My name is Galloway, I teach at NYU, and I appreciate your time. I have 44 slides and 720 seconds. Let’s this candle.
(Laughter)
OK so for those of you who don’t know me, I’m actually global television store. True story. I’ve had four TV series in last three years. Two of them have been canceled before they were launched, and were canceled within six weeks. Let’s recap.
(Video) If we to juice this thing, if we want to put a prod up the ass of the economy. Bloomberg. The most trusted name financial news. Not for long.
Andrew Yang: I’m going to do whatever I for this country of ours.
Scott Galloway: Jesus, come on, dude, you’re 0 for two.
(Video ends)
Face for podcasting. So insight of the day. I’d like to be the first person to welcome you the last TED.
(Laughter)
OK. By the way, it’s clear — what’s it called? What we here for? “The Brave and the Brilliant?” It’s clear that Chris is a frustrated soap producer.
(Laughter)
Essentially what we have here is a telenovela where, after a night unbridled passion between Bill Gates and Malcolm Gladwell, they give birth to their bastard child, Simon Sinek.
(Laughter)
OK, I start us with a question. Do we love children? Sounds like an illegitimate question, right? Well, I’m to try and convince you otherwise.
Essentially, as we go down generations, we’re seeing that for last two generations, people are making less money on an inflation-adjusted basis. addition, the cost of buying a home, the cost of pursuing education, continues skyrocket. So the purchasing power, the prosperity, is inversely to age. Simply put, as we get younger, we’re taking away and prosperity from our youngest. The social contract that is now no longer in and for the first time in the US’s history, a 30-year-old no longer doing as well as his or her were at 30. This is a breakdown in the agreement we have with any society, and it creates rage and shame.
(Applause)
As a result, people over age of 55 feel pretty good about America, but less than one in people under the age of 34 feel very good America. This creates an incendiary. Righteous movements, cuts to society end up becoming opportunistic infections because generally speaking, people have a warranted envy, they’re pissed off and they’re angry that they don’t enjoy the same spoils prosperity that were provided to our generation.
A decent proxy for how we value youth labor is minimum wage, and we’ve kept it purposely pretty low. If had just kept pace with productivity, it’d be at about 23 bucks a share. But we’ve to purposely keep it low.
Out of reach. Median home price has skyrocketed relative to median household income. a result, pre-pandemic, the average mortgage payment was 1,100 dollars, it’s now 2,300 dollars because of an acceleration in interest and the fact that the average home has gone from 290,000 420. By the way, the most expensive homes in world, based on this metric, are number three, Vancouver. Why? Because 60 percent the cost of building a home goes to permits. Because guess what, incumbents that own assets have weaponized government to make it very difficult for new entrants to get their own assets, thereby elevating their own net worth. This is transfer I’m going to be speaking about.
(Applause)
This resulted in an enormous transfer of wealth, where people over the age 70 used to control 19 percent of household income, versus under the age of 40, used to control 12. Their has been cut in half. This isn’t by accident, it’s purposeful. This is at UCLA in 1987. I know your first thought I haven’t changed a bit.
(Laughter)
This is also Silverio, who is the analyst who put together these slides. By way, Mia is 26. I did the math, just virtue of her being in this audience, it brings average age of the entire conference down 11 days.
(Laughter)
When I applied UCLA, the admissions rate was 76 percent. Today, it’s percent. I received a 2.23 GPA from UCLA. I learned but how to make bongs out of household items and every line from “Planet of the Apes.” the greatest public school in the world, Berkeley, decided to let me with a 2.27 GPA. And that’s what higher ed is about. ed is about taking unremarkable kids and giving them a at being remarkable.
(Applause)
And every year it’s gotten expensive. Higher ed and homes and the ability — not is higher ed incredibly expensive, it’s not accessible. Because me my colleagues are drunk on luxury, and I’ll come to that.
We’ve embraced the ultimate strategy. Me and my colleagues higher ed wake up every morning and ask ourselves the same question when we look the mirror. How can I increase my compensation while my accountability?
(Laugter)
And we have found the ultimate strategy. It’s an LVMH strategy, where we artificially constrain supply to create aspiration and scarcity such that we can tuition faster than inflation. And old people and wealthy people have done the same with housing. All of a sudden, once you own a home, become very concerned with traffic, and you make sure there’s no new housing permits.
And here is a to my colleagues in higher ed: we’re public servants, fucking Chanel bags.
(Applause)
Harvard is the best example of this. They’ve increased their in the last 40 years and have decided to expand enrollment, their freshman class, by four percent. Any university that doesn’t their freshman class faster than population that has over a dollars in endowment should lose their tax-free status because they’re no in higher education. They’re a hedge fund offering classes.
(Cheers applause)
My first recommendation: Biden should take some of that 750 billion to bail out the one third of people that got to to college on the backs of the two thirds that didn’t and a billion dollars to our 500 greatest public institutions, size-adjusted, in for three things. One, they use technology and scale to reduce tuition by two percent year, expand enrollments by six percent a year and the number of vocational certifications and nontraditional four-year degrees by 20 percent. Where does that us? In just ten years, in just ten years, that doubles freshman seats and cuts the cost in half. This isn’t radical. This is college in the ’80s and ’90s.
Another transfer of wealth. at what’s happened to wages. Oh, they’ve gone up? Not as much as profits. There’s a healthy tension between capital and labor. But the last 40 years, capital has been kicking the out of labor. Well, you think, what about wages, right? They’ve gone up. Well if you compare them the S and P, they barely register. It’s been an amazing time to own assets. your attempt to get the certification or the income such that you can acquire assets gotten harder and harder. In my class of 300 kids, it’s never easier to be a billionaire, it’s never been harder to be a millionaire.
By the way, our in higher ed isn’t to identify a top one percent of people are freakishly remarkable or have rich parents and turn into a super class of billionaires. It’s to give bottom 90 a chance to be in the top ten.
(Applause)
You know doesn’t need me or higher education? The top 10 percent. whole point of higher ed is to give the unremarkables, i.e. truly, who was raised by a single immigrant mother, a shot of being remarkable.
The has been purposeful. While the cohorts, corporations and the ultra-wealthy continue to garner more and more our wealth, we have decided, “I know, if they win the gold, let’s give them the and the bronze, and let’s lower their taxes.” This transfer purposeful. It’s not by accident, and it works. Senior poverty is way down, we should celebrate that. Meanwhile, child poverty is flat to up.
The third rail. I’m going to about Social Security. It would cost 11 billion dollars to the child tax credit. But that gets stripped out the infrastructure bill. But the additional 135 billion dollars a year to Security, that flies right through Congress. And every year transfer 1.4 trillion dollars from a cohort that is doing less well to the cohort that is the cohort in the history of this planet. I’m not against Social Security, but the criteria should be if need it, not whether you have a catheter. 80 percent of you, 80 percent of you absolutely no reason to ever take Social Security. It bankrupting our nation. And we have fallen under this mythology that somehow it’s this social program. No it’s not. It’s the great transfer of from young to old.
(Applause)
How is this happening? Because our are in fact, representative. Old people vote. Washington has become cross between the “Land of the Dead” and “The Golden Girls.”
(Laughter)
Quite frankly, this is ridiculous. And if I sound ageist —
(Applause)
If I sound ageist, I am. And you who else is ageist? Biology.
(Laughter)
When Speaker Pelosi had her child, get this, two thirds of households didn’t have color televisions, and had just declared martial law. But she’s supposed to the challenges of a 17-year-old girl who’s 5′ 9″, 95 pounds, tips on dieting and extreme dieting from Facebook? She’s supposed to understand the challenges a 27-year-old single mother faces? By the way, young dreamy.
(Laughter)
Young and dreamy.
(Applause)
The great intergenerational theft took place under the auspices of virus. I know, let’s use the greatest health crisis in a century to really speed-ball transfer. This is the Nasdaq from 2008 to 2012. We let the markets crash. And by the way, need churn, you need disruption because it seeds and advantage and wealth from the incumbents to the entrants. It’s natural part of the cycle. But wait, lately, no, a million dying would be bad. But what would be tragic is if we let the Nasdaq go and guys like me lost wealth. So we pumped the economy, which again, increased the massive transfer wealth. The best two years of my life? Covid — more time my kids, more time with Netflix, and the value of my stocks absolutely exploded. And has to pay for my prosperity? Not me. Future generations will have to deal with an unprecedented level of debt. am I here, and why do I get the prosperity I enjoy? Because in 2008 we bailed the banks, but we didn’t bail out the economy. let the markets fall. So as I was coming into prime income-earning years, I got to buy, no joke, these at these prices. This is where those stocks are now. Where does young person find disruption? When you bail out the baby owner of a restaurant, all you’re doing is robbing opportunity from the 26-year-old graduate of culinary academy that wants her shot. We need disruption.
(Laughter) I like this slide. It has no context or relevance.
(Laughter cheers)
We’re economically attacking the young, but I know, let’s their emotional and mental well-being. Let’s take advantage of flaws in our species with medieval institutions, Paleolithic instincts and technology.
I’m just going to say, I think Mark has done more damage to the young people in nation while making more money than any person in history.
(Applause)
Oh, but wait, it could be worse. It’s if we let an adversary implant a neural jack into our youth to raise generation of civic, military and business leaders that hate America. can we be this stupid?
(Laughter)
This all adds up to a bunch of all headed up into the right. And what are they? What’s first one? Oh, that’s self-harm rates, which have exploded, especially among since my colleague Jonathan Haidt pointed out, it’s really, gone crazy since social went on mobile. What’s the next one? Teens with depression. next one, men and women not having sex. Biggest of my parents was that I was going to get in much trouble. My biggest fear, honestly, is that my kids aren’t going to into enough trouble. My advice to every young person watching program is go out, drink more and make a of bad decisions that might pay off.
(Laughter and applause)
Next graph, cumulative gun deaths. You’re likely to be shot in the United States if you’re a toddler or infant than a cop. Next graph, obesity, way up. By the way, the industrial food complex wants addict you to shitty, fatty foods so they can you over to the industrial diabetes complex. We should not romanticize obesity. You’re not your fucking truth. You’re finding diabetes.
(Laughter and applause)
Overdose deaths, way up. Deaths of despair. When I in high school, it was drunk driving, now it’s killing themselves. Young people don’t want to have kids anymore. Two-thirds of aged 30 to 34, able-bodied, used to decide to have at least child. It’s been cut in half. It’s now less than third, 27 percent. As a result, people over the of 60 in the US, pretty happy. People under the of 30, not so much. Some of the lowest the free world.
What can we do? Nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed with what’s with it. We got the hard stuff figured out. are programs to address all of these issues, they cost a lot money, that’s the hard part. And we have figured this out. just five minutes post an earnings call, we can add a quarter of a trillion to the economy. We’ve got the hard part figured out, the resources.
We the money, but we decide not to do it. is per-capita spending on child care in the United States to other nations. This is housing permits. Things are doable. We increase minimum at 25 bucks an hour, it goes into the economy. wonderful things about low- and middle-income households is they spend all their money. We to have or restore a progressive tax structure with alternative minimum tax on corporations and wealthy individuals. We to refund the IRS. We need to reform Social Security. It should be based on you need the money, not on how old you are. need a negative income tax. My friend Andrew Yang screwed a great idea, but he branded it incorrectly. Instead of it UBI, he should’ve got Republicans on board by calling it negative income tax.
(Laughter)
We need to eliminate the capital gains tax deduction. When we decide that the money that capital earns is noble than the money that sweat earns? Shouldn’t it flipped?
(Applause)
We need to remove 230 protection for all algorithmically-elevated content. need identity verification. The reason we can have identity verification is because we have a First Amendment. up Big Tech. We have monopolies that are incurring greater and greater costs every small business and parents because again, see above, representatives don’t understand these technologies. We need to age-gate social media. There’s absolutely no anyone under the age of 16 should ever be on social media.
(Applause)
We need pre-K. We need to reinstate the expanded child-tax credit. need term limits, see above, Andrew Yang. We need income-based affirmative action. Any visible signs affirmative action make no sense at all. You would rather be born gay or non-white, in the States today than poor. And that’s a sign of our and our need to recalibrate who we give advantage to. Affirmative action, which I’m a beneficiary — I got Pell Grants, I got unfair — affirmative action is a wonderful thing, and it should be based on color: it should be based green. How much money you have or don’t have. college enrollment in vocational programs. Mental health, ban phones in schools, invest in third places, Big Brothers and programs. We need national service. We need to tell people in the United and Canada that they live in the greatest countries in the world, and we need to remind of that every day by exposing them to other great Americans they feel connective tissue.
We can do all of this. can do all of it. We have the resources. The question is, do we have will? This is my last slide. It is an emotionally manipulative to try and get you to like me more.
(Laughter)
But it have a message. This is the whole shooting match. here without kids, ask someone with kids. You have world of work, you have your world of friends, have your world of kids. Something happens here, your whole world shrinks to this.
(Applause)
So present, as I wrap here, with just a few questions. One, you acknowledge that our kids are the most important thing in our lives, that everything else we do is meaningful, but our kids’ well-being and prosperity is profound. you acknowledge that they’re doing more poorly than previous generations. you believe there’s a chance that the illusion of complexity has nothing but provide cloud cover for the unbelievable transfer of will, of well-being and of prosperity from young to old. And you believe we can actually fix these problems and have the resources, then I present to you, I posit, I augur the question that I has more veracity than it did 17 minutes and 24 seconds ago. And that’s the following question. Do we our children?
My name is Scott Galloway, I teach NYU, and I appreciate your time.
(Cheers and applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)