The Priests of the Decline

The following is excerpted from “Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy” published by Crown and now on paperback 

During the six years I spent running Venture for America, my job involved speaking regularly about the mission of the organization — in our case training entrepreneurs and creating jobs in communities around the country. Over time, I became aware that the economy was transforming in fundamental ways that would displace millions of workers, requiring larger changes to society than my nonprofit could address. Our nation’s $22 trillion economy was turning against people, and there’s no nonprofit on earth that operates at that level; the largest nonprofit in the United States has a budget of less than one-hundredth of $1 trillion.

Despite my epiphany, it was very difficult to acknowledge this thinking in my role. My job was to motivate people and to be grateful. People were volunteering, working hard, and donating money every day to keep the organization going. And we were doing phenomenal work that was changing lives. I had to be a can-do guy. The last thing I, as the CEO of a nonprofit, could do would be to stand up and say, “The problems are getting worse, not better.”

There are many people stuck in versions of this same situation. You do good work. You’re proud of it. But part of you knows, “There are deeper problems here than I can solve.”

One example of this is schoolteachers. We expect schoolteachers to do amazing work. Millions of teachers do just that every day. But the data shows that two-thirds of our kids’ educational outcomes are determined outside the school by many external factors: number of words read to the child when they’re young, parental income, parental time spent with the child, stress levels in the house, quality of neighborhood, and so on. Teachers know this. Imagine being asked to do a very important job when you know that you can control only about one-third of the result.

The economist Eric Weinstein has posited that our failing economic system is making liars out of many people. Two examples he cites are academia and law firms. In academia, it used to be the case that someone could go to graduate school, get a PhD, get an academic post, and aspire to a full-time professorship. But today, tenure-track positions have dramatically shrunk in number relative to the supply of graduates. Since 1980, the number of teaching positions has increased by more than 100 percent, but the number of tenure-track positions has increased by only 22 percent. Most academics will never get tenure or even be considered. PhDs keep getting produced every year, though, so the vast majority leave the field or become underemployed as permanent underpaid adjuncts in a sort of nebulous purgatory.

The same dynamic is playing out in the legal industry. Graduating law students incur well over $100,000 in school loans. I owed about $120,000 myself when I graduated from law school in 1999. It made sense when you could be confident you’d have a high-paying job waiting for you when you got out of law school. Today’s graduates have far less certainty about their financial rewards, yet their tuition is significantly higher than mine was. Similarly, young attorneys agree to work themselves to the bone for eight to ten years in the hopes of being named a partner, getting a corner office, and making even bigger money. But law firms aren’t growing as they used to. If profits don’t grow, partners will not want to anoint new partners, because they will just be cutting the same pie of profits into smaller slices. They can’t come out and admit that to the associates who are joining the firm. So they wind up telling them eight years later that it turns out there’s no room for them at the top.

No one wants to admit the above realities in academia and law. As a result, institutions and the people who make them up keep proceeding as if opportunities will exist that won’t be there.

I call this dynamic constructive institutionalism — a tendency among leaders to state publicly and even hold the belief that everything will work out, despite quantitative evidence to the contrary, coupled with an inability to actually address a given institution’s real problems. Maybe you even acknowledge the failings and struggles, but you do so in a way that ends up increasing both your credibility and trustworthiness. Imagine a gathering of twenty university presidents to talk about why colleges are so expensive and why the underprivileged don’t have a higher level of access. They would say very smart and compassionate things about the perverse incentives put forward by the U.S. News & World Report rankings and the financial pressures of maintaining competitive appeal. You would think, “Wow, these people really get it.” But not one of them would actually go back and change anything important.

“How will we train Americans for the jobs of the future?” or “How will we overcome polarization and bring Americans together?” I’ve been asked these questions innumerable times over the past several years. The honest answers are “We probably won’t. It will almost certainly get worse.” I then talk bravely about the caring economy, vocational programs, changing the language of politics, or circumscribing social media. But none of those things will actually happen. By talking about them as if they were possible, I’m giving people a mistaken sense of reassurance. We have become a whole network of people bullshitting each other into believing that smart people are thinking about it and good things are happening that will address the problems. And then we all just go back to whatever we were doing.

Government is largely about this kind of theater. When I talk to government officials, oftentimes they lack the power to do anything about a problem, particularly in a time of legislative gridlock and dysfunction. You know what many of them say? “We do have the power to convene.” They will send fancy invitations to a bunch of powerful or well-known people who are involved with or knowledgeable about the issue at hand, and everyone will come together to discuss “the future of work” or “elevating entrepreneurship” or whatever the issue is. Their big delivery will be to get a mayor or senator or member of Congress to show up to said event as an enticement.

I was named a Champion of Change by the Obama administration in 2012 and a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship in 2015. Both of these honors involved meeting President Obama. When I was running for president, I sometimes made use of the photos I had from these gatherings to great effect. I still use them today.

But it turns out the photos were the main deliverable. Champion of Change was a designation given to people doing work that the White House Office of Public Engagement was looking to spotlight. When I went to the Champions of Change event, it was as one of a group of nonprofit leaders to meet the president. We did an interview with the Office of Public Engagement afterward where we were asked for feedback. The first speakers expressed their gratitude for being there. By the third or fourth leader, though, people started saying things like “I wish that we were given a contact who could help our organization” or “I wish that I was getting resources so that we could grow our work.” Many of these nonprofit leaders were running small grassroots organizations and were constantly scrapping for money. The power of the keepsake photo was already wearing off.

The Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship program, on the other hand, was for business titans, including several billionaires and household names. If I was one of the coolest Champions of Change, I was certainly one of the least cool Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship. I joked that they must have needed an Asian American for the photo. I met Daymond John, Mark Cuban, Barbara Corcoran, Hamdi Ulukaya, and Nina Vaca at the White House. (Also there — Elizabeth Holmes, the since-disgraced Theranos founder. She struck me as odd, but I was like, “Who am I to say?” Meanwhile, Daniel Lubetzky, the founder of KIND Snacks, at one point asked us if we were hungry. A bunch of us said yes, and he opened his jacket pockets and produced all of these experimental KIND Bars that none of us had seen before; he was the Batman of snacks.)

Even for people at this level, our function was mostly ceremonial. We convened at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Palo Alto in 2016. The highlight of the event was Mark Zuckerberg sitting on a stage and advising young entrepreneurs from around the world. Some of these entrepreneurs were from Africa and clearly of modest means. I felt like screaming out, “Mark, cut these folks a check!” from my seat in the tenth row. But no. It seemed that the entrepreneurs walked away with a photo of being onstage with Mark and some advice.

If running for president consisted of camera angles, our current approach to governance rests significantly on photo opportunities and performances that demonstrate our understanding. I found out later that at least one major entrepreneur who was a public company CEO turned the honor down because he was more about action than ceremony.

As someone who’s been a part of this theatrical tradition, my incentives are to continue the fiction. If I was on a panel or attended a conference, it’s much better to suggest that the panel really did make a difference. If I have a photo with Obama, I must have his cell-phone number or at least be able to get in touch with him.

Indeed, two groups that are especially prone to constructive institutionalism are those that we rely upon both to give us a sense of the problems and to solve them — journalists and politicians.

Journalists are typically trained to be impartial observers, which inhibits them from expressing emotion or opinion. They are supposed to calmly document and present the news. For many, there is an implicit perch of authority and stability. Unfortunately, this has also turned many into market-friendly automatons and cultural guardians who make pro forma gestures about decorum, virtue, and propriety while ignoring the disintegration of trust, the dissipating integrity of their own organizations, or the decline of the American way of life.

I’ve been blown away by how so many journalists seem to keep a stiff upper lip even as their industry has been decimated. Talk about bravery — or bizarre institutional acceptance — in the face of real-life distress. More than sixty thousand journalists have lost their jobs over the past ten years, with over half of that in 2020 alone. Digital media companies that were supposed to be the future have hemorrhaged employees along with the old-line businesses. On their way out, many tweet out chin-up messages about it: “It’s been an honor reporting alongside the most talented colleagues in the world for these past 10 years. I learned so much. Thank you.”

The most visible figures command enough of an audience to make the industry seem healthy, even while the rank and file disappear. Top journalists continue to make good money; there will just be a lot fewer of them, with others looking up at them. The winner-take-all economy is subsuming the field as it is so many others.

If you ask a journalist about the secular disruption, you’re likely to get a response like “Don’t worry, journalism will continue to reinvent itself via a combination of Substack and podcasting” — the kind of response that is the epitome of constructive institutionalism. There’s nothing wrong with the institution after all; it’s just that the journalists are not adaptable enough. Perhaps if they pivot quickly enough, you will subscribe to their new newsletter on coronavirus vaccine news.

That’s a much more common response than the correct one: “Help! I’m sad! Our sector is being blown up, and we need either massive philanthropy or public funding if it is to survive in a way that approaches the needs of a modern functioning democracy!”

If journalists are conditioned to calmly document dispassionately, politicians are conditioned to invoke profundity, resilience, and the greater good at every turn. As a politician you’re like a totem or shaman. You show up to a gathering or charity event to speechify and elevate the proceeding: “Thank you for the incredible work that you’re doing. It’s so important.” Which it is, of course. Though it would be if you didn’t show up too.

You are meant to embody the concerns of the community. You listen patiently to all. You are present. If someone asks you a question, you answer it reassuringly. You express values and aspirations. You are a human security blanket, and your job is to make people feel better.

You make false promises regularly or lay claim to powers you do not have. “Together we can ensure that every child has the kind of opportunity that they deserve in our community.” “If we come together, there’s no limit to what we can accomplish.” “If we listen to each other, we can create a bright future for all.” You are all about the singing of brighter horizons.

Perhaps the biggest example of this magical thinking is the political conversation around retraining workers, often expressed, absurdly, as “teaching people to code.” The actual success of government-funded retraining programs has been found to be near zero in a majority of cases, with many workers simply holding valueless certificates afterward. Has the politician ever tried coding before? Have they tried to retrain a thousand former manufacturing and retail workers? Would they hire those thousand people if they needed a thousand coders? How about a hundred thousand?

We accept ridiculous statements on their face because we have grown to regard them less as real actions or policy statements and more as simply value statements and political representations of the world as you wish it to be. The country has lost more than four million manufacturing jobs since 2000, devastating hundreds of once-thriving communities in the Midwest and the South. That’s fine; if ten politicians stand in a circle holding hands and chant in unison, “You’ll like to code, heed this refrain, despair not, you shall retrain,” those millions of workers shall all move to Seattle and become Amazon Web Services technicians.

You can’t solve the problem, so talking assumes the role of solution. Right before he left office, Justin Amash, a Michigan congressman, said, “I’m seeing all of these campaign ads right now, and everyone’s saying, ‘I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that’ . . . No you’re not. You’re not going to do that, because you have no power to do it. The system is not designed to allow you to do that.” It’s much easier and more compelling for a politician to say, “I’m going to fight for each and every one of you!” than “there’s not much I can do about that one.”

Of course, politicians and journalists reinforce each other’s fictions. I’m reporting on you because you represent the people. I’ll catch you if you misspeak, because your speaking right is the most important thing; if you spoke right, all would be solved. This is important.

Politicians are increasingly reduced to well-liked or poll-tested stewards to tend to our emotions rather than figures who can actually improve the situation. There’s a negation of the self: you are not a human being; you are our weathervane and expresser of grief, outrage, celebration, sorrow, sports allegiance, or whatever the occasion warrants. You can’t actually amend the institution that you represent, but you can make us feel better about it temporarily as we go home.

If there is a big hairy problem — climate change, automation of jobs and a dehumanizing economy, dysfunctional government — you can attend a conference about it. In a world where preserving your role means playing along, who is left to tell us the truth about either the organizations they represent or what is happening to us?

The mistrust that is building up in American life is born in large part of the pervasiveness of constructive institutionalism. We have conversations about what we can do better while the reality degrades around us, increasing the divergence between the world we’re talking about and the world as it is. We’re paid to be positive and market-friendly and can-do. We say something like “We must solve these problems” while counting our book royalties. The people who are on the outside of these institutions lose trust in us. Their instincts aren’t entirely wrong.

Can this dynamic be changed? It’s an open question whether we can reinforce more disciplined communications that call out the reality of our situations without descending into happy talk. We must start distinguishing between compassionate and conformist statements, on the one hand, and actually improving the facts on the ground in a world where action and statement have become the same, in part because very few are capable of actually taking steps that would improve the reality on the ground.

The previous sentence was constructively institutionalist. You see how it works. Or doesn’t.

The above is excerpted from “Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy” published by Crown on sale now