Adam Tooze
Appearances
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
Just put some numbers in the picture here. There are 160 million people working as employed people in the United States, 170 million people in the workforce as a whole, so there's 10 million self-employed. There are 12 million people working in manufacturing, tightly defined. If you add 8 million in construction, that gets you to 20 million for industry.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
Now, that is not a base from which you can transform American society, right? What was it in the 50s, Adam? Do you have a sense of the percentage? As a share of employment- Yes. Yes. It was closer to 30%. Okay. So now it's closer to 10%. Less than 10%. 7% in manufacturing narrowly defined.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
By a couple of million would be a huge success and it would take you closer to 10% than we currently are at. There are two different projects. There is the fulfillment of the Hamiltonian project of sovereignty and independence and security, which requires certain technological capacities.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
There are industrial communities that exist that should be defended and developed and supported in ways that are appropriate. But then the big challenge surely has got to be to deliver on something closer to a new deal, shall we say, for want of a better word, social and welfare bargain.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
for the 20 million people that work in healthcare, for the 17 million people that work in leisure and services. That is a holistic bargain which can't any longer be based around the male breadwinner model of the UAW duking it out with GM and Ford and Chrysler in Detroit in the 40s and 50s.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
This is a highly diverse, very feminine workforce, which has to continuously think the problem of childcare organically with the problem of their working conditions. That's where progressive politics, to my mind, needs to focus, not on the, yes, it's the last war.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
The promise of retaining industrial jobs for that classic industrial working class is not a bad goal, but it's not to be confused with the project of actually supporting progressive change for the majority of Americans. In the industry itself, John, amen to everything you've just said. The Chinese are discovering this, right?
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
The cutting edge of Chinese EV production is not Fordist tens of thousands of workers. It's not even like the Foxconn plants that make the Apple phones. They're these dark factories with hardly any workers operating hyper-sophisticated robot machinery, which churn out the cars at unbeatably low cost.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
So the Chinese themselves are going to discover this problem of the disconnect between manufacturing and industrial success and the share of people that can be employed and the social model that goes with that. It's three layers here that are continuously conflated.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
Overheating.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
Yeah, and it's always service sector inflation is what really causes the financial markets to panic. And so the sector inflation is driven by labor costs. So that goes hand in hand with wage increases for the lowest paid American blue collar workers, blue collar in the widest sense. But I mean, in fairness to the Fed, they ran this baby as hot as they dared, right? For as long as they dared.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
By central banking standards, this was an experiment in risk, which of course more centrist Democrats like Larry Summers attacked from the very beginning and the GOP rode in on in an utterly cynical way. during the campaign, denouncing inflation and everything else. Whereas you're saying, John, this has been, like it or not, believe it or not, a good time for the least well-paid American workers.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
A lot of the inequality of the 70s and 80s has been closed up by rises in their wages. Not at the super top. Obviously, the billionaires are better off than ever. But within the workforce, there has been a modest closing of the gap.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
Everyone was farming in that period. 80% of Americans were farmers in the Hamiltonian period, right? Right. This policy seems to be taking us back more to 1870. It's great. This is a good exercise. The 1890s. That's what I'm not sure of. The huge waves of migration, the 93 to 96 recession, the 1907 recession, 2021, and then the big kahuna. And then the big one.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
The Great Depression, like the most dynamic economy in the world by all means, but the worst governed, the most unstable, incredible inequalities. Patronage, corruption. Class war, the Ku Klux Klan, the whole, you know, that is the, this is what we want.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
I think to make sense of this is a fascinating conversation. I think we need two extra terms. One is social democracy, which I quite like this reading of the New Deal as Jeffersonian goals by Hamiltonian means. But another way of thinking of the New Deal is it's America's effort at social democracy. In other words, an organized bargain between American workers and capital.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
The fact of the matter is that a very large slice of America, particularly in big cities, loves social democracy. They really like that vision. They really like social insurance. They like the LaGuardia vision of well-managed cities. They like the Wisconsin, Minnesota, California.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
There's lots of different variants of it, but it's essentially recognizable as American social democracy, like in Europe. And the partners of the New Deal Democrats in doing this were the professional managerial class. In other words, folks like us. And I read Trumpianism and the Musk element within it as a double attack, right?
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
In the name of the working class, which is largely non-existent and not in the room, de facto, their immediate victims are civil servants, public servants in federal government doing things like weather forecasting. By the way, demonized.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
No, they're not. But in many cases, they're not the working class. They are actually university educated middle class people. American class language is confusing.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
How dare you? So this is like some kind of a racket. Right. And that is how I read this current moment as a double attack, effectively continuing the... undermining of the real conditions for working Americans, but with a novel element of a really no holds barred attack on the PMC, on the professional managerial class.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
And that includes big corporate capital, which has its DEI and its ESG agendas, none of which they're down with. And it's done in the name of a kind of entrepreneurialism, which is Jacksonian, which is about breaking things and seeing what happens next.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
But it was wallpaper that was held in place by tens of thousands of people whose job it was and who did believe in it and whose careers were actually owed to it. It's a real thing. And who are real people. There were real people and talented and there were elements of that story that actually worked, right? Affirmative action was a program that actually transformed American society for the better.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
And so we can't let go of that. But that I think is the double element that's at work here. And I would agree with you, John, that the vision that someone like Musk holds out is I just don't think we've ever quite seen anything. I go back to Jules Verne and late 19th century sci-fi where you've got some bad villainous business guy who's got an island and a submarine and a rocket.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
And the crazy thing is he has an island and a submarine and a rocket. We're going to iRobot here. He's got like thousands of satellites. It's insane.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
In another way of reading, this would be less manipulative and it would be more optimistic in the sense that these changes are happening in American society. Women are going to college at rates never before seen. They dominate in many parts of education. DEI, as far as they're concerned, is not some sort of concession. It's just companies getting real.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
No, they're trying to constrict it is what I'm saying. Yeah, exactly. And they were flexing around it and trying to figure out what their positioning is in relation to it. I think at that level, the same is true about the American working class. It's a large percentage of women and it's incredibly diverse. And so like woke strategies of recognizing that diversity are just realism.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
No, I mean, I basically agree with you. As late as the 1970s, there was still that fear that if unemployment went really high, there would be something akin to social upheaval. And in parts of the world, in Europe, for instance, in Italy, in Great Britain for a time, it did actually look that way. 68 was a working class uprising in much of Europe at that time.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
But that fear is no longer, and that's part of the just grotesquery of the current moment. And Trump's inauguration with just the lineup of incredibly rich men as a kind of ostentatious display. And insofar as we can point, I mean, part of my argument a minute ago was there is a social pressure.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
I mean, I think it's going to be really interesting to see in the long run how gender rights, how issues around reproductive freedom and so on play out in American society, because I don't think the conservative agenda will work. It's not a threat of a revolution, but it is a huge polarization in politics we're seeing around the world between men and women. And in the end, that may tell.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
The question now is, what does the PMC do? Because they are a much larger group than manufacturing industrial workers.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
And very at risk of the AI revolution and now under a hugely politicized attack. And I'm not saying, I'm not predicting that there's going to be kind of a revolutionary upsurge of elementary school teachers, but that would seem to me to be the kind of piece of the puzzle. And the question, of course, is where the Democratic Party is. Why is it not leading? I don't understand.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
So that was interesting, Adam.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
Yeah, well, good question. Have you noticed?
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
Adam? I mean, to pick out the big fuck small theme, I think the economist in me says, well, Does big want to fuck all of small all the time? It seems that way. So the question is like, who is it? Who becomes victimized? Well, the question I think is serious. Who is it that's victimized? And at what level can resistance and resilience be built?
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
And how far does this also involve middle-sized players predating smaller players? You were describing small town labor relations are some of the most vicious in the United States because the stakes are very high, even though it's a small pool. And I think that's, I mean, it's an aversion of Zahrab's point about democracy.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
That's the content of the kind of democracy that we need to build is a democracy that faces this harsh, brutal, brutally expressed. I think the sexual metaphor is wrong. There is a predatory rapist kind of mentality to this that resists that at every level, both cultural and political.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
And this is where I think, you know, the agenda of feminism is crucial because it speaks to this experience of power as being fucked.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
Consent. Who is it that plays along? And that is where this sort of countervailing power has to be. And sitting, being employed by a big institution in a formidable city like New York, and you imagine some person like Trump coming along wanting to fuck this town, you try. You might want to, and people have done it, but it's hard.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
And it's not hard because it's a place full of flaming radicals that are trying to paint us that way. No, it's just a place full of people pursuing their own projects in relatively decent ways, quite bought into the legacies of New Deal institutions, great society institutions which work here, knowing that we need diversity because this is a very diverse place and we can't function without it.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
This is not Mar-a-Lago or Palm Beach. We can't pretend the world is different from the way it is and so we need politics appropriate to that. And that's where I have a, that's where I really don't see this spiraling off into disaster. I think of a community like New York City and think it'll take, you know, as Adam Smith would say, there's a lot of ruin in this.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
Like, you know, it'll take a lot to really bring this down.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
Great pleasure.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
I mean, you might think that, and that would in a sense be a continuity with the Biden team as well, because they were talking in rather similar terms. I mean, Jake Sullivan had that famous speech where he talked about, you know, new Washington consensus, post-neoliberalism was all the rage.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
Chips and IRA and that. And that's the question is like, where's the beef? And if they go on talking like this and it's quite difficult to actually put your finger on what they're doing and whether it could possibly be for real, you start wondering whether it isn't more like a facelift. It's more that Mar-a-Lago aesthetic where we all pretend to be 25. And no judgment, like that's fine.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
You go do your thing, but we aren't actually 25. And there's a way in which something like that is clearly true about the economy. I mean, the economy, there's never literally ever in history been a case of a society as successful as the US and as rich as the US that has somehow reversed the structure of the relationship between the key bits, right? The service sector, the industrial sector.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
And once upon a time, it would have been farming and agriculture, which I know you're into in New Jersey.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
You can't reverse, certainly nothing in history to date has suggested you can do that. And the US industrial and manufacturing sector right now isn't the platform from which you would expect a kind of reconquest or a transformation of all of American society.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
Technology is key here, and that's been the driver all along. The basic story, and this is why this is all so kind of ironic and weird, is that we've gotten really, really good at manufacturing an industry in the same way as we got really, really good at farming. Once upon a time, the vast majority of Americans were farmers, and that wasn't a lifestyle choice.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
That was because we just couldn't feed ourselves because we were so bad at farming. We got very good at farming.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
Yeah. I mean, that's the norm, right? Because people are desperate and all over the world and always been desperate. And so it's really anomalous to have rich farmers. That's a really peculiar situation to be in. Right.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
Yeah, for sure. You get slave labor, you get various types of forced labor. Right. But the story here of technological change is one that just cuts through this. The crisis story, the New Deal that you might be invoking, for instance, in the 30s, it doesn't change anything about the balance between the bits, right?
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
So the share of industry in the US economy as a whole was 40% before the New Deal and after the New Deal and continued at that level until the late 60s when really rapid technological change and the global redivision of labor kicked in where the Japanese learned to make cars, which Americans would buy. And there was that shift.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
So I think what history does and what policy does is set the terms under which capital and labor, amongst other players, transact within the frame, if you like, that technology provides. And New Deal was very favorable to organized labor, which is why I think middle class America looks back to it with nostalgia. That was the Treaty of Detroit. And neoliberalism broke that.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
And it's in a sense now as though they want the promise of the middle class lifestyle of the 50s without the power relations, which would be powerful, organized labor that actually made that possible. Wow. Okay. And all of this suggesting somehow and feeding off the idea that America's got to make things. And if it doesn't make things, it's somehow just floating free and without substance.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
I think that's right. And I don't disagree with Zorab in his analysis of the 18th and 19th century. My question is really about the relevance of that analysis to the 21st century and the world that we're currently in.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
And the question really is, sure, we know from many cases, not just the American one, that you can engineer on the upswing, if you like, an increase in the share of your manufacturing industrial sector. Most recently, the Chinese have done it to truly spectacular effect. The question is whether a mature and rich society like the American one can or even should want to do that.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
Now, this doesn't mean that America can't cherry pick individual sectors and say, we'd really like to have more competence in chips. Fine. Absolutely. You can do that. You can go after that.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
But that shouldn't be confused with a vision for society as a whole or the economy as a whole, let alone a kind of fix for the situation of the American middle class, which is how this is so often badged and sold in American politics today. There's a national security case for diversifying the source of memory chips and processors and so on.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
But there isn't, to my mind, a realistic social vision, which is why I raised the Mar-a-Lago and facelift thing, because it's not real, right? How dare you, sir?
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
Well, you either go down that or you go down the Tonka Toy kind of hardhat vision of the economy, which Joe Biden was addicted to. I mean, he just loved the picture of himself in a manufacturing plant, however rundown, however 1980s, he wanted to be there. And they are both kind of visions, right? Of an American, well, they're a past projected into the future.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
And I don't think they're helpful, right? Because I think they're misleading as to what would actually help the American working class, which is healthcare, childcare. You know, those are the things where you could actually affect tens of millions of people.