Many writers in recent years have argued that the American Dream is in peril. But what is the American Dream, and how has it been compromised, and can it be reclaimed? This week, Grant Reeher talks with author and economist Charles Whalen, author of "Fighting for the American Dream: From Blue Collar Kid to Maverick Economist, The Battle to Defend Working Families."
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to "The Campbell Conversations." I'm Grant Reeher. Many writers in recent years have argued that the American Dream is in peril. But what is it exactly and how has it been compromised? Can we reclaim it? My guest today has thoughts about all of those questions. Charles Whalen is a research fellow at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at SUNY Buffalo, and the author of a new book timed for Labor Day. It's called "Fighting for the American Dream: From Blue Collar Kid to Maverick Economist." Mr. Whalen, welcome to the program.
Charles Whalen: Thank you, Grant. Pleasure to be here.
GR: It's great having you. So let me just start with this. The structure and the style of this book, I think, is one of its most interesting features. Tell us about that. And how and why you came up with the idea to write it in the way you did.
CW: So "Fighting for the American Dream" is the result of being asked to write a book about the erosion of the American Dream over 25 years ago. My career has focused on economic challenges facing workers and how to address those challenges to foster a strong economy for everyone. I've written much about worker insecurity, including insecurity related to jobs, income, and retirement. I've also written a lot about the changing economy after World War Two. And then in the late 1990s, friends asked me to pull all my work together into a book on the erosion of the American Dream. I didn't have the time, partly because of my own job insecurity, but the economic problem didn't go away. Then the pandemic struck, and I had the time for several projects, including sorting through about 100 boxes in my home office. Boxes of papers and research material accumulating since the 1970s. And then it hit me. The way to address the American Dream wasn't to write another purely academic book. It was to tell a story that connects with a wider audience by drawing on my own experiences. So the book explores that long erosion of the American Dream through the lens of a career narrative or a career memoir. It mixes the profile, the professional and the personal. And now that it's done, I can begin, perhaps, to toss some of those boxes.
GR: Yeah. Well, good luck with that. I want to say, you know, you mentioned COVID being your opportunity moment to do something like this. And I've heard that from a number of authors who have written things that are different. And someday somebody has to accumulate all those and sort of look at the look at the impact. But let me ask you this, getting into the substance of the book, as you just mentioned, both parts of this book, your story and the broader story of the economy, they’re driven by this concept of the American Dream. That's your organizing principle, and you have a pretty extensive and I thought interesting discussion of different views about that dream in your footnotes. But you use the term in a particular way, and without getting too far into the economic weeds, just tell us what are the basic contours of some of the main sort of ways that people have argued that the American Dream needs to be seen. And then, leading to that, your definition of it and why you chose the definition that you did.
CW: Well, if you don't mind. Let me focus first on my own definition.
GR: Sure, absolutely
CW: We can talk about some others. I think mine is a modest definition. People want steady jobs, family-supporting wages, health care and retirement security. They want an improving standard of living as they gain more experience, and they want a chance for their kids to have a better life in the future. And I think this is a modest version, but it's also widespread, and it's grounded in an assumption that hard work pays off for individuals and for society. And there certainly are many other definitions out there. Some focus more on aspirations or great wealth. Others look at the questions through the lens, and some of my footnotes do this through the lens of race or gender or other considerations, or even religion. But for me and for my purposes, it's what I've described. And the only variation for my own conceptually American Dream is that, in part because of my religious experience, is my upbringing in Catholic school and so forth. I have a conceptual American dream that says, yes, we should put food on the table and we should achieve all those things that I described a moment ago, but they're also should be service to humanity. And so for me, I tried to find a way that would allow me to put food on the table, but would also allow me to serve others through a professional work. And so that's the only variation on my theme, on my conception of the American Dream, is that I have this service component that may not be the same for everyone.
GR: Yeah. That's interesting. So you write about the American Dream slipping away. What are the most important, I guess external indicators that that has been happening? What are the sort of the data types of data that that, that you looked at as an economist to say, here's how we know this has become a problem?
CW: So I think sluggish wage growth, stop, stalled up mobility, the erosion of employer-provided pensions, health care and other benefits, increasing corporate hostility to collective bargaining and unions in general, the spread of unstable work schedules and endless rounds of workforce cuts. I think those are some of the things we've seen since the 1970s, and those really get to the heart of some of this erosion of the American Dream.
GR: Yeah, yeah. And so this would be something we could probably talk the rest of the program about. But what are the causes of those things? You could take that at any level of proximity that you like, you know. But I'm just curious, what do you think drove those things?
CW: Right. well, of course, there are many factors at play. And in fact, in the book, I say a comprehensive discussion would be sort of like the "Murder on the Orient Express." They all did it.
GR: They all did it.
CW: Right, but at the heart of the problem, I think, was an intense business focus on generating short-term returns for shareholders. And I think that largely is because of the pressure from institutional investors such as managers of mutual funds, hedge funds, pension funds, private equity. And that business focus has caused companies to do whatever they can to cut costs. And it's led directly to the reduced worker well-being and greater worker insecurity. And of course, institutional investors are major campaign donors and lobbyists. And they also often hold positions in top top positions in administrations, both Democratic and Republican. So institutional investors affect both business and government. And so I think that's the center of what I'm describing. But one of the things I might add is that I believe that worker insecurity is a defining characteristic of this new era, of this new sort of shareholder-driven era. But at the same time, I think that this shareholder focus has made our daily life more precarious in many ways, in many aspects of our life, ranging from air travel to health care. The demands for greater financial returns compel firms to scrimp on operational capacity, on quality controls and even standards of care. But the book focuses primarily on the worker insecurity, which again, I think is sort of like the flip side of this rise of shareholder value. There are two sides of the same coin.
GR: Interesting. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Charles Whalen, who's just published a new book titled "Fighting for the American Dream: From Blue Collar Kid to Maverick Economist." You know, one of the things I want to come back and explore with you a little bit at length is something you said just a minute ago about stability. But before I get into that, I wanted to ask you this as a follow-up to what you just said. A lot of folks, if you ask them what is behind this, they'll immediately go to globalization and saying, that's the thing that really triggers all this, particularly in the manufacturing sector. You didn't do that. And I was curious, how does globalization fit into your story?
CW: Well, I think that the globalization, the outsourcing, offshoring is part of this new era of institutional investors and shareholder value. It's in part because of the drive for this increasing shareholder value that we see companies willing and trying to find a way to offshore and to encourage the public sector to engage in trade policies that allow that to be a more smooth process. So I think that the globalization is one piece of this new era, and I think that some of the reasons for it are directly related to both the business side and the public policy side that I described. So we see policy focus on free trade policies. We see policy focus on deregulation of finance and so forth, which also makes that enables that to be more globalized. And so I think that that that's that's the best way I can describe what you've asked.
GR: That makes sense. Yeah. Thanks. Well, I want to come back to this stability thing. And it really struck me how much in your book you emphasize that, in addition to just, you know, what a family can have materially, it's how they generate it and how they experience it. And this may be an example of great minds thinking alike. You and me. But I've, I've always thought that the stability and the reliability and the stress issue in a family's economic life are arguably even more important than their overall income and wealth indicators, particularly if we're thinking about political, how they experience it in a way that comes out politically. And I think you emphasize that, too. So I was curious to hear you reflect a little bit on this central role that stability plays in your narrative.
CW: Well, as academics, we know that if you don't have a bit of stability, it's extraordinarily hard to engage in scholarship. Yeah, and I think that's true for everyone. If you want to start a business, develop your talents, become an entrepreneur. It's incredibly hard to do any of those things when you don't know for sure what your work schedule will be tomorrow, whether you'll be employed. So I think that that foundation of stability is, is something that a society needs for people in order to pursue the American Dream. It's a foundational element that we require. And so many of the things that we attempt to do, it provides for families to build and so forth. And if we take that away, then we have diseases of despair. We have public health problems of a variety of sorts. And when I was working on this someone who I know who teaches at a school of public health, pointed out that folks in the public health area are doing research on this now. And for example, there's a new research report about Stuckism and how if you feel stuck. So it's back to the psychological dimension. If you feel stuck, that can have adverse consequences on your well-being- your physical and mental well-being- and that can affect your family; it can affect your community. And so, Stuckism, they argue, this is some work done at the University of Pennsylvania by some public health scholars that Stuckism can have consequences for the society in general. They argue that addressing that is an important part of restoring the American Dream.
GR: You're listening to "The Campbell Conversations" on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Charles Whalen. He's a research fellow at the Baldy Center at SUNY Buffalo, and we've been discussing his new book. It's titled "Fighting for the American Dream: From Blue Collar Kid to Maverick Economist." So I want to ask you about your argument for a new social contract. But before I do that, I want to pick up on something that we were talking about before the break. And that is this problem of stability and the stress that it puts on families, even though if we looked at their overall income, we might not see a great difference, you know, over 15, 20 years. But the way that they make that income and the reliability of it has gone down. I've had these conversations with an economist friend of mine, and one of the things that he says back to me is he says, Grant, you have to look also at not just their income, but the absolute material things that they are able to buy. And the example that gets used often is televisions. So, you know, he reminds me, look, when we were growing up, you know, getting a color TV in a middle-class house it was a big deal. And they were very expensive. You know, in today's dollars, they were hugely expensive. And you got this crappy little television. Now you can buy this huge flat-screen beautiful thing for, you know what, for $300. So you have to factor that in. What is your how do you take that into account?
CW: Well yes, you're right. This is talked about in the book, and I just think it's an absurd yardstick. Workers care about having a job, being able to support their families. If there is a television or two in the house, that pales in comparison to their ability to to put their children through school or to have enough money to go to the doctors on a regular basis and so forth, or to have enough in their retirement savings that they don't have to worry about how they can afford to live and feed themselves in retirement. So at the same time that I was hearing some of these questions from people, as you described, my, I was talking to my dad, who was a machinist, who told me about his colleagues on the factory floor who were training foreign workers, then taking the machinery and stripping them from the factory floor, sending the machinery abroad. And then, of course, you know, the next step, which was they lost their jobs. Now my dad didn't lose his job at that point, but my dad eventually lost his too. And then the email or the letter, excuse me, came in the mail to all of them that said, "Your health care for life that we promise you is expiring, terminated effective today.” So it doesn't matter how many televisions people have or that they have a smartphone; that's not a very useful measure in my mind. At the same time that I was hearing this, I was on, I think, the eighth year of, of 1 or 2-year contracts. After having my PhD and I, I was an accomplished doctoral candidate. I had academic articles published. I had several milestones and achievements. And here I was going from job to job and my parents thinking from that old economy of mindset, they said, well take this non tenure track job and you'll get your foot in the door. Well, I think you know that, Grant, and the other academics know that's not the way that academia works. And that's not the way that most of the new economy works for, for anyone, even outside of academia. And so my experience, the experience of so many other people indicates that televisions is a poor yardstick.
GR: Okay. Fair enough. So you argue that we need then, because of all these problems, a new social contract? What, briefly, because I know you could talk for very long about this, but what is the social contract you want to see?
CW: Well, I think we need to start by recognizing that capitalism comes in many varieties. Right now, we've got this turbocharged, shareholder-driven economy. And we have to recognize that capitalism has existed, does exist and can exist in different forms. Recently in "The New York Times," Nicholas Kristof wrote an article saying, “If you want to live the American Dream, move to Sweden or to the Nordic countries.” And so I think that we need to have greater security, for greater security for workers, a greater ability for workers who lose their jobs to transition to something else. We need healthcare security for workers, and we need to find a way to provide that health care security. It doesn't have to be Medicare for all. There are many, many other approaches out there. And when I ran for Congress, in fact, I didn't talk about Medicare for all. But I did bring up the fact that there were many other approaches that could get us there. But what we have now and now getting into the politics a little bit, but we have now and we had at the time that I was running for Congress, and even since the Affordable Care Act was passed, we've had pressure upon pressure to reduce that security, to erode those benefits, those protections. So I think the new social contract would recognize that it would recognize the importance of full employment. At the end of World War Two, we tried to have a guarantee of a job for people who were unemployed, which really means that you could get public service employment if you need it. And certainly we have plenty of things in this economy to do with the opioid crisis, with climate change, not only mitigation but also prevention. There's so much that we need to do. But so I think public service employment would be fine, we can find ways to do that. Instead, ever since the Reagan era, those things have been eroded. And I think that what I would call for it would be, job security for people, health care and retirement security. And again, this gets back to what we said before. Those things are a springboard for success. They're not what some might argue would be just an opportunity for lethargy.
GR: So what do you make, then, of this new popularity in the Democratic Party of Democratic Socialism and socialism? It sounds like there's obviously similarities to what you're sketching forward about the new social contract. Do you think that's evidence in the country of a hunger for some kind of movement toward this reestablishment of this version of the American Dream?
CW: Yes, but I think that sometimes folks on the left don't really articulate what it is that we're facing. They talk about greed and oligarchy and so forth and the wealthy. But I think we need to be more specific about the problem. And one of the reasons for writing the book is if we don't understand what the problem is, and if we don't get beyond scapegoats or broad generalities, then we won't really have a chance to effectively address the problem. And so that's what I guess I would say. I focused a lot on workers. In fact, again, a broader discussion of the point you asked me earlier. The question you asked me earlier would include treating workers with dignity, but also to recognize that they are a valuable resource that can be the source of competitive advantage. Instead, these days we look at in business, we look at workers as a cost to be minimized. And so that's, you know, I think that having workers' voice in economic decisions in the business world and also in public policy is an important thing. And also just treating government as a creative and constructive force. So I guess there could be overlaps. But the Democratic socialists, as I understand it, they themselves argue they move beyond the Michael Harrington era. And I guess I'm stuck in the Michael Harrington era. Michael Harrington could walk into a union hall, and if people came and heard on the way in that this guy was a socialist, they would walk out saying, “Oh my God, if this is socialism, sign me up.” Michael Harrington talked about working on the left wing of the possible. I would argue that many people on the left these days have sort of lost touch with the left wing of the possible. And again, one other thing I would argue is, this is not crazy radical what I'm suggesting. In 1944, in the State of the Union address, FDR talked about a second Bill of Rights, and that second Bill of Rights emphasized opportunity for a job, family, supporting wages, health care, retirement, a place to live, support for farmers. That's where I come from. Defunding police or eliminating prisons? That's not on my agenda, and I don't think it's on the agenda of most people.
GR: Okay. If you just joined us, you're listening to "The Campbell Conversations" on Public Media. And my guest is Charles Whalen, the author of "Fighting for the American Dream: From Blue Collar Kid to Maverick Economist." So there are a couple of things I wanted to ask that are a little more personal about you. And we have starting to have a little bit of limited time. So this next question, I know you probably have a lot to say on, but if I could try to get you to condense that, because I want to make sure that I'm able to come back to these other things. But as you mentioned, you ran for Congress in 2018. Tell us about that experience. How far did you get, and what did you learn from it?
CW: Well, I learned that, perhaps giving you a short answer is that I'm best suited to using the pen. And so that's fine. Also, timing is really important, you know, and this was the time of the MeToo movement. And you know, people come up to me and say, Charles, you know, you have great ideas. In fact, the other candidates in the Democratic primary were stealing my ideas. I was like, the think tank idea, think tank for the whole party at that time in this congressional district. But it just struck me that, you know, people come up to me and say, “Charles, this is just not the time for a guy, you know.” And in the end, it turned out that the party did nominate a woman, which is fine; I understand that. So it was a matter of timing, but in the end, I think that it's, you know, it's important that I find a way that I can get my ideas out. I thought that I'd try that, and it, you know, it wasn't successful, but that's fine. And now I go back to what I've always done, which is write.
GR: Well, I have to ask this next question because I'm curious. And also you're so open about it in the book because you talk about and you are you mentioned it in the interview already, but you talk about your own economic struggles and your own, you know, your own your own instability. And as you pointed out, I mean, you earned a PhD in economics at the University of Texas. That's a great school. By all accounts, you wrote a fantastic dissertation, but you never got on a stable career path for tenured professor or other kind of research and policy work that would provide that stability. Nasty question, perhaps, but what went wrong?
CW: Well, remember, I come from a blue-collar background. My parents never went to college. I had no mentors, no people to guide me through the process. I went to the University of Texas at Austin because I wanted to study with Ray Marshall. He had been the Secretary of Labor for Jimmy Carter. That term had just ended because Ronald Reagan came into office, and I desperately wanted to study with him. It was the right move. I mean, he was one of the founders of the Economic Policy Institute. I did work with him, but I just walked down there and plopped myself into his classes and tried to rely on grit, determination, and in good work. Mentorship. I think I talk about that in the book. It's vital. And so mentorship is vital. And also timing again, you know, at the time that I came out, there weren't the jobs that there may have been. If I come out ten years earlier, it might be extraordinarily different. So mentorship, timing and timing. There were academics who were looking for something different. And the things that I offered, no matter how much I try, were not always the things that they wanted. So what can you do?
GR: Yeah, there are fashions in academia, and that's a good point.
CW: May, I just add one thing about that?
GR: Absolutely. Yeah. And then I’m going to ask you my last question.
CW: Yeah. So economic history was something that I was extraordinarily interested in. In fact, when I started teaching in Hobart, Wayne Smith, I contacted a Cornell University professor who was world-famous in economic history and said, “Can I come down and take your graduate seminar? He said, I don't offer it anymore.” People aren't interested in economic history. But he gave me the syllabus and I worked on it and taught a course using that. Economic history now is everywhere. And that's the difference. Is this timing right?
GR: Yeah. Yeah. Well, we've only literally got a couple of seconds left. So I'm going to ask you this question. And it's going to be sort of like a lightning round. So having said all that, what would you tell a young person from your type of background getting ready to graduate from college or university? Sounds like the first thing you'd say is get some mentors.
CW: Choose the right mentor from the very beginning. That's the most important thing I can say.
GR: Okay. All right. We will leave it there. That was Charles Whalen. And again, his book is "Fighting for the American Dream: From Blue Collar Kid to Maverick Economist." Charles, thanks so much for talking with me. I want to say, as I read through the book, he really did a nice job of weaving your own story. And with the broader story, that's a tough thing to do. You were very deft at that, but thank you.
CW: Thank you, Grant.
GR: You've been listening to "The Campbell Conversations" on WRVO Public Media. Conversations in the Public Interest.
