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