Dream on: Biden and social mobility

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Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Patrick Lane, filling in for Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The making of concrete generates about 8% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. But the industry could be much, much greener. In time, it might even become a net extractor of CO2. And TikTok is the unlikely home of a new wave of book reviews. The critics are mainly young and female. Their style is hugs, not hatchet jobs. And they're proving a boon for the book trade. But first, President Joe Biden's grand plan to rebuild America is in better shape than it was this time last week.

On this vote, the yeas are 228 and the nays are 206.

The motion is adopted. Last Friday, the House of Representatives passed a $1.2 trillion bill to repair and modernize the country's creaking infrastructure. I don't think it's an exaggeration to suggest that we took a monumental step forward as a nation. It's an important legislative victory for a president whose record until this point has been somewhat patchy. But the big spending on roads, bridges, and public transport has a dual purpose. A once-in-a-generation investment that's going to create millions of jobs. It's not only about providing jobs, but reinvigorating an American dream that for many is fading. And if Mr. Biden is to achieve that, he knows he'll need more than spending just on infrastructure.

The American dream is predicated on the idea that no matter who you are, where you come from, If you work hard, you can succeed and thrive.

Idris Khaloun is The Economist's Washington correspondent.

The problem that Joe Biden faces, and one that he has set out to address, is that social mobility, the chance of someone actually making it, has fallen significantly in the past 70 years in America.

Can you give an example, Idris, of how things have changed over those past 70 years?

So if you look at kids who are born in the bottom 20% of the income distribution, basically kids who are poor, and you assess their chance of actually making it to the top 20, so the archetypal rags-to-riches story that people might think of when they think of the American dream, the chance of doing that in America is roughly 7.5% and actually much less than in Canada or some countries in Western Europe. And especially low in comparison to Scandinavia. So in some senses, the American Dream is more alive in those places than it is here.

Do we know why this is so?

Over the last 70 years, there's obviously been a tremendous transformation in the way that economic growth is distributed. It matters a lot more how educated you are, and if there is a lack of equality in access to education, that is now much more determinative of your future earnings. And it's no longer possible, really, to have a comfortable middle-class life without a college degree in America. Poorer kids stuck in poorer neighborhoods without access to high-quality education, it's much easier to become stuck in place. This is especially true not just for poor Americans, but especially for poor African Americans who have a much higher chance of remaining stuck in poverty and in the bottom of the income distribution than poor whites in America.

President Biden has this problem of inequality and reduced social mobility in his sights, doesn't he? So how are his spending bills intended to do something about it?

The big agenda that Joe Biden rolled out was what he called to build back better. And implicit in that statement is the idea that before COVID-19 hit America, there were deep inequities embedded in society that were causing quite a lot of turmoil, both economically and politically, and that rebuilding from this point, you know, the American state should be bigger and it should do more to ameliorate these inequities. So there would be spending on traditional infrastructure, roads and bridges and these sorts of things, you know, things that you could literally build back better. But a significant portion of the legislation would also have been spent on early childhood development, which is something that America lags behind its peers on, and improving welfare programs, moving America basically to a more European safety net.

How might the social safety net element of it shape social mobility?

So one pillar that's very important is equalizing opportunities for kids. It's most efficient to target spending then, and a lot of the proposals would have done that. So there's the anti-poverty measurements in the tax credits. There's the universal pre-kindergarten program that was proposed. Another proposal to subsidize childcare is included. And then there are also the supports that are targeted towards people who are already working. Some of those would be new jobs that would be created to build these bridges and roads and to do some of the climate mitigation work that's also been suggested. And a third pillar that might also affect social mobility is the creation of new taxes to fund all this program. You know, if you are able to disrupt the transmission of huge amounts of wealth from one generation to the next, you also have some effect on social mobility as well.

Will Mr. Biden have to scale back his ambitions for this social spending program if he's going to get meaningful legislation through Congress?

He's definitely already had to scale back his ambitions. Democrats are divided about the extent of this legislation. Although it was initially proposed at something like $4 trillion, it looks like ultimately something a bit above $2 trillion is what is ultimately going to pass. So there are some hard decisions that are being made about precisely what should be pared down and what should be kept. Initially, even at the sort of $4 trillion level, this proposal was a bit crammed because it contained everything that President Biden had campaigned on. All the climate change stuff, all of the infrastructure spending, all the safety net spending, and everything was, you know, just about funded. If you slash everything in half, you have to choose some things and disregard others.

Well, what's going to be dropped, and does this change the impact on dealing with inequality?

So, you know, for example, one of the proposals to provide 2 years of community college tuition-free has now been jettisoned and seems unlikely to pass as well. That also means that the grand European-style welfare state that had been contemplated, those start to look more expensive now because obviously a means-tested program costs less and gives you more room for other priorities. So there's quite a lot of slimming down that's already happened and there probably will be more as well because Biden will need to satisfy moderate or conservative Democrats, particularly Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia or Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona, who have been raising objections to various parts of this bill.

And although we're only a year into the Biden administration, people are already beginning to talk about President Biden's legacy. How important is this legislation for his legacy, whether he gets it through or whether he doesn't?

I think it will be probably the defining legislation of Biden's presidency. Joe Biden has, for all of his career, emphasized how he is an ambassador for the middle class. And he has said that, you know, throughout his career that what he aims to do is sort of revitalize the opportunity for those who are in the middle class or striving to get there. This is the best chance that he'll ever have in his career to do something about that agenda. But even though he has the opportunity, he now only has a very short window in which to do something with it.

Idris, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks for having me. As an aid to traffic, hundreds of new bridges have been completed, designed to withstand high waters and the pounding of heavy loads. Thousands of other bridges have been repaired and made safe.

One thing Joe Biden's big infrastructure plan will involve plenty of is concrete. The modern world has been built with it, whether in roads, bridges, buildings, or dams. This versatile material can be found just about anywhere that you find people. And that ubiquity is causing serious problems for the environment. Pound for pound, concrete is a super polluter. Its production generates 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions. But there's hope yet that this may change.

If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world, after China and America.

Paul Marchili is The Economist's innovation editor.

In an ideal world, you might hope that the global consumption of cement would fall in the face of such staggering numbers. But in fact, demand is set to double over the next 20 years as we cover even more of the planet with the grey stuff. Now, people are looking at ways to reduce the amount of concrete that's produced and make the whole process much greener.

Paul, why does concrete generate so much CO2?

Well, the vital ingredient in concrete is cement, and it's the process of making that cement that causes the problem. And that comes about in two ways. The raw material you need to make cement is limestone. You break it up, mix it with some other materials, and you put it into a kiln where it's heated to over 1,400 degrees centigrade. Now, two things happen there, and that is where most of the emissions come from. The first is that you need some kind of fuel to heat the kiln, and usually coal or some other fossil fuel is used. The second thing, which is about half of the emissions, is the chemical process that takes place. That's called calcination, and it generates a huge amount of CO2, and that's unavoidable. And what that means is that at present, almost 1 tonne of CO2 is released for every tonne of cement that is made.

So if it's part of the process of making concrete, is there a way to mitigate it?

Well, yeah, you tackle those 2 things. The first is relatively easy in a sense, because it's what a lot of companies, energy-intensive industries, are doing. And that is replacing fossil fuel with renewable fuels. So that deals with about sort of 40%, 50% of the emissions. The other 60% or so is that chemical process called calcination. How you can deal with that is to capture the carbon dioxide. Now, the really interesting thing is that scientists and engineers are finding that if you pump some of that CO2 back into concrete when you're mixing it with cement, it actually makes the concrete harder. If you have harder concrete, then you can use less of it to build stronger buildings. Now add all that up and you end up actually reducing emissions quite substantially.

So is that it? Would that solve the emissions problem for concrete?

Besides making the concrete stronger, you can also tech it up, if you like, by adding other materials to it. Some of this is done already. But the material tends to come from places like coal-fired power stations. So that's not really long-term sustainable. The better idea, and this is what's happening in a number of places at the moment, is to use synthetic and natural fibers, which give concrete a more composite structure. And in some cases, even graphene, which is a substance that's stronger than steel and consists of a single layer of sheets of carbon atoms. Now this really high-tech concrete not only means you can use less of it because it's stronger, but it has other properties as well. It can last longer, it doesn't necessarily break and cause buildings to crumble, and you could even make flexible concrete, bendable concrete if you like, which can cope with heavy traffic and could even improve the earthquake resistance of tall buildings. So teched-up concrete combined with the carbon capture makes the material quite promising for the future.

Well, it sounds promising, yes, but also a lot of work. Are there other greener materials you could just substitute in for concrete?

Not really. Nothing that's terribly practical. The favourite probably is engineered timber, which is increasingly being used to make buildings. Now, wood, of course, is a renewable resource, and it even is being used to build some quite tall buildings. Wooden ply scrapers, as some people call them. But wood only represents a very small amount of material. Compared to the vast quantities of cement concrete which will be poured over the next two decades. And there shows no sign of that demand flagging. We don't really have an opportunity other than trying to make cement and concrete greener.

So if you take all these possibilities together, Paul, how green could concrete get?

With some modest changes such as tinkering around with the energy efficiency of the kilns and replacing some of the fuel, you can get to probably probably 80% of current emissions fairly easily. Now, companies could really reduce their emissions if they powered their kilns with materials such as biomass, which contains wood, and capturing the CO2 that was used in the first place. You can get down to possibly zero emissions and maybe even beyond that, where you're actually removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Now if this happens in the future, we'll have turned one of the pariahs of global warming into a material that actually might help us fight it.

Paul, thank you very much for joining us.

That's a pleasure.

Our sister podcast about addressing climate change, To a Lesser Degree, reports the This week on The Pressure Points at the COP26 conference in Glasgow, we hear how the courts can be used to force climate action when governments aren't doing enough. Donald Pols is the director of a Dutch environmental organization that successfully took on the oil company Shell.

It was an enormous climax of emotions.

I'm a father of three.

For the first time in my life, And I've been working on climate change for more than 20 years.

For the first time, I was convinced we're going to stop climate change.

To a Lesser Degree is available wherever you get your podcasts. It's a social media phenomenon.

So this book is by one of BookTok's most beloved authors. It's It's different than her normal works. It's like—

Micro-literary reviews on TikTok, which can be as basic as showing covers of the book someone's reading or something more passionate.

And you guys know this is going to be a good one. I'm literally here in my freaking pimple cream with no makeup. It's like 10 PM at night because I'm so excited to read this book.

Now these BookTok reviews are turning into big money for the real book world.

If you talk to publishers, they get enormously excited about BookTok.

Katherine Nixey is The Economist's Britain correspondent.

Bloomsbury, they're the publishing house of Harry Potter. They've got record sales this year and a 220% rise in profits. And the head of Bloomsbury put this down to the absolute phenomenon, as he called it, of BookTok. And the most startling place I think you see it is that if you're looking up a book that you like on Amazon, what you find is that the title of the book itself has changed. So a book that used to just be called It Ends With Us is now called the slightly more breathless It Ends With Us 'TikTok made me buy it.' Katherine, what explains all this?

What is so special about BookTok?

As a literary reviewing style, it's incredibly different, and it kind of indicates that we've got literary reviewing all wrong anyway, because a literary review was famously a nasty thing. So Cyril Connolly, the great critic, described it as the thankless task of drowning other people's kittens. And what literary reviewers and magazines have often praised is the review that works with a kind of sharp blade rather than a big hug. And BookTok just says things like, I really like this book, I love this book, it made me cry, it made me weep. It's startlingly different to the chin-stroking style of most book reviews, but it seems to be working. And one of the reasons perhaps that it's working is it's largely done by young women for an audience who are largely, one assumes, young women. And these are the people who buy books, so it's reaching places that literary reviews have failed to reach hitherto.

So tell us about some of the stars of BookTok. Who are they?

One of the best-known ones is Celine Vela. So she's a 19-year-old American student. She was a high school student when she started out, now she's at university, and she runs the account @moongirlreads_.

Okay, halfway checkpoint. This book is amazing. It's dark and the groundwork has been laid for shit to go down. Oh my God, this is amazing but sick. Verity is worth the hype, 5 stars, but And they're young book enthusiasts.

They often got into it in lockdown. As far as I can see, they didn't start it cynically. Nobody had any idea it was going to become the phenomenon it did. And they're saying very simple things. They're saying things like, "I loved this book." They'll often give a gauge of how heavily the tears fell is something that they'll say. So one says, "Oh, I cried so much I had to change my shirt." And another one says, "You know, I cried so much it kept me up all night." It's this sort of terribly, terribly emotional, but at the same time, very enthusiastic response to literature.

Is the focus mainly on new books in that case?

Some of their books are completely up to the minute, but they're also looking at books that were published what in publishing terms is an age ago, i.e., about 7 or 8 years ago, like Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles, and they're bringing them back into the bestseller list. So they're, in publishing terms, it's an interesting and new thing to get books that had sort of reached the end of their lifespan having a second lease of life.

So Catherine, is this more emotional, less delectory, less hatchety style of reviewing the future of literary criticism?

Well, it's certainly going to be a future of literary criticism, definitely. And I mean, it's helping a whole new generation of readers find the books that they love and, and read them. And it's capturing people who were never going to read. These people were not about to subscribe to the Paris Review or the New York Review of Books. Their books are never covered by that kind of thing. So these are young adult female books that these magazines would consider beneath them to review, and they're being reviewed and taken seriously by these young women. So yes, it is a future. I, I think probably what we're finding in the new internet age is lots of different futures can exist concurrently, side by side.

Catherine, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts. See you back here tomorrow.

Healthcare can feel complicated. That's why Optum uses technology to connect the people and processes that make healthcare easier, more affordable, and more effective. We're making it clearer for you to know to know exactly what your benefits cover. And to help you better manage your health, we're coordinating care between your doctors and your technology. We believe better, simpler healthcare is always possible. That's healthy optimism.

That's Optum.

Visit Optum.com to learn more.