The Right Goals are the Key to Success

The second critical pillar of Democratic political success – after embracing a reasonable modicum of humility and respect for all our citizens – must be to make the governments Democrats lead serve the core interests of the entire population, but most centrally, of the bottom 50 percent of earners. Right now, half of our fellow citizens are struggling just to get by, and they often see little hope of meaningful change through aligning with Democrats. This half of our population owns only about 2.5 percent of all wealth and earns less than 15 percent of all income. To win the real and lasting support of this half of our citizens, we should fight to increase their share of wealth by at least 10-fold and their share of income to at least 30 percent.

Accomplishing these goals would translate into some very visible improvements. We could double the number of people in the bottom half owning their own homes. We could cut their consumer and student debt to a fraction of today's levels. We could provide everyone with quality health care. And everyone could have a good job, with a real living wage, good benefits and working conditions, and the dignity and sense of personal security that would come with all that.

To achieve these outcomes, we must overcome the pervasive cynicism and lack of trust that surrounds us today and that disables so many of our institutions. Because there is so little trust, and because there is so much hostility, our programs and policies must be designed to produce rapid and visible improvements in day-to-day lives. An appeal to trust us, to sacrifice now to benefit later, is unlikely to be a winning battle cry.

Essential Reforms

The Democrats have many faults, and to win real and lasting support, those faults must be remedied. This should begin with Democrats freeing themselves from their dependency on wealthy donors and then stopping their collusion with the exploitation of blue collar and service industry working people. This is the main reason support for Democrats from people in the bottom 50 percent of earners is so weak. Workers don't distrust Democrats because they are stupid. They lack trust because they have felt betrayed too many times.

Compounding these errors, Democrats have continued to support oil and gas development, and they have been complicit in permitting the predatory terms of many student loans. For these and other perceived betrayals, they have lost the trust of a significant fraction of younger voters.

Weak support and lack of trust from both working-class voters and younger voters add up to a very weak hand for Democrats going into the next election.

Donations, volunteering, and enthusiasm for Democrats are down, and considering the history, that should come as no surprise. Democrats are on a disastrous path. That President Biden could lose the 2024 election to the likes of Donald Trump can be explained in no other way. That an estimated 40 percent of union households supported Donald Trump in 2020 can be explained in no other way. That 75 percent of Americans polled support the UAW strikers, but that only about 40 percent of them say they approve of President Biden's performance, can be explained in no other way. And approval of the job Democratic leaders in Congress are doing is even lower, standing at a dismal 33 percent in April of 2023.

To fix this, we must enact a bevy of reforms that change a system that has enabled the rich to seize a vastly disproportionate share of the nation's income and wealth.

These reforms begin with real campaign finance reform, reform that stops the rich from buying elections and from buying the votes of incumbent Democratic politicians. We currently tolerate legal in-plain-sight corruption. This must end.

We must enact tough lobbying reform and drain the swamp for real this time. We must stop the rich from writing our laws and regulations. We must end the revolving door of politician to lobbyist, enact real transparency requirements, and stop approving last-minute hidden tax loopholes and hidden regulatory exemptions.

We must strip special interest provisions and exemptions out of the tax code, and likewise eliminate regulations created to advantage some market players over others, regulations created as barriers to competition and that allow jacking up prices.

We must end the corruption made possible by regulatory capture, make predatory lending illegal, make the predatory practices of hedge funds illegal, and stop rich investors, acting through hedge funds, from taking over housing markets, hospitals, and medical practices and then jacking up prices to walk away with billions, leaving renters, patients, employees, and their communities poorer than ever.

We must toughen antitrust enforcement, break up monopolies, and dilute the overgrown market power that allows many large corporations to freely increase prices and thus take an ever-larger share of the economic pie.

And, the critical element, we must raise taxes on the very rich in a very big way, to New Deal levels. These taxes should cover both income and wealth. This new revenue can then be used, through industrial policies, to create tens of millions of good new jobs. I'll describe this below as a "Marshall Plan for the Left Behind."

If necessary to accomplish real reforms, we must take on the status quo protecting Supreme Court. Its interpretation of the Constitution's requirements systematically serves the wealthy. Remember, the Supreme Court tried to block FDR's New Deal. They will do likewise in our era. We need a new New Deal, and we cannot allow a Supreme Court packed by a phony populist serving the wealthy to block what we must do. The Supreme Court can be changed.

Jobs & More Jobs: Jobs with Benefits

There is simply no good reason that we cannot create a reality in which everyone can get a job that pays a living wage with decent benefits. We have a ton of work that needs doing, and millions of people are eager for good jobs. The fact that we cannot find a way to combine the two to make us all better off is symptomatic of a gross failure of imagination. Nothing would do more to reduce anger and help heal our political wounds than a good job with benefits for everyone who needs one. Consider this today's version of "a chicken in every pot."

What would happen if it were true, in every individual case, that anyone who wanted a job could get a job that pays a good living wage and comes with benefits and worker protections? I can't imagine anything that would be more effective in reducing the level of resentment, and all the conflicts arising therefrom, than making a good job for everybody a reality. It would completely revolutionize our politics and our culture. We should move down this path with continuously growing economic security as our lodestar.

Key to making our politics work to support the change we need is to make sure our programs and policies are executed in a way that produces continuous actual improvement in the public's feelings of economic security. Citizens need to be confident that they will be protected. They need to know that we all have each other's back. Trust is low, so our path cannot be to ask citizens to make a leap of faith. Sacrifice now with the promise of benefits later won't work because such promises won't be believed. Our path must be founded on continuous improvement as felt by real people in real time. This must be a cornerstone of our strategy going forward.

There is no Shortage of Work to Do

This idea that there isn't enough work that badly needs doing to keep all of us busy is clearly not so. The nearly complete rebuilding or substantial modification of everything – buildings, equipment, vehicles, infrastructure – to become sustainable will provide a massive Keynesian stimulus for at least a generation, more likely two.

What is true is that no business, no government agency, and no other organization is offering employment to do the many things that need doing. Things that we'd all benefit from getting done aren't getting done and won't get done without political decisions to make them happen. There is no market demand for much of what we need, and so there are no jobs offered to perform many vital tasks.

All that can change if we execute a workable process competently. There are many ways to create the jobs we need. President Biden's industrial policy legislation (the Infrastructure Bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPs Act) got us started in the right direction. We need to greatly accelerate this process, and a fair and enforced taxation of the income of those currently earning millions every year can move us forward.

Other large parts of what we need to do cannot be accomplished by incentivizing private investment but will rather take direct public investment in human services, in education and training, in environmental cleanup and ecosystem restoration, and much more. A wealth tax, to claw back the excessive profits now held as wealth by the very rich, can help pay for much of this.

We cannot rush into this heedlessly. A change as massive as we need will involve jobs lost as well as jobs gained. For those who lose jobs, their welfare will need to be fully protected in real time. Every single one. Nobody can be overlooked, and nobody can be left out. Without that, enough trust will not be created support the difficult steps that must be taken.

Almost everyone agrees that a good job with benefits is a far better deal than even generous welfare. Instead of fighting about welfare, we should agree that we do want to eliminate most of it, but by the singular means of replacing it with good jobs, jobs that provide a living wage, reasonable benefits, and one way or another, medical benefits.

The replacement of welfare with jobs should not be merely theoretical or statistical. We should set up a process so there are no victims, nobody left standing when the music stops. This shift must, again, be done with attention to each individual, so that literally no one is left behind. Let me be clear. If we see someone hurting because they are being left behind, we must give that person the "shirt off our back" if that is what it takes to keep our promise to each other. Only if we keep faith with each other will we muster the trust without which nothing else will be possible.

An Economy That Benefits Everybody

The heart of the matter is that the financial system – the market generally and corporations within that market – is functioning in a way that favors elites and favors the incumbent products currently offered in most sectors of human need. This holds back the adaptive change that would be possible if the benefits of markets flowed to the many rather than mostly to the few at the top.

Unless we want the government to own most businesses and government officials to make many of the decisions about what products and services will be available and at what prices, unless we want the market system replaced as a whole, we are going to continue to live in a system where markets determine much about the direction of the economy.

It has long been accepted wisdom among economists and senior government leaders that markets need to be overseen, policed for such activities as the acquisition and use of monopoly or market power, predatory pricing schemes designed to drive competitors out of business (allowing prices to be raised much more easily), and many other complex forms of predatory behavior.

Assuming markets are overseen competently, a huge problem remains and must be addressed, and that is the problem of externalities. A business often makes its profit on products priced either without or with too little consideration of the costs those products impose elsewhere in the economy and society. It is often profitable for businesses to offer products that end up costing society many times whatever profits may be made. A commonly cited example is a factory polluting a nearby river. Those living downstream face the negative consequences, but these external costs aren't paid by the factory owner or incorporated in the price of its products. And that's just in dollar terms, before considering, for example, the excruciating suffering of people battling cancers caused by industrial pollutants.

Internalizing these externalities by bringing external costs into the prices charged for products in real markets must be accomplished in a way that produces net benefits to society at each stage along the way. That, by itself, will be very challenging, and compounding this challenge is the certainty that this sort of change will inevitably produce adverse side effects. These harms must be anticipated (or spotted quickly) so that we can neutralize the impacts on individuals who would be displaced and who would be hurt badly if we didn't protect them.

Of course this will be difficult, and impossible without a good faith process supported by a broad cross section of the public as well as by a similarly inclusive array of institutional, business, and political leaders. But the alternative, if we fail to force markets to tell the whole truth about costs, is direct intervention to make innumerable decisions by government dictate. Make no mistake about it. Fair warning to the interests who will resist. Those who make market reform impossible will make market regulation inevitable.

Beyond internalizing externalities, one additional focus for reform is vital. It is not nearly as technically and politically complex but will nevertheless be politically challenging. That area is corporate governance. The incentive structure currently controlling business decisions could hardly be more contrary to our long-term interests. Quarterly profits dominate, and with stock prices driving top executive compensation, a very short-term focus is the inevitable result.

On top of this, the managerial class has apparently decided that it deserves – or in any event can and is going to take – tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for chief executives. These incentives then drive many large corporations into corrupt behaviors and dishonest communications with regulators, with customers, with residents and governments of host communities, and with employees.

There is clearly a vital role for government intervention. We do, as elsewhere in our efforts, need to pay careful attention to unwanted side effects of any interventions we attempt. These chief executives also keep the lights on. Corporate governance reform can be approached in many ways, and many difficult choices will be required. The most important point now is that this process must be carried out with great attention to unanticipated effects and with a clear focus on delivering near-term benefits while explaining those benefits in a fashion the public can understand.

Make Equality of Opportunity Real

Enforcing equality of outcomes provokes justifiable resistance, but equality of opportunity rings hollow because it has for so long been little more than an empty slogan. Stepping back, we quickly recognize that we have never had anything remotely approaching equality of opportunity. Disadvantaged groups must send their children to inferior schools, and they enter those inferior schools after their preschool programs (if they have had any) have failed to give them the advantages provided by the much better preschools attended by the children of affluent parents. Real equal opportunity would begin in the mother's womb, with adequate nutrition during pregnancy and adequate prenatal health care, and then it would extend continuously until that same person is no longer seeking new opportunities, which is probably never. Real equality of opportunity means equal from the cradle to the grave.

So, we've really made a mess of equal opportunity. It will not regain credibility until and unless it produces real progress, and it will not produce real progress without very large and sustained investments. Providing equal opportunities for growth and development from before birth and extending throughout adulthood should never mean pulling down the many qualities the affluent enjoy. Leave those alone. The task is to bring the quality of the opportunities the non-affluent have up to an equal level. Anything less is not equal opportunity.

We can begin to fix this by creating new opportunities in the geographic areas and among the demographic groups that have had the fewest new opportunities in recent decades. That would mean really focusing on small town and rural communities, many in the Midwest and South, that have seen major losses of income. It would include focusing on the rust belt manufacturing hubs that have been hollowed out by globalization. And, of course, it would include focusing on the urban poor, whose fortunes have failed to rise with the middle class. Some of these groups lost what they had, and they are angry. Others never got the opportunities they were promised, and they too are angry. Together they are the Left Behind, and they should be Left Behind no longer.

A Marshall Plan for the Left Behind

We are not literally at war between the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe, but we are way too close for comfort. Psychologically, on both sides, ours is an almost pre-war mental state. All that anger is powered by adrenaline, and that is exactly what powers fighters in actual battles.

The winner of any epic battle has an opportunity, and the United States saw and embraced that opportunity after the Second World War. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers had suffered, had been grievously wounded, or had died at the hands of the Germans and the Japanese. Thousands of Americans had been held as prisoners of war, and the camps were, as they often are, venues for the indulgence of cruelty and sadism. And yet, after all that violence, all that hatred, all that pain, the United States as victor created the Marshall Plan. We poured large sums into helping those who had very recently been killing us in large numbers. If an earlier generation could do that then, certainly we can do something similar now.

The Red States have real, substantial, and legitimate economic grievances. If Democrats continue to be the victors of near-term political battles, a proactive effort to put big investments into righting these economic wrongs would be our era's equivalent to the Marshall Plan. It would require the same far-sighted wisdom displayed so many years ago. This would ask a great deal from us in one very particular way: We would be called not simply to help our "enemies" but to care about and respect them. We would need to recognize that they are not our enemies at all.

But all this still leaves out other segments of the Left Behind. The struggling residents of our older interior manufacturing cities, and the poor of our coastal cities, have also been left out of today's prosperity. These encompass both working class whites and people of color, and for non-whites, many of the gains promised by the rhetoric of civil rights and equal opportunity simply never arrived. If we marry the Marshall Plan for the Red States with a similarly large and effective effort aimed at the rust belt cities and the urban poor, we end up with this idea: A Marshall Plan for the Left Behind.

We are one country, and we have a duty to each other. We can think of that duty as if we were Marines: No soldier, and no citizen, should ever be left behind. That is a powerful ethos, and one we should embrace. Our creed should be that nobody should ever be abandoned, ever left behind to suffer, as if their lives don't matter.

And, of course, if we integrate a green transition plan from top to bottom into this effort, the entire enterprise can become a fantastic investment that will make all of America more prosperous for decades to come.

Political Results

Winning a lasting majority would require huge change, change that the working class and middle class together would see as a major improvement in their life circumstances. Of course, we cannot accomplish this agenda of change before the next election. But we can make our intentions clear. We can make our commitment to fight for real change unmistakable.

Politically, this would lay the foundation for a lasting and strong majority in three ways:

1. It would firm up the support of working-class and young voters with weak and wavering support for Democrats.

2. It would give non-voters a reason to turn out and vote for Democrats.

3. And it would, if combined with a new attitude of respect toward conservative and right-leaning voters, allow us to win perhaps 15 percent of those voters over to our side.

Given the choice between the phony populism of Trump and a Democratic Party truly fighting for them, we could seriously contend to switch a fraction of conservative voters.

There Will Be Many Objections

Reformers of past eras have learned many painful lessons. They learned, and we must remember, that the "road to hell is paved with good intentions." We would be well served by considering these painful lessons carefully, and by listening with equal care to the many objections which will be voiced in our time to any reform agenda as sweeping and ambitious as described in these pages.

Below I will consider and discuss some of these challenges. I'm sure that there will be others not anticipated by the discussion below. I have suggested that we would do well to emulate the New Deal and undertake a reform agenda as bold and sweeping.

Recognizing the severity of the crises he confronted, President Roosevelt succeeded in a program of reform that created a stable governing philosophy and coalition that lasted for decades, much as we must do today. His response to the uncertainties and unknowns of change was captured in his famous 1932 speech on change:

"The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."

Roosevelt recognized that in times of crisis, it is crucial not to be paralyzed by indecision. Instead, he understood that risks were unavoidable then just as we must understand that they are unavoidable today. This dictated for FDR, and it should for us as well, a humility that acknowledges that we may at times err in our attempts. We must try things, abandon what doesn't work and build on what does. But above all, our current path is not working, and failing to try a new path is the biggest mistake we could make.

The Unintended Consequences Challenge

We live and struggle inside a society that often feels impossibly complex. Few are unwise enough to believe they understand the society we have created in any comprehensive way. People who have thought seriously about complex systems know that "it is impossible to do only one thing."

For us, that may be the understatement of all time. It may be impossible to do one thing without at the same time doing a great many things. Many of these consequences would be unintended and unexpected, and surely some would be unwelcome. Perhaps very unwelcome.

While we should not allow this awareness to paralyze us, we also should not allow ourselves to act recklessly. Without a constant vigilance to watch for such unexpected and negative effects and act to blunt them before they do too much harm, we could unwittingly undo the good we intend.

So, to all those who would point out these dangers, we should not ignore their worries. Instead, we should request their help, and reply, "yes, and please help us to anticipate as much as we can and when we fail, help us to act quickly to remedy our mistakes."

We must always remember that good intentions are not enough to keep us off the road to hell. We must be humble enough to seek insight from every quarter, most especially, from those opposing any step we propose or begin.

For many of the policies we may initiate, we would be wise to go cautiously and be constantly prepared to course correct. Unexpected effects will be everywhere, and we must remember to expect the unexpected.

The Freedom Challenge

Clearly the reform agenda I have begun to describe involves extensive interventions in existing systems. Many will be suspicious that the motives of reformers, with their sometimes righteous attitudes, will lead them to impose changes by authority, and that our society will become less free as a result. We want a future characterized by many freedoms, and so we should listen carefully to these concerns.

Managed markets, industrial policy, and large-scale changes in tax and regulatory policy, will impact the interests of many parties. Any time someone doesn't get what they want, including the maintenance of things as they are, they are likely to experience an action causing unwanted change as an imposition on their freedom.

There is considerable historical experience justifying concern about the growth in government power. On the other hand, many of the changes we should seek would involve changing the way government power is deployed so that it expands the freedom of the many even while it constricts the freedom of the few.

A key point regarding freedom is simply that to the extent we can internalize externalities, the need for the use of regulatory authority could be replaced by market incentives. We should consider that the so called "free markets" aren't quite so freedom promoting when we understand that they all too frequently involve imposing costs on others, and without first gaining their consent.

Still, we should guard against unwarranted growth in government power, and try to accomplish necessary ends with the lightest use of power that will be effective. The majority must generally approve, so a reform agenda should not be imposed on an unwilling public. A democracy requires gaining the voluntary consent of citizens.

It was in no small part from such concerns that Roosevelt spelled out his famous Four Freedoms in his 1941 State of the Union address. They are worth quoting in this context:

1. The first is freedom of speech and expression.

2. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way.

3. The third is freedom from want.

4. The fourth is freedom from fear.

Today, at least for the bottom half of our population, we have vastly neglected the freedom from want and the freedom from fear.

The Environmental Challenge

The idea that there are not enough natural resources to continue to grow economically has long been widespread among environmentalists. Without getting into this debate as such, the same concerns and arguments will, of necessity, be related to an all-inclusive reconstruction of the built environment. We will need to rebuild almost everything (structures, infrastructure, equipment, and vehicles) to make industrial civilization more efficient and to electrify it. It is only logical that the concept of natural resource limits would call the feasibility of this project into question.

My assessment is straightforward, although guarded and somewhat tentative. Very large quantities of non-carbon energy are becoming technically and economically feasible. Considering solar radiation, wind, currents, tides, and heat stores beneath the Earth's surface, the amount of affordable non-carbon energy available to humanity is likely to be several times more than all the energy we use today. And this is probably true before considering "safe" nuclear, or fusion, if it becomes feasible in the future.

The other key resource requirement for an all-inclusive reconstruction is metals. Recent assessments, plus the ability to capture metals from low concentration sources (if cheap non-carbon energy becomes abundant) and from the ocean floor (if done carefully), will likely mean metal supplies will be adequate not only to replace current equipment but also to build the equipment we will need to remove carbon from the air and salt from ocean water. We will also be able to recycle the metals in much of what we will be replacing. Cheap non-carbon energy will in addition probably allow us to both clean up meaningful amounts of polluted land and significant currently polluted water supplies, as well as to capture industrial pollutants from the reconstruction process before they are released to the environment.

Environmentalists are certainly right about the need to stop consuming and destroying the living natural environment, and this will significantly constrain and channel economic growth. E.O. Wilson's suggestion that we should dedicate half the Earth's area to the protection and preservation of ecosystems and to preventing species extinctions is likely a good baseline goal, and this scale of preservation will certainly be very challenging and be a significant constraint on many types of growth.

But cheap non-carbon energy and abundant metals will make a massive reconstruction project possible as well as help us solve several critical environmental resource problems. In the interim, relatively benign options such as non-till agriculture, a shift to lower levels of meat consumption, ultra-white paint on roofs and constructed surfaces, large scale urban and rural tree planting, and perhaps ocean seeding with iron, can help a great deal. In combination with hardening our communities against climate impacts and physically protecting species and ecosystems, these measures can help us keep the most destructive effects of climate change from becoming catastrophic before we can build out the renewable energy sources and the other technologies (carbon removal, salt removal) we will need in the long run.

All of this means that environmental limits need not stop us from creating prosperity for the many. The employment created by an all-inclusive rebuilding project will make a major contribution to the new jobs that prosperity for all will require. This logic, with a variety of caveats and stipulations that we don't need to explore here, can likely be extended globally.

The "Can't Afford It" Challenge

As a society, we are experiencing growing labor productivity (from robotics, AI, and other labor-saving technologies). Many projections of the potential for labor savings are enormous. Large fractions of total labor cost could ultimately be saved. We are inclined in the current system to see this as a big problem. But it could instead be a big resource to make us all safer and better off.

When this savings flows up to the rich in the form of dividends or increased executive salaries, they buy yachts, mansions, artwork, and so on. In that case, the average person is worse off. If this same money was used not to pad profits or executive compensation but instead was used to subsidize housing costs for workers or to provide better health care benefits, then it would be the workers who would gain. They would get the same salary but enjoy lower cost housing or better health care. Everything depends on who gets the savings from labor-saving innovation. This is a political choice that we could make to our common benefit if we had a democracy strong enough to do so.

Labor saving innovation only makes working people poorer if the extra profit goes to the already rich rather than being recycled back to workers. This recycling could happen as an increase in hourly pay, as a shorter work week, as a lower cost for some other product or service, or in the form of payment to do socially beneficial work for which the market economy does not currently create jobs.

Managed for the benefit of society, labor saving innovation could make our entire society better off. It just doesn't work out that way in the current "market" economy. It will take some combination of much stronger unions and much higher taxes on the rich to make it so.

In our current economy, "we" are sitting on an enormous accumulation of saved wealth, a large portion of which is held by the top one or two percent of the population. It is often either saved for their children, spent on still more luxuries, or used to buy power. A significant portion of that reservoir of wealth could be available to society for investments that would make us all better off, but we'd have to tax the rich to use it to benefit the many rather than the few. Again, what would be required to do this is simply a much stronger democracy with the political will to serve the needs of the many.

So, here's the (new) deal. We go all in for labor savings but capture all that money for the many through taxes and collective bargaining. And we claw back the excess wealth from past excess profits through taxes and invest that money in the things that will make us all better off.

The bottom line: Bring Fortune 500 CEO compensation down by a factor of 10, from 300 to 400 times average worker pay to perhaps 30 to 40 times, a level common in the 1950s. Bring returns on low-risk investment to perhaps 2 percent above inflation, down to levels common in the past and sufficient to motivate people to save and invest. (As a side note, how much risk premiums on interest rates would be needed would depend on the level of risk we want or need the private sector to take. This is an important question, but not one this discussion requires resolving.)

In terms of total wealth held by the rich, today the top one percent holds about one third of total US wealth. A significant portion of this could be taxed for society's needs. How much the rich should keep is an open question, but there is no conceivable justification for one third. Inheritance taxes should be high enough to prevent the formation of a hereditary aristocracy, but graduated in a fashion to accommodate parents who are motivated to protect their kids from the vicissitudes of the future.

Beyond that, how much we can ultimately afford depends on how hard we are willing to work, how smart we are in the use of limited natural resources, how efficient we can make our governments, and how much we can save by reducing welfare (work instead), reducing military spending (make peace instead), reducing prison spending (stop mass producing a criminal class), and similar savings.

What Are the Rich Good for Anyway?

At this point, it is necessary to pause to be sure that some important things are understood about the "working rich." (There is really no defense for the "idle rich," so none will be attempted here.)

Even if we don't feel the top CEOs deserve as much as they get paid today, and even though we sometimes fall into scapegoating and complaining about their "greed," many of us, given similar incentives, would make similar choices. Top level CEOs are as a group different from the rest of us mostly in being more driven and harder working. The Harvard Business Review conducted a study detailing the life of a CEO, including how they manage their time and the demands of the role. According to that study, top level CEOs work 70 or more hours per week. Their jobs are filled with high-stress situations, constant travel, and burdensome decision-making responsibilities.

As a group, they likely aren't a lot different from the rest of us as moral creatures. Of course, there are the headline making examples of heartless and ruthless actions. But most, I suspect, want to be "good people." Want to do the "right thing" when circumstances permit. Going further, I have no doubt that some are outstanding humans in every way. Some I believe are working quite sincerely to reduce societal problems, injustices, and dangers. Some feel a strong desire to "give back," and retire from their careers to be philanthropists. And some do a lot of good in these adopted roles.

We would be making a big mistake to demonize them. Just as I have argued previously that we should respect conservatives as a group, I also believe respect is due to our business leaders.

We shouldn't kid ourselves on this. We need our CEOs and all the other senior managers that currently run the corporate world. Nothing said elsewhere on these pages should be misconstrued as calling for a "revolution." A "revolution," if we mean throwing out those in charge now and replacing them with other people, would be a disaster.

Changing society to create prosperity for the great majority will be very difficult, and we will need the people who know how to keep the lights on and the trains running. We need the top managers to stay in charge while we also need to reform substantially the incentives that guide their choices. We need them to continue to run their businesses. We just need to stop them from running our politics. And to make this all work out, we will also need to allow the rich to stay rich. Just not nearly as outlandishly so.

Socialism, meaning government bureaucrats making most choices, won't work out well for us. Markets, properly managed, have many virtues, and we should keep them while curbing abuses, internalizing costs as much as possible, and correcting for market failures. If markets are preserved, incentives for quality and creativity will also be preserved. We can keep style in clothing and architecture and continue to enjoy a creative culture generally. We do not need to devolve into the flat colorless socialism that ensues when bureaucrats micro-manage everything.

We do, however, need to be guided by industrial policy. The major investment decisions of society should be guided democratically, but we should listen carefully, respectfully, to what our current managers think will and won't work. They have life experience the rest of us lack, and we would be unwise to ignore what they have to say.

We've created a corporate meritocracy, and for all its faults, the people running it are smart and driven. In their own fashion, they are workers too.

The "Not Enough Jobs" Challenge

So, this brings us to our final challenge. Is there enough work to keep us all gainfully employed? There is much handwringing on this question, but the worry doesn't hold up when we look at what society needs. Left to current market forces, there will be nowhere near enough employment opportunities, but that is a different question altogether.

Labor saving methods will certainly eliminate much of current employment, but if the money freed up by those innovations is effectively recycled, and if we reimpose a New Deal level of taxation on the wealthy, available funding would allow many tens of millions of paid jobs to be created. Among many socially beneficial uses, these funds could pay for some combination of the following:

• To solve our many problems and meet our many unmet needs, millions of workers will need to be paid to acquire new skills.

• We need to undertake a major effort to protect and restore local and regional ecosystems, protect endangered species, and cull invasive species.

• We need a truly massive effort to clean up the mess we've made. This includes capping abandoned oil and gas wells, cleaning and covering abandoned mines, restoring forests that have been clearcut or burned, restoring grassland pastures that have been overgrazed, cleaning up the plastics and other wastes that are everywhere, and so on.

• We need to at increase substantially the construction of affordable homes so that we can at least double home ownership by the bottom half of earners.

• We need to renovate our entire existing stock of structures, from homes to commercial buildings to factories to chemical plants, to make them efficient, powered by electricity, durable, and hardened against the increasing tide of climate chaos driven disasters. And we need to harden our infrastructure and other community facilities at the same time.

• We need to build and operate industrial facilities to remove carbon from the atmosphere and salt from seawater – and do these things on a massive scale.

• We need to plant trees, in both urban and rural areas, and paint most roofs with the new ultra-white paint to reflect solar radiation back into space.

• We need to replace every gas- and diesel-powered vehicle.

• We need to replace every non-electric appliance.

• We need to change our infrastructure, as our existing plumbing, wastewater, stormwater, and electricity transmission grids will not meet our evolving needs.

• We need to replace most of our industrial equipment.

• We need to create a massive renewable energy system in all its aspects, including storage, and develop many types of renewable generation to fit local needs and opportunities.

• We need a massive system of care services for the sick and aging, as people with these needs will become a much larger share of our population.

• We need to disassemble and recycle everything we are replacing, as we will need the natural resources we have already extracted from the natural environment (abandoned structures, industrial sites, chemical plants, commercial structures, equipment, vehicles, etc.).

• "Women's work" will eventually have to become paid work. Child rearing and elder care will in the future be recognized as societal needs rather than merely personal choices. The US and most of the developed world are reproducing at less than replacement rates, and thus, according to a New York Times analysis, we will eventually face a continuous drop in population. Today, having children usually places a woman at a financial disadvantage, and so long as this remains the case, women are likely to continue to prefer fewer children than a replacement rate would require. Even if you believe our population should drop by a lot, at some point reproduction must return to replacement levels if we want to see our species continue. For this reason, the current financial disincentive to childbearing will have to change.

This list could go on for pages, but you get the idea. There will be no shortage of work, but even if we can pay well, there could easily be a shortage of workers. And all this is said with robotics and AI fully in mind.

Much of this work will involve potential worker health and safety issues, and careful attention will be needed up front on this. Taking apart everything involves a lot of exposure to health risks, and this will slow down the process and mean we will need even more workers to do it all.

Most of what I have described above will not be demanded by today's markets. Market forces, at least as the market is currently structured, will not provide most of these jobs. We are living inside massive market failure. The markets do not demand what society plainly needs.

Finally, consider that all this cannot be a US only project. Many aspects of this simply will not work if not approached on a global level. And I'm not talking just about environmental or natural resources. Tax reform of the type described above could motivate capital flight, and controlling this will require a coordinated international effort.

Done in the right way, with careful coordination and sequencing, attention to supply chains and worker availability, all this will be massively stimulative. It can usher in a generation, and more likely two, of economic boom, and after that, another difficult transition will be upon us.

But for now, this is enough. We can only manage all this with a strengthened democracy, with a voting public that comprehends the challenges we are facing and is prepared to persevere though the inevitable ups and downs that will come with charting a new path into an uncertain future.

Democracy, a much stronger, smarter, and more durable democracy, is the only way to make it through all of this.

D.C.
Published: October 2023
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