 My name is Christian Dorsey. I'm the director of external and government affairs here at the Economic Policy Institute. We've got our president in the back of the room being shy and inobtrusive, Dr. Larry Michelle. And again, thank you all for coming to this event where we're gonna take a look at what's needed in the 21st century vis-a-vis the role of government. And as a framing question for this event, we have a subhead to this title. Do we need strong effective government to achieve shared prosperity in the 21st century or are big government solutions just nostalgia for a time gone by? Now, as you look at the front of the room, we've got some incredibly deep thinkers who are gonna engage this fundamental conversation. Now, full disclosure, all of these individuals, I believe, are actually on record as opposing the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. However, you should not conclude from that that what will follow has everyone sort of reading from the same playbook. In fact, the type of debate and conversation we are about to have is one that really does qualify as unique and if history is any guide is gonna become almost non-existent as the presidential campaign ramps up. Now, the inspiration for today's event comes from the most recent work by Professor Jacob Hacker along with his collaborator, Paul Pearson, and in full disclosure, Jacob is a board member here at EPI, but their latest book, Amnesia, gives, and I'm not gonna go too much into it because Dr. Hacker is here today and he can tell you all about his book, but a central element of it is taking our current debate of the government versus the private sector or more insidiously, us versus them, and then describing and analyzing growth, progress, and broad benefits that accrued under a mixed economy where government and the private sector worked somewhat in partnership. Now, tension was certainly a part of that process, but regulation and pushback from the private sector produced better regulation and more successful and innovative markets according to Mr. Hacker. And moreover, they remind us that the problems that the mixed economy was designed to solve, the economic conditions that were left in the wake of unregulated markets that persisted for far too long. It is this kind of look back that informs their prognosis that anti-government free market fundamentalism is a grave threat to America. Now, Yuval Levin, author of another recent book, The Fractured Republic, also diagnoses an America that's in need of healing. And like Hacker and Pearson, he also looks to history to bring context to our current state of affairs. But for Mr. Levin, and again, I am just briefly synopsizing since he is here to fully explicate, it is the breakdown of mediating institutions, what he calls family, civic institutions, faith-based organizations that have given rise to this kind of hyper-individualism that has left people longing nostalgically, remembering a time gone by that they feel was better, that he ultimately concludes is not instructive and not helpful for our current political debate and our current way forward. Now, joining this conversation, we also have Anne O'Leary, who's a senior policy advisor with the Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign and is also an author, I'm sorry, an attorney and a nonprofit advocate who's among her many areas of expertise has been a deep work in areas related to children and family and social policy. Now, if you think about how we move forward in this country, you typically hear people of all ideological stripes talking about the importance and the value of children and families. Yet, they're still not able to come through with fundamental policy reforms or fundamental policy agreements to substantially move things forward. So I think it's really interesting to have Anne as part of this great big conversation about the role of government and the role of ideology in shaping our future when it comes to looking at children and families ostensibly an area where you should get broad agreement. Now, to moderate this very high level and interesting discussion, we have one of America's foremost journal scholars and thought leaders, Mr. E.J. Dionne, who will moderate the debate. And we're gonna start off with Professor Hacker in just a minute. If you wanna get a sense of some of the incredibly amazing things that these individuals have contributed to public debate and intellectualism, we do have bios which replaced on your chairs. So take a look to get a full sense of what they are all about. We certainly don't have enough time to go into all of their exploits this morning. I should also note that as some of you have found outside of the room, we are selling books or I should say writers, a local independent bookstore, is selling books that feature the most recent works of Jacob Hacker, Yuval Levin, and E.J. Dionne. They're special event pricing. They are all hardback books. And I'm sure once we conclude, they'll all be ready to sign. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce Jacob Hacker. Okay, great. Well, thank you, Christian. And thank you, Larry, for helping make this event possible. You may not believe this, but Larry asked me some time ago if I had a fantasy vision of an event, what it would look like. And I basically described this event. So you might think that I have strange fantasies, but I'd like to think that this is a kind of conversation that we should be having during this very important campaign season, at this very important juncture in our economic and political life. So I also wanna thank E.J. for being here. E.J. and I go way back. And as he'll tell you, he helped me out with my dissertation some time ago. And Anne and I go way back as well. So it's a wonderful group. And I'm really pleased also to finally meet Yuval. I finished his book. I think it's excellent and encourage everyone here to take a look at it. I appreciate in particular its tone of humility, its intent to search for common ground. And I hope we'll have a discussion that's in that vein. But of course, I'm also recommending this book, which is here in part because of someone in the audience, Will McGrew here, who is now at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, helped me with a lot of the facts. So anything that looks accurate in what follows is due to him. And I wanna thank my co-author, Paul Pearson. He and I have been working on this book for a while. It came out a few months ago. It's been a big moment for us. I know you probably heard this old line about the period before a book is launched is the calm before the calm. So I'm glad that we're having a little bit of a break in that calm. And I'm sure Yuval feels the same way. So people have complimented me on the cover for this book. They think it's a Photoshopped image, but in fact, this is the nation's capital because as some of you may know, next to the capital is a massive smokestack for the capital power plant. And until 2009, it was the largest carbon emitter in Washington DC. Due to the opposition of coal state senators, it continued to use coal and spew out coal ash and other pollutants and CO2, of course. Until fairly recently. And I use this as an image because I think it really captures essential argument of the book. And that is that there are a number of ways in which government has enormous numbers in which government has made our society richer and healthier because of the positive constraint it can put onto private actors and individuals, sometimes over the opposition, as in the case of the coal state senators, over the opposition of those actors. This isn't an isolated story. Across the country, the Clean Air Act of the 1970s and its amendments under George H.W. Bush in the 1990s have led to enormous improvements in the life expectancy and health of Americans. This figure, which comes from a study that was done fairly recently, looks at major US cities and says, what's the increase in life expectancy for kids born in the 19s? You can see the numbers are pretty big. On average, it's about between one and two years, but in some places it's much greater. And I just have to pull out Wichita, Kansas here, 4.3 years for those who don't get why I like to mention Wichita, Kansas. I'll just give you a little reminder. The Koch brothers have not, you can say a lot of things about them, but one thing I think it's accurate to say is they've not been huge fans of environmental regulations, but Wichita, Kansas seems to be better off because of the Clean Air Act. And the Clean Air Act and some of the other policies I'm gonna talk about today really capture the essential argument of our book. And that is that in a complex interdependent economy, you need to have a constructive role for government. And it's important to say right off the bat that when I say government, I don't mean the federal government, though I think in many cases, the federal government has to play an integral role. But you need to use the power of public authority, the ability of government to compel people to do certain things, to observe certain externalities such as pollution, to look forward when they might be myopic about long-term risks that they face and so on. And the metaphor that we use in the book is that of a hand. So if you think of the market and the voluntary sector as sort of the nimble fingers of the hand, government is the thumb, right? The strong thumb of government. This image comes from one of Paul's dissertation advisors, Charles Limbloom, and he wrote about this in a relationship. And the idea is that you wouldn't wanna be all fingers, right? That would be pretty awkward. And you wouldn't wanna be all thumbs because that would be pretty awkward, but you wouldn't wanna be all fingers as well. You need to have both. And if you look at our history, it is that combination that really marks the dividing line between the slow growth and poor health of our ancestors and the rapid advance in human potential that begins around the 20th century. And I wanted to emphasize here because it's sort of against the instincts that we all have, many of us have in this room, both on the right and the left, I think people tend to think about government's role as primarily about redistribution. And obviously redistribution is an important part of this story, but really the fundamental role that I'm talking about is about government producing kind of positive sum changes through its use of its distinctive capacity to remedy clear failures of the market and of individual coordination. And where that capacity has been used, we've seen enormous gains. So there is an analysis in this book about the kind of failures of the market, which we've been learning more and more about, about failures of individual cognition and behavior and failures that we've known for a long time, such as negative externalities like pollution or public goods, we talk about those failures. I can't talk about them all today, though hopefully we'll discuss some of them in the conversation, but I can show you just a few of what I see as the sort of broad benefits that addressing those failures has produced. So think about life expectancy. And here I use the UK as a proxy for Western life expectancy prior to the United States arrival on the scene. And you can see here again, an enormous transformation around the turn of the 20th century. This is deeply tied up with government. All those who've looked at this recognize the government's role in public health, in the development of vaccines and antibiotics, in investment and research and development, in the spreading of health insurance. These were fundamental to this transformation really in the horizons of human potential. This is a great positive story and it's a story where government was central. So too with the other massive change of the 20th century, namely the huge increase in income over this period. And here again, the story is really a story of the 20th century. And here we really highlight government's role in economic development. As I said, it's not just about redistribution, although redistribution can play a role in this development. So for example, expanding the skills and capacities of workers. Why was the United States such an economic powerhouse in the 20th century? It was in part because we won the education or misexpansion to skills and capacities of workers. And not just their educational capacities which was overwhelmingly due to public investment in schools and higher education through the GI Bill, through the creation of the first nation to create universal schools. The first nation to have universal public K-12 education. It was overwhelmingly through public investment but it was not just investment in schooling. It was investment in the sort of essential fuel of a modern economy. And that is knowledge and science and technology. And through research and development, through investment in what you might call the medical industrial scientific complex, through a creation of a robust program of investment in science and higher education, the United States really came to be the dominant scientific power in the world. You can see that in Nobel prizes. And the quote from Jefferson here is just to remind you that even our early leaders understood not just a centrality of education but the fact that knowledge was a public good, that it required that you had some measures to make sure that you invested in the kind of basic science that no individual company had incentive to invest in. And there's a hero in our book that I think you've all might feel some kinship with as well, his name was Vannevar Bush. And he was a conservative Republican. He worked for FDR. And he was the person who basically crewed with military industrial scientific academic complex. He envisioned the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. And he was very skeptical of government's ability to plan. He saw that government had the forefront of investing in scientific development in making sure that scientists acting autonomously but with public responsibility and accountability, we're doing the things that were necessary to achieve prosperity. And those things are really what accounts for our massive economic growth. It's a story of increased productivity. This Rert Solow's famous growth residual is a story broadly understood of technology, research and development that made the United States the richest nation in the world. Now, part of this as I said is about redistribution. Now, look at this. This is a picture of a college class before World War II. What do you notice about it, right? I mean, all the diversity is facial hair. And so I think it's really important to understand that expansion of opportunity has been an enormous part of our economic growth. 20% of the growth in GDP between 1960 and 2000 is due to the increased opportunities for women and minorities. And so even today, when we see male labor force participation, declining and female labor participation stagnating, there's enormous opportunities to increase our overall economic potential by essentially ensuring that the full talents of the American Society are harnessed in the workplace. And then I just wanna mention because I think it's one thing notably absent in Yuval's ex book. And that is that a lot of times this took overcoming very powerful private interests. We're seeing a reconcentration of many sectors of our economy, healthcare and finance in particular. And in these areas and others, it took pushing back against powerful corporations. It did so in dealing with tobacco, which is probably one of the most successful public health efforts of the 20th century with eight million lives saved. It did so in phasing out and cleaning up lead, which has resulted in enormous gain in the story of the mid 20th century. That's when we had high lead levels, right? In Flint, Michigan today, you don't see lead levels as high as you saw in major American cities in the 1960s and 1970s. And the decline in lead is probably one of the reasons why we've seen such a sharp decline in crime. So I'm not the book, and I need to wrap up, but the book tells this story, but it tells the story not to celebrate what we've lost, but to argue that we can develop a mixed economy that works well in the 21st century. And so I wanna emphasize that this isn't nostalgia. It's about learning from our history to build a mixed economy on these new foundations because in a complex or dependent world, you need that government role as much if not more than ever. Now, I think it's clear that in a complex, independent role, there's real challenges for the public sector as well. And in the book, we're quite candid about the ways in which because of some of the forces we describe, the decline in the engagement of corporate elites, the shift of the Republican party sharply to the right, the degree to which the Democratic party has been unwilling to really confront the need for effective governance and key areas that because of these changes, it's proved more difficult and government is often not working well today. But I wanna be clear that the story that we tell makes the case for an informed, capable public sector, not for living markets or individuals alone to deal with these challenges, because markets and individuals acting alone can't deal with some of these fundamental changes. It's a case that says that with climate change, for example, there are many ways in which we can accommodate and innovate in response to climate change, but it won't happen unless government makes people pay the social costs of carbon emissions. That's going to take public authority. In many areas, it's not about micromanagement. It's about setting clear ground rules about making those necessary supplemental investments and about making sure as well that people have the skills and capacities to contribute in a vibrant market. So with that, I'd like to stop, but I wanna just invoke someone who's beginning a lot of invocation lately, namely Alexander Hamilton. Oh wait, sorry, Alexander Hamilton. And just to say, this is from the New York Ratifying Convention where he emphasizes the need for vigorous effective government. Just to say that this sentiment, which is embodied in many features of our constitution, it's not a constitution that was set up, it's often supposed just for gridlock or in decision-making sentiment is one that we sum up at the end of our book with another less quoted aphorism, which is the government that governs least. I mean, sorry, the government that governs best has to govern quite a bit. So I believe that's where we need to go. Thank you. Thank you, Jacob, very much. And really, thank you all. I'm very grateful to be invited. I'm a consumer and admirer of EPI's work even when I disagree really, especially when I disagree. And it's frankly just awfully nice to see this kind of cross-ideological conversation happening and I appreciate being asked to take part in it. It doesn't happen nearly enough. I'm pleased in particular to be here alongside Jacob Hacker and to offer some thoughts about the book that he and Paul Pearson have written, which I found to be not surprisingly a very smart and thoughtful and challenging and highly engaging book. So although I'll offer some criticism of the argument here, so as to earn my keep, you asked for a debate. I have to provide you one. I certainly do want to start off noting my admiration for their work, my estimation of how important and valuable it is. And I really do recommend it to your attention if you haven't read it. I would also naturally want to suggest to your attention my own recent book. I don't have a slide. I really should. I should just walk around with them. The book actually takes up a remarkably similar set of questions to those that, yeah, thank you. Yeah, exactly. I should just take Jacob around with me. Yeah, that would be. It would get interesting pretty quick. The book takes up a remarkably similar set of questions to those that Jacob's and Paul Pearson's book does, though from quite a different perspective. And I assume that's why the folks at EPI suggested a conversation like this. One way to think about our larger question for this morning is to contrast the two perspectives of these two books on the question of how we got here or what has happened to our politics, which is really, I think, a core question that both books wrestle with. So I'll use my time to do that in a way that hopefully proves constructive and maybe opens up questions we can think through. In a sense, we both begin from a very similar set of facts, which is that in the middle of the 20th century, Americans had extraordinary faith in our country's large established institutions. And in a sense, in the interrelationship of those institutions, in a large assertive national government working together with big labor, with big business, to take on some of the country's challenges and manage those together. And over the intervening half century and more, we've lost that faith in our institutions. That's clear in public opinion. It's clear in our national life more generally. We no longer have much confidence in any of our large established national institutions, including the federal government. Jacob and Paul Pearson offer a very different explanation as to why we lost that faith than I would. And all I can do in summarizing it is just be blatantly unfair. And I apologize because I'm just going to do it in a paragraph. But in the interest of summarizing, it seems to me that they argue that a lot of what's happened that has changed these attitudes of ours about the government and about other established institutions has had to do, on the one hand, with the material interests of the wealthy and on the other with the world view of radical libertarian ideologues who hate the government. And these two forces working together have persuaded the country that government is evil and ought to be drowned in a bathtub. I have some concerns about that explanation as a way of thinking about the last half century and more. But in a sense to deepen those and to temper their expression a little bit, let me first offer you in brief my own explanation and maybe make the point by way of contrast. It seems to me that what we had in America in the middle of the 20th century, in that moment that in parts of their book, Jacob and Paul look back to, and really that so many of us look back to often, in that post-war moment in America was an exceptionally consolidated version of American society. In very broad terms, very broad terms, the first half of the 20th century through the Second World War was an age of growing consolidation and cohesion in our national life. As the economy industrialized, as government grew more centralized in response, as the culture became more aggregate through genuinely mass media, and national identity and cohesion in America were often valued above individual identity and diversity. In those years, a lot of the most powerful verses in American life were pushing each American to become more like everyone else. And the nation that emerged from World War II and from the depression and from that long process was therefore a highly profoundly unusually cohesive America. It had at first an extraordinary confidence in large institutions, as I say, in government and labor and business working together to some degree to manage the country's needs. That confidence, by the way, is just stunning when you look at it. If you look at public opinion in the 1960s and the early 60s, it's extraordinary how confident people were in our large institutions, including in the federal government. America's cultural life at mid-century was no less consolidated. It was dominated by a broad, traditionalist, moral consensus. Religious attendance was at a peak. Families were strong. Birth rates were high. Divorce rates were low. And in the wake of a war in which most of its competitors had more or less burned each other's economies to the ground, America really utterly dominated the global economy for a time and was able to offer economic opportunity to workers of all kinds, whether high skill or mid-skill or low-skill. But almost immediately after the war, that consolidated nation began a very long process of unwinding and fragmenting, really in response to what was experienced as an over-consolidation of American life in that period in the form of oppressive cultural conformity of unjust racial exclusion and sexual exclusion and excessively constricted economy, a shortage of choices and options in every realm of life. The culture liberalized and diversified as the struggles against that racism and sexism coincided with what was a massive increase in immigration starting after the immigration law of 65. And then some key parts of the economy were deregulated to keep up with rising competitors. And our labor market was gradually forced by globalizing pressures to specialize in higher-skill work that has diminished opportunities for Americans with lower levels of education over time. And in politics, an exceptional mid-century elite consensus on some key issues gave way by the 70s to renewed divisions that have gotten sharper and sharper, of course, as the years have passed. In one arena after another, America in the immediate post-war years was a model of consolidation and consensus. But through the following decades, that consensus fractured. By the end of the 20th century, that fracturing of consensus had grown from diffusion into polarization, polarization of political views, of economic opportunities, of incomes, of family patterns, of ways of life. We've grown less conformist but more fragmented. We've grown more diverse but less unified, more dynamic but less secure. Now, all of this has meant many gains for America, in national prosperity, in personal liberty, in cultural diversity, in technological progress, in those options and choices that American life was missing in mid-century. But over time, it's also meant some losses. A loss of faith in institutions is one of those. A loss of social order and structure, a loss of national cohesion, of security and stability for many workers, a loss of cultural and political consensus. And these losses have piled up in ways that now often seem to overwhelm the gains and that have made our 21st century politics distinctly backward looking and morose. Conservatives and liberals have emphasized different facets of these changes. Liberals often tend to treasure the social liberation and the growing cultural diversity of the past half century and more. But to lament the economic dislocation, the loss of social solidarity, the rise in inequality, conservatives celebrate the economic liberalization and the greater dynamism, but lament the social instability, the moral disorder, the cultural breakdown, the weakening of fundamental institutions. But these challenges are all tied together. The liberalization that the left celebrates is the fragmentation that the right laments and vice versa. That set of forces liberalizing and fragmenting, diversifying and fracturing are all functions of what was really in a lot of ways the essential driving force of American life since the Second World War, individualism. And so if the first half of the 20th century in America marked an age of consolidation, when as I say many of the great forces in our society were driving each America to become more and more like everyone else, the second half of the 20th century and these opening decades of the 21st have marked an age of deconsolidation, of liberalization or fracture, when many of the forces shaping our national life have been driving each America not to become more like everyone else, but to become more like himself or herself. Mid 20th century America, especially the 1950s and 60s stood between these two fairly distinguishable periods and for a time was able to keep one foot in each of them, combining dynamism with cohesion to an extraordinary degree. And that kind of straddling of cohesion and diffusion or unity and diversity was really a wonder to behold. It's not surprising that we idolized that time and miss it. It offered us a stable cohesive backdrop for different forms of liberalization, be it toward cultural liberation or market economics. But that liberalization has now done its work and our society is its result. We're a highly individualistic, diverse, fragmented society, economically, politically and culturally. And none of that is about to be undone. So we're gonna have to solve our problems as such a society. Both our strengths and our weaknesses are functions of this path that we've traveled together and we'll now have to draw on those strengths to address those weaknesses. That's I think the essential challenge for American politics in the 21st century, how to use the advantages of a diverse dynamic society to address the disadvantages of a fractured and insecure society. But if that doesn't sound to you like the question that our politics is asking itself, that's because it just isn't. Our political culture has not been very good at grasping either the challenges we face or the strengths that we possess in facing them. It's instead been overwhelmed by nostalgia, by a desire to reverse the process of liberalization or diffusion that's transformed our society. And so whether in economic terms for the left or in cultural terms for the right to recreate a consolidated centralized consensus that defined America not all that long ago. It does seem to me that this nostalgia is very powerfully palpable in some elements of the argument that Jacobs and Paul Pearson's very impressive and important book makes. They take the enormous faith that Americans had in government at mid century as a kind of norm and they argue that it's been lost as a result of the nefarious workings of disreputable scoundrels. Greedy plutocrats and randy and radicals. I think we should always be at least a little suspicious of any theory and politics that functions by assuming bad motives on the other side. And this one really doesn't strike me ultimately as explaining as much as it might. It seems to me instead that the moment of extraordinary confidence in government and other institutions at mid century was extremely unusual and unsustainable and that what's happened since has been for good and bad more or less what the American people have wanted. Cultural, political, and economic liberalization and therefore the fragmentation of an intensely consolidated post-war America. We've lost faith in pretty much all of our large institutions, public and private, political, cultural, religious, and economic. The church no less than the government. The university is no less than the banks. So the question as I see it is how should this diverse and dynamic, fractured and fragmented society think about and address its problems? Problems that are in part certainly functions of market failures. That are in part failures of the progressive governance that's tried to counterbalance the market for a century now. And that are in part functions of the growing division and fragmentation of our national life. How should the mix of our mixed economy evolve in response to the changes our country's experienced in this age of fracture? I worry that Jacob and Paul's book does too little to consider that question because it denies that that's the question. It asserts that our core political debate in America is about whether we should have a mixed economy. When in fact it seems to me that our debate is about what the mix should be. Our differences on that front are real and meaningful. They run deep. They can reflect profound divisions about very basic questions, philosophical differences, anthropological even, sociological, epistemological differences. But their differences about the nature and purpose and proper structure of our liberal society and its regulated market economy. Their differences about what the mix should be, not about whether we ought to have a mixed economy. Both of our political parties are of course at this point doing a very bad job of engaging in a debate about what that mix ought to be. That is about how markets and governments should respond to the ways that our country has changed and to the problems it faces in this century. Instead, the parties often seem to wanna have a debate about whether we got the mix just right in 1965 or in 1981. And so to present election after election to voters is more or less a choice between the visions of those two periods in American life. What would it mean to do a better job? I'll summarize very briefly as I'm sure I'm over my time, but it seems to me that for thinking about public policy, the fragmentation or fracture of our society has some crucial epistemological implications and some crucial sociological ones. In epistemological terms, that is in how we know, what we know, our fragmentation means that the knowledge that's required to properly design and implement social policy in the 21st century is more likely to be distributed knowledge than concentrated knowledge. And so social policy should function through more distributed mechanisms. Where possible it should work by giving people options, by giving them the resources to make choices and by letting those choices matter rather than by prescribing centralized solutions. That would change in some cases quite significantly how we think about education, about healthcare, about welfare. It would force a necessary modernization of American public policy. And in more sociological terms, our fragmentation means that our society itself is less cohesive and concentrated. So that effective solutions to problems that aren't simply about moving money around are likely to require some degree of subsidiarity, of enabling institutions closer to the ground to make judgments and to deliver services. I think that there are very plausible conservative approaches to reforming our mixed economy along these lines and very plausible progressive approaches to doing that. I prefer the former for a variety of reasons that I'm glad to get into in most cases at least. But I don't think we're seeing enough of either one in our public debates at this point. Before we can arrive at those, we have to see that they're necessary. And that means understanding the crisis of confidence in government, not only as a function of dark forces persuading people to believe a lie, but as the consequence of a long and on the whole probably ultimately beneficial process of fragmentation and fracture that requires the modernization of our governing institutions in just the same way as industrialization and mass media required a modernization of American government a century ago. So the question isn't, do we need an effective and strong government? The question is what kind of government institutions does 21st century America require? What would an effective government that is strong within its proper sphere look like now? A debate about that would serve the country a lot better than the kinds of debates that we've been forced to have in this election year. And again, it's why I'm so glad to be asked to be here because here you certainly have those deeper debates. You certainly look past what our elections look at and you think about the kinds of challenges that the country faces in their own terms. So again, thank you and I look forward to the conversation. Thank you so much. This is the first panel I've been on in a very long time where you didn't hear the words Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump at all. And so it's really quite amazing but I think it's the type of conversation I wanna just wholeheartedly agree with you all that it's the type of conversation we should be having in our country. And it's what we see out on the campaign trail. So I wanna speak to that a little bit. But first I'd like to thank my friend, Jacob Hecker. I had the great pleasure and privilege of working with Jacob when he took a year at UC Berkeley. And before he arrived, I read all of his books. And so he said that he thinks I might have been the only one but I think EJ Dion also has read all of his books. So I'm really delighted to be here and wonderful to be introduced to you of all and look forward to reading your book soon. And thank Larry and the crew here at EPI. So let me just respond a little bit to the ideas that were put forward and to suggest that I think that both Jacob and you all have it right in terms of some of the diagnosis of what their problems are. I'm gonna start by saying a little bit. Hillary Clinton is actually going to Columbus, Ohio today to give a major speech on the economy and particularly to contrast how she thinks about the economy versus how Donald Trump thinks about the economy. So she'll be following that with a speech in North Carolina tomorrow in which she kind of lays out her proactive agenda for the economy. I think it's important to say that in terms of the ways in which Hillary Clinton herself thinks about government it probably does look a little bit more like the way Jacob Hacker is thinking. And yet I think there's something deeply true about this notion that we have a very polarized electorate in our country and I don't think that we have figured out how to deal with that problem. And I think that's very clear from the primary. I think it's very clear from the general election. I think it's clear from the media. So I wanna address both of those issues. Let me start by saying that I think, one of the things that I would take issue with a little bit is this notion that we no longer have a government. I do agree that there's a deep sense in America that people don't believe in the institutions of their government. And yet there's a narrative that we haven't been able to do anything in government for years. But you look and you think the Affordable Care Act, the Recovery Act, the fact that we got the economy back on track, that we have Dodd-Frank and that we broke up the big banks and that we have gone forward in a number of different ways in which we've really made sure that we actually do have a robust role of government. So sometimes I think there is a analysis that's not quite right in terms of where we are. So I think Hillary Clinton starts from the point of view of a very deep faith that the government does have to play a role in helping not only our economy, but really helping the kind of fabric of our communities in terms of children and families. And you know, Kristen started by saying my background is in the children and family space. So let me say a little bit about one of Hillary Clinton's kind of great accomplishments and why I think it shows what her belief is in government and why it matters. So when Hillary Clinton was the first lady, she obviously, as many people know, was tasked by her husband to work on universal healthcare. She did not succeed in that effort as we know. But what she did is two days after that failure, she actually pulled together a meeting in the White House and began kind of plotting how we were going to get children's health insurance done in our country. And through her behind-the-scenes work and the great work of people like Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch, a bipartisan effort on the Hill, made it such that we passed the Children's Health Insurance Program. And people know that we then, you know, covered, we now have covered over 8 million children. Even before the Affordable Care Act occurred, we had 90% of kids in America had health insurance. Now, I think that is a wonderful thing in and of itself. But to go to Jacob's point of thinking about what are the broader implications of government intervention, there was an amazing article in The Sunday's New York Times about a new study that had just come out showing that not only did children's health insurance program help to make sure that we had coverage in America, but it actually, for those who were covered, it reduced infant mortality. It decreased the number of hospitalizations that kids had over their lifetime. It means that kids who were covered actually had more likelihood of graduating from high school, more likely to graduate from college, and more likely to make higher incomes. And so if you think about the fact that Hillary Clinton has this deep belief that there's a role in government, and the role is to not only make sure that people have access to something, but it's this notion of the trajectory of how we improve lives in America. And I think Jacob started with that when he talked about the Clean Air Act and what that means in terms of life expectancy. And so I think it's really important that we recognize that. And it's something that is kind of core to her belief that we have to have a role here. Now this has been a campaign where it's been very hard. I'm on the policy team. I am a policy wonk by heart. And it's very hard to get policy ideas out there in the stream, which is kind of shocking. But one of the things that Jacob talked about and that we feel so deeply about is that I think it's really important to kind of recognize that Hillary Clinton very much looks at what do I want to do when I become president and how do we use the government to effectively move forward? And so I'm going to give one more example in the space of kind of health and children and families. And then I want to talk about what she's going to say today. But one of the other areas is that she actually called me last summer and said, I really want to make sure that we are making a very big investment in Alzheimer's research. And really thinking about how do we change the trajectory of Alzheimer's? You look at the demographics in America, obviously people living longer as a result, much higher incidence of Alzheimer's in our country. And so what she knew is this notion that we need to have a knowledge economy. We know that the government uniquely plays a role in investing in research, investing in science. And so we put forward a plan saying, we need to actually invest $20 billion over 10 years to try to get to an effective treatment of Alzheimer's. Now, you don't read about this as much in the paper because we are caught in this reality TV like a presidential election cycle. But I give those examples because I think it's important to acknowledge and recognize that she very much sees this importance of how we think about government and that these very core values of research, innovation, investment in a way that only the government can do is so critical to who she wants to be as president. Now, she also is somebody who is a consumer of ideas and thoughts about how we live as a country. And so obviously, people know that she wrote a book in the 90s called It Takes a Village, which she very much believes in very fundamentally, which is it's not just that it takes government action, but we really have to think about how we come together as communities. And so as we go into the general election, she is rolling out what will be the theme of the general election, which is that we are stronger together. Now, I think that it is a hard notion to think about that, as you've all said, which is how do you think about that when we are such a polarized country? How do we do it in a way that celebrates our diversity, but also thinks about bringing our ideas together under one tent? And it's work that we have to do. And I think that you look at, and these are all public polls, but you look at the polling, and I'm not telling you something you don't know, but we have a very polarized electorate on many different levels, which is to say we have polarization with regard to gender. We joke about the women card, but the fact of the matter is that there are very different opinions by women and men about who they're going to vote for. We have, obviously, very differences in terms of race and ethnicity, in terms of support. So we have this very, very different polarization in our electorate that we are trying to address. And one of the things that Hillary Clinton keeps saying is, you may not be with me, but I'm going to be with you, and I'm going to listen to you and think about how we address these issues. So I just want to say a few words about what she's going to say today, because I do very, very evident of how she thinks differently about the government, and then E.J. is going to have a conversation with all of us. But she's in Columbus, Ohio. She's laying out an agenda and talking really about the difference with Trump. And I just wanted to say a few words about that, which is, I think it's hard. We all know that Donald Trump changes his mind very frequently, some say, even within Larry Michelle, saying even within a sentence sometimes, you're not sure which way he's going. But I think it's important to acknowledge that in very fundamental ways, he has said that he wants to take us backward in terms of the economy. So he talks about, obviously, making America great again. But for him, what that means with regard to Wall Street is that he wants to wipe out all of the consumer protections. He wants to wipe out Dodd-Frank. He wants to get rid of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. So all the ways in which we have thought about how we need to make sure that we're regulating, we're protecting consumers, we're looking at going forward. He has made very clear that he wants to get rid of all of those government rules. He has put forward a plan, a tax plan that would actually add $30 trillion to our debt over the next 20 years. There's analysis out saying that his plan would actually cut 3 and 1 half million jobs, that he has a vision of the economy that's really about making sure that we have tax breaks for the wealthy, but not investing in the institutions that we know matter. He's talked about getting rid of the US Department of Education. He's talked about repealing the Affordable Care Act. So all of the ways in which we feel like there's a fundamental role that government plays, Donald Trump has said no. He doesn't believe that government has a role to play. So I think it's important, as we think about this conversation, that there's really two challenges ahead. And I totally agree with Yvonne that we haven't quite got it right, which is how do we make sure that we put forward an argument that government has a central role to play, but also acknowledge that there's both less confidence that government can do that, even when things are getting done, like the Affordable Care Act. There's a deep skepticism, and that we haven't quite figured out how to deal with this polarization. And in part, one of the things that wasn't talked about is the media, which is that we read and we consume and we watch different things. And so it's very hard. I'm guilty myself of reading The New York Times and Washington Post and listening to NPR and turning on CNN and MSNBC. And my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, at least in this presidential campaign, are not watching and reading the same things. And so part of it is we are having very different conversations. And so I think part of the notion is how do you get to a national conversation when you're literally not consuming the same information, I think becomes all the more challenging. So I am really delighted to be here. It's a lovely break from the craziness of the campaign. And I think these are exactly the conversations we have going forward. Because even if Hillary Clinton wins, there is such a deep amount of work that we need to do to rebuild. Oh, I just said rebuild, like make America great again, which is not quite what I meant. But what I mean is that there is this deep sense that both of Jacob and Yvonne are right, which is that we really have work to do to think about how we lift up the government, but also how we deal with this deep polarization and this kind of hyper-individualism that I think we're all seeing. So thank you all so much for having me on the panel today. Myon, there we go. My voice is pretty loud anyway. My friend David Brooks once hurled one of the most gating insults at me anyone's ever confronted. He said, EJ is the only person I know whose eyes light up at the words panel discussion. And I think if you look at this panel, you will see why. I would defend myself against David. A couple of quick things. I really want to pay tribute to Larry and EPI. There was something very odd that it took Donald Trump's candidacy to have a lot of people discover that there is a working class out there that is hurting and needs help. And Larry and EPI have been the conscience of this city for a long time in calling people's attention to the condition of American workers. And we are grateful to you. I'm also grateful for Christian Dorsey inventing a term. I'm sorry. Say again? I said, put it in the column. Um. Yeah. Why not? I'm also grateful to Christian Dorsey for inventing the term Giorno Scholar. That sounds like one of those contradictions like jumbo shrimp. But I was grateful for it. I have two biases here that I should put on the table. Bias one, those of you who know me know my views are closer to Jacobs and it ends then to Yuval's. Bias two is I really like all of these people. Jacobs, right? He wrote his PhD thesis outside my office at Brookings. He was kind enough to say I helped him on the thesis. The truth is that I had this absolutely brilliant guy outside my office and I interrupted him all the time in his work because I learned so much talking to him. Yuval is someone I deeply admire. The kind of conservatism I am closest to is a sort of civil society conservatism that he represents but he really won my heart one day when we were talking about Thanksgiving and he said every Harvard degree and BMW registration should have Ecclesiastes 9-11 stamped to it. And every panel needs a biblical reading so Ecclesiastes 9-11 is I returned and saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bred to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill, but time and chance happeneth to them all. To have a conservative say that success depends a great deal on luck, fortune, or providence is a real blessing and I want you to preach that to your side over and over again, Yuval because it's very important and I've admired and for a long time for work on children and families and it's a real honor actually to be on a panel with her and I want you to know how wise she is. It turns out, if I'm right, am I right about this? All three of the guys on this panel are married to lawyers. So Anne found the only panel in Washington where she would be surrounded by people who love lawyers so this is great. I wanna end all this nice, we all love each other and understand each other so well and please buy our books, sort of talk and try to get at what really divides us here even though I agree with the premise that I think there are certain things that unite us as a liberal or a progressive or a social democrat, one of the things that's always bothered me is that we are often viewed as enemies of civil society. It is as if we don't appreciate family institution, the institutions of family or community and by the way, the labor movement is also an institution of civil society and there is a fundamental divide here on if one way of putting it and it's why it was a good panel is what rural government plays in strengthening rather than weakening the institutions of civil society and I think implicit in Yuval's argument is a view that government tends to weaken rather than strengthen civil society. In Jacob and Anne's view, I think it's fair to say that they see many ways in which government can strengthen civil society so I'm gonna put a few question on the table and then allow everybody to sort of have an exchange with each other so I'd really like to join that argument. I wanna challenge Jacob in one way which is to say if government is so great and I fundamentally agree with his view that government has been essential to our progress, why is it viewed so negatively and obviously one answer to that problem is to write a really important book saying, hey, wait a minute, government has done a lot more for us than we think but what has happened? What have, if you will, progressives done wrong to find themselves in this state? We know what conservatives have done to discredit government but what has our side, if I may put it that way, done wrong and what do we need to do? To Yuval, I'd like to direct that personal responsibility question. Yuval's argument is conservatism should strengthen personal responsibility and upward mobility. What are the GI bills, student loans and survivors benefits except that, except what John Stuart Mill called help toward doing without help which I think is one of the central purposes of a government that wants to build society. On civil society itself, as you know, Yuval, my main critique of your view is you deal with centralized government power but not with centralized economic power. What happens in communities say in Western Pennsylvania that have a vibrant civil society, strong churches, unions, community organizations and a big company suddenly pulls out and that community no longer has the wherewithal to sustain, they didn't lack civil society, they just suddenly find themselves without any economic base and the third is on children and families which will allow me to pivot to and there is this, I was glad you mentioned it takes a village and you use the phrase there are things only government can do. On the children and families debate and this is where I think Yuval's intro, the first part of his book makes an important contribution. I felt for a long time that too much of our politics is defined by whether the 60s or 80s were worse. I wrote about that in a why Americans hate politics. I'd like you to talk about the pressures on the family because my dream if there ever could be consensus is that liberals and conservatives might at least come together around the idea that family actually really, really matters to the well-being of children but we have to come to some agreement. A lot of our conservative friends mostly blame 60s values and other values whereas there's also been a real battering of families by economic change. William J. Wilson's book, When Work Disappears I think is a powerful commentary on that and the paradox is that many of these Trump voters who are frustrated, who are tend to be or many of them are older white man hammered by globalization and technological change have some of the same complaints as inner city folks, African-Americans whose life chances were also hurt by the de-industrialization economy. I'd love to have you do that. So maybe I'll start with Jacob on what have progress has been doing wrong. You've all to try to deal with this thicket of civil society government questions that I laid out and to talk about how in the world could we build a consensus on children and family policy? Take a point and just I have to leave in five minutes. All right, I should say this. I just quickly say a few points and then I'm gonna leave it to you. Ann has a vital meeting on Capitol Hill which will change the course of the Republic and we do not want her to be late for that so let's let her go first. Thank you. Yeah and I know I just spoke and I'm just gonna say a few words and then these two will have a wonderful debate once I step out but I think one of the things that Jacob taught me that I wanna add here because I think it's something that I would love and I'll follow up with them to get the answer to this is that if you think about the way that our social policy was constructed over time there is this notion that families were always the first line of defense in terms of social insurance which is to say that if somebody lost their job there was an assumption that somebody would able to step in so oftentimes the wife would be able to go to work for a short period of time there would be some savings. If somebody became ill there was a grandparent who could take care. If there was a child at home who needed help a woman would not be in the workforce and so one of the things that I think has happened over time is that both we often talk that we haven't updated our social policy to deal with some of these work family conflicts and we talk about that in a very cabin way which is to say that we say oh we need to update social security for example and this is something we put forward on the campaign which is to have a caregiving credit so for women who have taken up to five years out of the work or women or men it's often women who have taken five years out of the workforce and don't earn social security credit during that time we should have that but I think there's a more fundamental question and this is where there is a disagreement which is because of the fact that we do have families that are no longer the kind of traditional family we have either two working parents or single parents we haven't come to an agreement across the political spectrum about how to deal with that which is it is going to take both more government resources and more family resources to deal with the expenses of childcare which obviously used to be provided within the home is going to take more expense to figure out how do you deal with a worker who has these work family conflicts so that we have paid sick days and paid family leave and I think that there is a very deep resistance often in times by Republicans to these types of investments because there is this notion that if we just made America great again many went backwards to a time when women stayed at home that we could deal with this and even Donald Trump says things like it's an inconvenience when women have to take time off to have a baby it's something if you want to deal with childcare just get some blocks and swings and they'll be fine and so I think part of it is this notion of we actually need to update our social insurance in a way that understands that we have a fundamental shift in our family so I will leave the two of you to figure out how we're going to do that and I just want to say thank you again and I apologize I have to sneak out a few minutes early but it's terrific to be here today. Thank you Anne. By the way on making America great again Jacob and Paul did a piece off their book in the foreign affairs magazine and very puggishly the editor or they ran it under the headline making America great again so. Well thankfully our editor stopped us from having the subtitle of the book being how the war on government let us to forget what made America great prosper it's what made America prosper so I think it's very important that we get down to the sort of in the real discussion about what the implications are of these conflicting views and so I want to answer your question and in doing so say just a few words about where I see our disagreements in the process so you're absolutely right I mean there's a broad level of dissatisfaction with government there is a really wonderful study that was recently done by the Center for American Progress and Jeff Guerin was involved with it and really to share and what they found is that when people say they don't trust government the number one thing in their mind is politicians right so they in fact they don't think that many they have real questions about government's competence but they tend to actually believe there are very important roles that government should play and in some cases want government to play a larger role so I think it's important to distinguish to some extent between this really pervasive dislike of politics why do Americans hate politics EJ and this question of whether or not they see government as having a vital responsibility and I mean I think I was doing the government is awesome discussion but I think it's very important to know that one of the important reasons why people are skeptical of government and down on politicians is that there's been a lot of really big strains that people have been facing and so as we put it in the book we're still moving forward but very slowly and in certain areas that the EPI has been central writing about such as rising inequality and the difficulty of middle class families are facing you know it's understandable why Americans don't feel that the political system is responding to their felt needs and that's I think a really that really sort of pushes us to ask you know is this fundamentally a failure of government's capacity to do this in the abstract or is it really that our political system is failing to allow us to reach some positive some solutions and we make the case that it's the latter and one thing that I think is really important in this that doesn't get I think the attention it deserves and you've all worked is the financial crisis right I mean this was a case in which the power of the financial sector led to massive withdrawal of government which in turn led to this massive economic crisis and we can debate exactly the story there but I think it's everything that you've seen in the polling suggests that that has been a really scarring reality for Americans and the fallout from the financial crisis is a big part of the distrust that Americans feel so that's the kind of broad picture view of why I think there's this high level of distrust and it's a long standing one and it really begins in key respects with the rise in economic insecurity in the 1970s but I think it's adding to this is what we call what we discuss in the book and we sometimes call the doom loop of dysfunction the fact that there are political actors mostly on the Republican side of the aisle who are reducing, further reducing the ability of government to address pressing problems I mean I think Yovall is right that we should be having a debate over what's the role of government in that mixed economy not whether we should have a mixed economy at all I don't think that many leading conservatives have gotten that memo because in fact and we have lots of evidence on this in the book there are leading groups and political figures who are really questioning the fundamental role of government itself and their central argument is that government and markets are in this inevitable tension with each other and they've also been very active in trying to tear down the capacity of government particularly if you think about what's happened with the IRS with discretionary spending the decay of our infrastructure and research and development investments to me these are areas in which government isn't working well in part because there are hostile attacks on it and then in turn that leads people to think that government won't work well in the future now the Democrats have been complicit in this as well I mean deregulation was a bipartisan affair driven in part by the investments of the financial sector very lucrative investments it turned out in deregulation but also I think more broadly because at one point in time I think as Yovall rightly says there was a kind of taken for granted quality to this confidence in large public institutions and Democrats have taken that for granted for many years and there hasn't been an active effort to kind of rebuild and justify this positive role for government and you can see it in a lot of places to me one of them is in the sort of tendency to submerge or hide what government does so you think about the biggest middle class component of the stimulus package it was the payroll tax cut and it was designed in part to be invisible in part because that was seen as a way to ensure that people would actually spend it but then a few years after the stimulus package is passed the polls are showing that most Americans aren't even aware that there was a payroll tax cut at all and so to me that is we progressives they're probably gonna have to be more forthright about the role of government in the future and of course as someone who's advocated the public option and health insurance I've often argued that this can take a form that Yovall discusses in the book of having a public option in retirement or in healthcare that's there to be able to be a very clear visible example of the capacity of the public sector and that capacity is revealed in a lot of comparative analyses and so one thing that I think is really striking is the degree to which there is no sort of cross national analysis in Yovall's book because we're falling behind not just relative to our past which is kind of the consolidation, deconsolidation story he wants to tell but also relative to other rich democracies we spend more on healthcare for less result than many other rich democracies we've seen among the largest, the second largest decline in male labor force participation among OECD nations we have seen health improve much, much more slowly and for some crucial groups like middle age whites we've seen actually death rates rising so the point is that we see other countries that are facing globalization technological change and they are not nirvanas by any means but they have managed to deal with some of these problems more effectively than we have. Let me go to Yovall and maybe I can sharpen the question to you Yovall you talk a lot about subsidiarity and everybody's forced subsidiarity but as Bill Clinton would say it depends on what the meaning of the word subsidiarity is which is it's often said to be mean everything should be done at the lowest level possible in fact as you know real subsidiarity is it should be done at the lowest level if the lowest level can handle it and so for example I don't think you would be for although I could be wrong dismantling social security and shipping it off to the states that we are better with a national insurance system and yet you might be for I think if you've supported Ryan budget so I guess that means you might well be for dismantling Medicaid and shipping it off to the states and I just wonder where what this means because I worry about the subsidiarity being misused to justify the dismantling of programs rather than a genuine search for which level is the most appropriate. Yeah well thank you there's a lot here to respond to let me first say to be clear that though I'm certainly not a Trump voter I'm also just as certainly not a Hillary voter so I wouldn't want to leave people confused about the nature of the panel or the conversation I'm a conservative that's why I can't vote for Donald Trump and in an even more understandable way in some respects why I wouldn't vote for Hillary Clinton. Sorry. Well we can start working through names but eventually we get down to whoever I end up writing in and go in and getting a drink. You're even less likely to vote green. Yeah I think that's probably right. Look I'm a frustrated voter it happens nobody owes me a rose garden. A couple things to respond to here. I would say that one thing I'd warn against or at least I react against is the abstraction of government such that everything that government does is judged by the GI Bill and the NIH. Government does some things well and some things poorly and you have to think about what those are and why that is and how things could be done better or whether things should be done differently. And so I really don't think that the question of say scientific research is all that controversial and in terms of a role for government between the right and left. The NIH budget grew by 70% in the Bush years with the Republican Congress. So again it's not a question of whether there ought to be any role and I don't think it makes sense to describe Paul Ryan as an iron brand, acolyte. I mean I just think you have to be a little more precise in the nature of the problem you are identifying. And so to your original question about the GI Bill and survivor benefits, I think those are examples of a way of using the federal government that can be quite effective precisely by giving people options. I think that's quite distinct from what ultimately ended up being done with say the Affordable Care Act. I just don't find it confusing that having passed the Affordable Care Act and people think government is incompetent. I think that makes perfect sense. If I can just sharpen that on the Affordable Care Act, there are two big pieces. One is an expansion of Medicaid which continues an existing government program. The other is it seems to me a classic Yuval Levin program which is essentially find health insurance in the private market where you can. What is your agenda? Well the trouble there is that the definition of health insurance is very strict in the Affordable Care Act so it's not finding where you can. It's first defining what health insurance is quite precisely and then requiring people to purchase something that meets that definition and the fact that there's buying and selling involved really doesn't make it a market program. I think the core difference between left and right at this point on what they're offering on healthcare is that conservatives want there to be a variety of options, a genuine variety of products, insurance products and coverage options and care that allows people through the choices they make to make our system more efficient. The underlying health system more efficient because that's the problem to be solved. We do agree ultimately about the problem to be solved. It's a classic left-right distinction about how to solve an efficiency problem. Is it by concentrating the decision-making and allowing for more efficiency through concentration? That's not a crazy view. I got me wrong. I just think it's not right in this kind of case. Or is it by decentralizing, by allowing people's choices, incremental choices made at the margins to shape the system in a way that's ultimately gonna be more efficient for meeting their needs. I think you find that difference in the kinds of distinctions that you would find now between left and right on healthcare. That difference has been there a long time. And in a lot of respects, it is a core left-right difference. What Republicans are offering on healthcare is much more like the GI Bill than what Democrats are offering on healthcare. And in that respect, I don't think that either side is arguing that, well, obviously the left is not, I don't think the right is arguing that there's no role for government in providing social insurance. There's no role for government in providing the kinds of public services that we've come to expect. The question is how, what kind of government do we need to have in the 21st century? And the arguments we have about that are just not helped very much by saying that we have great bridges and we invest well in scientific research sometimes. It's not the same question. There's a big difference between government as a provider of services, as it is in Medicaid, for example, which I do think needs to be decentralized and turned into an unwrapped to a private insurance market rather than into a government program that functions as an insurer. And it's ultimately a fairly big difference between that kind of program and government backing of science or cash benefits to people whose needs basically amount to not enough cash. So that's just a way of saying again that I think the argument is about how our mixed economy should function in the 21st century, not about whether it should be a mixed economy. And so as it relates to civil society, to your other question, I certainly agree with you. There are ways in which government at all levels can be reinforcing and supportive of civil society. And there are ways in which it can take over roles that ought to be played by civil society. It seems to me that part of the difference is a kind of vision of ultimately what society consists of. And this is why the argument of my book is much more against individualism than it is against centralization, because I think those two things actually work together to a very great degree. And this is an argument that has been made at least since Tocqueville in the 1830s about America that our kind of radical individualism invites a view of society in which there are only individuals and a national state. And that this is harmful in both directions to the actual sources of American flourishing because that flourishing happens in that space between the individual and the national state. Where families are, yes, but where communities are, where local governments are, where as you say labor unions are and also associations of business people, also schools and churches and all manner of other things that we do together that are not exactly the national government, but that can work with it and can work around it and can work together. So I think it's extremely important for us to see that ultimately the health of that middle space is essential to the health of our society. And there are ways that government can advance that health and there are ways that it undermines it. And so government is not a yes or no question from where I sit. Let me, if I read the program right, we're just talking up here, we're not having Q and A from the audience, am I correct in that? Because there are two things. In the original vision, we were gonna end with some Q and A from the audience and given that it's 1157, we may wanna open things up. Yeah, let me open it up. I wanna put two underlying questions on the table for you and then let's get a few questions and comments from the audience. Underlying question number one is, I would like you to, and we don't have enough time for this, talk about this difference you have on healthcare. Cause as it happens, both of you have spent a long time studying healthcare and have reached very different conclusions. I was thinking Jacob, about your advocacy of the public option. And one of my favorite speeches at the 2012 Republican Convention or favorite moments was when Chris Christie talked about his dad going to Rutgers on the GI Bill. And I sent out a nice innocent little tweet that seemed very popular among liberals saying good to see Chris Christie commenting on the role of government in helping his dad advance. And what's interesting about that is that it is a GI Bill model which you like but with the public option, Rutgers, which Jacob likes. The second thing, which maybe this is beyond our scope today, you worry a whole lot about centralized government power, Yuval, but you don't really talk a lot about centralized economic power. And if you look at the broad progressive tradition, this is one of the things we differ on. I don't see it as nearly as much about ruled by experts which is what you like to look at it as. I see it much more as countervailing public power to break up concentrated private power. But that may be beyond us but those are two things I wanna put on the table but let me open it up. The gentleman in the back and then Norman. Let's take a few comments and then we will let these guys close it out. Mr. Hacker and Mr. Levin, I don't think your visions are entirely irreconcilable and I think that's best evidenced in the fact. A counselor, I like that. It's a marriage counselor. President Nixon. Nobody likes to talk about President Nixon anymore but he had a vision of the new federalism where you would decentralize powers to the states and the holidays while still having a very active federal government making investments in infrastructure and such. So my question to you two is why is, not necessarily why is Nixon not a revered figure in the American Pantheon in 2016 but why is that vision of collaboration between those ideas not as envisioned nowadays as it could be? And then let's get the mic to Norman. I love that this, let it be recorded that a kind word was said about Richard Nixon at EPI. And Norman, some have said he's the last liberal president which is an interesting idea. At least on you. I don't think there's any doubt Nixon was the last new dealer. But look, if you take, it takes seven hours to fly from Washington to Western Europe on an uncomfortable journey. In these days, it gets much more uncomfortable. The closer you get to London, Paris or Brussels because all of us in the progressive camp like Jacob have of course pointed for years for decades to the successes of the European welfare state which is a mixed product of European social democracy, social Christianity and a good deal of European conservatism as well. But it seems that these systems in Europe no longer satisfy the Europeans. I'm thinking particularly of West Europe, East Europe is another question. And when one asks oneself what's happening, it seems to me that one of the things that's happening has been a complete loss of language, of rhetoric, of language, and of language as a capacity to describe the world. The smartest Europeans in politics and out of it will acknowledge that the notions of wealth, of consumption, of career, of life course somehow don't any longer work. I think a good deal of that is also true for us ourselves. So the interesting question about this entire debate is whether it seems to me new terrain might not be needed and in that sense, I think of an intellectual who's been preoccupied by governmental tasks with a limited amount of influence, namely Barack Obama, and maybe he'll have something to teach us when he comes out. Thank you. Do we have one more? Let's do two real quickly and then I'm gonna shut it down. But if you could be very brief because we've all talked too much. Yes. Up here, we have talked too much. Thank you. You all described a cohesive America of post-World War II and I think you would not describe it as cohesive if you were considering people of color because that was exactly the time when most workers of color were not even covered by social security because they were agricultural workers or domestic workers. The federal government ran a segregated workplace. So I would not describe that America as a cohesive America and related to that is the viewpoint advanced by Professor John Powell of Berkeley that much of the fractured America is also the result of the Civil Rights Act and when people of color came to the table that was when mainstream America suddenly had a problem with the social programs and the shared prosperity. So your reactions to that. That's a great question and it actually relates to some of the problems with European welfare states as societies become more diverse. This gentleman up front here and then. Yeah, that was actually my question exactly. What are the middle space schemes on the poor, sexist, racist, and solutionary? What are the, if governments not clear solution to bring this together, I don't think what is the solution? So we have Nixon as the model we should all dream about. The problems with the European welfare state and how do we deal with that and the fifties were cohesive for everyone except for all the people who were left out of the cohesiveness. So let's, why don't I have you all speak and then Jacob and then we will close up and you are all invited to buy the books. I want to reiterate that. Amanda, let me start on the question of cohesion and race is a very important question that I didn't get to in talking about it here but do try to get to in the book. I actually think that the exclusion of America in that period of America really until the middle of the 1960s is a way of looking at the same thing that I'm calling cohesion, which is a country that had such a constricted sense of what it was to be an American that it left a lot of people who were Americans out of it and so liberalization that was a reaction against an excessive cohesion which some people in white America understood as forcing a kind of social conformity. A lot of people outside of white America understood as something much worse than forcing social conformity as exclusion often violent exclusion and at the very least exclusion from the benefits of American life. And this is why I say that the fragmentation and the fracturing of that cohesion of that excessive constriction was in many respects a very good thing. It's not a mystery why it happened. It happened because a just society growing wealthier and more comfortable believed it all happened. And so the prices we pay for that have to be understood as a price of progress in a lot of ways. I also think the same way about the growing market orientation of the economy where it has done a lot of good for America but it's also come at a cost and especially those of us like me who are friends of the market economy have to be alert to those costs and have to acknowledge them and think about what ought to be done about them for the people who are paying them. And so I completely agree with you that it's absolutely essential in thinking about American life in that period that some people now look back to as a kind of golden age. It was not a golden age for everybody and there's a reason that there was such social pressure to change it. On the question of what happens in that middle space when there's a kind of recreation of that kind of exclusion again or much worse, it seems to me that what it means to live in this kind of fragmented society is to see the solutions to those kinds of problems as taking the form of options too. That is of giving people choices and giving people options and giving people ways out. And so therefore not requiring a universal consensus about every question. There are some questions that our society has to answer as a society and I do think questions of race are there on that list for historical reasons and for philosophical reasons and for reasons of basic justice. There are also some questions, practical questions, that can be answered differently in different places and I think we've lost some of the patience for that because we take mid 20th century America as a kind of norm when it was in fact a very, very strange version of America, a very unusual one. And if you'd looked in on America at most any point in the 19th century, you would have found a lot of the things that we now find strange. You would have found very little faith in institutions. You would have found the kind of jumble of media we say, now everybody can get whatever news they want, whatever facts they want. Well, welcome to America in the 1870s. There was many newspapers as people in this contractically and people just got whatever facts they wanted. How to live with that is a difficult challenge about which we can learn something from our former selves even as we think about it in 21st century terms. So I think these are the right questions and these are the right challenges but it does seem to me that we've got to see that what it means to think about addressing the kinds of problems we have in this fragmented era is that we have to address them as the society that we are. We do not have the choice of addressing them as a society we used to be. And on both the right and the left in different ways, there's a very strong desire to instead become again a society we used to be and run the film over. I just think that that desire poisons our politics and makes it very difficult for the kinds of ideas that are worked out here, for the kinds of ideas that are in Jacob's book and in Jacob's work to get a hearing because people just want to look backward and it's not just a problem on the right though it certainly is a problem on the right. It is also in a lot of ways a problem on the left and a problem that's debilitating our politics. You know, we're going in the fall into a presidential election where we're going to see two 70-year-olds argue with one another basically about how to go backward. If we're honest with ourselves, it is about how to recover something they miss. And that's just not good for America. Well, so first it's- He jizzed Marius, it's an ugly head. Thank you for that. Well, if you read Yvall's book he's not so keen on the baby boomers in certain ways. But to go back to, since this is the last word first, let me just thank everyone for coming and I do think this was very much the beginning of the larger debate that we should be having and I hope it's a sign that we will be having that. I think there is a kind of abstraction from reality in some of the ways in which Yvall is speaking about this because I feel like his version of conservatism that says we should have a serious evidence-based discussion about what the role of government should be within a necessarily mixed economy. It just doesn't seem to be the debate that we have been having. And I hope that he has increasing influence over those on his side of the political aisle because that's the kind of debate I want us to have. And in some ways, I think one of the questions is do we see Trump as a kind of aberration or do we see him in some ways as reflecting coming in and filling a vacuum that happens when there's such a demonization of government that's occurring in our political dialogue and a lot of it coming from the right. Now, I just don't think that saying that the Clean Air Act and R&D investment and investment in health research is an abstraction, is talking about something where there's universal agreement. I mean, the ravaging of discretionary spending due in part to a set of fiscal priorities that have both denied the need for greater more aggressive government action to control health costs. And at the same time has fetishized tax cuts that undermine the fiscal capacity of government and not to mention undermine the IRS itself. That is part of the reason why we've seen a very substantial erosion of our investment in our infrastructure and in our research and development and higher education, which is a lot of which has occurred at the state level. And I think it's very much the case. And this is where we're in total agreement that we should not assume that one level of government or one set of actors within society should be the one that would take care of any particular problem. And I guess the way I would put it is we don't have a dog or if we do have a dog, we have a friendly dog in the fight over which level of government is best poised to address these problems. I really do believe it should be evidence-based. But when I look at the evidence, there are some core areas where failures of the market necessitate national solutions, which may in turn result in local or state or private sector partnerships and implementation. And one of them, as I've mentioned, is climate change. I also think the enormous opportunity gap that we see in the United States is going to take as Robert Putnam has eloquently written, national level commitment as well as local and state investment. And I guess that's, I mean, we have a whole chapter in the book on market failure, right? And it needs to be a serious discussion and we have some of that but not enough of it, I'm sure, in the book about government's own weaknesses. But when we talk about market failure, I mean, the list is very long and it includes things that we did not even think about 30 years ago, like the increasing evidence of heuristic biases in people's decision-making that leads them to make very poor choices. Absent, some supportive architecture for decision-making. And so this, I study retirement and health and those are areas in which this is prevalent. On healthcare, EJ, I guess I would just say that, look, we, our system is a policy disaster relative to other industrialized democracies. What do these countries have in common? They have very many differences in their system. Some are very subsidiary, if that's a word, like the Swiss system, but they all involve a central role for government in both ensuring everyone has coverage and in restraining prices because the powerful private actors in healthcare are going to demand as much of the national economic pie as they can get without the countervailing power of government or actors enabled by government to play that role. And so I think the Affordable Care Act is a success on many dimensions and to the extent that it's had, especially at the exchanges, had problems. It's probably from relying too much on the states as the locus of implementation. In fact, if you look at what's happened on Medicaid, that was clearly a case where the Supreme Court said that the states could decide whether or not they wanted to deny health insurance to their own citizens. And lo and behold, many of those dominated by Republicans and conservatives have decided to do just that. So let's have an evidence-based debate about the role of government in the 21st century, but let's not pretend that the current political context is not one in which there is a significant consolation of actors, particularly on the right, who are denying the necessary positive relationship between effective public authority and a dynamic private market. Thank you. I want to close with three thoughts. First, I want to thank Larry and EPI. Your guilt tripping me, Larry, will probably work because I'm Catholic and I believe in guilt. Second, one thought of my own. In my book, I have a chapter called Reforming Conservatism or Trumping It, in which you've always a significant role and in positive ways, as well as in my critique. I really do think that reformed conservatism or the sort you're talking about needs to be more adventurous. My reformed conservative friends say, I won't be happy until they all become social Democrats. There may be something to that, but that's not where I'm going. And I hope this, I hope you write a chapter for the paperback of this book that takes into account the challenge Trump poses to conservatives. I just want to close with two quotes, two sets of quotes, one from Yuval and one from Jacob. I really do like this argument from Yuval. I think he's right and we have to come in terms of all of us. We have spent the beginning of this century drenched in nostalgia. We have become so accustomed to the ubiquity of nostalgia in our public life that we barely stop to notice it anymore. I think that's really true and important. And two great lines from Jacob and thank you to my interns, Jim and CJ out there for helping me on research before I came here. This is a great Jacob line. Picture this headline quotes, things are getting better comma slowly comma because of government policy. Your eyelids are probably drooping. Journalists are attracted to controversy, not cooperation, decline, not improvement and people not policy. But then there is the ringing Jacob, which is it is possible to build a new model of economic success on new political foundations to deepen prosperity in the 21st century. Grasping these opportunities requires a mixed economy, the strong thumb of government, as well as the nimble fingers of the market. I think we're gonna be hearing that line in this campaign. Thank you all for coming. Thank you. And thank you, Jacob Yuval and Annan perhaps. And the books are outside the door. Everyone before you leave, just a couple of questions.