 of Ricky guard diamonds commission on women Kerry Brown tonight Tico a Pico Todd excited for the celebration and discussion on the state of women's economics these two women and our cartoonists they're strong advocates and resources for women in Vermont and beyond and I've just learned that Pico Todd is also an advocate for elephants Pico and Ricky met while teaching at Vermont College and it looks as though it's a nice Vermont College reunion here tonight I'd like to let you know that Kerry will be speaking first for about 10 minutes and then Ricky will present her new book screw nomics I wanted to have a copy to hold up so I guess I don't have to urge everyone to buy a copy but I urge you to buy a copy and one for your friends and everybody you know we will be taking questions from the audience we will break for refreshments we have cake that will be cutting cheese and crackers and there is wine compliments of the author and then we'll have time for book signing from both the cartoonist and the author oh I also wanted to talk about the icon of girlfriend when you be talking about the icon of girlfriend or boyfriend book group so as I said pick up a copy and pick up some for your friends I'd like to remind you to please mute or turn off your cell phones and to let you know that the front door is now locked if you need to leave during the event the back door is open the back doors this way to my right the bathroom is also located at the back of the store to the right of the back door and I'd like to thank the Vermont Arts Council for featuring tonight's event as a Vermont Arts 2018 program feel free to pick up a Vermont Arts sticker they're at the front desk at the counter along with the book and also some handouts about the book and how to start a book group I'd also like to thank Orca Media they're here filming tonight's event if you'd like to see the video please feel free to sign up on our newsletter sheet it was being passed around it's also a nice place our newsletter to learn about future events and I'd like to let you know that next Friday May 11th we're hosting author Bernd Heinrich who will present his new book of essays a naturalist at large and that comes out on May 8th that book I'd like to introduce Kerry Brown as I said she will be speaking first she has many years in service to women's empowerment including working on legislation on equal pay parental leave and economic equity security she is a masters of public administration from Norwich and is the director of the Vermont Commission on Women she also has a great sense of humor which fits nice help me welcome thank you Sam and thank you Ricky for writing this great book and thank you so for illustrating this great book I'm really really happy to be here and it just thrills me to the bottom of my heart to see this room filled up with people who want to talk about women's economic security in Vermont and the Vermont Commission on Women has been around since 1964 we've been working on economic equity and security for women since 1964 we've got a little ways to go we're still working on it and I just I just have to say that in this room we have currently one of our commissioners Lisa we have Susan Ritz who's working with us on the change the story project that I'll tell you a little bit more about and Sarka who is a former executive director of the Vermont Commission on Women so is anybody else have any connection Kathy Johnson did some work for the Commission on Women at one point anybody else have any connections here 54 years been a really really long time so the good news is that Vermont has been supporting our work of increasing opportunities and reducing discrimination for women for 54 years the bad news is that we're still at it so I I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the economic status of women in Vermont as I say we've been working on this for a long time so have many others in Vermont so the Vermont women's fund and Vermont works for women are two organizations that have also been spending decades on this issue the three of our organizations decided we would get together we would combine forces and we would take an approach that looks at policy philanthropy and program all together to see if we couldn't advance women's economic status much more quickly than we've been seeing happen so far in Vermont and so that's the change the story project and the one of the first things that we did was a really in-depth research project that took a couple of years we came out with four reports which I have a copy of each one here they're all of course online so you can go and take a look at them and they really describe what's going on for women economically right now so I want to share a little with you of what we see happening right now and then a little bit about what's being done in response to this and then Ricky's going to be able to talk about a little bit more about kind of why and what's really going on underneath all of this all right so bear with me as I race through some data for you I have no visual aids whatsoever so you're just gonna have to listen and hang on and I'll try not to overwhelm you and this is a tiny little taste of what we have all right so as many of you probably know women are 51% of the population in Vermont 66% of Vermont women are in the labor force that means they're working they have jobs and that compares to 69% of men so it's really pretty similar very close and we're also a little bit above the national average for women in the labor force one interesting thing that we found when we looked at how many people were working based on their ages over the course of a lifetime the peak for women in the labor force is during the child wearing years and so we might think that when you have kids you have babies you have children take care of that's when you step back from work and work less which is much more true for women than it is for men but overall women are working much more they're working in the most at that time in their life and so I think that's really important to recognize one of the one of the things that that reminds us about is the importance of child care and how women need to work and so they need child care as do as do dads who are also in a workforce we when we looked at the research that we did was women who work full-time and because it was it gave us a clean comparisons but the reality is that many more women work part-time than men do 25% of women in Vermont are working part-time and that compares to 10% of men so it's two and a half times the rate for women to work part-time and we don't know all the reasons why they do that but we do know that when they're asked women are nine times more likely to say they choose part-time work because of family responsibilities and so women are spending much more time taking their kids to the doctor picking them up from soccer practice taking care of the aging parent or grandparent it just falls disproportionately on the shoulders of women which takes time out from how much they can be in the workforce and how much money they can be making 71% of the part-time workers in Vermont are women so it's really your typical part-time Vermont is a woman and partially for these reasons and many others women in Vermont are much more likely to live in poverty they're more likely to live in economic insecurity than men are 57% of women who are working full-time in Vermont are making less than $30,000 and 57% of men are making over $30,000 so it's interestingly kind of exactly flipped and we see that disparity there overall when we look at Vermont families 13% of them are living in poverty and this is meaning below the federal poverty line which I can't tell you what that number is does anybody know what that is right now it's it's shockingly low you would be flabbergasted at how little money that actually is and so that's 13% of Vermont families but when you look at the families that are headed by a single mom then it's 37% so that's a really dramatic number of people that's all that's a lot of of neighbors and friends and the people who live around us in Vermont and then even the women who are not living in poverty that low are still having a pretty rough time so every couple of years the Vermont Legislature's Joint Fiscal Office does an analysis of how much it actually costs to live in Vermont they come up with something called a basic needs budget it's kind of a realistic look of how much money do you need to meet your basic needs and 43% of women who are working full-time in Vermont 43% are not making that much money this is full-time work and they're not able to meet their basic needs so that's a little grim sorry this this is a lot of bad news all it was so when as women are making less money over the course of their lifetimes when they hit retirement that's when it really shows up so less earnings means you have less in savings it means you are less likely to have a pension it means you've put less into social security over the course of your life and so when Vermont men on average are getting $20,000 in social security which is not a heck of a lot of money Vermont women $10,000 it's half of what men are getting so this is a time in life that everybody is more likely to be economically vulnerable but it's much much worse for women and some of the we looked at a little bit of some of the reasons why the earnings are less we looked at where women work won't surprise most of you to know that women tend to be clustered in lower paying jobs men tend to be clustered in higher paying jobs so for instance an elementary school teacher in Vermont makes about $45,000 and an engineer in Vermont makes about $75,000 and of course most elementary school teachers are women most engineers are men and so one of the responses that people have had to this is to encourage more women to go into science technology engineering and math to more women to become engineers which is a great approach and really something we need to be focusing on but we also do need to be asking why is it that the elementary school teachers are getting paid so little and if you look at early childhood teachers it's it's much lower than that it's yeah it's less than the livable wage in Vermont which is pretty low already so so it's something we need to think about our values the the work that women do is valued less than the work that men do and we do a little bit of a historical look at where women are working this is one of the surprising things that we found out we looked at where women were clustered in 1976 and where they're clustered in 2013 so in 1976 98% of office administrators were women secretaries how many what percentage do you think right now are women anyone have any guesses saying it's 98% it's 98% and we looked also at teachers 66% of teachers back then were women now with 67% of teachers are women so a little bit higher nurses back then a hundred percent of nurses were women there were just virtually no men doing it now it's a little bit better 93% so we'll count the progress where so we can wherever we can so that's that's a little bit of grim news I have more bad news but I think of it telling it all to you and instead I'll talk a little bit about some more hopeful stuff some some of the kinds of things that it's happening in response to this so the Commission on women works at a we don't run programs and that's why part of why we partner with Vermont works for women because they do but we do things like monitor legislation and provide a testimony to the legislature as they're considering legislation so some of the things that they're working on right now that we've been contributing to are a bill that actually has passed both the House and the Senate now that prohibits employers from requiring you to give them your salary history when you're applying for a job and this is significant because if women are earning less and then they go get a new job and the boss says I'm gonna give you a 20% raise over what you got at your last job aren't I generous it's if they're doing it to the men too you're just perpetuating that disparity and so this is passed with the House and the Senate the governor is very supportive of it and so this is something that we're seeing happen all across the country it's one of the the newest tools in the the arsenal against the pay inequity we're also working on paid family leave which has passed the House and is in the Senate right now and I don't know what's gonna happen with it it's having a hard time going through the Senate but this would be a very modest benefit that would allow people to take a little time off when they have a baby or when they have to care for a sick family member and then also there's a bill that is trying to combat sexual harassment that again has passed the House and is in the Senate right now and this is one that's really important to us not only because of course sexual harassment is you know unjust but because it has a real impact on women's economic security if you you know the majority of women who experience harassment on the job end up leaving their jobs and a lot of them end up going to less for paying jobs or jobs with with less responsibility and so it could be a huge huge setback and road block to a woman's career and to her economic security so that's why we care about that one and then I would just say one more thing that you all can do as well we'll pitch for this is a project of change the story it's called conversation cards it's a deck of cards that includes both data some of which I shared with you and also thought-provoking questions if you get together in a group of your friends or a school group or a book group or something that you can use these to have a conversation around gender roles and around gender stereotypes and we have I've all bunch of these if you want to take one of these I will give them to you can take them out and make good use of them and we'll just ask you for a little follow-up but those are those are there and afterwards we can talk more about those so I will now that I've shared a little bit about what things look like for women in Vermont economically Ricky's gonna be able to tell us a little bit more about why and where this came from and what's really going on here to kind of try to get underneath all that so I'm really happy to be here with Ricky I met Ricky a few years ago when I wrote an article for Vermont woman and she was my editor and she was so impressive as an editor I gotta tell you she took I'm a decent writer okay I can write and yet what came out of Ricky's hands was so much better and I was so appreciative of that and so Ricky became the founding editor of Vermont woman in 1985 she's still a contributing editor and she spent over 20 years teaching writing and literature feminist and media studies at Vermont College at Norwich University and had all of the while she was publishing articles and fiction in 1999 she published a novel called second sight and that was reissued by Harper Collins in 2000 and she's working on another novel right now and in 2000 sorry I can't read my things 2011 you were awarded the National Newspaper Association Award for an article series called an economy of our own you see we're going here and then in 2014 she won a Hedgebrook fellowship for her work on this book screwnomics so now we get to hear all about it thank you so much for being here right here thank you so much for your provocative information about what you've discovered here in Vermont in particular I think that kind of local information is so valuable for us to have and I don't know how many other states are doing that kind of thing I I know that Massachusetts is doing a little bit some of the New England states but that's something I hope we can spread and I'm so happy that change the story has kind of adopted screwnomics is another piece of the toolkit possibly for starting those conversations that we really need to have I I would love to give you some good news but I'm afraid it's even worse as far as you're all being screwed and systemically and and so that's part of what what screwnomics is really about I want to I want to thank Samantha Colver for putting this whole event together coming up with this incredible cake you have to see a picture of it please because you know it's gonna break my heart to see it no I want you to all to have it I didn't spare any money there's the best box wine you can and I am of the opinion that economics really should not be talked about except among friends with some nibbles and a glass of wine that really is the best way to approach it I I really am happy to say that I saw something on PBS about independent bookstores like this don't you love this place are actually making a comeback because a community of readers is so valuable to our communities and I'm so happy to know that that is happening so I encourage you to if you read screwnomics it would be wonderful if you could post something on Amazon and good reads but come and buy your books here if you can I know electronic versions are available too but I you know I like those old paper ones so I want to thank so many people there are two pages of acknowledgments in screwnomics because I have been I see so many dear friends here from Vermont College some of whom you know I've talked to them about these issues in their eyes and play tolerated it you know but they've also encouraged me and Stanton who is my dean over here I said to her is it all right if I combine literature and economics you know most people would say absolutely not that's not your training Ricky and she said yes you go for it so it's really it's really her fault and also the fault of all my wonderful colleagues at and my students at Vermont College where we engaged all the time in vigorous dialogue where we had intensive conversations about what really really mattered to us so that's where this book has really come from and also I have to point out Suzanne Gillis who's back here in the in the corner she's the publisher of Vermont Woman and to seldom recognize they've been for more than 30 years she was the one who series into the National Newspaper Association I won this award or Vermont woman won this award and Margaret Mishnuets encouraged me to yeah you write another one Ricky go ahead you know and and so my getting that award just kind of went straight to my head and I thought about people would say well when are you gonna read write a book about this Ricky and I thought well I probably should but you know even that that series of articles in that objective newspaper voice that speaks a little like you know I'm being very fax only and I want to report to the facts of the situation that didn't really fit how I felt about the economy I really wanted to make it personal I wanted to make it conversational I wanted to be a little snarky I admit it I wanted cartoons I wanted to laugh at what was often absurd and and so the book is kind of a strange mixture of memoir my my story is in it my mother and my grandmother's story is in it those stories of many women involved with the economy are in it and and these are women you know I called a call this book in a way a female body of knowledge because women in fact have been thinking and talking a lot about the economy but they mostly they're like Cassandra you know that story they just not listen to they'll say Troy is gonna be destroyed if you don't do something and nobody would listen to them so I want to tell you that this this I'm sort of a translator for a lot of economic thinking that is is maybe not as accessible as schoonomics is but I hope schoonomics will be a kind of jumping off point for you to to get involved in a in a more detailed conversation so I mentioned you've all met Pico Todd Pico to stand up and say well that's a long story but what I like to say is I saw the name of the book and said anything with screw in the title this is more dependable anything this electronic begins to freeze up and they senses my fear you know so these are our three main characters that Pico and I created as we thought about you know well how can we create this kind of mini series within the book and we worried that it might be too much but I think it I think it really works and they're at the end of each of the chapters and this is one of our Sunday tunes we have a Facebook page and a blog and we have these one panel cartoons which I love this one turkey sandwiches turkey soup the best part of Thanksgiving leftovers and Jess says sometimes this economy makes me feel like a leftover but the best part is knowing we're all in the soup together so this is kashanda who has come back to Vermont after finding the music business too hard in California and she's got a new band called kashanda and the not so neoliberals and then this is Jess who is a single mom she's got a couple of kids and she's on the the welfare program which is called get a grip get a grip program and this is suki who is our proverbial blonde embo and pay no attention to the color of my hair but suki is she's married to the antagonist of our series which will whom you'll meet and a little bit but she's thinking you know she's got pretty much got it got it figured out because she's married somebody who's got a lot of money okay so those three characters I've already thanked people I've got so many more people I'm gonna embarrass later on I think I've already said that screwnomics is unusual because it's got stories in it because it's about women it's kind of unusual for an economics book to be aimed at women an example I like to give is this great book by Thomas Piketty that got a lot of attention 20 capital in the 21st century all about economic inequality a really important book about how this is a mathematical phenomenon that is just going to keep getting worse and worse and we need to pay attention to it 700 pages long seven index references to women or females in the book so it's not typical for women to play a big part in economic books so I think that makes screwnomics a little different for me what made the subject interesting was what all around me invisible like the air being applied everywhere but never spoken about was what I had to name screwnomics the economic theory that women should always work for less or better for free and that includes our mother earth who's also you know we never call call her father earth she's always mother earth and also men who do those jobs like nursing or teaching why do we value those why do we discount those those jobs that have traditionally been female so I wanted to figure out you know how do we get here what what's the story behind that it's a it's a long story going back 40,000 years as it turns out but I'm going to tell you a story from the book about my life and what got me started asking that question so this is from chapter one titled talking dirty about dirty secrets the bargain of women's work comes cheap while other prices inflate and go up dressed in my business suit and new earrings embarrassed and tentative I take a seat in my local Michigan welfare office waiting room it's 1979 and my shock at being there at all is met by the greater surprise in the eyes of other waiting faces darker than mine and with eyes sadder than mine I'm ashamed of how well off I must look dressed in earrings and business suit sticking out in the company of those darker mothers in t-shirts surrounded by young children but also by how well I am treated by the all-white social workers they rush me into a private meeting room leaving those who've been waiting waiting at the time I didn't think monetary policy mattered to me or to those other moms in the office I assumed my ignorance of the difference between macro and micro economics must mean that I shouldn't trouble my pretty little head I was part of the economy but too busy working to think about something I've mostly found intimidating I thought more about my own budget scrawled out in pencil on a yellow pad it's numbers adding and subtracting but mostly subtracting despite working full-time same as my ex-husband did I couldn't make my budget work I couldn't support my three children on my wages and child support of twenty five dollars a week I was scared and felt guilty what was wrong with me luckily for me by the time I joined the company of the low income working women had begun to challenge economic divides in 1982 here in Vermont for instance I would learn that women as a group made fifty-nine cents on a man's dollar in the workplace this helped explain my economic situation in a larger way than my personal failures I began to see that some people's success was made harder or even impossible race prejudice does play an important role in poverty but I am not in the minority nationwide the greatest numbers of poor in the US are white like me and are often working single moms blacks in Hispanics are poor at more than twice the rate is white people however just as women are more likely to be poor than men unmarried women with children are among the poorest women of color in that situation the most likely to be extremely poor eventually I would join others to make change but that year I was on food stamps and welfare I only felt shame so along with women's stories like like mine and my mom and my grandma who were working women at a time that you know wasn't particularly cool to be a working woman scurnomics explains the basics of economic vocabulary and practices and here's another important piece to think about from that first chapter it's in a subject with a subhead called male voice of money as the outspoken feminist Andrea Dworkin once put it money speaks but it speaks in a male voice I began to see it does matter very much that those who run our national economy and shape its fiscal policies serve a particular insider group of a particular class and a particular race and gender three decades after my initial wake-up UVM economist Stephanie Seguino confirmed that the pattern I had first noticed in the political realm applied to economics as well it is one of the dirty secrets hidden under our noses that this book is about I had to invent a new word to more easily describe the ultramasculine ultra rational mindset that has become a social construct of our time the pale male voice of money and privilege iconoman okay I think this is a good time for us to to meet Sukie's husband we named him blaze Bernays and his business card said it's your right to profit no matter who pays my place here so let me now show you the real thing this is blaze Bernays the cartoon but there's a really kind of man too and I'm gonna show you one of them and and I show you others but this is a guy that I really love Milton Friedman and this expectations adjusted Phillips curved illustration which I'm sure you're all familiar with what is that from you know it's from the 1976 Nobel or what I call the almost Nobel award for economics and this is from his his lecture at the Nobel Awards so let me read you a little bit about about Milton by the time Ronald Reagan was reelected president in 1984 I had witnessed a transformation in how our government viewed the economy Reagan's favorite economist Milton Friedman had promoted trickle-down prosperity for all theorizing that cutting taxes on the rich would soon eliminate the need for government safety nets by growing the economy it sounded good what had been called voodoo economics by president George Bush the first became the greatest thing since sliced bread I later learned this economic pivot had actually begun in 76 when Friedman was catapulted into fame for this Nobel Prize in Sweden that award is living proof that economy man really does count on most of us not paying close attention economics was never included in Alfred Nobel's recognition for noteworthy endeavors established in 1895 in 1969 the Swedish central bank created its own separate award the memorial prize in economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel timed rather cunningly to blur its difference from the older original awards for chemistry physics literature and peace until recently when the Nobel family protested the press had routinely left out this detail apparently considering the banking world's conflict of interest in elevating the field of economics irrelevant Friedman sought to link economics to a physics of natural forces describing its parts with complex mathematics the award he received posed help pose his prescriptions as something loftier than power and politics and in terms less disputable more like gravity and momentum in other words the lying notion that a class of privileged men did not create these ways of thinking or at all benefit from them rather he only described inevitable natural laws you know like the natural law that says a woman without a man should live in poverty and of course this the statistics that you are seeing here in this Phillips curve are from the nation of chili which if you know anything about that history that he was an advisor his first customer was general pinochet okay so now I want to explain to you in great depth about the the coaxials that you see but this is an example of what I am calling economan explaining which is from Rebecca so that's great I say men explain things to me and that's where we got that term mansplaining there there's a lot of economan explaining going on now lest you think that I am being too hard on men and I'm poor Milton and Sufis glaze perfectly nice guy I'm sure and he's due to inherit millions I'm sure he's going to do lovely things with it but these guys are not what I'm calling economan economan is a hyper masculine ideal that we have created a social construction that I believe is operating at a half conscious level and harming the majority with its assumptions in the big picture Milton and blaze are pikers okay really so I want to talk about another part of schoonomics which are the the definition boxes that you'll see in the book that you can read or you cannot read it depends on what you're interested in there about 50 of these boxes in the book explaining complicated things like derivatives and what are some of the name energy swaps and that sort of thing but this is a simple one millions billions and trillions because I think so many of us really don't appreciate the enormous difference there is and it's easier to see if you translated into time so if you take each dollar and make it a second in time and you translate that money into time this is what you come up with a million is a thousand thousands so you count each single dollar is a second in time one million seconds gives you twelve days okay a billion is a thousand millions I'm gonna stand in front of this so how much do you think that adds up to how much time does that up twelve days is a million how much is a billion no it's 31 years 31 years of time that big of a difference now what do you think a trillion is it's a thousand billions a thousand billions thirty one thousand six hundred eighty eight years yeah so that trillion figure remember is that that deficit figure that our new tax bill has given us coming up soon with the Federal Reserve talking about raising interest rates you know so it's kind of interesting to think about that especially when you look at where the rest of us are now I'm gonna pick on Bill Gates a lot because I like to be the biggest billionaire that we had now I understand Jeff Bezos is now the biggest right he's the guy who owns Amazon right but Bill Gates in 2008 when the big meltdown happened you know well this is before the big meltdown in 2008 he had 46 billion dollars now how much time do you think that is it is 1,426 years all for himself okay so now what do you think he has after 2008 you know everybody crash everybody lost money what happened to Bill Gates he now has reportedly 86 billion dollars almost double what he had before the meltdown and we have now a record number of millionaires and billionaires not only in this nation but around the world and that's that phenomenon that Peking was talking about at the same time oh I guess I should ask your income anybody here we only just this last year caught up with what we were making in 2008 and the figures in 2008 were stagnated they've been stagnated since the 1970s okay so the median American household income in 2008 was fifty seven thousand two hundred and eleven dollars or the equivalent of how much time 16 hours 16 hours compared to you know you get the picture and keep in mind this is a household income which more often than not represents not just one paycheck but two maybe three paychecks half of all Americans make less than that because that's the median what's written what's in the middle and the female half of that has had the least in assets in income and in time you know so I am now out of time because I want us to be able to field your questions and hear your comments about all of this and I do want to just say quickly before we do that that this isn't all scurronomics isn't only bad news I do talk about wonderful solutions that many people are already coming up with that are seeking to unscrew the economy and make it work a little better for everyone and more inclusively and I'm talking about things like new corporate structures new labor organizations that are more inclusive more responsible investing possibilities and different forms of financing local businesses and banking in the public interest is a big interest in our book in my book and I even found this Swedish bank that actually has figured out how to cut housing costs in half to help build assets more quickly which is kind of cool so I also talk about a 30 hour week standard which was passed in 1933 by our Senate most people don't know that most people get scared when I talk to them about that possibility because they say well I'm not making enough money now I can't afford to go live on three well we should think about getting a livable wage for 30 hour work weeks which sounds impossible doesn't it but we have been told it's impossible before and the you know folks who were working 12 hour weeks seven 12 hour days seven hours seven days a week were told an eight hour day was impossible we we we can do it and as Susan B. Anthony said failure is impossible because if we continue on the path that we're on now we're looking at big trouble for our planet for our climate for our grandchildren so that's all I'm going to say do you have questions what money aristocracy forming in this country so they made sure that there was a very hefty inheritance tax okay that sort of prevented that kind of monopoly game where some people start on Marvin Avenue instead of go you know so when you rename that inheritance tax the death juice and you talk about it as well that's so unfair they're dead they can't even fight for their rights and you know it's so wrong to you reshape how people view it and and I think that the hedge fund folks and and their groups who are very active in in Washington where policy gets made I have done a good job of reshaping that the public conversation they also own the media which is a big advantage and so I think we really have to examine the language that people are using because I mean the entitlements is that we can't afford anymore that's an that's another you know instead of calling it social security insurance that you pay your premium on every you know with every paycheck somehow the idea gets out there that we can't afford that anymore even though a nation much poorer than we are established that a long time ago so language I think is a big piece of untying those knots and beginning to talk about what Michael Hudson who's a wonderful economist at University of Kansas talks about his book is called killing the host and his idea is that the economic overhead of hedge fund managers and those like Henry Polson who was the secretary of Treasury was with Goldman Sachs and and he he was so well regarded that he was called King Henry by everyone you know and he left the Treasury office with you know an 800 million dollar fortune and nobody instead it was like oh King Henry just entered the room you know so we need to begin to say we signed off on Kings in 1776 let's let's let's rethink this and that's that I think is part of that social construction I call economy man because that that idea that I should be king I should rule I should make all the rules for that operate on all of your lives still is in place in the economic realm researching the value the real values of jobs the new economics Foundation in England there are a lot of great organization and an example that I've remembered since reading the report I don't know if they've done it updated since but was sanitary a sanitation worker a cleaning lady or cleaning lady in a hospital contributes $17 to the economy versus a tax lawyer who takes $47 out of the economy for every hour or whatever it does comparisons like that so it shows the real value of jobs new economics Foundation they do a lot of really interesting they do they do and I well I'm looking at you I need to mention the way we account for things with the GDP that needs to change doesn't that just counting money and not counting other things of great value like gross national happiness and there's there's a new the social economic indicators economic social wealth economic indicators called sway that Rianne Eisler and her Center for Partnership Studies is working on that you know not only shows the value of those other things but of community and family and but also shows the economic results of that I mean instinctively I think we know that if everything is disintegrating if our communities and our families can't hold it together because of the economic stress they're under that that that isn't good for the economy overall generally but we have to see the numbers have to be able to prove it so there are lots and lots of ways that people are already working that are very exciting to think about so I don't know about you but aren't you ready for some cake