 Good afternoon, everybody. How's everybody doing? A little better now that we've got a little food in our stomachs. Very glad about that. Apologies to our online viewers and to everybody. We're starting a little bit late today, but I am really excited to have you all here, whether you're in the room with us or watching online. And I am really excited to have this panel and this conversation. I'm Justin King. I work in the Family-Centered Social Policy Program at New America. And we have teed up for you today a really tremendous discussion about opportunity and wealth in America and what we can do to make things a little better than they are right now. We have with us today the coauthors of a new book, Making Education Work for the Poor. William Elliott and Melinda Lewis are here with us today. I have a bunch of confessions to make. Willie's a fellow of our program and a long time friend. Melinda is as well. So you may detect notes of bias coming from me as we, but just a soup-son, like in the background, hint. But in his day job, Willie's a professor at the University of Michigan. He's a leading researcher on the impact of savings on education and a real scholar of the field of children's savings accounts. And it is great to have you here today, Willie. Melinda is a professor at the University of Kansas and another leading expert in the field of children's savings. And again, somebody I'm definitely biased towards. Our other two panelists today, I have less warm feelings for. I just met Richard Reeves for the first time. I am, however, a longtime fan of his work. He's at the Brookings Institution, where he wears many hats, which is an indication of his incredible talent. He's also the author of a great book, which, if you haven't read, I really strongly recommend picking up, called Dream Hoarders, which is about the extent to which the upper middle class in America is pulling away from the rest of America and separating themselves. And it's a really powerful argument about how this is happening, why it's a problem, and what we can do about it. And Richard, we're really thrilled to have you here today. Derek Hamilton is here as well. Derek's a professor at the New School. But more importantly, Derek thought doing something about wealth inequality was important long before everybody else thought that was cool. So working with his colleague, Sandy Darity, 10 years ago, and forgive me if I'm misstating the time frame, Derek helped to articulate an idea called Baby Bonds, which would radically reduce the racial wealth gap in America and is today known for that work, but is also a very visible voice in conversations about a universal basic income, a federal job guarantee, and ways in which public policy can act to promote equity across racial and class lines in America. So we are thrilled to have all of you here today. Have a little conversation with the authors of the book. We're going to get them to share with us a little bit about what they wrote, why they wrote it, and how. We're going to get some reactions then from Derek and Richard. And then we're really hoping to have a robust conversation involving you, the audience. We'll have a microphone that we can pass around for folks to ask questions. If you're online and you're following the conversation and you want to ask questions at any point, we're using the Twitter hashtag making education work. And so fire those questions away at us, and we'll try to get them to as many of them as we can. This book, Willie and Melinda, first of all, congratulations. Any book is a labor of love and a work that requires persistence. So congratulations. I really like this book because of the way it mixes some really deep scholarship with some very clear passion and purpose. And I think a lot of times we come across academic work that is or academically centered work that is really important and tough to penetrate. And this is a deeply sourced work, but it is not tough to penetrate. You guys bring your personal stories to this work, and you bring a level of passion to a really clear problem. I think the problem statement arises really early in the book, which is helpful for those of us who are slow readers. But there's this circular conversation that happens in Washington about whether the right thing for us to be doing, the right thing for us to care about is inequality or opportunity. And you guys tackle that right off the bat. And you say that your goal is to eradicate the opportunity gap, but that doing that requires eliminating persistent patterns of wealth inequality. And so you're tying these two things together and taking this conversation on really clearly, really directly. And the other thing I think that's really helpful and really provocative about the book is that you're taking this issue of inequality and opportunity and then tying it to the educational system and recognizing that there is a confluence of factors that need to be addressed in concert here. And so while in many ways what you're talking about at the end of the day is the need to reduce wealth inequality and a plan for so doing, it is in service of making change on these other scores and creating a virtuous circle in the long run. You're saying, really, we need to jump start our attack on wealth inequality by delivering assets to all children early in life. And this will help fix our educational outcomes. And that will pay dividends through a more equal and inclusive society in the long run. I think it's a really strong argument. I think for a lot of people it comes a little bit out of left field. People who think about educational outcomes certainly are aware of the problems of poverty and how that influences education. But you've taken it to another level and said that wealth is really the place we ought to start in working to fix it. So that's a little bit of background about the book. I wonder if you could, one thing I admire about the work that Richard and Derek have done is that they've been very upfront about the way their personal stories have influenced their work. I know stories about Derek being a freshman at Oberlin, which is, and I know stories about Richard coming to America as an immigrant and how what he saw based upon his earlier perceptions has influenced the public work that he's done. You two begin this work telling your stories as well. Can you just, I don't think your stories are not as well known maybe as Richard's and Derek's. Can you share a little bit with us a bit about your stories and how they brought you to this place? Sure. I really want to start off by giving you some context. And so we understand the stories and everything we say later within this context. It's just this idea that the American dream can be broken down almost into a formula. That effort and ability should lead to desired outcomes. We have this vision in our mind. We think about education in the same way. And education being that great equalizer in some sense, where if you go to college and you put your effort into it and you put a work hard, you should be able to achieve certain kinds of outcomes. And so a lot of that idea is behind a lot of what we wrote and what we talk about. And even the stories I'm about to tell you. Two quick stories because we have a limited amount of time we want to get to the conversational piece. In one, I have all my kids here. And one of the stories is about one of my middle daughter, Michelle. And while she was in elementary school, by the way, I grew up in poverty, homeless. As we drove up here, we stopped by and looked at my old neighborhood and just for them to get a sense of kind of where I came from, which is totally different than when most people experience. I mean, I don't think they had any sense of kind of the outward poverty, how visible it is. Because in my life now, I don't see it every day, right? We live in a totally different environment. But anyhow, so in a quick note, when she was in elementary school, she had just above average math scores, slightly above average math scores. But my wife and I knew that was really important for her to get into advanced math classes. And that she had the kind of effort that would allow her to succeed in that. And so we really spent a lot of time pressuring, talking to the administration, the school that she was at, to get her to put her into advanced math. Now, this is important. Once she got into advanced math was essentially this, right? So she was in third or fourth grade. And so they were teaching her fourth grade math. So when she got into advanced math, she was in third grade. They were teaching her fourth grade math. At the beginning, she had a slight gap between her and the other students, just slightly above average. But at the end of that semester, for no mysterious reason, her scores were far better than the people in her cohort. Now, it's not surprising, right? Because when they do the state tests, they're essentially measuring her score against all other third graders, but they're teaching her fourth grade math, right? And that has just compounded over time to where now, she's kind of like far ahead of all the other students. And when she goes and applies for college, they'll forget about the time that me and my wife spent there talking to those teachers to get her into that class, right? That won't be evident. That extra institutional help that she received, all they'll see is this person who is far ahead, everybody else, and think that she's some kind of genius. Is she is a hard worker, and she is smart. But she's no genius, neither am I. I mean, that's the reality of it, right? I'm not a genius either, right? And I've met very few geniuses, but that gets lost in the equation, right? That's so fundamental to what we're talking about in this book. One other quick example that I'll give Melinda some time. I always tell this story, and what it is, is I already told you, I grew up poor and all the things that come with that, you know? And so when I went out to buy a car when I became a young adult, you know, I didn't have good credit. I didn't have money down, right? And so me and the car light both knew that I could only buy a car at a limited number of places. Someone, a big enough organization who could give person like me credit, right? And so the dynamic, the power dynamic was so much different for people who grew up poor. I go out and buy a car now, I have money down, my credit's good, I can buy a car easily, right? I and the car light know that I can get up and walk out. That is a kind of power that Derek Hamilton, myself, and all the other asset researchers haven't really measured, right? So we're gonna talk later about CSAs and the kind of concrete things they give, but that bargaining power, that ability by having an asset and being able to determine where I go to buy my car is extremely important. And we have to understand that's why assets are so important. It's not just about purchasing a good, but it's that bargaining power that gives you that opportunity and flexibility that gives you. I'll stop there. I'm actually gonna deviate from the schedule a little bit. Give your daughter equal time. Oh. Yeah. Melinda, I mean you come to this same work, this same conclusion, but from a very different perspective. No, I mean I think the story, the way I try to tell my story in the book is really how it looks different to me through a lens of wealth and equality, right? So I think at the time it mostly looked like that equation Willie talked about, effort and ability equals success. And I write in the book, I don't remember a single time that anyone ever expressed any surprise when I did well in school, when I got merit scholarships, when I received awards. I see that now though through a lens that understands how institutions were working at my service and how my parents doing things that really looked just like good parenting, like the things that you would expect them to do, whether it was my mom taking me to an after school creative writing class or the time my dad took off work because Gorbachev was coming to the next state over and he thought, of course, your kids should go here Gorbachev, right? Or when, and had of course the ability to take the day off work and take me there. Or the time that when we went to a visit at the university where I am now a professor and my parents felt very comfortable walking up to the chancellor and talking with him and the chancellor then saw me as a strategic asset that he wanted to have at the university with my national merit scholarship and track record to earn future awards. And so it really in every way I talk about it is like I walked into a pattern of expectations where I almost would have had to work to not succeed in education and to not have that pay off in my favor, right? Like the path of inertia was really sure. I had to work hard, right? I had to not blow off the test and show up when it was time to take the PSAT. But everything that my family was doing was not nefarious. Richard talks about that in his book. It wasn't like they were trying to game the system. It was that the system game was set up for them to do what came naturally to them in a way that then accrued benefits to me that I see now as not fair and really then by that equation, not American, not the way we want to think education is supposed to work for people. So that's really interesting, really helpful. I'd like to ask you to flip hats really quickly because the other element of the book is that it is a work of, it's an academic work. Actually, I finished it the other day and I went to my colleague Rachel Black and I had split the book in between where the writing stopped and where the appendix was. I said, well, if I had known, I wasn't going to have to read the last third of it. I would have started sooner. So it is a deeply sourced work. It's an academic work. The end notes are remarkable and important and intimidating. If you're trying to make that case the same case from an academic perspective, can you just talk through what is the elevator pitch, what is the most pressing piece of evidence that you can muster to say that actually to change these power dynamics and to change these educational outcomes to get more people to where we want them to be, we don't need to change the way classes are taught, like silver bullet style. There is no one thing. The one thing that we need to focus on to help all those other things work better is to intervene early in life to give kids the resources that are going to deliver a different message for them and empower them in a really substantial way going forward. Well, I think it really starts where you started, Justin, of how we've tried to make a connection between the inequality and the opportunity gap. Because there are so many pieces of evidence, we could point to, that show how the gaps are widening and they're widening not because disadvantaged children and their families are falling behind. In fact, in the aggregate and absolute terms, we're seeing gains and sometimes because of some of those types of innovations in the classroom and in different contexts. But what we're not seeing is those gains in any way keeping pace with the fairly meteoric increases in achievement and returns on that achievement to people who start out ahead. So we see that we have a wider gap in SAT scores between low income and high income students today than we did in the 1980s. And it's not because of the SAT scores of poor children or children who come from poor families are falling. It's because they're not keeping up with the gains that we're seeing from those more privileged children whose systems are all working for them in terms of what their parents are putting in, the way that their schools are positioning them and preparing them. And we see the same things in other kinds of achievements and scores. We see the same thing in college completion rates. College completion has increased for all children, but the benefits of wealth are amplified because of the way that being able to avoid student debt and selectively choose institutions and position yourselves with internships and some of the things that Richard talks about, how that gives people who start out ahead even further start ahead and how difficult it is then for people to catch up. And Willie, I think that for folks in the room that have met you before, have seen your work before, certainly we've worked to highlight it. Lots of other organizations have. I think the single piece of research that you're probably best known for up until this point is research that points at children's savings and says kids that have it are much more likely to attend. And this has sparked sort of a movement of people that are out there that are trying to deliver savings accounts that tend to be sort of pretty small dollar, but are trying to sort of change the arc of kids' lives by awarding them small amounts of assets early in life. And in the book, what you argue for is a much more robust system of the same kind of thing. So I think the same kind of question for you. You've traveled an arc here from an academic perspective, from an evidence perspective, what are the pieces that you hone in on that say, we need to make a transformation in the way that we do things. What is most compelling to you and how do you communicate that to an audience? When you publish books, you finish them like a year before they actually are published. And so I have learned things since the book was written. And one piece of language that I tend to use at this point, which is at the heart of the book, but maybe not expressed as clearly as it could be, is the difference between policies that focus on survival and those that focus on thriving. And I think that's really important at this moment, because one of the things we see in the current administration is the idea that we won the war on poverty, right? That because we have almost full employment, that the people don't need jobs anymore, that this is no longer a problem. And really what it's about is, the American dream is not just about can I eat today, it's about can I thrive today, right? For me, opportunity means thriving. It means a chance to be whatever it is I want to be, wherever my effort and ability will take me to be. And so one of the important things while we use our stories is because we're trying to frame the conversation different about a wealth transfer and the importance and how it fits into our values. And I don't think academics spend enough time thinking about how do our values connect to our research? And so that's one of the important things there. I want to make, so as far as data goes though, and Derek Hamilton's one of the researchers have done some work on this, I haven't done any research on this myself, is this idea that with an education, low income families and minorities don't do as well as their counterparts. And so though they have an education which is supposed to be the great equalizer in society, and though they do better than their peers, other low income families or minorities who don't graduate, they don't do as well as their Caucasians who graduate and go to college, bottom line, right, in higher income families. And so if we're talking about investing and telling these kids, you should focus in on school, but yet at the end of the day they understand and they realize and they experience the fact that their degree doesn't give them the same level of income, doesn't give them the same level of wealth, then the dream falls apart for them. And we're almost a mockery to tell them to put their effort there, right? Because we all, as Americans, have some sense of competition and fairness, right? And so we wanna feel like when we invest that our investment is equal and we'll receive the same kind of return as other people. And so to me, the body of research around understanding A, that the current return on a degree, which means free college, will not be a solution because the return is not the same for everybody. And that doesn't mean that we should forsake education, that education can't be a great stool, but however we prop up education has to be in such a way that the return on a degree actually pays off for everybody equally, right? Or else everything around our system falls apart. We put so much energy, effort and investment in education if it cannot and does not function as we tell our kids, we fail them and the American dream falls apart. I'll stop. So I wanna jump ahead and just really quickly, sort of cut to the chase of the book, right? What you guys argue for then is what you call opportunity investment accounts. And this is every baby in the United States born has an account opened in their name at birth with a large amount of money deposited into it. On a sliding scale, you would say, kids from low wealth households, $10,000 in their account, kids from upper income households, a smaller amount of money in their account. The funds are sort of invested and held until the kids get to be 18 years old. You write that you want families to have skin in the game, right? You expect a contribution from them monthly over the course of this time so that you sort of say that other actors can intervene to boost and promote the wellbeing of take that burden on for families. And it's targeted, you want this to be targeted towards post-secondary activity, but you don't hard and fast say, this is your college money. You actually sort of conceptualize this a little more broadly as, I think the phrase is what you're interested in doing is facilitating a successful transfer to adulthood, which I think there's a lot to argue and discuss there, but the idea being that one size does not fit all and we need to recognize that from a policy perspective. And the math on this is basically you're targeting for everybody to end up at 18 with like 40 grand in the kitty to then make the choices that help them to be empowered to navigate their lives successfully. So that's the, I've captured that all right. We quibble with some things, but this is what's happening. But we have time for quibbling. But yeah, I wanted to put that on the table to make sure that people knew like, this is what the argument is driving towards, right? When we talk about a significant investment in kids. Derek, this to me echoes in many ways pioneering work that you and Sandy Darity did on Baby Bonds, there's big differences, of course, but the roots are very, very similar. I really would love to just sort of give you an opportunity to share high level thoughts about the book and about this idea that the path to sort of achieving opportunity is by attacking wealth inequality. Okay, so let me first say that I'm gonna try to be provocative in my comments, but please don't take that as a non, I endorse the book and highly recommend that you go out and buy it and read it. But that said, I'm gonna try to do a few things. I'm gonna critique the opportunity gap framing. I'm gonna talk about there is a purpose to using an opportunity gap framing in America and it fits in with what my colleague to my left describes as dream hoarding. I'm gonna talk about the role that race plays in that, the overemphasis on education and our life outcomes, the agency that wealth provides and then finally present an alternative which is instead of an opportunity gap framing and economic rights framing which I think is a better way to go. All right, so that's a lot and I don't have a lot of time so let me get into it. Is the so-called American ethos of studying hard and working hard in order to climb the proverbial economic ladder of rules? Is equal opportunity as a substantive American ideal or is it a rhetorical device whose purpose is to maintain social hierarchy? In other words, is the rhetorical aspiration of equal opportunity largely another mechanism, a tactic so to speak, to facilitate dream hoarding for the elites in the upper middle class. You all know about Richard's book so I'm not gonna describe it but I'm gonna say it relates very well to the Nobel Laureate, not a martyr, the Nobel Laureate, come on, what's his name? Why am I forgetting it? Sir Arthur Lewis's frame about competing and non-competing groups. In that book when he talks about race, he talks about the way society is structured, subaltern groups are rendered non-competing and that they have limited access to the attributes that will be rewarded in the labor market and for those individuals that are able to acquire those attributes, there are two mechanisms that are used to maintain social hierarchy. One is change the rules, change the credentialing criteria, redefine what it means to be successful. Another way is to outright discriminate so discrimination serves a purpose as my colleague William Darity has said is a functional role to discrimination and that functional role is to maintain social hierarchy and then does this opportunity gap framing lead to a neoliberal perspective where we argue that as long as the, as long as people have the proper motivation, the proper skill set, markets are supposed to be such that individual agents properly incentivized, markets become the solution of efficient allocation as well as fairness, it is an appealing narrative, it is one that presents the allegories of hard work, merit, efficiency, social mobility, freedom and fairness, agency and personal responsibility and fairness to my colleagues, they certainly aren't making the case, they are explicit and arguing in the book that it's not just hard work, it's resources so that isn't the case they're making but that narrative I think feeds into this framing. It is in this neoliberal frame that we get austerity policies that behavioral modification, particularly with regards to personal and human capital investment are the central issues, why fund government agencies and programs which at best misallocate resources to irresponsible individuals or at worst create further dependencies that fuel irresponsible behaviors. On the left we might get more tinkering programs with the market but at the end of the day we are reliant on the market to make decisions. Instead we end up with, to address poverty, we ground stigmatization and race, we end up with anti-blackness providing the political fodder by which we implement harsh impunitive control on the underclass because of their marginalized status and overrepresentation in poverty blacks become the symbol by which we define persistent unemployment inability to get education, a malice, a drain on social resources. I'm arguing that opportunity gap framing leads into all of this and in fact could be that neoliberal thought and opportunity gap framing and personal responsibility might literally be bad for black people's health. We know that health disparities rise with education. We know that wealth disparity rise with education. Is it the initiative of trying to overcome one's barriers in the face of stigma and racism does that lead to a detrimental health outcome for so-called overachievers? Basically education is positively associated with economic outcomes, I'm not arguing that. In essence education though is not the anecdote for the large inequality and racial gaps that we see in society that doesn't diminish the value of education. There's clear intrinsic value in a social responsibility in and of itself as a motivation to provide everybody with a right to a good education from grade school all the way throughout college but it is a myth that that is the explanation for black, white inequality. We overstate the functional role of education and we understate the functional role of wealth. In terms of opportunity, wealth is both the beginning and the end. It is wealth that begets more wealth. Wealth provides agency over one's life, simply put when we talk about narratives of freedom, it is wealth that gives people freedom. It provides the economic security to take chances and invest. So I know I'm running out of time so I'll just close and say that the issues aren't me, we're not done. I don't accept the narrative that America is rooted in that, the American dream is rooted in this notion of work hard and strive to get by because we've had policy domains that have had a different framing, one of economic rights, and I'm turning to the New Deal period in which we were explicit in talking about the economic rights of man and that is how I would frame baby bonds and again, I know I'm running out of time so I won't go into detail about it but we could talk about rights to a job, rights to capital, rights to education, rights to healthcare, as well as on the rights in addition. Hey Derek, I think it's really important actually to be clear here, right? And I know about baby bonds, I've known about it forever, I don't expect that everybody does. So I mean I think, tell me why, tell us the thumbnail sketch of baby bonds and then if you can connect that to the, and I know you can, so forgive me for choosing that word, and then connect it to the frame, the economic rights framework. Sure, in respect of my colleagues I'll be brief. I'll say baby bonds are intended to address the fact that when people become a young, in my estimation, the main source of inequality around wealth is that some young adults have access to some seed capital that allows them to purchase the asset appreciation of some type of asset that will passively rise over their life and that could be a home, that could be a debt free college education or that could be some seed capital to start a business. Somebody that owns a home and somebody who rents, that the homeowner is now less savvy, no more savvy, no more astute. The homeowner likely got some transfer that allowed them to purchase that expensive home in Washington DC or New York City. So what we're talking about is providing every young adult the economic security of some asset, some seed capital so that they can get into that asset. So when you become an adult, based on the wealth position that you're born into, the accounts would be progressively funded at birth and they're not technically bonds, they are trust accounts and the trust would be managed not by one's family but rather by the government. In essence, some of the ways in which we differ from the child savings accounts is that we're not trying to incentivize families to save more. In fact, their research has indicated there's potentially some perverse incentives that come along with that. If you're in poverty and you're faced with an incentive of if I put $100 and I get a match for my savings, will I forego baby formula milk? And I know I'm being dramatic but forego some other consumption that's needed. So what baby bonds is intended to do is address the source that we perceive of inequality which is endowment itself, not savings. In fact, we know that when you control for income there has been no evidence from a credible economic study to suggest that blacks actually save less than whites. Indeed, there's some evidence to suggest that they save marginally more. Yet there's a myth in society that lets us, that I think is framed in this opportunity gap that leads us to believe that blacks are dysfunction in the ways in which they save or make economic decision. To me, the source is really, and again, I don't wanna be polemic, we can have financial literacy training but if we're gonna do financial literacy training there should be an asset or some finances to manage in the first place. So I think, does that explain it? Yeah, that's really helpful, thank you. Yeah, and then I guess the last part is I don't think we should frame it in, I think we should frame it in rights because as a society I think it's useful for us to believe in an ethos that says that simply being a belonging member to society you are entitled to some resources so that you can have human capabilities so that you can be self-defining and have the mechanisms to achieve the goals that you set for yourself. Thanks Derek, I really appreciate that. Richard, I wanna turn to you and get your sort of broad take. I have to say as someone who does a lot of panels one of my worst fears is being asked to follow Derek. Oh, no, stop it. So I'm just gonna go through a whole series of boring policy questions now. So there's some stuff I like, I really like in the book so I thought I'd just go through those quickly and then some questions which I hope will help to spoil the conversation. Some of which overlap with Derek's comments. First of all, I love the stories. All social science is autobiographical at some level so as best to be honest about it. It's not random that we end up studying a particular issue so I think it's very good to be hands above the table about that. I actually quite like the opportunity gap versus income gap framing because for some of the reasons that you identify in the book but I will point out that the language around this is very important and this is not something you do in the book but just slightly reacted Derek's comment about meritocracy. The myth of meritocracy is in fact a kind of veneer under which the US class system very ruthlessly reproduces itself and so I actually come to believe the idea of a classless society and meritocracy is now doing profound damage to the chances of more equal society and it's a good reminder 60 years after the book that coined the term was published by Michael Young in 1958 that the term meritocracy was coined as a warning. It was a dystopia that he wrote and he warned very strongly that a society that comes to believe itself to be a meritocracy will tear itself apart. Some of the reasons we're just gonna talk about. I like the fact that you focus on the promise of education as an equalizer and the practice of education as a stratifier. That's true for wealth is also true for income so one of the most striking charts in recent social science is the one from the Equality of Opportunity Project showing that with a coefficient of 0.66 I can predict your chance of enrolling in college just by knowing your parents' income. It's unbelievable that chart. I mean yet it is wholly believable. So I like that. I like the jujitsu that you perform with 529 savings accounts. I myself am a fierce critic of 529 saving accounts. I think they're a horrific, regressive, pointless, overly complicated barnacle on a generally horrific and regressive tax code. However, you do perform some jujitsu given that we are stuck with the darn things and in fact they're expanding. Why not use them as a vehicle through which we can do some wealth redistribution. And I like the way you kind of connect wealth and education I think by implication and sometimes directly with race because I think that's hugely important. And what's what's striking and I think here's a difference that's emerging I think is that you're not just interested in taxing wealth which I think a lot of us are interested in but in actively redistributing it. Where you part company from Derek it seems to me is that you want to redistribute it specifically to pay for education rather than it just being in and of itself an important finding. And for the moment I'm somewhat agnostic about that. I will say that I served in the British coalition government in 2010 and perhaps the worst decision we made in terms of small board decisions was to abolish the child trust funds which had been established under labor which was the very very small beginnings of an asset based welfare policy. So I like all that. So my questions I'll be very these are very brief. First of all, how do we pay for it? So there are significant costs involved and we've had a hint of that already and we're already under significant fiscal pressure but some thoughts about just how you move from A to B you have a debt finance system now you want to move to an asset finance system like all of those sorts of transitions that's a very big check to write. So how do we write that? Secondly, a critique that could be made is that this is a very long way around to tackling this problem. We're gonna have to wait a long time for these accounts to mature. Maybe some aggressive changes now in applications procedures in public funding of state colleges, et cetera. If you were on the left of the Democrat party now you'd just say let's have free college tomorrow and find the money for it. That's immediate. It solves the problem of affordability up front. Maybe a more moderate proposal is to move to an income contingent loan system but nonetheless, it's like let's just do something now and more directly, it feels in some ways this could feel like quite a long way around to solving the problem of access. The next question is you say it's working for the poor. One challenge I might have is that actually despite the complexity of financial aid that you mentioned actually those who are genuinely poor very often will get decent levels of financial support. Those who are at the top, the dream hoarders that we have plenty of money. It seems to put those that's in the middle who may be struggling the most and some recent evidence suggests that that's where the fall-off in selective college enrollment has been in the middle of the distribution. So isn't this really making education work for the middle class, not just the poor? Next question is more to you, Willie. The psychological versus economic impact of this money. So you've now gone hard on economics but your earlier work shows that a very small amount of money can have quite big impacts. $500 with big impacts on enrollment because it changes the psychology. It gives you this college saver mentality. If that's the case then maybe small amounts to change the psychology and do it and find another way to deal with the economics and it seems to me that distinction between the psychological effect and the economic effect is lost slightly. Last but not least, I know some people who've got a lot of wealth. The Ivy League colleges with massive endowments. In fact, some of the other endowments too. And they're now being faced with endowment tax which I happen to support. So maybe that's one place you might wanna go. Do you support the endowment tax that was recently enacted? Should I jump in or? Because I'm ready to jump in. You know, I mean, so I mean. We don't really need you to say anything. Just say jump. I actually, I'm done here. All right, thank you, so I'm gonna jump. Wait a minute, wait a minute. No, so I think, so these are really important compelling issues that you brought up. And I think part of what we do is we think about single issues. So it was a philosophy major, Wittgenstein said we begin to, we believe anything, we don't believe a single proposition but a whole set of propositions, right? And when we think about these issues it's not one or the other. So yeah, you could have free college but it doesn't redress your return on a degree. It doesn't address the fact that some kids grow up with both income and racial inequality that makes them unprepared to take advantage of that free college in the end. And once they get that degree and it can't get a return on that degree. So we need a system that kind of thinks more holistically about how we solve these problems, right? And so why is it important to start early? Now I think we should have a long-term and short-term version, right? Vision, not version, vision. So these are a long-term vision. I think that's a fair point. I would say that politically we've chosen to focus on education because that's most acceptable to people we found out through surveys and whatever else that people are willing to invest in. One of our struggles within this field is how do we begin to have a conversation about a wealth transfer? Because in the end, if you look at this book and really think about it it is not about CSAs per se. It's about wealth inequality in the end and how do we solve wealth inequality? We think that CSAs are an important vehicle that can, or a vehicle for a wealth transfer. And so we're with Derek. We think that you should, why is it important? Because with $500 we can improve social-emotional development through randomized control trials evidence. We can improve parent expectations. We can help with math and reading achievements. So it works within it. So if I'm just gonna give you money if I put it in these accounts I can do all these other things in addition to just giving you the money. Because I don't think that money alone is enough in our society. And so we need to be tackling at the same time some of these other issues or at least working in conjunction with other efforts to tackle some of these things. So free college, just about how do we pay for college? This is about how do we change people's mindsets? Even about that little story I told you about a person buying a car and about that ability for me to sit down and negotiate with a white person on some kind of equal level. Where he knows I can take myself somewhere else to buy my car because I have an asset. I know that. That power that it gives me is an individual sitting there. How I felt then and how I feel now when I buy that car are two separate things that we haven't even begin to do any research on and really think about. So growing up with that asset is fundamental for how why did Melinda think about I'm always going to college because she grew up with that asset. It's not just about giving them money on the back end. It's about changing how they see the world. I graduated from a PhD program, Washington University which is one of the better PhD programs in three years. Why? Because I'm poor. That's all I know. They don't know that. That's what I grew up with. That's how I see the world that has affected my vision. And so I felt like if I don't graduate quick, it won't happen. Why do I feel that way? Because I was born somehow different? No, because my experiences told me time and time again that I can't trust tomorrow. And I can't shake that. I'll never shake that. I live that's affected my vision of how I approach my life. And so we need to have kids grow up with a different way of seeing the world so that they think that somehow they can plan for their futures because they have one. That's what a CSA is about. It's not just about giving them wealth but it's about changing their mindsets, their family's mindsets, the community's mindsets, building a culture around saving. Saving is not the be all, end all of things. And so I would like to get into later how I think these are true weaknesses in the field that you point out that a CSA as it is currently designed and thought about, give everybody $50 is not enough, is not sufficient. That's why we talk about a wealth transfer into those accounts. Because we cannot, we must not only change their psychology, we must present them with real opportunity. And if they don't have the asset in the yield in the end, while they might think college is a great thing, they cannot get there. While they might think buying a home or doing, we also have to give them the means. So we need a wealth transfer and we need to regain our capacity to talk about a wealth transfer not as something devoid and why do we do the opportunity gap? Because I believe you believe and I tell my kids, stand up and verify. You must work hard. Every day you hear that message from me. It's important that you work hard. We're not forsaking that value, it's part of our inheritance. We understand that you might not have money to save today but you must understand that it's important for you to save, right? And so we must build within those institutions other ways for them to engage what we're finding excitingly in the research and randomized control trials is that while they might not be able to save, they'll engage through other ways. So they want in the sense of whether it be doing homework assignments or whatever else or whether it's now we have these reward cards. They'll go and they'll spend at grocery stores in order for their families to earn money, right? So they're willing to engage but they don't have money. So we have to provide, oh, shut up. But this is my passion. I want you to understand that we are on the same line and we have to attack those things but we have to regain the ability in our lexicon to talk about wealth transfers as being something that's connected to American values. That it's something you can believe in middle America. Derek? Well, I agree that we largely agree. There's no doubt about that and I love the passion and I'm with you and I'm glad you're doing this work. Both of you are doing this work. But is there a potential downside of over incentivizing education? Yes. Is there the case that those that are most vulnerable actually with this American ethos and American dream, those are the ones that are most susceptible to fraud? I'm thinking about for-profit universities. I'm thinking about all the blacks that go to college and don't end up graduating but end up with debt because the number one reason they drop out is because of finances itself. This money can only be used at that point. Well, I'm not talking about the policy itself, I'm talking about the framing of incentivizing education, not the specific policy. But the policy, right, I'm largely critiquing how we frame inequality in this American narrative and trying to point out the downside of it and that that downside might be more cynical than we sinister than we are giving credit to. Who are the people that are vulnerable to predatory finance? Those that are most motivated. Wouldn't a for-profit college ad say, get up off the couch and make something of yourself? Tomorrow we can have you enrolled. When we go, even with home lending, people are ambitious and they're poor and they lack resources and they're susceptible to being exploited because we have this larger ethos of you need to work harder to get by. And I'm saying that that's cruel. It's cruel because of some of the ramifications. I'll make two quick other points on the notion of free college. Of course, there's no such thing as free college. I don't like that narrative either, right? We're talking about tuition free at the point of delivery of education. We gotta pay for that, right? Those are social investment and social costs, but even that framing of free, I think, becomes problematic. And then I'd say the whole question of how do we pay for things in general? Well, the government writes a check, but that's tongue-in-cheek. I know that's not addressing its point. There are concerns around inflation. There are concerns around other types of crowd out. But we're talking about investing in the social fabric of our people. So there will be productive capacities generated as a result of these investments to curtail a lot of the inflationary costs. But in actuality, we literally do write a check. And we did not ask that question or few asked that question, not enough when we talked about how to pay for this $2 trillion tax cut that we're about to spend over the next decade. So clearly, in my mind, the US government has the large capacity to raise substantial funds of money. It's a question of what we spend it to, not can we, and there's ample evidence of that. We can look at the last great recession and see how much money we use to bail out Wall Street and compare that to if we had a federal job guarantee in place and how those resources would have been differently distributed. So the how we pay for it, I think, is another constraint that we on the progressive side are susceptible to, but we should be more bolder and recognize that we spend the money, but we're talking about investments, not giveaways in our society. Can I, so I wanna try and contextualize how I see this happening versus what's happening in policy. So, and then I wanna start to bring the audience in because we've thrown a lot on the table already. But so from a policy perspective, like what's happening here in Washington is like a rapid and aggressive program of upward wealth redistribution through the tax system and deregulation on the educational side, right? Broadly speaking, there are, and a lot of think tanks guilty, and I see other guilty parties here in the crowd have started to really gravitate towards, well, this is a moment for us to be weighing in on states and cities and things are happening there. There was a really good report from a century foundation that came out a week or two ago, sort of showing that college promise or basically the state's debt-free college programs are growing, right? That there's resources being put into some of these relatively modest, right? Focused at community colleges, but there's energy and there's resources flowing in that direction in some of the states. And we've also seen on the CSA side, we've seen sort of continued growth, right? Pennsylvania just announced that they're opening an account for every kid that's born and a hundred bucks are going into it. And basically the way that they've chosen to do this is they make so much money off of the 529, the people who fees from high-income people who put money in there, they squeeze the provider and they say, you're gonna take some of your profit and you're gonna open accounts for them. So these things are happening out there in the world. And I think the thing I'm really interested in is is the politics and Derek, you have as much experience, I think, probably trying to manage this question as opposed to the specific policy of jump-starting a conversation about wealth redistribution, particularly targeted towards kids. Mark Schmidt, who's a long-standing colleague here at New America, had a great piece in the New York Times a few weeks ago. He's basically arguing for re-centering a lot of our policy and political conversation around children who, in the 90s, played a central role for us but are sort of forgotten as a matter of politics and policy in the big scale. So I would love Derek first and then Richard and then Melinda and Willie if we can engage for a minute on the question of whether it's baby bonds or opportunity investment accounts or something more modest, the politics of engaging with and trying to jump-start a conversation about wealth redistribution and what that looks like given the background that's a block away from here right now. I mean, that's the quintessential question because to me the problems are more political than they are economic. Ultimately, to effect change, we are gonna need a social movement and I am proud to say that a lot of young people, as you just pointed out, are engaging and agitating and trying to create a new norm. Sadly, it was my generation to drop the ball. We got caught up in this opportunity gap framing where I'm a black kid, I'm going to that Ivy League school, I'm gonna be fine, if those other black people would stop behaving and shooting each other and acting a fool, we would all be fine if they just need to do the right thing. And a lot of us moved away from collective efficacy into othering even within the black community and that led away from political movement. The young people today are back to collective organizing, so I'm proud of them and glad they're going in that direction. The emphasis on babies and children, that is obviously intentional, using the alliteration of baby bonds. Who's opposed the babies? A baby, you can't call them socially irresponsible. However, I think that claim that I'm making is we're about to see the right go after children. I mean, if it's not already happening, right? We are seeing already the demonization of that demographic as they try to put forth a social movement. So I don't think I answered your question, but I think that is the right question to ask and I would, hopefully, somebody else can answer it. Richard? Well, one of the most useful things about the book actually as a policy wonk is the up-to-date appendix of all of the programs that are already in place that are local and or kind of state-driven. And so I think there's huge space for that kind of positive action at state and local level and that's candidly, I think, where most of the energy is in much of this work and I'd defer to the authors on that. On the federal side, though, federal government does have an important role to play in many of the areas that impact on the regulation and growth of the post-secondary market for profits being a good example. It was towards the end of the second Obama administration that we were starting to see some, the tightness really being put on for profits and, of course, that was one of the first things to go under the new administration and so the accountability that was kind of coming in, they were beginning to move towards slightly fairer loan-based system, maybe even income contingent loan systems where how much you pay is more late than how you earn. So I think at a federal level it's all backwards at the moment and the question is going to be whether or not enough can be done at a local and state level to counteract what I think is going to be a very bleak period indeed for federal policymaking around post-secondary education. Of course, President Obama couldn't get free community college, but it was in his platform and it was much more salient issue for the previous administration than it is for the current one. Melinda, it's all really good and there's another section of the book that I think is really good. You grapple with polling and you grapple with how some of these messages have tested over time. Can you share with us some of your insights there about how you think ideas like this can resonate and what you've seen out of that that says this is helping us to define what a way forward might look like? Well, Richard gave me what is going to be my mantra of acceptability now that social science is all autobiographical because I only pretend to be a researcher. I'm a community organizer and have been. And if you think doing work around racial wealth inequality is tough, it is. But I was an organizer for immigrant rights in Kansas for a decade and my husband says it wasn't until I started doing student debt research that he could take me to parties without kind of instantly the room going quiet when I said what I do is try to get access to social services and educational opportunities for undocumented immigrants primarily. So for me I think the key, I mean that's the reason really that we've talked about the creating opportunities and what people want to think this country is about. I get it that that's always been a lot more of a facade than it is actually a foundation. I have four kids, including some who are really good at pointing out really bogus stuff when they hear it. So I totally understand that a lot of that is a lot more the stories we want to be able to tell our kids about the way this country works and what opportunity it looks like. But the reason it's intentional in the book is because I have seen how using ideas and a vision can galvanize people to that collective action and I still get to wear a hat sometimes that's out in the street with some of those young people working on issues that I think are redefining the ground underneath us and making things that don't today look politically possible at all seem like it put policy inevitabilities in the relatively near future. So I think that that's the key is for us to think about like what are people saying about the chances their kids have to really make it and how are as Richard pointed out totally accurately that's not just poor folks who are concerned about what those features look like and how can this growing concern that the country doesn't work the way that we want to try to pretend it does and has never worked that way for a whole lot of people and if we want to make that more than just rhetoric then it's going to take building movements and what are the kinds of visions and the kinds of images that might be powerful enough to do that. I want to hit concretely two things quickly. One is I do think that there's value in and I'll just take it from a simple standpoint of a parent teaching a kid that work is important. The problem becomes so when I talk to my kids I talk to them about what they do. When I talk to institutions I think institutions need to focus on what they need to do. Institutions provide opportunities. Are they providing the opportunities for those kids when they work hard? The kids need to do what they need to do and I think we can have that kind of round of conversation about each. Both is important and so the problem is now if we give every kid $40,000 in their account early on or whatever the number might be and we don't know the exact number. I put that out there. Then you eliminate some of those problems with effort because they don't have the resources to then use their effort in the right way. I'll leave that good there. Some of that is just structural problems that we have that I would totally agree with that need to be fixed so that when we talk to our kids about working hard it has some relevance that it actually plays out that way and that the problems with institutions. I think we agree on that. This other thing is about the paying for it. So as I said, you write a book a year later you learn so it opened up certain things and so now we've introduced two new programs. A I would say, and this is the emphasis of the book we need a wealth transfer. The federal government has the money and can find the money for tax cuts. They can find the money to put in the kids' accounts if they want to. But we also have to have a value, have it connect people's values to understand that that wealth transfer is not welfare. It is actually leveling the playing field in some kind of way so that your belief in effort and ability would actually matter, right? Now beyond the federal government doing what it should do with the CSA programs I have been someone who has spoken out against small dollar accounts per se. I think they're important to the state and city level that's what they can do but we need to be honest about the fact that low income people have small amounts of money to save. Yes, we found out they do save but they can't save large amounts of money so it can't just be saving if we're being realistic about this and we really want to create opportunities with these accounts and not just change expectations. So one of the things we concretely have begin to study and look at and we've gotten some good randomized control data back this week on that we've been able to analyze is something like changing spending into saving. What does that mean? Rewards card, you all have a rewards card, right? At some store, you go there, you get a rebate. So in these apply even when you have food stamps. So if you go buy your groceries with food stamps however you buy your groceries, you get a rebate, that money goes directly into your account. Guess what? Families will do that, right? And it's having a rigorous impact on, significant impact on how much money they have in their account. So you give them these rewards cards, all they gotta do is go shop and they get a certain money in their account and that's gonna help them build some assets and it's one way we can begin paying, it's not enough. And I think it can be manipulated in ways that actually end up benefiting middle and high income families if we're not careful and think about it. A lot of the things we do ends up being something that benefits wealthier families and so we have to really think about and have in our mindset, how can this be? Second thing, P cards, what are P cards? I have no randomized control evidence on this, right? But it's common sense, having a rewards card. Are you gonna have more money in your account if you go buy your groceries and you get a rebate and it goes into your account? Yeah, I can do research about that but that should be obvious to all of us. P cards, same way, government card. So Long Beach, California is getting ready to do this. Essentially, and they've estimated what their P card is, a government credit card. So every time they purchase goods, they essentially get a type of rebate that goes into their general education fund. They estimate they'll make about $15 million a year using these P cards, just based on the spending they're already doing, folks, you already buy groceries. Why not get some of that back into your account for your kid? Government cities already, employers already have to purchase goods, put some of that in a substantial amount of money. How can we fund this, right? Yes, federal government, but if cities, states can take what they're doing now, spend and then get a rebate and that goes into their account for a general education fund that gets dumped into a CSA and I'm with you. I don't know the five, two nons are the best thing but it's what we have but we can create another system. That's his policy, that's easy. So third, last thing, this is a wealth building agenda now that I'm laying out for you. How do we actually tackle wealth inequality? We can do CSAs, which have all these other benefits to them, psychological and otherwise, even small dollar. We can do rewards cards, helping famous get more money into their accounts. We can do P cards, allowing us to invest more money as a city-state into these accounts so we can get to Derek's money in that account. Lastly, and the college board talked about this, I think we talked about it some too, but why not take a Pell grant or other scholarships that we have now, put those in the accounts early on for the person like me who has no future orientation because of the experiences that I had in my life so that I can begin to interact with that money early on. Put that money in, now we can have a substantial, folks, it's possible, right? We can put a substantial, I'm trying to tell the CSA field that because they think all they can do is $50 in an account. We can get real money in these accounts and these are the ideas I have and I know nothing. If we put our minds together, I'm sure there's other ideas but we can do this, we just have to want to and it has to connect with our values on some level because we have to understand as Americans that this is not creating a welfare system. This is equalizing the playing field so that you can actually live out this ideal that you have. Derek, give me one second. So if you have a question for our panel, would you please raise your hand now? And if you are on Twitter and you wanna ask a question, you better do it fast using hashtag making education work and if you would hold your question for one second, I wanna give Derek a quick chance to respond to Willie's wealth building agenda, converting saving to spending mantra. So I'm not gonna respond and hold to his agenda but I'm gonna be I guess more overview and say that first we need to put the rest the notion that people growing up in the hood are not properly incentivized. In fact, if you face disparity, you might work harder to overcome that barrier. So it is not necessarily the case that they lack motivation. Now of course having other resources could have the effect of incentivizing you to work hard but it also could have the dampening effect where you say, why bother? I'm gonna be rich anyway. So I think we need to be careful with some of that. I'd say that incentives are useful. I'm an economist. I'm about to take a connecting flight to get to San Francisco because I'm in Delta's reward system and I want the miles when it would be a lot more efficient to take a direct flight. So I respond to incentives. However, I think we need to stop trying to incentivize people so much and really come from a frame of providing people the resources so that they will have the agency to make choices for themselves. We don't have to tinker with so much incentives. I think that is a problem in some of our policy frames that we need to change. Last point I wanna make is, what was the point? I think, oh, the how to pay for it prosperity now has shown already in a lot of work that they've done that we already spend a lot of money on asset incentives. The problem is to whom they're distributed. We spend over $500 billion a year promoting, how much? $660 billion, I gotta keep up. I'm on a couple of years behind. The problem is to whom it's distributed. The bottom, maybe I'll get this right, the bottom 60% of households get about 5% of that allocation. We could redistribute those resources in a more positive way and fully pay for baby bonds and the aspect of CSAs that I find most appealing is the universal account aspect. Again, the problem is in savings, but we all need accounts to function in our financial economy, so giving everybody an account and having that is useful, but I like the baby bonds because it targets endowment which is the source of inequality in the first place. That's great, let's go to the audience. Could you let us know who you are and make sure there's a question mark at the end of your sentence. Hi, I'm in Syria, I'm an intern here this summer. Thank you for being here. So I have not had a chance to read your book, but so pardon me if you address this, but earlier in your talk you talked about how education can be used as an equalizer. And so I wanted to ask, so what about the students that perhaps like me with my barriers like undocumented, low income, first generation, et cetera, like all of these other identities that cause obstacles and barriers, somehow I do make it into the system. And then what if someone with my same identities, my same obstacles don't make it through? And it's beyond financial, so there's so many other factors. So that could be, oh, I have these family things that I'm dealing with, I have these traumas that I'm dealing with, I've had these other things that go just beyond economics. So let's say that there was some sort of funding that does help in some way, but it doesn't address all of these other things that also play a role in this. So I guess my bigger question is like retention of students who have these other things that go beyond just financial. So great point, and I'm a high school dropout, so hey, I get it, right? Part of it is, is the accounts aren't going to solve all the problems in a row, and I wouldn't sit here and say they will, right? And so with undocumented students, I think that is a policy piece that needs to be addressed in conjunction with providing people with money to go to college. That's just, and I think there are many policy issues, but understand that these things don't have, they're not an either or situation, right? And secondly, what I really wanted to say was that when we talk about education being an equalizer, we understand that it currently is not, right? But now what do we need to do if we aspire for it as a country to be an equalizer, what needs to be done in order for it to function in that way? And I would say, we say in the book, maybe we don't say it enough apparently, is that we don't even believe that these accounts should be exclusively used for education. Now we do think that the political will is, like he said about babies, who can hate babies? It's kind of like seeing them at college. People get behind people paying for college, they understand that financing, but they don't want to give people money to buy a home, start a business, and do other asset building kinds of things. We think in a progressive world, these accounts would be able to be used, and should be able to be used for asset building endeavors across the board, not just education, because some people aren't going to go to college. Some people will for a myriad of reasons not be able to complete. But there is some randomized community in Italy, randomized control data that shows that we're on CSAs that they both increase enrollment in performance while in college. So I think they can have some positive effects on persistence, but still it's not going to solve all these issues, right? I think that, so my thinking on this has changed a lot. I've become, to the extent that I'm interested in accounts at this point, and again, prosperity now keeps coming up, but thinking about ways that we can stop restricting accounts, so because we're more and more recognizing that people need money to conquer various challenges in their lives. So flexibility, I think, is a really important part of this conversation. Can I see hands again? I wanted to go, I'm going to do something crazy here. I'm going to go one, two, three, all together, okay? So just hand the mic to the next person after your question. We'll take them all after that. So we'll start in the back and then move to the front. There you go. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, that's great. I get too passionate. Robin Hickey, school biz match, believing that there is no, and by the way, what you're offering and suggesting is wonderful. There's no monopoly on the pain that children's inequality, on children's inequality, observers, people who want to do good about it, people who want to correct the problem, also suffer. I raise my hand to the new reforms in the schools and possibly think, the question would be around complimenting what is going on in K-12 reform, which is community schools, Fresh from the Field, Baltimore and Cleveland last week. Schools are getting family engagement in workshops. They're getting behavioral, social, emotional in workshops, trauma as in homelessness and eviction. It's in print in the programs in workshops and how the schools, the administrators and the teachers can handle these issues. Incarcerated parent children are getting workshops on how to deal with their trauma. It is the most incredible thing. I've been in the field forever and I saw inequality at UCLA when the School of Ed put me into student teaching right around campus in Brentwood. I said, okay. Can you put a question on it for us? And then Watts, and then Watts. And I went, oh my God, life is unfair. So we suffer too. Robin, can you put a question on it for us? How to compliment your good work with what the K-12 are now, I mean, believe it or not, this year rolling out. Thank you very much. And the title, the first one in Baltimore was called Educational Opportunity and Equity. Great. That was the title. Thank you. Thank you for your good work. Right behind you there. Thanks a lot. Oh, you want me to go now? Yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. My name is Maurice, I'm a research intern here in DC. And my question is mainly just for you two. With this new program, would there be any like, I guess partner legislation on the federal level to ensure that if you give a student who's going to trade school or an elite school or a state school, some kind of control on the tuition increases because as we've seen over the last 50 years, we have a really robust financial aid system now at all levels of government and at schools, but they just keep on raising tuition. So in the grand scheme of things, college is getting more expensive as we pull more money into the financial aid part. That's a great question. Thank you very much. And we're going to come over here for our last one then we'll get the panel to tackle all of these and send everybody off. Hi, I'm David Coker. I work with the Campaign Legal Center on campaign finance issues. Leaving the politics aside, which I know is difficult, as a matter of pure policy, I was wondering how you would feel to raise money for these programs to have a tax on assets and wealth rather than just income. Yeah, that's like the easiest one to answer. Richard, do you want to start there? And then we'll kind of go backwards around. Yes. It should be a tax on assets and wealth including getting rid of all, and you should get rid of all those tax deductions and the capital gains tax relief you get on primary residences and, and, and, and, and. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous, it's complex, it's inequitable and it's a kind of a society that was truly about anything, about rights or opportunity would be much more aggressively taxing wealth and capital than it is right now. The only other one I briefly mentioned is the equalizer point that was the first one, which is this kind of, I said equalizer in theory stratifier in practice, but it's an equalizer in the following sense, which is important, I think, which is conditional on attending and completing in a specific institution. Your background makes very little difference to where you end up in the labor market. So in other words, if a kid from a poor background goes to a great college, they're gonna do almost as well as a kid from a rich background who goes to a great college and my kid who goes to a less great college is gonna do almost as well as a poor. So, so in that sense, if you go to and through, actually post-secondary education has a very powerful effect on reducing the connection between your background and your future, the problem is very few kids from poor or modest backgrounds do, in fact, go to high quality institutions. That's why it's a stratifier in practice. So I wanna do something that I don't typically do, which is pause it for this remarkable panel that everybody agrees that holding down tuition is an issue that needs to be addressed and that if we were to give everybody $40,000 to spend on college, that we would not want that to be simply hoovered into institutional accounts. And I think that there is a deep discussion to be had there that we are out of time on today. And I'm also going to pause it that the panel agrees that working holistically to connect interventions in the school and through parent engagement is a worthwhile endeavor and something that, again, we may not have time to address here today, but I wanna thank you all for your questions and for your participation here today. If I can say a very special thank you to Willie's wife and kids for coming all the way from Michigan to be a part of this. And Melinda's youngest daughter, Evie, who came to join us today. Thank you for being with us. It's a pleasure to have you here. Books are for sale out in the hallway. They're 14 bucks a pop. Willie and Melinda have agreed to stick around and sign them and have further conversation with folks. Derek has to run to San Francisco as he mentioned. And Richard, I'm just gonna throw you to the wolves. Thank you everyone for joining us today. It was great to have you.