R. C. HICKMAN PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE, THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
The figurative device at the heart of ‘The Sum of Us’ is a community swimming pool, drained to avoid integration.
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together
By Heather McGhee
One World
Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism
By Mariana Mazzucato
HarperCollins
Imagination drives policy, and until we address deeply rooted yet flawed presumptions embedded in our political imaginations, we’re stuck with austerity, fragility, and inequality. That’s the core argument of two major books by Heather McGhee and Mariana Mazzucato.
McGhee and Mazzucato argue that two separate false constructs must be directly and explicitly addressed. For McGhee, it’s the belief that gains made by Black people must mean white people’s loss; for Mazzucato, the belief that government’s job is to reactively correct market failures, instead of being an exciting, creative force.
The books fit together like pieces of a puzzle. The failure to take bold public action with real investment in communities started in the 1970s, alongside an ongoing civil rights backlash. Together, McGhee and Mazzucato seek to overthrow both these frameworks, and offer a vision of an activist government with the drive to work to everyone’s betterment.
McGHEE’S OUTSTANDING new book, The Sum of Us, argues that zero-sum thinking is behind decades of unnecessary suffering for all Americans, white, Black, and brown. While it may seem obvious how racism, and racial-group competition, hurts Black Americans, she shows how it also hurts most white people.
McGhee, the former leader of the think tank Demos, peppers her deeply researched causal argument with intimate moments taken from three years traveling around the United States, talking to mostly white people who have been beaten up by America’s policy failures, and connecting their struggles to strategically deployed racial divisiveness.
The figurative device at the heart of The Sum of Us is a drained swimming pool. In the 1950s, parents who had spent their summers lounging around public swimming pools suddenly demanded that their cities and towns shut them down. Cement filled what had once been a center of joy and community and relaxation. Communities drained these pools to avoid integration, and went to court (and won) to defend their right to do so.
The swimming pool example reveals the first way racism hurts white voters. It leads them to oppose public programs when they have to share them with people of color, even if that leads to those beneficial programs shutting down.
A second effect of racial stereotyping and group identification is the zero-sum belief, which leads many white people to believe that they are harmed by anything that helps Black people. McGhee shares research showing that this does not work in the other direction; Black Americans do not assume that they are in competition with their white counterparts. She argues the zero-sum approach toward racial advancement has been a major driver behind our failures to fund higher education, address climate change, provide affordable housing, protect the right to vote, and provide health care to everyone.
A third effect is that white people—here McGhee highlights those in power—aren’t able to identify broken policies. The tendency is to ignore warning signs from communities of color, coding them as “their fault” instead of as a systemic failure. When the canary in the coal mine dies, they don’t treat it as an oxygen problem when the canary is Black.
For instance, 9.3 million homes were lost in the Great Recession, what McGhee calls the “far-reaching and permanent” impact of the “explosion on Wall Street.” This explosion led to metaphorical contagion—lowered home values, lowered tax bases, weakened school funding and public services—and literal contagion, like demolitions of blighted properties that sent lead toxins into the atmosphere, as well as a rise in suicide, increased morbidity, and declining fertility.
There’s no question that homeowners of color were disproportionately impacted by the Great Recession, mainly because Black and Latino homeowners had more wealth attached to their homes. But in raw numbers, most foreclosed homes were white-owned. McGhee interviews some of the devastated victims. We feel we are sitting with her as she talks to Amy Rogers, a white woman who has gone from a homeowner with a city job to losing most of her belongings and working three jobs to make $24,000 a year, anxious about whether she’ll be able to pay rent.
The proximate cause of Amy Rogers’s precarity looks like a bad mortgage. The ultimate cause, McGhee argues, was a series of choices in the financial sector dating back to the 1840s, where racism and greed combined to create systems that exploited both people of color and white Americans. Clear warning signs of the Wall Street explosion were there by the early 2000s. The United States could have prevented the crash, McGhee says, if white decision-makers had translated abuses of Black homeowners as abuses instead of seeing them as something happening to the other.
In other words, racism cost Amy Rogers her house. White people should want to address racism not just because it hurts others, but because it is hurting them.
What is to be done? Racial identification and zero-sum thinking is a social fact. McGhee argues that, to erode it, lawmakers, organizers, and thought leaders must present an alternate framework. Research that McGhee commissioned when at Demos shows that a huge number of white Americans are more likely to support policies when race is explicitly addressed. They are more supportive of a policy that “puts the interest of working people first, whether white, Black or brown” than a policy that “puts the interests of working people first.”
McGhee is speaking directly to white people who don’t talk about race when they talk about policy, especially those who believe that emphasizing racial salience will increase zero-sum thinking, and make it harder to get more public investments. That’s a dangerous approach, she argues. Not talking about the racial impact of policies, when racism has been the defining feature of American political life for hundreds of years, has the impact of ceding the argument to the zero-sum crew. It also builds up false stories (see the infamous “welfare queen” trope) and leads to false explanations of current inequality, explanations that put the blame on those who are struggling.
There is a place for zero-sum thinking, of course, as McGhee demonstrates throughout the book. When it comes to competition between Wall Street or corporate monopolies and all Americans, the big guys really are taking a giant share of the pie at the expense of the rest of us. But unlike the zero-sum thinking about race that dominates our current thinking, the Wall Street/monopolist concept is true. They benefit directly from racial division.
When, instead of silence, explicit connections between races are emphasized, it leads to what McGhee calls the “solidarity dividend.” It is a brilliant book, and its argument is liberatory. Truth-telling about race and the opponents of progress, and collectively building toward a community-based, multiracial future, doesn’t mean losing public-policy battles—it means gaining solidarity.
I HAVE BEEN a longtime admirer of Heather McGhee, ever since I got to work with her in 2009–2010, when I was a new associate professor and she was the director of the Washington office at Demos, the think tank she later ran. She gave me guidance in D.C. etiquette and credit default swaps. During that time, we both attended an important event at the Roosevelt Institute called “Make Markets Be Markets,” with speakers including then-professor Elizabeth Warren and Joseph Stiglitz.
While economist Mariana Mazzucato would likely have agreed with many of the particular proposals put forward at the event, the title would have attracted her maximum ire, as her new book about political imagination, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, explains. The phrase “make markets be markets” presupposes a baseline functioning world of markets, which have the job to innovate, create, drive, and build. Subsequently, the job of government is to correct misfires in all of this generative activity, and then, only when absolutely necessary.
This market failure theory (MFT), Mazzucato argues, is wrong, dangerous, and getting in the way of a thriving economy. Government has been unfairly cast as an unimaginative, reactive partner or disciplinarian, constantly taming and filling in the gaps of the private sector, which may be potentially dangerous but is also the active, leading edge to which we owe all of our gratitude. In our current mental map, governments just “de-risk and facilitate.” In reality, only the government has the capacity for radical transformation of our economy.
We must imagine government differently, and doing so requires us to also imagine markets differently. There is no such thing as the Platonic form of the market, which the government can bring about through tinkering and nudging. Instead, Mazzucato argues, there are things that need doing, and the government should do them, not just in the face of a “market failure,” but because they are valuable, important achievements.
We must imagine government differently, and doing so requires us to also imagine markets differently.
Mazzucato’s figurative device is the trip to the moon, which takes on new life in her very able hands. She uses the Apollo program, where aeronautics, textiles, electronics, and medicine joined together in a grand mission that had extraordinary success and thousands of by-products, kick-starting technologies that are used throughout society today. This was not the government “regulating” moon travel, or “facilitating” it, but leading it, embracing the risk and uncertainty.
When we talk about public-private partnerships, we’re often in the world of Tim Geithner circa 2009, where big hedge funds are given a sweetheart, low-risk deal in exchange for helping out a little. But Mazzucato imagines aggressive project management on the government side, engaging private industries on an agile, as-needed basis.
What happened to the government that led that fight to the moon, she asks? Since Reagan and Thatcher, the state has been typecast as slow, bureaucratic, and reactive, and the private sector as fast, flexible, and creative. This typecasting shapes our bizarrely low expectations from the state. It’s as if we thought the role of cars was to make music instead of drive. Inasmuch as the market failure theory has a tinge of morality to it—you’ve heard the peculiar phrasing about what government should and shouldn’t do—it suggests that driving a car approaches the sinful. Why not drive the car? Why not go to the moon? Why not, in the last year, manufacture COVID-19 vaccines directly? Why spend all our time nudging markets when, in many cases, the state is better equipped, and state involvement will have enormous innovation benefits?
The MFT is not a single thesis, but a worldview that leads to a series of myths. Mazzucato punctures the idea that outsourcing improves effectiveness, or that government should be run like a business. These are all lazy theories that haven’t worked out in practice. Cost-benefit analysis, another mythically superior concept, treats policy questions as if they are scientifically answerable, instead of asking basic political questions like “What society do we want?”
Mazzucato is not interested in the government running all aspects of industry ad infinitum, but vigorously leading by ambitiously setting targets. The line between the two isn’t always clear. What’s also unclear is whether the kind of public-private partnership she envisions can work in the modern world, where the corporation is (as she knows) part of a massive, financialized web.
She is at her most persuasive with her impatience with our habits of fiddling around the margins, relying on corporate social responsibility to address massive problems that we have the power to take head-on. We must put government back in the driver’s seat, in fact and in our imaginations.
Mazzucato’s book brought to mind the big push at the beginning of the pandemic to get Donald Trump to use the Defense Production Act. Our political imagination was limited to demanding that the president use an existing law to nudge markets, instead of immediately calling on the government to produce masks, ventilators, and other key forms of equipment itself, to take on the mission of the moment.
The synergies between the two books are resonant. For example, the American public investments that Mazzucato holds up as models of public missions with big private-sector investments—from the mission to the moon to DARPA-backed funding that led to the internet—are examples of an investment where the imagined recipients and heroes were white.
But while they are both critiques, these are profoundly hopeful books.
If we can recast government as a creative, mission-driven force, if we identify the deep racial divisiveness underpinning austerity arguments, if we recast a booming multiracial society as an equal boon for all races, then the possibilities for a thriving economy and democracy open up, letting us imagine a country we have never yet seen.
