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tv   Key Capitol Hill Hearings  CSPAN  August 23, 2016 6:31am-8:32am EDT

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into purchasing the huge body of work in suggesting rockefeller and to the public to make some money, entering the publishing world to sell pop-up books which did not work out. talk about how he stumbled a little bit. i was the case that the man who is very talented but could not escape together to buy the entire collection he found for sale. he wrote the letter. we don't know if he sent this to rockefeller, but i expect he spoke to him about this
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compensated just and at the university of chicago. maybe university of chicago would like to agree collection and i'd be willing to go through the collection with you and tell you which are the more value pieces that should be reproduced . so rockefeller did not fight back. >> host: and it went to a competitor and i guess he was a bit miffed about that. >> guest: ultimately, some of the collection did get to walter. in 19 as seven there is a panic and suffers a loss of a tremendous collection of shapes. and to huntington and the senate can't get the best. i'm going to give it the shakespeare thing altogether.
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ultimately henry fulcher did get some of that collection. >> one of the most thrilling accounts in your bouquets of a particular description described as them single most valuable, desirable in the world. contemporary movement to the collection -- thank goodness it was calm because that is a name you certainly could not take a period that had its troops and dance. you talk about it? >> guest: share, bulger became aware of the coffee complete with the original leads from one copy of the folio it had not been supplied from another copy of anything.
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it had part of its original 17th century carter within the modern countries that have been put on it. and we knew who had owned it from the get-go so it was the only presentation copy we know given by the printer to his friend. >> host: with the presentation copy referred to? >> guest: we know it. the author or the publisher gets a copy to a specific person. they do that we know of, one mr. augustine incident. if you look at the end paper is that the book it has the presentation copy with the inscription by the printer in it. the other presentation copy what if god to the library at oxford, which was mandated same way.
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so fulcher becomes aware that copied by english shakespeare scholar and then for four years he chases after to find out how much this guy once for a superb coffee. folger says can i buy it over time? a look at it on approval? that's a lot of money. that attack is he's made up his mind had been able to scrape together the wherewithal permit the english man who owned the copy says that rather had the book to look at. if you right around christmas time asking if i changed my mind. so you come and ask me. genuflecting asked me if i'm ready to sell my book or not. and at some point he raised and
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said someone else has offered me some money and that gets back to folger. if you're willing to offer me 10,000 pounds, which was an enormous amount of a record price for a book at the time. folger again had some financial difficulty in getting the money together at one. can i pay for it over time? he invented david 10,000. >> host: when you follow this story in the book, there's an opportunity to get it again. >> guest: cics was to have you gone the same right that henry can, which was you don't know whether he'll end up with a copy you're not into the suspenseful. i used was rooting for him to ultimately get the copy.
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>> guest: that brings up an interesting point. we have so much to talk about. my initial reaction, this is their star playwright and an upstart yankee who very note what they're never be any backlash? there was some backlash. that's a manuscript you're referring to. >> guest: it happens twice. there is a copy all of the library and when the bodleian acquired a subsequent folio, they tried to sell there first. so it gone. years later, some collector comes in and asks them, can you verify this is the first folio? they look at this in the unique cover which contained a patched
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so that someone couldn't feel it. this is unique to these copies at the library all found by a man. >> host: there is an interesting names in our conversation today. >> guest: yes, they are. short story, the bodleian wanted to buy it back from this color are. soldiers said where do i send the check. i want to buy that coffee. i will take you right now. meanwhile he was trying to buy about for some election and articles appeared in the newspaper in notes and queries they want anybody pony up the money? boxer amendment not ponying up
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the money to buy this bag. some cambridge men had even given instead. in one of the newspapers, a cartoon was published by the faceless millionaire because they didn't know what was. he's going through his book dealer and it was a portrait of someone like moneybags, a man clasping bags of cash and looking at english treasures. who is this millionaire? there was a great deal of backlash that these treasures have been brought overseas. the second time that happened was finally the acquisition of gainsborough and fulcher's acquisition of the copy, the cartoon appeared with uncle sam was to avoid under one arm and looking out for shakespeare's
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bones in his grave and thinking update to bring this back to america as well. they were not happy that the americans with a lot of cash were coming in via their cultural treasures and liberating books from the dusty library in england and taking them back to the united states. >> host: our time is racing along. i can't believe it's gone by so quickly. i do want to turn the tables a bit here. you and your book have a lovely dedication to your mother into your father who i remember he enlisted to defend shakespeare's england. i thought that very touching. let's talk about you a little bit, please. i know you have an economics degree. i think you are prone i think your protége of frank mccourt,
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were you not? one of my favorite writers, privileges. also how you came to write the book. guess how my father is english and he joined the navy in the fight during world war ii. he privately took me upon avon when as a teenager. >> host: is that when the bug can't you? >> guest: it was probably the colonel. this storytelling and his mentor is one of my high school teachers taught me shakespeare. he was the quintessential storyteller. it didn't matter what it was about. they tell how to develop dramatic tension and how to tell a good tale.
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>> host: as i mentioned in my remarks in another review i read all of them rolling. it was a page turner notwithstanding the former attorney of working on the blog review. i appreciate footnotes and you are as meticulous as anything else. the book is just page turning. absolutely is. one thing i would like to talk about you alluded to before his many viewers are familiar with folger prior to our discussion are reading your book, david think of the library of course be a dimension not a little bit. how many times does he have to be in this life. he knew he wanted to have the home. how the folger library came about as interesting. >> guest: henry and his wife emily were friends for shakespeare scholar at university of pennsylvania and it was he that suggested the library.
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not just bad these things away books. how many copies you have her give a copy of this second look at. he would say it's also in storage. i can't get to it. doesn't that liberates and said he had a copy of hamlet, can i look at it? he was saith up passed away -- packed away. for the turn-of-the-century should build a library make it available to scholars. >> host: duty of the catalog? >> guest: no. and the catalog of the book. she hand wrote index cards detailing that the publication was and what the condition less, where they bought it, and those index cards still exist. but he didn't catalog everything. and part because it started rising in such great volumes he
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couldn't keep up with it. he would buy a watercolor painting by the boxful and it was not a catalog. there's so many individual items sent the folger library that they are not catalog today. >> host: we have massive material with other libraries. >> guest: henry and emily consider building a library in new york city, but with their modest of a relatively modest endowment they cannot afford real estate day. some things never change. her father had worked for the abraham lincoln treasury and she was familiar with washington. on one of their train trips on vacation they stopped by and let the round of the property in capitol hill and said this to be a good place. i wonder how much it would cost to do that. the end of the stories they bought the property here and worry much about the library with the money they had. it took a total of nine years to buy up all of the 14 townhomes
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on east capitol street between 82nd and third. by the time he finished acquiring all the properties, the congress had made a decision to expand the library of congress across the street and they would use eminent domain to take the property just acquired. imagine you spent nine years acquiring the property. congress is going to take the property. he enlisted the help of the library of congress after all the president didn't say that he is going to take this property? i won't buy the library and the library in congress named putnam helped him deal with congress and carving out the parcel that he had purchased from the acquisition the library of congress made. the library of congress made
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expansion building behind the library. they managed to work it out. >> guest: and encourage viewers to go there. in fact they have a wonderful gift shop in which i thought and hosted a banquet for about 40 or 50 people and it was a great time. they had a great time doing that. we are almost out of time. you describe yourself are these the copywriter in the back of the boat describes you. henry folger of course. how many expand our very counted for both at the library that is henry's collection and elsewhere around the world. just go there at 82 copies at the library. the next largest collection for comparison is at the university of japan and that is 12.
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the next largest after that is the british library and 95. so it's not common for people to have a dozen or more copies. we know as of november of last year we know of 244 copies of the 780 original printed. >> host: out there somewhere there is a first folio for you. just what that would be delightful. i could probably afford a page. >> host: may be due simply to divert can find one in a barn. >> guest: maybe i will. there's a few place we know about that he wrote about that he wrote that we don't have copies. >> host: thing still being discovered? >> guest: yes. in fact, no manuscripts i've been gathered. copies of the first olio have recently gone for between five and $6.5 million.
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many librarians put through their inventories and say maybe i have one out there as well. in fact, a french university near l.a. recently discovered a copy and had it verified that is number 245. >> host: our time is up. i wish you luck in your quest. >> guest: thank you.
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>> senator dick durbin growing up in east st. louis, illinois, what sparked your interest in reading? >> guest: my mother. she discovered the library and
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took me there. the rule as i can only check out his many books as i could carry. i used to take a stack of books and take them home and race through them and get a chance to go back to the st. louis public library. to me it was a real adventure. that's probably why did my appetite. >> host: what kind of books that you gravitate towards? >> guest: kids books. i got into the dr. doolittle series which back in my youth nobody was reading. it wasn't until after the movie came out. but most people discovered who he was and what it was about and i think it was a reddish set of books. for some reason i got a kick out of the fact that they were talking animal spirit and of course the hardy boys and all the others who follow the period that was kind of part of who we were. my mom was an immigrant to this country from the eighth grade education. but she taught herself
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everything under the sun. , shorthand, reading, art, all of this. i think that probably inspired me. >> host: where do she emigrate from? >> guest: lithuania. she was back here at the age of two. team from germany to baltimore. she didn't land at ellis island in new york. the baltimore and ohio rabbit had two destinations. chicago and st. louis. had she gone to chicago she would've been part of the largest immigration of lithuanians to america with a huge lithuania population. she took the southern route, her mom gave commit to meet up with my grandfather and i was kind of a part of the st. louis. stockyards can the steel mills, railroads connected that immigrants could work in. she came, drop out of school, became a switchboard operator
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and worked her whole life. she really was the original teacher. >> host: what books do you gravitate towards today? >> guest: mainly nonfiction. i tried to discipline myself every third or fourth book to read something fiction. i think it's interesting for me. a politician is going to be reading history, biography and the like, which i love. but i've got to get into it. a few years ago is talking to someone and they said you know they have courses online that you can take. it doesn't charge anything corsair. so i decided i would take a college course. so what you think i took? >> host: writing. >> guest: that would've been my second choice. may 1st choice was poetry. i thought i never had a poetry choice. so there was a professor at the university of pennsylvania who
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taught this online. boise could. really good. i got to monitor his classes and they would conduct tests and such. it was a great experience. i could get out of poetry online and i learned emily dickson and walt whitman, all through these different pilots. i made the mistake of telling one of the people at the editorial board of the daily herald outside the city of chicago than it did this. they put it in the paper. next thing you know i'm on all things considered and been interviewed by taking a poetry course. i thought i could talk for a few minutes about that. they surprised me. i've never seen or met this man by videotape. he said he has a quiz for you today. so we asked a few questions about poetry and that goodness i got it right. i always try to use my reading to expand a little bit into
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fiction work, for authors, poetry, kind of push myself a little bit. >> guest: last year during my summer reading quiz, we asked a lot of senators that they are reading and a lot of them said all the way we cannot see. what was that about the boat unless the senator sharing it? >> guest: i don't know about the others. for me i heard about it and i was captivated. it is such a fascinating premise that there was a blind girl surviving bombing raids in france and what happened to her. i recommended it to others. susan collins and i often trade books. i can't remember if i recommended it to her or she to me. >> host: what's another book you recommended to senator collins? >> guest: call of carriages and novel i read i thought was very well written.
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they made a special out of it. the life of pi i remember recommending that to her along the way. what kind of had this exchange back and forth. >> guest: senator durbin, within your current list? >> guest: i read in the heart of d.c. which is a story by nathaniel philbrick. it's a story about the ethics committee whaling ship out of nantucket that was sunk by a whale in the pacific and many members of the crew survived. despite herman melville to read "moby dick." the story behind the story. i like that so much. philbrick much. so they came out with a second look which is a revolutionary workout. i bought it. got it sitting there. it will be my next one in terms of what i'm reading. in terms of those have been through recently that were particularly good that they
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expand and timothy e. king, a writer for "the new york times" had a heck of an author. he wrote the immortal irishman, a great story about an irish man who is banished to an island in the south pacific, escaped the united states, became a big prominent binary of union troops. the irish battalion during the civil war went off to montana where he died. i won't give away anymore but it's kind of the premise of the book. tell us the story after that. he can have such a great author. what i've read about the dust bowl i thought i have these images of where the dust bowl was that led to the migration in the 30s of folks from local homes to california, grapes of wrath and so forth. he can write a book about it, the worst hard times about the dust bowl. my goodness. it was an incredible scene to think the city is her jesting
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golfed and dust was blowing through their accumulating and it became a challenging city. are you going to stay or be a quitter in need. people would sign pledges i will never leave and then leave. but it's a book i strongly recommend. >> host: do you have her read books by politics? >> guest: kosher. in the club are his book i've read. i read harry reid books and quad pascals book. i tried to read those along the way. >> host: what about a dick durbin book? >> guest: i don't know if there will ever be one. i've got 60 chapters set in the drawer of my desk, but i don't know if it's about. issues stories that accumulated in britain over my time in congress. i'm not sure if there's a book in there. there's a lot of writing in there. someday i may entice an editor to sit down with me and look it
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over. i wrote a chapter about a continuing project. i got this curiosity in my mind when i was with obama on the campaign trail. i said do you carry with anything with you your pocket every day? oh yeah, he showed me this pendant he had which was like a tiny buddha. i believe that's what it was. i take it with me everywhere. i'm going to ask all these people i know who are presidential candidates, would you carry in your pocket? one of the chapters is a story of the senator and what they like to carry in their pockets. is it worthy of a book? i don't know, but it was something that caught my attention. co. is very viral? >> guest: is all over the place. a politician can write apache life without reflecting on what brought you here. the immigrant mother. my father died of lung cancer
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smoking two packs of camels today. examples i had with paul douglas, introduced me to paul simon to work in his lieutenant governor's office. how i got into this battle to take smoking off airplanes. what it was like passing a bill in the house. there's a lot of personal and action on this. there may be a book in there somewhere. >> host: and a poetry? >> guest: not yet. i'm not that good at it. i'm humble enough to save their son james i do a little bit at the don't profess to have any great expertise. the interesting thing in that course as it isn't just the stories. i actually stop and read the poetry of or at least try to read the poetry. >> host: senator durbin, as the democratic whip, your time is pretty scarce.
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do you have to build in reading time? >> guest: i have a lot of airplane time. i commute every week. i've been up for 32 years from illinois back to washington so there is time there. i found the book to be a great way to pass the time. catch up on the magazine clippings and so forth and then get into a book. if i really get into it i'll stick with it until the end. i'm not into the kindle. i tried it. it just wasn't my style. i like the tangible feel about paper boat. i also find it kind carrying the turn you around in my briefcase i'm going to finish it. how are you going to carry this? it is embarrassment. it's also a great way to sit next to a passenger you don't want to talk to. that does happen to politicians. the head of the nra colorado, thank you, i've got a book to read. he reaches a point where you have a legitimate, kindly way to say don't bother me.
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>> guest: when is the last time you and e. st. louis library? >> guest: blog god. one of the casualties which is now struggling to survive. but it really meant a lot to me. >> guest: what happened there? it took a transition and then went for a racial crisis where there were african-americans getting improved incomes, wanted to move into new neighborhoods and white flight. my family was a casualty of that. we moved to another place at another place of the st. louis event to a suburb to probably 95% plus african-american. who's got a great new mayor. she believes in pressing. i've got my fingers crossed she will turn the city in the right direction. >> host: industry? >> guest: nothing except the casino riverboat. it's all god and that is part of
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the problem. >> host: what about popular books? i'm thinking of harry potter is in potter is in some of these this week the country. do they attract her attention? >> guest: usually not. that was the whole thing that grow with the dragon, i guess i read those. they were pretty good. i don't get caught up into that too much. i do get fixed and certain authors. a fellow named sebastian barry who is an irish author and he's written a series of books, seven or eight of them about his family. i get the biggest kick out of reading his books. they are good stories to begin with. they talk about im and in the 20th century and just the irish phrase i get the biggest kick out of reading not. a woman named fuller. she's really a special case. she wrote several memoirs but
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are not south africa in the southern part of africa and the two that i thought were excellent, one was going to the dogs tonight in the second one was cocktails under the tree of forgetfulness or something of that nature. she came from the most dysfunctional family. the political structure their. her father was a handyman and she grew up an egg drink a little too much and not came through the stories. >> host: are there books that help you? >> guest: sometimes they gravitate towards those don't make a difference. there's another one, a new biography at brandeis.
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i don't know enough about him. i bought that one. i want to get into that one. there's another one in six in medicare. trying to get myself into the frame of mind dealing with some of these impediments programs and some would work off of. >> guest: i find if i can't finish a book, even if i try a second or third time, maybe it was not meant to be. and that's okay, too. i don't mind trying it in passing it along. i think i learned some things even if i stop at 100 or 150 pages. >> host: where'd you get get most of your books? >> guest: at amazon. my favorite story is picking up
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a day am i missing a morning and thinking i've got to order some looks. they said the white same-day delivery on fm in chicago. i'd like to find out how that works. darned if they didn't deliver bite 2:30 in the afternoon. it's pretty convenient. having said that, i go out of my way to overpay for books for neighborhood bookstores. i worked my way through college at a bookstore and dupont bookstore called discount books and records here in washington. it was one of the best jobs i ever had. i memorized the inventory. i knew where everything was. i got a big kick out of it and not come me started on this craziness. i have more books than i should. but i thought about amazon and how good they are, but i also thought i don't want to lose all these neighborhood bookstores so i'm broadway run the court information chicago -- i spend
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too much money. i could've saved 20% for sure and amazon but i think i've got to keep these guys in business. they've got such a good story. i've got a soft spot with neighborhood bookstores. >> host: when you walk in there, do they know who you are? >> guest: .com if they do. if you told me, durbin, we've got 30 minutes, great. we've got an hour, great. our in-house, great. if it's a good bookstore, just just give me the time. i will amuse myself for however long you want it to stay in the simulated bookstore. >> host: are there any you recommend your staff? >> guest: yes. i thought to myself i know nothing about native americans.
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i read somewhere noon. john corning comes walking in. i say to john, have you read this? ever heard of. i give it to you. texas and oklahoma were they dominated for decades. he loves it. he gives it as a gift. that's when i recommended that turned out to be popular. >> host: is that the only book you've ever recommend it to your counterpart on the republican side? >> guest: there's a book called the heart of everything that is. i recommended that to haiti had canned and amy cobo char because a lot of it has to do with the dakotas and minnesota. >> host: what about illinois? is there but you'd recommend?
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>> guest: there are a lot of them. i was recommended to one of the staffers here. this is a 19th century history of chicago ended housing permits early days of settlement on through the columbian exposition. rick larsen spoke takes place in that same area. 1892. they built this huge white city. but i think it is such an eye-opener in terms of actually creating a cd. it was a small town that kind of grew geometrically. the end of the 19th century with railroads and its central location and opening up the west. so i would start there. that's a good book to read. i read most of the books +-plus-sign member. he was prolific.
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they said he has written more books than ronald reagan. along the course of the campaign. he was a prolific writer. his books are very good reflection. >> host: what about the u.s. senate? any book you'd recommend? >> guest: his book about lbj and the history of this oddity. >> host: this is lbj sold hideaway office we are in. >> guest: he has so many offices in the capital. who thought this was a little ways from here and if this is part of the legacy, he would walk through at night. paul douglas can then view a secondary work douglas kennedy
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was that dinner worked for as a kid, phd in economics come in economics commits every probe the pro-progressive can exactly the politician that lbj hated. douglas is chairman of the joint economic committee. lbj gave it to him because he couldn't cause any trouble. he worked late one night in one of the side offices over here. the door opened without an announcement. he looks around the office, closes the door in the us. the next day douglas gives notice. you've been a big hit. it is time i think he made claim to a lot of real estate in the capital. >> host: as a u.s. senator, do you have any involvement with libraries in illinois for u.s. libraries around the country? >> guest: idea. i'm working with them and with them in their with them and there is a fun and has been nominated to be the next librarian of congress. her name is carla hayden. african-american librarian now
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in baltimore was originally from illinois. you would expect chicago. it was downstate illinois. it was the large african-american population, but her mom and dad were born into coin, illinois. the reason was that of those. the african-americans gravitated towards the railroad and other places. the father turned out to be a prominent position. she was born in florida. he went to new york, finally made it to chicago. if you go to malcolm x in chicago, the auditoriums named after her dad. carla hayden has a great story. she's running into some opposition but i hope she ends up being the next librarian. one thing about writing if i can. when it comes to writing, and think of like most of their skills. you know, they say you need to do it 10,000 times.
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if you read stephen king, he's got a book called on writing, which i recommend because the front end of the book is an autobiography of stephen king, which is hilarious. he's also as funny as another writer that i read all the time. the life and times of the lisbon cap, a story of growing up in des moines, iowa. he's interested in science-fiction another crazy things nobody like to read. he'd have to read it eventually worked up the courage to write. he had this kind of quirky way of looking at things so he writes a book called kerry. the book in hard on doesn't do very well. he's married. he's sitting in a small apartment. the publisher calls and says he decided to put it into paper boat and you're going to get a $10,000 advance. he couldn't believe it. i was the launch of his publishing career. the second half of the book is a primer, how to be a writer and
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get it done. the key is pretty obvious. write every day. discipline yourself to write every day. some insights on how to write every day. a book on how he got his inspiration to be a writer is called my imaginary girlfriend. his two passions in life, wrestling -- i mean legitimate wrestling, not the entertainment kind, in high school and college. in that book he listed the 10 books that inspired him to be a writer. i think i got through half of them. i've seen this book saw the series, but it was irving to pick out a few of them. he has quite a few books. if you're interested in writing, there's a lot of great writers share their secrets. >> host: do you practice writing? just thought i'd write columns.
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some of them improved, some of them doesn't. i write chapters and put them in the tour i was telling you about that would never see the light of day. >> guest: host of stephen king was at the library of commerce. >> guest: i would definitely gone, but i missed it. when they bring in authors and they're usually about history, look, stephen andress and others that come in. they are cuevas. is it rubenstein? thank you for doing it. it's one of the most popular bipartisan events on capitol hill by far. you get to go to a nice dinner, listening to david interviewing doctors and get a free copy of the book. it's a pretty good night. there is one coming up tonight. >> guest: there's no cameras allowed. we've tried to get in there. >> host: is a book about
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churchill and frank roosevelt. i want to see what that is all about. >> host: senator dick durbin is the democratic within the u.s. senate. we appreciate your being on booktv. >> guest: thanks.
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[inaudible conversations]. >> okay. i think we're going to get started. i'm margaret levi. i'm the director of center of advanced study of behave i don't recall sciences and for what promises to be a great talk by two people. i have to hold it up? okay. you may be wondering why there are so many cameras in the back.
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we have not only our normal videographer here so we can put this talk on the web for those unfortunate enough not to be here who want to hear it again but we also have c-span here tonight. those who want to watch it sometime later this year at some hour or another it will be available we're told. we will let you know when that's the case. okay, let me introduce our two speakers and i will be very short and therefore somewhat unfair to them as i want to get on to hearing them and not having you hear me. so lewis hyman is associate professor of history. as of this fall, director of the institute for work place studies, industrial and labor relations cornell university. which moves him from ithaca to new york city. he went to columbia where he got his ba. harvard phd, and he is a
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fellow baltimoreian by birth. he is the author of the well-reviewed and popular books, bore row, the american way of debt, and debtor nation, the history of america in red ink. certain theme there. but he is now completing temp, the deep history of the gig economy as well as coauthoring a book with me, i'm happy to say, tentatively entitled supply sided. he is one of the leaders among a group who are revising and revisiting the history of u.s. capitalism with a nuanced perspective of the particularities of how businesses and finance have developed in this country, and with what impacts on the social structure and inequality. natasha iskander, is associate professor of public policy at wagner school at nyu.
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she has stanford ba a and mit phd. she spent part of her youth in cairo, her aunt leila, winner of prestigious goldman environmental prize, involved her helping garbage workers learn recycling techniques. she has had very amazing youth that led to some amazing work and perspectives on work. natasha is an expert on migration and its relationship to jobs and dignity of work. not just work and contracts but dignity of work. her first book, migration state, 40 years of development policy in morocco and mexico and one she is completing on immigrant contract laborers who work in the construction industry in qatar, not only deepen the napping of role of immigrants on international labor and
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development but they also make us rethink the common conception of what it means to be skilled. a lot of people who we look at think they're unskilled, actually encompass, embody very important skills that deserve our respect and natasha is helping us to see this. both have been ask actively engaged in a project on future of work and workers. there are several others who are engaged. i see catherine and margaret you're here. maureen, are you here? i saw you earlier. and phyllis, i thought i saw you. have i forgotten somebody? good. tino, you're here who helped us start the project. both contributed fantastic essays as several others in the room to the series in the subject on the specific standard. maria stray since ski who is at
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"mother jones" helped us get that started. welcome you to what promises to be a great talk. [applause] >> well, first of all thank you all for coming out to join us in this conversation about what are two happiest subjects you can probably imagine, the future of work and climate catastrophe, just to keep it on an up note. when we think about the future of work it struck natasha and me, perhaps many of us are worried about the uber economist. this is what we see dominating pages and dominating conversations especially outside of silicon valley. but we think perhaps the future of taxis in the climate of climate catastrophe might be just a little bit narrow. that in fact taxi drivers are important, it is important conversation but it is not the whole conversation. in fact it's a small part of
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perhaps even broader conversation about robots. now robots are all supposedly going to take our jobs. we like talking about technology. it's fun. maybe you like talking about technology and work. climate change is harder. climate change strikes us as something more difficult to get a grasp on, get our heads around and find a location where we can really make change. when we think about the future we think about the rise of robots we you should also think about the rise of oceans. in fact we will argue tonight you can't think bun without thinking about the other. to think about climate change without considering the future of the economy, without considering the future of work is blind to the possibilities and importance of both. now like i said, it can be a little daunting to consider climate change, automation, migrant population all at the same time you but this is what we're going to face in the 21st century.
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and so, natasha and i began a thought experiment. i'm historian. she is sociologist among many other things. what is the big analogy to think about the issues, about climate change, automation and migrant population and we began to think about the 1930s. we began to think about the multiple crises of the 1930s, especially the dust bowl and the great depression. climate change is not as visible as the dust bowl but we still need to act. in the words of fdr, we must act, we must act quickly. what are the similarities between these two moments? the 1930s experienced a depression and the dust bowl. naively if you look back in your head back to high school history, you remember the dust bowl had a lost dust.
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it was a ecological crisis, ecological catastrophe. and the great depression had something to do with money. they actually both had roots in the same things, in the stock market speculation, in urban mortgage speculation and farm mortgage speculation of the 1920s. they converged in into economic and ecological crisis stemming from the relationship with the land that was primary financial in practice. now, the new deal had lots of ways to handle the economic. there is long list of very long words there you don't need to read, i promise you. then for the ecological solutions they planted kudzu. they planted some trees that rapidly died. in fact their economic imagination was stronger, more vital, more creative than anything we did with the ecology. so as we think through these issues, we want to ask the deep question, why have we forgotten so much about the economic
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solutions of the new deal which put our economy on a brand new footing in the postwar, and why is it so much harder to imagine ecological solutions in tandem with the economy? the now one of the things we learned as we wrote this talk together is that we disagree. which we think is at the essence of how we need to approach these problems. we need collaborative disagreement which is also part of the new deal. was also part of the policy solutions of the 1930s. and we're going to frame our talk around two issues of mitigation adaptation. where adaptation is the idea we need to adapt our political economy to climate change but don't need to alter the underlying logic. mitigation is we need to fundamentally alter the relationships which our capitalism operates. this was also in the new deal personified by these two men,
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these two white men, these two whit men with power in the 1930s. things obviously a little different now hopefully. jesse jones on the top there. he is the guy hanging over the shoulders of those two other guys. the reconstruction finance corporation. he was a banker from texas. a investor, a publisher. he was quintessential capitalist. he believed in the power of capital to alter the world around him. the way texans could be world remade according to their will as long as you find enough loans. on other hand, harold ickes, secretary of the interior a politician. he believed capitalism itself had failed that we need to find a new way. high school history you remember is probably more about the harold ickes variety. direct spending, building of stadiums, civilian conservation corp, building of beautiful national parks there. is another part of the new dial
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from the jesse jones perspective. ickes felt capitalism failed and results in the '30s and something new had to be built atop it, where jones felt capitalism need ad little love, need ad little help in reconnecting the dynamism of capital investment to the economy. in the 1930s just like now the causes of our crises were man made. the solutions need to be as well. in his first inaugural address roosevelt told the americans that the problems in the economy were not, quote, a playing of locusts sent by an angry god but the result of stubbornness, incompetence of rulers of exchange of mankind's goods. what is nice about this, because it is man made, we can adapt to it, engage in it, through the very mechanisms we caused this crisis to occur, hopefully invent new solutions. but these conditions which
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roosevelt warned come very close to de"troying" modern civilization, are upon us to use this as analogy to talk about these two very scary, very important, very pressing issues that are facing us today. >> so as we think about this analogy we thought it would be helpful to review what happened in the dust bowl and how it came to enter the political conversations about what to do during the new deal. so on may 9th, 1934, a few wind started blowing in the north dakotas, within two days a huge wall of earth, some 2,000 miles wide barreled toward new york and washington. the cities on the eastern seaboard were completely eclipsed. the statue of liberty was not visible. the symptom dropped 350 million tons of topsoil as
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it moved across the country. but most importantly, this storm brought the dust bowl, the ecological disaster in america's heartland to washington and new york, the centers of power and finance. today climate change is not always most directly felt in the centers of power and finance. so, as we go through the story we'll be bringing up some of the analogies that might be helpful. the dust bowl and storms that accompanied it was truly apocalyptic. the storms were catastrophic. the dust, sorry, the drought that afflicted the region was equally catastrophic. reporters who visited the region wrote of blistered fields, dead crops, starving livestock, plagues of jackrabbits and grasshoppers. "the new york times" wrote, the cold hand of death had descended
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on the bread basket of the nation t has become a losh people living in a lost land. by the time this hit, 850 million tons of topsoil had been lifted off the earth and transported around the country. these storms would continue for four more years. so unlike today where climate change is something theoretical, off in the future, this was truly catastrophic. it felt like the end of days. but dust bowl was geographically separate from washington. so here you can see where the dust bowl was concentrated. it was concentrated in the southern heartland of the united states and policymakers felt it intermittently. what this, the effect that this had was that the policy solutions to a ecological
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disaster did not feel as pressing as the economic disaster afflicting the nation. but just 10 years earlier the dust bowl was the great plains. right, so only took 10 years to transform this verdant area you could see herds of bison 50 miles wide transfer this area to a massive ecological disaster so these changes can happen tremendously fast. so how did this happen? well, essentially the dust bowl was a product of a speculative bubble. the government had begun parceling out the land in 1909 through expanded homestead act. people didn't take them up on the offer right away. when wheat prices shot up to $2 a bushel during world war i, when the turks block ad shipment
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of wheat, to the u.s., eastward, westward, i'm a little dyslexic, and wheat prices shot up dramatically, people moved west and it was the new gold rush caused by these high wheat prices, but it was also made possible by a series of financial structures that allowed for the massive and energetic movement of people to take advantage of this. easy credit for mortgages and tractors and most saliently also, the notion it didn't matter that this area had no rivers, the rain would follow the plow. if you disrupted the earth it would cause atmospheric imbalances which would cause rain to fall. so the movement was massive and people came who were speculative farmers. they were called suitcase farmers. then the wheat prices started to fall. it didn't fall dramatically at first. they fell a little bit from $2 a bushel to half that. pretty dramatic you but not
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catastrophic yet and people started to leave. before they started to leave, sorry, i'm jumping ahead of myself, they started to overexploit the land. they broke up more sod and planted more wheat and shifted the wheat to the cities. in much the same way we are also facing a situation where the financial structures that we have set up, the speculative structures we set up may be affecting our planet in ways that we haven't yet fully understood. drought came to this region in 1930 and belied the claim that rain would follow the plow. it dried up the land. people began to not plant crops. suitcase farmers left. the price of wheat dropped dramatically. when the winds started to blow, which they did in 1933, 33 million-acres were naked, ungrassed, unplanted and
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vulnerable to the wind. by 1940, 75% of plains land lost their original topsoil. that is a loss equivalent to 7% decline in gdp, or the total value of the land in oklahoma. the poor, as they always are were hit hardest. 1/3 of all farms faced foreclosure. the poor was getting sick on dust pneumonia. so much livestock was starving that the federal government launched a program to purchase and cull starving cattle. by 1930s, by the 1930s, the mid 1930s the a quarter of families in the great plains relied on aid for basic subsistence. this is not surprise. the poor are always hit the hardest. the issue this example raises are the poor an indicator when our social and economic systems are not working? are they an indicator of broader system failure?
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the poor left. 2.5 million people left. those who were poorest without resources without land and they went westward. these are the famous pictures that dorothy lange took. they became the first climate refugees in the u.s. so these drought refugees as they were called at the time became a huge cultural phenomenon. think steinbeck. think dorothy lang. turns out most people didn't leave, they didn't leave the dust bowl. most people moved to places where there hadn't been as much erosion. but the total population decline was only 5%. there is also a narrative about you how everyone moved to california. this is the great migration of the oakkies to california.
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well, many did migrate to california but turns out not that many more than migrated in the previous decade. so between 1930 and 1940, only 80,000 more people that had migrated in the previous decade, migrated in the dust bowl. that is 8,000 a year. that is not a huge amount. but they migrated at a time of economic crisis. they displaced people from soup lines and jobs and this is why there was such a strong reaction. so our economic systems may actually be much more fragile in times of economic crisis than otherwise. so, federal government came up with a series, with a series of ideas about how to deal with this. most of them were national in scope but the one idea they did come up with, for dealing with a ecological disaster in particular was very, very modest. to deal with this cataclysmic a
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disaster to bring the land back to life creating the soil conservation district. there was much discussion whether this was necessary. the leader of the soil conservation district asked should they bother. turned out a dust storm blown in from the dust bowl. he said, sirs look outside of your window. the rehabilitation of the land was very standard, not very imaginative. things like terraces, drainage, plowing techniques, the planting of trees. saplings which died within a year and grasses. and, but making the rehabilitation of soil contingent on receiving state aid. you deal with any collective action problem there had been. this program was modestly successful t was modestly successful achieving its goal to make sure people could stay where they were and continue to
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plant wheat by breaking up, by exploiting the soil and in a way that the soil could not handle. so fast forward. right, so it turns out that we actually following that same trajectory. the dust bowl is an area where the technical engineering of agriculture has expanded and deepened through agribusiness. agribusiness not only grows wheat but grows many other thirsty crops. it does so by drawing on underground aquifer called the oklala aquifer, 30% which is drained within 50 years. the prediction, within 50 additional years we're not likely having any water at all. the equivalent of one lake meade is drawn up every year. in some places the water is already gone. it would take 6,000 years to replenish this aquifer. more energy in the form of soil
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fertilizer goes into the ground than comes out through food. there is an economic system through federal subsidies and organization of agribusiness that supports this kind of agriculture. and as the aquifer declines we're beginning to see some of the same kind of desperate intensification strategies we saw by farmers during the dust bowl. trying to figure out how to draw up more water, drill deeper, plant wider. but, the dust bowl has reemerged as the dust bowl. the great plains has reemerged as the dust bowl. they have been hit by drought since 2012. and many old-timers who lived through the first series of droughts and storms claims it looks just like the beginnings of the dust bowl they lived through. >> that is the story of intensification. what is the story of innovation in the new deal?
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what is the story of not just misallocation of capital you but proactive, innovative allocation of capital? so the economic policies in the new deal did not directly address the dust bowl. but it helped the people who were set in motion, the migrants the displaced begin to adapt to their new lives. we see pictures here of the so-called hoovervilles. these were the shanty towns visible in most cities. this one flooded out in california. these weren't unique. about 300,000 migrants came to california. it was not substantially more than would have come in the previous decade as well. but this issue of all these people, like today, was framed as an excess of people, an excess of labor. there's too many people. there's not enough jobs. but it wasn't just in the early 1930s, the question of too many people or excess labor but a question of excess capital.
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today if you look at our own banks, how much capital is there above what is required by law? the answer is, $2.3 trillion. in excess of what is required to meet reserve requirements. that is about 2/3 of a federal budget. i will come back to this number in a little while but i think we should recognize if there is $2.3 trillion just sitting in a bank, probably it is not being well-used. the probably this capital ought to be invested somewhere else. this right here is where capitalism fails. this is not a question of uber or even of robots but the failure of capital to be invested in innovative new industries that provide millions of new jobs. this problem is not unique to today. it was also a problem in the great depression. more than any graph you can look at this letter, which is a letter between the head of citibank, then national city, and the head of bank of america
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where they talked about how, it was, quote, impossible to find any use of money. they did not know where to invest their capital. the smartest bankers in the country were unable to find a place to invest their capital productively. the new deal was not just a story of harold ickes and statist spending. the new deal was also a moment where there was a reinvention of how capital could be stimulated to move through the economy. to restart the economy. how do you get the private capital, now making the film guys nervous, how do you make private capital over here on to the garden to foster recovery? this is an image from the 1930s. i want you to notice how nervous uncle sam looks. how uncle sam is standing on the hose but only uncle sam has the nozzle.
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and this is, basic question of the 1930s. how do you get private capital back in circulation, so that there is a widespread recovery? the way they did it then, we can get wonkish in the q&a if you want, but basically how this private capital at bank of america, citibank and our largest insurance companies got filtered through federal market-making mechanisms like the federal housing administration which provide houses, the rea, which provide electricity through all rural america and the defense plant corporation. which i will get back to it. there was not one single silver bullet. there was multiplicity of approaches. capital went to local banks and finance companies. capital went to electric cooperatives and capital went through to big business. you can see a varieties of sectors of the economy received stimulation. aerospace which i'll talk about
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now, was but one of many different areas to which this idle capital got put in motion again through the activities of men and women like jesse jones. why are we talking about this? why are we talking about this? well how do you get someone to invest in something that seems impossible? in retrospect the aerospace industry seemed like obvious thing to put money into. it is really bad for oil consumption but really great to get around. how do you do this? how do you get something into something that seems cutting-edge and impossible. in like, green energy. in the 1930s the airplane remained an oddity. the depression was closer to lindbergh's famous flight over to the atlantic than the ansari x prize is to us today. lindbergh flu the atlantic in 1927. you should think about the relationship between between the new deal and the aerospace
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industry like we think about space planes today. now maybe in silicon valley, oh, yeah, that works fine. everybody else that seems crazy. nobody thinks they will ride a space plane anywhere, every. this is how aerospace was conceived. to put it in perspective in 19, 39, aerospace was big in the '30s, i watched indiana jones, he rode in an airplane. it was more a garage industry. more americans in 1939 worked in candy manufacturing than worked in aerospace. how do you do this? how do you go from something less important than candy to be the main driver of the entire economy in about five years? the answer? it was done through the defense plant corporation. the defense plant corporation, using legitimatemation of war, really allocating capital, takes all this mon money from the banks and insurance companies and puts it into the aerospace industry.
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in the course of a few years, the aircraft capacity was
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raise alarm bells that cause us to think about necessity for exploring solutions about adaptation and mitigation. these are areas of the u.s. that are very vulnerable to sea level
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rise and to extreme climactic events that accompany that. with them storms and flooding and seawater intrusion and so forth. these are areas of our economy which the economy is most productive. you will notice that there is a colocation here. that they map almost perfectly on one another. this is the place where we're betting on our future. this is where venture-capital is investing. this is where we see our future emerging. if you noticed there seems to be an overlap. okay. unlike during the dust bowl, i mean in some way, but the catastrophic, very painful, cat chrisic climate event that happened, ecological disaster that happened in the dust bowl with the climate event of the drought was a godsend. it moved labor from small i will
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scale agriculture to industries that needed them. so this act of god protected the federal post from having to do it basically by force or through other policy means. it was fortuitous. if you look where our future lies, or at least where we think it lies, we, any kind of climactic event that affects those areas is not likely to have the same kind of s -- >> salutory. >> effect. if we look at two sectors we think of places of innovation, financial innovation. technological innovation, we see those centers with a one meter rise are likely to be highly affected. the thing to note here this one meter rise, projection when it is likely to occur moves closer
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and closer as each scientific study emerges. a year ago we thought this would happen in a century. now we are worried it may happen within 30 to 40 years, the light of a mortgage, right? if you are in new york, you might think okay, that doesn't look terrible. no more people from new jersey. they can't cross the bridge. maybe that is not so bad. but if you are google, you should be asking yourself why you're building your headquarters where in 30 years it will be flooded. if you're facebook, you should be asking yourself investing locating your offices here? we're likely to be fine. >> investing in casbs. is the takeaway. what does this mean, what does this mean thinking about the new deal. thinking about the 1930s. these are analogies. these are not a playbook.
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they are experiences, warnings, beginnings of conversations, encouragements to help us think about the future, help us think about what has worked and what hasn't worked? it hasn't defined entire space what we can do and what we definitely shouldn't do. avoid more of the same. investment is easier than abolition of wheat farming for instance. we know poorest hit hardest both in the u.s. and abroad. at same time though, where it has been successful, the collaborative disagreements, multiplicity, inconsistent experiments of portfolio mind set enable us to think through, succeed solving some of most crushing economic challenges of the day. but world is not the same as it was. there are new things in the 21st century. the biggest advantage we have of course is that one, we know what is coming. we know that this is going to
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happen. we know climate change is now inevitable. two, we have lessons of the past to help steer us through these shoals. between the two of us we have a slight disagreement. we agree with our values. we agree what will happen but how to respond to this. this is not something to be avoided,age nod, encouraged and fostered. always through the collaborative disagreement we can get through the crises. i for instance, think, it is very important to creatively finance new technologies, new work practices that will help us mitigate climate change. i think we can remake capitalism to be greener, to be more profitable and more ethical. we can move from oil to artificial photosynthesis. we can move from consolidated, centralized stable work places to distributed work places. and i think this because i know it has happened before. i think to be practical, we should confine our solution space within the rule set of
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capitalism, but at the same time, i think that rule set of capitalism can be wildly altered. i can think back to the 19th century where we radically reconfigured capitalism towards more moral and more profitable ends. of course i'm thinking about the end of slavery. in the late, in the mid 19th century about half of our gdp was related to production of, the consumption of or the distribution of slaves and slave-related commodities including mortgaging of enslaved people. did we end slavery? we did. did it destroy capitalism? no. in fact the opposite. we took something half of our economy that reoriented new kind of capitalism and more profitable and innovative than anything before. this is how we should reframe the thinking of challenges to our economy. this is not about cost. this is about opportunity.
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>> so, in thinking about climate change, there is a lot of discussion about technological innovation, tech logical opportunity. while i think this kind of adaptation is very important it is not very efficient. google cars become avatar of future. they're exciting, self-driving but actually, what will make, matter more for climate change is fundamental rethinking of how we move through space. google cars use the same highways, the same infrastructure, and same concept about moving through space. what we may need to start thinking about are things like zoning, designing our transport systems. rethinking our relationship to space and how we move through it. i'm picking on google here a little bit but google is thinking about that a lot through their alphabet outfit. they have a lab called sidewalk labs.
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the trouble with zoning it is not sexy. so why is zoning not sexy? okay, we have certain ideas where the fields of possible action are during the new deal. they were very heavily focused on finance and agriculture -- less so on agriculture as we've shown. another way of thinking about these are institutions and land use. so, institutions are essentially how we interact with each other, how we deal with each other. land use is how we deal with the land. how we use land for our productive purposes. as we conceptualize these, we always have you the earth as unchanging. it is a constant. it's a background. it does not change unless we change it by plowing up the earth and hoping that the rain will follow or today's analogy, seeding the clouds to hope the rain will fall on california. planning though, becomes very sexy, if you imagine the earth constantly changing under your feet. if you imagine that what which
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understand to be stable is no longer so that these are new problems and new challenges that we have to build new systems of flexibility. thinking about planning in that way forces us to rethink how we might think about how we interact with each other through institutions if we were worried about the earth changing in unpredictable, unknowable ways. how we interact with the earth, if it is also changing and evolving, unpredictable and often very, very fast ways. the trouble is, that the, and the big challenge from making fundamental change, is that the people who worry about climate change don't talk to the people who worry about changing production systems in the future of work. in both fear there is understanding we're at an inincome shun point. that things going forward are likely to look very different from the way they have looked in the past but these discussions have remained separate and our
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intention with this talk was to bring them together. okay. what we'd like to see, which i think is extremely important, is that climate scientists help inform discussion about how production is likely to be impacted by climate change. how will our transport routes be affected? how will our global supply chains fall apart? how will manufacturing happen if we can't bring steel to firms? how will you build the plane? right? and what we'd like to have is people who worry about changing production systems, have conversations with climate scientists so they can productively think about how to adapt and mitigate even as they produce. and, bringing these areas together raises a whole new series of unasked questions and experiments. some which seem fantastical. how do we move silicon valley. that is not a trivial question
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if silicon valley gets flooded. how do we move the knowledge economy so embedded we haven't been able to replicate, even though cities and countries around the world tried to replicate it. how do we move it? that is 30 years down the road. that is whole series of questions. some of the questions we are asking here through the future of work and workers project at t casbs. what is a new moral economy for a changing world? louis and i highlighted our differences. it may be difference in approach. when you're worried about adaptations seems solutions are easier to come by. there is data and clear price signals and institutional pathways and historic


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