Trust Us (2022) - full transcript

(tense contemplative music)

- [Narrator] For 100 years,

we've been the guinea pigs

in a grand experiment.

Can managers, experts and

bureaucrats more efficiently plan

and run our lives than we can?

Does society flourish

when a select few determine

the path for the many?

Experts are critical to

evaluating, judging, and planning,

but shouldn't we be in

charge of our own lives?

(static hisses)

- [Announcer] Let's start

with you and what you want.

(soft bright music)

What does anybody want?

Millions have worshiped the strong man.

Millions let somebody else decide

what they want by fear, by force.

(speaks in foreign language)

(crowd yells)

Yeah, a dictator.

Over here, we don't like dictators.

Our government represents us, the people.

Our government is our

servant, not our master,

and it makes a lot of difference to you

what you can do and what you can't do.

Limitations of our rights? Sure.

But for the public good,

and that's the way our

country has gone ahead.

(static hisses)

(contemplative music)

- It was the year of

science, turn of the century.

Every day, new ideas came out.

Society was changing much more rapidly

than it ever had before.

An important figure was Speedy,

Frederick Winslow Taylor.

Speedy was his nickname,

and Speedy was the great efficiency expert

who helped us to get the assembly line.

- Industry was this

enormous thing that erupted

during that time, and apparently,

Taylor could improve productivity.

(flames rumble)

(muffled speaking)

- He would observe industrial processes,

and he would figure out how

to make them more efficient.

- [Narrator] The guy was obsessed

with scientific precision.

His own peers called him authoritarian

because he brought that obsession

with precision into everything he did.

He believed everything,

especially factory work,

could be perfected through science.

- [Amity] One of the places

Frederick Taylor worked

was at Bethlehem Steel,

where they were trying

to get more productivity

out of a worker.

- [Narrator] And as

providence would have it,

the Spanish-American War sparked a surge

in demand for American steel.

Large demand for steel means

Bethlehem Steel Company

must move product,

80,000 tons off the train

cars and into the yard.

In fact, they were

struggling in comparison

to other steel plants.

The workers were already the lowest paid

and likely a third as efficient.

With a desperate need to

improve Bethlehem Steel

and a theory that could change everything,

this was Frederick's time to strike.

- Frederick Winslow Taylor was the founder

of scientific management.

Why don't we figure out

what's the one best way,

the one best sequence of

actions to get this, that,

or the other task done

in this large factory?

- Taylor believed that we

could all do things better,

and that's fine, and factories

could be more productive.

Definitely true.

But he also believed that

people need to be categorized.

He actually said, "Some people are stupid.

They're like oxen. They

need to work an ox's job.

Other people are bright.

They need their college men.

They need to study the

oxen and help the oxen

and order the ox around."

- So that was the principle

of Taylorism is top down.

"Science is what makes me

a legitimate authority,

and you who don't have science

must be totally disempowered.

You're just cluttering the system."

- [Narrator] It was Frederick's theory

of scientific management

that made this possible.

Take any job and reduce

it to its simplest,

most efficient tasks, steps, and motions,

and motivate the right person

to work as efficiently as possible.

Most of these men collapsed

from working too hard and refused

to complete Taylor's first

experiments in efficiency.

Taylor later found one in particular

who could outperform the rest.

A Pennsylvania Dutchman

Frederick had nicknamed Schmidt

was all he needed to prove his theory.

Frederick had Schmidt hustling up

and down wooden planks

to achieve his goal,

and in a single day, Schmidt achieved

what took the average worker

an entire week's work.

Taylor took backbreaking work

and made it extremely

profitable for his career.

Taylor's cult of scientific

efficiency was born.

- [Amity] Taylorism was enormously popular

because the early progressives

were after progress.

- [Narrator] Harvard, Penn State, Cornell,

Purdue all converted his lectures

into the world's first MBA programs

where influential intellectuals were eager

to impose an ideology that,

not only can every corner

of society be planned and controlled

from the top down, but that it must be.

- The progressives

really took this question

of national efficiency,

and they took Taylor's ideas

and they saw applications

of those ideas well beyond the plant.

Taylor himself says, "We

can apply this not just

to industrial management,

but we can apply it to religion.

We can apply it to private philanthropies.

We can apply it to the farms."

It was an economic idea,

but then there were people

during The Progressive Era

in the early 20th century

who said, "This is an

idea really that applies

across a whole range of

things, including politics."

- The progressives were one

of the first intellectual

movements that viewed society

as a big company, let's say,

or just a big organization

that needs to be managed.

- Taylorism then became

the idea that the expert

can come along, tell the

non-expert how to do it,

whatever it might be.

- It essentially believed

that if you had enough science

and enough power, you could

fix the human condition.

(dark brooding music)

- I think Taylor's ideas led directly

to the enshrinement of expert government,

the idea that experts should be involved

in making all of the decisions.

- [Narrator] Everything we do suddenly

requires more scientific

management. Personal hygiene,

diet, child rearing, housing, posture,

recreation, family structure.

- And I think the 20th

century took that model

into its politics.

- [Narrator] Government control.

- The idea is that that we human beings

are there to be controlled,

and there is a scientific

way for us to be,

and then they use this information

when making their directives to us.

They issue their commands based

upon what they've learned.

That's the big mistake.

That's the category mistake.

A country is not a company.

- [Narrator] And we would continue to read

what the world's first

management expert sowed.

Within a few decades of

Frederick's experiments,

the consent of the government was about

to be delegated to the experts.

Revolution had ripped through Russia,

and Vladimir Lenin had a

worm in his stomach for more,

but food and power were scarce,

and things were only getting worse.

Having lost many skilled

workers during the Revolution,

he needed a system that could

turn malnourished peasants

into red-blooded factory workers.

Lenin's solution was a managerial economy.

- It must have dawned on

him how congenial that was

to that entire structure

that he had erected

of political power.

The Communist party is the

ultimate Taylorist organization.

If you ever saw how things

worked in the Soviet Union,

to the bitter end,

it was this little group

of people take over,

and they, through science

and expertise and technology,

dominate everybody else.

- [Narrator] When Stalin

took Lenin's seat of power,

the Soviet Russia represented

the ultimate expression

of Frederick Taylor's idea,

a complete scientifically managed state.

The promise of

scientifically precise order

and efficiency excited them,

but they weren't the only ones.

- American progressives

weren't getting very far

when it came to politics in the 1920s.

Nobody was paying attention to them,

and they wanted to be admired,

and over in the Soviet Union,

larger scale experiments were

going on, and at one point,

Soviet leaders invited

American progressives,

particularly people in the

union movement, to come over

and admire the Soviet Union

for a fancy junket trip.

- [Narrator] Basically

a glorified field trip

to admire the Soviet Union's achievements

up close and personal.

- In 1927, a group of

progressives went to Russia.

They went over on a boat

called the Roosevelt,

named after Theodore Roosevelt.

- [Narrator] Stalin's guest

list included an assortment

of journalists, intellectuals,

and labor leaders.

Among them were two fanboys

of Taylor's writings,

Rexford Tugwell, an economist

who saw a great need

to reform American agriculture,

which he believed was too

inefficient and wasteful,

and Stuart Chase, a social

theorist who believed

that engineers should be

in charge of government

and run society like a machine.

Both saw much potential

in the centralized economy

of the Soviet experiment,

and the timing of their visit

couldn't have been better.

But even with a generous audience,

Soviet leaders still had a lot to hide.

- You're not getting recognition at home.

You think you deserve recognition.

You go over to Russia and

they unroll the red carpet.

(dramatic music with Russian vocals)

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] What they didn't know

was that Stalin meticulously

planned every detail

of their tour, the factories, the farms,

all carefully staged for them

like a perfectly scripted Disney ride.

They saw a lot of Russia

but only the Russia

that Stalin wanted them to see.

- Russia put on a good show

for these Americans to impress them.

They built a modern Potemkin village,

a fake Russia to show the travelers.

They showed them only the good parts.

They sat them down with pretty girls.

They made sure they had a good time,

and they hid the bad parts,

the Soviet government and

the Soviet trade unions,

from these visitors.

- Of course, what they're

never shown are the gulags

and the execution chambers

and the torture chambers

and all these things,

and only educated Western intellectuals

could be stupid enough to believe the kind

of Kabuki theater that

they were being presented,

either by Stalin's Russia or anyone else.

- They were thinking about

work and labor productivity

and the American worker and

the Soviet worker, but Stalin,

he was talking past them.

He was really grandstanding 'cause then he

could say an interview

with the United States,

and he needed what?

Western currency.

Russia was actually desperate

because the Soviet experiment

was actually already failing.

It needed America and it

needed American recognition.

- [Narrator] And if you

impress these intellectuals

and labor leaders, you'll

legitimize the Soviet Union

and create diplomatic ties.

By the end, the junket

left Russia ironically

on a ship called Leviathan,

stuffed to the brim with hopes

of spreading the dream of a reimagined,

fully managed, centrally

planned United States.

- There was always a kind

of fascination with Marxism

and Marxism, Leninism among

American intellectual leftists,

and so a certain predisposition to believe

that America could learn

from Soviet Russia,

that the Soviet experiment was working.

- They all left with one big impression.

"I can have more authority.

I can have more power

'cause the Russians do.

Look, they run the economy.

I could do it, too."

Americans were all interested

in the Soviet experiment.

I've seen the future and it works.

- [Narrator] Journalists

at The "New York Times,"

"The New Republic,"

and other news sources were

breathlessly favorable.

These voices of the media were

what the Americans trusted,

both working class and

political elites alike.

Walter Duranty, The "New York

Times" Russia correspondent,

was especially helpful in

pushing a utopian narrative

about the Soviet Union.

- Walter Duranty, who later

emerged when you read the copy,

is an apologist for

Soviet abuse, for murder,

who helped to cover up the evil

that was happening in the Soviet Union.

- [Narrator] It turns out,

after winning a Pulitzer

that much of what he reported

about the Soviet Union

was, quote, "some of the worst reporting

to appear in this newspaper."

Those are their words, not mine.

By the time the truth

of what was happening

in the Soviet Union finally

began to surface in the '30s,

the misinformation and propaganda

had already taken root

in many people's minds.

Duranty's influence was cemented

as soon as he won the Pulitzer Prize.

Nevermind the cover ups

over mass starvation.

He had the ear of the people

and of elites like

Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

and when FDR won the

presidency a few years later,

he'd bring along two gentlemen

who saw the Russian experiment firsthand.

They became a part of

FDR's group of advisors,

the Brain Trust,

and the Brain Trust had some new ideas

for how to cure The Great Depression.

- [Announcer] And here it is,

the beginning of the greatest

drama in American affairs,

the creation of a new chief executive.

Roosevelt is the nation's idol here today.

Thousands of Americans are

here to cheer the birth

of a new era in national

affairs, a New Deal era,

which is supposed to pull

the country out of its chaos.

- I am prepared under

my constitutional duty

to recommend the measures

that have stricken the nation

in the midst of a stricken

world may require fraud,

executive power to wage a

war against the emergency.

This nation is asking for

action and action now!

(audience applauds)

(tense music)

(triumphant marching music)

(flames crackle)

(slow dramatic music)

- [Joseph] The circumstances

under which Franklin Roosevelt

enters office in 1933,

the country's really in a chaotic state.

The stock market crash happens in 1929.

It's been going on now for several years.

- [Amity] Unemployment was over 20%.

We had a national emergency.

People actually were starving.

- [Joseph] The Great Depression

really put so many people

in America on the edge of subsistence,

and so this created a situation

where people were willing

to turn to whatever solutions

they thought might work.

They were desperate for

government to do something.

- The Great Depression and the election

of Franklin Roosevelt in

1932 presented progressives

with a priceless opportunity to put

into practice their

optimistic hopes for the power

of government to solve

social and economic problems.

The Harding and Coolidge

administrations dismantled much

of the machinery of government

that had built up particularly

during the First World War,

and Roosevelt was certain that

if he had the opportunity,

he would rebuild it in a way

that it couldn't be torn down.

♪ All the world on the way to the ♪

- [Narrator] And Roosevelt pledged

to strike a New Deal

for the American worker.

In other words, "I know you're suffering,

and I have a plan that will fix it.

Trust me."

The predominant view in the

Brain Trust was that the market

was too unstable, too

inefficient, and wasteful.

This depression could only be

tamed by expert bureaucrats.

- These were people basically

in the Roosevelt administration

who weren't necessarily politicians.

They were experts.

Roosevelt really embraces

the idea of expert government

that his Brain Trust is

starting to pitch to him

as the future of American government.

- [Steven] Franklin Roosevelt

and the other New Dealers

were enormously critical of the waste

and inefficiency of

free market capitalism.

- Now we have an industrial economy

with advanced things like

railroads and telephone.

So the world's changed.

So we need to direct

things from Washington.

That was the mindset that

Roosevelt and his Brain Trust had.

They were smarter than the rest of us.

- Franklin Roosevelt had tremendous faith

in experimentation as a means

of solving social problems.

(contemplative music)

And he says in one of his speeches,

"We should try something.

Just try it, and if it doesn't

work, try something else,

but above all, try something."

(muffled shouting)

- If we would keep faith,

if we would make democracy

succeed, I say we must act now!

- [Narrator] Roosevelt's

government descended

on the country in militaristic fashion,

waging more on this economic beast

and claiming all the executive

power that comes with it,

creating a bunch of new agencies

through a compliant Congress.

- And it's really those

first couple of years

of Roosevelt's presidency

where the most audacious

and wide-ranging

centralized planning efforts

were attempted.

- The centerpiece

of the New Deal was an administration,

the National Recovery Administration,

that regulated business across the board,

including in very confusing ways,

such as how many chickens a

chicken seller could sell,

what price something might be.

- [Narrator] Hundreds of new laws

regulating every little

detail you can think of,

the precise components of macaroni,

the price a tailor could

charge for sewing a button.

Consumers can no longer

pick their own chickens.

And the point of all of this was

to bring the runaway economy

under rational expert control.

- This was basically a

mandate to the president,

the ability to restructure competition

across the entire country.

- [Narrator] And on the heels

of the NRA came the Agricultural

Adjustment Act, the AAA.

More regulation.

The Brain Trust believed

that government expertise,

not the free market,

could dictate the economy

by artificially controlling prices.

- The idea of scientific

management is clearly

what leads to the

Agricultural Adjustment Act,

and the basic notion is we need

to make sure that the farms

aren't producing too much food

because once that happens,

the prices of all of the

commodities will go down,

and that will put the

farmers out of business.

- [Narrator] The AAA

turned over any surplus

of food to the government.

So now with millions of starving Americans

and a government that owns

a surplus of commodities

that could solve that

problem, what did they do?

They destroyed it. Dairies

dumped milk into the sewers.

Train loads of oranges

were soaked in kerosene.

Businesses shuttered, and

people continued to starve

because Roosevelt's inner circle

of experts knew what was best.

- [Joseph] We need to plan

agricultural production

so that the farmers produce less food

so that their prices can say high

so that they can stay in business.

- Suddenly, businesses were saying,

"This New Deal does not work out for us.

There are too many rules.

They're meant to help my business,

but actually, they hurt my business

and keep recovery far away from me."

(soft ethereal music)

- And the New Deal really is

the full emergence of this idea

of centralized planning

by administrative experts,

and I think the American people were ready

to take that direction from the government

because they were afraid

for what was happening

in terms of their own families

and their own futures.

All of Roosevelt's policies

really didn't do much

to end The Great Depression.

The Depression continued for many years.

- That is why I am asking the

worker of America to go along

with us in a spirit of

understanding and of helpfulness.

- [Narrator] Despite the

Trust's best thinking,

planning, and experimenting,

the Depression was refusing to disappear.

The New Deal tested the

limits of executive authority,

and the Brain Trust proved

that any government,

given the right crisis, can

transform a country completely,

sometimes for good and

sometimes for the worst.

(triumphant music)

It was 1934. One in five

American workers were unemployed.

The experts who staffed

President Roosevelt's

new National Recovery

Administration believed they

could end The Great Depression

by writing strict new

regulations for the market.

- Franklin Roosevelt and the

other New Dealers believed

that they could solve the

problems of those industries

and therefore solve the problems

of American economic life

through the application of technical

and scientific expertise

within the government.

- Nobody knew what the New Deal would be,

but what it did prove pretty fast to be

was a threat to small business,

particularly the National

Recovery Administration,

which had a lot of codes that made it hard

for business to operate.

- [Narrator] But Americans quickly soured

on the National Recovery

Administration's overbearing

and ineffective bureaucracy.

- And the way it all came to a head

was through a chicken business,

chicken butchers in Brooklyn

called the Schechters.

- [Narrator] The Schechter

brothers were Jewish immigrants

who ran a kosher chicken business.

Unlike the economists

at the National Recovery Administration,

the Schechters were

uneducated working class men,

but they knew the poultry business.

Their last name Schechter

was an occupational surname derived

from the Hebrew word for slaughter.

- So these Schechters,

it was in their culture

for their customers, restaurants,

or sometimes individuals,

to pick their chickens.

You wanted to be able to pick

which chicken you were buying

'cause you wanted a healthy,

not a tubercular, chicken.

It was the culture of the

marketplace that they came from.

They were religious Jews.

They sold kosher chickens.

It was very important for their customers

to have chicken choice.

- [Narrator] But according

to the National Recovery Administration,

customers weren't supposed

to choose their own chickens.

NRA inspectors wrote up the Schechters

on 60 code violations,

including some criminal charges.

In addition, the Schechters

allegedly violated NRA codes

that set worker hours

pay, and chicken prices.

- New Deal comes along and

says, "You're breaking the law.

We're gonna charge you.

You might go to jail."

(slow dramatic music)

They find themselves on the

stand, count after count

against them, being

prosecuted by the government

for violating New Deal law.

And in the arguments by the attorneys,

what you can feel is the

arrogance of the expertise.

The lawyers who were prosecuting

the little chicken dealers

really explicitly berated them.

They said, "How dare

you presume to tell me

what a chicken's price must be?

Only experts can say that.

If you had studied agricultural economics,

you would be an expert, but

you're not an economist.

You're just a little chicken dealer."

So you see that clash

so clearly in this case,

the expert book learning versus

the expert, the common man.

- [Narrator] The case

of Schechter Poultry

Corporation v. United States

went all the way to the Supreme Court.

On May 27th, 1935,

the Supreme Court handed

down its decision,

a unanimous victory for

the Schechter brothers.

- Sometimes it's referred

to as Black Monday,

the day that the Supreme

Court said that the New Deal

and major components of

it were unconstitutional.

- [Narrator] The National

Recovery Administration was dead.

It should have proved to

the Roosevelt administration

that their experts couldn't

regulate the economy back

to health, but FDR didn't

give up on managerialism,

and eventually, the Supreme

Court upheld many other programs

of the New Deal, programs

that may have actually

extended The Great Depression.

- Louis Brandeis, one of the

people who brought the ideas

of scientific management

into the public square,

was now on the Supreme Court,

and he was part of that Supreme Court

that handed down these decisions saying

that the New Deal was unconstitutional.

- [Narrator] Years earlier,

Brandeis helped make the father

of managerialism,

Frederick Winslow Taylor,

a household name.

Brandeis was the one

who told Taylor in 1909

to call his system scientific

management, but now,

Brandeis was saying that

FDR had crossed a line.

- It's a peculiar historical fact, right?

That people credit FDR

with rescuing Americans

from The Great Depression.

Anyone who knows any

history at all knows that we

were still in a deeply depressed

state in the late 1930s.

The evidence is overwhelmingly clear

that he didn't save Americans

from The Great Depression.

He extended the length of the Depression.

- [Narrator] Meanwhile,

what happened to the Schechter brothers?

The government's persecution

cost them everything.

The Schechters spent every

nickel they had on their case.

Their poultry business,

which was doing $20,000

of business every week

before the New Deal,

went down to $2,000 a week

and then went out of business.

On the year anniversary

of the Schechter Supreme Court victory,

The "New York Times" reported

that the entire Schechter

family was virtually penniless.

The Schechter case was a momentary

defeat for managerialism,

but there were still plenty of experts

in the government that were certain they

could regulate their way

to a more perfect America.

- What is an expert?

Is it someone with practical

experience in a certain field,

or is it someone with book learning?

The man with experience,

the regular person,

was insufficiently

respected by the New Deal,

and we can experiment with

people because we're clever.

We're professors and they

need us. There's an emergency.

The patient is dying on the

table, the U.S. economy.

Let's operate on his heart

because we are surgeons

who know better than everyone else.

- [Narrator] After World War II,

a new president would

launch his own expansion

of expert rule which he

called the Fair Deal.

Expert economic planning

had taken a major hit

in the Schechter case,

but what about expert housing planning?

(soft ethereal music)

(audience cheers)

The purview of expert

administration grew bit by bit.

It all started

with Woodrow Wilson's

supposedly modest effort

to offload the minute details

of government administration,

from Congress to disinterested

and efficient experts

until FDR's New Deal.

Now a public that had

endured a Great Depression

and a Second World War

was growing accustomed

to centralized federal power.

Six years of war dramatically

transformed the U.S. economy

and many of its cities.

This brought waves of

migration into cities,

and that unsurprisingly brought

its own housing challenges.

So how does the federal government

solve a problem like housing?

Simple, by throwing money

and expertise at it.

President Truman took

a page from FDR's book

and unveiled a Fair Deal agenda,

which included the Housing Act of 1949.

The FHA poured money into urban renewal

and slum clearance projects.

The government's experts

believed that slums

could be replaced with highly efficient,

self-sustaining public housing.

- The beginning of the Great

Society was urban renewal,

building tall towers to house people

on the principle We knew

how to house people.

- [Narrator] Perhaps no

project was more ambitious

than St. Louis's Pruitt-Igoe Complex.

A massive stretch of

downtown was completely razed

to make room for it, entire

neighborhoods erased.

Up and coming architect Minoru Yamasaki

was selected to design the buildings.

Yamasaki was highly influenced

by a French architect named Corbusier.

Corbusier was a huge fan of

Frederick Winslow Taylor,

and Taylor's principles of

efficiency imbued his work.

Yamasaki wanted to try something

similar for Pruitt-Igoe.

Architecture magazines raved

about his initial designs.

Skip stop elevators stopped

on every third floor.

The idea was both to

maximize the number of units

and to foster a sense of community

by encouraging interaction

between neighbors,

and although he preferred

a mix of building sizes

rather than strictly high rises,

St. Louis officials said no.

- [Amity] He had to work for government,

and government said, "Well,

this is too expensive.

You have to make this housing more dense."

- [Narrator] Reluctantly,

Yamasaki did it their way,

and up the towers went.

- 33 Towers, 11 stories each,

and the premise was people live in slums.

Let's move them into something nice,

an animal farm in the city, right?

Pruitt-Igoe. These towers are clean.

They have all sorts of amenities

that the homes these

people live in don't have.

They're gonna be happier,

and progress will ensue.

- So we'll take these people,

raze all these private homes,

create the modern towers.

Just the fact that they're

in this modern gleaming place

is going to engender

feelings in the residents

(lawnmower hums)

that are gonna lead to utopia.

Well, what happens is the exact opposite.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] It's hard

to find the right word

for what happened next, tragedy, disaster.

St. Louis officials assumed

the city's population

would keep growing.

It did not.

The same FHA money that

allowed for the construction

of the complex also subsidized

suburban home ownership.

Whites left the city in droves,

making the complex de facto segregated.

(film reel clicks)

(tense music)

There weren't enough people

willing to live in the towers,

which again were designed

to have maximum occupancy

so that the collected

rent would cover upkeep.

Many of the residents

received government benefits,

so they paid a much lower rate.

Under Missouri law,

welfare benefits came

with a brutal requirement.

A family could only have

one parent, a mother.

The government was paying mothers

to kick fathers out of their homes,

disproportionately

wrecking black families.

Upkeep quickly unraveled as there

wasn't enough money

generated to pay for it.

But Yamasaki's designs

bear some blame as well.

- Because people couldn't get off

on their floor through the elevator,

they had to go on the stairs,

and muggers came and mugged them there.

No one wants to go up and down stairs

'cause that's where the muggers go.

It was true, and Pruitt-Igoe

became very dangerous.

- [Narrator] Light

fixtures in the breezeways

were constantly being smashed,

leaving nightmarishly dark holes

where the worst of things

could and did happen.

- This glorious national symbol

of a public housing project,

instead of becoming heaven, became hell

and was eventually dynamited

in a very sad and dramatic session.

So instead of building

the future American home,

we put people in prisons.

That's what Pruitt-Igoe was.

It was universally hated

by a proud city, St. Louis.

It's still a scar on the cityscape.

- The people had no voice on it.

Science as interpreted by the politicians

in the 20th century took

on an arrogant edge to it,

and, of course, that meant

the rule of the experts,

the rule of the scientists.

(slow dramatic music)

We don't know enough.

We know a lot, but we don't know enough.

- [Narrator] Nobody took the failure more

to heart than the architect Yamasaki.

He expressed regret for

his deplorable mistakes

with Pruitt-Igoe.

By the 1950s, he was

giving bitter speeches

about the tragedy of housing thousands

in exactly lookalike cells,

which certainly does not foster our ideals

of human dignity and individualism.

To the Detroit Free Press,

he put it more simply.

"Social ills can't be

cured by nice buildings."

The final towers were demolished

on spectacular display

in 1976.

With them should have gone the hubris

of centrally planned government, but alas.

What did government do instead?

We launched the Great

Society, the next New Deal.

Early progressives were

interested in efficiency,

in making government more efficient

through expert administration.

They hated wastefulness.

Their solution was to run

society like an engineer.

To them, political science

could replace politics.

The New Deal was just

applying that principle.

Centralize as much power over the economy,

over housing, over business as possible.

The Supreme Court may have

reined FDR's program in,

but the administrative state

he helped construct continued

to grow in size and scope anyhow.

When Lyndon Johnson announces

his Great Society initiative,

the goal of this administrative

state is no longer just

about expert control over the economy.

It's far deeper.

- So Lyndon Johnson's Great

Society was an attempt

on the one hand to harness New Deal,

progressive-style government,

faith in expertise,

the attempt to ameliorate the problems

of modern capitalist

industrialist society.

We're not just going to throw

money at the poor and say,

"Okay, we've provided a safety net.

We're going to end poverty."

And you think about how

radical that really is.

We're gonna transform the human condition.

- And this administration today here

and now declares unconditional

war on poverty in America.

- Poverty has been with human beings

since human beings began to

exist, and we're gonna fix that.

We, in our time in 1960s America,

have the wealth and the

resources and the expertise

to transform the human condition,

to permanently end the problem of poverty.

We have the ability in this time, not just

to solve man's material needs, but also

to solve man's cultural

and spiritual longings.

We are going to fulfill

the longings of the soul

through expert government programs.

We're going to bring the

city of God down to earth.

- [Narrator] Utopia was within reach.

All that was required was

enough managerial power

in the hands of the right people.

- So we get food stamps

as a new entitlement.

We get the expansion of Social Security

to include Medicare and Medicaid.

We get increased housing assistance.

- [Narrator] Urban renewal

efforts like Pruitt-Igoe

were a flat-out disaster that left cities

in worse shape than they'd seen before.

Even the more successful

programs fell wildly short

of Johnson's goals.

Shortly after health

entitlements were introduced,

it became clear that there

were crucial gaps in coverage.

High prices to taxpayers and losses

through bureaucratic

inefficiency and fraud

quickly bred increased

government dependence

with an ever increasing

burden on taxpayers,

which caused backlash by

a disillusioned public,

but the damage was done.

- By the latter half of the 20th century,

all the intellectual foundations

for, and the framework of,

the justification for

the administrative state

had been put in place, and

it had, for better or worse,

been widely accepted by the general public

and by the political class.

- [Narrator] But that was

not the original pitch

for the American republic.

At least FDR pressured

a compliant Congress

into signing legislation

for his ambitious programs.

With the Great Society

and greater expansion

of government power over our lives,

this whole three branches

of government thing

was getting tossed right out the door.

- Republics are based on the idea

that we elect people who make the laws,

but most of the laws today

aren't made by Congress.

Most of the laws today are made

by administrative agencies.

(muffled speaking)

The rules and regulations that are made

by the national government

are made in EPA, at FDA,

at the FTC, at the SEC,

and all of the alphabet

soup agencies that we know

are the real governing

institutions in America today.

(soft ethereal music)

(camera shutter clicks)

- [Narrator] Woodrow Wilson

opened a fourth branch

of government, expert

administrators who would deal

with all the little details of regulation

that Congress neither had the time

nor the expertise to handle themselves.

But this fourth branch was

overtaking the other three.

- It now exercises all three

powers of the other branches,

which is a big no no under the

idea of separation of powers,

which is a key component of

our constitutional system.

- The promises that Lyndon Johnson made

about what government could

do for them were unbelievable

and, in the end, unattainable

and have fueled the perception

that government makes promises

that it can't keep that,

that we should be cynical about government

because government is a disaster,

government can't do the things

that it's supposed to do.

It makes promises and doesn't keep them.

- [Martin] What happened

in the 21st century

is a sudden realization by the public

that they were in somewhat

of a parallel position

to the worker in the factory floor.

Don't think, right?

Because the experts know.

- [Narrator] The experts

know more than you do

about what's good for

your personal nutrition.

They know better than you do

about how to keep us all safe.

They know better than

you about your finances.

They know how to protect the environment.

They know how to protect your health.

- [Don] What the COVID episode

showed is that a free people

can indeed be made so scared

that they are willing,

in fact eager, to give up their freedoms.

- The COVID pandemic really

highlighted the ability

of scientific experts

to abuse their powers.

- [Martin] The government

thought it knew more than it did

and then demonstrated it knew

less than it thought, okay?

- The idea that government in an emergency

should respond rapidly

to deal with a crisis,

that's always been part

of American government,

but what's new is the

authority of the science

and the authority of the scientists

to command our allegiance.

All of our decisions

were going to be based

on a model produced by

experts inside the government

who could predict with much more accuracy

than they actually can what would happen

if you just follow their orders.

- When COVID came along,

Anthony Fauci first said this,

and then he said the opposite,

and CDC stood in the way

of developing a vaccine,

and there were all these

moments where the people

in charge seemed to be more

the problem than the solution.

- It soon came to be taken

by the general public

and by the political elite

that they were the experts,

and any questioning of

that was to deny science.

- We should always

remember Richard Feynman's

wonderful definition of science.

"Science is the belief that

the experts are wrong."

Science is about

contestation, not orthodoxy.

- The lesson that I draw from the effects

of the administrative state

is that it's a bad deal.

- America's in the midst

of a really central moment

in its history where,

on both sides of the political spectrum,

there's an increasing distrust

of the people in power.

I think we do need to

rethink the foundations

of modern administration.

We need to restore some

idea of an administration

that is in our control.

- We need experts. We need expertise.

The issue is, will experts have power?

Value expertise but fear expert power.

- [Steven] We actually have

to have the power to say yes

to this expert, no to this other expert.

- If we want a true rule

of experts, in my view,

it would be to decentralize

decision making

as much as possible.

No one is more expert in

what is good for me than me,

and I have an incentive to get it right.

Don Boudreaux is the

world's leading expert

on Don Boudreaux.

- [Narrator] For 100 years,

we've been the guinea pigs

in a grand experiment.

Can managers, experts, and

bureaucrats more efficiently plan

and run our lives than we can?

Does society flourish when a

select few determine the path

for the many?

The time for hypothesizing, theorizing,

and moralizing is past.

The data is in, and it is overwhelming.

No matter how knowledgeable,

the consolidation of power

in the hands of the few

has harmed the governed

every time it was tried.

Experts are critical to

evaluating, judging, and planning.

But if losing our freedom is

the cost of trusting anything,

is it really worth it?

- Things have gotten bad,

people are suffering,

but it's up to us.

I would like us to return

our autonomy to the people.

That we can do, but we

have to choose to do it.

It's not easy.

(dramatic music)

It's not clear how you unwind

the administrative state,

but it can be done, and it must be done.

(tense contemplative music)