John Markoff spoke with 2018-19 CASBS Fellow Kirsten Wysen about her work as a public policy analyst for King County, WA - which includes Seattle - and its “Communities of Opportunity” program. They discussed structural racism and debt in poor communities, and their relation to health.
King County's Communities of Opportunity program
Kirsten's article "The almighty credit score: It tracks the past, predicts the future, and maintains existing hierarchies"
San Francisco's Mission Asset Fund
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's report on payday loans
Betrayal Trauma Theory (a concept pioneered by 1989-90 & 2018-19 CASBS fellow Jennifer Freyd)
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
@casbsstanford on twitter
John Markoff: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. I'm John Markoff. Kirsten Wysen and I recently sat down for a conversation in the CASBS library. She's a public policy analyst working on the Communities of Opportunity program for Seattle and King County. We spoke about the problem of structural racism and the challenge of debt in poor communities and its relation to health. We also discussed predatory lending, equitability, and the consequences of treating humans as if they are disposable resources. I wanted to start by just asking what your path was to CASBS.
Kirsten Wysen: My dear friend Carrie Cheehawk was a policy fellow last year, and she is the chief policy advisor for King County Executive Dow Constantine. And then she recruited another King County person to apply as a policy fellow, and I have had the great fortune of working with her on several projects, I think over 15 years, and she said, "Why don't you apply to CASBS?" And I said, "Are you looking at me or the person behind me?" And she's like, "No, Kirsten, I'm looking at you." This is a new category—
John Markoff: this is not a new category. We've had policy fellows in the past. Is that correct? Yeah.
Kirsten Wysen: I believe that our esteemed director, Margaret Levy, has the intention that government use academic findings more often than they do, and that academics produce for government audiences more often than they do. So she has had a couple policy fellows. I work at the county level, King County, Seattle, Washington. The other policy fellow this year, Jacob Bowers, works for the federal government. Last year, I think similarly, there was a county and federal government person. Yeah, so we're the flavor, the spice for the academics.
John Markoff: So what kinds of resources were you able to tap into at CASBS that could inform your work down the line and actually inform your work here as well?
Kirsten Wysen: CASBS has just been completely eye-opening to me for at least a couple reasons. One is the idea of looking back at history. And another wonderful public health fellow this year, Sherman James, talked to me about public health as a field as being quite ahistorical. We really look at today's snapshot of the outcomes that we see, the health outcomes usually, and we rarely go back into history. So this place is just permeated with history and a way of thinking that is based on history. And so the idea that what we see right now in the relationship between debt and health and that, how that has been established based on what happened in the last 100 years, and then I got my mind totally blown by David Graeber and The First 5,000 Years of Debt, and that book looked at how humans relate to debt for 5,000 years, from 2,000 BC to now. You know, so we take what we see as a given, always has to be this way type feature, and to look at history, you can see that what we're encountering with predatory debt is the oldest trick in the book from finance. This is nothing new. This is indentured servitude. So that then we can also look back in history for solutions. And there have been a million solutions. We've solved this problem before.
John Markoff: I was going to ask you this later on, but one thing I took away from your memo was this notion of debt forgiveness historically. And I wanted to see if there are modern variants of that that you might be able to use in policy that are interesting. And is that something that's on the table, or is it something that you could put on the table as a—
Kirsten Wysen: Well, you know, Elizabeth Warren has debt forgiveness of student loans as a central part of her platform, and more of the Democratic candidates are adopting that platform. But there's no alternative. People cannot live the way they are right now in terms of being overindebted. And okay, so the other part of CASBS is this whole idea of how the human brain and the human psychology interacts with the financial system. So we see that behavioral economics was invented here with economists and psychologists working together, but to bring the human psychology of how we as dutiful humans embedded in our context, whether it's religious or moral or experiential, how we deal with debt, you know, in terms of shame and isolation and not advocating for ourselves to the point of not feeding our children or not taking care of ourselves or not continuing to have housing. I mean, I think debt and homelessness are so intertwined. So yeah.
John Markoff: Well, that brings up something I also was going to ask you further down the line, but I'll put it on the table now. Um, today's San Francisco Chronicle has a piece about a bill that will be introduced at the city level by two supervisors about an aggressive mental health program. To try to, you know, San Francisco attempted to deal with the homelessness problem for decades. It's gotten worse during that period. Clearly mental health is part of the equation. I don't, you know, the city already has a mental health for all kind of program. I'm not quite sure what they could do more, but is that something you've worked with in King County? First of all, is mental health a lever you can pull on as a government person to help with that relationship between debt and homelessness?
Kirsten Wysen: I am not a homelessness expert, so I'm offering you Kirsten Wyssen's view of the world. But in my research that does look at overindebtedness and debt forgiveness, one really cool policy option is to forgive debts where the interest is more than the principal, because that is kind of a clearly predatory And any debt can be structured in any way depending on the terms, the interest, and the length of the repayment, and what happens if you skip a payment. So student debt, if you skip a payment, your interest goes up. People do nothing and their level of what they owe just keeps climbing. So you easily get into this point where you've borrowed $3,000 but you owe $7,000. So that's a predatory debt and that doesn't help anybody's life or the system's life. So forgiving debt when the interest is more than the principal is an idea that is in David Graeber's book and has been done many times through history. And typically it's called the Jubilee where— and Occupy Wall Street had a lot of people protesting and advocating for debt relief and for a Jubilee. Farmers used to have it all figured out before the Middle Ages, where every 7 years they would just forgive all the farmers' debts so they can go out from being roaming nomads in the woods that are about to attack the castle, go back to their farm and start planting. But so I think what our roaming nomads are cloistered and clustered into our cities. They have nothing to lose. They're desperately, irrationally in debt, many of them. And this is a research question that could so easily be figured out.
John Markoff: Let me ask you about debt from the other side of the coin. We're talking a lot about the debtors. What do you know about the lenders?
Kirsten Wysen: You know, of course we want to demonize the lenders, but they're humans and they're people and they're operating in response to the incentives that they perceive. So if the lenders always want to increase their profit at all costs without a huge awareness of the consequences, we get into capitalist bubbles. We get into '08, we get into $145 trillion worth of debt where the, you know, it dwarfs the global economy.
John Markoff: Was that the 2008 number?
Kirsten Wysen: Yes.
John Markoff: Oh God. Makes our national debt seem nominal.
Kirsten Wysen: So, and also just to put these numbers, I mean, another great thing at CASBS is how to think about some of these hard abstract numbers. And issues. Like student debt right now is $1.5 trillion. Who even knows what $1.5 trillion is and means? And it was— I graduated college in 1986, and there was no federal student debt at that point. There were grants, there were Pell Grants, and there wasn't federal student debt started in the '90s. But $1.5 trillion is more than the gross domestic product of Australia. Australia is $1.2 trillion. There's a lot of people working hard in Australia on their economy. So there's, there's no restructuring, there's no tampering around the edges. There's only wholesale forgiveness if we want to have— my concern is health and the health of young people and the health of people of color and the health of marginalized people in our country. So if we want to have healthy, vibrant economies, we can't have this level of financialization, and nor can we actually address climate change. So the solutions are all the same, and I think will lead to a better life for young people than, than we've experienced, but we're on the wrong track.
John Markoff: So let me ask you about health and the health of populations, and let's talk about King County, for example, because That's your world. What are some of the metrics and how do they vary by, I guess, what, income class, gender? I mean, is that the word? What jumps out at you when you look at King County?
Kirsten Wysen: King County, 2 million people. We have excellent average health outcomes that are better than Nordic countries. Our average health outcomes in terms of— are rivaling Nordic countries' life expectancy, obesity, diabetes, asthma, car injuries— excellent on average. But once you start to disaggregate and peel it apart by income, education, and in particular race and ethnicity, we see 10-year gaps in life expectancy. We see the reflection of the structural racism in all of our policies, in our financial policies, in our land use policies, in our education policies.
John Markoff: Can we talk a little bit about structural racism? I mean, you know, pick it apart a little bit. When you say structural racism, and there's overt racism, there's sort of implicit racism, what's structural racism?
Kirsten Wysen: We think of structural racism, we think of four kinds of racism essentially, and you've named two of them. One is implicit bias, which is kind of hardwired into our brains for whatever reason, but we can overcome that by using our brain to prime ourselves toward a pause and a positive disposition toward people of whatever shade of color they are. Personal racism is kind of what we all don't like and think of as a mean person who just glances at a person of color and says, "I don't like you because I'm seeing—" you as an individual, and I'm individually gonna be mean to you or not inclusive. And two other kinds, one is organizational racism. So I see that in my own public health department, which, and we have a 10-year intention to address racism. As a country, for hundreds of years, we have been so socialized to understand and believe that white people are different and are superior from people of color, indigenous people. It takes a long time to get away from this, but within our organization, we see, whereas our whole 1,000-person staff reflects the demographics of the county, and maybe 20% Hispanic, 10% Black, 15% Asian, at the leadership levels, we're virtually all white. Public health is a funny field because it's not— it is female-dominated, so we have a lot of white women in our leadership and management, and a handful of white men. So those are the three implicit personal organizational racism, but structural racism is so interesting to me as a policy analyst because it is the outcome of our policies and our systems. And I mean, rarely do we do this maliciously, but what we do is we— student funding, we wildly fund per kid schools in the Seattle area that are predominantly white at higher levels, if you take PTA and public funding, than we do with our low-income schools, which are highly segregated. We— the stupid things like South King County, which is where most people of color live because Seattle is becoming so expensive that people of color are being driven out of the city. If you want to build sidewalks and bicycle paths, our funding formula— because our region wants to have shovel-ready sidewalks and bicycle paths— so if you have architect— if a city has architectural plans to build that sidewalk and that bicycle path and the curb cuts, they get to the top of the funding list. So Redmond and Bellevue and Seattle always get their bike paths and their sidewalks built, their gorgeous mobile transit infrastructure. And down in Auburn and Federal Way, down toward Tacoma and around our airport in SeaTac, there is one person is the planning staff. They do not have a budget to hire an architect for a sidewalk that might be built someday if it's approved.
John Markoff: So are those areas less white?
Kirsten Wysen: These are where our people of color live. So there's no sidewalks and there's no bike paths and the parks. And so everything kind of weirdly conspires to provide more amenities and infrastructure to higher-income white people and deprive people of color with booming populations of basic necessities of living a healthy life.
John Markoff: Did you sit in on Arnie Milstein's lecture a couple weeks ago? The striking sort of data point that he shared was about sort of the most significant factor in long-term health outcome was education. It trumped everything else that was— I mean, maybe that's not a surprise at all, but it was really quite striking that, you know, get an education, get a PhD if you want to live a long life.
Kirsten Wysen: Absolutely. And we pour good money after bad into our medical care system, and we don't pour enough money into our education system.
John Markoff: Do you have this category of structural racism? Is there a way to measure it? Does the county look at it in a formal way or is it just on the agenda?
Kirsten Wysen: That is a great question. You know, some of these systems like the financial system and like structural racism and laws that, like even the sidewalk bike path, funding formula could be quantified, but I think we are at early days of how to measure the impact of policies and of financing systems. Okay, so one way to measure it is just what's sitting in front of us. In the Seattle area, we're talking about homelessness, 50% of homeless people in Seattle are Black. Okay, literally 6% of the population is Black. So I've had this amazing time, the luxury of time at CASBS rather than having 5 deadlines per day when I'm working at the county to say, why? Why? What? Where? When? How would we even end up in a place we hardly have any Black people? And we've got half of our homeless are Black, some powerful structural racist force is at work, which is how I got onto credit scores. And I was shocked, absolutely shocked, to see that 20% of American adults do not have a credit score. They don't have a low score. 5% have a low score. 20% have no score.
John Markoff: And is that because they just haven't entered into the, the structure, the system. They're outside the system, for they just live in this world that's detached from—
Kirsten Wysen: they do. But let's also take a close look at the system. This, this— another CASBS feature is how humans tend to overvalue a number as a rating, a form of rating. And we heard that physicians tend to overvalue what an AI system tells them as they diagnose patients. So I think all of us have kind of overbought into the idea of a credit score. 3 credit score companies— Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion— do not tell us how they derive their calculation, their number. I know what my number is. We all know what our numbers are, but it seems to be a reflection of whether we're white, because 28% of Black and Hispanic people are not in the system don't have a credit score, but only about 14% of white people don't have a credit score. And simple, simple things like counting payment of mortgage payment, that improves your credit score, but counting your rent payment does not. So that's a structure, and that has racist impacts.
John Markoff: Do you have any idea what the lineage of that idea is? Where did that, or that metric, why not?
Kirsten Wysen: The metric came, it's so sweet, from Baltimore grocers who were trying to figure out in the 1940s and '50s who to extend credit to. But Baltimore in, Baltimore today, but Baltimore in the 1940s and '50s was a very white superiority social structure.
John Markoff: You're saying this national credit score system that we have is rooted in the experience of one—
Kirsten Wysen: FICO, the Fair Isaac Corporation, came from these Baltimore grocers. Grocery credit score systems, and they are opaque. They are not transparent. Any kind of opaque system, I think it reflects the values of our culture. And I, I did a sneaky little analysis of the board of directors and the senior management of the 3 national credit rating agencies, and bless their heart, they're 96% white and male. They're 80% male. So I mean, it's not malice. I think it is blind spots. As I've learned about my own internal racism and how I've been socialized to think instinctively and incorrectly that white people are somehow superior to indigenous and black and people of color, I've had to understand how severe my blind spots are. Well, it suggests—
John Markoff: doesn't this suggest a policy tool? I mean, if you wanted to change things in a big way, you could just get the regulatory infrastructure of the US to take control of that metric, and you could do something like what we've done with— well, very controversially, apparently— done with the SAT scores by adding an oppression index or something like it, or, you know, giving people a score who don't have a score somehow just as part of a government— There's a million things you could do.
Kirsten Wysen: The solutions are fun to me.
John Markoff: Is that on the table anywhere?
Kirsten Wysen: One, so there's really no good reason that loans need to be based on credit scores. And that's kind of a fantasy that white superiority financial system has invented and somehow we have fallen for. Historically, loans have been based on character. So you could have lending circles. You can shift the power to a smaller local group character loans.
John Markoff: So what about some of the— are the microlending NGOs that have begun to emerge playing a role at all in the US? Have they showed up?
Kirsten Wysen: We have our own homegrown lending circles, and they're typically through our community development financial institutions. There's an amazing one in San Francisco, the Mission Asset Fund, that has created small circles of 12 people, more or less. Each person donates $100 or $1,000, and then once during that year you get $12,000 or $1,200, and they talk to each other and they meet and they help each other out and they get skills and they improve their accounting and their marketing. So they do it in— I read an amazing community development financial institution in Florida that has done character loans for so long that there are now 100 black entrepreneurs in their little chamber of commerce. It's absolutely doable.
John Markoff: So one of the things you said that you came across at CASBS is a term, a phrase that I do not know about, so I wanted to ask you to sort of walk us through it. Betrayal trauma theory. Was that something you learned about? It was basically a model that you learned about here that you can apply to to the stuff you're working on.
Kirsten Wysen: Tell us about it. Betrayal trauma theory, I think, is fascinating for its potential for future research and its potential to really understand how our human brains, which we've learned can be so easily hacked, but how our human brains respond to trauma. And Jennifer Freyd, Dr. Jennifer Freyd, is a psychologist at the University of Oregon She originated this theory in 1995, so extensive research has been done within the world of childhood trauma and particularly childhood sexual abuse. And through Betrayal Trauma Theory, you understand that a child, very young child, is so dependent on their parent that they would not survive if they left the parent. So there's a mental coping mechanism, which is to become blind to the trauma, which then the perpetrator can make good use of and continue this, you know, totally inappropriate damaging sexual violence. But where I think it's interesting, because I really bring a racial equity lens, and now I think a financial lens, you know, if you look at White Americans with a high school education and without a college education who are dependent, highly dependent on a story, a frame that if they work hard enough, they could be anything. And then being— taking out student loans, having unsustainable levels of student loans, and in particular Black women have the highest level of student loan. But they want to believe, they're dependent on this belief that that is the right thing to do. So now we have white people with a high school education being systematically predatory lent to, in addition to people of color, Black women, in addition to rural. These three groups are really the greatest recipients of these insupportable loans, but they have a belief that the system needs to work and that, I mean, their relatives have died in wars.
John Markoff: My framing sense is what you're talking about is what I think of as the American dream. It's this ideological notion that there's no obstacle preventing anybody who works hard from going far in our society, and that's a mechanism which, so these, the lending community basically exploits that because they know people are striving. And so a lot of this lending is to sort of try to bootstrap yourself up, but in fact they're bootstrapping their way down. That's, so there's a complicated, so have you tried to write about that? Is that in your paper? That's one of the focuses of your paper, that this ideologically sort of produced The predatory lending cycle?
Kirsten Wysen: That is the next paper that I want to write because it is a complicated intersection of structural racism because in '08, the predatory lending happened primarily to Black and Hispanic families. So there's something structurally racist, but those Black and Hispanic families responded by wanting the American dream and wanting financial security. Security of owning a home, but they received a predatory loan. So they were lied to. They could have— many of the lenders would have qualified for a fixed-rate 30-year mortgage, but the lenders didn't share that information. So then that intersects with this shaming, self-shaming and self-blaming of, "I got myself into this." But then what happens is we have this tragedy that is unfolding in front of us of indebtedness without the feedback system that is very clear to the rest of our society that we've got a big problem here because people are absorbing their own shame and blame with their debt. It is starting to come out and there's some interesting work through Debt Collective, which started with Occupy, where what if debtor were a proud name? What if we could all find solidarity in our status as a debtor. And what if we, you know, J. Paul Getty said, "If you owe the bank $10,000, the bank owns you." But if you owe the bank, students owe $1.5 trillion to the bank, students are starting to get a little bit of collective power. So if they all say, "We're not paying," the bank has got a very large problem. So some collective action on the part of debtors would be another way to just snap through some of these problems.
John Markoff: You talked about one example. Are there any— I mean, that was— is the Wall Street movement still alive? Occupy Wall Street?
Kirsten Wysen: I see online so many bright, optimistic groups of young people talking about a debtor collective and debtor as a way of organizing that perhaps has lost a little steam in the last couple years. So I think it was really vibrant and alive in the 2014, 2015, 2016. But you can— there's forums. If you look at Reddit, there's debtor groups on Facebook. I mean, people are— once you start to tell the story that why am I sitting here with $180,000 in student loans and I can't get a job. The media is starting to tell these stories. We see more news articles. Presidential candidates are starting to talk about debt forgiveness of student loans, free college, you know, so it's coming.
John Markoff: You've got this model that you're working with which involves individual psychology, stuff that goes back to early childhood, which is tied into sort of institutional and cultural things in America. In the middle of that, you have these sort of mechanisms like the last mortgage crisis which was facilitated by this commoditized form of loaning. Are there other CDOs that are lurking over the horizon that are, you know, sort of coming at society and are likely to create other crises?
Kirsten Wysen: I think that the financial system— and honestly, I am a public health analyst who works at Public Health Seattle-King County, so I'm not an economist. And my dearest hope is that if I could write down some of these conceptual connections, that researchers could test these theories. And Jennifer Freyd with Betrayal Trauma Theory has got a simple 10-question survey that she can use with people who have experienced trauma that could easily be modified to debtors. Have you— are you experiencing betrayal trauma? Are you blind to your perpetrator? So I think all of this is very rich fodder. I wish that there was a public health economist field and that public health and psychologists and economists could really tease all of these ideas that are just nothing more than surmises at this point. But the financial system, I see the financial system in its desire to have asset fact securities. So a student loan is an asset, a credit card is an asset, a mortgage is an asset. And a lot of this work comes from Saskia Sassen at Columbia University and her work on how the financial system expels people from the system. So whereas— and this is why I think the solutions are all the same— whereas we see the financial system and our economy in a dig-burn-dump mode where we dig resources, we burn them, and then we dump them, and then obviously that creates a climate crisis. Our financial system is also doing that to humans. We're digging, we're extracting our assets, we're stripping homes from people, and we tend to do it toward Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic people. We're stripping loans, people are going into default, and then we're burning it through these weird financial products that insure against default. We don't have to— if you look at David Graeber, you look at Islam, which doesn't allow interest as a concept, so Islamic people cannot take a loan. You look at the Bible, which says that usury is not permitted. There's, there's so many other ways to live on this planet that don't involve dig, burn, dump, whether it is natural resources or humans. But so I, as a health person, literally see for the first time in my career, and I never would have dreamt this in a million years, declining life expectancy in the United States of America. And we have Anne Case and Angus Deaton who say it really is white Americans with with only a high school degree who are driving this shortened life expectancy. The last time the United States had 4 years in a row of a shortened life expectancy was 1919 to 1918 with the flu epidemic and World War I. Something is not right. We are burning through our humans. We are extracting their assets, and they are our homeless in downtown San Francisco.
John Markoff: And if you're homeless, your life expectancy is 45 —last two decades, one of the new things in terms of financial systems and consumer finance in America is the internet. Do you see the internet playing a role in the relationship between debtors and lenders in a significant way? Has it changed the equation in any significant way? Given payday lenders a new way to reach a new market or—
Kirsten Wysen: What I've seen in the short run, because I got really obsessed with payday lending here at CASBS— there were no payday loans in the United States of America from about the '30s to the early '90s because state law prohibited usury, and you couldn't have an interest rate more than about 15%. In 1978, there was a Supreme Court decision that started to deregulate banks, and then in the '80s, the federal government really deregulated banks. So payday loans were— became legal, and they were exempted in 35 states, but not all states. Many states never allowed payday lenders in their state, and right now 17 states have seen enough drastic poverty and women who do not feed their children because they are trying to pay the interest on their loans. So what I do see, and I'm coming to the internet, is the internet right now is a vehicle that is spreading predatory, unsecured, short-term loans, typically called payday loans, and they're shapeshifters. So whereas Uh, before, if you borrowed $100 and you're paying $15 every 2 weeks, it's much to the payday lender's advantage if you never touch your principal. So $15 every 2 weeks on a loan of $100 is a 400% interest rate. A lot of low-income, church-going women are paying fees every 2 weeks to their payday loans. And that is just sucking resources from these neighborhoods where I have worked for 25 years, and I think I'm doing a great thing bringing $6 million in grants to low-income neighborhoods south of Seattle through Communities of Opportunity. But I'm now looking at payday loans that are sucking millions of dollars out of these neighborhoods. Personalize this.
John Markoff: What pulls someone to a payday loan? What— You know, what's the first step to getting into that cycle?
Kirsten Wysen: Step number 1 is not having a credit score. Right. Because you and I, when we go out for dinner, we swipe our card. When we need to buy tires, $400, we swipe our card. Think— just think of your life without a credit card. So you're living your life on a cash basis. Maybe you're doing prepaid debit cards if you want to look like you have a credit card. So, but you have to front everything. So who uses payday loans tend to be women, tend to be people earning between $20,000 and $40,000 per year, people of color. They're the people in my neighborhoods in White Center, south of Seattle, in SeaTac, in Kent, where I'm doing my grant work. And they have an unexpected expense. Their kid needs supplies for September for going back to school. They're, you know, it gets so intertwined. Their nephew needs to get bailed out of a DUI, court fees, any kind of unexpected. There has been wonderful research by the Pew Trusts of why people take out payday loans, but it tends to be basic needs. It tends to be meeting rent, tragically food, but unexpected expense, medical debt. People take out payday loans to pay medical debt.
John Markoff: I saw a recent report that got national exposure about the fragility of a large fraction of the American population. What percentage of the population couldn't satisfy a $400 unexpected expense? Isn't it some— 47%. Is that a real number? That's just so staggering.
Kirsten Wysen: Stunning. I think it's worse than that because I've— as I've looked at debt, I've started to look at the net worth of people of color and of low-income people in our country. And 22% of people in our country have a negative net worth. 22% of people in our country are in debt. So, and again, it's this dig, burn, dump where people are never going to get out of debt. They're just driving themselves to poor health and early death or crime or drugs. I mean, I heard a really amazing presentation here when Anne Case and Angus Deaton, economists from Princeton who have shown that lower-educated white people are really driving the decline in life expectancy. But they were introduced with this idea from Dante, which again, everything new is old, which is when there is no hope, we are only left with desire. So you get into this, you know, very short-term way of living, and you're homeless on the streets in San Francisco or Seattle. There have been some— a really exciting thing for me this year, and weirdly awesome luck, is the fact that in 2018, that was the first year that public health epidemiologists ever looked at the health impact of payday loans on people's health, and they found this clear connection. And it's, it's like being exposed to a virus. But if you are exposed to a payday loan, you have a measurable 38% decline in your rating of your own health. You're 38% more likely to experience poor health. Or if you're exposed to a payday loan you have higher blood pressure, more inflammation within your body, more obesity. So, so we really are starting to be able to empirically make this connection between predatory lending and human health. There's some great work happening down here in Alameda County's Public Health Department where pregnant women, who are the last people that you want stressed out about predatory loans, trying to improve credit scores for pregnant women. And community organizations can report to credit scores, here's a beautiful trend in rent payment, let's improve this woman's credit score. Targeted basic income rather than universal basic income, but you can do targeted basic income to women while they are pregnant. I mean, it's welfare, so, but anything, anything to do with the stress mechanism out of their life while they're trying to give birth, while they're pregnant during this critical transition in human life. But it's who has control over national credit rating agencies? They're non-governmental. But there are, as I said, Community Development Financial Institution, the Mission Asset Fund has, you know, if you shift power, to a group of a lending circle, there's also that empowerment and that self-determination that makes you feel more in control of your life and your social network's lives, and that is beneficial for health. So I think it's the being deprived of a sense of agency in an unfair way that crushes the human spirit.
John Markoff: I noticed in— I'm thinking about sort of fundamental inequality and what government, local government might be able to do to change it. In San Francisco, in terms of funding that mental health plan, the supervisors are talking about taxing the corporations which have a CEO that's paid more than 100 times more than their employees are paid. So that's a specific group of corporations. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out. I mean, I've seen how Jeff Bezos in Seattle has responded to to the notion that his corporation would be taxed. Are there any other levers that the county could— is exercising to control inequality? What do you do to deal with— you've got Microsoft and Amazon and Google's there, everybody's there in Seattle. How do you deal with the increasing inequality that's largely been driven by technology corporations?
Kirsten Wysen: It's a very interesting question what the levers are for a county, and I've worked at county, state, and federal levels of government, so each of these levels has different levers. Within the county, it's, I think, the bully pulpit, which is an effective lever, and centering ourselves on our values King County in 2010 passed a law, the Equity and Social Justice Ordinance, so that we as role models use an equity impact review analysis when we make budget decisions and when we start a new program. And we measure the demographics of our leadership versus our line staff. And we really try to establish a norm, and it is spreading, that structural racism is often invisible, and we all have blind spots. And if the county can become a role model and say, here is a dashboard of what we're measuring at the population level of who has housing, and practices like always disaggregating data by race and ethnicity so that we're aware we're measuring whether things are getting better or getting worse, and they're getting drastically worse by race and ethnicity. The Black family's wealth in our country is 1% of white families' wealth. Median white family's wealth is about $120,000 in our country. Median Black family's wealth is $1,700. It was never, it's never been at 1%. It was at 6 and 7% 10 years ago. So we've got to act fast. And, you know, again, if you can take this longer view, there have been times that have been objectively unfair to the population. In terms of how resources are distributed, and it doesn't last, you know, whether it's voting, regime change, religion taking on— I mean, to me, what I see is this idea of the response to climate, the climate crisis, and transitioning away from a dig-burn-dump economy based on carbon and fuels. If we can share jobs, if we can downsize, If we can stop buying everything from China, if we don't need packages delivered more quickly to our doors. But the trade-off is we get time. We get time with our loved ones, and we get time person-to-person, and we get time with our neighbors and with our churches and with our local organizations and with our gardens. And we're not commuting, and we're not spending, you know, 80 hours a week working 3 jobs. I mean, this is It's just, you know, people, young people are moving to other countries to dodge their student debt. But you go to places like Costa Rica, or you go to Bhutan with the National Happiness Index, and I've been really encouraged, the Well-Being Economy Alliance. Places outside of the United States, typically in Europe or Latin America, are well aware that there is more to life than our debt or our bank accounts. And Robert Kennedy said, "The gross domestic product measures everything except for what is important in life." I mean, it's not that hard, actually. And it's happening.
John Markoff: That might be a good point to end on. I think I saw you mentioned Bhutan and their Gross National Happiness Index. I think New Zealand is planning on going in that direction as well. So maybe there is some room for optimism beyond our borders.
Kirsten Wysen: I hope there is.
John Markoff: To learn more about the topics in this episode, check out the show notes. There you'll find links to works by our guests and relevant articles. Thanks for listening.