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