Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

As Americans, the things that we hold dear, like freedom and getting good deals. Two things that we really debunk today is that we're not as free as we think we are, and we also are not getting a good deal.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Many of our shows this year have focused on accurately diagnosing and understanding problems. Why don't things in the United States feel like they work the way that they should? And so often, why does life feel so much harder than it would need to be in the wealthiest place in the history of humanity? But this episode is about solutions. And in another sense, it's about hope. It's about hope that the problems that plague us aren't unsolvable. And in fact, other places have solved them with tactics that are within reach. T

oday I'm speaking with the author of Another World Is Possible, Natasha Hakimi Zapata. I'm challenging myself not to use the word Norway even once over the next hour because I recognize the utility of gesturing repeatedly at the actual richest country on earth. If we're talking about wealth per capita of approximately 5 million people has its limits and I've probably exhausted them.

So today we're going to talk about how Singapore made housing affordable for essentially everybody, how Finland created the most impressive and equitable education system the world has ever seen, how Portugal solved drug abuse, how Estonia made the internet a human right, how Uruguay broke records in its transition to renewable energy and how New Zealand's created a universal pension program. And yes, if you read Natasha's book, you will also get to learn about how Norway made quality childcare available to everybody. But like I said, my know Norway challenge begins.

And now Natasha, welcome to the Money with Katie Show. I am very thrilled to talk to you today about solutions.

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

Thanks so much for having me, Katie.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

So before we get into country specific conversation, I want to talk to you a little bit about American exceptionalism. I'm really curious how often over the course of researching and writing this book, going on tour for this book, did you encounter someone who said, well, sure, that's great for them. I'm sure that works for them, but that would never work in the United States because our special snowflake problems are just so unique and different from everybody.

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

So as you suspect, I of course got this a lot, especially in terms of like, are we too racist to have things like universal healthcare? Yes. No, I'm kidding. Well, I mean one of the things I really wanted to do is I wanted to stay away only from Scandinavian countries. I did go to Norway and look at their amazing paid parental leave policy. I did go to Finland to look at their public school education system, but I wanted to offer a pretty big variety of economies and cultures and take this really global approach and look at policies that have been successful and around for at least 10 years. So I had all of this data to really say we don't actually have an excuse if all of these very different places are able to address these issues that we also have in the states and that really feel intractable.

And so a big part, it's important to explain as well where the book came out of. I'm a journalist. I've been a journalist in progressive media for about 15 years now. At the same time that I was writing and reporting on all of these issues that felt so intractable in the US where I'm from, I was also living in a number of different places and traveling to a number of different places where they seemed like they'd gotten a lot further along on those same issues. And so the personal side, which I write about in the introduction to the book comes from an experience with my mom. So I'm the daughter of undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Iran. And speaking of American exceptionalism, I grew up around this idea of the American dream. And I often say my brothers and I were these little American dreams that my parents had, but as we got older, that American dream that they had seemed more possible to me in some of the other places I lived in. And part of that was back to my mom and this health incident in which because she couldn't afford healthcare health insurance really for large parts of her life, she had undiagnosed untreated diabetes that was finally diagnosed as she was being rushed to the emergency room and had to have her right foot amputated.

And at the same time that I was filled with this dread that many of us have felt unfortunately of worried about my mom's wellbeing, what was her life going to be like? How would she survive? I was also worried about how we were going to be able to afford the care she needed, the insulin she would literally need moving forward to stay alive. And I knew because I'd lived in places like the UK where I live now, that universal healthcare is possible. We can address at least that part of the issue and do so successfully.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

There's so much there. I was just with some family in San Miguel de Allende and we were talking about the Medicaid cuts and we've been talking about this on the show a lot as well, how when you remove healthcare from somebody, you remove their health insurance, their ability to access that care. They don't stop needing care, they just go about accessing it in other ways. And oftentimes the other ways they are forced to access it is through emergency room care as your mom's story so nicely illustrates and not only are the health outcomes typically much worse, but it's a lot more expensive too. So I like to highlight that every chance we get just to be like, we think we're doing this on the cheap and it's going to be saving money to take healthcare away from people. And that's just frankly not the case.

I also think that when we have conversations like these, and you made this joke about are we too racist to have universal healthcare? We're kind of kidding. But that is in so many words, the argument that people make when they say, well, our country is too diverse for that, saying that we're too diverse for something is just a nicer way of saying we assume that some population of this country is not going to want to see minority populations receive these things. And so it's like we're kidding, but we're kind of not the other pushback that I often hear. And I think this one actually is more legitimate, that there is such low trust in the government. Trust is required for these programs to work and for buy-in to happen. I'm curious if you heard that as well.

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

I've definitely heard that as well. And of course the other question I get a lot is like, can we afford this? But I always like to remind people it's the wealthiest country in the history of the planet. It's about how we allocate resources and what our priorities are.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Drone strikes.

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

Right? Well, exactly. And what does that really cost? Not just the world, but also our country? And we're seeing that very much right now in the states. But going back to this idea of trust, I really like this concept that I think Robbie Nelson from DSA talks about, which is engines of solidarity that these policies, especially universal programs, I'm a huge believer in universal programs. Even more so after writing this book, they show us in a very real material way that we're all in this together. We already are. But when we all have the same healthcare system, when we all have to send our kids to the same local school, we understand that we are materially in this together. And that can lead to more solidarity, that can lead to more trust.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

We'll be right back to this conversation with Natasha after this break.

So let's dive into some of these country specific case studies that you have. I want to start with Singapore's housing development Board. In the 1960s, the Singaporean government revolutionized its views on public housing. And just keep in mind here that public housing has a very different connotation in the United States as we know, but in Singapore, they devoted the resources to creating just an astonishing amount of housing supply. So by 1980, 67% of Singaporeans lived in public housing, two in three people. How does buying public housing in Singapore work?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

That number is actually higher now. 80% of Singaporeans live in public housing and 90% of them are homeowners. So it's just this incredible radical experiment coming from this very unlikely place. So the way that buying public housing works in Singapore is that your down payment, the way that we would in the US have a down payment and get a mortgage for an HDB Housing Development Board apartment comes out of these mandatory employer employee contribution based savings funds for pensions. And what that means is essentially that your deposit is sort of automatically saved for you that most of the time don't even need to actually spend a single Singaporean dollar of your cash savings in order to buy a home. And that your monthly sort of mortgage payments, their HDB loans that are sort of similar actually come out directly from that pension fund. So again, you don't even have to really think about the fact that you have these payments, that money's coming straight out of your paycheck each time.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

The housing is also aesthetically appealing. It is in many cases very beautiful and it's just not what you think of when you think of public housing and that they make this ongoing investment. So you write about how in 2007, the home improvement program just upgraded everyone's plumbing and wiring.

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

Yeah, there's this real sense that housing should be dignified and actually excellent for everyone. I had the privilege of interviewing Liu Thai Ker who was one of the master architect of Singapore, of modern Singapore as we know it, and he designed a lot of the public housing, a lot of the HDB housing that you can still see today. And he talked about blurring this line between what looked like private or public housing. He wanted to eliminate that stigma that we have in a lot of other countries that's attached to public housing. And it's gotten to the point I went to different HDB units for different decades, and as Singapore has gotten significantly wealthier, the HDB housing has gotten a lot better. And as you said, they've continued to improve it through these home improvement programs and ensured that the maintenance is there, but also that the services are there. I think this is one of the things that I really loved about it is that they also, that HDB chose what kind of services were available in each area, in each building, in each neighborhood, depending on what the demographics were in that area. And so if you had younger families in a certain place, then you need more daycare centers. If you have more elderly people, you need more community centers for the elderly and things like that.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

That dreaded central planning. Sounds awful. Sounds miserable.

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

Yeah. The other dreaded thing is that the 15 minute city, right, this has been so maligned and actually most neighborhoods in Singapore are sort of 15 minute neighborhoods, so to speak.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

One can only dream from the suburban sprawl of the US. Well, I also, I really like, and I appreciated that you highlighted the shortcomings of these programs too. You're not painting this utopian idealist picture. But I think what's funny is that I don't think the shortcomings are going to be what people are expecting. It's not run down ugly buildings. It's not some of the problems that have plagued public housing efforts in the United States. It's that the socially conservative government of Singapore now has the ability to exclude people based on their identities. So if you're gay or if you're single, the carrot of affordable housing is used to encourage heterosexual young marriage, effectively family formation that they want. I really couldn't help but notice the parallel here of the US government's own discriminatory housing policies of the past redlining blocking Black Americans from qualifying for loans. So I guess for you, what was the biggest lesson from Singapore's radical experiment in housing?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

It's to me a really good example of how we need to internalize the right lessons from these stories. That's why I outline all of these flaws in every chapter for every program. There's no policy that's perfect. There's no country that's perfect. And I wouldn't want people to hear this or read my book and think, oh yeah, we should use housing to promote these sort of retrograde ideas. And I often get asked, does it matter who implements these policies? If it's the right or the left? These policies will have such a huge material impact on people's lives that we kind of just need to get there and we can always make them better. But of course, it's incredibly frustrating to see what we would consider progressive ideas like student loan forgiveness, be used to recruit ice agents who are kidnapping people and destroying communities. And so again, important to internalize the right lessons about this, but there are some really important lessons about Singapore and I chose Singapore as opposed to any other countries public.

There are a few examples that are kind of more left wing in a way, but I wanted to show that even in a hyper capitalist context, this is a country where things that we even still take for granted in the us, like public schools existing, they don't have that in Singapore. They're all fees charging. It's a very pick yourself up by your own bootstraps kind of society, even more than the US in many ways. But I wanted to show that even there, there's an understanding that so many issues intersect with housing that can actually go a really long way to stabilizing and creating a solid foundation for society to ensure affordable housing for everyone.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I hadn't picked up on that, but I think that's such an interesting point because typically when I think about, okay, where do we point to be like who has housing figured out? I always think about Vienna and red Vienna is what created the affordable housing there. So it's like, again, you're going as pretty much as lefty as you possibly can. So yeah, pretty strategic move there to be like, no, no, no. We're going to look at a socially conservative, hyper capitalist, hyper individualist place in order to prove that these things can actually work regardless of the context.

So switching gears a little bit, we're going to head over to Scandinavia now. I know I promised everybody in the introduction that I was not going to talk about Norway and I'm not. I'm going to talk about Finland, Finland's education system. So in the year 2000, Finland shocks the world. Their students outperform their peers in reading in all of the world's largest economies. And this came decades after Finland did away with standardized testing, which is something that in the US is like sacrosanct. And this is not just a commitment to excellence and access for elementary kids, it's all university degrees. Graduate degrees are tuition free in Finland, which is unthinkable. So before we get into the details, I want to talk about how Finland treats its educators, it's teachers. So what is it like to be a teacher in Finland?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

One of the big things that every teacher in Finland that I spoke to talked about, and they see it as a key difference between their profession in Finland and how it's treated in the US is autonomy. They are really trusted to teach however they see fit, and a lot of that comes from the fact that they are required to get a master's degree, which as you explained is completely free paid for by the state, and that ensures a really high standard of education across the board. You're having teachers that are essentially getting the same quality of education anyway, and on the other hand, their actual conditions, their labor conditions are excellent. They are only teaching four hours a day. They obviously have to do a lot of other administrative work and grading and things like that. The focus is on how they can show up as best they can, and so that doesn't mean just hours in the classroom.

They have these amazing, what someone described as palatial teachers lounges that just kind of highlights how they're valued. And that's the other thing. They're really valued by broader society overall. They're respected by not just parents, but just everyone that understands that these are the people who are in charge of educating future generations, and that also is translated into how they're compensated. So they are well compensated, especially when you take into consideration other salaries and other professions In Finland, again, this is a profession that is well respected and that everyone knows people are having to get a master's degree in order to do, and they have teachers contracts that are negotiated with municipalities through the trade Union of education. And so a lot of how their salary goes up is actually with experience and time spent teaching, and it's not up to the local schools to decide what your salary is.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I was immediately reminded of the lightning rod of teachers unions as a talking point in American politics.

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

So the trade union of education, the majority of teachers are a part of the union in the way that they're associated with the government is that they actually get consulted because they represent basically all teachers or most of the teachers in the country. They get consulted when it comes to things like curriculum. They get a seat at the table or whenever there's any sort of educational policy change. The union actually has quite a lot of power to influence these things because again, they are made up of by most of the teachers in the country.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

So something else that jumped out at me is the process of funding. Municipalities are responsible for financing 60% of their educational budgets through their municipal taxes, and then local governments receive central funding per student in each district up to about 40% of the budget with additional money that's allocated for special needs. If you have low income students, if you have foreign students as well as children with single parents or parents who are uneducated and not for nothing, something as simple as school lunch. The nutritional well-balanced school lunches is free for all students and has been since 1943, which really makes me feel like we are living in the dark ages. But this approach to funding really struck me as kind of a core difference maker. This is something that's come up on the show several times now at this point, just the way in which we fund public schools in the United States and how it leads to these really disparate outcomes. How did you contextualize funding and the way these schools are funded with everything else that you learned about the Finn's approach to education, what role is this playing?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

I'm really glad that you brought up funding models because they're so important and really make a difference to outcomes. It is an overall more equitable approach to funding education, and it ensures that there's not this zip code lottery like what we have in the US because funding essentially is standardized across the country and this has the effect of making everyone's local school the best possible school. So it comes back to this thing of these engines of solidarity. Everyone has to put their kids in their local school and so they're not moving around the way that we do in the US if we're even able to in order to go to a better school. I talked about a little bit in the book that I went to an excellent public school in the US and part of that was that it's not because I lived in an area that had a great public school, but rather one of my aunts did, which you're not really allowed to do.

And so I'm really grateful for the public school education I had in the us, but I'm also very aware that that's not the case for many, many people across the country. And a lot of that again comes back to how we're spending on education. We're actually spending more in terms of percentage of GDP on education than Finland is, but we're getting worse outcomes and a lot of that has to do with the fact that a lot of that funding is going towards private education. So again, the results are really uneven across the board. Really. I didn't realize that a lot of it was going to private education. How does that work? Or a lot of people are getting school vouchers to send their kids to private schools. That's public money. Some of it is also due to the fact that we're having a lot of charter schools instead of public schools.

That comes back to how underperforming schools are treated in certain places. But a big part of this is also even the fact that we have private schools. This is one of the things that Finland did during their huge educational reforms is that they actually decided to abolish private schools. And a big part of the effect of this is that as someone explained to me in Finland, is that if you eliminate these off-ramps for the wealthy like they did in Finland in terms of school, and I think we could apply that across the board to a lot of things in the US, then again, you have no choice but to make the public option the best option.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

It makes perfect sense. I can't even imagine the uproar that we would see, but it's true. If you don't have the ability to pay for something better, then the only option is to funnel more money into making the universal thing better. It's a tough chicken or egg for sure because I think the pushback that you would hear, it's like, well, the public schools aren't good enough for my child. I want my child to have the best education and they're not going to get that best education with the quality of the public school that they have access to. Property values are also really inflated if they are zoned to a school that is perceived to be good or better. So kind of the tie in between the two countries we've discussed already that you're also going to pay a lot more to live in a neighborhood that has access to a good public school, it's going to become more expensive for you. Something that I think is really interesting about the Finnish model that the American system could benefit from was its approach to higher education as well. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

Absolutely. So in Finland at the point in which we would kind of go to high school in the states, you have these upper secondary schools, which are an academic route, but they also have the option of vocational schools at a much earlier stage. And again, this is all paid for by the state. They've just extended it so that you're in school until you're 18. You could actually leave school at 16 before this. And what this means is that you can actually choose the path that's best for you, but there's no dead ends in the system. I think that's really important to point out that if let's say at some point you do choose a vocational route and you want to go back to an academic route and get a university degree, that is still open to you with state funding and state backing, again, all of this is well funded and encourages a kind of more holistic approach to society.

We need people to do a lot of different things. And if you feel that your strengths and interests lie in something that is a vocational path, then that should be supported and well compensated as well. And so there's also this kind of more modular system. I went into some of these secondary schools and it felt a lot more like going to college the way I did in the states, and you can just take a number of different classes and credits that go towards your degree, but it also means you don't get held back a year. You kind of go at your own pace and take classes that you're interested in. And again, it's about building out a more well-educated society overall, regardless of the paths that people choose.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

In the US there have been attempts right to turn this around, no child left behind sticks out the program that gave us an incredible meme. The child left behind meme, but what went wrong with no child left behind? Where did that program air?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

There are so many things that went wrong in this. How much time do you have? Just to highlight a few. Again, it goes back to the way that standardized testing became the norm across the board in order to actually make decisions that are linked to funding. So if a school or the students in a school underperformed on standardized tests, this would lead to more funding cuts. It's the exact opposite of what the fins do where they're like, okay, if they're struggling schools or struggling students, we need to fund them more. We need to actually support them more because that will lead to a healthier overall society. But this kind of exacerbated and fast forwarded us through the mass privatization of a lot of public schools in the states, and a lot of this comes back to this thinking that we have in the US that's been really destructive.

Somehow the private sector can do better than the public sector. And actually we had this kind of shining example of public school education in the US for so long. We did really well. No being again, a proud product of the US public school system. We were one of the first countries to have a public school system from the New Deal era onward that was actually universally accessible. It still technically is, but again, with no child left behind, the quality of that education has really gone down because instead of having teachers that have this teacher autonomy that we were talking about in Finland who can decide how best to address the needs of a certain classroom of their students in a classroom, they're mostly teaching to these tests because it's so punitive for their students to underperform on these tests.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Okay, thank you for that. So let's shift gears again. Let's go to Portugal. This is a country that in the late 20th century had a real problem with illicit drug use and some of the visuals that you presented in this chapter of people leaning against the sides of buildings and busy public places with needles in their arms reminded me of some of the most extreme depictions of drug abuse in the US today and the challenges that we have in major cities. One of the first steps that their task force enacted to solve this problem was decriminalizing possession and use, though trafficking drugs was still illegal. Tell us more about how they approached this issue, because I know that decriminalization is another one of these kind of lightning rod ideas in the United States, and we're going to get into some of the times that this has been tried in the us, but how did they do this?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

In Portugal, they were dealing with a dual epidemic of overdose deaths and rising HIV aids rates from the 1980s until about the year 2000 when they decided to pass this law. And it was so extreme that it was something like one in every hundred Portuguese people was experiencing some sort of problematic addiction as they called it. And it just became an undeniable problem that this crisis had to be addressed differently. So this is around the same time that we're doing the war on drugs in the us famously successful bo on drugs and spreading the outcomes to that to other countries. Portugal decided to do something really different and that was decriminalize personal drug use. So not selling drugs but using drugs. And although this is the part of it that gets the most sort of play because it is quite radical, the main thing about it is that it allowed drug use and addressing problematic drug use, not just drug use in general to as a public health issue rather than a criminal justice issue. So it quite literally moved dealing with it from the Ministry of Justice to the Ministry of Health,

And this allowed them to take a much more holistic approach to drug use. As some of the experts told me, one of the key successes in Portugal was that they did everything all at once. So they did everything from early intervention and education and treatment and harm reduction programs to what I think is one of the most interesting parts of this policy, which is that they open what are called persuasion commissions, which is that if you get caught with any amount of drugs of any illicit drug that is deemed for personal use, you get a citation kind of like you would get a speeding ticket and you have to go and talk to someone or to two people at a persuasion commission, which as the name suggests is a place where they try to dissuade you. It's actually not from using any drugs ever, it's just from going down a path that could be harmful and you really just have a chat.

And I've met at some of the people who work there and they're like social workers or legal experts, but what they're doing is they're again taking a very holistic approach to drug use, which is to talk to people in this very humane way and ask them, what's your life like? Do you have a family history of drug use? Do you have a job? What's going on that might've led you to want to start using a certain drug? And most times they're actually letting people go without even a fine or anything like that. A lot of the times they don't deem it problematic, but in the times when it is considered problematic, they are able to put information, not force anyone, put information in front of people who may not have access to it, about treatment options, about rehab options, and this is really key when it comes to actually helping people who need the help.

And what were the results of the shift? The results actually surprised everyone, even the architects of this policy in that they had sort of hoped and expected that overdose deaths would go down. They did. They had hoped and expected that HIV and AIDS rates would go down. They did, but the thing that really shocked everyone was that actually the use and possession of illicit drugs, there was a small uptick for a minute and then it went down and it hasn't gone up really since then. Despite the fact that you can not legally, I should say decriminally use any sort of drugs in Portugal, there is less drug use there than there was before this law was implemented. And the other things are the social cost of drugs, meaning what it holistically cost society to have people who are using drugs. It has actually gone down drug related prison rates. It won't surprise you to know it fell dramatically. I think it was 40% in 2001 to the latest number I had was 2018. So 16%, I think it's probably lower now, and that's compared to the US where in that same year we had one in five people detained, were detained because of drug offenses. So that's incredibly costly and that's just one of the costs we're talking about.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I read recently that the US incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other major democracy. That's pretty shameful, honestly, for a country that really prides itself on freedom and justice, it's like, oh, that's not a good statistic. I know that drug use, the criminalization of drugs is a big piece of that. So coming to the US for a moment, you reference organs efforts to decriminalize as well as the measure was eventually reversed in the state. It didn't seem to work there. So what do you make of that?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

Oregon is another example of how we need to adapt lessons to our own context, but also to internalize the right lessons. So at the same time that in Oregon you had a rise in homelessness and it intersected with the fentanyl crisis. This was around the pandemic, but the same thing happened in California where they hadn't decriminalized drugs and drug use. So this was a very easy scapegoat for people who were against the idea of decriminalization. But the other thing is as people in Portugal told me, because obviously they followed the case in Oregon, there wasn't enough time given to decriminalization and to allow the programs around. We're talking about all of these other programs that can exist once you take away the punitive aspects of things. There just wasn't enough time for the results of this to be seen. The other thing, and here's where the kind of right lessons comes into play, is that rather than these persuasion commissions, which I think are really great and have this very personal humane touch, Oregon spent unfortunately a lot of money on a hotline that was really ineffective and that didn't have that same ability to really approach someone who is possibly in need and have a conversation that could change their lives.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

We will get to the rest of this conversation with Natasha after a quick break.

We are going to go across the Atlantic again. We're going to Estonia. So after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, Estonia began privatizing its industry, but they took a different approach to the internet and to internet access because they felt that internet access was a human right. What does this mean in practice?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

It's so fascinating because at the same time that what this means is sort of universal access to internet. Stony understood that having access to internet didn't mean anything if people one didn't have the education to use it. So there were all of these public programs, well, public and private because of their former Soviet country. There is sort of this emphasis on public-private partnerships, which I don't always agree with, but certainly they did rely on for this. But there was a sense of, okay, we need to teach people how to use the internet. This was the 1990s, so people didn't even really have email accounts or they didn't really know as much as we do about how to use the internet, let's say. But importantly, this resulted in a push for more accessible public services, and part of that was to put some of these services online. One of the things that I really liked about Estonia was that you could do everything from vote online to register a marriage online, and all of it is through the same kind of citizen portal where you put in your ID number and you can access all of this information.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah, that part of that chapter sounded almost unbelievably futuristic to me, this idea of the citizens portal where all of your government services live. So you mentioned voting, you mentioned registering marriages, there's also your taxes, there's real estate, your IDs, births, working with the police, filing for government services of any kind, everything in this one portal that is centrally managed and easy to access, easy to operate. It really made me feel like our system and our interfaces are quite primitive by comparison, and you raise the point in this chapter that the US' tendency to outsource work like this to private tech companies, to contractors, to engage in these private public partnerships rather than retaining the public ownership of digital infrastructure and investing in it. That does seem quite central to this conversation, and you point out that we shouldn't want these private companies to have so much control and oversight over our data and our lives. I could see someone listening to this who's maybe skeptical of the power of the state saying the same thing about the US government especially. I would just point to what's happening right now, the way our data is, we're being surveilled at a scale that is kind of unprecedented. How do you think about the centralization of that much power? Is this another instance of internalizing the right lessons?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

In the case of its digital infrastructure for public services that is publicly owned and run through the government, that is really key. But going back to this idea of centralization of that much power, especially in the wrong hands, what's fascinating is that there are a few things that they've put into place that actually protect abuses of power in this way. So one of them is what they call the once only principle, so it started almost as a fluke, but essentially what they've done is that the same data doesn't exist on the same servers. So just to explain, this one's only principle. If you update your home address at the DMV at the equivalent of the DMV in Estonia and they have universal healthcare, and so your healthcare is also accessible and the citizens portable, and let's say you go to the doctor and rather than have to enter your new address to them again with all of this private data that's all living in the same server in the same place, they actually just have, they've created this system that pulls that data, borrows it from the DMV and doesn't keep it anywhere attached to your health records, but knows that that's your address when you need to.

And so it's a very technical system that I spend many, many hours trying to understand and having experts explain to me. But the result of it is essentially that the data is safer because it's not all in one department or that you're not repeating the same very private information and having it live in all of these different servers.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Interesting. When I read about that in the book, I didn't make the connection as far as data privacy goes or data safety, but that's interesting. I want to talk about a key example of this in the United States, this kind of public private partnership issue, and when I read about them being able to file their taxes in this portal, I was like, angry, flashback. Let's talk about tax filing software. Estonians have been able to easily and freely file their taxes online for a quarter century. Americans still have a relatively archaic and fragmented process. Why is that?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

A lot of things in the states, it won't surprise you and your listeners to know that money got involved. Basically, the US government, the IRS made a deal with companies like TurboTax and all of these private tax filing companies decades ago that they would not put out a public option to file for taxes, even though this is literally the money that we are all collectively giving to our government that we've democratically elected to fund the services that we need. But it won't surprise you to know again that companies like TurboTax were lobbying against it because they're actually profiting quite significantly from Americans filing their taxes. So the average American spends about $240, but they're also benefiting, profiting from our private taxpayer data that then they're sharing with big tech companies. So again, when we have no public oversight over critical infrastructure like this, it gets used for nefarious reasons.

And just to go back to this idea of oversight, another thing that has been put in place in Estonia that is really key to securing privacy is that citizens in that same citizen portal that we talked about can look at who has accessed their information. So what agency has pulled what data from where, and even what private companies have pulled X data for, let's say you gave them your ID number for something, wanted them to get your address, then you can see that that's what they did. That allows us to have a lot more control as Doge or dodgy, as some people have been calling it dodgy have gone around taking all of this extremely private data that can put people at risk. It would've been great to at least know what it was. Right.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

So you're saying that there's almost like a log of those types of data polls that is transparent. You're not in the dark about who has seen this and why Exactly. Oh my goodness. Where does internet as a human right and net neutrality stand now in the US?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

We're at a point in which the internet is quite ubiquitous, but whether it's free or open or affordable is another question. And so you have this example again of for-profit companies interfering to try and get as much as they can out of something. So the Trump administration is trying to abandon and cut funding that's over $40 billion worth of funding that was allocated to connect rural communities to high-speed internet. This was when Elon Musk and him were still friends. So I don't know if they're still going to go through with this, but I mean it was pretty transparent that that was so that Elon Musk could go and sell some more starlink. And so things like that show that we're still delegating this very critical infrastructure to the private industry, and they're just making it quick buck off of it. The other thing in terms of net neutrality is that in January, a federal appeals court practically killed net neutrality, which opens us up to this pay to play model in which internet service providers can basically charge wealthier sites to not only send more traffic to their websites, but also to slow down or throttle traffic to competitors.

Whoa, this is going to create a situation where censorship is rampant, but also it's going to create worse success all around. It's not the end of this. It's still possible for congress to legislate and codify net neutrality, but who knows in this climate? Maybe we should take a step back and define net neutrality. Okay, so net neutrality is defined a little bit differently depending on who you're talking to, but in this case it means this idea that internet service providers can't charge websites to prioritize certain content or to send certain content towards other people.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

So we're going to go somewhere else now we're going to go to Uruguay. One critical component of any country is energy. Energy costs have almost innumerable downstream consequences in every sector of an economy, and Uruguay is a country that has never had any naturally occurring fossil fuels, which put it at an immediate energy disadvantage. And you write, unlike many other countries, Uruguay never succumbed to the neoliberal wave that led governments to sell off most of their public utilities, and to this day maintained state ownership over an oil refinery, telecommunications company, water and sanitation utility, and other public services. So how did this set of circumstances change their approach to developing renewable energy?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

There was a point in which more than half of their energy supply came from hydroelectric dams, and the rest of it came from importing fossil fuels from neighboring Argentina and Brazil. What happened was that throughout the 20th century, especially when there were droughts, which became increasingly more severe and more common because of the climate crisis and oil prices would go up, the government again responsible for supplying electricity to its citizens through this public utility could not keep the lights on. It was going bankrupt, just trying to keep up with the energy needs of the country by importing these fossil fuels, which again fluctuated significantly in price. So it became such a key issue and it was so incredibly disruptive to civilian life. I went to a factory in which they said, for a long time if there was a power cut, we just had to put down our tools and we couldn't do anything about it.

And it was just the day was over. Then it was similarly to Portugal and to a few other countries in the book, it became a crisis that no one could deny, and it led to this very scrappy solution, which was to, okay, keep looking for fossil fuels even though again, they never found them. But actually to consider something that we've been talking about in wealthier nations for a really long time, and we have the technology for, but it was to entirely green their grit. And what's incredible about it is that they not only did this, so it was a left-wing government under Beba Mojica from Amplio who the party that's now back in charge that managed to do this. But because it was such a crisis, they actually managed to set up this cross-party agreement that got all political parties in the country to agree that this was the way forward,

And they had no idea how long this would take them. It could take them 25 years and they would be out of power, who knew? But actually they did it in record breaking time, so under 10 years, and this is a country with significantly less resources than we have, and that many other countries, it was a pretty low income country at the time, yet managed to green their grid and have something like 97% of their energy come from still hydroelectric, but also wind, solar and biomass, and what are the cost implications of this? So whenever they had dry years during these extended droughts and they didn't have enough water in their hydroelectric dams, you were talking about a threat of a 2.5 billion bill kind of looming over the government, over the public utility. Now they spend less than $700 million on average to keep the lights on, and in a country in which actually because the economy has grown quite significantly, people actually have quite a lot more consumer goods and consume more energy than they did 25 years ago.

They're still able to do this relatively cheaply. Not only that, they're saving millions of dollars. They're also able to sell millions of dollars’ worth of excess energy to neighboring Argentina and Brazil who they used to buy fossil fuels from. An amazing thing about the Hawaiian example is that through the public utility and through the contracts that they set up, yes, with private wind and solar farms, because they couldn't afford to do this with their own funds, they actually ensured that electricity remained a defacto public good by setting up contracts that secured all electricity generated to be sold back to the public utility, which was then also in charge of transmission. The savings that they made from this were also then used by the state to fund anti-poverty measures that helped bring unprecedented prosperity. You're talking about they reduced poverty from nearly 40% in 2005 when FIO was first selected to under 9% in 2019 around the time that they left office.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Oh my goodness.

Wow. I read Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani recently, and I learned so much about solar power. If you were to kind of zoom out and look at all of our challenges and how many of them are ultimately downstream of energy cost or a major component of the final cost of something that if you had practically infinite supply of the energy that you needed to accomplish these things, which comes from the sun, that it would really unlock kind of untold prosperity. And it's funny, it doesn't feel like we often talk about solar power, green energy in that context. Usually we're talking about it from the standpoint of the heat death of the planet and the way that fossil fuel use is going to cause and has been causing a climate crisis. It's kind of interesting to think about it from the opposite lens of, no, this transition isn't going to require a bunch of sacrifice and cut back and money. It's that what's on the other side of this is actually more supply and cheaper access to this stuff than you can actually probably even imagine.

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

Yeah, it's so fascinating because I did all of these interviews and I spent about almost a month in every country that I reported on and talked to everyone from people on the street to these electrical engineers that had to keep explaining to me kilowatts hour, because I really don't have a brain that works this way. And I had to sort of remind myself to ask about climate change because it never really came up in these conversations. No matter if it was policymakers or people actually implemented running this wind farms. And the reason for that is that, but do I really saw this as an economic question. It was an existentially economic question. I would argue, as you've pointed out with the he death of the world, there are been plenty of studies, but even a few years ago, Oxford University had a study that said that the world could save $12 trillion if we ditched fossil fuels by 2050. Imagine if just in general we did or sooner. I think you're absolutely right that we need to think of this as something that will change things for the better. Wai has certainly shown that Ramon Menes, who is the physicist actually who was in charge from the government department that led the transition was telling me that for him, it's quite clear that there's going to come a point in which there's going to be a difference between green economies and those that are still depending on fossil fuels

And that the green economies are going to be able to prosper because they have this endless renewable supply of energy that can fuel all of these different endeavors.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah, I found this quote that kind of summarizes, Bastani says in Fully Automated Luxury Communism, what is more the wider social benefits of the shift must be seen as running parallel to flourishing on a personal scale rather than a sacrifice to some greater good. This is the politics of the self-help guru be precisely who you want to be embedded within a broader program for political change. You can only live your best life under this system and nothing else, so fight for it and refuse the yoke of an economic system which belongs to the past. It's a really good book. Everyone should read it. So you mentioned that one of the challenges in the US is the sheer number of electric companies, and I feel like I've lived in a few unique places in this regard. I have been a resident of Texas where energy is very deregulated and there are a bunch of private companies with convoluted plans.

I lived there during the deep freeze in 2021 where the state was exposed to a lot of cold weather that was not planned for, and the grid basically shut down for like a week and people froze to death in their homes. It was horrific. I've also lived in California where the public utility, PG&E is also a publicly traded company. Everyone who listens to this show knows how I feel about PG&E, but I have to be honest, both of these experiences were bad. They were bad for different reasons, bad in different ways, especially when compared to my situation where I live now in Denver, Colorado where our public utility is, energy is cheap, right? It's pretty straightforward. What are the major obstacles right now for transition to renewables in the us?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

We have a real mixed bag in the US when it comes to utilities, but I am a big believer in the need for public ownership, and I just think that it's the only way to ensure that robust, essential infrastructure is accessible, affordable to everyone and not just for those who can pay it. But the other kind of huge obstacle is funding political will. I mean, obviously it's a huge problem that Trump is trying to cut 15 billion again, that have already been allocated to renewable energy and other green initiatives, and it just comes back to the two things we were talking about earlier. This is an economic question. It's an economic no-brainer to transition to green energy. The other thing is it's an existential question as you were talking about with the deep freeze with people dying and freezing to death in their homes. My family is in Los Angeles, and the majority of the people I knew fortunately weren't affected by the recent horrific wildfires, but it's just one of many examples of how we cannot afford to continue extracting fossil fuels that fuel the climate crisis. We won't survive this planet.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah, that's why they're building bunkers and trying to go to Mars. Let's go down under, I noticed in your chapter about New Zealand pretty wide disparity in the rates of elderly poverty. So almost one in four older Americans live in relative income poverty compared to one in 10 Kiwis. Why is that?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

So dating back to the 1970s, New Zealand started experimenting with a universal pension. It's a universal flat rate, non-contributory superannuation they call it, which means that essentially, so to break it down, flat rate meaning it's the same for everyone, non-contributory, meaning you don't actually make contributions to it. You don't make payments based on your wages. It's paid for through general taxation, and it's universal in the sense that it's available to everyone after the age of retirement, which is about 65. There's just a residency requirement, which has recently gone up a bit. But it means as well that regardless of what you earned throughout your lifetime and regardless of the fact that if you, for example, are from a historically oppressed group that has been underpaid and underappreciated in our system, or you were engaged in unpaid labor, which is often women caregiving labor and weren't able to make contributions to the pension system, you are still going to be able to count on the same exact amount as everyone else in the country when you turn 65 to have a dignified older age. That is a real game changer for people of all backgrounds. The other thing is that conditions change over a lifetime. I talked to people who were like, well, I was doing well up until a certain point, and then I lost all my money because of a crisis, but when I got to 65, I knew that I was able to count on my NZ super. That has essentially created a society in which the elderly are more appreciated than they are, I think in our home country.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

The cause and effect there. Do you think that it has created the society where the elderly are more appreciated or is that they value the elderly more and so they feel that this is necessary? It just kind of strikes me that if the Estonian principle was that the internet is a human right, this feels like the belief that retirement is a human right.

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

It's such a chicken and egg situation, and I think about this with all of these programs. Did that solidarity come first or did these programs create that solidarity? Did that appreciation for older people come first or did these policies created? It's kind of hard to tell, maybe it's a bit of both, honestly. But I think another really interesting thing about the NZ super is that it's actually tied to a percentage of average wages every year. I think it doesn't fall under 40%, or maybe it's around 40% for one person of the national average wage, which is a lot more in line with the actual cost of living. I don't want to be too mean about social security because it's one of these still, it's one of the only good, right? It's like one of these things that we still have from the New Deal era, one of the few totally, but it is not enough to live off of, and a lot of that has to do with the way that it's structured.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Social security does need to be reformed. I was just speaking with somebody about this yesterday actually. We were talking about, I said, well, obviously this is one of the biggest cost centers for the government, but you can't get rid of it. And the person was like, well, but it does need to be reformed, because the way that it was set up, when it was set up, you had many more workers for every retired person and every retired person life expectancy was lower. So now it is kind of structured inefficiently, but I imagine that this system that you're describing where it is funded through general taxation as opposed to this running out of the funds modeled, the trust is being depleted. I imagine this is really expensive to administer. No. How does that work?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

So this is another example where we're spending more for worse results. So New Zealand actually spends about 4.9% of its GDP on old age pensions, whereas the US spends about 7.1% just on old age pensions. In terms of social security. That has to do with how easy and how cheap it is to administer a program like this. Social Security is apparently not that expensive to administer, but the NZ Super is incredibly clear cut, right? Everyone's getting the same amount, you turn a certain age, that's it.

And they've actually prepared for that problem that you're talking about, where once you have less workers and people are living longer. So there was a point in which the treasury started to think predicted that the costs of running the NZ Super would actually go up to 7% of GDP. And in order to address this future problem, they set up a sovereign wealth fund called the NZ Super Fund that is dedicated solely to making up for that gap in funding for a number of decades once it kicks in. And I think they already have enough money, they're just now sort of just accruing more wealth in the Sovereign Wealth fund. But essentially it would serve as a kind of tax smoothing mechanism in which they wouldn't have to raise taxes on workers in order to keep paying for the NC Super. It also helps this idea that we have in the States and a lot of other countries where we may not have Social security when we get to old age, it feels like it's running out. Kiwis don't really feel that way because they're like, oh, okay, well there's been at least some provisions made for this.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Well, and I think the non-contributory element is the most striking feature here. You kind of highlighted this. A major issue with the US public pension system is that it inherently will undermine care work for people who work inside their homes. It means you're low wage worker is going to be guaranteed low wages in retirement because your public pension amount is tied to the contributions you're able to make to it. And this is where that cultural element really comes into play that those who were advising FDR on how to build social Security recognized that Americans like and favor benefits that they feel they earned culturally. That feels like a very loaded topic that we could spend the next hour discussing. But I thought that was a really interesting component of how, I don't know if we can throw this one back to the Puritans, but it definitely feels like a roadblock.

So backing up overall, as we zoom out and look at this body of work in total, I also have to say you have some extremely heavy hitters that blurbed your book. Vincent Bevins Jakarta Method, incredible Giannis Bar Faki who've talked about on this show before Megan Day, obviously Nathan Robinson of Current affairs. So you've got a lot of really, really impressive and intelligent people who have said very nice things about this book. So I think everyone should get a copy and read it themselves. But there are a couple overarching takeaways that you write about at the end of your conclusion where you lay out, these are my main insights here and I want to focus on three of them. One is public ownership, the importance of public ownership. It feels like we've talked about that a lot today. The next is that we can have so much more than we do now that this world already exists. It's in reach, there's already a playbook. And finally, that we badly need better leadership in the United States. Pick whichever one of those is resonating most for you right now and tell me a little bit more.

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

I really want to go back to this idea that we can have so much more because oftentimes we're told, oh, well, we can't have nice things because all of our taxes would go up so much, all of our tax rates would go up. And I just want to point out that in a lot of cases, we're overspending for worse results. So just to talk about healthcare really briefly, 27% of household spending goes on healthcare. I know that the system that I live in now, the National Health Service is funded by general taxation, and it's true with a caveat that taxes are higher here, income taxes are higher, but I never have to think about spending money on healthcare. It's not a line in my budget. I don't have health insurance. I pay a maximum of nine pounds per prescription whenever I need to get if my prescription renewed.

And it's like that across the board. In fact, in Scotland, they don't pay anything for the prescriptions, which I'm a little jealous about. The reality is we don't have a progressive tax system. So the real problem is that the wealthiest Americans and corporations are just not paying their fair share when it comes to the average American. Matt Brunick had this really great piece in Jacobin a while ago. He compared the labor tax rate in other wealthy nations to the US and he took health insurance into consideration because especially given the Affordable Care Act, by law, everyone has to have some form of health insurance. And plus, all of these other countries for the most part have some sort of universal healthcare system. So it makes sense to add it. In the UK where I live and where we have this great national health service, the labor tax rate for a married person with two kids is around 26% Norway, which I know you didn't want to mention, but hey,

Katie Gatti Tassin:

The rule is that, I can't say it, but you can say it.

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

The chapter I have on Norway is on paid parental leave, and they're amazing paid parental leave policy for all parents, but also they're high quality, highly subsidized childcare, and they also have universal healthcare and a bunch of other really great things. And you're talking about a 32% labor tax rate, Finland, where they have a lot of the same things. And also this great public school education system, 38%. The us, when you take into consideration what we spend on health insurance, it's actually closer to 43%. Holy smokes. That to me highlights that we're just getting a bad deal. And I think as well as Americans, the things that we hold dear, like freedom and getting good deals, these are two things that we really debunk today, is that we're not as free as we think we are, and we also are not getting a good deal.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

This argument of like, oh, your taxes are going to go up. The taxes are going to go well. Yeah, probably. But what's funny is that they're going to go up. The people that are telling you the taxes are going to go up are often the rich people and the corporations in media that is quite favorable to corporate power. That is the dynamic. That's how it works. Most media companies are reliant on corporate spending, and so they're never going to meaningfully challenge corporate power in any real sense. And so when we hear the taxes are going to go up, it's like, yeah, for you, maybe mine will go up a little bit. But to your point, the deal we're getting now is not a good one. And I think that if you spend any amount of time looking into this, healthcare is what radicalized me in the us.

That was kind of the first major crack in the facade of my own American exceptionalism and my own belief that we live in the greatest country on earth. I went to Norway, I went to Copenhagen, I went to these places and I was like, oh my goodness. I really had this crisis of identity of I feel like I've been lied to my entire life in the biggest picture since you finished the book with an emphasis on anti imperialism, and I really appreciated that you write quote as the foremost global power. Our country has a disproportionate impact on international policy, especially in less developed nations, that power has been most often wielded for imperialist capitalist ends throughout the world at the cost of countless lives and suffering. We can and should work hard to implement progressive policies to improve American's lives, but we must simultaneously examine how our foreign policy can often keep other countries from achieving their own self-determined progress.

In other words, our politics must be both local and global, and our progressivism must be international and founded in our greatest collective tool against the ongoing tyranny of imperialism solidarity. So that stuck out to me because when I was working on an episode for my other show about global capitalism, one quote that really resonated with me in that research in Vincent Bevin's book, Jakarta Method was a really big influence in that episode. And the shape that it took is that imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. And that even our favorite examples, my beloved Norway, these Scandinavian social safety nets were still ultimately reliant on colonialism and resource extraction to make them happen. So I don't mean to undermine our entire conversation at the end, but it does feel really integral to moving forward that our benefit does not come at someone else's expense.

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

Absolutely. So the policies that I looked at in this book are broadly redistributive, but we need to think about redistribution on a much more global scale. The goal isn't to become this perfect socialist island and just leave everyone else out, especially given, as you've pointed out, that wealth that we have in our country has come at the expense of exploitation around the world. I'm the daughter of immigrants. My dad's from Iran, my mom's from Mexico. It would be impossible for me to talk about all of these great things that I want to see in the US without acknowledging our position in the world and how we have oppressed a lot of people in a lot of other countries.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

The Jakarta Method was eye-opening for me. It's another book I recommend quite emphatically because one of the angriest emails that I will receive, if I ever use the word communism or reference socialism in any context, is from people who will say things like, don't how many millions of people have died under communist dictatorships or have died because of socialism around the world. And what Jakarta method gave me was the ability to say, don't you know how many people have died because of American capitalism? Many millions of people have died because of capitalism. It is actually not even comparable. He has this map at the back of the book that shows the globe and shows in every country where the American CIA went in and violently repressed and uprising because the people of insert country here said, we actually don't want you to be extracting our resources anymore.

We'd actually love to nationalize this natural resource that we have. And anytime that happened, we go in and we go, boop, nope. No, you don't get to do that. And then to sit back and be like, well, capitalism is the only system that's ever worked anywhere. It's because every other attempt has been violently repressed. And I think that learning about that history and spending a lot of time confronting that over the last six to 12 months, just in my own personal reading and curiosity, has really revealed that sort of pushback about, well, this is the only system that works. Look at how many wonderful things we have. It feels very flimsy,

Natasha Hakimi Zapata:

And we live in the world that the Cold War has left us with. And in many ways, what you're talking about with capitalism and how it's killed so many people, American capitalism has killed so many people across the globe. It's also killing Americans. Coming back to this idea of not having universal health. Healthcare costs so many lives, even not having paid parental leave causes irreparable damage to moms and kids, not transitioning to green energy is causing a number of health, economic and social issues, not to mention killing the planet. These are all things that we are also feeling the repercussions of. And going back again to the world that the Cold War left us with. Capitalism hasn't had to try that hard to do any good because there is no alternative. They've destroyed the alternative. Right?

So we have this most unhinged version of capitalism, partially because there's no competitors, as you said, they've been brutally repressed. Well, that's a great uplifting note to end it on. So thank you. Well, I do have an uplifting thing to say. Oh, please, please. There's a really great quote from James Baldwin where he talks. He says, I love America more than any other country in the world. And exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually preach. I think that we can love where we come from and want it to be better and want it to do better in the world. A hopeful note, I hope for everyone listening, is that most of these countries turn things around in record time during the darkest moments. A lot of these policies, Uruguay's amazing green transition, came out of this constant crisis. These rolling blackouts, Finland's education system actually came out of having very few resources and wanting to stabilize its grow its economy in some form. The National Health Service in the UK came out of the literal ashes of World War II. Singapore was turning the chapter on a colonial past. All of these moments actually led to stronger, more radical, even longer lasting solutions that as we face these really difficult times in our country, we need to remember that not all hope is lost, that we can and turn things around and do so for the better.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

That is all for this week. I will see you in two weeks where we will be back with another Rich Girl Roundup. Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin with audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.