(2020-01-15) Chris Hughes Wants Another Chance

Dylan Matthews says Chris Hughes wants another chance. Hughes — worth around $400 million, according to Forbes — is aware of his role in building this culture. He also knows that he’s hardly the first rich business leader to turn apostate and critique the capitalist processes that enriched him. But he’s unique in an important sense: He’s the first founder of a major tech firm to call for that firm’s dismantling (Facebook).

Unlike his college roommates and Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg (still at the company’s helm) and Dustin Moskovitz (now CEO of Asana, which makes project management software), Hughes, 36, is out of the tech game entirely, having departed the company more than a decade ago.

Hughes has settled into a different niche, one that harks back to his long-ago role as Facebook’s house “empath.” He’s now a philanthropist, and a convener of other philanthropists and organizations. His full-time job, he says, is trying to craft a world “after neoliberalism” — one with a heavier hand of government and a smaller role for corporate power, one perhaps without Twitter monopolizing our sidewalks.

Hughes founded the Economic Security Project (ESP) with veteran activists Natalie Foster and Dorian Warren in 2016, and has increasingly focused on what they call an “anti-monopoly” agenda, encompassing traditional antitrust enforcement, offering “public options” on everything from banking to health care, and tighter regulation when firms can’t be broken up.

The agenda found its most public expression in May when Hughes in the New York Times called for the breakup of Facebook. In October, he and ESP went a step further: They announced a $10 million commitment from a variety of funders (Hughes included) to start an Anti-Monopoly Fund, which will invest in think tanks, researchers, and activists working on these issues

Hughes has emerged as a committed funder of a left-wing economic agenda, working with allies like Felicia Wong, president of the Roosevelt Institute, and Tom Perriello, the former Congress member who is now running US programs for the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations.

But Hughes and his team have had real successes. The Economic Security Project’s biggest initiative to date has been the “Cost of Living Refund,” an effort to dramatically expand the earned income tax credit and funnel more resources to low-income families. So far, the group and allied organizations have gotten legislation passed in California and Maine

Unlike Zuckerberg and Moskovitz, he graduated from Harvard on schedule in 2006. He left Facebook a year later, at age 23, to join Barack Obama’s 2008 primary campaign, where he helped launch My.BarackObama.com, an early candidate-focused social networking site and oft-cited example of the technological edge that enabled the Obama campaign to topple Hillary Clinton.

after a short period launching and running the startup Jumo (which sought to connect donors with charities and volunteering opportunities)

he’s in school again, getting his master’s in economics at the New School.

When I joined him for an evening class, the instructor, labor economist David Howell, made it clear that it would not be a traditional economics seminar.

*I visited during a week Hughes had chosen to present. The readings were on Speenhamland, a food aid program in 18th-century Britain whose track record has become a proxy battle about the effectiveness of welfare and cash assistance. It’s a debate of huge relevance to Hughes’s efforts to fund basic income programs.

“There’s a renewed movement today for a guaranteed income, and people continue to cite Speenhamland … as a confirmation of this view that humans are really just slothful and lazy,” he explained to his classmates.*

“The time has come to design, develop, and organize for a Basic Income,” Hughes declared in the headline of a 2016 Medium post announcing the formation of a new group to promote the idea

Eventually, ESP’s interest in basic income resulted in the funding of a large-scale pilot program in Stockton, California, championed by the city’s young mayor, Michael Tubbs. But the direct political work of the group has shifted from giving cash, no strings attached. Instead, Hughes wrote in his 2017 memoir, Fair Shot, he and his allies decided to work within the existing American model of giving cash primarily to people who work, to reduce poverty and protect middle-class incomes in case of emergency... working within the existing work-based welfare state. “The optimal way to structure a guaranteed income would be through an expansion and modernization of the Earned Income Tax Credit,”

The tax credit is a huge program, distributing some $70 billion in benefits per year to Americans, mostly families with kids, and a robust community of activists and experts has sprouted up around it with plans to expand and modernize it. At the top of the agenda, for years, have been efforts to distribute it more regularly (say, monthly or at least biannually) and to expand the program for childless adults, who currently get a paltry benefit.

ESP’s campaign for a “Cost of Living Refund” — basically an expanded version of the earned income tax credit — has enthusiastically embraced both those policies, particularly regular, visible payments instead of payouts as part of tax returns. In June, both California and Maine passed proposals that ESP classifies as Cost of Living Refund bills; Maine’s would nearly triple the state EITC and offer the option to receive monthly credits

ESP’s insistence on this specific idea rubs some other advocates the wrong way. For years, momentum in child poverty circles has been building for a policy called a child allowance, which would offer all or almost all families a set check per child (say, $300 per month for young kids, and $250 per month for older kids), with no strings attached or work requirements.

A couple of advocates for that policy expressed frustration to me that Hughes and ESP are putting so much energy and money behind a separate policy to help families with kids

Hughes and I were chatting about the reception to his proposal to break up Facebook... Hughes knows his arguments for taking monopolistic power seriously aren’t original. In his piece, he cited Barry Lynn, who has been sounding the alarm about corporate power for decades and was eventually forced out of the think tank New America as a consequence, as well as younger anti-monopoly legal scholars Lina Khan and Ganesh Sitaraman.

Hughes sees his work on the matter, including convening his $10 million Anti-Monopoly Fund — backed by the Hewlett Foundation, Omidyar Network, and Soros’s Open Society Foundations — as much broader than antitrust. (Omidyar Network is a partner on Vox’s Open Sourced project.)

“I come from the labor movement,” Dorian Warren, the ESP co-chair, says. “This thing had been gnawing at me: What is the other side of the equation in terms of worker power? It’s taking on corporate power in all of its manifestations.”

The Roosevelt Institute’s Felicia Wong, who relies on Hughes as a senior adviser as well as a funder, positions him and ESP as central in a broader effort to repudiate neoliberal economics — rejecting a focus on markets and privatization ahead of building government capacity — and craft an economic agenda that can be bolder and leftier than what the Obama administration achieved.

Roosevelt started to do this work with Hewlett and Omidyar around what an economic paradigm ‘beyond neoliberalism’ would look like,” Wong says. Hughes ate it up.