 Good morning everyone and thank you so much for coming. My name is Alita Sprague and I am a policy analyst with the asset building program at the New America Foundation. The asset building program works on a wide range of policy proposals to enable low and moderate income Americans to build wealth and move up the economic ladder. And it's my pleasure to welcome you to an event that will focus directly on some of the key barriers to those objectives. Chasing the American dream, who's left behind and how do they get ahead? We borrowed the title of today's event from an important new book that draws on an extensive series of interviews to explore how the concept of the American dream has evolved and how it is perceived and defined by Americans of varying backgrounds in the area of growing wealth and income inequality. We're very lucky to have two of the authors present and we will be kicking off with a discussion of their findings and some of the policy implications of their work. Chasing the American Dream is available for sale outside and I'd urge you all to pick up a copy if you haven't already. One of the key insights of the book is that while the American dream is premised on the idea of individual effort and determination, we're all operating within an inequitable landscape of opportunity as the authors term it, which is structured by labor market conditions, geography, gender, class and race. And that landscape has changed significantly over the past several decades. It is also, of course, shaped by policy choices, including the structure of our tax code and public assistance systems. In the second half of the program, we want to build on this theme and think more critically about the role of policy in determining who has access to the type of economic opportunity the American dream represents. In particular, we'll be examining how even today, public policy explicitly denies certain groups' opportunities to move up the economic ladder. We'll assess whether the American dream is a one-shot deal or whether we enable second chances, and if so, for whom. And finally, we'll explore how big data and technology play a role in both facilitating and constricting opportunity. This topic intersects and interacts with so many different issue areas. On our second panel, we'll have speakers from a leading criminal justice organization, a prominent technology research institute, and an influential public policy school. Just in the past few weeks, as we've been planning this event, I've come across a range of pieces in the media that relate to this topic. And I want to highlight just a couple before we get started, because I think they showcase how pervasive these issues are within a wide range of policy debates and discussions. First, a new report came out just last week from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, a new rating over 45,000 codified barriers to employment, housing, public assistance, and basic political rights for individuals returning to their communities from prison. In the aggregate, these collateral consequences result in a massive population, which is proportionally men of color, cut off from the American dream even after they have ostensibly paid their debt to society. In the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates had a remarkable piece about how an extensive history of intentionally discriminatory policy created an American dream long reserved exclusively for white Americans, particularly as it relates to home ownership. And lastly, a few weeks ago, a European court ruled that a plaintiff had a right to be forgotten and have information about himself removed from search engines. The case itself underscores how past mistakes can define our futures as never before. So while these three pieces may at first glance seem somewhat disconnected, I think they each speak to factors that shape our modern-day conceptions of and interactions with the American dream. We're living in an era of unprecedented wealth inequality, where we both failed to fully reckon with our collective past while at the same time allowing our individual histories to drastically limit our future potential. So I think we have a lot to talk about, and we're in for a really interesting discussion. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Rachel Black, who will be moderating our first panel. Rachel is a senior policy analyst with the asset building program, where she focuses on reform of asset limits and public assistance programs, federal spending and support of asset building objectives, and initiatives to increase savings at tax time. Joining her on stage are two of the authors of Chasing the American Dream, Mark Rank and Thomas Herschel. Their full bios are available in the program materials, but just to provide a brief introduction. Mark Rank is the Herbert S. Hadley Professor of Social Welfare at Washington University in St. Louis, and is widely recognized as one of the country's foremost experts on poverty inequality and social justice. Thomas Herschel is a professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University, where he is also the director of the Population and Development Program and the coordinator of the work team on poverty and economic hardship. We reserve plenty of time for questions at the end, and we also invite our online audience to submit questions via Twitter using the handle at assetsnaff or the hashtag shaping our fortunes. Rachel. Great, Elita, thanks so much for the introduction, and Mark and Tom, thank you both so much for being here to talk about your book. I think it's something that's really, it's very contemporary, the issue resonates, but in a way the idea of the American Dream has been with us since our founding, and I think what's so important about your book is it contextualizes this idea really within modern experiences and modern circumstances. I think one of the primary ways in the book that you get at understanding what the American Dream is and the opportunities that are out there are through an extensive amount of interviews with people. So, sort of in that spirit, I'd really like to get started by turning to our audience and seeing what you think the American Dream is. If you've eaten anything outside, you've already obligated yourself to participate in this exercise. You may be called on. So, if we could just get, you know, through your four hands, I'd really love to hear, right, oh, here we go. And there's a microphone going around, so please wait for it to get to you. Hello. Hello, my name is Sahan. I'm here for the summer interning in Washington, D.C. I'm from the University of Iowa. So, for me, the American Dream is, for me, is achieving the best you can. And for me, personally, I'm an immigrant. I was born and raised in Sri Lanka. And I moved to the United States when I was 16 years old. So, for me, it's just seeing the endless possibilities and seeing what you can achieve is endless in this country. And for me, the American Dream personally is doing the best you can to be the best in your field, whether it be engineering or finance or politics or whatever field you pick. So, for me, it's being the best in your field. Great. Thank you. I'm Ibrahim Mukman. I'm a workforce development consultant. And what's really important to me is for people to be able to get a decent job making an income that can help support them and their families. And also making sure that people who ex-offenders or returning citizens have the opportunity to pursue their craft and not be turned down because of previous mistakes they made. Great. Thank you. Let's take maybe two more. I'm Boris Cherner with CBA Credit Builders Alliance. To me, the American Dream is not just economic. It's also a place or an opportunity to not encounter these barriers that we're going to be talking about essentially pursuit of liberty, happiness and property, property being last in my priorities. Great. One more. Hi. My name is Asandarant. I work as a staff writer for Science Magazine. To me, the American Dream is to be able to live a comfortable life while also not stepping on the toes of others in order to achieve that comfortable life. That's great. Thank you all for sharing those ideas. So, Mark and Tom, I think we've heard the ability to get a good job and provide for your family. The ability to sort of engage in the activities that it takes to advance without encountering barriers to doing so. How did these ideas sort of square with what you've heard in your research? Well, I think this reflects really well in terms of what we found. So, we talked to 75 people from all walks of life and asked them questions about various questions, but questions about what the American Dream meant to them. And based on that information and based on survey information, we kind of distilled the American Dream into three big components. The first one is the idea which was first raised from the audience. The idea that the American Dream is really about being able to pursue your passion, pursue your interests so that you can really develop your full biography and really bring out your full potential. That's one thing that people said the American Dream is about, that I can follow my path and do that. A second component, which was also mentioned by the audience, was the idea that if you work hard, you should have economic security. You should be able to lead a comfortable life. Not that you're going to be rich or anything like that, but that by working hard and playing by the rules, you should have economic security. And that was a second big component of what people said was the American Dream. And then the third one, which was also hinted on in the audience response, was the idea that the American Dream is about hope, about optimism, about making progress in your life, about seeing progress in your children's lives, so that each generation is seen as doing better than the previous generation. So those were three big components that we found when people were asked about what is the American Dream. That's great. Yeah, I think that's really important that we worked really hard to kind of say what is to define the thing according to how people live their lives and not just sort of be abstract about it. Because what we found is that people are actually very motivated to pursue the American Dream. This is a really powerful thing. And in our data what we also see is we also had life course data looking at what happened to people between the ages of 25 and 60. And what we find is a lot of fluidity, both at the top and at the bottom. A lot of people have experiences of poverty and experiences of high income and wealth. And there's a lot of fluidity and we think that that's one of the real tensions in our culture is that people feel insecure because of this churning and fluidity in our society. And the fact that the top and the bottom are becoming farther and farther apart. So we think that's one of the reasons why for example in politics you have like a tea party movement or something where people are saying I don't want to just vote for this party or that party. I really want to change the rules to try to sort of shore up my situation. Great, I'd love to follow up on the dynamics. You mentioned that people are broadly feeling insecure about their future. And you have a pair of really perplexing statistics. One that most of us at some point during our working years will be economically insecure. And another that most of us will at some point be in the top 20% of income earners. Those seem almost contradictory and they certainly suggest a lot of volatility as well as mobility. Can you talk us through that? Well, a lot of people are, you know, we've done a lot of work on the lower end of the income distribution and have found this idea that most people during their lives will experience a spell of poverty, near-poverty. In fact, we find that if you define economic insecurity as poverty, the use of a welfare program or being unemployed, 79% of Americans between 25 and 60 will experience at least one year of that kind of economic insecurity. So it's very, very high. And one of the reasons is we're looking over such a long period of time. So if you think about your own lives and you think about what happens between, say, 25 and 60, that's 36-some-odd years of information. And things happened to people that they didn't anticipate, both good things and bad things. So we've focused a lot on the bottom end, but we also find this effect on the top end. And Tom, maybe you could talk about what we found in terms of the top end of the income distribution. Yeah, we were very surprised. One of the things is that if you look over time, our data starts in 1968 and goes till the year 2011. And you see that the top end is moving up because people are getting higher and higher income. Despite that, the fact that it's moving up, we find that if you observe people between the ages of 25 and 60, now this is a lot, 36 years. Mark just mentioned that. You find that actually 12% of the population get this top 1% income, which is a pretty high six-figure income. But they don't necessarily stay there very long. And it's only a small fraction of the population that stays there for 10 years or more. So actually, even in the top 1%, you have a small part of it that's stable and a lot of people moving in and out. So again, this is speaking to kind of the fluidity of our economy, I think. Well, and you know, we've talked about this, that there's an image out there, speaking about the top end. There's an image of the 1% and the 99% that it's a very static kind of image, that the 1% is the 1% is the 1%. But actually, there's a lot of, again, there's a lot of fluidity that's moving in and out, especially at the top, you know, 20, 10, 5, and then the 1% level. So there is a lot of volatility, and that sort of exemplifies some of the economic concerns that people have. There's a story we tell in the book about a factory worker who was working at Chrysler Plant, and he was making about $80,000 a year. He had a really good year, one year, where he made about $136,000, so he was in the top 20%. And then a couple years later, the plant shut down, and he was now making about $25,000 as an independent roofer. So he had experienced within four or five years this kind of fluctuations of income throughout, you know, the last few years. Yeah, and I think that illustrates one of the factors that you mentioned in the book that helps determine what trajectory somebody will be on. I mean, you call them twists of fate, you have a chapter devoted to twists of fate. Just sort of the random incidents that happen in people's lives, one of them becoming unemployed unexpectedly, and people's ability to be resilient in those instances and continue forward or be scarred by those experiences varies widely. Can you talk a little bit through that? Yes, so we have, there's a chapter that's called twists of fate, and it's something that social scientists usually don't deal with. These kinds of things that happen in your life that you didn't anticipate that were fairly random, a missed telephone call, a chance conversation that actually had a profound influence. And so we have a chapter where we talk about three particularly profound twists of fate. And one example is somebody who just walks into the office one day and finds out he's being laid off, and it had nothing to do with anything he had done. It had to do with somebody else who had a conversation about reorganizing the department, and that developed and resulted in him being laid off. And the issue is those twists of fate are really profound in terms of impacting people's life course. But they're also important in terms of how individuals react to those twists of fate and how they respond to that. And so again we play that out with three different individuals who have pretty profound twists of fate and how they react to those situations. And what are some of the tools that people draw on to be able to create a buffer? You talk specifically about savings for instance, and certainly through our own work we know that access to that particular tool that's both a buffer during times of financial disruption and also necessary to move up the economic ladder is becoming much more concentrated and less accessible to the people who are typically in situations where they're encountering these type of volatile situations. I think savings are certainly an important kind of economic buffer. I also think that we look at people's ability to intellectually understand what happened to them and then to respond positively. Another person that we feature on our chapter in twists of fate is someone who actually grew up in Weimar, Germany as a young child was involved in the Holocaust. And she somehow made it out on something called a kinder train, and then her whole life became dedicated to social justice causes. So it's really interesting that she saw something happen as a child and then she responded to that intellectually and sort of dedicated her life to try to right social wrong. So I think it's also, you know there's an economic aspect but there's also kind of an intellectual mental aspect that I think is really important that people can see something wrong and then think of a way, well let's try to make the world a better place because what I went through shouldn't happen to other people. Well in another example in that chapter is we have a case of an individual who as a child had an accident where he was burned on over 95% of his body. And you know it was extremely traumatic, he barely survived but he wound up being an inspirational speaker and talked about motivation and dealing with adversity and that this had really, you know, later in his life had a strong intellectual impact on where he went with his life. So in addition to twist of fate which really sort of captures the idea of randomness, I think one of the takeaway points as Alita alluded to is that there really are these very powerful structural constraints and in some ways where you end up is almost determined at birth and you categorize these as, or this theme is cumulative inequality and in fact you have this great visual. It's the funnel model of achieving the American dream and it looks very much the way that it sounds. It's very broad at the top sort of encompassing everybody and you identify sort of specific factors that make someone much more likely or less likely to end up in the American dream bucket at the bottom. Right, so we could think about, we focus strongly on the factors of class and race and you might think of them as strong currents that tend to push people in specific directions. That doesn't mean that everybody is pushed in that direction. There is individual agency and people do make decisions and so on but those decisions should be understood within the context of, for example, class and race as having a significant parameter in terms of the types of decisions that people can make. And so the funnel model starts out with people sort of aligned in different directions depending on their class, race and ability and then that then leads to a high quality or a lower quality education which then leads to a higher or lower quality job. And so you can think about this over the life course how this plays out, this notion of cumulative advantage or cumulative disadvantage. Yeah, I think it's a really good metaphor. It's kind of a metaphor about fluid dynamics and if you think about race and class and American history, you know, 50, I guess at the beginning of the 20th century there was this sort of Jim Crow, this very hard barrier, the racial barrier, right? It was color, you know, African Americans were prevented from going certain places, riding on certain trains, sitting in the back of the bus and so forth. And now you have a more dynamic kind of race and class system and so you have fluid dynamics and people are tossed around. And so you have these funnels that people go through, educational funnels, family funnels, how much wealth your parents have but the forces are very dynamic and people get tossed around and individuals end up in places that may be unexpected based on the categories that we have because the fluid dynamics are kind of pushing individuals around. And the question is thinking about what's the interaction between individual agency and individual actions and decisions versus these larger structural forces. And so we try to finesse that and say, again, that they're both important but really the overall context that's really critical in terms of thinking about these things is the overall impact that in particular class and race have on people's life course trajectories. Yeah, I want to dig a little bit into a specific example from the book that I feel like reflects what the experience of encountering these sort of conflicting channels is like between sort of your understanding of how the system is supposed to work and your role in it. This is from Gloria Ramirez and she was a participant in one of your focus groups and she said, I actually feel like there's a triangle. There's a few wealthy people at the top that depend on a huge base to support the few wealthy people at the top and it's been built that way. But the only way that workers are going to keep on working that way is if they think that they can get the American dream. If they keep working hard enough paying their taxes and doing all this stuff, it's like the bait. They cared in front of the steps that are grinding on doing all of the footwork and the grunt work so that those people at the top make it big. And I think that's a really powerful statement. And I'm wondering if you got that sense from other people that you were talking to that sort of in spite of their best efforts, in spite of what they believe to be holding up their end of this bargain of the American dream that they weren't making it. Well, the interesting thing about that is the American dream is really a double-edged sword. Because on one hand I mentioned at the beginning that hope, faith, thinking about progress is a key part of the American dream. And yet for a number of people that may realistically not be there. But it's sort of like what Marx talked about when he talked about religion being the opiate of the masses. The American dream in a way is the opiate of the American people. Because if you believe that eventually things will work out, you will struggle and you will persevere even though it may not happen. And so it's a very double-edged sword. But for most of the people we talk to, you know, when you think about your life, hope is really the last thing to go. It's the last thing to really to vanish. And so even though we talked with a lot of people who were struggling, some folks who were homeless. But even in that case, I can think of several guys that we talked to that were homeless that had faith that things would work out eventually. Even though in reality they may very well not. But people were very reluctant to let that go, to let that dream go. I think that's a really important example that you picked out, Rachel. Gloria was voicing this profound frustration that a lot of people have that they're working hard and they're not getting ahead. And I think, since the book was written, I've been watching something in the South called the Moral Monday Movement. Where people are going down to the courthouse and they're protesting some of the policies that make it hard to be poor in North Carolina and some of the other states. I think there's also a Moral Monday Movement in Georgia now. But the idea that people are feeling this frustration and they want to say, well, we need to have a more moral society that is just to the poor. And we need to change the rules, not just play within the same rules anymore. And that kind of sentiment that's voiced, I think is actually becoming more general in our culture now. So I think it's really interesting. Yeah, and I think a lot of that is very much focused on reforming policies to expand access to the American dream. And that seems to be a point that Gloria was trying to get to, that our understanding, Mark, as you said, of the American dream tends to disproportionately focus on the role of the individual and not the role of the state, not the role of public policy, not on the role of the legal system that creates sort of the pathways for them to be able to pursue the American dream. And I think this is really playing very heavily into a very concerning narrative that I think we're all familiar with. This is, you know, Romney's 47% of Americans are dependent on the government. And this is Paul Ryan's comfortable hammock of the social safety net that sort of rolls people into complacency. That's very much at odds with, I think, the experience that Gloria was expressing. I'm doing my part. I'm doing the best I can. Right, right. And, you know, that's, we talk about sort of the fundamental American paradox. And the paradox is that in American documents, we generally focus on the word all, liberty and justice for all. But in reality, it's really liberty and justice for some. And that's because equality of opportunity is not open to everyone in an equal fashion. That if you think about education or you think about various areas, all children are not getting an equal education. Some children are getting an outstanding education, others are getting a very substandard education. And so it is the case where, on the one hand, we say the American dream is open to all, but in reality it's not. And so from a policy perspective, we need to think about how can we open up the avenues of opportunity? How can we create a society in which everyone is allowed to really live up to their potential? That's the American dream, as was mentioned in the beginning of the session here. What kind of policies can we have that will lead people to really live out their full potential? Those are the kinds of questions we need to think about. And what are some of the barriers that are in the way, which is what the second part of our session today will talk about? And what are some of those ideas? You enumerate a few policy options in the book. Well, I mean, I think that our book is really this concept of the life course that people live their lives starting from really conception and then to the end, which we all know what that is. And so kind of really investing in early childhood education, investing in healthcare nutrition, maternal nutrition, those are the really important investments. And those investments are made very unequally across our society. We have a graphic which shows the poverty level among children of different, children of color versus white children, very different kind of mosaic if you look at the country. There are many where I live in upstate New York where Cornell is, there's a large area where the African American children are living in poverty, the white children are not. So kind of different worlds in my region. So this kind of thing is still, it's the legacy of our country that we still haven't dealt with yet. So I think we have really a lot of work to do. And then of course, job programs, educational access, all the things that happen in later childhood, adulthood and then into the working years. I think looking at the life course and especially looking at the early years, that's really where the policy should be focused. And I think the other thing that we talk about and that we'll get some insight into in a few minutes is the whole idea that if you look over the last 40 years in America, the kinds of jobs that we've been creating are less and less high quality jobs. There are, there is a small segment of very high quality jobs, but many of the jobs we're producing are low wage jobs without benefits that really prohibit people from living the American dream. The idea that if you work hard and you work at a job, you should be able to have a decent life. Well that's becoming more and more difficult. So what are some policies that we could think about, and this is very difficult, but what are some policies to improve the quality of jobs that we have in the United States? Great. Are there any closing thoughts that you would like to leave the audience with before we transition to our conversation on some of those barriers and policy ideas? It's a great book and you should try it out. You're going to love it. That would be my closing thoughts. Well thanks for showing up. You know, it's great, it's really good to, the idea of the book is to really begin a conversation about what can we do about the situation we're in. I think that's really what we want. Great. Thank you both very much. And I second the endorsement. It is a wonderful book. I encourage you to pick it up on the way out. And at this point we're going to transition to the second half and I'll invite our panelists to come up. So in the second half of our conversation, we're going to look a little bit more deeply at some of the areas that Alita alluded to in her opening remarks that are currently serving as pervasive barriers to achieving the American dream. A weak labor market, a criminal record and digital discrimination and we have an expert panel to tackle these issues. I'm very pleased to introduce Harry Holzer who is a professor of public policy at Georgetown University. Harry was also the former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor and the Clinton administration. Nicole Uston-Hillary is the director and counsel of the U.S. Office, excuse me, the D.C. Office of NYU School of Law's Brennan Center for Justice. And Nicole is a leading voice on criminal justice reform and finally New America's own Cida Gandagarin. And she is a senior research fellow with the field team here at New America. Cida is really one of our leading minds thinking about the intersection between social justice and technology. Thank you all for being here. And we'll start with Harry. Thank you, Rachel. I want to congratulate Mark and Tom on a very fine book, a book with lots of insights and a nice way of drawing all these insights together. Since I think I'm the only economist on the panel, possibly in the room, I thought I should play the role of economist and talk a little about some of the complexities that I think have led to one of the phenomena that Mark and Tom emphasized this changing job market and why it's so hard for people, especially for people less educated folks to get good jobs. And, of course, having more education is no guarantee either, especially since the Great Recession started, but what that looks like and what it means for policies. So let me sort of throw out a few of these ideas. The changes in labor markets leading towards more inequality in jobs and job quality have been very dramatic over the last 35 years. Economists mostly talk about two sets of forces, market forces and institutional policy forces. So the market forces are basically the growth of digital technologies as well as several different kinds of globalization. The institutional forces are weakening unions, declining minimum wages, declining regulation. I think both of those sets of forces have played some role. As an economist, I actually lean a little more towards the market forces. And I think it's harder and harder for institutions within that market setting to play the role that they once played. I think what these market forces mostly do, some people call it skill-biased technical change, they replace people with high wages that are easily replaceable, that do a sort of routine kind of work on assembly lines and offices, etc. And I think the big result of these market forces is not that all good-paying jobs have disappeared from America, far from it. What it's really done is it's reduced or even eliminated good-paying jobs for people with only a high school diploma, or even less than high school. Those have largely disappeared. We create a lot of low-paying jobs in America, a lot of low-age retail, low-end of the service sector jobs, but many fewer good-paying jobs for high school graduates as we used to. And since 2007, since the Grace Recession again, that's just one-over-overlay that makes it that much harder. Everything is worse in terms of job availability for everybody. There's no guarantees. You can get a college diploma, you can get a graduate degree, and there's still no guarantees. And I think young people especially have been hit very hard by this downturn. The recovery has also been very, very slow. I think it's hard to recover from these kinds of downturns. When I went to financial bubble bursts, it leaves a big mess and it makes the recovery much slower. But on average, I think it has hurt again the people without those skills. And I think this has two important implications. A lot of that is nothing new. I mean you've probably all heard that story, but there's two implications that I think need to be emphasized that make the situation that much more difficult. Number one, if you've ever had an econ class and people talk about something called the elasticity of demand. That concept made you sick 30 years ago. But it basically means that if you try to push wages up through some mechanism like unions or minimum wages, it's that much harder to do without job loss. Because employers have other places to go and consumers have other places to go. When I was a kid 30, 40 years ago, the UAW could raise wages. The auto companies would just simply pass it on to higher prices and Americans would keep buying the cars. And that's one of the things that enabled unions to be powerful in that kind of their heyday from the 30s to the 50s or 60s. That's not true anymore. Americans can sit at a computer terminal and buy stuff from all over the world, including very low wage labor markets. And that simply makes it harder then to sort of raise wages and pass on those higher costs and higher prices. And it means we're not going to regulate our way out of this. And by the way, employers simply have many more choices in terms of technology, globalization, not all employers. A lot of employers in the service sector, you can't replace people who clean your hotel rooms, for instance, with technology. You can't outsource those jobs. But those labor markets are flooded with all the people from other markets whose jobs have been eliminated. And again, it's just much harder for the markets to do that. By the way, I support higher minimum wages and I've signed statements in support of higher minimum economic statements. I have no trouble with a federal minimum wage going up to $9 to $10 an hour. I'm pretty worried about Seattle going up to $15. We'll see. It's a great natural experiment. I'm actually leaving it a little nervous about the District of Columbia and a couple of counties in Maryland going up to $11.50 when Fairfax and Arlington are going to stay at $7.25. And I just think over time it's going to be very easy for employers to start shifting more jobs in that direction. And I think that's not a right-wing fantasy. That's something we really have to wrestle with and think about. But the other phenomenon I think is very important. We're going to have a lot of low-wage jobs in America no matter what we do. Tens of millions of low-wage jobs. One of the ways in which people can still get to the American dream in that context is to have two-earner families. The ability of less educated folks to get to the American dream on one salary is just going to be very hard. Two-earner families are important. And then the problem with that is labor market changes have hit less educated men very hard. That's a group that's probably suffered the most. It's not just African-American men. It's also white and Latino men. And they are not viewed as very good marriage prospects when their earnings capacities are down. That's just the fact. If you plot the decline in marriage in America against the decline in wages for less educated men, it's almost a perfect fit. So the economic changes in some ways make it harder for a lot of these men and women to marry. And again, it was an African-American story. But now you see it in the white working class, you see it in the Hispanic working class now, and that's troubling as well because I think marriage and two-earner families is one of the ways in which people with less schooling can still do this. So what does all this mean for policy? So first of all, obviously, there's not a dramatic insight. Raising the skills of American workers helps. It doesn't guarantee. It's not a panacea, but on average it helps a lot. It's very troubling in America that not only are there very unequal chances for achieving good education based on race and class, the gaps seem to be growing wider. All the evidence now suggests that the gaps in achievement, college attainment are growing wider in the last 40 years. The fact that they exist at all runs counter to the notion of equal opportunity. And knowing wider is very troubling. I agree with what we've already heard from Mark and Tom about how to do that in investments in high quality early education and high quality K through 12 education. But I want to emphasize it's not just investments. Just spending dollars doesn't do the job. You've got to make sure the dollars are well spent. It also means accountability and incentives. And it's not one or the other. And people on the left and the right who argues one or the other, it's foolish. It takes the right combination of incentives and accountability and investments, but it doesn't happen. I look a lot at the higher end sort of beyond high school. What do you need for the labor market? So for instance, in America, we send a lot of people to college. We give a lot of people Pell Grants. But you know Pell Grants is just the voucher that says here, go to college, good luck when you get there. So we send a lot of people to college. We have these enormous college dropout rates in both four year and two, and especially at the schools, the sort of the two year colleges. I think we could do more to reduce those, to help people who go to college who want to get a job, use their college to get a job that pays well. There's a whole set of policies to make higher ed more responsive to the labor market and make it easier to get those degrees. And by the way, I define college, I define post-secondary very broadly. It could be a good apprenticeship program. It could be other kinds of high quality career and technical ed and work based learning. I'm not in favor of old fashioned bulk ed that tracks people by race and class. I'm talking about high quality career and technical ed that prepares people for good jobs in high school and beyond high school as well in the post-secondary world. Sectoral efforts, career pathways, etc. But secondly, we're in a world where a lot of jobs simply aren't going to pay well, period. So besides marriage and two earners, one of the things, we need government supports, public supports to supplement what are often low wages and benefits in the private sector. That means health care, the Affordable Care Act. That means childcare. It means things like the Earned Income Tax Credit, which has done a lot of good for low income moms with kids. I like to see it expanded to low income men who are maybe non-custodial dads, etc. But there's two problems with expanding those supports. There's a very powerful low tax movement in America. And there's a very powerful movement to defend government expenditures on retirees. Expenditures on not only on Social Security, but on Medicare. And the combination of those two things. The low tax movement freezing the size of the federal sector and an ever-expanding pot of money that goes only to retirement. It means there's just nothing left. There's very little money left for making the kinds of investments and supplements that we've been talking about. And I fought politicians both on the left and the right for not being honest with the American people about that. The last politician I remember that talked about raising taxes was Walter Mondale. It didn't go so well for him, as I recall. Every other Democrat has been running away from that issue, but you need to get rid of the low tax. And as I look at the numbers, they don't have to be a genius to look at these numbers. You can have two out of three things. You can either have really low taxes, really generous retirement and health programs, or some extra money to spend on these things. You can have all three of them simultaneously. It simply doesn't add up. And I think we're going to have to make some hard choices. And if you look at Medicare, if you project out Medicare under almost any assumption, Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security are really going to eat up much less Medicaid than Medicare and Social Security. So I think we have to face hard choices there. If we want there to be money to make these sensible investments. Finally, incarceration and issues like that are huge. And I know other panelists are going to talk about that. The fraction, low income black men, more than anyone else. If you're a black male high school dropout, the odds of being incarcerated are about two out of three. If you're any black man, the odds of being incarcerated have been one out of three. It's stunning. We simply need to lock up fewer people in America and those who have been locked up to help them get a foothold again. And we put so many barriers in place that's absurd. But there's a positive note here. And there is increasingly a growing number of conservatives in this country, including conservative Republicans, who are also getting very tireless. I think it's an enormous waste of money to lock up so many people and then to keep them from being able to make it afterwards. An enormous waste of money. The libertarian strand hates this. And I'm going to panels and roundtables on limiting incarceration at fairly conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation these days. And I think that's a quite positive movement. It simply doesn't make sense for America to lock up so many people and then to keep them from bouncing back afterwards. And child support. Child support is another big problem. These low-income men get a child support or the clock is ticking even when they're in prison. They come out, they're hugely in arrears. There's an enormous tax on their earnings and they have all the incentives after that to not join the regular workforce to go underground. And I think we need to rethink some of those policies too. So I'm going to stop there. I think those are some of the complexities in the job market. And again, congratulations on a very, very good book and hope we can have some good conversation afterwards. But thank you. It's been perfect because you actually segued very well into some of the things that I want to talk about. You know, we actually have an underclass in this country. People who are part of our criminal justice system in the United States are really second-class citizens. Not only do they become second-class citizens when we incarcerate them, they remain second-class citizens for life. That is an enormous problem in the United States that we simply have to fix. All of the things that you heard Mark and Tom talk about are palpable real issues. Imagine if you have the additional problem of being a person who has a criminal record. You are in a worse position than even the person who has not been able to attain a college degree or a graduate degree or the person who is in a low-income job. You can't even compete with those individuals. You know, this is an interesting year for us. The year 2014 is a year of many significant anniversaries. One we know of is President Johnson's War on Poverty. Well, if you go back to the start of that war on poverty and you look at what our criminal justice numbers look like in terms of the numbers of Americans that we incarcerated and you compare that to the numbers that we incarcerate now, your head would explode. We have indeed become a nation that has a systemic problem of mass incarceration. I was at dinner last night with a group of professional friends. We all work in the areas of criminal justice. And when we started dinner, one of our friends had the question, can any of you recommend a good criminal defense attorney for a friend whose 11-year-old son has just been suspended from school for a minor infraction? He had a small melee with another kid in his class. Now, I remember having small maylays in school. I remember seeing small maylays. You were sent to the principal's office. You might have gotten tapped on the wrist. Yes, back in the 70s they could still tap you on the wrist. And they called your parents and everybody apologized and you went home. Now that same kind of incident may mean that not only are you sent to the principal's office and your parents are called, it may also mean that law enforcement is called in and that you, as an 11-year-old, become part of our nation's criminal justice system. It's called the School to Prison Pipeline. And it's real. It's palpable. And it means that many young people, particularly young African-American men, are becoming a part of our criminal justice system at a very early age. And it starts a vicious cycle. So what does that mean for us as a country? We are now incarcerating 2.2 million people in this country, more than any other democratic society in the world. And even if you are not an incarcerated person, we still have a significant number of Americans who are part of the criminal justice system through probation, through parole, through some kind of home confinement. And for all of these people, they have to deal with what that means for them in terms of housing, in terms of educational opportunities, in terms of employment opportunities, and in terms of their ability to simply participate in our democratic society. NPR just this past week, and I hope many of you heard it and if you haven't, I urge you to go and listen to it, did a wonderful series on the criminal justice system and how fees and fines are impacting individuals who are part of the criminal justice system. I'm proud to say that the Brennan Center was a part of that series and a lot of the work that they referenced dealt with a report that we did at the Brennan Center called Fees and Fines. What they talked about is if you become a member of the criminal justice system, even the ways in which you get out of that system are costly to you in terms of real dollars and cents. Many of you probably don't know, but in some jurisdictions, we all know about Gideon and the right to counsel. And I think for many Americans, their understanding of that is what they saw in law and order. And they think you get in trouble and the local government appoints a counsel to you and you get help and that's it. Well in some jurisdictions, you actually have to pay for that. You no longer everywhere in America and get simply a counsel when you get in trouble. Also, you have other fees and fines related to your incarceration. There are some jurisdictions where they actually charge you for your period of incarceration, where you are paying for the bed and the food. Once you get out, you get a bill. There are also some jurisdictions where once you get out of jail, if you have any kind of past debts that you owe to the government, whether it be for parking tickets, whether it be for overdue child support payments, you will remain a part of the criminal justice system until those fees are paid. And what does that mean for us? That means that you are then caught in a cycle that is very hard for you to get out of. Once you are finished with your incarceration period, what's the first thing everyone has to do? You know you have to get a job. If you can't get a job because you are someone with a criminal justice back, with a criminal history, then how in the world can you pay the fees and fines that have now been attached to you so that you then can become a taxpayer, a good citizen of the United States? That becomes very difficult to do. So we have all of these barriers in place at every one of these junctures of what I call the four important and crucial areas of life that we all depend on. Your housing. Imagine if you are someone who has come out of the prison system. Where do you go to live? Most people don't necessarily have a home of their own to return to. They may return to live with relatives. Well for many people who are in our criminal justice system, they are people who come from poor economic background. And they may have relatives who live in public housing. And therefore your option is to return to live with that family member who is in public housing. But guess what in the United States? If you have a criminal background, you are banned from public housing. And that doesn't simply mean that you yourself can't get access to public housing. That may mean that the auntie, the uncle, the grandmother who is the tenant in that public housing unit who has said come live with me, they very well have been told if you allow this person with a criminal history to come and live with you, you will be in violation of your lease. And not only will they not have a place to live, you will be evicted from your public housing unit. So then you have no place to live. And we talk about educational opportunities and how important they are. Well, there was a time when in our criminal justice system, our jails actually provided opportunities for individuals to get training, to get education. This was an important part of the restoration process. And remember in this country, we say, we talk a good talk about this. We say that when we send people to jail, it is not supposed to be about merely punishing individuals. It's supposed to be about providing opportunities for individuals to remake themselves and their lives so that they can return to society and become productive members of our community. Well, we now no longer provide those same educational opportunities in prison. We now no longer provide the same level of treatment services so that if you have health issues, if you have mental health issues, if you have trainings that you would like to get, you no longer have those same opportunities. Those are few and far between. So then you leave the criminal justice system or at least you leave incarceration and you try to find a job and you don't necessarily have the skills that are required to get the kinds of jobs that will enable you to actually support a family. And let's say that you do. I have a friend in the criminal justice system who actually is an attorney and he through a drunk driving incident killed his girlfriend and had to be incarcerated for a certain period of time and he came out of jail clearly with a high level of education. But we know we have this problem of employers asking you on job applications, have you ever been convicted of a felony? Have you ever served time in jail? Well, many employers will hold that against you and regardless of what your skill set is, regardless of what kind of contributions you may be able to make to that employer, they don't want to talk to you. So there is an effort underway to do what we call ban the box. Take that box off of job applications and simply look at candidates based on their skill sets and their educational backgrounds. And until we do that, that means that that prison time, that criminal justice background again can be a severe barrier to you even getting a job. So now we see you can't get housing. You can't get the educational opportunities that you would like to so that you can become a productive member of our society. You cannot necessarily get the jobs that you need. And then in terms of becoming a member of our democratic society, you can't in many instances even vote. There are very few states, I think two, that allow you to vote even when you are still incarcerated. Most jurisdictions take that right away from you. And it's funny when I often talk to everyday average Americans about this issue, many of them think, well, we understand that that right is taken away from you while you're incarcerated, but certainly it's restored when you come out of jail. It is not. In most instances, your right to vote is not restored. And in many instances in states with very draconian laws like Virginia, Kentucky, you have to petition the governor of your state for special permission to be considered to have your rights restored. So not only are we keeping you from housing, employment, and educational opportunities, we're also keeping you from voicing your opinion in this country through the ballot box. And we know that is the main way in which we all as citizens are playing on an equal playing field. Everyone has that same opportunity to express themselves through the ballot box. If you don't have that opportunity, you then don't have the same voice, the same opportunities to express yourself as do other Americans. So what we have in place is a system that basically says, if you make a mistake, if you commit a crime, we are going to do everything we can to keep you from really returning to society and becoming a productive member of your community. That is not what this country is supposed to be about. The Declaration of Independence says we're all created equal, and we all believe that in this country. And we all believe that even when you make a mistake, you are supposed to be given an opportunity to correct that mistake and do better the second time around. Well, we have turned into a society where we really are not providing those second chances, those additional opportunities. So this is a huge problem and it is an area where we have got to insist that our legislators, our policy performers put their thinking caps on and figure out how do we provide opportunities for these individuals. And let me be clear about this. Oftentimes when organizations like the Brennan Center talk about restoring voting rights and providing these opportunities, sometimes people get confused. And they think what we're saying is we don't think people should pay for crimes that they've committed. No. I think we all agree if someone does something bad, if someone does something that breaks a law, we think you should indeed pay your debt to society. What we don't believe is that that should be a permanent state of existence for you. We do not believe that therefore you should be kept from being a productive member of your community. That does not make sense in terms of uplifting our country. It does not make sense in terms of productivity. And it certainly doesn't make sense from the perspective of making our communities safe. If you are not giving individuals an opportunity to reinvest in their communities, to become solid family members, to become the heads of households, you are leaving them in a set of circumstances in which perhaps the only choices they have are to return to the criminal justice system. That is an insane system. That is not what we should be encouraging. We should be putting ourselves in a position where we make it possible for people to actually stay out of the criminal justice system. So here's the good news. I know that all sounds dire, but here is some of the good news. There are actually reformers and policymakers who are thinking about what we need to do to make these changes. Harry already mentioned some of them. We do have people on both the left and the right who are talking about how we solve these problems. State legislators are looking at the fact that the ways in which we incarcerate people and keep them in the criminal justice system are simply costing too much money for our state and is taking money away from education, housing, other areas where we simply know we need to invest. As a result, they are looking at alternatives to incarceration. There is a group of reformers called Right on Crime. It is made up of conservative individuals who are working very closely with the progressive community and are saying we've got to have a meeting of the minds on these issues and we've got to figure out ways that we can work together to provide these opportunities and to stop this groundswell of mass incarceration in the United States. In Congress, there are members who are saying we've got to make some changes. Senator Ben Cardin and Congressman John Conyers in the House have introduced a bill called the Democracy Restoration Act. This bill would restore the right to vote to all individuals who have been formerly incarcerated once they have finished their incarcerated period. And it is regardless of whether you owe fees and fines, it is regardless of whether you remain on probation or parole. Again, because they understand that you have to have a voice in your communities and they also understand that this sets an example for your families. We have had instances at the Bretton Center where we've talked to in town hall settings, we've talked to people in communities who have said once I had my right to vote restored, not only did it make me feel like I became a part of the community, my children saw that example. They saw me going to the ballot box, exercising this right, standing up and saying it is important to be a part of our democracy and that has a trickle down effect. So not only do those kinds of policy reforms impact the individual, it impacts their families. When your children see that you are able to earn a living wage and take care of them, that impacts them, that impacts the goals that they set for themselves and what they think is possible for themselves. When they see that you are able to put a roof over their heads, they know that they can depend on you, that that provides stability. That stability means that those young people then have opportunities that they can take advantage of because they are not worrying about things like, will we have a place to live? Will my father or mother be able to feed me, to clothe me? They see when you have a job and you go to work every day that again, that is opportunity, opportunity that they can take advantage of and it provides a model for future achievements for them. So we have lawmakers that are looking at that. We have lawmakers that are looking at things like banning the box. The EEOC actually instituted a note, they had a note and comment period where they asked for policy makers and advocates to talk about this issue of banning the box and they have since come out with a recommendation that employers stop asking about criminal history background. And there are other policy makers who are looking at that. And they are saying that unless your criminal history background has a direct impact on the job that you are seeking, there is no reason to ask for it. You should simply be looking at what the qualifications are for an individual. So I say all this to say that even though we have individuals who have difficult times accessing the job market, accessing educational opportunities, we have got to go beyond that and look at this underclass of individuals and think about how do we make changes in this country, how do we stop this issue of mass incarceration and what do we do to ensure that the individuals who are a part of the criminal justice system can reintegrate in our communities. When I talk to Americans about how do we fight crime and how do we keep our communities safe, that is a key way to keep our communities safe. If everyone feels invested in their communities, they then feel invested in keeping them safe and being productive members and working hand in hand with their neighbors, with their schools, with their law enforcement officials, that is the way that we have to keep our communities safe. And that is all related to ensuring that we are providing more opportunities for all Americans. So I will stop there and I look forward to having a thoughtful conversation about these issues. Thank you. So I'm going to switch gears a little bit and also I want to be, I'm excited to have a conversation between us and also with the audience. I'm going to try and pivot by talking about what I think all of us have been addressing, which is this concept of cumulative, I think in your book you refer to cumulative inequality or as I've been talking about it in some of my work, cumulative disadvantage. And I want to do that by talking through this question of technology and our increasing reliance as a society on data-driven systems, big data, predictive analytics and how that lines up with some of the issues that we've been talking about. So I think in my introduction, Rachel mentioned that I work at the intersection of social justice and technology. These issues about the criminal justice system, about workforce development, about education, these are issues that directly intersect with some of the questions that I think are coming up in tech policy circles that have not been adequately addressed. So I just want to step back and talk a little bit about technology and about big data and what it is and how it intersects with some of these ideas. So we're operating in an environment now where we increasingly reveal information about ourselves. That is both aggregate and anonymized information about ourselves that's identifiable information about ourselves. That information is fed into data brokers. So let me just give you an example of the kinds of information that we reveal about ourselves that relates to information about our voting records, about our credit card use, about our social media use, which I think is increasingly being used in law enforcement and things of that nature. We create digital footprints about ourselves that are difficult to put a container on, difficult to identify boundaries and there are actors that are increasingly using that information to either turn a buck, to target us, to sometimes penalize us and that I think is a worrisome trend. So Nicole talked about banning the box. Imagine a scenario where that information is already out there on the internet and it's difficult to put that information away so we might ban that information on an application but because of the way our society works we might have a scenario where people are and this is a, so let me come back to a study, let me identify a study that was done by Latanya Sweeney at Harvard University that looked at the disparity between advertisements that appear when you search for Caucasian sounding names versus black sounding names and one of the things that she found was that with black sounding names you saw advertisements for criminal background checks which is suggesting that when people are actually searching for African American sounding names that they are doing it within the context of looking at your background trying to determine is this person a criminal or not. Now it's difficult to get around that system, that reflects biases that we have as a society but that information is out there and that can I think be very detrimental not just in terms of applying for a job but just if you don't have a background, a criminal record imagine what that experience has on you as an individual as you are learning how to use the internet for the first time and you search your name and one of the first things that comes up is do you have a background? That is really something that shows to you how you are valued in this world and I think there is a cultural impact that that experience can have. I think with predictive analytics there are four or five practices that disproportionately disadvantage communities of color so the one that I've just described is that these predictive systems, these systems that make inferences about ourselves are biased, they reflect bias in society. There is also the possibility that these automatable systems actually reflect biased decisions that they come from bad actors. These systems also reflect inaccuracies that disproportionately affect communities of color so I'll give the example of the E-Verify database which is a database that's run by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. This is a system that's designed to verify your eligibility as an employee that tracks between W9 forms and the problem with these systems is that often employers are inputting names incorrectly and for people of color that have non-coccasian names there is a high degree of error so there's a chance that an employer has inputted your name into the database and then they try to check that against your existing W9 form and there's a mismatch and what's the outcome of that? Well it means you don't get a job because you're not seen as having a legitimate reason to work in this country. So there's bias in these systems because of inaccuracies. There's also the problem of increasingly these automatable systems are relying on proxy variables or proxy indicators that make that kind of circumvent or escape the usual types of regulations that have come about through the Civil Rights Movement. So with credit for example there are now a number of variables that you can use to determine someone's credit worthiness that aren't protected under our various credit laws and the effect of that is I think there's increasingly grey area and room for these kinds of services to actually target people and channel them into either products that they don't need, predatory products that they don't need and it's increasingly difficult to track. And the last area that I'd like to focus on and that I've written about has to do with the use of data that's out there that is correct but has the result of really I think disadvantaging and keeping people in this path of no opportunity. And so the example that I want to turn to is the case of reverse redlining. So in the 2000s as subprime products became available there was a real increase in the lending industry, in the subprime industry in terms of using different data points to target certain kinds of consumers for subprime products. That information was collected from offline data as well as online data so what you were searching for online, whether you were on bankrate.com looking for a mortgage that information was collated with your IP address and geographical information which then meant that you were marketed these high risk products. Now we know today that African Americans and Latinos were targeted at higher rates than other populations and we also know today that African Americans and Latinos remain the most disadvantaged or they are not recovering from the economic recession at the same rate as other populations. And what I wonder about when I hear stories like this is to what extent are the data that we're releasing about ourselves and that's being collected by a number of actors really creating this cycle where what we see, what we consume, what we think our opportunities are actually very narrow slices of what's possible. And I think that it's worrisome that we increasingly have less and less control over how this information is used about us. I would say, because I do want to move into the conversation, I would say that there is some hope, so Mark and Tom you mentioned moral Mondays and the fact that there is some activity at the grassroots with people realizing that actually we have a voice and we have something to say about what might be wrong in these systems. I think similarly within the tech policy space and within the conversation around predictive analytics and how that might be kind of coordinating us off in a particular path in society, we're seeing a number of civil rights and social justice groups really pay attention to these issues and think about how technology is changing the way that law enforcement is done in this country and or how we're able to access economic opportunity. Recently the Open Technology Institute here at the New America Foundation was a signatory on a set of civil rights principles for the era of big data and I think that's some sign that some of these conversations are bubbling up from the ground and we need to think about how inequality and injustice are manifesting themselves in increasingly invisible and technically sophisticated ways and we need to empower our, you know, not just individuals but our social support system to help root out these problems and help prevent them from happening. I would say there is a host of other I think policy interventions that we could pay attention to in the data broker industry and so forth. I won't go into those because I don't think we have time for those. I will just mention very quickly because Nicole had talked about education and correctional education. One of the things that I'm very interested in is literacy, whether that's digital literacy, privacy and data literacy but in general I think we need to incorporate technology and how technology might be creating bias in systems and, you know, exposing us to limited kinds of opportunity, you know, whether that's in the correctional education system or in early education I think we need to understand how technology is playing a role in discrimination. So I'll end there and we'll open it up to conversation. Great. Thank you all so much for making those thoughtful comments and if everybody would just join me in giving them a round of applause before we transition to our conversation. Well, first Mark and Tom, this has been a lot of food for thought. I'd like to invite you to give any reflections that you've had on the comments from your fellow panelists. Well, I think that each is pointing out barriers to the American dream. So I think that the points are very well taken and yeah. Yeah, I think this is a really great panel. I think one of the underlying questions that was across all three of the responders is and I think it's also implicit in our book. Our book kind of begins around 1968, 1970 and looks at what's happened in society since that period and that really is the period of a technological revolution where you have Moore's law that, you know, computing power, microprocessors are doubling in power every 18 months to really profound things so information technology is getting cheaper, more powerful, more easily used to replace low-skill workers, even to replace high-skill workers, to do the kind of digital discrimination that Evita was talking about, that Nicole was talking about, the criminal justice. So I think really what it means to live in a high-tech society I think is a really profound question that we really haven't dealt with at all. I mean we've dealt with it to some extent but I think it's really a critical element. I'll just add to that really quickly which is to say so at the Open Technology Institute we've done a lot of work in digital literacy and digital inclusion and we worked in the city of Philadelphia as they were trying to roll out this project to bring people online and it was out of the Recovery Act and it was really amazing to see how much hope there was around learning to use technology and having technology be part of that American dream. And some of the fears that we're going to be automated out, that we're not prepared for our digital future as workers but also that there might be some concern that we don't have control over digital footprint and that we could actually do good by becoming more and more digitally literate. Yeah, I think when we have more powerful technology we almost need more powerful morality to go with that more because this stuff can really do things and it can go in the wrong direction or it can go in a really good direction and people learning about the technology, that's also a really important verb learning about it, deploying it, how to use it for civic purposes not just for private gain or for whatever, behind the scenes discrimination. And not only learning about it but also giving people access to it. One of the big issues that the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights works on is how do we ensure that the poor and working class even have access to the technology and we often talk about things that we want to change to make things easier for Americans like for instance with respect to voting. There's a lot of discussion about online voter registration. The poor and working class do not have access to computers. They don't have laptops in their homes and lots of people say oh but they can go to the libraries. We know that states are closing libraries that there simply is not that access so I think that's got to be part of the conversation too. How do we even bring some of the underclass into the realm of having access to the technology to help make their lives better? Yeah, in North Philadelphia there's very little internet access in the poor area of Philadelphia so I think that's really, really, how can you get a job if you can't go on the internet? It's much more difficult. We'll make one point and I've agreed with virtually almost everything I've heard by everyone else on the panel but again sometimes these things are a little more nuanced than we thought. I have done studies based on surveys of employers that ask employers to check criminal backgrounds on the internet which has become very cheap and easy to do and then what kinds of people do you hire? Surprisingly we found in a whole series of studies that employers who check criminal backgrounds actually hire more black men than they otherwise would and it's a counter to a phenomenon because a lot of the reason employers, I mean we all know there's discrimination based simply on race and gender. There's discrimination based on criminal background and sometimes there's the combination of the two but it looked like if employers can do a criminal background check and find out that a black man doesn't have a criminal background. They're much more comfortable hiring them. It was kind of surprising. So it's not as though the internet and criminal background checks are all bad. I think the problem is that often the information is misused and I think if people follow the EO guidelines about the right way and the wrong way to use this information it wouldn't be a problem. The problem is that a lot of employers don't follow the EO guidelines. We can't enforce that and I think there's a subtle difference. I think the problem with the box and the applications that employers see the box check and then they throw it out without looking more carefully at other information. And so I have a little bit of sympathy, some sympathy for banned the box. At the same time I think that the information that employers can get is not all bad if it's used judiciously. And this is why I support EO efforts to make sure the information but not efforts to completely block the information. But the banned the box thing is that I think an effort to not suppress the information but to get employers give this guy a look before you make that judgment. I think in that guys, but it is a more sort of nuanced way I think of thinking about the issues. Let's go ahead and open the conversation up to the audience. There's a microphone. If you have a question for anybody or everybody on the panel please just raise your hand. State your affiliation and please raise your question in the form of question. My name is Sahan, like I said, and I'm interning this summer in Washington, D.C. And I think Nicole probably could answer my question more than anyone else. So I mean you were certainly bringing up great points about how the United States incarcerates more people than even countries like even China and Iran. Do you think that another reason for this mass incarceration is the private prison system where many of these private companies are like their sole motive is profit. So of course you know when there's more likely area where there's more crime to happen that means it's better for their bottom line. So you think that the privatization of prisons is another very big reason for the mass incarceration and the misuse of the criminal justice system here in America? Absolutely and you know it's very difficult to separate economics from any of these issues as you know. And the private prison industrial complex we know is massive and it has grown tremendously over the last 40 to 50 years. So certainly when there are incentives in place for businesses to make money by incarcerating people, by building more prisons, by producing more guards, more security systems, more security services, yes that is certainly a part of the problem. I think though from a policy perspective there's far less being done to address that and I don't think that's surprising. I think with respect to anything in this country where we are taking on large corporations and large industries there's always tenetiveness even from policy makers and legislators and that also kind of gets into the whole money and politics issue and like who pays for campaigns and what helps keep people in office but that's for another panel on another day. But so yes, so the simple answer to your question is yes, I think that is a huge part of it and something that we've got to address further. It's simply not being talked about enough. Of course in some places the only jobs available for long-term men and women which you know it's not just the businesses but the workers in those areas and their unions and that doesn't make it right. But again it complicates it a little bit. Great next question. Okay. Thank you. Hi, my name is Oliver Grimm. I'm the US correspondent for a newspaper from Austria which is called Die Presse. I would be interested in your view whether the American political system is actually capable of addressing all the grievances that you've pointed out in the criminal justice system and the social system and so forth. Because I'm particularly struck if I look at most European countries over the past 20, 30 years we've tried to enlarge suffrage. We've tried to make it easier for people to vote. The voting age in Austria is 16. In Estonia you can vote online. We make any effort. I think even in most countries, I'm not pretty sure about that, but in most European countries you can even vote if you're in prison unless it's for a very severe thing. If you're a youth citizen you're allowed to vote in any other country in municipal elections. So I was living in Belgium. I'm Austrian. I voted in the municipal elections in Brussels. And I have the impression that on the other hand in the US on the state level, particularly you're putting up more and more barriers to voting. You've got this crazy gerrymandering. Actually you don't really have free elections anymore in many places in America. You have these crazy systems of introducing ID laws and so forth and so forth. Just to cut that long question short, is the American political system in a position to do anything about this? Because I don't really see any big difference between voting for a Democratic or Republican president. They will promise all sorts of different things, but we haven't really regulated the financial markets and so forth and so forth. Thank you. Sorry, big question, but it nags me. Does anybody want to take that on? I have a lot to say about that, but I just answered the last one, so I'll let somebody else go first. I'll have a comment on that, which is it's unusual that we have elections in this country on a Tuesday. Most countries have elections on a holiday or on a weekend where people are off, but we have our elections, which again makes it more difficult, particularly for some folks to vote versus other folks. But I don't have an answer to your big question. I mean, I agree with everything you said until your last comment. It doesn't make a difference because they're all the same. They're not all the same. It was, of course, and you succeeded. It wasn't correct, however. But I think to me the problem is that, frankly, there is one political party that has a vested interest in suppressing the vote. So even people who in principle might certainly agree that once people have served the death of society or making it easier in practice, it is in their interest. And of course, the Supreme Court keeps making decisions that weaken the Voting Rights Act, that throw out restrictions, that just feed that problem, make it worse. I agree with you. It's a very serious problem, and there are structural factors that just make it hard to reform. I'll just say really quickly to, you know, Mark and Tom said the last thing to go is hope. I think that most, you know, from the vantage of where I stand, which is, you know, I do work in D.C. and I do a lot of work with social justice groups on the ground, there is an incredible amount of optimism that things are going to get better. I know that sounds crazy given your long question and how you set everything up. I mean, I agree that it's difficult, but there is resilience out there and I think there is an expectation that we can do better. And actually Americans as a whole tend to be more optimistic than folks in other countries. We tend to rank higher in terms of levels of optimism. So yeah, I think that's right. I have to quickly just go back to the history in this country. I think one of the differences, because one of the things we often talk about is yes, if you compare us to European countries, they are much more advanced in terms of voter registration and the whole voting process and how their citizenry is engaged. But you can't, the history of this country is one that is based on the subjugation of a class and race of people. And many of the voting laws, if you go back to their, you know, to their development, were based on an effort to keep those individuals, those descendants of slaves out of the political system. And I know everyone in this room has probably read it, but we always go back to it, but Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow, gives a very interesting and poignant accounting of that history. So I think to understand the story of why we have some of the voting laws that we have on the books in this country, why there are still efforts in place to suppress the vote, particularly of not just black and brown people, but of the poor, of the elderly, of students, that is all related to that history of making certain that certain classes of people and certain political parties get to maintain power while other groups don't get to come to an equal level of power. And I think as long as we have these interests, as long as we have parties and certain lawmakers who have a vested interest in keeping some people out of the political process, we are going to continue to face these problems. I, though, am a glass half full person. I certainly think that we can chip away at it. I think there are inroads that we can make, but I certainly think that, you know, as long as we have these individuals with these interests, we're going to continue to have these issues to fight against. Great. And since we're running short on time, and actually we are, in fact, over time, I would like to take a couple final questions. Rapid Fire Style will package them, present them to the panel as a whole. So if you have a question, raise your hand now. Probably to, I guess, Harry or to Nicole, I'm surprised that people don't talk about what does it cost to incarcerate a person in America? You know, forget all the morality. You know, on the ideal world, it should be nice for people to do this, whatever, but sometimes you can talk to people about their pocketbooks because if you put all these two points, whatever the number of people is in jail, who's going to pay for that? We pay for that. And so to me, that might be part of an argument we should begin to make. Elliot up front. Debbie Weinstein, Coalition on Human Needs. You've all recounted and we've heard even more examples of barriers that are starting earlier and earlier and earlier to deny opportunities, just reading about expulsions of three and four year olds from preschool and credit checks as well as incarceration, denying employment. At what point, if ever, will kind of the powers that be start to think of this as being economically not in our interest to sort of block such a substantial part of our population from making the full contribution they can make or would have been able to make to our economy? Great. And let's take one more. Yes, my name is Rolf Hörn and I'm from the Swedish Embassy. I wonder if I could ask about specific ethnic group. You described the office, described ethnic groups as sort of one of the possible currents that could help you along or not help you along in life. And my understanding without being an expert at all is that if you look at Americans of Asian descent in some sense, they have done fairly well for themselves in the last 30, 40 years. They were having low incomes and so on. If you look about 40 years back, while it's now they tend to have higher incomes of maybe then European descent and also higher educational achievements. So I just wonder what has made the American dream possible for that particular group of people? You could have a low speaking voice. Could you just repeat the question? Yes. I wondered a little bit what might or might not have set the Asian or the group of Asian descent as a part. They seem to have been doing fairly well the last 30 or 40 years. They were a fairly poor group as far as I understand 40 years back. But now they have higher incomes than many Caucasians and they have higher educational achievements. So what has made the American dream possible for that group to a larger extent than other groups possibly? I'd like to take on the self-interest question. I think that it's a really important argument to make. And to say that we should invest in our people is really in all of our self-interest. That we will be a more productive workforce. We will be more competitive. It's that kind of argument. I know Harry has done work on what is the cost of poverty in general. So maybe you could comment on that. I sort of agree with the sentiment that you expressed. And it all goes back to your question about the costs. We're spending so much on keeping people locked up. Different ways of cutting the data. By some measures it costs more to send somebody to prison than to Harvard or Georgetown. And that's problematic. I think the problem is that there's big debates about how effective these investments are. And a lot of the expense, everything from pre-K to expense, Pell grants, all those things. A lot of the workforce development programs we know that the evidence of their cost effectiveness is usually mixed. The best programs clearly work. So I think that just muddies the water and complicates the debate. That debate's gotten so polarized I want to have a debate about how can we make investments and then make sure that they are effective. And I think that's a discussion that I think there can be wide agreement on from both sides of the aisle. Then the other question the gentleman asked about immigrants, there is still a lot of upward mobility for people who are either very entrepreneurial or who can do well in sort of a technical world and in a higher ed world. America works great for a lot of those people. It's for the folks who don't fit into those categories. I think that your book directly raises a lot of difficult issues. I'll just add one, that as the child of the American dream, my parents, my mother is from the Philippines, my dad is from India. The Asian population in the United States is very diverse. It's not a homogeneous community. There are so many different kinds of Asians here and not all Asians have the same opportunity and they don't fit into those same categories. So I think it's something actually really important to think about when we're looking at who's doing well and who's not doing well. I actually want to jump in and ask one final question about the cost of marginalization. I think everybody has made an argument that these individual experiences aggregate on the societal level and some with an explicit cost, $500 billion a year in the cost of child poverty for instance. But we are, as you two explained in the book, a highly individualized society where a lot of the attention is focused on the ability of the individual to navigate whatever circumstances are before this person. So even though we can put a price tag and we can identify the consequences to all of us of injustices to some of us, is that persuasive? Well I think costs and benefits are seen from different points of view and I think the gentleman from Austria was talking about, well how can the political system reform itself? Well we have growing economic inequality. I think that leads to growing political inequality where people want to protect their own interests. And I think that really is the process that we're in where people are not getting what they want from the American dream from one side or the other. So they're trying to achieve some kind of reform of the system. So what kind of programs do we have? How does economic inequality translate into political inequality? And for politics that's the way that people solve problems is going into politics and then reforming the system. So I think these kinds of questions that we're asking, there are people in the criminal justice system who are benefiting from all the incarceration. The people that own the prisons, to the extent you have private prisons. So I think really this process of growing economic inequality leads into political activity in the long run. So I think a strong argument is that what are the values that we really believe in and do we really live up to those values? I think that to me is a very strong argument and I think you could, from everything we've been saying on this panel, the issue is we are not living up to those values and that to me is the key question. I actually think the values point to such an important one and if I had just one closing remark it would be, you know, despite the numbers, despite the statistics and all of these things that we've talked about today, one of the things that we have to get at is how do we reach the moral hearts and minds of people in this country? You know, when we talk about some of these criminal justice issues, we recognize that there are some people who simply don't care. They think it's not impacting me. This is not my kid. These are not my relatives. I don't have to think about it. These are the bad people. I don't care if they go away. I don't care if we put them to death. I don't care about any of that. We have to start having conversations in this country where we can engage everyone to feel invested in these issues and to understand how it is indeed impacting you and your neighbor and your child and your niece and nephew. I think that's got to be a foundational conversation and it's one that we simply haven't been having. I think that's a great place to stop. Please join me in thanking our panelists and thank you all for being so generous with your time.