name could be president ited states but you know the name meritocracy ironically was coined by a british labor left parliamentarian who wrote the wrote a book called the rise of meritocracy as a satire of what the world would look like if you actually pursued that this ship and what he he predicted in what i write about in the book is that it actually would become a very ossified very sclerotic kind of society and what we've seen in this society is that over the thirty or forty years in which we've adopted this is our social

model radical rises in inequality that continue to accelerate and what goes less reported but in some senses i think is more more important is the decline in social mobility so the meritocracy is a model that isn't even living up to its own promise it has a spend spend writing back in the one nine hundred twenty s. was saying something very similar although you know he was a fascist ultimately but but the society had become a caricature of itself he was very concerned about the future of the elites to tocqueville the one nine hundred thirty six when he wrote democracy in america he his take or at least my recollection of his take it's been a decade or more since i read the book but was. the amazing thing about the american dream as it were you never use that phrase but we would today was that anyone could achieve it and it wasn't high station it wasn't like the france that he had come from it didn't mean being part of louie's court or even being part of

the parliament or something like that. it was more like you know your dad the community organizer my dad you know worked until a dive shop for forty years that they had hit a point where they could raise their family they could open their home they you know that was the american dream for large chunks of the united states reagan seems to recalibrated that to the american dream is now over the last thirty years you too can become rich. what are your thoughts on how that has shifted and how does that feed into or come out of your book. i think i think that's a really good point i think one of the things one of the cultural shifts we've seen and it's gone with i think the reagan era symbolized it in terms of the cultural shift and the financial ization of the american economy as a as an economic shift and those two things that got together are the rising inequality has all kinds of cascade effects and one of them is marriage and salary or income begin to become confused for one another so we start to think

not just that someone's someone is earning money because they deserve it in their talent and they're smart but if they're earning money then they must deserve it and turn talented and smart is a very dangerous way to think about things and i think it also has created this constant ceaseless status anxiety among the elite themselves because when you get to the top what you observe in the distribution of income what i call in the book fractal inequality that is inequality that reince cries itself at every level of analysis the constant idea that there's always someone above you there's always other some other step to rise to right it produces this kind of neediness this kind of acquisitiveness this competitiveness that is the seed bed of a lot of corruption is a lot of a lot of corner cutting because people who are in the upper ranks of the meritocratic elite i think there's a sense they never can feel satisfied they always that there is always another competition around the bend and i think that that is part of the kind of norm

degradation that we've seen particularly when we've seen what's what's happened on wall street but also me look at the revolving door right i mean you know we all know when someone leaves you know when someone leaves and peter leaves o.m.b. we know he's going to go work at an investment bank for a million dollars a year that's that's sensually that's a done deal. because we just consider this part of the way the elite works they move seamlessly between the public and private sector because if they have power they can cash it out if they have money they can purchase power and and. yeah. and you had an experience and you write about the book you just mentioned fractal inequality the way you wrote about it it seemed like that was your moment of opinion on that particular thing the conversation you had with joe stiglitz his wife and showing up at the airport you mind sharing that story with. yeah i mean you know you go to davos i had gotten a credential to go to cover it because i was writing the book and i thought well i'm writing about the elite i got to go to davos and you fly to davos and you get

into the airport in switzerland and you think yourself oh you know i'm going to davos like i am you begin to feel this little bit that i am one of the elect and you go and there's a very nice booth where very attractive swiss young swiss to greet you and they they give you a ticket you go to a bus and it's a perfectly fine coach bus and you get on it and as you're making your way from the plane to the coach bus you also notice there are people who are getting off the plane who are in first class and they're being approached right at the gate by this whole entourage of davos employees in red jackets who are a scorning them to these gleaming black mercedes sedans outside and they're going to get driven there and you guys all of those are the v.i.p.'s and suddenly your perspective stick shifts right a second before you thought i'm one of the electorate on the inside of the small group of people that get to go to davos and then you know actually i mean i'm i'm in the low class right i'm in the steerage in this coach bus actually the real select people are the v.i.p.'s and then later on as you're you know doing reporting

and talking to people over drinks you realize that actually the real v.i.p.'s are the c.e.o.'s they they don't even bother with the mercedes right they fly in a helicopter for the airport with stunning views of the alps and and what you realize is that the entire world of the abos i mean there's a great line from from on your ship friend who was blogging about this happen to happen to be married to joe stiglitz saying you know it's incredible hustle they've created where you get all these wealthy people to come and feel constantly and propecia lee in secure like they're always missing the best party like something's happy. in some room that they're not part of and i connect that to this amazing speech that c.s. lewis gave in one thousand nine hundred five called the inner ring and he talks about the seductiveness of wanting to be on the inside of the inner ring of walking into a room when two people are having a conversation and they hush and they stop talking as soon as you walk in he says if you ever experience that you've experienced the pull of the inner ring of wanting to be on the inside of it and he says that will in your life be the source

of most of moral corruption that happens to you and the meritocracy in the current structure of the elite are nothing if not a series of perpetual earrings and you talk about. bishop tutu talked about the apartheid and you write about how apartheid not only corrupted the average person and south africa it ultimately destroyed or badly corrupted anyway the elites how is that happening in america. yeah the did this time glad you're is that to quote because i think it's such a profound moral observation about systems of oppression systems of hierarchy systems of inequality which is they there but he basically says look the obviously you know we were the apartheid system was worse for the black africans who were who were ground down under the heel of tyranny but it also degraded and debased the the moral core of the souls of the white africans who are running the system

and the argument that i make in the book about inequality is not the kind of argument that i think we tend to see about inequality which is a good argument not one i don't disagree with which is all the ways inequality is bad for people at the bottom of the social pyramid what i'm more what i'm talking about is that inequality makes people at the top of the social pyramid worse of the more elitist american society gets the worse the caliber of elites it produces and i think we see you know when we look at the at the examples of elite failure throughout the decade when you look at the jamie diamonds of the world for. it's i think we see that pretty clearly and kind of implicit in that is there is the notion that we need the elites let's let's pick up that thread we come back from this break that's all right with you chris more conversation of the great minds of chris face right after this. story.

coming up.

go back to conversations of great minds with chris hayes this is a political commentator and host of up with chris hayes airs saturday and sunday mornings n m s n b c also the editor at large of the nation magazine and writes on issues central to the progressive community including what is hurting the democratic party and how the labor movement is changing chris is the author of the critically acclaimed newly released book twilight of the elites america after

meritocracy let's get back to it chris huey long back in one thousand thirty four said rather famously this was his is you know every man a king who spread the wealth of speech he said it is not the difficulty of the problem which we have it is the fact that the rich people of this country and by rich i mean the super rich will not allow us to solve the problems or rather the one little problem that is afflicting this country is refer to the depression because in order to cure all of our woes it is necessary to scale down the big fortunes that we may scatter to the wealth to be shared by all the people now if you go back just sixty years in time harry truman when he retired from the presidency went back to missouri and lived a very modest life you know he has net worth was never even close to being a millionaire walter cronkite was making sixty thousand dollars a year doing the c.b.s. evening news. since reagan dropped that top tax rate down below seventy four

percent there's been this explosion in the nature of elites in the united states what what what are the consequences of that and what are the solutions to. i'm glad that you you know the dropping of the top marginal tax rate i think is a i don't write about it in the book when i write about taxation policy in the last chapter but i think it's a really important thing because it really does change if you if you believe as as conservative economists say they do in incentives right the idea of dropping the top tax rate is that people will work harder build the you know that the mark zuckerberg of the world formerly would have just sat around on their duff but now they're going to invent facebook and they're going to keep working on facebook and keep giving us all some products because they're going to take home more of every marginal dollar they make i don't think that's actually an accurate description of what drives really good entrepreneurs but one of the underbelly of that is that it also provides an incentive for a lot of corruption and cheating and this is something that i investigate in the

book when i when i look at the steroids scandal in baseball as a kind of microcosm connected to enron and wall street you know the steroids scandal baseball you know baseball is kind of perfect meritocracy in a certain sense the aging slugger if you can of the fastball he gets benched the young dominican kid who's nineteen years old throws a hundred miles an hour he's going to he's going to be able to start huge rewards for success ten million dollar contracts and punishment for failure you get the bench and sent down to the minors and what we see when we look at the steroids scandal in baseball is that it is difficult to very difficult to design a system with huge rewards for performance that is it also a system with huge rewards for cheating the line between those two is a very fine one and so when we create a system like for instance the way we're changing our educational system where we're going to do merit pay for teachers when we create huge wall street bonuses where we change the tax code to create big reward rewards for performance income

you're also creating more rewards for cheating and i think i think the top marginal tax rate in that respect is really important in sort of forming some of those norms and producing incentives for the. behavior that we've seen so do you do you think that the the elites as it were are fundamentally different now than they were in the forty's fifty's sixty's seventy's and early eighty's and if we were to go all the way back to the twenty's you know there could be a famous quote it was from the great gatsby you know the rich are different from us you know they're they have no money but i mean the there is this notion that the rich are actually different from us and i think that that wasn't so much the notion during that middle era. i think the middle layer is in retrospect sort of anomaly in american american life and i don't want to be for the old wasp establishment i mean i think there was a lot of things about it really precious there's a lot of sexism and anti-semitism and criticism imbedded in that in clubbiness and cetera but i do think that the inequality that we see now does create what i call

in the book social distance i think the the the meritocratic elite the people at the who are moving between power in public life and in the private sector are increasingly socially distant from the country in which they are making decisions that are going to affect the mass of the populace and that's little distance has real consequences and that i think is distinct about this era and i should say look i think you know societies that have elites are prone to certain kinds of dysfunction in different kinds of social order with different kinds of elites have different kinds of dysfunctions what i'm describing the book our what our particular model has and the particular crises that it has brought down our heads but you know social distance an example of how that works i mean here's here's a perfect example and this gets your point about what's different now and then then you know we have a lower percentage of veteran lawmakers and we've basically ever had and we we see among people in the top of the of the income distribution households very very low

rates of those folks are in the armed forces and i really think that one of the things that has facilitated it produced a decade of war. the longest period of war in the republican street is exactly that fact is that we're found distance the social distance between decision makers and the people have to fight the wars between the elite in toto and the folks that have been asked to bear this burden in multiple deployments and i think that's one of the many places that you see this dynamic play out and that was something that really wasn't true earlier right i mean you really did have. the there was much more integration at least circles with with the armed forces in earlier errors you know how do you define elites. it's a really good question because it's such a contested we're right in our political vote and vocabulary i mean it's next to freedom i think is probably the most contested word and the right has been very successful in marshaling it and co-opting it in fact i think the right uses it more

than the left does actually international desk discourse sarah palin was railing against the elites and and the conservative definition of it i think we're all familiar with is this set of cultural signifiers right these you know you drink a lot today you drive a volvo or a prius you live in the coastal city in a neighborhood in san francisco you listen n.p.r. and that you know what i'm just trying to do is is reclaim the original meaning of elites which is a meaning that's not that controversial among writers on the left and the right over several hundred years which is just it's not your cultural affinities it's not what music you listen to it's how much power you have over societies direction the elite are a relatively small group of people who have a disproportionately large influence over society's direction that have access to large resources whether those are from anshul social capital networks with other elites a platform you know i'm i think i probably fall in this area myself you know i'm

but i'm lucky enough to have a to have a cable news show so i be implicated in this book as well but but that's that's what we're talking about we're not talking about you know some. you know some civil servant in new york who listens to n.p.r. and reason new york time that's not the elite just because you know someone has those those tastes and similar and similarly warren buffett you know everybody knows he drives an old beat up car he lives this kind of quiet modest life in omaha . but if he's not a member of the elite the no one is frankly clearly the reason that he's a member elite doesn't have a new to do with how you present himself or what kind of car he drives it's how much power he has i believe it was thorstein veblen suggested many years ago that if you could influence the my recollections he identified it as about twenty percent of the population that he called the influencers if you could influence the influencers you could change a society you didn't have to worry about everybody else in the society would that

whether i have the quote correct or not with that concept to be consonant with your notion of the elites is that we are to. yeah i mean i think the influencer is probably a good way of thinking about it as well i mean i think one of the i know in the book one of the really encouraging trends the last decade one of the few encouraging trends last decade is that of all the different kinds of power there are political power financial power what i call network power which is you know who who do you know write. what i call in the book platform power which is how many people you can reach that's the only kind of power that we've actually seen or how many people you can influence to to use the influence or term that's the only kind of power we've seen actually democratized and redistributed and drawn down in a in a really i think powerful way i mean think about this thought experiment if you were say a fairly established professional or a professor in one thousand nine hundred eighty or one thousand nine hundred five or even one nine hundred ninety and you wanted to let two hundred of your neighbors

know about some cause that was important to you that would that would be some work i mean you could maybe go knock on doors you could make a whole bunch of phone calls. you could put up notes in the local diner now every teenager in america almost literally from the from kids in harlem who are on social networks to suburban kids in affluent communities has that power instantly through social media that's that's a really big change and also we've seen this this this balkanization of the mainstream media i mean walter cronkite talked to twenty million people every night which is more than all the evening newscasts combined right now and we're seeing that you know the distribution of audience break down and down and i think that does have a really interesting countervailing effect to the concentration of power we've seen in other realms do you talk about inequality and its role in all of this in the last three minutes we have here what. how does inequality the

growing inequality in the united states lend to that region of occasion that you were talking about earlier and and how do we address it. i'm glad you asked that and getting back to the top marginal rate i mean you know want to think that talk about the book is look we need to make but the goal needs to be making america more equal i mean and i think we need to have a frank conversation in which we actually debate whether the social model we've all adopted a bipartisan kind of cross ideological adoption of this meritocratic model whether it is producing the results we want and if not what we replace it with how we change it to produce a caliber of to produce the leads that are more closely connected to enlarge social mobility to bring down inequality and you know one of the straight forward ways i mean figuring out how to make a society more equal isn't actually rocket science you quote the quote before. you

know there are governments that brazilian government are lugo that just breezed marginal tax rates increase transfer payments the poor raise the minimum wage raised pension and universal benefits for people that were working class poor and middle class and low and behold in brazil levels of inequality came down dramatically that's happened in a lot of places in latin america through a variety of policy frameworks by a variety of center left governments that ran explicitly on an egalitarian agenda got elected put the egalitarian intended to practice and lo and behold made this is these more equal and so it's not a policy problem and that goes back to huey long i mean obviously he longs a complicated figure who i do not want to endorse without reservation but it goes it goes it goes back to huey long what he was saying before about the obstacle isn't a policy obstacle the obstacles a political obstacle the question is how do we build a national conversation political movements political discussion that is going to dislodge that power that's going to open up the boundaries of the debate we can

have about what we really do want our social model to be. and what we wanted to deliver and you've done a brilliant job of cracking open that conversation in your book twilight of the woods chris thanks so much for being with us. thank you really my great pleasure to see this in other conversations of the great minds go to our website of conversations with great minds dot com. and that's it for the big picture tonight as tom always says democracy begins with you get out there get active tag you're it we'll see you next week.

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