Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. This season, we're talking about power and
Speaker 1: the many ways that power shapes the most important stories
Speaker 1: of our time. The pandemic has been profoundly difficult for
Speaker 1: so many people, but anytime there's a disruptive situation, someone
Speaker 1: figures out a way to benefit. Almost no one has
Speaker 1: benefited more from COVID nineteen than Amazon dot Com. The
Speaker 1: numbers are striking. In twenty twenty, the company saw a
Speaker 1: nearly two hundred percent rise in profits and its sales
Speaker 1: rose over thirty percent. For the first time, the company
Speaker 1: employed more than a million workers global. It can be
Speaker 1: a real challenge to understand the rise and impact act
Speaker 1: of a company so big and with so much power,
Speaker 1: But today we have someone here to help us. Alec
Speaker 1: McGillis is an award winning journalist who covers politics and
Speaker 1: government for Pro Publica. He's the author of the new
Speaker 1: book Fulfillment, Winning and Losing in One Click America. It's
Speaker 1: a book about Amazon, and it's also a book about
Speaker 1: much more than Amazon. It's a book that's meant to
Speaker 1: be about the ways Amazon symbolizes and embodies many of
Speaker 1: the trends in the United States that have led to
Speaker 1: growing inequality between rich people and poor people, and importantly
Speaker 1: between richer and poorer geographical regions and even richer and
Speaker 1: poor cities in close juxtaposition to each other. It's a
Speaker 1: book that sets out to transcend its own subject, a
Speaker 1: tall order for any book, and we have Alec McGillis
Speaker 1: here to talk about it with us. Alex, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for being here in congratulations on your very
Speaker 1: bold an ambitious new book fulfillment. I want to begin
Speaker 1: by asking you, how did you get the idea to
Speaker 1: write a book that is both about Amazon and not
Speaker 1: about Amazon? What road led you to this conception. The
Speaker 1: road started really not with Amazon at all, but with this,
Speaker 1: you know, this issue of regional inequality, these disparities that
Speaker 1: I would see when I was going around the country
Speaker 1: as a national reporter. I would go to the Midwest,
Speaker 1: you know, or Appalacha or whatever it might be. In
Speaker 1: these sort of great recession years. That's when I really
Speaker 1: started doing that kind of serious national reporting and just
Speaker 1: being so struck by these disparities, these cities out in
Speaker 1: the Midwest that were just really reeling during the recession.
Speaker 1: Then you'd come back to Washington and you see this
Speaker 1: incredible prosperity on display and this total disconnect really with
Speaker 1: what was going on elsewhere in the country. And it
Speaker 1: kind of drove me crazy, just the complacency that you'd
Speaker 1: see in Washington, no real notion of just how bad
Speaker 1: things have gotten out there. And I saw it again
Speaker 1: when I moved back up to Baltimore where I live now,
Speaker 1: and just seeing in those forty miles between Baltimore and Washington,
Speaker 1: just how huge the disparity was growing over wider and
Speaker 1: wanting to write about that, and then after Trump got elected,
Speaker 1: realizing just how big the political fallout from these divides was,
Speaker 1: but then finally decided to write about it through the
Speaker 1: frame of Amazon shows that as my frame, and shows
Speaker 1: it as the frame for two reasons. One, the company
Speaker 1: is now so ubiquitous that it's just a very kind
Speaker 1: of handy way to take you around the country because
Speaker 1: it's everywhere now in our life, so it's just a
Speaker 1: good thread to sort of show who we are now
Speaker 1: as a country. But more importantly, it was a good
Speaker 1: frame because it itself helps to explain the problem. The
Speaker 1: tech giants are a big reason for these these regional inequalities,
Speaker 1: because the regional inequality is based partly in economic concentration.
Speaker 1: The concentration of our economy in just a handful of
Speaker 1: companies has driven a lot of this concentration of wealth
Speaker 1: in certain places. Let me ask you first a historical
Speaker 1: question and an economic question about this place you started
Speaker 1: the regional inequalities. So when I think in a non
Speaker 1: scientific way about the history of regional inequality and disparity
Speaker 1: of wealth in the United States, my first instinct is
Speaker 1: to say, that's almost baked into the history of the country.
Speaker 1: You know. I think of the fight over ratifying the
Speaker 1: Constitution in seventeen eighty nine, huge geographic difference in desire
Speaker 1: to ratify, reflecting huge disparities in wealth between small farmers
Speaker 1: in the interior and growing merchant class closer to the coasts.
Speaker 1: Tell me whether you see the geographical disparity in wealth
Speaker 1: that you're seeing now as in some way different in
Speaker 1: kind than the kinds of disparities that we saw in
Speaker 1: the United States at other moments when our economy was
Speaker 1: shifting to a new kind of economy. I see it
Speaker 1: it's different both in degree and kind. For starters, while
Speaker 1: we've always have had wealthier and poorer places in the country,
Speaker 1: of course, the gaps have just gotten a lot bigger,
Speaker 1: just the way that the gaps have gotten lot bigger
Speaker 1: on the income ladder between you the one percent and
Speaker 1: nine nine percent, so have the regional gaps gotten bigger. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, as recently as nineteen eighty, there were only
Speaker 1: certain small parts of our country that had median income
Speaker 1: that was twenty percent or greater than the average, or
Speaker 1: twenty percent or lower than the than the average. Most
Speaker 1: of the country kind of clustered close to the median.
Speaker 1: Now huge swaths of the country are above that plus
Speaker 1: twenty percent line or below twenty percent and below the average.
Speaker 1: So just great growth at the extremes of wealthier and
Speaker 1: poorer regions. But I also see it as different in kind.
Speaker 1: What has happened and has a lot to do with
Speaker 1: sort of tech dominated economy. What's happened is that the
Speaker 1: tech economy encourages agglomeration of prosperity and dynamism, and in
Speaker 1: a way that did not happen during this sort of
Speaker 1: the manufacturing heavy on me that we had for most
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century. In a manufacturing economy, one stable
Speaker 1: way of thinking about it is that once you come
Speaker 1: up with a given advance, say the steelmaking process, you
Speaker 1: could take that technology that advance anywhere that had the
Speaker 1: manpower in the national resources and the transportation links, and
Speaker 1: you could build a steel mill. And and that's so
Speaker 1: you had those all over all across the Northeast in
Speaker 1: the Midwest. The tech economy is different. The value lies
Speaker 1: entirely in the almost entirely in the initial innovation. It's
Speaker 1: all about coming up with the advances, creating the software,
Speaker 1: creating the app, whatever it might be. And and so
Speaker 1: it's all about having the human capital to prove that innovation.
Speaker 1: And those innovations come often through proximity, through the proximity
Speaker 1: of having all those great minds together with each other
Speaker 1: and with a great end with a capital to fund
Speaker 1: their work. That's how you end up with sort of
Speaker 1: the growth of clusters, like like a Silicon valley, where
Speaker 1: despite the incredible expense of living there and doing business there,
Speaker 1: you know, in the sort of dystopian levels of wealth
Speaker 1: and congestion and kind of unaffordability of those places, they
Speaker 1: still exert a pull because you sort of feel like
Speaker 1: you need to be there and TB in the mix,
Speaker 1: and so you end up within a conglomeration of wealth
Speaker 1: sort that we really on levels that we have not
Speaker 1: had before. It really is a new kind of thing. Well,
Speaker 1: we feel like we've always had wealth here and poor cities.
Speaker 1: In fact, what we're dealing with now is on a
Speaker 1: different scale. That leads to my second question about the
Speaker 1: agglomeration thing, which is that when it comes to I
Speaker 1: don't know, let's say a social media company that in
Speaker 1: raw numbers doesn't have that many employees, but it's super rich,
Speaker 1: there is some sort of human capital feature. Amazon in
Speaker 1: a way seems like a different kind of company in
Speaker 1: that it's not primarily just based on its technology. It
Speaker 1: has technology. Businesses are that probably do benefit from this.
Speaker 1: But with respect to a lot of what Amazon does,
Speaker 1: it is capable of being less agglomerated. It is capable
Speaker 1: of being more for far flung and more distributed. So
Speaker 1: I wonder about how you see Amazon itself fitting into
Speaker 1: that model that you're describing, the model where agglomeration of
Speaker 1: people and putting them near each other has made some
Speaker 1: places super rich as opposed to other places. I see
Speaker 1: Amazon a very much as actually as fitting into that
Speaker 1: model makes the Amazon different than of Google or Facebook
Speaker 1: is that it has a mass workforce that is in
Speaker 1: the warehouses, that is in the fulfillment centers, and is
Speaker 1: doing the actual physical work of delivering these physical products.
Speaker 1: Which is what made it so appealing for me to
Speaker 1: use them as my frame, is that you actually have
Speaker 1: a physical manifestation of the company and all the sort
Speaker 1: reforms out around the country in a way that Google
Speaker 1: and Facebook do not. There's just a landscape and ecosystem
Speaker 1: to writing on Amazon that they lack. But as far
Speaker 1: as the actual headquarters operate of Amazon, it is very
Speaker 1: much a classic case of aglamoration. The reason why Jeff
Speaker 1: Bezos chose Seattle early on to locate his company was
Speaker 1: partly because there were tax advantages to doing so, to
Speaker 1: putting the company in Seattle not in California, but also
Speaker 1: because Microsoft was already in Seattle and he knew there
Speaker 1: was a workforce, a skilled tech workforce there that he
Speaker 1: could draw on in building his company and just as
Speaker 1: now in setting out to build his second headquarters. Because
Speaker 1: Amazon was outgrowing Seattle with forty five thousand tech employees,
Speaker 1: crammed into crammed into the city. They need a new home,
Speaker 1: and what city do they choose for their new home?
Speaker 1: But Washing Union, DC, a city that also has a
Speaker 1: large skilled tech heavy workforce as a result of all
Speaker 1: those IT contractors in the DC area that they could
Speaker 1: draw off of. And then you look at the other
Speaker 1: their smaller satellite offices of several house in each and
Speaker 1: those are all in the tech capital. So you Boston
Speaker 1: now is just they're just announced that they're going to
Speaker 1: expand to Boston up to about seven thousand salary tech
Speaker 1: types in Boston, New York's second headquarters in New York,
Speaker 1: they're getting several thousand more theirs. You got a bunch
Speaker 1: in the Bay Area, they got a bunch in Austin.
Speaker 1: So it's very much a case of them putting those
Speaker 1: people in the places where there are a lot others
Speaker 1: of those people. One of the really beautiful things about
Speaker 1: the book is the way that you go out to
Speaker 1: these fulfilming centers all over the country and tell at
Speaker 1: a very human level. The reader really gets the feeling
Speaker 1: of getting to know a little bit about the people
Speaker 1: whom you've interviewed, and you've really gotten to know them
Speaker 1: in depth, who are experiencing the effects of Amazon's economic power,
Speaker 1: That is, they are dealing with the reality that they
Speaker 1: don't have much negotiating power of their own. Visavi, this
Speaker 1: huge employer who may ultimately be the only really available
Speaker 1: employer in town, or the only employer at scale in town.
Speaker 1: And you show compellingly that the company exercises that economic
Speaker 1: power with respect to wages, with respect to hours, with
Speaker 1: respect to work conditions, and you humanize that. And I
Speaker 1: think that's tremendously powerful and a great contributions of the book.
Speaker 1: As I read those descriptions, the thought that kept running
Speaker 1: through my mind was this is all terribly upsetting. But
Speaker 1: isn't it always very upsetting when one sees the operation
Speaker 1: of capitalism in practice? You know, if we were looking
Speaker 1: at other industries that were not as much in the news,
Speaker 1: that we weren't as reliant on, wouldn't we also see
Speaker 1: those with economic power I mean capital, That is to say,
Speaker 1: when capital is able to do it exercising all the
Speaker 1: power that it can exercise to try to pay as
Speaker 1: workers as little as possible and extract as much at
Speaker 1: work as possible from them. I'm not saying that's Okay,
Speaker 1: you know, and that is obviously part of the history
Speaker 1: of why capital it has struggled with labor for the
Speaker 1: last one hundred and eight or so years so intensely.
Speaker 1: But is there something about this struggle that's really distinctive?
Speaker 1: Were different in that way other than the fact that
Speaker 1: Amazon's really darned powerful. I've thought a lot about this,
Speaker 1: and I and the chapter where I kind of take
Speaker 1: this on at its core iss the chapter on the
Speaker 1: extraordinary transformation of a place outside Baltimore called Sparrow's Point,
Speaker 1: which it's peninsula just southeast of the city, and it
Speaker 1: was the home to the largest steel plant in the world,
Speaker 1: Betheheim Steel Plant, that had at its peak about thirty
Speaker 1: thousand people working. There's a huge company town like right
Speaker 1: adjacent to the steel millages. It's vast industrial works. When
Speaker 1: things started out there in the early twentieth century, it
Speaker 1: was indeed very brutal place. It was just you had
Speaker 1: incredibly low paid workforce with unbelievably rough hours. Two days
Speaker 1: off a year, two holidays off year, Christmas and July fourth.
Speaker 1: They were making about a dollar a day doing incredibly
Speaker 1: dangerous work, incredibly demanding conditions, and no say on the job,
Speaker 1: and you ended up finally, of course, over the next
Speaker 1: few decades with an improvement of conditions, thanks heavily to
Speaker 1: the fact that they got organized, And so you ended
Speaker 1: up with those jobs becoming for the latter part of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century much better paid. Jobs that were still
Speaker 1: very treacherous, very dangerous, very challenging, but the middle class
Speaker 1: jobs you could support a family on where they had
Speaker 1: much more say on the job, jobs that made good
Speaker 1: money and found to some degree purposeful. That mail has
Speaker 1: now been wiped completely off the face of the earth,
Speaker 1: declined steadily, relentlessly until the Foundly went out of business
Speaker 1: in twenty twelve. Has been wiped off the face of
Speaker 1: the map, and it's been replaced by a logistics park
Speaker 1: which includes a two Amazon warehouses. And I actually found
Speaker 1: a man who worked at the wheel for thirty years
Speaker 1: and now went to work at the warehouse, making way
Speaker 1: less money and feeling much less purpose in sensive camaraderie
Speaker 1: on the job. And and so I I do think that,
Speaker 1: of course, you know, anytime I can think of job,
Speaker 1: other sorts of jobs now that if we look closely
Speaker 1: at them, with seem pretty bleak and horrific. I think,
Speaker 1: you know, for instance, what we've learned about the meat
Speaker 1: packing plants during in the age of COVID and just
Speaker 1: what reality is like there is bleaker yet then, of course,
Speaker 1: than what we see in the warehouses now. But if
Speaker 1: we compare the warehouses with what has come before them,
Speaker 1: a sort of a mass workplace, a place where where
Speaker 1: the average American worker looking for a job can expect
Speaker 1: to go to work that is now has now increasingly
Speaker 1: become one of these warehouses. They're so ubiquitous, they're they're
Speaker 1: so huge, they're so rapidly growing. They are in a
Speaker 1: way now the mass workplace of our country. And if
Speaker 1: you compare them to what became before them at a
Speaker 1: place like Sparrow's Point a mill, where workers were making
Speaker 1: far more than they're making now in these warehouses, and
Speaker 1: you know, have had more sense of a meaning and
Speaker 1: purpose in their daily life. Or if you compare them
Speaker 1: to the retail experience that these warehouses have in some
Speaker 1: sense sort of replaced the experience of the department store
Speaker 1: clerk that's been sort of wiped out by the e
Speaker 1: commerce revolution, I'm not sure that we would say that
Speaker 1: necessarily that the warehouse experience is no bleaker than those
Speaker 1: things that replaced. I would say that both of those
Speaker 1: other experiences had some kind of a level of better
Speaker 1: working conditions conceivably and also more of a sense of
Speaker 1: basic humanity and connectiveness than what is now on offer
Speaker 1: in the vast windowless warehouse. The root causes of that
Speaker 1: transformation seemed to me to be two, and I want
Speaker 1: to ask you about both of them. They're both addressed,
Speaker 1: i would say, obliquely in your book, but not centrally.
Speaker 1: One is globalization, which is what brought down the American
Speaker 1: steel mill. It just became much less expensive to produce
Speaker 1: steel in other places around the world. And the second
Speaker 1: is and that of course is repeated across a wide
Speaker 1: range of construction industries. And the other is unionization. Right
Speaker 1: when the Sparrows Point Steel plant was at its worst,
Speaker 1: it's because there weren't yet unions there. And then with
Speaker 1: the growth and the rise of unions towards their peak
Speaker 1: in the middle of the twentieth century in the US,
Speaker 1: the jobs got quote unquote better in the sense that
Speaker 1: conditions improved and pay improved. And then with the decline
Speaker 1: of unions, which of course is linked in some ways
Speaker 1: to globalization too. They're not totally independent of each other.
Speaker 1: Those jobs, as you say, disappeared through as it were,
Speaker 1: no fault of Amazons, right, and then the idea of
Speaker 1: what they get replaced with. Yes, it's connected to the
Speaker 1: e commerce revolution, but in the end, the core point
Speaker 1: is that the stuff that we buy and sell isn't
Speaker 1: any more made in the United States, never will be,
Speaker 1: so I wonder. And unions have also been very much
Speaker 1: in the news because of efforts in Alabama to unionize
Speaker 1: parts of Amazon. So I wonder if you just reflect
Speaker 1: on those forces, you know, the global press, which is
Speaker 1: what rid of those quote unquote good jobs, and then
Speaker 1: the unionization, which may be a partial solution, but even
Speaker 1: by your account, doesn't sound like a total solution. It
Speaker 1: sounds like those jobs in the warehouses would still be
Speaker 1: pretty bleak, to use your word, even if they were
Speaker 1: unionized and had better conditions and paid better. If the
Speaker 1: warehouse has got unionized in years to come, it would
Speaker 1: be a really big deal. I do believe it would be.
Speaker 1: It would serve to some degree to kind of term
Speaker 1: the arc of history and a couple notches forward again,
Speaker 1: so that in a place like Sparrows point where you
Speaker 1: now are back to kind of square one, with a
Speaker 1: non unionized workforce working really demanding job pay less than
Speaker 1: what they're owed, with very little say on the job.
Speaker 1: If you could then kind of lift those jobs up
Speaker 1: to something that's supported a more sort of stable middle
Speaker 1: class kind of existence, with some more sense of voice
Speaker 1: and respect and dignity on dignity on a job if
Speaker 1: they if they pull us off. So it really is
Speaker 1: a big deal. I mean, if you absolutely can see,
Speaker 1: um this the spreading to other warehouses. And the fact
Speaker 1: is that as difficult it is to unionize in this
Speaker 1: day and time, and as aggressively as Amazon has fought it,
Speaker 1: the warehouses are actually relatively well suited to unionization in
Speaker 1: a way that too many other forms of our certain
Speaker 1: contemporary work are not. You know, it's it's really hard
Speaker 1: to unionize the gig workers, the uber drivers, that it
Speaker 1: exists outside of kind of a normal employment kind of realm,
Speaker 1: Whereas whereas the warehouses, you've got thousands of people in
Speaker 1: one place, and so you you you could see it
Speaker 1: spreading and that's why, um, you know, it's also not
Speaker 1: inconceivable that Amazon is going to be so worried about
Speaker 1: the spread that there's people who floated the prospect that
Speaker 1: they might shut this place down if it were about yes,
Speaker 1: that that's how that's how much of a threat who
Speaker 1: would be to them for this to become a president,
Speaker 1: and that they would want to do anything possible to
Speaker 1: to just just just quash it. So the stakes really
Speaker 1: are are quite large. But but as for the larger forces,
Speaker 1: this is something that the Amazon talked a lot about
Speaker 1: when I was discussing the book with them, and they said,
Speaker 1: you know, look, these are all these are all larger
Speaker 1: forces at work here that have kind of brought us
Speaker 1: to this point technology globalization, where we just happened to
Speaker 1: be the company that's that's kind of come to fill
Speaker 1: this this slot. And if it wasn't us, some company
Speaker 1: called something else doing what we're doing now, and it
Speaker 1: just happens to be us. And and that's true to
Speaker 1: some extent. But I think there's a tendency among a
Speaker 1: lot of us to kind of especially a lot including
Speaker 1: a lot of like sort of liberal wrong types, to
Speaker 1: kind of often to sort of ascribe too much, to
Speaker 1: sort of grant systemic structural forces and leave personal and
Speaker 1: corporate responsibility out of the picture. I mean, there are
Speaker 1: choices that the company has made over the years that
Speaker 1: have made these Some of these problems especially acute. The
Speaker 1: things that described in the book, the the aggressiveness with
Speaker 1: which the company has from its very founding pursued tax
Speaker 1: avoidance at all different levels. The the extremity of it
Speaker 1: of the demands, the production demands in the warehouses, the
Speaker 1: fact that it has that a further exacerbated regional inequality
Speaker 1: by choosing to put the big second headquarters in the
Speaker 1: richest city in America, Washington, DC, instead of seeing this
Speaker 1: as an opportunity to somehow spread spread the wealth a
Speaker 1: little bit by putting the company in the Saint Louis
Speaker 1: or Cleveland. These are all choices that the company made,
Speaker 1: and so I do think absolutely there are larger structural
Speaker 1: forces at work. In the book is not intended to
Speaker 1: somehow hold the Amazon Singly responsible for everything about the
Speaker 1: way we live and we are today. The company's partly
Speaker 1: is probably, as I said, the outset also an expression,
Speaker 1: a symptom of metaphor first sort of who we are now.
Speaker 1: But it is also partly an explanation and a cause
Speaker 1: We'll be right back. One of the pairings that you
Speaker 1: do a great job of highlighting in the book is
Speaker 1: the Washington, DC, with its tremendous economic growth in recent
Speaker 1: decades versus Baltimore just a short distance away. And you've
Speaker 1: written both for the for the Baltimore Sun and for
Speaker 1: the Washington Post, so you're ideally qualified to write about this.
Speaker 1: And you say that the disparity between the two is
Speaker 1: sort of like their different worlds, which I agree with entirely.
Speaker 1: You also say that it's unprecedented. And I sort of
Speaker 1: wondered about the unprecedented part because I immediately thought of Newark,
Speaker 1: New Jersey, and New York, New York, which I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously, new works a lot smaller than New York,
Speaker 1: but they're pretty darned close together. And you know, Newark
Speaker 1: once had a thriving middle class and then didn't. And
Speaker 1: the disparity is really extraordinary because parts of New York
Speaker 1: are among the poorest places in the United States. Of course,
Speaker 1: so are some parts of New York City itself. Could
Speaker 1: also argue that, you know, East New York, taken as
Speaker 1: its own city, is extraordinarily disparate in its poverty relative
Speaker 1: to the unimaginable wealth of Manhattan, and you know, you
Speaker 1: can almost see one from the other. That's that's how
Speaker 1: close they are to each other. And it made me
Speaker 1: wonder again if this kind of just tremendous wealth disparity
Speaker 1: isn't kind of cooked into capitalism, or cooked into American capitalism,
Speaker 1: and maybe in a certain way long has been. That's
Speaker 1: not to excuse it. You know, it could be just
Speaker 1: as bad if it's been going on all the time.
Speaker 1: I mean, that'd be sort of like saying that, you know,
Speaker 1: racial injustice in the United States today is unpresented. It isn't.
Speaker 1: We've had racial injustice of an even more extreme form
Speaker 1: throughout most of our history. It still makes the irracial
Speaker 1: injustice we have really evil. So it's not that if
Speaker 1: something has been around for a long time that excuses it,
Speaker 1: And I don't mean to be suggesting that it would.
Speaker 1: It just made me wonder about the rich get rich
Speaker 1: or poor get poorer elements that are built into capitalism itself.
Speaker 1: With the small exception of that period in the middle
Speaker 1: of the twenty century, when because of unionization and the
Speaker 1: results of World War two, roughly speaking, in a rapidly
Speaker 1: growing economy, we got something like the burgeoning middle class
Speaker 1: that we now like to think back on as almost
Speaker 1: an idealized moment. I think it is different though, what
Speaker 1: we have now. I think there's something especially stark about
Speaker 1: two having two actual cities of actually quite similar scale
Speaker 1: sitting side by side that are now unrecognizably different prospects
Speaker 1: and prosperity to actual cities that with actual downtowns and
Speaker 1: similar full urban structures of relatively similar weight, much different
Speaker 1: than the New York New York example, which yes, of
Speaker 1: course that's always been a very very stark juxtaposition, but
Speaker 1: it was very much also apple and Oranges, just in
Speaker 1: terms of scale. But to have two cities that where
Speaker 1: not so long ago one was even was actually larger
Speaker 1: than the other. Despite the fact that Washington was that
Speaker 1: was the national capital, Baltimore actually was in some ways
Speaker 1: still more of a quote real city with actual much
Speaker 1: larger population, more more sort of the more of the
Speaker 1: trappings of a real city. You know, it was the
Speaker 1: place you went to see baseball, and there was there
Speaker 1: wasn't even baseball and Washington, DC. And so now to
Speaker 1: have those two cities that had once been a relatively
Speaker 1: similar scale now just be so unrecognizable different to the
Speaker 1: point where I experience a kind of dizziness when I
Speaker 1: go to Washington, DC, that the atmospheric pressure is so
Speaker 1: different between the two cities. It's just it's mind boggling.
Speaker 1: If you've spent you know, a day in DC or
Speaker 1: you're just living there, and then you come take the
Speaker 1: train after forty miles to Baltimore. It takes less than
Speaker 1: an hour, and you get off a train and you're
Speaker 1: in a city like you're It's not like you've just
Speaker 1: come to some outlying neighborhood. You're in a coherent city
Speaker 1: that's been around for a couple of centuries, and with
Speaker 1: all that sort of design of a regular city and
Speaker 1: feel of regular city, except that there are there's something
Speaker 1: wildly different. There's just so much less energy, so many
Speaker 1: fewer people, incredibly lesser wealth. You know, we're home to
Speaker 1: the I keep, you know, in the book, I talk
Speaker 1: a lot about the homes, but the fact that we are,
Speaker 1: that you have one city where where that is experiencing
Speaker 1: a massive affordability crisis, and where we're twenty by one
Speaker 1: serious count, twenty thousand black people have been displaced just
Speaker 1: less a dozen years or so, and where your average
Speaker 1: rowhouse townhouse now costs you know, seven eight nine hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars, if not more, and just up the road
Speaker 1: you we are demolishing by the hundreds um rowhouses that
Speaker 1: were in their day, you know, arguably even nicer than
Speaker 1: the ones that were there. They are so expensive now
Speaker 1: in DC. There's something deeply out of whack about that
Speaker 1: and kind of kind of broken in a way that
Speaker 1: I do think is new in its darkness. I don't
Speaker 1: disagree with your description at all. I think it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's cogent and accurate. Why isn't the takeaway here that
Speaker 1: sort of DC saved itself from the fate of Baltimore.
Speaker 1: I mean, when I read your book, I get a
Speaker 1: sense of almost you know, astonishment that DC became a
Speaker 1: city with industry, right that the old DC didn't really
Speaker 1: have an industry. It had the government, but no one
Speaker 1: was making much money in the government. And DC managed
Speaker 1: to achieve a kind of much higher degree of economic
Speaker 1: vitality in this period. As Baltimore essentially continued to decline.
Speaker 1: It never fell off a cliff, but it continued to
Speaker 1: decline in a pretty steady way. Other than the fact
Speaker 1: of the disparity, which I don't dispute at all. Why
Speaker 1: isn't that actually a happy story for DC, even if
Speaker 1: it's an unhappy story for Baltimore, Because I think you're
Speaker 1: undercounting the costs of the hyper prosperity. I think you're
Speaker 1: undercounting the cost of displacement. I think undercounting the cost
Speaker 1: of the unaffordability. What the book argue is that this
Speaker 1: imbalance is not healthy for either kind of city to
Speaker 1: hap things be this out of whack, That there actually
Speaker 1: is such a thing as a happy middle and that week,
Speaker 1: and that the happy middle has been lost in a
Speaker 1: lot of these places, and that we'd be better off.
Speaker 1: Both sorts of places would be better off if they're
Speaker 1: a little bit closer to that medium, if there was
Speaker 1: a greater balance across the board. This reminds me a
Speaker 1: little bit of the argument you hear on the on
Speaker 1: the flip side, which is you hear in places like
Speaker 1: Baltimore where people people worry about, well, gosh, if we're
Speaker 1: you know, if we're going to if we were to
Speaker 1: get if the Amazon had set up shop here, or
Speaker 1: if if you're if we're going to get this or
Speaker 1: that company here, we're going to be we're going to
Speaker 1: end up with, you know, wild gentrification and unaffordability and
Speaker 1: all that. What that missus is scale if Baltimore, places
Speaker 1: like Baltimore has so much, so much plight, now so
Speaker 1: much capacity to spare one hundred populations that are hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands, blow there, blow their peak, that the situation
Speaker 1: has gone so out of whack that that in fact,
Speaker 1: you could have so much, so much growth and additional
Speaker 1: vitality in a city like the Baltimore, Saint Louis or
Speaker 1: Cleveland before before one's got anywhere close to a real problem.
Speaker 1: And because that that's just how extremes the situation has gone.
Speaker 1: The book argues or not argues, reports shows that that
Speaker 1: what has happened in cities like DC and Seattle, it
Speaker 1: comes with real costs, that the displacement, that the change
Speaker 1: of character in these cities, that political poison has even
Speaker 1: crept in. And I describe in Seattle around the whole
Speaker 1: fight over raising taxes on Amazon to try to deal
Speaker 1: with the house and homelessness problem. I think it's it
Speaker 1: takes a certain level of um. One has to look
Speaker 1: past a lot to believe that what's going on right
Speaker 1: now in places like the Bay Area, in Seattle, in
Speaker 1: New York and DC is all a happy story of
Speaker 1: uplifting prosperity without any serious downsides. Again, I don't mean
Speaker 1: to be saying that suddenly the presence of the very
Speaker 1: rich is always good. Far far from it, just that
Speaker 1: we don't necessarily have an obvious example in the US
Speaker 1: of the happy middle that you're describing. Do you have
Speaker 1: in mind, you know, here's a place where that happy
Speaker 1: middle works, whether it's in the United States or in
Speaker 1: another country. I do. I think there's some places that
Speaker 1: are somewhat gets someone closer to the middle. I would
Speaker 1: say that Philadelphia is somewhat closer to being in that range,
Speaker 1: and obviously all sorts of problems still experiencing them right now,
Speaker 1: horrific regression and violent crime. I would say that that Chicago,
Speaker 1: to some degree have it something closer to the middle.
Speaker 1: There are cities in the Midwest, in the interior of
Speaker 1: the country that have become some of the few successful
Speaker 1: kind of you know, deacons in Middle America, like a Columbus,
Speaker 1: that are but are at risk now of becoming almost
Speaker 1: their own kind of winter. Take all cities in their
Speaker 1: regions where you're seeing enormous disparities kind of growing between
Speaker 1: them and the smaller cities kind of around them in
Speaker 1: their region, but that are still somewhat of a balance
Speaker 1: of prosperity and accessibility right now. Gosh, maybe a Denver
Speaker 1: like I think Denver, it strikes me as a place
Speaker 1: that is managed to be successful without yet becoming a
Speaker 1: completely suffering yet from from the worst effects of hyper prosperity.
Speaker 1: But you really, you do have to, you have to
Speaker 1: look for them. Most places I think of really tend
Speaker 1: to to fall into one or the other. And again,
Speaker 1: it's not that growth is bad. It's not. And I
Speaker 1: guess that's why I get so frustrated when I hear
Speaker 1: people in Baltimore warning about learning about the effects of
Speaker 1: growth in a place that so desperately needs it and
Speaker 1: that can so easily accommodate it. But it's all about scale,
Speaker 1: and there's just there's no question that a place like
Speaker 1: DC has is experiencing effects of a kind of hyper
Speaker 1: prosperity that is going to get even more extreme now
Speaker 1: that you've got twenty five thousand more of these these
Speaker 1: well paying jobs that are going to be coming in
Speaker 1: in the coming years, just billions more invested across the
Speaker 1: river there in Crystal City, and and and that there
Speaker 1: would have been it would have probably been better for
Speaker 1: both sorts of places if that kind of investment had
Speaker 1: had ended up elsewhere. But that's as Amazon sees it,
Speaker 1: that's not how things work. Your book does a really
Speaker 1: extraordinary job of telling the story of bipolar distributions of
Speaker 1: wealth and of opportunity. What do you see as your
Speaker 1: intended audience, because you could imagine it being sort of
Speaker 1: like in the Upton Sinclair tradition, you know, of his
Speaker 1: description of the horror of meat packing plants. You know,
Speaker 1: when he was writing, Sinclair famously said that he was
Speaker 1: he was actually trying to turn people into socialists, but
Speaker 1: instead what he got was food, you know, processing reform.
Speaker 1: But that is a kind of book which was clearly
Speaker 1: intended to make people sit up and take notice and
Speaker 1: do something different as a consequence. And there's another kind
Speaker 1: of reporting that I think is trying to capture the psychegeist,
Speaker 1: you know, say, where we are as a country right now,
Speaker 1: so that when astarians look back, or when we look
Speaker 1: at ourselves in the mirror, we get some sense of
Speaker 1: who we are as a country. If those are sort
Speaker 1: of two poles, you know, the book that's designed reportage
Speaker 1: to draw people's attention to an ill and seek to
Speaker 1: fix it. And a work which could be a work
Speaker 1: of literature effiction or non infiction, that's designed really to
Speaker 1: explain the world to us. Where on that continuum, if
Speaker 1: that is a fair continuum, do you see your own
Speaker 1: book falling. That's a very well described spectrum. And I
Speaker 1: would say somewhere in the middle, to the extent that
Speaker 1: the book seeks some kind of a sinclear like policy correction,
Speaker 1: policy reform, policy answer, you know, implicitly, you know, suggests
Speaker 1: that one way to deal with this regional concentration of
Speaker 1: wealth is to deal with the economic concentration of so
Speaker 1: many sectors of the economy in certain companies, and that
Speaker 1: the book makes an implicit case for an antitrust, for
Speaker 1: a new approach to antitrust, basically by bringing to bear
Speaker 1: the regional element to it, showing that this economic concentration
Speaker 1: that we're now experiencing not only distorts markets in ways
Speaker 1: that are not healthy and that the economists and the
Speaker 1: sharp any trust legal minds are now explaining to us,
Speaker 1: but also has a regional effect and contributes to our
Speaker 1: regional disparities that have been so kind of unhealthy for
Speaker 1: a country and our politics. So it points when in
Speaker 1: that direction in a servemplicit way, But then it also
Speaker 1: definitely was meant to sort of describe who we've become
Speaker 1: as a country, and definitely to have some kind of
Speaker 1: an effect on the general consciousness of what I used
Speaker 1: to I would describe as your average center left, middle
Speaker 1: upper middle class liberal consumer who probably uses Amazon quite
Speaker 1: a lot, has used it even more this past year
Speaker 1: during the pandemic, and probably has not thought all that much,
Speaker 1: you know, about what lies behind the one click. To
Speaker 1: not only get that reader to think more about what
Speaker 1: lies behind the one click in terms of the warehouses
Speaker 1: and the drivers and the cardboard makers that supply chain
Speaker 1: that's that's bringing the box to them, but just to
Speaker 1: get them to think more generally about the country as
Speaker 1: a whole. I have a lot of my reporting the
Speaker 1: last few years has been has been an attempt to
Speaker 1: kind of bridge these disparate worlds that you know, have
Speaker 1: gotten so starkly removed from each other. And I traveled
Speaker 1: between them a lot, and I like to kind of
Speaker 1: bring news of one to the other and and I
Speaker 1: do believe that that that there's a real basic purpose
Speaker 1: served in building empathy or the potential for empathy. And
Speaker 1: I'll say that I have I felt this purpose all
Speaker 1: the more strongly this past year because I have been
Speaker 1: astonished by the the alacrity with which a lot of
Speaker 1: people did embrace the one click life during the past year.
Speaker 1: That's sort of hunkering down um and sealing ourselves off,
Speaker 1: which was of course at the behest of the recommendation
Speaker 1: of our public health authorities. But there was a wholesale
Speaker 1: nature of the embrace, the alacrity of the embrace, and
Speaker 1: the extent to which we may not be willing to
Speaker 1: really to to move on from it now, even as
Speaker 1: as conditions gradually improve. One hope of the book is
Speaker 1: that it will help to to get us to re
Speaker 1: engage somewhat in the physical world around us and the
Speaker 1: world of our of the places we live, our communities,
Speaker 1: not just you know, not just in terms of using
Speaker 1: local businesses, returning to the physical world around us in
Speaker 1: all of its forms, whether it's you know, a theater
Speaker 1: or you know, just getting out of getting back out
Speaker 1: of our homes and into physical world, showing the sort
Speaker 1: of the cost of going full digital, of going full
Speaker 1: one click, of isolating ourselves and becoming people who please
Speaker 1: sit the computer and seagull our fulfillment online and then
Speaker 1: get our wishes delivered in the box on that lands
Speaker 1: on the porch of the stew I mean, I'm squarely
Speaker 1: in that target audience, I will say. I mean I
Speaker 1: was somebody who you know, it's not that I never
Speaker 1: used Amazon before, but I made a point of always
Speaker 1: shopping at my local bookshop and shopping at my local
Speaker 1: grocery store and not even the big box, you know.
Speaker 1: And and then you know, COVID simply had the effect of,
Speaker 1: you know, making us change the calculus. I mean, these
Speaker 1: moment to moment decisions have I think defaulted us somewhat rationally,
Speaker 1: as you say, to the convenience structure of Amazon. So
Speaker 1: you know, I share profoundly your wish for us to
Speaker 1: re engage with the world, but I also under you know,
Speaker 1: what this last year would have been like if there
Speaker 1: hadn't been that default option. I mean, yes, there are
Speaker 1: things we didn't absolutely need. You know, I know lots
Speaker 1: of people who grew beard. You know, we don't need
Speaker 1: to you know, we don't need to buy daving cream,
Speaker 1: and you know, maybe it would. It's perfectly reasonable to
Speaker 1: wait weeks or months for a book to come rather
Speaker 1: than to have the book come quickly. So it's not
Speaker 1: that I'm claiming that these consumer creature comforts are somehow
Speaker 1: my inborn right there aren't. They're not anybody's. But I
Speaker 1: do think that in a way Amazon has entered into
Speaker 1: our consciousnesses in the last year, in a way that is,
Speaker 1: as you say, genuinely transformative. And I guess my last
Speaker 1: question for you is what is the route back? I mean,
Speaker 1: raising people's consciousness is good, and I definitely had the
Speaker 1: experience in reading your book of thinking listen, don't just order,
Speaker 1: think about the supply chain engage. And I have been
Speaker 1: thinking about that since I read the book. But I
Speaker 1: also have to admit to myself that I still haven't stopped,
Speaker 1: as a consequence, from clicking the button rather than going
Speaker 1: to the to the brick and mortar store, at least
Speaker 1: at this stage in the pandemic. So how do you
Speaker 1: think about that transformation of action in relationship to the
Speaker 1: change in consciousness. Well, I would hope that that as
Speaker 1: more time goes on and as conditions further improved that
Speaker 1: someone like you would be more likely to actually get
Speaker 1: back out of the house and to think harder about it.
Speaker 1: I do, like I said before, I do believe that
Speaker 1: we all have agency, and I'm not I'm not absolutist
Speaker 1: about this. I using Amazon when I have to sort
Speaker 1: of a last resort thing. But it's all about moderation.
Speaker 1: It's all about again, it's about scale. It's not all
Speaker 1: all or nothing. It's it's the degree to which to
Speaker 1: which we do things. There's there's it's a spectrum and
Speaker 1: to the point about how things would have been without
Speaker 1: them without What that supposes, I think is that things
Speaker 1: might have been actually, you know, somehow vastly worse if
Speaker 1: we had to go out out of the house to
Speaker 1: fill our basic needs. I think what that also overlooks
Speaker 1: is the fact that while we were doing this, living
Speaker 1: in this way, we were of course relying and you
Speaker 1: were you were relying on a whole lot of people
Speaker 1: who did not have the benefit that you did of
Speaker 1: staying home and ordering your shaving cream in. There were
Speaker 1: people who there were people who are bringing that to you, yes,
Speaker 1: and this book is about those people, but it's mostly
Speaker 1: directed at the people who were who were ordering a
Speaker 1: shaving cream, and it's and it's sort of showing you
Speaker 1: the whole world of all those people who all along
Speaker 1: we're in the warehouses, whether the person nexts them in
Speaker 1: COVID and so this, yes, this book is about what
Speaker 1: was happening this past year, well all of us were
Speaker 1: ordering our shaving cream online. Thank you for the thoughtful
Speaker 1: conversation and for the extremely thought provoking a book and
Speaker 1: very beautifully written and engaging. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Reading Fulfillment and listening to Alec McGillis was a rich
Speaker 1: and a fascinating experience that affected me both emotionally and intellectually.
Speaker 1: I will just tell you you couldn't read a book
Speaker 1: like this and have a heart and not be affected
Speaker 1: by the powerful stories of individuals who take a job
Speaker 1: in an Amazon warehouse because it's the only job that's
Speaker 1: available to them and in some cases even seem to
Speaker 1: cross the boundary of what we would like to think
Speaker 1: of as just working conditions in a country like the
Speaker 1: United States that is, on the whole, a well off
Speaker 1: country in the world. To read these stories is therefore
Speaker 1: to appreciate the tremendous good fortune of those of us
Speaker 1: who are able to click the Amazon button to order
Speaker 1: products rather than to have to do the heavy lifting
Speaker 1: literally in many cases, of getting those products out of
Speaker 1: their warehouses and to us as the people who are consumers.
Speaker 1: At the same time, the book emphasizes the tremendous wealth
Speaker 1: gap that has emerged regionally and between different cities, and
Speaker 1: that in turn raises a problem that is more than emotional,
Speaker 1: that is also intellectual, and a question about how power
Speaker 1: should be distributed in our society. The book and the
Speaker 1: conversation made me think more seriously than I had before
Speaker 1: about the question of whether it's okay or not that
Speaker 1: some places are getting very, very rich as other places
Speaker 1: are getting very poor. Notice that that's a slightly different
Speaker 1: question than wealth disparities between individuals. When it comes to
Speaker 1: wealth disparities between places, we're talking about whole ecosystems that
Speaker 1: manage to rise through the advantages of attracting people who
Speaker 1: can earn a lot of money, and that create with
Speaker 1: that rise, real forms of displacement and challenge for people
Speaker 1: who have traditionally lived in those communities. Meanwhile, there are
Speaker 1: other communities that fail to benefit from the newly emerging economy,
Speaker 1: and those places end up getting poorer. Should we be
Speaker 1: designing our country, Should we be designing our political institutions
Speaker 1: in such a way as to enhance the equality between
Speaker 1: geographical areas. This is a very challenging policy question, one
Speaker 1: which I do not purport to be able to answer myself,
Speaker 1: and one that, to be fair, Alec McGillis himself does
Speaker 1: not fully take on in fulfillment. He wants us to
Speaker 1: ask that question and to feel that question, and he
Speaker 1: has an implicit answer, which is that we ought to
Speaker 1: do things differently without giving us a detailed analysis of
Speaker 1: what we actually should be doing differently. And that's certainly fine.
Speaker 1: It's a lot to ask of any book that it
Speaker 1: both tell the story of our times and tell us
Speaker 1: what we ought to be doing differently. In the conversation
Speaker 1: that we had, Alec made the point that there were
Speaker 1: individual decisions at the level of agency of the corporation
Speaker 1: that Amazon might have done that might have spread the
Speaker 1: well to a greater degree. But even had Amazon taken
Speaker 1: those decisions, there's no question that one company alone could
Speaker 1: not have reversed the very substantial differences in distribution that
Speaker 1: exists geographically in the country. With respect to wealth. Power
Speaker 1: to make decisions like that comes from a wide range
Speaker 1: of different factors. It includes the incentives that local governments
Speaker 1: are prepared to provide. It includes the path dependent developments
Speaker 1: of different regions based on the educational institutions they have,
Speaker 1: based on who ends up living there. And it has
Speaker 1: to do as well with the very complex policy decisions
Speaker 1: governing real estate, infrastructure, and indeed the history of the
Speaker 1: United States going back centuries. I hope you'll read Fulfillment,
Speaker 1: not because it has all the answers, but because it
Speaker 1: deepens the questions that we ought to be asking around
Speaker 1: the distribution of power by geography and wealth in the
Speaker 1: United States today. Until the next time I speak to you,
Speaker 1: be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep background is
Speaker 1: brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mo Laboard,
Speaker 1: our engineer is Martin Gonzalez, and our shore runner is
Speaker 1: Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music
Speaker 1: by Luis Skerra at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia,
Speaker 1: Jean Coott, Heather Fain, Carl mcliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler,
Speaker 1: and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at
Speaker 1: Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion,
Speaker 1: which you can find at bloomberg dot com slash Feldman.
Speaker 1: To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg
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