 Welcome to economics and beyond I'm Rob Johnson president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking I'm here today with Thea Lee the president of the Economic Policy Institute and formerly a trade economist who spent over 20 years at the AFL-CIO as the deputy chief of staff and director of policy Thea thanks for joining me thanks for having me Rob well as some people may know I have the good fortune of having served on EPI's board for some time so I get to come once or twice a year down and and get invigorated by the things that you and your colleagues are doing and I'll be able to explore some of that with you today but I think EPI is a very very important organization an important voice and it's never been more important than it is right now so I think we should get right down to it we've coming to the end of June the 2020 this pandemic is what I will call unmasked many things and then a deep dive I'm curious what is it that you see has been revealed what fault lines need to be corrected what do you see happening that's encouraging what do you see not happening that you would like to underscore and urge our leaders to embrace and put us on a trajectory to a better life in a better world thank you Rob for that question covered a little bit of ground there and I'd like to say to have you again and Rob I just like to say how proud we are to have you on the board of the Economic Policy Institute I couldn't be more excited to lead this organization at this particular moment history where I feel like the team of economists and experts that we have an EPI have really done some extraordinary work both trying to understand what's happening in the middle of this economic crisis and then also trying to put forward the kinds of solutions that we need so we all know that we can can and should blame the Trump administration for the extraordinary corrupt incompetent inhumane handling of the public health crisis but it's also true the sad truth is that our economy was woefully unprepared in every deep sense of the word for this pandemic and even though the economy was by very many superficial benchmarks healthy before the crisis with low unemployment and decent economic growth there are a lot of ways in which that health was shallow and illusory and I think for us as we think about what do we want going forward how do we get out of the crisis it's really important that we understand the roots the deep roots of the dysfunctionality of the US economy so that we can think about how we're going to fix it going forward and we see this dysfunctional labor market where wages and working conditions for the vast majority of workers were essentially stagnant for decades while with the rewards were concentrated at the very top both of the labor market and in capital and just not just for CEOs but also for the finance sector and other things and meanwhile we saw the decades of erosion of power for working people tax on unions and workers rights the erosion of the minimum wage and other labor standards the deterioration of job quality fair scheduling workplace safety health care retirement security and the rise of the so-called gig economy where employers became so aggressive and creative in finding wages to evade responsibility as employers and all facilitated by conservative pro corporate anti-worker courts but it's also true that as we see all of those weaknesses and we see the rise of globalization and trade deals and outsourcing to further imbalance the balance of worker bargaining power the growth of monopoly powers you've talked about in some of your previous podcasts especially in finance and tech where the the amassing of political and economic clout further was used to to rig the rules for everybody else and then the attacks on government the very concept of government over the last several decades have left us with a tattered social safety net and a government that has at largely abdicated its responsibility in important areas of the economy like regulation child care and health care and then the results of course in terms of racial equity and justice these are the deep wounds that we have been living with for so many decades and when the pan when we woke up one morning in the midst of a pandemic we could see I think more clearly than ever what the new truths were about exactly how rotten this economy had been for so many people and I hope that what that's doing so this you asked the question about hope but I hope that the the clarity that we can have in the middle of a pandemic about the failure of the economic policies of the last several decades will help us form consensus about how to move forward in a very different direction going forward so I'd say the first truth that we discovered in the pandemic is that a wealthy country United States that doesn't provide universal health care or paid sick leave or reliable child care for the majority of workers puts everybody's life at risk that we have as a society where people cannot afford to stay home when they're sick they cannot afford to stay home when their kids are sick and they can't afford to take care of themselves and their basic health care needs without risking bankruptcy that is all insane in a world that has been and will be ravaged by these kinds of pandemics it's insane in any kind of world the second big truth is that the global supply chains that people were still life about for so long the sort of I think the received elite wisdom around globalization was that more is always better and that anything you can buy cheaper abroad you ought to do so it doesn't really matter what the consequences are for workers or for the environment and now I think those global supply chains are really fragile and when something goes wrong it could be a hurricane or an earthquake or a pandemic and so I hope that that will give us the ability to rethink the kinds of multilateral trade rules and institutions that we need to put in place as well over kind of domestic choices that we're going to make around taxes or around government procurement policies or around trade policies and third about labor markets we see that essential workers the people who have to keep going to work during the crisis have so little bargaining power that they're almost treated like indentured servants and we have to figure out how we can make sure that every worker can have the confidence to go to a safe job and to be remunerated when they are forced to take risks and our labor markets as they're currently constituted after we for decades wrecking workers rights destroying unions and eroding workers voice means that we we don't have those chances but the good news the last and then the the third piece is the racial inequity which is magnified in this crisis that every form of inequity has been magnified in the crisis but I think we see in particular that in every dimension of the disparate impact of the pandemic on black people in particular but also latinos other people of color Asians who are facing a lot of discrimination in this crisis that with respect to health care and with respect to neighborhoods education jobs the kinds of jobs that different people have we see that we have magnified tremendously the already staggering inequality and injustice that we have and those are I think our marching orders going forward Rob so let me um leave it there but also I guess one last point to make here is about government policy I think one of the things we've learned is that government policy does work if we let it and we have needed some tremendous intervention by the federal government with respect to unemployment insurance and state and local aid and that's an area that I want to talk more about because I think we see in you and I both know in terms of Keynesian economic policy response that the government can step in at a time when demand and supply are shattered and the economy is wrecked and replace some of that income and that that is the right thing to do the big question though is whether our political leaders and policymakers have the courage and the wherewithal to do that at the scale needed going forward well I you've you cover a lot of ground in a relatively short time but I want to start in a place that uh how to say reflects the fact that you're based in Washington DC and see things inside the Beltway at how I say with the bird's eye view right there in 2011 on political a reporter then named Ben Smith who's now at the New York Times I believe he he talked to a democratic policy official who was defending off the record the Obama administration because he essentially said the American people are not advocating like at the time of the New Deal for more government they are actually very skeptical about government and at the time there was a gentleman who appeared on a blog named Stuart Zekman who was a musical artist is my recollection and he made a podcast which friends have shared with me and this is in the aftermath of the financial bailouts and so forth that I worked on quite closely and Stuart Zekman said if you look at the Gallup surveys this anonymous gentleman who's in the political article is correct meaning most Democrats are skeptical about government but the question was why and when you go into the Gallup polls the nature of skepticism about governance was not about the effectiveness of government policies meaning the potential it was about whether government was captured whether the money politics lobbying PR type system had done what I will call commodified social design and as income and wealth distribution became more concentrated as corporate power through Citizens United and others was unleashed in the electoral process representatives of both parties needed to obey wealth in order to survive in elections and so the question I mean I guess I'm asking you is we went for many many years really 40 years of a deteriorating system in terms of the quality of representation what do we need to do to repair that system so it can be responsive to a broad spectrum of American society many of which I will say the fault lines you did a beautiful job of presenting in our first few minutes that's a great question and it's one I think about all the time in terms of how is it and I think there's two issues here one is about communication and packaging where I feel like the American people have just been miseducated for many decades about the role of government and you know starting with maybe the Ronald Reagan joke I'm here the scariest words in the English language is I'm here from the government I'm from the government and I'm here to help you and and all the way to Robert Norquist talking about we're going to shrink the government down to the size that we can drown it in the bathtub but I think the Norquist point is not even so much shrinking the government it's also wrecking the government so that if you wreck the government and you make it corrupt and you make it answerable to wealthy interests and corporate interests then it is true that people will become cynical and they will become just desperate about whether government can help and so there's two differences in the abstract can and should we have a different kind of government sector and I actually think even in econ 101 we learned that there's a role for government in terms of addressing externalities that is when in the course of producing things but either bad or good things happen there aren't captured by the price system and then also in producing public goods but and then economists can spend a lot of time arguing with each other about what is there isn't an externality what is there isn't a public good but it seems almost it's just logical common sense that there are many things that the private sector cannot and will not and does not do well and some of them have to do with you know organizing labor markets so that there is a balance of bargaining power so that workers can have a countervailing voice against the wealthy and powerful corporation and that is what the role of unions or collective bargaining can and should be in the economy and in the labor market and but also things like climate change where I don't think even rabbit libertarians believe that profitable for-profit companies acting in their own interest will address a big system-wide problem like climate change and the same thing with public health and the pandemic that it's not reasonable to expect an individual company to be able to address public health by itself we need you need a government to to step in and do that and in terms of social safety net or regulatory issues it it seems like it is common sense and necessary for that but first and I guess this is maybe the the sequencing of things we do have to recapture our government and that's why the kinds of voting reforms and democracy protections that we're discussing right now are so important that if we allow corporations to and the wealth and the wealthy to use their already sizable economic clout to buy elections and to buy elected officials then we can't expect governments to make those right decisions so we need to start by having a really vigorous defense of our democracy and then we need to use the power of democracy to cut through the crap to cut through the kind of rhetorical tricks that are being used to confuse us when people when pollsters ask about you know do you like government or hate government that's sort of a dumb question but if they ask you know do you want a sidewalk you can walk on or clean air or do you want public services do you want decent schools and community healthcare a lot of people will say yes and so I think the pollsters haven't always been as maybe adept as they needed to be about trying to get underneath that question about government good government bad big government small government those aren't the right questions the question is really how do we use collective action and in the public sector to solve problems the private sector can't and won't well I I can bear witness in my own life to when the largest donor sector in the economy the financial sector got a bailout in 2009 we spawned a tea party and we spawned an occupy movement both right and left and we transferred majority from democrat this was in the obama administration to republican of the house in 2010 and then the senate and then the white house so there is a I think a sense that you you hit the nail on the head that people can be despondent about this government but not necessarily about the things that a government should provide to us that are public goods or the repair of externalities and I know a lot of people who I work with at the institute for new economic thinking and involved with us are terrified of our neglect of climate change and that's before the pandemic but it's it's a symptom of the same kind of dysfunction exactly and I've heard political folks say and I think it's really interesting that every election for the past several has been a change election that people want something different from what they've had and if you think about 40 years of wage stagnation and growing inequality then it's easy to see how people can become angry that we are eroding the american dream that the idea that people people born in america will live better than their parents did and that there are you know opportunities abounding for anybody who has the wherewithal and the energy and and the foresight to follow them and it almost feels like people have taken a sledgehammer to that dream over the last couple of decades and they have you know they have busted what what had been strong strong sectors and manufacturing with good jobs for the middle class that were unionized where people could not have a college education and yet really earn a decent living and maybe send their kids to college and buy a house and and see that kind of shared prosperity not for everybody and it's never been never like the united states had a perfect era because we haven't we've had a lot of discrimination and inequality and failures but we did for a while know how to build prosperity that was more shared and we were actually closing some of the racial wage gaps and wealth gaps in the 70s when some of those good jobs were there and then I think we let the the corporate sector have its way where they went after unions they globalized in the wrong way they cut taxes they deregulated they privatized they got almost everything they wanted and what they were left with ironically is an economy that's not actually that good for business either because it's a consumption driven economy and so if you start destroying consumers ability to earn a living by being greedier and greedier and greedier and taking more and more wealth and power into the hands of a small group of elite at the top of a multinational corporate pinnacle then you actually end up with an economy that isn't resilient that doesn't bounce back after a recession and that is never all that vigorous and that's kind of what we're seeing now so that's our challenge really is how do we rebuild an economy that's going to be good for working people and that may even be better for different kinds of business but part of what we need to do is have a a new mindset businesses have to be I think more take take the longer view and not try to squeeze out every penny from every worker in the short term I want to underscore for our listeners the amazing quality of the website that EPI has it's at www.epi.org and many many times in my own life when I give speeches presentation powerpoint and what have you I come to your website to illustrate the kind of phenomenon that's taking place and I've seen maybe a hundred times a graph that your organization produced about the trajectory of productivity and the trajectory of wages and how if you will wages flattened out while productivity continued to soar I've seen work that you've done on life expectancy and it's a very unusual thing to have an economy that's going up and life expectancy going down until you disaggregate and understand that the life expectancy going down is related to the fact that roughly 70 of the population income wealth benefits what have you have been going down since 1989 and that the top say 10 to 12 percent are making more than 100 percent of the gains so the upshot the ramification of our policies is that people are not being paid in correspondence to their productivity as traditional theory would suggest and furthermore the quality of life for a vast majority of people as measured by life expectancy or diseases of despair as an case and angustine emphasize suggests that how would I say a well-functioning democracy would pick a fight with that and correct it but we haven't been we haven't been able to get there but I think either your website for years has been unmasking the nature of the challenge and now the pandemic has how I say brought it to the surface thank you rob for that and I totally agree and I hope everybody will go check out our website at www.epi.org because I am constantly amazed I've been president of epi now for about two and a half years I came back to epi after about 20 years away at the AFL-CIO and I just you know we have about a dozen PhD economists a couple of lawyers a bunch of other super talented folks and these people understand data and they understand empirical work and what they've done during the camp pandemic what our team has been able to do is to just kind of take everything apart look at things by race by gender by age by occupation and just try to understand who's getting hurt how and as you say Rob I mean the amazing work that EPI did over many decades on the productivity wage gap I think really helped a lot of people understand when we talk about we use the words the economy the economy isn't one thing it's made up of a bunch of people and if there's massive growing inequality in that economy that is why the economy in quotation marks can't be healthy if a majority of people are seeing their living standards erode and and I think you know EPI is committed to one thing which is working people and that's what we put at the center of our analysis that's what we think all all of our policies should be about making sure that working people can have good jobs good wages good benefits and that that is actually at the end of the day what a strong economy needs not a lot of wealth concentrated at the top in a few hands and we see that in the pandemic that you know when we give people money to spend we when we increase the unemployment insurance payments for example that is money that goes straight into the economy that people go out and spend that right away and that helps keep the economy from tanking even further when you give money to rich people or you know give them another tax break or they have more money a lot of times it doesn't get spent because they don't need to um they put it in their gold bricks under their pillow or you know financial instrument but there's just a very different macro economic impact of about putting money in the hands of working people versus the wealthy I want to emphasize again related to your website you have put out a document that I've relied on for as long as I've been an economist which I think dates back to about 1982 uh which is called the state of working America and you have a network they call the urn network economic analysis and research network which provides data that's how would I say not just national averages but traces what's happening in each region so that people who are concerned about what's happening now they can read your analysis in your papers and so forth but they can also go see the data that illuminates these dysfunctions and these agendas that uh how I say are on the front burner yes the challenges we face now yes thank you for drawing attention to those things Rob because those are I think what EPI does so well the state of working America and all the databases underlying it are actually on our website part of what we do it's a service to humanity is to take these government databases but we clean them up and we try to make them more accessible to people we put them into different formats that people can check and you can check as you say not just national but by state you can check a lot of times whether it's wages or whatever it is if you want to look at look at the breakdowns by race or gender or age or education or occupation or region you can get all of that on our website so part of our job I think is to empower people and to educate them so that they aren't intimidated by economists who can sometimes be kind of snooty and sometimes also have sort of a conservative bent and so that's part of what we want to do the earn network the economic analysis and research network you talk about it's really important that these are around 55 state level organizations research advocacy policy organizations in about 43 states plus the district of columbia and each of those groups you can find them on the website so if you want to know in a particular state if there's an organization that is looking at these same kinds of issues at the state level this is a terrific resource for you and we're you know we're in the process of kind of building out and strengthening that network we're really proud of it we're also really proud of the work we're doing on race and ethnicity in the economy we have a program called pre the program on race ethnicity in the economy we're increasing the size and the scope of that program and i think particularly during the pandemic but really before that as well thinking about how do we how do we measure the disparate impact of the economic crisis and the health crisis on people of color and black people um and what do we do about it like you know do we need policies that are just class-based or do we also need to write in a racial dimension to the kind of policy solutions we're looking at and so we're our team is is really taking a close look at all those issues and we think there's a lot of really valuable stuff up there and we invite you i invite you to go check it out thanks brab well i think uh there are a number of people i know that work closely with you in particular valerie wilson is a brilliant analyst of the nature of the american race and economy issues and uh i know richard rostin has done some fascinating work for you yes indeed and uh i so i think i think there's what i guess i'm saying to our listeners is that you provide a public good not just your own analysis but you you give them access through the public good of the data sets or the data libraries that you create where they can they can go explore for themselves about what their concern is they can go explore what they can they can look at what you did and find out if they agree or disagree because you you go palms up and you give them everything that you're using so it adds to credibility and uh and it adds to the kind of illumination that lots of people can experience by drawing on those public goods that you provide thank you thank you robin we we really appreciate the funding we get from both foundations and unions and individuals um to be able to provide these kinds of databases to help people understand their own lives we have a couple of others that i think are really interesting to the family budget calculator tells you by county in all three thousand some odd counties in the united states um what does it take to have a decent but adequate standard of living for 10 different family types a single person up to a couple with kids and um and people i think have found that really useful for all sorts of things even if it's let's say bargaining contract and at the local level we also have a tax and spending explorer which is relatively new on our website which allows you to sort of drill down and look at different elements of the federal tax and spending system and find out what is the level of progressivity or the impact of those different pieces of of each element and i think that's going to be helpful people as we get into a big policy debate about you know what kind of changes do we need to the tax system going forward that's a great um a great resource so yeah i hope people will check it out and play with it a little bit and take a look at it we also have something on the top one percent by state and county so there's just a ton of resources on our website and i i hope people will spend some time taking a look thanks robert ring and i had mentioned valerie wilson but there are other people who i'm familiar with hidey shareholds robert scott on trade john schmidt your research director josh bivins there and i could go on and on but there are a lot of really highly capable and accomplished people you could name every single one of them uh rob and i would agree on you because we really do have a tremendous staff right now and they are churning out amazing work on a daily basis we have blog posts that go up every single day we have a pretty active social media set of accounts and um and each one of those individuals and more i don't want to start naming names i don't want to leave one single person out because really we have a terrific team and one of the things that's great it's like an inner intellectual critical mass that people are really pulling towards the port of each other and we have a learning community at epi people learn from each other every day and that's part of why i love working so on the horizon in light of this pandemic what new programs are you all opening up what is in your even if you haven't announced them yet what's on your wish list of things for your team to explore okay great question um i guess a couple of things pop up immediately one is i think we've learned about the unemployment insurance system in the crisis that we have like 50 creepy antiquated systems at the state level they don't coordinate with each other all that well and and they were i think too slow to be able and not nimble enough to be able to implement the program but on the other hand this is actually a pretty useful way of injecting money into a system that's needed at relatively short term so we'd like to see that system kind of reexamined because there were also changes made to eligibility for example during the crisis where gig workers or self-employed workers or people who hadn't been in the labor force very long all of a sudden were eligible for unemployment insurance and they aren't normally and we see that that really helped a lot during during this crisis so one thing to think about is maybe we should expand eligibility for unemployment insurance on a permanent basis not just temporary in the same thing with paid family leave the CARES Act or the FFCRA the the first virus relief act did extend temporary paid family leave to a lot of workers not enough but a lot of workers but that could be done also on a permanent basis you know i think obviously in terms when we think about the the role of the public sector infrastructure and public health and investing in a new energy economy those three things are all massively important and everybody seems that a lot of jobs have been destroyed and will be destroyed permanently over the course of the pandemic that's you know our way of life is going to change some things aren't going to come back to the same extent that they were before or even not not for the foreseeable future but the good news is that there are so many burning needs this is a moment for the government to step up and really expand its reach in terms of public health and contact tracing and having a permanent core of workers that can help make sure that we are all safe as we go back into the workplace and into the public space our infrastructure system is sorely neglected and but there are ways as we rebuild infrastructure that we can take into account energy needs good jobs training where things go and and i hope we will do that and make some massive investments there childcare for example we see everybody having to kind of scramble around to deal with child care issues and so those are those are some immediate things in terms of um trade policy i think it's also important that you know we need to figure out how does the u.s show up in the world what is how are we engaging with other countries around both trade and investment and financial flows and is there some kind of a coordination mechanism around these public health emergencies where instead of every country kind of hoarding and um in trying to figure out how to take care of its own needs can we have some kind of a mechanism where countries can be coordinated and supportive of each other but also have faith that the system is really going to work for them going forward but i think we need a whole different set of guidelines and rules for the global economy around workers rights and environmental protections and around public health that you know have have not been a priority for the past couple of decades um and then i think the most important thing and this is both at home and abroad is worker voice and worker power as i said before you know the corporate sector and the right wing have spent three or four decades trying to undermine worker voice and worker power and attack unions and implement anti-union anti-worker policies at both the state level and the federal level we need to completely reverse that because i think what we see now is that workers without a union or without some kind of collective voice and collective action are really at the mercy of their employer and of of a public health crisis and you know even something as simple as having nurses being able to get public personal protective equipment which should not be a heavy lift it should not be a hard thing we saw that unions were the ones that stepped in to do that when the the system really failed them so i think you know going forward and building a different kind of economy that is much more resilient and humane is within our reach but we have a lot of work to do and you know we have an election coming up in november and people will have a really important choice to make not just at the level of the presidency but at every level of government down to city council and dogcatcher and i think we should be asking questions about what are you know what are the priorities of the people running for office and who will they take care of come next i think yeah i think that's important let's talk a little bit you do a lot of work related to globalization and at inet we have a commission that's co-chaired by joe stiglitz and michael spence called the commission on global economic transformation and uh we tended to focus on a number of things i will call the four disruptors climate technology financialization and what i will call the destruction of the treaty of west failure meaning the nation state is a bit uh how would i say a bit weaker than advertised and people like joe stiglitz and danie rodrick on our commission are working on this question of in a world where globalization is taking place automation transformation of the structure of the economy is rampant how do you govern if you go up to the level of global governance then everything's under the roof but you may not be sensitive to what's happening in certain locales if you go down to the locality well the scope of the market is much larger than the domain of the sovereign and so there's things you can't control and a good friend of mine a chinese professor at jinghua university wang hui made a lecture that's both at burbitt college and he did at the trinto economic festival with inet sponsorship called the crisis of representation and he said you now have a place where government officials have to tell the people who elected them to curtail their demands otherwise technology financial capital and real tangible capital will pick up and fly off with wings and relocate somewhere else so the questions related to climate whereby are we are we going to the lowest common denominator where people don't have to pay for the kind of climate damage they do is something that i know is central to your work the labor conditions across countries become arbitrage where foreign direct investment goes where the labor costs are low or where the labor rights are not well defended and what my global commission is really talking about is how globalization is rendering the ability of nations to protect themselves uh how i say lessening that ability it's eroding that ability despondency about politics despondency about the narrowness of prosperity i think all of these things have a systemic element and it's difficult to see how we're going to bring it back into balance yes thank you rob those are some big enormous questions there and that is a lot of what i've spent most of my life working on is these issues about the the interplay between national democracy where you know we don't have democracy at the global level as you say we don't have a global parliament to adjudicate you know differences in minimum wage or environmental protections yet we are in a global economy as everybody likes to remind us constantly and for me i think the answer is that we need multilateral trading rules because we need to be able to come to agreement on what is a legitimate form of competition and what is not in other words we need to take something out of competition like slave labor or child labor or environmentally destructive production but in order to do that we all have to agree that that is that that is the right way so we've had the world trade organization which is our the home of the multilateral trade rules and yet that organization has been completely captured by global corporate interests and we see that you know certainly the united states is a big leader at the wto or has been in the past and yet through democratic and republican administrations i've i have personally seen the u.s government uh basically urged the wto to go and to continue in a direction of corporate um corporate enrichment and corporate power as opposed to these other things so i would say i would love to see a new conversation at the wto i mean you could destroy the wto but then you'd have to rebuild it so and right now it's at an impasse it's a paralyzed ineffective organization right now because it's lost credibility and it's lost its um its energy but i i would like to see a new north south alliance built at the wto with the leadership of the united states and i would say that there are four huge issues that countries cannot and should not resolve by themselves they need to resolve in an international forum and climate change is one of them you know you can't if one country moves forward rapidly to reduce emissions that's a really great thing and should be rewarded but if all the industry moves out of that country and moves to a place that has not instituted emissions controls then the world becomes dirtier and the emissions the global emissions grow and it's um and the country that did the right thing is punished for it and the workers and the business in that country are punished so there needs to be border adjustability there needs to be the ability for countries to take bold action on climate change and not be at a competitive disadvantage so that's the first one the second one is workers rights which is similar where the whole idea is that we have international consensus around core workers rights from the international labor organization freedom of association the right to bargain collectively prohibitions on child labor forced labor and discrimination and employment we've all agreed on these core workers rights and yet we don't enforce them and we allow both governments and businesses to profit from violation of workers human rights we need the trading system to make sure that that countries and companies cannot profit from violating workers rights and therefore that again that you can use border mechanisms and I think Danny Roderick had spoken about this also to offset if one country wants to have child slave labor their products may not cross the border and may not receive the kinds of free trade the benefits of free trade and I think the the last two things tax policy is the other one where you talked about you know if you don't have some kind of mechanism for addressing tax havens and so on then it becomes impossible every country and I think this is particularly true now needs to be able to have a tax base in order to provide public goods and take care of their citizens and if they're constantly being whipsawed by the threat of corporations or rich people moving from another country to avoid taxes that becomes very difficult to do and yet we don't have even a forum in which to to address that those kinds of I'd say anti-social anti-competitive behavior and currency manipulation is the fourth one where if countries are constantly manipulating and dramatically undercutting their currency as a way of getting a competitive advantage again it becomes impossible to have the the kinds of benefits of trade and goods and services that you want so that's my thought is that that we we can build multilateral rules for an international system that allow countries to make different choices at home but sometimes making a choice to wreck the environment or to violate work of rights means that you you can sell those goods at home but you you don't have access to international markets and that should be a really important inducement for countries to to come into line but we're pretty far that that's pretty blue sky we're pretty far from having any kind of international consensus to be able to move into that direction but I I would say that's where we need to go at the center of the wait my say global stresses you'd you'd mention the WTO and I remember at the end of the Obama administration not not long before they had two bills that were trade policy and I remember when Elizabeth Warren spoke at a conference I did on women finance and society in Washington White House officials became infuriated as though the public was not supposed to or the representatives in this case senator warn we're not supposed to discuss openly the provisions in that legislation and you had talked about essentially capture by the corporate world in the WTO it felt like we were so far off course at that time and as much as I have my regrets Donald Trump beat 15 republicans in Hillary Clinton by running around saying the system is rigged and anybody that saw the reaction to Elizabeth's dinner speech which she did at my conference about trade would have to agree with Donald Trump so that's a long-winded way of saying if Donald Trump is defeated in November of this year by a democratic candidate Joe Biden is the prospective nominee what do the Democrats have to do so though they don't bring us the despondency that produces which you might call the next version of Donald Trump in four to eight years that is the most important question Rob that you can ask because what we saw in 2016 was that Donald Trump stepped into a vacuum that democratic policy makers at the elite level had been unwilling to name this as a problem that you know we're losing jobs overseas and our policies are no good and we need to do something different we these trade agreements like NAFTA the North American Free Trade Agreement have been bad for working people so Donald Trump named it the problem of course is that he he surrounded his views in zenith racist rhetoric and and and a nationalist rhetoric when i'm not against you know policymakers thinking about what's good for the United States of America but i think there's a difference between looking for policies that will benefit and create good jobs in the United States of America and policies that are aimed to to hurt people in other countries which is i think Donald Trump likes to talk about it so he was able to do that because for a couple of decades leading democrats and particularly the presidential candidates had not had the courage to call out the system and and to really challenge a system that was good for corporations but bad for working people so i i would like to see democrats going forward in the next congress the next administration really stand for a reform of the global economic system and the global rules in a way that is not xenophobic and racist but is about building solidarity with certainly the AFL-CIO and the work the labor movement we think about lifting up workers in all countries whether it's China or Mexico or Bangladesh or France or Norway that when we look at reforming the rules the global system it's not about American workers winning and everybody else losing it's about working people globally being able to engage in the global economy without having their living standards and their wages and their public sector grounded dust so that's the goal and i think it's doable but but it will require letting go of some of the comfort blankets of the past of NAFTA or TPP or the WTO in the way that it has that that it exists now Pete DeFazio congressman Pete DeFazio just introduced a bill that would have taken the US out of the WTO but that bill i think is not going to see a vote unfortunately it was prevented from from getting a vote but i think we need to be unafraid of having a deeper conversation about restructuring global economic rules not exiting the global economy but rewriting those rules pretty dramatically around workers in the environment and the tax system in particular well at the at the frontier of this global interface has been US and China relations and i do think we still need collaboration between the United States and China particularly as it relates to the challenge of climate but i'm seeing in the press just in the last four or five days thomas freedman at the new york times did an op-ed piece china and america are heading towards divorce for 40 years the two countries had an unconscious economic coupling or will shell runs the china program at the asia society the death of engagement the policy of engagement has defined us china relations for almost a half a century and it didn't have to end this way these are very ominous indications i mean they are they're a symptom of extreme dysfunction but there's a great deal to lose for planet earth if the two largest economies and obviously in the case of china one of the two largest populations can't find a way to collaborate can't find a way to create what you might call a mutually beneficial base but that does seem to be where we are what what do you envision and what do you recommend for the relationship between the united states and china another big question there robin you know i sit on the u.s china economic and security review commission so i've been more engaged with china policy in the last year and a half than than i had been for a while i mean i think this is such an important relationship obviously these are two powerhouses in the globe and i guess one of my big frustrations has been that for the last couple of decades at least the u.s government engagement with china has been very narrow and very short-sighted that in my mind the two most important issues in the u.s china relationship are workers rights and currency manipulation and neither one of those have really been front and center in u.s engagement and certainly when china joined the world trade organization in 2001 i remember i was at the afl cio at the time and we were lobbying hard against china being granted what was called permanent normal trade relations and essentially being able the u.s supporting china's accession to the world trade organization and i remember the thousand page document that the u.s had written around china's accession and all the things that we were going to ask china to do as concessions about you know i don't know how much floor space wal-mart would have and ownership you know insurance companies finance companies and so on but it was really about corporate interests in china and there was not a word about democracy there was not a word about workers rights there was not a word about the environment and there was not a word about currency in the thousand pages or so of the accession document that the u.s negotiated and to me that's really what the problem is that we have we have clout with china i think you can see that in the even the phase one deal that the trump administration negotiated but we have misused that clout we have a tremendously imbalanced economic relationship we run a massive trade deficit with china we ought to be using that to ensure that that we do see the kinds of reforms going in the kind of direction that we need to have a reciprocal balanced fair open transparent relationship with china and right now we haven't seen that is it possible i think over time it is possible and it's certainly necessary because we can't we can't ignore china's existence china is powerful it is certainly using its relationships around the world in different parts of the world in a very strategic way and and the u.s has not done what we need to do at home in terms of investing in infrastructure and technology and skills to make sure that we are prepared for a different kind of competition but it's also we need to challenge the very unfair ways that china engages in the global economy and we should do that with our allies with europe with canada with australia because other industrialized countries are facing the same kind of challenges we are with respect to china and we will be more likely to succeed if we can get them to come on board to address the systematic and egregious workers' rights abuses the lack of democracy human rights abuses in place like xinjiang the relationship in hong kong and taiwan so there's a lot of issues there's a lot of stresses there but the relationship is important to both china and the united states and we can't afford to not to take on these big challenges well thea how i say you took us on tour inside and out all over the united states around the world and covered many of the really important structural issues and i want to thank you for being my guest here today and thank you for running epi and providing as i mentioned earlier on the kind of illumination and the kind of analysis and the kind of public goods and data that you all present so i hope you'll accept my offer to call you back in a few months and as events unfold we'll get maybe beyond the election i'd like to have you on again and we could continue to explore but i want everybody to go to epi www.epi.org and explore the wonderful work that you're doing thanks for being here today rob thank you so much for having me and thank you for the far-ranging and deep conversation i really appreciate your work and thanks for having me on the podcast it's my pleasure bye bye and check out more from the institute for new economic thinking at inet economics.org