 All right, good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to today's policy lecture, policy talks lecture, which is co-sponsored by the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and Poverty Solutions. My name is Luke Schaefer. I direct poverty solutions. It's a university-wide initiative of the University of Michigan that seeks to partner with communities and policymakers to find new ways to prevent and alleviate poverty. Tomorrow we'll mark our first birthday, so we'll be having some cake and stuff. And we think there's no more fitting way to celebrate one year into poverty solution than with a speaker who offers an important voice in our national discussion on how to confront poverty. And we appreciate the Ford School's willingness to partner with us through their Outstanding Policy Talk series. Dr. Arthur Brooks is president and the Beth and Ravinal Curry Scholar and Free Enterprise at the American Enterprise Institute. Before joining the Institute, Dr. Brooks was the Lewis A. Bantel Professor of Business and Government at Syracuse University, where he taught economics and social entrepreneurship. And before that, he spent 12 years as a classical musician in the United States and Spain. So hopefully we can talk a little bit about that in the Q&A. Dr. Brooks is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and a best-selling author of 11 books on topics, including the role of government, economic opportunity, happiness, and the morality of the free enterprise. His latest book, The New York Times Best Seller, is The Conservative Heart, how to build a fairer, happier, and more prosperous America. He's also published dozens of academic journal articles and the textbook, Social Entrepreneurship. Dr. Brooks has a PhD and a Master's of Philosophy and Policy Analysis from the Pardee Rand Graduate School. He's been married to his wife Esther for 25 years, and they have three children. My intel from just a minute ago is that they're teenagers, another thing to talk about, I guess, they currently live in Maryland. Following his remarks, Dr. Brooks will take questions first in a conversation with me and then from the audience. So beginning at 440, staff will start collecting question cards. For those of you watching online, please post your questions via Twitter using hashtag policy talks. Ford School Professor Natasha Pilkaskis, along with U of M students Jesse Arm and Kate Blessing, Kwama Moura, will facilitate the Q and A. One thing I admire about Arthur is his eagerness to engage others who hold a variety of views and perspectives. Such exchange is a core value of the University of Michigan. Just this week, President Schlissel echoed this sentiment saying the University of Michigan will quote, always be in an unalienable forum for discovery, debate, and discussion, a place where respect and disagreement are complementary, where each makes the other stronger and where we will all advocate for and learn from their confluence. Here at the Ford School in a poverty solutions, we seek to live into this call in our teaching, research, and engagement. With that, please join me in welcoming Arthur Brooks to the University of Michigan. Thank you, Luke. Thank you very much and thanks to all of you. It's wonderful to be here. It's an honor for me to be here at the Gerald Ford School. I'm the president of the American Enterprise Institute and Gerald Ford, the month he left office as president, joined AEI as a senior fellow, a position that he held until the month of his death, as a matter of fact. He's somebody that's held in great reverence as a moderate voice, bringing people together in public policy, somebody who treated politics with great respect. And it's a wonderful name to have on your school. Congratulations on that. It's great to be here with my friend, Melavitsky, who's been a professor here since we were colleagues together at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. I've been looking forward to seeing Mel. We've corresponded by email over the past couple of years and now we're getting, tonight we'll have dinner together in person. It's wonderful. I'm gonna talk to you today about entrepreneurship and poverty. These are actually, for me, until relatively recently, two completely disparate lines of research and thinking. I never wanted them to be. I wrote about entrepreneurship. It was my main area of scholarship when I was a professor. Poverty was the thing I cared about the most. And I always wanted to find the way that those two things could come together, but I was never able to do it. And I'm gonna tell you what my problem was and how I finally solved it and what I learned. And if I do my job, I'm gonna tell you that what I learned about putting entrepreneurship together with poverty as a solution to poverty actually has given me solutions on how I personally can live a better life. And I'm gonna offer those solutions that I learned from people living in poverty to you, even though I'm assuming that no one here is actually poor. So where do we start? I'm the president of this think tank in Washington, DC, and if there's one thing to know about what it means to be the president of a think tank, it's that you have to raise money all the time. It's a nonprofit based entirely on philanthropy. We take not one dime from the government. We don't have any contracts. We sell nothing. We get all of our money from voluntary contributions. And that means that for me, I'm in the hunt all the time. Now, the good thing about that, I mean, it's tough because I'm on the road a lot, but the good thing about that is I meet unbelievably successful entrepreneurs and they're very interesting people. Now, one of the things I've taken to do is I ask them to tell me in their own words their story of success. It's fascinating. It's anthropologically interesting. As a behavioral social scientist, because how they explain their own success, whether it's humble or egotistical, and it's great actually. And I wanna tell you the story that one of my donors recently told me, a very wealthy man, a billionaire, told me about his secret to success. And it's gonna make a point that you'll see here in a second. He said, my secret to success is really a very simple story that started with an experience that I had when I was 12. He said he grew up in a little town in Kansas. And one day he was at the edge of town there was an orchard relatively near his house and he was looking up into this apple tree. It was full of, it was August or September and it was big, beautiful red apples and they looked so delicious. And the farmer noticed that he was admiring the apples and came up to him and said, kid, you like those apples? And he said, I said, yeah. He said, do you want one? He said, yeah. He says, I'll give it to you for a nickel, a nickel. Turns out his father had just given him his allowance. It was a nickel and he pulled it out and he bought the apple. He said I was walking into town and I was shining it up on my shirt and a businessman comes walking up to me and he said, hey kid, that's a great looking apple. I'll give you a dime for it. And I said, that's a 100% profit margin. And my entrepreneurial career was born. He said, I took my dime back out to the edge of town I bought two apples and brought it back and I doubled my profit again. I said, this is amazing. This is a, it was revelatory for him. So after school the next day he went running out with his now 20 cents and got 40 cents. He said, I started doing this every day. By the end of two weeks I was taking my bike out with a, bringing a box of apples in and selling them to business men, doubling my money over and over again. Two years of this go by and I realized I can't take this thing to scale. So I'm 14 at this point which apparently is the driving age in Kansas and he borrows his uncle's truck and takes it out to the edge of town and buys a truck load of apples and brings them in and it's this business. And he said, this is my secret to success in a nutshell. I doubled my money with apples day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year and then my father died and left me $100 million. So you weren't expecting that and I wasn't either. Why do I bring it up? Because stories of entrepreneurship you know in your heart in America today you kind of think that that's the real ending. I mean there's more and more data coming out that show that fabulous riches, Horatio Alger stories are largely fiction anymore and I want it to be true. I want them to be false but you find that rags to riches stories when you dig a little bit are actually kind of riches to riches stories? The average entrepreneur who's successful in this country monetarily successful, financially successful starts in the upper middle class or lower upper class. That's just the truth. If that's the truth, then we have a problem if we wanna pose entrepreneurship as the solution to poverty. We have to solve why it is that the avenues to entrepreneurial success don't appear to reach all the way down to the people at the very bottom of the economic pyramid. Why is that? And what can we do about it? Now I've been thinking about this problem for a long time because as I said, I want it to be the case that you can offer entrepreneurial opportunities to everybody. I believe I've dedicated my career to equal opportunity. That's what really moves my heart and when I don't see equal opportunity, it's a problem. The heart of the American dream and the American experience is wrapped up in this mythology of entrepreneurship and so I have to figure out how to solve this. When you look at the data, by the way, I mentioned just a minute ago I made some assertions about the sort of the broken path, the inability to go from the bottom to the very top but you look at it and it's very clear in the data that we see. The stories of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, these are really stories of people that started in relative privilege and made it to the very top of the economic food chain. So what do we do? I've puzzled about this for a long time. How do we solve this problem? Maybe the entrepreneurial system really isn't the solution to poverty. That's possible, right? I don't wanna believe that because if that's the case, then the only way that we can solve poverty is by treating people in poverty as largely charity cases and solve it with the government. I got nothing against government solutions to poverty but I don't want them to be the only solutions to poverty in a country that was based on the idea of individual initiative. Let me do better than that. So in doing research on this, I kind of held this in my head. And by the way, when I was teaching entrepreneurship, I had a complementary problem to this. I was teaching at the Maxwell School of Citizenship in public affairs at Syracuse, but also in the business school at Syracuse and I had these MBA students in my social entrepreneurship class and they would always ask me this question, MBA students, they would say, what's the secret to successful entrepreneurship? Do you know the secret to it? What's the kind of a, because I'm a behavioralist and so they wanna know, what's the behavior? What are the personality characteristics? And so I actually dug into that at one point so I'd have an answer. What do all the successful entrepreneurs have in common? And one of the most interesting ways to look at this is to go to an organization that I admire a lot called the Gallup Polling Organization. We do a lot of work with them now at AEI and their most important product is called the Strengths Finder. You think of them as doing public opinion polling about how popular is the president that's actually not how they make their money. They make most of their money from these products called the Strengths Finder where you go into a big company and you survey everybody in the company to find out what they're really good at. You ask two or 300 kind of unrelated questions and then you use relatively sophisticated statistical tools to collate through that data and tell those people what they should be doing or what they shouldn't be doing. Find your strengths, Strengths Finder. Great tool. I recommend pay a couple of bucks and do it yourself. You'll learn something about yourself. That's really interesting. Why do I bring it up? Because I was looking at that Strengths Finder data for the personality characteristics of entrepreneurs and what I found was really discouraging. According to this, only 2% of the population is naturally entrepreneurial and only a quarter of them has the personality characteristics to be able to manage an organization of any reasonable size. Only one half of 1% of the population has the characteristics of an entrepreneur who can actually run anything. So when my student said, do you know the secret to entrepreneurship? My answer should be, yes I do, and you don't have it. That's not motivational, is it? So I dropped the whole thing. Got these two complementary problems. Poverty and entrepreneurship, I can't connect them. Entrepreneurship, it seems like something that's elusive to begin with. It's not ubiquitous. That's not a very American story either, is it? And I went around and around on this for a long time. I came to AEI and I kept thinking about it. And by sheer happenstance, I had an experience that finally solved my problem for me. About the connection between entrepreneurship and solutions to poverty. I was doing something else entirely. I was making a movie, or documentary film. It's coming out in the spring. It's called The Pursuit and it talks about happiness and how people can build their lives, particularly people at the very bottom. If it's any good, you might hear about it. If it's not, you probably won't. I don't know yet, quite frankly. But when I was making this movie, I was looking for the most highly functional organizations in the world for pulling people up from poverty. For enabling people really to pull themselves up from poverty, because that's the stories that we really, really like, right? Where we allow people to live their own dignity and build their own lives. So I was looking for examples. And I was pulling everybody I could possibly find. You ever heard of a good organization? I was in New York, and I was in Mumbai, and I was in Barcelona, and I was just all over the place looking for these programs. The one that inspired me the most was in Houston, Houston, Texas. And it was called the Prison Entrepreneurship Program. Okay now, you already know what it is, just based on the title of the thing. First, before I tell you about it, I'm gonna tell you why it exists. And the reason that the Prison Entrepreneurship Program exists is because of a problem I would like to recommend all of you join me in worrying about. And that's criminal justice reform in America. Okay now, if you go to Texas, and this is typical of any place in the United States, you will find basically three pieces of interlocking data. Let's start nationwide. Today, on this very day, there are 23 million people walking around in the United States who have been in prison for felony convictions. 23 million. That's like the whole population of Taiwan walking around free. Now, it's not bad that they're free. You don't want a criminal justice system that locks people up and throws away the key. You want people to get out. You want most people to get out when they go to prison. And is that a large number or a small number? I don't know. You can decide for yourself whether or not we lock too many people up. That's not my question here. The problem is among those 23 million, statistic number two, is that they have a 70% unemployment rate. And three, they have a 50% likelihood of going back to prison within the first 24 months of getting out of prison. That's a total disaster. I don't even care what your politics are. I don't care what my politics are. It's a disaster for them, for their families, for their neighborhoods, for their communities, and for you. Because you're living in a country that hasn't solved that problem. You have people walking around who can't work. They're literally, quite literally, the most vulnerable people in our society today, and are also so much of the periphery that we don't consider them just to be unloved. We consider them to be unlovable. That has moral implications to it, it has practical implications and policy implications to it. It's a big issue. Okay, why do I bring that up? Because I want you to join me in thinking that's a big problem that we have to solve. But, back to Texas. The reason the prison entrepreneurship program exists is because they're trying to find a way to solve this. They notice that the guys who get out of prison from the Texas State Penitentiary System don't find jobs, go back to their old neighborhoods, have nothing to do, commit crimes, and go right back to prison. They say, huh, how do you break that chain? Oh, I know. Find some way that they can make their own jobs. You can't get a job, and the hypothesis was they can't get a job because nobody wants to hire ex-cons. It's too dangerous, too scary, too uncertain, too unknown, right? And there are lots of solutions to that that people are starting to propose. But they say, okay, if that's the working hypothesis, then what we need to do is for them to create their own jobs. How do we do that? Oh, let's let them conceive of a business that they would create, and that will do the business planning and the elevator pitches and the marketing, and they're gonna get out, set it up, build their business, thousands of flowers will bloom. So they do this. They go into the prisons. They let 2,500 guys self-select into their program who are one year away from release. These are major crimes, too. A lot of drug stuff, a lot of violent crimes. They don't have any criteria for getting into the program except wanting to be in the program. They have hundreds of businessmen. It's only men, for now, who go into the prisons and they teach the guys about how to set up businesses. Now, I've been there and it's kind of unbelievable. These are guys who are talking about this concept of a business that they've always dreamed about, and these are not large molecule biological, pharmaceutical firms and software companies. They're talking about landscaping companies and barbecue joints and real stuff, things that they know how to do and want to do, right? And they're talking about it with these business people who are saying, here's how you do it. And they're giving their elevator pitches and it's just beautiful and it's inspirational when you see them doing it. Okay, so, does it work? Here's the data. Here's the relevant metric of success. I already told you, 50% of incarcerated men in the state of Texas get out and re-offend and go back to prison within their first 24 months. Graduates of the prison entrepreneurship program, 7%. They have one seventh as much re-offense. I mean, you're a policy analyst like me. You never see data like that. You never see, it's always, you know, the problem with our business and policy is it's like, I found a three percentage point difference but I promise you it's statistically significant. It's like, our lives are so dull because of that in this business, right? When I see 50% of one group and 7% of the other, I'm going crazy about this. This is unbelievably successful. And I talked to some of them and they're in the movie, by the way. And they're, you know, it's like how my life changed. It's so awesome. My brother and I were with this landscaping company. And I thought, wow, I mean, they all do this. They can all do this. And then I asked this question, because I only was talking to guys who had set up their businesses. And I just said to the guy who started the founder of the program, what percentage of these guys actually start their businesses? It's a standard question you'd ask when you're doing an evaluation of a program. And he said, 16%. Huh? This is not making sense to me. One seventh is much re-offense, but 84% don't even start their businesses. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't work in my head. So I just start digging in more. I have to start evaluating at a deeper level. So I start talking to these guys to find out what's really going on. And this is where the light really turned on for me. I thought I was going to find the secret of startup businesses. And what I found was the secret to start up lives. See, when I talked to these guys, they didn't talk to me about, they didn't want to even talk about their businesses and the money that they were making. They wanted to talk about all the things that were going right in their lives because they had learned about entrepreneurship. They talked about how they had re-engaged in the lives of the mother of their children or the kids themselves. Or how they saw their own life as an exciting adventure. They talked like entrepreneurs with the enterprise of their lives. Here's the secret to entrepreneurial living. Your life is an enterprise. I didn't get that from Steve Jobs. You know, I spent lots of time in Northern California with very wealthy people who started up these incredible businesses. And when you talk to them, they talk about their businesses. But that's not the secret to your happiness. That's actually not the secret to your personal success. The secret to that, the real American dream, in your life is seeing your life as an enterprise and living it as such. I learned that from poor people, not from rich people. Now, it kind of changed my thinking, I have to say, about my own life. I got so excited about this over the past year that I'm working on a book right now called The Startup Life. How I learned about entrepreneurship from ex-cons and homeless people, not from Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. I'm not gonna put that last part in the title because people are so sensitive these days, right? And I'm so captivated by this. My imagination is so turned on by this that I wanna tell you two of the lessons that I've learned from these guys, and not just in Houston and New York City and places all over the country where I'm finding more and more and more people that are living these startup lives that are at the margins of society that we can learn from if we wanna be truly happy. I'm gonna tell you that what, for my money right now, are the two most interesting and counter-intuitive lessons of the startup life. And here's my money-back guarantee, I realize you didn't pay for this lecture, but the money-back guarantee is that if you do what these guys taught me, starting tonight, you're gonna be happier. It's the guarantee. Lesson number one of the startup life. Take more risk. It sounds crazy, actually, when you get to know guys who've been in prison, they are astonishingly forthcoming about their mistakes. They'll tell you everything, and it's amazing the stuff that they'll tell you. I mean, this guy is like, yeah, I said, what'd you do? You know, why'd you go to prison? He says, well, I robbed a liquor store that was downstairs from my house. Anyway, that's really a bad, that's a terrible risk to take. I mean, don't take that, obviously, or I bought drugs from an undercover police officer, the same guy three times, right? This is really dumb risk, and so it seems like the advice would be, don't take so much risk to criminals, or people who have been criminals. That's wrong, and I'm gonna tell you why that's the wrong advice. That's just scratching the surface of the startup life. And to explain this, I'm gonna take you to a study that I've been looking at that's kind of capturing my imagination. It's by an economist at the University of Chicago that you've all heard of before. His name is Stephen Leavitt. Now you know him, his name because he wrote a huge bestseller called Freakonomics. I'm not gonna talk to you about the book Freakonomics. I'm gonna talk to you about his newer research, which he's been doing recently, and a paper he published last year in 2016 in the National Bureau of Economic Research. It's a working paper now. And the reason that Stephen Leavitt is really famous and good is not because he has better technical skills than other economists, we can all do math. The reason he's really good is because he asks the most interesting questions. For those of you who are students and wanna be scholars, for those of you who are graduate students, the secret to success is the most interesting questions, not the best answers, okay? So, Steve Leavitt always asks these really interesting questions. And last year he publishes this paper where he asks, how do people answer the hardest questions in their own lives? How do people make tough decisions? Now, if I look around here, I'm willing to bet that about a quarter of you are in agony over a decision you're trying to make. It's all gonna be different. It's like some health-related thing or some love-related thing or some work-related thing. Do I do this or that? And basically, it always has the same form. Do I say yes to the scary thing or no, right? Do I take the jump or do I stay with what I'm doing right now? Do I ask her to marry me or not? Do I take that job and leave and drop out of college or not? If you don't have that kind of conundrum in your life right now, you have in the recent past or you will in the near future because everybody deals with these things and they're super hard. The easy decisions. So I go see that guy, Brooks, give this little lecture. It's a low-cost decision. You're not agonizing over that, right? I mean, it's like, eh, right now you're thinking, yeah, I should have gone and get coffee. Anyway, but there are other things that are just weighing on you right now. Now, what do you usually do? Most people usually don't make the decision and let it pass by which is an automatic no. That's what happens in the big majority of cases. So Steve Leavitt wants to know what's the right thing to do usually? Here's how he answers that. This is such an interesting question and an innovative answer. He puts out a call all around the United States and here's what it says. Are you an agony over a decision in your life, your personal life, you're having a hard time making, you just can't make the decision. Let me make the decision for you with the flip of a coin. And 6,000 people signed up. It's like, this is such a great country. I mean, you could do anything, right? And we're just crazy, we'll do stuff like this. It's like, and I can't decide. So, you know, I can't decide whether to ask my girlfriend to marry me. So I'm gonna have a University of Chicago economist flip a coin to make that decision for me. It's nuts, right? But 6,000 people, they sign up. Most of them stay in the experiment and it's a valid experiment if you look at the experimental protocols. Good stuff. And he doesn't flip a coin, a computer does heads and tails. Heads is yes, do it. Tails is no, don't do it. It's all different sorts of things that all have the same form. Should I do the scary thing or should I not do the scary thing? Okay, now here's where it gets interesting. He follows up six months and a year later to see how happy the people are. He measures their self-reported happiness beforehand. I've done lots of surveys on self-reported happiness and it sounds really goofy and soft. It turns out it's pretty good stuff because people tend to self-report their happiness with a high degree of fidelity and when you have large samples, you can count on it. Okay, in this particular scale, one is misery and 10 is total bliss. A year after this experiment, he follows up with the people who had the decision made for them by the flip of a coin to see whether the yeses are happier or unhappier than the noes. And what does he find? Yes, on average, is one entire digit happier than no. What does this mean? It means that the conservatism that we bring to our personal decision-making is usually suboptimal. That's actually what that means. Now, that's not for all of you. This is across the whole population. Maybe some of you are nuts and you say yes too much. But for most people across the population, probably including most of you sitting right here, you need to say yes more when you're afraid. That's what that study says. That's the actionable consequence of the study. So it's interesting because I took that thing when I was talking to the guys at the Prison Entrepreneurship Program and tested it out. And it turns out it exactly matches with their experiences. What were the yeses that they were afraid to say? It was about engaging in the lives of the women who had their children. That's what they were afraid to say yes to. They were afraid to get married. Everybody's afraid to get married, including guys in the Prison Entrepreneurship Program of course, because it's scary. It's your heart and it's a big commitment too. People were afraid to engage in the life of their kids. You know what they're really afraid of often? Was to take a boring job and commit to showing up for it every day. It's hard to make that commitment for a lot of people. It's easier to do drugs and to do crime for a lot of people than to make those commitments that are actually scary to every single person. And they felt that when they were willing to take those big risks with their hearts, with their love, that's what changed their lives and it made them feel entrepreneurial. Now, maybe you're thinking that it's kind of a sleight of hand intellectually for me to compare entrepreneurship with family life, for example. Well, I think it's okay. And I got a study that shows this too. There's a study that just came out in the spring from a university in Finland where these behavioral psychologists were doing what a lot of behavioral psychologists like to do now these days. Psychology, social psychology is getting a lot into brain science. And so one of the very common things to do is MRI studies, fMRI studies, where you look at brain activity patterns and then you see what part of the brain is being illuminated when people are making different decisions, basically. So it's kind of a structural psychology that's going on here. So these guys at the University of Finland took two groups of men and the first group were entrepreneurs who had started up businesses. And the second group were fathers. They were all comparably matched groups of men in their 30s. The first group when they were in the fMRI machine were given photos to look at of their businesses, like physical photographs of their startups. The second group, the dads, were given photographs of their kids to look at. And the pictures of the brains were the same. Indistinguishable. The researchers couldn't decide whether or not they were finding evidence that people, that startup entrepreneurs saw their businesses as their kids. Or whether or not dads see their kids as little startups. Either way, you find a common neurological experience of the entrepreneurial ecosystem that people find in their midst and they participate in in family life and affairs of love. Okay, so what does this tell us back to these guys at the Prison Entrepreneurship Program? They got better, their lives were improved, when they applied the principles of entrepreneurship to their personal lives and that meant taking the big risks. You can use that too. All of us can use that too because we're all not taking enough, I bet almost all of us are not taking enough risks. So here's what I'm gonna ask you to do to learn from these Prison Entrepreneurship Program guys. Think about that thing that you're agonizing over, that hard personal decision. It doesn't have to be in love. It can be in work, it can be in school, whatever happens to be. Say yes, it's probably the right choice. Principle number two of the start of life. Use your weaknesses to propel your success, not just your strengths. I talked to you about the Gallup Strengths Finder Survey which I love because I learned some things about myself when I took it and everybody wants to dig in to their self. I mean, it's interesting. And furthermore, you always got this advice that you should figure out what you're good at and do that because you'll be happier and more successful and that's good advice. I mean, your mother taught you that and your high school guidance counselor told you to do that and it's solid stuff. The Prison Entrepreneurship Program guys teach you that you should also look at the stuff that you're really bad at and especially that you're really embarrassed about and you should exploit that because that's your connection with respect to success in connecting to other people which is really part of the happiest life. Okay, now when I talk to really successful entrepreneurs, commercial entrepreneurs, one of the things that I've noticed and you probably noticed too is they never tell you stories of good things happening on their way to success. They always tell you about really bad things. It's like, yeah, we went bankrupt three times and I had to raid my kid's college fund and they always tell you about this rough times. Rough times are more interesting in the story of somebody's rocky path to success. They always tell you about weaknesses and disasters that happened. One of my donors is a guy, in terms of my organization, is a guy named Bernie Marcus who started Home Depot. I mean, it's an unbelievably successful enterprise. There's Home Depot every place. I say, tell me about the founding of Home Depot. He immediately starts talking to you about these early bankruptcies and they opened their first store in Atlanta and nobody will go in. And so he has his kids out on Peachtree Street offering, waving $10 bills to anybody who will just even go in the store to look around. It sounds awful, right? He says, yeah, it was terrible. Ha, ha, ha, ha. That's a weird paradox. He doesn't say, oh, it was smooth sailing. I was kind of born really smart and my dad had a lot of money and everything went really great and then I got really rich. That's not an even interesting story. You don't want to talk about strengths. The same thing turns out to be true for the guys who are working on the enterprise of their own lives. When I dig in with the prison entrepreneurship program guys and I see what really is charging you up that you're working on right now. You know what it always is? Yeah, I'm talking, I'm going to these high schools and I'm talking to these guys and I'm saying, you want to know what happens when you take drugs? Let me tell you what happens when you take drugs and they tell them their own story. Why? They're not bragging about it. They want somebody to not make the mistakes that they made, they're using their weaknesses as a source of strength in connecting to other people and that is profoundly satisfying to them. Now, when I tell you the stories of these guys, I've told you a few of the transgressions. It's hard to relate to. I bet none of you has ever come close to robbing a liquor store. I bet. I mean, I don't know, but I haven't. But you will hear stories that you can relate to. It's a very interesting thing when you're talking to people who have been in prison because you become very conscious very quickly that this could be you under different circumstances. What if you were known for the very worst thing that you did in your life? I bet if you gave it a little bit of thought, you could think about the very worst thing that you did in your life. Imagine that every transaction that you came into, every job application, every relationship that you started, that was the one thing that everybody knew about you. Imagine how your life would be different and you can suddenly start to experience a little bit of empathy with the guys in the prison entrepreneurship program. And furthermore, sometimes the very worst thing that they did is perilously close to the very worst thing that you did. Okay, so you didn't buy drugs from undercover cop. Maybe you've been intoxicated. I made a friend over the course of this research who was not from terrible poverty, he was actually from relative privilege. He came from a well-known family and with a well-known family business and he was kind of a waste roll, a little bit of a layabout, kind of a partier. You can imagine the type. And he smoked dope all the way through high school and he went to college because that's what he had to do. And it's a pretty ordinary story up to this point. You've heard it over and over again. And he said that he basically was drunk all the way through college. Again, pretty ordinary at most universities. He said in his senior year, he was coming back from a party, driving back from a party. It was three o'clock in the morning, he was stone cold drunk and he ran over a pedestrian and killed him. Now, put yourself in that position. Honestly, who do you prefer to be? Him or the pedestrian? You don't know, do you? It would ruin your life. It would be the end of your life. You would never live it down. He was arrested and he went to prison for a few months as you'd expect for a crime under those circumstances. You have to pay, but you're not gonna be in prison for life for that. And he had time to think about how he was gonna deal with this, how he was going to come out of prison. Was he gonna just basically try to sweep it under the rug and have his dad get him a job and pretend it never happened? Maybe that's what some of you would do. He made a decision when he was in prison to dedicate his life to that weakness. He became a drug and alcohol counselor and now dedicates himself professionally to warning people who haven't gone that far where this path can lead. I can relate to that guy, can you? When I mentioned that, he said to me, yeah, you know, you probably have something that you're really embarrassed about and that by embracing it you have or can change the course of your life for the better. I said, no way, no way, but I thought, is there something? Is there something for you? Is there something for me? There is something for me and I'm gonna tell you about it. Because thinking about that and embracing that actually has changed my life. Now, you heard a little bit in this really gracious biography about my past. I was a college professor and before that I was a classical musician, I was a French horn player. I played for a bunch of years in the Barcelona Symphony in Spain. And that's a kind of an unusual bio. It's an interesting bio, but it's the sanitized version of the bio. See, here's the real story. When I was 19, I dropped out of college. I don't have the experience that those of you who are undergraduates had. I started college, but I was a terrible student. I wasn't ready for college. So I dropped out, or you know, dropped out, kicked out, splitting hairs. And I decided to do what I always wanted to do which is to go on the road to be a musician. Because music was my life, man. It was pure joy. And so I kind of made a living, sort of paid the rent, played chamber music around the United States for a bunch of years. I wound up playing with a jazz guitar player named Charlie Bird for a couple of years on the road and then I wound up through a series of odd circumstances in the Barcelona Symphony in Spain. But you know what always bugged me? I got nothing against not going to college. It's fine for me if not all my kids go to college as a matter of fact, but it always bugged me that I failed. It bothered me. It's just prideful and I'm not proud of that, but I always thought, I'm gonna try again. But I had a problem. I was not living any place and I had no money. So I did a little bit of research and I found out that you can go to college with no money. It's called correspondent school. So I looked for a bunch of different correspondent schools and I found one. I was living in Barcelona at the time, but I found this place in Trenton, New Jersey. It was called Thomas Edison State College. That's where I went to college. I went to correspondent school. This is very unusual for an academic, to be sure. And it took me, I graduated from college one month before my 30th birthday. Graduation day for me was walking out in my slippers out to my mailbox and getting my diploma and walking back in the house in my apartment. And when I did that, I couldn't decide exactly what to do with this degree. It was an economics degree. By the way, I killed it in correspondent school. I mean, it was like, I got straight A's in correspondent school. I was a great student and I was super serious and it was, I loved every minute of it. And I studied economics, which is the most interesting thing in the world. If you want to understand phenomena and behavioral stuff, it's so good and so right, but I didn't know what to do with it. So I wrote to one of my mail order professors. And it's like, I don't know what to do now. What should I do now? And he was an ordinary professor at some like minor campus in the Colorado university system someplace. A retired guy actually. And he wrote back to me and said, in all my years teaching correspondence, students, economics, you did the best. I think, if you ask my advice, I think you should go get a PhD in economics. I'm like, what? What, me? Me? I'm just a French word player. And so I wrote back and I said, where should I do it? He said, you should apply to Harvard University. I am sure you'll get in. I'm like, Harvard. It's like the Shangri-La of academia. I literally knew nobody who had been in, and I'm from Seattle. It's far away and it was famous, but he got my confidence up. It was the first time I'd really had confidence in something like this. And it's like, maybe I'm actually kind of smart and maybe I can do it. And so you know what I did? I applied to Harvard with all my heart and all my affection and all my attention and energy. And I sent off my application and I got rejected in two days. It was like, no. And it turns out, in retrospect, it's kind of funny because for some reason thought that Harvard University is interested in a 30-year-old French horn playing correspondence degree earning college dropout. It's like, that's not their key demographic, right? But I didn't know what to do at that point because I didn't have any information. I didn't know why it had failed. And this guy said yes and then they said no. And so I said I was married at the time and I still am, same woman. And I said to my wife, I'm gonna call them up and see how close I came. And she says, you're an idiot, right? Because nobody does that. But I call up at the College of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University and I said, very nice lady answered the phone. I said, my name is Arthur Brooks and I applied to the PhD program in economics and I just got a rejection letter. She said, I'm sorry. I said, no, no, no. No, it's fine. I just wanna know how close did I come? And she says, okay. And I hear her leave the phone on the desk and go and she's opening and closing filing cabinets and taking out papers. And she comes back after a minute. She says, not close. So now I'm panicked or like I'm bargaining. I say, was I in the top half? And she says, no, and it was horrible. It was horrible. And so I went down a level in the rankings and I got rejected. And I went down a level in the rankings and I got rejected. I did it a couple more times and got rejected. And finally, I found a PhD program that wasn't paying close attention and I got in. And I got to graduate school and I never told anybody about my undergraduate experience. It's so stupid, right? In retrospect, but everybody went to these fancy schools like the University of Michigan, these good places, these famous places. And they would say, where'd you go to your undergraduate? And I would say, I went to ho, ho, ho university. I would just kind of change the subject. And then I got out and I graduated and I became a faculty member. I went to Georgia State University in Atlanta and then in three years, I went to Syracuse which in public affairs is the number one school in the country. And I was really proud of that. And you know what I didn't do? Tell anybody about my undergraduate experience. I mean, my CV was up on the web but it's like Thomas Edison State College. It sounds totally super legit. Nobody ever would think. I mean like, I'm a full professor at Syracuse University. But I never told anybody about it because I was honestly, I was really embarrassed. It's so stupid, but I was honestly embarrassed about this thing. All my friends went to Harvard. And then something happened. In 2008, I became president of the American Enterprise Institute. After a long search and there was a failed search on the part of the organization and weird circumstances turned it toward me and I took this job and I went to AEI and everybody who worked there went to Harvard. I mean, this place is super elite. It's the Ivy League of Washington think tanks. And so you know what I didn't do? I didn't tell anybody about my college experience because I was embarrassed and I was afraid it would be like a Washington Post story that the American Enterprise Institute had hired a hack, a patsy, a loser, right? It would be embarrassing to my colleagues and it would be embarrassing to me. And so I swept it under the rug. Year goes by, 2009. I hired this guy to do research on higher ed. His name is Andrew Kelly. He's a pretty famous guy. He's got this academic pedigree you'd die for. He undergraduate Dartmouth, his PhD got it at Berkeley. Super great pedigree the best. And now something about AEI you should know. We're like a university. We have pure academic freedom. When I hire you, I wanna know what I'm hiring you to do work in a certain area. And I want you to do work in that area and I'm gonna make sure that you share our values to be sure. But you get to do work on anything you want and you get to say anything you want, okay? So all you have to do is work a lot. So I bring in Andrew Kelly and I know he's gonna do exposés on higher ed. Higher ed, we love it, but we wouldn't be here. But it's all screwed up. It's too expensive and there's too much debt and people don't finish and there's not enough ideological diversity and it's just not the right kind of market that serves people well enough. We all know this and this is not mixed company. We can say this. Okay, so I bring in Andrew Kelly. I sit him in my office and say, Andrew, what's your first big exposé? And Andrew says, my first big piece of research is gonna be about fly-by-night correspondent schools. And now I'm like the jig is up kind of, right? I mean, I feel like the sheriff is on my tail with like bloodhounds or something. Or, or, or, you know, I'm panicked, but I don't say anything. I'm being cool because like maybe nothing happens. Month goes by. I get an email from Andrew Kelly, middle of the night. Middle of the night. He works at night. Hey, Arthur, you're not gonna believe this, but I'm on the Wikipedia site for a place called Thomas Edison State College. And this is a crazy thing. They're claiming you're an alum. So dude, you better get that cleared up. So what do you do now? It's gonna come out. It's gonna come out. So I think I gotta own this. So I wrote an article about it in the New York Times called my cheap, valuable college degree where I described how I got my whole college education, including the books for 10 grand in today's dollars. And included, by the way, a sticker for my car, which I didn't put on my car because I was embarrassed. And I sent it off and it, they published it in the New York Times. And I was wondering what was gonna happen. Was it gonna be, I knew it that that, you know, free market think tank was being run by a hack. I knew it, right? But that didn't happen. It was the number one piece in the New York Times website for two solid weeks. And I started hearing from people I had never heard from in my whole life. People who said, I got my education in an alternative way too. And I never told anybody, thank you for writing that article. And this one lady, she wrote to me and she said, my son, he's 31, 10 years ago he dropped out of college and he's really struggling. And he read your article and he just called Thomas Edison State College. And I think he's gonna sign up. Thank you for giving my son a second chance. My God, you know, here's the irony. I mean, at first I thought that's awesome but then I thought this is not awesome. You know why? Because I've dedicated my career to equal opportunity. I have radical views on the equality of human dignity. I'm a warrior for that. I left academia in a tenured professorship at the best school in my field to go without tenure to do management in a think tank. Because that think tank was dedicated to equal opportunity and to fight for everybody. And that's great, right? But there's one thing in my background that truly ties me to the people who need opportunity the most. For the people with the periphery of society as Pope Francis calls them. For people at the margins. And that's my weird college education. And that's the one thing that I had to running away from and denying for 20 straight years. Now, when that happened, when I embraced that, and I didn't do it on purpose and I'm not proud of this. I did it because I was forced into it. When I embraced that, it changed my life and it changed my approach to my job and know what it changed my institution. AEI today is known for fighting for the poor because I as chief executive say, this is my priority and I hire people where I want it to be your priority. That would have happened, I don't think, if it hadn't been for accidentally embracing that weakness. Imagine, my friends, if I had done it on purpose like my friends in the prison entrepreneurship program. One more point I want to make before I turn it over to you. I gave you two suggestions on how you can live your lives differently. But here's a broader point. In America today, we have trouble with despair. We have too much class-based separation, I believe. And one of the ways that we exacerbate that class-based reputation or lack of connections in our society is by having the wrong heroes. When you're a hero, is somebody who went from the upper middle class to the very upper echelons of the economy? That's necessarily cutting the American dream narrative out of the parts of our society that need it the most. We need better heroes. We need heroes that actually remind us of who we are. Now I'm gonna make a very radical suggestion to you. Who do the PEP guys remind you of? It should be you and your family. See, I look around this room and most of you, I mean, some of you are immigrants. And if you're not immigrants, you're just a few generations away from being immigrants. Few generations away from people who are not from this country. We all have different stories. I mean, some of your great-grandparents were scratching out potatoes in Ireland. And some of your grandparents were running from a pogrom in central Europe. And some of your ancestors came here involuntarily. But let me tell you what we all have in common. We descend from ambitious riffraff. And that fact gives us pride, and that fact gives us satisfaction. Your ancestors were like the prison entrepreneurship guys who treated their lives like an enterprise. And that's why you get to sit in these seats today. This is the American story. And when we turn back to these stories of the people that give us pride because they gave us these good lives, we should be able to see the reflection of the people in the prison entrepreneurship program and the margins of society who are treating their lives like startups. And we should have the ingenuity, as people interested in public policy, of creating policies and cultural institutions that try to bring the startup life to more people. That's the connection between entrepreneurship and the alleviation of poverty. Where do you find the startup lives? Turns out it's easier than you think. One last story, and then I'm done. I didn't tell you the end of the Thomas Edison story. When I started getting calls and emails from strangers, one of the strangers that called me was the president of Thomas Edison State College. I'd never talked to him before. I didn't know him. I really admire him because he's an educational entrepreneur who's trying to give opportunity to people like me and people who needed it more than me. And he said, wow, you're running that big think tank in Washington. I said, yeah. He said, would you come and speak at graduation? And I thought to myself, first thing I thought was what's graduation for a correspondent school? I mean, is it like eight guys in a conference room? I don't know, right? But I said, yes. And I went to Trenton, and it was in the Trenton Ice Rink. And I went in there with my son, Carlos, who at the time was 13 years old. And I wanted him to see it because I don't know what his life is gonna bring. And there were 5,000 people in this ice rink. And hundreds of them were graduating that day. And I looked at him, and it was one third active military. And it was poor people, and almost everybody was the first generation in the history of their family to go to college. And they were filled with pride. And there's this one lady. There's one lady I remember I will never forget. I mean, I had given this graduation speech on happiness and how to live a good life, and yada, yada, yada, right? But what was really interesting was what they said because each person got to say their name and one biographical fact. What name? And then they had to go on, because hundreds of people had to cross the stage. There's one lady, she's like 45, and she has lines on her face, she's lived, right? She gets to the microphone and she says her name, and she says, and for this moment, I just wanna thank my five children and the living God. And I said, that is a start-up, life. That's an ordinary, yet extraordinary American hero. And these people are all around us. If you join me in believing that your work must go for the benefit of people with less power than you, you must start by admiring people who have less power than you. And that is not only the secret to their start-up lives, but your start-up life as well. Thank you. Do you wanna sit or do you wanna stand? Oh, sure, we'll sit down. Okay, great. So Arthur, you had this great, I was trying to write it down. I think you said radical approach, a radical view on human dignity. So can you tell us a little bit more about that? I've been thinking about dignity our mutual colleague, Kathy, has. I know sometimes public policies can act to strip people's dignity away. But it seems like, trying to figure out how do you measure it? How do we know when we have policies that positively and maybe enhance human dignity? Human dignity is defined in a lot of different ways. It's not a social science construct, to be sure. It has a lot of subjectivity to it. But the one thing that we do know is that people say that their lives have dignity. The people who say that they feel a lot of dignity in their lives, they all have one thing in common, which is that they feel needed. And this gets back to the poverty conversation. And this gets back to the radicalism of my own views. The poverty conversation that we have too much in America today is all about how to help poor people. It's not about how to need poor people. In point of fact, if you take an entire class of people and treat them like charity cases and come up with better and better and better and better ways to help them, but you say, you know what, we don't need you, they will feel an attenuation of their dignity. And an attenuation of dignity has an opposite side. It actually leads, ineluctably, I believe, to despair. And if you wanna see what's going on in this country, if you wanna see the fruits of class polarization, if you wanna see the haves and the have-nots in the deepest moral sense, you'll look at the indicators of despair in this country, which indicates a lack of dignity, which proceeds from not being needed. And you can see it every place. You know, I talked about this film I'm making, we made with a prison entrepreneurship program, but I also was, for making this film, was in a place called Inez, Kentucky, where we kicked off the war on poverty in April of 1964. Actually, the big speech on that was May 22nd, 1964, when Lyndon Johnson talked about the Great Society of War on Poverty on this campus, was a speech that was given when I was one day old. I remember it well. And in Inez, Kentucky, where he went for a photo op to show third-world poverty in the context of American life, he found people who hadn't worked in generations, people who were malnourished, people who were really, really despairing. If you go back there today, you know what you find? 29% of the adults are in the workforce. You find that 40% of adults are on welfare. Every single family has somebody addicted to drugs. Every family has people who are unemployed and have no skills, feel that they have no hope and have no place to go. That's despair, and it has to do with dignity, which comes from not being needed, and that's the approach that we have to take to poverty today. What am I going to, if I believe in equal dignity? And by the way, I don't think that most people do believe in equal dignity. If you think that it's okay just to help poor people, but to not make them needed, even though you're sure that your own kids should be needed, you don't believe in equal dignity. You effectively don't believe in equal dignity. And that, I think, is a radical thing to say. So what do we need to do? We need to change our whole approach to poverty alleviation in this country to say, what am I going to do to bring work to people's lives, to bring family life into people's environments so that people are actually needed in the lives of other people? If we can't answer that question, we're not actually ever going to morally answer the question of what we're doing about poverty in America. And we can't be a great country. We're gonna turn it over to our students. Hello. Hi. Can everyone hear me? Yep. My name is Kate Blessing Calamora, and I am a second year master's student here at the Ford School of Public Policy. I'm Jesse Arm. I am an undergraduate here at the University of Michigan. I'm studying International Political Economy and Entrepreneurship, and I am the chairman of the American Enterprise Institute's Executive Council here at Michigan. And our first question is, do these principles account for systemic racism, and how will these principles work for underserved individuals of color? I believe that these principles work for everybody because we're all the same in what we need as people. This is the key thing. Racism and classism are linked together because we're talking about people at the margins of society, and we have all kinds of attitudes that don't try to treat people at the margins with equal dignity. The good news is what's good for one person is good for somebody else. What's good for rich people is good for poor people. What's good for black people is good for white people, but we have to be dedicated to the idea that everybody does need the same thing, and that is dignity, and that is to be needed. So my view is that we have problems with racism just as we have problems with classism, as we have problems with discrimination, and we have to address it in the same way with the belief in the equality of human dignity and acting as such. So I assign capitalism and freedom in my book, and Milton Friedman is a great classist, as you of course all know. Has a great chapter on occupational licensures and how interest groups use occupational licensures to restrict access to good jobs, and this disproportionately affects people of color and underrepresented groups by cutting off opportunity, and then it raises the costs of goods, like going to the dentist or going to a lawyer, which is a double whammy. So is this sort of one of those areas where we wanna look for ways to increase opportunities and reduce the restriction away from those? Concrete ways, the thing that as a policy wonk, I wanna do is take your points and nail them down into concrete policy. The most important thing to understand in public policy is before you try to do some, you try to take some proactive solution to a problem, the first thing to think about is what can I take away that's creating the problem? That's a very important principle in life, actually. I mean, you can say, well, let's see, I feel lousy, what pill can I take? It's more important, that might be the right thing to do. It's more important to think, what can I stop doing that I'm doing that's making me feel lousy? I mean, it's just, it makes sense, right? So in public policy, we forget that a lot, so we try to rush, especially when a policy wants. We wanna rush toward building with policy design new institutions that will solve problems. But in the case of a lot of the things that we're talking about in poverty, it's taking away barriers to earn success. And one of the key things that we're doing in this country right now is occupational licensing. It's just, it sounds really, really sort of nutty and crunchy, but it's simple. For a lot of really ordinary entrepreneurial things, you need a license to do it. And it kind of makes sense on its face. You know, if you're doing something that has any possibility of hurting other people, you have to be trained appropriately and then we have to have proof that you're trained appropriately. But in most of the cases when you look, it's nothing more than a barrier to entry to people who are already in an industry. And I'll give you an example. In Washington, D.C., if you wanna be a realtor, right? And this is a very frequent second career for upper middle class women when their kids grow up and move away. That's kind of the demographic you typically see in the realty profession in Washington, D.C. It takes about three months of training and costs you a few thousand bucks to get your license. It's not a lot or a little, I don't know. Maybe it's appropriate. Now let's see you wanna do hair braiding with no chemicals. This is a very typical first job for single African-American women in Washington, D.C. who have kids in the home. It's a very typical thing to do. They have skills, there's no harsh chemicals, it doesn't hurt anybody. It takes a year of training and $16,000 to get your license. My friends, that's discrimination against the poor. And that's happening every day of the week. Why? Because the African hair braiding specialists, they don't have a lobby. They can't fight against it. They don't have the power to do it. So what do they need? They need you to fight against it. They need you to stand up for them. And that's not just standing up for capitalism, although it also is that. It's standing up for people who need the capitalism the most, who are at the margins of society. I don't need, the realtors don't need me. The hair braiders need me. And so you know what? They're gonna get, I'm gonna strap on my sword and shield and I'm gonna fight for them. How, if at all, does your Catholic faith and Catholic social teaching inform your approach to poverty and entrepreneurship? So apparently there's information on the World Wide Web that I'm a Catholic. And it is true. It is true. I'm a Christian, a lot of you are traditionally religious. Some of you are non-traditionally religious. But let me tell you how faith actually informs my values just a little bit. And I just, I offer it to you for your interest, not to proselytize. When I was in the music business, when I was still playing the French horn in Barcelona, my favorite composer, I mean you all know who this composer is, even if you don't like classical music, it was Johann Sebastian Bach. Everybody knows Bach. Bach was this, for me, the greatest composer who ever lived. And he was unbelievably productive. He wrote, he published more, he lived to 65, and he published more than a thousand pieces for all different sorts of instrumentation, for chorus and for keyboard and for orchestra and for chamber music. And it was all beautiful and it was all good. And he was so prolific. And by the way, he also had 20 kids, which is prolific. And near the end of his life, he was not famous as a composer. He only became famous a hundred years after he died because another composer named Felix Mendelssohn found his scores, dusted them off, played them for his friends and said, this is awesome. So he was just kind of a well-known teacher at his time. But he was asked by this minor biographer, a local guy in Leipzig, Herr Bach, why do you write music? Why do you write music? And here was his answer, textually, not in German, I'll give it to you in English. The aim and final end of all music is nothing less than the glorification of God and the refreshment of the soul. And I read that as a French horn player and I said, man, that is exactly right. I wanna be able to say that in my work, but I can't as a French horn player. I literally left music because of Bach. Isn't it ironic that the greatest composer in the world pushed me out of the Barcelona Orchestra and made me into an economist? Because only when I studied the way, the path forward from poverty to prosperity, from despair to dignity, could I actually put Bach's axiom into practice in my own life. Let's say you're not a traditionally religious person, but Bach is saying is that the purpose of your work is to serve others. That's what Bach is saying. How do I serve others in a world where billions of people can't make a living? Where billions of people are at the margins who don't have what we have in this room? The answer is you have to have a system that works while you sleep. And there's only one system in the history of the world that has pulled people out of poverty by the billions. It requires globalization and free trade and property rights and the rule of law and the entrepreneurship that I've talked about here. And it's not perfect. You also need other stuff. You need regulation, you need government, and you need charity, and you need human values, but that system is revelatory for me. It changed my life. Bach showed me that. My approach to public policy and the love that I have in my heart for other people and the way I can instantiate in my day-to-day work. It doesn't just come from my faith. It comes from music. It comes from the intersection, I believe, of truth and beauty. That's kind of a long answer. That's probably more than you were expecting. This question comes from Twitter. Yeah. This person... From Twitter himself. That's right. It's just from Trump on Twitter. That's fake news, by the way. I've wondered about other states borrowing the prison entrepreneurship program idea. Are there plans to scale it up to other states? Yeah, the prison entrepreneurship program is proliferating all over the country, and it's not just being copied. There are lots of people who've had the same idea. One of the great things is that it's super simple, and you can probably find it here in Michigan. It'll take a minor Google search for you to figure it out, and you can probably get involved in it. And I would strongly recommend that you do it because it'll change your life as much as anything else. So yes, this is happening all over the place, and this is the kind of spirit of experimental entrepreneurship that we need to really change society. So I recommend that you find out about it, get involved in it, and maybe even just maybe start it yourself. So Arthur is, again, my policy wonk hat. Tell me why I shouldn't think selection is what was driving the positive result. You could imagine that the people who signed up for a program like this might just be that much more likely to succeed that you could see a split 7%, 50%. For sure, and so for those of you who are not following the wonkies here, the selection issue is maybe the 2,500 people in the prison entrepreneurship population were probably gonna be okay anyway, and they just saw an opportunity and so they took it. I have no doubt that that's playing into it because there's no way, this is not a treatment and control design. It would be a good idea, by the way, if we did a treatment and control design in the context of a prison entrepreneurship program where we had people sign up and people not sign up or people would sign up and get entrepreneurship training and the other guys would play board games or something like that. I mean, it would have certainly some ethical implications, human subject implications to it, but that would be a good way to evaluate this type of program. I have no doubt that that's the case, but when you talk to the guys in the program, some of them will repeat offenders. Some of these people had come out, done drugs, gone back, come out, knocked over liquor store, gone back, and they just didn't know what to do. They were so desperate for a different way that when they had this, they found a different way. And I have no way of evaluating the veracity of these claims, but my heart tells me that a lot of it is true. So some of it, no doubt of selection, but I'm as convinced as I can be without the preponderance of experimental evidence that this is a good way to go. Do you think reform conservatism, which promotes the kind of anti-poverty ideas that you talked about here today, is viable in today's current Republican party? Yeah, so reform conservatism, as people often refer to it, is one that's really focused using conservative ideas to, in a way, you'd think of as sort of liberal-heart conservative head. I mean, that's how people sometimes talk about it. I think that's really important that we have hearts for other people, and whether or not you're a liberal or a conservative is almost beside the point. We need a competition of ideas where different ideas can come together around the moral consensus of helping people at the margins. One of the reasons, I believe, that we have such terrible political polarization is not because we need more moderates. I'm not very moderate, and many of you aren't either. You don't need to be moderate. What we need is to agree on the moral project of pushing opportunity out to the people who need it the most. That's the moral project, I believe, of the American experiment. And if we agree on that, then our differences are rotating around that moral core in this competition of ideas, and man, that's when it gets really fun and interesting in this country. That's when people can disagree civilly, and that's when they can compromise in public policy, and we can bring all the ideas to the game, and where the best of the left and the best of the right can actually get together to actually serve poor people, as opposed to when the moral core collapses, not to commit political science on you people, when the moral core collapses, these competing ideologies are no longer rotating around it, like in Adam, they hit each other head on, and we get an ideological holy war, and that's what we currently are today. I think that reform everything is the way to go, and the essence of reform is remembering that we are not doing things for our own good. We are doing things to serve the people who need us the most. We've had a couple questions about what can we learn from the PEP? How do you take the lessons from the Houston Prison Entrepreneurship program and scale them into actionable policies? How the ideas in the Prison Entrepreneurship program, it's interesting when you go there, you know when you're a policy person, you're always thinking about what are the public sector solutions, right? I think that's not the right place to start, because it's not necessarily the case that we need to scale everything into a government policy. I think at lots of times what we need is a moral revolution that changes our culture. That sometimes is the way to do it. In 1835, when Alexis de Tocqueville was tooling around the United States, which by that he meant the East Coast, and when he was looking at all these communities that were vital and they didn't have any bureaucrats involved, and they didn't have any men of gentry telling people what to do, he found people that were actually just helping each other for the sake of helping each other as a part of American culture. That's the essence of what the Prison Entrepreneurship program is all about. They don't take government money. And I don't think, I don't say that they shouldn't take government money, but I'm saying that the essence of this is not somebody in the state capital going, you know what we need? We need people with warmer hearts toward ex-cons. We had people who said, I'm gonna live out my personal beliefs by doing this, and actually I think that's what we need more of, at least to start, and maybe even to finish. So this is gonna be our last question for today. It seems as though college is a great pathway. Oh, two more questions. Pet ultimate question. Pet ultimate question of today. It seems as though college is a great pathway out of poverty. The colleges are constantly under scrutiny with public ones receiving less and less support. What's gone wrong? That's a hugely intricate and very nuanced, deep complicated question. So I can only chew off one tiny corner of it unless we're gonna be here until nine. A big problem is the premise that college is the pathway out of poverty. That's an incorrect premise. The truth of the matter is that we have been sold a bill of goods that we should have college for all. That's the wrong way of thinking about it. I realized that I told you a story of my harrowing journey to get a college education, but that's not the right pathway for everybody. And let me give you just a couple of quick stats that should trouble you, I think. This year, 90% of high school seniors say they're gonna go to college. 65% apply and matriculate, 38% will finish. That's a 52 percentage point gap between aspiration and achievement. A lot of those 38% are gonna have some college and some debt and no qualifications and no help. And guess what else? There's all kinds of pathways to success that shouldn't require college. Isn't it, it's just unbelievable that you can, I mean, the great battle that my wife and I have been is to try to get the high school where my kids, my boys have gone to try to counsel some kids that trade school might be a good thing to do. There are six and a half million unfilled jobs in this country and nearly one in five working age able-bodied men is out of the workforce. I mean, you got 18% of guys who should be working, they're able-bodied and they're working age and they're not working, and there's six and a half million jobs. And by the way, this doesn't even talk about women where this is increasingly a problem as well. You know, that mismatch has a lot to do with the fact that people come out of high school, say college for all, start college, or don't go in the first place and don't get the skills that our economy needs and they need to have dignified, high paying jobs that you can't outsource to other countries. That, my friends, is crazy and it's crazy bad public policy that starts with the incorrect premise that we gotta force everybody through the pipe of college. So let's rethink that. And we just might come up with some new public policies that will serve Americans, all kinds of Americans, a little better than they're currently being served and treat them with the dignity that they need and deserve as well. What's the last question? Not that I have strong views on this, right? Actually, it's a two-part question. All right, a two-part question, that's good. First of all, can you talk more about single mothers and how entrepreneurship can be an avenue out of poverty for them? And then second, are the guys who are entrepreneurs in the program we've been talking about escaping poverty? Yeah, so the second part is really easy answers. Absolutely, yes. If you want poverty for former convicts, for people who've been homeless, the answer to poverty is full-time work. One of the things that we often hear, I realize that wages aren't high enough and one of the things I care an awful lot about is how to make wages higher and the earned income tax credit and some of these technical solutions that I think are quite important, but the number one reason that people are poor is a lack of full-time employment. One of the things that we see that for even people who are working, who are the working poor, the number one variable is insufficient hours of work, actually. So that's the full-time work and people who are coming out of the prison entrepreneurship program, they're working like crazy. They're working tons of hours and you find, I mean, not rich, some of them are doing really, really well. I saw a guy with a print shop and he's cleaning up, but not all of them, most of them are not rich, but that's not the point. I bet nobody in here really cares about getting rich. I mean, we care about a life full of dignity where we're earning our success and feeding ourselves and supporting ourselves and our families. That's the essence of dignity. And there's like almost uniformly, that's what you find. Single mothers, it's a very interesting thing. It could go either way. When you're a single woman and you have children, working has added pressures to it. It's a really hard thing. It produces what social psychologists call undue cognitive load. But there are good studies that I find compelling that show that what's good for single men is also good for single women who even have children in the home. There were some pretty interesting studies using the general social survey who show that women who went from welfare to part-time or full-time work, even when they were caring for kids, had dramatically higher levels of happiness in the years after they started employment. Is entrepreneurship one of the ways to do it? For sure, particularly when we get past these problems that we see with occupational licensing, when women actually see the ways that they can make their own living and there are more opportunities for them to do so, that just creates more opportunities, more pathways for them to earn their success. So I find compelling the idea that people can handle it. Now, does that mean that we need public policies to make it easier for them to handle it with childcare or parental leave? Yeah, maybe. Maybe that's what we wanna do. But work is good. Work brings purpose. Work brings meaning. Work, an ordinary work, is a sanctified and a beautiful thing that everybody deserves to have it. Thank you. All right. Thanks, Arthur. Please join us for a reception outside.