My name is Scott Galloway, I teach NYU, and I appreciate your time. I have 44 slides 720 seconds. Let’s light this candle.
(Laughter)
OK so for those of you don’t know me, I’m actually a global television store. True story. I’ve had four TV series in the three years. Two of them have been canceled before they launched, and two were canceled within six weeks. Let’s recap.
(Video) If we to juice this thing, if we want to put a cattle prod the ass of the economy. Bloomberg. The most trusted name financial news. Not for long.
Andrew Yang: I’m going to do whatever I can for this country ours.
Scott Galloway: Jesus, come on, dude, you’re 0 two.
(Video ends)
Face for podcasting. So first insight of day. I’d like to be the first person to welcome to the last TED.
(Laughter)
OK. By the way, it’s clear — what’s it called? What are here for? “The Brave and the Brilliant?” It’s clear Chris is a frustrated soap opera producer.
(Laughter)
Essentially we have here is a telenovela where, after a of unbridled passion between Bill Gates and Malcolm Gladwell, they birth 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 you otherwise.
Essentially, we go down generations, we’re seeing that for the last two generations, people are making less money on inflation-adjusted basis. In addition, the cost of buying a home, the cost of pursuing education, to skyrocket. So the purchasing power, the prosperity, is inversely correlated age. Simply put, as we get younger, we’re taking opportunity 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 no longer doing as well as his or her were at 30. This is a breakdown in the fundamental agreement we have with society, and it creates rage and shame.
(Applause)
As a result, over the age of 55 feel pretty good about America, less than one in five people under the age 34 feel very good about America. This creates an incendiary. Righteous movements, cuts 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 prosperity that were to our generation.
A decent proxy for how much we value youth is minimum wage, and we’ve kept it purposely pretty low. If it had just pace with productivity, it’d be at about 23 bucks share. But we’ve decided to purposely 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 an acceleration in interest rates and the fact that average home has gone from 290,000 to 420. By the way, the most expensive homes the world, based on this metric, are number three, Vancouver. Why? 60 percent of the cost of building a home to permits. Because guess what, the incumbents that own assets weaponized government to make it very difficult for new entrants to get their own assets, thereby elevating their own net worth. is the transfer I’m going to be speaking about.
(Applause)
This has resulted an enormous transfer of wealth, where people over the age 70 used to control 19 percent of household income, versus people the age of 40, used to control 12. Their wealth been cut 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 Mia Silverio, who the analyst who put together these slides. By the way, is 26. I did the math, just by virtue her being in this audience, it brings the average of the entire conference down 11 days.
(Laughter)
When I applied to UCLA, the admissions rate 76 percent. Today, it’s nine percent. I received a 2.23 GPA from UCLA. I learned nothing but to make bongs out of household items and every line from “Planet of the Apes.” And the public school in the world, Berkeley, decided to let in 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 ed and homes the ability — not only 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 colleagues in higher ed wake up every morning and ask ourselves the question when we look in the mirror. How can I increase my compensation while reducing accountability?
(Laugter)
And we have found the ultimate strategy. It’s called an LVMH strategy, where artificially constrain supply to create aspiration and scarcity such 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, and make sure that there’s no new housing permits.
And here is a 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 faster than population that has over a billion dollars in endowment should their tax-free status because they’re no longer in higher education. They’re a hedge fund offering classes.
(Cheers applause)
My first recommendation: Biden should take some of 750 billion earmarked to bail out the one third of people that to go to college on the backs of the two thirds that didn’t give a billion dollars to our 500 greatest public institutions, size-adjusted, in exchange for things. One, they use technology and scale to reduce tuition by two percent a year, expand enrollments six percent a year and increase the number of vocational and nontraditional four-year degrees by 20 percent. Where does that get us? In just ten years, in ten years, that doubles the freshman seats and cuts the cost in half. isn’t radical. This is called college in the ’80s and ’90s.
Another transfer of wealth. Look at what’s to wages. Oh, they’ve gone up? Not as much as corporate profits. There’s healthy tension between capital and labor. But for the last 40 years, capital has kicking the shit out of labor. Well, you think, about wages, right? They’ve gone up. Well if you them to the S and P, they barely register. It’s an amazing time to own assets. But your attempt to get the certification or the income that you can acquire assets has gotten harder and harder. my class of 300 kids, it’s never been easier be a billionaire, it’s never been harder to be millionaire.
By the way, our job in higher ed isn’t identify a top one percent of people who are freakishly remarkable or have parents and turn them into a super class of billionaires. It’s to the bottom 90 a chance to be in the top ten.
(Applause)
You who doesn’t need me or higher education? The top 10 percent. The whole point of ed is to give the unremarkables, i.e. yours truly, who was raised by single immigrant mother, a shot of being remarkable.
The transfer has been purposeful. While the cohorts, 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 down, and we should celebrate that. Meanwhile, child poverty flat to up.
The third rail. I’m going to talk about Social Security. would cost 11 billion dollars to expand the child tax credit. But that gets stripped out the infrastructure bill. But 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 is increasingly doing less well to the cohort that is the wealthiest cohort in the history this planet. I’m not against Social Security, but the 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 bankrupting our nation. And we have fallen under this mythology that it’s this great social program. No it’s not. It’s the great of wealth from young to old.
(Applause)
How is this happening? our representatives are in fact, representative. Old people vote. Washington has become a cross the “Land of the Dead” and “The Golden Girls.”
(Laughter)
Quite frankly, is fucking ridiculous. And if I sound ageist —
(Applause)
If I sound ageist, am. And you know who else is ageist? Biology.
(Laughter)
When Speaker Pelosi had 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 the challenges of 17-year-old girl who’s 5′ 9″, 95 pounds, getting tips dieting and extreme dieting from Facebook? She’s supposed to understand challenges that a 27-year-old single mother faces? By the way, and dreamy.
(Laughter)
Young and dreamy.
(Applause)
The great intergenerational took place under the auspices of a virus. I know, let’s use greatest health crisis in a century to really speed-ball the transfer. This is the from 2008 to 2012. We let the markets crash. by the way, you need churn, you need disruption because it seeds and recalibrates advantage and wealth from incumbents to the entrants. It’s a natural part of the cycle. But wait, lately, no, a million dying would be bad. But what would be tragic if we let the Nasdaq go down and guys me lost wealth. So we pumped the economy, which again, increased massive transfer of wealth. The best two years of life? Covid — more time with my kids, more with Netflix, and the value of my stocks absolutely exploded. And who has to for my prosperity? Not me. Future generations who will have to deal with unprecedented level of debt. Why am I here, and why I get the prosperity I enjoy? Because in 2008 we bailed out the banks, but we didn’t out the economy. We let the markets fall. So as was coming into my prime income-earning years, I got to buy, joke, these stocks at these prices. This is where those stocks are now. Where a young person find disruption? When you bail out baby boomer owner of a restaurant, all you’re doing robbing opportunity from the 26-year-old graduate of a culinary that wants her shot. We need disruption.
(Laughter) I like this slide. It has no context or relevance.
(Laughter and cheers)
We’re economically attacking young, but I know, let’s attack their emotional and well-being. Let’s take advantage of the flaws in our species with institutions, Paleolithic instincts and godlike technology.
I’m just going say, I think Mark Zuckerberg has done more damage the young people in our nation while making more money than person in history.
(Applause)
Oh, but wait, it could be worse. It’s if we let an adversary implant a neural jack our youth to raise a generation of civic, military and business leaders that hate America. How 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 my colleague Jonathan Haidt pointed out, it’s really, really gone crazy since social 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 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 go out, more and make a series of bad decisions that pay off.
(Laughter and applause)
Next graph, cumulative gun deaths. You’re more likely be shot in the United States if you’re a toddler or an infant than a cop. graph, obesity, way up. By the way, the industrial food complex wants to addict you to shitty, foods so 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. Young people don’t to have kids anymore. Two-thirds of people aged 30 34, able-bodied, used to decide to have at least one child. It’s been cut half. It’s now less than a third, 27 percent. As a result, people the age of 60 in the US, pretty happy. under the age of 30, not so much. Some of lowest in 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 figured out. are programs to address all of these issues, they cost a lot of money, that’s hard part. And we have figured this out. In five minutes post an earnings call, we can add a quarter of trillion dollars to the economy. We’ve got the hard figured out, the resources.
We have the money, but we not to do it. This is per-capita spending on child care in the United States relative to nations. This is housing permits. Things are doable. We increase minimum wage at 25 bucks an hour, goes into the economy. The wonderful things about low- and middle-income households is spend all their money. We have to have or restore a tax 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 you need the money, not on how old you are. need a negative income tax. My friend Andrew Yang screwed up great idea, but he branded it incorrectly. Instead of calling it UBI, he should’ve got Republicans on by calling it a negative income tax.
(Laughter)
We need to eliminate the gains tax deduction. When did 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. We need verification. The reason we can have identity verification is we have a First Amendment. Break up Big Tech. have monopolies that are incurring greater and greater costs on small business and parents because again, see above, our representatives don’t understand these technologies. We need age-gate social media. There’s absolutely no reason anyone under the of 16 should ever 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 all. You would rather be born gay or non-white, in the States today than poor. And that’s a sign of progress and our need to recalibrate who we give advantage to. Affirmative action, which I’m a beneficiary — I got Pell Grants, I got unfair advantage — affirmative is a wonderful thing, and it should be based color: it should be based on green. How much you have or don’t have. Expand college enrollment in vocational programs. Mental health, ban phones in schools, in third places, Big Brothers and Sisters programs. We need national service. need to tell people in the United States and Canada they live in the greatest countries in the world, we need to remind them of that every day by exposing them to other great Americans where they connective tissue.
We can do all of this. We can do all of it. We have the resources. 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 here kids, ask someone with kids. You have your world work, you have your world of friends, you have your world kids. Something happens here, your 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 meaningful, but our kids’ well-being and prosperity is profound. If you acknowledge that they’re doing more poorly than generations. If you believe there’s a chance that the illusion of complexity done nothing but provide cloud cover for the unbelievable transfer of will, of well-being and of prosperity from young to old. And if you believe we actually fix these problems and we have the resources, then I present to you, I posit, I augur question that I hope has 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, I teach NYU, and I appreciate your time.
(Cheers and applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)