Felicia Wong is the president and chief executive officer of the Roosevelt Institute, a New York-based think tank and campus network, and the co-author of The Hidden Rules of Race: Barriers to an Inclusive Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
The Roosevelt Institute, founded in 1939 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is the nonprofit partner of the Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York, the first U.S. presidential library. The institute today is a think tank for progressive economic policy ideas and runs the nation’s largest student policy network on college campuses.
Wong grew up in California and says her politics were shaped in part by her parents’ lives and experiences. Her father, Ed Wong, grew up in Augusta, Georgia, in the Jim Crow South. At that time, Chinese Americans lived on the black side of the railroad tracks, but were considered “honorary white” for the purposes of schooling.
Wong’s mother, artist and poet Flo Oy Wong, grew up in Oakland’s Chinatown. Her mother’s mixed-media assemblages have addressed the experiences of Chinese immigrants entering the country through California’s Angel Island, and the often buried history of Japanese Americans in U.S. internment camps during World War II.
We spoke by telephone in early March, before the full effects of the coronavirus pandemic were being felt, and continued our conversation via email later in the month.
Q: Let’s start by talking about Franklin Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights, which he delivered in the State of the Union Address in January 1944. Bernie Sanders has called it one of the most important speeches ever made by a President.
Wong: I think it’s really important that the Economic Bill of Rights is coming back into our politics. I think Sanders is not the only person invoking the idea that we need both equity and rights, and those rights must be more than civil, more than social. They also must be economic, and in fact all those three things go together.
Q: How did we get away from that notion of government as the provider of economic rights to its citizens?
Wong: In a word, neoliberalism. We got away from this notion of true freedom including economic freedom, and the neoliberal turn in our politics was a very big part of that. Neoliberalism is this idea that only the market can bring freedom, and only the market and not government can provide choice. So you must therefore get government “out of the way” in order to let the market function properly.
In some ways, you can date it to the 1980s. You can date it to the 1940s, if you want to. You can certainly date it to 1964, with the failed but in some ways successful Goldwater campaign. Or the 1970s and the tax revolution in California whereby property owners—white, older property owners—successfully argued that they were being strangled by property taxation. That led to lowering those taxes, which really lowered school and transportation and other kinds of revenues that are essential for a well-functioning democracy.
The idea that economic rights are human rights and that those things are essential to human flourishing really was severed intellectually starting in the 1940s. It continued through the 1970s and 1980s with the advent of the Chicago school of economics, and came into political power in the 1980s in the United States with [Ronald] Reagan and in the United Kingdom with [Margaret] Thatcher.
Q: So this idea of economic rights as human rights is very much a part of our democratic history, and yet also has been kind of severed from it. What do you see today as the main factors promoting and perpetuating income inequality in America?
Wong: There are a lot of policy choices that we made starting in the 1970s and 1980s and continue to make today that drive economic inequality. But I think it’s important to take a step back from the policy choices. What makes us think a policy choice to lower taxation, to deregulate banking, or to loosen some of the regulations put forward on “medium sized banks” by Dodd-Frank, et cetera, are the right choices? To me, you have to go back to our worldview.
So the Roosevelt Institute’s day-to-day mission is actually to change the way that people think about the economy, and therefore to change the way we think about what’s possible economically.
Neoliberals argue that the economy is driven by “free markets.” We know empirically now that a healthy economy is not driven by those kinds of markets. The economy is shaped by choices. It’s shaped by institutions. It’s shaped by the rules that structure our markets. Our rules determine who benefits or who loses in a changing and dynamic economy. We have to look at how we structure those rules.
So it’s not about rules “getting out of the way.” Those rules never did get out of the way. They just ended up ensuring that powerful companies could take more market share and be more powerful. They ensure that rich people could become super-rich. It’s about making those rules more visible so we can begin to understand what is driving this kind of radical inequality of income and of wealth that we see today.
How we think about the economy is an important foundational starting point.
Q: How should we think about the economy?
Wong: You have to look at our economic policies, and our democracy policies. I’ll name just a few that are really toxic.
The first is definitely tax policy. We have seen taxation on the super-rich, like wealth taxation, go down radically since FDR’s day and even since Eisenhower. We have seen corporate taxation reduced significantly. We’ve seen individual income taxes come down. We’ve also seen this plethora of tax havens, corporations stashing profits away from taxes overseas.
The second element of policy focuses squarely on race and gender. We have had a number of rules, since well before neoliberalism. Going all the way back to the days of enslaving people of African descent, we have excluded some people from the labor market, from earning living wages, and ultimately, from accumulating wealth and capital in a system that privileges wealth and capital.
We’ve defined economic participation according to identities and, in the case I just mentioned, race. We’ve also, since the beginning of American history, asked women to do labor and not compensated them for it, and not given them legal rights to property, to contracts, to have a credit card, et cetera.
Many of these laws have been changed now but their effects still linger. This is why you see such radical inequality by race and by gender. We have had rules that excluded people and we now need rules that include people.
Then I think the third thing is the way our democracy works in and of itself. We have a system whereby political rule-writing is dominated by the wealthy and a few corporations who can afford massive lobbying, whether it’s through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or through other kinds of associations, trade associations, the real estate lobby, the oil and gas lobby, or individual companies.
The super-rich have far greater access to politics than ordinary people do, and corporations and corporate lobbyists win the vast preponderance of any policy fights. And they’re able to write rules, whether it’s minimum wage rules, or rules about regulating pollution. They can write rules that benefit them and are literally anti-democratic in that they do not reflect the will of the majority of Americans.
Q: Given the landscape we’re in, what are some changes that we can implement to address those inequalities?
Wong: The critiques actually suggest their own solutions. To take that tax policy example, you can raise taxes on the wealthy. You see more calls for that in today’s political environment, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders having done the best job of making arguments for taxing the super-rich. We need wealth taxation, increasing corporate taxation, and international and trade agreements that focus on closing international tax havens.
With respect to affirmative inclusion, we need to make sure people are included by race and by gender in the labor market and in the ability to gain and accumulate wealth. One set of new ideas is childhood trusts or baby bonds. This idea that all children should be given some modest amount of capital at birth and that capital would accumulate until they’re eighteen. Property, of course, is the primary way we accumulate wealth.
Finally, we’ve got to look at the anti-corruption proposals that Roosevelt put out and Warren has put out. Reversing Citizens United, and closing those revolving-door loopholes to ensure that people in public jobs actually work for the public. It’s important to appoint people to those jobs who have demonstrated a fidelity to more egalitarian policies, which are publicly popular. These ideas are popular not just with Democrats but also with Republicans and independents.
Q: What about reparations as a way of addressing some of this historical racial income inequality?
Wong: Absolutely. Reparations are a really important part of our politics and our policy. It’s important to calculate, and to debate how to calculate, the cost to descendants of enslaved people, and to our nation as a whole. Imagining that enslaving an entire race of human beings for hundreds of years is cost-free 150 years after Emancipation is naïve. So really reckoning with those costs, economic and human, is a critical part of our thinking about economics. It’s also fundamentally important to think about the cost to our politics.
And this idea of battling for the soul of progressivism. Sometimes you’re battling for the soul of the Democratic Party. That’s kind of the framework you see out there these days.
But one way to battle for the soul of our nation is to recognize the immense and enormous cost of slavery to black Americans, to white Americans, to Americans of all races. Reparations play an enormous part in that conversation.
I recognize we’re going to see enormous white patriarchal backlash from even suggesting that we have that conversation. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, you need the courage to “do the thing you think you cannot do.” I think America needs the courage to have this conversation if we’re legitimately going to begin to heal.
Q: In what ways are the impacts of economic inequality highlighted and exacerbated by the current crisis we are experiencing with the COVID-19 pandemic?
Wong: The current public health and economy crisis lays bare the deep inequalities that are already endemic to our society. Everyone is, of course, frightened by the virus itself. The times are extraordinarily stressful for all. But many wealthier people can isolate, while low-income workers—often people of color, new immigrants, women, people in the retail or health care or caregiving sectors—need to keep taking public transportation or physically showing up for work. And the first people to be laid off in the case of a demand shortfall are usually the lowest paid employees.
The good news is that we can do something about this. The federal government can absolutely afford to provide cash backstops—at least $1,000 per person—to those in need. We can mandate paid sick leave for all workers. We can extend unemployment insurance benefits. We can expand health insurance coverage and put in motion public production of basic medicines. In fact, given the amount of wealth in this country that could be put to better public use, we can’t afford not to do these things.
The COVID-19 crisis shows that we are all equal—equally vulnerable to illness, and part of an inextricably connected society. Our economics can and must reflect this reality. υ