Evan Baehr & Avik Roy on the Politics of Equal Opportunity
How conservatives and progressives can find common ground.
Evan Baehr, a member of FREOPP’s Board of Advisors, once had the opportunity to work for Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. Sandberg introduced Evan to Mark Zuckerberg with the line, “Evan is the only person I’ve ever hired because he asks great questions.” I got to experience that firsthand when Evan interviewed me for his podcast, Our American Experiment.
Our conversation centered around FREOPP’s unique mission, which seeks to achieve a progressive goal—expanding economic opportunity to those who least have it—using principles, like free markets, usually associated with American conservatism. Below is a transcribed excerpt from our discussion, edited for clarity.
Evan Baehr: Tell us what FREOPP is and talk a little bit about how you are thinking about innovation in advancing ideas.
Avik Roy: Technically, think tanks are generally non-profits, they’re 501(c)(3) organizations, they’re supposed to be non-partisan. But in reality, most think tanks that you’ve heard of—that are well-known—they’ve picked a team. They’re either on the Democratic team or they’re on the Republican team.
There’s a role for that. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you’re trying to achieve major change—if you’re trying to pass laws that make a real difference for everyday Americans—under the rules that we have in the Senate in particular, you have to get 60 votes to pass meaningful legislation. That means you have to have bipartisan majorities to actually achieve major reform.
That’s what Charles Murray did. Charles Murray wrote a book called Losing Ground, which convinced Democrats that our welfare system was broken. Republicans, of course, already believed that, but Democrats, by looking at the empirical data and showing them that, “Hey, the war on poverty is failing and if you believe in lifting people out of poverty, you should be concerned about the fact that the welfare system of 1965 is not working.” And he persuaded Bill Clinton and a lot of other people in what was then called the Democratic Leadership Council to embrace those ideas…
The welfare reform bill really was transformative for millions of Americans who are at the bottom of the economic ladder. That’s, to us, a powerful model, and again, what was it that Charles Murray succeeded in doing? Yes, he had an idea, but it was not merely that he had a good idea, it was that he persuaded Democrats [and Republicans] that the idea had merit, and that’s how a Democratic President signed that welfare reform bill into law.
Evan Baehr: Any insights in terms of how he did that? I mean, Losing Ground is filled with tons of data and also story, he’s a great writer, but I mean, on the other hand, it doesn’t seem that unique…Anything about Murray’s approach that you think was effective?
Avik Roy: Yeah. I think that what Murray did…is he really framed the argument in terms of how best to expand opportunity for those who least have it. So, the unifying principle, for really Americans more broadly [was that] most Americans believe in the idea of equal opportunity.
We may disagree about exactly how to achieve it or what it means, but we basically believe in general in the idea that it doesn’t matter whether you’re rich or poor [or] where you came from. That what makes America great—what makes America exceptional, in fact—is the idea that you can come here from anywhere, you can come here from any circumstance, and rise up and be the most successful person in America. The richest, the most famous, the most successful in your profession, however you define success, you can do that in America, and it doesn’t matter what circumstances you were born in. That’s what makes America special, exceptional…as a country.
And that’s something that Democrats and Republicans—conservatives, progressives, centrists—all believe, for the most part…[But] that’s a language that conservatives rarely use.
Conservatives typically will justify their policy ideas by saying, “Let’s do X, because it will shrink the size of government.” Or, “Let’s do Y, because it’s more faithful to the Constitution.” Those are basically the two arguments you’ll hear people say…It’s more of a procedural argument than it is a results argument…It’s a procedural argument that limiting government is good. “Why” is left to the listener to infer…
Evan Baehr: A quick, maybe nitpicky point. When I hear the phrase “equal opportunity,” it rings in my ear from the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, which [gave the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] ground for suit in federal court on possible discrimination across several factors. I think race, ethnic origin, religion, a handful of others…And so, when I hear equal opportunity, I have this slight little gut reaction to think, what they really mean is equal outcome, and it seems to be a phrase used by the left. So I’m curious, educate me a little bit on what does “equal opportunity,” or “equal economic opportunity,” what does that mean, and are you being deliberate about choosing that phrase?
Avik Roy: Great question. So that’s kind of what I was alluding to earlier when I said that there are people on both the left and the right who don’t like the term “equal opportunity.” There are people on the left who don’t like it because [for them] equal opportunity is not enough. Equal outcomes is what matters to them. And there are people on the right, maybe the hard-core libertarians, who think “equal opportunity” is itself statist, because if you want to achieve equal opportunity, how do you do it? Well, you have to have things like public education to make sure that poor kids can have a chance to rise out of their circumstances, and that means that you’re basically a statist [according to hard-core libertarians], because it requires a certain level of government activism in order to achieve some sort of equal opportunity… There will always be a push and pull and a debate as to the degree of government activism necessary to preserve or advance equal opportunity.
But that’s precisely the point of FREOPP: to litigate that debate, to be part of that debate, to join that debate and to say, “Okay, our goal is to say, again, we’re free market oriented, we want to achieve equal opportunity with the minimal federal intervention possible, the minimum government intervention possible, the minium economic distortion, because we believe that, actually, it’s free markets that do the best job of equalizing opportunity.”
Where have we been most successful at lifting poverty all around the world is in economically free societies. So, our whole point is to say it’s freedom that has done the most to expand economic opportunities. Regulation rewards incumbents…
Evan Baehr: So is a level playing field analogy fair to say, people can have the same opportunity economically when they live in a neighborhood free from violent crime and they live in a neighborhood or a family that has several people that express love and affirmation for them? When they’re given an education that through hard work, they can continue learning. Is that how you think? [That] when we serve people with meeting some basic fundamental human needs, then hey, we can’t promise they’re going to make a bunch of money and live as wealthy people, but we can say that they have been given a chance to have equal opportunity in the market?
Avik Roy: Yeah, I would add two others to that. I would add the ability to be free from the risk of bankruptcy if you get hit by a bus or have a stroke, and I would also add to that list the ability to choose the profession or career of your choice without regulatory barriers.
Evan Baehr: Interesting. Okay.
Avik Roy: So yeah, but there’s a whole suite of policies. One might be to be able to actually afford a house, to afford a place to live at a time when we’re driving up the cost of housing in America through all sorts of policies, both at the state and local levels and at the federal levels, but basically, there are all sorts of things where we are making life more expensive, more challenging, and making it harder from a legal standpoint for people to live the way they want to live and advance themselves in that way, but yeah, it’s all those things…
Evan Baehr: What I appreciate about this is, even in you adding affordable housing to that list, I have this initial little knee-jerk reaction of, “Oh, that’s a bad idea, because the only solution must be for the government to provide more housing for people.”
Avik Roy: See, this is exactly my point, Evan. What you just described, and you alluded to it earlier, this is precisely what I’m trying to attack…[that] when somebody says “equal opportunity,” when someone says, “affordable housing,” when someone says, “universal health care,” [conservatives] just have this [knee-jerk reaction]. But in fact, it’s free markets that can achieve all those outcomes and [conservatives’] emotional resistance to those words, the voters know that, and voters are intuitive; they get that…In our everyday relationships, we know when someone is just saying something or when they really mean it, and that’s true in politics, too…
Evan Baehr: We had an interesting visit recently, [to] a really interesting place called Community First! Village in Austin, a housing community of the formerly homeless, and you initially think, “1970’s brutalist cement buildings filled with homeless people and drugs everywhere.” It’s the opposite of that. It is completely privately financed, but there’s some very interesting freedom-related principles that are kind of operating there. So, freedom plus maybe responsibility, so month one, new residents must pay rent. There are no exceptions. Everyone is paying.
Another piece that was super interesting to me was the emergence of a desire to generate income and not just make money, but [to] have a purpose. We were waking through one of the areas of the village, and there was a man named Mr. Pickles and on the front of his 400-square-foot tiny house, [there] was kind of a graffiti sign with “Mr. Pickles.” He had had a stroke—I think he had nearly died—he’d been in the hospital and he’s recently back out. He’s called “Mr. Pickles” because he makes pickles, and he brought out, with this spunky woman who was a neighbor, this batch of pickles that he had just made, and they were selling them.
I bought a jar of pickles and he’s like, “Oh, wait a month. I just put them in. They’re not ready yet.” I was so struck in the moment that there was something really interesting about this principle of freedom, the principle of being able to participate in the economy that for Mr. Pickles, in that moment, in that tiny house, that he had done something and contributed in a way that someone else valued in a voluntary exchange. There was dignity in there…How cool to see principles of freedom manifest and make something, in this case, actually work.
Avik Roy: What I’ve been struck by in similar context is how often the people who are doing the work, that kind of work, think of themselves as Democrats, even though so much of what they do is conservative. There’s this movement in the non-profit world of charitable organizations where they really focus hard on metrics. It’s not enough [for them] to say, “We’re a pro-education non-profit.” [Instead, they say that] “we actually need to measure how often our kids are graduating and how successful they are at math, and don’t fund us if we don’t actually achieve these metrics,” instead of just saying, “reward us for our intentions.”
And these groups are run by people who are passionate Democrats, but who strongly believe that the government and the traditional liberal fogginess isn’t working…I think to myself whenever I hear them talk, it’s like, “These people are all conservative entrepreneurs, but they don’t think of themselves as conservative entrepreneurs, because of that icky feeling that people in the conservative movement get when we talk about these things.”
And that’s…a big part of what FREOPP is trying to do…And, by the way, for rising generations, this is especially important…[The] mores of rising generations are much more passionate about this point [and say] “It’s great to be an entrepreneur, we love Mark Zuckerberg, we love Steve Jobs, but we want entrepreneurs whose work serves the public interest, that actually makes communities better off. That really matters to us.” And there’s room there for an entrepreneurial capitalistic philosophy, so long as it sheds the feeling of ickiness towards lifting people out of poverty…
Evan Baehr: Even in this conversation now, I am trying to step out from myself and see how your language, in some cases, leads me to have these subconscious, irrational reactions to things, and I’m certainly going forward much more curious about that…Thank you for being with us today. Thank you for all you’re doing and taking risks and leaving behind traditional careers that are probably more lucrative and more expected, to take risks to advance these things that will make this country a much better place and facilitate flourishing of so many more millions of people in this country and around the world. Thank you.
Avik Roy: Well, let’s hope. Let’s hope.
