 Is this thing on? All right. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Economic Policy Institute. My name is Pedro DeCosta. I'm the Director of Communications here. And it is my distinct honor to welcome Simon Johnson to speak here today about his this piece called The Quiet Coup in the Atlantic Magazine that some of you may be familiar with. And as someone who had been covering emerging markets as a reporter and was then transitioning to covering a sort of developed world crisis, I was really taken by his analysis, which was essentially that he used his experience as a former IMF chief economist in the insights that come with dealing with developing countries in that position to basically come to the conclusion that the US, while having in previous instances told emerging markets that they needed to do X, Y, Z during financial crisis, the US did exactly what those emerging markets did, which was to coddle their bankers and not punish the people who needed to be punished and thereby prolong the financial crisis. So I was really taken in by that work, and that's when I started to follow his work. And that piece eventually led to the book called Thirteen Bankers, which in my opinion I highly recommend, in addition to today's book, because in my opinion, it's one of the best analyses of the financial crisis that's been written. So his new book, which we're here to hear about and discuss, is called Jump-Starting America, How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth in the American Dream. I was co-authored with his MIT colleague, Jonathan Gruber. And to me, it's a perfect example of how Simon's thinking is just kind of broad and curious and creative and why I've come to appreciate his work over time. He has a ton of proposals for sharp increases in federal investments in science and technology. And the idea is that we have failed to keep up with the rest of the world in those areas, and that's been a big hit to our economic productivity. And Simon has several creative approaches for dealing with this problem that I'll let him expound on. And I was thinking about this book, it really resonated with me personally, because in a way, I probably wouldn't be standing here today if it weren't for the kind of federal investments that happened between the 40s and 70s that Simon chronicled in his book. My dad moved here in 1971 to study astronomy and to become an astronomer. My wife's father came here from Nepal to study civil engineering in Texas. So my generation is a product of that era that Simon's here to talk about. So it's with great pleasure that I'd like to introduce Simon Johnson. Pedro, for that kind words of introduction, thanks for the opportunity to talk with you today. And for reasons that I hope will become clear, both in what I say, I'll talk for the next 20 minutes and Theo and I are gonna have a discussion. I think that now is the time when we need to hammer out ideas around job creation and how to sustain more good jobs in America. I think, given where we are in the political cycle, it needs to be now. And nobody should ever turn a book directly into policy. That's not a good idea, it's not how the world works. We need debate, we need argument, we need conversations like this one. So it's a fantastic opportunity for me. In the fall of 2017, Amazon announced they wanted to build a second headquarters somewhere in North America. And they pointed out that they'd had some impact, positive impact, they said in Seattle, there's certainly a lot of jobs created. And they said, we'd like to do this in some other place. And we're gonna be creating a significant number of jobs, 50,000, as there was the headline number of jobs. And these are gonna be good jobs, at least $100,000 average earnings, perhaps higher in some reports. You have six weeks in which to apply to be the place to host HQ2. And as I'm sure you'll remember, almost every city in the United States raised its hand and said, yes, we would like these jobs. In fact, Amazon had some cutoff criteria. Don't bother applying if you have less than a million people in your metropolitan statistical area. As far as I can see, a lot of people just ignored that and raised their hands and said, okay, we only have 100,000 people who really want these jobs. And of course what Amazon did after some discussion and some, I think, raising of expectations and we can talk about who was to blame for that. But this word transformation was used quite a bit. It could be a transformative investment. What they actually chose to do was place those jobs in Washington DC or Northern Virginia, just across the river, as you know. And in New York City, just across the river from Manhattan in Long Island City. And of course New York, then after some further reflection and community engagement said, no thank you, not on these terms, and Amazon pulled out of that. So why do I start with this story? I guess I think it actually has absolutely everything that we refer to and we come at in the book. We come at it in a more analytical way with a lot of data. We talk about a lot of the relevant research on three points. The first is the level of economic growth. What's been the experience in the United States in recent years? And what are the, what's people's hopes and expectations? And I think the answer is growth has decelerated in recent decades. We used to grow at 4% a year, then 3% a year, 2% a year, we'll be lucky to get more than 1% a year productivity growth in the 2020s the way things are now. So growth, we have to talk about that. Second thing is location. Where are the opportunities? Where are the strong local economies? Well, we're sitting in one by many measures, not perfect of course, there's plenty of issues of inclusion and exclusion, but this is a strong local economy. Boston, New York, Washington DC on the East Coast, Seattle, San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles on the West Coast have a disproportionate share of the innovation, new business creation activity in this country. Other parts of the country are anxious. They're very worried about the effects they've already seen from automation, globalization, other processes, including the decline of trade unions. And they wanna know, how do we secure our future? How do we make sure we don't hit some secular decline and how do we make sure that we bounce back? And of course, many of the headline numbers, including headline unemployment number, is much better than it used to be, but I agree with colleagues like Petro that this number is at best not fully informative and maybe even misleading in some way. So we have to think about growth. We need to think about where we grow and the location of opportunities and why it's become so skewed and is this a process that we could tilt back and involve more people and more geographies? And I think we also have to reflect on and come up with ideas on the relationship between technology companies and entrepreneurship and innovation when it happens and the American people. To what extent people, all of us actually benefit when somebody builds big new companies, including companies that may be based on a considerable amount of public support in many ways. So the way we go about this in the book and I think a good way to have this conversation in general is to start with some history. In the spring of 1940, Germany was sweeping across Western Europe, a small group of people came together in Washington, D.C., some frankly fairly elite scientists, persuaded policymakers including the President of the United States, President Roosevelt, that while the U.S. had been a strong engineering country for a long time, it had not been and wasn't at that moment a scientific superpower. The strongest science in the world in the early part of the 20th century, you can look at who won the Nobel Prizes for example, plenty of other metrics. The strongest science was in Western Europe, it was in Germany, France, U.K., some other European countries. Vanneva Bush, who was a former dean of engineering at MIT and head of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., persuaded, he and his colleagues, persuaded the political leaders that what we should do in the United States was make a big commitment to investing in science, mostly initially financial defense purposes and it was a very defensive reactive moment. Oh my goodness, the Germans are applying science in new ways. Yes, that war seems somewhat distant right now but it may come to us sooner than we think. We should prepare by finding technologies that we can develop to defend the United States. It was a brilliant idea, it was extremely timely, it was aided by some good luck in terms of receiving key pieces of technology at early stages from the British. A tremendous amount of resources went into this effort, two-thirds of all physicists, the estimate is, worked on this scientific initiative, federal government funded, of course, it developed radar, which went from being a pretty clunky, somewhat inaccurate technology in 1940, 1941, to being a technology that could see the periscope of a submarine at great distance and help turn the battle of the Atlantic where the American, American allies defeated, detected and defeated German submarines. A number of other military and also civilian technologies were developed including around healthcare and pharmaceuticals and of course this entire effort culminated in the development of the atomic bomb, which, yes, had mixed implications that I'll come on to in a moment. In 1945, this same group took a step back and said, okay, we had this big impact by applying federal funding to science in a way that had never been done before and scientists, to be honest, prior to World War II had been quite reluctant to embrace the federal government. They felt it would come with too many strings attached. They had overcome this, they had worked out a relationship that was a pretty good relationship from that point of view and there was a great deal of satisfaction in Washington with how, with what the impact had been. But the question was, could we turn this into something that would help the civilian economy? Could you build better jobs? Could you improve lives through the same kind of science-oriented push? And the answer that they came up with was yes, they made proposals. They, of course, needed Washington, so it went through a somewhat messy political process. But at the end of it came the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, other parts of the scientific push, which perhaps went a little bit more through the Defense Department than had originally been proposed and conceived. But out of this came breakthrough technologies like digital electronic computers, modern pharmaceutical industry, jet engines, a wide range of impact. In fact, most of the big new breakthroughs that we had in the 40s, 50s, and 60s can be traced back to this wartime effort and its successor, which was a deliberate attempt to fund knowledge creation in a way that absolutely paid off created companies, created jobs, and those jobs spread across the country. Remarkable, remarkable success. Sputnik, which was launched in 1957, was a further catalyst to action and also prompted a scaling up of these efforts, and we can talk more about that. I think there's some very important lessons from the post-Sputnik experience for our modern moment. Now, if I'm right that this was such a good idea and it had such positive impact, why did we back away from it? Why do we scale back these efforts? And we have scaled them back. Federal spending on research and development was close to 2% of GDP in the mid-1960s. It's now 0.7% of GDP. So you should scale these things always by the size of the economy. We are actually today less than half of where we were during the Ronald Reagan years, let alone the 1960s. So how do we go from this big, we argue, successful effort to something that's still significant, that still has very big positive effects. I'll talk about those in a moment, but it's substantially smaller. Well, I think the answer which we go through in the book is really in three pieces. One is that there was some overreach in terms of scientific, goals that the scientists felt were achievable and you can argue about whether it was a scientist, whether it was a policy makers, whether it was the private sector. Free electricity was essentially promised by the authorities in charge of atomic energy. That, as you are well aware, did not turn out very well. Nuclear power became, proved to be much more complicated to implement than it had previously been imagined. That was point number one. Point number two is that the scientists fell out with the people in power. So when Eisenhower wanted to react to the launch of Sputnik and to demonstrate his commitment and the commitment of the country to respond in a productive manner, he hired the president of MIT to be the chief science advisor to the president of the United States. And the president of MIT, James Killian, who's a pretty modest chap, wrote in his memoir, I really don't think I brought that much to the table, but they wanted the science brand, which came through the letters MIT attached to the presidency. By the end of the 1960s, so agreeing between the scientists and the physicists and authority was not that hard when you were reacting to Soviet rockets, you needed to build rockets, you needed to get people to the moon as part of that response. When the Vietnam War came, this relationship became substantially more complicated. Many scientists had reservations about what was happening. The authorities also started pushing very hard on supersonic civilian aircraft to fly over land in the US. This is very noisy technology. They tested it in Oklahoma City, nobody slept for a year. The scientists said, let's not do this, but the White House and some large companies who like to build planes were adamant that it should proceed. There was a big falling out, a big argument, there was another big argument about missile defense systems. For example, scientists opposing, actively opposing, testifying against the White House in correctional testimony. The truth of the matter is, when you speak truth to authority, authority cuts your funding and fires you from the White House. So the scientists got kicked out of the White House. Now, this was bipartisan, LBJ and Richard Nixon both fell out with the scientists, let's be clear, but it was Nixon who abolished the position and kicked the scientific council out of the White House. The third thing that happened, honestly, was the fiscal squeeze. I mean, I know that we have a lot of fiscal fire power, I wrote another book on this, but the reality is that discretionary domestic spending of this research and development type has become squeezed, including by the turn against taxes. So the tax revolution and the declining willingness to pay taxes has had real consequences already over decades, including squeezing this kind of productive investment. Now, one response to this history, I mean, I don't think the history is actually particularly disputed. Some people say, well, okay, fine, Simon, but while public R&D support has declined in recent decades, total R&D has remained fairly constant because private research development has actually gone up. And a lot of this research development is not so much done through corporate labs, that was a previous generation, we can talk about that if you want, the impact of Bell Labs and so on, is much more done through a venture capital type of model. Now, it's true that venture capital has arisen and it has had some remarkable successes, but private venture capital, private R&D is never going to do what public R&D does. And it's a very simple reason, which is basic science, general knowledge creation is not ever going to be in the interest of any one company or any one funder because there are big spillover effects and you cannot capture or monetize, to use their terminology, the full benefits of that technology for you as an individual investor. Human Genome Project is a spectacular example. So the Human Genome Project was originally proposed, mapping the human genome was proposed by some scientists who were extremely preeminent, they had business experience, successful startups, they wanted to raise $10 million from the private sector to get this going, couldn't do it in the 1980s. Nobody's interested because, and the funder said to them, look, great idea, but you're going to create all this general knowledge that other people are going to benefit from. What's in it for me as an investor? That is the right question if you're an investor. They were just doing their jobs. Eventually this becomes a federal government project, costs $3 billion over 13 years, creates an industry that employs close to 300,000 people, average wage of $70,000, good wages, pays $6 billion a year in taxes from this industry. Because when you create general spillover knowledge, that's what happens. Companies will arise, value will be created, good jobs will be created. So federal government commitment to science and technology, research and development has been successful in the past. We scaled it back from the 1960s, private R&D is never going to, is important, we're in favor of that, we want more of it, it's never going to play the same role as public support for R&D. It's just a different animal. Don't be confused by that. Federal R&D support remains productive today. The rates of return, John Van Renen who's our colleague at MIT has done the leading work on this. And I should say, we're standing on the shoulders of a lot of giants on the research side in writing our book. And that was part of the fun of writing a book. And that's why we have a hundred pages of footnotes also. So you can go look at their work directly. So John Van Renen and his colleagues calculate that the social rates of return on R&D are very large, four to five times as large, at least as the private returns on R&D, which are already significant. Every drug as far as we can see in the data, introduced to the market between 2010 and 2016, had its basis in NIH funding. The rates of return on these, now healthcare is a little complicated because the government is also the purchaser of this technology and we can talk about that. But in terms of creation of products that had impact on people's lives, it's a phenomenal success story. And in terms of our impact on the world, it's also a remarkable success story. NIH funding also generates a great deal of follow on private capital that builds on the technology created in exactly the way that we're discussing. So our first idea is let's boost productivity, let's have higher growth that served us well in the past, let's do it again and the obvious way to do this is to increase the federal support for R&D. That's proposal number one. However, if you're at all salt on this and you're interested, well maybe I've got something, I'll think about that and think about which technologies, a great technical discussion would be which technologies do you want to focus on? We can have that discussion. We make some proposals in the book where there's plenty of others to talk about. But here's a corollary or a very close related idea that we should also consider which is where do you want to do this R&D? So the places that do most of the public R&D now, get the public R&D dollars, are also the places that have more of the private R&D, remember there's a complementarity between those things. That's not surprising. It's also the case that innovation has, there've always been agglomeration effects in economic activity. My co-author, John Gruber, by the way, sends sensitive regrets, can't be here today, but he has a number of jokes that I should tell. And one of his favorites is that the way the economists, justify themselves is by making up words, long, complicated words, for things that are completely obvious to everyone. So agglomeration effect just means that towns and people want to live and work closer to other towns and people. And you see this in Washington DC, you see it in lots of these big cities, where people don't want to live and work out in the suburbs, they want to come back in towards the cities, which obviously has a number of positive effects and a number of complicated effects, that we should talk about. So agglomeration effects are taking place. Innovation is becoming more concentrated. I know companies that have successful pharmaceutical research around Boston, Route 128, for example, on the perimeter of Boston, which they are moving to Kendall Square, right next to the MIT campus, which is already extremely crowded and very expensive real estate, but they want to be close to other companies doing similar work, they want to see what everyone else is doing, they like the informal mixing of their workers, interesting enough, and their workers, certainly the younger workers want to live and work in the city. I don't think all the older workers are terribly happy about this. They got a longer commute, but the younger workers are very enthusiastic about this crowded condition. So if you put your federal R&D dollars into the places they're already getting those dollars, disproportionately, you will just be reinforcing those six economies, three on the East Coast, three on the West Coast, they're already pretty strong, actually, and they're already very expensive. Now, I don't know if you've been to San Francisco recently and tried to pay for a night's in a hotel or rent something on Airbnb or otherwise, it is already very expensive, extremely congested. The price of real estate is prohibitive for a lot of young people. Same thing is true in New York. Has anyone been to LaGuardia Airport recently? Yeah, don't do it, absolutely. Avoid LaGuardia Airport. Walking to New York is easier than flying to LaGuardia. Boston has got similar problems. So one thing we did in significant piece of research we did in the book is look at other places around the country and say, okay, who's got, what is it you need to be a tech hub to be at the forefront of innovation? Well, you obviously need a significant number of workers. Amazon made that clear. You need to have enough educated people. We think that, and the evidence is that innovation generates jobs for people who have a high level education, but also people who don't have quite as much education. For every PhD, you generate three or four non-PhD jobs. People who have maybe didn't even finish college working in the labs. So we need workers and we look at places with over 100,000 working age population. We need college educated people as a part of that. So we look for places that have more than 25% college educated and you need reasonable real estate prices. So we look at places that have real estate prices below, median house price below $238,000, which is my colleague, John Gruber, likes to say is a month's rent in Boston. It's not quite true, but Boston is very expensive. So we find that there are 102 cities in the United States that have these characteristics. And we have a website that you can go to called jumpstartingamerica.com, jumpstartingis-nated, where you can look at our index and you can play with the index. You can change the mix of specific characteristics that we're using in our index and you can make your own index and you can see how that, what's sensitive and what's not sensitive. What you will find is consistently, there's a lot of places in the industry Midwest which have a strong, which have a strong technology background that come out well in this index. There's a lot of places in the South actually that have a considerable amount of technology health potential. There are places we find in 36 states, home to 102 cities that 70 million Americans living in those cities. It's a lot of places where you can build technology. And our proposal is that you scale up R&D in part by looking at geographies where you're gonna have a bigger bang for your dollar in terms of the science that you can develop, as opposed to, for example, putting the money into Kendall Square, where honestly a lot of that, a lot of the game would go to private landlords. Not sure why you wanna do that. You want to build labs, you wanna hire people, you want to make sure that places that take up this mantle, build affordable housing, don't, I think the lessons from Seattle are that while they generated, while the tech industry has generated a considerable amount of jobs over the past few decades and the economic fortunes of the city changed dramatically once it became a tech hub, they suffered from a lack of advanced thinking about housing and about affordable housing. As a result, they've squeezed a lot of people out and it's become a pretty difficult place, an expensive place to live. So that's all avoidable. And we propose to do this through a competition. So run an innovation competition, make it transparent, get cities to compete. Not an Amazon HQ2 type competition. The problem with these private competitions is, as I'm sure many of you know, that there are race to the bottom. That what the company's asked for is basically tax breaks. I mean they may ask for some infrastructure so on, but they are undermining local tax capacity. The estimates are that at least $50 billion a year are given away to companies to support these investments. Most of those investments would have taken place anyway in the places where they end up being made. So you get nothing for your tax breaks except a transfer from taxpayers to the stockholders in those companies. That's not a good idea. What we propose is a win-win competition where the federal government is providing this commitment to science and trying to build up new innovation hubs. And the local, state, authorities, with the private sector, with labor, with universities are bidding to make complimentary investments to make the land available to provide worker training. So what happened after Sputnik, actually the same thing happened after World War II in the GI Bill, is if you have a big push on technology and you create new industries, that's very good. You're going to increase the demand for skilled labor. At the same time as making that push, both the GI Bill and the National Defense Education Act in 1958, push to increase the supply of skilled labor by making it easier to go to college, easier to acquire skills. Now, I'm not saying that college is exactly what everyone needs. I think appropriate worker training, apprenticeships, the kinds of skills that are appropriate to the industry trying to build. That's obviously essential. And I would put a lot of that decision-making in the hands of local and state people. So the federal government is providing the catalyst and the incentive to get this right, but have local people think about what's needed in their communities, where the gaps are, what's strong, what's not strong, what needs to be strengthened. So, big increase in federal R&D. And we're talking, our proposal is $100 billion a year, 0.5% of GDP. We're at 0.7% of GDP right now. Let's go to 1.2% of GDP. That is not back to the 1960s level at all, not even close, but it's back to the 1980s level. $100 billion a year. It's a significant amount of money. It would move the needle. How many hubs should we create? Well, more than one, definitely, if we're right at all, the evidence is right on the rates of return, but not 50. This is not, everyone gets one. That would not be a good dynamic. Have a competition, attempt to establish between 20 and 30 of these new hubs is our proposal. That's big, no question. But for modern America standards, that's a very big government initiative. Compared to what we did after 1957 or during World War II, it's tiny, frankly, very small. So, we push an R&D, spread around the country, do it through open transparent mechanism. We propose an innovation commission. We propose an open competition, a lot of transparency in that. Turn the state-state competition away from the waste of local taxpayer dollars, who, well, they pay to private companies, towards this win-win competition. So, let them use those resources in this competition. In constructive infrastructure, we're talking about infrastructure investments, basically, but it's the infrastructure for science, which could include roads, it could include airports, there's no question about that. But it's also labs, it's also education. It's the infrastructure that supports science. But here's the third piece, and then I'll finish. You know, we did create a lot of great companies after World War II, as I said. I mean, every technology company, you can trace the roots of many of those ideas back to these publicly supported innovations and the general knowledge creation. And that's terrific, and that's how the process works. That's how it should work. But what's the upside for most Americans? It's become a little too indirect, a little too diffuse. I was having this discussion with some private sector people, including one person who's an active investor, and he said, and this is not a left-wing person at all, I can assure you. And he said, you know, Simon, I get it. Public, the government invests in their breakthrough science, we're not gonna do them, private sector, fine. And then we're gonna hire the post-docs who come out of that to build the companies, and that's gonna create jobs. But I don't like this other piece, he said. I don't like this idea that you're gonna have some upside participation in the success of our companies. He said that's unnecessary, we're just gonna pay taxes. And I looked at him and I said, I said, good. But what I was thinking was, successful American technology company pays taxes. I mean, that's an interesting headline by itself, right? So we think that on the table, and for our discussion, including today, should be all forms of reasonable upside participation. This is not redistribution, this is we're creating value. The private sector's gonna be immensely successful based on these investments. What's the direct participation? So we propose, and this is just one idea to get the ball rolling, that when you make these investments, when you create the new hubs, when you unleash the agglomeration economies, you are increasing the value of the real estate in those places. And you know you're gonna do this and you know it's the result of what the government's gonna do and what the government's doing and what the universities are doing. There should be some ownership of that land, ownership of the real estate in public hands or if you prefer, you could make it a surcharge on the property tax. So when a mall is more successful, mall owners charge higher rent to the individual stores because their argument is we've generated more overall traffic, therefore you should be more successful there, therefore you can pay higher rent. So you could do it that way if you want. Participation in the appreciation of the real estate value in the innovation hubs, take the money from that, put it into an endowment fund. Alaska does this with oil revenues. So the Alaska Permanent Fund pays out on average between $1,000 and $2,000 per year, cash, same amount of money to everybody who's resident Alaska in that year. May not sound like a lot of money to some people but it lifts 20,000 Alaskans out of poverty every year, that amount, that transfer. So let's aim to create a cash transfer to all Americans based on, we argue the real estate appreciation that is gonna come from the creation of these new hubs. Does it completely address the problems of inequality in modern America? Of course not. Does it change fundamentally the power dynamics of Washington C? Maybe not. Does it change though the relationship and the expectation between American people and the companies that they help create? Yeah, I think it does. I think it fundamentally does. I think it says that we did this together, you get a return on your private risk-taking but ultimately we make sure that there is a direct cash flow back to all the Americans who made this possible. Thank you very much. Turning myself on. Thank you, Simon. That was great, really interesting and provocative. I think pretty radical, really. Good. The idea is the government funds research and ordinary people benefit. It hasn't always worked that way in history, right? There are a lot of examples and a lot of counter examples, right? Where the government might fund some of the research and then the private companies tend to amass the profits. So I guess a couple of questions for you just to start things off and then we'll open it up to all of you for some questions from the audience. But do you think it'll be challenging to build political consensus for this kind of a proposal in this anti-science, anti-expertise world that we seem to be living in right now? Well, you're definitely correct, Theodore, to point out that one dimension of polarization that is taking place is polarization around science and around attitudes towards science. However, at the same time, we find that we presented this book in quite a few places around the country and we're looking for more places all the time to go have these conversations. Nobody's opposed to more good jobs, right? And there's a recognition that when you invest in creating new ideas, that can lead to new companies and the jobs that they bring. And if we don't do it, other countries are already doing it. It's not that they will do it, they're already doing it. We talk about this quite a bit in the book. So the global competition is increasingly around who can innovate and get to market first. And just like with the Human Genome Project, if you get that first, you get more of the good jobs. So we think if we don't embrace an effort like this with no doubt, a lot of explanation involved, a lot of outreach, polarization will get worse, it'll get harder to support an innovative economy and our competitors will take these jobs. Thank you. So I feel like your book goes right to the heart of one of the questions that economists like to address or to noodle around on, which is, what is the rationale? What's the line for government spending versus private spending? And you talk a lot about the spillover effect, which is sort of the classic econ 101. First of all, there's just not enough of it. So I think that's sort of obvious. And you go through a little bit of the history over the decades where one seemed obvious to Americans that of course the government should tax everybody, should invest in science and technology and everybody will benefit. There'll be so much, there'll be lots of private profits, but there'll also be lots of public gains. And then at some point, but private capital can also go wrong in a lot of ways, right? And so is it just about spillover effects or is there something more? And I'm thinking a little bit about, if you look at the pharmaceutical industry, where there still is a fair amount of government intervention and government funding of various things, but you look at the research that's done by the pharmaceutical companies left to their own devices, super wealthy, profitable, successful companies. And they can spend a lot of money like going back and forth and reformulating the same medicine to extend the patent or they can spend a lot of money convincing people they have diseases they don't have in order to create a market around some kind of preventive medicine. So do you feel like the policy proposals that you lay out are adequate? It's one thing to sort of do the positive thing, sort of let's put some money here and create these hubs, but do you think that that gets at the real problem here, this the nature of the private public problem? Well, as you said at the beginning, it may come across the radical idea of what we're proposing. We think we're actually being quite modest and we think we are trying to make an argument that can pull a lot of people towards it because it is pretty basic economics and the evidence around spillovers are extremely strong. Now, you're absolutely right that there are many other problems that we should confront, including just to frame what you said a little bit more broadly, the role of the government as customer. So the government buys a lot of things. The government buys, as you know, healthcare for 100 million Americans. The government buys a lot of energy products, for example, directly and indirectly. Could we and should be using the government's purchasing power and the way they set those priorities, including to what extent, if you have research development of this kind, to what extent should you say, well, the manufacturing that comes out of the R&D should also be in America or a certain proportion of it should be in America, including advanced manufacturing, which I think to be honest, it's tended to come back to America anyway because automation means labor costs matter less and you can build really good manufacturing facilities for high-tech products in the United States. So I think that that is, as we've talked to people around the country, there is a lot of interest in thinking about the public-private partnership also through the lens of government as customer. And government as customer, not trying to make people's lives difficult, but saying, look, these are our priorities. This is what we need for our communities and this is what other countries are doing, right? So this is what's reasonable for us to do. I think that's a very fair set of points, which I think would sit on top of our proposal. I think that would be entirely complementary to what we're talking about. And in some ways, we almost do the opposite now. So instead of using the power of government procurement to create good jobs here, which as you say, a lot of countries do already, we're sort of like, oh, no, let's just get the best price for it and let's, you know. Right, well, the rhetoric is obviously people say, well, we'll let the market decide, but it's not actually a market, it's this internet, there's this very bumpy or uneven or strange competition between governments and states to try and get good jobs. And we have, I think, disadvantaged ourselves in some real ways in recent decades. Now, I think the best way forward is through this kind of R&D investment and shaping that future. I don't think, you know, getting into tit for tat trade arguments is what we're talking about here at all. But it is, I think it is smart to recognize that other governments have read American history and have distilled the right lessons, which is let's be strategic and let's find ways we can help our own private sector, but make sure that they generate good jobs for our people. And recognizing, I think, which is a pretty important truth, which is that if you move the manufacturing to another country to save labor costs, you're gonna lose some of the dynamic, the innovative energy and the ability to have the next generation of innovation, don't you think? Yes, there's a complementary between manufacturing and innovation, no question. I don't think you should forbid manufacturing, your company manufacturing elsewhere, but I think there should be more pressure, more expectation, maybe more assistance. I'm not in favor of corporate welfare at all, but thinking about infrastructure investments that would make it easier to happen, for example, so that manufacturing can be closer to innovation. We talk about examples in the book, for example, where this is beginning to happen. I think one of the stronger policies in this regard, which also had bipartisan support from the Obama administration was these advanced manufacturing institutes that were set up, regional hubs that are really trying hard to build manufacturing capacity that's complementary to R&D in different parts of the country. It's early days in terms of evaluating those, but our idea is pretty much more of that scaled up for bigger impact. But are there any other differences between your proposal and that other than scale? I think that there is a scale difference that it's a big difference, because those are millions of dollars, and we're talking about billions of dollars. I think that our proposal is, and this may be because of the timing and where we are right now, we are more explicitly looking at this geographic element and saying, look, we must, we should be trying, we think it's a big strategic advantage for the United States that we have a lot of people living away from these hubs who have a lot of education, they really want to build new activities, land is available, and you can shape the development of these cities in a way that will be genuinely inclusive. We think that's a big advantage of the US relative to, say, Western Europe, which doesn't have that kind of potential. That was not the explicit focus of that Obama administration initiative, although it wasn't overly coastal focused either. I think since that proposal came together, so it was in the last five, six, seven years, we've become more acutely aware of the hyperglomeration on the coast, east and west coast, and the lack of participation in that kind of growth, although there is growth, there is population growth in some other big cities, but they've not become the same kind of strong innovation clusters. That divide has become more apparent to us in the past half decade. So you've talked a little bit about government procurement policy, which I think is a really important tool. It's almost like governments purchasing preference, like a consumer could walk into a store and say, I'd like to find a Made in America T-shirt address, and if the government says, I'd like to spend my money on Made in America. But in the U.S., it's almost like we've used all of the policy tools at our disposal, including tax policy, to do the opposite, to sort of drive companies offshore, to reward them when they move jobs offshore. Do you think there's a tax policy element to your proposal as well, or is there a? Again, I think that absolutely could be complementary to what we're proposing. And our goal is absolutely and clearly, first and foremost, more good jobs in America. So clearly, and we believe R&D is an element of that, because this is building the future. But if you did the R&D and it immediately created jobs elsewhere, that would be disappointing. I do think that over time, manufacturing will become less labor-intensive than it was in the past, just because of the nature of how factories operate. But R&D will be is and will be relatively labor-intensive. So in terms of the number of jobs you're creating, over time you'll see more in the labs and more in the, let's say, the services side of the commercialization, less in the physical production of goods. But I think manufacturing, as we discussed a few moments ago, having that co-locate with the innovation is incredibly helpful. Part of the agglomeration. Right. Just ask. So I want to drill down a little bit on your federal-style Amazon bidding process for tech hubs that would revitalize communities in need. So tell us more about how you might ensure that we didn't allow politically powerful actors in Congress from trying to just favor their states and their districts. How might you address that? Well, both John and I have worked around policy for quite some time. So we're not totally naive with regard to the realities that would actually transpire. But our proposal is to create an independent commission similar to the base realignment and closing commission that has operated effectively in the past. I don't think anybody regards that as an enjoyable experience, but they have closed bases. Closing bases is incredibly hard. This is like a hub opening commission, as opposed to base closing. And Congress would have to approve all of these proposals because Congress is clearly going to control the purse strings. So you would set this up. You would recommend to Congress to set it up so that Congress would approve on an up or down basis the entire set of a round of hub openings. So you wouldn't get to cherry pick. You would have less, perhaps, scope for some of the political problems that might emerge. But frankly, elected politicians want to understand what it's in for their constituents. And if some well-connected people, prominent figures on left and right, both sides are interested in this, by the way, helped their own constituents get better organized and make stronger proposals, if we are spreading opportunity around the country, I think we're moving in the right direction. In economic terms, we look at the evidence. And to us, it seems very hard to make the argument that you'll get a bigger bang for your research dollar if you put it on the coast versus elsewhere in the country. But you might get a slight bigger effect in economic terms. But in political terms, if we go out there and say, hey, let's have more research funding for Boston, that doesn't get a lot of support. Or let's put more money into Silicon Valley. I mean, that's just going to enrich people already on land there. Politically, you need a coalition. The coalition, I think, will be somewhat emergent. Who wants to be in on this? Who's got the capacity to be a contender? And that's why we did this data analytics approach. And that's why we opened up on our website. And there's no trickery here. You can go look for yourself. We did not dock to the index to get a particular outcome. We chose a particular set of parameters. You might not like them. Choose your own parameters. And you'll get a sense of what an innovation commission would come up with and how that's going to be genuinely and legitimately, for good reason, spread around the country. And one last question, and then we'll go to the audience. Tell us a little bit more about the innovation dividend. How would it get measured? How much do you think it could pay out if your proposal were fully implemented? Well, that's a great question. I mean, I think it's very hard to answer that, because the question is what would be the scale. And there's also a tension between if you prefer to focus on making more land more readily available at affordable prices, then you would set up the zoning and you would construct some of these hubs. So there's actually less capital appreciation. Capital appreciation comes from this effect, which you see, for example, Kendall Square, right next to MIT's campus. It was a very depressed area for a long time. It became, it was very depressed, right? And nothing, I was a graduate student there in the 1980s. There was no way to eat, even, let alone places to work. It's that diner. Right, there were a few places to eat. I like that diner. But it's completely transformed now and it's become very expensive because it's a very restricted area that people are trying to cram their activities into. It's stuck there between the river and the highway. Exactly, right, and the campus. So if you, when cities are bidding to become innovation hubs, if they're making more land available, more commercial land real estate available, that's going to keep the prices down. That's also going to reduce the upside that you would get through the capital appreciation. So there's something of a trade-off there and then there's some decisions to be made and this, I think, would naturally come out of the local bidding as part of our process. So I don't have a number for you on exactly how much that dividend could be. The point is to create the principle and establish that capital appreciation through the real estate and maybe some other people are interested in ways to get the appreciation, capital appreciation of the companies. I think that is more controversial, but it's definitely worth considering. The point is get that principle so that there's a cash element coming back to people. I mean, honestly, the major way most people benefit is through good jobs, stable communities, enough tax revenue to provide for decent schools and public safety, and being able to keep that over time as the global competition evolves. But the innovation dividend, we feel, would create a link between individual and community corporate success and people. That doesn't exist right now. People have become extremely alienated from technology for a bunch of reasons. But one of the reasons is people have been fantastically successful and pay no tax. And that goes back to the very first point I made, which is about the radicalness of this proposal. Because I think we've almost gotten accustomed over the last couple of decades to the idea that innovation is really owned by a company or an individual, and that therefore that company or individual really deserves the full benefit, even if some of it's a little bit by accident, that the real estate that you're standing on tripled in value, and you happen to own a big chunk of it at the right moment in time. But so on that note, let's open up the conversation to the audience. And I see lots of folks interested in talking. OK, go ahead. I'm Dr. Caroline Poplin. I'm a physician. I grew up in Newton, right around 128. I remember Kendall Square. That's where we used to go to the movies. Two things. First of all, we have a set of national labs already. There's a Percaven and Sandia and Fermi. And is that the model you're talking about? And if so, why haven't these worked better? Or maybe they have. I don't know. More important, your definition of a good job seems to be something that requires a lot of training. And therefore, you'll get paid a lot. I think the definition of a good job is one that pays a living wage at least. And you don't necessarily have to be trained. And innovation that raises productivity doesn't necessarily mean that workers get more. They did until 1980. And you had Milton Friedman. And then you had the Pat Kostreich, where Reagan showed exactly what the government thought. And now you have Uber. It's great technology. And the people who own it are making a fortune. And the workers are making nothing. So how does your, I don't think your solution addresses that. Thanks for the question. So the national labs are absolutely a great achievement and a treasure. They have not, for the most part, proved to be central to the kind of R&D clusters that we're proposing, in part because they're relatively geographically separated. They're also relatively, for legitimate national security purposes, segmented away from commercial activity. And the incentives that they've had have not been to generate products and services that would go out into the private sector. So I think in some instances, the national labs could be part of the consortiums that bid to create these new innovation hubs. I think we'd be delighted if that came together. But this proposal is not structured around the existing national labs. On the second question, obviously, you're right that many of the technology-based companies that employ large numbers of people, including in the so-called ridesharing industry, are not paying living wages. And I think that's part of the problem. And I'm not also saying that what we have in this book addresses all the issues that are out there with regard to adequate compensation and so on. However, it is the case that in the R&D industry, two things are absolutely in our shared experience. One is that while you do create some jobs in genomics, for example, for people who have PhDs, there are many jobs created for people who do not have PhDs and who have some training but not a high level of specialized science. So people who are working in labs, the technicians. So it's between, for every one PhD you're creating three, four, or five non-PhD jobs, I said. The average wage in the genomics industry, which I quoted earlier, is $70,000 a year. That's not the PhDs who are getting $70,000 a year. That's people with less education. Depending on where you're living and the cost of living, $70,000 a year may be a living wage. And in many of the places that we're talking about, and this is one reason we're looking for places that are affordable in terms of real estate, those would be good jobs. So taking that into account. So I think it's the knowledge creation industries, not the ride sharing, not the employing low wage people. That's a different set of issues that are very important. What we're talking about is new, more knowledge creation and commercialization industries. And those do tend to generate more good jobs by the living wage definition, which is a good definition. Great. So I see a lot of hands up. So can we ask folks to state your name and be quick? And then we'll take, let's take three at a time. So, okay, Joel up here. Okay, yes, okay, I will. Hi, I'm very interested in your book. I think I might actually buy it. Wow, thank you. Joel Yudkin, principal of High Road Strategies, consultancy on economic manufacturing industrial policy. I've, first one is that you're making the case, which as you recognize builds on a whole literature of how they're all in the public sector. And the need to go back and really hammer that a lot harder because a lot of people forget that that's the case soon. But the point I want to get to is, is what Theo was already talking about, that manufacturing USA institutes seem to be the kind of thing you're talking about. There's 14 of them right now, eight of them under Department of Defense and the DOE and Commerce. But they're about, except for the DOD ones that are threatened right now, whether they're gonna have any extended. But the other thing that they have in them, I have to have a lot of work, I've been exposed to them a lot. But one of their charters is to tie this to workforce development as a component, as well as working closer and linking the small manufacturers by chain development with that. So I would say that you have a infrastructure to build on already. You know, it seems to me that you might want to push to work with the manufacturing USA folks and really extend that and really build the basis for drawing that. Many of them are already in the heartland and also they network, they'd like to point out that they network along with the labs and others. So I wanted to get more of your thoughts on how we can build on that momentum. We don't have to reinvent the wheel a lot. Right here, red, yeah. Good afternoon, my name's Julian Kyle Lewis from the illustrious Howard University in Washington. I wanted to say, in addition to my question, when you were talking about going through the history of the MIT president who was the advisor to, I think, Roosevelt, I thought it was really funny when you said he was quite the modest chap. That was really funny. But when I was in high school and I was filling out my college applications and trying to decide where I wanted to go, MIT was the kind of school where you thought, man, I gotta be the smartest of the smart people to get into a school like that. It was just so foreign, because I'm from the South and just, we don't really think in the terms that people in schools like that think. And I was wondering if you could give us some kind of insight into something that you've seen or heard or experienced in a school like that, that you could speak to young children where I come from that's really unique, something that you would only see or hear or experience at MIT for folks who would never dream that they'd be able to be accepted into that school. Thanks. And in the back there. Hi, I'm part of the Our Revolution Bernie Sanders group in Northern Virginia. I'm also part of a coalition for National Infrastructure Bank. With the $2 trillion on the table now in terms of infrastructure, this could absolutely go into new technologies, high-speed rail, magla, fusion, desalination, et cetera. The big elephant in the room is how to pay for it. And what we're impressing upon people is the way that Franklin Roosevelt financed both the New Deal and the World War II mobilization with Reconstruction Finance Corporation and how the bank was used three other times in US history, going back to Alexander Hamilton, Quincy Adams, and Abraham Lincoln. So my question to you is, would you support a bill in the Congress supporting a National Infrastructure Bank which would be focused on jobs, Davis bacon wages, rebuilding unions, middle class, Justice Franklin Roosevelt did. Got it. So on the manufacturing USA Institute, you're absolutely right that they're a terrific role model. The scale we're proposing is substantially larger, but you're right that we're not, we're proposing to build on that and to follow that lead. We do say that clearly in the book, so buy the book. Or you can look at our website, our website which you don't have to pay for, jumpstartingamerica.com, jumpstarting is hyphenated. The policy proposals are there, and not all the history and all the details, but good point, thank you for making it. Look, on the MIT, I was a graduate student at MIT in the 1980s, and I've been away and done a number of things, and but I've also been on the faculty there for the last 20 some years. It is a special place, it is a very innovative place. It is a place focused on trying to change things and a place that encourages experimentation and innovation. But I would not go overboard on the MIT is so much better or so much different than anywhere else. No, on the contrary. I think there are many other innovative places in people in America, and that's part of what we're flagging in the book. I think it is an obligation and an opportunity for MIT to share those ideas and to encourage other people, but we're in no way like, hey, we're MIT, we have all the clever answers. No, not at all. We think the clever answers come from local communities and they come from people like you and they come from these arguments and these debates. And we think the federal government can play a catalytic role, but it's about local people figuring out what they need in terms of training, in terms of what's gonna work from the university dimension, but also from the private sector dimension, that complementarity. I would not exaggerate the importance or the specialness of MIT at all, although I will be appearing at graduation on Friday, so don't tell the parents I said that. It's a great place to send you kids. My dad actually taught at MIT, so he taught in the Urban Studies and Planning Department, which is not what MIT is really known for. It's known for the math and science, but it is, and my parents actually lived in the dorm for a couple of years. They were dorm parents, so I have a lot of affection for MIT also, but as you say, it's not magic. It's just another... Although we will bring math and science to everything, including urban studies, linguistics, you may have heard of Noam Chomsky. Certainly economics. Economics, absolutely. But at the end of the day, it's not about the math, right? At the end of the day, it's about the people. And at the end of the day, it's about, I think, creating more good jobs for all Americans, which is something we have to do together, which leads me to the very good point about the infrastructure bank. And I would like to point out that Ro Khanna, who is the co-chair of the Bernie Sanders campaign, has said incredibly nice things about our book and this proposal. And he's framed, and he's the... If you haven't followed his writings, I recommend it to you more generally, but he's the member of Congress representing Silicon Valley. So he's working with the people in the leading innovation hub of the world, arguing that we should spread this more broadly around the country as part of a broader, more general infrastructure push, which we certainly agree with. And in terms of how to pay for this, you could raise taxes. You can think of some people who could pay high taxes without really noticing, and that would pay for it. You could borrow, which is certainly one reasonable approach to any productive investment, particularly when interest rates are low. Should you structure this specifically through a bank, which is your question, that is a very interesting question. And we think there is... We're working hard to persuade people on the general need for this idea and the general need to do it, and there are multiple ways to finance it and pay for it. I think we're somewhere agnostic. Whatever works would be our answer in terms of getting it funded. I don't think it needs to be done in one way or another way, but if the infrastructure bank gets traction and if that's something that we feel has a robust governance structure, I have no problem with that whatsoever. The key thing, though, is to scale up and push on that public research and development and to make sure everyone benefits from it. That's the core. And that's what I'm paraphrasing Ro Khanna appearing on Fox News saying that. That was a good place to make that statement, too, for him. Yeah? Rob, over here. Hi, I'm Rob Scott. I work here. I work low-end trade and manufacturing, and I just want to delve into that aspect of the R&D question. Manufacturing generates about 70% of the private R&D in this country, and manufacturing's been suffering. And as you point out, co-location is critical if we're going to harvest the benefits of these proposals which you're developing. And one of the things that we emphasize, well, first of all, manufacturing's been flatlining. If you take out the computers and electronics, the rest of the manufacturing sector has essentially been stagnant in terms of real output since the mid-'80s, according to Susan Hausman, who was here last year. And we call for measures to greatly expand manufacturing production in the US. The key in our proposal is to realign currencies, bring the dollar down 25% or 30%, and to track much of that manufacturing production back to the US. But if you don't change the prices, you're not going to get the manufacturing. So I think that's a necessary compliment to what you're talking about here, to get the most bang for the buck from what you're proposing, because I have more of a comment than a question. And then up here. Hi, I'm Bonnie Kavusi. I'm at the Washington Center for Accudable Growth. I read the book. It was fantastic. I recommend everybody read it. And buys it. Yeah. A quick question. You know in your book that a lot of our public investment in science came from our reaction to external threats like World War II and Sputnik and the Cold War. So how do you recommend that we invest in science consistently without thinking about external threats? I am Storm Cunningham, publisher, revitalization.org. And I love the federally funded innovation hub idea. I love the innovation dividend idea, like the analogy to the BRAC process. There's one weakness that I think I'm perceiving here, but I think I've got a solution to it, is that the folks, the talented folks, are drawn to other talented folks just to be around other talented folks. They're also drawn to the quality of life of these places. And a lot of the places that you seem to be describing as needing these innovation hubs have a quality of life that kind of sucks. So what I'm thinking is that they need the money upfront. They can't wait 10 years for this innovation hub to pay off in the form of local tax revenues, rebuild their infrastructure and get more green space and all of that. Have you thought of combining this program with tax increment financing so that if you were to indicate, for instance, that they'd be receiving the federal innovation hub monies in, say, three years, that would give them the basis they need to launch a TIF district around where this is gonna go so they can get the money upfront to do all that quality of life improvement and make themselves more attractive? So at first point it was on trade. Obviously, trade is a critical piece of what's happened in America and what's gonna happen going forward. I was previously the chief economist at the IMF and we had a lot of discussions about exchange rates and about problems emerging from the, particularly the Chinese massive undervaluation at the beginning of the 2000s, which really did have dramatic negative effects on a lot of manufacturing, as you know, and on many jobs in America. And I do think it is of fundamental importance to make sure nothing like that ever happens again. That's a really big tail risk to everything. And anything we might consider in terms of reasonable economic policy. And I also think that there are instances when you can move the dollar, even though it's hard to move an exchange rate that operates in the way the dollar operates. And it is also difficult, we have got ourselves into a position, unfortunately, in terms of capital inflows that we use to finance our debt and deficit, which has only been made worse by recent tax cuts. That has created a situation where we have to tread more carefully than we might otherwise, because we need, at least until we can better get ourselves into a stronger fiscal path, we need to make sure that capital continues to come to the US, industry rates may be relatively low. So I am absolutely convinced we need to deal with exchange rate as a tail risk. And I think the more we can move ourselves into industries and activities that are less sensitive to price competition, so a lot of the innovation intensive activities, for example, around human genome or other, even when we move away from healthcare, other new products, new technologies, I think are less vulnerable to the currency concern. And if there are feasible ways to ensure we remain competitive in an exchange rate sense, I'm absolutely open to consideration of those. I think it's nothing as, well, okay, the only thing that's done similar level damage to us in recent decades is the financial crisis of 2008, 2009. And we clearly don't want that to happen again either. So these are key tail risks to take off the tape. On Bonnie's point about the external threat, look, it's a very fair and accurate historical point that the initial push into science in World War II came from a tremendous threat that was responded to in good time. The Sputnik threat I think was, in retrospect, a little bit exaggerated, but the response still was bipartisan, it was productive. It included the National Defense Education Act, which greatly strengthened the teaching of math and physics in college and high schools. It also made federal money available for people to go to college and to afford college irrespective of their family background for the first time. That was a tremendous contribution. I am, we are not hoping for a crisis of any kind and it seems silly to say, well, we need to have a more dramatic external threat moment in order for this to happen because the evidence is clear. We're leaving money and jobs on the table, if you like, by not making these investments. But it may be the case that the way politics work, there has to be something that brings this home, some innovation that is done elsewhere that makes Americans realize that we're missing out on opportunities that otherwise should be ours. I wish it weren't the case, but it's possible, that's what's made up. On the up-fronting of the money to build stronger communities. Yes, of course you're right, there has to be, if you're saying to people, money is going to flow in over some period of time, but come now because we're gonna build it in the future, they can reasonably say, well, is it really gonna come and how do we know and maybe the quality of life is not so good. Now, of course what we saw in place like Kendall Square in recent decades was when people believed there's a momentum and a direction there, you do get early adopters, you get people who are willing to come in and real estate, including residential real estate, is cheaper earlier in these turnarounds. Now, we do want there to be an affordable housing element to these local consortia so that you're not, the idea is not to drive up the prices of houses immediately around these hubs that would be counterproductive in terms of making them inclusive. But I take your point that one should make sure that the local communities have a fiscal capacity to improve roads, improve schools, make sure housing is actually available. I think then the private sector, they've seen enough of this happen, this revitalization happened. That getting people to create restaurants and open shops is not hard. I think making sure you don't squeeze out the relatively low income existing inhabitants, that's actually an important priority that we should discuss and embrace directly because it can be, and when you don't think about it, it is a challenge and when you don't think about it, they just get pushed out. So that you don't want, that's not the goal of what we're talking about here. It has to be recognized and dealt with early on. Absolutely built in is what I would say. I think we're all on the same page. Yes, good, thank you for that point. John Schmidt here at EPI as well. I wanted to follow up a little bit on Bonnie's question. She was making the point that it's external threats that have mobilized us in the past and clearly we have this massive external threat in some sense external called climate change and it has not been enough to mobilize us. And I wonder if at the federal level, there's so much gridlock. Is there as an opportunity here to try and do something like this at the state level? Could a Michigan or a Wisconsin take, three or $4 billion a year and create an example hub that might get this jump started and circumvent the federal level? I mean, do you think it's reasonable to try and do it at that level? Two points in reaction to that. One is yes, it's reasonable to try at the state level. I think, and there are people at the state level who will tell you that there's elements of what they're doing in Rochester, for example, where we're having a, this has been well received and we have a number of conversations ongoing. They will say that absolutely they're moving this direction and there's already some federal funds available around photonics that they're using, including on the manufacturing that's consistent with and reinforcing innovation. So absolutely in favor of state level initiatives, I'm not sure it moves the needle in terms of the macroeconomic impact of the kind of job impact that you guys are pushing for them that we want. So, but as I roll models and showing people that it can actually work, demonstration effects, yes, we're happy to encourage any of that whenever we can. I think on climate change, there may be a bit more of an opportunity than you're detecting in the sense that, so in the book we don't emphasize that because we wanted to make the point that this is actually our approach to somewhat neutral across technology priorities. So you could choose to push various kinds of technologies, use this mechanism, create more good jobs along the way. Climate change is obviously somewhat polarizing in partisan political terms. However, it does occur to some people who've read the book, let's say, that one could take a green energy priority, use the kind of machinery that we're talking about and I think substantially agreeing, at least in this room and use that as a way to generate, make sure you get good jobs and make sure that the government as the purchaser of a lot of these products has procurement policies that are consistent with making sure you get the manufacturing jobs and the manufacturing jobs are sticky in the US and so on. So I think that that is a little bit of a political decision above my pay grade, but I do know some people who are at that pay grade and should be thinking about it and I think are thinking about it and I think that you then have to persuade people, this is the right priority, but in terms of dramatic circumstances that really bring home to people, yes, we should deal with this, whether related catastrophes may have that potential. I don't wish for catastrophes and I don't wish for any kind of crisis, but I think you and Bonnie are making a good point. New York. My name is Yuren Wang, I'm a news reporter. So I'm interested in the human resources side of this issue. One of the greatest edges of the United States is willingness and ability to attract best talents from all over the world and retain them, but now the government seems to be reluctant to keep the door as open as it was at least to certain countries or in certain fields of study. Do you think this orientation will hurt the innovative capacity of the US in the future? Thank you. Yes, I think the existing restrictions on immigration for both highly skilled people and also less skilled people are damaging to economic growth in the United States, including to innovation. It is also the case in American history that the policies of immigration have been more difficult when macroeconomic circumstances were less favorable. Now, this is the question of, the headline numbers are quite good right now, but I'm skeptical that those headline numbers speak to people's individual realities that both what they perceive, how they perceive their wellbeing and what they expect would happen to their job. So I think this is a moment of relatively high anxiety on the economic front and that comes over into concerns about immigration. If the economy has more opportunity, when the economy has more opportunity for more people at a variety of skill levels, then I think people are historically in the United States have been more open to immigration. And as an immigrant, the gentleman who found my accent amusing has left, unfortunately, but it's a leftover British accent if you were wondering, because I've been in this country for a long time and I became an American citizen and I worked long and hard to become an American citizen. I'm very happy to be an American citizen. And I think it's a great and amazing thing about this country that has been so open to immigrants for so long and I personally advocate for immigrants at every opportunity. So I think that immigration is an important part of what's made a successful in the past and will contribute in the future. But let's be honest, immigration is easier when there's more opportunity for everyone. Hi, I'm Ashabala Krishnan from the Science and Technology Policy Institute. I have a question about technology transfer. And so tech transfer is one of these things that sort of is done, from my understanding, better at universities than at national labs and probably because they're not really meaning to produce products and services but nor are universities. I think that the Manufacturing Innovation Institutes have tried hard to think through their IP and tech transfer policies but I think a lot of what you're talking about really, really depends on IP and tech transfer policies and how that's gonna make it out. So I was just wondering if you have any thoughts on that. Okay, so that is a very good question. And it is interesting that, well, a couple of observations about MIT, again, the person who asked about MIT earlier has left, unfortunately, but. So MIT still is a very big Defense Department contractor. During the Cold War, MIT was an innovative place where it wasn't a commercially oriented innovation place. So after the end of the Cold War, when some of that funding dried up, there was a big push towards entrepreneurship at MIT and that was actually part of the push that led to me getting hired there. People will now tell you that MIT has a very pro-commercialization culture that the faculty are encouraged to create companies. Their colleagues like it, the administration likes it, the students like it, because it creates all kinds of opportunities for them and that then comes back to the classrooms. And I think that's correct. And I think there are other universities and other university private sector city, local community combinations that could perhaps move their culture a bit more in that direction. But the MIT culture has changed since I've been there. So it's not like, oh my goodness, we've always had this, everyone else should only aspire to it. No, on the contrary, I think it's a question, it's something you can build. It's something you can encourage. The, in terms of IP lore and IP general, the policy that's available within the university community, that should be the same for everyone. Maybe there are some state level concerns. What about national labs? Well, look, yes. So the, yes. But how do the national labs face different IP or tech provisions than universities? Right, but my point is, so I agree with that completely. Within universities, there's big variation, which is interesting. And so, thinking about how all universities could become more inclined to transfer technology is a good idea. And another element that some people who are close to national labs emphasize is that there's a lot of young people at universities, students and postdocs. And having young people around seems extremely conducive to setting up new activities. So the big grants we get from, senior scientists will get those and there's plenty of people who are working as postdocs for a long period of time and so on. But there's something about the pressure you get from students, what students are asking for, what students want, what young people need today is more good jobs that pay good wages in order to be able to pay off their loans and build life for themselves. And I think that the universities have got a bit more of that than the labs right now, but let's try and move everything in that direction. That would be our suggestion. Okay, I think that pretty much takes us to the end. Sorry, everybody didn't get a chance to ask your questions, but please join me in thanking Simon Johnson. Thank you very much.