CNBC Make It celebrated America's 250th birthday by locking an 80-year-old former Labor Secretary in a room with a 26-year-old newsletter writer who makes TikToks about history. The result: a conversation about happiness and success that will definitely fix capitalism.
Robert Reich spent four years trying to raise the minimum wage in the Clinton administration. Kahlil Greene writes about the past for people who scroll. Together they achieved what centuries of political philosophy could not: absolutely nothing measurable.
The premise here is flawless. Take notable voices across age ranges, sit them down, and spark conversation. Not action. Not policy. Conversation. The country gets older by 250 years and younger people get to hear an octogenarian explain what went wrong while they nod and post about it later.
Greene creates content about history, which means he has already accepted that the past repeats and we learn nothing from it. Reich knows this too. He watched Wall Street gut the middle class for decades and wrote books about it. The books sold well. The middle class still got gutted.
CNBC positioned this as a dialogue about achieving happiness and success in America today, as if those concepts are available to people who need to read articles about achieving them. If you are happy and successful, you are not reading CNBC Make It. You are on a boat.
The conversation covered politics, protest, and capitalism. Three subjects that have inspired millions of words and zero solutions. Reich has been talking about economic inequality since before Greene was born. Greene will still be talking about it when he is 80. The Dow will be at 120,000. Your rent will cost more.
Retail traders saw this headline and thought maybe Reich would drop some insight they could trade on. He did not. He talked about systemic issues. They bought another meme stock and lost another paycheck.
Photo by Mike Newbry on Unsplash
Leave a Comment