well, it's my pleasure to

discuss second class with the author, my dear friend boccia. boccia, how are you doing? i am so happy to be here with you, robbie. are some in the needs to know about you before we get started? and it's this most people in industry think that they are very generous people, but they are actually stingy grinches. you are a very generous person, but you like to pretend that you are stingy grinch. all of which i say because i know we're going to have a very heated conversation here. you don't agree with? all of my views and i cannot be more for it. i'm excited as well and while i

don't agree with everything in the book, found it to ba really fascinating of so many working class people. you did just tremendous reporting for it. so let's get right into first. you start with an easy question. what inspired you to write this? after doing your first book about the news industry, the media, and how that had changed from a working class profession, an elite profession? i see how this follows logically from that, but could you tell us more about process of actually writing this book? absolutely. so in my first book, bad news how woke media is undermining democracy, what i found was was that the main characteristic of our news media, which is suffering from just historic lows and trust was not that it was polite sickly partizan, but that it was made up of the over credentialed college elites. a class divide has come to define american life and our news media is much on the side

of. one of the halves of that divide the college educated and as i was writing that book, i to understand something that i think is really fundamental about and yet totally misunderstood and it's this rabi american are much more united than we are and that include us on all of the issues that media and our politicians are divided on, issues like guns and abortion and race and health care. these are all issues that the parties are super divided on, but the american people are not. and because our media is weighted in favor of the elites and the interests of the elites, we don't hear from the working class. and it was that insight that the vast majority of americans who are more united than divided have affected really been deplatformed from american public view that made me want to write a book that really explored who is the american working class? do they still have a fair shot

at the american dream? how do they see their in america and would america look like if we centering their voices so define some terms. how do we actually define the working class? is it simply people who don't have college degrees or are in a certain income below a certain income threshold, do they work certain jobs? what do mean when you say the working class? this is such an important question and the answer is it is very difficult to define. i'm going to tell you how i define it in a minute. but first, a word on difficulties. you know, we know, for example, that there is a big overlap between income and culture and class but these things don't map very neatly to each other. i'm sure all of us know in our lives an electrician or a plumber who makes maybe more money than we do right, although that is obviously a classically working class job. another problem is that people parents have a college

education, are often more to have access to that of education and thus to the american. how do we define it intergenerationally? how do we define it in terms of income? also robby as you know, americans think of this as a classless. and so though we have come to defined very much in class terms as argue in second class americans don't necessarily themselves as working class. and so having this conversation involves many steps of definitions and and qualities and life, culture and region. what might considered working class in some parts of the country would be considered middle class in other parts of the country because the cost of living so radically different between let's say los angeles and then something like west virginia. right. the way that i eventually ended up defining class. and it's a little clunky bear with me but it's people who work in a job that do require skills. you learn in college who are not

of the top 20%. so i'm not talking about rich plumbers, right? i'm talking about people who effectively are working in working class jobs, jobs that require physical labor or other things that you don't necessarily learn in college, although of the people in my book have a college degree who have been locked out of the top 20%, that's the kind of clunky that i felt most, the kind of people that i feel have been sort of erased from public view. and also it was a good proxy for the phenomenon that i'm trying to describe, which is that divide and the chasm separating out the fortunes of people who have a college degree who are much more likely to become, who live much longer, who are able to retire and dignity versus the working class, whose lives have become increasingly characterized by precariousness. well, let's talk about that. how do you think their lives have changed over the last 100 years? i when you think of, you know,

we to romanticize the past a little bit or at least i think people romanticize the past they oh, you know things were so much better in say the or i guess now we're now we're far enough along maybe maybe i'm romanticizing like the eighties in the nineties, the time of my childhood. but then it used to be a time where people could work, save, afford houses, a car, acquire material wealth, move up in their possessions and then leave a better future for children. has that actually changed in last half century or more? well, we know that 1971 was the high watermark. working class wages and that productivity and profit continue to skyrocket. but working class wages stagnate did and with inflation today they've fallen. so there's a very objective way to measure you know, the rate of home ownership has actually not significantly it's around 63%. but if you separate out the

working class it's really fallen drastically. and that's because so many more people are going to college. about a third of americans go to college. and so it would make sense that that rate would hold. but it is increasingly a privilege. you need a college degree in order to. enjoy. now, again, this is not across the nation. you can be pretty poor in west virginia and own your own home. the american dream is paradoxically doing better for working class in red america simply because if you define the american dream, a middle class life as having a sort home ownership component to the way that the vast majority of americans do housing blue america has just become completely. we can get into the reasons why and the solutions for that, which really i think like because they are they're all market driven. that was the that was the solution i like the vest. you ended with that one. we will definitely to that so a little bit more on this though because. i know people will say who maybe don't necessarily disagree with

on on a lot of your premises is in the book but i think right some of the wages don't it doesn't it depend a little bit if we're counting like how you know the average wage of the household actually fewer people in it now so it's like the number cars owned per person in the household. i think larger the the actual again material goods in the house even for relatively not as well-off people have internet access and laptops and tvs are cheaper than ever and there's more to be. air conditioning and indoor way more likely are in, frankly, than in a lot of our even european peer countries that we think of as, yeah, they take care of everything. they have smaller they have smaller apartments and homes and don't have as much access to those things. so a lot of that has better even if the wages maybe not kept up the way we'd like them to. and then of course, we'll talk about. right, all of the sort of labor intensive services like education and health care that have gotten way, way less affordable. i totally agree on those.

yeah. so i think the point i would make is this is not a book about the poor, although there are people in the book who have 1 to 3 jobs who work and work and work and our poor, our having to call the electric company and beg forbearance and create a payment plans and so forth. driving around in cars, no windows because they can't afford to fix them. but this is a book, the working class. so people can afford flat screen tvs, but you can't afford to buy a home to put it in and you have nothing to leave to your and your children have fewer possibilities than you. and our downwardly mobile if you can't afford health care which i know we're going to agree on if you cannot afford to retire and you don't have a home to retire to it seems me that there's something and forgive a ball in an elite class that has taken all of those things for granted saying it's okay with me that the woman who comes to clean my home will never be able to stop

working until the day she dies. even though her work is so much more physically demanding than mine, right? it's not about people living in boxes, the streets without plumbing. it's the fact that the elites are hoarding the american dream for themselves while relying on the labor of the working class who no longer access to those things. so i think let's define the american dream, right? so we can talk about what the thing that has become unaffordable are these people what they want? i mean, rob, it brings tears to your eyes. how modern, what their desires are and. i hope people will read the book because there are so many people in this book that i want you to meet. i want you to hear in their own words, because these people are resentful. they are simply hopeless, and their desires so modest what they want, how do they define american dream? so the majority of people i interviewed would say it means the ability to own your own home at, some point to retire and dignity to have your children have at least as many choices as you do, and to have adequate

health care. i mean, these are such modest things. unfortunately, we sold out the working class. who could use to be able to in the seventies and rely on being able to afford those things if work hard and in exchange we gave them a flat screen tvs and i think you can see why that to them seems sort of like not a great bargain. and i want to emphasize your book is just so impressive in of the number of people you interviewed in these working class people, but in vastly circumstances, it really is a very impressive live work of of reporting. this is not just an op or an economics paper about what you think are the right solutions. it is it is substantively a very series of interviews with these fascinating people that i learned a lot from. and people should definitely it. can i ask you how you about your reporting process is i'm interested as a journalist how

did you how did you meet these people and can you talk to us more about that? yeah, that was definitely the hardest part for us all. thank you for saying that. i so appreciate that. i wanted to interview people who i felt were representative, not just their stories, but a larger trend or a larger group of americans, but also people who are interesting in their own. so it was a sort of that was the biggest challenge. i did about 100 interviews from which i think about 20, 23 people who are deeply profiled in the book and. the way i chose the people was i first went to this wonderful professor at brigham young university. joe, who has a team of research assistants, grad students. and what he will do is he will allow journalists me to hire them out to create a quantitative analysis. so they took the american census survey. i asked for them to compare 2020 to 2000 so i could see the trends developing in the last 20 years. and they did a breakdown of who

is the american class. so i had this kind of eagle eye data analysis of how many people are there, how much they making, where do they live, where are the home ownerships highest industries have the highest levels, home ownership and all of this is in book. and then i went and looked for people who were represented of of those trends that i saw so that i wouldn't be picking and choosing and cherry picking. i really wanted to combat my own confirmation bias in terms of what i was looking for and honestly i was very surprised by lot of the findings in the book. one of the most surprising was i didn't interview a single black man who was planning to vote for joe biden. and at the time i thought well, that's weird. but now when you look at polling, it makes a lot of sense. that is a huge trend developing among voters of color who are working class are defecting from the democratic party. thing that i was very surprised to find was. i really thought that the thesis

was going to be, you know, that the american dream is totally inaccessible to the working class. not true. that is not so the skilled trades still provide a very foundation for working class americans to achieve the american dream, which is why it is outrageous, robby, that we give $200 billion a year to fund higher universities and colleges and only 1 billion to vocational training, which was gutted under president obama in favor sending people to college. it's totally unforgivable, because that is one of the pathways to the american dream that has just been intentionally shrunk down. yeah, let's actually talk about this at greater length. i think this is an area of agreement. us, frankly, if there's a villain in your book it seems to me to be the college diploma and very deservedly so that emerges that the kind of worst off are people who attempted or felt

pushed or encouraged to get a college degree, who took out loans, get it, and then either ended up getting a degree in something that doesn't render you particularly employable or you can not even as nearly as close to a vocational kind of trade or people just didn't finish college and then they still have the debt they're the worst off of all, but our policies have explicitly encouraged this this choice that ends up just being an extra hoop so many people to jump through that cost them money before they can qualify for work and what what it seems to me and correct me if this a misperception that a lot of these these people who you've profiled who struggle to find good paying, regular who often will have a job for a period of time and then have to go take a different job. part of it is because they're competing with people who do have college degrees, the college degree doesn't really help them do the job better because they have this extra credential and i'm all for competition. but this a competition that would necessarily right even in

a free market. this is a competition. is that happening because there's a massive to people who jump through the hoop but there's massive encouragement they have to end up paying it back afterward but it's this perverse and distorted incentives that are forcing people down a path that doesn't actually make them more productive or better workers. it takes up more of their time, money and energy and then makes them taking jobs for people who didn't have the opportunity to do, who would be perfectly fine in those jobs no notes was that's that's perfect. i agree with that. and that is how working class people, when they talk about the diploma divide, there are people in the book who really wanted to go to college and couldn't afford it. one person, especially cyrus, he would have been an amazing lawyer. but most of the people i profiled had no interest in going to college. they really, really valued and god dignity from the working class that they did. but you're that some had been pushed to go to college and all

had been told in high school that you're a loser if you don't go to college and this is for the dumb losers and it is madness. it is madness. it is not only infuriating, like you said, that these people have student loans for jobs that don't require college degree. if they dropped out. and by the way, though, we know that 50% of college graduates are underemployed void, meaning they are also doing jobs that. you don't require a college degree to learn the skills, although infuriatingly they are still making more money than people who go to college trying to do those same. exactly. like you said, robby, it's absolutely infuriating. and the thing is, is we actually need more skilled trades folks. there is a huge dearth of trades folk in america and instead of encouraging that and giving thanks to these people for doing these jobs that we, the college educated, would rather not do and they are happy to do, we

have instead devalued those jobs in them for doing them and then made them pay less and less and less with every year as we plundered the middle class and our jobs paid more and, more and more. and that is the direct of democratic policy 100%. i mean, i don't think they did this, you know, out of some evil, although i do think that they thought that the more people went to college, the more people would vote for democrats, which is true, you know, they simply thought this was way of the future. they didn't realize that we will always need people to change the diapers of our elderly. we're always going to need people to do we are always going to need truckers. we are always going to need people to clean toilets. and the fact is there are americans who get a lot of dignity from doing those jobs. but because the college educated elites would rather die than do those jobs, they decided that they don't have to pay living wage. we're going to ship good paying jobs overseas and then we're

going to just import masses and of illegal immigrants to take these jobs or to lower the wages of those jobs because. we in the elites didn't think that they were dignified. and there is something to me that is so godless about ravi, just the absolute right refusal to acknowledge how much we need these people to do these jobs and how much simultaneously made these jobs not of doing and not capable of the most basic, basic, humble needs. let's talk about immigration, which i think really emerged as one of the more consensus views among the people you interviewed, people who come from all walks of life and who are politically diverse in terms of what party they affiliate with all seemed very skeptical of increased immigration and particularly illegal immigration, which is, as you said, very contrary to how elites feel in this country very supportive of immigrants.

and, you know, you kind of, i think, attempt to debunk some of the common talking points about immigration. i mean, i've used some of these in the past. i, i don't we probably disagree on this but is it really the case, do you think that these jobs some of these jobs that that would be done eagerly by the working class because you know, the thinking some of these are right very dirty or difficult jobs your your maids your laborers in the fields those kinds of things. these are jobs, immigrants are willing to do. it's still for the immigrant. it's i mean, you know, that's there observed preferences. right. they would rather here and do those jobs than remain in in their home country there's maybe political persecution and violence and crime in addition to a lack of economic opportunity. they're willing do those jobs and is the working class really are they those jobs from the working class? you really think that i mean, i interviewed a number of janitors

who love their job. it's very hard and they love cleaning and they are simply unable compete with teams that are completely staffed by illegal migrants. i'll you i'll give you a free market example this robby there's so many examples of it i think you know siena's women who take care of the elderly. of course, these are jobs that are difficult but they take take they get dignity out of doing these jobs. and we know that the vast majority of immigrants who came here between 1971 and now are employed in working class jobs. so, you know, they're either taking the jobs or they're driving down the wages simply with the supply of labor. i mean, it's like obvious supply and demand. you import 10 million people and the majority them are going to be employed, you know, in restaurants or, in agriculture or in hospitals or as cleaning people or landscapers.

those are going to have many more workers for employers to choose from, which means they're going to have to offer a lot money for them. right. it's kind of very free market, but let me give you an example that i think you'll appreciate. there's place where we can see a controlled of the way in which illegal immigration impacts wages of the working class. and it's less the average woman or man who cleans hotel in las vegas, which is a very physically demanding job, one that surely the elites believe that no american would want. the average pay is $22 an hour, which depending the price of housing, is a middle class. the union there gives them full health care. they don't pay any fees, any co-pays. they can get $20,000 help on a down payment on a home from the it's really, really great work. it is sort of the promised land for hospitality. how are they able to get so much? how are they able to get all these amazing benefits in working conditions?

it's because of this? robby, the casinos are so tightly they're not allowed to hire illegal immigrants. and so there is not a single illegal immigrant employed in any of those casinos. and as a result, hospitality, jobs, pay a living wage. if you are a busboy, you making a living wage and remember, i went there, you know, to report this out for the book. and the first thing that struck me was my first time being in las vegas was swagger of the working class there. i mean, you walk around the hotels and the men working there, they'll hit on you. and i thought that was great. i mean, that won't happen to you in new york because the people employed in those jobs are either being completely undercut by low wages or they are illegal. and so you have a test case in las vegas of what it would look like. we actually took immigration seriously and took working class wages seriously because it's a perfect test case where what happens is, working class wages go up and up and up, right.

guess the concern from sort of an economist standpoint, right. is that that would be like, you know, that's labor is an important component of the economy, that it's a it's a resource. if arbitrarily cap it or ourselves off from that, that would be like let's have less to wood or food or metal or, something like that. it raises the price of groceries, the price of homes, which is a major point in your book, which we're definitely going to get into in a bit. you know, if we if we have to the economy, if the people things have to pay more to produce those things that impacts everyone in the whole country. right. so the answer to that i think let's go back to 1971. this high water mark for working class wages. and what you had there was biggest sector of the economy was in manufacturing. and as a result, you americans

who were employed let's in auto factories and they were cars for the american consumer and so the price had to be set somewhere where both the labor of the working class worker was protected, dignified, but also where the american consumer could afford buy that car. and the way that worked effectively was it came out of the profit margin. you didn't have corporations that did everything to try to maximize profit. what you was bosses and owners of these car companies saying well i need my guys working on the line to be able to afford car so i need them to be making a dignified living. right? i mean, that's kind of how it worked. and the price point was set at a place that honored both the consumer and the producer. now of course, we know that we shipped 5 million manufacturing jobs off to china and mexico. china's competitive is that it doesn't pay its workers, which

is, you know, not really a natural, if you think about it, or at least it really shouldn't be treated as one. and the largest sector of of our economy. today's finance which again comes back to shareholder maximization. now, i don't have anything against, you know, corporations or billionaires. a lot of working class people admire billionaires. they see them as jobs creators. but i think this idea that we have to be in a race to the bottom on behalf of the american consumer. the consumer that's being pictured there is often somebody who already has all of their most basic needs met. and the idea that in order meet that bottom line, we would undercut our own workers seems to me to be a mistake. truth is that the resources you mentioned, let's say, would right food there is a natural limit on how much can have of those resources. and i america should see labor that way there is a natural limit on the amount of labor we can have and it is the limit by how do we ensure that our workers who engage in backbreaking labor that we rely

on to survive, can afford to feed their families and support themselves in dignity that should be bottom line. at the end of the day. you mentioned that a lot of the people we interviewed did not have antagonistic feelings toward billionaires or even toward big businesses. frankly, it seemed to me that two employers in particular amazon and starbucks, starbucks, excuse me, actually got pretty good reviews from. the people you interviewed who had who had worked there and there was not a not a hostility to organized labor, to unions, but it seemed like some of the people you talked to, thought unions made sense in some situations. and not others, which is frankly always corresponded with my view of unions or what i've seen of organized labor. if you have a, let's say, car manufacturing, you have a lot of people doing similar that somewhat compartmentalized you would want to have the workers being able to negotiate on behalf of a large group, whereas you have you know, now we're

seeing, for instance, our industry getting rapidly and i'm like, what is the people? it's a creative position that people have wildly different values from frankly from like month, month, depending on whether facebook, youtube is being kinder to our distribution models and and it doesn't make any sense. but can you talk about the view of of labor in business that you came across? yeah absolutely. i know, robby, when i see these journalists who make $165,000 a year unionizing, i always think to myself, what's next? the ceos union, you know, coming well and frankly, them them doing something that one of the people you mentioned in the or who you talk to in the book pointed out right away is, you know, if the union negotiates or you get a kind of minimum starting pay or a minimum wage, how does that impact people who are just starting off, who are maybe not worth employing at that rate? are you just like cutting them off from opportunity for the company to give them a chance? so you're you're right. let's start with and starbucks

i, i know that there is sort of starbucks unionization efforts afoot. i was not able to find a starbucks worker who was not happy and they really like working for starbucks. the place gives really incredible benefits. while i was reporting the book, there was a great moment. i'm sure saw it, where bernie sanders, senator bernie sanders, howard schultz, who started starbucks in front a senate committee to sort of berate him about, you know, the union busting and so forth. and at some point, howard schultz looked at senator sanders and he said he said, senator sanders, when wanted to come up with a minimum wage bill for the country, you were asking for $15 an hour. but my workers at $17 an hour like why you giving me such a hard time? you only asked for $15 an hour. and, you know, there this sense that, you know, sanders problem with schultz was that he had opted to do this rather than been forced by the government to do it. right. i mean, clearly howard schultz

found a market rationale to give his workers great pay. i don't think anybody expects to be at, you know, for a career, although there's a lot of advanced movement up. wal-mart is another example of that 7070 5% of management positions at wal-mart are hired from people who started out hourly. you can be a manager at a regional wal-mart without a college degree making $250,000 a year. that's great stuff. mean wal-mart started out being a place that was really harsh to its workers and it's had a real kind of come to jesus moment. i think literally it's a religious company and they they treat their workers. the workers there that i spoke to that i interviewed were really happy. they're amazon as well. i got say i know that there's a lot of reporting out there. you know, what the warehouse is like. and i interview somebody who at some point had worked in the warehouse and it had been really dreadful and she's a really hard worker. and sheaid was the only job that got the better of her. but i spoke to amazon drivers, packers and people in other places who love that company and said to me, is this the best job i ever had in terms of unions?

it's very complex because on the one hand, support for unions, intellect, emotionally, union vice jobs are good right now. people really appreciate unions and what they do there's a very positive view unions. and yet only 6% of the private sector unionized there simply is not a mass race to unions. despite the positive vibes people have about them right now. i thought that was really interesting. people would say a lot. oh, i totally you know, i support unions. i think they're great. just don't need it in my workplace. you know, we could quibble, i'm sure progressive would say they're wrong. they should. and so forth. to me the number one reason why unions are failing to gain more perches is because they have embraced mass migration and they do not. between legal and illegal workers, at least rhetorically and in terms of their lobbying. and i think that for a lot of working class people that feels like a little bit of a betrayal. of course, there's also at the

national level, the unions are super woke and there's a vast gulfs separating out culturally. the union leadership from the rank and file. and you're seeing this now rank and file is pretty you know, especially in sort of the teamsters, places like this, steelworkers, the rank and file is like in the bag for trump and leadership is out there like, you know, endorsing biden and so forth. but at the same time, i don't think people rejecting unions because of that sort of cultural difference. i spoke a lot of conservatives who are very happily in unions, electricians and so forth who said, yeah, i know my boss, a liberal, i don't care. it seems like there was a great deal of political frustration and frustration at deserve at both parties. you know you talk about with a lot of disaffection for democrats and interest in trump. trump obviously a big play for working class unionized people. ross belt states, the midwest, that kind of thing. of course, then he did get to be

president a term and are these do you think these people are still on the trump train? are they coming back him or is it just they are totally unimpressed by what joe biden has accomplished. maybe they're frankly unimpressed with what all the major figures in both parties have promised and delivered. i didn't speak. to any trump voters who are voting for biden, but i spoke to a lot of biden voters for for trump. feel like it making any predictions that i am the worst prognosticator whatever i prognosticate the opposite happen so i will i but it's very hard in this moment having written book and spent this much time with working class people to see how. joe biden pulls this around and everything the media is talking about, they're just on the wrong thing, you know, they want to tell you that you know, he's going to lose biden is going to lose michigan over gaza. he's not he's going to lose michigan because there's 600,000 auto workers there. and the whole ivy scam was just

completely punishing to them and. they know it and they know that that's, you know, joe biden tells them that's the future they know that that is going to just sink the industry. so i sort of see everything this class lens forgive. no, i think that makes sense. well and the electric vehicles subject is i mean, it's kind of near and dear to what we're talking about here. i say, great, if those things can succeed on the market on their own that's fine. and that's how competition works. and sorry, if you work in different company, but of course they're totally and relentlessly subsidized and pushed government. sometimes our government officials sound like they're they they're making commission on selling them and which is the opposite of fair competition. right 100%. and of course you know, this is just class warfare against the working class, the whole grain agenda of these puts it's thumb on the scales for china. and the reason that the liberals and, the left are doing that is because their base, like a nifty little chinese ev because all the driving they do is you know

the six blocks from their apartment in brooklyn to the whole foods in back. right. i mean they don't have to drive like they're not truckers they don't live in rural america. they're not farmers. they don't have to drive an hour to get their kid soccer practice. i mean, it's just so it's very myopic and for their voters. and you know what? nothing wrong with that, right? i mean, this how retail politics work. you do favors for your voters. joe biden wants young voters. he give, you know, pay you know, pay off their student loans, up for transfer of wealth from the working class. it's just very important, i think, to call that out because so much of it is done with this high minded know as if in the name justice. and really it's simply an economic play for votes it's simply, you know, it's it's pork belly. let's talk about the biggest point of agreement between us in your book. you have a wonderful section at the very end about housing and how zoning laws have made so unaffordable made it more difficult build new housing made it more difficult to build the kind of dense housing where you

can have a lot of units, a lot of people in one place and you know, owning a home is, i think, correctly positioned by you as one of the major components of the american dream. the thing the working class is aspiring to achieve something that was obtainable for them 50 or 80 years ago and now still is certainly in some locations in the country depending on your circumstance as, you said some red states doing better and then always, you know, there's the blue urban area versus the red area surrounding in many states. but know talk to us about this very deliberate policy choice that made it so difficult for frankly not just working class people frankly, all of us to afford housing. it's definitely true. i mean, there's lot of college educated people in urban settings who, you know, think i will never own home. they will, though. i mean, it's sort of a fantasy right now. of course, interest rates through the roof, but they are much more likely to be able to afford a home at some point than

working class americans. and the reason for that is it's to admit it. but, you know, elizabeth warren actually wrote a whole book about this called the two income trap, where she really nailed it. you know, it used to be that doctors would marry nurses and lawyers marry secretaries. and so you had this kind of, you know, that itself was a sort of trickle down economics, right? because somebody who making a lot more money would marry someone, who was making less money, and then she might even home. right. and they would live off the doctors income. right. or she would keep working as a nurse, maybe part time, maybe full time. but now what happens is, is doctors marry doctors and lawyers marry lawyers. and so you have these households that have a combined of, you know, 500,000, $1,000,000 a year and class people. right. the cleaning lady who marries the landscaper is now left to compete for a dwindling stock of home as against the doctor and the doctor right.

the market simply ate up the extra income of second partner in these power couples essentially who defined the top 10% the top 20% and basically have 50% of the gdp locked. you know, they love to rail against the 1%, but really vast majority of the gains and the plunder has been to the top 20% from the middle class. so what this has done is made housing and so why aren't we simply building more housing? well, let's go back to these couples. once they get their home, they really want to protect the value that home in the way that they have done. that is zoning laws effectively. 78% of the land that is zoned for housing on the coast, is zoned for single family detached, which means that know let's say an older couple passes on and you know there's a house there that's for sale. well, a developer could come and

tear down the home and build duplex or a triple decker or maybe a little complex with four, four apartments in it. a nice starter home for this cleaning lady who works for somebody who lives in, you know, a nice, wealthy neighborhood. but the is zoned against that. so you can only build another single family detached home there, which protects the housing value of. all these people. now, robby the dirty secret is this is happening in liberal places this is where liberals they sit there and out of one side of their mouth they talk about building affordable housing and all of this stuff section eight vouchers and on the other side of their mouth, they are making sure that the housing crisis gets worse and worse. now, why won't affordable housing help this problem? why won't more vouchers help this problem? the problem there is that giving people vouchers or saying, you know, we're going subsidize a person with a lower income living in this place. all you're doing is creating more demand, right?

you're increasing the demand there where before you had a person who could only afford to live in an apartment. but now have a lower income person who has a voucher to live in a home. that's an extra person, right? you're only expanding demand all of the left wing ideas about how to help the housing crisis. they're only going to make the problem worse. the only thing that will help this problem is increase the supply of housing. so we need to get rid of these zoning laws that just we need to get rid of them. and the estimates are, if we get rid of them tomorrow, we can build a million units in one year and in a decade we will have solved our housing crisis. incredible with just that change, we could do it. yeah, i very much agree with you. and i've seen i live in washington dc, i've seen the, you know the the eight housing, that type of stuff fails over and over again because i think that frankly is aimed at maybe the lowest rung of the of the working class or actually just

outright impoverished people or people who aren't working at all, who those kinds of arrangements up having to tangle with serious mental illness, crime, violence, drug addiction, those sorts of problems that can wreck those entire buildings, those up not being places where people want to live. right. that's not the kind of and frankly, you talk about that a lot of the book people the people you're talking to don't wa to be seen as a recipients of of government handouts or at least undue recipients of government handouts. they don't want to be permanently on the on the on the take. want to they find dignity in work. they want to you know, i think they believe there should be support for people in tough situations, but not that it should just be permanent thing for people to get their check for the government live in house the government built for them and that's just their lives. that's not really what they're looking for 100%. and this is totally lost on liberals. they think, you know, an agenda that caters to the poor, to the dependent poor is, you know,

that's that it that's the goal. right. they don't understand that working class see an agenda that caters to poor and expands the welfare state in direct tension with their interests. don't want welfare. they don't want they see work through a spiritual lens. they take so much pride and they get so much dignity from working. and they see it as an inheritance from their parents. they remember their parents getting dressed to go to work every day. and it makes them feel connected to their parents. it them feel proud to be american. they don't want to live off government handouts. they but but you're sometimes, you know, they will see someone who they saw work, work and work and why can't that person help if they're in a slump, if they need it just for now just a little bit here and there and again, a lot of this frustration with the welfare state comes from firsthand knowledge. i mean, most the people i interviewed knew people who they were scamming the system and they felt deep frustration with that because they felt like,

well, they could have chosen to do that and they didn't because they have too much dignity. and yet when they need help, they can't it. and i remember college students getting the whatever they're called different things in different states the the the grocery that you know the grocery cards the just by using that to buy to buy booze. you talk about a concept called benefits cliff that's related to this people who who who do have some kind welfare and would actually stand lose it if they if they increased their salary or their employment and thus are disincentivized from doing so. can you talk more about that? yeah. isn't that amazing. if you are a single mom let's say and let's say you have a kid. so you're getting help and you're making, let's say $10 an hour. so you're getting know help in terms of food stamps getting help, let's say, in terms of child care, which is extremely expensive. and let's say your has a disability or some sort of, you know, special need. so they're on medicaid, which is the cadillac of of of insurance of health insurance.

if you are such a woman and you're you're a hard worker and you show up to work every on time, and your boss recognizes you and your potential and says, you know what, i want to give you a raise i want you to come on full time. i to give you benefits and i want to give you 15,000, $15 an hour. that woman. lose $25,000 a year in benefits. she takes that raise and, you know, you might say, look, take the raise it's fine. it'll even out. but first of all, it won't even out because to 22, $10 an hour to $15 an hour does not equal $25,000 over the course of the year. but also it would really be as a parent malpractice to do that. why she doesn't know how good the health insurance is going to be. she doesn't know ahead time whether it's going to cover what her child needs, what her child is getting off of medicaid. so many of these employer backed insurance plans are garge. so how can she take that raise? and i think a lot of that is why we see that so many people who are employed by these big box

stores or are on government benefits, it is corporate. it is they aren't paying a living wage. but at the same time, a lot of people are making that choice because they cannot in good if they have children, give up these benefits. we have waited the system to incentivize the worst kind of behavior. marriage. marriage is one of the most stabilizing forces from a purely economic point of view, the average black head of household who is single makes $33,000 a year. the average male black head of household who is married makes $95,000 a year, which is a solidly middle class wage and most of the country. now why we disincentivizing marriage if woman is struggling working but she's sort of making it she's making that $10 an hour. she's got kids. she's getting help if she does the best thing she can do and gets married, she will lose access to so many of those benefits. now, you might say, look she won't need them anymore.

there's another income. maybe, maybe not. but we should be incentivizing the best behaviors possible. and we should be incentivizing the kind of autonomy that the working longs for, and instead what we've done is incentivize dependency the lack of stability in the family structure does come across very clearly not just obviously in your book in your reporting in works done by other people in hillbilly elegy by j.d. vance, which i'm sure was something of an inspiration for this kind of work. you know, the fact that elite people, the upper class, they're divorced are, i think, lower than ever. they having children. but then they have when they do have children, they have they don't have children beyond means to take care of them. and they're very sound situations, whereas working class, lower class poor people have just appalling rates of divorce or just not being

married in the first place at all. and out of wedlock children and more children beyond what can be supported. you know, some of this, right, is there are certainly government policies can be tweaked like what you just mentioned. we talked about for zoning. but is it is it a cultural is it a social trend? is there kind of collapse or spiritual malaise, taking place what what what explains what has happened to the family stability in these kinds of of working class lives? i think there's a crisis, a spiritual definitely plaguing some corners of the working class, especially men because of the devaluation of working class labor. they cannot see themselves as and along with that has come a kind of self infantilizing and almost you have 7 million young men who are not in the workforce, who are simply missing from the workforce. and of course, you can't ask women to marry like me living in

their mother's basements and playing video games all day oh, you know, there's i think it's very hard for women to see them that way, too. and that stems both from economic and spiritual and cultural and social. it's it's a of a horrible witch's brew of self forces. you know, in retrospect, was a really bad idea to say that masculine itself is bad, that, you know, machismo and being a provider, being a supporter and being manly brawn to effectively know socially and culturally criminalize all of these things through all of our culture it's had a disastrous impact on men, women and children and. you know obviously that obviously came from a good place. people, women to be empowered. you know, people wanted, you know, blessed domestic violence or what have you. i mean, obviously, there good, good feelings behind this, good behind this propelling this. but, you know, the idea we shouldn't admire that. you know, men should at the

bottom of the pecking order that they should always second guessing natural impulses to to be, you know, macho, to have a little, you know, braggadocio whatever. i think that that's had a really big impact. and you combine that with the the economic forces we've been talking about, and this is what you get when obviously stable employment, especially we were talking about, you know, the youngest of the young i mean, teenager, right. teenagers and 20 somethings who who come from bad backgrounds and who are at the low income rungs are frankly the most dangerous in our society. right. males, the crime spike we're seeing in some, including the nation's capital where i live which is just appalling levels of crime is is by people you know it's almost better if they'd in their mother's basement playing video games they're out on the street carjack kings grocery store robberies that kind of thing, you know. how does that correspond to the devaluation of doing you know,

of doing summer jobs? that kind of work is? also something that is i think, look upon now, frankly, by a lot of progressive people. look, i don't i don't want, you know, 13 year old child slaves, anything like that. but i've seen progressive now saying it would be like like torture to to expire it to expect a 15 year old to flip burgers for a summer to what's going on with that. this is maybe one of my most consumable opinions. i never hear anybody talking this, but i'm going to talk about it because i think it's incredibly important. children who are raised by a grown up in house who is not their biological parent are much more likely to be molested and there's a nypd police detective who is in the book, detective patrick. he's a black cop. he spends a lot of time with the criminal element. he's spent many night sitting

with them in the hospital, waiting for them to get arraigned and what have you and a lot of them have been sexually molested. and i'm not saying that to take responsibility away from, you know, what they've done and their crimes but the crisis in marriage, i think, has so horrific implications that a society we're not ready to talk about and we need to start talking about it because it's extremely important. yeah, terrifying. well, we're getting toward the end of our time, so let's go big picture again. and you know, what are some other solutions to improve the lives of the working class? now, i know you and i don't see eye to eye on. i know you're a big fan of the trump and then some of the biden trade policies to have this look i am fine the with the microchips being manufactured in the country i think i agree with

you that we'd be better off if they were being here rather than china. but you know, we had that whole subsidy package. and my understanding is a lot those factories are not being built because it turns out the the regular versions are still too exhausting time consuming and financially that even with the it's still difficult to do these kinds of things. so then my question is is really the problem that we have made work in this country, i think you and i would agree the regulation front people know this. but, you know, countries in scandinavia have very low corporate tax rates and very low regulation. and so, you know, they have very robust welfare state. but, you know, when senate or sanders likes to talk about these places as a utopia, he's really missing 50% of the picture there, which is the thing that makes it easy to become a corporation that then creates jobs.

know that's very important. and i would agree with you. i mean, there's a lot of regulation if you talk to small business owners, you know, another backbone of this country and it's so unfair the level of regulation that they have to deal with. so i would totally agree you there. i think i would say excuse me. what i would say is that the sort of the major things that would improve working class life from, the perspective of the working class is. yes. tariffs and protecting trade and making our trade have more america first balance. trump did a great job on this. and thank god biden has sort of really carried the torch forward there. housing and getting rid of zoning laws in mediately, freeing up space and land to build duplexes, starter homes for working class people, folks rational training. my god let's tell young men in school that they don't have to learn shakespeare and algebra to have the basics of a middle class life. let's teach them how to become the skilled trades folks that we

desperately, desperately need. get rid of the diploma. divide to make it illegal to require a b.a. for a job that not require a skill that you would learn in college and make sure that people aren't using soft eyewear that filters out people who don't have. a college degree. these are all complete nonpartizan ideas that would have an immediate impact on the lives of working class americans, immediate and you know, it's not for one side or the other. these are things all of us should be able to agree on. and these are solutions that i spoke to experts about and then brought back to the working class americans. i interviewed in the book to ask them what they think about them. so you can read about eir take on them. they, of course, improved each and every one of them when we would talk about it, because they know it would work for them. but these are all things that have their stamp of approval as yeah, eliminating degree requirements is is a huge one and is so broadly popular frankly is something that know

to end on a optimistic note is being taken up. i believe pennsylvania's governor i think signed a signed into law something eliminating that requirement specific industries and firms are also eliminating it too because it's popular do so and they're probably discovering that it doesn't they you know to employ people again who spend more of their time jumping through hoops is not always a benefit and is frankly sometimes to detract from the value of their work. absolutely. yes. yes. there is a lot of good news on that front. and then you know, the last thing i would say is really immigration. you know, having a strong immigration policy, controlling the border, but also, you know, limiting the number of immigrants who are coming in here because they are competing with the working class. they're not competing with us, rob. they're not competing with people in the knowledge industry or people who need a credential to do their job or. people who need a command of the english language, you know, they're competing with people who use their bodies to work. and we should protect that labor. we should protect those

americans. well, there are high school, high skilled excuse me, immigrants coming into the country as well. that's just strictly limited by the government. right. the ones who are going to compete with us. but i think the country would be better off with more of them. and i will take competition. but as you point out, that does speak to what you say about the policies of the elite of the government favoring, the elites, and being very just not even listening to what the working class concerns are. absolutely. leigh. well, boccia, thank you so much for participating. participating this discussion of your book with me. it is fast nating you did a terrific job on all this reporting and i learned a lot. thank you. thank you so so much robby. this was just such a pleasure. thank you