Strain, director of economic studies s a i, widely published scholar in a comic finance and many other areas in his new book is an exceptionally clear and broad overview of the state of American Economic life, the actual conditions we face, the trends over recent decades, the dark stories we hear in our politics about the conditions americans have experienced and what our prospects are. Things are better than the mood of our politics and the critics of the market economy would sometimes suggest, we do face risks and maybe the mood and those critics are among the most important of those risks. It is a controversial thesis. As a conservative im resistant to being cheered up and told everything is fine but it is a powerfully argued thesis it as you will see a very thoroughly supported thesis. Joining us to respond to mikes argument is richard reeves, one of the smartest policy thinkers in washington, the whitehead chair and senior fellow of economic studies at the brookings institution, director of the brookings initiative on the future of the middle class and the author of any important articles and a number of important books including most recently dream orders, how the american middle class is leaving everyone in the dust, why that is a problem and what to do about it. Our format is reasonable. Mike will offer an overview of the argument of the book, richard will offer a response. I will moderate a brief conversation between the two of them and we will draw you into the conversation with some q and a. Lets welcome michael strain. Thank you for coming and thank you for the generous introduction. The title of the book contains the argument i am making that the American Dream is not dead at the subtitle makes the secondary argument that it is an excellent cover in the reason for any of you to read anything on the inside of it but we will talk about that anyway. What do we mean by the American Dream . There are many definitions that mean Different Things to different people, the freedom to choose how to live your own life, have a good life, a good family, Strong Community and comfortable retirement, Home Ownership is a big part of the American Dream in popular imagination. I would argue a key part of the dream is economic success, no matter what specific flavor of the American Dream your most interested in or your particular definition everybodys definition involves a large economic component. Loosely defined the idea that your kids will grow up to be better off than you, the idea you can do better yourself through hard work and you can see your economic outcomes advanced. Then there are the rags to riches component, also a strong economic component the poor kids can grow up to be a billionaire or president , that sort of thing. That is what i focus on, the economic component because it is so central to everybodys shared understanding of this important motivating national concept. The National Conversation assumes the American Dream is dead. Donald trump with his usual nuance has said the American Dream is dead. This was his theme during the primaries of the 2016 cycle. His theme after he was elected, his inaugural address discussing american carnage and how terrible everything is, he has pivoted in the last few months which is good but it is a defining characteristic of his presidency. Marco rubio told about his family, how his family came to america without much education across generations. He told the story when he was running for president in 2016 as an example of the American Dream being alive. In the past few years he tells the same story with the same set of facts but uses it to argue that that path is no longer possible. The American Dream has disappeared. A little foreign, the rich get richer, everyone else falls behind, the game is rigged, bernie sanders, for many the American Dream has become a nightmare for josh holly, 70 of americans havent seen a wage increase in 30 years, Nobel Prize Winning economy from the clinton administration, the American Economy a billionaire investor, the American Dream is lost, Tucker Carlson referring to the dark age we are living through, the American Dream is dying. My point is this is bipartisan, something you hear from senior elected officials in both parties, Business Leaders and Public Opinion leaders, there is a consensus. My point is the consensus is misplaced. My goal is not to be contrarian. Americans have High Expectations for their american outcome, their wage growth, High Expectations for the success their children will have. That is a good thing. America does a series economic challenges and america faces serious social challenging, not trying to diminish or sugarcoat or ignore any of the real problems we face. Im trying to be accurate and trying to be accurate about the broad picture of the american experience. How American Life is experienced by most people in those circumstances. We are focusing so much on pockets of real struggle for we are confusing those pockets of struggle for the common experience facing people and i think the American People keep hearing that their experience is the same as the experience in places where people are really struggling. I dont want to deny their suffering rather struggle but i do want to say those are atypical situations in the common experiences, much more positive than the narrative suggests. Todays economy is delivering for American Workers. For typical workers in the past three decades. The quality of life has improved for most households over the past several decades. Middleincome jobs have been hollowed out, economic dynamism creates and destroys. We hear about the Creative Destruction or the creativity and you see a new middle starting to form where the old middle has been eroded. America is characterized by economic ability. Another a few assertions, the narrative about the American Dream matters and we need to do more to advance and secure the dream for the next generation. Very briefly i want to stand here for 20 minutes and give richard the opportunity to respond and have some discussion. I will do the best i can. I thought it would be better to have real disagreement then have me stand here and lecture for an hour. The economys delivery for workers, Weekly Earnings for workers in the bottom 10 are faster than growth over the last several years. The Unemployment Rate for workers without a High School Diploma is below the average of the Unemployment Rate for college graduates, wages for nonsupervisory workers growing faster than overall average wages since last february. The argument that the gains from the hot economy are occurring only to people at the top, the game is rigged against workers who are not at the very top is not supported by the data. The recovery is reaching wide loss of the labor market including the least experienced and most vulnerable workers. My second argument wages are not stagnated for decades. This is a graph of wages. This is a graph of the wages of nonsupervisory workers, production workers in manufacturing, construction workers in construction and nonsupervisory workers in services. These include this group of workers, 80 of all workers, 4 in 5 workers, you can think of them as workers, not managers. The average wage for workers in that Group Adjusted for inflation and i want to make simple observations. What you see is throughout the 1960s into the 1970s there was rapid and sustained wage growth for this group of workers. What you see is from the mid1970s to the 1990s this group of workers did not do so well. You see stagnant and declining wages. Since the 1990s ic wages going up. I dont see wages being stagnant. Are there periods wages arent growing during that period . Yes, but on the whole if your choice is to characterize this as stagnant or increasing i think it is quite clear that over the last three decades the most accurate way to characterize this is wages are increasing. It is common to go back to 1973. One of the things i want to do in this book is argue comparisons from 1973 and 2020 is too long a window to make comparison but it is common to go 1973, wages are growing 23 since 1973. I wouldnt call that stagnant or spectacular but i certainly wouldnt call it stagnant. I would argue we should not compare 1973. This debate about wages among the policy Community Gets hung up on what price index to use to adjust for inflation. I want to say what we should be doing is the starting year. Less time debating, the price index, more time debating the actual period we are making the comparison over. 19731979, you see a 30 year period where wages have been going up. I argue it starts in 1990. When politicians and opinion leaders argue wade said been stagnant for decades people here that as referring to their wages, the wages of people currently working. 1973 was 47 years ago. For the purpose of the policy debate a more recent year, a year that is more relevant for people that are working seems pretty straightforward. 1990 was a Business Cycle peak, the summer of 1990 is close to a structural break in the series, seems to occur around the mid1990s. What i mean by that is if you start in 1973, what you are doing is comparing, conflating appear go of stagnation and decline with the period of growth and that to me seems statistically inadvisable. Instead point growth over appear go wages are growing and calculate stagnation when wages are stagnating and dont conflate the two if youre getting a handle on what low wages are doing. 1990 was 30 years ago. You hear a lot of talk about several decades, that seems like a reasonable time to go back. It is harder to adjust for inflation the further back in time you go. One of the ways to sidestep these debates, which frightened excuses not to try to go back 50 years. If you go back ten years the price index agrees more strongly than if you go back 20, if you go back 20 they are more strong than if you go back 30. One way not to get into a price index debate is to focus on shorter time period. My main point is even if you want to go back to the 70s it is not a complete picture to argue wages have been stagnant. Instead i think you characterize the two different periods. If you want to go back to the 70s fine. What you should be saying is wages stagnated throughout the 70s and 80s into the 90s and since the early to mid 90s wages have been growing. That seems to me to be a much more complete characterization of the behavior. 32 growth, 42 growth over the last 30 years. Is that properly described as stagnant, slow growth in the top one , significant increase of purchasing power and we shouldnt be content with it. Not stagnant but not fast enough and lets acknowledge it is different from what is happening at the top but it is more wrong than right to describe this as stagnant and instead of one third increasing purchasing power significant. Lets make the point about the price indices. This is a graph that adjusts wages and you see the closer you get to the present the more the price indices agree. Another argument not to got back so far. What do percentiles look like . Medians have grown by 24 . Wages of grown by a third, the 20 have grown by a third and wages for the 30 have grown roughly around there as well. Median wages of gone up by a quarter and workingclass and lowincome wages of ghana by a third. Not stagnation. What about income . Cbo computer 3 measures of income. If you look at the post transfer income that has gone up by 44 for median household, marketing, has gone up by 21 . If you look the bottom 20 , it has gone up by two thirds and Market Income by 44 , not stagnant. And if you look at cbos income series and gini coefficient which is a Standard Measure of inequality you see a significant increase in inequality in the 1980s in 1990s, the concern about inequality exploded, a 70 decline in this measure of inequality transferring income, looking at Market Income, you see an increase of 2 . This is another example how the narrative about American Workers is not kept up with the data. Wages were stagnant in the 1970 numplaps1980s. Inequality was growing rapidly in the 80s and 90s. For the past decade it has been growing less rapidly. This is a more straightforward measure of inequality, the ratio of Weekly Earnings from the 90 of the 10 and other measures as well as you see these have not shown any Significant Growth in inequality over that period. Do people care about inequality . This chart here shows concern about inequality against actual inequality. Public perception whether the rich are getting richer versus the actual behavior of the gini coefficient there is not much relationship. The correlation coefficient is negative if you look at this graph, this is a graph of concern about inequality and wage growth and you see that wages are growing throughout the 1990s and concern about inequality is going down. Combine all those together. Measured inequality is going up, concern about inequality is going down, wages are going up. This estimate people care more about how they are doing than about the actual behavior of the rich poor gap. My third didnt big point life was better three decades ago. I like to show this graph of airconditioning. This is important to me personally and you see Significant Growth, airconditioning over this period, perhaps more seriously there have been significant changes in medical care, advances in transportation safety. The idea that life was better 30 or 40 years ago even for the white workingclass borders on the absurd. If you take an argument seriously it is impossible to imagine many people if any would actually go back in time 40 years ago no matter what their current socioeconomic situation is now. Middleclass jobs. This is a chart that shows the hollowing out of distribution, you see employment losses in the middle. Production workers, clerical workers, the jobs with a lot of political failures during the trump era and you see an increase in lowwage jobs along with increases in higher skilled high wage jobs and economic dislocation and suffering in the lives of many people, coalition between expectations and reality, a serious reality of American Economic and social life. To put some numbers on it if you look at low, middle and high wage occupation. And the middle occupations, 23 of total employment, that is a significant decline. What happens to these workers . A lot end up moving into a higher income bracket. You see in this chart, it has gone down considerably. They replace with households earning more than 100 k, not replaced by households earning less than 35 k. The story of disruption has some positives. I will skip over this, if you focus on production jobs, we see that declining with a share of total employment. And with middle wage jobs, these are education and training, personal care and services. I wasnt lying, with Food Service Managers at the bottom. The moral of the story, it also creates. We dont hear about the creativity. With middle wage occupation this. The dynamic capitalist economy. It replaces some workers and tasks. And to assist workers in doing so. The moaning economic change, hurting the very workers you are trying to help. Upward mobility. Rags to riches. I wont explain this in great detail but i did calculations to see what share of people born in the bottom make it to the top and it is 7 person. What share of people who were born in the top make it to the bottom . I cant read that. Looks like 8 . It still happens in america. It is not common. It is not the norm, not something to be expected but you can go from the bottom to the top in america. If you want to temper that and look at rags to comfort you see considerably more upward mobility, people born in the bottom 20 and in the next quintile end up rising into the middle class at a pretty good clip. The measure of upward mobility is not the sort of relative ranking. I want to ask, are you doing better than your parents did . What i have done in these calculations is look at people in their 40s today and their Household Income and say if you are 40 years old today are you earning more than your parents earned when your parents were the same age. 3 quarters of people in their 40s have a higher Household Income than their parents had when their parents were in their 40s. If you were born in the bottom 20 , 86 have a higher Household Income than their parents had in their 40s. This strikes me as considerable upward mobility. Median Family Income was up 54 across those two generations and the bottom 20 is up by 153 . These are not trivial gains. What about earnings . That includes government transfer. I look at men and i say of men in their 40s how many are in more money in the labor market than their father earned when their father was in his 40s, it was 60 . If you were raised in the bottom it is 80 . The reason it is 60 is people in their 40s who were raised at the top, a lot are learning earning less than their dads did so the central tendency is pushed down. Still the norm for men to out earn their fathers and if you were raised in low income bracket or in workingclass three quarters. 64 , nontrivial gains. I have some material prepared on the populist threat to the American Dream but i think i will hold on that until we get to the discussion. I will advance through all this. I copied this verbatim from the washington post. What you should do is read the book and by the oped and see if i am consistent but i would like to invite richard reeves. Aei is committed to a competition of ideas. The idea i am an tackling in this book is difficult and they are not straightforward and there is plenty of room for reasonable disagreement. I thought it would be better to have the reasonable disagreement. I was thinking to myself who is the most thoughtful person i could find to present a compelling counter narrative and he wasnt available. Welcome, richard. Thank you for the kind introduction. Michael strain has been a clear, empirically grounded and irritatingly wellwritten book. Im going to briefly outline areas of agreement and focus on areas i think are useful disagreement. What are the incentives for pessimism if we are overly pessimistic, probably. It is working for us in some way. I agree there is an overstatement on left and right and broad trends affecting us, the middle classes been killed says joe biden, american carnage as donald trump, etc. There is a bipartisan overstatement of the problem. Wage and Income Growth to use michaels words have been solid. Not spectacular but not stagnant. These used to be the right words. Michael is right to split postworld war ii economy into these broad 3 phases, very strong growth followed by stagnation followed by more growth, not as strong. One of the problems in the postwar years, when you have an economy that is growing by 4 a year from 20 years, you get a lot of upward mobility, people Getting Better off and it seems to me that era of American History casts a shadow over all contemporary economic debate. Those who are old enough to remember those years have fixed that as the norm and it was not the norm. It was the exception. We agree trade is good and the china shop, the Us Manufacturing was real but small and geographically targeted. Katherine abraham, the impact of the china shop has had less than a one impact on the population ratio and mostly in the past but there is a risk to prosperity from both protectionism and reduced immigration and a risk to social are many from incitement of racial animosity. There is a risk from the reduction in dynamism which michael didnt talk about, people moving jobs etc. I would add the sharp decline in geographical mobility is another reason to worry about dynamism. We agree the value of work goes beyond economic utility to include dignity, purpose, etc. I strongly agree with michaels statement on page 135 the government needs to do more to advance Economic Opportunity to those who need it most. That brings me to four areas of disagreement. The first is to be antipopulist. Michael talks a lot about the need for limited government, a dim view of government bureaucrats etc. A straightforward fair for someone as freemarket as michael is. It seems to me you can think about this differently, takes two to tango. The government can provide insurance, human capital, the market can reward risktaking, innovation, hard work. Rather than seeing the two as opposed to each other i think of the role of the marketing government as being like the two arms you might put out as you balance your way, too much of one you will fall in too much of the other you will fall too. Im thinking about the way government activity can listen anxiety and fear of the future and boost risktaking. A conservative chancellor in the uk made a strong freemarket argument for socialized healthcare, you never have to worry about where your healthcare is coming from. I dont plan to get into that debate right here. I dont see what can be proposed. You can have a strong and active government and an open economy. It is a false choice between the two on both left and right is in some ways one of the biggest dangers we face. Dealing with political philosophy stuck in the era defined by your attitude towards government. What are the best institutions, what is the best blend. Rather than having pro antigovernment approach. Very often the government is wasteful and i will give one example of wastefulness that was true until the tax reform passed by donald trump. For every dollar the federal government spent on trade adjustment assistance to help displaced workers for every dollar we spend on that, we spend 25 in tax subsidies to elites and i would argue strongly, spending that kind of money, we shouldnt be spending it on elite colleges, we should be spending it on workers being affected by trade. No wonder people think for every dollar i get to help me adjust to trade shot, 25 are going to the elite. Michaels own chance shows from difference between pretax and transfer inequality levels, the government has been doing quite a lot for the inequality we saw. The second thing, i will be brief about these things, we are not in great shape. I would say one thing in particular, you can make an argument, i make an argument as someone who runs a project to help the middle class, the middle class hasnt been doing well as michael implies, it is how holding some growth, cumulative percentage change goes back to 1979 so all those warnings, what this does is shows the cumulative Income Growth for the top 20 , the blue line is the bottom 20 and the red line is the middle three which is how we define the middle class so 80 plus increase in Household Income, not the same people which is twice as much as we have seen in the middle of the distribution. That might speak to what people have, the data is from the Congressional Budget Office and include all taxes transferred and includes the value of healthcare. If you take out healthcare, the bottom 20 drops significantly. The reason the bottom 20 kept up the top 20 is the largest part of the story. That is the story in particular, government provided health care and health subsidies. Over the longer time period, the government has served the bottom 20 pretty well but 60 have not been as well served but i will say this briefly. From downward mobility, he talks about the quintile transitions. Im not going to enthusiastically cheer for downward mobility but i will say if you want more people rising into the top 20 it is a matter of math that people fill out the top 20 and i more troubled by the fact that 20 appear to be getting secure over time. So there isnt more movement into it over time, it is lower than in other countries, it is sticky in certain places but we should ask ourselves how it is those who are in the top 20 pass on the advantages to our kids and some of the ways we do that including the Higher Education system are blatantly unfair. Im not talking about that operation. The contribution towards downward mobility of inequality is somewhat greater than michael suggests. It is a different charge than the one on absolute mobility, the famous one in social science, showing chances of being better off than your parents, dropping from 90 of born in 1940. There are all kinds of issues with this chart to get into. What they do is say how much of that is being a result of lower growth because it has been lower growth for the distribution of that growth and what they show is what it would be like if you held inequality at the same level, dropped growth and what it would be like, they essentially show that more drop in downward mobility driven by a change in distribution growth rather than the amount of growth. That a distributional part of the story as well as growth. I want to make a couple point decks, to some extent you can choose your story and select the data. It is a longer discussion but i want to make the point this is cumulative percentage growth and what i have done is use a different data set. And in that time period, Pretty Healthy wage growth. If we use the median rather than average. Are we using average median, and and and there are 7 people who care about them. One is better for wages. I go back further, back to late 70s. I think i can you stagnant now i would like to say it is falling. A really nice drop. Not that any of these are right or wrong. Having these debates, to be hands above the table, why that year and not this year . Why are you only looking at men . There are women we havent noticed. To wage stagnation, we should be careful we dont choose our narrative and find facts that support them. I make two brief comments. If you cant read the whole book, read the exchange between Michael Olson and michael strain. I think about these issues and it is very possible. It depends on what people expect. What do they expect . How much wage growth did they expect and why . Because of the agenda, quantitatively michael makes a strong case but qualitatively when you look at people in qualitative work, they compare themselves to previous generation. And that may be the wrong thing to do. I want to talk about why we are drawn to these stories, we are trying to they wont get elected. Donald trump classic example. They brought it back to life. It was interesting to say it was broken. Media narrative, i interesting, pessimism danger is greater to the left than the right. More and more government investments, where does the money go . The government has done well in the last few years. It is closer to home. We should be honest something of an intellectual glamour of pessimism and polemicist him. The investable world his polemic. My hero said in the middle of Nineteenth Century it is thought essential any man who knows anything think ill of it. The study of people looking at book reviewers, some are negative and some are positive. The review is negative, much cleverer than the reviewers. And if in the policy think tank, to justify our solution, is very great indeed. And the share of public attention and get more people signing up. The incentives are strong. Which i agree with. It is reasonable and modulated and responsible but without loss of intellectual brilliance but rather the other way around. I congratulate him on his work. [applause] congratulations on a great book and great commentary. I want to give you a chance to respond to richard. Know. Do that again. Let me push you on one point. It seems in some of the arguments you are having with some of our friends on the right, there is a lot of traipsing carefully around the question of women. And even less carefully in the case of Tucker Carlson. Mister carlson described the entry of medicines the workforce as a disaster which is not an undercurrent but a statement. I wonder if you think you do that your self. There are places where you mentioned men had it worse. Populism has had it worse but theres not a lot of discussion what to make of that fact in some of the debates we are having the men are lagging while women are rising is one the cause of the other . Politics best understood as the difference between them . What do you make of the economic effect . I think i didnt want to get bogged down in discussions of to specific subgroups. Im here to bog you down. I want to focus on the broad picture. Since you are asking male workers who are relatively more educated have been doing fine. If you are a man and you did not graduate high school you are in bad shape and the opportunities available to you in the labor market are significantly limited. That is the minority of workers of course but it is still imperative that we have better Public Policy to help advance Economic Opportunity to those workers and you are also right that that group of workers particularly in the american heartland and rust belt states have been driving a lot of our current political current. They are not wrong. I am suggesting they are not wrong to think their opportunities are less then they would hope for. They are not wrong to think their opportunities are less then they could reasonably have expected when they were growing up but i think the conservative i take issue, the conservative response to this reality i think has been deeply disappointing. We had in the 80s 90s a debate about welfare reform in this country and conservatives got very accustomed to making the argument that low income africanamerican single moms should be expected to work, the argument that that was somehow beyond their capability will be on their ability given their circumstances in life was denying them agency, that there was ample Economic Opportunity if Public Policy was crafted to help them create it and the ability passed into law has the phrase personal responsibility in the title. Now when we are talking about white men in the heartland who dont have a College Education all of a sudden they are victims of a rigged game, victims of the elite, wall street alito but of china to free trade to enrich themselves, that has an is a rated them at their expense. The conversation acts like they dont have agency and are not able to take advantage of the opportunities they have. I find that to be extremely troubling. I also think the narrative on the right is wrong, we need better policy for those workers but there is ample Economic Opportunity for many of those workers more than the public debate would suggest. Finally i would say that i think they would respond better to a different message. The stagnant wage story is true for men, no one disagrees with that, there has been significant wage growth for women. Put them together you get a different story. Economically the rise of women has been hugely beneficial in terms of macroeconomy, the labor force, no one denies that. What is at stake is something about the fact that the capacity, some people on the right only focus on men. And good reason why that is wrong but you take seriously the idea that the capacity of men to be a breadwinner in a traditional sense significantly less than it was today. The economic requirements on women that there with a man is ethically less than it was but the expectation men have of themselves into a large extent the women appear to have of men is to have the breadwinning capacity so there could be a lag between the ability of men in the traditional role and apparently ongoing expectation not only on the part of men but also on the part of women that they should do so put a lot of men in a difficult position and that is the heart of many of the problems we are seeing. I want to open this up in a second to think about what questions you might have but one further related question. You begin with the premise that the American Dream is about economics and then you wonder why people complain even though the economy is doing fine. Me the complaint mean it is not about economics, not is fundamentally about it. That may be true. It is a complicated concept. A lot of the complaints are driven by the Great Recession which was an economic event. The recession was tremendously disruptive. Millions and millions of workers and household suffered enormously of a consequence of it. That disruption is the spark that let the populist fire we are still living through. This is part of the pattern. If you look at the last 150 years, look at 30 or 40 of the worlds leading democracies what you see is an empirical regularity which is a financial crisis is followed by a severe recession, you see an upswing in populist sentiment in those countries and a large increase and seats in the legislature held by populist candidate. The United States has said that pattern the financial crisis we experienced is much larger and stands to reason it would take longer for that system and theres other structural reasons why we have a president ial system and not a parliamentary system. I see this being driven largely by economics people experience life as participants in their communities. There are a lot of times of im open to the idea that there are things more complicated going on than that. Lets take questions. Microphone going around the room and please just tell us who you are and try to frame your question as a question. Lets start here. Thank you. Mike, if you can hear me. What is populism and how can it kill the American Dream . Populism is kind of a system of animosity in which the people are pitted against the elites, and, you know, that has different flavors in different historical contexts. I would argue theres more than one thread of populism in play in the United States right now but a defining characteristic is the people fighting against against the elites. How could it kill the American Dream because it can kill the American Dream in 2 ways. One way it can kill the American Dream is policies and a populist response to the perceived plight of the working class. Thats the policy enacted. If you look at the trade war, dampen export growth and hurt some of the stocks of the companies that are supposed to be helped by it and the most recent evidence suggests that the trade war has reduced manufacturing employment rather than increase manufacturing employment. So these policies are bad for American Workers. Bernie sanders also running a populist campaign, his economic agenda would be a disaster for American Worker and household and even though he would only get a small fraction, thats not a whole lot of solace in and of itself. I think that their policies also affect longterm prosperity in ways and i think the president s extreme animosity toward immigrants threatens the United States role for the destination of the best and brightest and talented ambitious people in the world to come. Thats a direct threat to longterm prosperity. The president s attacks on institutions and attacks on the norms of governance that are carried out on behalf of the people against the system threaten longterm prosperity by weakening those important institutions like the fed and by weakening the culture and norms of governance. Bernie sanders would have similar effects. He says that billionaires shouldnt exist. Thats exactly the opposite message. President of the United States should be rooting for more billionaires and not fewer billionaires. The president should not be sending message that success is punished and success is something to despise. So there are there are serious, serious risks from populism and the second way deeply damaging to the American Dream is the narrative precisely it is not true that the system is rigged and. It is true that hard workers pay off and wages and incomes arent stagnant and america is broadly upwardly mobile precisely because those things are true and if all people hear that they are false, they can dome aspirations, and reduce energy andhe since those things are false, if people work less hard and aspire to less economic will suffer. Its a double threat and not just the policies to be worried about even though they are deeply strongly. Can i disagree with and agree with that a little bit . There are certain aspects of the american political economy where we dont use the word rigged. Certainly work much more effective those in position of the power than others. You yourself talk about the Housing Market in the book and theres a strong case. I think the house is rigged in favor of those, et cetera, there are other examples of the Higher Education system and its complexity. Well informed and well educated. Its strongly in their favor. We cant discount the possibilities. Some of the populist anger, doesnt feel like its working for me in middle america, the median, kind of is working for all of the people like us. I dont think we can discount the possibilities untrue to that and that should create consensus where i agree that populism both in the uk and the u. S. , its antielite but also antiopen. Real distinction and not left and right. You see this closing in, dangerous and damaging for the things that michael said about immigration and protection and all of that and i think it both breathes and feeds on pessimism which is the argument here and this is where im going to go with with you. We have to take serious these problems because capitalism generalist, american capitalism runs on optimism. The reason you invest and take risks and education and start businesses because theres a sense that would pay off in the future. A future utility that would come from the investment or the risk you start to believe that it wont, why move, why risk college, why start a new business, if you cease to believe theres future. The real threat is not socialism is pessimism. Thats the reason we can try to find a consensus. Everything is not right. We have to disagree with the role of government but are we going to handcuff. One more question in the middle. Glad i got the other one. Its hard not to comment a little bit, michael, it sound like Mark Anderson impact news of independent journalists, sound like youre simply defending the status quo. A real other quick comment is all taxes, yeah, all taxes make prices go up not just tariffs, income taxes, property taxes, any tax that is you apply would eventually reach theat price tag and result in increasing prices so people say free trade, presentationism and thats bad because they make Consumer Prices go up but all taxes make prices go, not just tariffs. Thats something people overfocus on tariffs. One of the things i would mention this addresses mr. Reed. Have you ever heard of social credit store ch douglas out of britain and distributism and the idea was that its not that the economy is rigged but the defect that we have debtbase money system and that the problem is consumerism and the ability of people to buy whats purchased and that we need a debt free Monetary System not a debtbase Monetary System based on introducing new money into the economy, so its more of a monetary infrastructure problem which government could be involved into a point like you point out, have you ever looked at that aspect, distributism and social credit not to be confusing with chinese social credit. I would contend that its a monetary infrastructure problem and the inability of people to buy whats produced because theres a shortfall. So i am not just attempting to defend the status quo and let me agree with richard that there are obvious areas for improvement in Public Policy. I think housing is one of them, occupational licensing is certainly another one. I dont remember all the ones that you mentioned. Higher education, theres plenty of lowhanging fruit. In the book i devote a chapter to describing what i think are pressing problems facing the country and i devote a chapter discussing policy solutions that i think could help improve things, so my point is not to say everything t is perfect, the are no problems and and theres no need for any new solutions. My point is instead to say that the National Narrative about the issues is so completely disconnected from the underlying reality that there needs to be a corrective and because there needs to be a corrective doesnt mean that the status quo is perfect. It just means that there needs to be recontextualized. Well, we will end there, thank you very much. The book is the American Dream is not dead. Michael, thanks. [applause] now on cspans 2 book tv, more television for serious readers. Please welcome executive director megan paulson. Good evening, happy wednesday. How is everybody feeling . Great. Happy friday. Even better making sure you guys are paying attention. Well, welcome, my name is Megan Mcdonald paulson and new ec