 Good afternoon. Welcome to the second annual Samuel Rolls lecture of the U.S. Amherst Economic Department. I'm Michael Lash, I'll go and chair the department. In addition to supporting the economics department, the Samuel Rolls lecture is made possible in part by the generous, anonymous donation. I would also please the department minister Sheila Gilroy for exceptional work in organizing the event and the political economy research institute and equally outgoing administrator Judy Fogg for hosting the event. A reception in the Gorda Pauley Dream will immediately follow the lecture. The purpose of the Samuel Rolls lecture is to highlight outstanding work in the tradition of Samuel. Last year, I was able to skimp on the introductory remarks because the lecturer and the lecturer conveniently have the same name. This way I have to cover both. The story of Samuel and the establishment of radical political economy at the University of Massachusetts is recounted in at the edge of Camelot, Donald Castro's intellectual history of our department, published by Oxford University Press, which tells the story of the early years of the modern economics department beginning in 1973 to the early 1980s. So I will summarize briefly. Radicalized by the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam, Sam Bowles was denied a tenure and a bitter political purge by the increasingly conservative Harvard University Economics Department, despite or perhaps more accurately because of his profound ideas and prolific record of publication. Sam made an exodus to western Massachusetts and attracted an extraordinary cohort to UMass economics, including our late friend and colleague Steven Resnick and Professor Samaritai Herb-Gintus, Richard Wolfe, Rick Edwards, and Jim Crowdy. Soon thereafter, the Valley filled with exceptional students who would make up the next generation of political economists. One of those first students is today's speaker, Manuel Astor Jr. Manuel is a Californian, raised in Los Angeles. He earned a bachelor's degree at the University of California Santa Cruz, independently by our fine weather and by the opportunity presented by the fledgling UMass Amherst Department of Economics. Manuel came east to UMass for graduate school and studied with Sam Bowles, among others. After Manuel completed his PhD in economics here in 1984, he joined the faculty of Occidental College, soon becoming associate and later full professor of economics. Manuel then returned for 10 years, now as professor to the University of California Santa Cruz, where he created and directed the Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community. That's when I first met him. But the call of Los Angeles was strong and Manuel returned to the city, taking his current post as professor of sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. At USC, Manuel created and continues to direct the program for environmental and regional equity and the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration. Manuel's honors are legion. He is an inaugural holder of the Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change at the University of Southern California. He has received many national awards for research, teaching, and outreach and engagement. Guggenheim, McArthur, Kellogg, Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Haas, Hewlett, Irvine, Gates, Amenberg, and Russell Sage are among the many foundations that have recognized Manuel's work with awards and with large research grants. Manuel's authored some 17 books and monographs, many, many peer-reviewed articles and chapters, and countless reports from climate change to banking justice to public health. Manuel's reports do not sit neatly on shelves gathering dots. Manuel's work stands out for his close ties to the social movements that can do something with his ideas and with him to address the economic, environmental, and social conditions facing low-income urban communities. Phelps said that for Manuel, relative research is really a call. Before I end over the floor, I want to pay tribute to how much I have learned from Manuel. One of Manuel's many streams of research concerns environmental justice, analysis, and advocacy about disparities in access to environmental goods and exposure to environmental bads, and his thinking of research would have found effects on me. I've learned how forces of economic change are horrible to environmental degradation and how communities can resist. I've learned that community elders sometimes know political economy better than the economy nutritionists do. I've learned that the world is round and has rambley-shaped implications for fine-scale methods of pollution exposure. I've learned it's incredibly fun to visit Manuel at USC to geek out for a day or a week. I've learned that waiting and rewriting to make complex findings accessible to broader communities is a deeply worthwhile pursuit, indeed a responsibility, and that community engagement is the most important pathway for meaningful research. Recently, Manuel's published two volumes of Cornell University Press, Unsettled Americans, Metropolitan Context and Civil Leadership for Immigrant Integration, and this could be the start of something big, how social movements for regional equity are reshaping metropolitan America. You also recently co-authored with Chris Bemer, Equity, Growth, and Community, so a nation can learn from America's metro areas. Based on that work, annual recent developments, one of them raising the level of uncertainty, Manuel Castor will now deliver the second annual Samuel Bowles lecture, Equity, Growth, and Community, Progressive Economics, Metro Strategies, and Social Movements in Washington. That was a very kind introduction. I'm a little tired though after listening to it. The one part that Michael didn't bring up that I think is really key is, despite all that change and transformation over time, I'm married to the same woman. We like to say we've been married together now 35 years, many of them happily, so it's been good. And I would note for Michael there's a sort of thin line between outgoing and out of here, which I think I'm hearing, so good luck to the incoming chair as we move forward. So I'm going to talk a little bit from this book that we wrote about a year ago, actually I guess we wrote it about two years ago, and it seems sort of remarkably prescient because we were trying to talk about how a sort of combination of demographic anxiety and economic uncertainty and epistemic distance between groups was creating a fundamental crisis in the United States. And my gosh, the election sure seems to have lived up to those expectations. So that's a little bit of what I'm going to talk about. He might want to let you know why I'm using a mic. For some of you, you might think it's because I'm trying to look like Lady Gaga at the Super Bowl. It's not. Although it's that over the last five years and Michael and a few other people know this, I've developed a speech disorder that's called spasmodic dysphonia spasms around the voice pox which is something that Diane Rehm on NPR talked about quite a bit. Robert Kennedy Jr. has it too. Now me. And so it can cause the voice to spasm a little bit or not project very well. And that's because it gets treated actually, this is literally true, once a month with Botox. So you're beautiful. Because that's how exactly. And that's how we treat everything in Los Angeles. It really works. I'm super glad to be back. So I'm going to talk about this talk, but I want to talk about two things. The first is what I learned from being at UMass. And the second that I'll end with is what I learned from Sam, who was one of my mentors while I was here. So here's what I learned at UMass. Aside from the fact that you've got horrible weather, and I wanted to be back in Los Angeles. By the way, when I first moved back to LA from being at UMass, I used to call my friends on the east coast and say, I'm shoveling sun out of my driveway. What are you doing? I lost a lot of those friends, and so I decided to be kind during my phone calls. But what I really learned here were sort of three things that stuck with me, and you'll see them come out today. One was something I think the UMass Econ program was sort of famous for, but it was a little bit submerged in the story about being radical, which was that people construct markets, their social institutions, and markets construct people. They form who we are. That whole notion of endogenous preferences to a whole notion of sort of structures in a way that they change who we are, you're going to see it coming up in here, because a lot of the talk I'm going to be presenting has to do with the creation of epistemic communities, knowledge and social norms that are based in data and dialogue, and then allow people to find some consensus moving forward. So that was one real big takeaway. The second big takeaway, which you're going to see here, harkens back to my dissertation. In my dissertation, which looked at the International Monetary Fund and its impacts on income distribution, short description, bad. What I basically did in that was to take an IMF methodology and copy it, but wind up looking at income distribution so that when they couldn't say anything was wrong with my method, but instead have to grapple with the fact that the single biggest impact of the International Monetary Fund was on lowering labor share of income. That goes with that today, because what I'm going to talk about in part is an empirical strategy we borrowed from the IMF to show that equity actually or inequality actually slows economic growth in America's metropolitan areas. Hard to criticize because it's an IMF method. The third thing I learned from UMass, is actually on the night that I defended my dissertation, we had a party at my house, and as we were leaving, and this will sound bad initially, but it's actually not, as Sam was leaving, I walked out to his car and he said, you know, he did really well today, but I can't tell whether you're smart, or you just tell a good story. And I respond that, and some of you might have been insulted by that, but I didn't take it, I said what's the difference? Because I think telling a good story, figuring out what the story is that your research is about, is incredibly important. So let me kind of set the stage for this book with these trends that actually have now really kind of come in full blossom with the election. And the first of course, and this is one big strand in the election, is demographic change. You can see here that the United States is projected by the year 2043-2044 to become so-called majority minority, or as I like to think of it, all minority all the time. And, you know, already the underage population is majority kids of color and that's going to sort of filter through going forward. And it's of course that economic anxiety or this demographic anxiety that has had a big impact on the identity crisis really of some folks who voted for Trump, who felt like America was slipping away demographically. For some of us hearing the news that the U.S. will become majority people of color is a great thing. It means more Korean taco trucks which by the way is a big thing in Los Angeles. It means more cultures coming together. But for others, it's a very frightening thing. Now, we've been through this before. If you look at the demographic change in the United States between 2000 and 2050 where the U.S. becomes majority people of color sometime before that, that's basically the demographic change that California went through between 1980 and 2000. And in some ways, and I'll get back to some of the other data points on this, the United States just had its Prop 187 moment. Prop 187 was the famous anti-immigrant proposition in California in 1994. It came after a gigantic recession in which 50% of the job losses in the United States had occurred in California. Industry was disparaging in particular echoes of the United States as well. The sort of black de-industrialization had occurred a decade earlier. This was the white de-industrialization with aerospace shrinking. All of a sudden, it was a crisis, right? Cracked cocaine had erupted, right, the opiates of that day. But when this transformation took place in 1994, big demographic changes, we got this anti-immigrant hysteria and that kind of happened in California which is now kind of calm on the other side of it. When you think about the demographics of what was going on in California at the time, really what was going on in part was a rise in the share of foreign born. Now, this is something that the rest of the country is now grappling with as well. But in the 80s and in the 90s, if you look at the share of foreign born, this is California, and then the orange line is the rest of the United States taking California out which, by the way, is something we're actually really into right now, is separating ourselves from the United States because we don't fucking understand you all. So, I know you're videotaping this. Sorry. But you can see that the increase in the share of foreign born that was going on quote-unquote in the United States was in the 80s and 90s actually mostly occurring in California. The huge increase in the share of foreign born, it's now stabilizing in California for the last two years. The share of foreign born has been on the decline. The share of foreign born in Los Angeles has been on the decline for the last four years. The increase in the immigrant population is occurring in other parts of the country and the anxiety that it triggered in California is being triggered in other parts of the country as well as you can see from the data points here. So, what's interesting though is that's really a sort of reshuffling of the immigrant population in some ways because the immigration flow into the United States is stabilizing. The immigrants from Asia are now at pacing immigrants from Latin America. Many of you know this net migration from Mexico is actually negative. There's more Mexicans returning to Mexico than coming to the United States partly because of economic growth there, partly because of change fertility rates in Mexico, so less of a push factor, which by the way means that I keep trying to help people list that if we build a wall we're just pinning Mexicans into the United States, it's probably not what Trump had in mind. So big demographic changes and those changes now are being driven less by immigration and more by the growth rate in children. This shows you for 2000 to 2010 the number of young whites in the United States actually fell by 4.3 million. That does not mean that 4.3 million young white people died. We would have noticed that. It means more moving into 19 and 20 than moving into 1 and 2. You can see that the growth rate in the youth population entirely Latino and Asian Pacific African American population more or less stable, probably folks redesignating to some degree into the multi-racial category. But what's driving us now nationwide is births. Interesting thing to take a look at too and then we'll move from the demographics to a little bit of the economics and then to what this book was about, is about the demographic change where it's occurring. So this is the United States in 1980 and it looks like what a lot of people still think the U.S. looks like the black belt to the south heading to D.C., the borderlands of Texas with Mexico, the Hispanic and Native American areas of Arizona and Nevada. You'll notice something about California. California had only one county, Imperial County on the border with Mexico that actually was a majority of the people of color. Los Angeles itself had not yet crossed that threshold. As you move from 1980 to 1990 to 2000 to 2010, you can see a lot of change, but a lot of change in California. Now what's interesting is that what most people think then is that because so much change occurred in California, that that's what's going to drive the change in the rest of the United States and California will become 150% Latino, sort of super Latinos marching the Earth, declaring the Reconquista Aslanique we are back. But really what's going on is that the demographic change is going to occur in a lot of the rest of the United States, some exceptions, slowing down in California. One interesting, two interesting things to note about this, one place you wouldn't expect that's going to become a majority of people of color is Salt Lake City. I know, I thought the same thing as you, Salt Lake is not just white, but sort of shiny white, sort of Book of Mormon white, but it's actually on a pretty rapid demographic change. You'll know what's interesting is that the Midwest and the areas that were the Trump voters are not going to experience this demographic change. So the most anxiety that's occurring is in places where the change is not really occurring, it's a sort of fear of the weather and a sort of fear of loss. So big demographic change and that big demographic change has been coupled with high levels of economic uncertainty. The data on this is familiar to a UMass Amherst crowd. Super sharp increase in the share of the income going to the top 1%, that's the blue line. This is manual size of the data. Biger increases going in the, from the 70s and early 80s to those between the 1 and 5% of the income distribution hosted to the 5 to the 10%. But a lot of action happening at the sort of top 1%. What's going on as well is something sort of beneath that and beneath that is what's going on for full time year-round workers. And this just shows you again data familiar to you. People who are at the 90th percentile for full time year-round workers have seen increases in their real wages between 20, between 1980 and 2010. And as you move down the distribution of full time year-round workers decreases. The earned bars are California. More of an accelerated pattern in California. Just like California was sort of America fast forward demographically. America fast forward in terms of the level of inequality. So the 1% running away from the rest and then beneath those these ships in the labor market which are discomforting even if you're sort of in the 99%. That is that people who are highly skilled are making much more than they did in the past. People who are less skilled making less than they did in the past. The way I talk about this for popular audiences is I'm a professor. I make much more money than a professor ever did in the past because there's a premium for the kind of education and skills we've got. My dad was a janitor. If he was still alive, he'd be making a lot less money than a janitor ever made. But beneath that sort of distributional and labor market story is incredible anxiety about the future. Anxiety because work is becoming precarious, temporary part time and changing. Anxiety because it requires a sort of other level of talent in terms of creativity. Interestingly work is increasingly caring not in the way we treat workers but in the nature of work because we've got much more care work that's taking place that's very poorly rewarded. But this anxiety about the changing workplace is also what's fed into the Trump victory and you could have heard the rumblings of this before of the white steel worker who may still actually even have a steel job but feels like his children will never be there but also in the young folks who voted for Bernie Sanders as a result of their anxiety about the future as well. My kids were enthusiastic Bernie supporters. My son in particular, he is 30 years old, he is a musician whose backup career is as an actor so there's plenty to be anxious about. A couple of years ago he's always had good girlfriends but a couple of years ago he had a girlfriend, a great young woman he was 26, she was 23 and he told me one day dad he was an entirely different generation and I was like that was that possible and he said well you know she came of age during the great recession she expects she's never going to have a job for the rest of her life. So there's this tremendous anxiety for young folks with the college debt with the sense of the labor market turning over with the sense that if you're an Uber driver now helping you destroy the taxicab industry that job is not going to be for you in the next 5 years as they move to driverless cars. So tremendous anxiety so demographic change economic anxiety and then one final factor that fed into the election but these were things we were noticing before the election for this book that we wrote which is growing social distance and that growing social distance has taken a lot of different forms and it's something I think economists ought to take a little bit more seriously we talk about distributional changes but we forget about epistemic changes the ways in which people's lives become increasingly distant from one another and people don't see themselves in the other and therefore how can you see any kind of politics of solidarity when there is so much social separation. That social separation has taken a couple of different forms one thing is that in the United States in fact residential segregation between African Americans and Latin whites has been on the decline in our major metro areas slightly residential segregation between Latinos and whites has been on the increase slightly but what's been on the increase is segregation by class increasingly high income people sorting into high income neighborhoods and then able to tell themselves a story about how smart they all are together and low income folks being sorted into low income neighborhoods with the problems of concentrated poverty that that brings growing social distance in our schools this is data on what percent of kids in the United States by ethnic group live and or go to school in high poverty schools which means schools where more than 75 percent of the population is on free or reduced lunch less than 10 percent of white kids go to schools in the United States about half of African American kids and about half of Latino kids go to those schools so tremendous social distance in the educational experience in parents thinking about themselves in their own common ground and then one thing that folks don't realize that sort of as a company this demographic change and it's the age structure of our population so this is the median age by race and ethnicity of the U.S. for the year 2014 the median age for non-Hispanic whites in the United States is 43 years for API Asian Pacific Islanders 36 African Americans and Black Americans 33 for Latinos the median age is 28 so that's a big difference that's 16 years that's a generation gap it's a racial generation gap when an older group doesn't see itself in a younger group and if you don't think that as consequences two data points to keep in mind one is what state in the United States do you think has the biggest racial generation gap the whitest old in the Browns Channel Arizona with its fractious politics around immigration with its fights around I think studies in the schools but more significantly with its it had the third largest cuts in the last five years in K through 12 spending per capita and the largest cuts in university spending just as a new generation is arriving now if you think that that's just something that's a casual point I'm making we've actually done a thing where we looked at county level local spending on education for multiple variables that predict education spending in a fixed effects regression and the racial generation gap in your county has a statistically significant effect on reducing spending on education so we've got a generational gap and we've also got a big social gap in terms of our institutions and our knowledge formation our institutions are broken this is a chart that I love we should do more charts like this this is comparing congress to various other things which is more popular so if you compare congress to lice congress people prefer lice by 67% if you prefer congress to a colonoscopy it's 58% and I think that's primarily because there's people below 50 who have never had a colonoscopy right the only thing that congress is almost as popular as is the band nickel back right which of course shows extraordinarily bad taste but the other thing that's going on is a kind of epistemic distance right living in places that are essentially very different reality universes so it's become famous with alternative facts it's become famous with Baghdad Bob speaking from the pulpit there, Sean Spicer increasingly distance from reality the way in which there's not a basic agreement on sort of what the facts are that people are talking about so this combination of what we in this book wanted to address this came out in late 2015 we talked about the fact interestingly that we thought that the US was facing a jobs crisis and that jobs crisis was key because jobs provide people identity and meaning that the US was facing an inequality crisis and that the US was facing an epistemic crisis an epistemic crisis that was partly about race but it was actually facilitated by the other ways in which people were siloing and sorting and separating and we wanted to write a book looking at these different aspects how would we address our jobs crisis by facing our inequality crisis and how was that connected to addressing the epistemic crisis and then we wanted to say how was this happening at a metro level and how might it bubble up to the nation before we got a Trump that didn't happen soon enough so what we did in the book is to do a couple of different things we wanted to in this book establish that equity paying attention to inequality was actually a fundamental building block for achieving prosperity and achieving job growth that is the inequality and job crisis were actually connected the second a little bit a little bit more controversial is that we wanted to make a very simple point that knowing together creates a possibility for growing together that is that if you can create knowledge communities in which people share facts and dialogue there's a possibility of resolving tensions between groups and ways that don't happen in the usual atomistic and sort of sharply divided political struggles that take place we had hinted at this in an earlier bit of research called just growth but we wanted to try to specify it a little bit further here and then also to complicate this because that framework of knowing together creates the possibility of growing together can sound like a kumbaya framework that if we all sit down and love one another and if you're from California get naked in a hot tub together celebrate your medical marijuana with your friends that somehow a good thing will come from it but we wanted to point out that conflict was a way of forming community that there was a way in which conflict and raising tough issues was actually a way of creating dialogue between sectors that could change minds so that's a lot to try to do in one book but it I think turns out to be a really good book I urge you to buy it if you don't want to buy it it's actually available for free as a download from UC Press it's a new model they're trying so that people actually read academic books and then if you are particularly don't even want to read it you can simply wait until the motion picture comes out which of course what happens because I'm in LA I'm actually having to rush back tomorrow morning to finish negotiating the movie rights I'm going to be portrayed by Antonio Banderas and I'm super excited about that so so let me talk through the different pieces of this it was a very mixed method project and it's led to a couple of different things so the first part of it was empirical and that part actually did a really interesting from my point of view transposition I think many of us are aware that the old framework around inequality and economic growth sort of rooted in misinterpretation of the Kuznetz curve that Piketty points to as being very sort of historically rooted one was that somehow inequality might be good for economic growth and in some ways Marxism has sometimes fallen into this as well by thinking that higher rate of exploitation is going to generate more investment and growth it's kind of an early critique I made of some of the radical critiques of the International Monetary Fund instead of looking at their class impacts they were looking more at growth impacts but there's been this kind of extraordinary shift in economic thinking it actually first started in the developing world context when people began to take a look at the fact that countries that had a more equitable starting point better land distributions more equitable distributions of education more equitable distributions of income actually tended to grow more over time was coupled by a bunch of research by people like Allison and Rodrick taking a look at the fact that places plagued by high levels of inequality tended to get into a lot of macroeconomic instability because they couldn't come to the political consensus about how to adjust about 10 years ago I and a bunch of others began trying to lift that research and sort of place it into the American metropolitan context trying to take a look at the relationship between measures of poverty measures of residential segregation etc looking at the impact of those things on economic growth looking at things like the 80-20 income ratio where it's bigger if there's more inequality looking at the impacts of that on growth in this book and then the sort of articles that came from it what we decided to do some of you if you were paying attention saw something a bit startling from the international monetary fund from about three or four years ago to set a studies by Berg and Austria that were looking at what predicted growth spells the idea was that if a country could sustain growth for a longer time a more secure political environment a more secure environment for investment and they wanted to take a look at what predicted growth spells over time and they defined growth spells as being able to sustain GDP growth for longer than five years they looked at 104 growth spells of more than five years for 140 countries since the 1950s and for them the striking result was that income inequality was the most robust predictor of whether or not you could sustain growth over time whether or not you could sustain growth over time and they found that a 1% increase in the initial Gini coefficient led to about 11-15% reduction in the length of being able to sustain growth over time so that sounded to me like an opportunity to do something like what I've done in my dissertation which is to yank some methodology from the IMF and with my friend Chris Benner apply it to the United States so what did we do what we wound up doing was to look at spells of employment growth we said what predicts the ability to sustain job growth over time we moved in job growth data from QCW from those who are familiar with that we looked at spells of employment growth from 1990 to 2011 for the top 184 metros in the United States those were all metros that had more than 250,000 people as of 2000 I think it was in the middle of the time period we defined a growth spell as being able to sustain 12 quarters of consecutive job growth year over year we tried alternative measures the results are not sensitive but we tried alternative measures and we wind up with those 184 metros having 324 periods of sustaining employment growth over time and we used a kind of variation of what Bergen Austria used they used a technique that's called accelerated time ratio but one that's more familiar probably not familiar because I'm going to get economists to use either of these things mostly is a survival analysis so looking at how long a phenomenon survives and what we're looking for in a survival analysis is whether or not you can predict how you exit from the spell so you're growing what throws you off having sustained growth over time now there's a couple of methodological concerns with this one that most that most concerns the two that concern people are if your data is time limited you've got a right censoring phenomena because the spell could last longer right fortunately for us but unfortunately for the world it was a great recession and so almost everybody's employment spell except one stopped and then didn't reboot quick enough to be a three year spell in that period of time the other thing you've got to worry about is left censoring if you had a growth spell before the time period that you got and for that what we did was we took all the cases of left censoring we used them then we tossed them out to see whether the results were robust they were robust so unlike some of these techniques we didn't really have to worry about censoring on either side a couple things to motivate it then the regressions first there really is a relationship the higher the genie coefficient the shorter the growth spell the lower the genie coefficient the longer the growth spells by the way there's another thing in here your growth spell can start in the 90s or can start in the 2000s so when we do the work we're looking at the initial coefficient either from 9090 for the 90 spells or from 2000 for the 2000 spells again it's not too sensitive if you just go back to the 90 coefficients so it looks like we've got a relationship there if you look at the length of growth spells how long any growth spell is again it looks like you've got a relationship the higher the genie coefficient the shorter the growth spells these are associated with growth rates and then one final bit to convince you that this is actually important because one objection you could have as well you know grown for a long time but maybe it's like a real dud of a phenomenon right you're growing really slowly so you know big deal so this is the of the 184 metro areas 181 of them had growth spells in the book we let you know which 3 growth spells 3 metro areas had no growth spells at all but it's kind of embarrassing to talk about them right so these are all 181 regions and the number of quarters any of those regions spent in growth spells so what you can see is that if you were a region a region spent a lot of time in growth spells 18 35 21 to 2012 spending 12 quarters in a growth spell which means you only had one growth spell over the whole period or less than 30 that's about 35 what you're going to notice is the more time a region spends in a growth spell this is employment growth over the whole period the more time it's spent in a growth spell the bigger the increase in weekly earnings over the whole period so looking at growth spells it's associated with faster growth rates the chart I kind of jumped over but it's also just associated the more you spend growing the better off you are after 21 years so what predicts being in a growth spell and not or falling out of a growth spell this is fortunately what I love about kind of mimicking IMF work is that they do really basic stupid stuff and then we can do basic stupid exploratory stuff and say hey they did it so they explore a lot of relationships and then they kind of put it all together in a parsimonious model basically what we did do what we found out a couple of different things that I the darker colors are more significant the lighter colors are less significant but basically the two variables so it turns out the percent of population born that's foreign born is actually associated with you falling out of a growth spell we haven't quite figured out why that is having a lot of people in manufacturing that's associated with you falling out of a growth spell kind of makes sense given our manufacturing structure but in this regression it's sensitive to this particular specification the two most important variables are the initial level of income inequality is likely to shorten your growth spells and then something called metropolitan power diffusion metropolitan power diffusion is the fragmentation of government structures within your metropolitan area which is also a sign of epistemic distance or taboosh and sorting where people are trying to kind of be in separate governments so that they're not taxing themselves for the commons so equity might be good for economic growth social distance is actually not good for being able to sustain growth over time we also did a little bit of looking at the politics of it but I want to jump over the econometrics right now to talk about the field work and then sort of bring this to a conclusion but the punchline of the econometrics was trying to create a platform for the idea that inequality and social distance because some of the other variables like residential segregation were significant city, suburb, differentials and poverty rates were significant that social distance would shorten your growth spell so then we wanted to take a look at the question of which how did communities close some of the epistemic distance I think of one example then jump through a few of the case studies and conclude this is Jacksonville, Florida in the 1960s in fact on August 27th 1960 when in the city of Jacksonville lunchtime or lunch counter protesters were met with a crowd of 200 whites armed with baseball bats and axe handles who attacked them on a Saturday they became known in Jacksonville history as axe handles Saturday the police did not intervene until African Americans started to fight back in which case they began to arrest African Americans so super highly fragmented ribbon in 1960 if you go to Jacksonville today it's a place that did something pretty interesting first it's one of these metropolitan areas that annexed all of its suburbs as a result it's like one of the biggest cities and county footprints but there's not a lot of city county or you know how in Massachusetts you're a great small box government place so like all these little cities that will not collaborate with one another you can't do that in Jacksonville because it's all just one government it closes the social distance second thing in Jacksonville is something that's remarkable that's called the Jacksonville Community Council it brings the other people from all different walks of life multiple sectors who go through a leadership program in each year are supposed to adopt a problem and try to address it together homelessness poverty job training multiple sectors creating a conversation together around those problems we were intrigued because it turns out Jacksonville by the standards of the south has actually done better in recent years on race relations it's growing more equitably than most of the south it does what a lot of metros try to do attract business but it will only give a subsidy to a business that's being 135% of the median wage so every business that comes in has to be for them I wrote write or lift up so was all this conversation part of that strategy now if you're an economist that's traditionally trained it's pretty hard to imagine that talk would make a difference it's also pretty hard to imagine actually going visiting places and talking to people about that we should just model it and test it on the data but we decided to visit and what we did over the course of a couple of books was to develop a notion of epistemic communities where people create mechanisms to share knowledge a lot of this has been developed in the literature but the way it's been developed is around professional epistemic communities professional practice and experts solving problems particularly around international relations what we wanted to do was to deploy this down to a sort of community and civic level and to complicate it to look at diverse and dynamic epistemic communities were they diverse in terms of bringing together people from different sectors different ethnic groups, different class and were they able to respond to shocks and change and by doing that create strategies for leadership development create interactions the big insight here telling me over a bunch of stuff actually comes from this great book by Eli Benkler The Penguin and the Leviathan which I really urge everybody to read it's actually wonderful what he says is that economists attended the model of the world as though it's Hobsian nasty brutish and short people are self interested and they compete and in that Hobsian world either you have to have the state to coordinate and suppress everybody or you have the free market and you believe that that's going to lead to parade of equilibrium he says that doesn't explain Linux it doesn't explain people coming together and coding together to develop a co-operate so what are the mechanisms under which people co-operate and are there and when you have structures that encourage atomistic and self interested behavior of course that's what you'll get if you've got structures that encourage solidarity you make it solidarity and so our question was do these regions have different structures if this sounds familiar Sam we quoted heavily from Sam from Identity Economics by Akerlof and from Benkler who wrote a more sophisticated book than this but I barely understood it I understood this one so what we did was we looked at a lot of different places some places you wouldn't really imagine Salt Lake City I know you might say to yourself how could Salt Lake City be a place you would take a look at it's a lot more diverse than you think it's actually a lot more equitable than you think in terms of its outcomes and it's a place that's got something called the Utah Compact which was an agreement among civic leaders business leaders faith leaders and immigrant rights people to have a more civil conversation about immigration Utah had driver's licenses for undocumented six years before California in state tuition for undocumented one year before one year after California they've got a planning mechanism in Salt Lake called Envision Utah which brings together people from multiple sectors to talk about how the Salt Lake metro ought to look a lot of they've just put in a rail line they're very proud that it runs from the airport to downtown but they're particularly proud that it runs to the lowest income Hispanic area in Salt Lake and it's providing employment to the downtown and to the airport there's something about the way folks came together it's not all kumbaya one of the stories we tell in the book is about San Antonio if you went to San Antonio now one thing that they boast about everybody talks about collaboration, collaboration, collaboration they were able to bring one of the promise zones from the federal government and a promise neighborhood and a sustainable communities initiative they were able in the city of San Antonio to pass the sales tax the finance case through 12 education for disadvantaged kids it's pretty amazing when voters do that most amazing was that the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce supported it if you've been to San Antonio 40 years ago this is where the Industrial Area Foundation cut its teeth on their sort of new form of organizing in San Antonio the west side of San Antonio largely Latino was disenfranchised through an large election system so they couldn't get African American Latino candidates onto the council they were literally disenfranchised in terms of public investment to grant flooding they became very vibrant community organizers who challenged the Chamber of Commerce they got a hold of a secret plan that the Chamber was using to market San Antonio as a low wage metro they embarrassed them they challenged them they froze the most important bank in town the owner of that bank actually wound up buying the book Rules for Radicals by Saul Lewinsky and passing it out to all the business people saying this is what we're up against right that same banker is now the chair of something called Project Quest which is a joint community city workforce development program to put people into the middle of the labor market which is run by this community based organization the fights actually led to collaboration third case and then I'll close on a couple of reflections of what this means for the election is Seattle Seattle as you know went to the $15 an hour minimum wage it did it before Los Angeles something we're very upset about I did it through a very unusual thing it did it through something called the Seattle process which is quite literally a cultural process in Seattle of talking things through so they've got a pretty dynamic affordable housing program came as a result of the Seattle process when they raised the minimum wage it was a fight but they also created a commission that had 25 people on it at the end of the commission 23 of the 25 supported the increase to a $15 an hour minimum wage the only two holdouts were the trust guide member of the Seattle City Council she wanted the minimum wage to go up the next year and the head of the Jamer of Commerce who said that she was in favor of the increase but she couldn't pull all of her members to get them to agree on it they literally figured out a collaborative process to get there there's a lot of problems in Seattle but there's a lot of a knowledge community being created to try to talk things through so that's what this book was about and it was sort of optimistic that a lot of what we were learning at a metro level came together face to face race to race in place to place to talk things through that there could be solutions moving forward was an optimistic vision and it's one that's been rocked of course by this election just a couple things about the election and then close it certainly was an election deeply reflective of social distance of people feeling that the other can be completely dismissed Nancy Pelosi who I actually don't normally quote said a great thing about Donald Trump which is that he has mistaken cruelty for strength and cruelty is only something that is possible with tremendous othering and distance this is a weak regime and because of it is it could actually be more dangerous moving forward because I think it's going to wind up sort of relying on the sort of deportation sideshow when it doesn't get the economy working again because the fundamental thing holding the economy back at a US macro level now too is this level of inequality and lack of opportunity just like that's a secret at the metro level it's an open secret at the national level that means that as we move forward we need to speak about the economic anxiety and economic distress but not lose the fact that race is an important part of that it's going to require a compelling economic vision I'll just say a couple of other things I think it's going to require a much more paying attention to geography that's a little bit evident for the following reason Hillary won but she lost because of geography right 3 million more votes in the wrong places interesting stuff going out at a metro level how do we bubble it up to the nation and then a profound need I think on our parts to recognize something and I do think it gets back a little bit to this book and then a little bit where I want to close with what did I learn from Sam so this is a huge movement moment and those of us who have been thinking about organizing working with organizers raising sharp critiques of the society etc see the stark contradictions that are being lifted up and about to be lifted up and we might be excited about how this is a political moment I think one of us our biggest mistakes would be to think of it as a purely political moment that is if you think about the phenomena that's emerging and in particular the women's march where people didn't march there for a political reason per se they marched there out of a sense of solidarity with other people out of a sense of the need to be kinder with one another it was a movement that got lifted up initially by white women and there was some distance because of that there's a wonderful piece by Lisa Garza one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter talking about how do you put aside your own trying to interpret it purely through a political lens and go with the strength that's built there and the strength that's being built there about solidarity and about values that's what we saw in these metro regions that's in part what our econometrics was demonstrating to us that's in part what this political moment is and that's kind of what I've learned from Sam I know what I should have learned was theory I know what I should have learned was statistics I'm okay with that I know what I should have learned was to ask persistent questions because Sam, particularly when he's your advisor has a zero-tating habit of just asking question after question after question and having you do I think I'm done, I think I'm done, oh no I'm not oh no I'm not but what I really learned from Sam was the difference between theoretically thinking about economic man and thinking about human beings and how they actually behave and I remember being with Sam he gave me a notice of me at a college and had a delightful argument with one of my colleagues who was talking about why having a fixed return on age was good because that way people could plan and Sam went back and forth and said you know but it just really made me sad when my dad had to retarget he didn't really want to and I feel like it's just kind of not human to force it on people and I thought by God that's really what should be driving us what I also learned from Sam and this has been a great comfort in the decisions I've made professionally is that it's not about being the smartest person in the room or having the best possible job the only real bit of advice Sam gave me when I went on the job market aside from good luck was that the trick is to find a good job in a place where you want to live which again is profoundly human and the third thing I learned from Sam and continued to practice is that Michael mentioned it some of the wisest ideas are with the community people that I work with you know people in their bones understand that when you treat people badly 15 doesn't work people in their bones and in their organizing realize that when you build one-on-one relationships you have solidarity and each other's troubles moving forward people even in business know that when you have sustained relationships between buyers and sellers it's not about short-term advantage it's about sustaining that market going forward I learned the value of being a public intellectual and I learned that yeah a good idea to tell a good story thank you there's no where's the space for world to have a conversation with urban and metro because it continues to fall out where's the space for this because rural actually does what you're talking about and in terms of election people are blaming white rural men who are losing their jobs and manufacturing industries and coming back to those places and I know they're not rural but I'd like to understand if there's if there was any space for a world in what you do and where's those points of intersection that's a great question let me complicate one thing you said and then get at it which I think and I think that's really from my colleague John Powell that it's too simple to say it was by rural men of Luth there's a couple of other things you could play on as well number one, still action wise if we have been able to run the kind of campaign that had motivated you know, 100,000 more African-Americans in Detroit Madison Milwaukee, I'm sorry Philadelphia that's the election too but the other thing yeah, they did but I think that the other part of this is that it's really the sense of loss of identity right, so I think that this I brought up from my colleague John Powell is a race theorist at UC Berkeley so it's people the economy was shifting and the demography was shifting at the same time I feel like what's my place in this America and that's what I think is being lost and that there's a reaction that's coming out from that yeah, I mean it's true, I mostly do Metro work, I got kind of fascinated in this because we were trying to do a lot of this work in Los Angeles and I was trying to see how it worked elsewhere the fact that I'm on this Metro kick actually happened after the allies civil unrest when a bunch of us were sort of running from meeting to meeting thinking if we went to one more meeting we'd actually solve some and in the middle of one of those meetings someone said you know while we're thinking about recovering this part of the urban economy, other people are talking about the regional economy, how do we start thinking regionally so I've been on this urban and metro track but you're right, I think that the rural things has been ignored by a lot of folks and it's absolutely critical it's also really uneven when I've seen the article in the New York Times just yesterday that some rural areas are actually really thriving and some of them are actually thriving in part because there are new immigrants coming in as well, transforming the area so, more questions Thank you very much, I really enjoyed the talk and I was thinking of a treat by the example of Jack Small Florida and let me know who you are I'm Pidan Petulis and I'm an associate professor in the economics department and I'm particularly interested in civil rights issues so, you framed the example of Jack Small Florida starting off with 1967 riots, civil rights sort of riots and then you told us about how Jacksonville now is the largest energy falls area, it used to be tiny and then you talked about how there is a lot of community discourse of inclusion but I was wondering was there a connection there in terms of did the presence of those riots trigger something, what was the kind of discussion leading up to making this very large metropolitan area, was it because of the civil civil rights that triggered people to create a large metropolitan area in the hopes of creating a more inclusive community, was that kind of was there a causation there or I was just wondering whether we can see that kind of relationship more broadly where towns that had civil rights protests later on we see this sort of geography a designation of geography that's large and needs more inclusion. That's a great question, any answers? Yes, I don't want to claim a big book, we're very careful to say that these things are associated with that they seem to be going out at the same time but they're getting easy economic results because they're making an assertion of plausibility that there's not any geometric thought at this time of the district. But for Jacksonville at Saturday it was immensely embarrassing it didn't happen in 1960 there was some attention to race relations the annexation piece which was sort of now you can't come supper was something going on in the south of the time for a different set of reasons a different connection in two other places and then a sort of interesting sort of reverse story in two other places that are in the book. In the book we wound up wanting to look at three places in North Carolina and three places in California because we wanted a whole state context concept and then look at because you could say well all of this has to be with state rules etc. So in North Carolina we looked at Raleigh and Charlotte and Greenbrook and in Charlotte Charlotte and Raleigh are both places that try to position themselves as emblematic of the New South and by what that meant was those of racial blocks. So Charlotte merged with Mecklenburg County and created a rule where no supper could become a supper. As soon as you got big enough as an urban area you were absorbed into the city so you couldn't become a supper. They created a single school district and created a busing system and the first people on the busing system were the sons and daughters of the white anger elite because they were trying to market Charlotte is a place that didn't blow up. Charlotte is the first place that elected a black mayor in the south in a long majority black city or weekend and Charlotte no surprise is the place that passed the LGBT rights transgender bathroom use rights rights that became the big fight in North Carolina in recent years. Raleigh actually has a very similar history. You might know about the Raleigh school district. It's also a place where voluntary busing and they did it by class not race and they got it done very well folks love it Tea Party candidates got into the school board and killed it in the last couple of years but it's like one of the enormous success stories of the south etc. You can contrast that to Greensboro very famous for its own civil rights struggles also famous for the shooting of civil rights workers in the 1980s if you go to Greensboro and talk to people especially when I talk to people that's interesting to do whites will say why do black people keep talking about the past and African Americans will say the past is vibrant it's still here it's still a racist structure people are very much at odds with one another not surprisingly it's a place that's been able to sustain economic growth and it's not a Raleigh or a Charlotte in terms of generating economic growth Charlotte has a program that tries within the city of Charlotte to target its lowest income neighborhoods every year so that's a new word in California it's a city profile Fresno Fresno looks like San Antonio did 40 years ago huge racial conflict the description from progressives about Fresno is that it's DOA development oil and agriculture they all rely on cheap wages to make sure that any good economic idea is DOA down on arrival and it's incredibly fragmented politically it's now starting to make some progress coming out of that so I think these things really do you're really in answer to your question you really do see some relationships is it one for one is it absolute no but is there a plausible sociological story that goes along with this economic story it seems possible if you look in other times in other places you could find very unequal societies that are growing and so if that's the case and even if it's not the case it isn't the quality valuable in and of itself and so wouldn't that be a much stronger argument well I would agree with you that equality is an important value it's one that I will too but I also agree that in some cases most of the work I've done has been looking at the United States since the 80s so it's pretty clear that there's income and equality sort of view curve where complete equality might smash incentives and slow growth complete inequality and if smash is growth there were sort of on the wrong side of that trade off right so true these are sort of time contingent estimations of this so I think I came back to the first thing that while I agree with you that equality in and of itself is a value that's one that I hold I'm not sure really loose the needle that much in the United States the level of inequality to the jobs crisis actually has more political traction talking about why inequality particularly at these levels is toxic for our politics toxic for our society and toxic for our economy is I think an important argument to make and so that's this sort of narrative or political shift I'm trying to make perhaps one more question then we'll close yes excellent presentation I promise I'll read your book if I do not see the movie I want you two things about I want you to touch on is the global context and so but I want to just picture you about the growth differential between the US and the rest of the world where one issue is now growing there are some parts of the world which are growing which are actually growing faster than the US changing the global context and that may whether this may also fuel this fear of the other in the sense that this China's going to get passed as well as economically and that's why also building the those jobs to of course was about when I think about a number of autocratic regimes modern autocratic regimes they tend to focus on winning and keeping control over the global population and sometimes they even forget about the global area about Ethiopia and so on building that golden ANC in power but they don't care about the elite as long as the larger population and educated rural supports the power in the regime of power they're fine but how sustainable is that calculus in the US if Trump or his regime is not in two, three years from now it's not possible to give the goodies to the people and how is he going to keep the idea that is the savior of the whole area if he's not being able to bring the jobs that he can because he can keep ignoring the Los Angeles and the Europe and I'm wondering what kind of what kind of things are we going to deliver to the rural community to be able to hold the... Well I think that could be a challenge for every reason so first there's an interesting thing that came out from Brookings after the election which is that the counties that voted for Clinton have about two thirds of the nation's GDP first the county is about one third so in terms of economic pregnancy that's a really sort of key thing second I think this is where the rural communities are going to really have a shortfall aside from just how the economic strategy would be generally if you think about the ag cuts the benefits of that to rural communities it's going to be pretty normal here's the thing that's the most striking to me the thing that's going to be sold the most is being good for communities is the infrastructure package but the infrastructure package is based on market like public private partnerships and basically follow the market nobody wants to build like a new highway in a rural area that's actually a recipe for bringing more investment to urban areas so here there's going to be a lot of disappointment and when there is disappointment economically then that sense of identity is being denied then there's another sense of identity that has made more powerful by deporting people by unleashing a police against African Americans in urban areas which is the newest Jeff Sessions announcement today which is they're going to go back and look over every one of the consent degrees with the police over the last couple of years that that stuff is going to be really symbolically important as the economy is not doing well in those areas for me looking at the metros side to the fact that I just thought that they were interesting it's also I think we should be able to know about these things part of the reason I study things is because I need my political silence I'm pretty convinced that if you like the only way to win Texas is by moving Houston and Dallas and Austin and El Caso that's the way you win Texas is by moving those metro areas and their suburbs you'll note that the campaign for $15 an hour moved in metros before it moved to the state level you'll note that a lot of metro areas have climate plans even when their states do not so I'm really convinced that the metros are a very useful political vehicle and are useful in epistemic vehicle because there were people have to have conversations with one another that's for the international side of things my god that's a big question I think that's a question that should be answered by an incoming chat okay can we thank our speaker?