 Dr. Arbeck, what would be your perspective on how a change in attitude along these lines would actually, would it be possible and would it have the effect that Dr. Berkley is saying it would? Now you're asking for a suspension of disbelief. Look, I spend most of my time, since I live in Berkeley, defending the U.S. market system and so I have a lot of sympathy for his position because I think markets generally do work better than most people understand and I think in many cases government attempts to intervene in markets make things worse. But I also think and I spend a lot of my time teaching about the circumstances in which markets don't work well and which government intervention appropriately designed can make things better for the market participants. And I also think that you need a, you're not going to educate people to be against their own self-interest and if they understand that markets functioning well, perhaps with assistance from the government when they don't, are going to leave them with very little no matter how hard they work, they're not going to support it and you can educate them day and night and write more books and they're going to feel the same way as they do right now which is very unhappy. So let me just quickly, first life is not just about money and that's part of what we need to educate people. It's not just about money, freedom is far more valuable than money. Let me, going back to the improbability of this, the science fiction of it, if you were sitting in 1650 in any place in Europe and somebody had said, you know, one day in less than 150 years there's going to be a country founded on these new ideas that are coming out of the Netherlands about individual rights and the didrofen, all these other philosophers are talking about, that John Locke would formulate and they'd be a country based on that system. They would have thought you were nuts. And then by the way, and there would be a separation of church and state. This is in the middle of the Catholic slaughtering the Protestants at vice versa. People would have thought you were crazy. So I, yes, there's never been a country exactly like the way I would like it to be. There was never in America before there was in America. But what shapes history, what shapes the world ultimately are ideas, are philosophies. And while I don't expect to see big movement in the direction that I would like it to go in my lifetime, I do believe that good ideas went out in the long term. The long term is the long term. It takes a long time. I'm very realistic about my prospects for short term success. Well, let me ask you this one. Can you think of an example today of a market failure that you would concede requires government intervention? No. I mean, because I don't concede the term market failure. Just every time you point me in the direction of a market failure, I see government controls and government regulations behind them or corruption in some way or fraud. And fraud we know is wrong. Fraud, there's a thousand years of common law. We understand that. Suddenly there are violations of property rights that are new that come about to government has to intervene. Pollution being one of them, intellectual property rights, we didn't know really intellectual property rights existed to relatively modern phenomena, how we apply it. So I'm not an anarchist. I believe government is necessary. Government is necessary to define and then protect property rights and the application onto property rights is something that evolves and changes because the world evolves and changes. We discover new things. But no, I mean, every time people point me to, I don't know, financial crisis or Rockefeller in the 1860s, 70s. I see either good things like in Rockefeller or yeah, everything about this financial crisis I see government all over it. Now, was they greed on Wall Street? Yes. But there's greed on Wall Street every single day of the year. It's their job. Their job is to make money. And you create the right incentives. They do their job well. You create the wrong incentives. They do a horrible job. And that's what happened in 2008, among other things. I've gotten a bunch of questions on upward mobility and the impact of income inequality on mobility in our culture. Dr. Abar, why don't we start with you? What would you say are the facts about upward mobility in the last 10 years in America and what has been the contribution of income inequality and what would be the fix? The evidence on income mobility in the United States is it has not really changed that much. You have to look over long periods because over short periods we have recessions, we have other things that distort what the picture we get. But if you look over decades, as inequality has increased, there really hasn't been much of a change in mobility. Number one. Number two, the U.S. is often held out as a very mobile society. And that is certainly true if you look at certain groups such as recent immigrants. But overall, if you look at the U.S. compared to other Western countries, the U.S. does not stand out as being a more mobile society. And Dr. Burke? I mean, I think empirically that's right. I don't disagree with that. Although I think America was more mobile in the late 19th century, early 20th century. And I think that we've lost a lot of that. And it's unfortunate, both on the way down and on the way up. But I think that what's important here are that there are policies, in my view, that clearly hold people back, that we institute in order to correct inequality. And I think the minimum wage is a classic example of that. In the name of helping the bottom rise up, we're creating a whole subgroup. And everybody admits this. It's one of the trade-offs, a subgroup of teenagers, particularly inner-city teenagers who will never have a job. And if you never have that first job, because you just don't produce 15 bucks an hour, you're just not producing or 10 bucks or whatever the rate is. If you never have the first job, it's hard to get a second job and you're never going to get a third job and you can't rise up. So in a sense, many of these policies are instituting a certain group into their poverty or take licensing laws, the ridiculous licensing laws in California where you need license to shampoo hair. Now that is not going to hood my kids, right? But there are poor kids out there who would like to get a job shampooing hair and use that again as a stepping stone. They need a license which costs, I don't know, 1,000 bucks to take a course and to do this thing or to open a nail salon. You need a whole slew of government licenses, which costs again, $10,000, $20,000. This is a young, typically immigrant entrepreneur who's trying to start a business and improve their life and rise up. And in the name of protecting a monopoly, right, the people already have the jobs, we're excluding them and we use the excuse protecting the customer. We've got so many of these laws and regulations and ultimately I would even argue the welfare state itself discourages mobility. It encourages people to stay put, to become entitled, to have an entitled mentality rather than to exercise real ambition and to raise themselves up. Dr. Fairbott, if you could address that topic also and talk a little bit if you would about ideas you might have for increasing the mobility from the bottom part of our culture. Well, first of all, let me agree that there are government policies such as excessive licensing, which are aimed to protect incumbents and industries, which I don't, as an economist, don't favor either. The fact that there are bad government policies doesn't mean government policy is bad. I agree with you that it's hard to get things to work. You're taking a risk when you turn a responsibility over to government because there are going to be interests that lead to the kinds of situations that we have. I would also agree that a $15 minimum wage in California that applies even in very low wage areas with high rates of unemployment is probably not a good idea. I think, frankly, that's the consensus of the economics profession. The economics profession is more split about some minimum wages in some places, but having a very high minimum wage in a very low wage area is something that actually would get very little support among economists, in part because they see better policies, not no policy as an alternative. And there are other policies. And some of these policies, such as the earned income tax credit, which is a very important policy for addressing both disincentives people have to work, as well as poverty, I think, are very successful. So I think policies like that, policies promoting education among people who don't have access to capital markets or opportunities to borrow adequately to become educated are important ways of addressing mobility and addressing poverty. And simply citing certain government policies that are counterproductive as proof that government policies don't and can't work, I think, is incorrect. Dr. Burke, one of your points in your book is that the notion of equal opportunity is a false premise from your perspective. And I think some of the policies you're talking about would be attempting to equal the opportunity playing field out there. Could you talk a little bit about why you think, particularly in our culture today, where there are some very gross inconsistencies in people's basic opportunities? So my main point is that equal opportunities just equal outcome at a different point in the spectrum. And the left has identified this a long time ago. The right thought they had some new insight by saying, oh, we're against equality of outcome, but we're for equality of opportunity. But equal opportunity is a type of outcome. And you can't achieve equality of opportunity. And just like equality of outcome, achieving equality of opportunity requires hurting some for the benefit of others. It requires redistribution, which I'm against. Sacrificing some for the sake of others. I'm against this trade-offs of benefits. And in my view, what I am for is maximizing opportunities, creating, making it possible for people to have the most opportunities that are feasible. And I think the best system to do that is a free market. It's where the government is not trying to play redistributor and figure out how to do this. And the example is, I don't know if you're gonna get to a question on this, but an example of this, you know, where we're really seeing huge, if you will, inequalities is with education. I mean, our educational system is so immoral and so disastrous, it is really horrific. If you look at public education, the worst schools are in poor neighborhoods and poor kids who've already got a bad break in life because of where they're born and they don't have money and their families might not be a supporter. Then they get sent to the worst schools one can imagine. We spend huge amounts of money on these schools and they're complete disasters, all in the name of equal opportunity. In my view, what we're doing is destroying their opportunities because giving them allows the education. I would like to see a world in which we had real innovation, real competition for schooling. I'd like to see the entire school system privatized where this was a market that entrepreneurs Silicon Valley would go into to try to compete, to make money off of poor kids' education. There's amazing opportunities here and with destroying those opportunities, they won't even, you know, you can't even get school choice, voucher systems, minimal little things, which I think are way too minor to really make an impact. You can't even get that passed because the politics are such that these interest rates are entrenched and you cannot make the case that this is for the students, none of this is for the students. Here's a statistic. In the inner city of Chicago, it costs the city of Chicago School District, by the way, which is technically bankrupt, officially bankrupt. It costs them $15,000 to educate one child per year, $15,000. The ICHD, the Catholic schools in the same inner city in the same geographic location cost them $7,500 to educate the same kid, half price. You could shut down public schools in Chicago, give the money to the archdiocese and return the rest of the taxpayers. And that's without real competition. I'm not even counting Marvel Collins, who had a phenomenal school in the inner city in Chicago and charged half what the archdiocese was doing and every one of her children went to college and she, again, no selectivity in terms of who entered. If you really bring innovation and competition into schooling, that maximizes opportunity. Doesn't equate them. You can't equate them any more than you can equate outcomes. That is a mythology. It's a platonic ideal that cannot be in reality. But what you can do is dramatically improve the opportunities these kids have. Dr. Abbak, there are a number of questions here on this educational topic. I'd be interested in your perspectives on what needs to be done in making education more equal in this country. And could it be done without government regulation? Well, first of all, I'd like to just call attention to the inconsistency in the argument we just heard. It was an argument against government intervention. But it all hinges on the idea that the government is giving vouchers, I assume, or some other mechanism to allow poor people to pay for the education that they get to choose in the free market. It's a reform of government policy, but it's a policy that would still have government very involved in the form of redistribution. Charter reforms, school choice. There are arguments on both sides. I certainly think there are a lot of arguments in favor of it, particularly in poor areas. It's in poor areas where charter schools seem to have the most impact. And one can understand why, because you're starting from a very, very low baseline. But that's not a private system. A private system is where the government says, bye-bye, you're on your own. You want to go to private school? Fine, you pay for it. We don't have any proposals for that. Again, the people on the right who you say are giving up on everything, none of them are proposing that we do that either. And I guess you're not proposing it either. You're proposing that we still have government involved, but we have them involved in a way that allows markets to operate better. And I'm fully in agreement with that. Let's just not call it a lack of government involvement. So let me correct the impression. I was offering a transition. And this is what happens when I offer a transition, right? Ultimately, absolutely, you want an education, pay for it, the government should have zero redistribution. That is the ultimate. How you get there, you see, I offer a middle ground and I get nailed for it. Can't do it.