Felicia Wong on Challenging Neoliberalism and Reimagining Capitalism
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During the first half of the 20th century, the overriding priority of the American left was to tame U.S. capitalism and create a fairer, more humane economy. That became less true in the latter decades of the century as a new set of urgent concerns took center stage—civil rights, gender equity, military intervention, the environment and more. Meanwhile, business interests and conservative philanthropy mounted a powerful attack on New Deal liberalism and the economic worldview underpinning those policies.
By the beginning of this century, inequality stood at record levels and free-market ideology reigned supreme, facing little pushback—even from the Democratic Party. But that’s been changing over the past decade since the financial crisis. In recent years, there’s been a real renaissance in progressive efforts to challenge inequality and reimagine capitalism. Say what you will about President Joe Biden being a moderate, but the fact is that his economic proposals put him well to the left on these issues of any president in my lifetime.
That’s not because Biden experienced some big epiphany about the danger of extreme capitalism. It’s because of the efforts of a slew of activists, thinkers, and political leaders—including, of course, Bernie Sanders, who ushered in a sweeping new push to create an economy that works for everyone.
One key player in this work has been the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank based in New York City. Roosevelt is not one of the larger think tanks around. But it’s been laser-focused on mounting a fierce challenge to neoliberalism and calling for a new set of rules to govern our economy. It has published a long line of reports and briefs making these arguments, and it’s also played an important role behind the scenes, trying to influence elected officials. The Roosevelt Institute is led by Felicia Wong, who has dramatically expanded its work, funding and influence over the past nine years. I recently interviewed Wong for my new podcast, Inside Change. You can listen to, or read, the interview below and download other episodes here.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
David: Hi, Felicia. Thanks for coming on the show.
Felicia: Hi, David. Nice to be here.
David: So you have been president of the Roosevelt Institute since 2012, eight years. That’s a long time, and I know how hard those jobs can be. And I also know that when you take a job like that, you face a lot of choices as to what your priorities are for the organization. You chose pretty early on to really focus on a set of economic issues, advancing a critique of neoliberalism and corporate power. And then you doubled down on that. I’d be interested in hearing about your thinking behind those choices and how you decided that was where you want to place all your chips and make a big bet for the institute.
Felicia: I took over Roosevelt in the middle of what was still then the Great Recession and the economic crisis. Roosevelt, just before I got here, started to think through the structural and the institutional changes needed to address not just the economic crisis itself, but also the larger economic problems that consumers faced.
What I learned over the last eight years since I’ve been at Roosevelt is that it turns out that economic work is much more generative than just a single policy area or a single crisis. Looking at the economy helps you understand the structure of our whole society. Looking at the economy helps you understand racial exclusion or racial inclusion. It helps you understand the ways in which the labor market is really very different for women than it is for men. It helps you understand the role of government in catalyzing new industries.
At Roosevelt, we treat economic work as a lens into our entire society, and in fact, into our democracy. We use it as a way to think about, really, what our deeper needs are for driving social transformation.
David: What about finding the funding for this work as you got that up and running? I know that it can be difficult. A lot of wealthy donors don’t really want to fund work that fundamentally challenges capitalism. Private foundations are also rooted in capitalist wealth. You seem to have done pretty well on the funding side, and I wonder how that part has gone.
Felicia: It wasn’t always easy. When I took over the institute in 2012, we really just brought in a couple of million dollars a year. We have grown every year since then; I’m really proud of that. This is public information, so I’m happy to say it. This year, we are $9 million; next year, we’re going to be $12 million. We’re moving into the ranks of a properly mid-sized think tank, I would say. And we have been really lucky over these years to find donors who do want to support this work.
About 80% of our funding comes from some very large foundations. I think that we have been successful with many large foundations because we really think about funders and donors as strategic partners and as thought partners.
Funders have a lot to teach their grantees and a lot to learn alongside their grantees. So for example, we worked very early on with the Hewlett Foundation and with the Omidyar Network, both of whom have been thinking through the next economic worldview—what does the world look like beyond neoliberalism? How do we reimagine capitalism? And I think that we have been on a learning journey. It’s kind of a corny phrase, but it really is apt in this case; we’ve been on a learning journey with them. Overall, what it shows is that there’s a real hunger for the kind of work we do, the altitude at which we work.
David: I wanted to ask you about those two funders, the Hewlett Foundation and the Omidyar Network. Both of them are rooted in Silicon Valley wealth. Previously, I thought of both of them as pretty moderate on economic issues. Pierre Omidyar, of course, the founder of eBay, seen as this libertarian figure. Hewlett definitely a moderate funder. To have those two funders really on the leading edge of this critique of capitalism and this challenge to neoliberalism says something to me. I wonder what it says to you?
Felicia: I agree that having both Hewlett and Omidyar lead on this economic worldview stuff is a sign. I think both Larry Kramer and Jen Harris at Hewlett, and then Mike Kubansky and Tracy Williams and Joelle Gamble at Omidyar. All of them, Larry and Mike, in particular, who both lead their respective foundations, looked at the data after 2016, and I do think that the Trump victory in that election was a real catalyst for both of them. Like, what is going on here in our society that Donald Trump could win that election? Hewlett previously had done a tremendous amount of work through their Madison Initiative on questions of partisan polarization.
But I think Larry in particular started to think like, wow, are there other kinds of economic drivers in all of this? And it really kind of sent him on this exploration to try to understand the role of economic worldviews in shaping the politics in which we live and shaping really what we think is possible.
We joined them pretty early on in this set of explorations. We did a very significant amount of research, looking at the landscape of people—left, right and center—who are thinking about new and different worlds using the economy. Does neoliberalism have any legs anymore? How would you categorize new economic thinkers? What do they think the new economy ought to look like?
I think because we worked really closely with folks from both of those foundations, and then ultimately people from other foundations started to join, it really does feel like a genuine partnership. I don’t think of it as a purely transactional or even primarily transactional relationship.
David: I want to come back to that landscape review that you published in January 2020, which I thought was quite fascinating. But first, just sticking for another moment with the donor side of things, Pierre Omidyar’s transformation strikes me as particularly striking. It seems like he was really radicalized by Trump’s election and we’re seeing other wealthy donors come out, questioning capitalism. Ray Dalio, the hedge fund guy, most famously wrote a series of big LinkedIn posts on this. And I wonder how this makes you think about the role of the upper class in remaking capitalism at this moment. One of the reasons I ask, of course, is because the Roosevelt Institute was created to help channel the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, who was a patrician, a member of the upper class, who led the last real fundamental challenge to the economic order.
Felicia: Yes, FDR was famously a traitor to his class. Helped along by Eleanor, by the way, who totally knew what she was doing with respect to women’s rights and civil rights. But at any rate, I think change has to come from a lot of different places all at once. I do think that for many business leaders or philanthropic leaders, the combination of, again, the Trump victory in 2016, and then the absolutely unassailable data about just how bad economic inequality and racialized inequality were getting. That’s what Ray Dalio’s posts were all about. They were just charts on the data, and basically the economic system that all of us grew up in. You can call it neoliberalism if you want to. But basically, the idea that prosperous business was going to lead to a prosperous society for most, if not all, right? That just turned out not to be true by 2008, 2010, 2016.
That was a real wake-up call to people who were leaders in business and in philanthropy, but I also think that you do not get change from the elite or the upper class alone. You absolutely do not. The only way in which you get real fundamental change in this country is to have a combination of insiders and outsiders, and often outsiders have to push the insiders. So the kinds of social movements around economic justice that you saw with Occupy in 2011, obviously, the kinds of social movements that we have seen over the last five years, and especially last summer. This is what it is going to take to really make sure that we have change that works for real people. So I think both of those things are very important.
David: Talking about some of the different political players in the mix, there is potential for alliances on the right in rethinking capitalism. We can talk about that in a moment, but I’d be interested in what you’ve observed in the last eight years in terms of how the progressive ecosystem thinks about the economy and capitalism.
When I was at Demos in the early 2000s, it seemed like a lot of people were tuned out to these issues of economic inequality. We had big challenges getting attention for that part of our work, and things have really changed. And I wonder what you attribute that shift to, and how that has played out in the mix of organizations that you’re familiar with and have worked with.
Felicia: It’s a couple of things. I do think that the unassailable data that I just referenced is a big piece, and that data is really a reflection of a revolution and paradigm shift in economics itself. You really saw a little bit with [Thomas] Piketty’s work in 2013. This idea that the mass accumulation of wealth was essentially both a sign of and a driver of a society eating itself alive. That is really what the economics profession itself started to say.
I think that set of realizations four or five years after the Great Recession started to drive different thinking in policymaking. I can give just a couple of examples now of how we think differently about policy as a whole, now as compared to 10 years ago.
One example is that progressives no longer default or simply acquiesce to conservative means to achieve progressive ends. It used to be if you’ve got a problem with poverty, you better create a tax credit. If you’re going to be really radical, maybe you’re going to make that tax credit refundable.
But nobody ever wanted to do direct public spending—that was somehow seen as wrong. And that’s no longer off the table. The other thing I would just point out is that it is no longer the case that we think it’s OK to just use government power in the least disruptive way. I think many progressive thinkers now pay a lot of attention to power and would say that what we need to do is to use government power in a way that is intentionally disruptive. Because the status quo is so broken. We used to think, like, just do a little nudge. And now we think no, this is about actually disrupting and ultimately remaking the system.
David: I want to get to those progressive thinkers in your landscape review in a moment. But first, just to come back to the question of unusual suspects and allies in this battle to remake capitalism. We’ve talked about the rich. What about people on the right? I think of somebody like Oren Cass at American Compass, or Marco Rubio—two thinkers on the right saying, “Hey, you know, this system isn’t really working. We can’t, as the Republican Party, be checked out to inequality indefinitely; we have to have a set of responses.” Do you talk to those people? Are you optimistic that they can be allies?
Felicia: Marco Rubio did a big report on corporate governance about six months ago, and we didn’t talk to him, but we were very interested to see that he cited a lot of our work in that report. And I think Oren Cass is another really interesting figure in all of this. I think it’s right and important that many people who don’t identify as progressives or don’t identify as moderates, but actually identify as conservatives, are challenging market fundamentalism. It makes total sense to me.
The obvious and core question for conservative economic thinkers is, how are they going to deal with, or think about, the history of racial exclusion in this country? One of the reasons we have so much economic inequality is that we’ve built systems that have deliberately, for centuries, excluded women and people of color from the labor market. That racial realization has been something that many people on both sides of the aisle, but in particular, Republican, have just been slow to recognize and might even deny. So given that, I think the question for new economic thinkers on the right is, how are they going to deal with questions of race?
David: Very interesting. And I think that as they look to do better with Latino voters, those issues may come more to the fore for them.
Felicia: Latino voters, actually black voters, too.
David: As you were figuring out how to do Roosevelt’s work, challenging neoliberal orthodoxy, and coming up with a set of alternatives, there were a lot of different issues you could have gotten into—whether it’s wages or Wall Street regulation, or any number of things. How did you decide where to focus your attention and what issues to really drill into?
Felicia: The economy is obviously a big topic. The United States is a big place. The global economy is even bigger. So it took me a few years at Roosevelt to really think through how to even categorize or create a system in my own head, anyway, for thinking about the different components of economic thought and social thought and how we might productively organize our programmatic work.
One very important piece of the work focuses on corporate power and corporate governance—what’s happening at the top of the economy, how large companies are behaving. So we have a whole area that looks at corporate power. We look at taxation. We look at antitrust and anti-monopoly. But you also have to look not just at companies, but also at workers. And so we have a second program area that looks at worker power.
The third area we launched about a year ago, and the way I think about it is the economic future. It’s an area called climate and economic transformation. And that is the basic idea that the future of our economy can be, should be, must be greener. And if that is going to be the case, then what we’re going to need is significant government investment in decarbonization. The government’s the only entity big enough to really invest at scale in a green economy. Not the sole investor, but probably the most important first mover.
And then the fourth area we call progressive economic thought, which tries to take all of those areas and look at how they all add up to a new way of thinking about the structures of our society and the structures of our economy.
David: One place where you pull together some of that is in this landscape review that you did in January 2020, looking at the “new progressivism,” as you call it, and the different players who are involved in challenging capitalism in its current form—not just on the left, but some outside the left, as well. I thought it was a super-interesting document. Can you say a little bit about it?
Felicia: It came out of this work that I had described us doing with Hewlett and Omidyar and others. We really just started with, who’s thinking about the economy out there, and what are they saying? So we reviewed over 100 thinkers. Again, left, right and center; maybe a little more left than right, but we really tried to look across the board at a lot of different thinkers and groups. And ultimately, we came up with four different groupings of thinkers.
The first group of thinkers we call the market structuralists. These are people who think that the government actually does have a role in creating markets that really work, creating markets that are innovative and competitive and dynamic. And just for ease of explanation, we put avatars—human being representatives—for each of these categories. So the most obvious market structuralist is Senator Elizabeth Warren. She always talks about how government should be like cops on the beat to make the economy work as it should. So that’s category one.
Category two we call the public providers. These are folks who think the market doesn’t provide everything that human beings need and certainly doesn’t provide everything in a way that is equitable or fair or universal. And so the government needs to step in. Healthcare is clearly underprovided in this country, housing is clearly underprovided, and so government should be providing those things. The avatar of the public providers is Bernie Sanders.
The third category we call the economic transformers, who really believe that the government has a role in setting the North Star for our economy. Government’s role isn’t just to sit back and wait for markets to fail and then very occasionally do a little bit of poverty relief. Rather, the government can actually set the direction for where we need to go. The avatar for this, you can say, is [Washington Governor] Jay Inslee, who was the climate candidate. But I think, on my better days, that the avatar for the economic transformers is and could be President Joe Biden, which might sound kind of surprising, but Biden has really embraced this idea.
And then finally, the fourth category we have are people who look at the economy through the lens of democracy, because basically one of the big problems, in fact, one of neoliberalism’s biggest problems, is that it took people—democracy and popular voice—out of the equation when thinking about how you basically make economic decisions. Neoliberalism tried to say, like, it’s all just about where the supply curve and the demand curve cross, and no human beings ever have to make any decisions. And I think lots of thinkers now think, no, our economy actually has to be more democratic, small D. People need to have a say on the jobs, so they need unions and they need to have a say in how budgets are made, which could be something like voting, which is obviously critically important, but it could also be some of the participatory budgeting we’re seeing, or some of the ways of thinking about economic cooperatives, where people have more of a say on the economic decisions in their day-to-day life.
David: Labor unions historically were key players in that regard, offering up a voice for workers—and by the way, using that power to push for the public provision and to restructure the economy and all the rest. Those four buckets that you sketched out are super-helpful. I can fill in the blanks in terms of other people who might fit in each one.
I want to ask you about the challenge of selling some of these different ideas to the American public and how this plays out in elections. There’s a lot of polling to suggest that working-class voters and many voters generally are supportive of populist economic policy. People like the idea of raising taxes on the rich. They like the idea of raising the minimum wage, as we saw in Florida. They like the idea of regulating corporate power, taking on Wall Street. Increasingly, though, the democratic coalition is dominated by college-educated voters who are often wary of populism. And of course, elected Democrats and progressive institutions are heavily dependent on wealthy donors, many of whom come from finance, who also can be turned off by populist rhetoric. Do you worry that the kinds of ideas Roosevelt is generating are a tough sell to more moderate and affluent voters?
Felicia: I actually don’t. Most ideas that we’re calling progressive—whether it’s raising wages or raising taxes on the wealthy or having the government do something about very large corporations—are just incredibly popular. In a country that is so extensively polarized, what is really striking is that 70% of all Americans are in support of all of the things that I just mentioned.
And I don’t think it’s a problem that wealthy Democrats don’t like populist ideas, because 80%, 90% of all Democrats, pretty much like all the ideas that I said. It’s Republicans who are more split, but even Republicans are more like 50/50 on higher taxes for the wealthy. So more or less, that gets you to a 70% number. The point being, I don’t really think that the problem, at least on the economics, is a problem that wealthy people don’t like these things.
Our system has two problems. One, our system isn’t democratic. It’s captured by the vagaries of the electoral college and the way our court system increasingly has a stranglehold on the rest of our political system. The most popular ideas don’t win out. And that’s because of the way we conduct our politics. That’s number one.
I think number two is obviously race and gender. I’m just gonna, for a second, stick with race. Americans have much less agreement around whether or not, for example, structural racism is a real thing, whether people are discriminated against on the job because of their race or their gender. So that is a much more polarizing and difficult set of questions that does divide Republicans and Democrats.
David: We have a Republican Party that is able and willing to weaponize race at every turn with wedge issues. I was struck that in the recent election, not only did Trump and his allies weaponize race with lots of dog-whistling about urban crime and violence and protests, but they also tried to weaponize the phrase “socialist.” I want to just challenge the notion that all of these progressive ideas are equally popular with the public or equally likely to be political winners. It strikes me that some are more vulnerable to political attack than others. It’s one thing for progressives to attack corporate power and concentrated economic wealth. It’s another thing for progressives to advocate expanding government power and using redistributive means to provide public benefits because that triggers people’s distrust of government—and fear of concentrated government power in a society where there’s distrust of all forms of concentrated power and institutions. It seems like that can be a tough sell. And that’s partly what Republicans were zeroing in on and weaponizing with that socialist attack during the election.
Felicia: First of all, the idea of weaponizing a socialist attack is definitely not new. You know, FDR faced it himself, obviously, in the 1930s. I’m skeptical, actually, about the efficacy of the socialist atack. Florida is a good example. Florida voted for Trump and also voted to increase the minimum wage.
I do think that what Democrats and progressives need to be doing now is to show that they’re gonna bring real relief to real people. We’re living in the middle of a global pandemic. This is absolutely a time where the government needs to take action. People want the government to take action.
David: Felicia, thank you for coming on the show.
Felicia: Thank you. Great to talk to you with you.
