Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter, columnist, and these days morning newsletter writer David Leonhardt, he has a new book called Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream. It's just out today. As usual with David Leonhardt, this both tells many people's stories and is also very data-rich. David was an economics reporter steeped in the numbers as well as the people, and you can see it again in this book. David, congratulations on the book. Always good to have you on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.

David Leonhardt: Thank you so much, Brian. It's great to be on the show.

Brian Lehrer: How old is the term, "The American Dream," and where did it come from?

David Leonhardt: It is nearly a century old. What I find most striking about it is that it dates from the Great Depression. There is a book in 1931 called The Epic of America by a historian named James Truslow Adams, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his first book, but this was the best-selling book he wrote. It's really remarkable to think about the fact that in the midst of the Great Depression, 1931, so he's writing it in 1930, he writes a book where he says the American Dream is this country's greatest contribution to world thought. He defines the American Dream is the notion of a better, richer, happier life for all citizens of every rank. He acknowledges all the challenges to that dream, but he says that is the fundamental American idea, the American Dream, and that's when it dates to.

Brian Lehrer: Why then? It's ironic at least that the American Dream as an idea grew out of the American nightmare that was the Great Depression.

David Leonhardt: I think part of what he wants to do is pull back the lens, broaden the lens, and essentially argue that it's not a short-term situation, right? If you look at the full history of the United States, you really do see a very different picture. It is a picture in which living standards had risen for most people, particularly immigrants, but not just immigrants. Obviously, not for all people, but for most people over time. What I find so striking about it is he's writing it at a moment when both the American economy is falling apart and we're seeing the seeds of something better that can grow out of it.

Brian Lehrer: Well, how inclusive or exclusive was the American Dream at its peak? We'll talk about why you think it's in decline and how to revive it. People who know the history of the last 100 years, I guess that's the people not in Ron DeSantis' school system, ha-ha, but people who know some of the ways that American Dream economics favored white Americans in particular and white males even more so might be wondering, "How much did American Dream economics reduce income disparity at its peak?"

David Leonhardt: You mean American Dream economics in the decades after World War II?

Brian Lehrer: Correct.

David Leonhardt: It's really remarkable. Brian, we're sitting here in 2023. We have basically been living through rising inequality for all or most of the adult life of everyone who's been alive today because inequality starts rising really, depending on how you look at the numbers, in the late '70s or the early '80s. We're talking now about 40 years or more. It's remarkable when you look back at what happened in our economy in the '30s and the '40s and the '50s and even into the '60s and the early '70s.

Incomes rose more for the poor and the middle class than they did for the rich. That's something that we almost can't wrap our minds around today. Even before the great victories of the civil rights movement, the Black-white wage gap shrunk and the Black-white life expectancy gap shrunk in the '40s and '50s quite markedly. We got an economy. We got mass prosperity. We got an economy in which 92% of people who were born in 1940 grew up to earn more money than their parents did.

Think about that. 92%. It's nearly everybody. It's the vast majority of people who suffered a layoff or who had a health crisis. Many of the people who didn't make more than their parents, they ended up doing okay. They may have grown up as the child of a corporate executive who decided to become a teacher. The up escalator of the US economy was so steep and going so fast that it really just lifted the vast majority of the population.

Brian Lehrer: I think maybe the biggest think-way to look at your book, obviously, you'll tell me, but is that it's largely a narrative of two competing forms of capitalism, one that you argue helped create the American Dream that you're just describing and one that's been ascendant in recent decades that you argue is destroying it. How would you begin to define those competing forms of capitalism?

David Leonhardt: This is a book of history. It's not a book of economic analysis for the most part, although I really tried to explain the economy to people. That first version of capitalism I define as democratic capitalism, small-D democratic capitalism, although it's important to say that the capital-D Democratic Party has been the main force over the United States history to push this version of capitalism.

In democratic capitalism, you acknowledge-- the word "capitalism" is important in there. Capitalism still is the best system for lifting living standards around the world. There really is no model of a communist or socialist government creating mass prosperity in the way that we've had it in this country and in the way that Japan and South Korea and Western Europe have had. Capitalism also has predictable excesses.

Capitalism tends to produce rising inequality over time if left unchecked. Capitalism has these side effects like climate change in which the market doesn't take care of. Under democratic capitalism, you have a government that acknowledges both the great aspects of capitalism and the great downsides of capitalism. For example, it makes sure that workers can join unions. Because if you leave companies and unions basically to fight it out themselves, it's pretty easy for companies to prevent anyone from joining a union.

We see Starbucks doing this now, right? There are several Starbucks stores where people have voted to join the union. Starbucks somehow figures out how to make sure that those people and the union organizers don't have jobs there or they assign them to really miserable shifts. The government needs to step in and basically say, "Hey, workers should be able to join unions." If you don't have an economy where they can, you have massive inequality.

The government also needs to tax really high incomes and wealth to prevent inequality from coming together. An excerpt of my book ran in The New York Times over the weekend and The Times magazine. One of the other things that I described in there that the government needs to do is it needs to build roads and it needs to build schools and it needs to invest in science. That shouldn't be a partisan point.

There is no president over the last 100 years who did more to increase US investment in future-oriented research than Dwight Eisenhower. This doesn't need to be super expensive. You don't have to believe in a very big government to believe that the government should do these things. That's democratic capitalism. Even with all the injustices in American society and all of our problems in the '40s and the '50s and the '60s and into the '70s, that is what we had. It is why living standards rose so much for so many people.

Brian Lehrer: You said these are competing forms of capitalism. This is not about socialism, but I'm sure some people will say because the thought popped into my head, "Well, what about Scandinavia, which we would call social democracies?" They have a socialist element. We're obviously not talking about the Soviet Union there. By many measures, they have a better standard of living, more equality, more quality of life as well than we do. They would be small-S socialist by many definitions.

David Leonhardt: I would argue that they really still are capitalist. They would call themselves capitalists if you go there. Spotify is a Swedish company, right? If you spend any time in Scandinavia, it is a capitalist economy. The vast majority of your day-to-day interactions are with private companies. Now, you could argue that it is a more extreme form of democratic capitalism in which the government does more. They do more with education. They do more with social services and safety net.

I would argue that Scandinavia actually makes the point of just how strong democratic capitalism can be. You can have a more intense version of it where the government has greater involvement or a somewhat less intense version of it as we did in this country in the middle of the 20th century, but I think Scandinavia is actually a great example of how capitalism, when it is checked, when the government plays an aggressive role, can really create very good lives for people.

Brian Lehrer: We have a few more minutes with David Leonhardt from The New York Times whose new book is Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream. As a matter of history, you write that the political turmoil of the 1960s began to change the trajectory of government investment and Americans' relationship to it. Do you mean the rise of the counterculture or the rights movements or the Vietnam War? What was it about the '60s that would have affected this?

David Leonhardt: In the 1960s, two, I think, important things happened. The story of the 1960s and the left in this country is not the main story. The main story is the rise of the Reagan conservative right that basically rewrites economic policy in this country. The story of the Democratic Party is important as well. Starting in the 1960s, the Democratic Party really turned away from the idea of being predominantly a working-class party and really focused increasingly on attracting college graduates. We have seen this continue to happen today.

If you look at the most affluent communities around the country, places like Martha's Vineyard or some of the most affluent suburbs of New York City or really some of the most affluent suburbs of any major city in America, these places are overwhelmingly democratic today. The Democratic Party has struggled to win the votes of working-class people. Brian, this is something you and I have talked about before. It's been true for a decade or two among working-class whites. In the last five years, it's spread to working-class Latinos and Asian Americans. Democratic support has even declined among working-class African Americans since 2018. Only a few percentage points.

Brian Lehrer: We've been talking about this a lot on the show recently, so I don't want to get too sidetracked, but you know this thread of conversation drives Democrats crazy because they say, "We're still the party that supports labor rights, that supports all kinds of policies, paid family leave, minimum wage, you name it." That is in the interest of the working class, but maybe for cultural reasons, the white working class is turning against us.

David Leonhardt: Yes. I think it's important to say, it's not only the white working class, right? I think that's why some of the last five years are particularly important. You look, for example, in Texas and Florida. You've seen a very significant shift among Latinos away from the Democratic Party. Look, I don't know exactly what reverses that, but I think it's something that the Democratic Party needs to think about, "Okay, how can it take steps that can win over more of these folks?"

We still are a country where the majority of Americans do not have college degrees. That is just an absolutely vital political constituency to appeal to. I think it's important to say this as well. The Republican Party, since 1980, has been pursuing an economic policy that really has not worked out for most Americans. To me, the central statistic about this is that in 1980, the United States had a typical life expectancy for an affluent country.

Since about 2006, we have had the single lowest life expectancy for any affluent country. Lower than Japan, South Korea, Canada, Western Europe. It's even lower than some less affluent countries like Chile and China and Slovenia. There are little signs that some Republicans are reconsidering this. For the most part, the Republican Party remains deeply committed to this economic philosophy that just hasn't worked for the United States.

Brian Lehrer: Let's end-- Oh, go ahead. Do you want to finish this up? Go ahead.

David Leonhardt: No, I think what's fascinating about this is, and deeply important to our politics, if Democrats could figure out a way to win more multiracial working-class votes, they would have a much better chance to implement an agenda that could work better than that Republican agenda has worked.

Brian Lehrer: We have two minutes left. Let's end on education. You cite a period and you were just talking about how life expectancy now is below Chile and other countries, Slovenia, that Americans might not guess. You cite a period from the late 1800s through much of the 20th century when the US consistently had the most educated population in the world, but that's no longer the case. How come? Briefly.

David Leonhardt: For a long time, the US believed in the idea of mass education. Europe said, "Why do we actually need to send our workers to high school?" This was before high school was even universal. "Why do our workers need to learn math? They're just workers." The US said, "No, we're going to try to educate our population broadly with huge inequalities, but nonetheless set out to educate our population broadly."

We led the world in producing high school graduates and then we led the world in producing college graduates, thanks to the GI Bill. Then the rest of the world said, "Wait a second. That American approach to mass education, that seems to work. It produces hugely productive workforces. It reduces inequality." Around the same time over the last few decades, we actually lost faith in our own approach.

We've made it harder for people to go to college. We've starved community colleges and four-year colleges that educate masses of people like City College here in New York for resources. It's really a sad story because this is, in many ways, an American idea. It's core to the American Dream, Brian. We're going to educate everyone. Now, other countries have passed us by in terms of having the world's most educated population.

Brian Lehrer: In 30 seconds. Is that your number one remedy for restoring the American Dream to what it used to be? Mass education?

David Leonhardt: It's hard to pick number one, but I guess, Brian, I actually think if you force me to focus on one, I would say labor unions. I think labor unions are enormously important to the economics within companies. I think they're enormously important to our politics. They create a place that can help people think about what their economic interests are and maybe sometimes persuade people to vote based on economics rather than culture. If you look at the Democratic Party, when they've had control of levers of government, reforming labor law is the thing that they've never quite made a top priority.

Barack Obama passed healthcare reform, which I think really improved people's lives. LBJ created the whole Great Society. In all these cases, Joe Biden has passed all this education. In all these cases, they've said, "We are going to reform labor law to make it easier for workers to join unions if they want to join unions." In all these cases, the Democratic Party hasn't gotten it done. I think that arguably is the most important piece of federal policy that could make a real difference in people's lives and in our political system.

Brian Lehrer: David Leonhardt from The New York Times who writes their morning newsletter, author now of Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream. If you want to hear more from David in person, he'll be at the Brooklyn Public Library Central Branch at Grand Army Plaza tonight in conversation with Michael Barbaro, so host of The Times morning podcast, The Daily, meets the writer of The Times Morning Newsletter at seven o'clock this evening at the Brooklyn Public Library Central Branch. I didn't know either of you do nighttime events given when your stuff comes out.

David Leonhardt: Well, it comes out early, but we don't have to be working when it comes out.

Brian Lehrer: Shh, don't tell everybody.

David Leonhardt: [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: I have to be here in the morning. All right, David Leonhardt, thank you so much. Congratulations on the book.

David Leonhardt: Brian, thanks for having me.

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