To me the best argument for affirmative action is trying to rebuild trust in society.

You know that fundamentally I actually think things are not so bad, but because people believe that they're so bad, it ends up having really negative

consequences.

Affirmative action is a great example of that.

I think whites believe affirmative action is much more aggressive than it is and African Americans believe

it's much less aggressive than it is and that fits in with you know sort of

how you see how racist society is. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

After the great recession, thinking about economics underwent something like the great disappointment.

For most of American history, most Americans thought that things were getting better, that most people were increasing the living standards from one generation to the next.

And by and large, that optimism was born out.

But when incomes for a lot of Americans started to stagnate in the 80s and 90s and 2000s,

when the Great Recession led to massive unemployment, the intellectual

foundations of a great disappointment started to take hold. There were three primary intellectual foundations of it. The first was that, as David

Auteur argued in 2010, the American job market seemed to be polarizing with high-skill

white-collar workers doing very well, but a lot of middle class jobs being lost and therefore inequality rising significantly.

The second part of this was Bronco Melana, which showed that globalization was having very mixed impact on different parts of the global income distribution.

At the bottom end, globalization wasn't doing very much.

For a lot of the lower middle and and middle there were significant gains for the 70th 80th percentile

of the global income distribution which included a lot of manufacturing workers in Michigan and other lower middle class jobs in

the industrialized West.

There really weren't any improvements, but then as you got towards the super rich, the impact of globalization

allowed them to become much, much richer. The third piece of the global disappointment was of course based in the work of

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