Money Talks: The Zero-sum Mistake

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3:32Hello and welcome to Money Talks. I'm your host, Elizabeth Spires, and today I'm joined by Roy Swan. And we're here to talk about a book you wrote called Positive Sum, How Zero-Sum Thinking Broke Capitalism and How We Can Fix It. Roy, welcome. Thank you, Elizabeth. Really pleased to be here. Thanks for inviting me. So introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the book. Yes, I am the inaugural director of mission investments at the Ford Foundation, where I was hired to help launch the foundation's foray into impact investing through its endowment capital. So that's about a billion in commitment, exactly a billion in commitment, and then another 450 or so in other forms of investment capital.

4:20The goal was really to figure out whether we could generate strong, positive social impact alongside the appropriate financial returns required for a perpetual foundation. And so far, so good. So your background is really banking. And then you went into the nonprofit sector. How do you think about the incentives as being different? So when you talk about being able to run an impact investing firm that actually generates returns in a way that, you know, kind of acceptable to donors in the market, how are these two things different in terms of people's expectations? Yeah, my background is pretty varied.

5:02So I've done investment banking, law, direct investments. I've worked in the nonprofit sector, the quasi-government sector. And what I'd say for the foundation world is there's been at least a 30-year debate around what is the role of a foundation with respect to the use of its resources. And there was an old joke, you know, what's a charitable foundation? It's a private investment club that gives away money as a hobby. The legal requirement for foundations is that they use 5 % of their resources every year. It's called the spend rate, and you have to use a minimum of 5 % for charitable purposes aligned with your mission.

5:48Typically, an investment office would consider its job to be maximizing financial returns, understandably, because they're like, look, the more financial returns we generate, the more grant making we can do because the bigger our endowment. But the role of impact investing is to invest with both positive and negative externalities in mind. And externalities, I can get caught up in terminology that may not be familiar. An externality is simply an outcome or consequence of a business's operations that don't necessarily accrue to shareholders or could be dumped on society. So the old-fashioned topic is pollution.

6:30So if you're a company that pollutes, it's hard to track pollution. So your shareholders don't have to pay for it. The cost goes to society and taxpayers. So the big incentive for foundations in my job is to prove that you can generate great financial returns and positive social impact. Yeah. And I think it's not always intuitive to people who are outside of the foundation space that this is how it works because I think they just look at the numbers and they see a giant endowment and then payouts that are 5 % minimum, but that's not a cap. But you still see relatively smaller payments going out and people who've had any interaction with the grant making process know it's kind of slow, it's a little cumbersome, it's risk averse.

7:17So in certain ways, when you talk about mission aligned investing, I think to lay people, they sort of think, well, isn't the foundation itself mission-driven? Why would the investment arm have such a radically different raise in debt than the grant-making operation? How do you explain that to people who are not sort of in the industry? Yeah, gosh, boy, you've really hit a couple of very important points. One is that the 5 % is a minimum, and you're right, it's been treated by many as a cap. I was speaking with a friend today and he mentioned the term MGI, which stands for most generous interpretation.

8:01So if I look at that light, you can say that, well, if you're a perpetual foundation, you want the foundation to live forever. So the disciplined approach might be to limit, you know, to use the 5 % as a cap, because in order to make a foundation live forever, it's a really high financial bar. It is the spend rate plus inflation. And today, that's like nine and a half percent. It's hard to make that kind of money over the long term. So in the most generous view, it would be a disciplined approach. You want to be able to help organizations for a long time, forever, if you're a perpetual foundation.

8:40The best explanation is, look, we want to do the best we can for society. The investment office is there to make a lot of money so we can take care of a bunch of nonprofits, make our charitable contributions all around the world, depending upon what our focus is. The harder question is the second one you raised, which is how do you explain to people that not all of a foundation's resources are dedicated to their mission? I guess I could say that a couple of foundations got tired of answering that question and they decided that, oh, we're just going to dedicate all our resources. So F.B. Heron, back in 96, the chair of the board then started asking the question.

9:20And there were two people who really translated the words into action. And that's Luther Reagan, who got F.B. Heron started on the journey towards 100 % of their resources being dedicated to mission, both the investment and grant making. And then Clara Miller took it from Luther Reagan's sort of 40 % start. She kind of rounded it out to 100%. Nathan Cummings Foundation has announced 100 % and they're well underway, 100 % mission. The California Endowment is now the largest foundation with that commitment. It had been the Ford Foundation when I joined. We committed to a billion. The California Endowment, I think, has close to$4 billion endowment.

10:02Another foundation, McKnight Foundation, has done a spectacular job of ramping up. So it's becoming harder and harder to explain. I think Darren Walker had a quote, something like, he could no longer justify dedicating just 5 % of resources to charitable mission. So it's an ongoing conversation. Just to pull out a little bit to the larger thesis of your book, your top line kind of short version is that we live in a capitalistic system where people are, they tend to think about making money as kind of a zero sum game. And I think that is maybe at its nadir now because of the political environment we're in.

10:43You know, we have a president who tariffs are his favorite economic weapon. And so he thinks of that as a scenario where if the U.S. is imposing tariffs on other countries, we're always winning. It's just built into the culture. So it feels like you're publishing this book at a time when you're a little bit rolling the boulder up the hill culturally. How do you talk about it in that context? Well, what I have learned through my experiences in life, largely formative years of university and law school, what I learned back then versus what I learned later in life is that we weren't taught the full story.

11:22There was a very significant amount of abridgment. And again, I'm going to use this MGI most generous interpretation. And let's assume that whoever was doing the abridging thought they were doing the right thing. So whoever put out the abridged version of Adam Smith that many of us were taught in economics class, decided to hone in on The Invisible Hand, which was mentioned, I think, a grand total of once in the two books that Adam Smith wrote, versus The Impartial Spectator, which I had not heard of until I read both books about six years ago, or maybe it was three years ago, I don't remember.

12:00And what I found by reading the two books, I remembered somewhere that Adam Smith had written this book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and it just kind of stuck in I'm like, why would a guy who wrote a book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments support the notion of an amoral form of capitalism where ethics don't matter? It's just like, you know, invisible hand and self-regulated, et cetera. And that curiosity was satisfied when I read both books. And I realized he actually didn't say that. He said that, you know, in order to have a healthy economic system, it needs to be founded upon morals, ethics, charity, treating workers well, and very importantly, keeping business out of the business of regulation and just having them follow the regulations.

12:47And he had a whole view on tax payments and progressive tax, the whole bit. The other thing that I found to be a curiosity was the whole Milton Friedman shareholder primacy topic. And that's the shareholder primacy just means the only thing that matters is the shareholders and nothing else matters, etc. The basis of that belief, I will take some blame for that because when I was assigned that essay, it's only 3 ,000 words, but it fell into the category of what I call assigned but not read. So I read the headline and thought I knew the punchline. And the headline title was The Social Responsibility of Businesses to Increase Its Profits.

13:27But if you read the essay, it's all about stakeholder capitalism, which says that, you know, Johnson & Johnson credo says it nicely. It's about the, they call them the patients, the employees, the vendors, the communities. and if you do all those, if you take care of all those entities and people, the shareholders will do well. And that's essentially what Milton Friedman was saying in that famous essay. He's saying, of course, you're going to take care of workers and of course, you're going to take care of the community. That's not social responsibility. That's called enlightened self-interest.

14:02So anyway, between that and the other sort of 100 plus books I've read in preparation from writing this book. I just learned so much that helped me understand that much of our education, you know, possibly unintentionally was just wrong. Well, I just think, you know, regardless of education, 99 % of the people who have very absolutist views about shareholder primacy, you know, I haven't read Smith or Friedman anyway. They sort of have an idea of what it means. And that idea is so prevalent. It is the hegemonic idea of what capitalism exists to do. This is being particularly embraced by, I think, Silicon Valley in the sense that, you know, you have high profile figures like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel who argue for monopoly and, you know, shareholder value at the expense of everything else and openly push back on things like DEI programs and now ESG.

14:59how do you kind of reconcile what you're trying to promote in the context of the fact that everything is sort of working against you culturally? That accepted idea of shareholder primacy is so dominant. How do you convince people that that's not what it means? They're probably not going to go back and read all of Adam Smith. No, and I read 140 books so others don't have to read them. And I presented the information in what I hope is a fun way, an entertaining way, an inspiring way, and in a truthful and objective way. One of the fun things about doing the research is I kind of became a much more aware, I'm not going to call myself an expert by any stretch, but I dug into anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, economics, a little bit of math and policy.

15:50And what I learned was, if you just look at human nature and neuroscience and psychology, the most primitive position of human nature is to protect oneself and one's tribe. And so there was a time when we were living alone, shivering in caves, where everything that moved that wasn't a part of your little circle was an enemy, a potential enemy. It was a predator. And so your defense mechanisms and sometimes your attack mechanism were activated. In order to go from those caves to villages and towns and cities and sprawling metropolises, we had to evolve and suppress some of those kind of natural instincts of tribalism and self-preservation and understand that we're all better off when we're all better off.

16:39I have this saying, we all win when we all win. And so cities sprung up because we understood that collaboration was the way to a great, thriving, prosperous civilization. So the way I see it is there's room for evolution, for people to learn that something is basic as we're better off when we have empathy and when we're all a part of the team and we all have ownership in society. Pete Stavros of KKR is kind of, I guess, in some sense, maybe at the opposite end of some other views, which is he found that advancing ownership of everyone in the company from the receptionist to the C-suite, plus when the C-suite has high levels of empathy, that is the most profitable combination for business performance.

17:27It's not theory. He's lived it. So I believe that's true. Now, in terms of people wanting monopolies, I mean, look, I don't make judgments around what people see as the best way for them to make money, but that's what regulation's for. Everyone knows that monopolies, I imagine most people who know anything about business know that a monopoly is a great way to maximize your profits. But that's the whole point of law and regulation. So that's our job as voters. It's the job of policymakers and elected officials to put guardrails that create limits for business. I mean, it's a natural tension. I think there is plenty of empirical research to back up a lot of what you're saying or what you're advocating for in terms of collaborative activity.

18:13But sometimes it's hard to make that argument, particularly when you look at the dynamics of who has power and who doesn't. You know, you talk very early in the book about you sketch out what's likely a sort of prisoner's dilemma situation where people are better off if they collaborate. But if they defect, they can run away with all the spoils. And one of the things that kind of strikes me about that situation is when you have that dynamic, it's sort of a trust game. You have to be able to come back to the negotiating table over and over again and trust the other party. But the other thing that I think gives me pause about the whole situation is that you also need some mechanism for accountability to keep that trust in place.

18:51So right now, when you're sort of, let's say you're giving this talk to the CEO of a major company, and they're looking around them and they're saying, well, you know, the biggest oligarchs in the country aren't doing any of this. They don't think empathy is important. They're rolling back DEI. They don't really care about the calculus of what empathy could, you know, bring them in terms of even profits. What are the sort of arguments that you pull out then, especially to people who feel like the tide is just moving against them? Yeah, I think one fundamental principle of communicating is understanding what resonates with people.

19:33And one thing that we know from the research is that narratives matter more than data. We know that. We know that the way to change behavior is through convincing communication, and it doesn't necessarily have to do with truth or falsehood. So the challenge before me, and part of the reason why I wrote the book, is it's an attempt to create a narrative that would be interesting and inspiring to people. And I understand that it takes time to change hearts and minds. There's also, within the narrative, the evidence base. And if you point to people who are respected by their peers, all we can do is do our best and hope that people change and just show how everyone can be better off.

20:18You know, there are Nobel Prize winners, including most recently Darren Acemoglu and James Robinson, who wrote the book Why Nations Fail. And they're trying to do the same thing. They're trying to convince people through evidence, through interesting stories, that inclusivity is more profitable than exclusivity. But the problem is the idea that some people would prefer to have less as long as they have much more than someone else. And that's one of those situations of economic irrationality and psychological rationality. So something can be rational and irrational at the same time, depending upon the lens.

21:00And that's just hard. Edward Bernays wrote a book called Propaganda. That book talks about the power of messages and cheerful persistence. And that's the best I can do. And I hope others will join. And we'll be back to talk more about that with Roy Swan right after this.

21:36How do you think about where, for example, people in the nonprofit sector, and I'm including not just foundations, but charities, churches, what we call kind of third area organizations. How do you think about where those organizations sit in terms of changing this culture where people do believe that everything is zero sum. You know, one of the most moving parts of your book is when you talk about your involvement as a preacher's kid and how churches that you were involved with looked at the legacy of slavery and then went back and kind of thought about how to do restorative things that would, you know, help heal that kind of thing.

22:12And particularly in the current environment, I think about, I grew up Southern Baptist, white evangelical Southern Baptists. And I see the opposite thing in that church, you know, in the way that they attack particularly policy problems and economic problems. They've really embraced the kind of Reagan era bootstrapping and, you know, you're responsible for your own welfare and helping vulnerable populations has become something that is considered borderline irresponsible, you know, and that filters into policy, it filters into culture, and it filters in the way that people think about charity, too.

22:46So where do you see the bright spots? There are things like the church that you were involved in where you feel like you're not always fighting against that idea. You know, history is the story of swings in views, what are accepted truths, moral norms, etc. If you look back at history, you'll see that when change occurs, It is typically through a small group of people that then creates a larger group of people that creates a movement. And that movement continues to push the boulder uphill until they reach flat ground. And that's where we are right now. Sometimes the pendulum swings so far into one extreme that there are events that occur where, let's just say, a leader that you trusted turns out to be something other than what you expected.

23:43And when you reach a point where even for those who would rather have less overall, as long as someone has less than them, even they will have a line in the sand. And you don't know when those moments are going to occur. You can't time them. So what's very important is the approach that Lewis Powell took when he crafted the Powell Memo. You should explain really quickly what the Lewis Powell Memo is. Yeah, Lewis Powell memo, it's really a brilliant work describing the perception that labor, that is everyday workers, students, the media and others were attacking the American enterprise system and presenting our own fellow, you know, Americans or people in America as the enemy.

24:36And then taking sort of a military intelligence approach, which was we have to destroy the enemy from within. Keeping in mind that these workers are just trying to put food on the table for their families. They're trying to make ends meet. And they wanted to be paid for their work. There was a period of time when students disagreed with some of the strategic national security direction. You know, at the time, it was the Vietnam War. And a lot of students, they didn't want to be drafted. They, you know, look, I'm all about national security. But, you know, that doesn't mean everyone needs to agree with me.

25:14What Lewis Powell said was, we need to identify and essentially destroy workers' power, student power, capture the media, take over politics, et cetera. And the brilliant thing about it was he had a long-term view. And he said, let's collect our forces, our intellectual forces, most importantly, our economic capital. Let's pull everything and let's just go after these folks. It's going to take a long time, but let's be patient and we'll get it done. That's an example of zero-sum thinking. They have to lose in order for me to win. So why not try the opposite way? And that's what I'd like to do.

25:53I mean, I'm like, OK, that's zero-sum. This is positive sum. Let's just let's get to work. I hope to have another 30 or 40 years of productive work ahead of me. And I'm happy to keep pushing that boulder. And I want others to join. And yeah, let's just pool our resources and think about how we can make everyone better off. Well, you're definitely not going to run out of work. That's for sure. Powell Mimo was early 70s, right? 72 or thereabouts? I think it was 70 or 71. I get that confused with the Friedman essay. So 70 or 71. Yeah, I was just thinking the Richard Hofstetter book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, came out a few years before that.

26:33And it had a critique in there about American business schools, which were just sort of starting to be a thing. And some of the elites were worried about them because they were concerned that if people became more educated about how businesses work, they might take the side of labor. You know, now it seems like we do live in a world where Powell sort of got what he wanted. You know, we have a sort of culture that really valorizes people who have been financially successful in a way it certainly doesn't labor. So well said. Yeah. I take a lot of my views on collective action of the nation and the idea of how the greater the prosperity of an overall nation, the more powerful the national security, the stronger democracy.

27:18I take it back to, I'm going to say, Peter Drucker, who became known as one of the top sort of management gurus. But he started out as kind of an economist. And his first book is just, it's stunning that this was his first book. It's called The End of Economic Man. And he wrote that book when he was about 24 years old. And he couldn't get a publisher to publish it because they thought some of his views were outlandish. One of the things he was talking about was he was predicting the Holocaust in the early 1930s. They finally published the book in, I think, 1938 or something like that. But one of the things that Drucker found was that the rise of Hitler was made possible through economic alienation and economic distress.

28:06His view was it would lead to authoritarianism, potentially totalitarianism, because people, when they're under economic distress, they're just looking for a savior. And what Louis Kelso said, Louis Kelso created, he's the inventor of the employee stock ownership plan. What he said, and I became obsessed with Kelso when I was in college because I like his idea. His fundamental idea was in order to strengthen capitalism, everyone needs to have a piece of the pie. And he said, let's just make all workers owners. Because once you make all workers owners, we're all capitalists. And we're all a team.

28:45We're all rising together. And that's what Pete Stavros at KKR, Pete Stavros' broad-based employee ownership approach is the most successful investment strategy in KKR's 50-year history. It's when everyone from the receptionist to the CEO is an owner. We're all rowing together. Everyone's coming up with innovations to make the company better. Everyone's productive. what Pete found was among those superior performers, there was another cut of companies that were even better than the average of those. And those were the companies where there was empathy in the C-suite. So it doesn't get more beautiful than that to me.

29:27It's like, everyone's got a piece of the pie. People care about each other. Everyone's rolling together. You've got a more resilient company. You've got lower attrition and just greater happiness. So what's not to like about that? Yeah, I think you sort of explain these ideas in theory and everybody nods and goes, yes, that makes total sense to me. But then in practice, you see these kind of, if you're going to talk about employee stock option plans, I know from your book that your dad was unionized, mine was too. He was a local lineman for Alabama Power, and they had a great employee, well, started out great employee stock option plan where they would match contributions.

30:04But it was the match was so high that employees really were discouraged from putting money anywhere else. And then when the company had problems, it affected everyone. And I think about, you know, when you talk about empathy in the C-suite, what does that mean to a worker? You know, how is it measured? What does it translate to on the ground for people who work in those companies? Yeah, that's you know, that question reminds me of a story that I cut from my book. And that was when my dad was made a foreman at General Motors. It was a dream for him because it meant he'd be bringing home a little more money for the family.

30:42My dad typically had two, three jobs, and so every little bit helped. And then he was relieved of his foreman role several months later. And the reason why he was relieved of his role is because he wasn't yelling. He wasn't using expletives. He was being too nice to the workers. And they had given my dad a couple warnings. And he said, well, they're actually, people are working better. They're showing up on and on. Why do I need to behave that way? And they said, oh, that's just the way we do it around here. And he was relieved. And he was, it was one of the few times I saw my dad a little crestfallen because he thought he had let us down.

31:26But that's partly it, right? It is, I doubt you're old enough to remember, there's this guy named Chainsaw Al Dunlap, who in the 80s. I think I was a child, but I forgot about him. Yes, yes. I'm surprised you were born. But yeah, that was, you know, Neutron Jack Welch, right? That was, you got to be, that's zero sum. You got to be mean in order for people to win. Well, the reality is, you know, attrition is costly. And if you just look at that, forget about the additional innovation and productivity that comes when people believe they care about you, the workers. It's just kind of common sense in many ways.

32:05And that's what's great about this is there's so much common sense, which appears to be in short supply from what I can observe sometimes. Now, on the matter of some companies failing and so therefore people losing the ownership value, I'm not sure what you can do to stop that. Maybe it's possible, but I think life is filled with challenges and sometimes you fail even though you give it your best. Milton Friedman had a great solution for that. And we didn't call it universal basic income, but that's essentially what it was. So Milton Friedman said, we got to take care of the people who try as they might get sort of hurt by capitalism.

32:48And by hurt, he meant they might not be able to keep up with demands. And he said, we need a negative income tax, which is essentially universal basic income. He said, let's not worry so much. He has criticism of policy designs based on an assumption of freeloaders. His view was most people want to be productive. No one wants to like be kind of a slug in the society of productive people. He said, let's not spend time worrying about the folks that are going to cheat the system because it's never going to be perfect. Let's focus on the overwhelming majority of people of whom they're good people.

33:27Well, to go back to people not actually reading those books, I think that would surprise, you know, many libertarians I know who like Friedman in theory, but are not aware of those views in particular. So before we go, I'm going to ask you sort of as a thought experiment, if you were pitching this idea to Elon Musk, who has been notoriously resistant to a lot of what you were talking about, what would be your best foot forward? How would you pitch it? I'd probably start with Musk's support of, he actually goes beyond universal basic income to universal high income. So I'd start with that and my embrace of that notion.

34:07Number one. Number two, Elon Musk believes in hardworking people. He appreciates hardworking people. And what I say is there's a lot of people out there that want to work hard, but they can't get jobs and they don't get to enjoy the value of what they produce. That's the classic labor versus capital argument. And that's why Louis Kelso said everyone should be an owner because when you help make a company more productive, but you don't get the benefit of that increased productivity, then it can logically decrease your motivation. So I would just walk Musk through an argument drawing upon what I know appeals to him, which is science fiction.

34:55And I'd walk through, I'd use that type of narrative and that type of framing. I have no doubt, I mean, He's such a smart guy. I have no doubt that if I could convince him to set aside any preconceived notions and just start fresh, he would get it right away. I have no question in my mind that if Elon Musk were to read this book, he would get it. This book was meant to be relatable to the high school senior and to surprise the college professor. And based on feedback I've gotten, both things are true. Some people have called it a page turner. There are parts that some people say feel like a spy novel.

35:40That's the Lewis Powell part. I feel like my job is to make the complex simple and understandable so that people are in a better position to make informed decisions with the jobs they pick, how they speak with their managers and their outlook. And yeah, I think that covers it. Well, thank you. So that's it for Money Talks. Thank you to our guest, Roy Swan, for joining. And thanks to Jessamyn Molle of Seaplane Armada for producing. We'll be back Saturday with our regular edition of Slate Money.

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