End Poverty. Make Trillions.

End Poverty. Make Trillions. End Poverty. Make Trillions. By Darryl Finkton Jr.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review. Copyright © 2023 by Darryl Finkton Jr. Several names, characters, places, and incidents have been changed or altered for privacy reasons. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that neither the author nor the publisher is engaged in rendering legal, investment, accounting, or other professional services. Any advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional when appropriate For more information, address: content@endpovertymaketrillions.com. First print edition: February 2023 Regenerative Publishing ISBN 978-9-69-289212-4 (paperback) ISBN 978-9-69-289211-7 (ebook) ISBN 978-9-69-289213-1 (hardback) www.EndPovertyMakeTrillions.com

For Every Being, For Every Block, For Stephanie. “Everyone shall sit under his vine and under his fig tree, And no one shall make them afraid; For the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken.” MICAH 4:4

Contents Part 1 1 Introduction 3 Chapter 1: This Can’t Be Life 7 Chapter 2: You Can’t Win, Child 15 Chapter 3: They Made Us Hate Ourselves and Love Their Wealth 23 Chapter 4: Far From a Harvard Student 35 Chapter 5: Don’t Give Me That Do-Goody Good Bullshit 51 Chapter 6: It’s a Rich Man’s Game, No Matter What They Call It 63 Part 2 77 Chapter 7: I Think I’ll Try Defying Gravity 79 Chapter 8: Ism Schism 91 Chapter 9: The Waters Around You Have Grown 107 Chapter 10: Now That I’m Older, All Childish Things End 119 Part 3 127 Chapter 11: The Seed Money Act — How to End Poverty in the United States and Make Trillions Doing It 129 A Brief Lesson in the History and Evolution of America’s Great Wealth Divide 130 Benefits of the Seed Money Act 132 The Seed Money Act Will Provide Financial Stability 146 The Demonstrated Value of Direct Cash Transfers 147 iv

Supporting Data 148 Let the Poor Decide What the Poor Need 149 The Seed Money Act is an Affordable Solution 150 The Cost 151 With the Seed Money Act, Society Has a Baseline Level of Economic Dignity 154 How to Make Trillions of Dollars by Implementing the Seed Money Act 155 Poverty is a Bi-Partisan Problem with a Bi-Partisan Solution 158 Why We Haven’t Already Eliminated Poverty 162 Who Decides the Needs of the Poor? 166 Part 4 169 Chapter 12: Lack of Understanding Leading Us Away From Unity 171 Final Thoughts 183 v

| 1 Part 1

| 3 INTRODUCTION God blessed me with exceptional intellectual abilities and a savvy, determined mother. She never let the constant weight and disappointment of poverty defeat us. Because of her love and presence, I went on to graduate from Harvard and Oxford and to make more money than I ever dreamed possible. We Americans love to tell rags-to-riches stories like mine to placate the masses. If he can do it, why can’t you? American culture over-emphasizes tales of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” as a means of convincing us all that if you’re poor, it’s your fault. Whenever I say the words “End Poverty,” I get eye rolls and skepticism. People will say, “There will always be poverty,” if they’re nice, or I’ll hear, “You must be a special kind of stupid,” from the more aggressive types. “I’ll tell you how to end poverty, get a job!” is another favorite quip, even though the vast majority of poor individuals, even the homeless, do indeed have a job—often more than one. Why does the topic of poverty elicit such strong emotional responses from us? “Life isn’t fair, and it never will be,” or “This isn’t a perfect system, but it’s the best there is,” are common refrains. As a nation, we have a collective sense of defeat when it comes to over a tenth of our citizens living in abject poverty. We’ve had poverty and hardship among us for so long, we can’t even imagine a world without it.

4 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. Poverty falls into two types: relative and absolute. Relative poverty is having less than someone else. I may have a place to sleep at night, but it pales in comparison to your mansion, so relative to you, I’m poor. Absolute poverty has nothing to do with comparisons. When you lack the basic necessities for human existence that we all learn about in kindergarten (food, clothing, shelter, and transportation), then you’re suffering from absolute poverty. It doesn’t matter if you’re the only person in the world starving or if everyone on the planet is starving along with you. Starvation is terrible no matter how you slice it. I’m only concerned with absolute poverty in this book. When you reframe the question in this way, asking how we can end poverty simply becomes: How do we make sure that every household has the bare minimum food, clothing, shelter, and transportation they need to survive? Even with this clarification, Americans will usually reject that it’s possible for us to have a capitalist society where everyone is fed, clothed, housed, and able to get to and from work. How on Earth did we get here? To understand how an entire civilization became convinced that someone has to starve for someone else to eat, we have to take a deep dive into our history, cultural narratives, and personal biases. Rest assured, the solution to end poverty is the easy part. I’ll explain in the following pages. The difficult part is that, simply put, we’ve been thoroughly convinced that sharing is a bad thing. We see neither the value nor the obligation to help our neighbors. This begs the question: if we believe sharing and helping one another are bad things, then what’s the point of society? We have gotten so lost in our pursuit of individual wealth that we have forgotten that the fundamental purpose of civilization is to care for one another. People form communities and broader societies because they intuitively know they can be better off together than separate. Our likelihood of survival skyrockets when we work together in collaborative units. Yet somehow, the words ‘cooperation’ and ‘help’ have become triggering for many Americans. We believe so much in individualism that we’re willing to spend trillions of dollars treating the symptoms of poverty each year, rather than directly tackling the root

INTRODUCTION | 5 cause of it. A lack of money. In a modern economy, absolute poverty exists for one simple reason: people don’t have enough money to buy the essentials. In allowing people to live in extreme poverty, we as a society ultimately pay the high price of shelters, jails, foster care, street cleaning, property damage, medical costs, theft, and more. I often hear in response, “I don’t have time to worry about other people’s problems. I’ve got too many of my own.” It’s challenging for many of us to grasp that we don’t live in isolation. When we allow people to go hungry or to live on the streets, their problems quickly become our problems when our streets are covered in filth, crime seems to be everywhere, and taxes continue to rise without any clear benefit to most American families. I hope to show you that making a small, unconditional investment in every American household will pay incredible dividends to us all, not just to the poor. I’ll take you on my own personal journey to show just how much talent and money we allow to waste away. I want you to realize poverty isn’t someone else’s problem, and it’s not unsolvable—so, let’s fix it. A solution is long overdue. When you’re done reading this book, I’m confident you’ll see that we can soon abolish absolute poverty in the United States, and we can make trillions of dollars doing it.

| 7 CHAPTER 1: THIS CAN’T BE LIFE It was always the same story while I was growing up. “Darryl, we’d like you to take a special test for us.” Then would come the questions. “Does your mother read to you at home?” “Did someone help you write this story?” “Can you write another one in front of us?” Teachers always had a hard time believing that, somehow, I might be really smart. I don’t blame them for their surprise at my intelligence. I was a poor black kid. I didn’t fit into their idea of ‘genius’. The thing is, intelligence exists in equal ratios in every community, regardless of income or race. The difference is how that intelligence is nurtured. I grew up around all kinds of smart people, but one by one, they all flickered out. Poverty has a way of smothering even the brightest flames. As the burden of life becomes increasingly heavy, kids stop being curious, stop caring about school, and give up hope for a better future. We start life with resilience, but we all have our breaking points. A person can only take so much disappointment, and growing up poor is a life of constantly being told ‘no.’ I decided at a young age that it wasn’t God watching over my family: it was my mother. And I could see the life being drained out of her as she tried her best to do it all. It wasn’t God who kept me safe, it was those few friends who’d join me in a fight, even when we were outnumbered and

8 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. sure to lose. If there was a God, I reasoned, why did he think it was okay that my mother had to work so hard every day for so little? Why did my family and the families of those around me have to suffer so much? The world was a cruel place, and I didn’t see where a benevolent God could fit. “What do you think happens when we die?” my sister asked one day when we were playing outside. “Nothing,” I replied, drawing with my stick in the dirt. “I think you die and that’s it.” I was five years old, and my sister was seven. We were a Christian family, but looking back, I think my logical young mind simply couldn’t reconcile itself with the concept of heaven when God so clearly played favorites. Being born poor felt like a curse that sucked the soul right out of me. Many in my community doubled down on their faith while I walked away from mine. No one was coming to save me or any of us. My parents got divorced when my mother was five months pregnant with me. At twenty-nine, she went from being a full-time homemaker (at my father’s behest) to becoming a single mom and the sole provider for herself and her four children. My mother was the only person who was always there for us. She worked tirelessly to feed, clothe, shelter, educate, and love us. She cried and struggled like everyone else’s parents, but she kept trying—and she never left. She did this all while never earning more than $30,000 a year, and most years we came nowhere close to that figure. As a child, I never thought we had it all that bad. Everyone around us was poor. On a relative basis, we seemed to be doing well. We missed a few meals here and there, but we never went more than a day without eating. Our clothes were used but clean. My mother did her best to keep her children at a safe distance from the chaos of our world, and when she wasn’t able to, we got through our trauma one way or another. Anyone who grew up poor will understand when I say that I grew up poor, but not dirt poor. Many of my friends, neighbors, and relatives weren’t so lucky. They grew up with nothing. Life was stressful. If any word can summarize poverty, it’s stress. You

CHAPTER 1: THIS CAN’T BE LIFE | 9 stress about rent. You stress about bills. You stress about food. You stress about losing hours. You stress about crime. You stress about the police. You stress about your children. You stress about your parents. You stress about health. You stress about life. You stress about death. Poverty is all-consuming. And it’s that way by design. Socio- economically speaking, if you want to keep the poor under control, you need to saddle them with overwhelming burdens. That way, they never have the time to question why so much is falling on their shoulders while so little falls into their coffers. My mother was no different than every other struggling single mother. She was tired, always tired. We share tales of incredibly strong black women who raise kids all by themselves as if they’re uplifting stories—but they’re not. I watched my mother cry, just like my aunts, my sisters, and all the other women doing the job of a village by themselves. It’s too much. Her life was an endless sacrifice. She never bought herself new clothes. She pretended she wasn’t hungry when there wasn’t enough food to go around. She didn’t sleep enough. She never went to therapy to heal her childhood traumas. She was able to make it through it all, and today is deservingly proud of everything she overcame in life, but she didn’t get the life she deserved because she had to do everything alone. Few things hurt the way seeing your mother in pain as a child hurt. I had a seriousness about my demeanor by the age of five that only poverty and struggle can manufacture. I tried my best to be strong and mature for my mother. I stayed out of trouble and did whatever I could to make life a little easier for her. I wasn’t a perfect kid by any means, but I always kept my mother in mind when I was making decisions, and I tried not to do anything to embarrass her. A lot of the silent trauma that existed in our family made outward affection difficult for us—as it does with many families—but we did our best to be there for one another. Although I can’t say I truly appreciated my mother’s love when I was a child. I’m talking about the kind of love that motivates someone to wake up every single day, catch a bus, go to a job they hate, catch another bus, come into a messy home with arguing

10 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. kids, clean up, cook, solve quarrels, and keep everyone alive. That level of love isn’t easy for a child to comprehend. I complained and was bratty about not getting cuddled and showered with the loving attention I thought families were supposed to give. I always respected my mother, but poverty kept us from having the warm relationship we should’ve had. She couldn’t pick me up and smother me with kisses or go outside and run around with me. She didn’t have time to do science projects with me or sit and talk about how things were going with my friends. A hard life made her incredibly tough and determined to keep her children healthy, out of trouble, and in school. But like most mothers playing the role of a village, she didn’t have much else to give after all of that. It wouldn’t be until adulthood that I understood and appreciated how much love my mother poured into all of us. I’ll never be able to thank her enough for that love. Ultimately, what my mom showed me was that you have to keep fighting, regardless of the circumstances you’re in. You must do whatever you can to get out of that situation. She accepted the burden of poverty but did everything she could to help her children find a way out of it. There isn’t much room for being a child when you’re poor. There’s so much burden saddling down every adult, the children are forced to step into their own almost immediately. Life is about survival; there’s no time for childhood innocence and love. Despite the stress we faced being poor, we didn’t live under a shadow of doom and gloom. I’ve always found poor folk to be a lot more fun than other groups. When you face that much struggle, you learn to smile and let it go. You try to appreciate the good moments and be grateful for what you have. Poor people are also some of the most generous people because they have so little to give; we understand the importance of community and will lend, give, and help out friends and family in whatever ways we can. I played outside with my friends every day from sunup to sundown. I never was enrolled in any camps or shuttled from one activity to the next.

CHAPTER 1: THIS CAN’T BE LIFE | 11 The morning routine was to gather all of my friends and find free ways to entertain ourselves, ideally without getting into too much trouble. We didn’t have family events often, but when we did, they were full of kids laughing, adults dancing, and an uncle with a watchful eye over the grill. All the adults treated us kids like we were their own, for better or worse, fully exercising their rights to both spank you and hug you afterwards. We all struggled, but at least in those early days we struggled together. Poverty is most tolerable when there’s a sense of community. At those rare gatherings, I’d play with the kids some, but it was only a matter of time before I’d start peppering the adults with questions. I wanted to know everything. How does a car work? What’s fire made of? How does Santa have time to get to every single house in one night? Why doesn’t the moon fall out of the sky? At home, my questions drove my mother crazy after a while. She had enough on her plate from the meat grinder of poverty without my endless queries. She did her best to humor me, but I would eventually wear her down and she’d tell me to go find something to do. Then, I’d go and bother my siblings. Being the youngest of four children, I had all the knowledge I could ever want within reach. I’d ask my brother to teach me how to wrestle, then bug my sister to teach me the Spanish alphabet again. I begged them to take me to school with them in the mornings. When they weren’t looking, I’d steal their books and struggle through them. I started off going to kindergarten in the housing projects where we lived. The public housing had a big open courtyard in the middle, surrounded by buildings with barred windows and unkempt lawns. I’m pretty sure whoever planned our projects based them on the architectural designs that were used to build prisons. No effort was made to create a visually appealing aesthetic. It had a negative impact on the area. No one cared about where we lived, and it showed. Residents in our neighborhood were deprived of a sense of pride in their home and community. City planners certainly weren’t concerned with ‘frivolous things’ like beautification initiatives in the housing projects. The neighborhood had a constant sense of tension. Everyone was dealing with too much stress,

12 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. too much trauma, and there was always a feeling that something could explode at any moment. In my neighborhood, everyone struggled. Poverty is a fully immersive experience because when you’re poor, you always deal with it. You don’t have the luxury of focusing on anything beyond survival. You can’t lift your head up long enough to think about personal fulfillment because you’re too busy trying to ensure your basic needs are met. I remember when I was young, if we ordered pizza, we’d have to walk several blocks away from our house to meet the delivery guy. He refused to come into our area because he’d been robbed too many times. When people are very poor, the urge to steal can be compelling. Even a few dollars from the cost of a pizza can make a big difference for people who are hungry. The neighborhood tension spilled into our kindergarten classroom. At school, the teachers spent most of their time trying to get kids to sit still or dealing with emergencies happening in their students’ homes. Kids would come to class hungry, neglected, abused, and dirty. Sometimes there were adults at home, sometimes there weren’t. I was lucky to have my mother and siblings, and they provided enough safety and stability in my life to keep me from falling into despair. Kids in my neighborhood didn’t have a nanny or caregiver constantly watching over them, but my friends and I always felt safe together. That didn’t mean scary things didn’t sometimes happen, though. I remember being about seven years old and was playing outside with my friends when a police cruiser pulled up. My friends and I took off running even though we weren’t doing anything wrong. I didn’t know why I was running, but I was afraid, and I had this sense that the police were bad. The officers rounded us up and made us all sit down for a lecture, cuffing us all for added effect. It was a scary experience, but I didn’t think much about it after the fact because it was just part of life in that neighborhood. It’s only when I got older that I realized how absurd the experience was. It’s not something that would ever happen in a wealthier community.

CHAPTER 1: THIS CAN’T BE LIFE | 13 As my mother fought and struggled to get a hand onto the economic ladder, we moved a lot. This instability makes it hard for poor communities to stay intact. Rampant increases in housing prices and gentrification eroded the one thing that made life bearable—community. I went to three different kindergartens, and by third grade, I’d attended eight different schools. I became accustomed to the routine of change. Once the teachers at each new school had sufficiently poked and prodded me, they’d call my mother and ask her permission to place me in a gifted and talented classroom, or to skip me up a grade or two. My mother cared about my social development and wanted me to be around others my own age, so she always went with the gifted classes. Those classes were a safe haven in the madness of the Indianapolis public school system. The kids were all bright and relatively well-behaved. The teachers could actually spend their time teaching. I can’t say much about the effect that pulling the fastest learners out of class had on the rest of the students, but it allowed me to learn at a pace that wasn’t as painfully slow. People are more likely to give opportunities to poor kids if they’re smart. At least that was my experience. My teachers all seemed to like me and would give me extra assignments because they knew I liked the challenge. They played their part in making sure my intellectual thirst was quenched. That usually meant giving me separate assignments or asking me to lead group projects. Sometimes I would read to the other students to give my teachers a break. I loved school. It had rules and structure. It was predictable. I thrived in environments where the tasks were concrete and hard work appeared to be rewarded.

| 15 CHAPTER 2: YOU CAN’T WIN, CHILD Caste systems are rigid social structures where a person’s culture, job opportunities, social status, neighborhood, income, and life expectancy are all determined by their birth status. In America’s caste system, to be born poor is to be in the lowest caste, whereas to be born poor and black means you’re an outcast. A ‘broke nigga’ in America is the equivalent of an untouchable in India. We love to talk about the American Dream, the idea that anyone in this country can make it to the top if they work hard enough, but the reality in America has been a lot more nightmarish. Our nation was built on an inescapable social hierarchy, with slavery as its foundation. Quite the opposite of allowing anyone to make it; being born with a drop of color in your skin ensured a life of servitude for more than four hundred years. Of course, things have improved, but not to the level Americans assume. The US falls behind Singapore, Austria, Japan, Ireland, the Czech Republic, South Korea, Lithuania, and a host of other countries in terms of social mobility measured by the World Economic Forum. This means where you start in America is typically where you’ll finish, especially if you’re born poor. And it should come as no surprise that social mobility for black boys born in America is by far the lowest of any demographic. When you’re poor, you’re taught to navigate welfare systems. You know how much money you can earn before you lose your housing

16 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. voucher. You know to make sure there are no adult males at your house if the housing authority visits. The systems are intended to keep poor people subservient and mired in poverty. You exert all your mental energy arguing with government bureaucrats that see you as subhuman rather than trying to see through the wool the system has placed over your eyes. You have many questions, but there are no good answers. You wonder things like, “Why are we supposed to take the lowest-paying jobs?” “How am I ever supposed to get out of poverty while making $10 an hour?” If you’re hoping a higher education will be your salvation, you ask yourself, “How am I supposed to pay $50,000 a year for college?” “How am I supposed to compete academically with kids hiring full-time tutors for every subject?” And as I got older, I asked myself, “How am I supposed to build capital when I have no money?” For most people living in poverty, the fact is, you can’t win. The game is rigged in ways that few poor people can even fathom, especially given the state of our public education system. Because of this, they focus on what they know—they focus on navigating poverty. I was one of the very few that had a realistic opportunity to escape, and that’s because I had my brain, my mother, and my teachers. Academic success came easily to me in those early years. My mother noticed and did everything she could to get us into better schools with more challenging curricula. In third grade, we moved into one of the best school districts in the city. Although we lived in one of the poorest corners of the district, that decision changed my life. Going to school there felt like I was being skipped ahead by two grades. The children at the new school were asked to think and I liked that. I adjusted to the higher expectations and performed exceptionally well, but I was soon back to feeling bored in class and in need of greater academic challenges. I had little patience in those days and always wanted to work at warp speed. I’d finish my work early, get bored, and start fidgeting and chatting with those around me who hadn’t yet completed their assignments (the most trouble I ever got into). Luckily, my teachers didn’t slap me with a attention deficit disorder label and try to medicate me into obedience as

CHAPTER 2: YOU CAN’T WIN, CHILD | 17 is done to many young children across America. The teachers saw that I needed bigger challenges and adjusted where they could, allowing me to take advanced courses and do independent study projects that stretched my limits. I often felt bored with school, but being bored at one of the best schools in the state meant I had a future. In that new school district, I began to realize how much life in my neighborhood was different from that of my classmates. My school peers were solidly middle class at a minimum. They’d never eaten mustard sandwiches. They weren’t at all familiar with the rules and guidelines of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), the Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT), or the Housing Choice Voucher Program (commonly known as Section 8). My classmates had never been to a neighborhood like mine. Most never would. They didn’t have incarcerated family members or friends. Cops never harassed them. They never had their electricity or water turned off. It’s an understatement to say the new school was a culture shock for me, but I was able to experience some of the advantages of wealth, namely access to a better education in the new school district, safety, and higher expectations. Yet, I was still an outsider, and many of the perks were still beyond my reach. I loved basketball almost as much as school, but you needed to pay $60 a year to play on organized teams. Since we didn’t have that kind of extra money lying around, and we didn’t have a car to get to practices or games, I was unable to participate. That was about the time when I began to understand that money was intrinsically linked to quality of life. For a kid, having at least a little money meant being able to play organized sports, learning how to play a musical instrument, and getting to go on school trips. While not having any disposable income at all meant sitting on the sidelines, watching wealthier kids enjoy those (and other) opportunities. To have a chance at living life instead of watching others do it, I hustled kids on the basketball court, sold candy, washed cars, mowed

18 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. lawns, fixed houses—anything to keep from being poor and on the bottom of the ladder. I always had some entrepreneurial plan percolating at the back of my mind. I used my earnings from selling newspaper subscriptions to buy packs of gel pens, which I’d then sell individually for a small profit to the kids at school. As I became more business savvy, I started letting other kids sell the pens for me, thereby increasing my sales base. In low-income neighborhoods, high-paying job opportunities don’t exist. You don’t have relatives to call on that can get you interviews. You can’t go work for your father’s construction company or your mother’s medical practice. All that tends to be available are minimum wage jobs, like collecting carts from grocery store parking lots, working a cash register, or selling drugs (usually not making much more than minimum wage with a lot more risk). Or maybe you decide to rob and steal for your dignity rather than languishing away, waiting for the manager of some dead-end job to call you in for an interview. That’s not how things worked for kids in my advanced classes. Their parents were doctors, lawyers, accountants, or worked in some other well-paying profession. Those kids never came to school hungry, never saw an eviction notice on their doors, and never watched all the men in their lives get carted off to jail for trying to feed their families. They began their lives with opportunity, and the world both expected them to succeed and ensured they did. Economic mobility is mostly a myth. In a merit-based world, how much money your parents make would have nothing to do with your future income. Everyone’s talent and drive would determine their lot in society. We can ignore for a moment the absurdity of assuming someone’s IQ or vertical leap should determine whether they have a warm place to sleep at night and food in their belly, as a meritocracy would warrant. We don’t live in a merit-based society in America: we are an aristocracy. In America, your zip code tells you nearly everything you need to know about what will happen in your life. First, your zip-code determines how your neighborhood will be policed, and whether you’ll be born with

CHAPTER 2: YOU CAN’T WIN, CHILD | 19 a parent—most likely your father—incarcerated. Your zip code will tell you what job opportunities your parents have (or don’t), whether they have any formal education they can pass onto you, how high their stress levels are, how clean and safe your streets will be, and whether you’ll go to bed and school hungry. None of this is your choosing or your fault, but it’s your fate nonetheless. Second, our schools are funded based on property taxes. So the quality of our education, the primary way that we think of moving up in American society, is determined by how expensive of a home our parents can afford. Of course, the worst performing schools are almost universally in the poorest neighborhoods, and the neighborhoods with the highest performing public schools cost the most to live in. Nothing is more important for student achievement than teacher quality, and the teachers in low-income communities are asked to teach students facing the greatest difficulties while receiving the lowest pay. It’s no surprise then that the best teachers often wind up at the wealthiest schools. Third, social networks determine financial success. As the old adage goes, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. And when you’re poor, you tend to only know poor people. Having friends in low places doesn’t get you very far in a fiercely competitive business environment. Wealthy children go to wealthy schools from kindergarten onwards, often paying as much as $60,000 a year on tuition for K-12 schooling. I never quite understood this until I bluntly asked a good friend’s dad why he was willing to pay so much money for his kids’ educations when there were free public schools that were academically rigorous in neighborhoods he could easily afford to live in. “Darryl, I’m a businessman,” he began as he grasped my shoulder. “When I go watch the kids play sports, I’m always sitting next to two other parents who can afford to pay $60,000 a year for their kids to finger paint.” The networking alone made the price tag worthwhile. When you’ve been having playdates with the CEO of Apple’s kids since you were toddlers, getting that first job out of college in Cupertino isn’t so hard.

20 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. Fourth, and the most ignored in American society, your zip code determines how much wealth you’ll inherit. Wealth is incredibly unevenly distributed in America and the world. If the human population were one hundred people, two would have half of the wealth. We speak mostly about wealthy people being self-made, but that’s hardly ever the case. The vast majority of wealthy people aren’t famous, don’t want to be on any public ranking lists, and they inherited their wealth. Capitalism is called that because of the absolute importance of owning capital in the system. Your zip code will determine if you inherit $50 million from your parents or debt and funeral costs. Nothing determines your long-term financial outcomes more than inheritance— not even close. It takes money to make money, as they say. And when you’re born rich, the interest on your inheritance will generate more money while you’re still in your diapers than most poor people will earn in their lifetimes. When I explain these unfortunate truths, people often get angry. “So, are you saying there’s no hope for poor kids?” No, there is hope, just not in the ways people assume. Yes, exceptional people will have an opportunity to reach levels of incredible wealth in America. But the vast majority of us aren’t LeBron James, and don’t possess extreme talents that society puts a high value on (being the kindest friend, best mother, best tomato picker, etc. won’t lead to any financial wealth). We shouldn’t be designing society just for the—by definition, few—humans who have rare skills. Instead, we should aim for a society where everyone has the basics, and those that want to invest the energy can have the opportunity to receive exceptional rewards. The answer is not for us to fight for a single seat at the table. We just need more chairs. Our current system is designed for the rich to stay rich and the poor to stay poor. We point to the few instances when someone goes from rags to riches to mask the fact that for the vast majority of us, if you’re born in rags, you’ll die in rags. I began to develop two separate personas as I continued to straddle

CHAPTER 2: YOU CAN’T WIN, CHILD | 21 the different worlds of wealth and poverty at school and at home. I heard people say that money couldn’t buy you happiness, but I knew it could buy fresh food, a car, a bus pass, access to healthcare, books, a graphic calculator, a computer, or an instrument to learn music—all things we typically can’t afford as poor Americans. Given the consequences of being on the bottom of a cruel, hierarchical world, like any rational poor person, I decided to do whatever it took to get my hands on some capital, social or financial.

| 23 CHAPTER 3: THEY MADE US HATE OURSELVES AND LOVE THEIR WEALTH While the economic consequences of America’s caste system are obvious, the social and psychological damages done by it are hidden. Humans make mental associations all the time. A snake, for example, is not intrinsically good or bad. In some cultures, people associate snakes with treachery, while in others, the serpent represents health and vitality. Because of these very different mental associations, people in these two types of cultures will have polar opposite emotional responses when you show them an identical picture of a snake. In America, greed is good. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of wealth and its associated status in a materialistic society. Exorbitant wealth is seen not only as good, but as the ultimate good. And since wealth is good, by association, anyone with wealth is also good. When society values Birkin bags, if you’re rich, you buy one of those and reap the positive associations people have with that bag. If fashion shifts and people now value rare jewels, you can buy those too. Paintings, names on buildings, stolen cultural artifacts, exotic animals, land, whatever is the new thing to love, a wealthy person can buy it, and people will associate that ‘good’ thing with wealthy people. If wealth enables you to buy whatever material item is being idolized at the moment, then being wealthy in and of itself becomes holy.

24 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. Fancy clothes are good, and I have fancy clothes. Expensive cars are good, and I have expensive cars. Mansions are good, and I have three. If I have all of these ‘good’ things, then by association, I must be good too. And if I have the most things, then I must be the best person. In America, we worship the rich because we worship things, and rich people have all the things. Rich people are good by definition—good in a materialistic society. The opposite is also true. If having expensive things means you’re good, then not having expensive things means you’re, at best, not good. Personality traits are not the social currency, so being emotionally available, dependable, or patient pale in comparison to being rich. You struggle to feel special or unique in any way. When character is valued less than things, then the inherent diversity and uniqueness of us all gets ignored, leaving the vast majority of society members feeling basic, uninteresting, and unloved. You aren’t bad per se, just not good. For poor people, the consequences of living in a materialistic society are damning. While not having expensive things isn’t good, causing someone to have less things is downright bad. Poor people living in absolute poverty (defined as having insufficient means of purchasing food, clothing, shelter, or transportation) have needs, not things. If you befriend a poor person, they’re likely to ask you for help quite often, as they can’t provide their families with the essentials for human life. This means you’ll have less material wealth as you socialize with more poor people. The Bible summarizes the plight of the poor perfectly with the proverb, “The poor are despised even by their neighbors, while the rich have many friends.”1 When you’re poor in a materialistic society, you are bad. The psychological harm caused by having your being defined as bad in society is often insurmountable. Despising humans because of attributes assigned to them by birth is nothing new. However, blatant bigotry based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality is universally condemned in 1 Proverbs 14:20

CHAPTER 3: THEY MADE US HATE OURSELVES AND LOVE THEIR WEALTH | 25 mainstream American society (at least publicly. Behind closed doors we still have a long way to go). Blasting the poor as filthy, lazy vermin is still very much in vogue. “I’ve got a plan to end poverty,” announced a highly educated, very wealthy man sitting next to me at dinner. Given that I’d just mentioned my efforts to end poverty, I was interested in hearing his pitch. “It’s called the Zamboni plan,” he continued. “I take a Zamboni and run over all the homeless people in America.” He found his joke quite funny, and a few others joined him with a chuckle. The rest simply pretended as if nothing was said and moved on to the next topic. Suggesting at the dinner table that we commit genocide on the poor did not elicit even the slightest reprimand from this group of successful, well-mannered professionals educated in the most elite universities across the country. He never would have been allowed to say that about gay people or Mexicans, but it was perfectly acceptable to say about the poor and homeless. In elementary school, I became painfully aware of my poverty and was afraid it showed. I tried to change how I spoke, dressed, and behaved so I didn’t appear to belong to that class of people that everyone spoke so badly about. You know, those people. We hate poor people in America, so I learned to hate myself and those around me for being born poor. When poverty is despised, then anything associated with poor people is automatically categorized as bad in the collective cultural mind. Imagine feeling like everything about your culture—the way you dress, the food you eat, the way you speak, the home you live in, your hairstyles, your name, your hygiene, your etiquette, your humor—were all bad and something to be ashamed of. Unless you embrace the ‘badness’ of your clan, adopting a counter-culture mentality, your chances of having any genuine self-esteem are nil. The chest-pounding and violent posturing stereotypical of impoverished communities are typically little more than cries of mercy from a young man or woman begging to be valued, to be seen and loved as a human being. As a child, I didn’t understand all of this, so I hated my community

26 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. as much as the next person. I bought into the American narrative that we were all poor because we were somehow not good enough or not working hard enough. I told myself I was going to work my way out. I was going to matter. I saw how people looked at me when I told them where I lived or when they learned that my family didn’t own a car. I was humiliated whenever I slipped and let my poverty show, and it stung when I thought others noticed. I wanted out. I decided to master this rich, noticeably white world and prove my worth. I tried to advance socially in the obvious ways—being exceptional so people assumed someday my existence would matter. I leaned into being smart and worked on becoming more athletic. But any of these positive traits would be negated if I was seen as being poor, so I hid it the best I could. I never let kids from class come over to my apartment to study or hang out. I always pretended to live a few blocks down the street in a nicer neighborhood when being dropped off. At school, I waited until the lunch lines were empty so the other kids didn’t notice my free lunch card. I started to care about brand names, but there was no way I could afford them. “I want the new Penny Hardaway shoes,” I told my mother, completely unaware that these plastic sneakers cost $175. “Sure, if they have them at PayLess,” she replied as we walked to the store to buy my school shoes for the year. That wasn’t a no! Which was rare in those days when I asked for something. You can imagine my devastation when the lady working in the store reached down, rubbed my head, and gently told me, “We don’t carry name-brand shoes here.” We went home with cheap knockoffs. And the teasing started immediately when I got to school, most of it coming from other poor kids. We were taught to hate ourselves and were vicious in enforcing the rule amongst each other. I hid the hurt, as always, and responded with jabs about their tattered clothes or dirty homes as was the custom. We hardened each other with cruel humor and wit. The words that really hurt, we buried those deep in our psyche and

CHAPTER 3: THEY MADE US HATE OURSELVES AND LOVE THEIR WEALTH | 27 hobbled on. I didn’t make the mistake of buying imitation brands again. In the future, I’d go to Value City or T.J. Maxx to find discounted clothing due to some minor manufacturing defect to appear middle class. Still, I treated my shoes with the utmost care, knowing I couldn’t afford a new pair any time soon. At least those didn’t have any holes like my old pair. Of course, everyone knew that I was poor, but at least helped me pretend they didn’t know. Youth is all about building confidence. It’s impossible to do so when you feel your defining characteristic, being poor, is inherently bad. In American society, status is mostly about material wealth. When you have no money, all you can do is create false signals to appear well-off (or at least not as poor as you truly are) to have a shred of self-esteem. School was no longer fun; academic success became my way of achieving dignity and self-worth. Learning no longer had intrinsic value. It was a means to an end, a way to shake off the stench of poverty. I became increasingly self-conscious. I spent more and more time thinking about how others viewed me instead of doing the inner work to understand who I was as a person, what brought me joy, and how to show up for others. I still cared about people and expressed that through friendship, giving, volunteering in the community, and so on. But the purity was gone. I started a decade-long journey of whitewashing the poverty from my skin to metamorphose into a full-fledged human being. I clearly had a gift for learning. I made straight A’s with relative ease and won the respect of my classmates. Unlike in my neighborhood, where few people saw examples of how excellence in the classroom could lead to financial wealth, my schoolmates had the importance of academics pounded into their heads from day one. They weren’t any smarter than my friends at home, but they were better trained. And they knew that if they made it through college, they’d at least end up as well off as their parents were. With them, academic achievement was a badge of respect because of how it predicted future wealth. I learned that regardless of the economic class you were born into, the

28 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. average person is, well, average. If you started off life poor and you were average, you stayed poor. Graduating from high school didn’t guarantee anything and, most of the kids in my neighborhood didn’t know anyone who’d gone to college. We looked around us and saw poverty, that begot poverty, that begot even more poverty. For a poor kid of average abilities there was no hope of escaping it, so why would they waste their time trying? The middle-class kids often had parents with some sort of trade skill. Their parents were plumbers, electricians, teachers, etc. Their families weren’t dealing with the stress of just trying to make ends meet. Those kids had examples of what a relatively burden-free life could be, and how to get there. The average middle-class kids knew they’d stay middle class. They just had to ensure they at least graduated from high school to obtain that lifestyle, which they mostly did. The rich kids were a different breed altogether. They were born on top and knew they would stay on top. Average or below average, it didn’t matter. They would inherit their parents’ wealth and could do as they pleased. They still had a pecking order and competition among themselves, but there was less room for them to move up, so they tended to be a less ambitious bunch. Americans, ironically, have this narrative about poor people being poor because they’re ‘lazy,’ but I always found the rich kids to be the laziest by far. And well, they could be. They had so much help and support, there was no chance they wouldn’t make it to college. Drug habits just meant a stint in rehab. They really had to try hard to end up not rich. For those kids, social status was mostly inherited. If your family had the most money, then you were the most popular. Everyone had some money and some status, so the tension caused by the lack of basic human necessities wasn’t present. In my new school, kids didn’t use violence as a tool to work out their differences. Words and ostracizing were their weapons of choice. They would gossip about each other, stop talking to someone who upset them for a few weeks or spread nasty rumors. No one ever got beaten up or killed for any of that. It was just kids emotionally

CHAPTER 3: THEY MADE US HATE OURSELVES AND LOVE THEIR WEALTH | 29 abusing one another for status. Their problems and in-fighting seemed trivial to me, but that was my new world, and I had to adjust. If I could deal with the problems of poverty at home, then I could play their social games at school. Knowing I’d never be valued by the rich kids caught up in the money game, I gravitated toward the nerds and the athletes. My athletic abilities were nowhere near my intellectual gifts, but I figured I might as well hedge my bets. It also didn’t hurt that my friends at home valued athletics and the potential riches sport could bring, so by doing well at both school and sports, I’d be able to be ‘good’ in both worlds. I didn’t grow up with money, but I had several extreme advantages in my ascent from poverty. I could effortlessly absorb huge amounts of information, and I loved to learn. I had a mother that cared about education, and I went to a great school. I had very bright siblings who were able to teach and protect me. School was clearly my ticket out. I decided to be a doctor. I liked the predictability and structure of science and wanted the wealth and prestige that came with being a physician in the US. Adults all nodded in approval when I said I wanted to be a pediatric cardiologist. I’d help kids and make tons of money doing it. It was a lofty goal, but practical enough. My dream, though, was basketball. Despite my athletic skills being nowhere near my academic abilities, it was hard to resist the allure of someday being a pro athlete. I have a genuine love for basketball that still lives in me to this day, but I’d be lying if I said the wealth and status that came along with being a professional athlete weren’t major motivations for me back then. The media mostly provides kids like me with grossly unrealistic examples of people that started off with nothing and went on to make hundreds of millions of dollars in professional sports. A total of only sixty players worldwide are drafted into the National Basketball Association every year, even though over half a million kids will play high school basketball in the US—nearly every one of those kids believes they’ll go pro.

30 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. I know I did. Kids in poor communities countrywide bet their lives on an outcome with a lower probability than winning the lottery. And the adults encourage it. There are far more adults willing to mentor and nurture excellent athletes than there are who want to develop excellent students. That’s because we value athletics as a society over intelligence. So, despite my obvious advantages, all I really wanted to do was be like Mike. All of this was magnified post-puberty. Suddenly, social status meant even more as we all began jockeying for partners. When I finally got old enough to play for school teams (you don’t usually pay to play at your school), some great coaches took me under their wings. I’d always worked hard in school, but in sports, I had to push myself even further because I wasn’t the most talented, and I had a very late start with high-level, organized sports. From my playground days, I was a better basketball player than most kids my age, but high school basketball in Indiana is a different monster. And my high school was a perennial powerhouse—one of the top basketball teams in the nation. I had to scratch and claw just to make the team. The feedback loop was incredibly positive and being poor didn’t matter all that much anymore. I got way more love and attention for playing basketball than I ever did for my scholastic achievements, and I bathed it in. Girls liked me, teachers wanted to talk to me about our games, even strangers stopped me in the grocery store to ask for an autograph or to share their analysis of last week’s game. Finally, I’d stumbled into a bit of social capital. I started to stand up straight, speak more directly, and felt a sense of pride in who I’d become. I felt I was earning my humanity. I poured everything into being a student-athlete, getting up at 5:00 a.m. to work out before school, and staying up until midnight to finish my homework. I say this not to encourage others to follow in my footsteps, but to point out how absurdly difficult it is to make it out of poverty in America, even when you have huge advantages like a high IQ, great teachers and coaches, and a 6’3” frame.

CHAPTER 3: THEY MADE US HATE OURSELVES AND LOVE THEIR WEALTH | 31 We had outstanding basketball and weight training coaches and athletic trainers. Follow the dollars and you’ll see what a society truly cares about (the highest-paid public employee in a state is usually the head coach of the basketball or football team). Knowing all of this, I gave everything I had to mold myself into a decent player. Luckily, I had help along the way. One coach in particular constantly pushed me to my limits. He was somebody who really cared about his students as individuals and wanted us to show us that the only thing that could stop us was our own self- limiting beliefs. We didn’t believe him, of course; we knew the world wasn’t fair. But it was nice to have someone at least tell us that. With him, I’d train until I vomited, couldn’t walk, couldn’t stand up, and then train some more in a few hours. Despite me not being anywhere near the best player on our team, he invested his time in me because he saw my hunger. Because school up to that point had been relatively easy for me, basketball was the first time I ever had to dig into my inner depths. I became comfortable with pain and exhaustion. I needed to go beyond my mental boundaries just to have a chance to get on the floor. My coaches and trainers showed me what I was capable of and redefined tasks I once saw as impossible into just another good challenge. I improved drastically as a basketball player because of the investments that exceptional coach and others made in me. Years of training hard by myself were less effective than a month with these men teaching me the game. Wealthy children get this level of attention in every activity they do. Whether it’s sports, art, school, camping, or debate, they can afford world-class teachers to teach them and push them from the time they start walking and talking. Because of these incredible advantages, they significantly outperform relative to their skill levels because society invests so much more in them than we do in anyone else. As poor kids, we have to show elite promise before anyone will invest in us. As rich kids, your worth is a given.

32 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. Few people from my neighborhood had my experience of jumping from the bottom to the top tier of our local caste system. Everything went right for me in my school years. And it had to. People liked to use me as an example of the “American dream,” and I would always laugh it off. I was not naïve enough to buy into that fairy tale. I knew I was always one wrong step away from a life of poverty, and so were all my friends at home. When you’re poor, you get no second chances. If you’re caught with drugs, you get charged with intent to sell, and you’re tried in court as an adult. No questions asked. If you act out in class, no one asks what’s going on at home. You’re labeled a troublemaker and placed in remedial classes. If one of your parents gets sick, it was time to quit school and help at home. The older I got, the wider the gap between home and school grew. In the neighborhood where I lived, fighting evolved into shooting. People dropped out of school, started having kids as teenagers, and one by one lost their battles against poverty. None of my friends from class were living that life. Their biggest pressures were about upcoming tests or sporting events. And I no longer bought into the myth that hard work was the only thing that mattered. I saw proof every day that in America, the key to success in anything was being born with money. I knew if I wanted a better life, I had to be more talented and work twice as hard as my classmates who were born on second and third base. I was up for the challenge. When I learned to combine the intense work ethic I developed through sports with my natural academic gifts, there was no limit to what I could achieve in the classroom. With the help and support of so many people around me, I somehow avoided every potential landmine and pitfall I faced. Academically, I was qualified to gain entrance into every school in the country. Athletically, I was recruited by mid-level Division I programs. By that point, I knew I wasn’t on track to make it to the NBA. I just didn’t have the skills or raw athletic ability. In any endeavor, talent becomes increasingly important as you move into elite levels of competition (since

CHAPTER 3: THEY MADE US HATE OURSELVES AND LOVE THEIR WEALTH | 33 everyone is trying to be the best, hard work only gets you so far). I’d done everything in my power to position myself to receive a full scholarship, without which I never could’ve dreamed of attending college. Then, one day, out of the blue, I got a call from a Massachusetts phone number. “Hi, Darryl? This is the men’s basketball coach from Harvard.” My days at the bottom were done.

| 35 CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT By the time I graduated from high school, I was finally starting to feel comfortable in my own skin. I’d somehow managed to become a decent basketball player on one of the top teams in the country. I worked several jobs to buy a car, go to prom, dress a little better, and eat out from time to time. I graduated with highest honors and accepted the offer to attend Harvard University on a full scholarship. I had solid footing on the ladder to success, whatever that was. Before starting my first semester at Harvard, I remember walking into Foot Locker with pride and stocking up on the oversized ‘tall t-shirts’ everyone from my neighborhood wore back then. I bought a pair of Air Jordan basketball shoes—something I’d never considered splurging on before—and a pair of Timberland boots. I had to make sure I didn’t step in any of that Boston snow and ruin my new footwear. It was one of the most expensive shopping days of my life, but I was on my way to Harvard, and I wanted to look the part. I didn’t have the money to ship any of my things to Boston, so I stuffed everything I owned into two suitcases I’d won at a carnival. One of my suitcases began to burst before I even reached the airport, but I figured it would still make the trip. At the airport, I placed that suitcase on the scale with dread and it weighed fifty-three pounds. I wasn’t about to pay an extra $25 for an overweight bag, so I took out my coat and a hoodie to get it under the fifty-pound limit. It was hot, but I decided

36 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. to wear them both since I didn’t have much money to spare and didn’t intend to leave them behind. I finally landed at Boston Logan airport and knew it was the beginning of a special chapter in my life. There, I thought, I would just be a student from Indianapolis; I would no longer be defined by where I grew up. I naively figured that from there onwards, all that would determine my fate was merit and my performance in school. In which case, why would it matter where I started? After collecting my bags, I dragged them over to the Silver Line bus, and eventually got onto the “T,” Boston’s subway system. I was drenched in sweat at that point, thanks to the coat and hoodie, but I stood up the whole ride to campus, too excited to take a seat. “Harvard station,” I heard called over the intercom. It was finally my stop. I struggled past the other passengers with all my luggage and exited the subway, then made my way up the stairs. It still felt surreal. Just a few months ago I’d taken my first flight ever, when I took a short trip to St. Louis to visit Washington University. That was the first time in my life I’d been recruited. I felt wanted. My performance in academics and basketball paid for that ticket. At the time, I couldn’t imagine feeling prouder or having better prospects. There I was, about to begin my post- secondary studies at arguably the most prestigious college in the world. The moment I emerged from the subway station and turned into Harvard’s yard, my heart stopped. I saw parents everywhere, each driving the most expensive cars I’d ever seen. It never crossed my mind that this would be a family event. Kids were bringing in complete furniture sets, wardrobes, and shoe collections. I’d never seen cardigans or topsiders before, but there, they were everywhere. “Where’s your stuff?” asked one student. “Oh, it’s coming later,” I lied. Everyone on campus seemed to already know one another from boarding school. It took a little time before I realized that their asking, “Where did you go to high school?” was a subtle way of assessing my

CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 37 worth and rank. “North Central. Do you know Indianapolis?” I would answer. “No,” came the inevitable response. To many students, not going to the ‘right’ high school meant there was no reason to waste any further time speaking to me. I wasn’t elite. Fortunately, not everyone was snobbish. A few students kindly asked me to join their families for dinner once they realized I was alone. I politely declined. I appreciated the offers but wasn’t about to start being looked at as a charity case on day one. I unpacked my bags and sat there in my 250-year-old dorm room. Somehow, I’d just gotten a hundred times poorer. It seemed I was further from the top than I’d ever been. I felt bad for myself for half a second, then remembered what I’d done to get there and decided I was just as good as anyone else. I stood up, grabbed my basketball, and went to the gym. I began my meditative rituals on the court and those insecurities melted away. I wasn’t starting from scratch. I’d put in work that few humans can imagine to get there, and no one was going to tell me that I didn’t belong. I may be poor, I told myself, but I’ll be damned if I’m not elite. The first few months of college were brutal. Long before graduating from high school, I’d decided the best way I could help others would be to become a doctor. One of the biggest obstacles for poor people in the US is affordable access to healthcare. I figured as a doctor, I’d be able to practice medicine in poor communities and could serve those who needed help the most, while still earning a great salary. I also liked the idea that, as a medical professional, I might one day have a voice in shaping healthcare policy across the country. So, I’d chosen to do my premedical studies in the field of neurobiology. In the first two days of biology class, we went over everything I’d learned in my advanced placement high school courses. I couldn’t believe how fast we were going, but the other students all seemed fine with it. I asked around and soon discovered there were schools where kids are taught by college-level professors starting in the sixth grade. My

38 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. classmates had been groomed for this, while—for the first time in my life—I struggled to keep up in school. I got a C- on my first test and started questioning if Harvard had made a mistake in letting me in. On top of that, I got hit with the realities of Division I basketball. I considered myself good at the sport, but it was a whole different level of talent, and I was out of my depth. I was now playing against some of the best college players in the country—some of whom would go on to play in the NBA. Basketball at this level was a full-time job, and there I was, trying to do that and take one of the most difficult course loads available at Harvard. I foolishly started working a part-time job and signed up for a few extra-curricular activities. I didn’t have much of a choice since I needed the money and had to start building out my resume for medical school (yes, Harvard students start thinking about graduate school from day one of Freshman year). I was overwhelmed with the number of things on my plate and wasn’t performing to my expectations in anything. I needed to dig deeper. I decided I didn’t care about social life or sleep. I worked constantly. I started reading several chapters ahead in my textbooks so the material wasn’t so new to me during lectures. I worked alone in my room because there was too much socializing in the libraries. I went to office hours, saved some money to get a writing tutor, and mapped out every fifteen-minute block of time of every day so I could juggle it all. The lack of socializing didn’t bother me that first semester. I quickly realized that I didn’t fit in at all. I wore a durag, spoke with a funny accent, had extra baggy clothes, and didn’t know anything about prep schools or secret societies. Dating was also tough when the other guys all had multi-million dollar trust funds. One of the hardest things for me to adjust to was how different friendships worked at Harvard. Growing up poor, your friends were everything. They were the people you relied on to help you when things inevitably hit their worst. If you were going to get jumped in a fight,

CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 39 they’d have your back. Same went for if you really needed a place to stay when things were too crazy at home. Our problems were real, so we needed real friends to help us through them. Being poor, you couldn’t survive on your own. Friendships for rich people, I learned, aren’t like that. They have money and can buy whatever services they want, so they don’t feel like they really need people. They treat each like business associates. If someone gets into trouble, rather than coming to help, they’ll distance themselves from that person. If they get an opportunity to swap out one friend for a wealthier one, they do it in a heartbeat. They didn’t care about you, they cared about your money, access, and status. It’s a dreadfully cold and lonely world. I become guarded and defensive. I made a few friends with people who had backgrounds like my own, but I mostly kept people at a distance and stayed focused on my reason for coming to Harvard in the first place. I was there to escape poverty and to help people like me get access to a better life. That would make the nightmare of a place worthwhile. The more I got to understand it socially, the more I hated Harvard. I came close to leaving several times that first semester—at one point, I had the transfer papers filled out. But eventually, things started to click. Once we got to the point where the material was new even for the prep school kids, keeping up became a lot easier. And then before I knew it, I was helping other students grasp concepts. That first semester was without question the hardest of my life, but I stuck it out, and I had all A’s on my first college transcript at the end of the term. School never became easy, but as I learned how to master the classroom, my stress levels dropped, and I had space to work on the other aspects of my life. Academically I belonged. Socially, I was doing okay. Being an athlete helped, and I mostly stuck with the other minority students, especially those who grew up with household incomes below $1 million a year.

40 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. That gave me a start, but I knew in order to thrive there, I was going to have to figure out how to speak with a broader set of students than that. So, I started to venture out and befriend a wider variety. When I first got to Harvard, the income differentials were overwhelming. I’ll never forget the first day I agreed to go along for a group dinner. We had unlimited swipes at our dining halls, so I saw no reason to go off campus and pay for food. But dinners were a big part of socializing at school, so I decided it would be good for me to go. I figured I would only have an appetizer, so it wouldn’t cost too much. To my great surprise, when the bill came, everyone started whizzing out their credit cards to pay for the check without even giving it a glance. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My heart leapt into my throat. These kids had ordered everything under the sun and not eaten half of it, and there I was, hungry as hell, pretending to be full to save money. And now I was expected to pay for it all? I just couldn’t. I buried the shame when the waiter came to the table and asked, “Are we splitting the bill evenly?” “No, I only had an appetizer. Put ten dollars on my card, please.” I said this, then sunk into my chair, vowing to never leave the dining hall again. But things got better. Harvard pays kids a ton of money to work campus jobs. I remember calling my mom not long after I started working there. “They’re paying me $15 to move refrigerators. And they pay time and a half for overtime!” To this day, I don’t know how I did it all, but I worked at the grill and the library, I cleaned bathrooms, I had a research job, I worked at the cleaners, and I tutored other students. I made enough money to at least get myself a few pairs of loafers and some form-fitting t-shirts, and I saved enough to go on the occasional trip to New York. I even went to Puerto Rico with some friends from school. One of the best things about Harvard is that everyone there is a nerd. I gained a lot of social clout for being one of the smarter kids, despite coming from a public school. Growing up, I was just cool enough to be able to have a girlfriend and get invited to the occasional party, but in the

CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 41 land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Harvard kids were awful dancers, super awkward, and most had never even been to a party. So, I thrived. As a black man on a predominantly white campus, I was often fetishized and stereotyped when it came to dating, and although I knew that was the reason for some of the “romantic” attention I received, I ignored it. I was finally getting my self-esteem back, and I wasn’t going to let my conscience get in the way. I got invited to join social clubs and started to venture beyond the jocks and minorities. There was a lot of growth that happened during my time at Harvard, but also a lot of shrinking. I was proud of myself for going out of my comfort zone and meeting people from different countries, ethnicities, and social classes. But more and more, I became aware that no one was curious about my culture, aside from their interest in hip-hop and dance moves. We weren’t meeting one another in the middle. In my heart, I knew what was really happening. I was learning how to be white and how to be rich. My culture wasn’t worth learning about in the eyes of my classmates. I came from poverty, and that was something to be escaped, not celebrated. My previous life was summarized in that one word: poverty. And it was expected that I would shed that past and learn more ‘civilized’ ways of being. It’s nearly impossible to become the best version of yourself when you’re trying to fit into a group that, by default, will never accept you. I fought it, but slowly and surely, I began leaving my past self behind. I lost my accent. I threw away my durags. I told myself I liked super- skinny girls. Over time, I stopped wanting to simply escape poverty; I started wanting to be rich. I’d gotten a taste of what it felt like to have status and I liked it. I began a decade-long transformation that would ultimately leave me lost and wondering who the hell I’d become. I was constantly analyzing the fascinating new world I found myself in. Over time, I noticed something surprising: once you got over how

42 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. well-spoken they were, the wealthiest kids at Harvard weren’t really all that smart. This is all relative of course, but I never would have imaged the least qualified students would be the ones with the most resources. It clicked when I started learning more about their primary and secondary school experiences. Apparently, there were schools all over the country that charged $50,000 a year for kindergarten! Because private schools aren’t reliant on public funds, their curriculum isn’t limited by state-legislated mandates. Which means the standards and curriculums at those schools reach far beyond state regulations. At those schools, the teachers all have doctorate degrees. Children are free to explore at their own pace, they often don’t have grades, and they get unlimited one-on- one attention. The schools are small, so almost everyone makes the varsity sports teams. They have almost unlimited budgets for after-school programs, so every kid gets a chance to be president or founder of whatever club or group they wish to join. But it’s not just about a better academic experience. The guidance counselors have all the Ivy League schools on speed dial, and they receive a guaranteed number of spots for their students every year. Preparation for the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) starts for these kids in sixth grade and continues through high school. Kids at boarding schools have regular dinners and outings with their teachers, and those teachers provide their students with even more connections—in addition to excellent letters of recommendation. At those elite schools, students are given the answers to all the tests in life. It’s nearly impossible for them to fail. I’m fully supportive of this kind of academic environment. It’s wonderful that students get this kind of nurturing and guidance. What didn’t sit well with me was knowing that those students were getting spots in what was supposed to be one of the toughest academic institutions on the planet. They hadn’t earned their spot by being the best or the smartest. They’d simply grown up with an exceptional economic advantage. Maybe it was my athlete mentality, but I found it difficult to accept this reality

CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 43 without judgement. When you play basketball in Indiana, you quickly learn what real talent looks like. I would put my work ethic on the basketball court up against anyone else’s. But my talent? Not so much. I greatly outperformed my abilities and had no qualms admitting it. Academically, I benefited from my talent advantages, so I understood both sides of the coin. When it comes to elite levels of competition, talent takes over. Some kids are blessed with exceptional talents, and when that’s combined with a solid work ethic, those kids become stars. Everyone wants to be great, and everyone tries hard, but that’s not always enough. No matter what effort I put into basketball, I knew I’d never be as good as LeBron James. Then again, no matter how much effort LeBron James put into school, he’d never be as good as me in the classroom. There’s nothing fair about the distribution of talent. For some reason, people have a difficult time acknowledging the importance of talent when it comes to elite-level success, but it’s just a fact. For the rich kids, they didn’t need much talent. They were taught how to appear smart and were given a seat at the table. And if the $50,000 a year’s worth of training wasn’t enough, their parents would simply donate a few million dollars to their school of choice and get them in that way. I share this insight not to ridicule my wealthy classmates. A few of them were indeed brilliant—most were not. But I say this because growing up poor, I always assumed rich people were exceptionally smart. I thought people became wealthy because they outworked and outsmarted the rest of us lowly peons. As it turns out, the key to being rich is being born rich. We use academic institutions to pretend that the world is a meritocracy—meaning success is based on demonstrated ability and merit—but it isn’t. Meritocracy is a myth used to convince the poor to work themselves to death. Consider the American College Test (ACT) and SAT scores, for example. Since talent is randomly distributed regardless of economic class, why do children from wealthier households consistently perform better on these tests? Well, if your parents have a lot of money, you start

44 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. studying for the ACT and SAT in sixth grade. If you take the same test over and over, with someone telling you how to master the test, you’ll do well. Kids from lower-income families often never study for these tests given the high costs of SAT Prep courses and tutors—add that to the growing number of ways poor kids are competing with one hand tied behind their backs. It took a fascinating course in philosophy to help me resolve my frustration with this inequity. In that course, the professor walked us through a mental exercise where everyone starts off life equally, but through merit, those with talent gain all the wealth and power. Was that fair? I’d never questioned meritocracy. I assumed the people that were the best at school or sports should get the best things because…well, I didn’t know why. That’s just the way things were. But suddenly, I was forced to grapple with the idea that I never did anything to deserve my talents. So why was I any more deserving of this opportunity for a better life than anyone else? My being born with an innate ability to learn was no more of a fair reason for me to have riches than someone born into it. I didn’t think the legacy kids deserved to have such extreme advantages over everyone else, but I never questioned my own privileges. Why should someone have to live outside just because they weren’t born with abnormal talents? Who deserves nothing? I genuinely love learning. Once I finally got away from a school environment where I was forced to read hundreds of pages a day, I even learned to love slowly gliding through a good book. School, however, was always a means to an end. I found a lot of the tasks we were assigned at every level of school unnecessary and oftentimes even counterproductive. The US education system is structured more like a weeding-out system than a way to provide useful skills and knowledge to the general population. Look no further than the lack of basic financial education, vocational training, emotion

CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 45 management, civics, or even cooking skills to see school isn’t where you learn the most important skills for adult life. Instead, we force kids in the prime of their lives to spend ungodly amounts of time studying often useless topics, all so they can compete for a limited number of good jobs. Practical application of a subject, to say nothing of aptitude and personal interest, has no bearing on curriculum requirements. I always found it pointless trying to guess what a poet writing in Old English five hundred years ago meant or why they wrote something. I also found absurdly biased history lessons a colossal waste of time. We’re expected to learn in school what the system wants us to learn with no questions asked. Even a class like economics exists mostly to promote classist propaganda. I started to question more and more accepted ‘truths’ about society. I began to read books outside of what was on the syllabus. Once I satisfied all my academic requirements, I spent what remaining time I had in the real world. If life wasn’t a meritocracy, I had to find out what it really was. Instead of using my brain for my own advancement, I dedicated more and more of my free time to helping those that didn’t win the genetic lottery. My initial academic worries aside, I was confident I wouldn’t end up living in poverty again, given my performance in school. People who graduated from Harvard didn’t end up poor, and there was no way I would not graduate with the grades I was getting. Knowing this, I spent my mental energy trying to figure out how to help all the people still living in poverty. “Why are we spending so much time talking about career planning?” I asked at yet another job networking event during freshman year. “Let’s be real, we’re all going to get jobs. Why don’t we discuss bringing up the rest of our community?” I got blank stares back. “We’re not all going to get good jobs. Don’t be naïve.” I was a little surprised to hear that. “Really? I think everyone who graduates from here can make $100,000 a year if they want to,” I persisted. This time, the looks I received told me they thought I’d just said the dumbest thing they’d ever heard. “That’s not a good job.”

46 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. To me, $100,000 a year was more money than I’d ever need. It was more than triple what my mother earned and raised four kids on. I wish I could say I changed their minds and convinced everyone that it was more than enough money to live on and that perhaps the brightest kids in the world should be thinking about the hardest problems our society faces rather than asking how they’d be able to afford a $10 million second home. But I didn’t have that kind of courage yet. Still, I was unjaded and determined to make a difference, so I stayed focused on helping others. I ran social programs for children in Boston’s poorest neighborhoods, engaging mostly with kids who were growing up in environments similar to those I was raised in as a child. As my worldview expanded, I started asking how I could help the poorest people in the world, not just the poorest people in the richest country. I co-founded a non-profit organization that focused on economic development mostly in Western Africa and the Caribbean. We used our newfound proximity to knowledge and wealth to deliver basic goods to the world’s poorest people. One of the great things about being at Harvard was having access to some of the best minds in the world in our professors, and we weren’t shy about seeking guidance and advice when needed. Not to mention, with all the money and connections on campus, raising $50,000 in donations was suddenly realistic. I experienced what I thought was poverty while I was growing up in Indiana. Though as I started doing international aid work, I realized I had no idea what real poverty was. Growing up poor, we might’ve had the water cut off occasionally, but I didn’t know anyone who didn’t have permanent access to clean water—and everyone had a toilet. When I traveled to the world’s poorest countries, I visited areas where miles and miles of people lived in complete destitution, with no running water and barely enough food to eat. The people in these countries still died of diseases long-since eradicated in the developed world. People wasted away without enough energy to even swat away the flies that landed on their faces. Those in the midst of humanitarian crises didn’t smile or even look at you; there was no hope in their eyes.

CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 47 Mothers watched as their babies lay despondent beside them, knowing they couldn’t feed them. Hungry children would approach us and pull on our clothes, begging us for money. We gave what we could, but the need was overwhelming. It was difficult to witness this kind of suffering. I remember seeing a line of thirsty, severely malnourished children, several with distended abdomens. They stood under a nearly bone-dry waterfall, waiting with their mouths open, hoping to catch a few drops. We saw the consequences of extreme poverty everywhere we went. I’ll never forget the smell of rancid latrines in the summer. My heart still aches when I think about the first time I saw a starving human chained to a tree. The man was suffering from a mental illness, and the people in his village believed it to be a demon possession. I wish I could say it was the only time I witnessed such a horror. I still cringe when I remember a mother drinking visibly fecal-contaminated water. When you see poverty like that, you can’t unsee it. Those memories and so many others will haunt me for the rest of my life. Our non-profit organization drilled boreholes to access water, built irrigation systems for dry-season farming, and revamped social enterprises whose profits funded orphanages. After suffering a career-ending knee injury while playing basketball, I threw all the energy I’d previously dedicated to basketball into fighting poverty worldwide. I had the time to sit in on lectures at the School of Public Health and in the economics department. I read every international development book I could get my hands on. I went to office hours of Nobel Laureates to get advice on my projects and ask about their development theories. I was obsessed, and I loved my work. I stuck it out as a neurobiology major and finished all my pre-med curriculum requirements. But my heart was already set on economic development. The idea that there was a way to systematically lift not only poor communities but poor nations out of poverty was incredible to me. Maybe there didn’t have to be poor people. Perhaps we could design a world where everyone had enough, and some had even more.

48 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. Around that time, a teacher, mentor, and close friend of mine pulled me aside and asked what I wanted to do with my career. I thought about it and realized I was already doing what I wanted with my life. “This,” I told him. “I just need the tools to get better.” He asked, “Have you ever thought about applying for a Rhodes Scholarship?” I hadn’t. I honestly didn’t even know what the scholarship was for. I knew Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar, but I couldn’t tell you what it signified. I started digging into it and wasn’t all that impressed with the history. Cecil Rhodes is the Babe Ruth of colonization. He “made” (a euphemism for stole) a fortune plundering Africa, then decided to put it all in a trust before he died. He wanted men from all the British colonies to have a chance to come and study at Oxford so they too could become “refined gentlemen.” I didn’t buy into all that, but I did see it as an opportunity to study international development and public health with some of the brightest minds in the world before I went on to medical school. As luck would have it, I applied for and won a Rhodes scholarship and was off to England to study at Oxford University a few months after I graduated from Harvard College. If you think Harvard is old money, try Oxford. Harvard was founded in 1636, about 400 years after curious minds began to gather on the lawns of Oxford, England to discuss and debate the mysteries of the physical and spiritual worlds. The majestic Annenberg dining hall at Harvard that tourists flock to each year was modeled after its older Oxford counterpart. In Europe, class is something you’re born into. No matter how much money you make in England, you’ll always be lower class if you’re born lower class. In a strange way, that made it a lot easier for me to forget about being poor. There was no need to worry about something I couldn’t change. Plus, it was a foreign country, and I didn’t feel the need to try to change things there. I simply wanted to experience the new world it provided. Unlike my early days at Harvard, I dove right into social life at

CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 49 Oxford. The unbelievably extravagant (and frequent) black-tie events at Harvard were nothing compared to the white-tie affairs at Oxford, complete with long tailcoats and top hats. I’d been around extreme wealth for four years, though, so it didn’t faze me much. I enjoyed the extravagance to an extent and didn’t take it all that seriously. There was classism for sure, but I gave it little thought. I went out of my way to meet students and professors from various countries, social classes, and academic departments. Academically, I no longer felt the need to prove myself. If someone didn’t believe in my intelligence, then they never would. I decided that was their problem with racism and classism, not mine. Instead, I focused on learning. I went to Harvard to escape poverty; I went to Oxford to learn how to help others do the same.

| 51 CHAPTER 5: DON’T GIVE ME THAT DO-GOODY GOOD BULLSHIT My spirits were higher than ever. Rhodes Scholars all receive monthly stipends (i.e., seed money), so I didn’t have to stress about finances while studying. I took that, along with the extra money I made tutoring and coaching basketball to pay for my travels across Europe. I didn’t have a lot of money, but I had enough for once. In graduate school, that small stipend meant I could focus on studying, implementing development projects, and getting to know some of the smartest people on the planet instead of cooking curly fries and working at the cleaners. I continued to run my non-profit organization and spent a significant amount of time working in Western Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. My non-profit worked with partners to drill boreholes, build irrigation systems for dry season farming, build social enterprises, assess poverty alleviation programs, and more. I began doing rigorous academic research to add to my poverty-fighting toolkit. I read Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Amartya Sen, Jared Diamond, Milton Friedman, and others to gain a deeper understanding of global economics. I was twenty-two years old and living the dream. I was doing purposeful work I loved, I was seeing the world, I had brilliant friends to learn from, and I finally didn’t have to worry about money. Life felt as close to perfect as I’d ever hoped it would be.

52 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. I’d made it. Then, as often happens in life when you think you have everything figured out, my worldview started to crack. I had long since moved on from believing poor people deserved to be poor. Now, I thought poverty was a lack of basic infrastructure and education. If we could spread western technical know-how to the poorest communities in the world, then we’d be able to end poverty once and for all. But as I gained a deeper understanding of financial systems and economics, I began to question that logic and doubted the general impact of my work. I’d decided potable water and improved sanitation were foundational infrastructures needed to lift people out of poverty because of the importance of healthcare to a person’s well-being. I’d read UN development reports that confirmed my beliefs. Not having access to clean water is one of the largest causes of death worldwide, especially for children. You see high infant mortality rates in areas where people have to drink dirty water. Kids pick up parasites that live in the water they drink, which causes diarrhea and dehydration—and ultimately death. Once a community had access to clean water, was it off to the races from there? Not quite. If the community couldn’t afford to solve its water problems on its own, it was unlikely to be able to solve its remaining hardships without further financial assistance. Even the water and sanitation solutions didn’t typically last because the communities couldn’t afford the upkeep. I started to notice broken water pumps and solar panels in village after village. The development world is obsessed with giving people things, with no means of maintaining these expensive pieces of equipment. I started to think perhaps I wasn’t digging deep enough. While implementing one of our clean water, hygiene, and sanitation projects in rural Ghana, I asked people what they thought their community needed most. “We need money.” “We want jobs!”

CHAPTER 5: DON’T GIVE ME THAT DO-GOODY GOOD BULLSHIT | 53 “If I had money, I could buy sachet water.” Sachet water is water that has been sealed in polyethylene plastic bags. It is popular in Ghana because it is convenient, easily accessible, and cheap. “If I had money, I could double my crop yields.” “If I had money, I could send my kids to primary school.” The answers were varied but always like this. Those households were so poor, everyone was making major trade-offs, and they knew it. If you decided to stop paying your child’s school fees so you could afford to eat, that didn’t mean you doubted the importance of a good education. It meant that poverty made you make an unimaginably difficult choice. Therefore, everyone knew how they’d spend extra money in highly impactful ways because there were so many gut-wrenching sacrifices they’d been forced to make for survival. I felt pretty stupid. I was well indoctrinated in the global aid and development world, but these people’s responses had stripped things down to one simple truth: they knew how to fix their poverty, they just didn’t have the resources to do it. Technical assistance and equipment are without a doubt helpful, but what those communities needed most was access to money and resources to implement those improvements. Although I’d grown up poor myself, I’d forgotten that poor people are more than capable of identifying and solving the major issues in their lives. They want cash to enable them to effectively solve those problems just like everyone else, though they’ll take boreholes if that’s all that’s up for grabs. With money, villages could drill and maintain their own boreholes if that’s what they wanted most, but it would be their choice. As I went around the village, everyone had different ideas about what they’d do with their money, including buying hand soap and clean water storage tanks for their homes. Unlike me, everyone I spoke with knew a lack of access to resources was the root cause of poverty, nothing more. Yes, clean water was important. But it’s not like there was no clean water in Ghana. The poor just couldn’t afford it. That hasn’t always been true, but in today’s world, you can get most essential goods if you have the money to pay for them.

54 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. The simple answer to eradicating poverty worldwide was staring me right in the face, but my ego wouldn’t let me see it. “No, I’m doing the right thing.” If what people needed most were resources, then all we needed to do was share more and the world would be fine. Redistributing resources is simple. There’s no room for me or anyone else to be a savior. But the cognitive dissonance was too much at the time, so I rejected that and pressed on with my efforts to teach people how to stop being poor. I was stubborn, but the seeds of doubt had been firmly planted in my mind. My plan had been to finish up my studies at Oxford, then head to medical school back in the US. But I’d begun to accept that a lack of healthcare, clean water, and education were symptoms of poverty, not the cause. If I wanted to help poor people, I needed to help them get paid. I contacted the University of Pennsylvania, where I’d been accepted to attend medical school, and asked for another year of deferral, which they graciously granted me. I decided to spend that year learning more about business and money. I set my sights on management consulting, which is known as the brains of capitalism in the business world. I put in the work, got a little lucky, and leveraged my newfound privilege and networks to land a job at the top management consulting firm in the world. It was time to start learning the truth about economics from the inside. I felt secure in my path and grounded in my identity. I spent most of my time in the poorest parts of the world, sleeping on dirt floors and living on a tight budget. I practically never thought about money because I had plenty to eat, always had a place to sleep, and was living a life in service to others. I never questioned why I was doing what I was doing or spent much time wondering why I was working for free because I had my basics covered. I hesitate to say that I was ‘happy,’ because a life of purpose and fulfillment is naturally one with all kinds of emotions, but I cared deeply about my work and the people it affected. In a given week, I would feel joy, sadness, disgust, love, disappointment,

CHAPTER 5: DON’T GIVE ME THAT DO-GOODY GOOD BULLSHIT | 55 determination, and pain. I was growing as a human being and using my full talents to attempt to create a better world. I was complete. Then I moved to New York City. Shifting my focus from solving technical economic and public health problems to thinking about money re-opened old, deep wounds. If the key to being able to help others was solving the hardest puzzles, then I felt great about my chances of adding value to the world. I could problem-solve with the best of them. If the key to changing the world for the better was access to money and power, what hope did I have of accomplishing anything? Years of rubbing elbows with the wealthiest kids in the world didn’t suddenly make me rich. I was broke and powerless, grappling with the fact that, to achieve my one real goal in life, helping those who have the least, I’d have to face all of my insecurities around money head-on. In addition, while doing development work, I mostly surrounded myself with people that genuinely cared about other people. Not everyone in the development space is that way, especially in larger institutions that pay well, but you can easily find people pouring their souls into their work for no reason other than wanting to see a better world. Many of those people came from family wealthy (one of the reasons they could work for so little pay without stress), but rarely did people doing on the ground work ever flaunt or base their egos solely around their money. We got our sense of self-worth from the impact of our work (this comes with its own set of problems, the most prominent being the messiah complex many of us develop), not our money or things. But working in a high- paying job in New York, social life was all about money again. I thought I was grounded enough to handle it this time. I wasn’t. I worked and learned plenty, but my priorities shifted away from helping others towards proving my own self-worth again. I was now twenty-four, living in Manhattan, and making more money than most doctors. Everyone around me had money and were dead set on making much, much more. I wish I could say it didn’t affect me, but it did. A lot. Since college, I’d done everything in my power to ensure I didn’t attach my sense of identity to money. It was the only way I could feel good about

56 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. myself being completely broke while constantly surrounded by students whose parents were regulars on the Forbes list. But suddenly, there I was, earning a top ten percent income at the ripe old age of twenty-four. The partners at the firm where I worked made more money than most professional athletes. Instead of being a source of embarrassment, my financial status overnight became yet another source of exceptionalism to further inflate my ego. I’d never felt the power of money. I’d been an athlete, a scholar, a do-gooder, but the status associated with those were drops in a bucket compared to the tidal wave force of money. I could afford expensive clothes and shoes that signaled I was somebody. Wearing the right things and being in the right rooms, everyone assumes you have money and treats you accordingly well. I quickly became enamored with those shortcuts to what felt like love and acceptance. I learned there were shoes that cost four times as much as Air Jordan’s, and I bought myself a pair, telling myself I needed them to fit in at work. But it wasn’t just about work. My social life had changed too. With the extra income, I started going to clubs and parties every weekend. Jay-Z has a line, “If you grew up with holes in your zapatos, you’d celebrate the minute you was having dough.”2 I was becoming someone I never thought I’d be, and I was having a blast doing it. It was fun for a while to do the things that I had always dreamed of being able to do. Ironically, that’s when my happiness started to slide. The first few times I partied with celebrities and girls that never would’ve spoken to me a few years before, I was ecstatic. At a few hundred thousand dollars a year, I wasn’t wealthy by any means, but I was on the right path to riches and well entrenched in the scene. I saw my favorite rappers in the clubs, spent weeks in the Hamptons, partied on yachts, and regularly ate at the best restaurants in the world. Before moving to New York, I drank liquor socially—like most college kids—but I’d only smoked weed three or four times at most. When you’re poor, being caught with even a small amount of weed on 2 “99 Problems”, 2003

CHAPTER 5: DON’T GIVE ME THAT DO-GOODY GOOD BULLSHIT | 57 you can mean a sentence of years in prison. I wanted nothing to do with that, so I’d always stayed far away from drugs. Most people I knew growing up did, too. A little-known fact is that drug use steadily increases with income. Most people associate drug use with the poor, but the reality is, drugs are like any other desired product: the more money you have, the more you can buy. Pablo Escobar didn’t get rich selling cocaine to poor people. It’s the rich who buy and love drugs. I was seeing drugs everywhere. No one was the least bit concerned about going to jail. Most people in my new social circle had been doing drugs since high school—some since middle school. They didn’t think anything of it. In fact, it seemed normal to them. They failed to see the hypocrisy when I tried to explain how those very same drugs were used to explain why poor people were poor and deserved to be incarcerated. It was different there because those people were functional. I saw plenty of people develop habits, but their lives usually didn’t completely fall apart because they had money, support, and most importantly, they weren’t criminalized when their problem was discovered. Apparently, drugs are only a problem when you can’t afford them or when you can’t afford rehab. Everywhere I went, there was what seemed like endless supplies of wealth, drugs, beautiful people, sex, jet skis, fashion, DJs, celebrities, and socialites. I never got deep into drugs, but I tried a little bit of everything. I knew enough about them and alcohol to know moderation is key. Of all the temptations, I was most intrigued by the girls. I went from being a relatively shy kid to arrogant and empty seemingly overnight. Being in the scenes, I knew I didn’t really belong. That wasn’t who I was at my core but the positive feedback was too difficult to resist. There’s nothing like the transition from being treated like you’re poor to being treated like you’re rich. Like anything else, once the newness wears off, it got old. In those wealth-driven environments, there was little pretending what people were after. Everyone gravitated towards the biggest spender.

58 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. Conversations didn’t matter, how you treated people don’t matter. Vibe, energy, connection, loyalty—none of those things were important. The currencies were, in order of importance: wealth, fame, connections, and beauty. People weren’t trying to express themselves as much as fit an image and move closer to the top. Instead of being fun for its own sake, partying became mainly about status. In an environment based on that kind of competition, practically no one was really having any fun. It was all posturing and pretending, especially once Instagram became a thing. Chasing wealth is no different than chasing after a drug high. The rush of those first few events and purchases wears off, and over time, you need bigger parties and bigger spending to feel that same thrill. While I was making plenty of money, I started noticing that relative to my classmates and colleagues, I was still poor. As a kid, I remember searching online to learn how much money physicians made. I saw some specialists were making over $500,000 a year, and my mind was blown. I figured it would be almost impossible to spend that much money. I share the absurdities above so you can see that once you cross a certain threshold, spending money has very little to do with practicality and everything thing to do with status. Our desire for things is limited, but our desire for status doesn’t stop. Companies targeting wealthy people know this, and prey upon their insecurities. It’s hard for most poor people to imagine what being rich is like because they envision having lots of money yet liking and valuing what currently matters to them. Of all the concepts I learned about in neuroscience, adaptation is the most important to understand when it comes to wealth and greed. You make money so you can go to fancy places and feel good about yourself. When you get to those fancy places, you see everyone there has money too—some of them have much more money than you—so you feel less good about yourself. You work to make even more money, and once you’re finally one of the wealthiest people in the room, you start feeling good again. Then you get bored with being in that room because, of

CHAPTER 5: DON’T GIVE ME THAT DO-GOODY GOOD BULLSHIT | 59 course, you’re always the wealthiest person there so you don’t even think about it. Since you’re not getting joy from the status anymore, you start looking up and realize there are even fancier, more expensive places, so you excitedly head there (if you can get the invite). Then you are sad once again because you see that everyone here is an even greater level of rich. Having $10 million doesn’t feel all that great when everyone else in the room is worth at least nine figures. I’ve always been fortunate in my ability to learn from watching others. I carefully watched my siblings growing up to learn what to do and what to avoid. And in that new environment of wealth, I carefully dissected the lives of everyone around me. I focused on the people who were seemingly on top: the trust fund heirs, managing partners, star athletes, pop stars, etc. I got a front-row seat to a look into the future we all were dreamily chasing after and saw nothing but smoke and mirrors. Once the novelty wears off, wealth and fame are toxic. Money is extremely isolating. If you have lots of money and are surrounded by people that don’t, they’ll ask you for your money. The only way to build wealth is to not give away your money. To adjust to this problem, wealthy people become calloused and tell themselves that sharing is a bad thing. If you’re generous with your wealth, you won’t have it for long (many people see giving away wealth as a bad thing. I don’t). So almost universally, wealth results in fearful hoarding and greed. You only spend money in ways that will generate more money. Gifts become a form of manipulation since everything and everyone becomes something for sale. When you have money, those without it will do whatever you tell them to do. That isn’t a relationship; it’s control. So the more wealth you have, the more you have to push people away out of fear that they’re coming for your money. And, for the select few allowed in your circle, you’re training them to pretend to be exactly what you want them to be—meaning that no one is themselves or genuine. They want what you have to give so badly, there’s no hope that any meaningful number of people around you will tell you the hard truths. You’ll be surrounded by people, yet utterly alone.

60 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. For people like me who grew up poor, wealth was even more isolating. One path was to cut everyone from your past out of your life. When you come from poverty, typically all your friends and family remain impoverished. They’ll have very real needs and always come to you for help. None of them can afford to socialize with you, so you’ll need to pay their way every time. They don’t have power, money, or status to offer in return, and since this is what you value now more than anything, you’ll no longer see those people as valuable. Because they always want something from you, and seemingly have nothing to give, you’ll walk away from your friends and family, surrounding yourself instead with people who also have wealth and status. It isn’t until you’ve made this transition that you’ll realize that without thinking, you’ve lost your culture and can never go back. The other path is to stay close to your old crew. You’ll have to put everyone on payroll so they can afford to stay with you. You’ll have pieces of your past culture to bring along with you into the new world of wealth. However, the nature of these relationships changes drastically. The power dynamic is lopsided, and you’ll have little tolerance for anyone not doing as you say (given how much you feel you’re doing for everyone). Your friends and family become more of an entourage, and you’ll drift into loneliness. The rat race is all-consuming and universally plays out as described. There’s no way around it. When you get your sense of self-worth from money, you’ll be fearful that everyone wants something from you— because they do. All your relationships will be pecuniary in nature, removing any semblance of genuine love and affection from your life. Your sense of happiness will fluctuate with the ticker prices for your assets. And, of course, you’ll have lots of people worship you, feel powerful and accomplished, and experience everything money can buy. You’ll see the world as one big game, a relentless competition where it’s kill or be killed, everyone out for themselves. You’ll joylessly climb a mountain for the rest of your life and never reach the peak. It’s a trap.

CHAPTER 5: DON’T GIVE ME THAT DO-GOODY GOOD BULLSHIT | 61 Being extremely wealthy is toxic to your mental health, as is being extremely poor. Love and a sense of belonging to a community are, without question, the most essential components to a fulfilling human life. Extreme wealth, even more so perhaps than extreme poverty, makes being open and loving almost impossible. After a few years of seeing all of this, I had enough data to know being wealthy was incredibly overrated. I don’t expect everyone to understand that and absolutely don’t seek any sympathy. I’m not sure if in our materialistic society full of non-stop marketing there’s even anything I could say to explain why seeking wealth is a fool’s errand. I had to go through those experiences myself to learn that far more important than having wealth is knowing when you have enough. I pushed aside a life of fulfillment and purpose for one of superficiality and vacuous consumption. It took that journey to learn chasing money is a losing game no matter who you are.

| 63 CHAPTER 6: IT’S A RICH MAN’S GAME, NO MATTER WHAT THEY CALL IT When you’re poor, few things are more infuriating than rich people telling you that having money is overrated. I ask for forgiveness. While I still don’t recommend it, I’ll share exactly how building generational wealth works for anyone that wants to go down that path. During college, I comforted myself by thinking that although I was poor, my peers and I were all in the same place and therefore equal. After we graduated, everyone in my class gravitated to similar jobs. Everyone wanted to work for big investment banks, consulting firms, law firms, and hospitals. We all went for the money, in one way or another. But something strange happened. After about six to twelve months, all the wealthiest kids from my graduating class quit their jobs. “I got what I came here for,” they’d say. “I’m not slaving away for these guys for so little money.” Next thing I’d hear was that they’d suddenly started their own business or had gotten top jobs at one of their parents’ companies. There was no chance I could do something like that. At twenty-four, it required more than a little seed money and some powerful connections to raise the $5 million needed to start a new company on the scale my former classmates did. Raising money is nothing for wealthy kids who are family friends with all the investment gatekeepers. It no longer mattered who had the

64 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. best grades; what mattered was who had access to capital. The game, it turns out, is completely rigged for the rich to stay rich. As they say, it takes money to make money. From the ages of five to twenty-four, I mastered being a student. I wrote papers, took tests, and got good grades. The tasks were concrete, there were rules, and it was usually clear how to move on to the next step. Basically, school is the opposite of work. School teaches you that you can learn everything there is to know about one topic. If I get an A in biology class, that told me I must know all there is to know about biology. Wrong! We take a very tiny slice of whatever knowledge exists about a topic, turn it into a syllabus, and test students on that tiny slice. In the real world, there’s more to know about any given topic than any one person can ever come close to learning. Yet, despite the practically infinite amount of information that exists, the business world is full of arrogant people who think they know everything about everything. The reality is, most of them know very little about the subject matter they speak so confidently about. In an environment like this, people rely heavily on trust. But how do you know you can trust someone you’ve never met? People assume that because a person holds a degree from an elite school or they’ve worked at a top company, they must know what they’re talking about. It’s not true, but alas, people believe it. Consulting companies take advantage of this belief by routinely hiring fresh graduates with impressive resumes, knowing it’ll convince clients to believe whatever the consulting firm recommends. That’s the reason why I was paid an ungodly amount of money to make PowerPoint slides. I told myself that doing that kind of work was okay. “Just put your head down for ten years and you’ll climb the ladder,” I’d say to myself in the bathroom mirror each morning. “You’ll be able to do some good for the world once you have a ton of money to really make things happen!” But I found myself getting sadder and sadder. The partying lost its luster as I saw it for what it was, and my work wasn’t meaningful. How was I

CHAPTER 6: IT’S A RICH MAN’S GAME, NO MATTER WHAT THEY CALL IT | 65 going to do that for an entire decade? It wasn’t as if work-life got much better with each progressing year. When I looked at the people in the top positions at my company sacrificing everything to advance, they typically had no life whatsoever outside of work to demonstrate how ‘all-in’ they were for the company. If anything, they appeared even more lost than I felt. For those that can postpone their lives for ten to twenty years, it’s a comparatively low-risk way to build a net worth in the low eight figures. In an attempt to make it bearable, I scratched and clawed my way into the teams that were working on meaningful problems around poverty, especially in the healthcare space. I was happy to discover that although there’s a lot of bullshit in the consulting world, there are still people who do excellent work and care deeply about driving impact. Those people are rare, but they exist. The company I worked for provided strategy advice to the biggest healthcare organizations in the world. It was interesting to have a seat at the table and talk strategy with some of the most powerful people in wellness. I wanted to try and understand how I could help fix our healthcare system. What I came to realize is that the American healthcare system isn’t broken because we don’t know how to provide good healthcare—we provide phenomenal healthcare to people who are rich. The problem is that we don’t choose to make it accessible to everybody, and we choose to make it extremely expensive so that people in the business of healthcare can generate profit. Everyone was making money off this system: the pharmaceutical companies, the hospitals, the doctors, the insurance companies, etc. And I could see that the system incentivized these individuals and companies to keep things that way. It was a disheartening realization, to say the least. The first key to generating wealth is not being too concerned with the consequences of accumulating it. The leaders of top companies were excellent at that. Although I’d been able to steer my career towards a more interesting path, I still wasn’t willing to wait in line for a decade or two before being

66 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. able to advance to a position where I’d be one of the drivers of change. I’d grown up believing that in the real world, success was based on merit, but I saw first-hand how absolutely untrue that was. No one ever promotes their subordinates above them. The jobs themselves aren’t all that hard, so at big companies, most of your energy goes into playing politics as you compete for the top spots. Again, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. The aspiring billionaire should not fall for the trap of focusing too much on content knowledge or domain expertise. After a few years, I decided to leave the consulting firm and go work for a start-up company. At the time, that seemed like a faster way to the top. I packed my bags and moved to Washington, D.C., only to learn the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. Turns out, no one makes money at start-ups when companies have their initial public offering (meaning when they initially sell a portion of their company to the public on the stock exchange), unless they have meaningful ownership stakes. Typically, the CEO and investors are the only ones who have a large equity stake. Those people putting in 100-hour work weeks to secure the company’s success mostly earn a below-market rate salary and a small number of common shares, while investors who did little more than write checks would make millions off their preferred equity, billions when things really went well. People who own common shares don’t make a dime until everyone with preferred shares get paid out, so oftentimes even with a successful exit, most employees will make little or nothing from their stock grants. So much for hard work! In capitalism, it’s better to invest your capital than it is to invest your labor. What separates capitalism from other economic systems is the privatization of capital. Prior to capitalism, resources were largely controlled by the state. If you wanted to start a business, you had to get a charter (permission) from the government. However, during those time periods, there was also an abundance of commons (shared land and resources). The thinking was that although the king owned everything, people

CHAPTER 6: IT’S A RICH MAN’S GAME, NO MATTER WHAT THEY CALL IT | 67 needed access to resources to survive, so a large portion of the king’s land was available for everyone to utilize for hunting, timber, water, grazing animals, etc. When capitalism emerged, however, those commons were all claimed by individuals. For the first time, everyday citizens were now truly poor. That, of course, had been true of slaves throughout the world for thousands of years, but the concept of citizens having no rights to any natural resources was both new and devastating. We talk about capitalism and the competition it encourages as if it’s this great equalizer, without asking, “How did you get all that capital in the first place?” The majority of wealth in the world comes from land and natural resources. If someone makes a claim on commonly owned land, then uses that stolen wealth to start a successful business, are they really self-made? The key to capitalism is capital. If you don’t have it already, it’s incredibly difficult to obtain. If you do have it, it’s easy to make more of it. All you need to do is go online and see how much more money you can make in interest or market returns by lending to various types of projects. It’s money you’ll make for doing absolutely nothing but handing over money. While I may have thought graduating from Harvard and Oxford had evened things out between myself and my wealthy classmates, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Many of my peers had $50 million trust funds—some much larger than that. At a modest five percent annual return, which requires zero labor, an individual with a trust fund of that size would receive $2.5 million in interest alone, every single year. That’s capitalism. It’s the ability to make money without working—because you already have money. Once you have capital, your job becomes searching for people like me who’re willing to work a hundred hours each week so that your $100 million magically turns into $120 million next year. And that’s exactly what my classmates did. They knew working for their money was a sucker’s game. Since I had no capital, I was the sucker. Or at least, that’s how I felt.

68 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. I kept working on healthcare projects and other projects that seemed to help people, but I’d strayed far from a service mentality. I almost never went home to Indianapolis anymore, and I rarely saw my family. I volunteered in low-income communities, but my focus was my career. All my energy went toward getting to the top. I’d long since given up my position in medical school and was fully entrenched in the business world. If ignorance is bliss, knowledge can be painful. I now understood how the sausage was made, and let me tell you, it wasn’t pretty. Once it finally became clear to me how the whole system worked, I became incredibly disillusioned. There is no competition. As D’Angelo Clarksdale so aptly put it, “The king stay the king.”3 There was no sophisticated analysis needed to explain why one country was poor and another was rich. A country is rich because they assert that they own assets, and other countries are forced to agree. If you go back far enough in time, you’ll learn that those assets were almost always taken by force. In the modern world, we don’t see it that way. We don’t question the origins of wealth. Instead, we’re enamored with the occasional rags to riches story. Those stories are used to convince the poor that they too could become rich someday. But the truth is, to build wealth, you need wealth. If you don’t have wealth, you better do whatever wealthy people want you to do. And usually, what they want you to do is to make them wealthier. Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Donald Trump, and virtually every other ultra-rich individual you can think of made their money because a wealthy friend or relative loaned them the money to get started. Wealth begets wealth. It’s cyclical. Armed with this knowledge, I was left to wonder what the hell I was supposed to do. Poverty exists because the people with money choose not to share it. That’s it in a nutshell. If wealth generates more wealth, and everyone had just a little bit of wealth, then no one would be poor. But 3 The Wire, 2002 television series

CHAPTER 6: IT’S A RICH MAN’S GAME, NO MATTER WHAT THEY CALL IT | 69 what we’ve done is allow wealth to become concentrated in the hands of a very small number of people. Which means the financial rewards of capitalism all flow into the hands of the global elite. We all work hard so they don’t have to. As someone without wealth, I still had bills to pay. I wondered what I could do, career-wise, to effect change in an impactful way. Would I try to explain the way the system worked to poor people? I doubted that would make a difference. Most people, educated or otherwise, don’t understand finance and economics, and poor people are no different. And even if I were able to explain it to them, what were they going to do about it? They’re powerless, I thought. I lost faith in my economic development work the more I learned about capitalism. I stepped down from my non-profit organization. It felt like I was just taking crumbs to the masses to placate them in a system designed to impoverish people. Whenever I tried to come up with a new project to help the poor, my analytical mind would reveal it as a facade. I kept thinking a person could hand out food or clean water all they wanted, but until the poor had ownership and equity, they’d always be poor. How could I possibly help the poor gain wealth? I didn’t even have wealth myself. Sure, I was making a good income, but income from labor isn’t the key. It’s income from your capital that matters most in capitalism. I remember sitting in the park in front of the White House feeling completely lost. I’d always made sure I made enough money to feel good about myself, but I’d never fully embraced wealth. I’d told myself I was just having a little fun, but that I’d always stay focused on helping the less fortunate. Now, I saw that I needed power to create change. Money is a form of power, but I had no desire whatsoever to live a life surrounded by people solely focused on making more money. I wanted to walk away from everything. If that was the type of world people wanted, then let them have it. I didn’t want to play anymore. I knew there was no nice way to get to the top. Everyone wants power, and if I wanted it, I’d have to sharpen my elbows and get ready for a fight. The

70 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. thing is, at that point, I wondered who I was fighting for? I wasn’t poor anymore, and I hadn’t lived in poverty for a decade. I’d been spending more time thinking about setting up my potential future children for success than thinking about helping the poor. Once you escape poverty, you start to put it out of your mind. Well, at least I did. The system is what it is. Either I had to play along or get tossed aside, right? I stared down the various paths I could choose for my future, and nothing looked interesting. I knew too much to be excited about childish dreams of a better world. I was too far removed from home to ever go back there. It felt less like a crossroads and more like an impasse. And yet, if I considered Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I should’ve been right up at the top, feeling fulfilled and satisfied with what I’d achieved. My basic needs were met, and I had no concerns about my safety or financial security (though I thought about money now more than ever before). I was accomplished and successful, as were my friends. On paper, and to the casual observer, it appeared I had it all. But there was a gaping hole in my chest. The world wasn’t all that complex. There were boots, and there were asses. We could easily treat each other better, I thought, but enough of us had bought into the idea that people must suffer for others to shine, the concept had become intractable from modern society. Given my position in the world, I had practically no chance of changing that. If life were a test, I wanted to quit. Where was the off switch? How can I stop playing this pointless game? I remember asking myself rationally. I didn’t feel any suicidal urges, just the weight of reality. I felt like Buzz Lightyear from the movie Toy Story when he finally realized he was just a toy. By ignoring the realities of capitalism and wealth generation, I’d fooled myself into believing I could somehow change a system without having any real power and authority within it. America does an incredible job of convincing its citizens that we all have an equal say in how things work, and that the best ideas bubble

CHAPTER 6: IT’S A RICH MAN’S GAME, NO MATTER WHAT THEY CALL IT | 71 up to the surface. But I saw, without a doubt, that wealthy individuals and corporations ran the country—and the world. If everyone is out to generate more money, then who wins? Whoever has the most power to bend the system in their favor. And of course, those who already have wealth have an inordinate ability to shape and reshape the system in their favor. Of course, a very small number of people will rise through the ranks, but the chances of that are practically nil. No one was going to listen to anything I had to say until I had some power. I’d deluded myself into believing my voice mattered before it did. And once I was on the climb, it was clear I couldn’t reach the levels of power necessary for change without going all in on an unrealistic goal. I made up my mind, and thought, well, if you’re going to keep living, why not try to do the impossible? I wondered what the best thing would be for me to do with my life. I didn’t care how good the chances of success were; if there was some chance, I was going to try. The best thing I could do with my life, I decided, was to help everyone get a little wealth, so we could get rid of poverty once and for all. I had no idea how I’d accomplish this, but I figured I was going to need money to do it. I got up from the park bench, went home, and started ordering books on investing and finance. I was done with the development work. If I wanted to help the poor, I needed wealth. The odds of success were low, but I knew the best ways to gain extreme wealth, even if starting off with none, and felt my chances of cracking the code were as good as anyone else’s. Since I didn’t have a significant amount of money of my own to invest, I decided to become an investment advisor. The key to winning in capitalism is to make money using other people’s money. Even as an entrepreneur, your real wealth generation comes from raising venture capital to invest in your business, as opposed to relying on your own money. Capitalists are, in theory, rewarded for taking risks. In reality, the best capitalists don’t risk anything themselves; they finance everything. Don’t spend your highest energy years slaving away for someone else

72 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. just to save a few hundred thousand dollars. That’s a complete waste of time. Even if you’re stashing away $25,000 a year, it’ll take you four hundred years to have that initial $10 million to invest. And you’ll still need to multiply that $10 million a hundred times before you tap a billion. Whereas if you’re able to have someone give you $200 million to invest, with a promise to share twenty percent of the profits with you, you can turn that $200 million into $400 million dollars and pocket $40 million for yourself, with your investor taking home $360 million. Both go home happy, and you’re able to skip the multiple lifetimes it would take to luck out and have that $200 million to start off with. Asset management was the elevator I needed. It didn’t matter that my educational background was not in finance or investing. I knew I could learn everything I needed to know if I applied myself. The next thing I did was sell all my things. I was done trying to fit in. I wanted to master finance, and that was it. I wasn’t going to spend my money on buying status. I was going to use it to make a difference. Finance became my life. I worked my day job from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. every day, took a two-hour break for food and recovery, and then studied finance from 9:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. Monday through Friday. On the weekends, I studied from 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., took a lunch break, then kept going from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. I have always had the ability to maintain focus when I set a goal for myself. The hardest part about learning finance is all the jargon. Jargon isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Once you understand it, it allows for faster communication between two knowledgeable people on a given subject, but in finance, a fair amount of jargon is intended to be confusing. Once I could ‘speak finance,’ however, my learning accelerated rapidly. I’d taken multivariable calculus in college, and compared to that, none of the math in finance was all that difficult. I also found the concepts were significantly easier to grasp than the precepts of physics or neurobiology. After a few months, I was comfortable enough with finance to keep up with a junior investment banker. I was making progress, but that wasn’t my goal. I wanted to master finance and investing. The problem

CHAPTER 6: IT’S A RICH MAN’S GAME, NO MATTER WHAT THEY CALL IT | 73 I had was finance isn’t a science. The quality of a good scientific theory is based on its ability to predict future outcomes. Finance is miserable at this. One of the first things you’ll learn about asset management is that past performance isn’t a predictor of future performance. So, what does that mean? To understand investing, you must understand a little about probability, which is the likelihood of something happening. If I ask a thousand people to guess a number that I have in my head, ranging from one to ten, about one hundred people will usually get that answer right just by guessing. If I take only the winners from the first round and ask them to do it again, about ten people will guess correctly. If I take those ten winners and ask them to guess one last time, one of them is likely to get it correct. That winner has now guessed the correct number in my head three times in a row! Is that person a mind reader? Absolutely not. They’re just guessing. And when enough people are guessing, someone will get it right. To make an informed investment decision, you need insight into things like a company’s products and services, vision statement, market share, target market, governance, and management structure. Without these things, you might as well be throwing darts at a wall. Because of the substantial financial rewards, there are a lot of people guessing about financial outcomes in stock markets, bond markets, real estate, cryptocurrencies, and any other market. Prices in these markets fluctuate because of each decision that everyday consumers make. Many people will claim to be able to predict where these markets will go, but over time, no one truly can. Still, a broken clock will be right twice a day. While predicting the market is impossible, you can change the probability of success by knowing more about the potential investment opportunity. That’ll help you identify significantly over-priced or under- priced stocks in the market. Let’s say you go to a garage sale and are digging through someone’s collection of old baseball cards. You see an autographed Willie Mays rookie card and several other gems. The owner walks up to you and says,

74 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. “These were my dad’s dusty old baseball cards. I never understood why he kept these things! I’ll sell them all to you for five dollars.” That’s what investors call information asymmetry. The individual selling the items has no idea what they’re worth in the open market. You wisely make the purchase and can immediately sell the cards online for a profit. These opportunities exist, but usually not for long, and typically they’re rare. Warren Buffett’s mentor, Benjamin Graham, became rich finding opportunities like that in the stock market after the Great Depression. Back then, there were no supercomputers searching for this kind of mispricing, so you could find a fair amount of them. Today, there are few opportunities like this in the world, but those who find them can make a lot of money for themselves and their clients. Now, if you find one of these opportunities, you’d be an absolute fool to write a book about it. As soon as other people learn about your quick trick for making easy money, they’ll start doing it too. Eventually, the sellers get wise, adjust their asking price, and the opportunity goes away. So, as an investor, it’s in your best interest to keep quiet. Why then, do you see so many books and online courses promising to help you get rich quick? It’s because one of the best ways to get rich is by taking other people’s money. Whether your advice is sound or not, if a million people pay you $15 to hear it, you’ve made $15 million. The truth is, most asset managers are selling snake oil. Over time, I became very good at seeing through the veil of most investment pitches. The problem is that most pitches are nonsense. You need to kiss thousands of frogs before you find your prince. I was eventually able to transition into investing full-time. I helped build a small venture capital fund in the healthcare space, where I had the most experience, before moving on to co-found a hedge fund. For those who are unfamiliar with investment terminology, a hedge fund is a partnership of investors who manage a fund (a collection of stocks) with the sole purpose of turning a pile of money into more money. We looked at investments across all industries, so I had the opportunity to learn

CHAPTER 6: IT’S A RICH MAN’S GAME, NO MATTER WHAT THEY CALL IT | 75 about every type of business under the sun. We were constantly on the lookout for mispriced stocks. I kissed a lot of frogs, but I also found a prince or two. This time, I stayed away from materialism and status. I’d still go out from time to time to release stress, but I was focused on mastering finance to be able to make a difference in the world. I kept my cost of living very low and saved most of my earnings. I invested nearly everything I made, and before I knew it, I’d become a millionaire. I didn’t let this accomplishment distract me. I just kept working and saving. I had everything I needed in life, and I had been careful not to attach my sense of self-worth to my income, so the money didn’t excite me. I saw it as the means to an end, and that was it. I was moving toward my goal, but I found no joy in my work life, and it was taking a toll on me. Finding the occasional mispricing was fine, but my heart wasn’t in it. Most of my peers were in the job because they loved money and the status that it brought. All they ever wanted to talk about was money. I knew I didn’t want to fall into that trap again, so I kept to myself and worked. As the years passed, it became harder and harder to get out of bed in the mornings. I told myself I was working to earn enough wealth to be able to change the world, but the reality was I was working to make rich people richer. For every dollar that I earned, some ultra-high net-worth person was earning $10. I volunteered on the side when I could, but it didn’t feel like enough. I knew I wasn’t making any kind of real difference in the world, and that knowledge grated on me. At the back of my mind, I had a plan to use the money I’d been saving to help people in poor communities. But how much money would I need before I could make a real, positive change? Would $100 million be enough? Would $1 billion? I started to wonder what I was waiting for. By that point, I knew enough about finance to know luck was a lot more important than skill. Given my academic pedigree and abilities, making a few hundred million dollars over a thirty- or forty-year career was within reach. If I wanted to make billions of dollars, I’d need a lot of

76 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. luck, but in my mind, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Regardless of whatever lofty financial milestone I set for myself, however, it meant I’d spend my entire life doing something I didn’t care about. I started to doubt what sort of impact I could make on the world, regardless of how much money I amassed. How would I be able to help the poor gain wealth? At best, I figured I’d be able to spread my wealth across my family, but that would be about it. It was becoming increasingly clear that my plan was flawed. Then COVID-19 hit, and I watched in awe as world leaders one-by- one announced that their countries would be shutting their economies down. Everyone was locked in their own homes for the foreseeable future. Suddenly, I had no outside distractions. I could see my life for exactly what it was. I sat in front of a computer screen all day looking for mispriced assets. I was wasting my brain on a task that felt utterly pointless to me. There had to be a shortcut to accomplishing what I yearned to do. I decided to turn the problem on its head. Instead of thinking about mispriced assets, what would happen if I started focusing on mispriced ideas? Maybe there was a way to solve this poverty problem that would be obvious to me, but not to everyone else. Instead of spending my whole life trying to get wealthy so I could have the power to make some limited amount of change, what if I could find a mispriced idea that was just lying around? I could bring that idea to the wealthy investors I already knew and get them to fund it. I didn’t care about the money, and I didn’t care about getting credit, so there was no reason it couldn’t work since I at least knew a lot of billionaires and wealthy families. I began to do what I do best: think. I put aside time after work every day again, but I also spent that time thinking about poverty. I knew I’d never be able to change the world with a moral argument. It had to make financial sense. How could I make getting rid of poverty a good investment?

| 77 Part 2

| 79 CHAPTER 7: I THINK I’LL TRY DEFYING GRAVITY As humans, we’re designed to be able to connect easily with ourselves and each other through our emotions and our feelings. We’re created with a sense of intuition allowing us to feel the direction our life should follow. When we listen to it, intuition helps us to make better decisions, but overtime, we learn to ignore it. That’s because we often must do things in life that don’t feel right inside. Society teaches us that the key to success is doing things we don’t want to do. And of course, when you’re poor and utterly reliant on your paycheck, you don’t feel you have much choice in the matter. Putting your head down and grinding away at a job you hate is a way of ignoring your intuition, and over time, you get better and better at it. To be able to be truly fulfilled in life, you need to pay attention to that inner voice. I decided to move to Los Angeles to spend time in nature. The idea of being close to the beach appealed to me. Everything else was closed due to the pandemic, and the outdoors had always helped me think better and made me feel alive. One day, shortly after I’d moved to LA, I visited the arts district downtown with a friend. I’d asked my friend if they wanted to visit Skid Row, which I knew was nearby, but they weren’t interested. While we were driving, however, we made a wrong turn and somehow ended up in

80 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. Skid Row anyway. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the area, Skid Row is an area of about fifty city blocks in downtown LA that’s ‘home’ to one of the country’s largest homeless populations. It’s received a lot of attention because it’s in the middle of an otherwise wealthy part of town. Driving through Skid Row was like being in a third-world country. It wasn’t just adults there, either. There were families with children too, all living in tents and makeshift shelters. We saw kids going through garbage cans looking for anything of value. There was a pervading feeling of hopelessness. It reminded me of the places I’d visited during my college days. Once in a rural Caribbean village, I noticed several dog houses made from corrugated steel. They were tiny, ramshackle structures stacked on top of each other on a hill next to the river that separated Haiti from the Dominican Republic. When I asked why there were so many dog houses, I was informed that they were inhabited by people, not animals. I couldn’t believe it. Looking across the water, I could see the homes on the Dominican Republic side. The houses there weren’t lavish, but they were nice-looking regardless. It was shocking to see that kind of wealth disparity in such close proximity. When we turned that corner into Skid Row, I was transported back to all those memories. I couldn’t believe my eyes. My shock wasn’t at the extreme poverty. What I couldn’t believe was that this level of poverty existed right next to some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. As I drove home, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I saw. Block after block of abject poverty and squalor, right next to multi-million- dollar condominiums. Back at home, I started watching a documentary on Skid Row. A few minutes into it, I realized I’d seen it before. But this time, as I watched, I felt it. The ‘homeless’ who were filmed in the documentary were the poorest people in America. They were all people just like you or me; they’d just had a string of bad luck that resulted in them becoming homeless. Most of us have been trained to think homeless people are this

CHAPTER 7: I THINK I’LL TRY DEFYING GRAVITY | 81 different group of people who became homeless on purpose. We think they must’ve done something bad to deserve that kind of life, or that they have mental health problems, or any number of other prejudicial reasons you can come up with. There’s a stigma that says they’re all on drugs or addicted to something. Most people don’t stop to think about what might have gotten them there in the first place. It’s easier to think they want to be homeless, rather than asking ourselves why we ignore their suffering and choose not to help them. These were the least fortunate members of our society, and we’ve all decided it’s okay to let them rot away. We’re pretending like they aren’t humans, I thought. When I drove through Skid Row that day, I realized I’d been ignoring my inner voice for far too long. Having lost my faith in religion at an early age, I never gave much thought to intuition and gut-feelings, as I associated those with faith. I’d always put my faith in my own intelligence, hard work, and determination to help me accomplish whatever goals I set for myself and to helping others. Believing that something natural lied within us that could lead us to our greater purpose seemed naïve and childish. It’s called an existential crisis when you start to question the meaning of your life. Anyone who’s taken a behavioral science class will be familiar with a theory called Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s a theory that explains what motivates people by ascending order of need, from physical, to social, to psychological. When you’re poor, you’re focused on survival and meeting your basic, most fundamental needs. As your economic situation improves, you can satisfy other non-essential but very important needs such as safety and security, love and belonging, esteem and respect, and finally the need for self-actualization—which essentially means fulfilling your desire to become your best self. The downside to buying into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is that you end up believing that finding your higher purpose belongs at the end of life and is an outcome reserved solely for the well-off. Ironically, as my own needs evolved beyond the physical and emotional and became

82 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. more about seeking spiritual fulfillment, the stronger my sense of disillusionment grew. I can see now that this profound dissatisfaction was my body’s way of compelling me toward my highest purpose. My unhappiness was the consequence of not listening to my intuition. We get side-tracked from our higher purpose because we don’t realize how easy it is to connect with the collective unconscious, or God, or whatever it is you choose to call it. If we all listen to our intuition and work collaboratively together, we’re spiritually aligned, and we can accomplish anything. We don’t need to be told what our purpose is, and we don’t need someone else directing our actions when we listen to our own divine. When we make this sort of connection, we feel in synch with the universe, and everything unfolds before us naturally. If we allow it to happen, and we let that voice tell us what we truly want to achieve and what we care about, we’ll be able to accomplish it because it’s what the universe designed us for. It’ll just make sense. The answer to the poverty problem in our country hit me with a wave of clarity. I saw my mispriced idea. I’d never experienced anything like that in my life. I could fully see the math, messaging, partnerships, and policy. My wrong turn was no coincidence. I knew exactly how we could not only end poverty worldwide, but how we could make trillions of dollars doing it! Having spent virtually my entire life relying on logic and empirical data, this incredible sense of instant awareness was completely new for me. I was able to see how all the experiences of my life—the childhood poverty, the achievements in academics and sports, the international development and community outreach efforts, the corporate success, the finance, investment, and wealth lifestyle experiences—had all prepared me for what lay in front of me. I realized how I could use my collective gifts and experiences to serve a greater purpose, and everything I’d been feeling finally made sense. I started writing that night and couldn’t stop. When I ran out of steam, I went to sleep, woke up, and got right back to it in the morning.

CHAPTER 7: I THINK I’LL TRY DEFYING GRAVITY | 83 The ideas were pouring out, and I felt like if I didn’t write them down, they’d disappear. It was all there, fully formed in my mind. I just needed to get it out. I still had a day job, but I got my work done as quickly as possible so I could get back to writing and planning. In two weeks, I’d captured it all on paper. I’d written a complete analysis on how we could drastically improve our society through a minor reform that would save taxpayers enormous amounts of money and stimulate the economy. I figured all that was left to do was to share it with the right individuals. Thanks to my time as a Rhodes Scholar, I knew a fair amount of people working in government. I shared my essay with them and asked for feedback. I made edits here and there based on the feedback I received, but the core analysis stood up to all their questions. It all made sense. But that’s where it stopped. Everyone agreed the plan would end poverty and save taxpayers trillions of dollars, but so what? Having a great idea was one thing, but it was about more than a new business idea. It was about solving one of the greatest problems the world has ever faced. It wasn’t just a long shot in their minds—it was a fantasy. They didn’t see what I saw. I saw exactly who I needed to get onboard, and how we could get it done. Others only saw the obstacles; I could see far beyond them. I saw my life’s work in front of me and knew I was being called to do something bigger than myself. I saw the investment of a lifetime, and I decided to push in all the chips. I walked away from my career in finance and started working to end poverty. “You’re throwing your life away!” “How can you just turn your back on everything you’ve built for yourself?” “You’re not their savior!” “You need professional help.” “I’m worried about you!” “You used to be so normal.” “If you have to pick a battle, at least pick one you have a chance of

84 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. winning.” Those were but a few of the comments I heard from co-workers and friends when I told them my plans to drop out of the wealth race. It was amazing to see the polarizing effect my decision had on the people around me. Some took my plans as a personal affront or judgement on their own life choices, while others just shook their heads and turned their backs. Nearly every one of my colleagues in finance thought I’d completely lost my mind. So did practically all my Harvard and Oxford friends. Although Rhodes Scholars typically arrive at Oxford determined to fight the world’s fight, over time, we have the tendency to become somewhat self-centered. Prizes carrying that much prestige have a way of making people obsess about status and the acquisition of additional prizes and accomplishments rather than leaning further into service. The ego is powerful. But I didn’t care. I understood where their judgement was coming from. Instead of giving myself and my family an opportunity to build generational wealth, which was something most of those around me could relate to, I was turning everything on its head. I was no longer on a path to reach maximum financial success, so to a lot of former friends and colleagues, I was no longer useful. I was more surprised by the reactions of many friends who’d also escaped from poverty. I figured they would be on board with my plan, but most weren’t. In retrospect, I get it. When you’re poor, it only takes one misstep for everything to come crashing down. My goals had always been, in order, to get myself out of poverty, to get my family out of poverty, then to do good in the world. Fear of falling back into poverty had always been my motivator, and the accumulation of wealth had been a comforting security blanket. For kids like me who were climbing their way up from the bottom, we didn’t have safety nets our whole lives. Because of this, we learned to be unbelievably careful with everything we did. Never rock the boat. Never deviate from the path. And there I was, rocking the hell out of it.

CHAPTER 7: I THINK I’LL TRY DEFYING GRAVITY | 85 In their eyes, I was taking too much risk, and they’d worked too hard to get to where they were to be involved. These were the hardest losses. I saw how much we all were fighting to be accepted by people who would never truly ever accept us. From day one in life, we were told that we didn’t matter because we were poor or because we were part of some minority. It’s impossible not to take messages like that to heart. Instead of deciding to fight against a system that determined someone’s worth by the color of their skin and the size of their bank account, many of us tried our best to stop being poor, to stop being Black or Latino or whatever other minority group we’d previously identified with. Teaching people to hate themselves is a powerful trick. It worked on me for years. But I wasn’t going to let it stop me this time. I was on to something special. Neither the fear of failure or anything else was going to deter me from following this journey to its completion. A select number of humanitarian-minded souls stood by and listened to my plan, intrigued. “Help me to understand,” they urged. I’m fortunate to have a small but mighty collection of friends who care deeply enough about other human beings to not only encourage me to take the leap but to lend hours of support editing my essay, making introductions, poking holes in my talking points, and rolling up their sleeves to work right alongside me. It didn’t hurt that those were some of the smartest people on the planet—many of them with deep policy and legislative expertise. I was starting out on a journey to ensure every human being had access to enough wealth to meet their basic human needs: food, water, clothing, shelter, transportation—and information. It was the biggest leap of faith I’d ever taken. It was also, hands down, the best decision I ever made. I’d come up with a way to end poverty and save taxpayers trillions in the process. I call this proposal the Seed Money Act. It’s a plan that would provide an unconditional, permanent, regular grant (called seed money) to every American household in an amount that is equal to the federal poverty guidelines. The proposal outlines a fiscally responsible way to pay for the grants that’ll result in trillions in tax savings for our country.

86 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. With the help of many, I was able to turn this proposal into a draft bill. My goal was to get the bill sponsored and approved by Congress so it could become a legislative reality. (You will learn all about the Seed Money Act in Part 3.) I gave myself one year to get it done. A common saying goes that people grossly overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what’s possible in ten. In my case, the maxim was right. I figured that once enough really smart people in positions of power read how simple it was to end poverty and save taxpayers trillions along the way, it would take no more than a year before we got the legislation passed. But after a few months, it became obvious that finding the solution was the easy part, and I’d need to invest well over a year to get it done. I may not be very materialistic, but I have just as much ego as anyone else. And that ego made me scared as hell to walk away from all the social status I’d accumulated over life. When I decided to leave finance and try to end poverty, I lost a lot of friends. It turns out, when you live your life focused on accomplishments, you attract people who like you for those accomplishments. Once you no longer play that game, they no longer love you. I was saddened by how many people stopped answering my calls when I wasn’t reaching out to talk about making money or partying, but I wasn’t shocked. I took one last look at my life and asked, “What am I here for?” It was difficult to explain to others the passion that had awakened inside me. I’d experienced a deeply spiritual personal epiphany, and I’d connected so completely to my own truth that I couldn’t have ignored it, even if I’d wanted to. I could only accept it as the gift that it was and trust things would unfold the way they were meant to. The knowledge that I was following my own inner guide gave me the courage to let go of my old life and move forward without regret. I knew a lot of people wouldn’t like what I had to say. I worried about that for a while, but then I realized something very liberating; I’m not here on Earth to earn anyone else’s approval. Trust me, it’s a daily fight, but I’m determined to live a life of service to the world instead of serving

CHAPTER 7: I THINK I’LL TRY DEFYING GRAVITY | 87 my ego. The more you ‘rise’ in the world, the more everything becomes a competition. Who is the smartest? Who is the fastest? Who is the richest? Who has the prettiest partner? I knew that by walking away from my career, I’d be seen as a ‘loser’ to those still playing the game. “Would you rather have a five-million-dollar home or a one-million- dollar home and four-million-dollars that you could use to help those in need?” I asked a woman I’d been on a few dates with. She looked at me like I’d asked the dumbest question she’d ever heard. I felt an instant flutter of relief, assuming she also thought that a one-million-dollar home was plenty. “I like nice things,” she replied. I’ve spent enough time around wealthy people to know most of them, like the woman on that date, aren’t bad people. Poverty just isn’t real to them. It’s nearly impossible to understand an experience you’ve never seen, let alone lived. In general, the rich are like everyone else: they think mostly about their own lives. Poverty is a problem that rarely affects them—until it’s too late. We live in a world where we just don’t care all that much about other people. I don’t blame the girl on the date or anyone else, for that matter, for wanting to accumulate wealth and status. I went through it. I get it. We dance around it, but our entire social hierarchy is based on wealth. We say it’s “nice things” that we’re after, but underneath everything, it’s status we crave. There’s a reason companies care so much about branding. We don’t buy expensive things because of the quality of the product. We buy luxury goods because of the statement it makes. No one spends $1,500 on a $75 bottle of champagne at a club because they like nice things; they do it to feel superior. They reason, “This is expensive, which makes it better. And I have it, so that makes me better!” We’ve come up with all these different systems to convince people that having money makes you better than everybody else. Our society convinces us that the people on the bottom are stupid, lazy, dirty, etc. Using this logic, it’s easy to think people who have less than you aren’t

88 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. important and don’t matter. There’s a power hierarchy in play that says as long as I have even a little more money than someone else, I have some power. So, there are a lot of people in the world who don’t want to see poor people do better. Giving poor people money would shift that hierarchy and create a change in the power dynamic. It’s a threatening prospect for many, and it’s at the root of why some people are resistant to my proposal. One of the greatest tragedies of our time is that we’ve created a society where the rich and the middle class live separately from poor people. We use that classism mentality to justify why it’s okay that we’re living in a house and have everything we could possibly want, while right across the street, we can see people who are freezing to death while they sleep on the streets. We saw a similar mentality during the Irish potato famine in the mid-nineteenth century. Although the potato crops suffered, there was plenty of other food to eat. The problem wasn’t that there was no food, it was that, at the time, the British had control over Ireland, and they exported all the food that was available, leaving the Irish to starve to death. This same separation exists in the US today. The distance between rich and poor neighborhoods prevents those with money from seeing the effect many of their decisions have on poor people. When I worked at the hedge fund, I was around people worth more than most humans can imagine. The thing most of those individuals had in common was that they had a complete disregard for the environment and the rest of the world. It wasn’t because they were horrible people. They’d simply grown up in a world where all they thought about was their own wealth and comparing their wealth to that of their peers. If you’re a billionaire, you must separate yourself from people who don’t have as much money, because those less fortunate people are constantly asking you for what they don’t have. This narrows the pool of friends you can choose from. So, who do you hang out with? The answer is other people who have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. Ultra-rich people are no different from any other group of people in

CHAPTER 7: I THINK I’LL TRY DEFYING GRAVITY | 89 the sense that they’ve got their circle of friends, and they want to be the highest-ranking member in that circle. The difference is, when it comes to very wealthy people, the defining factor of why they’re all together is their wealth. And the way they determine their internal social hierarchy is based on who has the most money. Within these social circles, you find situations where one billionaire will be frustrated because another billionaire has more money. They’ll obsess about it. It was fascinating to see because it’s extremely stressful for them. Obsessing about who has more money isn’t something they enjoy or do on purpose. As somebody who grew up in poverty, I could see how these people were helping to create a more difficult world for those who were on the bottom, but they weren’t even aware they were doing it. It’s one of the reasons I’m confident about achieving my goal—because most rich people aren’t evil. They’re just oblivious. If you have extreme wealth and you want to gain more, you must tell yourself that other people’s needs are unimportant. You have to become blind to the rest of the world, and our social isolation of classes makes this disturbingly easy. So, when I told friends that I wanted to walk away from that bubble and dedicate my life to helping the poor, they looked at me with a blank stare, as if I’d said I wanted to go live on another planet. Because to them, poverty does indeed exist, but only in another world. Losing people in life is always painful. But the fact is, growth is traumatic. When you want to change, the people that liked the old you may not like the new you. So be it. I knew how unfulfilling that old life had been for me, and I was done with it. There were too many people with barely enough to survive for me to feel comfortable living a life chasing excess. I don’t blame others for seeking wealth because they didn’t create the society we live in. We were all born into this mess. But I was done following. It was time to lead.

| 91 CHAPTER 8: ISM SCHISM There really isn’t a middle class in America anymore. We have the working class, and we have the rich. I knew I’d have to convince both groups to abolish poverty. Thanks to my years of investing and working for elite institutions, I knew a lot of very rich people. Most ignored my calls. A few special ones answered. They listened to my proposal, and after about an hour or so of conversation, I could see I got them thinking. They’d come back a few days later with a list of questions, and we’d talk a bit more. After two or three discussions, I typically had them convinced that the proposal made sense, but they’d still have their doubts about my ability to get politicians onboard. The most interesting part was that it didn’t matter whether the person identified as a Republican or Democrat. It didn’t matter whether they cared mostly about ending poverty or saving taxpayers trillions of dollars. I had to cut through their preconceived notions—the same notions I had when I began this work—but those with open minds kept coming to the same conclusion: we could really do this. Next, I started reaching out to more working-class Americans.4 I couldn’t believe what happened—they understood the proposal within 4 The term “working class” is interesting to me. It’s really just a euphemism for poor people. According to Wikipedia, it’s a general term used by economists and pollsters to refer to people who don’t have college degrees, but it begs the question, who isn’t working? The answer is a very small number of very wealthy individuals.

92 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. ten minutes. I guess I’d been surrounded by so-called elites for so long, I’d started buying into the idea that education was somehow correlated with intelligence. While the working-class friends and family I spoke with may not have been able to reference a particular study or economist, they understood poverty. When you’re part of the working class, you’re always just an accident away from poverty. You know plenty of people who’ve had it happen to them, or maybe it’s something you’ve gone through yourself. Those people would walk away from the conversation saying, “Sure, this makes sense, but you’ll never get the rich to go along with it.” Finally, I thought about those I’d seen on Skid Row. They’d benefit most from the proposal. What would they think? I grew up poor, but we were never homeless. Anyone who’s grown up in poverty knows that there are levels to being poor. We were food stamp poor, not welfare poor. We had to stay with relatives from time to time, but we always had a place to stay. Homelessness was something I couldn’t relate to. In the same way that the rich never thought about people like me, I never thought about the perpetually unhoused. I pretended not to see them, just like everyone else. It was time for that to change. I let go of my fears and started going to encampments and shelters to speak with the poorest Americans. I asked them about their lives and their thoughts about my proposal. Once again, I saw how prejudiced my beliefs were. The conversations never lasted longer than one minute. I wasn’t telling them anything new. They understood how inefficient and dehumanizing our welfare systems are. They’d seen people killed in shelters. They waited for hours in the rain, hoping for there to be enough food left when their turn came. They’d tried and failed to get jobs because they had no address or couldn’t get access to a shower. They’d been arrested for sleeping outside, then told they couldn’t get work because they’d been arrested. I hated myself during these conversations. I’d thought about poverty my entire life and always considered myself to be an advocate for the

CHAPTER 8: ISM SCHISM | 93 disadvantaged. But the poorest people in my own country had been invisible to me. I realized I knew nothing about their struggles, their joy, their fight. I’d ignored the problems that were not mine. I only ever thought about people living on the street when they were in my neighborhood. I talked about “fixing” the homeless problem instead of discussing people in need of help. I spent countless hours speaking with people and hearing their stories. We shared meals, hugs, tears, ideas, and laughs. I finally saw them. And in doing so, I was able to let go of some of my prejudice against the wealthy. I, unfortunately, could relate to simply not seeing someone’s struggle because it was more convenient for me not to see. But if I can make that transformation, the world’s rich can as well. Getting this proposal made into law is only going to be the first step. For us to reach our true potential as a society, we must learn to see every human. I forgave myself for not seeing. Moving forward, I promised to be a light for others. I saw a vision for how to get the bill passed, but I knew it would be an uphill battle. After I’d talked to enough people to have a good sense of the proposal’s viability, I knew it was time to start raising awareness across the country. A lot of people don’t realize that it’s possible to end poverty and that we could do a better job distributing the money being spent in this country. Consider that we could’ve ended poverty in this country for the next thirty-five years using the money our government has spent on COVID stimulus funding alone, and that’s not taking into consideration the trillions of dollars in tax savings we would’ve seen, too. I began to plan a cross-country tour. I wanted to get people talking about the proposal, and to encourage debate because debate is healthy and important for democracy. I wanted people to understand how the Seed Money Act could benefit every individual in the country, as well as our society overall. I wanted people to ask their government representatives to support the proposal and use their votes to help eradicate poverty in our country.

94 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. The most important thing that you can do in a democracy is get involved. We have a right to tell our politicians that we don’t want to have poverty in this country, and we can use our vote and our voice to make them listen. I knew the stops on the tour would have to match the demographics of poverty in America. When most people think about poverty in this country, they think it’s centralized in the urban areas. In fact, there’s more poverty in the rural areas, and another lesser-known fact is that more than half of the poor people in the US are white Americans. I sat at my computer and pulled up a list of every zip code in the country. I began sorting them by income. Next, I opened another tab and broke down the poverty demographics using categories such as ethnicity, urban vs. rural, political affiliation, etc. From this, I put together a list of thirty-six of the poorest places in America. I made sure the final list matched the overall poverty demographics of America. I then found a crew of activist filmmakers willing to spend two months driving across America with me, going to the places we’re all told are too dangerous or too poor to visit. For any real social change to happen, I knew we’d have to start at the grassroots. I started reaching out to churches, schools, local governments, shelters, food pantries, individual activists, and everyday citizens in the poorest parts of the country. My intention was to build a coalition of all who are already fighting the fight against poverty on a daily basis. I didn’t care about their political views, skin color, or religion. If they cared about finding a way to help those who have the least, I wanted to meet them. Hamilton, Montana “What’s the economic situation here like?” I asked. “This is a Republican town,” was the only reply. I was standing inside a coffee shop. Hamilton is a part of the Bitterroot Valley, an area known as a hotbed for armed right-wing extremists. I didn’t find the gentleman responding to be rude or confusing. He

CHAPTER 8: ISM SCHISM | 95 was simply saying the quiet part out loud. America has a deeply rooted history of racism. He was politely letting me know that my skin color could get me into trouble in that part of the country. I was aware. There’s nothing all that special about American racism. I’ve seen versions of it all over the world in my international development work. Racism is a microcosm of imperialism. Whenever a society decides to become an empire and ruler over lots of people, they must come up with systems of oppression. It takes too much time and energy to keep people down with constant violence, so you need to control their minds. The first step is always to divide and conquer. Humans are tribalistic creatures, so it’s very easy to get them to dislike each other based on arbitrary differences. If you randomly divide a room into an orange team and a yellow team, people will swear by God that their team is, without question, the best at every single activity—just because that’s their team. With imperialism, you need to take that tribal energy and turn it into murderous warfare. You take a small group and elevate them to an elite status. Select any common features, real or not, and say the best people have these features. It can be height, nose shape, skin color, anything. From there, you group and rank all of society. To make it all stable, you put a small minority at the bottom. That bottom group is volatile because they have no one to look down upon and will feel the heavy burden of the system of oppression. They’ll become the society’s scapegoats. If they’re too large in numbers, they’ll revolt and topple the system. If you can split this group so a small minority of them is at the bottom, but the majority is slightly above the bottom, that majority will maintain the system out of fear that in a new system, they might be on the ultimate bottom. Although the system is designed to oppress nearly everyone, most won’t see it that way. “At least we’re not those disgusting creatures on the bottom!” In the colonial United States, the system of hierarchy was originally quite complex. Most of the rankings from the Old World were brought over, dividing people based on their country of origin (e.g., Irish people

96 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. were considered inferior to the British people), the caste they belonged to within their country of origin, their religion, and so on. There were varying levels of slavery and servitude. You couldn’t just look at someone or hear their accent to know where they belonged in society because there was so much diversity. That was a problem for the system of oppression. In a multi-cultural society where land was so abundant, it was difficult to keep large percentages of the population in servitude. If a slave or indentured servant ran away, they could find land elsewhere with relative ease and start farming for themselves. To solve this problem, the British came up with a great new idea: race. After Bacon’s rebellion, which took place in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the British instructed the Governor of the Virginia colony to implement a system of racial control. Anyone of African descent would be considered black and on the absolute bottom of society, while anyone of European descent would be considered white. Native Americans would sit between the two groups. Given the small number of those of African descent, the system was a good one for oppression. It stabilized the system as white indentured servants saw themselves lifted from the bottom and had a reason to endorse the hierarchy. They remained extremely poor and mistreated, but hey, at least they weren’t black. These poor Europeans were then armed and hired to ensure that anyone of African descent remained a slave. That was the early beginnings of the American militia, which later morphed into the police force, the Ku Klux Klan, and other groups of racial oppression. Knowing this history, I understood what the gentleman at the coffee shop meant. This region was full of armed militiamen who were angry that the centuries-old system of racial hierarchy and oppression no longer seemed to be working in their favor. It’s why they continue to rally and meet to discuss ways of bringing back the “good ole days.” People who are poor have been systematically exploited and manipulated because they’re divided on issues like race, religion, and

CHAPTER 8: ISM SCHISM | 97 political affiliation. It’s easy to understand how they might be swayed by fear-based rhetoric from political leaders promising to help them regain what they believe they’ve lost. They’re convinced to buy into the very systems and people that want to keep them at the bottom of our society. Hamilton is one of the poorest parts of Montana, with about one-fifth of the people living in poverty. There’s understandable anger and frustration. Unfortunately, there’s also a lack of education and opportunities. That makes the area ripe for radicalism. Most people in Hamilton, and Montana in general, aren’t racist extremists. But the poorer the area, the more likely you are to find those characteristics. Generations ago, their families were promised a guaranteed handout based on their skin color, and now it seems that promise will never be fulfilled. The system has betrayed them, and their response is to fight with every bit of strength to keep someone—anyone—beneath them. What I hope to help people understand is that there’s a better way. In a world of plenty, no one needs to be stomped on, starved, and forced to work. We can still have an oppressive social hierarchy if that’s what people want, but we can make life more bearable for those living on the bottom rung. We can ensure everyone, regardless of skin color, religion, intelligence, height, or whatever other differentiating characteristic you can come up with, has access to basic food, clothing, shelter, and transportation. In doing so, we can inject capital into places like Hamilton, Montana so people can begin to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” We cannot look down on people who are from poor communities if we want to end poverty. Regardless of their belief systems, their children deserve to eat just as much as anyone else’s does. Most humans just want to feel safe, feed their children, and know their family has a chance to live their lives with dignity. That’s true for Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. When we tell the poor that they can’t have those things because the “niggers and immigrants” want to take it all away, they get scared and respond accordingly. We must stop

98 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. hating people who are manipulated in this way, and ask ourselves, why are we allowing people to sow the seeds of hate in the first place? Why are we comfortable leaving poor white Americans behind, only speaking to them once every four years when we’re competing for their vote? Until we address the underlying poverty in rural white America, the result will remain a bitter root. Watts, California The poverty in Watts is disturbing. Just like in Hamilton, Montana, it’s turned extreme and violent. “Do you know where you are?” an older gentleman asked me. I did. Having grown up in and around areas like that, I knew what he was asking me. Imperial Courts, Nickerson Gardens, and Jordan Downs are housing projects in Watts, and they make up the poorest district in Los Angeles. Children in those communities can’t walk freely down the street out of fear of gang violence. There’s trash all over the place, and a general sense of stress, fear, and anxiety in the air. “I’m here with the Watts Empowerment Center,” I replied. He nodded approvingly. Poor communities in Los Angeles have been blasted for their senseless violence and gang activity for decades. We’ve seen countless movies depicting the horrors of life in places like those. We describe the people and the communities as ‘hopeless.’ I spoke with community members who didn’t believe that narrative. They understood that if you told kids they were nothing and that there was no hope, they behaved accordingly. If you showed them love, you could make a difference. Radicalizing poor black children is no different than radicalizing poor white children. When people have nothing, it’s easy to convince them that another group of poor people are the problem. No jobs, plus lots of guns with a perceived enemy in close proximity is going to lead to violent outcomes.

CHAPTER 8: ISM SCHISM | 99 “My mission was to come back and save a few of the youth.” That was what Justin Mayo, founder of the Watts Empowerment Center, told me when I met with him. When asked about his goals for the Center, his response was immediate. “The first thing that comes out is all the negativity. You hear about the violence, but I’m here to empower. That’s why I call it the Empowerment Center. I want every kid that walks in that door to have a story.” Community members in Watts have banded together to make a difference. Among the Center’s many notable initiatives is their weekly farmer’s market. People line up for hours before the market opens each week in hopes of accessing some of the healthy food it offers. In an economy where food scarcity is no longer an issue, the fact that millions of Americans still struggle to access food speaks volumes about our society’s values. Growing up in a poor neighborhood in Indianapolis, I never went to a farmer’s market. Such things didn’t exist where I lived. We ate peas and carrots that came out of cans because it was cheaper than the fresh stuff sold in stores. The first time I ever went to one was in Ghana. I remember being amazed by the variety of colorful produce that cost so little to buy. When I finally saw a farmer’s market back in the US, I couldn’t believe how expensive everything was. It seemed backward that it would be more expensive to buy food at a farmer’s market than at a grocery store. It also makes you wonder why wholesome, healthy food is so expensive in this country, while foods that are processed, laden with sugar, salt, and chemicals are so cheap. The Center’s website highlights some disturbing statistics, and yet the community of Watts has fought to sign gang truces, established a weekly food pantry, launched a community business accelerator, and even raised funds to send a brilliant young man, whose mother is working three jobs to make ends meet, to college for free. They’ve gotten the attention of celebrities and been featured on the Kardashians, which raised the Center’s profile and helped with its

100 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. fundraising and outreach initiatives. We didn’t have access to that kind of resource growing up. Most of the poor communities in US cities we visited still have nothing close to what’s happening at the Watts Empowerment Center, and that’s the problem. Aristotle said that “poverty is the parent of crime and revolution.” We must stop pretending like anything other than jobs and financial inclusion will save our inner cities. Putting more people in cages won’t solve this crisis. When people are dirt poor, with no options, bad things happen. Putting poor working people in jail not only punishes the offender but negatively affects the offender’s family and community. When you understand the roots of the incarceration system, it’s easier to understand the prejudice suffered by poor people within the system. Rather than punishing already marginalized people, we need to reframe how we look at marginalized people within the justice system. The same pain I felt for the people of Hamilton, I felt for the people of Watts. I saw individuals trying to hold onto hope and pride in their communities and in themselves. I saw people waving flags to show how tough they were, how resilient. In both places, I saw the poor suffering and crying for help. Our nation has failed the people from both of those towns. We continue the pointless game of pitting the poor against one another, wasting trillions of dollars in the process. Our country becomes less stable, our streets unsafe, and our democracy is put at risk. Poverty is ugly. In a nation where those without money get tossed aside, ridiculed, humiliated, and stripped of their dignity, you can expect that group of people to become violent, contrarian, unruly, and eventually, radical revolutionaries. Instead of giving people hope, we’re giving them guns and liquor. We’re creating terrorism in our own backyards all because we won’t move on from the false notion that people are poor and uneducated because they’re somehow ‘lesser humans.’ In capitalism, people are poor

CHAPTER 8: ISM SCHISM | 101 because they don’t have capital. Give everyone a little money and watch these problems melt away. We don’t need complete equality; we just need to give people a sliver of hope. Otherwise, those we oppress the most will eventually burn the whole thing down. Pine Ridge Indian Reservation “You won’t be back,” she sighed. “Everyone wants to come here and film, but no one ever helps.” I was talking to a young woman who lived on the Reservation in South Dakota. The genocide that occurred in the Americas is the worst thing that’s ever happened in human history. In less than a century, nearly fifty million people were wiped off the face of the planet. Entire civilizations were intentionally destroyed with disease, war, and famine. For the Native Americans who survived the initial genocide, the following four hundred years wouldn’t go all that much better. Their lands were snatched away from them in violated treaty after violated treaty. Their people were slaughtered, raped, and subjected to unimaginable horrors such as the Trail of Tears5 and the Wounded Knee Massacre6. “It’s dangerous in Pine Ridge,” we were told by outsiders. The same false narrative arises again and again. We take a group of people and subject them to centuries of abuse. We systematically destroy their culture and community and rob them of any real opportunity. We set their world on fire, then ask as they wail and scream, “What’s wrong with them?” “We were nomadic people, and now we’re forced to live on reservations.” Having lived her entire life on the reservation, she’d finally had enough of the injustices and was preparing to move on. “We have thin soil and destructive hailstorms. So how do we survive?” In the past, the tribe would have moved further south during these winter months. Now, that isn’t an option. With a poverty rate of nearly fifty-four percent, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is one of the poorest places in North 5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears 6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre

102 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. America. With no jobs, poor soil, and no hope, depression is rampant on the reservation. Life expectancy in Pine Ridge is the lowest in all of North America, with a Lakota man expected to live fifteen to twenty years less than someone living a hundred miles away. The only way to survive is to live off government programs. “When you live here, you’re at the mercy of the government.” In areas of high destitution, government programs breed dependency. But people don’t need programs, they need money. The Seed Money Act could radically transform a place like Pine Ridge. It’s virtually impossible to start a business in an area where everyone is this poor. An injection of capital would nearly double the local gross domestic product. Once again, I saw a community that had been forgotten and left for dead. But they hadn’t given up on themselves. Everywhere I looked there were examples of people trying to improve their situations and raise up their community. They were building vocational schools to train young people, had started community gardens to finally bring fresh produce to the reservation, and were bringing back traditional language and history into their classrooms. All they needed was a little funding to move things along. I grew up in a place called Indiana, and as a kid I’d never met an indigenous person. Where I grew up, all the poorest people were black. And when I watched TV, I saw the same. We’ve wiped Native Americans out of the narrative altogether. When I walked around Pine Ridge and talked to people, their issues were all too familiar. We can racialize it all we want, but the truth remains that we have a poverty problem in America, not a race problem. If someone doesn’t like me because of my beliefs or my skin color, I can live with that. But when someone creates a system to force me to live a life of servitude simply because I was born with less, that’s unacceptable. We’re not going to be able to unwind the centuries of race-based hate in this country overnight. But we can eliminate the very source of that hateful energy: poverty. If we wipe out poverty across the country, we

CHAPTER 8: ISM SCHISM | 103 give every community a chance to begin building a brighter future. We need to shift the energy away from pulling down other communities and start directing it toward building up our own. We don’t all need to get along. We just have to get out of each other’s way. I plan to return to Pine Ridge, but not as some kind of savior. I don’t know the area, I don’t know the culture, and I don’t know the people. It’s the people of Pine Ridge that know how to solve their own problems. My job is to find a way to get them the resources to do it. I know they can. When I go back to Pine Ridge, I’ll do so to see what happens when, instead of bureaucratic government programs, we give them seed money and freedom. Rexburg, Idaho Few Americans are poorer than college students. Rexburg is a beautiful mountain town with clean air, luscious green landscapes, and a forty-three percent poverty rate. I split my time there between talking with students and local families that are often low-paid employees at the school. Initially, many of the students expressed the typical concerns about helping the poor. “My only concern is that people given this opportunity won’t use the money to get themselves out of poverty,” was the most common response. “Do you have any wealthy friends here?” I asked the group. “Sure. Of course.” “Are any of them wasteful with money?” I continued. “Absolutely.” “Are any of them starving to death?” “No.” “Are any of them homeless?” “No, not at all.” They started to see that no one deserves to be poor. People across all income levels make mistakes. That’s a part of being human. But when

104 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. you have nothing, the effects of your mistakes are magnified. Why are the wealthy allowed to make mistakes but the poor aren’t? I’ve seen people make terrible financial decisions from every economic class. But when someone is starving, I’ve yet to see someone get handed money that didn’t then immediately go purchase food. We demonize the poor for any crutch they may have that helps them cope with the incredible pressures of poverty. We pretend that it’s the alcohol that causes their poverty, and not the other way around. You see wealthy people with drug addictions. You see wealthy people lose their jobs. But you never see wealthy people living on the streets. Humans are flawed. Those flaws don’t mean that someone deserves to starve. “What would you do with the money?” I asked one family. “Probably make a better life for her,” the mother answered, pointing to her daughter. “There ain’t much here in terms of jobs, so that would really change things for us. A place would rather hire college kids than locals,” she added. “It’s hard to get a job around here.” It was nearly impossible for the students to empathize with this mother. Their worlds are too different. “When someone needs help, they should turn to their family first,” said one local professor. But what if that family has no money? We may understand that people need help, but we must also understand that when an entire community is poor, and they don’t have the freedom to just start farming empty land, they’ll need some help to get going. I shifted the conversation to what they could understand: themselves. “If you ignore everyone else, what would this money do for you?” I asked. “As a father and a husband going full-time to school, I don’t have a chance to work,” one student told me. Once they were able to work through some of these classist tropes, the students were able to shift their thinking. We have a hard time thinking about helping other groups in this country because we see them as undeserving and lesser. But when it comes to ourselves, we’re gentler and more forgiving of our circumstances.

CHAPTER 8: ISM SCHISM | 105 “It would be great to eat some better food other than top ramen or mac and cheese every other day,” admitted another student. “I’m already deep in debt, and I want to go to physical therapy school, which means more debt. This would help me avoid taking on so many loans.” Our tribalism stops us from realizing obvious truths. Americans are trying hard to improve their lives. We should give them a helping hand. Helping one another is a good thing. If a student in college has a little money in their pockets, they don’t suddenly drop out of class. Instead, they can attend lectures more consistently and are less likely to have to quit school to get a job. When a struggling family receives a little extra cash, they typically spend it on their children’s futures. “That money would be an opportunity for us to reduce the anxiety of either getting into debt or losing every bit of life savings we have. It would be a chance to grow.” Our fear and hatred of one another is pulling everyone down. Those students were initially ready to shoot down my seed money idea because they thought it was going to help a group they believed to be deserving of poverty, even though they themselves would be major beneficiaries of the grants. The conversations brought to mind an old Hebraic parable I once read about a man who wasn’t getting along with his neighbor. God told the man he must learn to be happy for his neighbor’s blessings. In the story, God offered to grant the man anything he wished for but said whatever the man received, his neighbor would receive twice as much. The man asked for several things and saw his neighbor blessed with twice as much each time, and rather than being grateful for his own blessings, the man was unhappy that his neighbor received more. So, the man asked God to take out one of his eyes. My job is to show people how they, as individuals, will benefit from a world without poverty because, unfortunately, we often feel hateful and fearful of our neighbors. So many of us cannot see that the thing we should despise is poverty, not our neighbors or some vulnerable minority sub-group in our society. I want people to understand how eliminating

106 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. poverty will lower our tax bills, reduce violent crime, protect our property from theft and vandalism, eliminate homelessness and the associated filth in our streets, reduce healthcare costs, and wipe out hunger. There’s something in it for everyone because each of us is better off when no one is desperately poor. Luckily, the students in Rexburg were more than willing to engage in a respectful discussion. They shared their views and were open to hearing mine. We all walked away having learned something new and proved that we’re not like the man in the parable. With constructive dialogue, we can find solutions to our nation’s problems. “I feel like, as a people, we’ve lost the opportunity to bring forward an idea that’s awesome, you know? To give everyone the opportunity to change their lives,” concluded the student-father. His open-mindedness and willingness to adapt based on his evolving perspective challenged this gloomy thought, and that gave me hope.

| 107 CHAPTER 9: THE WATERS AROUND YOU HAVE GROWN Pueblo, Colorado Pueblo has six jails and prisons in its fifty-four square mile area. Neighboring Florence, Colorado has four prisons, including the infamous ADX Supermax facility, which houses many of the country’s most dangerous and high-profile inmates. Incarceration in this part of the country was big business. “There’s just this poverty mindset in Pueblo,” said one local pastor as we walked through town together. He was explaining some of the troubles the town faced. “There’s a generational gang problem here. They think that’s the only thing to do here, and it’s not true.” The pastor himself had once been close to counting himself among the many inmates in Pueblo. “As a child, I was abused sexually, mentally, and physically. My parents divorced. There were things that happened that I didn’t know how to deal with. I started using drugs, alcohol—anything I could get my hands on.” His story of trauma is, unfortunately, all too common across this country. Young people go through devastating experiences and are left to cope with the consequences on their own. Frightened and alone, not

108 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. knowing where to turn for help, they resort to substances to numb the pain and seek safety and protection from gangs. “It was just a lot of pain,” he shared, fighting back his tears. Pueblo was originally a steel town that attracted immigrants because of the employment opportunities. The city was diverse, safe, and prosperous. When the steel mill closed, it devastated the local economy. Automation is now a buzzword, with many predicting that millions of jobs will disappear across the country, potentially providing a death blow to the middle-class. Politicians and economists talk about this as if it’s some future dystopia we must prevent. But for Americans in places like Pueblo, Colorado, Gary, Indiana, or Erie, Pennsylvania, automation struck decades ago. Initially, the existing factories got smaller as machines could take on more and more tasks. What once required an entire city now only needed a few hundred employees. Ultimately, the entire factory was shipped off to China or Mexico, but the number of jobs had been declining for years. These rapid changes are difficult for any society to cope with. However, when we allow people to fall to absolutely nothing, giving them no support as they try to learn a new skill, relocate, or shift to a service-based economy, terrible things happen. Pueblo is now often ranked as the most dangerous metro areas in Colorado. Instead of finding ways to revamp the economy, we’ve invested in prisons. Americans somehow believe putting poor people in some of the most appalling cages in the world will somehow make them safe. Those people are subjected to rape, assault, solitary confinement, infestations, disease, murder, and more. We spend billions of dollars to keep people in cages, subjecting them to trauma that would melt the strongest of minds—then let them out. We make it impossible for them to get jobs due to their prior convictions, and we’re surprised when they revert back to crime. We live in a carceral society founded on punishing marginalized groups of people, including the poor and racial minorities. Many of the

CHAPTER 9: THE WATERS AROUND YOU HAVE GROWN | 109 laws that’ve been invented in our society criminalize behaviors associated with those marginalized groups. The system that exists is biased against poor people. Consider what happens when someone breaks the law. They’re charged a fine or must pay money to resolve the matter. If they’re arrested and given the option of being released on bail, they must also pay a sum of money. If they pay their dues by serving time for an offense and are released from prison, they carry a criminal record, which negatively affects their ability to obtain future employment. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. No country has ever put a larger percentage of its population in cages. There are decades’ worth of research that consistently shows why prison isn’t an effective way to rehabilitate people. So how do we prevent people from ending up in prison? The obvious answer is to invest in people. Educate young people, teach them social and work skills, make them feel loved and help them belong. That’s what the pastor decided to do. “We’ve all gone through something. We’ve all had some kind of pain, some kind of hurt, some kind of habit that was just devastating. But you don’t have to live there. We give the tools to help change mindsets.” His community’s ministry has the slogan: “Hope grows here.” The pastor shared his story of hope with me. While homeless and sleeping on the streets, someone came up to the pastor and asked him if he’d like some help. “What do I have to do for it?” he asked, cold, homeless, and deep into his addiction. “Start building a relationship with Jesus.” He liked how that sounded. At that point, he didn’t have many relationships. And if all he had to do was pretend to have a relationship with someone and that meant getting off the streets, he could handle that. His life didn’t change all at once. He relapsed, he struggled, he cried. But slowly, he started to turn his life around until one day, he was asked to share his story of recovery at one of the local prisons.

110 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. “I started telling those guys what I’d gone through,” the pastor said. He’d been invited to participate in a program designed to help inmates avoid falling back into a life of crime. “My story was similar to the stories of many others in that prison. I couldn’t understand how I wasn’t in prison with them.” When you grow up in poor neighborhoods, luck is often the only difference between ending up dead, in jail, or somehow making it out. “When I left the prison that day, I just started balling. Crying like a baby,” he went on. “I realized why I’d gone through all the pain and suffering I’d been through. It was for that moment. It was so I could help other people see that there is hope.” I knew exactly what he meant. There’s a spiritual lightbulb that goes on when you finally see your life’s work in front of you. For me, that moment happened on Skid Row. I saw exactly how I’d be able to help the world end poverty, and I knew why I’d gone through all that I had in my life. Ifelt my divine calling. My life’s experiences had shaped me in a way that made me perfect for this role; it was no coincidence. “That’s what we want to give the people of Pueblo. We want them to know there’s hope, and his name is Jesus Christ,” the pastor said. Our pain doesn’t have to happen in vain. If we turn our suffering into strength for others, we have the power to heal. I’m not one to argue with people about the name or nature of God. When I met people like this pastor, I knew we were both following our intuitive guides. For some things in life, there’s no explaining it with words. You have to feel the thing to know it, but once you do, you’ll know. America is changing, and in no place is that more evident than in Maine. Statistically speaking, it’s the whitest state in the country. However, the US census data shows that this is rapidly changing. Immigrants don’t typically have much of a choice about where they

CHAPTER 9: THE WATERS AROUND YOU HAVE GROWN | 111 end up when they’re allowed into the US. They’re assigned to places and accept what they get. Eventually, as more immigrants end up in a particular area, more permanent communities start to form. “Why do you think a nation of immigrants now hates immigrants?” I asked a young valedictorian whose parents immigrated to America from Vietnam when she was five. “That’s a hard question,” she answered. Her father worked two jobs, one in delivery, a second making glass. Her mother worked in the nail salon industry. Although she lived in the whitest state, she attended one of the most diverse schools in the northeast, and it showed. She launched an anti- racism website to help people learn about generational wealth, systemic racism, voting, policy, and other ways to reframe the narrative around immigrants and their stories. “One of the best ways to learn is through talking to people,” she said. She shared the stories of her classmates on her website. She humanized the immigrant struggle, noting that, “It comes back to education and integrating people more.” Despite being a brilliant student and winning the Maine State Science Fair for her work on removing arsenic from drinking water using carbon nanotubes, she feels hate from fellow Americans. “There are people who don’t want me here, and people who don’t want other people like me here.” I wondered, if we don’t want her in our country, then who do we want here? She was on her way to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the fall. “I saw a sign on the train station that said, ‘Fuck Asians,’ and it was a really scary moment.” The hatred is about fear. As much as America likes to talk about being number one, we feel threatened and afraid of hard-working immigrants. We all want to have some kind of guarantee that we get to stay where we are on the economic ladder. We worry about if, as the world becomes more globalized, we’ll still be able to compete. Will ‘my group’ still be on top? If a new group takes over, will they treat us as badly as we treated

112 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. them? That change is inevitable. Maine went from being over ninty-five percent white in 2010 down to ninty percent in 2020. That trend will continue. White Americans have gone from eighty percent of the population in 1980 down to sixty percent today. The racial identity that the American system of economic oppression was built upon is dying. People are migrating, and people are having mixed-race children. That’s likely the best thing that could happen for poor white Americans. Race has kept them poor for hundreds of years, as they accepted much less than would be expected for individuals living in a wealthy nation, all because they wanted nothing more than to be ranked above people of color. They were kept poor because of this promise, and now, even the promise of white supremacy has been taken away. That can be scary. But it doesn’t have to be. People like the young lady from Maine show that the next generation has no desire to recreate the injustices of the past. Students from her high school speak fifty different maternal languages and come from more than thirty countries on five different continents. They have their issues, but they all live together peacefully. We fear diversity and change because most of us have grown up in a system based on the exploitation and abuse of those at the bottom. We say we hate the poor, but what we really fear is the possibility that we may one day become that bottom group ourselves. There’s no need to fear that anymore—because it has already happened. The middle-class in America has collapsed, and it’s up to us what kind of new system we build. “Why is there such segregation? Why is there such hatred from a country that’s supposed to celebrate diversity? I think it stems from this idea of wanting power,” she finally replied. Wealth is power in a capitalist society. We dance around the topic to placate the huddled masses, inappropriately fixating on race, religion, and national origin to distract us from the inexplicable injustices of poverty. The only group that benefits from a system without economic mobility,

CHAPTER 9: THE WATERS AROUND YOU HAVE GROWN | 113 is the tiny group that has fixed itself at the top. Race has been such a useful tool of oppression because it fooled white Americans into thinking they were a part of the elite. In reality, the elite view them as trash. “Where is my white privilege?” asked one poor Mainer. Where indeed, I thought. Contrary to popular belief, racism in America was designed to keep the white man down. The horrific effects of racism on people of color remain an intentional side-effect. Many of the pilgrims were “poor vagrants, criminals, and rebels against the state,” forced to migrate to the Americas and work for free. Poor children found living on the streets of England were regularly rounded up, forced into slavery, and shipped over to the colonies in America. The ruling classes referred to these poor white citizens as masterless men and waste persons, complaining of the crime and filth caused by these so-called worthless human beings. The Elizabethan Poor Laws made it illegal to be poor and unemployed, so any child could be captured from the slums and enslaved as an “apprentice” or “indentured servant.” They were beaten, raped, forced to work, and murdered without consequence. When those poor whites arrived in the Americas, their masters continued those ruthless traditions. Whenever they got the chance, the white slaves and their non-white counterparts would run away. The vast size of the Americas, combined with the extreme ethnic and linguistic diversity, made it impossible to tell who was a runaway slave and who wasn’t. Prosperous communities of former slaves of all ethnic and religious backgrounds emerged across the New World. It was a great thing for runaway slaves, but not so great for the “landowners” hoping to benefit from forced labor. After yet another rebellion where a coalition of ethnic groups fought to toss off the chains of colonial oppression, the ruling elite invented race to stabilize the system. Skin color of course existed before that, but there were no ideas of united races. An individual was Scottish, Irish, Dutch, Akan, Mohawk, Yoruba, etc. In the new system, however, those of African descent were placed at the very bottom of society to pacify

114 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. white slaves who made up the majority of the forced laborers. White slaves continued living in horrid conditions but had someone to look down upon. Those ruling classes went on to build incredible wealth while white laborers remained, and still remain, extremely poor. Rather than improving life for poor white laborers, all the ruling classes had to do to keep poor white people pacified and working hard was treat black people worse and worse. That sadistic “schadenfreude” is all poor white Americans have to show for their complicity in systemic racism. By shifting the narrative to race, wealthy whites successfully convinced poor whites that so long as the people at the top of society were exclusively white, then life was good. That, of course, wasn’t true. Poor white Americans toiled right next to slaves for hundreds of years. As industrial towns began to emerge, poor white laborers lived in the same dilapidated shacks as poor blacks. Whites were given preferential treatment but remained extremely poor relative to the wealth that existed in the United States. White Americans remain some of the poorest people in the rich world. Twenty million non-Hispanic white Americans live in poverty, making up more than half of the poor population in the country. Adult white Americans have an incarceration rate of six hundred seventy-eight per one hundred thousand. That means if white American men were their own country, they’d have the highest percentage of their population in cages compared to any other country in the world. A white man in America is four point five times more likely to be in jail than a man in the United Kingdom, and ten times more likely to be in jail than a man in Japan. Poor white Americans even get shot and killed by the police officers they love so much. Those officers then get no prison time and keep their pension because no one cares if you kill a poor white person. How could American white men, who absolutely love freedom, be okay with being incarcerated this much? Racism. Black and Hispanic Americans are incarcerated even more, therefore pulling the wool over the eyes of white

CHAPTER 9: THE WATERS AROUND YOU HAVE GROWN | 115 men about their gross lack of freedom. A white child in the United States is four times more likely to live in poverty than a child in Denmark. How could Americans be okay with this? Again, racism. They aren’t as poor as black and Hispanic Americans, so they’re happy with their poverty. It’s poor white Americans that’ve been had, took, hoodwinked, and bamboozled. Race was not, and is not, designed to oppress poor minorities. No, minorities are just collateral damage in the war by rich white people on poor white people. Poor white people are openly called deplorables, white trash, and hillbillies. They’re publicly ridiculed as “poor, illiterate, and strung out.” “Now, you know what? You ought to be marching with us. You’re just as poor as Negroes. You are put in the position of supporting your oppressor because through prejudice and blindness, you fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people. And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are white. And you’re so poor you can’t send your children to school. You ought to be out here marching with every one of us every time we have a march.” —REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. The real struggle is for money. So many white Americans truly believe we’re in a post-racial society because they can’t imagine how the lives they’re living can be called “privileged.” The white privilege they’ve been promised is a centuries-old lie. They’ll remain poor and oppressed until they wake up and realize who is keeping them down. White privilege is an economic toll on an increasingly poor white society. The identifying feature of a billionaire is wealth, not whiteness. Until working-class white Americans realize this, they’ll sheepishly continue oppressing themselves with racism. We can easily eliminate poverty in the United States as soon as we help poor white America take the shackles off their minds.

116 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. The poverty that exists in the United States, the richest country the world has ever seen, is devastating. We have large numbers of families living without access to clean water, indoor plumbing, or electricity. We have people living in the streets, or close to it, in just about every state. The poor are criminalized and incarcerated. The school systems are underfunded. They work two or three jobs and still don’t make enough money to afford the basics. Yet everywhere I went, I still saw brilliance. Someone would always take me on a tour of their community and point out all the opportunities. Where I saw a lack of healthy food options, they saw a new food truck business that focused on selling healthy, delicious meals. In environments with fifty percent poverty rates, I met successful entrepreneurs. With pride, they’d show me their new tire business or their booming tipi company. Then, after showing me what they’d already accomplished, they’d walk me through their plans for the ten other businesses they were ready to start but didn’t have the capital to launch. I met children who wanted to be doctors, teachers, police officers, and singers. When I became old enough, I left my community as fast as I could. On my tour across the country, I met a sampling of all the people who stayed. Some never left, some explored the world and came back. They were all starving for change, they were all overworked, but they were all alive with hope. They refused to let the people in their communities be tossed aside, so they woke up every single day and fought. And they mostly do it with a smile. The problems that exist in poor communities are problems we’ve already solved, from a technical perspective, as a species. The talent is there, the will to work is too, so all we need to add is the capital and resources. In business, we talk about the low-hanging fruit principle. The term is used to describe the most attainable goals and objectives. Ending

CHAPTER 9: THE WATERS AROUND YOU HAVE GROWN | 117 poverty is not some impossible ideal—it’s the very definition of low- hanging fruit. There will be challenges for sure. In the tech world, it’s now a regular occurrence to see a twenty-something CEO with no real-world experience receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in investments. Investors aren’t afraid because they know that with the right advisors, team members, and general support, inexperienced leaders can still build billion-dollar businesses. If we can do that, we can take entrepreneurs in low-income communities and give them the guidance and assistance they need to build thriving companies in their neighborhoods, too.

| 119 CHAPTER 10: NOW THAT I’M OLDER, ALL CHILDISH THINGS END We often run away from home in search of a better life. I know I did. I thought the pain and suffering I experienced as a child was because of all the terrible decisions the people around me made. I now know how the media crafts false negative narratives around poor and minority communities, while creating equally unrealistic, flattering images of wealthy, white communities where everyone is happy, loving, and pure. I’ve seen both worlds, and I’m well aware that we as humans are deeply flawed no matter how much money is in our pockets. Still, poverty does something to people. When you have no certainty about your basic human needs, you enter a constant state of fear and stress. I saw that with everyone in my family, and we all had the same response: shut off your emotions. When you’re swimming in hurt, it’s better to feel nothing at all, so we train ourselves to expect nothing from anyone. We tell ourselves that nothing matters, and no one cares. We teach children at an early age to toughen up, look out for yourself, and trust no one. On the outside, we’d only project coldness and anger, never fear, sadness, and empathy. We did our crying on the inside. I needed to leave that environment to be able to grasp what’s been happening to those of us unfortunate enough to grow up poor, generation after generation. I needed to heal before I could look upon those I saw as being my tormentors with compassion and love.

120 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. As I toured the country preaching about the Seed Money Act, explaining the importance of the unconditionality of the grants, I felt the second major revelation of my life. I thought about my family and all the people I’d decided weren’t worth being around anymore. After a number of painful experiences, I told myself those people didn’t deserve my love. Yet, there I was, trying to argue with the rest of the world that every single person, regardless of what they may have done in the past, deserves another chance. I didn’t like that cognitive dissonance. How could everyone be deserving of the basic human needs of food, clothing, shelter, and transportation, but not be deserving of love? I sat, angry and confused. There were certain people I was just never going to forgive. My mother and I worked through a lot of our issues years ago, and I’m grateful for it. Building a loving relationship with her has been essential for both of our healing. But my father, I told myself I’d never forgive him for being the reason we grew up poor. My parents have suffered through things I can’t fathom. And when I go back to their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, the hurt of even thinking about it is too much to bear. As children, we don’t see our parents as what they are: a reflection of the world they were brought into. When I took the time as an adult to learn about my mother and see the world through her eyes, it hurt to think of how I wanted nothing more than to run away from the home she built for us and never come back. I blamed her for how hard things were, without asking how she got into that situation in the first place. The fact that she forgave me for my childish lack of understanding and ungratefulness is, to this day, my definition of love. I know the hurt that I’ve caused her, and she’s always forgiven me without a second thought. While on the tour I sat in my hotel room thinking about my family, my father in particular. “How many times should I forgive people?” I asked aloud. I didn’t hear anything. I’m not sure what I expected. I laughed to myself, then thought back

CHAPTER 10: NOW THAT I’M OLDER, ALL CHILDISH THINGS END | 121 to those WWJD bracelets from the 90s. What Would Jesus Do? I’d read the Bible several times, along with numerous other religious texts. I never vibed with religion, but there was something special about the teachings of Jesus that resonated with me. Treat each other with love, care for the poor, trust your ability to connect with the divine. I reached over into the nightstand and grabbed my Bible. I flipped to the New Testament and found where Peter asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” “I tell you, not seven times,” Jesus replied, “but seventy-seven times.”7 Effectively, there’s no limit to how many times we should forgive one another. I thought about that love from my mother and tried to apply it to my father. My mother gave her entire life to children who never truly appreciated what she had to endure to be able to give us what little we could have. We complained about what we didn’t have and about the affection she didn’t give—if she could give that kind of love, maybe I could too. I decided to begin the real work of forgiving my father eight, nine, or ten more times if necessary so we could begin to build a relationship with one another. I’ve left him out of this book so we can have a chance to heal our relationship in private. I’ve also left out the details of my relationships with my siblings and other close family members because we must work through these hurts ourselves before sharing them with the outside world. However, I write about them now because it’s essential I share the revelation above, that there’s no such thing as conditional love, and that there’s no limit to how many times we all deserve to be forgiven. I can only hope that the numerous people I’ve hurt throughout my life can find it in their hearts to forgive me as well. What does it mean to never forgive someone? A world without forgiveness implies we hold onto anger and trauma forever. That anger hardens our memories so we never let go of the pain, usually burying it 7 Matthew 18: 21-22

122 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. deep in our own bodies and souls. Forgiveness is therefore most important so the hurt person can let the negative energy pass through them without holding onto it any longer. It also then opens the door for us to re-engage with the person on the other side of the conflict, paving the way for them to someday acknowledge their mistakes, apologize, and learn from their past errors. Like with any challenging task, they may need you to allow them several chances to try again before they get it right, but we must provide time and space for relationships to heal if we ever hope to have community, family, and love. Love is the act of giving without any expectation of return. In a society where we measure our own worth by dollar amounts, that’s a difficult concept to grasp. We think in terms of transactions. What will you give me if I give you this? The Seed Money Act and everything I’m doing with my life today is an attempt to turn that on its head and ask, “What can I afford to give you, with no expectation of return?” When it comes to the Seed Money Act, that return will assuredly be trillions of dollars. When it comes to family, I’m not so sure. But I’ve promised myself that I’ll give whatever extra I have to any friends, family, or strangers that need it. In that way, I hope to reconcile my past mistakes of throwing people away with my current clarity around the importance of giving everyone a baseline chance. Hurt people hurt people. Relationships need boundaries and each person must trust their intuition to know when they need to back away from a situation and when they have the strength and courage to show up for a wounded soul (oftentimes, the most dangerous people to come near). We must protect ourselves from the damage other traumatized people can inflict upon us without abandoning those who are most in need of our love. We can step back from a physically and/or emotionally dangerous situation without also choosing to permanently discard that person from our societies, families, or lives. Traumatized people don’t disappear from the world when we toss them aside or put them in cages. That energy will remain until some community accepts the challenge to show them how to love, accept love,

CHAPTER 10: NOW THAT I’M OLDER, ALL CHILDISH THINGS END | 123 and heal. As a child, I didn’t have the strength to love those who hurt me, or who couldn’t reciprocate my love because the pain was too much. As an adult, I’m learning to channel the source of strength that allows me to forgive and love with boundaries but no conditions. I’ve made countless mistakes in life and ignored more suffering than I care to admit. I don’t consider myself to be an especially good person but a deeply flawed human being trying my best to choose good over and over again. We often act like helping others is some saintly achievement. It’s not. We’re social animals, and we’re meant to help one another. It’s in our DNA to find joy in the happiness of others and feel hurt when we see someone in pain. We’re designed to care about one another, but we’re taught to turn our feelings off. We need to open our hearts again and start caring about our fellow humans. I’m not a perfect person, and neither is anyone else. If we let perfection be our standard, we can never bear the pain of acknowledging our own faults and begin the slow process of self-improvement. Progress is striving for perfection, not being born as such. A better world doesn’t start with better policy. It starts with us being better people. Once we all have the basic human necessities covered, then we can spend the time and energy it take to look inwards, fixing our own shortcomings and healing our own traumas. When each of us can show up as a little bit better of an individual, then collectively we’re that much better as a whole. We were all born into a world of plenty, yet we’ve been duped into believing it’s one of scarcity and that we must fight one another to survive. This planet has graciously offered up to all of us more than enough resources to thrive alongside all the other beings on Earth. Poverty is not the result of laziness, ignorance, or bad fortune. Poverty is a result of greed. Once we all see that, the solution to ending poverty becomes simple. It takes an incredible amount of money and energy to keep the resources to yourself. As a wealthy country, we fill ourselves with hate and contempt for the poor, pushing once rare narcissistic tendencies towards

124 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. the cultural norm so we can block out the inevitable pain felt while stepping over human beings sleeping on the streets. Our indifference to the suffering of others for the sake of “stuff” is driving us towards self- destruction. As Drake says, we must “learn to love people and use things, and not the other way around.”8 I’m fortunate to be able to wake up each day and follow my heart. I have a passion for improving society, and I get to do just that. I want every single human on the planet to know what it feels like to live with purpose and dignity. No one was born to be a slave. By denying them access to food, clothing, shelter, and transportation, we’re condemning the poor to a life of servitude. The opposite of poverty isn’t wealth. It’s freedom. It’s time to recognize every human’s right to individual choice and freedom. We come up with ways to avoid the topic, but we know it’s wrong. We know it’s immoral. And now is the time to abolish slavery once and for all. “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. “But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. 8 “Connect,” 2013

CHAPTER 10: NOW THAT I’M OLDER, ALL CHILDISH THINGS END | 125 “In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.” —MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. It’s time to cash that check. End Poverty. Make Trillions.

| 127 Part 3

| 129 CHAPTER 11: THE SEED MONEY ACT — HOW TO END POVERTY IN THE UNITED STATES AND MAKE TRILLIONS DOING IT I’ve spent my life thinking about how to help the poor because I lived and felt poverty. Still, like nearly everyone else in this country, I missed the answer that was right in front of me. The fact is, we can easily eradicate poverty today in the United States. There really is a silver bullet when it comes to poverty. The silver bullet is a seed money grant set at an amount that is equal to the federal poverty guidelines. Many current and past proposals share similarities with the Seed Money Act. I won’t be addressing those here, but I sincerely thank all the great minds that have shaped my thinking. I avoid referring to these individuals not out of disrespect or arrogance, but to allow readers to judge the Seed Money Act on its merits alone, rather than agreeing because someone brilliant once said something similar. In the following pages, I’ll explain just how drastically the Seed Money Act would change life for the poor and how our country will save trillions of dollars doing it. Once you’ve read this proposal, I hope you’ll join me in recommending that Congress should grant seed money to all American households in an amount that’s equal to the federal poverty guidelines. The amount of seed money should be adjusted each year to reflect updates to the federal

130 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. guidelines and must be the first step in the Congressional budgeting process. Other federal spending comes after ensuring everyone has a vote in our economic system and can purchase the basic human rights of food, clothing, shelter, and transportation. The Seed Money Act would be an unconditional, permanent, regular grant to every US household, set to an amount that’s equal to thefederal poverty guidelines.9 For example, for a single-person household in 2020, the amount would’ve been $1,063.33 per month.10 What I’m proposing is a socially and fiscally responsible way to abolish poverty and restore balance to the federal budget. The financial case I present for the Seed Money Act will generate phenomenal returns in today’s world. In a cash economy, poverty is the lack of money. Simply put, an unconditional seed money grant that meets the federal poverty guidelines ends poverty. A Brief Lesson in the History and Evolution of America’s Great Wealth Divide “Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting, and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.” —NEW YORK DAILY TRIBUNE, JULY 13, 1865 9 There’s debate around the appropriate metrics to determine the federal poverty guidelines. It’s worth investigating how to improve upon the current metrics. I’m arguing for a metric accounting for the cost of food, housing, clothing, and transportation. It’s important that this metric doesn’t vary by region. Therefore, I’ve selected the Federal Poverty Guidelines for the forty-eight contiguous states and the District of Columbia to use throughout this document. 10 The federal poverty guidelines are a measurement of the minimum amount of annual income that’s needed for individuals and families to pay for essentials, such as room and board, clothes, and transportation in the contiguous states. For a single person household, that income level is $12,760. According to the federal poverty guidelines, a family of three is eligible to receive $21,720.

CHAPTER 11: THE SEED MONEY ACT — | 131 America was built on the belief that without the weight of an oppressive government, and with access to an abundance of land, individuals can prosper.11 Poor Europeans risked their lives and their families’ lives to sail to a mysterious new world where they were promised a chance to build a better, free life. While they pursued that, peoples from the African continent contributed at a cost that’s hard to imagine. In an agrarian society, economic participation required land, and it would remain this way for centuries. Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, borrowed much from English philosopher John Locke, who argued in his 2nd Treatise of Government for the three unalienable rights of, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property.” For the majority of American history, land redistribution was the cure for poverty. At the end of the Civil War, this land-centric view remained. Union General William T. Sherman promised African Americans forty acres of land and a mule because Black ministers convinced him it would be impossible for African Americans to prosper without a beginning source of wealth. Common sense prevailed, but not for long. President Andrew Johnson later reversed the order, and there were implications to this. We no longer live in an agrarian society. Nowadays, instead of land, money is power. We cannot simply head west, claim land, build a house with our bare hands, and operate a farm. We also don’t need people to do that in the modern economy. Through specialized labor, humans have advanced technology to the point where we can do things that would’ve been indistinguishable from magic merely a hundred years ago. Seed money is today’s equivalent of a land grant. It’s indeed a helping hand. The goal should be to give everyone a stable footing on the economic ladder. After that, let people compete. The Seed Money Act won’t create a utopian or equal society. For better or worse, massive wealth inequality almost certainly will remain. We’ll still need regulation to protect the environment, consumers, and other vulnerable interests, but the Act will finally end poverty in the US. It’ll give everyone a more 11 There were millions of people already in America when it was “discovered” by Christopher Columbus in 1492. These indigenous people were killed in the greatest genocide the world has seen.

132 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. realistic chance to gain wealth. As a bonus, we’ll also make trillions of dollars doing it. Benefits of the Seed Money Act The Seed Money Act provides a simple solution to a complex problem. The elegance of the Act is in its simplicity. I’m proposing we provide every American household with seed money grants equivalent to the federal poverty guidelines, which in 2020, as I’ve mentioned, was $1,063.33 a month for a single-person household. There should be no strings attached with no finite benefit period and no way to lose the benefit. This is a preferred equity stake in American prosperity for every citizen. To alleviate concerns that people might waste or lose their annual benefits all at once, I would recommend sending the check bi-weekly or monthly. That’s it. We don’t need to monitor what people are doing with their money. We don’t need a large bureaucratic system to distribute the money. While understanding the Seed Money Act itself is simple, understanding its benefits are less obvious. I’ve outlined just a few of them below. Housing Seed money can turn the homeless into homeowners. The Seed Money Act will eliminate absolute poverty and begin to end wealth poverty through homeownership. We’ve already decided as a country that homeownership is a part of the American dream. To facilitate this, we issue massive federal subsidies through the Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae), the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac). This is one of the largest wealth transfer programs the world has seen. The poor are systematically excluded from such programs when they’re given housing subsidies instead of cash for housing. Instead of

CHAPTER 11: THE SEED MONEY ACT — | 133 automatically passing government credits and subsidies to landlords through funding programs administered by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), we must look at rolling some of the funding into seed money grants. This will create an opportunity for the formerly poor to purchase their own homes, if they so choose, as they could use the seed money to pay for a mortgage instead of rent. If the poor prefer to rent, let them rent, but let them do so in places that fit their needs rather than federally designated housing.12 The homelessness problem is a poverty problem. HUD Conducts an “Annual Homeless Assessment Report” to Congress. This report is a point-in-time assessment of individuals in the country living without shelter. In 2019, about five hundred sixty-eight thousand people in the US were ‘homeless.’ The majority of this ‘homeless’ population (sixty- three percent) actually lived in some shelter or transitional housing, but many of those shelters and transitory housing systems have strict rules and stipulations, so some people choose the streets instead. Even if people avoid shelters or all the long-term free housing is full, they’d still like to be near the soup kitchens, free clinics, and other lifelines. Homeless people go where there are resources for the extremely poor. These hubs are often in city centers, which in the past few decades have become very expensive places. Places like Skid Row in Los Angeles and the Tenderloin in San Francisco are where much of the free and subsidized housing in those cities exists. Many of the homeless encampments in our cities are located near these shelters, which are areas of concentrated services for the extremely poor. Though these hubs, unfortunately, don’t have enough resources to meet the demand at their sites. The resulting overflow of poverty can look ugly. For example, there are few restrooms available, so people go outside. Contrary to popular belief, many people living in homeless encampments are families with children and little to no income. This is the indignity we offer our poorest citizens; these are the only places they can afford to live. 12 There are plenty of rational financial arguments against homeownership. Give everyone that choice.

134 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. The Seed Money Act will eradicate these extreme poverty centers, but it won’t stop gentrification. In a market economy where scarce resources are auctioned off to the highest bidder, only the wealthiest citizens can live wherever they want. Not everyone will experience the luxury of living in the most expensive parts of the country, and some will be displaced from neighborhoods they’ve called home for generations. This is an unfortunate cost of capitalism. Sadly, I have yet to come across a perfect way to split limited resources, but with seed money set to the federal poverty guidelines, everyone will have enough money to purchase food, clothing, shelter, and transportation in the US. That’s a much better version of capitalism and a much better solution to the housing challenges we face in our cities today. Without question, we’ll find savings opportunities within HUD if we implement the Seed Money Act. We should take the time to decide which aspects of HUD to keep once we end poverty. As I explain in the following pages, the financial case for the Seed Money Act is significantly enhanced by reducing spending on any redundant and inefficient poverty alleviation programs. But the financial case reaches far beyond these cost reductions. Food The Seed Money Act will eliminate bureaucracy and provide more stable and efficient access to food for the poor. We must debate rolling our Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) into the Act. SNAP is a great example of how direct cash transfers allow the market to solve social problems. Unlike housing, we don’t have an entirely different class of grocery stores or a separate food supply chain for the poor. New grocery stores don’t have to set aside an allocation of food for the poor. Instead, we give people money in the form of a debit card. They use it to buy the groceries they see fit, wherever they want. The problem with SNAP is its bureaucracy and uncertainty.

CHAPTER 11: THE SEED MONEY ACT — | 135 We know everyone needs food. We know poverty exists. Through seed money, we can skip all the paperwork and give everyone enough money to buy food. For a family living around the poverty line, this means no more scrambling to apply for SNAP benefits when someone loses a job. A safety net should be there when you fall. A safety net isn’t effective if it requires you to fill out an application while you’re falling through the air. Seed money means no more worrying about losing your SNAP benefits when you get a new job, something that ultimately discourages the poor from working. Rolling SNAP into the Seed Money Act is also more efficient and gives families more financial freedom. If a family manages to save money on food in our current approach, they must either forfeit the extra benefit or illegally sell their excess credit, typically at a discount. Not everyone wants or needs the same amount of food. With seed money, no one’s penalized for being a frugal shopper. If you’re frugal with your spending on essentials, then you’ll have extra money to do with as you please. That’s an American solution. Economic Development The Seed Money Act provides a better solution for economic development. We already know we can rebuild devastated societies by providing them with infusions of capital. The Marshall Plan, which was developed for Europe after World War II, demonstrated this. Under that plan, the US transferred over $13 billion in economic recovery programs to European economies that had been devastated by the war. While international assistance in a context like this made sense, domestic cash assistance for people who desperately need it would be even more financially prudent. American citizens supported by these cash transfers will be empowered and funded to bolster and build new local economies. And once they gain wealth through commerce, they’d then pay taxes back into our own system. I think we can agree it wouldn’t be wise to start a business selling

136 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. goods and services to people that have no money. Even if it was a great idea and it filled a need, if the people who’d benefit from your idea didn’t have any money, you’d have no customers. In 2019, there were thirty-four million Americans living in similar conditions to how I grew up. That works out to about ten and a half percent of all Americans. That’s a huge market segment, but it’s also highly unstable. Poor people’s disposable income is often unpredictable, and they suffer from many other well-known burdens of poverty. With the Seed Money Act, the poorest Americans become a new consumer demographic with guaranteed financial stability, representing a total market of at least $260 billion.13 That’s a slightly larger market than Sweden or Hong Kong. For entrepreneurs, this kind of massive, stable market is a dream come true. Businesses will have the chance to do well by doing good, and the formerly poor will finally have a say in what goods and services they want. There’ll also be opportunities to generate wealth from within the poorest communities. Entrepreneurs are best at serving customers they know and understand. The poor will be best suited to entrepreneurial endeavors that serve the needs of this $260 billion market segment. Business owners coming from poor backgrounds are also sure to create meaningful products for other Americans with higher incomes or people living outside of the US. That’s how you grow an economy. As soon as this happens, individuals will pay taxes on their earned income, and fewer Americans will be near the poverty line. The true cost of the Seed Money Act will continue decreasing. If we give people seed money, they have the power to shape society through their purchases, just like everyone else in a capitalist society does. The poor are disenfranchised from voting with their wallets because they’re not allowed to purchase goods for themselves. Instead of money, we give them things. We treat the poor like children, assuming they wouldn’t know what to do with the money we’d give them. The Seed 13 128,451,000 US households x 10.5% poverty rate x ($17,240 + $21,720 / 2) federal poverty guidelines for average household size (~2.5) = $262,733,675,400 (rounding)

CHAPTER 11: THE SEED MONEY ACT — | 137 Money Act will correct this. I look forward to seeing what new businesses and technologies emerge in our rural and urban poor communities, and beyond, when people finally have a little money to spend and invest. Some may have a problem with businesses generating a profit by selling to the poor. I don’t. Capitalism allows consumers to determine what they want and lets businesses compete to provide those goods. With seed money, I’d be happy to see businesses becoming profitable by offering goods and services that our lowest earners decide adds value to their lives. This doesn’t only apply to for-profit entities. The Act makes it easier for non-profit businesses to compete against for-profit businesses by providing goods and services to the formerly poor. Instead of begging for funding from donors, businesses that are not profit-driven would only need to create a meaningful product for the lowest earners. Their potential customer base would be a large and stable market. If you operate as efficiently as a for-profit institution, because of tax benefits, you should be able to offer that product for a reduced price if you choose not to take a profit. Otherwise, you can offer those goods for the same price as for-profit organizations and pay your employees more. I’m excited to see which organizational models and corporate structures (for-profit, not-for-profit, co-op, B-Corp., etc.) are best able to win in low-income markets when there’s a little seed money involved. In true American fashion, I hope the best competitor wins. Foundations and philanthropists will continue to invest in novel solutions for problems that affect the poorest people. They can then implement those programs as services paid for by the lowest earners. It’s something foundations are already trying to do via their social impact investing and social enterprise building efforts. Human Rights and Dignity Seed money offers a better solution for human rights and dignity.

138 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. The Seed Money Act guarantees provisions for the basic human rights of food, clothing, shelter, and transportation. This will end the use of basic goods and services as motivation to work. We’ll still work to satisfy our wants, but everyone will do so with the peace of mind that our basic needs are covered. This approach builds on capitalism’s strengths. Previous economic systems, including feudalism and slavery, relied on the belief that people don’t want to work and must be forced to do so. We now know for a fact that this is false. The pursuit of wealth provides sufficient motivation. Most working Americans already live above the federal poverty guidelines and many of the wealthiest individuals in society are known for their extreme work habits (i.e., physicians, lawyers, scientists, business executives, and government officials). Prior systems misunderstood human nature and focused their efforts on coercion. Capitalism shows that it’s the carrot that truly motivates rather than the stick. We all know this. Capitalism is a more productive economic system without forced labor. This is because individuals with the ability to reap the benefits from their own labor tend to work harder and more efficiently. When an individual is denied the human essentials of food, clothing, shelter, and transportation, they’re no longer working to reap the benefits of their work. They’re working to survive and existing in a state of servitude. We don’t have to deny people basic goods and services for capitalism to work. I’m suggesting we support our Declaration of Independence, which affirms, “all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The US has independent legislative, executive, and judicial branches to ensure a separation of powers. We vote for our leaders using a one- vote-per-person system that prevents a tyrant from gaining too much control of the country. We intentionally designed a decentralized legal system, but we haven’t done the same with our financial system. We don’t ensure each American has a vote in capitalism.

CHAPTER 11: THE SEED MONEY ACT — | 139 I’m not advocating giving each American an equal voice in the market economy. Nor am I proposing a limit on how much economic power any single individual or entity can accumulate.14 I’m simply proposing that every American have some voice when it comes to finances and recommend that each American have a guaranteed minimum influence on capitalism equal to the federal poverty guidelines. This preserves our current economic system while eliminating poverty and market exclusion. We get to keep the carrot of limitless wealth, but we remove the stick of hunger, homelessness, and poverty. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations to guarantee the rights and freedoms of all human beings. Unfortunately, human rights have largely gone unfunded. Just as the law is intended to protect our civil rights, we need the Seed Money Act to protect our economic rights. It’s impossible for an individual to participate in a capitalist society without any money. Just like democracy, if capitalism is to be for the people and by the people, then people must have some guaranteed money. That money needs to come in the form of stable, government-guaranteed, seed money grants set at the federal poverty guidelines. This should happen before any other budgeting because our human rights take precedence over all other needs. Luckily, we can easily afford to do this, and it’s a gross oversight that we have yet to finally end human forced labor. Let Americans work for their interests or for wealth, not to survive. We don’t want a society where desperation is a motivator for work. This country is one of the wealthiest the world has ever seen. We must end the use of basic provisions of food, shelter, clothing, and transportation as a means of exploitation. Crime Reduction The Seed Money Act provides a better solution for reducing crime. The poor are at a higher risk of being incarcerated. “Incarcerated 14 This is a worthwhile topic to debate but is not necessary to successfully implement the Seed Money Act. For this reason, it will not be discussed here.

140 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. people of all gender, race, and ethnicity groups earned substantially less prior to their incarceration than their non-incarcerated counterparts of similar ages,” according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. As sociologists Sarah Lageson and Christopher Uggen attest, “most crime is economic behavior—almost ninty percent of the serious offenses reported in the USA each year concern remunerative crimes.”15 A lot of crime is committed because people are poor.16 Particularly for adults, those released from jails and prisons are more likely to be arrested again if they’re unable to secure an income. Employers can legally refuse to employ someone for having committed a previous crime in the US, even if a person has completed their sentence for that crime.17 Unfair targeting aside, if the multitude of evidence suggests that many adults commit crime because they’re poor and seeking money, the Seed Money Act has the potential to solve a significant portion of our country’s crime problem. People don’t have to commit crime to survive when their basic needs are met through seed money. An individual attempting to re-enter society after being incarcerated doesn’t need to return to a life of crime in order to sustain themselves if they’re receiving grants sufficient to cover their costs for shelter, clothing, food, and transportation. Of course, there will still be crime, but we can eliminate crime that specifically results from the desperation of poverty. For these reasons, it’s essential that seed money grants aren’t withheld from citizens because of a criminal conviction.18 When someone leaves jail or prison, seed money will play a major role in helping that person re-enter society. 15 This figure ignores the numerous crimes, such as sexual assault, that often go unreported. 16 The poor are also policed differently than the rest of society. An adequate analysis of this is beyond the scope of this book. 17 Addressing this problem, and the larger issues of mass incarceration, the rights of former convicts and the US judicial system are also beyond the scope of this book. 18 What would happen if we allowed those incarcerated to keep their seed money? They could then use their seed money to pay for goods and services while incarcerated. They could use that money for job training, legal defenses, improvements to their living conditions, and reduce the likelihood they’d end up back in jail or prison.

CHAPTER 11: THE SEED MONEY ACT — | 141 Emergency Relief The Seed Money Act provides a better solution for emergency relief. Below, I’ll highlight a few emergency scenarios where seed money works: • During a recession, businesses won’t make capital expenditures and banks won’t lend. Seed money works to put money into the hands of the people without waste. • Autonomous trucks and cars are fully released and millions of Americans are out of work all at once. Seed money will be there to support these unemployed workers while they find individual solutions to get themselves back to work. • Another global pandemic occurs, and we have to shut down the economy. The poor must choose between going to work and risking death or staying home and risking financial ruin. Seed money works to give them a true choice in the matter. • Due to excessive fiscal stimulation through decades of low interest rates, asset prices reach bubble status, and national debt reaches all-time highs. The government can’t raise interest rates at risk of destroying the economy. Seed money works to provide direct stimulus to the people while we allow interest rates to float freely. Assets return to a reasonable level, and the economy continues because we can provide temporary extra seed money to consumers. Elimination of the Welfare Trap Unlike our current welfare system, the Seed Money Act doesn’t incentivize remaining on welfare. The welfare trap, or welfare cliff, is a well-studied phenomenon. Consider the following illustrative example from Illinois’s Policy: A single mom has the most resources available to her family when she

142 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. works full time at a wage of $8.25 to $12 an hour. Disturbingly, taking a pay increase to $18 an hour can leave her with about one-third fewer total resources (net income and government benefits). To make work ‘pay’ again, she’d need an hourly wage of $38 to mitigate the impact of lost benefits and higher taxes. We currently have generous welfare programs that provide many in- kind donations to the poor—meaning we give things, not money. These services are given and restricted based on income. As a person makes more money, they lose services. These kinds of welfare programs discourage the poor from earning more when they’re close to the program income cut- offs. This is a waste of money and counterproductive. The Seed Money Act eliminates the trap. Everyone receives seed money grants regardless of how much they earn. Once an individual earns income, they’re taxed on that income, but the seed money grant remains the same. For every extra dollar you earn, you’ll be taxed, but you’ll always make more than you would have if your income didn’t increase. Everyone will be motivated to focus on what they can gain through work rather than what they stand to lose from making more income. We don’t want to keep the poor impoverished. That costs too much in terms of dollars and social instability. We want poorer people to earn more and pay taxes like the rest of us. The Act makes sure we’re all aligned in this goal. Minimum Wage The Seed Money Act is good for business. We don’t have to eliminate the minimum wage in order to fund the Act, but it does make the minimum wage unnecessary. The minimum wage is a form of income redistribution also intended to prevent the exploitation of workers. The assumption is that companies would offer a lower salary if the minimum wage wasn’t mandated. The debate is then whether this increased salary redistributes income to lower earners from business owners (i.e., shareholders’ profits) or if it redistributes from

CHAPTER 11: THE SEED MONEY ACT — | 143 some lower earners to others by reducing the number of low-wage jobs available. Regardless of which combination of these answers is true, the minimum wage is a redistribution of wealth. Once we have seed money grants equal to the federal poverty guidelines, the minimum wage is no longer relevant. It’ll be impossible for businesses to exploit Americans through work in relation to poverty. If everyone has an income that guarantees their access to food, clothing, shelter, and transportation, their needs are covered. What remains is what that person wants. There’s no need to determine how much someone needs to be paid to receive what they want. That’s the entire point of the market economy. There are two sides to a contract. We may find that, once their basic needs are met, workers willn’t want to work extremely difficult jobs that pay very little. Those employers will either need to improve working conditions or pay people more if they want to fill those positions. Therefore, wages will be set based on what employees believe is appropriate compensation for the work. That’s how most Americans will think about their salaries because they won’t be concerned with being homeless or starving to death. They’ll find the best combination of wages, mission, work environment, benefits, etc., available to them given their skill sets. The lowest earners in our society deserve this same basic freedom. After seed money secures basic needs, wages can be free to fluctuate with supply and demand. It’s extremely problematic if we advocate keeping poverty so someone will take the least desirable, very low-paying jobs. We don’t have a shortage of food, shelter, clothing, and transportation. If we assume no one would fill certain jobs if their basic human rights were secure, then we’re intentionally depriving millions of Americans of those things so some will be forced to work undesirable jobs for very low wages. This is servitude. We have already agreed to end slavery in this country. Survival should not be a motivator for work in a free society. We’ll still need government involvement in employment. We’ve done much in this country to provide safe work environments for employees.

144 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. We should continue to do so. I’m only suggesting we evaluate the necessity of and consider removing minimum wage laws if we have the Seed Money Act in place. Unemployment The Seed Money Act provides a better solution for unemployment. Federal-state unemployment insurance provides unemployment benefits Americans receive temporarily when they lose their jobs. This is largely funded by employers through taxes. It’s designed to prevent workers from falling into poverty when they lose their jobs. It’s also designed to stimulate the economy during downturns when large portions of the population simultaneously lose their jobs. Spending on unemployment varies meaningfully from year to year but can be as low as $45 billion in some years and has exceeded $150 billion in others.19 I’m excluding COVID-19 pandemic-related years. Unfortunately, most unemployed people are typically not eligible for unemployment benefits. Anyone who leaves their job voluntarily, previously self-employed workers, gig workers, and students traditionally can’t apply for unemployment insurance benefits. Minimum earnings requirements mean that the poorest members of society are also not eligible for unemployment insurance benefits. With the Seed Money Act, we can eliminate the billions of dollars wasted on fraud and the redundancies of the federal-state unemployment insurance benefit. These savings aren’t a necessary part of the financial case to generate trillions of dollars in returns, but by replacing the role of unemployment, we can take that tax revenue and shift it elsewhere, potentially bringing down the cost of the Act. Each state sets its limits to unemployment benefits in a given year. For most states, the total allowable benefit (excluding emergency scenarios such as the COVID-19 19 Unemployment benefits are counted as income. We cannot, therefore, subtract these from our cost of implementing the Seed Money Act. But we can streamline the unemployment program to bring down its costs. The major improvements here are around ease of administration, inclusion in benefits, fraud elimination, and stability.

CHAPTER 11: THE SEED MONEY ACT — | 145 pandemic) is below the amount of our proposed seed money grant. Therefore, if an individual loses their job, the seed money would more than cover those benefits and prevent them from falling into poverty with no extra waste or bureaucracy. We can potentially argue that we should set aside extra benefits for some, but seed money would largely serve the current role of unemployment insurance. Labor markets could be places where people experiment to discover the best way they can contribute to society. Without seed money, people must work in jobs and shifts that don’t always make sense when others could have filled those same jobs and shifts. As a motivator for work, the threat of poverty is neither ideal in the short term nor the long term. Unemployment insurance is a quick-fix solution for what seed money offers: a more dignified and more dynamic way for labor to participate in a market economy. As the past century has shown it’s difficult to control economic cycles from the top down. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is a branch of the Federal Reserve System tasked with managing our nation’s interest rates and money supply. The reason the FOMC has this responsibility is because it’s expected to manage unemployment. Twelve members sit on this Committee and make the monetary policy decisions for our country. This is too difficult a task for any central group of people to oversee. We should instead allow the market to manage itself. For example, when we enter economic recessions, we see high rates of unemployment, which means consumers have less money. The economy further slows because when consumers don’t have money to spend, companies don’t have revenue. If companies don’t have revenue, they’ll have to cut more jobs leading to a reflexive effect. With a seed money grant system in place, the government can apply stimulus directly to people by temporarily increasing grant amounts. The government could directly stimulate demand and not have to worry about cumbersome federal relief programs for companies. If consumers have the money they typically have, they can easily shift their purchases to those businesses that remain. We wouldn’t need to bail out companies

146 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. because we’d instead bail out consumers. This would be an extremely efficient and equitable way to manage the money supply. Workforce Training The Seed Money Act provides a better solution for workforce training. With seed money that’s sufficient to provide the basic essentials, workers are supported while they develop the skills needed to enter or re-enter the workforce. Wealthier individuals are often willing to accept a lower wage early in their careers because they value the training they’ll receive on the job. Many of the most valuable work experiences are offered through unpaid internships. Medical residents, post-doctoral researchers, and interns across industries are all paid well below what individuals of these levels of education would typically demand in the employment market. They choose to forgo immediate wealth for the prospects of greater long-term earning potential. The poor can’t do this because forgoing income would mean being unable to afford essential goods. The Seed Money Act eliminates this disadvantage for the poor. Lastly, as we mentioned in the Economic Development section, the Act also promises to create new job opportunities for the lowest income earners by allowing them to serve one another with their own businesses. Seed money serves as a regular, direct stimulus to the poorest neighborhoods. By giving grants directly to the poor, we can avoid the incredible waste due to the rampant fraud that occurs when we wait for stimulus to trickle down. The Seed Money Act Will Provide Financial Stability Stable cash flows are the hallmark of a great business, and investors will gladly pay more for a business with consistent earnings. It’s easier to add debt, or leverage, to businesses, significantly increasing returns, and it’s easier to invest back into a business that’s supported by products generating stable income. What makes sense for the enterprise often makes sense for the

CHAPTER 11: THE SEED MONEY ACT — | 147 individual.20 While one-off donations can be helpful to the poor, they don’t provide stability since future income remains unpredictable. Regardless of your income level, getting a lump sum of cash can be daunting and difficult to manage. With that in mind, we make the logical misstep of assuming we shouldn’t give any money to the poor. Instead, we should give the poor money in a stable, gradual form. If we do this, they’ll never be poor again. If you give someone a fish today, they may starve in a month. But if you give them recurring seed money, I assure you they’ll eat just fine in a modern market economy. The Demonstrated Value of Direct Cash Transfers Those with wealth have always known the value of direct cash transfers and have benefitted from them for decades. The US already has a massive wealth transfer system. It just so happens the wealth transfer system is largely familial. The system is called inheritance. In 2020, Americans are expected to receive $765 billion in gifts and bequests, which is about four percent of all income. Nobody asks what these individuals will buy with their inheritance. No one’s concerned about whether they’ll go out and purchase the essential goods of shelter, food, clothing, and transportation. Those with wealth have been given fish for centuries, and somehow, they’re still doing just fine. As a society, we’ve decided this ability to transfer wealth and its associated income is so valuable and important that we provide Americans with a tax break on inherited income. This income is taxed at a rate that is less than fifteen percent—that’s significantly less than the typical tax rate on income earned through work and savings. Congress collected an estimated $16 billion in estate and gift taxes in 20 As with social security income, I’d recommend protecting seed money grants from garnishment to prevent predatory lending. Seed money would be protected to ensure recipients keep their basic freedoms while still gaining access to debt markets. Access to loans and increased liquidity are key for wealth creation.

148 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. 2020. That’s an effective tax rate of two percent. If we believe unearned seed money is good for rich kids, then why is it bad for poor kids? It’s not. Wealthy families understand the massive head start an inheritance provides. Everyone could use a little seed money to boost their chances of success and to become contributing members of society. Supporting Data There’s plenty of data to support the Seed Money Act. We already have plenty of supporting data on the impact of poverty. There are over one thousand eight hundred published articles in the PubMed database linked to poverty. We know what poverty is, what it does to people, what it does to society, what its opportunity cost is, and how much we spend fighting it. We’ve also run several pilot programs on unconditional cash transfers which have yielded positive results. There appear to be no appreciable labor market impacts of these dividends; however, dividend and negative income tax recipients do appear to consume more during the month the dividend is disbursed, children of recipients have better educational outcomes, and recipients experience substantial positive mental and physical health impacts. — Mayors for a Guaranteed Income Two unconditional international cash transfer programs in Finland and Ontario, Canada were terminated early due to political changes, and while we can’t reach statistically significant conclusions from these interventions, we do know, “[i]nitial snapshot data from SEED show that individuals receiving the benefit are overwhelmingly spending the money on food and merchandise, and only two percent are unemployed and not looking for work.” Self-preservation is a fundamental trait of humanity. These pilots ultimately prove the hypothesis that poor people want to survive, and that money helps them do that. We don’t get it right all the time, and there are self-destructive behaviors in the biological kingdom, but for the most part, humans are trying to survive. Most of us do what we think

CHAPTER 11: THE SEED MONEY ACT — | 149 is best with the resources available. This belief is central to the ethos of capitalism. If an individual living in a single-person household with $12,760 a year in seed money refuses to care for themselves, then that person is likely in the midst of a mental health crisis. Typically, we place individuals with self-destructive behaviors in involuntary detention in mental health facilities. It’s rare but it does happen. We’ll have to care for these individuals, some of them for life, as we should be doing already. Poverty is damaging to people in numerous ways, and the data suggest seed money is an effective way to eliminate poverty without disturbing labor markets. Let the Poor Decide What the Poor Need What would you buy with your $1,063.33 a month? What would you invest in? How would that change your life? How would that change over time? I don’t know how you’ll answer those questions. There are more than one hundred twenty-eight million households in the US with different financial profiles, living in different geographies, valuing different things. There’s no government institution, or individual, capable of telling every American how they should spend their money to achieve prosperity. This notion is the very reason we’ve adopted capitalism and free markets. The government can regulate markets but never have we, as a people, argued for the government to have broad control over our purchases.21 Yet, this is exactly what we do to the poor. By making much of government aid in-kind contributions—for example, they give you a free apartment instead of giving you money to purchase your own housing— the government is telling the poor what they can and will spend their money on. We must stop patronizing the poor. Leave it to American 21 This was a legal argument against the Affordable Care Act. The tax penalty for the individual mandate has since been removed. The point is not to debate the legality of Obamacare but to highlight that Americans tend to push against government mandates on purchases. We should be pushing back on government control of our social benefit spending.

150 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. adults to figure out which basket of essential goods they need to purchase and at what price. Americans are creative people. An ‘extreme couponer’ can bring a $300 grocery bill down to $10 while the do-it-yourself crowd can apparently make anything at home these days. On the other hand, on an episode of The Ellen Show, Bill Gates thought that a bag of pizza rolls cost $22. While it provided good comic entertainment, it underscores the point that we are letting the wealthy solve a problem they don’t understand. If Mr. Gates wants to return his wealth to the less fortunate, it would be best for him to give most of it directly in the form of seed money. The poor have spent their entire lives making a dollar out of fifteen cents, so who better to manage money that’s intended to help them? Whether they live in Appalachia, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, or Erie, I trust the poor will know how to shop for what they need. The Seed Money Act is an Affordable Solution We have more than enough money to end poverty. Let’s begin with an exercise to help explain how much a society could theoretically spend on redistribution. To answer this, we add together all the income American households reported on their taxes and divide it across the number of households. The result is called the ‘mean,’ or average household income. In 2019, the average household income in the US was $98,088. If we wanted to, we could offer Americans seed money in the amount of $98,088 through tax redistribution. Of course, that would mean no other government spending and a lot of frustrated people, but that’s just our theoretical upper limit. I’m not recommending we equally split all the money we earn in this country. At an equal income distribution, we’ve gone far past removing the stick of poverty and have now lost the carrot of wealth. There would be nothing an individual could do to increase their income. There would still be many other motivators for work (e.g., purpose, helping others,

CHAPTER 11: THE SEED MONEY ACT — | 151 pride, curiosity, health, status, etc.), but no financial incentive. As demonstrated, we can theoretically create an income baseline and set it either at the average household income or any value below it. We then must ask ourselves what do we want to spend? How poor should the poorest Americans be? If society wants to eradicate poverty, as we’ve so often declared, we should provide grants at the federal poverty guidelines. By setting the income baseline to the federal poverty line, we arrive at the simplest, cheapest way to eliminate all poverty in our society. This seed money is enough for every household to avoid poverty. For the average-sized American household in 2019 (calculated at two and a half people), the federal poverty guidelines are about $19,120. That’s about twenty percent of what we could afford at our upper limit, and it assumes we’re giving everyone this full amount. There would still be massive income inequality between executives and workers, doctors, and janitors. We’d be left with all that capitalism has to offer, but with no poverty. Some may advocate for higher seed money amounts, but I won’t. I just want to get rid of absolute poverty, along with its devastating effects on people, and the associated costs to society. The aim here isn’t addressing relative poverty or income disparities. Having gone from the bottom to the top end of the income ladder, I can attest that having money isn’t everything—but not having it is. The Cost Eliminating poverty will cost us an additional $200 billion each year. The previous analysis showed we can afford the Seed Money Act. Let’s now look at how much ending poverty in the US would actually cost, given the resulting drop in our current social safety net spending. Luckily, the US census already does some of this analysis for us. It calculates how many households are below the poverty line and by how much. If we multiply the total number of households below the poverty line with the average deficit per family, we get a more precise estimate of

152 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. the cost of getting everyone in America to the poverty line. That number is approximately $155 billion.22 I’ve rounded up to $200 billion to lessen the marginal tax rate on the poor, but that’s it. That’s how much it would cost us to end poverty in the US. Let me try to put that number in perspective.23 In 2019, the American government collected $3.5 trillion in taxes. The largest single discretionary spend is for the military. In fiscal year 2019, we spent $732 billion on the military, which is approximately twenty-one percent of the total US tax revenue for 2019. That was more than the military budgets of China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil combined. We spend $182 billion a year on mass incarceration through prisons, jails, policing, and our legal system. That’s five point two percent of taxes collected in 2019. It is worth noting that Americans earning less than one hundred fifty percent of the federal poverty guidelines are fifteen times more likely to be charged with a felony relative to those earning above that level. I hypothesize that using those funds to provide the poor with seed money will be a better use of tax dollars than incarceration for much of the country’s population. The additional cost to end poverty is equal to four point four percent of the total US tax revenue for 2019. We hopefully now agree that, on a national scale, this isn’t much money to end poverty. 22 To get to this figure, we multiply total population for all primary families living below the poverty threshold (6,554,000) with average deficit ($10,668) and add that to the product of unrelated individuals living below the poverty threshold (11,300,000) with average deficit ($7,375). (6,554,000 x $10,668 + 11,300,000 x $7,375 = $153,255,572,000. I round up to $155 billion. Estimates are for 2019. 23 Jeff Bezos, as of January 2021, was worth $181.5 billion. In 2019, there were 34 million Americans living below the poverty threshold. If Mr. Bezos decided to bring everyone out of poverty for a year, he’d still have $26.5 billion left the following year. He’d also have a pretty sizable tax deduction to carry forward. Apple, the maker of the iPhone and more, had $195.57 billion in cash on hand as of the first quarter of 2021. This isn’t intended as a criticism of Mr. Bezos or Apple. The goal is to help you contextualize how inexpensive this $155 billion price tag is relative to the wealth in the United States.

CHAPTER 11: THE SEED MONEY ACT — | 153 The American government has recently shown it can quickly step up to provide economic stimulus during the coronavirus pandemic. As of March 7th, 2021, Congress had already approved an initial spending of $3.92 trillion, along with another $1.9 trillion, bringing the total US stimulus to $5.82 trillion.24 If the cost of the Seed Money Act is $200 billion a year, we could’ve covered the cost of eliminating poverty for nearly thirty years with the current COVID-19 stimulus appropriations. If we put that $5.82 trillion into a poverty fund earning interest, we would need a real return of only three point four percent to fund poverty eradication in the US forever. If we were to provide seed money grants equal to the federal poverty guidelines to every American household, using 2019 figures, without offsetting any of it with a tax adjustment for those making above the poverty line, the bill would balloon to $2.3 trillion. Note, this is absolutely not the right way to provide seed money grants, as it’s extremely wasteful.25 The $5.82 trillion we spent on COVID-19 stimulus would still be enough to pay for two and a half years of seed money for the entire country, with no one working a single day. Why will we take back seed money grants in taxes from those solidly above the federal poverty guidelines? Before we calculate the return on this investment, we first need to clarify why most Americans will see no net change in their income with this $200 billion investment. It’s because we’ll adjust the tax rates so the seed money is deducted from the wages of Americans living well above the poverty line. Their incomes won’t increase, but they’ll have a true safety net. They’ll always have their seed money grants, set equal to the federal poverty guidelines, when they fall on hard times. That would be 24 This analysis is intended to show that we, as a country, can afford to take action when faced with an emergency. As the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us, poverty is an emergency. This isn’t a recommendation for how we could improve our response to the pandemic. 25 The point of the Seed Money Act is to invest in the poorest Americans. We’re not aiming to give people like me more money. It would be a waste to provide individuals well-above the federal poverty guidelines with seed money grants and not offset that through an income tax.

154 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. their right as a US citizen. With the Seed Money Act, Society Has a Baseline Level of Economic Dignity While this could make a major difference in people’s lives, the required changes to the tax code are rather simple and easily implemented. Let’s use two examples to clarify. Person A If Person A makes $40,125 in 2020, they’d pay $4,617.50 in federal taxes. This means, before any state tax, Person A brings home $35,507.50. Under the Seed Money Act (set at $12,760 a year), that person would receive a check for $1,063.33 each month throughout the year. That money wouldn’t be taxed. They’d also earn their salary as before. Person A earns well above the federal poverty guidelines, so we’re not looking to boost their income. We can therefore adjust their tax rate so they still bring home $35,507.50 when their seed money is included. Since they received $12,760 in seed money grants, their salary can be taxed at a higher rate, taking it down to $22,747.50. Together with the seed money grants, their after-tax income would remain the same ($12,760 + $22,747.50 = $35,507.50). This person would see no change in their total take home pay. What would change for Person A is, if they ever lost their job, fell ill, needed to take an emergency leave from work, retired, etc., they’d still keep their $12,760 a year grant. They would never fall below the poverty line. That’s their right and guarantee as an American citizen. There would be nothing to apply for, no associated shame or guilt, and no process. They’d receive this seed money and would always receive it.

CHAPTER 11: THE SEED MONEY ACT — | 155 Person B: If Person B makes $5,000 and files their taxes as an individual in 2020, they’re paying $500 in federal taxes. Before any state tax, that person brings home $4,500. Under the Seed Money Act, set at $12,760 a year, that person would receive a grant for $1,063.33 each month throughout the year that wouldn’t be taxed. They’d also earn their salary as before. Person B would be guaranteed to earn at least $12,760 a year. We’d tax their $5,000 income at a higher rate, while still increasing their take home pay significantly. If we set their tax rate equal to that of Person A, Person B would receive a take home pay of $2,834.58 + $12,760 = $15,594.58.26 In addition, they would never fall below the poverty line. That’s their right and guarantee as an American citizen. They’d also have nothing to apply for, no associated shame or guilt, and no process. They’d receive this seed money and would always receive it. How to Make Trillions of Dollars by Implementing the Seed Money Act We’ll make trillions of dollars by implementing the Seed Money Act. Two calculations explain how we can make accomplish that by getting rid of poverty. For the first calculation, we must consider how much money poverty costs us each year. This is referred to as the economic cost of poverty. Through the Act, we can eliminate this cost as the poor would be able to buy their essential needs to escape the financial effects of poverty. 26 Note the estimated deficit for this individual is $12,760 - $5,000 = $7,760. The actual increase in take home pay for this person was $12,760 - ($5,000 x ($22,747.50/$40,125)) = $9,925.42. There are multiple ways to adjust for the discrepancy that’ll occur with very low earners. We can raise the lower tax brackets across the board, because, the poor are being taxed at very low relative total percentages, including their seed money grants. It would also be fine for these lower brackets to even exceed the percentages of higher brackets for the same reason. We could also just increase the total cost of the program by twenty to thirty percent if we didn’t mind pushing the poorest earners beyond the federal poverty guidelines. As we’ll soon see, the return on investment for the Seed Money Act is more than sufficient to handle this increase in total program cost.

156 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. Therefore, by making the seed money investments, we increase the total wealth in our country by the amount of the economic cost of poverty itself. Estimates for the economic cost of childhood poverty alone are over $1 trillion per year.27 In addition, an estimated one hundred seventy-two thousand people a year die from individual and area-related poverty. I’ll leave putting a dollar value on a human life to others. The financial case for the Seed Money Act is nothing short of miraculous, given how wasteful we are with our current spending. We would need to spend $200 billion every year, as discussed, to eliminate the $1 trillion cost of childhood poverty. That’s an extra $800 billion annual increase in the total wealth in America; an astounding four hundred percent return on our $200 billion investment.28 Over a decade, that’s an over $8 trillion cash return. In comparison, the average annual stock market return since 1929 has been nine point six percent. If you don’t believe the economic cost of childhood poverty is $1 trillion, let’s assume for a moment the actual cost is a quarter of that (i.e., instead of $1 trillion, we say the economic cost of childhood poverty is $250 billion). The math still works. In that case, the Seed Money Act would still lead to a twenty-five percent annual return on capital, or $50 billion each year. In a decade, that comes to $500 billion, which is half a trillion dollars. Keep in mind, we’ve reduced the assumed economic cost of childhood poverty by seventy-five percent, and we haven’t factored in the economic cost of adult poverty. These financial returns are staggering. Let’s also pause to factor in the social value of saving one hundred seventy- 27 “These costs are clustered around the loss of economic productivity, increased health and crime costs, and increased costs as a result of child homelessness and maltreatment. In addition, it’s estimated that for every dollar spent on reducing childhood poverty, the country would save at least seven dollars with respect to the economic costs of poverty.” —Estimating the Economic Cost of Childhood Poverty in the United States, National Association of Social Workers Press, Social work Research, Volume 42, Issue 2, June 2018, Pages 73-83 28 Because of these astronomical returns, I won’t spend much time debating potential adjustments to the $200 billion costs of the Seed Money Act. We can double the cost of the program to $400 billion and the ten-year returns are still several trillions of dollars.

CHAPTER 11: THE SEED MONEY ACT — | 157 two thousand lives and moving over thirty million people out of poverty. Our second calculation is how much money can we save by solving poverty directly through seed money grants, rather than trying to treat the symptoms of poverty through in-kind donations (e.g., our social welfare programs). We currently have a social safety net for the poor. We indirectly give the poor $600 billion a year in healthcare through Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). We spend $380 billion a year on social welfare programs. Combined, that’s a little under $1 trillion a year in actual spending. Yet we still have poverty. Having low income leads to significantly worse health outcomes, which we’re paying $1 trillion a year for as a society. We know for a fact money solves poverty, but we’re using our social safety net to treat the symptoms instead of the disease. I want to stress that the price tag to eliminate poverty, given the expected returns, is so very low that we don’t need to cut current programs. However, I find it irresponsible to not engage with the incredible savings opportunities if we were to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our social welfare programs by using seed money to eliminate poverty directly. In 2019, we spent $242 billion on Earned Income Tax Credits, HUD, SNAP, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program (TANF), and school meal subsidies. If we replaced these programs with seed money, we’d spend $200 billion to save this $242 billion. That means an extra $42 billion each year. Over a decade, that comes out to $420 billion. That’s a return on investment of twenty-one percent each year. Note that we are not touching any of our healthcare spending and are leaving several programs in place that we may also be able to reduce. Let’s look at an extreme case where every person under the federal poverty guidelines lost their jobs. In this scenario, the cost of the Seed Money Act is now $242.4 billion.29 This means that all the poor today 29 If we go back to our example of looking at the average American household in 2019 of two and a half people, and we consider that there were about one hundred twenty million American households, with a ten and a half percent poverty rate, and a

158 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. now don’t work at all. That number is equal to the total spent in 2019 of Earned Income Tax Credits, HUD, SNAP, TANF, and school meal subsidies. In this scenario, where absolutely no one who’s currently poor earned any income whatsoever, we could still pay for the additional cost of the Act by eliminating these (now redundant) programs. As explained, we’ll make $800 billion each year by eliminating the economic costs of poverty and would make an additional $42 billion a year from eliminating some social welfare programs. Combined, we would make $842 billion each year. Over a decade, that is $8.42 trillion dollars. As a bonus, we also save one hundred seventy-two thousand lives each year, and thirty million people no longer have to experience poverty. The numbers are mind-blowing, but they are true. By providing seed money grants equal to the federal poverty guidelines, we’ll make trillions of dollars. Few investments, if any, provide anywhere near this level of return. The decision to have an expensive social welfare system that doesn’t eradicate poverty is a financial disaster for our country. Still don’t believe the numbers? Luckily, I partnered with a non- partisan think tank to develop an economic model around this concept.30 Anyone can test out these assumptions for themselves at policyengine.org. Poverty is a Bi-Partisan Problem with a Bi-Partisan Solution “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” —BOB DYLAN The riots that happened on both the left and the right in America during the coronavirus pandemic indicate the cracks occurring in our federal poverty guidelines of $19,120 for this family, then the absolute most it should cost to bring this entire population out of poverty, assuming not a single person is making even one dollar, would be: 120,756,048 x 10.5% x $19,120 = $242.4 billion. 30 https://endpovertymaketrillions.medium.com/economic-modeling-of-how- to-end-poverty-in-the-united-states-while-saving-taxpayers-trillions-of-1679b751d0c0

CHAPTER 11: THE SEED MONEY ACT — | 159 nation’s foundation. In an article published in “The Economist” in September 2018 titled “Can inequality only be fixed by war, revolution or plague?” Stanford professor Walter Scheidel is referenced saying, “Throughout history, economic inequality has only been rectified by one of the ‘Four Horsemen of Leveling’: warfare, revolution, state collapse, and plague.” Governments and businesses alike understand the dangers of an idle, impoverished class. President Lyndon B. Johnson launched a War on Poverty, aimed to mitigate this risk. In his January 1964 State of the Union Address, the president declared: “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort. It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest Nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it. One thousand dollars invested in salvaging an unemployable youth today can return $40,000 or more in his lifetime.” Even President Johnson was missing the key answer there. We actually do have a single weapon that can end this unconditional war on poverty. The mathematical and practical solution to end poverty for a wealthy nation is to provide seed money grants to all households set to an amount that’s equal to the federal poverty guidelines. By adjusting taxes enough to offset the seed money received by those not living in poverty, the price tag of this program becomes manageably low. In the case of the US, we’ve shown here that the incremental cost is $200 billion. That’s as close to a silver bullet as imaginable for winning a war that we “cannot afford to lose.” Add to that the trillions of dollars we’ll save in doing so, and it’s hard to envision a political party that would be against ending poverty right now. Poverty is a bi-partisan problem. The Brookings Institute found that in 2016, of the forty-eight million Americans living in poverty,

160 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. twenty-five million of our nation’s poor lived in districts represented by Republicans, while twenty-three million lived in districts represented by Democrats. Fans of either party should be disappointed with these results. Poverty is not an inevitability. We don’t need to have poverty in this country. By coming together and realizing that we’re throwing away trillions of dollars by not ending poverty, we can declare victory in this war and make a lot of money doing it. I hope the rich and poor, the left and right, can all see the clear benefit of this solution. Allow me to share some simple numbers to give you an idea of how wealth is distributed in this country. Americans are generous people, and I believe they want to see positive change. In 2019, American individuals, bequests, foundations, and corporations gave an estimated $450 billion to US charities. Of that, eight percent came from individuals, foundations gave fifteen percent, and corporations chipped in five percent. The money we collectively give as individuals is more than enough to provide the seed money grants. While the amount of money that gets donated to charity each year by the private sector is heartening, I stress it’s not the best way to end poverty. We need the federal government to provide the seed money in order to simplify the program and maximize the returns.31 But if we can’t get them to act soon enough, then giving directly to the poor, in the form of a grant, is a great start. The top point zero one percent (0.01%) of income-earning households in the US have over eleven percent of all wealth in America. 31 Rollouts of programs can be difficult. If we start with a single community, that’s fine, but it introduces new complexities. If everyone, in all states, receives the benefit at once, that limits the chance for market distortions. If only one state, town, city, zip code receives seed money grants, the risk of that state having an outsized economic burden with others moving to the area to receive the benefit are high. We see this already with homelessness in California. In a country where people can freely move from state to state, we need this to be a national program. When not everyone receives seed money, we must also be careful to protect the identity of those receiving the grants, so they’re not overwhelmed with requests to support others.

CHAPTER 11: THE SEED MONEY ACT — | 161 These are individuals earning at least $7.5 million a year in income. That’s approximately twelve thousand households earning more than twenty percent of all US income. But at these levels of wealth, it’s less about income and more about actual wealth. The US total amount of wealth is about $106 trillion. Eleven percent of that is $11.66 trillion. That’s $11.66 trillion being shared between only twelve thousand households. For these top income-earners, the $200 billion needed to end poverty in America represents a mere one point seven percent of their total wealth. The wealthiest people in our country—that top point zero one percent (0.01%) of income-earning households—don’t even know how much money they have to the nearest one or two percent. As oil tycoon Nelson Bunker Hunt said, “People who know how much they’re worth aren’t usually worth that much.” The bottom ten percent of Americans (about thirty-three million people) all have negative net worth. Meaning their liabilities are greater than their assets—in other words, these people owe more than they own. US foundations funded by the wealthy gave $75 billion 2019. These tax-exempt institutions are required by law to give away five percent of their endowments each year. American foundations currently have over $1 trillion in assets. With endowments well into the billions of dollars, many individual foundations could commit to providing seed money grants, guaranteed over a lifetime, to the poorest American households. For this to work, it’s essential that: • The grants at least bring the family to the federal poverty guidelines. Best case, provide seed money grants at the federal poverty guidelines to the poorest families in the country, ignoring what little income they currently receive. • The foundations commit to fund households for a lifetime. We want to incentivize people to further raise themselves away from the poverty line. We can’t take away the benefit if that person is successful. Instead, allow volunteers to donate some of their seed money to more needy families if they so choose.32 32 This is another key reason why the federal government is best suited to

162 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. • The focus is on communities with concentrated extreme poverty. By alleviating poverty clusters, we can reap community-level benefits. • There are no stipulations. We can ask people to share stories of how the grants have changed their lives, but we shouldn’t try to control or monitor how they spend the money. There shouldn’t be any way to lose the benefit.33 Individuals with more modest incomes can contribute as well. Any group of individuals can come together in-person or via online platforms to collectively commit to providing a poor household with seed money grants meeting the above criteria. The group can be whatever size that is necessary and any individual contribution counts. Why We Haven’t Already Eliminated Poverty If the social and financial benefits are so obvious, why haven’t we done it already? Let me try to explain. Poverty is a concept that evolves as a society economically and technologically progresses. In a hunter-gatherer society where any trading is done through bartering, there’s limited opportunity for relative poverty. Most food items would be shared, as there are limits to what the group can preserve and bring along with them. Everyone, more or less, eats together. Shelter would remain rudimentary as people roam. Clothing would be kept simple as people need to travel lightly. Transportation would consist primarily of walking (domesticated animals would be introduced later as the society evolved). For extreme inequality to emerge, a society must implement any seed money program. They have the ability to tax income. We as individuals cannot. As an individual earns income, the federal government can tax that individual sufficiently to offset the cost of the seed money program for those above the poverty line, while avoiding a regressive tax scheme. This is the best way to avoid the welfare trap, while keeping the cost of the Seed Money Act at a manageable amount. 33 If foundations are looking for an interesting way to evaluate the effectiveness of the program, I would recommend comparing the grants within the seed money program to the cost of giving in-kind contributions, including the overhead costs of both approaches.

CHAPTER 11: THE SEED MONEY ACT — | 163 progress to an agrarian form. For most of human history, there weren’t many of us, and our population density was low, so providing shelter for everyone was simpler. Once settled into an agrarian society, humans suddenly had more food, but it was of much lower quality and less variety than in their hunter- gatherer days. People began to specialize their skills, and eventually, not everyone had the time or ability to hunt, gather, or make their own clothing. Add in the ability to store food (e.g., grain), and we have the ideal scenario to create poverty. Some kind of economic system is necessary to determine who gets what goods in a specialized economy. If some people aren’t regularly distributed sufficient food or clothing, they’ll die or live in constant trauma. The rest of the people within the society, however, will survive. This is income disparity. During the first few millennia of human agrarian society, we hadn’t mastered farming as we have today. Food, therefore, was a scarce good at times, and it had to be divided by some system of distribution. Those who didn’t get food were, by definition, the poor. Crop yields were unpredictable and horrible famines occurred. Sometimes famines wiped out everyone, but usually it only wiped out the poor. The poor didn’t tend to take death by starvation lightly, so hunger was often a precursor to war and revolution. Ancient societies understood the risks of having poverty amongst them and created laws to rectify this social imbalance. The giving of alms is a central tenet of several world religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. In Christianity, a tithe, meaning a tenth, is to be given to the church as an offering, either as agriculture or coin. The church is then tasked with distributing that wealth back to the poorest members of society. In Islam, after prayer, the second most important of the five pillars is the Zakat. The Zakat is a mandatory two and a half percent annual donation to the poor based on disposable income. Throughout human history, we’ve worked to redistribute wealth at varying levels. Social safety nets are nothing new.

164 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. When the major item an individual needed to overcome poverty was food, it made sense to give that person a choice of food. In Judaism, Pe’ah refers to the corner of a field that must be left unharvested so the poor could come and collect their share—the poor were free to collect what they needed. Over time, people improved their ability to produce food. We now waste a third of all food produced for human consumption or one point three billion tonnes. Food is no longer a scarce resource. We have plenty. This is key to answering the question, “Why haven’t we done this before?” We haven’t always had enough food to go around, but we do now and have for quite some time. We also have plenty of space and empty homes we can improve, especially when, through modern technology, workers don’t necessarily need to live where they work. In the US, we produce eighty pounds of clothing waste per person each year. We’re even wasteful with transport, grossly underutilizing and under-funding public transportation and other cheap, clean ways to get around. We’re no longer struggling to produce enough essential goods for everyone, yet there are still Americans who don’t have enough food, clothing, shelter, or transportation because we don’t share. Our problem is resource distribution, and we’ve seen it’s very easy to address. As digitally managed money becomes more prominent in a society, more wealth disparity can emerge. There’s a limit to how much grain one person can store. There’s also a limit to how much physical gold or coins someone can safely protect and move around. But there’s no limit to how much wealth an individual can accumulate in a modern economy that largely transacts through digital payments and paper currency. If we add to that the modern complexities of urbanization and the associated importance of transportation, most of the population having moved on from farming, and few people specializing in making their own clothing, the modern world is ripe for poverty. This may seem somewhat paradoxical, given the extreme wealth advantages modern society has over a hunter-gatherer society, but it’s distribution that matters with poverty. In the defense of modern humanity, many strong systems of poverty

CHAPTER 11: THE SEED MONEY ACT — | 165 alleviation have been proposed and implemented. Sir Thomas More, Thomas Paine, Milton Friedman, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have all recommended some form of direct wealth redistribution. In the US, we already have components of both a negative income tax and unconditional cash transfer.34 In America, direct cash transfer programs now make up forty-three percent of the $380 billion we spend on our social safety net programs. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a negative tax. TANF is a temporary direct cash transfer to the poor. Supplemental Security Income (SSI) is a partial income paid to low-income individuals who are disabled, blind, or senior citizens.35 It took decades of legislation to install these programs and bring our social safety net spending to a point where the US society is ready for the Seed Money Act. We can do better and eliminate poverty altogether without a single government program. Could we have eliminated poverty in the past? I believe so, but given the progress we’ve made as a society, it’s never been easier or more profitable to end poverty than it is now. We’ve fully moved to a monetized economy, and we must accept that money is how we transact. This is a good and efficient thing. In a modern economy, money is the most effective and obvious way to eliminate poverty. We already calculate what we believe it costs to have all the basic essentials in this country. We already send Americans direct checks, and even direct deposits into their banks or phones. We have the markets to buy whatever we need. We even have the internet to allow people to see what rent prices are in real-time all over the country. We’re finally technologically advanced enough to be able to easily implement the Seed Money Act to completely eradicate poverty in the US. 34 A negative income tax is one that directly transfers taxes taken from the wealthier members of society and gives to the poorer members of society. The poorest pay no taxes and receive an extra income benefit from the government at the end of the year. This type of wealth transfer happens retroactively. 35 SSI does count as income in the US. Therefore, our calculations on the cost to eliminate poverty assume that SSI remains. SSI spending would not be available to reduce the overall cost of the Seed Money Act.

166 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. Given our massive spending on inefficiently solving this problem, and the well-proven economic consequences of poverty, we’ll actually make trillions of dollars in the first decade of this transition alone. We just need to take that final mental leap and realize that seed money is astronomically cheaper to provide than our current patchwork of bureaucratic programs. This is not charity. It is common sense. Who Decides the Needs of the Poor? For many, the concept of seed money can still feel radical. Some Americans may ask, “Will people actually spend their money on what they need?” To answer this question, we first must ask ourselves, who knows what the poor need? We can use the federal poverty guidelines to approximate how much an essential basket of goods would cost, but as we all know as shoppers, everyone has their own tastes. Some would rather have a bigger home and eat cheaply. Some would rather buy used clothing and spend their extra money to dine out at a restaurant on occasion. All of this is fine. We must ask ourselves, if the poor can’t decide what they need, then who can? People will absolutely make some purchases they’ll regret. Who hasn’t? If we’re worried about our abilities to responsibly spend seed money grants, then we might want to include personal finance and household management courses in our school curricula. Having many wealthy friends and colleagues and being an asset manager for many ultra-high-net-worth clients, I can assure you we all need help managing our finances. We all make “‘dumb’ purchases sometimes, spend more than we make, fail to understand the risks associated with debt, and make poor investments. We could all benefit from learning how to better manage our money, not just the poor. Others may ask, “Won’t everyone stop working if they get seed money grants?” They should also ask themselves, or ask any average American, “Do you want to live at the poverty line?” Most United States households already earn well above the federal poverty guidelines. Do you see people

CHAPTER 11: THE SEED MONEY ACT — | 167 retiring from their careers once they hit that milestone? No. Human wants are infinite, and we live in a society that has access to a seemingly endless choice of goods and services—if you have the money. Beyond money, people actually like to work, and they want meaning in their lives. Contrary to popular belief, the poor don’t want to sit around and do nothing their entire lives. We all have wants beyond the essentials. We all want to feel needed and provide a useful service to society. Finally, we must call out the concerns around the Seed Money Act. My main concerns about seed money are moral and social ones, many of which are feelings of unease rather than clear lines of argument. And even the clear lines of argument are concerns about things which might go wrong rather than strong reasons against its implementation. • This may go over budget. If people suddenly don’t have to work for a minimum wage to live, wouldn’t the cost of their labor rise and be passed on to people across the board, thereby lifting the cost of basic necessities and the cost to eradicate poverty? • How do we improve on the federal poverty guidelines so they’re actually representative of what’s truly needed to stay out of poverty? • Should we include the cost of the internet and a cell phone? I don’t have the answers here. We’ll have to find them together as a society. The way I see it, we’ve already seen the government spending trillions of dollars on infrastructure and bailing out corporations. Why not just spend $200 billion to completely end poverty? We don’t need to do any more studies to figure this out. I’ve written several academic papers about poverty and have read hundreds of others. Whatever study you look at, when you consider the outcomes, whether they’re related to health, incarceration, or mental health, if you’re poor, you’re going to have a much worse outcome. And if we already know being poor leads to really crappy outcomes, why do

168 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. we need to do any more research or field testing or put any more ‘time’ into figuring out that giving people money changes their outcomes for the better? If there’s a silver lining to be found amidst the fallout of the global COVID pandemic, it’s that we’ve learned we don’t have to accept the status quo. The pandemic has both highlighted and exacerbated many social justice issues that still exist in our country, but it’s also presented us with an opportunity to get involved in creating a more compassionate and egalitarian society. We live in such an incredible country full of so much possibility. What I’m asking is that we explore the possibility of ‘now.’ We have an opportunity to end poverty and save our economy trillions of dollars. We have nothing to lose and so much to gain. Let’s not be ruled by fear, greed, hatred, or prejudice any longer. The time to do this is now.

| 169 Part 4

| 171 CHAPTER 12: LACK OF UNDERSTANDING LEADING US AWAY FROM UNITY When I first introduce my proposal for The Seed Money Act, there are often questions. I’ve compiled a list of the most frequently asked questions, as well as the responses for each below. What is the Seed Money Act? The Seed Money Act is a socially and fiscally responsible way to abolish poverty and restore balance to the federal budget. Once it becomes law, the Act will be an unconditional, permanent, regular grant to every American household, set to an amount that’s equal to the federal poverty guidelines. For example, for a single-person US household in 2020, this amount would be just over $1,000 per month. For our repayment scheme, we ensure that everyone has repaid their seed money grants by the time their earned income reaches a set threshold through a tax deducted from their wages.

172 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. How did you come up with the amount of $200 billion? The US census calculates how many households are below the poverty line and by how much. If we multiply the total number of households below the poverty line by the average deficit per family, the cost of getting everyone in America to the poverty line works out to approximately $155 billion. The number has been rounded up to $200 billion to lessen the marginal tax rate on the poor. That number, of course, increases if we want to lessen the marginal tax rate, increase the seed grant amount, etc. Can we afford to invest $200 billion a year to end poverty and make trillions? The real question is, can we afford not to? Ending poverty requires a redistribution of a trivial amount of existing money, but it’ll require a shift in the way wealth is divided in this country. The Seed Money Act won’t adversely affect middle- or upper-income households, and it’s not going to change the amount of the average household income. The goal of The Seed Money Act is to give people enough money so they’re not in poverty. Ninety million people in the US deal with poverty over a five-year window. For a single-person household this money would mean $13,000 a year. Consider that the richest twelve thousand households in America have $11.6 trillion in assets. A $200 billion transfer doesn’t change their lives at all. Where specifically will the $200 billion in seed money come from? There are several approaches we can take. One approach would be a minor tax adjustment on the highest income earners. That’s the simplest, and most logical approach. If we didn’t want to tax the rich, another approach would be to reduce spending on a variety of other government projects to offset the costs. The US federal budget in 2020 was $4.79 trillion, so finding $200 billion in savings requires a reduction of other program spending of just four point two percent. A last approach would

CHAPTER 12: LACK OF UNDERSTANDING LEADING US AWAY FROM UNITY | 173 be to take half of the $400 billion we already spend on welfare, food stamps, and unemployment programs and use that to fund the $200 billion in seed money. That’s the least desirable approach, as it reduces the impact of the Seed Money Act by rapidly eliminating our current social welfare system. A likely political outcome is a combination of these approaches. If poverty were such an easy thing to eradicate, why hasn’t it been done already? In Part 2, I explain how the concept of poverty evolves as a society progresses economically and technologically. In the US, direct cash transfer programs now make up forty-three percent of the $380 billion we spend on our social safety net programs. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a negative tax. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) is a temporary direct cash transfer to the poor. Supplemental Security Income (SSI) is a partial income paid to low-income individuals who are disabled, blind or senior citizens. It took decades of legislation to install these programs and bring our social safety net spending to a point where American society is ready for the Seed Money Act, but we can do better and eliminate poverty altogether without a single government program. We are also finally technologically advanced enough to be able to easily implement the Act to completely eradicate poverty in the US. Could we have eliminated poverty in the past? I believe so, but given the progress we’ve made as a society, it’s never been easier or more profitable to end poverty than it is now. What makes this plan so different from others suggested in the past? Many current and past proposals share similarities with the Seed Money Act. I avoid referring to these other plans, and the individuals proposing them, not out of disrespect or arrogance, but so the Seed Money Act can be judged on its own merits.

174 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. Won’t government bureaucracy get in the way? The US government proved it could quickly step up to provide economic stimulus during the coronavirus pandemic. As of March 7th, 2021, Congress had approved $5.82 trillion in total for stimulus. If the cost of the Seed Money Act is $200 billion a year, we could’ve covered the cost of eliminating poverty for nearly thirty years with the current COVID-19 stimulus appropriations. Because the seed money would be given in the form of a grant, it means there’d be no strings attached, so there’d be no need for government oversight. Since every American household would receive this money, there’d be no additional burden placed on the government to decide who qualifies for the money. What happens to all the social programs already in place to support poor people? Do they just go away? The price tag to eliminate poverty, given the expected returns, is so very low, we don’t need to cut current programs. However, it would be irresponsible not to engage with the incredible savings opportunities if we were to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our social welfare programs by using seed money to eliminate poverty directly. Isn’t poverty a mindset? How do you change somebody’s mindset? We currently have generous welfare programs that provide many in- kind donations to the poor (i.e., we give things, not money). These services are given and restricted on an income basis. As a person makes more money, they lose services. These kinds of welfare programs discourage the poor from earning more when they’re close to the program income cut-offs. This is a waste of money and counterproductive. The Seed Money Act eliminates the welfare trap. Everyone receives seed money grants regardless of how much they earn. Once an individual earns income, they’re taxed on that income, but the seed money grant

CHAPTER 12: LACK OF UNDERSTANDING LEADING US AWAY FROM UNITY | 175 remains the same. For every extra dollar you earn, you’ll be taxed, but you’ll always make more than you would have if your income didn’t increase. Everyone would be motivated to focus on what they can gain through work rather than what they stood to lose from making more income. We don’t want to keep the poor impoverished. That costs us too much in terms of dollars and social instability. We want poorer people to earn more and pay taxes like the rest of us. The Seed Money Act makes sure we’re all aligned toward this goal. If you give poor people money, will they know what to do with it? It’s safe to say that, if you give seed money to someone unable to provide for their basic needs, they’ll use the money to address those needs. For many, the concept of seed money can feel radical. To answer this question, we first must ask ourselves, who knows what the poor need? We can use the federal poverty guidelines to approximate how much an essential basket of goods would cost, but as we all know as shoppers, everyone has their own tastes. Some would rather have a bigger home and eat cheaply. Some would rather buy used clothing and spend their extra money to dine out at a restaurant on occasion. All of this is fine. We must ask ourselves, if the poor can’t decide what they need, then who can? People will absolutely make some purchases they’ll regret. Who hasn’t? If we’re worried about our abilities to responsibly spend seed money grants, then we might want to include personal finance and household management courses in our school curricula. We all make ‘dumb’ purchases sometimes, spend more than we make, fail to understand the risks associated with debt, and make poor investments. We could all benefit from learning how to better manage our money, not just the poor. If everyone has seed money, does that become the new poor? There are two types of poverty: relative and absolute. Relative

176 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. poverty means having less than someone else. Absolute poverty means lacking basic human needs like food, clothing and shelter. The Seed Money Act eliminates absolute poverty, which means there’ll be no more homelessness, hunger, or crippling poverty. Relative poverty will still exist. People will still have to compete, but it’ll be for things they want rather than things they need, which creates a better, more inclusive model of capitalism. Why invest in poor people? Aren’t they poor because they’re lazy? We have this misperception that says poor people are lazy. The reality is, being poor usually means working two or three different jobs to try and make enough for a forty-hour work week. And that’s usually in jobs that don’t have benefits. When it comes to lifting people up, there’s this false narrative that tells us when we help poor people it’s a handout, but when we help big business through tax breaks, etc. it helps stimulate jobs. The fact is, we’re serving corporations over people across this country. If we flipped this around, and started investing in our people instead of corporations, the corporations would still benefit because they’d have more customers and a workforce that’s educated, healthy, and able to contribute in a meaningful way. Won’t poor people waste their seed money on drugs and alcohol? When someone’s living on the street and living on $10 a day, there’s no incentive to stay sober. They choose to buy something that’ll numb their pain and help them escape from the reality of their situation. Data collected from transfer payment pilot studies indicate that the use of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs for those dealing with extreme poverty drops when they receive regular cash payments. Simply put, the money they receive gives them more options and they no longer seek coping mechanisms to help them deal with the devastation that comes with extreme poverty. With enough money, they can get off the streets, afford

CHAPTER 12: LACK OF UNDERSTANDING LEADING US AWAY FROM UNITY | 177 rent, have a hot shower, and buy food for themselves. These are basic needs they can now afford. If you give poor people money, where’s the incentive for them to help themselves? The average American doesn’t want to live at the poverty line. Poor people are no different from those living well above the poverty line. Human wants are infinite, and we live in a society with a seemingly endless choice of goods and services, if you have the money. Beyond money, most people like to work, and they want meaning in their lives. Contrary to popular belief, the poor don’t want to sit around and do nothing their entire lives. We all have wants beyond the essentials. We all want to feel needed and provide a useful service to society. Won’t your plan hurt the middle class? The Seed Money Act finally provides middle-class Americans with a social safety net. Right now, middle-class families are on their own when they fall upon hard times. Most citizens are, unfortunately, a missed paycheck away from falling into poverty themselves. This plan ensures absolutely no one ever falls to homelessness and hunger. When something catastrophic happens to a middle-class family, they don’t need to stand in embarrassing lines or fill out confusing forms. Their seed money grants are automatic and guaranteed, just as a true safety net should be. That’s good for everyone in an increasingly demanding and expensive world. Poverty must be good for someone, right? If having poverty in a capitalist society was economically beneficial,, then the poorest countries in the world would have the best economic performance. But that’s not how capitalism works. Wealthy countries have such a competitive advantage because their citizens aren’t focused on survival and worrying about things like getting shot at or starving

178 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. to death. They’re free to think about building businesses, innovation, human capital, and solving problems. Poverty is a drag on the entire society. No really, who benefits from poverty? The only people who really benefit from poverty are a small subset of businesses we’re subsidizing as taxpayers. These include slum lords and payday lenders. Most successful businesses—whether it’s a Costco or Starbucks, etc.—invest in their employees. They understand it’s much better to have a workforce that’s excited to come to work, and recognize it’s almost impossible to be a productive member of society if their employees are starving or sleeping on the street. Is this communism, socialism, or capitalism? The Seed Money Act will simply increase access to the production that exists and is controlled by the marketplace. That’s about as capitalist as you can be. There’s much confusion around the terms communism, socialism, and capitalism. So much so, I often find them to be useless terms in conversation. To address these questions, I first like to share how I define these ideas. Capitalism is a system of economic production where private citizens can own capital and deploy capital. In reality, no purely capitalistic society exists. Every national government owns at least some of the natural resources and capital within that country. Most, including the United States, have a central bank that’s the largest asset holder in the nation. Socialism is a much broader political, social, and economic idea where the private pursuit of wealth isn’t the primary aim of society. In socialist theory, the national government is often viewed as the appropriate counter to the shortcomings of capitalism, the most important being wealth inequalities and the associated poverty. Every country in the world has some socialist programs, including the United States. Socialist programs run by the state include public schools, roads, hospitals, farm

CHAPTER 12: LACK OF UNDERSTANDING LEADING US AWAY FROM UNITY | 179 subsidies, government provided childcare, health insurance, government backed and subsidized mortgages, government-run utilities, indoor plumbing, and more. Communism is an idea that doesn’t exist in reality. In a state of communism, all production would be owned by the workers, and the need for any government would therefore disappear. Decisions would be made by people directly, and all goods would be shared based on needs. Some argue communism is nothing more than a utopian dream that runs counter to human nature. Proponents believe communism is the economic goal of society, something to strive for regardless of whether a truly communist society is achievable. No country has come close to implementing communism in this sense, but several have made it their stated goal. I don’t believe the countries with the stated goals of achieving communism have gotten any closer to building such a society than those claiming to be purely capitalist and free-market driven societies. When most people in the United States think of communism, they think of China and the former Soviet Republic. Both countries initially had systems of nearly complete state-ownership of capital. The Soviet Republic collapsed, and modern Russia is a capitalist country with social programs no different than America and most of the world. China has shifted ownership of much of its capital to private citizens and is economically quite similar to most modern economies in having a mix of state- and privately-owned businesses (though China remains more tilted towards state-owned businesses than the United States). The world’s most financially successful companies are a mix of state- and privately-owned enterprises. All of them significantly benefit from state welfare in one form or another. The mainstream debate around communism, socialism, and capitalism is largely void of any practical understanding of our current global economic systems. We must realize that the primary act of government is to redistribute resources. Pay close attention to how and to whom those resources are being distributed. The biggest welfare recipients tend to be the wealthiest citizens.

180 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. I thought poor people were mostly criminals. Are we helping criminals? When someone is living in extreme poverty, the urge to steal can be compelling. Even a few dollars can make a big difference for the hungry. But people don’t have to commit crime to survive when their basic needs are met through seed money. An individual attempting to re-enter society after being incarcerated doesn’t need to return to a life of crime to sustain themselves if they’re receiving grants sufficient to cover their costs for shelter, clothing, food, and transportation. Of course, there will still be crime, but we can eliminate crime that occurs from the desperation of poverty. So how do we make The Seed Money Act a reality? When a proposal such as the Seed Money Act is developed, the concept must be written in the form of a draft bill. Once the bill has been drafted, it must be sponsored by a member of Congress to be formally presented to the House of Representatives and the Senate for debate and vote. Representatives of Congress typically sponsor and vote for bills they believe are important to their constituents. We can help make this happen by telling our Congressional representatives that the Seed Money Act is important to us. Is this a Republican or Democrat party idea? Poverty is a bi-partisan problem. The Brookings Institute found that in 2016, of the forty-seven point eight million Americans living in poverty, twenty-five point one million of our nation’s poor lived in districts represented by Republicans, while twenty-two point seven million lived in districts represented by Democrats. Fans of either party should be disappointed with these results. Poverty isn’t an inevitability. We don’t have to have poverty in this country. By coming together and realizing that we’re throwing away trillions of dollars

CHAPTER 12: LACK OF UNDERSTANDING LEADING US AWAY FROM UNITY | 181 by not ending poverty, we can declare victory in this war, and make a lot of money doing it. The Seed Money Act sounds great in theory, but do you have evidence that suggests it will work in real life? Another way to phrase this question is, “Does sharing money work?” Of course it does. As the wealthiest country the world has ever seen, we have enough to make sure everyone can eat and have a roof over their heads. It’s strictly a matter of sharing the wealth that already exists. In doing so, we’ll lift the poorest members of society off the ground and allow them to become productive members of society as well, creating even more wealth overall. There are numerous examples of how unconditional cash transfer programs like these have drastically improved poverty in efficient ways. The best example in the United States is the Earned Income Tax Credit program, one of the greatest poverty-reducing programs we’ve ever implemented. When people have absolutely nothing, giving them money is extremely helpful. When I see a homeless person begging for money, I’m hesitant to give them cash. Shouldn’t I just buy them a coffee or sandwich instead? If you want to give someone a hand up instead of a handout, consider giving them cash. Despite not knowing their circumstances, we need to respect their autonomy as adults. Giving money is a way of saying, “Here, solve your problems,” rather than deciding what you think they need. When a person is in need, they’ll take what they can get, even if it’s just a cup of coffee or a sandwich. But we give them a greater sense of dignity when we give them money. It allows them the freedom to make decisions for themselves and is the ultimate sign of respect.

182 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. How will the Seed Money Act influence arts and culture in our country? Art can influence change in the world. Artists of all kinds, including those in the visual arts, musicians, performing artists, and writers communicate their ideas through their art. But artists are typically paid by the project, contract, or gig. These people are often forced to supplement their income to get by, especially when they’re starting out. Sometimes talented would-be artists choose not to pursue their passion for this reason. With seed money, these professionals will be able to pursue their craft without fear of poverty.

| 183 FINAL THOUGHTS Now that you have a clear understanding of the plan, I ask you join me in recommending that Congress grant seed money to all US households equal to the federal poverty guidelines each year as the first step in the budgeting process. Once we pass this bill to end poverty, there’ll be lifeblood in all our communities again, and they’ll begin to shine. I have no doubt we’ll end poverty worldwide and make trillions of dollars doing it. I ask you consider doing the following five things to help us end poverty:

1. Use social media! Knowledge is everything. Take what you’ve learned in this book and share it with your friends and family. We need to make ending poverty a worldwide topic of discussion. Please follow End Poverty. Make Trillions. on social media and visit the website endpovertymaketrillions.com. Like, comment, and share your favorite content, or create your own content using #endpovertymaketrillions.
2. Write to Congress! Send your representative a letter or e-mail with the subject: “Let’s End Poverty. Make Trillions!” Let them know why you want everyone to have at least some opportunity. Share your experiences with poverty, and how a little money could change your life, or the lives of your loved ones.
3. Recommend this book to a friend! All the proceeds from this book will go towards investing in low-income communities and advocating for seed money.
4. Organize! If you’re a community leader, talk to the members of your organization about ending poverty, and how we can save trillions of dollars doing it. Together, our voices grow louder. Host events, canvas the neighborhood, reach out to local politicians and business leaders, march, protest, be seen and be heard!
5. Love! It all starts with love. See every human being and every creature on this planet. Whether we like it or not, we’re all in this

184 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. together. We’ll no longer ignore people sleeping on the street or crying out for help. Be the salt and the light of the earth. I truly thank you for caring enough about either ending poverty or making trillions of dollars for our country. Both are laudable causes. I’m a firm believer that debate sharpens ideas, and I welcome you to talk to your political and community leaders, as well as your friends and neighbors, about the ideas presented to you. Please feel free to send me a message with your views, whether in support of or against my proposal. For more information about the proposal, or to reach me, visit www.endpovertymaketrillions.com. I look forward to the discussions and am hopeful about the change we can make. We’ll never have a perfect society, but we can try. Let that be our purpose. End Poverty. Make Trillions.