 Welcome to tonight's banquet of the two-day conference. Before we conclude the event, let's think about the following questions. Are you surprised when you find your savings are not growing, although you get paid each month? Are you worried about the money social security will pay when you become old? Do you feel frustrated when you choose to work longer but people think you should retire? Let's ponder these questions for a while and maybe we will think differently after tonight's talk. If you follow the news, you may find that people keep talking about unsustainable entitlement spending as boomers are hitting their retirement age. Tonight's speaker, Chris Farrell, holds a different view. In his book on retirement, Chris believes that boomers will continue to earn because they have better education and health. Those savings retirees have more connections, creativity, experiences to extend their working lives. They can contribute their wisdom and labor to our society. They can help generate higher GDP level and more tax revenues. Therefore, a good policy is not cutting benefits but allowing qualified international medical products to be available for us to purchase. These will drive medical price down and make social security sustainable. In other words, all we need to do is make modest adjustments. There is no aging crisis in the United States. Chris's books and columns reflected his living philosophy. Living with simplicity and frugality. It doesn't mean living cheaply but means matching our money with values. If we like George O'Keeffe buying a ticket to visit her museum brings true returns through our mind. If we feel for the poor donating money to keep them from starving is inconsistent with our value. But sometimes we don't find economic balances in our life. For example, we may spend an hour shopping for a coat on eBay and not find what we want but we feel like we have to buy something to justify our time. To live simplicity and frugality, we should ask ourselves, what do I value? What are the activities I want to support and what are the products I don't reward? Chris also emphasized a financially saving life. There is no easy formula to make money. Having conscious saving and spending habits is the key. Even for people with low income. We should stick with high quality investments, pay attention to fees and build skills we want over time. We can even live with multi-generations because its benefits can be significant. Grandparents are taking care of and working adults, children get trusted help with childcare. Most importantly, a financially saving life is insured because they are sharing a house. We think the concerns raised at the beginning of my intro, unsustainable social security and unhealthy personal finance. Now, don't do things we can embrace more hope in our life. Chris views have aroused our interest in these ongoing issues. In our final lectures of 52nd Nobel Conference, Chris Farrell, senior commentator for Minnesota Public Radio and Marketplace Morning Report, will take on the difficult task of wrapping up the conference for us. Without further ado, that's welcome, Mr. Chris Farrell. Well, thank you very much and I'm truly honored to be here. Although I'm not so sure, the honor is to be the very last speaker after two days of incredible talks and haven't they just been incredible lectures and they really have been. I just feel that I've learned so much in the conversations I've been engaging. You've had a good dinner and now you have to listen to me. So, I'd like to make some remarks about economic inclusion and then at the end open up for your questions and there'll be some people wandering around with mics and you can ask me anything you want about my remarks or about un-retirement, frugality, Minnesota Public Radio. But when I was thinking about it as you know, it's this conference about economic imbalance and I couldn't help but think of that story and you've probably heard it of the executive, goes on vacation, goes to a beach resort and I've taken a walk on the beach, sees a fisherman, local fisherman come by and it's early morning and he says, hi, he says, what are you doing? And the fisherman said, I went fishing this morning, got a couple of fish. So, you know, it's time to go home, relax, I'll meet some friends in the evening. The executive says, well, why don't you fish some more? And the fisherman goes, why? Well, then you're gonna have better gear. Why? Well, then you catch more fish and you could buy a bigger boat. Why? Well, then you're gonna sell more fish and you're gonna have more money to invest. But why would I do that? Because eventually you're gonna be able to retire, go fishing for a while in the morning, relax and then spend some time in the evening with your friends. So, I'd like to make some remarks about what an economic inclusion. And one of the themes that I plucked out that I think was running through the conference was on work. And it was Professor Ehrlich said, you know, when he talked about that often in the profession there's this image that work is a bad thing. And therefore you have to create these incentives so that people will do this bad thing because they know at the end they're gonna get this mojito on the beach. And yet we also know that that's wrong and that there's a lot more to work than that this is a bad thing. And Paul Collier, Professor Collier, just really passionately explained about, well, work is about pride. It's about esteem. It's about your community. It's about the feedback that you get from your community. And then Professor Regal, in his remarks, talking about work as an opportunity for creativity and to be creative and to be a person. And Professor Aschenfelter and the rise of real wages and this fascinating index using McDonald's. What an insight, what a clever idea. And then going through all that data, all the receipts, all those hamburgers that he had to eat to come up with this index but really to bring alive the differences in real wages. And Dieter McCloskey, I think that we are just all going to have the expression, have a go, right? I mean, if you think about it, have a go. And then John List, and one of the things that I'm gonna want to remark on is it just seems far away from work. But when you think about early childhood education and plucking in early childhood education, early childhood, a lot of the impulse about early childhood education is that as these children age, they're gonna move into the mainstream society, they're gonna move into jobs, they're gonna have productive jobs. And that's a lot of the motivation there. And so, just wanna take a step back. And if we look at the past several decades, you know, there have just been remarkable changes worldwide. I mean, living standards have risen. I think there's been a theme of this conference, poverty rates have fallen. And in many cases, you know, the gains have been partly driven by an embraced or trade and international investment. And commerce before nations is a lot more dynamic than you're exchanging goods and you're exchanging money. You know, trade and investment, they open up. Economies and communities and people to different ideas and different technologies. And Professor Colleen, when he was talking about, in Africa has been behind and yet even there, you're seeing some really intriguing spots like with Botswana and what can be done. And this same combination of forces here in the US and my remarks are gonna be largely focused on the US. You know, it's spurred entrepreneurship, consumer choice and risk to quality of everyday life. I mean, if you think about this, it's a cliche, but a smartphone, you know, really is a technology that is affecting your life at home and at work and as we travel. And yet for a variety of reasons, there's been a disturbing slowdown in the growth of living standards for many Americans. The economic gains are increasingly concentrated among a smaller group, a wealthy slice of the population. So journalists like me and I'm a journalist who writes about economics. I love economics. I love writing about economics. I love talking to economists. This has been heaven for me the last two days. But we write about things or we talk on public radio about middle class stagnation, decline in median household income, limited social mobility, black lives matter, marginal and marginalized people. The decline in average life expectancy or at least a stagnation in average life expectancy among middle-aged low income white women, particularly whites, but particularly white women in the South and the swelling ranks of contingent workers, the reality of age discrimination and the incarceration of millions of Americans who then are largely excluded from the job market because they have a record. So a decade ago in an interview with Mother Jones, Harvard University sociologist, William Julius Wilson, he eloquently talked about joblessness in the inner city. And what he said is the problems we see today are going to be a hell of a lot worse in 10 years if we're not willing to face up to them. These kids are just not going to be absorbed into the economy, so what are they going to do? And that was 1996. And I think the story of what he was capturing there is not just in the inner cities, but it is spread around elsewhere around our country. In the Washington Post, if you saw it, former treasurer secretary Larry Summers, he wrote a piece and he's reviewing a book by Nicholas Eberstadt, Men at Work. And Productors Summers does one of these, which he's very, very good at, back of the envelope calculations. And off the book, he predicts that more than one third of all men between ages 25 and 54 will be out at work at mid-century. So what I've noticed in this discussion, and I could come up with more examples, is that I think there's a growing embrace of a conversation, or if we wanna be social sciencey about it, there's an overarching theory that ties trends like these together. And the major economic imbalance of our time, here in the US, is one that runs from Baltimore's inner city neighborhoods to the hollowed out industrial towns of the Midwest, and to the working class streets of Muscogee, Oklahoma. And it is a lack of inclusion in the work world generally and in employment and jobs specifically. And as an aside, and I think it's an important side, if anything good comes out of this election, okay, I am an optimist. I'm a genetic optimist. But if anything good does come out of this election, is that the voter disconnect, discontent, has really highlighted the community damage, the personal damage, a sense among a segment of our population that they are not part and they are not welcome in this society. And I think in that sense, this election is a wake up call. So what does inclusion mean? And here I do wanna repeat Deirdre McCloskey's expression, to have a go. Inclusion means that you feel that you have a chance, you have an opportunity to have a go, and that more and more people feel that they have that sense and that opportunity to have a go. And that leads to more people with more ideas, more businesses, better job opportunities, and everyone benefits in a society where people believe that they have a go. So to me, that's why when talking about inclusion, you can look at it a number of different ways, but that work is fundamental. And I like the way that Nobel laureate, Edmund Phelps writes about it. And what he says is that, look, the isolation from the opportunities offered by mainstream society costs the less advantage, not only a loss of income, but a loss of what economists call inclusion, access to jobs offering work and pay that provides self-respect. The job, work, career, that is what inclusion means in modern America. And Phelps notes, and this is critical, it's not just a job, it's a quality job. It's a job that provides decent pay, self-respect, prospects for advancement. Lane Kenworthy, now we're going to sociologists, University of California, San Diego. He writes that work is an increasingly important site of social interaction. A job helps fulfill the widespread desire to contribute to and be integrated with the larger society. For many individuals, work is inextricably bound with identity and self-esteem. And when I was writing my book on retirement, one of the books that I read from my research was by Studs Turkle. Probably know him, the legendary broadcaster out of Chicago. And he wrote a book in the 1970s called Working. And what I was looking at that book in particular was stories about people who were retiring in the 1970s. But with Studs Turkle, he would do these interviews and with ordinary people. He had one famous person in there, Pauline Kale, but everybody else ordinary working people. And he would do these interviews usually in a bar over a couple of beers. And I've learned that maybe I should add beers to my repertoire when I'm doing an interview. And in the introduction, he reflects back. And what did he learn from all these interviews with ordinary people about their working lives? And he writes, work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor. So we know that a job provides an income to support a family. That's a lot of times how we talk about a job. But as these scholars are emphasizing, work is more than an income. You know, the factory, the office, the cubicle, the retail store, you know, these are also communities. And you have colleagues, you have cubicle mates, you know, union brothers and sisters. You have fellow employees and you celebrate birthdays. Someone's going through a divorce. You help them through that divorce. There are people you really don't like. It's a community. But there are also people that you do like in conversation and gossip. This is the lifeblood of the workplace. The job is also a classroom. And the importance of the classroom as a job came home to me. I should have realized it earlier, but it came home to me at a seminar. It was organized by the late Columbia University economist, Jacob Mincer, in the early 1990s. And he was one of the economists who was very influential in, you know, the theory behind the modern human capital ideas. And this seminar was focusing on the role of education in widening income inequality. We had a long enough period of time where it was clear that how much college-educated workers were widening the gap with their high school-only peers. So among the participants was Fisher Black. And Fisher Black's a legendary scholar. He was the initial rocket scientist at Goldman Sachs, the Black Shoals model. And so the conversation's going. It's a lively conversation. It's about 12, maybe 16 people. And we kept talking about the earnings gap between high school and college, and what does this mean? Fisher Black said nothing for a long time. Suddenly he said, why are we talking about school so much? I don't know the right number, but what you learn on the job is about nine to 11 times what you learn at school. That seems to be a reasonable estimate. And we all stopped, whole conversation stopped, and we all nodded, he's right. And then we went on and talked about the widening gap between income and equality, because that's what we were there to do. And reflecting back, it would have been far more productive using Black's insight as a starting ground for a conversation. People learn on the job. So how do we get here? And there are different stories, there's different theories, there's different emphasis. They're only giving me a certain amount of time. So what I wanna look at is some fundamental changes in the labor market and the social compact over the past half century. So following the Great Depression, Second World War, there was basically a bargain struck between the elites and workers. It's sometimes referred to as the Treaty of Detroit. So a scholar, Ethan Capstein, he's author of Sharing the Wealth, Workers in the World Economy. He said the deal was look, international economic integration would both increase national income and social welfare. It's gonna promote wealth and equity. There'd be greater opportunities for education and advancement coupled with a social safety net that would protect people against hard times. So that's like unemployment insurance and social security. And this basic bargain was always talked about in terms of creating a middle class. So the GI Bill opened up college to the then new Americans, the Irish, the Italians, the Polish, the Russians, East European Jews. My father, after World War II, he went to Columbia University. It took him nine years to get his degree. He was in the Navy, he was going at night in the weekends, but he did get his degree thanks to the GI Bill. And then he had subsidies for home ownership. And again, they were justified by building a great middle class society. And this middle class society was fundamentally inclusive, right? I mean, a majority of people would kind of occupy this middle ground and they have roughly similar incomes and roughly similar security and a mere sliver of our society was wealthy. And a little more people were poor, but not that many. And during the three decades after the Second World War, the U.S. economy grew rapidly. It was a golden age of economic growth. And so did the incomes of most households. It was the golden age in terms of economic growth. So in 2009, it was part of a public radio documentary team and we spent time in Muncie, Indiana. And we were investigating the impact of the recession on the town of Muncie. Now the reason why we picked Muncie, and you might know what the name, what the significance of Muncie is, but it's better known by another name, which is called Middletown. And Middletown is a wonderful book written by Helen and Robert Lindt. And what they did, I believe they're working for the Rockefellers and the Rockefeller Foundation essentially. And what they did is they made a study and a map and they wanted to just spend time in the quintessential typical classic American town. And so they picked Muncie, Indiana. They moved there. They lived there for a year in 1924. And in 1929, their book Middletown came out and it was a bestseller. And Muncie was a Midwestern manufacturing hub after World War II. At a small university, you know, a small medical complex, some professionals, business owners. But what dominated the town's character, right, was the factories. The factories and their worker. This is where the Ball Brothers Glass Jar Company was. There's a GM transmission plant. There are other auto manufacturers there and there are other glass manufacturers there. And from the end of World War II to the 1970s, you know, young men, and at this point it's really a story about young men. They'd graduate from high school, they'd join a union, and they made a good living at the factory. And if they joined one of the smaller companies, factories that didn't have a union, they were actually paid pretty well in order to keep the gap between union wages and their wages, not too, too wide. And they pocketed their earnings and they bought cars and homes. And they barbecued on the patio and they dreamed of retirement. And the expression of the time was that they were working class in the factory and they were middle class at home. Now we can't get too romantic about the Grand Bargain, right, I mean, we know the system largely excluded blacks and women. So the GI Bill benefited very few blacks, especially in Jim Crow South. And the ranks of poor were much larger than were imagined at the time. Nevertheless, when you go through and you look at the improvements in income, consumption, employment, education available to workers and their children, the American dream seemed within reach for more people than at previous time in history, writes Capstein. And the 1970s now marks a turning point. And it's a long turning point to get us to here. But we had a painful decline in manufacturing, took hold in the late 1970s. You had the dramatic decline in membership of private sector unions, which is about a third of the workforce in the early 1950s, but it's down to around depending five to 6% today. Corporate rivals from overseas nations, they move factories here, facilities here, intensely competitive environment. In 1986, Business Week had the cover story, the end to corporate loyalty. The management no longer thought much about just laying off a whole division. And so senior management, they restructured, they downsize, they right side. What's your favorite euphemism? And the result is millions of Americans lost their jobs while companies chopped their payrolls and the prospects actually got grimmer for the high school only. Now, you can't paint too dark a picture of this, right? We know that the rewards, the education rose and college graduates now essentially make twice as much as their high school only peers. And since the late 1970s, college graduates, both men and women have seen their regions rise. And we've also seen the rise of Silicon Valley, lots of technological innovation. The United States has been an enormous beneficiary of overseas auto companies, BMW being down in South Carolina, Honda being in Ohio, Marysville, Ohio. So there was a lot of activity that benefited the US. Nonetheless, more people saw their wages flat to down depending on the measure and the time frame that you're using. And even recent college graduates over the past decade have seen their real earnings decline. So there's a sense of wages are more stagnant, there's greater insecurity, workers are more transient, they're less attached to the workplace and they've lost leverage with their employers. And workers on the wrong side of a trade or of innovation, you know, they're largely on their own. And by the way, this is not an argument against trade or innovation. Because with trade, for example, the benefits are enormous. They are incredible, but they're spread throughout the society. But if you're on the wrong side of that trade, you can really lose. And what I think I'm talking about, I think a lot of what the economists and the theologian talked about earlier today or the past two days has really been about how do you think about the bottom third society and raise them up, raise their living standards, raise their prospects, raise their opportunities. So we have things like the Trade Adjustment Act, right? It's an adequately funded federal program. And it does provide retraining financial support if you lose your job to international trade, but it's really hard to qualify. It's very limited benefit and it's not much funding there. And displaced workers have found it harder and harder to find new jobs. And typically, their next job pays less and oftentimes doesn't come with health insurance or retirement savings plan from their employer. And their recent economic research and some of its controversial now suggests that the impact of China was much greater on the US manufacturing worker than was anticipated or expected. And here's how it, this is a 2004 Business Week cover story. The China price. They are the three scariest words in US industry. In general, it means 30% to 50% less than what you could possibly make something for in the US. Makers of apparel, footwear, electric appliances and plastic products which have been shutting US factories for decades, know well the futility of trying to match the China price. Now that was 2004. Now as the Gail wins the technology and trade captured by Business Week back then, there's been a lot of job churning. There's been lower lifetime incomes than anticipated and employment rose both in the manufacturing and the non-manufacturing sectors in these regions of the economy negatively affected by trade. And there are other signs of a lack of inclusion or disturbing signs where we're not seeing enough inclusion. And one of it is the rise of the contingent workforce. Now these are independent, these are company, independent contract workers, contract company workers, agency temps, freelancers, the accidentally self-employed and the gig economy worker, the Uber worker, the Lyft worker, not all of them, many of them. And for some people this really works. This is a very entrepreneurial venture. It can also, there's some fascinating research coming out from the Chase Foundation about how working at Uber or Lyft or TaskRabbit or any gig economy opportunities can help people go get through a spell of unemployment, it can supplement the income of people who are retired. Still, the Government Accountability Office now estimates that 40% of the US workforce is contingent. And that's up from 31% in 2005. Now other numbers that I've seen from consulting firms have a smaller number, the Government Accounting Office is using probably the broadest definition out there, but the trend is always the same. The trend is moving more toward a contingent workforce. As I said, the contingent work can be good for some people, but for a lot of people it means heightened insecurity. And it means that your ties to the mainstream economy seem more tenuous because you don't get a retirement savings plan through your employer, you don't get health insurance through your employer. And a social safety net is a lot worker, you don't get unemployment insurance and you're not subject to minimum wage protections. So we'll go back to Muncie. So the Auto Parts Maker, Borg Warner had opened its Muncie plant in 1928. Now I love old industrial architecture. I think it's beautiful. So this Muncie plant, it's enormous. And it's that red brick and it's got the green glass skylights at the top. And it used to have four shifts and it employed a thousand people. When we were there, there's just a couple cars in the parking lot. It was down to a trickle and actually the day that we were there, the day after we were there the plant was finally closed. And one of the people we interviewed was Charles and his father had labored on the assembly line in GM for nearly 39 years. And he went to work, Borg Warner, right after high school, 1983. He lost his job in 2008 at age 53. So the dream of a good pension and a comfortable retirement, it was gone. He was five years shy of putting in his 30 years at work. So Charles and his wife, Pam, they were solidly middle class. She had a variety of jobs over the years. She's been a hospital technical worker, tax preparer, she worked for the Girl Scouts. She volunteered for the Girl Scouts. They had a house, they had cars. Daughter had a good education. They paid their bills, took vacations. And like most of us, they didn't have much savings because it was always hard to save. So he was out of work, couldn't get a job, and for two years he's unemployed. And what they did is they finally dipped into their 401k to pay off the mortgage so they no longer had to be worried about their home being foreclosed on them. And Pam went back to school. She got her teaching degree. When I last talked to her, she was a substitute teacher. She was hoping to get a full-time teaching job. And he was stocking shelves and performing maintenance at a grocery store. And he made about half what he did at Borg Warner. Got a little tiny pension from Borg Warner and he does some handyman jobs. Now, that's a tough story, but there are even much tougher stories out there. The stories that came out of Ferguson were probably the best job. There's a wonderful story about Ben Castleman, 538, that one of the best jobs in Ferguson is working at the McDonald's. And you go to North Minneapolis, where there's high unemployment and there's high underemployment. And then, worst of all, is the effect of the war on drugs and mass incarceration here in the U.S. And so, by one estimate, in 2008, somewhere between 6% and 7% of prime working-age male population had been incarcerated at some point in their lives. And it makes them really hard to be employed in mainstream society if you have a record. So this is a background. What I want to turn to is a handful of policy proposals that are being discussed that I think focus on this idea of inclusion. And these aren't being discussed as much in the national political realm right now. Okay, I'm not sure what's being discussed in the national political realm right now. We're not gonna go down that path. But they are being discussed in think tanks and in among academics and among people who are concerned about the bottom third of our society among the disconnected. But I do want to dispatch one set of proposals and just put it out there that this set of proposals should be taken off the table. So there is a conversation out there that everything I've discussed, it's globalization. Immigration, you just, and the impact of technology on jobs, and we have to really reduce those. We just have to be tough on globalization and we can't have this immigration. And the thing about it is, whatever proposals you come up with have to do with inclusion, I think none of these stopping or blocking any of these should play a role. As far as technological innovation, we need more of it. We're actually not having enough technological innovation. I actually think that right now that is what the core of our problem is we're not having enough technological innovation. And we are net beneficiaries of immigration and we are net beneficiaries of global trade. And the data is really clear. But what that doesn't mean is that you don't do anything. I mean, that's kind of been the default position in the last couple of years. And when people don't believe that the system is working for them, they're gonna turn against sound policy. They're gonna turn against good policy. We want good immigration policy. We want good global trade. We want technological innovation. And if you think of making that up, all you have to do is think Brexit. Even the people who pushed for Brexit can't figure out how to do it. And it's causing a mess, an un, a mess that they shouldn't have written should not be in. So the forced policy option that's getting, you know, a lot of attention has this inclusion focus is kind of a historic term. I had to go back to the 1950s, 1960s. I mean, it was written about before then, but it's full employment. And the basic idea is simple. As Larry Summers put it, the best social policy is a high pressure economy in which firms are chasing workers rather than workers chasing jobs. And we're starting to see the effects right now of the lower unemployment right here in the US. And, you know, seven years after recession ended, but employers are finally reaching deeper into, you know, the pools of untapped labor. I mean, they're creating more jobs. And this is also going on with retailers and restaurants and hotels. And they're paying higher wages to attract workers. And this is what, this is the significance of the Census Bureau report that recently came out looking at incomes in poverty in 2015. So I think we can do better. Now, what is full employment? Well, economist Dean Baker, he's at the Center of Economic and Policy Research. He thinks, you know, it might be the 4% jobless rate of 2000. Well, then he also adds, who knows? It could be lower. You know, we also know, and scholars now know, that this sort of trade off between inflation and employment, you know, it's theoretically mistaken in many cases, historically inaccurate. I feel a little bit hesitant with Dider McCloskey in the audience to be saying this about history, but it just seems to me, periods of rapid economic growth, technological innovation, have often been accompanied with declining inflation rates. You get productivity improvements. And so, you know, we also think about the era of the late 1990s, when we had falling unemployment and stable inflation. So the second policy idea that is part of this inclusion discussion that seems to hopefully gaining some momentum, is that healthier economic growth is not enough. You know, that's a lesson we absorbed in the 1980s or starting in the 1980s. For example, between 1979 and 2007, so there's two peaks in the business cycle. The countries per capita gross domestic product increased by 50%. Good increase. During that time, average income of the middle three-fifths of households rose by less than 30%, according to the Congressional Budget Office. So another way of putting that is, most of the gains went to the richest Americans. And this is where Edmund Phelps and his idea comes in, because what he's calling for is a system of public low-wage employment subsidies. And this is in order to attract marginalized workers to the business sector, shrink their unemployment rates, and boost their pay. So the subsidy would be like a matching grant. Lane Kenworthy has a different idea. What he wants to do is build on the earned income tax credit. It's an idea that Phelps doesn't think is as powerful as it is. But this is the kind of discussion I think we should be having. And the EITC, Earned Income Tax Credit, is America's major anti-poverty program. And the basic idea was promoted by Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman. I mean, what he really promoted was a negative income tax. And you couldn't get a negative income tax through Congress. But Louisiana Senator Russell Long kind of liked the idea. And what they pushed through in 1975 is the EITC. And the tax credit, it's targeted at lower income working families. And it promotes work, it alleviates poverty, and it supplements low wages. So the major problem with the EITC is that it targets families where many single workers are struggling paycheck to paycheck. In 2012, for example, 97% of EITC dollars went to families with children. Childless workers under age 25 aren't eligible in very few single workers over that age qualify. And even then, it's a reduced benefit on average less than one-tenth of that for tax filers with children. So, expand the EITC to make it more inclusive. And it's interesting to see where Paul Ryan, the House Republican, has come out with the idea that yes, we should expand the EITC. And it's obviously more popular on the Democratic side of the aisle. Now, they disagree how you're gonna pay for this. And they disagree on some of the ramifications of that. But I do find it interesting that this is a policy proposal where there does seem to be some agreement that we want to expand the EITC. Now, Kenworthy would do slightly different. He would expand it and that he would push it higher up into the income distribution, you know, into the middle class. And so instead of phasing it out at a certain income, it would simply become a flat benefit that would be indexed to average compensation. So it's a concept of social insurance with work at its core. So those are two. There's some other compensatory schemes that are out there. One is wage insurance. More conversation going on about wage insurance. So you're working at a factory. You're making $20 an hour. You lose your job. You land another job, set a big box retailer. You're making $12 an hour. The government could offer wage insurance that would top up your pay or at least, you know, supplement your pay a little bit. And other proposals focus on training and retraining programs. And I think these are the kinds of ideas to take seriously to promote inclusion. And the next idea that's getting increased conversation on the op-ed pages, if you're reading The Economist, you're reading New Yorker, you're reading New York Times, even parts of the Wall Street Journal, it says notion that we need to overhaul the social safety net for the 21st century. And what's really pushing this is the rise of the gig economy, the Ubers. Now actually the gig economy is a relatively small part of the overall contingent labor. But it sort of has come to symbolize many of the issues that are going on with the contingent labor force. So the current social compact basically reflects a different economy, a different society. The basic assumption, the typical worker, you know, they're a full-time long-term employee at one place, maybe they're briefly unemployed for a brief period of time, but they get called back and then, you know, they get their healthcare through their employer, they get their health insurance through their employer. So it's kind of like a jobs for life with brief interruptions approach. But that's a relic, it's a relic. And the changing nature of work is pushing more and more people into multiple jobs, fluid careers. And I think this is a good thing. This is basically a good move if there's greater security attached to it. So that's why there's more movements about how do we create portable healthcare insurance? How do we make portable retirement savings plan? Instead of attaching the benefits to the employer, attach them to the individual. Do we change the way that we approach unemployment insurance? And again, it's to increase actually the opportunities that are being opened up by the gig economy broadly defined while again, limiting the downside. So another idea that's getting a lot of attention, and I have to tell you this one, I have very mixed feelings out. I can wake up on Monday and argue for it. I can wake up on Tuesday and argue against it. But it's the guaranteed minimum income or universal basic income. And the idea is everyone gets a periodic payment with no conditions attached beyond citizenship. And the amount in the United States that's usually proposed is in the $10,000 range. So conservative Charles Murray, the American Enterprise Institute, he's proposed a $13,000 universal basic income. And the basic idea is 3,000, that goes to health insurance. 10-thirs, 10,000, you do with what you want. Now what Murray has his attached to is you would also get rid of most of the poverty benefits. So you would get rid of the poverty system that we have now and substitute the universal basic income. More liberal proponents don't really like that idea. What they're like about the universal basic income is that it's going to lean against the tide of inequality or at least it's gonna raise the poverty floor. And so that's why they're pushing. And then you got Silicon Valley types who are very nervous that the combination of automation and algorithms means that unemployment is gonna get worse, long-term structural unemployment. And so they're pushing the idea of a universal basic income. But the reason why I include that is that this conversation is going to grow. The late Nobel Laureate and supporter was Herbert Simon. And the way he saw the universal basic income is he said, it's equivalent to recognizing shared ownership of a significant fraction of the resources, physical and intellectual, that enable a society to produce what it produces. And the last is that I think is out there and I think the one that actually will probably move the fastest, the one that will gain the most support. And it was talked about earlier this morning by Professor John List, which is early childhood education. And here you're gonna get the sense is growing and I think the sense is right, that this is how you're going to get the most bang for your public dollar buck. If you wanna look at a high return on investment, look at early childhood education. If you like to look at a high negative return on investment, look at the Viking Stadium. So that's how you can really think about it with public dollars. But here you have economists like John List, you have James Heckman at University of Chicago, you have Art Rolnick here, co-director of the Human Capital Research Collaborative at the Humphrey School. You have lots of neuroscientists and other scholars, all pushing toward that this is where the long-term return and this is where you are going to have a long-term improving the odds of increasing the odds that people coming from at-risk neighborhoods, low-income neighborhoods will have the set of skills to participate in mainstream society. So I want to end on a note another public radio documentary. And a colleague and I, we went to Chicago a couple years ago and we did a public radio documentary on the movement of tearing down the large public housing complexes and replacing them with mixed-income neighborhoods. And so we interviewed a lot of people and in one moment we interviewed a group of women at the Henry Horner Project. And these women had successfully fought the Chicago Housing Authority to have a voice in the remodeling of their housing project. And they won, it was a remarkable feat and they were incredible people. And unfortunately it was a radical idea at the time, I have a feeling it still is a radical idea. But the point is that during our conversation there's this former public housing resident, current public housing employee, and she turned to us. And she said, how do we connect the disconnected? That's the key to success in this community and any other community is connecting the disconnected. And she's right. And I think that's what a focus on inclusion does. It pushes you to think about how do we connect the disconnected? There are a lot of problems in our society, all right? And we could talk about them. But the fact of the matter is I think this is where economics matters. And this is a movement that can really change the direction of our conversation, about opportunity, about wealth and incomes and starting new businesses in innovation and ideas. Any questions? And we have a microphone over here and another microphone over there. So while she's bringing the mic to you and if you wanna grab her attention, she'll bring the microphone over. It should be on. Yeah. I don't have my question well formulated. That's okay. But there's a topic that I think has a lot to do with economics that wasn't mentioned at all the last two days. And I was sort of waiting to see if you would mention it. Not even addressed. And it's one which 1400 scientists around the world are in concurrence that were in a stage of near ecological collapse because of climate change, which to mitigate requires a lot of innovation and would spur, you'd think, all kinds of economic growth around the world, if not in the United States first and then other countries. In other words, new technologies, new infrastructure, everything to mitigate climate change and switch everyone to sustainable forms of energy. Why is that not discussed in something so important that there's Nobel conference? I'm disgusted by that. Well, it actually did kind of come up several times, but I can't answer for the Nobel conference, I can answer for me. That's all I can really answer. I can't speak for the other economists. I can't speak for the other. It's a great question. And it did come up, I believe it was Orly who mentioned that we all kind of think the same way when it comes to global climate change is you're right, you need more innovation. But I actually, this is an area where I think the economists are absolutely right. You raise the tax, you raise the carbon tax, you raise an energy tax, however you want to design it, and then you let the market work and you let the innovation flourish. And I think that that is probably the most efficient way to deal with it. It came up in parts of the conversation, but I would put that as part of, in my perspective, this is something that's gonna take a long time to deal with. And I don't think it's that, at the same time, I'm really concerned about people being left behind in our society. So I focus my remarks on the people being left behind because I'm worried about them being left behind. If we wanna talk about global climate change, it'd actually be a lot shorter conversation with me. It would be, look, create a political movement that raises the tax and then truly let the magic of the market work. There may be other arguments within this room, but that would be my argument. I think that global climate change at this point is a political issue, less of a scientific issue, and the politics are incredibly complicated. So I'll speak for myself at least. So I don't know if you remember my talk, but at the end I had a slide titled Great Big Externalities. And I said one of the most important issues facing humankind today is climate change. Yeah. But you didn't elaborate on it. Well, I could only elaborate on so many things that I'm working on. What I did elaborate on is I think that households are a fundamental part of the problem. And I talked about how one can use incentives, whether they're behavioral incentives like social norms or whether they're prices and how one can use those in combination to change people's behaviors or change the culture around using energy when we don't need to use it. Yeah, that was one of 60 slides, I agree. Maybe it could have been more, but I don't think that was a slight on the importance of it. I think it was a slight rather on the conference theme for me was something I should think about, which was early childhood education. But I wanted to allude to the fact that economists have thought very hard. When I was in the White House in 2002, I worked there for a year and a half. I negotiated the Kyoto Protocol in COP 8 in India. It's very important. It's very important to policymakers and to economists. So I apologize if you're disappointed, but I've worked on a lot and it was in the slides. Thank you. And good evening. I hate to follow that question, but this one is maybe as provocative. Good. I'm curious if it would be up to another conference to discuss what maybe have been our position now if we had never gone off the gold standard. So, okay, so, John, you wanna come on off here? Yeah, exactly. So all I can do is give you my opinion on that one. And it would be a fascinating conference. I think it would be a disaster to go back to the gold standard. I think they're very good reasons why we went off the gold standard. And there's a remarkable story. And it was told to me by the, in a blank in his name is a longtime treasurer at Exxon. And his father, who was in the Treasury Department, was sent over to Germany after the war to set up the Deutsche Mark currency, which was four marks to the dollar. And so I believe this must have been 1946, 1947. And there's a press conference. And of course, this is a big deal. If you remember, Germany had had hyperinflation in the 1920s that felt that that had led to the rise of Hitler. And so here's this person who's been told that you're going to do, establish the new German currency. And so the first question was, where's the gold? There's no gold. Where's the silver? There's no silver. Well, what's backing this? And he says, the productivity of the German economy and whether or not its people want inflation or not. He was right. I mean, I think the advance going from the gold standard to central banking was right. And that it really is what backs money is the productivity of the economy and whether or not people are willing to live with lower inflation rates or stable inflation rates and what it takes to do that. I don't think gold does that. I think what gold ends up doing is, it's sort of like a mystic, it has an aura, it has a mystery, but there was a period of time where it seemed to really work and was it the gold standard? Or was it the way that the global economy evolved at that point at which gold was part of it? But I do actually, I much prefer central bankers to gold. I would prefer human capital to a physical piece of capital. When the central bankers weren't behaving very well. And they printed and they printed and they printed. You know, taking a while but people learn. Yeah, finally they learned. Finally they learned their lesson. I've written on the gold standard myself and the basic point about the gold standard is it's a system of fixed exchange rates. That's basically all it is. And we can have fixed exchange rates with yet money or flexible exchange rates. The key thing is to not let, there is to persuade the central bankers not to do that again. It was very tempting to print more money. They're in Milton Friedman's TV show in the 1970s. He was in the government printing office where they make the money. Inflation at the time was 12%, upwards of 15%. And there was a big red lever by the machine that was printing this money like mad. And it said in emergencies, pull the machine. And he said, I'm very tempted to pull it. And if you're interested in, there's a wonderful collection of essays of Milton Friedman. It's a small book called Money Mischief. And he has a chapter in there, how he hated the progressive era political agenda. Hated it. But he believed that William Jennings Bryan was right about silver and gold. That his famous speech about, he said, Brian, he was right. And that we should have gone for silver. So it's a really fascinating excursion in the history, the gold standard, silver and monetary policy. And it's a fun read. There is, oh, sorry. I'm just looking for a comment sort of related, I guess, to changes in our economy and the technological economy that we have and how it affects employment and things like that. An article in The Economist where they're talking about sort of the new super companies that we have around the world. But they say in 1990, the top three car makers in Detroit between them had nominal revenues of about $250 billion. Had a market capitalization of 36 billion and about 1.2 million employees. In 2014, the top three companies in Silicon Valley had revenues of about 247 billion comparable. Right. But a market capitalization of over $1 trillion, but only employed 137,000 employees. So I'm just curious on comments about that. No, I think, one of the comments of that is, we're not going back to an era of, used to live in New York, used to go up to Syracuse, New York. And there was a period of time where Syracuse, New York, in the evening, or in the morning, 40,000 workers would be going, walking to the factories. And you're not going back to that. You're just really not. And with Facebook, now a lot of the employment in Silicon Valley, you really should get rid of the Pacific Ocean. Because it's really connected to Taiwan and China. And then if you include that, and you just forget the national borderies, there's a lot more employment that is going on. But I think this is part of the reason why immigration is good for us because it adds to the size of our economy, adds to the pie, the pie keeps growing. It's why technological innovation, it's really the spillover effects of technological innovation. But it is really, it's interesting that in the economy we live at, where the sort of epicenter design human capital is at least this moment concentrated at, it doesn't lead to that much employment within the specifics of that region and that industry, but it does actually lead to, there's gonna be a lot more employment, I was at a, it was a cocktail party. And it was really fun. You know, if you go to a cocktail party with journalists, it's pretty gloomy. Yeah, this was a cocktail party, and these were all big data people, data analysts. And it was really interesting to talk to people who are not worried about being unemployed. And there is so much demand for their services. And to realize that they don't care about general mills. They don't care about target. They care about data. They care about what they're doing. And so I think that there's not that much going on in Silicon Valley, but there's actually a lot going on in other parts of the economy. Now this is an aside from what you're talking about, but one of the things where, why is our economy not doing as well as it should be doing? You have very high productivity in the digital part of our economy. A friend of mine, Mike Mendel, you know, he's done estimates that productivity is running like a 2.8%. But where you have very low productivity is where you've actually surprisingly little, even though we think it's going on, it's just surprisingly little where information technologies have changed the business of healthcare, have changed the business of education, have changed the businesses of a lot of large organizations. And where our employment growth has been going on. And I think the, there's a lot of nostalgia about the manufacturing jobs. I actually think the manufacturing jobs of our era is healthcare. If you take a look throughout this all downturn, healthcare has been growing. And it's people who get technical college degrees, they get community college degrees, and they can get a job where they get a decent pay, but they also get benefits. And they also have opportunities to grow. So at the same time, this is a part of our economy that's not very productive, which is why the jobs have been growing. And I think I'm getting the hook. And I really do thank you very much because it is late in it, but it has been such a wonderful time. And I really appreciate everything. Thank you. Thank you very much, Chris, for that. And now I'd like to introduce the president of the college, Rebecca Bergman. I just said to Lisa, I could have done that. And I thought, okay, never mind. Thank you, Chris. Like all of our presentations and conversations over the last two days, this one gets you thinking. And I think that's been the whole point. So thank you to all of our speakers from Dan Ariely, who started us off, Orly Aschenfelter, Yorg Rieger, Paul Collier, John List, Deirdre McCluskey, and of course, Chris Ferrell. And I think we should give all of our speakers one more rousing hand. Thank you.