| And we have gone for more than 40 years without any meaningful increase in middle-income pay, and where the injustice experienced by African Americans and other communities of color are concerned, the differential in pay between African Americans and majority Americans is the same as it was in 1968, and the family wealth, the net worth -- it takes 11 and a half so-called "typical" African American families to make up the net worth of one so-called "typical" White American family. And you look at the soaring incomes in the top one or the top one-tenth of one percent, and people say, "Wait a minute. Whoever the experts were that designed these policies, they haven't been doing a good job for me." | |
| A final point, Chris: there has been an assault on reason. There has been a war against truth. There has been a strategy, maybe it was best known as a strategy decades ago by the tobacco companies who hired actors and dressed them up as doctors to falsely reassure people that there were no health consequences from smoking cigarettes, and a hundred million people died as a result. That same strategy of diminishing the significance of truth, diminishing, as someone said, the authority of knowledge, I think that has made it kind of open season on any inconvenient truth -- forgive another buzz phrase, but it is apt. We cannot abandon our devotion to the best available evidence tested in reasoned discourse and used as the basis for the best policies we can form. | |
| Is it possible, Al, that one consequence of the pandemic is actually a growing number of people have revisited their opinions on scientists? I mean, you've had a chance in the last few months to say, "Do I trust my political leader or do I trust this scientist in terms of what they're saying about this virus?" Maybe lessons from that could be carried forward? |