 We can't have a system in which many more Americans are working for poverty wages. For those workers themselves, we want them to be able to achieve a decent standard of living. And economically, we need the demand that they would drive in the economy by purchasing goods and services with their higher wages. If they don't make enough money themselves, they have to rely on debt or borrowing money, and that is an unstable way to rent an economy. We wrote this paper because we wanted to take a new look at the economic system that has created low wages for many, many American workers and working families. And what we call the low-wage social contract is the economic system that has been embraced for the last three or four decades in which policymakers and public policy in general has encouraged and embraced a system of employers paying very low wages. And to make up for that, instead of actually trying to raise wages directly, they've encouraged lower prices to make consumers as a whole better off and also lowered taxes through tax credits and other wage subsidies. The solution that we propose, we call the middle-income social contract, which is a combination of some of the elements of the modified low-wage social contract and a high-wage, high-price model that you might find in a Nordic country. And under this contract, we call for broad universal social programs like childcare, healthcare, so that everyone can afford it and that the prices themselves are kept low. At the same time, we want to raise wages by at least part of the way through higher minimum wages and other labor market interventions to at least push up part of the low-wage worker salaries.