 Good afternoon. I'm Reid Kramer. I direct the asset building program here at New America. And I'd like to welcome you here to today's event titled, In the Shadow of Economic Fragility, Work and Life After the Great Recession. And the event takes its title from the excellent book, which some of you might have walked by that's for sale outside that you might check out if you're interested. And its title is Working and Living in the Shadow of Economic Fragility. And it's edited by two of our panelists today, Marion Crane and Michael Sherraden, who have collaborated with others at Washington University in St. Louis in a very interesting interdisciplinary effort called the Liveable Lives Initiative. And today they're going to tell us about this effort. And our other panelists just came in from a meeting at the White House. This is Heather Boucher, and I was saying to her colleague, Pedro, that it's always great to say, I've just come from a meeting at the White House. But really we've just gotten started, so welcome. But anyway, Marion and Michael are going to tell us about their effort, Liveable Lives Initiative, which is really designed to move some interest beyond concerns about basic consumption, which is the traditional orientation of welfare policy. And towards a focus on some of the positive conditions that are essential for promoting economic security, social development, and political engagement. In a prosperous society, I think we need to aspire to do more than just meet basic needs. It's a pretty low bar to clear, but we need to focus on doing it well. But we should also be asking whether or not we're enabling our citizens to reach their full potential to contribute and to achieve their own aspirations. And Marion and Michael's project is designed to explore this. At Washington University, Marion has a couple of titles. She's Vice Provost. She's Wiley B. Rutledge Professor of Law in the law school there. And she's also Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Study of Work and Social Capital. Michael has a couple of titles as well that I'm aware of, maybe more. The Young Blood Professor at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work. And he's also the founder and director of the Center for Social Development, a great group that we collaborate with on a number of projects. To me, he's been a real inspiration, a mentor, a friend, and a colleague. His 1991 book entitled Assets in the Poor really provided the theoretical foundations for exploring the role that savings and assets can play in social development over the life course. And in 2012, New America organized a symposium that was designed to explore the impact of his thinking over the subsequent couple of years, two decades, Michael, more than two decades. And really look at the impact it's had on some of the policy thinking. And we actually created our own edited volume through that symposium, which there's a handout outside that you can check out as well. So anyway, they're going to tell us about this effort. And then we have a couple of discussants, Michael Lind, my colleague here at New America. He's one of our leading public intellectuals as well as the policy director for our economic growth program. He contributed a chapter to the book entitled The Challenge of Creating Good Jobs. And we're very pleased to also have Heather Boucher with us, whose work I followed for a number of years. And she's now executive director and chief economist at the newly launched Washington Center for Equitable Growth and also a senior fellow at Center for American Prospect. So anyway, I've enjoyed the book. I'm looking forward to hearing more about it. The broader initiative and looking forward to this discussion today. It has four basic broad policy themes that it touches on that I'm going to just share with you as a way of framing the conversation. The first policy area is really exploring the nature of work and employment and how it connects to economic well-being and democratic engagement. The second theme is exploring the long-term consequences of the current crisis and really the economics of inequality and instability, which are very much still in focus in today's discussion. A third theme is looking at the values that drive the policy considerations that are teed up and eventually codified in legislation. And the fourth is how all these policies fit together to affect livable lives among the middle class and among the poor striving to move up the economic ladder. And these are issues that we focus a great deal on here in the asset-building program. Our work examines the impact of how savings and assets can help people save and, you know, well, just how that can work for those on the lower end and the importance of it. Ensuring that families have resources to draw upon when they're hit with unexpected events, a job loss, a health event, and how that can provide a cushion and also seed investments that can pay off down the long run. Even small amounts can make a big difference over time. So a lot of interesting things to explore here. And with that, I think we're going to go down the aisle here. I guess Michael's going to go first, Marion, then Michael, Lyndon, and Heather. So thanks for your remarks, and then we'll include the rest of you as well. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Reid. Appreciate that excellent introduction. Is this working? This, let me say, I've enjoyed very much working on this project. The Liveable Lives Project has been, as Reid said, a truly interdisciplinary project on our campus and beyond. And I direct a center, and Marion has directed a center in the law school that cooperated. We were, I guess, the chief partners, but there were several other academic centers on campus and in economics and American cultural studies and other areas, and the provost office that all pitched in to make this project possible. So we've enjoyed that process. I'm very pleased with the book that has resulted from this. As Reid said, Michael Lynn has a concluding chapter in the book that, as Michael always does, thinks very big about the policy issues and makes sense of all of the preceding body of work. I would, my contribution to the volume other than serving as editor was minimal, but I would like to make a comment about it. We invited Christina Romer to give a talk on campus soon after she stepped down from President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors. And Christina came and gave a speech about employment policy, which starts off the book actually. And four of us responded, Marion and Steve Fazzari and the economics department, who also has a chapter in the book with Barry Cinnamon and Bill Emmons from the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis, a really excellent empirical economist and myself. And my comments to Christina's talk were based on work earlier in my life. And I want to make a particular point about this because it stands in sharp contrast to the policy response of the last six years, I guess, since the recession started. So I had done a dissertation on the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s. And I think it's worth, I think there's a fan out here of the CCC. I spent, actually spent a couple of years in the National Archives. It was empirical social science, so I was sampling, you know, all kinds of records and recording. So in some ways I feel like I really was in the Civilian Conservation Corps. And so I'd like to contrast the response because I think, and I raised a point in my small contribution to the book about having an active employment policy, and this really has not happened in the current period. So in the recession, as you know, President Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, other initiatives to directly employ lots of people. So there are lots of ways to do active employment policy. This is probably the most government-oriented, just the government, just higher people to do work. We may not want to do something exactly like that in our era, but we didn't even consider hardly any variation of that strategy. The primary emphasis on demand, such as it was, the primary emphasis on stimulating overall demand and that would then stimulate growth and employment, which I'll leap to others to assess the effectiveness. We've been struggling with low employment response since the recession and still struggling with fairly high unemployment. But I just want to make a comment about the scope of what happened in the 1930s. The Civilian Conservation Corps had about 300, averaged about 300,000 young men. There was also a National Youth Administration, not everyone is aware of it, a different organization also employed young women, but the CCC was oriented toward males. And the labor market today is about three times as large as it was at that period of time. So this would be, if we did something like that on this scale today, it would be one million young adults employed just in the Civilian Conservation Corps. If we did something on a comparable scope to the Works Progress Administration, it would employ at least nine million adults in today's labor market if it was a comparable scope. I'm just trying to give you an understanding of the scope of this, because nine million would eliminate the unemployment problem in the United States. I mean, not just help, it would eliminate it. So these are massive responses during a very severe economic downturn, the Great Depression, to be sure. They didn't happen right away, as you know. The Depression got underway in 1929. Roosevelt didn't take office till 1933, so it was four years of extreme hardship before these policies started to be created. But the country eventually came around to the idea that employing people should be a high priority. And I think what's been frustrating for many people in the current political environment is that there doesn't seem to be a consensus, and sometimes not even much discussion about the effects of the recession on employment and on real people's lives because of that. It becomes a discussion more now by people recognizing, as a really excellent chapter by Barry Sinema and Steve Fazzari in this book, recognizing that if we leave enough people unemployed long enough, it's going to drag down the whole economy. And this empirical work and this paper in here was the beginning of, the paper has gone through an iteration or two since that time and has been engaged in a broad national discussion. So we're getting at the issue of, well, maybe we should think about employment and people and stabilizing households so that households can actually be part of an economy so we can all prosper together. But we haven't thought about this. We think about it in this sort of larger macroeconomic sense right now, and really not so much in the micro sense of what's happening to real people in the economy. I still remain quite concerned about conditions. Unemployment remains high. Unemployment among young people remains especially high and especially among young people of color. There's a very high level of young African Americans who are not employed and not in school. And, you know, to be honest, I'm not quite sure what the country could be thinking. If millions of young people are going to be left in these conditions, it's not going to be, it's not very promising for a long-term future. But we have been locking them up in large numbers. If we stop locking them up, which we no longer afford to do, we're going to have to deal with the fact that we have lots of people in society who are not well engaged. And this is not just a humanitarian issue. It's not a social justice issue. It's really, it is those issues, of course, but it's an issue of how does a country function. If we cannot raise our young people so they can become engaged in society and productive adults, we have a real problem. And as far as I can tell, that's kind of where we're headed. So with those not so positive remarks, I'll turn it over to the next speaker, Marion Crane. Thanks, Michael. I want to say, first of all, thank you very much, Reed and the New America Foundation for having us here. This is a great opportunity for scholars who normally talk to one another to talk to the world and the public and policymakers. So we're really grateful for that. And the other thing I want to say is, in addition to a wonderful group of authors and contributors in this book, working with Michael, as far as I'm concerned, is a dream come true. I came to watch you from UNC, where I had worked with former then-Senator John Edwards in a good endeavor called the Poverty Center. I met Michael there. And it's actually Michael's presence at Washington University that drew me. Despite his, or perhaps this goes along with his very, he tends to downplay the power of his ideas, but he is a very influential thinker. And I'm grateful to be associated with him. So I want to talk a little bit about the book's premise and then give you some concrete examples in, from one chapter, drawn from a chapter that I co-authored with another, a former student actually named Ken Matheny. The book's premise is that economic fragility, by which we mean, among other things, rising income inequality, wealth disparities, and the shift of risk to workers, to individuals, and to their families. The book's premise is that economic fragility is a consequence of deliberate policy choices. And the policy choice I want to focus on for the purpose of this conversation is the diminished power and influence of labor unionism. So I'm going to start by saying just a few words about what that diminished power and influence looks like in terms of facts and figures, what it was that unions did that was valuable, why we should care, basically, and then conclude with some remarks about why we think this was a deliberate policy consequence, a consequence of policy choices rather than due to, say, external, larger macroeconomic forces or the choices of individual workers, and then gesture at some possible resolutions. So in the 1930s to the 1950s or so, American labor unions were in their heyday. They had a period of dramatic growth spurred on by enactment of the Wagner Act of 1935, the original piece of legislation that compromised, that comprised what we now call the Labor Laws, the National Labor Relations Act. It was part of the New Deal legislation that was designed to shore up workers' purchasing power and stimulate consumption to pull us out of the Great Depression. The Wagner Act in a nutshell protected the right to organize against employer power in the private sector and also gave unions the right to bargain collectively imposed on employers an obligation to bargain collectively with their employees once they formed unions and finally protected some tools for workers so that they had some leverage at the bargaining table, the right to strike, the right to pick it, to engage in boycotts including what are called secondary boycotts where unions pull in workers and employers who deal with the original employer with whom they have a dispute so that the dispute has ripple effects throughout the economy. By the 1950s, unions represented approximately one-third of the eligible population, those covered by the Labor Laws. That was their kind of high point. But since the 1930s, we've seen a steady decline, especially after the 1950s and into the 1970s and 80s in union density and also union power and influence. Today, unions represent only 11% of workers, 6% in the private sector and roughly 35% in the public sector with those numbers predicted to go down and steadily dropping. So why should we care? Some at this point might say, well, it's not a bad thing. Unions haven't been all good. Lots of things that they have done have had negative impacts. So let me give you a few reasons why we should care, why it matters even today. First, and most obviously, unions confer a direct wage and benefit effect on the workers they do represent. So as most of you probably know, unions significantly increase wages for the workers they represent. There's an approximate $3.50 wage premium for a unionized worker. It's more for people of color and for women. So they do even more for people of color and women than they do for white men. In addition, unionized workers enjoy substantially better benefits. This is significantly more important at this point. Health, disability and life insurance benefits, paid leave and pension plans can be kind of summarized in this data. Over $7 an hour differential in terms of the value to unionized workers versus non-union workers. So adding those together, it's a $10.50 plus depending on your union contract benefit to workers. Okay, that's the direct effect, but there are significant indirect effects that unions had on the rest of the working class and the middle class for that matter. These are the spillover effects. First, they establish powerful norms through collective bargaining agreements that influence both the evolution of the law and the kinds of norms and benefits that employers who were not unionized provided to their workforce, including job security protections, the right to be discharged for cause as opposed to at the employer's will, progressive disciplinary systems, the right to have notice and warning and some sort of due process in the workplace before one was disciplined or discharged, seniority systems, apprenticeship training programs, and internal job ladders so that people moved ahead within the company and received training from that company rather than having to job hop as is our more modern kind of norm. The threat effect of unions then motivated non-union employers to provide these benefits and more to the non-union workforce so as to decrease the incentive to unionize. Third, unions performed and continue to perform an important function as a watchdog for employee rights that are conferred by other statutes. So there's a host now of individual employment statutes, including occupational safety and health statutes, wage and hour laws, anti-discrimination statutes, Family Medical Leave Act protections to protect those who have to take leave to care for themselves or family members who are ill. And unions not only educate employees about those statutes and their rights under those statutes which are not a simple thing, but in addition, they often represent workers, even those, they even advocate for those they don't represent by filing amicus briefs and important Supreme Court decisions and fighting against judicial constructions of those statutes that might narrow those rights, those hard-won rights. In fact, unions were the ones that gained political voice in obtaining those protections in the first place. Unions were key players in obtaining, for example, not only all the statutes I mentioned before, but unemployment insurance, social security, Medicare, and the great civil society of the Johnson era, anti-poverty legislation. So unions function as a political voice, a lobbying force for workers, and also historically have worked against the narrowing of those rights once won in the legislature in the courts as well. So unsurprisingly then, given the functions that I've just outlined that unions have performed, multiple studies now show a strong correlation and even in some studies a causal relationship, very difficult to establish, between declining union density and influence and growth in wage inequality and also an increase in the percentage of corporate profits that are kept by employers and business as opposed to distributed to workers. The erosion of rank-and-file bargaining power, as we would say in the labor context in the workplace, essentially is responsible for this. It allows employers to reduce wages and benefits and to shift risks to workers so that the employer is no longer the kind of guarantor of the employee's economic future. In the legal and political realm, union loss of influence has translated into losses in the political sphere. Some of these are going to be very familiar to most of us. The election of legislators and appointment of judges hostile to workers' rights agendas has meant, for example, big losses for workers in the Supreme Court. The Dukes Against Walmart case is one that comes to mind in the employment arena. This is a case involving a class action sex discrimination suit against Walmart in which the Supreme Court made it very difficult for workers to sue as a group. So it's not just labor unionism that now is being cabined, but group rights more generally, including group rights to advance individual employment protections under these other statutes. That matters because it's very difficult for individual employees to find lawyers willing to take their cases, particularly low-wage workers. There's not enough at stake. It's just not worth the lawyer's time. So a class action or a collective action is the only way, often, that lawyers will become interested in these cases and bring them to court. Another example of a major loss that is traceable to the loss of union influence and power is the election of governors like Scott Walker and his retrenchment in the Wisconsin context on public sector employee bargaining rights, which obviously further contributed to the decline of public sector unionism, and the enactment of right-to-work statutes, as they are called, in a number of industrial stronghold states like Michigan, Indiana, and the like, these right-to-work statutes essentially create a situation in which unions are even more fragile because they have to deal with free-riding employees who don't have to pay union dues. Why is union decline not just a consequence of individual employee choice, you might ask, or larger macroeconomic forces? Why am I arguing that it's a policy decision? And the answer to this question is basically this. Although the labor laws, the Wagner Act of 1935, initially provided a significant boost to unions in organizing workers, the reason we saw this dramatic fall-off in union density and continue to see it, or one big reason, is because amendments to the labor laws in 1947 and 1959 and subsequent judicial constructions of the labor laws basically demolished the protections of the labor law, made what had been a promise to workers into a dangerous illusion. So, for example, the amendments reduced the number of employees covered significantly. Supervisors and managers could no longer organize. It outlawed the secondary boycott, probably labor's most powerful weapon. Judicial decisions restricted the right to strike, making it very risky for workers to exercise that right because they could be permanently replaced. My students still ask, what's the difference between being fired and being permanently replaced? There's not much difference, but you can permanently replace someone under our existing statute. And also limited unions' rights to picket, which was one of the main ways in which the working people got PR across to the public, certainly in that era. Legislative gridlock at the federal level, with which we're all familiar, and powerful federal preemption doctrines that prevented states from stepping in and trying to do more to protect workers' rights in this context at the behest of unions that might be strong in those states, completed the picture so that the labor laws ultimately became not only ossified, that is, they're not being amended anymore, but obsolete unsurprisingly. So they no longer fit the needs of a workforce that's increasingly mobile, has shorter job tenure, and expands through subcontracting arrangements in complicated ways so we're no longer clear who the employer is, who the employees are organizing against. By the 1980s, union leaders like Lane Kirkland, who was then president of the AFL-CIO, and Rich Trumka, now president of the AFL-CIO, then with the Mine Workers Union, declared that the labor laws were so dangerous and so such a farce that they should be repealed. Both of them argued for a return to warfare in the states, that is, they wanted to be able to fight these battles in courts and in legislatures at the state level. So what should we do now? Clearly, an amendment to this statute is not possible, or not politically feasible. So we sketch a couple of prescriptions in the chapter in the book, and I'm happy to take questions about this or refer you to the book, since I'm not going to detail this. But they are these. First, if we can't enact legislative reform, at the very least, we should seek to shore up some of the actions that the National Labor Relations Board has taken recently in the last four or five years in trying to strengthen worker rights to act collectively, to bring class actions in court or in arbitration, and to deal with firings that occur as a result of employee conversations that fall far short of a union organizing effort, like Facebook conversations. I'm referring here to what we call the Facebook firing cases. People are fired for talking on Facebook about their supervisors. That's one strategy. A second strategy is to repeal the NLRA, which is a provocative move but one we make in this chapter, and to advocate for substitution in its place, a strengthened version of the core part of the NLRA that protects the right to assemble and to act collectively. We would not, in this proposal, advocate for a right to collectively bargain. We would instead restore the tools to workers to have leverage that they need and let them fight that out with employers. So there are some things about this proposal. I've advanced it in a couple of other contexts that employers actually like, and that lefties hate. So there you go. It's something for everyone to shoot at. In conclusion, our proposal is obviously radical, utopian, or maybe suicidal for organized labor. But we think the NLRA at this point is so anachronistic, such a dinosaur of a statute, that's so different from other workplace legislation. In terms of its preemption doctrine, it doesn't allow for damage recovery. Employers make a cost-benefit calculus and determine that it's worth violating the law. For those reasons, we think it's more dangerous as an illusion out there that people have rights than it would be if it were repealed and there was pressure for something else to take its place. So dramatic inequalities require dramatic solutions. Last up here. Well, I'm very grateful to have had the opportunity to take part in this project, including the anthology in this panel. And grateful in particular to Michael Schirraden, who's been a profound intellectual influence on New America from its very origins. As you can tell from the previous panelists, the whole basis of this project is pushing back on what Roberto Unger calls false necessity, the idea that there is no alternative. That was a phrase frequently used by Margaret Thatcher to dismiss any other options to her particular set of policies by saying there is no alternative. And the TINA, there is no alternative mantra, tends to dominate discussions of the workforce by saying that there's some irresistible force, sometimes it's identified as globalization, sometimes it's technology, and there's nothing that can be done. It's beyond the power of human agency. We just have to adapt and suffer. And as Marion and Michael and other contributors point out, what is portrayed as the result of irresistible historic forces, in many, if not most cases, is actually the result of particular battles one by one side defeating another in particular policy changes. And while the politics may be difficult, it's actually kind of an optimistic analysis because it means that you can, other sides can win other battles and you can have other policies and other statutes and so on. In my contribution to the anthology, I don't set forth a particular plan. I just analyze the different options that are available. If we want to rebuild the livable lives, to use their very apt phrase of working class and middle class Americans, in the middle of the 20th century to oversimplify somewhat, the two goals of having a minimum middle class income and minimum middle class benefits were delivered through the job, or the good job, which was generally a unionized job. And let's be clear, this was not a utopia. If you were a unionized white male steel worker with a pension and good wages, negotiated by your union, you were pretty well off. It was a very gendered labor market. It was white supremacists, both de jure and de facto in different parts of the country. And of course in much of the south and west with right to work states, unions were crushed in the cradle and even white male workers didn't benefit from this. But it is nevertheless true that there were these good jobs. They came with benefits like pensions where the corporation, the employer, assumed the risk, not the individual. And also fairly high wages. And what we've seen in the last generation is the jettisoning of the adequate wages from more and more jobs by employers and the jettisoning of benefits by employers. And under genuine competitive pressure in some cases, not necessarily because they're evil. So sometimes it's because of competitive pressure. Sometimes it's simply because of corporate influence in the political system. But what that means is we've been moving away from this social contract of the mid-20th century in which it was the job or the good job that provided adequate income and adequate benefits towards a new social contract, if you want to call it that, in which one or both of these, adequate income and the adequate benefits are provided by someone other than the employer. Namely, in some cases, the taxpayer. So this is all very abstract, but let me just bring this down to earth. Any system of wage subsidies, like the earned income tax credit, which has achieved bipartisan support since the 1970s as the major anti-poverty tool, essentially says that we're not going to require employers to pay subsistence wages. We will allow some employers to pay wages that people cannot or should not live on, and the taxpayer, through the wage subsidy, will top this up and keep these people out of poverty. So that means you now have two sources of income. One is your wage, and the other is this government subsidy. And one can be in favor of this pro or con. I'm just pointing out that's a innovative model compared to the mid-20th century model. The same is true of benefits as more and more employers, and most employers never had generous benefit packages. These tended to be large concentrated industrial corporations in industries like automobiles and steel. But even there, there's been more and more shifting as the anthology points out of the risks from the employer to the individual, and we've seen either the expansion of subsidized private alternatives, like IRAs, like 401Ks, for example. Now, another method would be the expansion of public alternatives, social security and Medicaid and Medicare, but this has been off the table even for so-called progressive Democrats, for the most part, at least until fairly recently. So that's basically the choices, and I think there are kind of two decision points if we think about how are we going to go ahead if we want to have a new consensus. The first is do we primarily want to rely on increasing the leverage of workers or increasing redistribution? Increasing the leverage would include methods helping unions and collective bargaining of the kind that Marion has talked about, and in some cases it's things like the minimum wage, which increases the bargaining power even of workers who make more than the minimum wage. So that's one option. So the workers can bargain for more in the way of income and benefits from their employers. The other option, which to some degree is the path we've been taking, I think since the 1970s and 1980s, is using redistribution outside of the employer-employee relationship in order to guarantee some kind of minimum, middle-class income, minimum basic benefits. And there the debate, which needn't be the debate between left and right, but probably will be, is do you deliver these redistributionist benefits, be they wage subsidies or benefits like healthcare and education, primarily through direct public provision or through some kind of voucher system or some kind of system of subsidies for the private purchase of it. And right now we've got competing models. So if you look at retirement security, you have social security, classic direct public provision, you pay a tax and you get your check in the mail. At the same time, there are all of these things that have grown up since the 1970s, IRAs and 401Ks, which are essentially taxpayers subsidized. They're not free market, because the government is subsidizing these indirectly, but these are taxpayer subsidized private savings accounts for retirement. The two major expansions of healthcare since the year 2000, not counting the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, have taken this private route. There was the Medicare prescription drug benefit, subsidies for private insurance and pharmaceuticals, and the Affordable Care Act for the non-poor who don't qualify for Medicaid, where you're subsidizing the private purchase of this, merit good, this benefit in a regulated market. So those are the options. And just to wrap up, my heart is on the side of those who want to increase worker bargaining power, but I think with private sector unionism down to what is it like, 7% of the private sector workforce, in this assault we're seeing on the remaining bastions of public sector unionism, I just think that merely defending the existing strongholds of organized labor is going to be very difficult. When it comes to whether you want to provide benefits outside of the employer relationship, either through the subsidized private purchase in a market or a quasi-market or direct public provision, I used to be much more sympathetic to the subsidized private purchase than I am now. And it's just, as time has gone on, we've learned that all of these schemes for subsidizing private purchase of healthcare, of higher education, whether it's student loans, 401Ks, they just, they get gamed. And they're going to be gamed by profiteers. And it doesn't matter how you design it when you set up the legislation, because there is so much money involved from raking fees from private retirement savings accounts, from hidden fees to banks from student loans, that the lobbyists of these interest groups are just going to just work on Congress session after session, year after year after year. You know, it's Uva Reinhart, a great medical expert, has described our system of private provision of these public goods as feeding the horses in order to feed the birds. I won't go into the gruesome details. But it does seem to me on a pure efficiency basis, the case for simply expanded public provision of these goods, for example, just simply expanding social security, rather than coming up with all kinds of elaborate Rube Goldberg schemes of, you know, private tax-favored savings accounts. But on the other hand, rich investors cannot make any money from the expansion of public security. They can make lots of money from, like, you know, investing in all kinds of private savings accounts, at least money managers. And the same is true when it comes to the privatization of higher education and so on. But the takeaway point is not my preferences, but it's the idea that we actually have enormous flexibility in theory how we structure a middle class. You know, first of all, you can't create a middle class. It doesn't, despite technology and globalization, it was artificial in the past, and it's artificial now, and you can do it. Other societies achieve the same goal by different methods. So, you know, T-I-N-A, there is no alternative is false. There is an alternative. Thanks. Thank you. So, first of all, it's just a real treat to be here today. Thank you, Reid, for inviting me, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to share this volume. I very much enjoyed looking at it. I haven't had a chance to read the whole thing yet because I only got it yesterday morning, but I've gone through most of it, and I think it's definitely an important contribution. So, thank you for doing this. And of course, now I have a bunch of things I want to add to my remarks based on what Michael said. So, I think this is also going to be a rich conversation we're having here this afternoon. So, I wanted to start off by just saying, sort of very briefly, that the project that I'm engaged in now at the Center for Equal Growth, we are trying to understand whether and how inequality affects economic growth and stability. And the themes that are touched on in this volume in the shadow of economic fragility could not be more aligned with the kinds of questions that we are trying to think through. So, again, I appreciate being invited, but it's also, these are issues that we're thinking about a lot, and I'm glad that you framed your remarks, Michael, that you're very famous. There is no alternative, because I think one of the most exciting things that I'm seeing as an economist looking out at what kinds of research is being done, and this certainly fits into this bucket of work, growing bucket of work, is that there's a lot of new economic research that is pushing back against this idea that there's no alternative, which I think is a new, interesting development that I don't think we had been seeing up until the past, I don't know if I would say a whole decade, but I think economists have tended to sort of look at our models and say, you know, we're at equilibrium and everything will just work out fine, thank you very much, but that's not the case, and the idea that policy really does matter I think is something that's being underscored more and more, and I'll touch back on this again later in my brief comments here. But I also wanted to pivot off something that Michael said that I think is so important that feeds right into the remarks I wanted to make, which is, Michael, you said that there are these two decision points. We either increase the leverage of workers or we need to redistribute outside the employment relationship, and one of the things that struck me about the book and thinking about what it means to be living in the shadow of economic fragility is sort of what do we mean by economic fragility and what's changed and connecting the dots between what's happening to us and our families and what's going on in the economy, which so many of these chapters look at that intersection, and of course one of the most important things that's changed in terms of demographics over the past half century or more so now is the movement of women out of the home and into the labor market that peaked in the late 1990s and has been flatlined since then. So you saw these enormous changes for families that sort of stepped into a labor market built for a different era, an era when you could have workers and wages be the way that you supported a family because typically you had one earner, at least you did in middle class and upper middle class families, to a world where you typically have two earners and what does it mean to have the decision point be about the leverage of workers in that new family structure, and that's something that's really hard to figure out. It slams together different kinds of experts, different kinds of literature, you know, folks that think on the more sort of labor side and think about unions, we think either about wages or we think maybe it expands to be about a family wage because people are thinking about poverty or issues from the family experience. These are very, very different. And so this idea that we need to, that the other side is distribution outside of the employment relationship is in many ways giving up on the kinds of things that Marion was talking about, giving up on basically making employers pay for the full cost of their labor force. And that also creates a lot of confusion in terms of who's the bad guy. It was clear, I think, I don't know, I wasn't alive 50 or 60 years ago, but I think it was clear who the bad guy was. It was the employer in some sense. There was a clear sort of where that struggle was. Whereas today I think it's much more diffuse and if you're focusing on redistribution, redistribution for whom and what that's going to look like. So a lot of the chapters, and I encourage everyone to pick up the book, focus on different aspects of that. And I wanted to highlight a couple of contributions that I thought for me really got at some of these issues. And one is the piece by, I'm going to, Cinnamon and Fazzari, the name, Simon. Okay, now I'm Cinnamon and Fazzari. I've been following their work for a while now and I was really happy to see them in this book. They tell the story, if you aren't familiar with their research, they tell the story about how inequality has led to increasing fragility because of the way that it's played out through debt. And this is part of a broad new literature that's been emerging, especially since the economic crisis, although I for one would have liked to have seen it like, I don't know, 10 years before the crisis, so we could have prevented it, but that's another session perhaps, that how inequality played out, how inequality affected the lead up to the crisis through creating the conditions for greater acquisition of debt. And they have this great chart, and if I was one of those people that did slides, I would show it to you, but they have this great chart where they show debt to income ratios across income groups, and they show how the debt to income prior to the crisis grew most for households in the bottom 95%. That it was families sort of not at the very top, but families in the bottom 95%, which I think is actually quite wrinkly too big of a group to be looking at, but that they're the ones that were taking on more and more debt and they were the ones driving consumption. Well, that of course is consistent with what we would assume that families sort of at the lower end of the income distribution would have a marginal propensity to consume out of income, but the idea that they would also have an increasing marginal propensity to borrow and then spend that money increasingly is this new contribution that Cinnamon and Fazzare have brought to the table. Now, there's also other research that is focusing on this same theme, but in a slightly different way, and by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi, who are also arguing sort of building on the themes of this book that economic disasters are man-made, that the idea that there is no alternative is wrong and that we have created this crisis and no small part through policymaking. And I want to just focus on one thing that Mian and Sufi talk about that I think is important in relationship to the Cinnamon and Fazzare, which is that they focus on not just how debt, you know, that it was the fall-off and consumption that led to the crisis, the consumption had been increased because of debt, but then they go a step back and they say, okay, well, how did we get all this debt? And they, of course, point to the financial deregulation, which is a policy lever that gave us all of the access, especially to loans at the bottom and that were no longer government secured in the subprime mortgage market, and that it was because the effects of the collapse of the housing bubble were felt so unequally across families relative to how much income they had and what their net worth was that that exacerbated the crisis in very pointed and important ways, which gets to this theme of fragility that we need to attend to. And so riffing off that, you know, the thing that Mian and Sufi don't ask that I think Michael has alluded to that is asked in this book is that, okay, well, so why was it that all these families were actually taking on all this debt? What is it about what's been going on in the last few decades in the U.S. economy that changed the conditions for families and for households? And here I would go back to the fact that, you know, while we saw these massive changes in the U.S. labor market with the increasing labor force participation rates of women, we saw women going into the labor force. We saw families putting in many more hours of work. The typical family puts in 11 more weeks of work per year now than they did a generation or two ago. But what we didn't see was incomes rising. And importantly, what we didn't see was incomes rising in the bottom, I don't know, 80% of the income distribution depending on what years you're measuring it. And that, of course, is a fragility that has led to families taking on, you know, part of the conditions that led to this increased debt, but also led to a decrease if people had not taken on so much debt that would have led to a very sharp contraction in economic demand. And so really, I think that one of the things that I was glad to see in here that I think is important to really underscore is this connecting the dots between what happens to us in our families and how wages and incomes create conditions for consumption and demand. And then, you know, at the same time create the capacity for families to invest in the next generation or to create highly productive workers in today's labor market. But that if we, without, that in not attending to that, we've not only created increasing fragility for families, but we've actually created the conditions for an increasingly fragile overall economic cycle. And that, I think, is, therein lies the issue. To just go back to, because I just, I really like the way you frame this, Michael, with in terms of thinking the leverage of work or focusing on the worker or redistribution, figuring out where that answer lies is, of course, I think the most urgent issue facing us probably over the next 10 to 20 years, perhaps besides climate change. But understanding, you know, how we're going to deal with what is happening to families in the economy. But I think that I would caution us to think of this as not just about, to not let go of either side of the equation, that this is both about the long-term health and viability of our economy and our economic competitiveness in the macro sense, but it is also about the fragility and what's going on in our families at a micro sense. And I think connecting those dots is both good politics, but is also really important for us as researchers to be elevating and trying to think through. I'll pop up here and facilitate keeping this conversation going and yes, a lot of excellent remarks there by Michael and Heather. And maybe we'll start off marrying with letting you respond a bit. You know, I think it's a very interesting kind of formulation of this trade-off between leverage and increasing the redistribution of resources. And yet there is a context here of the economy, of the nature of work, and how it's changed over time. How would you respond to some of that? So I too loved Michael's framing of this as these alternative policy choices. The first point I would make, though, is that they're not mutually exclusive. They don't need to be. And so it's great because it makes it very black and white and we can easily think about this as a binary, but I would urge us not necessarily to look at it that way. Both could be possible. And just to give an example on each front. So with regard to increasing worker leverage, I don't want to be understood as arguing for returning to unions. As close to my heart as that notion might be, I think it's impossible and fruitless. And my friends in the labor movement are not happy with me. I'm sure for saying this, but it seems to me that there are many forms of worker activism out there right now. Group formations that we should be supporting. I'm thinking here of the fast food forward movement, which involves not only fast food workers, but retail workers and is now global. Enterprises like Occupy certainly had a bit of this flavor. Unions have supported both of these kinds of movements, so I don't mean to undermine their importance here, but these are the new way in which workers are coming together. Alternatively, workers coming together in a legal context to press for rights in class action contexts like the Walmart case involving sex discrimination. The problem with these cases, though, is the wins are not sustainable, usually. There's no institutional structure, like a collective bargaining mechanism and an ongoing relationship that keeps that going. So you win, but then there's retrenchment that happens automatically. What entity will fight for that? I don't have a clear answer to that question, but I think we need to open the law to create some breathing space to protect those entities as they try to form. And then to give an example of redistributing wealth outside the employment relationship, if you're thinking about this at all, my students always respond to this one. The sub-minimum wage for tipped workers means that whenever you leave a tip, you are subsidizing directly the low wages that the employer is paying. So just to bring it down to the, you know, kind of grassroots everyday lived experience level. I'll stop. Let's push a little bit more in this direction. I mean, government obviously does more than just redistribute or set the terms for bargaining. You know, it defines the space. It regulates the space that's been, I think, some of the story of the last number of years. And it can set, you know, wage standards as well. And that's one of the contemporary debates. Michael, you didn't kind of go into that as much in your remarks, but, you know, how do you see the minimum wage, you know, more explicitly fitting into that and what are the trade-offs with some of the other approaches? Well, the Swedish social Democrats in the 1950s and 60s. That's how you begin all your answers, Michael. Had a very useful strategy, which I think we could all share even in the 21st century, quite different societies. You have the traded sector, which is exposed to international competition, and you have the non-traded domestic service sector. So you have, let's say, the steel workers who today are exposed to all kinds of competition, and then you have the janitors, you know, who are not exposed to, you know, foreign competition in any way. And, you know, I think the beginning of wisdom is to recognize that these different sectors actually require different regimes and even different labor regimes. So, for example, the argument in favor of a minimum wage in the non-traded domestic sector, it's very powerful. You're not going to impair American competitiveness if you pay, you know, janitors and baristas $15 an hour. Now, you might promote labor-saving technology at Starbucks or McDonald's, which wouldn't be a bad thing in terms of productivity economy, but it's not going to collapse. On the other hand, it is the case, unless you're going to adopt protectionism, that wages are a factor in, let's say, automobiles and steel and so on. So, you know, there might be a case for, let's say, wage subsidies in the traded sector and wage regulations in the non-traded sector. And just one more piece on the sectoral thing. Most of the gains of productivity growth accrue to increasing returns industries in the traded sector, you know, automobiles, aerospace, it'll next have to be robotics and so on. So, let's assume we have this great return to unions, even beyond what Marion is talking about. The unions, you know, in Boeing and Apple and so on are going to be able to reap enormous increases just because of the huge profits, you know, in that sector. The nursing home sector, which tends to be a fairly low profit, highly divided, highly competitive sector in the United States, there just aren't enormously high profits to share, even if all the nursing homes are unionized. And I think that just strengthens the case for a kind of redistribution. It's not so much from class to class as from sector to sector. So you want to be able to redistribute from these high-tech sectors where you're getting these enormous windfall profits gains to the low productivity sectors where, because they're labor-intensive, that's where most people are going to work in the fairly labor-intensive domestic service sector. Heather, how have you weighed in on some of the minimum wage debates? I think the minimum wage is important. But I wanted to... Just one thing about this, though. I mean, I think that... I mean, a couple of comments. You know, first of all, the minimum wage affects a small number of workers at the bottom end of the labor market. So it's certainly not the only labor market policy that we want to focus on. It's certainly an important floor. We're seeing really exciting developments. Seattle just passed a $15 minimum wage, and I'm very curious to see the research that it does to that local economy and whether or not it's good or bad and how that plays out. I think, though... I mean, one thing that Michael just said that I do have to comment on, though, is that this is something, at least in the U.S. context, the minimum wage is a policy that, again, it's targeted at lower-wage workers. It's not the kind of policy that's going to affect workers in some of the industries that you mentioned, but it's also the case that many of our trade policies have explicitly put U.S. workers in direct competition with workers in other countries in ways that have exacerbated the consequences of globalization in the tradeable sectors that they haven't in the non-tradeables. And I think that there are other ways to get at that issue rather than just saying, well, we can't do anything in terms of improving living standards for those workers. Or I think, actually, more importantly, focusing on having a more competitive U.S. dollar, which would do away with some of those challenges. So I think that there's ways that you... we need to connect the dots and not just always be thinking that the problem lies in the wage subsidy, but that where is it that we are creating policies that are either... that allow for rent-seeking or that are focused at the top that actually have these very important consequences for workers down the income distribution. Thank you. So we can open it up to the floor here. I'd love to see some hands of... have some questions for the panelists. So just flag me down. Don't be shy. I wanted to actually even explore this concept. As Michael talked about, some of his earliest research was built in the 19th century at the station core. And every time I go for a walk and see a great trail or come on a building that was built, well-built in the 1930s and has some actually designed features to it, it's an interesting place. I often think, you know, why hasn't... haven't we embraced this again when our roads are falling apart or we can be creating infrastructure? The 21st century CCC is that too big of a hurdle for us in the political scene to overcome? But what would be the argument for it and where is its potential? I think it could be part of the mix of responses. We did... the CCC was the first and really iconic example of service or what we now call service and general category of serving the country but not in military service but in some kind of civilian service. And I think that eventually led to the creation of AmeriCorps as you all know which was enacted in 1993. So AmeriCorps really is the modern CCC. It's very much smaller. It's very much more decentralized not controlled by the federal government. I think that structure of AmeriCorps could be used to significantly expand these service ideas so that young people are actually people of any age. This idea could also certainly apply and does apply to some older adults but it could apply at any age. That some service to the country is a good thing and that there is work to do as Reid said. There's plenty of relatively low skill work that would be beneficial in energy use and conservation and also as Michael Linde has pointed out many times in infrastructure. A lot of those are more skilled jobs but they're not all more skilled jobs. So there's productive work that can be done. We could have a vision much like Franklin Roosevelt's that we will put together these unused resources of human resources with real needs of the nation and expand and the easiest thing to do would be just to expand AmeriCorps in some version and in very partisan times there still is reasonable bipartisan support for AmeriCorps. What's the size of AmeriCorps? Does anyone know budget-wise or who it's employing? AmeriCorps did get massive budget cuts over the course of the past few years and many of the offices are basically shuttered where they're not actually doing anything or having any projects go out because of the austerity that we're living in. This Center for American Progress we had been advocating very loudly for expanding not only AmeriCorps but other forms of national service and the past two congresses has been pretty dead set against anything that would actually have expanded funding for that. One thing I will add though that we did do in the same lines not so visible as the CCC but one of the objectives of the administration when they came in in 2009 one way to deal with the crisis was to make investments in green technologies and that's a lot of stuff that we don't actually see. I even sort of living here in Washington and working on these issues I was very sort of struck by I think his name is Michael Grunwald I was going to say Michael's book on the New New Deal Yeah very if you haven't taken a look it's very important because it gets at all of the hidden ways that those investments in that you sort of saw the money going out at the beginning but then he goes as a journalist goes through and documents all the different ways that these are actually very profound and important investments that are boosting the U.S. economy but not in the ways that lead to the beautiful buildings that you would notice. Yeah I think you have to distinguish between whether you're talking about the employer of last resort being a counter cyclical thing used in recessions where you expand and contract or as a permanent enlargement of the public sector workforce and it's just I think we've learned from the CCC from the Job Corps and the Johnson years you know from AmeriCorps they're real obstacles to the U.S. government of all governments being able to expand public employment and then to shrink it exactly when the Council of Economic Advisers says the recession is over are you actually firing these people particularly young people that you've hired during the expansion there is a case to be made it's quite avant-garde for a permanent expansion of relatively low and middle skilled public sector employment which is mostly at the city and county and state level you could triple the number of public school teachers that have classes that were on average of 10 students instead of 30 would you do federal revenue sharing to fund some of that something we have proposed here in the past at the New America Foundation and one of the advantages of this is if unions are pretty much decimated one of the great things unions did in the 50s and 60s was they set standards for the other employers because you could quit your crummy job and go work in the steel industry and so you had pattern bargaining where even non unionized sectors tended to follow those standards this is completely horrifying after 20 years of neoliberal democrats and conservative republicans it may very well be that in the 21st century as in the 19th the government jobs are the best jobs in rural America historically into this day if you can work for the county that's a better job than being a hired hand or something like that so as I say this is quite radical idea but something we may have to think about if I could just follow if I could just follow on we live in this period where the state has talked about with the region the role of the state in long term economic development as over time becomes stronger so it's not by any historical assessment it's not really there's not a reasonable case to be made for shrinking the state leading to stronger economies going forward although some people have this ideology really groundless in terms of how economies actually work so the idea I very much I don't know if it's avant garde or not but I very much endorse the idea of not using language like jobs of last resort just for practical reasons but I wouldn't consider them jobs as last resort there's real work to be done in some cases markets aren't able to to create that work it's a legitimate role of the public sector to do that we do it in to create militaries and to create other public jobs that people think are very good jobs the entire civil service a lot of people in Washington have public jobs and they do very well so I don't think we should view it as an employment doing work that has to be done or could be done to benefit everyone thank you okay let's take a few questions here there's a mic coming right to your hand there you go so there's certainly the economic fragility of the family where there's debt on one hand and there's a possibility of losing a job or something else or and related to that is the leverage that a worker has in good times the leverage a worker has is that they can quit and move on to another job and the result of that is that employers try to treat them better and even pamper them and we're in sort of the opposite situation I would call it the current mini depression 99% I think using the word recession is too well that's fine for the 1% since the stock market is higher than it was before but I have a friend with a master's degree who works for the state of Maryland and about a year ago her bosses told her crew that they're going to treat them more shabbily because they realized that nobody could leave yeah it related to a point I was thinking for Marion as well how can bargaining work when we have such a weak labor force where there have these conditions where people can be undercut where wages are stagnant and low what are some of the tradeoffs there you make an excellent point this shows again the link between the larger economics of the situation, the larger economic data of the country and the day to day life of American workers and the fragility of the American family so linking, responding to Reed's question again this is looking back in history but after all the labor laws as well as the minimum wage laws which we've been talking about and social security and other provisions were enacted in the wake of the Great Depression when we were still struggling with a situation much like what we face now that is more job workers than there are available jobs and the way in which workers resisted that, the kinds of statements this employer made to your friend was to stand together and when they had protection for the right to strike, picket and boycott they could actually bring that leverage to bear on the employer if they could persuade workers to join together in solidarity and people were sufficiently desperate I think with their backs against the walls that they were willing to do it I'm not sure those same conditions and the same ethos prevailed today in fact I don't think so that's why I don't think unions per se as they've originally been conceived will work I'm sure that I enjoyed your discussion earlier so what's happened is that private employment is roughly back to where it was before this many depression but not public employment and certainly what's happening in my state of Maryland is that there's no effort to bring state employment back to the levels of six years ago when monies become available they're figuring out how can we pass this on to the millionaires thank you I just have a question right behind Clay Ramsey program for public consultation University of Maryland and this is to Marion I was intrigued by your discussing and passing the idea of replacing the Wagner Act with something contemporary and it sounds like an idea that perhaps is spelled out at some length in the book and a couple of subsequent articles excellent and maybe you could summarize the nature of the replacement that is in particular what rights would be buttressed because I gather it would be a rights based substitute and how they would be buttressed how that would happen thanks right so I would model we would model this statute on section seven of the NLRA which is the core provision of the Wagner Act protecting the right to organize and the right to engage in concerted action from mutual aid or benefit which would include pickets, boycotts, strikes and get rid of the rest of the baggage associated with the act so no elections, no bargaining obligation just essentially warfare in the streets and in the courts right because workers would use the other employment statutes that have grown up since then to bring collective provisions or arbitration provisions their employers have required them to sign as a provision, a condition of employment to bring class arbitration actions against the employer on the basis of wage and hour laws and the like so those would be additional sources of leverage besides just striking and picketing etc. In addition we would include a remedial provision that tracks the remedial provisions in say the anti-discrimination laws so capped damages according to the size of the employer would be available instead of the current situation under the labor laws which is no damages available the worst thing that happens to an employer who refuses to bargain is in order to go back to the bargaining table and do it again and you can imagine that's routinely violated every once in a while in an extreme case there's an obligation to repay additional bargaining costs incurred by the union as a result of that violation it's just not enough to make anyone change their behavior particularly when the advantages of being union free are so significant financially so we need some remedial provisions that track those of other statutes and looking to the anti-discrimination laws they've made a huge difference right we may not be done with the work that needs to happen in the anti-discrimination realm I think we're far from it but we've made significant progress it's no longer politically correct to say for example I want to be minority free or woman free yet it's perfectly fine to say I want to be union free so we have a big you know dichotomy here between the two statutes and that's part of the reason money talks those damage awards are pretty significant the other thing we would add is a right to proceed on these claims in federal or state court so that we wouldn't have the mechanism of a national labor relations board appointed by the president and therefore swinging back and forth from right to left with each presidential administration that's the current state of affairs and unfortunately what it means is that NLRB precedent is unstable so no gains that are won under the statute in that administrative realm are really they're not sustainable Michael Schirraden in other context we hear you talk about the role that savings and assets play along with income and we do know that one of the ways that people deal with the fragile economy and uncertainty is that they're able to draw on some of the resources they have and if you don't have those you're really at a big disadvantage how are you seeing this kind of relationship play out between income and assets in the contemporary I think there is a direct link to part of this discussion as Michael Lynn pointed out since the especially since the 1970's there's been an increasing emphasis on redistribution outside the employment setting directly through retirement plans that are supporting workers and it's increasingly the case that more and more returns from a global product are going to labor and to capital and gradually less to labor I think Piketty's book is likely to be supported on this count despite the discussions in the last week so I think we're living in a world where labor in general is going to be drawing less of the product and within the incomes of labor the distributions have become more unequal so labor at the bottom is going to be very challenged and I think we're going to be very challenged to think about policy strategies that depend only on labor or supporting labor incomes that are too low I think that will be an ongoing catch up game going forward it doesn't look really hopeful so I think we need to rethink actually about what it takes to make a stable household and I think the idea of labor income is an industrial era idea that's how people have sustained themselves the social policy structures we have put in place really supplement that idea and gradually I think we're going to have to broaden that discussion so that social policies begin to support households in ways other than income support and I think we could start with the enormously regressive public subsidies for building assets in retirement accounts which are now and also in building equity in homes both of these are huge subsidies so hundreds of billions of dollars there going mostly to the top each year there would be in my view quite reasonable in DC we often talk over 10 years when you get a big number it's a 10 year number but these subsidies, these tax expenditures are 250 of you home ownership and retirement each year 5 years, trillion dollars right so every year and if you just thought in terms of well could this go could this go equally to each household in America which is something I would call fair since it's a public provision I would rather it was progressive but I would take fair then I think we take an important step towards stabilizing a lot of households just through this one mechanism alone so I think we should think beyond labor income we do this asset building subsidy this is the most regressive part of anything that's been discussed here today it should it's a it's a kind of scandal but we don't talk about that way and we should Heather I want to take the opportunity of having you here to connect this to some of the current inequality debates Michael mentioned the Paquetti book which obviously is getting a lot of attention and one of the contributions I think that's valuable is that it's shedding a light on wealth inequality in addition to income which is kind of a new dimension but something that we've been focusing on for a number of years he's focusing mostly on this divergence at the very very top and we've seen the importance of helping you know people kind of at the middle and bottom end build up their their asset base you know how do you see this current debate unfolding I think you know I've often said in kind of current discussions that the Republicans don't want to talk about inequality they'll easily talk about mobility say okay well let's talk about mobility then what do you got so but anyway that's not going away you're involved in this on a daily basis how do you see it playing out we have been involved in this on a daily basis we had an event with Tomas some weeks ago and have been digging into the hoopla around the financial times said that there were some errors in the data and actually compared the error the magnitude of the problem to the Rogoff and Reinhardt errors and I would just like to say here to the public that that is just could not be further from the truth was a bit of a stretch Rogart and Reinhardt made you know serious errors that had serious policy implications that led to millions of people not being employed Tomas Piketty made a few typos which always happens and one of my colleagues at the Center for Equitable Growth actually found that one of the things that the journalist pointed to that he thought that Piketty did wrong that he did right he actually did wrong so there's just a lot of confusion out there but all of this is a long way of saying I want to make three comments about this I mean first of all it is just enormously important that we are finally starting to have a fact based discussion around what inequality is what it means I think that's enormously exciting and I think there's a lot of potential for new work to sort of just keep having this conversation to see to learn more about what this means in our economy rather than just an ideological one second I mean it's been exciting too to see folks on the right some of whom have said that Piketty actually wasn't bad and that his data is good and some of whom have been talking about economic mobility inequality over the past few months and I think the thing that Tomas' work really asks us to think about is how today's rising inequality this inequality in the flow of income to people actually calcifies into tomorrow's increased inequality in the stock of wealth and of course it's such an obvious sentiment we all know that we're like yeah of course we knew that but we don't actually talk about that that's not been a debate that we've had here in Washington in terms of just directly connecting those two facts and then what that means what an increasingly calcified stock of wealth into the hands of a smaller number of individuals or corporations or families actually means for our economy so I think that is very exciting to just start having that conversation pushing it the third thing I will note about his work that I think is very interesting is that he calls for a number of policy recommendations that he himself calls utopian but the thing that he keeps coming back to that I think is really interesting for us here in Washington to start thinking about is we know a lot about incomes because we have government entities that gather data on them it's a small thing but it kind of makes all the difference we don't know anything about wealth because it's really difficult to track I mean if you just start thinking about it it's like you got a house we can all go home and google each other and figure out what the value of each other's homes are that's easy because that's all online at least for the District of Columbia and other places right but your other assets financial assets and assets that are overseas we don't know and so Thomas relies on the Fortune 500 listings and the Forbes magazine I mean that's as an economist that's ridiculous so he calls for greater transparency in wealth that would be I don't think it's just transparency it's just data sources too and it matters up and down the income scale and so we should be tracking it on a regular basis that's something we can do expanding some of our data sets that the Federal Reserve might collect every three years or so okay well thank you for your time everyone I appreciate we're going to bring this to a close but great discussion and wonderful contribution with the volume so thanks for being here thank you thanks to the new America Foundation for supporting this our pleasure