 Welcome to Economics and Beyond. I'm Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with my dear friend, Dr. Robert Duggar, who really was at the foundation of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He and I and George Soros had worked together to influence the TARP legislation and when it passed, albeit not something that we thought was holistic or complete, we talked about things that, how would I say, voids that would be to be filled. And the three of us had a lunch and Rob is very much a founding father of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. It's served on the board for 10 years until just a few days ago to resume or I shouldn't say resume, intensify a number of activities that are dear to his heart that he's been building on through Inet and out beyond. He is the founder of a group called Ready Nation, about 2,500 people in the business community trying to provide for nutrition, education and more resources to support the young. He was a hedge fund partner with Paul Tudor Jones at Tudor Investment. He's been involved in environmental projects in Tanzania, Singhita, Vementi, many other environmental projects including recent lawsuits in Oregon by young people who are taking on our lack of interest in the future. He started his career at the Federal Reserve in the 1970s. He has worked in both the House and Senate banking committees. He was at the head of the National Credit Unit Administration for a time. During the SNL bailout, he became a policy director at the American Bankers Association and worked very closely with me and others on the construction of the savings and loan resolution. Rob Duggar is as close as there is on planet Earth to a brother to me. And we have kind of gone in and out, most times him first than me following, but I got to the hedge fund industry a little before him. And I feel almost a kind of seamless, intertwined exploration that began in about 1984 when I worked with Pete Domenici's staff and continues to this moment and beyond. Rob, thanks for joining me today. It's a pleasure, Rob. Great to be here. Great to be in touch with you. So when we started out, I mentioned sitting with George and talking about some of the shortcomings that were going to become evident in the TARP legislation. You and I had worked very hard with Congressman Jim Moran, Barney Frank and others and their staff members who were many of our colleagues from time pass to how they say inspire that it be interpreted that the TARP legislation would permit the use of equity injection into the banks that were troubled or failing. And it did, how would I say that was realized in that tool was used shortly thereafter. But having said all that, you and George and I were not real comfortable with TARP. I mean, obviously the Dodd-Frank legislation came on and followed and so forth. In that lunch, we talked about the German and Austrian banking crisis of 1931, when the financial system loses its credibility for leadership, stability, farsightedness, there is a void. An ideological void, a void in faith and trust in expertise, administration, governance, or in this case in financial economics. And at that lunch, I remember agreeing that I would head off as at that time a consultant to meet with economists all over the world. Before I knew there was such a thing as the Queen's question. The question is, how do we miss this one? How could things be that far off course was at the forefront of my curiosity. But Rob, I'm mostly interested in how you saw, Inet, what was it mission meant to be right at the outset? Well, I remember that lunch too, very, very well. And I remember putting in George's office and we were talking about kind of what needed to be done and who would do what. And I basically made it clear that me, the commitment I made to Ready Nation and building that organization was my top priority and that I would do whatever I could to support you in putting together whatever this new thing was going to be, Inet or something like that. For me, when I look back at the tarpid legislation, it is, it is like what Inet was about, which is we're going to focus, we remove the focus back from the individual to the community. So taking in a much larger, you know, of things to a much broader lens. And later in a discussion with the Dean of the Georgetown Law School, I came to understand that what I was really sensing was something that actually was deeply a part of me and deeply a part of all of America, which is the final two words of the preamble, that those final words are we will secure the we adopt the Constitution to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. Now the framers could have stopped that sentence they could have just said secure the blessings of liberty put a period there but they didn't. They went on to add ourselves, they could have stopped there, but they didn't. They went on to add and our posterity so it reads the purpose of the Constitution is to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. And when we were wrestling with the troubled asset resolution program with the tarp, that's what tarp stood for that tarp legislation. What we were trying to do was to refocus back from the individuals, the bank executives, and what their preferences were to the needs of the society, what the best for the country. And for me, that is the central challenge of America today. And is is kind of a heart of what I sense was my net purpose. Well, clearly, Rob, we had just gone through a rather startling time where financiers were known for frustrating publicly financed projects on the grounds that we couldn't afford it. And then they made a mess of things, snapped their fingers and said, give me $800 billion to clean this up. Otherwise, we're all going down the drain. And we did, and I think it was the right thing because going down the drain would have been even more prolonged and painful. But then the process of money politics and reform essentially defended they're getting the money without them paying the price in terms of loss of ownership or criminal prosecution or what have you. And I think that contributed a great deal to the demoralization of many people that the government permitted this to happen. It happened and these people want to use the public treasure, meaning our fiscal capacity to bail themselves out without paying the price. And that's not a defense of the common good. That is a what you might call expropriation of the common good for private purposes. Absolutely, Rob, what we've had both in the, the SNL problem in the late 80s and early 90s and the downturn of the internet era with world calm and the other companies that were exploiting their accounting practices. And more and quite recently with the great recession in 2008 2009. We had circumstances in which the economics we've had founded as it was with a focus on the individual ourselves and not on posterity or society generally. That economics is an economic that is driven by individual profit objectives short term ism and leads to policies that are inequitable and unsustainable. It leads but not only in finance across the board particularly tax policy. We are tax policy where we are by virtue of underfunding the internal revenue service we don't collect for 100 to $500 billion a year. With a result that that amount of money would have been sufficient to cover the deficits annual deficits of the Obama year. And we'd go a long way to reducing the deficits we now we now have and so and and and people across the country understand that there are people who are not doing their part. They're not paying their fair share. And this leads to a corrosive distrust that pervades everything. We have a situation in which in a sense it's very easy for the affluent and the successful to criticize people running into a store and grabbing a television. And they're completely disregard the amount of looting that is being done. Let visibly through the tax system and through many forms of the deregulation we've had over the last 10 to 15 years. So the the concern that that sort of keeps me fired up is a concern that has to do with those final words of the preamble ourselves and our posterity. We have a society which is based on the individualism built into the word ourselves. And we give very little regard to the sustainability priorities of the environment fiscal policy education levels health care housing that have to do with our posterity. And I remember the ethic at that time two thousand five six seven eight where the code expression on Wall Street was IBG UBG meaning I'll be gone you'll be gone. So we got to press it hard now the upside is ours and its heads we wind tail somebody else loses and we'll be doing something else. Exactly. And that was a very short term very reckless kind of cavalier approach to public policy and the follow on to that crisis. As you said when I think when we started I net we were talking about how do we repair. First of all financial theory then financial policy and the structure of the financial industry so that this doesn't happen again. So we had all kinds of contradictions between what was really happening in these idealized notions which always seem to have done exactly what you said created a legitimacy for individual short termism. And I think we've had an overdose of such false consciousness. And in my view I net whether it relates to environment or politics political economy the social sustainability of extreme and growing inequality money politics. There's just so many dimensions that have to be addressed to create something that's what you buy call channeling this back towards that common good adequate provision of public goods and addressing the responsibility of posterity. Tell me you've done a lot of deep philosophical work from you know I've sat with you in arm chairs and restaurants and so forth and I've heard biblical stories founding father stories passages from Adam Smith. How do you see the evolution of the responsibility to posterity the ebbs and flows from the time of Abraham to the present. You know, thanks. Yeah, I'm glad you raised it that way, because what it does is it works. It lifts our thinking about economics to what we're really all about economics is a way of talking about how we relate to each other. The law is a articulation of the way we relate to each other. But underneath all of that is thousands and thousands and thousands of years of people coming slowly to learn what's right wrong and slowly deciding that we're going to do things this way we're not going to do things that way anymore. And over and over again. The way that society ultimately chooses is it chooses posterity. And you mentioned the Abrahamic Covenant. This is the story you remember Abraham was Abraham was going to sacrifice his son Isaac. To obtain God's blessing. And he took Isaac up to the top of the mountain and he was ready to sacrifice him. And God said no. Stop there is sacrifice that lamb who was born here. Caught in the thicket. And God said to Abraham, follow the word of the Lord. And your descendants will number as the stars in the Bible and in the Quran and actually in a number of other theology. What we've come to the word of the Lord is actually a way of life way of living. These are dietary rules. These are social rules. There are the 10 commandments. You shall not steal a cup at the neighbor's wife. All of these rules which enable society to get from one generation to the next. All of these rules the word of the Lord is about providing for the next generation providing for its assured success. It's assured well being. So, in a sense, what the covenant is all about is generational origin. And I like to distinguish between the enlightenment philosophy of the late 1700s and focus on the individual. That is the declaration of independence which says we're all created equal and endowed with an individual. That's an idea of individual focus of the individual. And it was a focus which was dedicated to bringing down the old medieval understanding of human relationships and human rights, which have which had built into it that you are effectively the slave of the person above you in the social hierarchy. No, we're going to get rid of that aristocratic view of rights and wrong. And we're going to adopt an enlightened view in which we're all equal. That was with the declaration of independence is all about as an expression of enlightenment individualism. At the same time the same year 1776 Adam Smith publishes the wealth of nations. And it's an economic expression where the declaration was a political expression. Adam Smith's wealth of nations same year was an economic expression which at this it said if everyone pursues their own greed. Everyone pursues what they think of as best for themselves. The wealth of the nation will be maximized. What people forget is that Jefferson and the other framers and Adam Smith and all of the sort of enlightenment economic thinkers in England. Went home at night and on the table in the in the in their homes was a Bible. And in that Bible they get open it up in the front pages or the back pages. There'd be lists of generations of people and each each person each of the each framer that Jefferson could see his name. And he could see all the names that went before him and all and a lot of blank spaces that went after him. So Benjamin Franklin George Washington all the framers of the Constitution had this sense of themselves as being a part of a long stream of people. And they were at the midpoint and there would be a lot of people afterwards. So they had a very strong sense that they were part of a long stream of generations. They also had a sense that they were writing a constitution for generations that they were writing a constitution not for now, but a conflict that will project the United States centuries into the future. So they had a strong sense of what I would like to what I think of as enlightenment generationalism. And we've lost that the Constitution clearly expresses it where it says secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. The first is the first is ourselves and that's all about enlightenment individualism. And the second part is about enlightenment generationalism. And the whole problem of quote unquote new economic theory is to move away from the economics that is based solely on enlightenment individualism. The enlightenment, you know the understanding of Adam Smith's market theories as individually and not generationally focused, which is what we saw in the 2008 downturn what we saw in the SNL crisis and what we're seeing now in the response to COVID 19. We have a reason why the United States has done so much less well in dealing with the disease in comparison to Europe and in Asia is those countries are much more generationally focused than we are. They are much more focused on the well being of the community, the well being of posterity than we are we are we are blinded and trapped by our by the by the net and the entanglement of our belief that individualism way to maximize the wealth of the United States. Sorry to go on. That's good. You know, Rob, my pension for musical lyrics as I was listening to you. I was recognizing that I believe at the end of Abraham's story. He, he did offer to kill his son, Isaac, and God spared Isaac. Yes. But I remember Bob Dylan singing that song highway 61 revisited the first verse. Oh, God said to Abraham, kill me a son. Abe said, man, you must be putting me on. God said, no, Abe say what? God say, you can do what you want, Abe, but the next time you see me coming, you better run. Well, Abe said, where do you want this killing done? God said out on highway 61. So just a little playfulness in there. But but it was the case that by abiding by God's rules. Isaac was spared. And it illustrated a pathway where when you were responsible to the collective, we can all be better off, but sometimes painful to subordinate your individual interest for the health of the collective, which includes these future generations. So I think I think it's a very powerful set of stories. But when, when did you see, you know, you talked about the Declaration of Independence, but the ebbs and flows. Abraham Lincoln, the 1314 15th amendments to the Constitution. When do you see what you might call the pinnacle of how they say sensitivity to the common good. Say after the Civil War. And when did it start to deteriorate why it clearly the Civil War represented a major move back towards thinking of the United States as a as a single society. And we put together again. And we then had the Gilded Age in which the late 1800s in which capitalism was absolutely dominant. There was an effort back to establish labor laws and get rid of child labor they were the bringing the right to vote to women in 1919. World War two of soldiers coming back had a strong sense of, I think, community. So I think that the posterity was was very strong in those late 40s and early 50s. The wealth of the United States. However, and the focus of capitalists drove through advertising through steady political efforts to reestablish individualism and they sort of free market fundamentalism. As a national sort of our national philosophy. So we move to the 60s. And we begin to see the emergence of a kind of steadily strengthening focus on the individual free market fundamentalism, the inherent right and correctness of whatever the markets determine that's the right answer. And then you have as you know well the statement of Milton Friedman. That the purpose of business is to maximize profits that there is no social obligation of business to anything other than simply to maximize profits. That was not the high watermark. The trumpet sounding in the night, basically signaling that all those who believe in these free market unconstrained market activities are free now to go forward and we saw that steadily gaining strength in the feeding decades. It reached a pinnacle I believe in 2008 with the collapse of basically Lehman Brothers and the entire mortgage finance structure. I think after 2008, the whole country began to become aware that we had gone too far that the belief in markets the belief in the rightness of market outcomes had gone too far that we were faced with a unsustainable unsustainable economic conditions, unsustainable income distributional conditions. And the politics were becoming increasingly difficult and more fragmented efforts were made to understand that. I net did it's, you know, made a significant contributions in that area and I'll just say now that I think the most important contribution of I net is the young scholars initiative. If we want to understand how that second word in the that that second word posterity is going to be incorporated into economic thinking with those young people that will tell us how to do it. There is that group of 12,500 young people who are members of the young scholars initiative of I net. There are six or seven Nobel Prize winners, and those people have embedded in them, a sense of the unsustainability of certainly US policies and unsustainability of global environmental and I would say, you know, income distributional policies. You know, it's it's interesting to me Rob, because I think you're in my professional careers or for me, graduate education and so forth, occurred at this at this turning point at the end of the 60s. And I remember Stephen toolman one of my favorite philosophers wrote a book called Cosmopolis and he talked about when people are pushing forward vigorously sometimes people get scared and there's a counter reaction, rather than a pushing forward to evolve things. And there's a gentleman named Ian McDonald who's deceased but wrote a book about the music of the Beatles and its cultural and social ramifications and influence how the music was influenced. And he also said at that juncture. You had two forces, which actually fed the turn back to individual individualism. The first was the attempt of the civil rights movement to use our founding documents and our institutions of governance to enforce a change in the treatment of African American people met with in particularly in the south, a resistance to governments. In other words, resort to a kind of libertarian philosophy because they didn't like to have to follow those rules. And on the other side, there was a streak which we'll call in within the hippies who wanted the government to stay out of how they ran their lifestyle. You know, their consumption of different types of substances or their relationship with romantic partners or what have you. And so as we moved into the stalemate of the 70s and the rise of the Black Panthers and a polarization and tensions related to the hostages in Iran. The counter revolution picked up energy by focusing on the individual, which converted some of the hippies and brought the south on board to diminish the power of governments, which had been so important, both from the escape from the depression of the 1930s and in the Second World War and and and and shortly, you know, in the years thereafter. So it's quite an interesting set of kind of internal forces and dynamics that led. I'm going to say back to that freed menesque world in and the crushing of something called the Phillips curve in macroeconomics, why the Chicago School and adherence to strict monetarism and all these things. It's awesome about the time that you and I were emerging professionally and now the pendulum. At least I would say hope is going to swing back a little bit in the other direction. And I think climate and the pandemic are enormous impetuses to both seeing and demanding that we increase vigorously adherence to the pursuit of the common good. I agree. Without your work now with ready nation in another dimensions to bring that. How would I say that respect for posterity back on to center stage I know you've been involved in some lawsuits where young people have sued. Eventually, the state of Michigan for malpractice in its public education. And the state of Oregon. It was location of another suit where young people are suing the government for its malpractice with regard to environmental protection. Yes, I thanks for bringing that up. Those two lawsuits. It is to say that the law is the guard rails that guide the flow of economic activity. You really can't have a new economics until you have built a new set of guard rails. And we actually aren't going to build out of something that is entirely different. We're going to use the same materials and the same designs that we've that we've used for a long time. The roads built today are pretty much like roads built. And in both those lawsuits. You are looking at the commitment of states, the first one let's talk about education the commitment of states to provide an adequate education nearly every state Constitution contains a phrase, which promises that the state is going to provide an adequate education. And in the case of the in the Detroit case, 15 teenagers from absolutely horrifically difficult education circumstances reached age 15, unable to read. And they sued the state of Michigan for failing to meet its constitutional obligation to provide them with an adequate education. District judge acknowledged that the conditions of their education were absolutely horrific. He went back through the terrible conditions that they faced the students and said that what was what happened was very definitely wrong, but he could not find in the Constitution. A right to an education, an adequate education. So he turned the suit down. The suit was applied and appeal to the sixth appeal. Initially, the three judge panel said yes the the kids do have a. There is a right to an education it arises out of due process it arises out of a right to vote. You can't really be a citizen unless you can read in a modern world. And then the full district court probably again, sort of receiving a message from the Supreme Court that they will really don't want to hear this case, because if 15 kids can sue a state for failing to provide an adequate education, then another group of kids can sue on other bases. For example, there might be a group of kids who sue the federal government for failing to conduct a fiscal policy which leaves them with a manageable amount of debt. They might claim that the misguided fiscal policies of the United States leave the next generation with an absolutely insupportable and unjust debt burden. So the the that case has been settled, not satisfactorily not with a full understanding that truly, if if there is a right to vote, then there's a kind of implied right to have an education to enable you to to to vote with with with understanding what you're doing. The other case is the Julie anniversary of the United States. That's a case in which 21 kids sued the United States for failing to change policies in a way which would bring climate change under control. That case. The key idea there is that these children actually have standing to bring this case in the first place that they have standing to bring a case and hold the government responsible for failing to provide for them what legal concept called the trust doctrine that it would lead to them in an environment that is livable at least suitable that case went up through the court system several times but ultimately was declared dismissed by the Ninth Circuit. And again, in this instance, the most likely the Supreme Court indicated that it truly did not want to have to hear this case on whether what would fundamentally is about whether society has obligations provide for the next generation. This clearly is a case that depends on the makeup of the Supreme Court both cases in fact depend on the makeup of the Supreme Court and lead us to a pretty clear indication of what where hope is just as Abraham Lincoln represents a kind of generationalism is a focus on the whole society just as he represented of the hopeful direction of the United States. We're at a similar point now we're across fiscal policy environmental policy education policy health policy hope lies in the direction of bringing into government leadership that will drive deep into the DNA of the executive branch the legislative branch the judicial branch, the idea that the word posterity has constitutional power that when you read the application and interpret it in the framework of ourselves and our posterity, you will conclude that there is a that they claim that we have a constitutional obligation to the next generation is a valid claim. How do we reintroduce what you might call the responsibility to posterity. And you take me to maybe we start right here. What happened in Oregon, which instead of ignoring it or rejecting it because it wasn't a precedent precedent in legislation. It became something vital for consideration and important and sets the stage for what I want to explore with you now, which is the very, very important changes in philosophy psychology and practice that are necessary to realize the kind of goals you and ready nation are working on to whether it's climate, whether it's the, we might call the burden of future debt. How, how do we honor those who don't yet vote, those who you don't yet have bank books and create that reverence and that protection of posterity. Rob, that is that that is the absolute core question. And very fortunately, we're we're on the process of doing it. It looks, and it always looks messy. It's always look messy in history, when new rights and new understandings of obligations of people to each other. As those obligations and understandings were coming into place, it's always been a messy process, but the very fact that it's becoming messy is the sign that we're starting to work. We're certainly at the beginning of the process, we may be at the end of the beginning and we're into the hard part, but in any case, we're underway. And the central challenge is what we've been talking about for the last 40 minutes or so. Is those two words at the end of the preamble, where it's the majority, a super majority of the states in 1788 approve the Constitution, a super majority of the states approve the Constitution with a preamble that says we secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. The blessings of liberty for ourselves, that's clear enough people will be able to do business and pursue their own objectives, just like Adam Smith described. The part that's tough is our posterity, how do we assure that what we're doing actually is best for them. For hundreds for thousands of years, that was actually not a tough question. There was no way in past human experience that human beings could actually wreck the situation for the next generation in a material way, but we can now can with the environment, with fiscal policy, with failures to provide the health care and education, family support, that people need to raise that next generation well. We have the ability now to do what we really couldn't do in the past, which is make the situation for the next generation materially worse than what we received. We violated the most fundamental principle of stewardship. We're not leaving to the next generation as good or better than we received. So the Black Lives Matter is an expression of a claim to community, a claim to participation in the community. If any lives matter, then Black Lives Matter too. And it's that posterity part. They're pushing themselves into the word ourselves, that's all of us, and they're pushing their kids and their descendants into that word posterity. In other words, everything the United States does has to be right for those kids too. So the fact that we're having such a terrifically difficult struggle over racism, classism, now, and the objections to economic inequality and opportunity inequality. These are the signs that the society is becoming acutely aware that it's having impacts on what it regards as most important. And this is the psychology part that you touched on and why it's so important to remember this. Parents will literally give their lives for their children. And when they see their kids getting so much less than they should be getting or could be getting, and their kids are not getting a fair shake, those parents become very edgy. They become very difficult. And so I think that what we're seeing is throughout the society an increasing sense that my kids are owed as much or better than everyone else gets, or as much or better than I got. That's what the importance of the literacy lawsuit in Detroit is all about. Does a society owe to its young people an education sufficient to enable them to function effectively in the society? Everyone knows the answer is yes. The law does not recognize it yet. But the fact that we're asking these questions, that's the first step. Now, the next generation of the environmental question, the question that's being raised out on the West Coast and Julianna versus the United States, is the question of does society have an obligation to leave the next generation a livable environment? And the answer we all know in our heart psychologically, we all know the answer is yes. But the law does not recognize that yet. It recognizes it's in some respect. We've got the Environmental Protection Agency. We have the general legal concept of a public trust. You can't poison the waters. The Love Canal case is the sort of standard there. But does a society in a general way, and the answer is yes, it does in a general way have an obligation to leave an environment that is as good or better than it received. And the fact that we're now struggling over this is a sign that we're taking the first step. So personally, I'm quite optimistic about this, but I can tell you I know from lots of scars that it is going to be a tough fight to push from recognition, which is what we have now, to action getting the United States back into the Paris Climate Agreement. Getting established that indeed states have obligations to provide adequate education. So that's the struggle part. But the fact that we have recognized those two final words and begun to pay attention to that second one, posterity, and then focusing on future generations and their obligations to them, that's occurring. And that's very encouraging. Very encouraging to me. In the what I'll call practical trenches, you and I both worked on Capitol Hill. You'd work with the American Bankers Association and we've each been in the private sector. So you have a lot of different vantage points and visions of process and how results actually are attained in society. And Rob, what I find interesting about Ready Nation, and you've shared with me your thoughts on this several times, is that we have a political process that depends upon what you might call the money implications of social policy. And you're bringing people who can provide the services that realize these goals towards posterity, education, health, child nutrition. You're bringing them to the table. And not only are they moral warriors and why they've chosen their path, it certainly is deeply related to that. But there can be lucrative and profitable industry in providing these supports. And they're just what you might call different than what's powerful now, particularly as it relates to the fossil fuel industry and the need for profound energy transformation. But I'd like you to, with our listeners, explore a little bit that vision of Ready Nation, how lots of people have a stake in building this system, and you've seen the picture and you've pulled them together to build it together. Yes, Rob, what you're referring to is kind of, we may know that it makes a lot of sense actually to provide quality prenatal care to at-risk moms. But there's some part of our community that says, you know, why don't they do it themselves? Why did they get into that situation anyway? Why is it my problem? That's not the approach we take at Ready Nation. We're interested in, they got into that situation, they're going to have a child, and what do we want to do about assuring the health of that child when it's born? Because we have morally made commitments to provide for the health of that child through Medicaid. Does it make a difference whether we spend a lot of time on the health of the mother before the child is born? And as it turns out, if you and I invest $100,000 in providing prenatal counseling to at-risk moms, and we do it as a loan and we ask to be paid back with a reasonable, say, 10%, 12% rate of return for a high-risk venture in a year, we might be very surprised to learn that not only can they pay us back, but they can pay us back actually very easily. Providing quality prenatal healthcare to at-risk moms-to-be reduces Medicaid expenses of the child enough in the first year to generate a return of 125%. Now, we are making, in Ready Nation, we make moral arguments using economics, because, first of all, it's more effective in making a case with state and federal legislators and budget spending, exactly as it determines spending allocations, spending decisions. It makes better sense to argue in terms of economics and cost savings and that sort of thing. The moral commitment, moral obligation to future generations is nevertheless there, but the beauty, the miracle is that successful economics, successful economies do work. We are our brother's keeper in successful economies. We are responsible for, and we act on that sense of responsibility for the other people in our society, and lower the hold of society produces more, it's more competitive, it's more efficient. It's more successful economically. Another example, for years there were debates about pre-kindergarten. Should states provide money for pre-kindergarten or so they've done. And a lot of arguments, while you're taking the young children out of the household and we want the young children to be staying at home with their moms, even though we have a situation in which we also want the moms to go out and get jobs. So we argued, there's a tremendous argument for many years about the advantages of providing pre-kindergarten that would end up with better educated kids and so forth. The arguments that actually won were ones put forward by INET affiliated Nobel Prize winner Jim Heckman document that quality pre-kindergarten generates economic returns over decades that are north of 10, 12, 13, 14 percent. So different studies give different numbers, but basically the economic returns from investing in kids, young children, especially at-risk children are so high, they're higher than stock market performance over decades. So we begin to win the argument based on economics and slowly but surely step-by-step state after state, region after region begins to implement quality pre-kindergarten programs and soon more and more kids are doing better in third and fourth grade math and reading tests and literacy rates are rising and child with the cost of special education are falling because more kids are coming ready to learn. All of that stuff is happening, but beneath it all, something else is actually happening. The economics is working because ourselves and our posterity is working. When we focus our economic decisions on what's best for posterity as well as ourselves, but if that posterity is right front and center of our thinking, low and behold it turns out our decisions are much, much better. We have quality pre-kindergarten. We have quality childcare. We have good prenatal healthcare and low and behold the whole society is more efficient, it's more economically robust, it's more stable, it's more frankly competitive. That's what the business people in Ready Nation understand. That's what we've got studies after studies after studies of different situations all across the country, across a wide range of human capital investments. And it just makes the case that the economics for the country are overwhelmingly better if we're thinking about posterity. When you are among the privileged, but you sense and value humanity, when you see people excluded, you might not be afraid that in this round you're going to be excluded, but when you're a member of a society which engages in negligence or cruel exclusion, your unconscious mind starts to work on the scenarios where maybe the rules change and instead of being the privilege, you become the other. Yes. And you start to know that it's your sense of security and safety is very fragile. Yes. That's what I call living in the haunted house. Now you use the metaphor of the haunted house. The greatest philosopher of the last century was John Rawls at Harvard, who use the metaphor of the veil. That is, we know we make policy or we know what is best for everyone if we make decisions about that behind the veil of not knowing where we or our descendants will be. Yes. This is the metaphor of the veil. The lottery takes place after you define the system. That's right. You need to understand that your children and grandchildren will live somewhere and you don't know where in this system they're going to be. And you introduced this idea that when you look around the society, it lifts some people up and lets other people down. And a reality is we don't really don't know where our children will be, where our grandchildren will be, our great grandchildren will be. The wealthy in our society attempt to address this uncertainty with trust and estates that are dynastic that continue for generations, which basically enable those generations of kids to be somewhat immune to the ups and downs of life. If you allow social systems to proceed to the breaking point, none of those elite protections work. They didn't work after the French Revolution, they didn't work after the Russian Revolution, they didn't work after the Chinese Revolution. And if we are not able to reestablish a sense of of posterity, a commitment to posterity in the United States. The economic conditions that follow from where we are now may be so disruptive that all those carefully structured trusts and so forth are ripped apart. And the decisions that all of us should have made in the beginning was let's plan as if we're behind a veil and we don't know where our children will be and we don't know where our grandchildren will be. So let's let's set policies that create a society where we would be happy wherever our kids end up. When I listen to you, the song that comes to my mind is one called My Back Pages by Bob Dylan. And the chorus and the refrain, which I assure all of our board members and my staff at INET would agree with me, characterizes your presence. Because I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. Yes, I honestly think that you and I and Soros and others thought we were kind of like we were we were on to something here. And now I'm very much aware that if I want to know where the future is, I need to go talk to those young scholars. I'm much younger than that now. I need to go visit with those young people and get a sense of how they see the world. Because I need to know how they imagine making ourselves in our posterity of that priority a reality. So I think we should call it to an end. But in how do I say on behalf of our board, the INET staff, and particularly myself, I know you and I will never disconnect. No. But I'll give you another little Joel to Bob Dylan. May God bless and keep you always. May your wishes all come true. May you always do for others and let others do for you. May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung. May you stay forever young. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Rob. It's a delight to speak with you. And as you keep getting younger, I'm going to bring you back on. As we turn the corner and get past the election, and we'll do another session. But thank you for today. I like it. That would be great. Thank you so much, Rob. I enjoyed it. Thanks. A lot of fun. Me too. Bye-bye. And check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at InetEconomics.org.