The Common Good Read online

  ALSO BY ROBERT B. REICH

  Saving Capitalism

  Beyond Outrage

  Aftershock

  Supercapitalism

  Reason

  I’ll Be Short

  The Future of Success

  Locked in the Cabinet

  The Work of Nations

  The Resurgent Liberal

  Tales of a New America

  The Next American Frontier

  AS EDITOR

  The Power of Public Ideas

  AS COAUTHOR, WITH JOHN D. DONAHUE

  New Deals

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2018 by Robert B. Reich

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited., Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Reich, Robert B., author.

  Title: The common good / Robert B. Reich.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017053384 | ISBN 9780525520498 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525520504 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Common good. | Citizenship—Moral and ethical aspects—United States. | Political ethics—United States. | Economics—Moral and ethical aspects—United States.

  Classification: LCC JC330.15 .R455 2018 | DDC 323.6/50973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017053384

  Ebook ISBN 9780525520504

  Cover design by Tyler Comrie

  v5.2_r1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Robert B. Reich

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Part I: What Is the Common Good?

  Chapter 1: Shkreli

  Chapter 2: What Good Do We Have in Common?

  Chapter 3: The Origins of the Common Good

  Part II: What Happened to the Common Good?

  Chapter 4: Exploitation

  Chapter 5: Three Structural Breakdowns

  Chapter 6: The Decline of the Good in Common

  Part III: Can the Common Good Be Restored?

  Chapter 7: Leadership as Trusteeship

  Chapter 8: Honor and Shame

  Chapter 9: Resurrecting Truth

  Chapter 10: Civic Education for All

  Acknowledgments

  Recommended Reading

  A Discussion Guide for The Common Good

  A Note About the Author

  To my dearest Perian

  Introduction

  I WAS AT the impressionable age of fourteen when I heard John F. Kennedy urge us not to ask what America can do for us but what we can do for America. Seven years later I took a job as a summer intern in the Senate office of his brother Robert F. Kennedy. It was not a glamorous job, to say the least. I felt lucky when I was asked to run his signature machine. But I told myself that in a very tiny way I was doing something for the good of the country.

  That was a half century ago. I wish I could say America is a better place now than it was then. Surely our lives are more convenient. Fifty years ago there were no cash machines or smartphones, and I wrote my first book on a typewriter. As individuals, we are as kind and generous as ever. We volunteer in our communities, donate, and help one another. We pitch in during natural disasters and emergencies. We come to the aid of individuals in need. We are a more inclusive society, in that African Americans, women, and gays have legal rights they didn’t have a half century ago. Yet our civic life—as citizens in our democracy, participants in our economy, managers or employees of companies, and members or leaders of organizations—seems to have sharply deteriorated. What we have lost, I think, is a sense of our connectedness to each other and to our ideals—the America that John F. Kennedy asked that we contribute to.

  Starting in the late 1970s, Americans began talking less about the common good and more about self-aggrandizement. The shift is the hallmark of our era: from the “Greatest Generation” to the “Me Generation,” from “we’re all in it together” to “you’re on your own.” In 1977, motivational speaker Robert Ringer wrote a book that reached the top of the New York Times best-seller list entitled Looking Out for # 1. It extolled the virtues of selfishness to a wide and enthusiastic audience. The 1987 film Wall Street epitomized the new ethos in the character Gordon Gekko and his signature line, “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”

  The past five decades have also been marked by growing cynicism and distrust toward all of the basic institutions of American society—government, the media, corporations, big banks, police, universities, charities, religious institutions, the professions. There is a wide and pervasive sense that the system as a whole is no longer working as it should. A growing number of Americans feel neglected and powerless. Some are poor, or black or Latino; others are white and have been on a downward economic escalator for years. Many in the middle also feel stressed and voiceless. Whether we call ourselves Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, we share many of the same anxieties and feel much of the same distrust. We have nonetheless been cleaved into warring ideological tribes, and tribes within those tribes. Some of us have even been seduced by demagogues and conspiracy theorists. We seem to be a long way from when John F. Kennedy asked that Americans contribute to the well-being of all. We no longer even discuss what we owe one another as members of the same society.

  As I write this, I am now a septuagenarian and Donald Trump is president. In many ways Trump epitomizes what has gone wrong. But as I hope to make clear, Trump is not the cause. He is a consequence—the logical outcome of what has unfolded over many years. His election was itself propelled by widespread anxieties, and distrust toward our political and economic system. Say what you want about him, Trump has at least brought us back to first principles. Some presidents, like Ronald Reagan, got us talking about the size and role of government. Trump has got us talking about democracy versus tyranny. Some presidents, like Bill Clinton, invited a discussion of how we can make the most of ourselves. Trump, by dint of his pugnacious character and the divisiveness he has fueled, raises the question of what connects us, of what we hold in common.

  Hence, this book.

  Is there a common good that still binds us together as Americans? That it’s even necessary to ask shows how far we’ve strayed. Today, some think we’re connected by the whiteness of our skin, or our adherence to Christianity, or the fact that we were born in the United States. I believe we’re bound together by the ideals and principles we share, and the mutual obligations those principles entail.

  My hope is that this book provokes a discussion of the good we have had in common, what has happened to it, and what we might do to restore it. Perhaps this book can even provide a means for people with opposing views to debate these questions civilly. My goal is not that we all agree on the common good. It is that we get into the habit and practice of thinking and talking about it, and hearing one another’s views about it. This alone would be an advance.

  I should clarify from the start what this book is not. It is not about communism or socialism, although in this fractious era I wouldn’t be surprised if the wor
d “common” in the title causes some people to assume it is. It is not a book about what progressives or Democrats or Republicans ought to do to win elections, what messages they should convey, or policies they should propose. There is already quite enough advice to go around. And it’s not a book about Donald Trump, although he does come up from time to time.

  It is a book about what we owe one another as members of the same society—or at least what we did owe one another more than a half century ago when I heard John F. Kennedy’s challenge. It is about the good we once had in common—and, if we are to get back to being a far better functioning society, must have again.

  PART I

  What Is the Common Good?

  CHAPTER 1

  Shkreli

  BEGIN WITH Martin Shkreli. Pale, thin, and boyish, with dark hair and an impish grin, Shkreli in early life exemplified the rags-to-riches American success story. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in March 1983, to parents who emigrated from Albania and worked as janitors in New York apartment buildings. Shkreli attended New York’s Hunter College High School, a public school for intellectually gifted young people, and in 2004 received a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Baruch College. Almost from the start, Shkreli showed a knack for finding unique ways to make lots of money. He started his own hedge fund, betting that the stock prices of certain biotech companies would drop.

  But then Shkreli’s life story became far less admirable. He used financial chat rooms on the Internet to savage the companies he bet against, causing their prices to drop and his bets to pay off. As one investor recalled, “Shkreli had a really good knowledge of who was faking drug results and who was gaming the system.” Another investor remembered he was “willing to take a lot of risk and do things other people won’t do.” Soon thereafter, Shkreli gained control of a pharmaceutical company called Retrophin, and then, in 2015, he founded and became CEO of another, Turing Pharmaceuticals. Under his direction Turing spent $55 million for the U.S. rights to sell a drug called Daraprim. Developed in 1953, Daraprim is the only approved treatment for toxoplasmosis, a rare parasitic disease that can cause birth defects in unborn babies, and lead to seizures, blindness, and death in cancer patients and people with AIDS. Daraprim is on the World Health Organization’s list of Essential Medicines. Months after he bought the rights, Shkreli raised its price by over 5,000 percent, from $13.50 a pill to $750.

  Shkreli was roundly criticized for doing this, but he felt justified. “No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it, but this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules,” he explained. “And my investors expect me to maximize profits, not to minimize them or go half or go 70 percent but to go to 100 percent of the profit curve.” He claimed he wasn’t bothered by the public outcry against him and even wished he had raised the price higher, and said he would buy another drug and raise its price, too. “The attempt to public shame is interesting, because everything we’ve done is legal. [Standard Oil’s John D.] Rockefeller made no attempt to apologize as long as what he was doing was legal.” In February 2016, Shkreli was called before a congressional committee to justify his price increase for Daraprim. He refused to answer any questions, pleading the Fifth Amendment. After the hearing Shkreli tweeted, “Hard to accept that these imbeciles represent the people in our government.”

  Shkreli was subsequently arrested in connection with an unrelated scheme to defraud his former hedge fund investors by, among other things, sending them fake performance updates after having lost all the fund’s money and then hiding the losses by raiding funds from Retrophin, the first company he headed. According to U.S. attorney Robert Capers, Shkreli “essentially ran his companies like a Ponzi scheme,” in which he “ensnare[d] investors through a web of lies and deceit.” G. Karthik Srinivasan, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District Court in Brooklyn, said, “Telling lies on top of lies—this is what that man, Martin Shkreli, did for years.” In anticipation of his criminal trial, Shkreli boasted to The New Yorker magazine, “I think they’ll return a not-guilty verdict in two hours. There are going to be jurors who will be fans of mine. I walk down the streets of New York and people shake my hand. They say, ‘I want to be just like you.’ ”

  During his trial in the Federal District Court in Brooklyn, Shkreli strolled into a room filled with reporters and made light of a particular witness, for which the trial judge rebuked him. On his Facebook page he mocked the prosecutors, and he told news outlets they were a “junior varsity” team. He retaliated against journalists who criticized him by purchasing Internet domains associated with their names and then mocking them on the sites. “I wouldn’t call these people ‘journalists,’ ” he wrote in an email to Business Insider. “They are the unwitting recipients of liberalism subsidy from large media and telecom companies,” adding that they were “only a few notches above the white supremacists we hear so much about these days.” On August 4, 2017, after a five-week trial, Shkreli was convicted on three of eight counts of fraud. Afterward, he called the case “a witch hunt of epic proportions, and maybe they found one or two broomsticks.” One of the jurors explained that “Martin Shkreli is his own worst enemy….He could have just said to everyone, ‘I lost the money.’ But his ego didn’t allow him to do that, and that’s why he’s in the position he is.” Initially some of the jurors were concerned about his mental competence, but they concluded that he knew what he was doing.

  * * *

  —

  I chose to begin with Martin Shkreli because his story typifies what has gone wrong. On the basis of the public information we have, what can we reasonably conclude about him? He’s obviously smart and driven. It also appears that he’ll do whatever it takes to win, regardless of the effects of his behavior on anyone else. He believes that the norms that other people live by don’t apply to him. His attitude toward the law is that anything he wants to do is okay unless it is clearly illegal (and even if it’s illegal, it’s okay if he can get away with it). He shows contempt for anyone who gets in his way—whether judges, prosecutors, or members of Congress. He remains unapologetic for what he has done; presumably he’d do the same in a heartbeat. In all these ways, Martin Shkreli defies what might be called “the common good.” But, I ask you, how different is Martin Shkreli from other figures who dominate American life today, even at the highest rungs?

  * * *

  —

  The idea of “the common good” was once widely understood and accepted in America. After all, the U.S. Constitution was designed for “We the people” seeking to “promote the general welfare”—not for “me the selfish jerk seeking as much wealth and power as possible.” During the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II, Americans faced common perils that required us to work together for the common good, and that good was echoed in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”—freedom of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear. The common good animated many of us—both white and black Americans—to fight for civil rights and voting rights in the 1960s. It inspired America to create the largest and most comprehensive system of public education the world had ever seen. And it moved many of us to act against the injustice of the Vietnam War, and others of us to serve bravely in that besotted conflict.

  Most people are hardwired for some degree of cooperation with and compassion toward others. Human beings would not have survived on earth to this point were we entirely selfish. Some people are downright heroic—consider the first responders to 9/11 and to massive hurricanes; the two bystanders who sought to protect a young Muslim woman from being attacked on a train in Portland, Oregon, in the spring of 2017, and paid with their lives; the thousands of police and firefighters who every day put themselves in harm’s way for the good of their communities; the hundreds of thousands of men and women in the armed forces who risk their lives for their country; the whistle-blowers who risk jobs and careers to report misdeeds in business or government; the owners
of companies who remain in their communities and keep people employed despite the lure of higher profits elsewhere. You can also see it in everyday altruism among strangers—helping someone lift a stroller up the stairs to a park, calling for medical assistance, aiding a disabled person.

  Yet the common good is no longer a fashionable idea. The phrase is rarely uttered today, not even by commencement speakers and politicians. It feels slightly corny and antiquated if not irrelevant. I doubt Martin Shkreli has the slightest idea of what it is. You find growing evidence of a breakdown. You see it in other CEOs who also gouge their customers, loot their corporations, and defraud investors; in athletes involved in doping scandals; in doctors who do unnecessary procedures to collect fatter fees; in lawyers and accountants who look the other way when corporate clients play fast and loose, who even collude with them to skirt the law; in the Wall Street bankers who defrauded their investors and brought the nation to the brink of economic collapse in 2008 before they were bailed out by taxpayers. You find it in police chiefs who look the other way when their officers violate the legal rights of Latinos or African Americans, sometimes injuring or killing them for no reason; in film producers and publicists who choose not to see that a powerful movie mogul they depend on is sexually harassing young women; in politicians who take donations (really, bribes) from wealthy donors and corporations to enact laws their patrons want, or who shutter the government when they don’t get the partisan results they seek; and in a president of the United States who lies repeatedly about important issues, refuses to put his financial holdings into a blind trust and then personally profits off his office, and foments racial and ethnic conflict.