Steven Brill was prompted to write his assault on the “people and forces behind America’s fifty-year fall” while riding in a taxi from JFK into Manhattan. He was struck by the parlous state of the infrastructure. The airport terminal had been dumpy, the traffic was bad, there were potholes along the Van Wyck. Next time, he might want to try the AirTrain to Jamaica and the E train to Midtown; it’s cheaper, faster, and better for the environment. But what’s a French-cuffed baby boomer to do? Brill, by all accounts, has made more than enough money from selling his various publishing ventures to afford a chopper. But maybe seething in a yellow cab is part of the fun.
His new book, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America’s Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It, begins with an interesting premise:
Knowing of Brill’s rise from Far Rockaway, Queens, to Deerfield Academy to Yale and Yale Law School to a rewarding career as writer and publisher, all of which he describes in the book, readers might wonder whether he is atoning for his own success—whether they are about to witness a spectacular act of journalistic seppuku.
Alas not. Brill walks us briskly up to his founding of American Lawyer magazine, and then . . . no more autobiography. He himself is one of the talented, driven Americans he describes. He got there by merit. And then what did he do? How did he educate his children? What benefits did he provide his staff at his various companies? After his long wind-up on how meritocracy, while well-intended, has in practice become a kind of aristocracy, Brill goes all quiet. He cites numbers rather than names. What I’d like to know is what he thinks of the Clintons and Obamas arriving in Washington and promptly bypassing the public-school system to install their daughters in an elite private school, Sidwell Friends? What message did that send to the rest of the preening equal-opportunists Brill so derides? Evidently, do what we do, not what we say.
So instead of what Brill promises in his opening salvo, what we get is a slog through some of his greatest hits. The desecration of the First Amendment so that corporations get to speak as freely as individuals? Check. The staggering rise in lawyers’ incomes? Check. The iniquities of big pharma and the greed of bankers? Check and check. Brill has hit all these themes hard and convincingly in previous books and journalism.
Brill’s takedown of Johnson & Johnson for its reprehensible peddling of the antipsychotic drug Risperdal to children is magnificent. But he has done it before and it seems a random example to pick of all that’s wrong with America. And we really don’t need another account of how America’s bank executives escaped the financial crisis scot-free, their backs groaning under the weight of bonus money. They were greedy and self-interested. Got it. Look at the profession they chose.
Brill’s views sometimes reek of old-school hair tonic. He laments the fact that truck-driving jobs are “no longer a bedrock of the middle class,” since anti-corruption measures reduced membership in trucking unions, resulting in reduced wages and pensions.
Ah yes, those golden days of Jimmy Hoffa and cement boots. When all it took to be a member of the middle class was an iron rear and a CB radio. It scarcely bears mentioning that truck driving wasn’t all Clint Eastwood and his orangutan, Clyde. It required—still requires—weeks away from family and nights in an uncomfortable cab.
Curiously for a man who has set up a number of media and technology businesses, Brill has little to say on the impact of technology on work. This is a live issue as artificial intelligence eats away at existing jobs (including, perhaps soon, trucking jobs). This complicated, rapidly evolving subject could use someone with Brill’s insight and journalistic experience slashing through the regulatory and legal undergrowth to figure out what happens next.
Brill ends each chapter with an example of people doing things right. After arguing that American universities are unintentionally creating a less economically mobile society he describes the wonder that is Baruch College. Baruch educates 18,000 students at a time from all over New York in its bustling Lexington Avenue “vertical campus.” The average income of a Baruch student’s family is $40,000; tuition for New York state residents is $6,600 a year. While more vaunted schools charge 10 times that and tie themselves in knots of political correctness, Baruch is getting on with giving its charges the tools to get well-paid jobs. The head of its admissions and financial aid programs tells Brill that the school’s job is “moving people into the middle class or higher.” Eat your heart out, Ivy League barista.
Brill’s examples are all sound and worthy. But he’s stingy with his credit. His view of America’s cycle of rebirth and renewal is limited. There are no New England hipsters making cheese to rival any in France. No Iowa technologists reinventing the global payments system. There is no Larry Page or Jeff Bezos. There is no yogalates.
It is a sign of how quickly President Trump has moved on many of the issues confronted by Brill that much in his book already feels out of date. Although he decries the effects of free trade, he offers us nothing on the Trump administration’s determination to tear up America’s major trade deals in the name of protecting America’s jobs. When Brill was writing, the Volcker Rule, which limits the range of trading activities banks can undertake, was merely under siege. Since then, it has come under full-blown attack.
Brill does, though, offer a splendid insight from Dennis Kelleher, a former corporate lawyer turned anti-lobbyist. Kelleher runs Better Markets, a pack of legal terriers who harry and expose lobbyists as they press their cases in obscure Washington hearing rooms. “Because of Trump’s tweets, the crazy things he does, and the crises he ignites, we’re not paying attention to what he’s doing to the day-to-day functions of the country,” Kelleher says. “He has spread all these termites throughout the departments and agencies who are eating away at all aspects of our government, day and night. They don’t believe in the laws they have sworn an oath to enforce.”
Bankers are scaling back regulations put in place after the 2008 financial crisis. Energy executives are running the Environmental Protection Agency. Health care executives are running the Department of Health and Human Services. The foxes aren’t just in the henhouse. They’ve killed the chickens, cleaned up the blood, and turned Washington into a most accommodating fox house.
Brill’s solutions are dull but necessary. More bipartisanship. More engagement with the political system. A demand for better leaders. “That can only happen if Americans borrow some of Trump’s bravado. The obstacles and all of their side effects must become energizing challenges, rather than excuses not to try.” This is a book that pulses with dry intelligence and righteous anger. Some gutsier return fire would have livened it up.
