Intro (00:02):

Welcome to the Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund hosted by Mitch Daniels.

Mitch Daniels (00:16):

Let me start by welcoming our digital audience to join those friends here at Liberty Fund headquarters in Indianapolis who are with us live and in person today for our most recent edition of the Future of Liberty. I’ve looked forward to it for a long time. Jim Clifton and the Gallup organization, which he has led for many decades now, are synonymous in the minds of most Americans with public opinion polling. But fewer Americans are aware that the real work of Gallup, or the bulk of it these days, has to do with things that are nonpolitical, like the health of our economy. The way Americans feel about their economic future is so bound up with their views about their personal freedom and the health of our institutions that I think both subjects are entirely appropriate for the content of this podcast. And Jim, we thank you very much for making time to be with us.

Jim Clifton (01:20):

Great to be here.

Mitch Daniels (01:21):

Say a few words about Gallup. Again, I say most of us have historically associated it with public opinion polling in the political world, but that’s really not a big part of what you do these days. As I recall, you may even lose money on it.

Jim Clifton (01:40):

Well, thank you, Mitch. Some people were asking me what I’m doing here, and I told them, “When Mitch Daniels calls, I don’t know why I do it. I just write down what he told me to do and then I come.”

(01:53):

I think some of you have that same thing going for you. I want to say congratulations here to Liberty Fund. I looked it up and read a lot, but what a really rich American mission and purpose. But it feels so good to be here. It’s an honor actually to be here with Americans that are thinking about this stuff, but God bless all of you for doing that.

(02:13):

I’d watched George Gallup, he was my Gandhi. I couldn’t imagine ever meeting him, but I was working on things like cattle feeding and hog farming and that kind of stuff. And he was kind of the living Aristotle trying to figure out what made a great life. And he probably has 60 IQ points on me, so I feel, Mitch, like I’m a steward of his work. And we’re still going around trying to figure out what the will of the world is. Kind of like what Aristotle was, that’s kind of a breathless remark, but what makes life meaningful?

(02:52):

And on the other side, we do a lot of work with managers and most companies, I think we said 500, almost all companies and all universities use something from Gallup called Clifton Strengths. It’s actually a different Clifton than me, but we wanted to brand it that way because there’s so many knockoffs. But like at Purdue, I got to work fast. I don’t know how much time I have left, but the dream, Mitch, is to make the United States a strengths-based nation. And at your school, 7,000 kids that come in, they all take Clifton Strengths.

(03:30):

The guy that built it was a really popular college professor and he said, “There needs to be a test that when you answer it, every answer is the right answer. There are no wrong answers. And then when you’re done, it tells you who you are.”

(03:45):

So Aristotle and everybody, and Maslow, they all told us, “Know thyself.”

(03:49):

The problem was that they didn’t have a tool. So I want to know myself, but now you have that tool. The guy who invented it died before it really took off. He’s got kind of a Grandma Moses thing going on. But I think it’s one of the reasons that Americans really run better workplaces. We’re always down on ourselves and all that, but we kick the world’s butt in running high-performance teams.

Mitch Daniels (04:16):

Well, as I attempted to say before, this economic growth, upward mobility, that’s the defining characteristic of the American dream. So it’s entirely bound up with our views about liberty, its necessity, its efficacy, and the way it’s being translated in our political system. So we’ll get into some of that now.

(04:39):

Jim is Dr. Data, so I asked him to bring some and we’re going to use it now. Americans are in a bad mood. We’ll get to that. But to some extent the question is, should we be and why? So here’s a basic economic indicator. Talk about the nation’s economy and where we really stand.

Jim Clifton (05:04):

Well, I love this slide, you guys. It was about 40 years ago, I was watching a panel on TV. It might have been black and white. I don’t know. I thought that’d be funny. Is my timing off this morning? My timing’s a little off, isn’t it? Because that should have brought the house down.

(05:24):

But anyway, there were liberal and conservative economists talking about how our GDP was only about $2 or $3 trillion at the time. Everybody agreed that Japan and Germany were going to eclipse us and blow us out. But I was thinking to myself, “That means America’s done. We’re over.”

(05:44):

And then we just boomed up out of nowhere, add them together and double them is what happened. But Americans, we get down on ourselves. We talk about it, “Oh my gosh, we’re going to lose the upcoming game.” Then we blow them out.

(05:57):

All of us came back from China 20, 25 years ago going, “This is it. Have you been to Shanghai? Have you seen what they’re doing?”

(06:05):

Everybody had the same lines with the country club, “They built trains that go 800 miles an hour and we can’t keep ours on the track between Washington and New York, the corridor and all that kind of thing.”

(06:16):

I hate saying this guy’s name. I don’t have anything against him at all. He’s Nobel Prize winner, Robert Fogel. Does anybody know him? Good. But he said that the China GDP right now would be 127 trillion. I do want to say something about him. He’s trying to do his job right. That’s how wrong Americans were about the next upcoming World Cup.

(06:42):

But I put this up because here’s where we are today. But China was supposed to be like three times what we are, and then nobody talks about it. But we rose up and re-beat the Germans and the Japanese, and now we rose up in a game where, if it was a football game, we were like a 30 point underdog and we won by 50 because China’s GDP is about 18, 19 trillion, something like that. And we’ve crossed 30.

(07:14):

Now, that’s where you can see that spike is the route. And boy, if you had to bet your car on the future, you definitely would bet on America right now, too. All the people who made those kinds of comments were wrong. One of the problems is that Europe, all our brothers and sisters over there, really are not doing well. And I think that’s not good for us. We need to buy and sell a whole bunch of stuff from them, but that’s the scoreboard right now.

Mitch Daniels (07:50):

So objectively, we’re wealthier than anyone in human history and wealthier than we imagined we’d be. So one question is how’d we get there? You have as apparently one measure of this, ambition. You say Gallup’s printed material talks about a culture of ambition. What goes into that and how do you measure it? And what effect do you think it has that explains at least part of our out-performance economically?

Jim Clifton (08:25):

Well, we just asked the whole world. The question was we wanted to know how much satisfaction they’re getting out of work. Is it meeting some kind of mission and purpose? We also wanted to know if you felt you were in a culture of high ambition. You needed to say culture, not to bore you about survey question writing because it’ll drive you nuts. When I see things about religious wars, I always look and go, “Those are nothing compared to…” That wasn’t funny either.

(08:52):

But you can be born with ambition, so it’s a trait, but also you can have a kind of humble ambition. But if I put you in a culture where everybody’s all wound up, this is a wound up group here, you’ll outperform. So you had to make the question double barreled.

(09:10):

Then we built consistent sampling frames around the world, 160 countries. And so the methodology is all the same, and that gets you 98% of the population. So it’s basically a Gallup poll. There’s nothing else like it. And then we reduced down to people that had real jobs, not informal jobs, selling stuff in traffic or all that kind of stuff. And then we ask them those questions. And then we refer to it as ambition, and ambition is a good thing.

(09:42):

But if you said, Mitch, “How do you explain that we’re only 4% of the population? How is it that we can route a great big country like China? Or when Germany and Japan got hot, how could we rise up and just rout them?”

(09:56):

Pound for pound, Americans do have more ambition than the rest of the population. There are about 170 million jobs, and about 135 million of them are full-time. So that’s 35 hours a week with an organization and a paycheck. You don’t have to love it or anything, but that’s what the government considers full-time employment. That’s how the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) defines it in the United States and how the International Labour Organization (ILO) measures it worldwide. So then we just isolated those individuals and said, “Tell us how your life and job are going.”

(10:31):

A third of our full-time workers are really wound up. So if you said, “What do I have to do to run a great civilization?”

(10:41):

Gallup’s answer would be, “The will of the world is to have a good job, one with a fair paycheck. But the big thing is if it can have some meaning, so you think you made a contribution to something that day, then you play at a much higher level.”

Mitch Daniels (11:00):

I’ve heard you say that you don’t have to have 100% of an organization of that mindset to have a successful business or other enterprise. I think I’ve heard you say that something like a third in any organization is enough to drive that sort of dynamic.

Jim Clifton (11:20):

Have you ever heard of the Stryker organization? They might be the best managed company in the world for a medium-sized Fortune 1000 company. And their CEO and everybody just really goes to work on this. That exact same number is over 70%. If you would’ve invested stock in them when they turned to that, which is about 30 years ago, you’re going to have to Google this because when I tell you, you’re not going to believe it or Chat it or Claude it or something, but it went up 150 times demonstrating how it drives everything.

Mitch Daniels (11:58):

So a lot of Americans wring their hands that we’ve lost our appetite for hard work or the ethic of striving to get ahead, and there is evidence of some real erosion there. But on the other hand, all things being relative, your data makes it look as though Americans are a pretty hardworking bunch.

Jim Clifton (12:21):

Yeah. Again, you got to segment it. A third of them get out there and really build our companies or build our organizations and all that kind of thing. By the way, at the very bottom, if you just do a world thing, it’s kind of 20% that are working real hard. At the other end, you got 20%. To be in that category, Mitch, you got to be really bad news. It’s not that you’re just showing up late. You hate the company, you hate the customers. Any day you drive a customer out, it’s a good day and they’re always working against that company.

(12:56):

We have a lot of academics, intellectuals and all that kind of stuff. Those are people that are really in trouble though. They’re probably that way wherever they go in their lives, which could be real depression, real psychological issues and all that kind of thing. But the trick is to get the highest percent of really hardworking players in your organization, your state, your city, your nonprofit or whatever.

Mitch Daniels (13:19):

As a nation, maybe a little erosion, but it looks stable over time. Oh, this is thriving. So in a nation that is grouchy about a lot of things, people seem to indicate they’re okay with their own lives.

Jim Clifton (13:35):

Yeah. And we’re off a little bit right now, and we don’t really know why, but it’s obvious that it started with COVID. Working from home may have made us slightly more productive. Nobody in their right mind would say that if CEOs like Jamie Dimon and everybody were sitting around because they hate working from home so much. But all of us said, “I’m not going to use Zoom.” I said, “I like to meet with people and all that.”

(14:02):

And then COVID came in and all of us got really good at Zoom. And then people found out they didn’t have to actually get in traffic to go to a job. They have a lot of meetings and all that kind of thing. But there’s no question that loneliness is like epidemic numbers now, and especially with males. So we drifted a little bit. I think we’ll get that fixed.

(14:28):

But thriving, the question that we ask Dr. Gallop and his people put it together a long time ago, you can do it with yourself or for a friend, but on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being the worst life imaginable and 10 being the best life imaginable, where are you on that scale today? And so if you and I both say a 7, the money is the next question. Where will you be on that same scale in five years? But let’s say you say that you’re going to be a 10 and I say I’m going to be a 3. Then we went to figure out what that was. And you’ll say, “Well, I live here in Cairo and my brother and I have figured out how to rent bikes to tourists. We were already making a lot of money and we might get some girls now because we couldn’t before because we didn’t have a job.”

(15:18):

There’s a lot of Darwinian stuff in this selection and everything else that nobody writes about. But see, you’re all juiced. That’s where you find hope. You actually can mathematically describe hope. But I say, “I’m old. Nobody’s going to hire me. I can’t keep up with AI.” By the way, all that’s true is what I just said. “And I don’t see a good future.” Everybody uses that, all the NGOs around the world. And so that’s kind of Gallup’s official gold standard for, “How’s your life going?”

Mitch Daniels (15:49):

So for any, at least present, who can’t quite read the slide, this measure captures both a sense of how well one’s life is going now and hope for the future as you just described for us.

(16:02):

Now, on the one hand you can say, “Well, we are not much worse off than we were in 2006, maybe about the same number. We’re better than the rest of the world,” as Gallup measures it, but that still leaves half the country who gets a low score for thriving. So tell us about them. What’s bothering them? Apprehensions about their job security or the job they don’t have now? What’s going on with the 51% that we’re not seeing there?

Jim Clifton (16:31):

By the way, the top line, if you can’t see it, that’s the United States and the real thick green one is the global median. So we ran about 15 points higher.

(16:43):

Anytime over my 50 years, anything that moves 10 points, whether it’s a customer score, whether it’s a membership score, whether it’s approval rating or anything like that, something really big can happen. The Arab Spring can happen. You get a big time revolution. You get surprised by Brexit, surprised by Trump. Not that any of them are right or wrong, but where the world really gets fooled are 10 points.

(17:10):

My theory, Mitch, is that we need measurement reform, because we go off in numbers that are really misleading. One is 4% unemployment. It’s not even close to true. So 4% means there’s about 6 and a half million Americans that didn’t have work this morning. Now, if you take working age men, 25 to 54, that’s a category, 6 and a half million of them don’t have jobs. They’re not in the 4%. Most people don’t know that, because they’re not looking. They’d give anything to have a job. I mean, they couldn’t be more hopelessly unemployed. That doubles it to 8. If you take the number of people that have part-time work but need full-time work, so they’re really struggling at home, that’s another 4 and a half million. Why didn’t the Wall Street Journal report that? Why doesn’t the New York Times report that? I mean, it could be a big cover story. It could be a bust.

(18:12):

What bothers me, I didn’t mean to get all wound up on this, is policy gets made off that 4%. Well-meaning left leaning and well-meaning right leaning are going, “Well, the fundamentals are strong, that 4% strong.”

(18:31):

Would you make the same decision if you knew it was 12%? And I didn’t even do women at home with no kids, not married. That’s half as much, that’s a little over 3 million. But if you say what’s wrong in, let’s say, I’ll just pick up Memphis. Sorry if you’re from Memphis. That’s not a good place to be. Neither is New Orleans. If you said, “Jim, you got to bet your car or your company on telling me what’s wrong.” It tends to be your relationship with your job. That’s what I think.

Mitch Daniels (19:08):

I mean, there are economic measures of unemployment that are numbered up. Then they do capture these other categories you’re talking about. We just don’t pay much attention to them.

Jim Clifton (19:18):

U3, UC.

Mitch Daniels (19:18):

And one reason I think we are a compassionate, caring society, we have made it possible, I won’t say easy, possible for people to stay unemployed for a long time. They’re not destitute in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases. And some people think we foster dependency where people are quite comfortable to float along without work and ultimately the dignity that comes from productive work.

(19:52):

Let me ask you a question. I’ll give you a chance to take a shot at a competitor. You’re talking about poor measures and so forth. Just before we taped this, there was a lot of national publicity, criticism of the Michigan Consumer Confidence Index, which we’ve all been reading for a very long time, and it’s been looking pretty pessimistic lately. But it’s come under some pretty sharp criticism by people who believe it overstates on the negative side.

Jim Clifton (20:24):

Well, they changed how they collect the data. They went from telephone surveys to email, with a whole bunch of academics involved in the process. My hunch is that it’s about right.

Mitch Daniels (20:39):

Is it? The criticism is that when people look at the sample that it’s lopsided in a way that would tilt the numbers today negatively.

Jim Clifton (20:49):

It’s getting really hard to do polling now because when I first started, you’d poll cattle ranchers and your cooperation rate would be all of them. Or I’d do hog farmers and they’d call you back going, “Hey, Martha said you called, what’d you want?”

(21:06):

But those are the good old days. That election down in Texas, those at the University of Houston, they’re good at polling. And they had those guys, Paxton and the other guy, Cronin, basically even. Then they’d show Paxton about 2 points. Nate Silver called it too close to call. That’s what he does now on all of them. And if he doesn’t, then everything is 65, 35. But anyway, they missed that thing by 28 points, and those are people trying to get it right. But the cooperation rates, Mitch, are so hard. When you get, I don’t know, six Irishmen or something with high income, you can’t just wait them up 20 times because they’re unusual because they cooperated. They had a special interest in whatever the question was or something.

(22:03):

But my heart goes out to the University of Michigan. A place called YouGov, they had something where they showed going back to church spiked way up and their data was just wrong. I don’t think Michigan’s is.

Mitch Daniels (22:22):

One more on economics before we shift emphasis to political things. Again, we’ve beaten ourselves up over the course of time that we’re not hardworking anymore, that compared to our friends in Asia and other places, we’re getting out hustled. But some of this data seems to say that Americans are at work to a greater extent than the rest of the world, or do I misinterpret?

Jim Clifton (22:52):

Well, we’re doing really well, Mitch, at the top. I think you all know this fact because it’s been everywhere. But we have four companies where one of them alone’s market cap is bigger than the entire public companies of Germany, not Italy or Portugal. One company bigger than their entire publicly traded markets. We’re crushing it up there.

(23:22):

But you got to split it. The fire that we need to run and put out is that the number of new businesses starting, it really is like the African jungle. I mean, you got the four big animals, but then you got all those little buffalo that run around. That herd’s got to stay big or the whole thing doesn’t work. I mean, Jeff Bezos and his wife started selling books, I think, out of their garage. So historically, killing it up here with the big animals, but down here, about 400,000 businesses are starting right now, and it’d be a lot better if it was 600.

Mitch Daniels (24:01):

The question everybody’s been asking since we all learned how to spell artificial intelligence is, will it lead to a job collapse? Do you have evidence yet on whether that’s going to happen or regardless, whether that’s part of the apprehension that Americans are feeling, whether it’s showing up in those numbers we looked at earlier?

Jim Clifton (24:27):

I really believe, Mitch, that Americans can turn this into something very positive. Marty asked Doc, “What’s the future?” And this is the world I live in.

(24:43):

And Doc said to him, “Nobody knows. It hasn’t been made yet.”

(24:49):

I think we’ve got to make the future. You know what we did with the internet, all these platforms, all these kids start platform companies, get a Tesla, go to Whole Foods and all that kind of a thing. We got to do that with AI. We got to do that with AI, too. And that’s why we got to keep young people’s minds in freedom and in liberty and that there’s really no limits to what you can do here so they’ll start companies. We need to help pick that up. I think we can.

(25:27):

I’ll make one more comment. We have a whole bunch of people involved in Clifton Strengths who are coaches. I’ll be talking to a group on Friday, and they’ll come up to me afterward and say, “Jim, is AI going to wipe me out as a coach?”

(25:41):

And I always tell them, “Yes, because of the question you asked.”

(25:45):

But see, if you take AI and put it inside yourself, you can become a 10 times better coach than you were before. But it’s true with every single job. Don’t look at it as AI over here. AI’s got to be inside of you. If Americans can do that, I think we’ll rise up to higher leadership than anybody ever could have imagined in the world. And I think we’re close to doing that.

Mitch Daniels (26:14):

So you also talk to people, not just about their economic wellbeing, but their sense of freedom. And here is data you recently supplied us, people who are satisfied with the freedom to choose what to do with their lives. What should we take from that? That’s the US on the top line for most of this period of this century, but dropping below the rest of the world more recently. What do you see going on there?

Jim Clifton (26:45):

Yeah, and you always have to remember, Mitch, with United States data, we have such higher expectations. We don’t really have poor people like Latin America and India and all that kind of thing. So when we’re down, we’re down from a much higher level. But COVID has changed human development way more than the disease did. It’s changing our relationship to work, and that’s definitely thrown us off.

Mitch Daniels (27:20):

Below these numbers, do you have any sense of people saying, as some do, there’s a substantial drop between 20 and 24, we can see there. But there was some erosion even back in the 10 or 15 years before that. Do we know why people feel less satisfied with the freedom they have?

Jim Clifton (27:45):

You see, when you take one group within the population, those 135 million people, we know them all. So we’re either one of them or we know someone who is. It’s not like Kevin Bacon, where we’re six or seven degrees away. We’re just one degree away. And a lot of that is because of the internet, communications, social media, and all of that.

(28:07):

But the American worker, let’s just kind of say blue collar, it’s more than that. But remember, their income hasn’t increased at the rate of everybody else’s over the last 30 years. That’s one thing. Another thing, now this goes back to the last five, but in ’24, 2 million kids graduated from college, and in ’25, 52% of them couldn’t find a job with a living wage or used a college degree. So then we just had five years of that. So that’s 10 million people and that’s 42%. So that’s 4 million kids that got a degree at Purdue or Indiana or somewhere, a good school, but they can’t find a job.

Mitch Daniels (28:57):

No, the Purdue kids did find a job.

Jim Clifton (28:59):

They did.

Mitch Daniels (29:02):

The problem’s with the others.

Jim Clifton (29:04):

Yeah.

Mitch Daniels (29:09):

Well, in any event, I think it would surprise a lot of Americans.

Jim Clifton (29:15):

We’re closer to people that are having a job problem, was my answer.

Mitch Daniels (29:20):

Yeah. Here is satisfaction with democracy, way down, not as recent a development as some people might imagine.

Jim Clifton (29:35):

Yeah, it’s been coming. You can’t blame it on Trump. I have to become a better writer.

Mitch Daniels (29:52):

You’re doing fine, but what do you see when you look at this chart? What do you think has been driving it?

Jim Clifton (30:00):

Mitch, I think it’s the same thing. We hear everybody better than we used to. And so small groups of people drive narratives now. Very small groups of people can drive narratives. And I just can’t believe I’m saying this, but if we had a trial, you’re a lawyer, and you and I were going to try a case on this, my first witness would be the US media.

(30:34):

And in 1970, Walter Cronkite, you got him? So he was the most trusted man in America, not in the news, the most trusted person. And he would get up and end it by, “That’s the way it was,” or, “That’s the way it is,” whatever.

(30:52):

The media was very, very trusted. And somewhere along there, you found you get a bigger audience. But see, if you take right now the social Democrats and MAGA, it looks like we’re all one or the other. And then if you turn on TV, you have Rachel Maddow getting you all wound up here, and on the other side, you have Sean Hannity getting you all wound up here. But you’re talking about the most gifted agitators in 250 years.

(31:29):

See, Democrats used to be 42%, Republicans used to be 42%, then you had 18% independent. The Democrats that were for socialism were kind of 40%. And now it’s over 60. You think they’re growing, but then you’re misinterpreting the statistics because what’s happened is they’ve dropped into independence. So Democrats, they don’t want to be a part of that.

(32:03):

The same thing happened with Republicans. So I don’t want to be a part of MAGA. I want to get down into the independent neutral category. And so now if you think of a pie graph, one quarter is Democrats, one quarter is Republicans, then the middle are independents, and it’s getting pretty confusing.

(32:21):

So if you take those three House members, is this boring? The three House members in New York, the turnout there, the representation that picked them is like 9%. And so, what you’re doing is you’re getting politicians that aren’t politicians of the people. They are of the voters who are either Democrats or Republicans, not the biggest population of all, which is tearing us apart quite a bit.

Mitch Daniels (32:52):

Well, two things. First of all, I think it’s very well understood now that the nominating process is in the hands of the most passionate, some would say extreme members of both parties, as you just illustrated. And that means that party, that growing piece of your pie chart in the middle, increasingly can’t find an option that they’re happy with.

(33:18):

Secondly, the fascinating analyst, Martin Gurri, who we had a chance to visit with just last night, was the first at least that I saw to identify the cause of the information, the problems we have today as information rather radically democratized. As you say, “Anybody is now an expert. Anybody can reach large audiences no matter how crackpot their ideas are.”

(33:50):

It is undermined. There will not be another Walter Cronkite, because authority has rested historically on the control of information and people respected it because that’s respected authority. He believes that we’re not going to see any recovery of authority in our institution. It’s not just our political institutions in which confidence has collapsed, the media being a graphic example.

Jim Clifton (34:19):

I think it drives a lot. Of course, you got the three branches, but the founders said, “You got to have a watchdog.”

(34:24):

And now the watchdog is the least trusted. I’ve wondered about that because people always ask, “Well, is there a solution?”

(34:33):

Well, one thing is, if you had one newspaper everybody could read that was honest and truthful, then you could go ahead and read The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or whatever you prefer. But imagine if there were one newspaper we could all read and trust. The other thing is that we all refer to the left and the right, and that puts you back to Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity again. But 50% of people don’t identify with either political brand. They’re independent, although they’re not necessarily completely independent. They may lean a little bit left, but they just don’t want to be part of all that other stuff.

(35:01):

Mitch, if they had a name, if you called them the moderates, for example, then when you do Meet the Press, you could have someone from the far right, someone from the far left, and then a moderate. But if we started recognizing that 50% group, I think people could become more interested, and I think it would provide an alternative that could possibly take off.

Mitch Daniels (35:22):

Yeah. We all know that averages are misleading. We all know about the statistician who drowned because he walked across a river that was on average three feet deep.

Jim Clifton (35:37):

Yeah.

Mitch Daniels (35:39):

But there’s a lot hiding in the averages these days. I want to ask you about a couple of examples of that. So this is capitalism and socialism, and beneath these averages, which look reasonably stable, I don’t see your 10 point difference across 15 years there. There’s some, it’s narrowed by 7. But there are huge differences lurking, particularly among age groups. Am I not correct about that?

Jim Clifton (36:16):

Yeah. The young people are turned off by capitalism at a higher rate than before.

Mitch Daniels (36:21):

What they think capitalism is.

Jim Clifton (36:23):

Yeah. But that’s why, excuse me, the words matter. Because if we redid that right now and said free enterprise, then it’d probably jump up to 64. It wouldn’t jump up to 80. But so capitalism is a word that’s been trashed so much.

Mitch Daniels (36:41):

Some other recent data from a respected competitor of yours, you do have some competitors you respect, I think.

Jim Clifton (36:50):

One or two.

Mitch Daniels (36:55):

Found that only 42% of young people had a positive view of capitalism. 56% of the oldest cohort did. When they age out, these numbers, if nothing else changes, will look even worse than they do now.

Jim Clifton (37:15):

And then if you go to 8th to 12th graders, we did a massive survey of these kids, a big sample, 2 and a half million. But we had a question that goes like this. It’s yes, no, “I will invent something that changes the world.” That’s hard to strike a yes to. 50% of 8th through 12th graders strike a full yes to that.

(37:39):

If you say, “I will start and build my own company,” that’s 50%, too.

(37:46):

But something happens between there and college. But if you could, I mean, this is just crazy American dreaming. So history, a lot of the social science stuff, they were telling me at UNC recently that nobody goes to those anymore and they pay the professors less. I kind of don’t know what I’m talking about right now, but those things are fine really. All you need is a college degree. The difference between having a degree and not having a degree still in this country is huge.

(38:23):

But the history teacher should tell you, “Here’s why it’s important that you learn this. Now tell me again what you want to build and I’ll connect it to that.”

(38:32):

So they say, “I want to build a chain of children’s museums.”

(38:35):

“I’m going to help you do that. Maybe we’ll find out about the history of a daycare.” I mean, whatever it might be.

(38:43):

I think we have to be more inclusive. So the university’s image is really down, way past 10 points. I think it had a 30-point drop. Remember the public knows everything unless you get too technical. But we say to them, “Why do you not trust them anymore?”

(39:04):

Their number one answer is they say they’re teaching politics over there. That’s number one. And that’s awful, that’s bad. And I think they do teach too much politics. Number two is the value of education. And the next one is it costs too much, which those two kinds of overlap.

Mitch Daniels (39:29):

I know all that data. And as someone trying to promote higher education, I want to believe that that data is enduring, but I still think we have to ask ourselves a question, will it be as true 10 years and 20 years from now as it has undeniably been up until the present?

Jim Clifton (39:46):

What do you think?

Mitch Daniels (39:48):

I’m less sure. It depends on what the degree is and how the student pursues it. We did a project together years ago, Gallup Purdue Index, to try to understand what it was about a college experience that most correlated to a thriving life later, not just economically, but in all the other dimensions.

Jim Clifton (40:10):

I remember it well.

Mitch Daniels (40:11):

And what you taught us and we shared with the country was it matters less where you go than how you go. And if you approach the college experience in a certain manner, you’re almost certain to benefit enormously from it. But what’s troubling many Americans, many of us, as much as anything else on the current scene is the apparent or the reported diminution of love of country, commitment to country, patriotism, we’ve usually called it. A percentage of young Americans who say if we were attacked, they would defend the country as opposed to flee has dropped a lot.

(40:55):

Regret to say that Gallup seems to be finding much of the same. So this is, “How proud are you to be an American?” And if you took on the red line, if you took, I guess these are the self-reported Republicans out of it, you’d have a very dismal picture, wouldn’t you?

Jim Clifton (41:13):

But it shows you that there really are two different Americas that people are living in right now. It’s hard to downplay that reality. I don’t know if you can see the lines, but the red one is, of course, Republican, and the dark blue one is Democrat. The independents aren’t doing very well either.

Mitch Daniels (41:40):

When data on this subject is broken out by age, you see a similar, enormous, yawning gap. That NORC study that I mentioned a minute ago, pride in American history, more or less the same question, but history specified. Young people 23%, 23%. People over 65, 55%. Is patriotism an important value to you? Young people, 23% again, 59% for most elders. It rises with age. In 20 years, are we going to be a country where three-fourths of us hate their history and hate their institutions?

Jim Clifton (42:29):

Well, that’s what we teach. I don’t think that’s political for me to say that because that’s what we teach, and we teach it in the public schools. My grandkids are in a private school. I won’t say the name of it. And I talk to them about what they’re teaching them and you cannot believe it. I can’t believe people even allow it. But I mean, at least teach it in a balanced way, I think would be the solution, but it’s not.

Mitch Daniels (42:59):

Yeah, no, that’s not a political statement. It’s empirically provable and has been beyond a shadow.

(43:06):

Well, let me then, as we wrap up, let me ask you these last two questions. First of all, if, as you suspect, our dynamism, our culture of ambition will continue to surprise on the upside and America will turn AI or AI will become a blessing, not a curse, all of that. Let’s assume that economics, life of this country continues to be very, very strong. Will it have an effect on these numbers? Will young people who have been taught, or maybe, let’s be fair, observed certainly a political culture over their short lifetimes that’s not very attractive? Will they grow out of it? Will life, if they feel they’re thriving by Gallup’s definition, in 10, 15, 20 years, will they have different views of freedom, patriotism, and American history than they do now, or will we have a much darker picture than that?

Jim Clifton (44:19):

I think it’ll get a lot better if we’re very intentional about bringing up what I’m going to crudely call the bottom third. I think that the top group is going to really soar over the next 10 years. But I think we just can’t allow the bottom third to be left behind. We need to make sure they’re soaring higher than they are right now.

(44:46):

And I always come back to something I was trying to figure out: What does the whole world want from life? What the whole world wants is a good job, period. I don’t want to hear about family. I don’t want to hear about friends or anything else, because you can’t have any of it until you have the respect and dignity that come from having some kind of job that pays you.

(45:06):

We have an under supply of good jobs in this country and we have to have measurement reform. And so there aren’t enough good jobs to go around. You say, “Where do we get those?”

(45:18):

Good jobs, 66% of them come in the first five years of startups. They don’t come from big companies. Big companies get big by acquiring. Everybody’s Jack Welsh, you acquire and you cut. That’s okay. That’s the way big animals work. But the little ones, you got to get the buffalo herds up to 5 or 600,000.

(45:42):

People in lower-income communities in big cities can start things and build things, but we’ve got to get them into a builder mindset, or we leave them behind. And every time we leave people behind, we see the consequences. Look at all the kids in New York who elected a mayor who shocked a lot of people. They feel left behind. And it’s easy to hate them, but we’ve got to help them somehow. I mean, even Democrats are asking, “What are we doing?” I’m trying not to talk politics because we’re not supposed to at Gallup. But what they’re saying, Mitch, is that they’re questioning the system they live in. Remember, we were all stupid in college, too. But now they’re asking, “What is the system I live in again?”

(46:19):

“Well, it’s called capitalism.”

(46:20):

“Okay, what’s the other one?”

(46:22):

“That’s socialism.”

(46:23):

“Okay, this one doesn’t work for me. I don’t really understand that one, but that’s my new way forward.”

Mitch Daniels (46:31):

That small minority in a very non-representative district or two in New York City, leadership of which was just captured by a sliver, that sliver’s not in the bottom third, that sliver has college degrees. This has been pretty well-documented.

Jim Clifton (46:56):

You got to do them both, but the college thing is getting really serious.

Mitch Daniels (47:00):

Yeah. No, no. I mean, revolutions have typically not been led by people from below. They’ve typically been powerless and had difficulty combining and so forth. They’ve been led by disappointed intellectuals or people with more advanced social-

Jim Clifton (47:18):

And universities.

Mitch Daniels (47:19):

Yeah. So we do have that issue. I think, correct me if I’m wrong, but if you broke out these figures about patriotism and love of country and all of that socioeconomically, I think you’d find more negative views at the top than you would at the bottom, or do I misunderstand that?

Jim Clifton (47:41):

I think then you’d have to go to political party and then also their age. But if you put those in there, I think those are the ones that hold us up. Well, of course, the red line there. But I think it’ll be another time where we rise up. It always goes back to that Winston Churchill line about, “Americans eventually get it right after they’ve tried every other way.” I think we’re right in that, and I think we will rise up.

Mitch Daniels (48:19):

And I think I know how you’ll answer our conventional last question at these conversations, but just to check, in the year 2050, will Americans be more or less free than they are today?

Jim Clifton (48:33):

Of course, free is a state of mind outside of regulations and stuff for people that are starting businesses. So then it starts to get complicated. Well, come back to your organization here. I think it’s why it’s so important.

(48:55):

You know what we’ve always won, Mitch, it’s that we’ve been a beacon, the United States has for the most talented people in the world. And what they’re really coming for is freedom. Now, they want money and all of that. And if you take the Inc. 500, I did two years, 1000 of them, a survey and all kinds of stuff with them, but almost half of them are immigrants.

Mitch Daniels (49:23):

And those are small businesses in the Inc. 500.

Jim Clifton (49:25):

Yeah.

Jim Clifton (49:27):

Fastest growing, but those are what you want because that’s where you get the 66% and all that kind of a thing. But I think freedom’s not only important for the states of mind. When you start a company, you have to be in a state of mind of where, “I’m unstoppable and that nobody else will stop me.”

(49:44):

But I think that’s ultimately the magic that we have here. I think it’s why it’s attracted the best scientists. How could I tell you this? But these super intellectuals are crazy. They’re prima donnas and all that kind of a thing. But you know why they’re that way? My wife hates Hollywood and I keep telling her, “They entertain the entire world.”

(50:04):

I mean, they do more soft power than anybody at the state department, but you know what they’re doing, all those people? They’re demanding freedom, and it looks crazy when they do it, but it’s the same thing with entrepreneurs. I always call them coyotes. Everybody’s tried to domesticate them and you can’t. There’s got to be a place for them. But as long as we’re that beacon for hope and freedom like you can’t get anywhere else, I think the best years we’ve ever had are ahead.

Mitch Daniels (50:37):

Well, Jim Clifton, in a nation in which trust in information sources, trust in institutions has plummeted, in a place where some people dispute the whole idea of truth or want to denigrate it, the Gallup organization remains one place where you’re in the truth business, and one place where people can rely and do rely on the validity and veracity of your information. So you’re performing a very important public service, and we thank you for that, and we thank you for sharing your time with Liberty Fund and its friends today. And we thank the audience present and especially the audience in the broader world for joining us on this latest installment of the Future of Liberty.
Outro (51:27):

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