In his 20s, Chris Hughes co-founded Facebook Inc., helped elect a U.S. president, and made almost half-a-billion dollars. Then he turned 30 and, as he freely admits, his lucky streak came to an abrupt, high-profile end after a disastrous attempt to turn around the New Republic magazine.
Hughes, 34, now devotes his time to evangelizing for higher taxes on the rich, such as himself. He's proposing that the government give a guaranteed income of $500 a month to every working American earning less than $50,000 a year, at a total cost of $290 billion a year. This is a staggering number, but Hughes points out that it equals half the U.S. defense budget and would combat the inequality that he argues is destabilizing the nation.
The idea is being trumpeted by the Economic Security Project, a major recipient of Hughes’ philanthropy. At the nonprofit’s office near New York’s Union Square, Hughes sat down to talk about his new book “Fair Shot”—part memoir, part policy argument—and the lessons he’s learned from both success and failure.
In your book, you admit: “I got lucky.”
I worked hard for three years, but the financial reward was wholly disproportionate from the work that I put in. I don’t think that there’s anything you can call that but a lucky break.
My case may be one of the more extreme. But a lot of people are getting very lucky because of the way our economy is structured. They’re working hard. They’re also getting very lucky. The janitor works hard to clean up their office at the end of the day. But because of the way that we structure the economy, the janitors haven’t gotten a raise in 40 years.
My point in using the word “luck” is to highlight the power of these macroeconomic forces that are creating these consistently massive windfalls for a small number of people, again and again—while everyone else is struggling to make ends meet.
Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and even Mark Zuckerberg have used this exact same language to talk about luck. It doesn’t get a lot of play when they use it, because they’re obviously all talented, ambitious, successful people. It’s a little easier to point to all the hard work that led to their financial reward.
What are you focused on right now?
What I’m doing all day is trying to make the case that income inequality is one of the greatest challenges of our time and that we have a moral obligation to eradicate poverty and restore opportunity to the middle class.
We talk about inequality—and the economy in general—in terms that make it seem like these are structural problems that we can’t do anything about. When in reality, we’ve created the rules of the road: the way the economy works now. The tax bill last year is one example of doubling down on trickle-down economics, which I think has been largely debunked and doesn’t work for middle-class and poor people but works very well for the top 1 percent and corporations.
You hear more and more wealthy people talk about inequality, including hedge fund managers such as Ray Dalio. What do you think is driving that—the 2016 election results?
Certainly, Trump’s election was a wake-up call to people on the left and the right that crazy ideas can very quickly enter the mainstream, and somebody like Trump can win the White House. There’s a sense that things are changing faster than people perhaps had realized.