My is Scott Galloway, I teach at NYU, and I appreciate your time. have 44 slides and 720 seconds. Let’s light this candle.
(Laughter)
OK so those of you who don’t know me, I’m actually a global television store. True story. I’ve four TV series in the last three years. Two of them have been canceled before were launched, and two were canceled within six weeks. Let’s recap.
(Video) If we want juice this thing, if we want to put a cattle prod up the ass of the economy. Bloomberg. most trusted name in financial news. Not for long.
Andrew Yang: I’m going to do whatever 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 to the TED.
(Laughter)
OK. By the way, it’s clear — what’s it called? are we here for? “The Brave and the Brilliant?” It’s clear Chris is a frustrated soap opera producer.
(Laughter)
Essentially what we have here is a telenovela where, after night of unbridled passion between Bill Gates and Malcolm Gladwell, they give birth their bastard love child, Simon Sinek.
(Laughter)
OK, I us with a question. Do we love our children? like an illegitimate question, right? Well, I’m going to try and you otherwise.
Essentially, as we go down generations, we’re that for the last two generations, people are making money on an inflation-adjusted basis. In addition, the cost of a home, the cost of pursuing education, continues to skyrocket. the purchasing power, the prosperity, is inversely correlated to age. Simply put, as we get younger, we’re away opportunity and prosperity from our youngest. The social contract that is now no longer in place for the first time in the US’s history, a 30-year-old is no longer as 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 the of 55 feel pretty good about America, but less than one in five under the age of 34 feel very good about America. creates an incendiary. Righteous movements, cuts to our society up becoming opportunistic infections because generally speaking, young people have warranted envy, they’re pissed off and they’re angry that don’t enjoy the same spoils and prosperity that were provided our generation.
A decent proxy for how much we value youth labor is minimum wage, and we’ve kept purposely pretty low. If it had just kept pace with productivity, it’d 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 of an acceleration in interest rates and the fact the average home has gone from 290,000 to 420. By the way, the most homes in the 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 make it very difficult for new entrants to ever their own assets, thereby elevating their own net worth. This is the transfer I’m to be speaking about.
(Applause)
This has resulted in an enormous transfer wealth, where people over the age of 70 used control 19 percent of household income, versus people under age of 40, used to control 12. Their wealth has been cut in half. isn’t by accident, it’s purposeful. This is me at UCLA in 1987. I know your first thought I haven’t changed a 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, admissions rate was 76 percent. Today, it’s nine percent. received a 2.23 GPA from UCLA. I learned nothing but how to make bongs out household items and every line from “Planet of the Apes.” And 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 shot at remarkable.
(Applause)
And every year it’s gotten more expensive. Higher and homes and the ability — not only is higher incredibly expensive, it’s not accessible. Because me and my colleagues drunk on luxury, and I’ll come back to that.
We’ve embraced the strategy. Me and my colleagues in higher ed wake up every and ask ourselves the same question when we look in mirror. How can I increase my compensation while reducing my accountability?
(Laugter)
And have found the ultimate strategy. It’s called an LVMH strategy, where we artificially constrain supply to create aspiration scarcity such that we can raise tuition faster than inflation. And old people and wealthy people done the same thing with housing. All of a sudden, once own a home, you become very concerned with traffic, you make sure that there’s no new housing permits.
And is a memo to my colleagues in higher ed: we’re public servants, not fucking bags.
(Applause)
Harvard is the best example of this. They’ve increased their endowment in last 40 years and have decided to expand their enrollment, their class, by four percent. Any university that doesn’t grow their freshman class faster population that has over a billion dollars in endowment should lose their tax-free status they’re no longer in higher education. They’re a hedge fund classes.
(Cheers and applause)
My first recommendation: Biden should take some of that 750 billion earmarked bail out the one third of people that got to to college on the backs of the two thirds didn’t and give a billion dollars to our 500 greatest public institutions, size-adjusted, in exchange three things. One, they use technology and scale to reduce tuition by two percent a year, enrollments by six percent a year and increase the number of vocational certifications and nontraditional four-year degrees 20 percent. Where does that get us? In just years, in just ten years, that doubles the freshman seats cuts the cost in half. This isn’t radical. This is called college in the ’80s and ’90s.
Another of wealth. Look at what’s happened to wages. Oh, they’ve up? Not as much as corporate profits. There’s a healthy between capital and labor. But for 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 to S and P, they barely register. It’s been an amazing time to 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 a billionaire, it’s never been harder to be a millionaire.
By the way, our job in ed isn’t to identify a top one percent of people are freakishly remarkable or have rich parents and turn them into a super class of billionaires. It’s give the bottom 90 a chance to be in the 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, 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 of wealth, we have decided, “I know, if they win the gold, let’s them the silver and the bronze, and let’s lower their taxes.” transfer is purposeful. It’s not by accident, and it works. Senior poverty way down, and we should celebrate that. Meanwhile, child poverty is flat to up.
The third rail. I’m to talk about Social Security. It would cost 11 dollars to expand the child tax credit. But that gets stripped out of the bill. But the additional 135 billion dollars a year to Social Security, flies right through Congress. And every year we transfer 1.4 trillion dollars a cohort that is increasingly doing less well to the cohort that the wealthiest cohort in the history of this planet. I’m not against Social Security, but criteria should be if you need it, not whether you 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 fallen under this mythology that somehow it’s this great social program. No it’s not. It’s great transfer of wealth from young to old.
(Applause)
How is this happening? Because representatives are in fact, representative. Old people vote. Washington has become a between the “Land of the Dead” and “The Golden Girls.”
(Laughter)
Quite frankly, this is ridiculous. And if I sound ageist —
(Applause)
If I ageist, I am. And you know who else is ageist? Biology.
(Laughter)
When Speaker Pelosi her first child, get this, two thirds of households didn’t have televisions, and Castro had just declared martial law. But she’s supposed to understand the of a 17-year-old girl who’s 5′ 9″, 95 pounds, tips on dieting and extreme dieting from Facebook? She’s supposed to the challenges that a 27-year-old single mother faces? By the way, young dreamy.
(Laughter)
Young and dreamy.
(Applause)
The great intergenerational theft took place the auspices of a virus. I know, let’s use the greatest health crisis in a century to speed-ball the transfer. This is the Nasdaq from 2008 to 2012. let the markets crash. And by the way, you need churn, you need disruption because seeds and recalibrates advantage and wealth from the incumbents the entrants. It’s a natural part of the cycle. But wait, lately, no, a people 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 with my kids, more time with Netflix, and the value of my stocks absolutely exploded. And who has pay for my prosperity? Not me. Future generations who will have to deal with an level of debt. Why am I here, and why I get the prosperity I enjoy? Because in 2008 we bailed out banks, but we didn’t bail out the economy. We the markets fall. So as I was coming into prime income-earning years, I got to buy, no joke, these stocks at these prices. This is where those are now. Where does a young person find disruption? When you bail out the baby boomer owner 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 like this slide. It has no context or relevance.
(Laughter and cheers)
We’re economically the young, but I know, let’s attack their emotional and mental well-being. Let’s take advantage of the in our species with medieval institutions, Paleolithic instincts and godlike technology.
I’m just going to say, think 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 an 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. what are they? What’s the first one? Oh, that’s self-harm rates, which have exploded, especially among girls since colleague Jonathan Haidt pointed out, it’s really, really gone crazy since social went on mobile. What’s the 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. advice to every young person watching this program is out, drink more and make a series of bad that might pay off.
(Laughter and applause)
Next graph, cumulative deaths. You’re more likely to be shot in the United States if you’re a toddler an infant than a cop. Next graph, obesity, way up. By the way, industrial food complex wants to addict you to shitty, fatty foods they can hand you over to the industrial diabetes complex. 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 I in high school, it was drunk driving, now it’s kids killing themselves. people don’t want to have kids anymore. Two-thirds of people aged 30 to 34, able-bodied, used to to have at least one child. It’s been cut in half. It’s now less a third, 27 percent. As a result, people over the age of 60 in the US, happy. People under the age of 30, not so much. Some of the lowest the free world.
What can we do? Nothing wrong with America that can’t be with what’s right with it. We got the hard stuff out. There are programs to address all of these issues, they cost lot of money, that’s the hard part. And we figured this out. In just five minutes post an earnings call, we can add quarter of a trillion dollars to the economy. We’ve the hard part figured out, the resources.
We have the money, but we decide to do it. This is per-capita spending on child in the United States relative to other nations. This housing permits. Things are doable. We increase minimum wage 25 bucks an 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 tax structure with alternative minimum tax on corporations and wealthy individuals. We to refund the IRS. We need to reform Social Security. should be based on whether you need the money, not on old you are. We need a negative income tax. My friend Andrew Yang screwed 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 tax deduction. When did we decide that the money that capital earns more 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 have a First Amendment. Break up Big Tech. We have that are incurring greater and greater costs on every small 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 age of 16 should be on social media.
(Applause)
We need universal pre-K. We need to the expanded child-tax credit. We need term limits, see above, Andrew Yang. We need income-based action. Any visible signs of affirmative action make no sense at all. You would be born gay or non-white, in the United States than poor. And that’s a sign of our progress and our need to recalibrate who we advantage to. Affirmative action, of which I’m a beneficiary — I got Pell Grants, I got unfair advantage — action is a wonderful thing, and it should be based color: it should be based on 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 Sisters programs. We need national service. We need to tell people in the States and Canada that they live in the greatest countries in world, and we need to remind them of that every day by exposing to other great Americans where they feel connective tissue.
We can do of this. We can do all of it. We have the resources. The question is, do have the will? This is my last slide. It is an emotionally manipulative slide to try get you to like me more.
(Laughter)
But it does have a message. This is the shooting match. Anybody here without kids, ask someone with kids. You your world of work, you have your world of friends, have your 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, our kids’ well-being and prosperity is profound. If you acknowledge they’re doing more poorly than previous generations. If you believe there’s a that the illusion of complexity has done nothing but provide cloud for the unbelievable transfer of good will, of well-being and of prosperity young to old. And if you believe we can fix these problems and we have the resources, then present to you, I posit, I augur the question that I hope more veracity than it did 17 minutes and 24 seconds ago. And that’s following question. Do we love our children?
My name is Scott Galloway, teach at NYU, and I appreciate your time.
(Cheers applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)