Slate Money - Money Talks: The Zero-sum Mistake

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2:02I was thinking the other day about what I'd tell myself on day one of starting this journey. I'd probably say, hey, maybe spend a little less time obsessing over the font on your business cards and a little more time on your infrastructure. When you're starting out, you try to save money everywhere. You use your personal data plan, you hop on whatever Wi-Fi is around, but eventually you hit a turning point. You realize that your business is only as strong as your connection to your customers. I wish I'd prioritized a provider like AT&T Business from the start. They're built specifically for small businesses, for people who have too many tasks and not enough hours in the day. Having a connection you can actually trust makes the whole day feel a little later. It's one less fire you have to put out. powered by AT&T Business, built to work. Get AT&T Business at business.att.com. Hello and welcome to Money Talks. I'm your host Elizabeth Spires and today I'm joined by Roy Swan. And we're here to talk about a bookie wrote called Positive Sum, How Zero Sum Thinking Broke Capitalism, and How We Can Fix It.

3:06Roy, welcome. Thank you Elizabeth. Really please be here. Thanks for inviting me. So introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the book. Yes, I am the inaugural director of Mission Investments at the Ford Foundation, where I was hired to help launch the foundations foray into impact investing through its endowment capital. So that's about a billion in commitment, exactly a billion in commitment. And then another 450 or so in other forms of investment capital. The goal was really to figure out whether we could generate strong positive social impacts alongside the appropriate financial returns required for a perpetual foundation and so far so good. So your background is really banking and then you went into the nonprofit sector. How do you think about the incentives as being different? So when you talk about being able to run an impact

4:10investing firm that actually generates returns in a way that kind of acceptable to donors in the market, how are these two things different in terms of people's expectations? Yeah, my background is pretty varied. So I've done investment banking, law, direct investments, I've worked in the nonprofit sector, the quasi government sector. And what I'd say for the foundation world is there's been at least a 30 year debate around what is the role of a foundation with respect to the use of its resources. And there was an old joke, you know, what's a charitable foundation? It's a private investment club that gives away money as a hobby. The legal requirement for foundations is that they use 5% of their resources every year. It's called the spend rate. And you have to use a minimum of 5% for charitable purposes aligned with your mission. Typically, an investment office would consider it's job to be maximizing financial returns

5:15understandably because they'd like look the more financial returns returnary, the more grant making we can do because the bigger are endowment. But the role of impact investing is to invest with both positive and negative externalities in mind. And externalities I can get caught up in terminology that may not be familiar. And externality is simply an outcome or consequence of a business's operations that don't necessarily accrue to shareholders or could be dumped on society. So the old fashioned topic is pollution. So if you're a company that pollutes, it's hard to track pollution. So your shareholders don't have to pay for it. The cost goes to society and taxpayers. So the big incentive for foundations in my job is to prove that you can generate great financial returns and positive social impact. Yeah. And you know, I think it's not always intuitive to people who are outside of the foundation, you know, foundation space that this is how it works because I

6:19think, you know, they just look at the numbers and they see a giant endowment and then payouts that are, you know, 5% minimum. But that's not a cap. But you still see relatively smaller payments going out and people who've had any interaction with the grant making process know it's, you know, it's kind of slow, it's a little cumbersome, it's risk averse. So in certain ways, when you talk about mission-lined investing, I think to lay people, they sort of think, well, isn't the foundation itself mission driven, you know, why would the investment arm have such a radically different reason that then the grant making operation? How do you explain that to people who are not sort of in the industry? Yeah. Gosh, boy, you've really hit a couple of very important points. One is that the 5% is a minimum and you're right, it's been treated by many as a cap. I was speaking with a friend today and he mentioned the term MGI, which stands for most generous interpretation. So

7:23if I look at it like you can say that, well, if you're a perpetual foundation, you want the foundation to live forever. So the discipline the approach might be to limit, you know, to use the 5% as a cap because in order to make a foundation live forever, it's a really high financial bar. It is the spend rate plus inflation and today that's like 9.5%. That's it's hard to make that kind of money over the long term. So in the most generous view, it would be a discipline, the approach you want to be able to help organizations for a long time forever for your perpetual foundation. The best explanation is look, we want to do the best we can for society, the investment office is there to make a lot of money so we can take care of a bunch of nonprofits, make our charitable contributions all around the world depending upon what our focus is. The harder question is the second one you raised, which is how do you explain the people that not all of the foundation's resources are

8:25dedicated to their mission? I guess I could say that a couple of foundations got tired of answering that question and they decided that oh, we're just going to dedicate all our resources. FB Heron back in 96, the chair of the board then started asking the question and there were two people who really translated the words into action and that's Luther Reagan who got FB Heron started on the journey towards 100% of their resources being dedicated to mission, both the investment and grant make and then Clara Miller took it from Luther Reagan's sort of 40% start. She kind of rounded it out to 100%. Nathan Cummings Foundation has announced 100% and they're well underway, 100% mission. The California Endowment is now the largest foundation with that commitment. It had been the Ford Foundation when I joined. We committed to a billion. The California Endowment I think has close to 4 billion endowment. Another foundation, Mcnight Foundation has done a spectacular job

9:28of ramping up. So it's becoming harder and harder to explain. I think Darren Walker had a quote, something like he could no longer justify dedicating just 5% of resources to charitable mission. So it's an ongoing conversation. Just to pull out a little bit to the larger thesis of your book. Your top line kind of short version is that we live in a capitalistic system where people they tend to think about making money as kind of a zero sum game. And I think that is maybe at its nature now because of the political environment we're in. We have a president who tariffs or his favorite economic weapon. And so he thinks of that as a scenario where if the US is imposing tariffs on other countries, we're always winning. It's just built into the culture. So it feels like you're publishing this book at a time when you're a little bit rolling the boulder up the hill culturally. How do you talk about it in that context? Well, what I have learned through my experiences in life

10:32largely, form of years of university and law school, what I learned back then versus what I learned later in life is that we weren't taught the full story. There was a very significant amount of abridgment. And again, I'm going to use this MGI, most generous interpretation. And let's assume that whoever was doing the abridging thought they were doing the right thing. So whoever put out the abridged version of Adam Smith that many of us were taught in economics class decided to hone in on the invisible hand, which was mentioned, I think, a grand total of once in the two books that Adam Smith wrote versus the impartial spectator, which I had not heard of until I've read both books about six years ago, or maybe it's three years ago, I don't remember. And what I found by reading the two books, I remembered somewhere that Adam Smith had written this book called The Theorem Moral Sentiments. And it just kind of stuck in my crown like, why would a guy who wrote a book

11:33called The Theorem Moral Sentiments support the notion of an amoral form of capitalism where ethics don't matter. It's just like, you know, invisible hand and self-regulated, etc. And that curiosity was satisfied when I read both books. And I realized he actually didn't say that. He said that, you know, healthy in order to have a healthy economic system, it needs to be founded upon morals, ethics, charity, treating workers well, and very importantly, keeping business out of the business of regulation and just having them follow the regulations. And he had a whole view on tax payments and progressive tax, the other thing that I found to be a curiosity was the whole Milton Friedman shareholder primacy topic. And that's the shareholder primacy just means the only thing that matters is the shareholders and nothing else matters, etc. The basis of that belief, I will take some blame for that because when I was assigned that essay, it's only 3,000 words, but it fell into the category of

12:36what I call assigned but not read. So I read the headline and thought I knew the punchline. And the headline title was the social responsibility of businesses to increase its profits. But if you read the essay, it's all about stakeholder capitalism, which says that, you know, Johnson and Johnson Credo says it nicely. It's about the, they call them the patients, the employees, the vendors, the communities. And if you do all those, if you take care of all those entities and people, the shareholders will do well. And that's essentially what Milton Friedman was saying in that famous essay, he's saying, of course you're going to take care of workers and of course you're going to take care of the community. That's not social responsibility. That's called enlightened self-interest. So anyway, between that and the other sort of 100 plus books I've read is in preparation for writing this book, I just learned so much that helped me understand that much of our education,

13:38you know, possibly unintentionally was just wrong. Well, I just think, you know, regardless of education, 99% of the people are very absolute views about shareholder primacy. You know, I have it read Smith or Friedman anyway. They sort of have an idea of what it means. And that idea is so prevalent. It is the hegemonic idea of what capitalism exists to do. This is being particularly embraced by I think Silicon Valley in the sense that, you know, you have high profile figures like Elon Musk or Peter Teal who argue for monopoly and, you know, shareholder value at the expense of everything else. And openly push back on things like DI programs and now ESG. How do you kind of reconcile what you're trying to promote in the context of the fact that everything is sort of working against you culturally? That accepted idea of shareholder primacy is so dominant. How do you convince people? Yeah. That's not what it means. They're probably not going to go back and read

14:39all of Adam Smith. No, and I read 140 books so others don't have to read them. And I presented the information in what I hope is a fun way and entertaining way and inspiring way and a truthful and objective way. One of the fun things about doing research is I kind of became a much more aware. I'm not going to call myself an expert by any stretch, but, you know, I dug into anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, economics, a little bit of math and policy. And what I learned was if you just look at human nature and neuroscience and psychology, the most primitive position of human nature is to protect oneself and one's tribe. And so there was a time when we were living alone, shivering in caves where everything that moved that wasn't a part of your little circle was an enemy, a potential enemy, it was a predator. And so your defense mechanisms and sometimes your attack mechanism were activated. In order to go from those caves to villages and towns and cities

15:44and sprawling metabolism, we had to evolve and suppress some of those kind of natural instincts of tribalism and self-preservation and understand that we're all better off when we're all better off. I have to saying we all win when we all win. And so cities sprung up because we understood the collaboration was the way to a great thriving, prosperous civilization. So the way I see it is there's room for evolution for people to learn that something is basic as we're better off when we have empathy and when we're all a part of the team and we all have ownership in society. Pete Stabros of KKR is kind of, I guess in some sense, maybe at the opposite end of some other views, which is he found that advancing ownership of everyone in a company from receptionist to the C-suite plus when the C-suite has high levels of empathy, that is the most profitable combination

16:47for business performance. It's not theory, he's lived it. So I believe that's true. Now in terms of people wanting monopolies, I mean look, I don't make judgments around what people see is the best way for them to make money, but that's what regulations for. Everyone knows that monopolies, I mean, I imagine most people who know anything about business know that a monopoly is a great way to maximize your profits, but that's the whole point of law and regulation. So that's our job as voters, it's the job of policymakers and elected officials to put guardrails that create limits for business. I mean, that's, it's a natural tension. I think there are plenty of empirical research to back up a lot of what you're saying or what you're advocating for in terms of collaborative activity, but it's sometimes it's hard to make that argument, particularly when you look at the dynamics of who has power and who doesn't. You know, you talk very early in the book about, you sketch out what's slightly a sort of prisoner's limit situation where people are better off if they collaborate, but if they defect, they can run away with all the spoils. And one of the things

17:52that kind of strikes me about that situation is when you have that dynamic, it's sort of a trust game. You have to be able to come back to the negotiating table over and over again and trust the other party, but the other thing that I think gives me pause about the whole situation is that you also need some mechanism for accountability to keep that trust in place. So right now when you're you're sort of let's say you're giving this talk to the CEO of a major company and they're looking around them and they're saying, well, you know, the biggest oligarchs in the country aren't doing any of this. They don't take import, empathy is important. They're rolling back the I, they don't really care about the calculus of what empathy could, you know, bring them in terms of even profits. What are the sort of arguments that you pull out then, especially to people if you like the tide is just, you know, moving against them? Yeah, I think one fundamental principle of communicating is understanding what resonates with people and one thing that we know from the research is that

18:57narratives matter more than data. We know that we know that the way to change behavior is through convincing communication and it doesn't necessarily have to do with truth or or falsehood. So the challenge before me, and part of the reason why I wrote the book is it's an attempt to create a narrative that would be interesting and inspiring to people and I understand it it takes time to change hearts and minds. There's also within the narrative the evidence base and if you point to people who are respected by their peers, all we can do is do our best and hope that people change and just show how everyone can be better off. You know, there are Nobel prize winners including most recently, Darren, Asimoglu and James Robbins who wrote the book, Why Nations Fail and they're trying to do the same thing. They're trying to convince people through evidence, through interesting stories that inclusivity is more profitable than exclusivity.

19:59The problem is the idea that some people would prefer to have less as long as they have much more than someone else and that's one of those situations of economic irrationality and psychological rationality. So something can be rational and irrational at the same time depending upon the lens. And that's just hard. Edward Bernays wrote a book called Propaganda that book talks about the power of messages and cheerful persistence and that's the best I can do and I hope others will join. And we'll be back to talk more about that with Roy Swan right after this. You know what happened to me? I was sitting at my desk at home working, reading something,

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23:14Watch Hydrojug's story at advertising.amazon.com slash rising dash stars. How do you think about where, for example, people in the non-profit sector and I'm including not just foundations, but charities, churches, what we call kind of third area organizations. How do you think about where those organizations sit in terms of changing this culture where people do believe that everything is zero sum? You know, one of the most moving parts of your book is when you talk about your involvement as a preacher's kid and how churches that you were involved with looked at the legacy of slavery and then went back and kind of thought about how to do restorative things that would help heal that kind of thing. And particularly in the current environment, I think about I grew up Southern Baptist, white evangelical Southern Baptist. And I see the opposite thing in that church, you know, in the way that they attack particularly policy problems and economic problems. They've really embraced the kind of Reagan era bootstrapping and you know,

24:18you're responsible for your own welfare and helping vulnerable populations as become something that is considered a borderline irresponsible. You know, and that filters into policy, it filters into culture and it filters in the way that people think about charity too. So where do you see the bright spots? There are things like the church that you were involved in, where you feel like you're not always fighting against that idea. You know, history is the story of swings in fused, what are accepted truths, moral norms, et cetera. If you look back at history, you'll see that when change occurs, it is typically through a small group of people that then creates a larger group of people that creates a movement and that movement continues to push the boulder uphill until they reach flat ground. And that's where we are right now. Sometimes the pendulum swings so

25:19far into one extreme, their events that occur, where let's just say a leader that you trusted turns out to be something other than what you expected. And when you reach a point where even for those who would rather have less overall as long as someone has less than them, even they will have a line in the sand. And you don't know when those moments are going to occur. You can't time them. So what's very important is the approach that Lewis Powell took when he crafted the Pal MMO. You should explain really quickly what the Lewis Powell memo is. Yeah. Lewis Powell memo, it's really a brilliant work describing the perception that labor that is everyday workers, students, the media, and others were attacking the American enterprise system and presenting our own fellow Americans or people in America as the enemy and then taking sort of a military intelligence

26:27approach, which was we have to destroy the enemy from within. Keeping in mind that these are workers are just trying to, they're just trying to put food in the table for their families are trying to make ends meet. And they wanted to be paid for their work. There's a period of time when students disagreed with some of the strategic national security direction. You know, at the time it was the Vietnam War. And a lot of students, they didn't want to be drafted. They, you know, look, I'm all about national security, but you know, that doesn't mean everyone needs to agree with me. What Lewis Powell said was we need to identify and essentially destroy workers, power, student power, capture the media, take over politics, etc. And the brilliant thing about it was he had a long-term view. And he said, let's collect our forces, our intellectual forces, most importantly our economic capital. Let's pool everything and let's just go after these folks. It's going to take a long time, but let's be patient. We'll get it done. That's an example of zero

27:32some thinking. They have to lose in order for me to win. So why not try the opposite way? And that's what I'd like to do. I mean, I'm like, okay, that's zero. So this is positive. Some, let's just, let's get to work. I hope to have another 30 or 40 years of productive work ahead of me. And I'm happy to keep pushing that boulder. And I want others to join. And yeah, let's just pull our resources and think about how we can make everyone better off. Well, you're definitely not going to run out of work. That's for sure. It powered me. My was early 70s, right? 72 or there. I think it was 70 or 71. I always forget. I get that confused with the Friedman essay. So 70 or 71. Yeah, I was just thinking the Richard Hofstetter book, anti-intellectualism in American life came out a few years before that. And it had a critique in there about American business schools, which were just sort of starting to be a thing. And some of the elites were worried about them because they were concerned that if people became more educated about how businesses work, they might take the side of labor. Now it seems

28:35like we do live in a world where Powell sort of got what he wanted. We have a culture that really valorizes people who have been financially successful in a way it certainly doesn't labor. So well said. Yeah. I take a lot of my views on collective action of the nation and the idea of how the greater the prosperity of an overall nation, the more powerful the national security, the stronger democracy. I take it back to, I'm going to say Peter Drucker, who became known as one of the top sort of management gurus, but he started out as kind of an economist. And his first book is just it's stunning that this was his first book. It's called The End of Economic Man. And he wrote that book when he was about 24 years old and he couldn't get a publisher to publish it because they thought some of his views were outlandish. One of the things he was talking about was he was predicting the Holocaust in the early 1930s. They finally published the book and I think

29:4138 or something like that. But one of the things that Drucker found was that the rise of Hitler was made possible through economic alienation and economic distress. His view was it would lead to authoritarianism, potentially totalitarianism because people when they're under economic distress are just looking for a savior. And what Lewis Kelsso said, Lewis Kelsso created, he's the inventor of the Employees' Doc ownership plan. What he said, and I became obsessed with Kelsso when I was in college because I like the idea, I like his idea, his fundamental idea was in order to strengthen capitalism, everyone needs to have a piece of the pie. And he said, let's just make all workers owners because once you make all workers owners, we're all a capitalist and we're all going to, you know, we're all a team, we're all rising together. And that's what Pete Stavros at KKR, Pete Stavros' broad based employee ownership approach is the most successful investment strategy

30:45and KKR's 50 year history. It's when everyone from the receptionist to the CEO is an owner, we're all rowing together. Everyone's coming up with innovations to make the company better, everyone's productive. What Pete found was among those superior performers, there was another cut of companies that were even better than the average of those, and those were the companies where there was empathy and deceit. So it doesn't get more beautiful than that to me. It's like, everyone's got a piece of the pie, people care about each other, everyone's rowing together, you've got a more resilient company, you've got lower attrition, and just greater happiness. So what's not to like about that? Yeah, I think of, you sort of explain these ideas in theory and everybody nods and goes, yes, that makes total sense to me. But then in practice, you see these kind of, if you're going to talk about employee stock option plans, I know from your book that your dad was, you know, as mine was too, he was a local lineman for Alabama Power, and they had a great employee, well, started out great employee stock option plan where they would match, you know,

31:50contributions, but it was, the match was so high that employees really were discouraged from putting money anywhere else. And then when the company had problems, it affected everyone. And I think about, you know, when you talk about empathy and the cease-weat, what does that mean to a worker? You know, how is it measured? What does it translate to on the ground for people who work in those companies? Yeah, that's, you know, that question reminds me of a story that I cut from my book. And that was when my dad was made a foreman at General Motors. It was a dream for him because it meant he'd be bringing home a little more money for the family. My dad typically had two, three jobs and so every little bit helped. And then he was relieved of his form and role several months later. And the reason why he was relieved of his role is because he wasn't yelling, he wasn't using exploatives, he was being too nice to the workers. And they'd give him my dad a

32:51couple warnings. And he said, well, there actually people were working better. It's they're showing up me on and on. Why do I need to behave that way? No, that's just the way we do it around here. And he was relieved. And he was, I can write, he was hard. It was one of the few times I saw my dad a little crestfallen because he thought he had let us down. But that's partly it, right? It is, I doubt you're old enough to remember. There's this guy named Chainsaw Al Dunlap who in the 80s. I think I was I was a child, but I yes, yes, yes, I'm surprised you're born. But um, but yeah, that was, you know, neutron jack wells, right? That that was you got to be that's zero sum. You got to be mean in order for people to win. Well, the reality is, you know, attrition is costly. And if you just look at that, forget about the additional innovation and productivity that comes when people believe they care about you, that workers, it's just kind of common sense in many ways. And that's

33:52what's great about this is there's so much common sense, which appears to be in short supply from what I can observe sometimes. Now, on the matter of some companies failing. And so therefore, people losing the ownership value, I'm not sure what you can do to stop that. Maybe it's possible. But I think it's life is filled with challenges. And sometimes you fail even though you give it your best. Milton Friedman had a great solution for that. And we didn't call it universal basic income, but that's the best essentially what it was. So Milton Friedman said, we got to take care of the people who try as they might get sort of hurt by capitalism. And by hurt, he meant they might not be able to keep up with demands. And he said, we need a negative income tax, which is essentially universal basic income. And he said, let's not worry about so much. He had criticism of policy designs based on an assumption of free loaders. His view was most people want to be productive. No

34:55one wants to like be kind of a slug in the society of productive people. He said, let's let's not spend time worrying about the folks that are going to cheat the system because there's never going to be perfect. Let's focus on the overwhelming majority of people of whom they're good people. Let's go back to people not actually reading this book. I think that would surprise many libertarians. I know who like Friedman in theory, but are not aware of those views in particular. So before we go, I'm going to ask you sort of as a thought experiment. If you were pitching this idea to Elon Musk, who has been notoriously resistant to a lot of what you were talking about, what would be your your best foot forward? How would you pitch it? I'd probably start with Musk's support of, he actually goes beyond universal basic income to universal high income. So I'd start with that and my embrace of that notion. Number one, number two, Elon Musk believes in hardworking people.

35:58He appreciates hardworking people. And what I say is there's a lot of people out there that want to work hard, but they can't get jobs. And they don't get to enjoy the value of what they produce. That's the classic labor versus capital argument. That's why Lewis Kelsso said everyone should be an owner because when you help make a company more productive, but you don't get the benefit of that increased productivity, then it can logically decrease your motivation. So I would just walk Musk through an argument, drawing upon what I know appeals to him, which is science fiction. And I'd walk through, I'd use that type of narrative and that type of framing. I have no doubt, I mean, he's such a smart guy. I have no doubt that if I could convince him to set aside any preconceived notions and just start fresh, he would get it right away. There's no quite,

37:01I have no question in my mind that if Elon Musk were to read this book, he would get it. This book was meant to be relatable to the high school senior and to surprise the college professor. And based on feedback I've gotten, both things are true. Some people call it a page turner. There are parts that some people say feel like a spy novel that's the Lewis Powell part. I feel like my job is to make the complex simple and understandable so that people are in a better position to make informed decisions with the jobs they pick, how they speak with their managers and their outlook. And yeah, that's I think that covers it. Well, thank you. So, and that's it for Money Talks. Thank you, Chair Guest, Roy Swan for joining and thanks to Jessman Mollie of C-Planer Amada for producing. We'll be back Saturday with our regular edition of Slate Money.

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