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Scott Galloway, the entrepreneur, teacher, and podcaster, has written a book that’s kind of an anti-book.

A portrait of America in 100 graphics, it tells the story of what Galloway sees as a nation in crisis, riven by inequality, economic decline, partisan anger and rising extremism.

In “Adrift,” Galloway’s numbers explain much of our politics, from the rise of the Tea Party and Donald Trump to the growing number of young people who espouse left-wing economic views or want to tear down the system altogether.

A man who speaks in the sound bites of an experienced TED speaker, Galloway chose the graphic format over pure text, he said in an interview, because “storytelling is the key to our species. That’s how we remember things.

Despite spending months piecing together grim data and building an alarming series of charts, Galloway said he came out of the exercise “optimistic” about America’s future.

“The problems are huge,” he said, “but I think the problems are of our own doing and can be solved.”

A crisis of inequality

Galloway identifies 1973 as the year economic inequality in America began to spin out of control.

This is when wages began to decouple from productivity: as the economy became more efficient, wages failed to keep pace, crowding out the middle and working classes.

Social scientists have studied this phenomenon for decades and offered multiple explanations. The rise of computing and automation. The decline of the unions. The Reagan Revolution.

Galloway doesn’t dispute any of this, but he attributes the wage productivity gap to a few fuzzier factors.

No. 1, he says, was that “we just decided the consumer is king.”

According to him, the shift from a manufacturing-driven to a consumer-driven economy has had the pernicious effect of reorienting America’s business sector around catering to disgruntled, legitimate customers.

He recalled how, as a child, his family took his broken television to the repair shop and paid the bill to fix it. This is no longer possible or even practical in most cases, as globalization and automation have driven the price of electronics so low that it usually makes more sense to just replace your flat panel display when it is broken-down.

Now, he says, “you expect a nice guy in a brown suit to pick it up and give you a new one, and a handwritten note of apology from customer service.”

To demonstrate the growing power of consumers, Galloway charts the number of goods transported annually by shipping containers, which has fallen from 102 million metric tons in 1980 to 1.83 billion metric tons from 2017.

Factor #2 is what Galloway calls “gross idolatry of ‘innovators’,” which has exacerbated economic inequality by heaping huge rewards on tech entrepreneurs, while hurting workers.

Time magazine – owned by Mark Benioff, the founder of customer service software company Salesforce – regularly features Silicon Valley titans on the cover of its annual “Person of the Year” issue, for example.

“Our new idols are ‘tech innovators’ and billionaires, because tech is the closest thing we have to a kind of divine mysticism,” Galloway said. “I have no idea how my iPhone works. I just know it’s amazing.

A particularly illuminating table in the book counts a start-up founder’s mentions in his S-1 filing, the federal document required to list on a stock exchange.

High? Adam Neumann, whose name appears 169 times in the 2019 prospectus of WeWork, the temporary office company that died just months after its IPO. Steve Jobs only appeared eight times in Apple’s papers in 1980.

Galloway contrasts the downward trajectory of America’s middle class unfavorably with that of China, where more than half a billion people have been lifted out of poverty in recent decades – “arguably one of the greatest achievements of the ‘humanity”.

As for the United States, Galloway rattled off statistics showing how much worse off 30-year-old men and women are in economic terms compared to their parents at the same age.

In a startling statistic from the book, Galloway found that “an American born in 1940 had a 92% chance of doing better than his parents.” Today, a millennial born in 1984 only has a one in two chance of surpassing their elders.

“The new American dream,” he concludes, “is to be born rich.”

The rise of girls and the fall of boys

Galloway is most concerned about the fate of young men, who he says “have fallen faster, relative to other groups, than any cohort in history.”

While American women and girls have risen, boys are “failing,” Galloway said. Seven out of 10 high school valedictorians are female, and they are much more likely to go on to college.

Boys, meanwhile, are twice as likely as girls to be suspended for the same offense, a discrepancy that makes the race worse. Black boys are five times more likely to be suspended than white boys, often leaving a permanent record that hurts their chances of getting into college.

At New York University, for example, where Galloway teaches marketing, he found that some schools in the university would have up to 70% women if they practiced no-identity admissions.

Because of this gaping societal imbalance, Galloway said, “we are producing far too many of the most dangerous people in the world. And he’s a broken, lonely young male.

The downward trajectory of young men poses a serious threat to the American political system, Galloway argues.

This is why, he says, Trumpism has taken such a hold on white men in particular. And that’s why extremist groups are almost always made up of angry young men, whether the country is Egypt, Sri Lanka or, increasingly, the United States.

“In the most violent and unstable societies in the world, they all have one thing in common,” he said. “They all have young men who don’t get attached to work, don’t get attached to school and don’t get attached to relationships. And when you combine that with Covid, when you combine that with the fact that men don’t develop biologically as quickly as girls, their prefrontal cortex develops later, they’re much more aggressive.

What to read

• Under Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, the number of Pennsylvania inmates serving life sentences who have been recommended for release has jumped. His opponent in the Senate, Dr. Mehmet Oz, seized this record. Trip Gabriel spent time with two formerly imprisoned brothers who now work for the Fetterman campaign.

• As a senator from Pennsylvania in 2019, Doug Mastriano, who is now running for governor, pushed a bill to limit abortion. He indicated that women who rape her should be treated as murderers, writes Katie Glueck.

• There may be no debates in the New York gubernatorial race if Governor Kathy Hochul and her challenger, Lee Zeldin, cannot agree on how many people to detain. Luis Ferré-Sadurní delves into “a now familiar rite of passage to the governor’s mansion in Albany: the debate about the debate.”

• After winning the Republican Senate primary in New Hampshire, Don Bolduc has reversed his claims that the 2020 election was stolen. But, writes Neil Vigdor, his recent comments on a QAnon-aligned podcast weren’t so straightforward.

Thank you for reading On Politics and for subscribing to The New York Times. — Blake

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