 My name is Rachel Black and I'm with the Asset Building Program at New America. Thank you all so much for sticking it out with us. So glad to see so many of you still here. I'm really excited to be moderating our last panel. I think it comes at, you know, a really great conversational arc in the context of what we've been talking about, you know, for the last day and a half. We've talked about specific policy challenges that have been facing millennials. We heard before lunch some really interesting conversation about the challenges that millennials sort of face engaging with the policy-making structures that they interact with. So in this conversation, we're really going to be melding those two together through the framework of a social contract for millennials, sort of piecing those two ideas, the policies and the institutions and government into sort of one cohesive frame. And to do that, we're going to start out hearing from our powerhouse panel. Mark Schmidt, who is the Director of the Policy Reform Program at New America. Taylor Joe Eisenberg, who is the Vice President of Networks at the Roosevelt Institute and Perry Bacon Jr., who is a senior political reporter for NBC News. And you all, you all are our fourth panelist. I'm going to pose a set of questions to the panel and I want everyone to feel free to weigh in or however you feel so moved. If you have a question, please pose that too. Before we jump in, just a couple of housekeeping notes. First, we have a hard stop at 1.45. I'm sure that this will be very engaging and interesting and we'll want to continue the conversation, but we have a very quick room turnover. So if you just all stand up and move the conversation outside, that'd be much appreciated. Next thing, just a couple of notes of thanks. First, to our graphic recorder, who's been doing an amazing job recording our conversation. And just a note of thanks to the New America staff who have done just an amazing job producing the event today, our AV staff. Leanna Simmons with our event staff. This is the first time we've been in this space. I think it looks awesome. I think if you agree with me, clap your hands. Great. All right, let's go ahead and jump in. So first, I'd just like to hear from each of you sort of your view of the world. You've heard a fairly far-ranging conversations. What are your reflections? What are the pieces that you think we should sort of tease out when we're thinking about sort of the construction of a social contract for millennials? Sure. Well, thank you very much, Rachel. It's great to be on this panel with Kern and former colleagues. And I really appreciate all the work that you've done on this conference. I'll just try to be as quick as possible in making a couple of observations. I was struck with Tara, Joe, and I were at a conference last week with mostly people who are a very small number of millennials. One of those conferences where I was probably below the median age, unlike this one. And somebody who was a millennial started saying, you know, millennials are really important because in 20 years we're going to be really at the center of power and everything. You know what? A millennial could be the next president in 2016. We're really talking not about people who are super young. Wendy Spencer used the word adults first. It's kind of astonishing. This is people who are really at the heart of your working lives and some who are heading towards that point. So I think we should think of it as a little bit, not just what works for millennials, but kind of what's going on in the economy right now and people who are millennials kind of are experiencing this economy at its fullest as opposed to people like me. We're moving this economy now, but we also had time in a previous economy. So I kind of think we should think about it a little bit in those terms. Like, you know, what's the situation of the economy we're in right now and how do you answer it? And, you know, thinking about the political engagement panel, my kind of naive political theory is like the first thing you want to ask is, is the political system actually providing answers that are persuasive to helping people move into the process? I don't think you can say, oh, people should be doing this, that, or the other thing, until you actually look back and say, have we got something for people? Is there something here that's answering people's stresses and situations? And I'm not sure we quite do. And I think we should really challenge ourselves as to whether we have adequate answers. I think that when you talk about the economy and the situation of people who are kind of moving into it or at the heart of their careers, there are two things that struck me about it from the previous two days. One is a lot of the life cycle is kind of compressed. So the period between paying off your student loans, beginning to save, you know, really getting more costly parts of having a family, that's a very compressed period. And then, of course, on the other side, retirement savings, which we didn't talk about at all, is an even more stressful thing. So the standard life pattern is quite different. And the other thing I was struck by, particularly in the work-family conversation today, is there are two very different worlds of work. And one of it is like what Anne-Marie Slott was talking about yesterday, which is the organization I work for. Super flexible, lots of autonomy, lots of opportunity. And there's a whole other world that's increasingly really, really the opposite of that, that people were talking about. And there's a gulf between. We don't always know people who work in that world. And that used to be there were terrible, stressful jobs, but at least they were compensated with some pay, largely because of unions. We're in a very different world. So I think we should kind of acknowledge that. And I think they're thinking about the social contract. I think of a couple different models we should think of. You know, the classic social contract is social insurance. There are situations you encounter in life, and you're going to kind of collectively ensure yourself against those in advance, retirement, disability, health, and so forth. And the student loan system, for example, is a kind of social insurance of its own. You're paying for it after rather than before. And with the newer income contingent repayments, it's really that classic model. But those are all based on specific situations in life. And they're kind of based on, and we need to make those things work. We need to make unemployment insurance work. But they're based on predictable events and assumptions about the life cycle. And I think we need to revisit those. The second way, the other aspect of a social contract that we've always talked about here, assets can be helping people build assets, whether it's home ownership, savings, accounts for education. It can be a kind of social contract that kind of helps protect people without necessarily focusing on those specific things. And I think that's an important aspect of it as well. The third piece is detaching some of that social contract from work. And I think as work becomes kind of tougher and more, you know, in a sense, every corporation is kind of tightening its costs and things like that, it's much more important to make those protections things that belong to people and not as an addition of employment with I think the ACA being one small first step in that direction. And then I think we need to think about what's going on, and particularly with things that are developing now and driven obviously by people under 35. There's an interesting phenomenon where I think there's a mistrust of a generous trust of government, not radically different from other generations, but not a full rebound to kind of the New Deal generation either. A fair amount of distrust of government, but a big trust in fairly collective solutions, often at a large scale, often technological. I mean, care.com, for example, which was represented here earlier, is a pretty large scale child care, elder care, a whole bunch of other things. People are putting a lot of faith in it. People put a lot of faith in Airbnb. You're kind of throwing into the unknown in some of these things. So I think that's an interesting challenge. Can we recreate some collective, you should government kind of model itself after some of these large scale collective organizing projects that have taken place, or should we kind of give over to that? I think that's a really interesting question. What are the costs of kind of putting so much collective action in these private agencies? And then I think the third thing, and I'll be quick, is I do think, especially when you hear about work and family, I think it's really important not to let big companies off the hook. I think the relentless pressure to kind of cut costs and cut stability and so forth that we're seeing throughout the economy is something we've got to address. I think corporate governance has something to do with that. Obviously, unions would be a great answer if it's not that, we need to find other ways to do those things. It's just a very, it's a much cooler world than it needs to be given the level of prosperity that actually exists in our country. So that's probably too long. Yeah, so I first want to say thank you to New America. We are really excited to partner on this event. I participate in a lot of different venues and spaces that are talking about millennials, and it's always heartening to be in ones that were very thoughtful and nuanced and stuff versus a lot of tokenization and millennials. You equal technology. That's my, that's what I'm taking away from this. So there's really appreciate the level of thoughtness in the conversation that we've had over the past day and a half. So I work with the Roosevelt Institute and more specifically with our Roosevelt Networks, which includes our campus network, which is a network of 120 chapters across the country and 38 different states of students doing policy work. So we in a lot of ways are building and training the next generation of policy wonks who are beginning to take on these issues now. I'm excited that we have a few of them in the room here today. So I kind of, when I was going through the last two days and I don't want to repeat all the phenomenal things that other people said, a lot of really smart people talking about a lot of really important things. But I think one of the things that I took away when we're talking about the social contract is we need to be thinking about some of the frameworks within those social contracts. And the obvious ones are the ways that the panels are organized. Talking about the new economy, talking about wealth, social, political participation. There's also some cross cutting frameworks that I picked up across the panels that are really interesting to me in terms of thinking out, what are these new frameworks? And again, it's not that they're new frameworks specifically for millennials, it's just they're new frameworks for the time that we're in and millennials are bearing the brunt of the repercussions of those new frameworks. So the one is this question on the American dream that was something across the board that people talked to us, we need to readjust our assumptions or what the American dream is and who is attainable for. The second was being explicit about race and class. I think somebody made a really interesting comment yesterday that's really important, is that millennials are very class conscious in a way that there was a lot of overarching narrative that we were moving away from. I don't think that's true. And how we'd be explicit and how we understand race and class and its implications and our policymaking and a lot of it has to do with the fact that millennials are 40% people of color and we aren't talking enough about that. The third is questions on work and family. One of our speakers earlier today also talked about the third elements, work, family and community, which is an important aspect from millennials or what are their new frameworks for thinking out those things coming together. The next would be, again, intersection of problem solving. For those who participated in the policy breakouts yesterday, there was a lot of conversation about we can't talk about these economic issues without talking about the state of higher education. And so what are the frameworks for our problem solving that help us realize that and bring all the different pieces and conversations together that need to happen. The next one is my favorite, it's talking about what Mark hit on, networks and institutions. There's so many interesting things that young people are doing to elevate the issues they care about, whether it's looking at the dreamers around immigration, whether it's looking at the young people helping to drive Occupy, whether it's looking at what's happening in Ferguson right now. But there tends to be a disconnect between the networks that are thriving and being driven by young people and the institutions of power that are positioned in some ways to institutionalize where these young people are coming at. And that disconnect is causing a lot of problems and that fits in very clearly with the conversation around the way that our social and political participation models are changing and shifting, whether it's looking at things like participatory budgeting, whether it's looking about the role of technology and politics. And the last is looking at a new framework around how we think about wealth of debt and stability. There's some really fascinating comments made yesterday about how millennials aren't as ready to enter into debt. And what does that mean? Thinking about the fact that stability is an extraordinarily important thing for young people who have grown up in a time of instability. And so what are the implications of that when we think about, again, our wealth, debt, and stability frameworks? And then I just wanted to share a few observations beyond just talking about some of the interesting framework concepts as well. As up on the stage, when a young person was on a panel, there was immediately discussion of power. And I think that's a really important thing to note because young people don't feel like they generally have it. Sometimes when young people are talked about, it's left out of the conversation. But when you bring them in, they're talking about it because they know what it's like not to have it. And when they feel a sense of helplessness because institutions are aligned against them. And so I think that's a good justification for making sure that, in Mark's point, they are in positions now where they should be a part of these conversations. The second is that there are two distinct millennial experiences. I mean, there's tons of millennial experiences, but there's two distinct ones. There's the one that is more common than media narrative around the entrepreneur, the startup, the person who's taking the reins. But there's also these 6.7 million young people who are not in school and not in work. That is a distinct experience that is very different from the one that is focusing on, as people talked about yesterday, the barista effect, the overeducated young person who is working on a coffee shop. And I think that's an important thing. It comes back because we're leaving out a whole economic strata and a whole conversation about how people of color, particularly young people of color are generally still not doing well in this economy. And then the next one was trust. So we talked a lot about trust in terms of government and young people trusting government and institutions, but there was really good conversation yesterday around financial institutions. So we had somebody up here who was using some new financial tools. And they made the comment that young people are trust tech companies way more than they trust financial institutions. And so the role of trust for the generation and the repercussions of the Great Recession around that and what that means for the policy mechanisms that we put in place. And Rachel and me talked about politics a little bit and had them lineals, used the political process and give more political power and influence to debates that are happening in Washington and around the country as well. And that's one of the most important points about that. The first one being that all the data shows that millennials tend to live in and want to live in cities. And that's a really important lever of power. We don't think about it this way, but Harris County is the county that includes Houston. 4.3 million people live there. That's more people than live in 24 states. 8 million people live in New York. That's all, that would be the 13th biggest state in the country that became president. If you can change his views on something, then you've changed the lives of a lot of millennials and that's a lot easier than changing Congress. A lot of we talk about policy making, what's Washington doing, what's Congress doing. We should always think more about what are cities doing, what are states doing. It's much easier to change a city and a lot of people live in cities. The partisanship, the partisan group doesn't really exist at the city level the way it does at the Washington level because a lot of cities are controlled to change. So a lot of the changes I hear about that would help millennials and others are already happening in a lot of places. Raising the minimum wage, the idea of banning the box, meaning you don't have to check a box to see what your criminal record is, which affects minorities disproportionately. Expanding pre-kindergarten education. Requiring policemen to wear cameras in some way. It's something we've been talking about since what happened in Ferguson. Encouraging schools to suspend kids less. These things are all actually great ideas and a lot of them are actually already happening. One big lever is to think about cities one and then states two because the gridlock is happening not, the gridlock is happening in Washington but most states increase their control by one party or the other party. And that gives you another lever as well because when you're talking about states there's the ability to change things because most people don't think Texas is going to turn blue or Maryland is going to turn red anytime soon. So there's more incentive there for politicians to work on the problems that are going to take over power in the future. There's not going to be a Republican governor of Maryland time soon or a Democrat governor of Texas anytime soon so you can use the lever of the states and I think that's another key one to think about in terms of how do millennials use the political process to change things. The second thing that I think is really important is to think about is millennials unlike the rest of our politics are not divided, our prejudices are not divided by race one and religion two. I mean you think about a lot of people where you have civil rights legislation you have bussing, you have the fight over that and then you have people who grew up in the 1980s and the fact that they collect cities they're all these problems with cities and there was urban crime and so on. And millennials have not grown up in that ideal, they're a much more diverse generation, the white black divide is not the same there, there's Hispanics, there's many more biracial people so those kinds of divides are gone and the religious divide as millennials increasingly are called themselves nuns in terms of religion meaning they don't identify with any kind of religion at all. That's an important divide too, I mean a lot of politics spends its time dividing people on those two factors, race and religion and millennials won't have those kind of divides. And when we talk about the power of millennials we should acknowledge that I know a lot of data says millennials are increasingly independent and they're increasingly out of the political process. That's one set of data, the other set of data suggests that millennials actually did play a big role in electing the current president and he's done a lot of policy that millennials would like and the uninsured rate among young people is like plunging because of Obamacare. There's been a lot of work on student loans by the administration already so when I hear millennials occasionally are powerless I'm sort of like the White House in October released a memo about what their policies are for millennials now and in the future. When you get a memo released in October in an election year that means you're a powerful political group. They already care about you and that's a good sign it suggests that like they care about the elderly like they care about Hispanics, like they care about blacks, they care about millennials as an institution already. So that is a way to wield power. I mean one of the things if I was designing a millennial strategy of the future is to figure out how do I get how do I take my ideas and make sure Hillary Clinton, Chris Christie, Rand Paul etc. are taking those ideas forward because Obama I would argue already did acknowledge the power of millennials and actually work with them to a great extent. The third thing that I think is a really powerful level is the media has such a big power in terms of what we talk about what problems we think are problems and you can tell millennials are already affecting the media a lot. We've mentioned that a little bit earlier the kind of the dreamers how they're coming up to politicians and asking them are you going to deport me are you not going to. This has become like viral video. 60 year olds aren't doing them but when the dreamers did that with Rand Paul that was on cable news all day long and politicians are very affected by what's in the news like millennials help make Ferguson big in the news and then Barack Obama is reacting to it and that's really important to think about that kind of media lens as well. And the fourth thing is related to this as well is it's important I think for millennials to define what the problem is exactly because I think the biggest problem is and this affects how it's covered is millennials they had all this college debt they graduated from college at a time where there were any jobs they went to graduate school so they had even more debt than previous generations if you think of that as the sort of one of the core problems of millennials you probably would write fewer stupid articles about how gee I wonder why millennials live with their parents so long that's like a dumb concept for stories most stories are written all the time but I think it's in part a failure of people like us to define more challenges of millennials is they have this huge amount of debt so of course they're living with their parents more than people who graduate college in 1997 when unemployment was very, very low so if you think about that so if you think about how do we define the problem to the media like if I ran Young Invincibles I would think every time Time Magazine wrote a stupid story about how many millennials live at their parents house make sure to flood them with tweets and letters saying the average debt of this generation is this much about ways in order to spin less on housing so it really is in effect a way to like change how the media tells the story and that will change the story itself. That's great. I think where I want to start is Taylor you had alluded to viewing the challenges with millennials maybe less in terms of how they're distinct from other generations and more in terms of how the degree to which they're experiencing those problems is defined by sort of the economic circumstances that we're in and when we're thinking about policy responses to those challenges you know I'm wondering how useful the millennial frame then is we heard from Bessie Stevenson earlier and she walked us through what the White House's agenda for millennials looks like and it very much looks like the White House's agenda for shared opportunity and prosperity is something that speaks to labor market access educational access health care in response to the White House's plan Metaglaces who we heard from yesterday wrote that actually in terms of looking at policy solutions looking at a prism of class or race to actually be more instructive given the diversity of the generation and the universality of the needs that are sort of met by it so I'd really like to get sort of your reaction to that. I think it was metaglaces who wrote an article last week that was essentially saying that the White House is essentially a proposal around millennials as a proposal which should be just general for the economy and yeah it's funny because I think you know we've been talking about millennials for like seven or eight years as a concept and it steadily gained steam and the funny part is that the policy world is by far the last group to talk about it that it was particularly in the marketing world and the tech world like they had an interest in being at the forefront of understanding the changing trends of young people and so they've been talking about this for a while and it's only like in the past like three, four years or so but you know the political and policy world has been like what is happening and I think the funny part is is I just saw a few weeks ago a marketing firm come out with a new report on Generation Z they're already talking about the people who are about to turn of college age who are distinct in their trends that are different from millennials that they actually even are less trusting that but at the same time they're much more collective oriented versus millennials what they call sharing oriented and so the part of I think the challenge of the millennial or the generational framework is that again it's not holistic and often it changes really quickly but I think the more important thing that I would take away from what you're talking about is that the policy political world and institutions are generally have been a little bit behind on some of this stuff and so how do we adjust and start being quicker and more responsive when it comes to our policymaking because those important things that are relevant to millennials as a framework in terms of how we think about policy and it will be the same for Generation Z and I also think it's a much more complicated your point is that you know we do have people who don't necessarily identify as black or white anymore and they're changing dynamics and race gender in itself is changing and you think about the conversation around transgender all of these are different prisms in which we need to see this work and so I would exclude generational but I don't think it's the only one that we can go to like as a panacea to understand the shifts and changes that we're going through Thanks and I invite either one of our other panelists as well as you and the audience to weigh in on this too if you care to make a contribution just flag down our staff member with with a microphone Perry and Mark do you care to weigh him in? Taylor you knocked it out of the park well done so when we think about a social contract really it is a balance of individual needs and sort of reciprocity on the part of government or other institutions who are creating these policies and I think what we've heard a lot about throughout the last day and a half is that these institutions are failing in myriad ways right Mark you made reference to sort of the lack of sort of retirement security options employers are less likely to be offering sort of defined benefit plans of course employees are also much more mobile they're also less likely to have access to employer provided health care and that's sort of just on the employer side you know on the government side we've heard issues related to sort of the responsiveness of government how representative government is and of course the problem of the government to sort of actively disenfranchising large amounts of people who should have a voice in the decisions that sort of make their lives make their lives better so what kind of changes and Perry I'd love to start with you what kind of changes with government in particular do you feel like we need to see for any any meaningful change in a policy agenda that helps the millennial generation or others advance changes or we could start with somebody else let me start with Martin let me take you by the way this is kind of the main thing that I try to think about I don't do any I haven't solved any problems yet but I've tried to I mean the failure of government to respond I mean we could talk about what we think ideal policies would be we don't have a governing system that's able to do that right now they're good proposals they're things that can sometimes be done by executive order they're tremendous things that were done in the first year of the Obama administration on whether it's student loans or the ACA not much since then it's a broken process and it's a very difficult process because of the because of the absolute partisanship it's a very difficult process to inject an idea in because it's very hard to have an idea have leverage unless it gets unless it's picking up some support in different parts of the political spectrum you know and you can kind of leverage those things against each other to make it happen at best you have an idea that either takes hold in the Republican channel or takes hold in the Democratic channel but it's even even in the cases where where Democrats have 60 votes in the Senate it's still very very hard to pull that off and that's a very different political world than you know when I worked on Capitol Hill less than about 18 years ago you know that was a world where there were all kinds of different kinds of coalitions and deals you could cut and alliances you could form and it was you know you didn't get everything done it was still a tough environment but things moved but we don't have that now and you know we do have to think about what's a structure that could make some of those things happen I don't you know I do think I think money in politics has something to do with it I don't think it has everything to do with it I think George Chung from the Joyce Foundation kept trying to raise the idea of do we need a different kind of party structure that gives a little more you know some opportunity for other kinds of formations to emerge I used to be kind of ok and lukewarm about that and now I'm kind of thinking I don't know if there's really an alternative I mean if you do something like rank choice voting that kind of gives different people different ways to participate gives politicians different incentives to kind of get out there and actually offer people something that doesn't fall into one of the established channels I think we have to think about ideas like that like I was saying I think changing Washington is sort of unrealistic right now and you might want to think about other levers of whether it's like foundations whether it's cities whether it's states whether it's counties as opposed I think we generally if we all agree what policies would help millennials best we could probably come up with a pretty decent list of what to do and I think that's what Maddie Glacier was writing about in some ways too the policies that would help millennials and out the rest of us I think we have a pretty decent sense of how to get them through I think is the challenge and then I would one that I think is require a little more creativity a little less kind of are the instinct among all people is why is an Obama doing X and I think we all have the answer to that and I think this is where millennials are actually really getting to your point about cities right in our network with our students like the locals where their head is at that is where they're thinking about trying to do a policy change work and we also did this big project of the course of a few years where the first year the students were building essentially a policy blueprint what kind of country do we want to inherit by the year 2040 what kind of policies we need to put in place on education environment the economy followed up with a budget to demonstrate they could pay for it and also to demonstrate to people they weren't idealist like this was a matter of political choices that they need to make but the last piece of what happened is the students said okay we have a vision for what we want we know we can pay for it if we're willing to make those hard political choices but our system is too broken to respond to us and to talk about what government needs to look like in the 21st century and it's a really I think it's a really creative and interesting conversation there's definitely the questions around the party system and the questions around polarization and its impact but there's also just about thinking about new models of participation and input and that with a generation in general that's very ownership driven I think that's where you see and participatory driven there's really some interesting questions like I don't think we've fully been able to wrap our heads around about the way that we can get a political system that is responsive and reflective and a timeline that actually is responsive to the needs of the moment. I just want to not challenge Perry but just raise the issue yes cities are great I think the idea that we're kind of we're post the corrupt machine city and post the crime-ridden city and the fact that we're sitting at you know 7th and at wherever we are 9th and 9th and Anne and you know we wouldn't have been here 15 years ago it's a really big deal in almost every city probably outside of Detroit even Camden, New Jersey where I used to try to do some work is picking up it's a really big deal I hate the idea first there are things that mayors can't do mayors can't create a student loan system and make it work for example and second I kind of hate the idea that we're going to move into a zone where lots of progressive things are being tried lots of great things are happening and then you know the majority of people living in Mississippi are living in the same situation that they lived in before the 50 poorest counties the 50 poor counties that sweep from West Virginia down into Georgia and Northern Alabama we're just going to kind of shrug about that because we're pretty happy with our nice art galleries here there's nothing too complacent about living in that world maybe we have to have some federal role for federal policy maybe the useful thing about problems that require lots of money and lots of economic and problems that don't like you know millennials overwhelmingly favor gay marriage and that is happening because it doesn't require lots of money so there are certain things in millennials favor that don't require lots of dollars and that kind of is a way to think about things that are very expensive but we're going to open it up to questions for the panel so if you have questions you want to there's a comment that you weren't able to raise during your policy workshop or something that people just didn't pay attention to now is the time to air it so please raise your hand yeah hi Ray Boshara Saint Louis Fed you know since this is a panel on the social contract as you know the social contract is centered towards the end of life and not so much towards the beginning recently the urban institute senator former senator Bob Carey folks at Kato you know left and right have made a point of how tilted resources are towards you know previous generations and you know there was even one study that showed I think the boomers might have been the last generation to actually get more out of government than they put in and you know millennials are actually it's another form of debt you know they're putting some money into the system and they're getting a lot less in return I guess the question is is that too big of an issue like is this too big for you should be worried about that massive allocation of resources and just think about very concrete specific things to be doing instead so and I just wonder about that the contract is reversed in many ways for how it should be and is that something you think that we should be doing something about so I'll say this is it's interesting I think sometimes in some ways it's a perfect example of how we can't talk about economics of any kind of generation without talking about political like a lot of people point to the reason why that is is because young people don't have the equivalent of the ARP and there's definitely been tons of efforts to think about building an ARP equivalent for young people I'm pretty sure I have three or four people approach me a year ask me have this idea an ARP for young people and there's definitely been my kind of thought about that is it's not reflecting where young people want to plug in and the concept of building this very bureaucratic heavy civic institution is not the direction that that needs to happen in but the interesting part about young people is like they're really supportive of things like social security and this goes back to some of the trends I talked about yesterday is that the generational conflict piece is not there and there's actually a lot of right-leaning organizations have tried to create that generational conflict and there's different conversations about how much young people should be getting annoyed about how many resources are going towards older generations I don't think it's a go I don't think people are going to respond well from a political standpoint I mean just to reverse that though is there a well on part of current older generations but is there also a sort of a similar sentiment like we've done very well as most seniors have at least historically and compared to previous generations is there a similar well like we need to be doing more for younger generations do you see that as well I'm pretty uncomfortable with that kind of generational accounting approach I'd like to put more resources really into children not necessarily into I mean there's a reason why we put resources at the end of life I mean that's when you're unable to work and incur significant health expenses and so forth so I'd rather put much more resources into children for sure without necessarily saying that has to come at the expense of a different generation I don't think that's a I think we should spend less on Medicare because it's inefficient in the way it operates not because this generation is getting too much and I think in terms of who's done well who hasn't I think we need to kind of get to the point where we shift away from the old tax conversation which is about you know only people above $250,000 need to you know need to actually contribute more I think there's a lot of us of many generations who are not over $250,000 but frankly we've done really quite well and we need to contribute more to the to into the social safety net and that's not a generational conversation but I like the idea of framing a social country we sort of have one for all people already which says you will not die in poverty you will have health insurance when you until you die should we have some young people where you will have the right to a high quality high school education you will have the right to go to college without being drained in debt where you can't take any job yes should we talk about that and should we lay that out in some way I think sure of course we in the same way we have we expect certain things when you're older we should expect certain things when you're 25 that you have and I think we should think about how to frame that as a you know what is the the Brooklyn framing is work hard play by the rules there should be something like that for people who are younger as well as older and we actually we actually think about that because you watch politics to do which is my job politicians are so focused on like look you know some politicians yes and we are going to cut Medicare and that is the end of time and they run ads focus on that both parties you rarely see you don't see as much a politicians going to make it much more hard to go to college and this is how we should attack them it would be great if we had equal emphasis on our system on the young as we did the old and I think that does go a little bit to voting pattern and so on let me call off on that I think that's a really interesting point though that we have such a robust safety net instead of social insurance programs that help the elderly and senior citizens at that point in their life but when we see what we would I think assume to be sort of comparable supports for a millennial or younger generation like a student aid financing and this is where we've seen a lot of divestment states are actually spending less and shifting the risk on to individuals rather than sort of stepping up and making additional investments so what do you think it's going to take to make sort of bad argument I mean I think we're I think it's one of the there's a little bit of shuffling right I mean we're disinvesting in public education itself at the same time that we're actually increasing costs you know increasing a shift onto loans so that people are bearing a higher burden and that balance needs to be needs to be shifted I don't think it's helpful to do that as a contrast with okay we've done this great thing for seniors because I mean it's not I mean Social Security isn't it adequate for people's retirement it's established it said it's better than in some ways it's better than what you have for younger people but it's not I don't think that contrast is really helpful because it leads you to kind of denigrate an incredible achievement that we have so what is the framing or the narrative that we need to be employing I think the framing is certain things are public education can be treated as a public good I mean it's not technically public good in the economist term but it's something we ought to be providing not making it super expensive and then letting people borrow massive amounts against their future earnings to get it many people who will make a bad judgment or be encouraged to make a bad judgment about whether that education will actually lead to those future earnings and I would say that I think this is where the falsities of the concept the American dream young people much more because I mean I'm sure most every time a young person hears a politician well back in my day I was able to work my part time job you should be able to take on the debt in the meantime a lot of it is there's a pure misconception about the lack of security that there is for you know young people and you know including you know kids and young adults you know people and so part of that's both shifting and recognizing the lack of security whether it's not whether it's framing it's about actually having a very overt conversation about the lack of security around this age group the long-term implications of that and essentially what do we get what are our public goods that we're going to put in place to ensure that that you know the first as I'm you know they're venturing out is the first step on the staircases there and that people can actually continue to climb it so I mean I would frame it as the goal is you have a high quality education college you don't have huge amounts of debt and you have a chance to get a job after we can then go to college which are we should get rid of for proper colleges that have huge you know cost a lot of money and then leave people in huge debt so they can't get jobs we can leave once we start from that big goal that we have policies that we know it's not that we're not spending enough money probably on higher education we're not spending in the right way I mean there are states that have married based financial aid programs and you know you can make a million dollars and you still be qualified for some kind of scholarship and that's probably I feel like if we almost detail the problem a little better it might be you can solve a little better too great all right next question thanks Abil you had a question did I see your hand yeah so just after that last discussion to what extent is so where does the taxation of private either private wealth or corporations fit into the story because you mentioned sort of philanthropies and a couple other things but there's a lot of dollars flowing through the economy but relatively little of it or less and less of it is flowing through the public sector and that's part of what's behind the rise of student debt and the hollowing out of public education and the hollowing out of the state itself and so where does that fit into the conversation we're having so far one of the great fears that I have is again the data shows that young people overall support this concept of the common good and the role of government and public institutions in securing some of those baseline entities. My fear though is that with the privatization that's happening a lot of this stuff that they will become a new norm and that there won't be that younger people won't have the framework to say actually these things that I deserve a good quality education that I deserve quality health care that the privatization element of some of this stuff means that the new norms they won't even have a framework to think about what they should be versus what is I'll just put that out there. Yeah I mean I think we're relying so much I mean I think there's a great model for in which things like private charity and foundation kind of model and test ideas and then government picks up the ones that work I kind of like that model it's a very 1960s Ford Foundation model of how the world works and but now I think we're in a zone where it's like because government is disinvesting we're totally relying on you know the private sector and philanthropy to do things like figure out the common core standards for us you know or or actually build the buildings on every university or fund the research or things like that. And I do think there's a great case for saying that we need to move some of that into the public sector where it's actually subject to democratic decision making and picks up the things that work not just the whims of Bill Gates had occurred at a particular moment in time. I guess my view is we sort of know what policies might fix that and the way you framed it is ultimately like the data now shows that the biggest thing that divides people in the world in America is not race or religion but politics and you framed that in a very I'm going to say left way and that would be and I if I was trying to solve all the problems I wouldn't start with I would start with the solution and maybe the problem and maybe not the politics because that's what is the virus. I want to follow up on that. I mean Perry you started by saying you know policies that are moving these days are often ones that don't cost any money right and I think what Ray was arguing is that inertia is very powerful right we already had these very entrenched very expensive policies sort of by virtue of being on the books for as long as they have and having sort of broad based constituencies and just sort of expectations that they'll continue to exist they continue to exist and when we're talking about making the kind of investments that are required to meet really these fundamental needs that millennials and future generations are going to continue continue to have I mean we encounter questions sort of like civilians is like well where's the money where's the offset how are you going to pay for that right and that's a very kind of distinct experience so I mean I'd love to hear a little bit more about your perspective about really what it's going to take to actually advance the kind of agenda that sort of employs some of the policies that we've been talking about what's going to take to advance can you fix this problem I mean as I said earlier I mean there was a there were lots of people under age 35 who were uninsured six years ago and they have insurance now I think that's a model for change electing someone who you know whatever you define you know I'm nonpartisan so I don't want to get too far in the zone here of who you should vote for but I think it gets to the point of like if they're whatever group we're talking about is always like list your policies you know bring them to the candidate figure out the candidates for them if the candidates for them support that person if they're not for them support the other person I just think that model of political change is not to me dead yet I think it's a you know one of the persons was for that and ran the president he won I mean I think there is a little bit of a simplistic way to put that but it's like if you if most millennial goals are achieved right now by the Democratic Party maybe they should vote for the Democratic Party I think the one thing I say is that we also need elect officials who are open and responsive to some of the generational language shifts that are happening and that means that we can't have the trend that we have now much Congress is getting older not younger and so we need that there's again some elements of the fact that like you're much more likely to listen to people that have shared your life experience and there you know there was that devastating court earlier forget the exact number around eight times white men have eight times the political power in this country and a large part of that is because their government looks like them and so I think tying that to the recognition that there does like it's about finding the politicians support you but you also need to believe that the politicians are open to what you have to say in the first place too so Mark why don't you want us to have what you have I'll I'll set it for six for six times I'll trade it away now I mean that study is really important and powerful I just want to say I think you know earlier today somebody had said something like well we have two corporatist parties that are totally identical and I don't agree with that I think Perry's made points that obviously that's that I don't think that's the case however it is very true that it is a lot easier to talk about non redistributionist politics on both sides of the aisle I mean you know the example that's often used is Andrew Cuomo Andrew Cuomo goes all in on anything that's basically non redistributionist in other words there's no tradeoff same-sex marriage choice you know equality in the workplace has some tradeoff but you know they're not directly felt he's all in on those really reticent on minimum wage any kind of tax increase anything that has any kind of redistributionist element well that reflects that you know if you're spending a lot of your time raising money on Park Avenue among people who call themselves liberals that's a lot of what you're going to hear a lot more comfort with same-sex marriage than with an minimum wage increase and that's kind of the tone of the modern Democratic Party and you know the tone of the Republican Party is all that plus there against all the non-redistributionist sex marriage so we have to find a way to bring that alternative that accepts that there's some level of redistribution that you know frankly I think it does include saying we need people who've done well who aren't you know they're not millionaires they're not making more than $250,000 but they have a level of security kind of need to contribute more generally to society as opposed to saying it's on the side of the seniors in Social Security but some other ways of talking about a collect of shared obligation to our fellow citizens that goes beyond just social liberalism I mean a lot of what Mark said if you wanted to have a panel about how to blacks get more power, how do Latinos get more power how do young people I mean the millennials have a lot of the same problems which is they don't have as much they don't give as much to campaigns they're not as rich so they don't have much way to do that and these are some of the same problems other disadvantaged groups have it's like I was sort of joking about the election a little but that's the core is that maybe we need to have Kennedy, the environmentalist Tom Steyer I don't know how old he is but I don't think he's a millennial I mean if we had if Zuckerberg and Sean Parker got together and like really came up with a millennial agenda here the 4th, I mean ultimately politicians are very responsive to money this is not news to anybody but I think that's part of one of the core problems as well. I mean Zuckerberg has that forward US of other young wealthy people into that. If you worked on an issue that what's the right framing of this if you worked on an issue that wasn't already sort of already established like he's working on immigration just the one issue that's already it moved as far as going to move the president's already behind that I mean it wasn't if they picked an issue that would be useful to have young young wealthy millennials who picked issues that were maybe not already entrenched in the political system and then raised those I mean we're not going to have like reparations for people who went to graduate college between 2005 and 2007 2007 and 2011 you know what I'm saying we're not going to have but we need to have some kind of maybe targeted there are some targeted policies that would help millennials and if you had somebody who really had a lot of credibility raising them they'd be useful to say Zuckerberg chose immigration which I don't begrudge him for but that's not necessarily an issue that was lacking in advocates. I'm going to say the same about climate change and Steyer. His money is making a big difference though in part because like the governor for he's politicians are more reluctant to talk about climate change then if you look at how many Democrats talk about climate change versus how many Democrats have immigration reform is as much smaller number on climate change I think. All right we have both an immediate seat in a competition issue we have time for exactly one more question so who needs to have the last word here I have the mic I can give it to another white male one of the motivations for this gathering was the kind of observation that the recession has really had a significant impact and in my framing piece there was also the observation that it appears that the markers to adulthood are changing for this generation vis-a-vis others and one of them is classic is on the wealth building is on home ownership moving forward and we circulated amongst ourselves an interesting article by a conservative writer who was decrying some of the trade-offs where he was saying there's not this aspiration for ownership anymore of the younger generation and it might be that it feels unattainable and he just thought this sounded very un-American and that there was a trade-off that was being considered ownership for access the demand for equal access to a number of systems and he saw this as a terrible thing it was going to lead to the ruin in the country and I'm not so sure anyway just wanted to get Mark and Taylor's observations on that initially because I think you'd read that piece and maybe Mark could even summarize if there was other things in that article that were relevant and is this indicative of other kinds of reordering of priorities aspirations that might signify some kind of generational progress in the days and years ahead? Well just some of the pieces by James Poulos who's often really incomprehensible conservative writer but basically that's the argument that he was making is that if younger people aren't as engaged with ownership it's going to harm liberty and he was looking back at for example the talk of the ownership society of the early Bush years and the idea like if you and it's part of Social Security privatization like if people own things they're more conservative they're more protective of liberty because they own their stock or their home or whatever it's all very abstract and I think that's an interesting it's always been an interesting contrast in politics I don't know that it's necessarily true that if you own something you're necessarily more conservative but it's kind of a big deal I think our obsession with home ownership obsession with home ownership harmed millions and millions of people and being willing to kind of when you don't own your kind of more engaged and collective activities you're a renter with others in a building and things like that so there's a little more of that responsiveness to collective obligations I think if you're not as obsessed with ownership ownership ownership it's a little crazy but interesting it was in the Daily Beast by the way and I would say I maybe haven't had enough life experience to have a concrete but I don't see the problem and it's again it's more like the politics and policies a little bit late to the game I was telling if you Google have Google work for millennials like for the past decade or so it's the car companies and real estate freaking out about the fact that young people aren't buying things and it also goes back to when you look at the trends that instead of seeing status through wealth and status through owning items or having that car or having being in that neighborhood, it's experiences it's being able to travel and being able to do things and being able to drink that fancy coffee and that's a little bit more for an upper middle class demographic with the purchasing power but I personally think in the beginning it goes back to when also millennials are interested in access for people beyond themselves I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing I'm a big fan of the move towards collective identity and a sense of community it might be useful to think do we want to have policies that encourage home ownership the way we do now we have child care tax credits we don't have things if you don't have children is there a way to think about generations in the future don't necessarily want to own a home they're not going to have children maybe the data suggests it's a little bit there then should we take it out of Texas and incentivize other different kinds of behavior great investment we'll have to stop please join me in thanking our panel