much the conversations were i'm very pleased to welcome to the program vance packard and vance packard maybe our leading sociologist in the united states if i may say so and he's written a really very very interesting book the altar rich and mr packard welcome very very much t the status weekers and a whole series of books that have looked at the american and the world side particularly the american society really years and i've written ten books of all water focused on what's happening there yet what's happening to the individual and our society in the face of rapid social the pace of change in the technological pace of innovation is coming now almost exponentially i mean in the time in which you and i live and talk certainly is  even the united states were to think they were not catching up you had to catch catch up in terms of being able to stay on the leading edge of production economically and so when the japanese in the eastern basin is doing so well now compared to it was if i may you may your book the great depression of the one nine hundred ninety and surviving the great duration of one nine hundred ninety which he sees coming he actually i think did an interview a few months ago with me actually thinks it's getting up close to thirty six percent of the ownership now is held by the upper one percent of the population and is that ownership question is perhaps more interesting and important than the income distribution and it's a dangerous trend and there's a concentration of wealth in ownership at the top within the american society do you think the concentration of wealth in american society is is characteristic of societies around the world that there's a leading class of people that tend to control maybe five percent or whatever one five percent of the people do it or is the united states particularly general the european countries don't or the japanese don't make extraordinary rewards and hundreds of millions and have a few that make it up there but it's just a handful of people it's not it's not dozens if not hundreds but here in the united states now we're getting we're getting up into the thousands of people who have up in the hundreds of millions of dollars and if you're talking about some of this say five hundred million dollars and you're talking about someone  working on this book wealth rich again you work in this book for a number of years been researching and finding out the nature of who the people are and you took it upon yourself to go out contact them and actually go out and talk and talk some of these people to find out what kind of personality traits to start rewarding people who will put their money venture capital in these areas i think that i think our tax system should be encouraging these rich people to do that with their excess when they get about say twenty five million or something th economy is maybe ten percent servitor or something like that and when you've got that amount of money the money building up that you can spend goes back into a compound so they can't they can't keep they can't possibly spend the amount of the donald trump yeah don't spend that much you can't possibly spend it and so they've got it left over that makes it makes question of what does it mean it is so concentrated why do you think it is that after nine hundred twenty nine we raised as you say thirty six percent there was a speculative bubble and boom and it was a great crash and so forth robbie bach grandmother says that we're heading in the same sixty year cycle but why do you think it is that there has been this accumulation of ownership at the top echelons upper one percent in the recent experience do the tax policies of mr reagan the supply side philosophy eleazer the that was very important and so forth how does it come that we have this increased concentration of wealth that there was a trend toward world for about thirty years after world war two and then the twenty seven percent got down to about twenty four percent actually but in one thousand nine hundred seventy seven or seventy eight the thing for very dramatically changed and by the time mr reagan got in it was going up quite rapidly and he helped along both with his his very permissive policies in terms of deregulation and and playing off on taxes letting the  look very little in terms of taxes and this is encourage them plus the more basic changes in the economy of the fact that the the a lot of new wealth has been created by the fact that the weapon transportation rapid communication makes it possible for change to explode chain stores to chain me to change and this is where many of the new fortunes are made you know in things because they can explode rapidly a piece in there about a man who was involved with battery park city and had done a great deal o isn't gets babies or something but the amount of the amount of money that comes from money itself and the money earning capability of capital is quite incredible and probably not well enough understood in our society the importance of that i mean and that so those  the top do have an accumulation of wealth that gets larger and larger and larger and that is the tendency has with rice on them you know and if you carry it out you also you also discussed from a particularly toward the end of the book where you talk about some solutions to this you very interesting lee deal with the individuals on an individual basis have a visit with them given some characteristics of their personalities and so forth then you also deal with some of the questions of what might be able to be how we might collectively as a society address some of the problems that this has and one of the people you talk about is moves kelso common points and friend that you and i have in his aesop movement where he has over the years been saying there ought to be a wide distribution of income as an instrument of income warship as an instrument of income distribution but the east side of the employee stock ownership movement is one thing that you see that is something that perhaps might be encouraged to move the society in the right to obviously it should be anyhow but i think that i think we should be encouraging these people  aesop is one aspect of that and it underscores the fact that in your human interest back again to your original theme of the individual in a technologically expanding society one of the points of this kelso makes is that technology itself and now we see robotics and other things coming technology itself is increasingly or has been increasingly responsible for the actual production of goods and services in the house and who owns the technology ought to have a return in a private property economy by the fact that they own that it would be a good thing perhaps to have greater numbers of people have ownership as a way of evan income rather than only wages which is the case of most of the people in the economy if you understand what i'm trying to say i think  i think it should be stripping a country it is actually i think a matter of a few years ago that was the point of all our economy will be companies that have this concept of employees sure you know ownership income for their life's purpose is the same way a capitalist who has a great deal of capital will have income come to them each month having earned maybe ten percent on an annual basis or something conservative that income comes to improvise purposes because they have a capital ownership of the technology that principle might well be established to greater numbers of people are very few people i think tend to live by dividends or live by the fact that they get a return on their capital ownership in it's a principle that could be politically one that presidential candidates and others could think about perhaps they're going to do that yes and they haven't sufficiently thought of that and most people still think in terms of only wages as a way of gaining income it would be a major sociological or economic know when i went to see him he was he was living in a house that was on a street back about thirty feet thirty yards from the street and i could see when i stopped my car right  the whole idea world he's turned off of the whole idea of wealth and i wonder if you get around to talking to many of those people about how they feel about that well whether or not because there's a there's a great deal oh there's batteries of lawyers that help them protect very often these people do not given hundred eighty the tax law one hundred eighty one the tax law in one thousand nine hundred six these have benefited generally the people that i or the levels of our society so that made it easier for them to keep their wealth and the administration really was trying to encourage enterprise something development helping and then also i think probably the attitude is that the private sector could do things well all ships will rise if you let the economy we have been in an economy expansion itself what but not all the ships are risen a lot of people have left behind and there's this incredible concentration of wealth at the top of the of the of the of the killer what about the idea is there const there's a question of we probably brought was brought up in others the idea of a tax on well a wealth tax there are some interpretations of the constitutions that would make that something difficult but there are some people are working on trying to see a means by which this incredible tax i mean it's incredible well could be taxed in a reasonable way which could very help reduce the deficit and build social equity and strength and so forth would even be missed by many of those people but what are what is the status of the possibility of there being in a constitutional way attacks upon wealth as the basis for tax be running out of initially energy in the next several years and yet very little money is being spent on this i think that people got all these hundreds of men should be encouraged to spend some of this money and things like that what about using the government  education which certainly are an occasion for and our infrastructure is falling apart we have many many which very often involve the government and there could be taxation that could be used to put through government intervention into the marketplace  could be a tax on wealth over say i don't know two percent at three percent robbie rogers and two three percent tax and over a certain amount of the net worth over the super incomes super well it would be hardly miss the amount of money that's coming in there and yet it could go a long way toward meeting like deficit problems another kind of thing it would realize a tremendous amount of income it's not a small amount of income all the tax about they want to tax consumption they want to tax other the general society the idea that there could be a tax upon the wealth those who are inordinately benefited from the growth of the society is one that might well be taken up there's a professor of law if i'm not mistaken lindholm or something it already he's working on that maybe if you share some of his work and so  better not to pay taxes and so when i said general attitude that people are very favored by the society and so forth they have a great number of people must be sacrificed to them because they have tremendous power and well i suppose there are many people even politically have to be answerable to that do they tend to represent do you think in terms of the national priorities and setting stablish many of the national agenda they tend to be active that way or not or is the political leadership of the nation and the intellectual leadership of the nation apart from that and what kind of relationship does the political and the intellectual leadership as it were have to this centers of great power and wealth in this very highly materialistic society that we know  said let them loose let them run into run or let them run free enterprise laissez faire let them run and it will benefit the society and the whole if they pursue their own selfish interests of what's in your view perhaps as well doesn't work there either i guess they say in theory that  changed over the last let's say you've been doing things for a long period time many decades the last ten twenty years is a change considerably the national thinking about and we become more materialistic than we were very day twenty years ago and how can we account for that is that our political leaders is it swings and mistress lessons or talks about how we begin to see changes or how in a long term view do we see because this is a serving well the society as a society in terms of equity and you know in terms of citing or national for taxes thirty forty percent for themselves because they know the result lifestyle but they love whether everyone is well taken care of and then where everyone has still has an opportunity they don't just a passing phase or a cycle we'll be able to is it a quality of the political intellectual leadership well we can hope for a new or new ideas and possibilities and whether it reflects an insecurity on the part of the society or idea of a tax on the wealthy something that's really worthwhile for some of our political leadership to pick up well i hope so you know seems it seems to be just dismissed by so many people as something that can be done the tax only has to come out of the mass of the society i mean you're taxing the wealth could have a a new way to think about our economy or maybe we tend to think pyramid you had a book pyramid so we have a pyramid of this tremendous again over a third of all assets in the united states owned by one percent of the population they tend to be very powerful people they tend to have a circles of people around them who must be second to them they must be sick of it and many of the people just tend to think that they set the pattern whatever they want we have to adjust to but in real terms there could be a change in our attitude toward that the people themselves you found so price and others or some other other people who addressed this maybe from a wider perspective as sociological spiritual perspective who view this issue and perhaps even among the echelons themselves who would see the need for there to be some sort of a change in the situation such as we have now i mean among the people in those upper echelons themselves i think there's a substantial amount of guilt maybe they don't see an alternative or something  be spoiled in and you think people tend to think in their mythology that if they have money they're going to be happy but many of the kids who inherited it are profoundly unhappy or the love of the sixteen or thirty people i saw sixty number that's  to the import of human activity is it becoming the will becoming more and more the production of our economy is more and more technologically based on can we see more and more of that as we begin to look at robots and so my conductors and other kinds of things  the technology becoming more and more responsible for production in a ratio with human imported labor well every year the amount of the average worker amount of the amount of the investment in terms of it is so that actually did it technology is more and more important in the technology is increasingly held by fewer and fewer people and that is a problem that we really have to collectively address particularly if we would allow for some capital formation available to meet some of these crucial questions as you say the energy question is education always on we've got all kinds of problems that are confronted we need to and yet we have a sense of capital shortfall capability for us to do what it is we're collectively capable of doing you think it's important to try and see if we couldn't build ownership again you said that it was a long perhaps with as well tax idea that limp home and some of these other people out but this idea of expanding seriously expanding the idea of greater numbers of people perhaps even the majority of people having a private property holding of capital so that some of that wealth could be distributed among the general society or i think i'd have income come to them other than just wages and that people could begin to think of having income come to them rather than just for wages or through government transfer payments or a certain makes sense economically that makes sense in terms of morale of the country you have a much less restless labor force and you had most people having a share and  ownership of the company they work for it have a whole new situation in terms of motivation on the situation in terms of contentedness why do you think that hasn't occurred let's say historically why is it that  know we live in a society that couldn't enact a three point three dollars and thirty five cent wage a minimum wage or something like that and so that the need for people to be getting their wages only as a way of getting their wages something that keeps people sociologically or keeps people in line as it were doing what it is that supposedly the feeling and it's a system of wage slavery that is characteristic of american society to do you think the american society is a just one in terms now in terms of the mass of but not the commitment of to equality in this country and this could come home to roost do i don't world scale we're talking before about the control of the ownership of the wealth in this society relative to the broader society in another sense the united states in the western powers and trilateral nations in relationship to the third world  developing world to have control of the capital assets on a large scale do you think the analogy could be writ large on a world scale that the control of the wealth producing capability is in far too narrow hands and there's a need to begin to expand in some equity terms to the underclasses or to the peoples of the world if we're going to move it given chemical warfare and other kinds of tremendous problems of possible r possible economic downturn but just in terms of the survival of the of the system we need to have some sort of a more equitable view and vision of the world than that which we currently seem to have most of our foreigners committed to that philosophy but  toward democracy and the country we're trying to help but realistically of course that doesn't happen you know it's interesting isn't it we had at the beginning of our republic we were in economic in a very real sense we're an economic democracy  fact that technology is increasingly responsible for adoption the growth of large companies or growth of growth of companies over a hundred years and you see that increasing i mean that the actual production in the economy of goods and services is going to be technology based as we begin to move it one looks at robotics and what it has begun to do and what it could do and the potentiality of displacing people from that process and one wonders again back it's how are we going to have distribution of income if it's the wealth is being produced increasingly by the technology in the logic would be to extend ownership beyond the narrow class and now owns it all this book would be one that could help solve the problem  think your in your own mind about how too much i just said twenty five million is too much twenty five million is too much to give to a kid without conditions it might be do it might do well for us to be able to try and sort of a thing where the wealth and the income producing capability of of wealth and assets could be distributed more widely among the society give people a sense of participation and you also create it in the book and it's highly recommended of course a number of very very interesting encapsulations of some of the people who do make up the wealth owning leadership at the very pinnacle of our society and like to thank you for that particular thank you for coming and talking to me here in conversation rather there i'm very happy to talk about the book and i also want to thank you for all your really pioneering work over the years incredibly rich rich addition to understanding that you've contributed to it and it's your pleasure in the in the table television knowledge i've had the perceptions in advance packard long distinguished career and top now at this point by the book the offer rich in the united states and western europe because people decided that this was a good thing they didn't even like it they thought it was necessary because as john mccain said a commie simply didn't deliver the goods and now in this