Intellectual and cultural institutions read and he has served as a member of the wall street journal editorial board, a columnist for the Financial Times and Bloomberg News and has taught economic history at this stern school of business. Now in addition to her prolific book writing amity serves as apresident ial scholar for kings carriage college, chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge president ial foundation and in a coup forus at and i , chairs the Selection Committee or the Manhattan Institutes hyattprize, an award she herself has one. Amitys latest work , Great Society a new history is a stunningachievement. Few decades have imprinted on the popular imagination as much as the 1960s and so many of us remember that decade for its most dramatic and turbulent moments. The assassinations of the kennedys and Martinluther King jr. , march on washington and antiwar protests. Neil armstrong on the moon and fighting in vietnam. Amitys focus though is not the drama that played out on Television Screens across the country so much as a failure of washington mb to control these events and direct the show red indeed, a generation of politicians aim to realize that the centralized hierarchal and highly regulated model of political economy dominated postwar america has stopped working. Yet more than just the technical failures, amity captures the stifling feeling of a country run from the top down. America puts up with the machinery and culture of mobilization during the two world wars and the early years of a Nuclear Cold War but at some point that old american yearning, swashbuckling independentminded, mistrustful of authority was bound to reemerge. This is a vitally important story or our time and we can all be grateful amity has told it such insights and bird. Im happy to report that books will be sold in the back of the room. Ladies and gentlemen, amity shlaes. [applause] you. If you cannot hear me, please let me know. Thank you reihan salam. A book about the Great Society deserves great thanks. Thanks to the Manhattan Institute president reihan salam comments former president larry mo, Vice President Vanessa Mendoza and all of them for hosting this event. Id like to thank my publisher from harpercollins, jonathan. My agent andrew wiley and his colleague who is with us. Id like to thank the Coolidge Foundation for supporting me, certain friends including thomas smith, jim pearson, ravenel curry are both here, kim dennis and the Kings College especially josiah petersonwho worked on the research. Id like to thank my family , my husband and my daughter flora who areboth here tonight. The first sentence of the book is a question. Why not socialism . This is a question we asked ourselves last night and we watched the president ial debate. How do we answer it . Its a question all centrists, all commonsense people , all market people want to be able to deliver an answer. We all feel an obligation to undertake the longTerm Investment in projects that would open americanminds. That american minds see the challenge and tragedy of socialism. We want to share the record of the past or the record of venezuela so that when they come to vote or leave businesses and families younger americans recognize what is not useful policy. But where are we . Its november in 2019 area and educating is a longTerm Investment. Some of us dont have a heart for the long haul. We feel frustrated at the prospect of flow outcomes and perhaps outright failure in our intellectual entrepreneurship. Politics are much more fun and instant ratification. All of us have some vanity, people remember politicians. They do notalways remember educators. So we tend to, we journalists, businesspeople, philanthropists, scholars want to be remembered to and sometimes we pickedshortterm projects for that reason. So tonight id like to tell you a story of a really long term project. A crazy project. This is a story which starts in the 1950s. Features a company, a man and the american public. Those are the three characters. It is indeed a story of a failing longterm project , of humiliation, of business, shame and intellectual failure, no way around it but the story which ends in the 1980s also reveals an unexpected payback. Some of you may know the characters but i appreciate hearing about them one more time to read the name of the company was General Electric. In the 1950s, General Electric road high. Its factories in new york, massachusetts and connecticut employed many thousands with the Industrial Center in some ways, every yearamericans bought more tvs, more radios or more freezers. But ge was not just the company, it was an icon to read it brought us the state space program, americans trusted General Electric as a trusted game of baseball. A good company that follows rules to the essence. As you know the soviets in 1959 this invited the us to create adisplay about progress at moscow. America sent several modern kitchens and the lemon yellow one was General Electric. Most ge executives at the time again were talking about the late 50s like executives at most countries at that time had set view of how capitalism work. Private sector was invincible. It was like a workhorse or a cow. What was supposed to do was serve as that milk cow for the public sector. The public treated the private sector like a domestic animal, John Maynard Keynes noted this at one point read ge or most of ge, that sounded fine. On the cow was content with the government. Tennessee valley authority, the client was the essence of a government project and ge executives at the top like it very much red he found that tva was one of its biggest customers. They didnt mind serving the space program, these executives, the military industrial complex, unions existed by virtue of very strong union law. And they demanded they pay packages you all right, you can pay that. Social experiments by the federal government, American Business would say that. Maybe expansion of healthcare, the us could say that or perhaps a longer leave for young parents. Thats just a joke. Pumping like a longer leave her young parents in the early 60s, we can pay that to read unions to pay any load. Stalin was said to have joked that the only country rich enough to afford communism was the United States. Why should it not be true . Why should it not be true . In the 1960s just some benchmark for you, the dow, Dow Jones Industrial average was approaching a record level of 1000 and it seemed only a matter of months before the dow would pass this landmark. But there was one aging, underappreciated executive at ge who saw things differently. It was an older guy. He was a Vice President Labor Relations and the name of this man was Lemuel Ricketts boulware. Boulware believed growth didnt come when a board pay taxes to the federal government or when itmeant altogether and wrote out big plans. Boulware believed growth took place when a lonely scientist and a dumpy lab had an idea and wanted the world. Ideas like the lightbulb, the ge idea. Boulware believed that the burden of Government Spending and the burden of Union Demands backed by government would gradually strangle american competitiveness. Even a little bit of socialism boulware said could do damage. The reason our 1959 kitchens were better than the russian kitchens was those longTerm Investments of inventors at the beginning of ge area reason the companies arrived was that the goods were affordable but the high wages and prices would render ge uncompetitive read in the end the russianswould make better kitchens. Nobody could quite imagine japan at this point. That was the slope of the imagination read the godgiven assignment and view of Lemuel Boulware of a Pristine Company like General Electric, a National Hero to inspire america to return to oldcapitalism. And the problem was urgent, boulware said. The current rapid trend has got to be changed or we screw are through with everythingwe cherish. Younger executives at General Electric found boulware ludicrous. He wasnt modern. His superlatives irritated them. And in the public many agreed with this evaluation. Fortune magazine described boulware as a figure who combined the folksiness of the Kentucky Farm background with the fervor of a washing machine salesman. The other executives ge did not worry. They were the future. Boulware was approaching retirement. He would be out anyhow, let him rant from his recliner in delray beach. Still, boulware determined to use his final years to make his own longTerm Investment in saving the future, ges america. He wanted to teach americans to guess the nature of the gift they had in capitalism. He spends millions of ge money mimeograph and pamphlets explaining the value of markets. He warned the town square ge operated that the high wages and all the extra social benefits would force companies eventually to leave red one such town was pittsfield massachusetts, and Industrial Center. He warned the people grass will grow in pittsfield. If pittsfield didnt wake up to the importance of competitive prices, wages and costs. Boulware used new media and in his case that would be television to reach the people reading a tv show some of you have seen call ge theater to showcase traditional american values. He hired staff including that aging actor to be ges postman. Remember the actor was a union man, a democrat who admired raichlen roosevelt and the new deal. Hell, i wont say his name yet but this actor who was hired had potential. We have our cspan audience. But lets stick with their story. Boulware kitted out a special ge house with all modern appliances, kind of like ge kitchen in moscow for the actors to live in and boulware school backer who was Ronald Reagan and adam smith, john locke with little essays added by henry hammer. He gave little books just like the Manhattan Institute does out and hope they would be read. This actor, reagan was knocked exactly popular across ge either. The younger executives didnt like having some kind of western propaganda and they complain about reagan but for the few remaining years boulware was there they couldnt stop him and his actor and boulware since reagan all over to hundreds of ge plants to explain all about the tva and the future of industry and the industry might move west and so on. The actor and he wrote speeches about the dangers of socialism and socializing medicine was a bad idea. That the tva was abad idea , power could innovate faster when it was free to make its own decisions, maybe hydropower wasnt the only kind of power in the United States and soon enough reagan the actor began to take boulwares arguments seriously. He even bought his son some ge stock. The year 1960 dark cloud over ge. Boulware and his propaganda mill. The Justice Department was investigating the company. In 1961 the new attorney general whose name was Robert Kennedy pull together a strong case ge was colluding with other Companies Like westinghouse to fix high prices on the turbines it sold to the tva. The Justice Department went to court the judge sent the ge executives to jail. The irony was undeniable. Here was ges Propaganda Department mouthing off about free markets even as ge cheated the american taxpayer. This was a terrible blow for ge and for boulware around the Company Look Like the worst in the world nationwide people felt betrayed by their trustedcompany. It was like the black sox scandal of 1919 when this happened to ge. A national betrayal, ges stock went in the toilet area actor was fired. Ge theater was canceled and Lemuel Boulware got pneumonia. He retired to delray beach in the years that followed the subject of the Great Society only deepened the sense of failure for such a venture. Ge itself deepened its cooperation as did many other companies with the federal government. The news on boulwares tv set mocked his old efforts to read American Voters didnt turn away from socialism. They thought social democracy or just government advancement sounded nice. They voted in Lyndon Johnson and a socializing program, if we can call it that, the Great Society. Johnson promised to cure poverty, to make america a better place, a great place with a stronger economy and they did great the beginnings of our National Healthcare system that weregetting now. Medicare. This era, the Great Society leader did strengthen unions and johnson was only the beginning. One of the revisions of the Great Society in this book is a revision of richard nixon. In my research i discovered that nixon actually expanded government as johnson had before him, in some cases even more rapidly and other president s just added on. Imagine a great and costing process of program upon program. Charles murray of the Manhattan Institute was the first to lay out the numbers and recent prize winner john cogan laid out a few more. Some of you were at that event read heres the scope of what the Great Society yielded. By 1980 health and medical costs were six times the 1950 costs in dollars. By 1980, public assistance costs were 13 times the 1950 costs read social insurance costs were 27 times their 1950 level and housing costs were 129 times their 1950 cost. You may recall last nightone of the candidates suggested we needed to spend more on housing. So what happened . The Great Society failed to read the government expansion did not eradicate poverty. In fact, the reduction in the poverty rate was already coming down pretty fast. It flattened out and we ended up with 10 percent and it stayed there. The programs shackled americans into dependence generally speaking there was a terrible morning after affect that follow the Great Society binge. The economy began to flail as it never had before. We know that unemployment went towards 10 percent and we know Interest Rates went past 15 percent. The high cost of labor under policies backed by the government did drive American Companies to leave town. Grass did grow in pittsfield. Just as boulware had predicted, the great Thriving Center of detroit did become the rust belt and i read a lot about that in Great Society. The Dow Jones Industrial average aid below 1000 for a generation. Today other americans believe an ever rising stock marketis their birthright. They expect nothing else so you want to stop and contemplate that duration from the mid 60s until the 80s, even in nominal terms with great inflation we did not pass 1000 area imagine this today, we had 2035 to get to the next barrier. In my book, what i learned in writing it is that you dont have to be socialist all the way to damage. Indeed he was right, even a little socialism does incredible damage. This is not zenos paradox, its science road, you do eventually get there and in fact sooner than you think. And the whole while you can imagine boulware who lived decades beating himself up about the failure of his efforts at enlightenment but as you know, one man was enlightened and he didnt care, that was the actor reagan and he decided to try politics and in 1964 he took his standard ge speech out of the can and gave it on tv. Technically word for word. America had to choose socialism or not. This was what became known as the time for choosing speech and then actor ran for governor of california where he challenged the Great Society of numerous times including the Legal Department that came out of our Poverty Program and he put the policies of ge into practice area and government restraint, saving money, fighting expansion ofwelfare, personal dignity ,support , respect for markets and when he did run for president in one, it was 1980 and it really was no longer the morning after affect of the Great Society. It could be morning in america. The entire counterrevolution that reagan brought, that morning in america came out of those little boulware pamphlets that lemuel had so lovinglyprepared. Boulwares long Term Investment that no one remembered had paid off a magnitude that is near unimaginable. Markets thrive in an era commenced in which we did get a strongly risingmarket. Ill stop and say theres several lessons from the Great Society. Thats one of 12 chapters of this book. The ball, the lesson , the overarching lesson of the book is that government is rotten at planning. No matter howmuch it spends. You get a privileged outcome. The second lesson is that a private project or a fulfilling profit project, one of ours looks like a complete goof or a failure in the shorter mediumterm may not turn out to be a complete failure in the end. Sometimes a project is just early sometimes early this is good. Think of it from the point of view of the voters. Who learned about markets from ge when reagan gave talks in the cafeteria of factories. Some of those tens of thousands of meetings to reagan and ge did have an effect. Those voters understood what reagan was saying when he spoke as a politician, that there was another way for the american worker. They emerged in 1980 as reagans famous bluecollar boat. Another point more obvious but worth mentioning is that the Great Society offers a lesson on trusting your own judgment. If you suspect that the program is not good, it probably isnt. If you suspect a program might be good, invest in it. Think of the institutions that inspired you as a child and lay the plans for your own institutions. Much of the work that i do in the Manhattan Institute does is trying to plant the seeds. A theoretical seed can be the most fruitful seed. A third and final point, individuals matter. Without Manhattan Institutes followers, individuals dollars there would have been no broken windows policy. Without boulware, no reagan area if you think your name and now id like to raise a theoretical glass of wine. One thing to be remembered for doing this work that you may be wrong. Im standing in manhattan in 2019 with you. Three decades after the death of that third ge executive and everyone in this room is raising a mental glass to reagan, to Public Policy work also most of all we are raising a glass to the name of Lemuel Ricketts boulware. Thank you very much. [applause] energy has agreed totake a few questions. Yes, sir. I wont have that yet. How are you . Michael myers, new york civil rights coalition. Two things come to mind. Lbj and race revolution in america . The riots in the streets, lbjs response that was the Great Society. Helping blacks get out of poverty, helping blacks overcome societal dennis discrimination. I remember about the race riots and strife in American Society was lbj was abandoned by the people who were opposed to the vietnam war. The only peoplewho stuck with him were the naacp. What was your question mark. My question to you is what about the civil rights revolution in america mark how can that not be in your book and how can we explain theGreat Society without talking about Race Relations . It is in my book and very extensively. This was one chapter. The book looks at civil rights law so we have the Civil Rights Act which came before as youknow the Voting Rights act. And basically the early rights are great and important and revolutionary and without them we wouldnt be where we are. The later laws particularly following Howard University speech of president johnson were more about benefits. That is, positive rights, what people get and i argue and theres plenty of evidence for it that those benefits didnt help poor people, white or black. They kept them poor. For example today we have the hillbilly elegy book. Its so important. Oh my gosh, appalachia, what can we do . Kind of a struggling group that has innate path elegy in addition to poverty. In the 1960s we had an appalachian law in order to improve appalachia but it didnt help appalachia, it just made life harder there and accustomed people to getting benefits. So i divide in this book, i marked the divide at johnson Howard University speech. I think johnson ahead of his keys and i do have a very ill just say it and we can move on but i have a long treatment of the 1964 convention at which the mississippi delegation was not seated and the decision kind of the trail by organized labor johnson to turn away those people the cause they needed to vote, they needed the vote of the regular mississippi party. Im excited to read your book, it sounds like a rifle success to your forgotten man book which was also excellent. There seems to be to schools of thought on the political right about the Great Society and the first is that it was bad and counterproductive in the second which is more modern and more accommodation or sort of centrist is that it basically does enough or about enough and if you include transfers and tax credits into poverty rates since 1960 is that youll see that a lot of these programs help to reduce poverty and we shouldnt accept the leftwing narrative that we need to do so much more and tax much more and do so many transfers and embrace more of the scandinavian or european, where you come down on that centrist or centerright interview that theres basically enough transfers now so kind accepts the Great Society. At a very important question and when you count poverty you can count it with benefits or without area are the poor and when you go without, there are a lot of poor people so what are we doing . I would argue we are anesthetizing people. One of the, that is their becoming so accustomed, they dont see a way out. They dont see an opportunity to work , they dont believe they can work. So i think its destructive even if it keeps people quiet area clearly some of the benefits of the 1960s particularly the money that flowed in chapter 4 from the office of economicopportunity to the cities was meant to calm people so they wouldnt write. It didnt work, because the money got caught in bureaucratic traps and because people were angry about genuine problems such as the bigotry of the police in los angeles but i dont think you can buy out people. I do believe we be stronger if we had a menu of opportunity ratherthan entitlement. Nick gillespie with reason. Kennedy, im partway through your book which im enjoying and im glad to learn how to pronounce lemuel. Could you talk a bit about the relevance of your book to contemporary days about redistribution and about growing wealth . Were going through a spasm which is really kind of knew right now. Of people saying we need to be redistributing things much more and then just to make it more complicated, what is the role of being in the cold war versus 30 years out of the cold war and how communism as both an alternative model and a threat to the american way of life, out of that play into arguments about getting benefits . Can i answer the second first . The second relates to attitudes towards socialism so younger people today have nothing to compare it to. They have not served in the military by and large they havent seen a lot so they love an idea. Younger people in the 1960s my book has a chapter on the porch are on statement so that would be people born 1940 or so. They were less nacve. They were still nacve they were less nacve the cause of war was closer, because communism was closer, because their older brother was in the korean conflict. So now we have massive nacvetc to deal with as thats the problem. Another parallel between that period and now but i will say nick i think were that liberated because if progressives can call for socialism and talk about socialism, then we can talk about socialism without being labeled as if were invaders area this doesnt have to do with moscow red there are a number of progressives who make foolish errors in my book, very few are actual traders. Their problem and it was a fatal terrible problem was that they were wrong about their ideas domestically. So we can talk about socialism now to without involving the soviet union and so on. But was there Something Else . I tried to do the job. I want to say one other thing. In the book i tried to capture the romance of socialism so you think about when young people today on a trip, they go to a latin American Country and ac more social democracy or they fall in love with scandinavia or their outraged. In the book i have a character who goes on a trip. That is sort of intellectual tourism, its called looking for socialism area and the character is tomhayden. Recently, Peter Collier died and peter gave me a picture of a pad that tom hayden gave me and it was made from the fuselage of a downed american jet. It was a north vietnamese sort of knickknack of pride that said hundred american plane down and someone gave that cohen made a fuselage of a downed american plane to tom hayden who gave it to Peter Collier. So toms trip is very romantic. He fell in love with a girl and so on and absolutely intellectually lazy, crazy and sad because he doesnt see the reality in hanoi at all. He probably got in the way of our bombings and im wondering whether jonathan called a halt at that time, there was a hole because he blamed for he didnt want to be blamed for bombing tom hayden but thats the story of the romance of socialism which is so present today. And toms own confusion. He based, the end of the chapter is he decides that socialism is wonderful because it never finished it as long as its not finished no one may criticize. Thats the beauty of it. I believe we have time for one more question. That was great, amity. My question is whether theres a society that has ever successfully woken from socialist anesthesia. Is there a model we might follow to walk back socialist tendencies . I dont want to Say Something bad has to happen to us before we wake up thats the usual pattern. The country gets knocked on the head, the countryinflates and the country regroups. I do believe americans love business and the more young people we can expose to traditional common sense ideas, im talking about for each or decca or reading books they dont get to read in High School Learning about Calvin Coolidge. I see they responded with great excitement. I hope reihan salam will permit me to plug my foundation at the Coolidge Foundation, its like the specialized high schools in new york or the Rhodes Scholarships which really are about Academic Merit and its quite serious competition and we have 4 scholarships a year because theyre very expensive. Its a full ride to college and we already have 15,000 kids to have registered to apply for 4 scholarships per year. What do those kids want . And what the money, they want independence from their parents, not to have to fill out their fafsa but a lot of them like the idea of doing things on their own so i think its important for all of us to send signals to young people that you will be rewarded for enterprise, for trying, for doing things on your own and currently our system doesnt particularly do that. Its more our reward system is about how you can figure out what you can get from the point of view of a 17yearold so i think its a change in the political culture if you focus on 16 to 20yearolds and show them whats in it for them and also play to their natural wisdom which they have and say we understand that you might think this and youmight not be wrong. I encourage all of you to join me in thanking amity. [applause] and i encourage all of you to buy a book, buy a copy for a friend, buy a copy for your enemy. All of them will be enriched the experience of readingthis wonderful book. [applause] coming up, secretary of the smithsonian institution, lonely bunch on the creation of the National Museum of africanamerican history and culture and then writers a book about the military talk about warfarein the 21st century. And thats followed by author Christopher Nolte on the migration of people to florida in the 20s and the development of thestates wetlands. While members of congress are in their districts due to the pandemic we have a special edition of book tv airing during the week. Tonight portions of our programs on books about pandemics from authors john barry, david clement, sonja shaw, ali khan and jeremy brown and then books on the economy with others peter lawson, henry paulson, then burning the, arianne cooper and others. Later authors ronald kessler, bob woodward, Victor Davis Hanson and Stephen Moore discuss their books about president trump. Enjoy book tv now and over the weekend on cspan2. The president , from Public Affairs available now in paperback and ebook. Presents biographies of every president. Organized by their ranking by noted historian. From best to worst. And teachers perspectives into the lives of our nations keep executives and leadership styles. Visit our website, cspan. Org the president to learn more about the president and historian features and order your copy today. Wherever books and ebooksare sold. Monday night on the gators, mark randolph. Cofounder of netflix and author of the book that will never work shares his experiences starting Online Streaming Service read on april 14, 1998, icy hit a few keys and we were live and it didnt take long and we got that first thing and we cheered and began opening bottles of champagne and then two or three minutes later, three more orders. We were so excited and then we got two more orders and all the excitement, we kind of lost track of things until someone noticed that its been a while since the bells rung. We look, is it unplugged . It turned out in the first 15 minutes of being online we hadcrashed all of our servers. Mark randolph monday night at 8 pm eastern on the communicators on cspan2