 And thank you for your remarks, Paul. Now, to move on, I would like to introduce our keynote commencement speaker, Sheldon Danziger. Sheldon is the president of the Russell Sage Foundation, the principal American Foundation devoted exclusively to research in the social sciences. Sheldon is one of the nation's leading scholars on the causes and consequences of poverty and inequality. He was also on the Ford School faculty for many years and recognized with the university's highest honor as a distinguished university professor. And yet for all of Sheldon's renown as a scholar, his career as a teacher and a mentor are just as central to his legacy. For 25 years, he led pre and postdoctoral training programs here at Michigan that were designed in part to bring much needed diversity of backgrounds and disciplines to the study of poverty and social welfare. Those former students are now successful faculty leaders themselves, training and inspiring their own students at colleges and universities around the world. Others are employed at foundations, think tanks, research firms, nonprofits, and government agencies. When Sheldon retired from our faculty a few years ago to take his post at Russell Sage, dozens of his former students eagerly planned and participated in a major symposium in his honor. And when I looked around the room that day, it was clear that Sheldon's commitment to mentorship and teaching had changed the face of poverty research for generations to come. Please join me in welcoming to the podium Russell Sage President, Sheldon Danziger. Thank you, Dean Collins, for your kind introduction. It's wonderful being back at Rackham with Provost Courant and my former colleagues, faculty and staff. I'm particularly honored because I think I was here for Susan's first six Ford School graduations in it, so it's particularly appropriate that I'm here for your last one. As I heard her remarks, I thought, gosh, she's got some of the same things in her talk that I have in mind, but she's so much better at getting it across. So I'm gonna talk today about why the evidence-based, nonpartisan public policy analysis that's a hallmark of the Ford School education is more important now than it has ever been in my career. I wanna start and congratulate the graduates only once, Paul did it twice, but the BAs, the MPAs, the MPPs and the PhDs, and I know how special this day is to the students because I taught here for 25 years and I know that you're relieved that you no longer have exams and papers, but I also know that you're proud of your accomplishments, but that the proudest people here are your parents, grandparents, relatives and friends, and I know your parents are particularly delighted that they won't get another Michigan tuition bill. The Ford School faculty and staff has been said, but I'll say it again, are remarkable people. I know the faculty not only spend time in the classroom, but also outside mentoring students, and I certainly know about the long hours, the writing instructor and career services offices and the other Ford School staff focus attention on Ford School students. I know that you as Ford School students get much more attention than do students in other programs on campus and almost anywhere else in the country. So again, as Susan said, one of the highlights of my career here is to look back and see many of the students I taught in leading positions at universities, think tanks, government agencies, and in the nonprofit and private sectors. So to turn to my remarks, and it builds on some of the things Paul said, is that at the Ford School, rigorous policy analysis is the order of the day. Students learn, I have three things, they learn other things, but three key things that are emphasized. First, all public policies have cost and benefits. Some intended, others not intended, and it's difficult to sort them all out. And one of the things you learn is to how to start the process of doing that. You also learn that private markets sometimes fail and that sometimes those outcomes can be improved by government interventions. You also learn that sometimes government interventions fail and they can be improved by private sector options. But the key lesson is that evidence matters, that you can't make good policy choices by invoking theories or ideologies or alternative facts, that almost all policy changes have winners and losers and you can't pretend otherwise. In other words, there are no magic bullets. So I wanna give you an example of how public policy has evolved in the poverty area, an area that has been contentious for many years and suggest how a Ford School education can help you think about moving forward. So I'll start in 1964 with a quote from President Johnson when he launched the war on poverty. He said, we cannot and need not wait for the gradual growth of the economy to lift this forgotten fifth of our nation above the poverty line. We know what must be done and this nation of abundance can surely afford to do it. Shortly thereafter, his administration launched and implemented major efforts that it's hard to think of our world today without them. Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, Job Corps, grants for college tuition, safety net protections for the poor, food stamps, increased minimum wage, increased social security benefits. Each year, tens of millions of low income, elderly and disabled Americans benefit from these and other social policy programs. There's a long tradition of research which continues to evolve that emphasizes that these programs deliver significant benefits to those who receive them. They reduce poverty and economic hardship in the short run and they improve the education and health outcomes of their children in the long run. Despite the research, a view remains widely held, best exemplified by a simple sentence from Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, quote, the federal government fought the war on poverty and poverty won. But if the research evidence says that the safety net works, but the conventional wisdom doesn't accept that evidence, why is it that poverty remains high? The simple answer is that it's the economy that's changed. And the economy changed drastically in the 1970s so that a rising tide no longer lifts all boats. We're living in an era of inequality where economic growth no longer trickles down to the poor or even to the middle class because most of the economic gains of the last 30 years have been captured by the economic elite. There are a lot of causes of this, also a long research, globalization, labor saving, technological changes, declining unions, and changing corporate employment practices have all combined to hold down the wages for workers without a college degree. However, even though the effects of these complex economic, social, and political changes are evident in the research, politicians continue to claim that magic bullets exist, that they'll increase economic growth and lift all boats again. The magic often involves such things as reducing taxes on the rich and reducing government spending for the poor and the middle class. Some people have even claimed that tax cuts will unleash huge economic growth that will pay for itself. I'll give two recent examples. The recent attempt to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, the research analysis of the Congressional Budget Office and other nonpartisan organizations showed that the American Healthcare Act of 2017 would have had more than half of the tax cuts go to families with incomes over a million dollars and the Congressional Budget Office estimated that within a decade, 24 million fewer Americans would have health insurance. That doesn't sound to me like a policy in which a rising tide will lift all boats. Just this Wednesday, the new administration put out a one-page proposal of more than five trillion dollars in tax cuts. A group called the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget, which includes former government leaders and senators from both political parties, wrote, it seems as if the administration is using economic growth like magic beans, the solution to all of our problems. But there is no golden goose at the top of the tax beanstalk, just mountains of debt. The Ford School, as I said, teaches students to reject magic bullets and evaluate the evidence. This may be a pipe dream in today's political environment, but you're just starting your career. And as Susan said, it's now more important than ever to take up the challenge of your Ford School education. Let me suggest a recent example of where I used my Ford School education to try to do something like this in the public arena. A few years ago, I was invited to join a nonpartisan task force, which was convened by the Right of Center American Enterprise Institute and the Left of Center Brookings Institution. When we joined, we were asked to take a pledge. Quote, we understand that the need to compromise and work together means that the final report is unlikely to be entirely acceptable to anyone. It wasn't easy, when we first started meeting, we argued and interrupted each other. We were fortunate that a psychologist was leading the group. And one of the things he did was always have a start at lunch and work through dinner. And at about five o'clock, he brought out the Scotch and the wine. And while people were getting their dinner, they talked about their families. And it actually got to the point even though we disagreed, we liked each other. We issued a report called Opportunity, Responsibility and Security. You can go to the website of either AEI or Brookings and take a look at it. We began to move forward when all of us agreed that there were three shared values that people on both sides of the political divide could endorse. And we were gonna use those values then to look at the evidence and come up with our policy responses. The first was non-controversial, nobody disagreed. I suspect nobody in the room would disagree. Quote, all Americans should have the opportunity to apply their talents and efforts to better themselves and their children regardless of the circumstances of their birth. The second, we all agreed, but it was the one that was the most important to the conservative members. Quote, all Americans have a responsibility to provide for themselves and their families to the best of their abilities before asking others for help. The third was more important to the progressives. Quote, all Americans are entitled to a basic level of security against the vicissitudes of life in a nation as rich as ours to a baseline level of material well-being. That echoes the Johnson statement that I read to start. We ended up concluding that we had to both promote personal responsibility and to ensure that individuals would be able to take that responsibility by having jobs available. Again, the report says we can't assume that enough jobs are always available for those who need them, especially for the hard-to-employ, those facing barriers to work, those who lived in depressed regions of the country such as rural areas and during economic downturns. None of us would have come up with the recommendations on their own. There are many other recommendations on family policy changes, education policy changes. You wouldn't want me to spend more time and go through all of those, I know. The conservatives preferred a greater emphasis on the poor taking personal responsibility. Progressives preferred a greater emphasis on raising the earnings of poor and low-income workers. We felt that if you could take a secret vote in Congress, you would get more than 60% of Republicans and Democrats to agree on our conclusions the way we had come together, the way Susan remarked that President Ford was famous for working across the aisle. Unfortunately, such willingness to compromise is rare today and at one time it was business as usual, but that's what a Ford School education teaches you to do. Careful policy analysis and thoughtful dialogue are what represent a Ford School education. So again, like Susan, I want to encourage you to go out and pursue rigorous research to document domestic and international policy issues that are ripe for change and to think about all the costs and benefits of the various solutions. We, who are in the closing decades of our public policy careers, need you to take up the challenge for the next decades. We need you to engage in and contribute to rational and civil dialogue in public and private realms, to write about these issues in the media, including social media. Social media doesn't have to emphasize alternative facts. Ford School students can blog about real facts to get involved in your community, to participate in politics, and even run for elective office. It would be nice to come back in the future to a Ford School graduation and find out that the University of Michigan had a second president who was a Michigan alum. Because of what you've accomplished at the Ford School, I'm confident that you are ready for the task of taking up these grand challenges. So once again, congratulations to the graduates, their parents, relatives, and friends. I'm honored to have the opportunity to address you today. Thank you.