Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from my December 2024 conversation with Ben McAdams. Excerpts will be published serially in the lead-up to posting the full conversation. 

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Aiden Singh: How’d your time studying and working in New York City shape your politics? Did they evolve at all after arriving in the city? 

Ben McAdams: Yeah. I think they definitely did. 

In Utah as a young college student I was probably, socially pretty conservative and fiscally pretty liberal. 

And I think being exposed to people from all over the world and seeing different perspectives and enjoying being around people who were different than me, my politics evolved into being more socially inclusive. 

But I also found myself more inclined to be more fiscally conservative.

I worked for Davis Polk, a big New York law firm. And when I started practicing law, a lot of my work was with Latin American companies looking to raise capital internationally. So I did a lot of work in South America, in part because I had spoke Portuguese and lived in Brazil.

And when I was in Brazil I saw a lot of poverty and a lack of infrastructure. Most of the people that I knew in Brazil didn't have a telephone because you had to pay for the infrastructure of installing a phone line to your house which cost thousands of dollars at the time - nobody could afford that. And you couldn't get a job if it was impossible to be reached by telephone or schedule an interview. 

When I was working at Davis Polk, it was around the time of the dot-com boom. And we helped companies that were raising capital at the New York Stock Exchange and then investing that in rolling out cell towers across Brazil. And I'd go back to Brazil and see people who I knew when I was there that previously didn’t have telephone service - and now all of them had cell phones. And it didn't cost them thousands of dollars to get that cell phone. 

So technology and market investment had expanded opportunity to millions of people in Brazil who didn't have it previously. And that was lifting them up in a way that I think heavy-handed government never could. So that was a real eye opener for me to see the power of capitalism, with appropriate protections.

Between that legal experience and some of the classes I took in law school, I think I evolved to see the good that can be done by harnessing the power of markets and incentivizing them through appropriate guardrails to accomplish some of our social priorities. So I would say I became more of a believer in the power of markets to accomplish social and policy goals - with appropriate protections that I think government has a role in establishing.

It’s probably where my politics as a center-left moderate Democrat became crystalized. 

I see so much of our debate today arguing “government is bad and we need to abolish everything” or “government is the solution and it needs to come in and be the answer to everything”.

The answer is somewhere in between I think. There's a balance to be struck between enabling innovation and entrepreneurship to thrive and to attract the investment of private capital while also making sure that societal goals are achieved through that process. 

There's a role for government - but that role should be limited and thoughtful.

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