 Welcome, welcome, I think we're gonna get started. I'm Mark Schmidt, I'm the Director of Studies here at New America and run the political reform program. I'm really thrilled to have such a great quantity and quality of the crowd for this discussion of Sabil Rahman's book, Democracy Against Domination. I'm gonna introduce our panel in a minute, but first I wanna say a couple things about this book and why I think it's so important. I think this is a book that links a lot of things that we care about both here at New America and generally in the broader community that we're part of. Both the interest in the impact of very concentrated economic structures on our politics as well as our economy, which is something that my colleagues such as Barry Lynn have been working on. Elizabeth Warren has really spoken about it in eloquent ways and it's a really important new avenue of renewed avenue of progressive thinking, but instead of putting it solely in terms of economic policy, it really connects it strongly to democratic values and a reminder that democracy can itself be a solution, not just economic competition and the book, I think challenges not only the logic of free market ideas but also the kind of judgment of experts that doesn't have room for citizens in it in an important way. I often start articles with a quote from John F. Kennedy in 1962 when he gave the commencement speech at Yale and he said, the problems of our time no longer have anything to do with ideology, they're technical problems for experts to solve. And I think the history of the decade since then have really shown how flawed that concept was and I think Stabil has the beginnings of some really important answers to that. So we've got a great panel here today. What I really love about it is we've got a good mix of people who understand this from an academic and political theory point of view from government and from organizing which is really the essential channel by which we help people engage with democracy. So I'm just gonna introduce folks, we'll get started, discussion among the panel and then we'll open it up. A lot of you have been here before so you know how fun this can be. Beginning with the discussion of his book is Sabil Rahman. Sabil is an assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School, a fellow here at New America and has been a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute where he and I were also colleagues. In fact, Sabil and I have known each other since maybe 2009 or 10. I introduced by Andy Rich, who was the president of the Roosevelt Institute and he just told me that. What he was working on at that time was kind of became the germ of this book. So it's been a real thrill to work with Sabil over the course of a number of years now. And he's also been an advisor on strategies for economic development in New York City and a member of the New York City Rent Guidelines Board and has been part of the leadership of the Gettysburg Project which is an initiative working with organizers, academics and funders to develop new strategies for civic engagement. I'll just do it in order here. Connie Raza is the director of the Center for Popular Democracies Research Efforts around immigrant and civil rights, economic and community justice and good government. Previously, she was a Community Labor United, a coalition of based building community organizations and labor unions in Boston, now working in Brooklyn. Shayna Strom is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, also a longtime friend of our work and has been working on issues related to the future of work, future of organizing, poverty and inequality. She teaches at Johns Hopkins and she's worked with a number of foundations. She's worked in the White House at the office at whatever it stands for, Oira, Office of Management and Budget. And she's worked on, you know, we know it, it's one of those acronyms, monumentally important, but hidden away. And she's worked on the Hill for Senator Al Franken and has been an organizer herself. Brishan Rogers is associate professor of law at Temple University, teaches towards employment discrimination and labor law, previously was a fellow in lecture on law at Harvard Law School. His focus is on drawing on social sciences and political theory to understand how best to regulate labor markets. So obviously we've got a huge range of voices here and a huge range of ideas, so I'm just gonna turn it over to Seville and thank you again for coming. All right, well, this is a real thrill for me to get to see all of you and so many friends and colleagues from over the years here and new friends that I'm looking forward to hearing from. I should start by thanking Mark and Cheyenne and Lee and the political reform program at New America and Barry and Reed and so many folks here who have just been such a great part of my intellectual life and our panelists, Connie, Sheyna and Brishan, I'm really excited to hear what you guys have to say and we've sort of all been in conversation for a long time and that's been a real pleasure for me. So when I started writing this book, I didn't really or couldn't have really predicted the turn that our politics would have taken by the time that the book came out. We're a week away from a pretty terrifyingly high-stakes election and I think the moment really accentuates for me the sort of toxic combination of crises, right? We have sort of ongoing economic upheavals since the financial crisis and going even before then and the book sort of kind of picks up with the crash in 2008. But that combined with a sense of pervasive political dysfunction and then much more sort of troubling in a lot of ways questions over these last few months about identity and inclusion. Whose country and whose economy and whose government is this really? And I think there's a sense in which everything feels up for grabs right now, that the decisions we make as a country, as a society are really going to shape what America looks like over the next many decades. And for me, I think that this is not just a fear of the kind of radical exclusionary populism that we're seeing on the right in this campaign, but there's also another worry, which is that these moments don't come very often. And I think there's a way in which progressive politics, progressive ways of thinking about public policy could miss the opportunities for a deeper transformation to create a more inclusive and equitable economy. So what does that mean really? So if we flashback six years ago now to April 2010, Obama goes to the Cooper Union in New York and he has to make this make or break speech he's trying to argue for his Wall Street reform package. And this seems like a lifetime ago now, given everything that's happened since then. But that battle over financial reform was in a lot of ways that first big skirmish over what a 21st century economy and democracy looks like. And so Obama's at the Cooper Union, he's got all the heads of the major Wall Street banks sitting in the front row and protesters outside, protesting those same heads of the firms. And Obama makes his case, and it's not a milktoe speech at all. There's some very real serious proposals that he was advocating about how to deal with too big to fail, but what's telling for me was how he framed the response. In Obama's telling, the main problem of too big to fail was really a technical one of risk management. The issue was that the market, on its own terms, had failed. You needed smart people at the Fed to have the tools to deal with this, to prevent future crises. And that's a perfectly reasonable way to think about economic policy through expertise that serves the public good. And there's a deep pedigree to that. In a lot of ways Obama channeled two traditions of liberal progressive thought. One is the New Deal tradition of people like FDR and his brain trust, who saw expertise in the regulatory state as a more modern, advanced way of dealing with complex policy problems. The courts don't know what they're doing, and neither does Congress, so we're gonna put smart people in agencies and have them deal with it. The other trend that Obama was channeling was a more recent one, that the liberal progressive response to conservative attacks on big government, in a lot of ways doubled down on this idea of expertise. If people don't trust government, what do we do, we try to make government smarter. So that's fine, but I think it has some real limitations, right? It overlooked in a lot of ways the problem of power, right? The economy isn't just a machine to be tinkered with, there are real disparities of who controls what and there are major sort of power relationships involved there. And it downplayed the idea of democracy itself. How can we be in a democracy, what does it mean to live in a democracy when we have, as a collective, not to have control over this sort of impersonal force of the market, or this equally sort of alienated impersonal force of the bureaucracy? And I think there were beginnings of an alternative tradition that were being voiced at the time. Now Senator Warren was not yet senator at that time, was among those voices. And they were picking up on a different progressive tradition, not the New Deal tradition and not the sort of ex technocratic tradition, but a more democratic idea of what the economy and government might look like. And so the book then tries to unpack what that alternative tradition is. So if we go back even further, a hundred years, give or take, in the pre New Deal progressive era, the country's undergoing a similar kind of moment of massive economic upheaval, right? In the face of the industrial revolution. And there's a surprisingly similar sense of economic crisis paired with political dysfunction, right? Sort of sense of corrupt party bosses and a government that just was not up to the task of dealing with economic change. This is the era of J.P. Morgan, the man, not the company, just as terrifying to progressives then as it is now. And there's a real sense that finance, but more broadly, private power of different kinds, monopolies, trusts, the market itself, we're choking off the prospects for economic liberty and meaningful democracy. And if you look at the thought of this period, what I think is really powerful for us today is that there are four common themes that I talk about in the book. The first is this problem of private power, right? Corporate power, monopolies, this is the start of the antitrust movement, right? And there's a sense that certain actors have just managed to hijack the economy to serve their own interests. The second was this idea of what in the book I call systemic or market power. And this is the idea that even if there's no one individual actor who you're worried about, right? The laws and policies that make up what we call the market, it's not a force of nature, right? It's a product of law and policy. And those laws and policies allocate opportunities, constrain opportunities, structure what one's economic prospects are. And that's something that should be subject to greater control, greater critique. This, by the way, was a view that was held not just by a lot of activists at the time, but even the American Economic Association, which was founded during that period as a progressive policy-minded institution, which is not quite what it is now. The third theme was that if we have this problem of private and market power, there is a sense that, well, as a democracy, as citizens, as communities, the real challenge is that we have no way of controlling these forms of power. We can't act on them. They're too big for any one of us as individuals or as communities to deal with, to grapple on. And so then this sets up the fourth theme, which I spend the bulk of the book on, which is the idea of democracy. We tend to think about economic policy as a battle between state and market. But to me, what's compelling about this history is that this idea of democracy really approaches both of these, all of these problems from a different way. That democracy is an idea about how we hold private and market power accountable to serve the public interest. And then how we use the levers of the state, of government, to serve those needs. It only works if we, the people, have some sense of meaningful control over all of these actors. So I talk a lot in the book about what this might look like in context of financial reform as a sort of concrete example. I don't wanna get too much into that now just because I wanna be quick on time, but just say, suffice to say that, I think it points a very different direction from the direction we took in 2010 with the financial reform package. And it gives some broader implications for where we are now. So in a nutshell, I think the title of the book, Democracy Against Domination, is sort of what I think progressive politics is or ought to be about, right? The problem is power, the problem of domination in the marketplace and in the form of private power, and the remedy is democracy. And so I think that tells us a couple of things about how progressives should think about after 2016, after this election, where we go from here. I'll just save these last three points and then I'll wrap up. The first thing it tells us, I think, is that when we're talking about economic policy, it can't just be about efficiency or consumer welfare. It really has to be about identifying what are those low-sized sources of private power and market power and then targeting those. And we can see this in our ongoing debates about finance and too big to fail or sort of resurgent concerns about monopoly and market concentration. And this idea of diffuse market power that I talked about, I think, sort of in many ways connects with a lot of the debates that we're having now about, for example, the changing nature of work and the social safety net and what that looks like in a 21st century. The second takeaway for me is this idea of democracy. So democracy doesn't just happen. It's not just about votes and it's not just about sort of public opinion. It's actually requires institutions and it requires organizing. And that requires a lot of work by a lot of parties, right? Those of us in the room, people on the ground and policymakers. And so in the book, I try to suggest some ways that we might think about creating that infrastructure of democracy, right? To create the capacity for we, the people, to actually govern ourselves. And then the last point, which I alluded to at the very end of the book is that, going back to where we started, this idea of the stakes of the moment. So the ferment of the progressive era before the New Deal, era of Brandeis and folks like Dewey, John Dewey, in a lot of ways that produced the New Deal and led to several decades of broadly shared economic prosperity. But I think we have to resist the temptation of trying to turn back the clock and recreate the New Deal settlement. The New Deal had its flaws. It was, in many ways, instantiated a deeply racialized and gendered form of exclusion, right? Not everyone could partake in the New Deal order. And it set up this sort of technocratic top-down legacy that I critique in the book. And so I think the opportunity for us right now, I'm an optimist at heart, right? So maybe we're all terrified for next week in a lot of ways, but I think the real opportunity is something much bigger. And it's not about this election. It's that we're in a similar moment now as the country was in the 10s and 20s. And we can sort of set the deck for what the rest of the 21st century looks like. And it's kind of on us whether we can actually make not just a kind of progressive economy, but one that is also inclusive in all the ways that the New Deal was not and democratic in all the ways that the New Deal was not. So I just want to close with two quick quotes, which frame the book. The book starts and ends with these two quotes and kind of captures for me what I hope the takeaway of all of this might be. So the epigraph of the book is from Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas, she writes in 1871. And he says, we have frequently printed the word democracy, yet it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come from pen and tongue. It is a great word whose history remains unwritten because that history has yet to be enacted. And then about 30 years later, Brandeis is giving a speech to, Louis Brandeis giving a speech to the Phylines Cooperative in Boston, sorry. And he has this to say, picking up on Whitman's charge. A hundred years ago, the civilized world did not believe that it was possible that the people could rule themselves. They did not believe that it was possible to have a government of the people by the people and for the people. America in the last century proved democracy is a success. The civilized world today believes that in the industrial world, self-government is impossible. That we must adhere to a system which we have known as a monarchical system, the system of master and servant, or now is more politely called employer and employee. It rests with this century and perhaps with America to prove as we have done in the political world what self-government can do. And we are to pursue the same lines in the industrial world. So Brandeis's charge in a lot of ways produced the new deal and several decades worth of consensus. I think for us, our task is to see if we can do better this time around. So I'll stop there. We'll version. Version, okay. So thank you so much, Sebel and Mark and New America, for having me here. I'm really excited about this book and about what it represents kind of in this political moment. And I'm just very happy to have a chance to have this conversation with everyone. I wanted to talk a little bit, sort of the other academic on the panel about how I see the book reframing some major debates within legal academia and then also I think within the broader policy world. And talk a bit about the impact on work. They'll try to leave that mainly for the Q&A or the open discussion. So I expect Shayna will talk about it a bit as well. So within the legal academy and I think largely within policy circles as well, there's been a rough consensus about optimal economic organization for a while now. Which is basically to ensure so-called open markets that will enable the economy to grow and then protect those who sort of lose out through some system of transfers, basically set a floor, but otherwise leave things to market ordering. I think of this as I sort of call my own had the elite liberal consensus. And it does a lot I think to explain even many progressive law professors' skepticism towards some basic workplace regulations such as the minimum wage, collective bargaining laws and the like. You know, the basic argument is if those may end up shrinking the pie and therefore hurting the people that they're trying to help. One of the things that I think makes Sabeel's book so great and so sort of wide ranging in my mind is that it shows that this whole sort of line of thought is based on a false premise, which is that equality is essentially about resource distribution. And he shows, argues that equality is more fundamentally about power. It's about economic power, social power and political power. And that's a key lesson of the progressive and New Deal eras, but it's one that's very often lost, within legal academy but elsewhere as well, in part because we're very focused rightly on rights-based theories of justice and we're sort of misguidedly focused on questions of efficiency and consumer welfare. And a good state needs to do more than just, you know, protect individual rights and make sure everyone has enough to live on, even though our state doesn't quite do that yet, right? But a good state needs to actually ensure that no individual or firm gets so powerful that it can end up dominating others. And the book brings together, you know, that set of insights about equality and inequality and what they sort of mean in everyday life roots them in neo-Republican political theory and then roots them also within our own progressive tradition. And here is I think the kicker, in my mind at least, that the progressive populism that Sebel identifies is actually an incredibly important and distinctively American progressive political tradition. You know, there are long debates within, you know, political science and within labor studies on why socialism never quite took off in the US in the way that it did in most European countries. And part of the answer it seems to me is right here. It's that we had our own distinctive tradition which was a Republican conception of equal citizenship in opposition to excessively concentrated power. And an ethic of a society in which everyone enjoys equal standing. You know, that's been resurrected in recent political theory. What Sebel shows again is that it's actually very deeply rooted in our traditions starting, you know, really from the founding but then also in the 19th and early 20th centuries. So a couple points about the policy relevance here. One, almost as an aside but maybe we can take it up in the Q and A. I think the strikes me that this sort of intellectual project strikes me is very important in this election cycle which has been dominated by, you could say, progressive populism and reactionary populism. Without going too deeply into this, I'll note there is a growing debate around what exactly populism means. John Vernon Mueller who teaches at Princeton has a book coming out that defines populism as anti-pluralism. And I think that's a, he makes an incredibly important point about the rise of populist movements in both Europe and the United States. Right wing populist movements. But I worry that that move may end up erasing this progressive populist tradition and sort of in fact delegitimizing a more progressive populist tradition. And so I think Sebel's sort of resurrection of it is incredibly important. And I think the book sheds light also on today's debates around the future of work which is, you know, my focus basically. You know, most of you I'm sure are familiar with this. It's being driven by things like the explosive growth of Uber and other on demand economy firms, sluggish employment growth during the so-called recovery and just other technological developments that are leading to fears of widespread technological unemployment. A lot of people have started to converge now around a basic income or UBI as a policy solution here. And for anyone who isn't following this, the basic idea is all citizens or residents or some criterion people in the country would simply get funding from the state each month or every two weeks as a condition of citizenship or residents. I'm a big believer in a basic income and I'll put in a very short pitch. I just published a piece in the Boston Review on it yesterday. But I think we need to spend a lot more time and this is part of what I say, thinking about the questions of institutional design here. And I'll note that mainstream debate around UBI basically follows the liberal consensus that I mentioned earlier. It focuses on a transfer program, a way to get resources from one group to another without actually addressing the underlying questions of property rights and the concentration of power within society. I would sound a big note of caution here and I think Sebel would agree. If we just put a UBI on top of existing institutions, what is our economy gonna look like? We'll still have a small number of oil companies, a small number of tech companies, a small number of retailers dominating their particular spheres, a small number of cable companies and telecom companies. Workers and citizens will have greater freedom not to work but will not have stronger rights of collective bargaining or consultation. The wealthiest within the country will still be able to dominate our politics and will surely use that power to push back against any tax increases to funds a basic income. So in my mind what we need is a UBI and a renewed progressive regulatory state along the lines of what Sebel is calling for. A state that breaks up monopolies or treats them like utilities, limits campaign contributions and otherwise encourages more democracy and less domination to use his terms. In a state that encourages more collective bargaining and more ways for workers to participate in both the economic decisions that impact their lives and in our political sphere and that I think means a very different set of models of labor and employment law from what we have today. I think we can build a progressive majority over the next five to 10 years and Sebel's identification of this distinctively American tradition I think gives us part of the language with which we can do that. So I'll leave it there and look forward to your questions and our discussion. Thank you. Shayna. So just wanted to thank New America and Sebel again and say, I mean, this really is an extraordinary book so I'm particularly happy to be here talking about it. I think part of what it says that is so important and that I should also say that I appreciate it as a former organizer is sort of the focus on power and the desire to have a more democratic accountability and as someone has worked in government I really think that there is a deep value in pointing out the ways that technocratic decision making itself can be political so to speak that it can be imbued with certain kinds of values and assumptions that really govern decision making and also the way that technocratic decision making says something about who is even allowed to participate in the conversation. So part of what I was reflecting on as I read this was I was working in the Senate during Dodd-Frank and was struck by sort of how few people from the public felt like they could have anything to say about it because again, it's Drew's topics, what option is there for people to say something about it but in fact, of course, these are questions that affect everyone's life in some really deep ways. And again, of course, the legislature is a place where people are supposed to have democratic participation but so part of my role on this panel is to talk about the policy implications of someone who has worked in government and as someone who used to work in the regulatory system I will say, while I very much agreed with sort of the thrust of this book, I also found it really challenging in the best of ways because it forced me to really think about how the system that I know could incorporate these concepts and how dramatic a shift it would be and how it would actually work in practice and in some cases I think trying to figure out about how it works in practice is really hard. So I took Sebel to be making two large parties to talk about policy statements. So one is about the substance of the policy and the other is about the process. So on the substance, Sebel's book calls for more structural and prophylactic policies and I think that's a very, those are very interesting concepts and it reminds me in a different literature, the sort of administrative law literature of the backlash against cost benefit analysis and the focus on a precautionary principle and what kind of impact that would have. So I'm not gonna weigh in specifically on that literature but I do think it is interesting to think about how this plays out in really different sectors. There is something to the fact that the book focuses on the field of finance and I think that that is one place where, I sort of wondered to what extent the question was that whether you think that sort of finance itself as a sector has fewer benefits for society, so to speak and so part of why you're less afraid of regulatory overreach is that. And so I think there's something really interesting about asking the question, how does this vary in different environments and do you need to think about prophylactic policies differently in different areas? And it's interesting, Brishen was talking about future of work which is an area I think a lot of us are working in right now and this is one area where I think this really comes into play. One of the things I've been thinking about recently is the ways that ERISA restricts the potential portability of certain policies that are developed and again not to weigh in on whether it should be that way or it shouldn't be that way but it is something you really need to think about when you're trying to figure out what it means to create structural policies and whether or not there is danger of regulatory overreach. I also want to say I did think there was some risk of making political choices no matter what you do. I was sort of thinking back to Jim Scott's book seeing like a state and the question of what kinds of decisions government should be making and what is inherent in those assumptions and when you're thinking about structural and prophylactic policies, I kept coming back to the question of how do we know that we get even these right and particularly if we're not convinced that our systems of democratic accountability are working the way they should, what kind of rest does that pose? So going on to democratic accountability, I guess I'm just struck by thinking that this is really hard. A lot of these are institutional design questions. How do you create a regulatory system that has a real way for people to participate and I think back to a lot of the conversations that we had working in the administration about trying to incorporate more people into the process and yeah, and I guess I was struck by Sebel and his book raises a number of really interesting ways to try to get people to have more participation in the political process, including the idea of having sort of a regulatory public advocate, somebody who is speaking in the public interest representing participants. And part of what I was left with is thinking these are all really good things to do and in many ways they're not nearly enough but part of what is really so hard when you think about designing these processes is how do you make them meaningful and still try to come out with policy that has the right level of nuance you want and so I say that all to say I don't have any answers to these questions but that's part of why I think Sebel's book is so important in sort of raising these exact tensions that on the one hand we really need to be thinking about all these policies in terms of power and structural arrangements and on the other hand figuring out how to do so in a way that is sensitive to those power arrangements and that allows for true democratic ability is just a very, very hard task. So thank you for challenging us and making us think about things that are very difficult. Great, thank you Shana. Connie. So I would like to echo the gratitude to New America and Sebel for this opportunity. Sebel and I have had many conversations about sort of where our worlds meet and so the Center for Popular Democracy and the Center for Popular Democracy Action is a network of grassroots organizing organizations on the city and state level across the country and so really thinking about how to democracy, right? Like I mean the thing that seems to me most striking about this is that democracy has to be an action that it's not a system even, it's the actions that we take and the ways that we engage so that we can offset the power of the economically, I'm gonna just say powerful, it's the same word that you're gonna forgive me today. I appreciate that in advance. So I mean I think for me coming to this, the framework of democracy against domination and of the deep overlap of economic and political power and its effects offers a real meaningful tool for the work that we engage in. I think that in the organizing sector, we often end up talking about the specific fights, the battles, right? We talk about minimum wage and paid sick days and paid family leave. We talk about fair schedules. We talk about fighting against police brutality and police killings and over incarceration. We talk about fighting against the push to limit the right to the franchise and to be able to enact, but also to actually have the right to participate in our democracy. And we talk about each of those often, but not all of those and not about the big vision of what it is that we're seeking to create. And I think that in order for us to be able to move to fighting against domination, like we have to be also thinking about that big vision and talking about that big vision all the time. And so I really appreciate the framework here. I think that it offers another option. This way of leading with this bold vision that creates a more equitable and inclusive democracy. And I too was struck by the moment that we're in now and how that moment is, sounds like a UFO. It'll get there. And how that moment is in such stark contrast to hope at the beginning of the book in 2008 and 2009 and where we are today. And so I think that it raises real questions for us, which I wrote down, to really grapple with, right? How do we create both a more equitable democracy and economy, which writes the wrong decisions of the past that stripped the rights, resources, and wealth, particularly from community of color and an inclusive democracy, which acknowledges the ways in which both white communities and communities of color have been so stripped by private corporate power. And I think this is like a framing of the question that is particularly relevant today in a way that I think we maybe didn't feel an urgency to frame the question even six months ago, frankly. How do we grapple with the sort of value of just desserts? So frequently we talk about how anybody who's working 40 hours a week should not live in poverty. So that is premised on the idea that in order to not live in poverty, in order to deserve not to live in poverty, you need to be working 40 hours a week. And in order to be working 40 hours a week, there needs to be enough work for everybody to be working 40 hours a week. So how are we sort of taking on directly this particular notion of sort of just desserts? How are we reasserting the right to leisure and to having fulfilling lives? How is that a political stance that we can take? I always think back actually to around the era that you're referring to, eight hours of work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will. And I think that we have often just dropped the eight hours for what you will. We just want to work enough and to be able to rest and get back to work and that's what we drive for. But what would it look like to present a vision that includes leisure as a right and as something that you could demand? I think we also need to think about reclaiming the right to protest and to govern. So I think as progressives we often are very comfortable in the position of protesting. We're very comfortable in the position of sort of participating in the selection of those who will govern us. But what would it mean for us to govern? And I think here, it's also a different relationship to how we think about the regulatory apparatus as well and what kinds of roles we take and how do we understand expertise? So as the representative of a network of community-based organizations, I would say technocrats have a set of expertise and people in communities have a set of expertise. And so how do we elevate that and bring that to bear? And how do we build real movement and organizing infrastructure and power at all levels in order to serve as the countervailing force to be economically powerful? And this feels to me like a crucial question because the structure is not gonna do it for us. We have to do it, right? This is too democracy. This is the act that's gonna make it happen is us building that and then rebuilding it and rebuilding it and retooling it. And then I think we need to think big, right? Like we need to fight the fights we need to have. We need to fight for the minimum wage. We need to fight for fair hours. We need to fight for paid family leave. We need to have each of these fights and we need to be fighting for something bigger all the time at the same time. We need to think big and we need to fight big and we need to be ready to have short-term losses in order to be able to build to the longer-term victory and to use the tools. And so there are a couple of quick examples, if I have time, of ways that we've approached this. One is a campaign that we've been running for several years with a coalition of folks that is broad and deep and strong on the Federal Reserve of all things. And so we have a campaign that's called the FedUp campaign and it is pushing for the Federal Reserve to prioritize a full employment economy and to diversify its decision makers. And it really comes to the fundament of, in order for us to have the economic environment for workers to have the power to not just raise the floor but raise the ceiling, we need a full employment economy and the Federal Reserve is one functioning body that is in the position to help make that environment a reality. And in order for the Federal Reserve to fundamentally make that shift, it is gonna be important for the decision makers to be much more diverse than they are by sector that they represent, by race and ethnicity and by gender. And so this is a campaign that I think really is tackling this intersection of economic and political power head on. And then the other is a set of exploratory work that we're doing on the basic income and this is a conversation that's happening in think tanks and in Silicon Valley and happening around a number of kinds of concerns. The robots are coming and there's not gonna be any work. The robots are coming. We're gonna make a whole lot of money but all these people are not gonna have work and they're gonna come after us. Like there are a number of different and it's a great opportunity to get rid of the social safety. Like there's a ton of ways in which people are coming at basic income. For us, the point of fighting for basic income is to expand the safety net that we have in order to ensure that everybody regardless of whether they have access to full-time employment or not has a standard of living that is decent. That it is a way of, in our vision, of reclaiming some of the profits that corporations have been able to reap because of the public investment and reinvest those in communities. And I think that the ways in which we're thinking about beginning to engage in this conversation and beginning to engage in this fight are ways that set the terms precisely in order to rebalance both the economic and political power. Great. Thank you. I really appreciate having those examples of actual, like what clicks, right? When you're talking about these kinds of things. Sabeel, do you wanna? Yeah, I don't wanna take up too much time. I'll just, so thank you. Those are great comments. I was scribbling madly as you guys were talking. Maybe I'll just say a couple of sort of thematic things that came out that I think maybe are helpful to emphasize. So the first is this idea of values and vision, right? I think we tend to think often in terms of policy specifics and campaigns and elections. And that's all important. But I think one of the things I'm trying to get at with this book is that there is a bigger moral vision and narrative about what progressivism means and ought to mean. And that's kind of, I think needs to be a sort of north star, right? As we're thinking about the specific policy tools or campaigns, right? And I think that's really important. The second thing to sort of pick up on, and this came up in a lot of Chena's comments, among others, is this idea of when we're thinking about economic policy, again, there's a, I think for a lot of progressives, there's a tendency to think in terms of fine tuning, right? How do we tinker with the system here and there to sort of nudge it in a more equitable direction? I think part of what I'm trying to get at is let's set that aside and let's kind of think about what the deep structures are. What are the policies that add up to a constrained sense of economic possibility for communities, workers, consumers, what have you, and who are the power centers that are sort of getting in the way of a more inclusive economy than let's get at that structure, right? And so finance is a part of it, antitrust is a part of it, there are a lot of labor laws and part of there are a lot of different ways to get at that, but as an approach, I think that's sort of where I want us to get to. And then the third theme is to close is about sort of how hard it is to do this in a democratic way, right? And I think each of you picked up on that in different ways. I think for that, I would just say that, yes, it is hard. And I think part of what I'm hoping for is this idea that, well, democracy isn't really one thing, it's an ecosystem. And it requires a lot of us to invest in it. So that means organizing on the ground, but it also means as a policymaker, we think of policymakers in terms of their, what's their relevant expertise, right? Are they an expert in this topic? I'd be almost more interested or as interested in, do they have some of those, that skill set in being the counterpart to the kinds of mobilizing and participation organizing that we want to make the policy process inclusive? Like that's a skill too. And it's one that we undervalue in our policy makers. But by counterpart, you mean not like the enemy of that, but like the people who can receive that, like, what is it to be a good absorber? Right, and so some of the examples I give in the book are when you, how might we design policies that create these sort of on-ramps for participation, create hooks and levers that communities can use to sort of plug into the process that might otherwise be very opaque and hard to grapple with, right? And that requires a shift on the part of organizing, but it also requires a shift on the part of the policy makers themselves. So I'll stop there. I'm sure there's a lot more for us to talk about. Well, before we open it up, I think there are a couple themes that we kind of haven't touched on, that I just wanna flag for as we go forward. One is, I mean, this book, it seems like it's important to reclaim the idea of freedom and human autonomy and agency as not just the territory of libertarians who oppose government action. And they often, like as if the only encroachment on liberty could be government. And I just think it's really important. I think the book does that. I think there are a lot of areas where it's almost revelatory. Like when you talk to people about, I'm totally fast, I do a lot of work on campaign finance reform. You know, the idea that, you know, a quarter of employers are talking to their employees about their political choices, encouraging them on how to vote, things like that. Sometimes quite assertively, that's a significant encroachment on political freedom that we never hear that, you know, we're trying to raise that up a little bit, but it's super important. The other element that I think is important here is, is creating structures that actually create the kind of consent around major changes that was a feature of the New Deal consensus. So I, you know, the way I sometimes summarize that is the, you know, like the, you know, we're obviously was still, we're still bearing the weight of the Affordable Care Act. There is not consensus around it. It's complicated. You know, if you go back seven years, and we had some kind of process that involved much more public deliberation and engagement with, what are the, you know, take a room like this, do it 10,000 times. Like here are your options. Leave things as they are, this, this. Maybe you might not get to a different result, but maybe you get to a result that more people felt they had had some role in and that that maybe had some, has some power to create policies that are less fragile and contested. And I think they're fragile and contested, partly because we kind of live in constant fear in the workplace about, you know, what could go wrong, how we might lose our health coverage and things like that. So those are just a couple of things that I wanted to. Yeah, please. Very quickly on that. I think those are great. And it speaks to this other sort of worry that I have in the book or goad that I have in the book, which is there is a strain of progressive anti-democracy, right? I mean, there's a way in which a lot of the ways that progressives think about policy and campaigns and missions is skeptical at best of what it means to sort of open the Pandora's box of democratic participation, engagement, and action. I think that's one of the things that I'm trying to push on, right? That's not to say that it's easy at all or that it's always gonna produce outcomes we like. And I think especially after this election cycle, we're sort of at risk of giving up on democracy as an idea. But to me, one of the underlying lessons of this election is to me, it actually shows how impoverished our democratic practice is that the election is playing out in this way. So to me, this is a call for sort of finding more ways and better ways of giving communities voice over their economic and political futures. And because we tend not to do that. Yeah. That thought was worth the price of admission here. Any other reactions to any of this before we open it up to the broader? We can open it up, we can open it up. Yeah, so raise your hand if you have a question. Please wait for Cheyenne to bring the microphone all the way in the back, sitting on the... Thank you. My name is Jamar Meyers Montgomery. So thank you for coming. My question is, how do we as citizens gain power when it seems that profit interests run counter to our own interests? And the fact is a lot of us work for the same companies whose interests run counter to ours. So how do we actually gain power in a system like that when we depend on these same companies to help us feed our families, close ourselves and provide housing for us? That's a good question. You wanna start? It's on you. The answer, no. So I mean, I think that there's... The answer is organized. I mean, I think that it's a facile answer. And I think it's something that we've been struggling with across, like labor unions have been struggling with it. Community-based organizations have been struggling with it. And I think that we have to keep struggling with it because I do think that there's a way in which as community members and as workers organizing together around the needs of the community. I mean, whether it's your very immediate community or the national community is a piece of the answer. The reason I keep struggling is because it is the case that we haven't built the power to really push the economically powerful. And so I think that we all struggle with, right, like that's, I think in part, why we often talk about the small battles. I believe, and I mean, I would be interested in other thoughts on this, that for a long time we haven't shared a vision. And that because we haven't shared a vision, we haven't imagined the structures that we need to accomplish that vision together and the steps that it will take us to get there. I think that we're getting there. I mean, I do think that we're getting there. And in some ways, you know, I think that there are ways in which the starkness of this particular election season has, right? Like, I mean, the way that populist progressivism has risen and reactive progressivism, I mean, sorry, reactive populism has risen suggests that people are starting to have that vision and are starting to really want that vision. But I think that it is also like, we have to practice the skills of building power in different places, so. So, I'd say a couple very quick things. And it's part of this like pivoting off of how civil closed. But then also what is the broader vision that we might share? One way of putting this, one way I sort of, you know, glibly put it is that the alternative to neoliberalism is democracy, right? We've had neoliberalism for a really, really long time. One of the things neoliberalism does is it sort of forts democratic processes and takes really important decisions out of the hands of democratically elected officials and of the populists. The alternative is not sort of more regulation on a worn out social democratic model. The alternative is democratic empowerment in various forms. To go sort of far down to the ground, another reason why is it so hard for people to take action? I mean, we have profound protections for political protest in the United States, right? Obviously, they're restricted in many ways that are bad, but still it's a fairly open society. The ability to speak politically and to act politically is available to all. Take citizens united off the table. I'm just talking about protest here for a moment. Well, you know, if we're in, and this gets to something that Connie was just saying, if you are working 60 hours a week or you're working 50 hours a week and taking care of children or a parent or a relative the rest of the time, you're not going to have time to engage in any sort of democratic process or deliberation. So one thing we ought to be thinking about in addition to our right to leisure is simple stuff like publicly funded childcare, publicly funded elder care, right? Ways to take those burdens off of individual families where they really should not be resting which would open up a tremendous amount of time for people to engage politically more. No, nothing after that. And somebody sort of using the example you gave writing your question, right? There are a bunch of different pieces that combine to make that sense of disempowerment, and we need to sort of tackle each of them. So you mentioned sort of the corporation that we all work for. Well, for progressives like Brandeis, corporate power was a threat to democracy for exactly that reason, right? Not for the campaign finance reason, although there was that concern too, but for this idea that you can't have a democracy where certain actors have so much outside control without any kind of the checks or balances we would expect of say a government institution, right? And this idea that private actors had state-like powers, but were not subject to checks and balances was one of the things that got sort of early 20th century progressives up in arms, right? So part of it is we need to sort of bake in more forms of kind of accountability for private power, right? And then the other side of that ledger is what Connie and Brishen were talking about, right? It's building up the capacity of communities to exercise political influence. Part of that is organizing. Then the last part of the equation, right? I think is this idea of reforming our institutions, right? You can organize and mobilize, but then you need a place to go with your claim. You need an institution lever that you can press on or target some policy lever that will kind of respond to the needs that you have. And so these are, so there are at least three, probably many more like aspects that produce, right? That sense of disempowerment and we need to sort of unpack each of them. Can I just ask one thing, I'm sorry. I also think that when we talk about organizing, like organizing in organization makes a difference. So organizing in the moment is powerful. Organizing over the long term has the chance of actually shifting power. And so I just wanted to throw that in. Right, and this is also, I mean, in a way this is a little bit of a question about labor law and the role of unions because I'm always struck by, we are very dependent on the companies we work for, but I kind of feel like people working for GM in the 1950s did not feel like their interest were the same as those of GM, although they sort of were, but they basically viewed it as a big pool of profit that they should get more of and more voice in the workplace. And we're much more tied in now in a kind of dangerous way, even where there are unions, I think, to the interest of the corporation. I think there was another question right in the back there, Shane, right where you are. Reporter from Voice of America, I'd like to direct our conversation to the ongoing election. And both of, I think two of the panelists mentioned the populace is on the rise in both the United States and also European. So I'm just wondering why it is the case and also does that mean that democracy is at its self-correcting now or something else, should we worry about that? Thank you. So I can maybe start, I'm curious what the rest of you think about this. So why populism is on the rise now? I mean, so I think it's not a coincidence that, I mean, right now we're sort of preoccupied with the sort of fall campaign, right, which has pitted a sort of right wing exclusionary populism against, you know, whatever we might call sort of a mainstream sort of traditional liberal candidate. But the spring campaign had the cleavage on the other side, right, the sort of Sanders-Clinton primary was this battle over what a left populism looks like and how that challenges a lot of the way we're used to thinking about policy and economy. I think, you know, why now, I mean, there are a lot of longer term things that have been building towards this moment, right? I mean, a lot of us have talked about the New Deal. I mean, you know, it wasn't just the financial crisis in 2008, though I think that was a big spark for creating our current environment, but there are a lot of ways in which, you know, the 20th century approach to the economy has been failing for a while now, right? Communism and left behind, what we now talk in the language of inequality has been building for many decades actually, and I think we're just sort of now seeing the breaking point, right, where I mean, that's what I mean by this sense of, like, you know, things are up for grabs, right? These, you have long periods of, if you take a long historical view, it's sort of what we might call a punctuated equilibrium view, like there are long stretches where things are kind of plugging along and there's a consensus about how we should operate and then sort of the pressures mount and then finally sort of break, and that's where we are now, I think where we haven't settled on what the new model is, and so that's why kind of everything feels very tumultuous. So I'd add a couple things to that, I totally agree. I think there's a couple factors, I'd put it this way. So one is over the last 30, 40 years, many people have not had any experience, like meaningful positive experience with democratic institutions. In the United States, this is always hard because it's a really, really big country, so it's hard, you know, you can engage at the local level or the state level maybe, but engaging at the national level is just quite difficult, unless you have some sort of intermediary institution, that's a role that unions played for a very long time, that was a way for working people, or at least, you know, a segment of working people, to access political power and engage in politics, but with unions in decline and many other secondary associations in decline, there's just less of that. So I think that's one, and it's compounded by the fact that in the last 30 years, in both the US and Europe, we've built these kind of, or globally in Europe, I should say, we've built these institutions that just aren't especially democratic, that it actually have profound power over people's lives. So, you know, two key ones, I think, are the WTO and the European Union. You know, WTO is obviously approved by national governments, but trade rules are set by international elites without much input from people who are impacted by them. The European Union is viewed by, you know, as far as I can tell, everyone in Europe, as a distant technocratic body that does not reflect democratic principles, and as a result is then dominated by elites, especially in Germany, but you know, elites throughout all of Europe. Add to that, and you know, we haven't talked about it much yet. In the US, you know, very, very clearly, and also in Europe quite clearly, is the question of simple racism, right? The elevation of Obama to the presidency, I think, provoked profound status anxiety in a significant swath of the white population in the US. The opening of borders in Europe sparked very similar status anxiety among workers in many, many countries in Europe, because workers are coming, you know, lawfully and unlawfully, well before the refugee so-called crisis in the EU, there was tremendous anxiety about Eastern Europeans moving west, and quote-unquote taking jobs from people in those countries. And that, I think, is a big root of the right-wing populism that you're seeing in both the US and in Europe, but I really think we can't lose sight of the fact that we have also built some extremely powerful institutions that are not democratically accountable in classic ways, and that that feeds into a sense of disempowerment among a tremendous number of people. Can I actually press? I mean, this is a great question. I don't want to cut off the floor, but I'm interested in obviously what one of you, I think you were to be called radical exclusionary populism, and this populism is really very much about particular populations that are the, it's racism, and it's about, it's got targets. And I think the question for progressive populism is does it need a target? So to me, I think there's a, one channel is Bernie Sanders, it's the billionaires and the millionaires, and in a way there's a kind of naming names of that kind of populism, and then there, like Hillary Clinton's approach to politics does not name names. There are problems to be solved, and I'm wondering is there a kind of, is there a populism in a way, I feel like your book is late, is there a populism that's built around collectively solving problems and doesn't have to put resentment at its center? It doesn't have to replace this resentment with a different kind of, not to defend the millionaires and billionaires necessarily, but you know. That's a great question, and I think sort of, I want to say both, or both and, right? I mean, a big theme for me in the book is that progressives do, there are villains in the story, right? Finance was a villain. We, for several decades, systematically rejiggered the economy in a way to prioritize the interests of particular economic classes, social classes, and corporate actors, and the current inequalities prices didn't just, it's not like a force of nature, it's a product of policy, and so we do need to name names in a sense, but I think that, but once you've named the names and identified sort of the villain, what is the response to that? And that's where this idea of democracy as a way of solving collective problems comes in, right? So the problem-solving part, I think, yes, that's right, these are public problems and we want to solve them collectively through kind of a combination of institutions and organizing and so on, but we have to call the problem what it is, and we can't just assume that it's, the tinkering of the gears that is, you know, we're just modifying on the edges. And into that, I think that naming, like the millionaires and billionaires and gazillionaires is valuable. I think naming the ways in which the millionaires and billionaires and gazillionaires have rigged the political system is also important, and I think, like, I would take your sentence to be all one step further, which is it's not just policies, but it's like policies people made. And so, like, we need to sort of identify the history and remind people, like, we can undo it. Like, we can make different decisions and then how do we go about doing that? Like, I actually don't think that naming names is necessarily the same as resentment. Like, clearly there's anger and, but I do think that there's, I think that progressive populism is hopeful, and not about resentment. Very quickly to that, you know, Vernon Roller, I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name right, apologies. His definition of populism, which he says is clearly right when populism, is that it's anti-elitist, but then also anti-pluralist, that it does not see a need for compromise, doesn't see a need for, you know, negotiation within a diverse society. I think progressive populism is anti-elitist, but it is, in fact, pluralist, right? In operation it will, you know, recognize sort of liberal pluralism. Just for reference, for people who want to look up, are you referring to Warner Mueller's, this is his essay in the Boston Reviews? Yes, and it was a forthcoming book as well. So anybody who wants to look that, Boston Reviews. And just billing on that really quickly, I think we have a tradition of this as well in American progressive history, I mean, so yes, there are some versions of populism in the late 1800s, early 1900s were also tied to, for example, Jim Crow and anti-immigrant sentiment, much like it is in the 2016 version, but if you look at the history of some of the things I find really fascinating is that, you know, there was a moment, a brief moment, to be sure, where, for example, the labor movement in the late 19th century was trying to build bridges with the abolition movement. If you look at how the civil rights movement morphed into the welfare rights movement in the 60s and 70s, you see a similar attempt to sort of unite economic inclusion and racial social inclusion. And I think that's, I mean, I'm a hopeful person, I think that's kind of the opportunity for the taking now. I mean, if you look at some of the language that, for example, in the movement for Black Lives policy agenda that they put forth, a lot of that is about structural economic change, right? It talks about basic income, it talks about antitrust and market concentration. It talks about finance as a driver of economic and racial exclusion. So there's a lot here that can be genuinely universal and distinctively progressive and not necessarily reactionary. But on that, I think that one place where we need to be very mindful is about naming race and naming where there are particular disproportionate impacts, disproportionate intent to the policies and what that legacy means today. And I think too often it's easy to sort of say, you know, we're the good guys and we're universal and it's all good, but we have to name race. We have about 15 more minutes in the front, Cheyenne, Rick Collenberg. Sorry to make you run around. Thanks. Hi, I'm Rick Collenberg with the Century Foundation. So this was a great discussion, thank you very much. When you were talking at the beginning, it struck me that this critique sounded like one that would apply most powerfully to Mitt Romney rather than Donald Trump. And so I was thinking, you know, it kind of, and I agree with the critiques of both, but you know, it was Citizens United and Domination by Powerful Corporations. And I agree with that critique. But this year it seems like it's something very different. It's a challenge to democracy from white working class nationalism that is scary and it's in a different way. But as the discussion progressed, it seemed like you were able to tie that all together. So maybe if you could spell that out for me a little more clearly, because I think there may be a connection between Romney's suppression of unions and then what we're seeing today with Trump. Yeah, so I mean, I'm sure all of us have thoughts on this. It's a great question. I'll just say kind of very briefly, there's a connection and there's a tension, right? So I think the connection is, so Heather McGee had this great piece in the nation. I'm forgetting her co-author now. Anyway, Ian Henry Lopez, of course. They had this great article in the nation a couple months ago where they gave the sort of pithy explanation that racism created the middle class and racism dismantled the middle class. And by that what they mean is that there was a racial component to the New Deal settlement of the 20th century. But there's also a kind of racial subtext to the dismantling of the safety net and the kind of economic deregulation ethic that we maybe associate with sort of someone like Romney or that wing of modern day conservatism. So that is a point of continuity between kind of Romney and conservatism and Trumpian conservatism if we can call it that. But I do think there is a disjuncture between these two. I mean, one of the things that's been really important to watch is how much of Trump's rhetoric basically jettisons the kind of free market libertarian aspects of American conservatism and how that's sort of part of their argument. And to me that's an indicator of just how critical it is to advance a progressive inclusionary critique of those same economic decisions that served one set of economic interests at tremendous cost for so many others. So I think there's continuity but there's also disjuncture and the challenge for progressives is we're sort of fighting on both fronts, right? We were fighting on the economic front but we're also fighting on the front of social and racial inclusion. Thank you. My name is Paula Stern and I'm sitting here wondering what you make of and how you would improve if you felt it needed. The various agenda items that are part of the plans that Hillary Clinton has laid out which should be an outline, should she get to be elected next week for what her administration will focus on. She's had a great deal of discussion about diversity, about particularly race as well as gender and inclusion throughout her economic programs that she's talked about, whether it's workforce preparedness and education or technology policy where there's a very strong plank on underrepresented and gender diversity as a role in innovation. So I'm wondering what you make of what we hopefully we'll see next week. Sorry, I mean I guess I don't know that I can speak specifically to Hillary's policies but I mean I guess there's a couple different things coming into life. One is that I think that to end up in the kind of democracy we want to see, you need more than just the policies, you need the strong civic participation in a real and meaningful way and that's why a number of people here have been talking about the importance of unions and institution building and that kind of thing. I think that part of the vision of society that just involves seeing a certain policy platform being enacted when somebody becomes president is that it's not, that ends up with a set of policies that are great but don't involve the enough democratic engagement and accountability. I also think there are probably ways in which you end up sort of tackling some things around the edges and not addressing specific large concentrations of power that you might end up wanting to deal with more broadly. One thing I would say just which is sort of related but not directly to your question is I do think that there are ways in which we can have policies around inclusion but the structure of the economy is not one that she's tackling and so the ways in which employers are distancing themselves from employees, the ways in which they're pushing down the risk of doing business onto workers so that workers get sent home if there's not enough traffic or get called in but didn't know that they needed to get childcare or were scheduled to work but don't come into work and that kind of thing. Like all of that doesn't change because we have workforce programs that are feeding people in or are targeting towards certain industries that look like growth industries if we're not also tackling the shape of the labor market and the ability for workers in a very generic sense to bargain for better working conditions and so I think that those are good steps. I think that Tashaina's point, like they're insufficient given the larger context and that's a context that really is about this intersection of economic and political power together. I'm just to add to part of it is also, I mean these policies all evolve over time and part of the question is not just what the policies are now but how will they evolve and if there aren't sufficient counterweights to certain concentrations of power are they gonna end up evolving in ways that we like? I would put a couple of specific things on the table in addition to everything that's just been said. So one is obviously we're making a lot of traction on the minimum wage but as was just pointed out that's not gonna help that much if people aren't actually classified as employees. So that's one thing we absolutely have to tackle. One way to do it is to expand the definition of employment under federal statutes. Another way to do it is to simply have some sort of a contract type mandate that says you cannot purchase labor for less than X amounts and those are some of the things that I think we ought to be talking about. Yet another is to start imposing liability throughout supply chains. So when a large company is purchasing goods from another company in the US at what point does the large, from a small company at what point does the large company have some duties toward those workers even if that relationship looks nothing like what we typically call employment. There are some models of that under the Fair Labor Standards Act but I think we could expand them quite a bit. Another would be wage boards and this is actually a policy I've been meaning to mention here because it's actually such a great illustration of some of the dynamics that Seville kind of was pointing to in the book. So what's a wage board? It's the state, New York just did this, some other states have it on the books. The State Department of Labor has the power to mandate wages within particular sectors upon petition from a group of citizens. That does a couple things. One, it can basically set a floor below wages which is incredibly important especially when it's difficult to engage in collective bargaining. And so in New York they set the wage for fast food workers at 15, I think, right? So all fast food workers in New York will now be covered by that. You don't have to go through the legislative process, rather it's delegated authority to an agency. Almost as importantly though it's a site for public organizing and deliberation around what work should look like. And one that then has this impact of affecting an entire industry whereas if you're organizing a union in one particular area you typically represent only a small number of workers in that area rather than all of the workers. So wage boards is another thing I'd like to see a lot more talk about at the federal level to actually start to address this. I'm struck by the irony that a number of the things that you're talking about kind of follow on the sort of last year of Obama which is the recognition of the kinds of things that make a big difference that can be done through executive action. Wage boards cannot, you need an active Congress. Wage boards cannot, some of the other things can. The overtime rules obviously were huge in changing the relationship of people to work. I mean monumental and it's really strike and I think that's really important and I think that's the track that we will continue on. It is of course less democratic. Right. Well less democratic in a sense of some of what you're describing isn't necessarily, I mean a wage board has another means in but it's bypassing this, the formal ledges. It'd be delegated authority from Congress, right? So yeah, it'd be democratic in that sense but then sets up a democratic process. But I think it raises an important sort of, it is attention for thinking about sort of how we operationalize some of this stuff. The only thing I'll add is that, so for a lot of these regulatory agencies that where we might run some of these types of policy decisions about the labor market or about consumer protection or antitrust or any of these kinds of things. You can think about that as a top down kind of non-democratic, technocratic sort of way of doing things or there are plenty of ways that they can be, these processes can be run that engage various communities, right? I think that's, the wage board example is a great example and that's part of what's compelling about it and I think one of the sort of more wonkier themes for me anyway in the book, so I teach administrative law in a law school and so I'm in the weeds on a lot of this stuff but I think kind of one of the takeaways for me is that there's actually a lot of leeway and a lot of tools within the administrative process that if we so chose, we could use harness in a more sort of participatory and representative fashion within the terms of how agencies run today. Now there's a limit how far we can do that without legislative action but that's I think sort of an area of, yeah. Yeah, but yeah, just to say one more thing, just picking up on things that both Freshen and Seville said, I mean I think one of the other important questions though when you're thinking even about policy substance is what policies are there that then create those levers and empower other people so other than wage boards, one of the other things that people have been discussing for example within the future of work context has been the idea of can policies that let third party entities provide benefits also be a way to then fund worker organizations. So for example, can unions and worker organizing groups end up providing unemployment insurance and other kinds of insurance to their retirement insurance, what not to their members, sort of like the way folks do in Nordic countries and is that also then a way that those groups become more powerful and can play more of a role in holding in check government later. So I think there are some ways in which, you know it's again it's sort of interesting not just to think about sort of what is the substance of a policy like oh this is a way to provide unemployment insurance but how does this then build organizations that as they grow more powerful in the future can continue to hold policy in check. Okay, I think we're gonna wrap up, this is wonderful. I'm really thrilled that everybody could come. I wanna thank Seville, Connie, Shayna and Gerson and thank you Seville for writing such a great book and there are more copies out there. Okay, thank you.