The Stalled Engine of American Opportunity with Yoni Appelbaum

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

NBCNews

News, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A defining feature of America from its inception has been physical mobility. And that physical mobility has been the engine of social mobility. But we’ve seen a great deal of economic and social sclerosis over the past few decades. Our guest this week has how, for many people, America has ceased to be the land of opportunity. Yoni Appelbaum is a deputy executive editor of The Atlantic, author of “Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity,” and a social and cultural historian of the U.S. He joins WITHpod to discuss how the idea of mobility has changed within the last century, how things might become less “stuck” and more.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The definition of zoning is that you are saying that some uses are acceptable over here and they are not acceptable over there.
0:14.0	The Supreme Court compares it to a pig in the parlor and not in the barnyard, right?
0:18.0	You can have a good thing that's in the wrong place. And the problem with
0:23.2	zoning as a way to do this is that over and over again, the more fine-grained you make those
0:30.2	rules, the more affluent communities get to use those rules as a means to keep their places free of pigs, but to consign other people
0:41.3	to live in barnyards.
0:46.6	Hello and welcome to Why Is This Happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
1:01.5	You know, I got a chance to go to China almost, I think it was around 15 years ago.
1:04.9	It's the only time I've been and I was on a reporting trip for a week and it was awesome.
1:06.4	Mind blowing.
1:11.6	There was a million things about it that, you know, just absolutely broke my brain and have stayed with me. And one of them was talking to someone about the intense migration that
1:18.1	was happening in China over a course of decades from basically the countryside to the cities.
1:23.4	And the fact that this migration was intensely managed and regulated by the government in the way that we think of immigration being regulated here.
1:34.1	Meaning you could not in China just be like, you know what, I'm just going to go move the city, check it out, maybe rent an apartment, try to get a job.
1:43.2	You actually had to like go through
1:44.8	essentially an immigration process to get the government. And the government had caps on how many
1:50.1	people could come in and intensely regulated how many people can move to a city, even what
1:56.4	city you can move to, whether you can move from one province to the city in that province or a city
2:01.6	in another province. And I remember thinking to myself like, oh, this is such an amazing
2:07.1	thing. Like, this is so Chinese, this level of state regulation and offends some deep part
2:14.6	of my Americanness. Like, obviously, I knew that China was a repressive state,
2:19.3	a one-party state. They don't have the freedoms of liberal democracy. They don't have,
	...

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