 Good afternoon, everybody. Good afternoon and welcome. I'm Susan Collins, the Joan and Sanford Wildein of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and on behalf of the Ford School community, it is my great pleasure to welcome our speakers, Jared Bernstein, Charles Murray, and our moderator, Clarence Page. I'd also like to welcome all of you who are with us here in the auditorium physically, as well as all of those who are watching our event today. We are delighted to have you join us this afternoon. The Ford School and the University of Michigan have very proud traditions in leadership in the field of social policy. For decades, our faculty have produced groundbreaking research that shapes public understanding of the causes and the consequences of poverty. And the students who train here in public policy and in social work are now designing innovative policy solutions to address income inequality. They're advocating on behalf of low-income families and their leading nonprofit and private sector efforts to reduce poverty throughout the United States. Our host for today has done a great deal to help the university earn its reputation as a top school for the study of social policy, and he is one of the nation's most distinguished poverty researchers, my colleague, Professor Sheldon Danziger. Sheldon has directed the National Poverty Center since its founding at the Ford School in 2003. He's a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellow as well. Sheldon is currently co-leading a major study on the effects of the Great Recession on workers and families in southeast Michigan. Sheldon will set the stage for our debate in just a moment, but first we'll hear from Chris Dobie, project officer from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. Today's event and debate was made possible by generous support by the Mott Foundation, and it is a great pleasure for me to invite Chris to the podium. Chris? Oh, good afternoon, lovely people. On behalf of the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, it's my privilege to join Dean Collins in welcoming all of you to today's debate and also to welcome those who are joining us via the live web streaming from across Michigan and the country. I'm asking you to indulge me for just a moment and allow me to express sincere thanks to the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and especially to the National Poverty Center. This afternoon's debate is the result of the excellent efforts, the outstanding academic reputation, and the professional relationships that characterized the center and its director, Professor Sheldon Danzinger. On both a professional and a personal level, I'd like to also express deep appreciation to the center's program manager, Sean Peelock. It was her hard work, her orderly mind, her attention to detail, her excellent communications, and her good humor that brought all the pieces together for us to enjoy this afternoon. Allow me a moment also to point out to you a special resource that's being made available. If you haven't already picked one up, please do. The American Prospect published a special issue in July called the poverty issue and examination of poverty in America today. And we're pleased to make it available to all of our participants. The credit for the idea for today's debate goes to the members of the Pathways Out of Poverty team at the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, a group of amazing, smart, dedicated, program and administrative staff with whom I am honored to work. Pathways Out of Poverty is one of four grant-making programs at the Mott Foundation. The others are civil society, environment, and place-based grant-making in our hometown of Flint, Michigan. The Mott Foundation was established in Flint in 1926 by automotive pioneer Charles Stewart Mott, an original partner in the General Motors Foundation, or General Motors Corporation, forgive me. The foundation affirms our founder's vision of a world in which each of us is in a partnership with all the rest of us, where each individual's quality of life is connected to the well-being of the community at the local, state, national, and global level. And it is in the spirit of that inspiring vision that the Mott Foundation is pleased to support today's debate. Thank you very much. Professor Danziger? Thank you. In 1962, 50 years ago, Michael Harrington published The Other America, Poverty in the United States. At the time, the American economy was in the midst of a golden age of economic prosperity in which a rising tide was lifting all boats. Since the end of World War II, the economy had grown rapidly, and the wages of most workers had been growing faster than the rate of inflation. At the time, there was no measure of poverty, in part because almost no one, academics, journalists, or policymakers, talked about poverty. Harrington's book changed not only the political discourse, but the public policy landscape. On the first page he wrote, there is a familiar America. It has the highest mass standard of living the world has ever known. He then went on to say, that does not change the fact that tens of millions of Americans are at this very moment, maimed in body and spirit, existing at levels beneath those necessary for human decency. A short time later, a review article appeared in the New Yorker magazine called Our Invisible Poor. And the author ended a very long review concluding that thanks to Harrington, quote, the extent of our poverty has suddenly become visible. It is said that Walter Heller, chair of President Kennedy's Economic Advisors, gave Kennedy both the book and the New Yorker review. Most people think he read only the review. But he did tell Harrington to begin to plan to put together some proposals to reduce poverty. In the last chapter, Harrington wrote, there is no point in attempting to blueprint or detail the mechanisms and institutions of a war on poverty. There is information enough for action. All that is lacking is the political will. On January 8th, 1964, less than two years after the introduction of the publication of The Other America, President Johnson responded, demonstrating both the political will and the plan that Harrington had called for. Johnson declared, unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope, some because of their poverty and some because of their color and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace this despair with opportunity. This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. And he went on to say, the richest nation on earth can afford to win it. Within a few years, many of the programs that we know today were implemented or expanded. Head Start, the Job Corps, what we now call Pell Grants, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and increased social security benefits. And the official poverty rate, which had been falling, continued to fall and reached 11% in 1973. And at the time, leading scholars predicted that poverty is officially measured would be eliminated by 1980. Obviously, that did not happen and the discussion in the debate today will focus on why that was the case. I think all of us agree that we live in an era in which economic growth has not been trickling down to the poor, an era of inequality in which the rich have gotten much richer, the middle class has struggled, and the official poverty rate has increased. Today's debate is timely because tomorrow, the Census Bureau announces the poverty rate for 2011 and most analysts, myself included, think the poverty rate will increase to something like 15.5%. If Harrington were alive today, I am sure he would remind us that the other America is alive and well. And so our goal today is to go back to Harrington's early goal and to make sure that poverty and inequality are visible. I'm honored to welcome Charles Murray, the W.H. Bradley Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Priorities. There are longer biographies of both them and Clarence Page, syndicated columnist and editorial board member at the Chicago Tribune, our moderator. I'm not going to read their many accomplishments because I want to turn the floor over to them. I'd simply close by saying this debate is timely, not only because it's the 50th anniversary of the publication of America, not only because tomorrow the Census releases the official poverty rate, because we're in the midst of a presidential campaign which is likely to determine the future of public policies regarding poverty and inequality. Please join me in welcoming Charles, Jared, and Clarence to the Ford School and the University of Michigan. Thank you, Salvin. Thank you very much. It is my great honor and privilege to be your moderator here today. And that's largely because I am so familiar with these two gentlemen and they've been so enlightening for me in the past. I've never had the opportunity to put them together here and chew over these issues that we're dealing with. I'm reminded of the editor who gave me a newspaper column back in the 80s, Jim Squires, a good old Tennessee boy, as they say, who told me what his editor had told him, that columnists are sort of like a one-eyed javelin thrower. They don't score many points, but they keep the crowd alert. So that's my job here today, keep the crowd alert. Keep things moving along. I'm not worried about getting these gentlemen to speak up. It may be keeping them to the time schedule may be a challenge. So we are well familiar with that and I just want to say that our format will be such that we will have opening remarks first by Charles Murray and by Jared Bernstein. He's going to give us about seven minutes to talk over our topic here on the future of inequality and how big the economic, social, cultural divide is today and how it differs from the divide that Michael Harrington described a half-century ago. And then they will be subjected to about a half hour of questions from me and then we will go to questions from the audience via index cards, some of which are being tweeted in, I understand, through the great courtesies of modern electronics, which I'm doing my best to understand in this century. Since my 23-year-old son isn't here with me to explain it, I will do the best I can. But this is a very timely topic, as has been said. About the time Harrington's book came out, I was in high school and I remember asking my factory worker, Dad, what class are we? And without hesitation, my father said, son, we's Po. What's significant here is, he didn't say poor, he said we were Po, meaning we could not even afford the O and the R. What is significant is, my parents were both dedicated to me not being Po no Mo. When I had to get an education, had to have the opportunities to move on up. This is why I love this country, because it gave me that opportunity. I was able to work in the steel mills during the summer. I grew up in John Boehner's district. I'll tell you about that. That's a story for another show. It turned out pretty well. Yeah, yeah, it turned out okay, you know, because it was a good working class district there, Middletown, Ohio there, southern Ohio under Cincinnati. You could work in the steel mills during the summer, pay your tuition at a good state university, Ohio University, go Bobcats. And thank you for your indulgence, Michigan. And that was a great opportunity, so I was able to move up and become the journalist you see today. Unfortunately today there aren't summer jobs at the steel mill like there used to be. Steel mills become casually a post-industrial America. As are many other factories around the area where I grew up. And tuition at good old Ohio U is 10 times what it was when I was a student there. So things have changed. Upward mobility isn't what it used to be in this country, even in my lifetime. And that's what we're going to talk about today among other divides. Charles Murray's going to lead our discussion today. I've known Charles since, what, a losing ground back in 1984? Yeah, a long time. A book that led to, many people will tell you, to the welfare reform bill in the 1990s. And Charles has a way of writing books that either enrage me or delight me. Nothing in between. We have talked many times over the years. We have sometimes argued. And yet, you know, even when we argue, it's fascinating. I learned so much just in dialogue with him. So I'm delighted to have him here today and a real heavy hitter, Jared Bernstein, to also contribute to this dialogue. Jared involved so many things besides being a White House economic advisor over the center of budget and policy priorities. One of those think tanks that we journalists turn to so often for statistics, et cetera, for real expert opinion. So you've got the cream of the crop here today, ladies and gentlemen. And we look forward to your questions as well. Without further ado, I'm going to pull out my little iPhone and my son's taught me how to work it. And I will be doing the timing here as well. Charles, you have seven minutes to respond to our question. Please have that. Okay, well, I'm not sure what the topic of the debate is because the way that Sheldon just explained it's about poverty, and then I'd heard it was about inequality on the poster. And so I'm going to ignore both of those in my opening remarks. That doesn't surprise me a bit. Because I'll tell you, a lot of the things I'm going to say won't make any sense unless you get a larger sense of the context within which I'm saying it. This is, I think, a problem for the people on the right in general, and I'm on sort of a weird part of the right. As far as I know, there are very few people who are on the right who say you're in it on your own. There are very few who are against the advanced welfare state because it costs too much. They've paid too much money to all these freeloaders. There are other reasons for my opposition to the advanced welfare state and to a lot of the measures that went into the war on poverty. So real quickly, here's the Cliff Notes version of where I'm coming from in the subsequent remarks in the debate. In my view, a human life is not a matter of passing the time as pleasantly as possible from birth until death. A human life can be a life well lived which has transcendental meaning, whether that transcendental meaning is defined in terms of religion or whether it's defined in Aristotelian terms or other ways in which life can take on significance. But to take on significance, life must be spent doing important things, things in which you can take deep satisfaction as you reach my age. My proposition, and I'll be interested if anybody in the audience wants to argue with it and add another domain, my argument is that the deep satisfactions in a human life basically come from just four domains, and those are vocation, family, community, and faith. I will say that vocation, I'm willing to include avocations and causes in that definition, but basically those four are all there are. There are other ways of having pleasures in life, but those are the things that give us deep satisfaction. The reason they give us deep satisfaction is because, if we are lucky, we spend our life doing something which we can legitimately say to ourself, made a difference, and something which was important to do, raising a child is important. Making a living, finding a vocation, something you love is important. Being a member of a community in which you are engaged in the lives of people around you and are a good neighbor in ways more important than having backyard barbecues. That can be important. And the gravamen of my charge against the welfare state is that it, ineluctably, inherently, for reasons that cannot be escaped, drains the vitality from each of those four domains of life. It cannot be overcome by clever program designers, and the reason is this. The advanced welfare state, in effect, says life is tough and there are some things that we're going to help take some of the trouble out of. Taking some of the trouble out of losing a job, unemployment insurance. It can be a good thing. That is not a statement necessarily against unemployment insurance. I am saying it drains to some degree the satisfaction that you get from getting a job, and the rest of it. The same is true of a variety of other programs, helping children in poverty. It is not necessarily to say those are bad, but it is necessary to say that in so far as the government takes some of the trouble out of raising a child, it also drains some of the satisfaction you take out of doing it. That is true not only of poor people, it's true of people at the top. If you are, as in my case, a husband who likes to think he's been a good husband and a good father, but has not spent nearly as much time and energy as my wife did in raising the children, she gets more satisfaction out of being a parent than I do because of the nature of her activities. In saying all of this, I leave open all sorts of things that we can debate. I leave open all sorts of ways in which we can talk about how government might help or might not help. But ultimately what I object to in a great many of the programs that will be defended by Jared and probably defended by most of the people in this audience, I am saying the problem with these is that they take too much of the life out of life. Now, in these remarks, I have not attempted to persuade any of you that I am right. I do hope as I talk further in the debate, it will give you a context for explaining what I mean. Thank you very much, Charles. And Jared, Charles was very prompt and succinct. A good role model. Do I get his extra time? I knew you would ask that. No, go ahead. Actually, before you count, if you don't mind, let me just say what an honor it is to share the stage with Charles Murray and with Clarence. Charles is a giant of social policy and one of the most influential people in that field. While I profoundly disagree with much of what he has written and believes to be true as you'll hear in our discussion, I've been reading him for years and I've always heard a voice of passion. It's always about trying to figure out ways to help and not hurt people as they try to achieve their goals and dreams. And I only can hope that I have that same level of passion and commitment in my own work and writing. So I'm a true admirer of the tone. I disagree with a lot of the ideas. So let's talk about that. Please, if you must. Yeah, that's okay. He can talk like that all the time. I'm not going to count that. I figured Charles would give me a few minutes on that one. In my opening remarks, I wanted to do two things. One, a very brief pushback on one of the key pieces of Charles' opening because I think we're going to have more time to get into that because it's so key to where he and I differ and that's the impact of what he calls the welfare state on the lives of people and their achievements of the various aspirations Charles enumerated. I'm not even sure that there is a welfare state anymore. I'm not quite sure what that means. I'm sure we can discuss that. What I do know is that we now have literally decades of research trying to look at the extent to which measures like an earned income tax credit, measures like temporary assistance to needy families, Medicaid, nutritional education programs, what I think Charles is referring to and he'll tell me if I'm right when he says welfare state and their impact on people's lives and far from sucking the life out of them or whatever was the phrase he used, I would argue that not only do these programs critically offset market failures and I have very good evidence of that deep market failures that are effectively offset by some of these programs, they provide people with the opportunities they need to achieve the vocation, the family, the community and even the faith that absent this kind of support they would have a much harder time achieving. That's part one. Part two of my opening comments is I want to reflect on Michael Harrington and this question of how big is the current economic divide and does it differ now versus when Harrington wrote The Other America 50 years ago? In fact, the economic divide is much wider now than it was then. The most recent peak year for the macroeconomy was 2007 and back then 23% of income, of national income accrued to the top 1%. Back in the early 60s when Harrington was writing that was 10%. So he was writing about an economic and a social and cultural divide but an economic divide where 10% of national wealth accrued to the top 1%. Most recently at the most recent economic peak that was 23%. I think it's down to about 20 now. The growth of inequality is a major factor in understanding the challenge of poverty today. So that's one of the connections I think that's intended to be made there. And this is not a static story. It's a dynamic one and it has great bearing in an area that actually may be an area of agreement between Charles and myself. One that's very consistent with Harrington and that's the following. And I believe Charles would agree with me here because I think he's written this. Public policy should not concern itself with the quality of outcomes but with the quality of opportunity and in losing ground Charles Murray writes regarding government expenditures quote, billions for equal opportunity not one cent for equal outcome. So we may actually find ourselves more in agreement on public investments that level the opportunity playing field. I think Sheldon was mentioning Pell grants before but there are expenditures targeted at preschool. I mentioned some of the ones earlier. But here's the thing. There's on the one side is this issue of inequality and outcomes and Charles wrote not a penny for equality of outcomes. There is a growing and very compelling body of research that links higher inequality the economic divide that Harrington was writing about to diminished opportunity and thus to diminish mobility. That is there is a causal linkage between the economic divide the high levels of inequality and diminished opportunity for folks in the bottom half of the income scale. In an economy with significant growth without all this inequality growth is broadly shared and leads to the kind of income growth and poverty reduction that Sheldon talked about that prevailed in the 60s and led the poverty warriors to believe that just on the basis of growth alone we could reduce poverty so significantly. But once you introduce high levels of inequality into this model a couple of things go wrong. GDP and productivity growth are now diverted from lower income families, middle income families stagnate and poverty increases even in a business cycle expansion as it did in the business cycle expansion of the 2000s. Poverty went up as the economy expanded instead of going down. This blocks opportunities and reduces generational mobility. Now if you think of this as kind of an economic model it generates a set of predictions. It predicts that income concentration plays out in the political realm and I feel very strongly about this and it worries me a lot by protecting the beneficiary of inequality's growth and blocking the policies blocking the policies that would push back against it. Politics reinforces the rising inequality that blocks those policies that would promote more broadly shared growth and thus you're stuck in a vicious cycle. I'll have time to go through this more. Two minutes. So I'll have time to go through more examples of this as we go but I think to bring it back to the debate that Charles and I hope to at least that I hope to engage Charles is that the problem is is that if you look at what I think I've tried to paint here is a pretty rich economic tapestry I think Charles crops the picture I think he's looking at too small a piece of it. There are multi-causal phenomenon going in there and I think it was in Hamlet Act 1, scene 5 that Hamlet says there are more things in heaven and earth ratio than are dreamt of in your philosophy and I would argue the same thing about Charles's books. Where are globalization and its impact on manufacturers? Where's the housing and the finance and the bubble and bust cycles that have characterized the recessions of the last few decades? Where's the loss of retirement wealth and 401k plans as a result of financial busts having nothing to do with individual morality? Where's the Federal Reserve and monetary policy? Where's the Keynesian demand side policies? Where is one of the most important missing factor in all of Charles's work? The persistent absence of full employment in areas where the problems he documents are most persistent. So I firmly believe that in a corner of the realm of economic reality where poverty interacts with the rest of the economy and society Charles is on to important points but by looking at such a narrow piece of it I'm afraid he misses the bigger picture and we'll have more time to elaborate that as we go along. We'll do our best. Charles, Jared opened up with an area of comedy and agreement and then got a little zinger in the end there that indicates the sharp division. Well, it is supposed to be a debate. Well, that's right. And we're going to do our best here because a little zinger in the end there about the causes of this poverty. You spoke earlier in terms of character, attitudes, behavior, culture. He brings in the geopolitical changes we've had, structural changes in the economy, job disappearance, the new globalism. I'm going to give you an opportunity to respond to that. Where does that play a role in your analysis? Well, if you're going to say such things as, for example, that there has been a fundamental change in working class culture in the United States by males with regard to the labor force, you are obliged to say, well, is this because the economy went bad or is it because of other factors? And I guess that there are a couple of ways of looking at that. As in any debate, we're going to be picking out individual indicators in a much broader context in which this can be understood. But let me use the example of labor force participation rate among males. And I'm specifically talking about white males getting rid of all the complicated issues associated with race. And I'm talking about males ages 30 to 49, which is the prime working years. As in 1960, you had virtually, not 100%, but it was at the high 90% of labor force participation among that group. Because if you weren't working or looking for a job and you were a man in your 30s or 40s, you were a bum. That drop out from the labor force started to rise not after the economy went south in the 1970s in terms of some dimensions. It started to rise during full employment in the 1960s. And it continued to rise, and if you plot it, I have the plot in coming apart, it sort of has a continuing secular rise all the way to the present. Now, if we'd had a rotten economy all this time, if globalization had taken away the jobs and you just couldn't get a job, I could understand that. But we have had periods in the 1980s, and especially the last half of the 1990s, but also some good years in the early 2000s, where basically there were jobs for anybody who wanted to work, and nobody seriously disputes that. I mean, there were help wanted signs everywhere. So when you talk about causes, to the extent that there just aren't jobs out there, and so these guys would like to go out and work, but they just can't find jobs, we should have seen a plunge in the dropout from the labor force in the last half of the 90s among white males. We did not. The only thing that happened was it stabilized. It didn't continue to go up, and then it continued to go up after that. Everything I am saying, by the way, predates the Great Recession. None of my arguments depend on what's happened since then. You then supplement those data with observational data on the ground, and what you find is, in talking to people who live in working class communities, there are a bunch of guys out there who are looking for work, that's true. There are a bunch of guys out there who aren't. They're living off their girlfriends, they're living off their parents, they're engaged in the gray economy or the black economy. They don't want jobs, and that's reflected in the increasing dropout from the labor force. It is a triangulation of evidence both sociological, anthropological, and economic, all of which point to a fundamental shift in the attitude toward work, and my label for a growing proportion of men in the working class is feckless. And unless we recognize that this is going to exist no matter what happens to the economy, as I think was proved in the last half of the 90s, we're missing a very important part of the puzzle. Before I give you a chance to respond, Jared, I want to clarify one thing. You referred to your latest book, Coming Apart, which I like, by the way. That was one of the good ones. Yeah, this is one of the good ones. I think Very Well may be the most important book of the year as far as I'm concerned because it does, as you mentioned, focus just on white Americans so we don't have the whole racial discussion because starting back in the late 60s, poverty got colorized in our national conversation as you know. When you say poverty, people think black folks are Hispanics, but as you point out, there is this similar kind of phenomenon going on among whites. So I was just wondering, your book starts really, you see the problem around 1960, which reminds me of my friend Pat Buchanan who thinks that western civilization began to decline as soon as Elvis appeared on the accelerant show. And you know what I know, he's not alone. There are many folks who believe that all of the decline started with the end of the 50s, that the mad men era for you young people out there. And I was just wondering, am I reading you correctly here? And do you see a call? I'm happy to answer that. You're going to have to give Jared some extra time because I'm a pilot. I definitely will. But I do want to respond in a couple of ways to that. First, I explicitly did not talk about causes for the new lower class in coming apart. I did talk about causes of the new upper class. But the new lower class, I didn't talk about them and the reason Clarence was because I didn't want you to get mad at me. I wanted to have a book that a person like you could read and not throw against the wall. And as soon as I started to talk about causes, I knew you would. Because look, I'm on record. Losing ground is a prolonged indictment of the 1960s, which has a lot to answer for. I'm going to stop there and be willing to go back and talk about it more with numbers. But I want to add a very important point. It doesn't make any difference whether I was right or not about the original causes. And frankly, it doesn't make any difference in my view if Jared is right about the role of globalization and the rest of it. We are where we are. And what has happened is a variety of cultural changes that have transcended whatever the original causes were. It's the classic case of I can describe exactly how the toothpaste got squeezed out of the tube. Jared can think he can describe precisely how it got squeezed out of the tube. It is out of the tube. And there is no rewinding that we can do. And if we're going to deal with the problems that we're talking about, there is going to have to be fresh thinking about where we can go from here because going back to the past is not possible. Either for Jared or for me. Okay, Jared, your turn. First of all, just where Charles ended, I mean, I guess I feel very strongly that your diagnosis leads to your prescription. And if your diagnosis is very individually focused as I believe Charles is, your prescriptions are going to emphasize, as does coming apart, cultural issues, industriousness, religiosity, things like that as opposed to a policy set that I believe is more responsive to more structural economic problems including a robust income tax credit, a robust unemployment insurance program. So I assume we differ on that and perhaps we'll have time to explore this solution set and how they differ. But now I'd like to utterly confuse you all by disagreeing about the data and that's always, I think, somewhat discomforting when you're an audience and someone says, well, things move this way and the other person says, things move that way. Charles, I know you're quite the data nerd as am I and that's a compliment. And I suspect... I'm not, by the way, sort of compliment. Okay, well, you won't... But when you think about MAP, I wouldn't be a journalist. So you won't be able to play in our club here. But I suggest whatever data differences we have, we try to work out maybe in some public forum and plot our graphs against each other. Here's a couple of facts that I think go in quite a different direction than Charles. Charles was asserting, I think, just then that, in fact, it really can't be a story of the demand side of the labor market, of the lack of ample employment opportunities for feckless guys because if you look at periods where the job market was strong, you don't see much response from them. So when I read coming apart, I sort of was puzzling over this and I looked at the sample that Charles was looking at. White men age 30 to 49, high school degree or less, and a few other things, a few other ingredients thrown in there that Charles can tell you about. So here's what I did. And I'm going to talk about, I was going to say, regression analysis. It's really a correlation. I took, thanks to my colleague, Arlock Sherman at the Center on Budget, I got a time series of annual hours of work of white guys age 30 to 49, high school degree or less, basically Charles's sample. And I looked at the relationship between their annual hours of work, including zeros. So including people who are out of the labor market. And I correlated it with unemployment and I just ran a regression of the percent change on those hours on the change in prime age men's unemployment rate. That one variable explains 76% of the variation in that series of hours worked. So keep that in your mind. That's point one. So now, that is not an economic model of the economy. That's a one variable correlation. But by Occam's razor and just by dint of a very simple and plausible relationship, movements in unemployment explain three quarters of the annual hours of labor supply of work in the paid job market of this group. And when the unemployment rate goes up, their hours go down and vice-versa's a very tight fit. Part two. And this has to do not with that sample but with single moms. In part because of the work of Charles in Losing Ground, we shifted from a cash-based welfare system, AFDC, to temporary assistance for needy families in welfare reform that was passed in the Clinton years. Folks here, I'm sure, Sheldon et al. and Sandra have done tons of work on this issue. If you look at the employment rates of single mothers and you compare them to the employment rates of, say, married moms, again, controlling for education so you're not getting that into the mix, you will find, Donna Pivetti and some other folks at the Center on Budget have done this work, you will find that the employment rates of single moms grow precipitously, grow steeply in the 1990s. Now, part of that is a Murray effect and it has to do with requirements within the welfare program. Researchers tried to tease out which shares which. We also had a full employment job market for the first time in decades. I don't think we've had one before since. We had a full employment job. We had a large increase in the earned income tax credit which incentivizes work. Ronald Reagan's favorite anti-welfare program. We had an increase in the minimum wage, a lot of moving parts. All sending these employment rates up, the analysis suggests that maybe 15 or 20 percent of it was welfare reform, the rest was the economy and the measures like the earned income credit and so on. So you have the married moms who aren't affected by the policy, so they're their control here. Their employment rates truck along as they did. The single moms go right up. They match the married moms and then starting in 2000, they all sort of slide down. Once employment growth became quite weak, I told you, poverty increased in the business cycle of the 2000s and then it fell off the cliff in the recession. You see a very good controlled experiment of Charles' hypothesis. The idea was that if the job market was creating employment demand to give these single moms the opportunities they had to seek by dint of the policy change and wanted to seek, especially the wages had an ample subsidy attached to them, you see very large employment effects, quite different than Charles' argument that you didn't see these effects at all. Once the job market weakens and then falls off the cliff, you see the opposite happening. So I very strongly feel, Charles absolutely has a point in that corner of the picture that he's looking at, but I very strongly caution an interpretation that leaves out the role of labor demand, of job availability and of social policy that incentivizes work. Without getting too deep in the weeds of those numbers there, and good job of going from regression analysis to Occam's razor in 45 seconds. I saw a certain contradiction there. Sorry, but what? Well, how do you respond to that, though? Okay, quickly, because we don't want to get too deep in the weeds. Actually, you know, this is another case where there's kind of a subversive agreement between the two of us, because you have two very different populations. Let's just talk about white males. Those that are in the labor force, they're working pretty hard, including in the white working class, the hours of work have not gone down. You have another set of guys who aren't in the labor force at all, and I would point out there's something really simple about the statistic I gave you. Percentage of men not in the labor force. And there's a real simple relationship to policy, because if you want to cure the economic problems of guys not in the labor force, you're saying to yourself, if only we could create a full employment economy again. We've been there, done that in the last half of the 1990s, and it did not change it. So you can have with women something else altogether going on. Women have flocked into the labor force. Can I give you a quick synthesis of what I think went on? A real quick synthesis. In 1960, if you were a guy holding down a low income job with a wife and family, you had an authentic place in that community of respect. It was respect both within that community. You were one of the good guys. You were looked up to. And you also had respect from the broader community. You then had a whole bunch of the things that I deplore from the reforms of the 1960s, but multi-causal. You also had the revolution in women's participation in the labor force. And a low income guy today does not have a position of respect from the community if he is a father and husband. That is gone. That is a statement of fact. Those communities no longer value that the way they did. And on the contrary, you're going to have people telling you you are a chump working for chump change. Am I sorry that women went into the labor force? Do I want to turn back the clock on that? No, I don't. There are things that happen as the result of good things, which are bad things. And one of the things that has happened is that the role of the male changed dramatically. And that is reflected in a growing population, not a majority, a growing population of faceless men. And I guess the only statement I'd add, Jared, on to that is, I am not trying for a global explanation that absolves the market of everything and blames everything on government. I am trying to force an awareness of cultural shifts that have occurred in this country that are very deep and very important and are most damaging of all to other people and part of society. Well, Jared, what about the role of culture? Look, if you go back and read Michael Harrington or Pat Moynihan, even William Julius Wilson, who I know you sparred with in the 80s, there's been a cultural piece for all of their analysis. They, my pathology of poverty, culture of poverty, this was not unfamiliar language to Michael Harrington, but I don't like it. I don't like it, and I don't know really what Charles means, and I've read his books carefully when he talks about this cultural shift. I don't mean to imply by the statistics I'm citing that there are no faceless guys, I myself feel faceless part of the time, or that the share of the sample that you've picked out, the white working class males with no labor force participation has increased. I will say, by the way, they're a shrinking share of the total. Very much so. In fact, your own numbers show that they shrink by about half of the total population. But I do think it's very much overdone and I have two objections to it. First, and this is not the position of Charles Murray or any of the researchers just mentioned. In the real world, Clarence, you maybe could speak to this just from your journalistic perch later at the interest in your take. I think in the real world, the cultural emphasis becomes damagingly divisive. Again, not Charles. Culture becomes a synonym and I think that's kind of that play right now in our national debate for behaviors that are acceptable in a subgroup that the rest of us agree are bad. But culture is a much richer phenomenon than that and cultural differences remain a beautiful attribute of America. Again, I'm sure Charles would agree. And I think many of the cultural critics, and I would include many of those I named above, actually get this wrong. Where people like Charles when he talks about this cultural shift, which I think you do critically, are identifying as a social dysfunction within a culture are actually viewed as abhorrent even within that culture. So what you're viewing as a cultural shift doesn't make a lot of sense to me because I don't see cultures embracing these bad behaviors that subgroups agree are okay. If you look at gang culture, gang culture is a good example. The parents of kids in gangs hate the fact that they're kids in gangs. If you look at out-of-wedlock births, parents of kids, teens who have out-of-wedlock children are often aghast that their kids are... So it's a complicated dynamic. And I caution against going there because A, I think it feeds right into a very damaging divisiveness that our society and economy is right for right now. I think it invokes discrimination. And I don't think it means the same thing to any two people you say it to. I think it's way to a fuzzier concept. Well, let me just ask you in terms of... It is a fuzzy concept. We're talking about culture. We're talking about shared values within a community. Is it too fuzzy for us to deal with? Because we all agree it's there, but is it something that... We all agree that it has an impact. I think it has an impact. Is there anything useful that we can do as far as that? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of it. I am arguing we should embrace. If there are cultural values that are inconsistent with the broader community, that's a much more complex question that I would give to Charles Murray. I don't think that there is an obvious role for government in addressing that kind of a thing. I do think there's a very obvious role for government in promoting the economic well-being success, the opportunity, the ability of kids to realize their potential, things like that. And I'm afraid that the cultural debate is a distraction from what's really important, which is making sure people have the opportunities that they need to realize their potential. I think the cultural debate has hurt that. One more quick follow-up to Jared. Give him a chance, Charles. Sure. Welfare reform, just an example. There are those who argue that welfare reform, as you mentioned, put welfare recipient mothers to work and changed a culture that before had disincentivized work into one that incentivized work and that this helped to reinforce the kind of values that you're shaking your head. No, I don't go there. I wouldn't go there, Clarence. No, I mean, as I said, there's research I could cite, chapter and verse, that argues that somewhere between 15, maybe 30 percent tops Sheldon probably did a lot of it. He could talk about this more authoritatively. Of the increase in the employment rates had to do with the policy change. And I think that's a perfectly legitimate thing. I don't think a society can support a cash welfare program that takes money from one group of taxpayers and gives it to another group that's not conditioned on work. That's neither fair nor sustainable. Charles had those insights decades ago and he was right. But I started life as a social worker. And I can tell you that the culture of work has been embedded in poor families, middle-class families, and wealthy families. They want their kids to get ahead just like we do. And all of this cultural stuff, I'm afraid, becomes way too close to discrimination and they're the bad guys and we're the good guys in ways that Charles doesn't mean. But that's how it plays out in the real world. Charles, let me ask you. You have in the past expressed something of a pessimistic view of the ability of government to do much good in these areas. Is there a way? Let's put it very mildly. Put it mildly. Is there something useful the government can do in order to change the culture in a productive way? No. Next question. You may elaborate. I wasn't actually being flippant. Let me see if, Jared, we can take this diffuse thing called culture and take what to me is the paradigmatic indicator because the thesis of coming apart is that we have cultural divergence. There is no social institution that is more central to the culture and especially American culture, but all cultures, than marriage. You go to 1960 and you have a definition of the working class that Jared gave you pretty much. People working in working class occupations, blue collar, with no more than high school education. That's the operational definition. Upper middle class, people with college degrees, working in managerial or professional jobs. Those are the two. Upper middle class, working class. In 1960, you had 94% of all whites 30 to 49 who were married and you had about 84% of all in the white working class who were married. So there was a difference, but it was a real small difference and marriage was the overwhelming norm. As of 2010, you still had 84% of whites ages 30 to 49 in the upper middle class who were married. And in fact, that number had been pretty stable since the mid 1980s and not only that divorce has been declining, so a lot of those marriages are first marriages, more marriages than were in the past. Marriage is alive and well in the upper middle class. In the white working class, same age group, 48% married. Now, there are real few examples of such a shift in a central cultural institution in 50 years as the one I just gave you, from 84% to 48%. Why is this important? I'm not speaking as a right winger who's attaching a moral value to marriage since I'm saying, look, marriage is the building block of communities. Single fathers don't coach little league teams very often. Single mothers very seldom have the time, even if they have the inclination to go to PTA meetings. All of the things that go into social capital, the kinds of things that Robert Putnam documented so thoroughly and bowling alone, social capital which makes communities work just goes off the edge of a cliff when you lose marriage. In addition, you have an increasing agreement among social scientists who follow these data, left as well as right Sarah McClanahan being a very good example who's known to many of you in this room which says in a single parenthood is bad for kids. It's not that some women can't be wonderful mothers and raise wonderful kids, of course they can, but are there real deficits in what happens to the flourishing of children and single parent families and the answer to that is yes. So in that one indicator I've given you, which is a very cultural indicator, no matter what the causes of the change were, you have had a divergence between working class America and upper middle class America which so transcends in importance anything having to do with sheer income and equality that dwarfs it and unless we come to grips with that change and the disintegration that that has produced in the functioning of working class communities, we're going to be stuck on dead center and trying to come up with solutions. Well Jared on that paradigmatic example of marriage, is there something that government can do or we as a society can do to restore marriages and institutions or do we need to? Can we deal with these problems without even addressing marriage? I think to understand the phenomenon that you and Charles are talking about and it's a very important one and I fully agree with the work of Sarah McClanahan for example that was cited a second ago. You have to understand the related cultural and I think I mean I didn't say this is a cultural phenomenon of feminism. You'd have to appreciate women's educational and occupational upgrading and accomplishments in recent decades and the earnings advances which have gone in a completely different direction than men. Men's wages from middle and particularly low income have stagnated and fallen while women have consistently gone up and I'm not just talking about at the very top of the wage scale but at the middle as well. Less so at the bottom but there's been progress there too. Again educational upgrading, occupational upgrading, earnings advances. I'm not saying that there aren't lots of women facing tough problems in the job market and gender wage discrimination is alive and well is the wrong word but remains a problem. No question about it but if you just look at the relative growth rates women and that has given women a lot more say in when they get married and when they bear children. This is not a bad thing. This is not a bad thing but at the same time you've also had and this is a bad thing of course you've had the jobs and the earnings opportunities of non-college educated men falling quite sharply and I would say the sharpest and most pointed arguments and arguments that resonated with me and many others against losing ground was by a sociologist named William Julius Wilson who wrote a book that came out I think a few years after losing ground that observed a very strong correlation between the decline in he had something called the marriageable male index and he was looking at the economic conditions of particularly young black men who would otherwise have been partners of women whose non-marriage rates were rising at the time and he very clearly identified the lack of earning the decline in job opportunities so I'm not saying that I don't want to be an economic reductionist here and say that if men's economic conditions began to improve the marriage problems that Charles documents would go away but I am saying two related points that push in the other direction one the fact that women have more economic and spiritual independence to decide when they get married and bear children is obviously a good thing I'm sure Charles would agree and second if the economic conditions of their marriage partners were improved and there is public policy and important public policy that could help there I think that would make a positive difference as well. Charles in your book you talk about and this is in your latest book coming up part you talk about how many people at lab based in the educated class especially out of the coming out of the 60s the cultural revolutionaries if you will for attacking marriage and traditional institutions but the irony is that today it's the upper educated class that has the lowest out of wedlock birth rate and the highest church attendance as I recall and the farther down you go the more you see this disillusion of the past institutions when I interviewed you looked at the book came out we had a little bit of an email chat back and forth and you were reluctant to want to analyze why this is happening because I didn't want to make you mad again. That's quite all right I'm very I've learned new patients and anger management and I'm eager to know if you've any new insights why this has happened that we have this class divide that matches a cultural divide. Yeah I was smiling because I get really irritated at the upper middle class and I know I'm a member of it but who better to be irritated at them look in the 60s my generation marriage no we don't need that sexual revolution great this that and the other thing and then as we got older we had the resources and the wherewithal to recover from our silliness and we did so we said okay when we got our lives in order and now I'm no longer smiling here is here is the thing that angers me the most about the 1960s we change the rules of the game not for everybody we change them for poor people and we especially change them for poor young people and we most especially change them for poor young black people and it happened in everything you can talk about it's not just the welfare system and the increase in benefits for single women just put that aside for a minute the changes in education that went on in the 1960s whereby it became a whole lot easier to go to school not learn anything a whole lot easier to drop out a whole lot easier to to get away with stuff that in fact kept you from getting education in crime we had during the 1960s crime took off after being plateaued during throughout the 1950s well you know what there was a conventional wisdom then which said if you put people in prison it only made them into smarter criminals as we had a rising crime rate you had reductions in clearance of crimes you had reductions in people in prison for crimes we had an actual raw reduction in the number of people in prison in 1960s a raw reduction not just a reduction in terms of the ratio of crimes to people in jail it became a whole lot safer if you were a teenage kid to engage in crime when I did an analysis of Cook County delinquents more delinquent than which there are none in the 1970s the average number of arrests for one of those kids before they went to a custodial facility for the first time was 13.6 so it became a lot easier to engage in crime it became a whole lot easier to survive if you were a guy without having a job you go through any of the day to day ground level ways of looking at the world that a poor person and a poor young person and a poor young black person especially had in the 1960s changed those rules in ways which made it profitable to behave in the short term in ways that were disastrous in the long term and they did not have the resources to recover from that they couldn't be like the upper middle class and say well the LSD was fun the serial sex was fun but I'm going to get a job and have kids and a family and so forth so the baby boomers had a lot to answer for in my view and in that sense we did something that in my view during the 1960s was incredibly destructive to poor people I'm going to ask you to do a little cultural analysis here again Jerry oh no forgive me but Estraal is right do the baby boomers have something to answer for here in terms of setting themselves as role models for a free and licentious behavior well look there is this kind of cottage industry now among the punditry to scold baby boomers I was opening the paper the other day and it was Bill Heller or Keller the guy at race for the New York Times Bill Keller had an article about how the baby boomers are greedily eating up the entitlements and those boomers love to attack each other you know I don't I got to say once again it doesn't resonate with me and it was a part of coming apart that I had trouble figuring out there's at the end of the book Charles suggests that people like us preach what we practice and I was described that is that the elites I think try to impart some of their industriousness and religiosity and and non-fecklessness to everybody else you know or to the bottom third who aren't doing that stuff and I was describing it to a conservative friend of mine and the other day and he said well even if I wanted to do that like what would I do I thought it was a good question you know go to a neighborhood and stand on the street corner and say let me tell you about how industrious I am so part of it is pragmatically I don't get it look I really the problems that you described in the 60s you know sounded in no small part correct however I disagree with where that has led us today and in fact I think and this goes directly against I think a lot of some you know you're deeply held principles here so I want to kind of get to this core point I think we have done considerable correction to many of the problems that you've identified particularly in the provision of anti-poverty programs and social supports for example a recent very authoritative study by academics without a Republican or liberal a thumb on the scale looked at the impact the anti-poverty effectiveness of our whole panoply of social programs this was a paper with a lead author I think was Bob Moffett who was just a very good reputation as a kind of stone cold-eyed econometrician on this and they did an interesting thing they said let's look at the anti-poverty effectiveness of all of the programs that Charles says you know kind of started in the 60s and bled us of our initiative since and let's not just look at whether they reduce poverty or not because guess what if you give some income to somebody their poverty can go down but let's look let's account for any work disincentives we now have enough years of research so we can actually estimate the extent to which there are work disincentives or incentives to have babies out of wedlock or the kinds of destructive incentives that Charles was talking about being planted in the 1960s and what they found was that those were miniscule and in fact I think I have a quote their findings here I don't have a yeah okay the combination of the means tested in social insurance transfers in the system have had a major impact on poverty reducing deep poverty poverty and near poverty by about 14 percentage points so 29 points down to 15% in the US and importantly this impact is only negligibly affected by work incentives which in the aggregate have almost no effect on pre-transfer poverty rates in the population as a whole so I would argue that we've come a long way and have built a system that is quite effective and I'll give you one more point and that will stop the great recession if you look at the official poverty rates over the great recession 2007 to 2010 you will find that they went up from something like 12.5% to 15.1% I think I'm right about those numbers they went up significantly from 12.5% to official poverty the official poverty rate doesn't count any of those benefits that I've argued are so important here it doesn't account for nutritional programs that act just like cash it doesn't account for Medicaid it doesn't account for the earned income credit it doesn't account for the child tax credit or various subsidies like that put those into the mix and poverty barely moved over the great recession it went from I think 15.3% to 15.5% so if you include the benefits that were supposed to dampen the impact of poverty over a huge market failure where Charles and others can't say well they should have gotten jobs there were no jobs you see an extremely effective safety net at work so I would argue that he identifies problems that were real but that social policy has done a much better job than it's commonly realized at dealing with we have several questions from the audience that have been passed on to me by index card I don't know if these were tweeted in or passed in but they are good questions Charles the first one is for you you don't say much about non-profit organizations in communities can't they play a role in shaping the lives of Fishtown residents this sounds like one of your readers here I don't think we talk much about how we do yeah you divide our new class structure between Fishtown and the what non-college educated working class yeah that's where Fishtown is a working class neighborhood of Philadelphia and I just use that as a generic labor non-profits can they play a role by the way I've got to interject something I have had so many debates with people who haven't the least idea of what I've said who have never read anything I've done they've only read the reviews of what I've done Jared I can't tell you how it warms my heart that you actually read my stuff you know I don't care if you agree but you read it you know what I said yeah non-profits I've even got you on my Kindle so there that's a commitment doesn't mean you read it that's right non-profits can play can play an important part but community as it historically has worked in the United States has been I won't try to attach a percentage to it an awful lot of it has been informal a lot of the social capital that binds communities together doesn't have any organizational basis Fishtown is a good example a white working class community it was a hard drinking hard fighting community but boy was it safe there was no crime in Fishtown because if you tried to come into Fishtown and commit a crime they didn't bother calling the police they took care of it themselves it was also a place where your kids could play outside safely and the reason they could play outside safely was because people kept an eye out and you can go to a place like Fishtown and using anthropological data you can document as as the author of Patricia Smolakom who I quote extensively in the book did document the ways in which all of that has been ravaged for whatever reasons so I am let me put it this way if you have 48% marriage among prime age adults in a community you've got no community I mean it's just a contradiction in terms community depends too much on all the things that adults do because they have kids that they're raising together and when that goes away the glue goes away too no community Jared? no I mean again and I like Charles personally so much and I am so appreciative of his passion and his commitment here that I really feel bad that I so disagree with almost everything he's saying here but I just I think so the problem is with the way Charles views the world compared to the way I think the world works is that it's not that if married unmarried people got married everything would be okay for well you're not here it's not that they would get on some much better economic trajectory I don't believe they would and a good example is some very I think compelling recent research that was done on teens who had children out of wedlock something that every poverty researcher agrees is a serious problem and something Charles has written about critically for years well there's a recent study that I thought convincingly argues I won't go into the weeds out of respect for the timing here but it argues convincingly by looking at things like kids who got pregnant but miscarried or kids who trying to isolate a counterfactual of someone who looked a lot like the teen who had the teen who became a mom and the one who didn't and it looks like the teens who became moms and had this very poor economic trajectory researchers would look at them and say well that's because you became a teen mom if you actually try to do the best you can to do a counterfactual and look at someone who was just like them who didn't have the child it turns out that their economic trajectory was awfully similar just about the same now I'm not saying that means teens should become moms they shouldn't it's bad for the kids it's certainly not good for their opportunities but whether we're talking about marriage or we're talking about out of wedlock worst it's that Shakespeare quote about there's more to this than you're seeing there is if the economy and the opportunities especially the educational opportunities the ability to access and finish school are not there for you whether you're married whether you have a kid out of wedlock it's just extremely tough and public policy that doesn't realize that and try to do something about it both for the out of wedlock mom and for the one who didn't is I think a breath but if you focus too much on the culture and the behavior and the marriage and the mom herself you'll miss that point I want to jump in real quickly here because I'm a hedgehog on this issue as opposed to a fox for those of you who read your Isaiah Berlin I made the assertion nothing about teenage births nothing I said without families communities don't exist families with children are what provide the social capital that makes communities work and I think that's an important hedgehog truth that can unite people across a wide variety of ideology that you can say boy it's the fault of the economy that we don't have families but the simple truth communities don't work without a norm of families of children that's just that's the way the world really works forgive me Charles I've got a question for Jared here I'll let you respond as well if you like Jared why did the Obama Administration do more for I'm sorry why didn't the Obama Administration do more for poor communities given his work as a community organizer give us some insight coming from your White House position you know if you look again I'm going to quote one of my colleagues from the center on budget and policy priorities a guy named Arloch Sherman you can go on the website of our institution cbpp.org you will find a number of papers that look at the impact on poverty of the stimulus the recovery act the recovery act lifted millions of people out of poverty the recovery act expanded the earned income tax credit now if you weren't working it didn't help you but it was a but you know obviously a lot of people kept their jobs the child tax credit was made refundable down to lower income levels lifted a lot of people out of poverty making work pay tax credit help low income workers later the payroll tax credit help low income or the expansions of unemployment insurance critical to the safety net by the way you heard Sheldon say that we will probably learn tomorrow that poverty went up in 2011 unquestionably if that's true one of the reasons is because we pulled back some of the safety net particularly in terms of extended unemployment insurance programs running out for people in a labor market that was still well much too unwelcoming all of those measures and more there was a subsidized job programs under TANF that was very effective big bang for the buck program in helping low income people so I would argue that particularly in the recovery act the president did quite a bit Charles want to respond to that you're probably I don't follow current politics I don't know what's going on since 2008 current events I'm serious you're probably happy you didn't try to do anything but let me ask you I have a question for you Charles mentioned the need for fresh thinking about where we can go from here are there any fresh thoughts around which the left and the right might be able to generate some galvanizing political yes best there is I wrote a book in 2004 I guess advocating a basic guaranteed income and there were a variety of people on the left who said whoa what's he doing that for you like that one it was short no regression equations at all look I think that's the way to go and I have my reasons for wanting to go that way I think we aren't going to go back to a libertarian pre-1932 state that's not going to happen and so there's going to be a lot of expenditures and income transfers and I want to strike a grand bargain between limited government people like me and social democrats I say okay we'll give you guys huge expenditures you give us limited control over the way that government can screw around with people's lives and the best way to do that is to my way of thinking taking all the income redistribution we have now transfers of all kinds including by the way corporate transfers all kinds of transfers and use that to provide everybody with a good basic guaranteed income and I go through the book to describe to my fellow libertarians why I think this would work but there is a potential there for discussion across ideological lines indeed I wrote a column on that the same thing since then Dave Chappelle had an interesting bit on his show no question about it one of the great social critics of our times and not exactly the same idea that you were working with but Chappelle bit his skit was a what if sort of a proposition what if black Americans were really paid reparations in cash and the bottom line is they would have it spent by sundown mostly on lottery tickets it was a hilarious bit you had to be there knowing comedy essentially probably going to re-run it tonight the way it's going they re-run them forever with that little nugget out there and you can address this I'm sure people say this well if you just hand people a guaranteed income how do you keep people from wasting it that's a longer conversation I will simply say that I spend a lot of the book trying to work through those questions in other words get the book but it is an interesting book though, I'll buy a break I think it may be available can I take a stab at this question? so I think it's very helpful to have big thinkers like Charles put out big interesting ideas like that but it is absolutely so far away from anything like politically realistic I have a hard time wrapping my head around it so I'm going to say something that could easily be accused as being equally politically unrealistic but I don't think so I don't know that anything Clarence knows he writes about this these days it's politically unrealistic to count on congress to keeping the lights on but in more normal times what I'm going to talk about I think is important and potentially realistic and I actually think maybe Charles would agree we now have a program Charles and I agree that well I shouldn't say that I have very much hammered on this point that there is not enough work out there for one minute there's not enough work out there to meet the supply of underutilized workers particularly non-college educated men we have a work-based welfare system now in part coming out of some of Charles's work and I think that's a perfectly legitimate social policy but not if work does not exist work-based welfare without work is a cruel hoax work-based welfare with work actually can work and can help enrich the lives of low-income people and their kids we saw this as I mentioned in the 90's during welfare reform so I would propose that if the economy isn't creating enough jobs for low-income people then it's the role of the public sector to create them and so we should have direct public service employment for folks who need to work who want to work, who we want to work when there aren't enough jobs instead of giving them money create jobs for them and believe me there's enough work to be done there's enough work to be done in this economy and our infrastructure that we can find good things for people to do thank you very much I'm going to call Sheldon Danziger back to the stand here thank you very much our time has run out I hope we have made productive use of it please on behalf of the Ford School the University of Michigan and the Mott Foundation please give another round of applause Thank you