Everyday Freedom: Philip K. Howard
April 18th, 2024
”We need a vision about how democracy should work.”
Philip K. Howard is the founder and chair of Common Good, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that advocates for simplifying government, and has advised both parties on needed reforms. His latest book is Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society.
Every community depends on democracy to deliver, whether that’s government services, schools, hospitals, or housing. Howard argues that a democracy depends on people being able to take responsibility, to interpret guidelines and perform their jobs or service accordingly. In a time when a significant percentage of Americans no longer believe in democracy, we need a national movement to remake institutions that honor the capacity of humans.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Philip K. Howard
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer: Zack Travis
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Philip K Howard Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:04] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
It's 2024 and the future of America is in your hands. Democracy is not a spectator sport, so we are here to bring you an independent perspective about the election this year and empower you to change the status quo. Here on the podcast, we think a lot about the comments and what everyday people can do to keep the public good top of mind and thereby make our democracy stronger. Perhaps one way to rethink our relationship to each other and to the comments, is through our conception of freedom.
To dig deeper on this idea, we're joined by Philip K Howard. He's the founder and chair of Common Good, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization which advocates for simplifying government and has advised both parties on needed reforms. His latest book is Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society.
Welcome, Philip. Thank you for joining us.
Philip K Howard: [00:01:16] Nice to be with you, Mila.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:18] So you've been on this beat for a while, trying to simplify laws in the US, and you tell some compelling stories to make that case in your book. But tell us what prompted you to write this book, making the connection to strengthen what you call the greater good through freedom.
Philip K Howard: [00:01:35] Well, this book came out of a forum that I hosted at Columbia University last year on human Agency with a bunch of scholars from different areas, economists and political scientists, and the like. And the urgency to turn it into a book came from the success of Donald Trump's candidacy, which is, you know, there's this sticky group of 40% or more of Americans who obviously so resent the establishment that they stick to someone, notwithstanding some obvious defects in his character and vision and such. And I felt that the other candidates were not talking to these people, and they're not talking to why people are frustrated, you know, why does
over half the country feel alienated? Why are doctors and nurses burning out, you know, so are there system problems here? And I argue that there are and that we need to come to grips with them if we want to arrest this slide into cynicism and polarization and alienation.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:46] Yes, I hear you. I think that the most damaging sentiment for American democracy is cynicism, that, you know, it really doesn't matter what I do, it doesn't matter what I believe or who I vote for, you know, why bother? Let's just call it a day. So we are a pro-democracy podcast, and we think a healthy democracy depends on a thriving society, which is the subject of your book. And in my mind, in an election year like this year, that means it must include, for example, robust civic education and voting rights. How does your concept of everyday freedom live in the house of American democracy?
Philip K Howard: [00:03:27] Well, you know, I think we need a vision about how democracy should work. So I think what's happened is for the noblest of intentions, we unwittingly took away the authority of people who run schools or who run agencies or run environmental groups to actually make the choices needed for those things to work. We've created this kind of red tape state with 1000 page rule books and procedures that can literally go on for a decade to get a permit for a power line, or that prevent new housing that's desperately needed, or that jack up the cost of shelter for the homeless by ten times or more because of antiquated codes. So for democracy to work, it needs to actually deliver. And democracy is not delivering very effectively. And both the failures of government to deliver and the broad alienation are symptoms of system failure. And the failure specifically is the disempowerment of people in their daily choices, everyday freedom in their daily choices, so that they can't actually effectively take responsibility. Democracy depends on people being able to take responsibility.
Mila Atmos: [00:04:50] Mhm. Well you touched on a lot of things here. Democracy, everyday freedom, responsibility, but also systems change. And if we're talking about system change, you wrote that democracy needs to deliver good governance. Otherwise it doesn't work. If it's not working for the people, why are we doing this? So in your mind, where is the best place for systems change to achieve good governance? Where is the low hanging fruit?
Philip K Howard: [00:05:16] Well, I think there's low hanging fruit everywhere. I think being able to manage a school and turn around a bad school should be low hanging fruit. It's just a human enterprise. If people can make new choices, that would be good. But people can't make new choices because, well, for one, the teachers unions have effective control of the operating machinery, so you can't change personnel. So that's a problem. So the difficulty is that a new leader is unable to do this. It requires actually a new philosophy embedded in a new operating structure. So I'm in the process of talking to some experts in different areas about doing effectively Charettes sort of 3 or 4 page outlines of what should be the authority framework that allows people to fix schools, what should be the oversight framework that relieves doctors and nurses from spending half the day filling out forms. And once you have a vision of how things could work, then try to create a popular movement and a democratic government that puts pressure on political leaders to do that.
Mila Atmos: [00:06:37] Well, in terms of schools, of course, teachers unions are not the only stakeholder in this process. It's also that state legislatures may not be funding schools properly. I just discovered in the state of Missouri, there are schools in rural areas that are only open four days a week because they're underfunded, and they pay the teachers so little that they continue to quit after a year or two, and then they have to rethink the model. But to your point, I agree we should be rethinking about how we turn schools around.
Philip K Howard: [00:07:06] So the political science of change is that it happens in Big Gulps called punctuated equilibrium. We get the 1960s and the rights revolution. We get a lot of changes. The New Deal, we got social safety nets, the Progressive Era. We got rid of the philosophy of laissez faire that allowed factories to mangle children and workers. Right. So I think we're at one of these points where we need a change. But I'm arguing that the change should be not one so much of public goals, but of execution, that we need to move away from the red tape model to a human responsibility and accountability model. Daniel Pink had a column recently in The Washington Post arguing that teachers should make $100,000 a year.
Mila Atmos: [00:07:53] Yeah, I saw that. Philip K Howard: [00:07:54] I'm all for that.
Mila Atmos: [00:07:55] Me too.
Philip K Howard: [00:07:55] Yeah. Fantastic idea. But teachers have to be accountable for their performance. There's zero accountability of teachers in this case. You can't get rid of a bad teacher.
Mila Atmos: [00:08:05] Depends. State to state is different. Yes. But in New York for example, very difficult.
Philip K Howard: [00:08:10] In the big urban states where there are a lot of problems with schools, there's near zero accountability. So it requires a new framework not to get rid of government, but to make it work.
Mila Atmos: [00:08:22] Well, one of the things you argue in your book is that a new framework for everyday freedom requires asserting social norms. So what do you mean by that? Because we're in an environment where one of the presidential candidates makes norm breaking a badge of honor, and we're flooded with disinformation and misinformation. And I think today we don't all agree what the norms are anymore.
Philip K Howard: [00:08:46] That's right. But the principal of a school subject to oversight by the school board ought to be able to assert within boundaries the norms of how it should work. So a principal, a teacher in a classroom, ought to be able to dismiss a student who's disrupting the class without having to go to a hearing to prove it. You're not sending the kid to jail, you're sending him out of the classroom. So it's really important to maintain order in a classroom. And so what the studies show is that the threat of having to prove that Johnny threw the pencil first has effectively disempowered teachers from maintaining order. And the kids read that brilliantly because they all get an A in reading what the teacher, you know, is scared of. And so then, then they misbehave and then none of the kids can learn. So those are the kind of norms I'm talking about. I'm not talking about what I'll call big norms. I'm not talking about the debate between the right to life and, you know, the right of choice. I'm talking about just what's fair or not in a given setting in a school. What's the right balance to strike when you're running a hospital between putting the resources here versus there?
Mila Atmos: [00:10:04] No, that's totally legit. Although I will say having only sons as children, one of my children was frequently disruptive and was frequently sent outside of his classroom. Just putting that out there, that that still happens, to the credit of teachers who assert authority in the classroom. You said something interesting about hospitals. And just recently there were these hearings about having a minimum number of staff in Michigan hospitals. And one of the pushbacks there is that if you cannot assure that we have enough nurses in a hospital, that the hospital must shut down, and the person who is advocating for this change is somebody who recently lost a loved one and is convinced if the hospital had been better staffed, that if there had been more people working, that his wife would not have died. So when you think about that and the reams of paper that everyday Americans fill out and we don't really know why we're filling them out, how do you strike a balance?
Philip K Howard: [00:11:10] Right, who reads all those forms? I mean, there's some giant file warehouse in heaven or something. And so the problem with red tape is it's self-perpetuating. You need you not only have to fill out the form, then there has to be somebody on the other side who checks the form. Then there's somebody who checks the form and files the form. So you end up having this inflation of cost that ultimately, in the case of health care, means there's not enough money to hire nurses. So so you want to put the energy into patient care, not into red tape unless the red tape is serving a really important purpose. Right. So you need to make those judgments. People who run successful hospitals and schools deal with the hand they're dealt. You know, they try to comply with the regulations. The reality is that it's impossible. There are so many regulations, it's impossible to comply with them all. And there are studies that show that that even inspectors charged with enforcing regulations don't know 10% of them. So you have to remake institutions honoring the capacity of humans to know what their bandwidth is. I mean, one of the things I talk about in everyday freedom is human cognition. Most of our intelligence is in our unconscious. It's like a quantum computer, and it includes our training and our experience and our instincts, and probably includes some biases. That includes good things and bad things. And then the conscious brain is like an eight bit processor. You can only keep a few things there at once. And if you put too much into it, that's not internalized in your unconscious. It causes people to burn out. So that's one of the reasons why doctors and nurses and teachers and others burn out, because they're trying to keep a lot of stuff straight while doing quite a hard job. So you need to create systems that honor both the capacity, the genius in some ways, and
the fallibility and the limits of human cognition, because we're still just people. Right? So instead, we've created this, this massive regulatory system that tries to ensure that everything is done properly by stacking rule upon rule and book upon book that nobody can keep straight. And it causes failure because everyone's going around with their nose in the rule book instead of taking care of somebody.
Mila Atmos: [00:13:38] Right. This is a big thread in your book, of course, that we are constantly protecting ourselves or aiming to protect ourselves against liability. I'm a big proponent of not having any frivolous lawsuits to begin with, but having said that, there is a place for them, right? Like in your mind, what's a legitimate grievance that people should continue to be able to go and sue someone or sue an entity for recourse?
Philip K Howard: [00:14:06] Well, I mean, there are legal principles that if you cause harm under tort law, you can sue someone. If if they acted unreasonably, then the question is, is it a colorable claim? And then the question is how much can you sue for? I mean, how much would you take to have a broken leg? How much would you take to lose a loved one, $1 million, $100 million? You wouldn't take any amount. Right. So so money is not a very good substitute for this, but you need to limit or at least put responsible limits on what people can sue for, because otherwise people will shrivel up into defensive shells because one unintentional accident could ruin your life, right, in a lawsuit. So the role of judges is to apply those principles. Let's say children are playing on a seesaw. And one of the kids gets off and the crashes down -- my brothers used to do this to me -- and somebody breaks their leg. So should there be a lawsuit against whoever controls the playground, there should have been more supervision. In hindsight, you can always say something different at least should have been done. And in my view, if the lawsuit will affect the conduct of people not in the courtroom, then there needs to be a legal ruling about whether such claims should be allowed. I'm not saying what the ruling should be, but if you allow a lawsuit because the kid crashed in the seesaw and broke their leg. The word will get out and all the seesaws will be ripped out because no one will want to take that risk. So just like all the jungle gyms have been taken out, tall swings and slides have been taken out. Not because there have been so many crazy lawsuits, but because everybody knows there's the risk of a lawsuit. So there was a famous case in England where the Law Lords overturned a case where there was a terrible accident. The person became a paraplegic as a result of diving into a county lake and breaking his neck and such, and they refused to allow the lawsuit to
go forward because they said, if we allow this lawsuit, the lakes and rivers of our land will be closed down and will deny people the freedom of taking reasonable risks. So judges have to make rulings like that. As one of the judges said, does the law require that all trees be cut down because some children may climb them and fall? That's something that isn't happening in America. And so we have this incredibly defensive culture where, for example, established businesses have a policy of not giving job references because they don't want to take the risk of a lawsuit if they say something either good or bad about somebody.
Mila Atmos: [00:17:02] Mhm. That example that you cited about the diver in the UK really struck me. And of course that's absolutely accurate. And to your point that so many jungle gyms have been removed from public parks where children used to play. And routinely I will say, I mean, of course I knew somebody who broke their arm falling off the jungle gym like, this is a normal thing and nobody sued anybody. Then that was like, not the thing to do, right?
Philip K Howard: [00:17:26] As one play advocate said, better a broken arm than a broken spirit.
Mila Atmos: [00:17:32] Mhm.
Philip K Howard: [00:17:32] There's actually a lot of learning on child development that concludes that children have to be allowed to go out alone and to play without supervision. Explore. That that's how they develop their sense of the limits and the and the risks and such. And if you have hovering parents all the time that you're really stunting the growth of the children. There's an organization called Let Grow run by Lenore Skenazy, but with the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is involved and others. That's all about liberating children from adult oversight so that they can actually develop the emotional skills and muscles to deal with life better when they grow up.
Mila Atmos: [00:18:22] We're taking a short break, and we'll be back with Philip in a moment. But first, I want to tell you about a podcast called 10% Happier. The 10% Happier podcast has one guiding philosophy. Happiness is a skill you can learn, so why not master it? Hosted by Dan Harris, a journalist who had a panic attack on national television and then set out on a journey of transformation, he's now on a quest to help
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And now let's return to my conversation with Philip K Howard.
I want to go back and connect this to democracy. A part of your thesis for this everyday freedom is that you can revive human agency. And when you do that, you basically remove the sense of disempowerment and alienation. When you think about American democracy, what does it look like to revive human agency?
Philip K Howard: [00:19:52] It's really just how people do their work. Can people be honest and candid in the workplace and give honest reviews? Can an environmental official make a decision that says, you know, for this power line, it's so important to get the energy from the wind farms to the big city, for the environment, that the only really significant issues that we need to study in the environmental review are what the route should be and any environmental disruptions there, and some other issue and make that decision. Have the environmental review be done in six months instead of six years, and then decide to give the permit or not. But no official thinks he or she has that authority. So it's a process of no pebble left unturned. And we have this antiquated electrical grid, which wastes the equivalent of 200 coal burning power plants just from the wastage of the antiquated grid, not counting the improvements for bringing things in from the wind farm. So I'm just talking about giving people the authority to do their jobs, and that requires moving from a process where it looks more like central planning, with a thousand page rule books and processes that go on forever, forever to something that looks more like the Constitution, where you have to do an environmental review. The official has to decide what are the material impacts to be studied. That's overseen by this other official and ultimately by a court. And then if there's a dispute among the different agencies about how to do this, because there are so many agencies involved in most decisions, environmental decisions, that they never agree. You know, Fish and Wildlife never agrees with the Corps of Engineers. Then the president or whoever the law says has the authority to resolve that disagreement. So you simply have goals, you
allocate authority and you figure out ways to resolve disagreements. That's it. It's a framework like the Constitution. Constitution says that there should be no unreasonable searches and seizures for words. The Fourth Amendment. It doesn't tell police exactly how to do things, but it gives us enough protection that generally, people feel pretty safe in their homes, that the police are not going to barge in for no reason. Right. So that's how I think democracy should work. It's all about giving people responsibility, not giving them an instruction manual.
Mila Atmos: [00:22:26] Yeah. Basically what you're saying, if I may summarize and paraphrase you, is that we need common sense judgment and essentially efficient government. You know, don't overdo it. We actually had a conversation with somebody who was a pro nuclear power scientist, and he told us about everything that is involved in putting up a nuclear power plant. Et cetera. Et cetera. My conclusion at the end of our conversation was that the biggest barrier to having a new nuclear power plant, whether you are for it or not, that it would take 30 years of red tape and getting approval, you know, through the various boards and, and the communities and this, that and the other. And I thought, well, if you're waiting 30 years, then, you know, you're not going to get one. It's not going to be a solution to climate change.
Philip K Howard: [00:23:11] Yeah. Yes. And so, you know, the objection to what I'm saying is that, well, who is common sense? You know, what if somebody makes a bad decision and of course people will make bad decisions. So I'm not suggesting that there is one common sense. What I am suggesting is that life is complex and that the people on the ground, the teacher in the classroom, the principal in the school, the environmental official looking at the permits have to have the authority to adapt to the circumstance. Just like doctors and nurses have to do triage when they have different patients who have injuries or whatever. And right now they don't have that authority. They don't have the authority to actually use their judgment. There is a famous management expert called Chester Barnard, who wrote this kind of first principles book 90 years ago, called The Functions of the Executive. But he said that 90% of all the decisions needed to get something done happen at the point of implementation, every situation is different, so you can have goals, but you have to have the freedom to adapt. It doesn't mean you'll always succeed, but it does mean that you have the ability to try to do your best and then to change if it doesn't work out.
Mila Atmos: [00:24:27] Yeah, well, one of the things here is that we assume that the person is really doing their best or using their best judgment. Right. And I think one of the problems we have in society today, and which you also write about in the book, is that there's a lack of trust. We don't really trust each other anymore. And no surprise, you know, with all that's happening. For example, in politics, most Americans are checked out precisely because they feel that why would they trust this process? And why would they trust these politicians? Because the outcomes don't appear to work for them at all. So if we're thinking about rebuilding trust, that's a huge lift in our current moment. What do you think should be the first practical steps?
Philip K Howard: [00:25:12] Well, it would help if we had some leaders with moral authority, and it's hard to come up with those, right? I mean, people like Colin Powell, I think President Obama had moral authority. Mike Bloomberg had moral authority. People thought he was trying to do the right thing. There is a lot in Washington. You know, people watch TV and it's like phoniness on a continuous loop. I mean, it's very easy to be cynical. It's just not working. And people are doing things for just partisan reasons. They're not solving the border problem so that Trump has an issue for the election. It's just outrageous. So there are lots of reasons to be cynical, but but in an institutional context, the only way you can really achieve trust is by having a hierarchy of authority that is making decisions that most people consider fair. And so it's very important in a healthy organization to have mutual trust that everybody's working hard and doing their best. So that requires, if somebody is not working hard or has bad judgment, or isn't a good teacher, that the person in charge say, you know, sorry, it's not working out. And if you don't do that, then, as the organizational psychologists say, you know, one bad apple spoils the barrel. People say, well, performance doesn't matter, right? So you get distrust. So. In any organizational setting, you need a hierarchy of authority. So what I argue in the book, which is contrary to what frankly, both conservatives and liberals think is that authority is not the enemy of freedom. Authority is actually absolutely essential to freedom, that in any framework, in any organization, there has to be an authority that is making choices that people think are generally fair and upholding standards and values of that organization. And if you don't have it, it's just anarchy. And you can do whatever you want and people don't trust it. I think authority has a gravitational force where when you give it, you actually get it back at the same time. And so managers discover that if they give the people below them the authority to do things to their own way, in a way it gives them more authority, because
now they get to see innovation, they get to figure out what works and what doesn't. Whereas if they're just telling people how to do things, they don't learn anything. This is like an assembly line, right? Because I think we're suffering a crisis of human disempowerment. You know, everyone's frustrated that things don't work and they're frustrated. They can't do things their own way. And the more the distrust grows because things don't work, the more we try to control it and things get even worse. You know, I give the example in the book of Australian nursing homes, where they threw away a thick rule book and replaced them with 31 general principles, like have a home-like setting, respect the dignity of the residents, that sort of thing. And the experts thought that the nursing home owners would get away with murder, and they went in a year later to look at it. It turned out they had dramatically improved. And they improved because by giving the nursing home owner more authority, you also gave the regulator more authority, and you gave family members more authority to make their decisions. And you ended up creating a feedback loop, as you put it, a sort of discussion loop of how could things be better? And instead of going through the day complying with a thousand rules, the nurses aides spent the day looking at what the residents needed and wanted. It was just dramatic improvement in the quality of nursing homes by throwing away the rule book and creating principles.
Mila Atmos: [00:28:55] Um hum. It just kind of makes me feel like this is an endorsement of really getting involved in local politics, for example, in smaller villages. Or you live in New Hampshire, for example, where you show up and you have a feedback loop with your elected representative in real time.
Philip K Howard: [00:29:11] Yes. And you raise a very good point, which is that it's really important for people in a community. To have much more of a sense of ownership in that community, to take care of the homeless people in their own ways, to provide social services for families in need in their own way. It doesn't mean they can do whatever they want, but it does mean that it shouldn't be subject to, again, thousand page rule books coming from Washington. I mean, every homeless person is different, every person is different, and they have different needs and different wants, and there needs to be resources to take care of the homeless, which we are not doing. There needs to be housing that's appropriate for the homeless, more like SRO housing with assisted living, which were not doing and the codes do not allow. But most of all, we need the people in the community to feel like they can go and make a difference. And it
makes everybody feel better about democracy and about themselves because they're part of it. Mhm. I think the worst thing about the current sort of red tape state is it doesn't let people participate. It just dictates. You know, we vote for people. And then every once in a while we get these thick rule books coming down from on high. Well, that's not all democracy is. Democracy ought to be, you know, a way of making a difference in your community. And we've haven't shut it out completely, but we've made it hard.
Mila Atmos: [00:30:39] Yeah. Well said, I agree. We know that demanding change is hard, and the impetus for big change is overwhelming public demand. So what are two things an everyday person can do to demand this kind of change?
Philip K Howard: [00:30:57] Well, I think pressures for local ownership are really important. Why can't we do this our own way? And one of the things that you can get a local representative to try to do is to go to the state legislature or whatever and get exceptions. I want a bill letting the town of Glasgow have pilot projects, if you will. That's one thing. But the second thing is that we really do need to create a national movement, not unlike the environmental movement or civil rights movement or the progressive movement that's based on re-empowering people giving people the freedom to take responsibility. Again, you know, there's a kind of alchemy to getting there, but ultimately it depends on people listening to a podcast like this in Future Hindsight, and then talking to a political leader. And then I'm talking to political leaders about using these narratives in their discussions. So I've been talking to some members of Congress from both sides. I've been talking to Senator Joe Manchin about it. We need leaders to pick up the cudgel and then have them attract supporters because they're advocating this kind of overhaul. So that's how the democratic system ultimately creates change. But it's going to be hard because Washington will resist this, will resist it because everybody there is getting rich doing things the way they work now. It's like a hamster on a wheel turning out lots of red tape or something, and we need to change the system.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:31] Well you've been trying for a long time. You've been doing this for decades and, you know, you're somebody who has influence. You meet with somebody like Senator Joe Manchin. Like I do not have access to Senator Manchin. But it's the kind of thing where most people don't do that. Right. So it's fantastic that you're doing it. And yet we're still here.
Philip K Howard: [00:32:50] Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So, so my background is as a civic leader, I was chair of the Municipal Arts Society, which was the group Save Grand Central Terminal. I was chair of the committee that organized the Tribute in Light Memorial for nine over 11. So I'm basically a civic leader and I'm a citizen, not a political activist. I've deliberately not joined a think tank. I do have an appointment at Columbia University in a branch of the economics department. But America's overdue for change. The ground is shaking. I mean, you can feel it. It's just feel the stampede of people, particularly for Trump, you know, why are they that it's because they hate the establishment. Why do they hate the establishment? Well, in large part, I think it's because of what I'm writing about, because they don't feel they can be themselves. They can't even tell a joke without getting in trouble. We are going to get change. The question is whether the change is against democracy. You know, there are all these polls that show that some significant percentage of Americans no longer believe in democracy. It's incredible. So is the change against democracy, or is it to make it work better? So I'm doing this because I think that even if I can't make the change and I do have a platform, I do get to talk to political leaders. I do get attention in the media and such. At least I can create a vision of what change might look like so that when there's a crisis and Washington has to change, there's something there that somebody can pull off the shelf. So I'm talking with leading experts in every area, and we're going to create something you can pull off the shelf. That's an outline of how health care could work better at a fraction of the cost, you know, and deliver care how teachers can get paid more and have better schools with a different management structure, and where Americans feel free to be themselves. You know, I think it's important, and I think it's important to change the narrative from the everyday distrust narrative, which is what we have today on social media, to one where people begin to imagine, well, how would I like it to work? You know, how would I like the schools where my kids go work? You know, what would be better for my health care? What would be better for my budget? I think we're at a point where ideas matter, and that's why I'm doing it.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:16] Yeah, well, ideas always matter. And I like that your ideas are human centric. So as we are closing out our conversation today, looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Philip K Howard: [00:35:29] Oh, I think America is still a great culture. I think the people of America want to do the right thing. Every time there's a study of how do we
deal with these immigrants, or how do we do something, you find people of very radically different ideologies coming to similar conclusions. You know, we just got to let people roll up their sleeves and be themselves. So I think that the social media and the political system is really a conspiracy against the better nature of most Americans. So we need to sort of break that downward spiral and mobilize a new movement. I mean, the parties are broken, both parties are broken. Let's just acknowledge that they're broken. I had dinner two nights ago with a Democratic congressman. We were talking about this. He says, yeah, my party's broken. The Democratic Party thinks that if you can advocate for good goals, that's all you need. No, you have to deliver. So we need to get people thinking about that. And I think this podcast and others is an important step in, in getting there that we need to change the system so that people can do what's right.
Mila Atmos: [00:36:35] Yes, I definitely agree that if government works, if schools work, hospitals work, people have faith in the system, people will have faith in democracy. So thank you very much, Philip, for joining us today. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show.
Philip K Howard: [00:36:50] Great to be with you, Mila.
Mila Atmos: [00:36:52] Philip K Howard is the chair of Common Good and the author of
Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Jonathan Metzl. He's the Frederic B Rentschler II professor of sociology and psychiatry and the director of the Department of Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University. His most recent book is What We've Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms.
Jonathan M. Metzl: [00:37:24] What does that data mean for the soul of our society that we have so expanded, not just gun ownership, but also live with mass gun violence in a way that even ten years ago, our whole country used to stop when we heard about a mass shooting. And now it's no less horrific, but we habituate it the way that soldiers in wartime do, for example. And so I argue that we, in part, live in a traumatized society that not only has normalized gun violence, but also guns as a means of everyday self- protection.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:58] That's next time on Future Hindsight. And before I go, first of all, thanks so much for listening. If you like this episode, you'll love what we have in store. Be sure to hit that follow button on Apple Podcasts or the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app, so you'll catch all of our upcoming episodes. Thank you! Oh, and please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts. It seems like a small thing, but it can make a huge difference for an independent show like ours. It's the main way other people can find out about the show. We really appreciate your help. Thank you. This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me. Until next time, stay engaged.
The Democracy Group: [00:38:55] This podcast is part of the democracy Group.