Intertitle: Which overlooked issue should the next President prioritize?
Douglas Rushkoff: There’s a general belief amongst the political class that a growing economy is good for everybody, because as corporations grow the money will trickle down, and everyone will be wealthy. And what they need to understand is that the way corporations grow is by extracting value from people and places and storing it up in share price. So, even if the Dow is going up, especially if the Dow is going up, it may just mean that people’s actual wealth is going down. So they need to really challenge that underlying assumption, and then start to reconfigure policy and tax law around that.
Intertitle: What job should the next President do for a day to understand the country better?
Rushkoff: I think it would be interesting if the President had to be a minister for a day and actually engaged with people’s spiritual bankruptcy, and think about, “Do I want to solve this by lying to them with another myth, or do I want to help them confront the truth?”
Further Reference
Introductory post about this series, and for this installment, at Slate.