To the conference this morning. Held under the under the auspice of common good and columbias center on and society. Nearby is philip howard, founder of common good and a senior fellow of the center. So were linked together. Hes a principal organizer of this conference with its theme reempower human Agency Agency as economists come to recognize for work to be meaningful, it has to working people some degree of. Not the mechanical work of in neoclassical economics. Without that the workers suffer, as Richard Sennett argued in his book of some years ago, the culture of the new capitalism. Philip howard has been making another point, one yet not absorbed, i think, by economists. The absence of human agency into bureaucracies prevents them. The bureaucracies from generous getting the services needed by the public. Here it is in the case of sennett, it was the workers that were suffering here. Its the consumers and producers who are suffering because theyre not getting good service. As philip has argued. Well, im looking forward to this discussion and i turn the dice over to philip. What should i do. Just get help getting out of it because somebody is coming over. Well, thank you. And its its an incredible honor to be able to collaborate with ned. I live for reflected glory. And so being around the smartest economists in the world is a good way of getting it. And i encourage you all to read neds new memoir, my journey an economic theory. I found it charming. And even though i was a student of economics. I learned lot about economics from reading it. I also want to thank all the panelists from todays forum. Thank cspan for covering it, and thank you all for coming participate. Format today is for four panels of speakers, each limited to 7 minutes. Back and forth. And then at the end of panel q a with the audience. The one condition for the speakers and the audience is you must use the microphone because. Were on camera, so otherwise it wont. What weve captured now, the title of the forum is the admission is re empowering agency, which has a suitably academic to it. But the hip hypothesis today has revolutionary implications that the legacy bureaucracies and legal structures mainly built since the 1960s, prevent officials and citizens alike from making sensible choices. This hypothesis, not antigovernment but pro good government. Its about empowering officials to do their jobs and to make sensible choices to make tradeoffs. So as you listen the speakers, i hope youll ask whether america has with the best of intentions, nonetheless backed itself into a dead end alley. And if so, the solution probably. The only solution is, a Major Overhaul of the operating machinery of modern government. So with that, ill turn it over to the to the moderator, the first panel wholl introduce us and try to keep us in line. Many barbara, are from the wall street journal editorial. And ned, i mean many after. Well thanks once more to everyone for joining us today to discuss the topic of why nothing in our life seems to and potentially at the end see if we can choose a few solutions to the problems. The first member of this panel of course, is philip howard, who is the of this event. The reason were all here. Philip is the founder and chairman of common good and thats an organization dedicated to exactly questions of how to promote good governance. The author of several books, including recently not accountable, which deals with the problems of Public Sector unions. And i had the pleasure of interviewing philip recently about that book for the. Our next panelist is jennifer brick. Mortazavi lee, whos the director of the center for governance, the university of pittsburgh. Focuses on selfgovernment to, particularly in eurasia and, central asia, and recently published a book called informal order and the state of afghanistan. Our next panelist is yuval levin, who will be joining us virtually. Hes the of the social, cultural Constitutional Center at the American Enterprise institute. His most recent book is called a time to build and deals with how institute can contribute to social flourishing. And finally, we have joining us, paul romer, who is an economist at New York University and of the 2018 nobel prize in economics. He focuses on how technology and also social structure can help promote progress in society and is also the founder of the charter cities initiative. Each one of these panelists will give you a short presentation and then well have a nice dialog and then time for q a after. Would you like to get a started . Philip. Thank you. Thank you. My 7 minutes now starts so. So my focus of this talk is not on public policy, but on public corporations. How things get done or they dont get done. And in our society, year after year, widely recognized problems just arent being fixed. For example, it was disclosed that 37 schools in the city of chicago had not. One student who is proficient in reading or math. Health care in america costs percent to 100 more than in other developed countries. Worse results. It also suffers from severe morale problems, permitting a major infrastructure in this country can take a decade or longer. Ive come to the conclusion that the legal labyrinth to permit an interstate transmission line is actually legally impassable. There are too many jurisdictions and too many departments within those with inconsistent goals. Homelessness in big cities is more or less literally out of anyones control. No one seems to have any vision of what the authority is, what what the facilities needed to deal with it. So every years or so, voters elect new political leaders who promise change. We can believe in, or to drain the swamp, but not changes. The politicians tend to talk about policy, but all the problems i just described are problems, not a policy or even of leadership. Their failures of execution and, the main cause of failure, i believe is the accumulation of legal and bureaucratic controls really over the last 50 years diverts and prevents people from making the sensible choices. So, for example, doctors and nurses spend the day doing guesswork. Teachers are weighed down by bureaucratic mandates and lack the Authority Even to maintain order in the classroom. Principals are shackled to Union Collective bargaining agreements and lack the basic of management, such as deciding who whos a good teacher and whos not. Infrastructure permitting, basically a perpetual process machine, clear lines of authority to make. There is this tendency of systems, and this was true all forms of government through history to take a life of their own. They need to be periodically cleaned, cleaned out and, cleaned up. That hasnt happened in our society in memory. But i argue that theres also a terminal flaw in americas public operating philosophy. We changed how we governed after the 1960s. We did it for the best of intentions because we woke up to the abuses of racism and gender discrimination, unsafe cars, etc. We needed to change our values, and we did. But the legal experts at the time wanted to avoid any abuses of authority in the future. So they rebuilt the operating machinery of with the explicit of avoiding human authority. So thick rule books would prescribe one correct way to do things properly. For example, 4000 rules on worker safety where the rules were not possible, officials would have to demonstrate correctness of their decisions and procedures. So the teacher had to be prepared to demonstrate in a hearing whether johnny, through the pencil first, for example, public supervisors must, by objective evidence any negative comment that they put in a personnel file of an employee. As a result, 99 of federal employees get a fully successful because no supervisor to go through that hassle. And last just to make sure nothing unfair ever happens. Any aggrieved person can claim their rights were violated and have a separate proceeding. Where the magnifying glass not on the common good or or the necessary tradeoff but whether it might have anything have been done differently or better for the aggrieved person. Public paralysis is the natural and inevitable effect of all of these legal controls, and thats reason enough to remake the system. But the philosophical error underlying this also has to change. Freedom is not, in fact enhanced by shackling authority. Authority provides the framework which actually defines things and protects our freedom. So, for example, the teacher lacks authority to order no in the classroom is free to learn if the universe city president lacks the authority to enforce boundaries of civil discourse. Then the students and professors no longer feel free to speak what they feel is the truth. If an official lacks the authority to give a permit for transmission, then citizens dont get the benefit of renewable energy. If the judge lacks authority to draw the boundaries of reasonable lawsuits, then everyone goes through the day tiptoeing and looking over their shoulder fear that anything they do might someone. Ive written a draft paper for this forum, which weve handed out. Its called the architecture daily freedom four, which im soliciting comments, and so i hope you will read it and and tell me what you think in this. I argue that america must rebuild the public operating system in a way that reempower officials and citizens alike to take. The goal, again, is deregulation, but restoring human. And i argue that whats needed is a principles based framework. More like the constitution version in which law and regulation are activated by people on the spot taking responsibility instead of a thousand page rulebooks and nearly endless proceedings, our protection in the system is accountability and, checks and balances. Judgment exercised by other people with response ability. So i believe and this the hypothesis for the forum that the current operating framework of america is designed to fail the wreckage. Us not public failure, but cynicism alienates an and almost a law of physics of growing extremism. As you listen to the speakers, i hope youll ask yourself whether you think this system can be tweaked. I think it can be. I think it would take 10,000 lifetimes to make sense of it. I think it must be replaced because its premise is to avoid the one essential element for an effective and moral society, which is human responses ability. Again, thank you all for coming. Here. Well, thank you very much. Its just a real honor be here. And i want to thank philip and his team for organizing such a beautiful event on such an important topic. And i think, you know, very introduction. I think many of you are wondering what the scholar on central asia is doing here. So let me be very brief. Ive worked in the federal government and i worked on issues of, foreign aid, foreign policy, and ive witnessed over the past 20 years how efforts to build good from the top down havent. Now, regardless of, your feelings on foreign policy, i think weve all been quite inspired by what weve seen in ukraine the past year. And theres a story there i want tell that youre not hearing when all of us know, these famous towns and cities in ukraine from ear pin to kharkiv to odessa. These are places now burned in our like buka. But one of the things that we havent heard, we hear the story of the ukraine is why why have the ukrainians been so resilient in their efforts to fight the russians . Well, in 2014, the government of ukraine after the maidan revolution made an important decision to radically decentralize governance down to the local level. This transformed governance dynamics that country. So when expected so many people ukraine ethnic to side with him. He was surprised to find many city councilmans mayors communities rallying their communities in support their cities. This is centralization of power giving people the right to retain 60 of their tax revenues radically, transform the way people viewed their communities at radically transformed identities. It made fight for their cities in their towns. We hear about zelensky, but in ukraine whats so important are communities. I saw for 20 years firsthand how United States failed in afghanistan. But what you may not hear in the headlines when we talk about corruption and malfeasance is the fact that over 20 years, not a single Afghan Community had the right to elect a mayor, a city councilman or woman, a governor a district governor, provincial governor. You it. At the local level, all authority came from the top. The United States made a massive mistake. 20 years ago when it recreated an old Constitutional Order that resurrected old soviet legacy institutions, Central Planning all financial at the local level was transferred to the center afghans lost hope because they couldnt fight for the communities in the way that they wanted to. They believed in democracy, but that hope in democracy was dashed by a centralized system that didnt take into account their agency. Now, what the lessons here for the United States, theyre huge ones. We look at Community Issues in our country that are struggling. Look at my center, center for governance and markets at the university of pittsburgh. We do research around the world in the United States, included on bottom up social political processes to understand how people Work Together to solve, how they Work Together to cocreate things. And often were doing work on an indian reservations and. So much of their agency that tribal sovereignty entails has been taken away, not just over decades, but over centuries. Proper rights, fundamental rights to criminal issues are no longer in communities. We look at Civil Society in the United States. We talk so much about whether government should be big or small. Were not talking about the operating system. So we may agree that government can work to help solve social problems, but government lacks the tools to do this. The Civil Society that we have all too often out indigenous forms of local authority, creative problem solving through top down social services. We agree that there is a need to have these social services. In fact, i would argue america is actually far more united these issues right now than it is at any time in recent history. But we have huge debates over how and enough debates over how to change this. Not enough Solutions Everyone wants to criticize, but communities Work Together to cocreate solutions. This is one way to help overcome this deeply felt alienation. You know, economies summit. I dont want to get too much into the world of economists today because im in such esteemed but behavioral economists talk about something called the ikea effect. And this is the idea that you something more that you build yourself. Economists call this a cognitive bias that we value something more, that we build ourselves. And this idea that we coax that people in communities have capabilities to solve is so overlooked in our desire to build. And in the Public Sector. Politicians talk about the most efficient solution. But whats often overlooked in, i think, the most pressing crisis that we have in front of us right now is, a legitimacy crisis. We can look for efficiency, but we may not find it. And all of the Efficient Solutions in the world that from the top may not matter if none of us believe in the system that were working in. And so legitimacy issue may come at an efficiency tradeoff. But whats more important is us together allowing people the platform and, the opportunity to Work Together to creatively solve problems. So a lot of my work inspired by another nobel prize economist who passed away not long ago, Elinor Ostrom and ostrom deeply in this desire. She in her empirical studies around the world looked the way that people not only rules and enforce rules and often this third way, neither states nor markets is so this Community Approach is never taken seriously by policymakers who are looking for this efficient. The silver this efficient outcome that is so elusive. So if we think about legitimacy first, if we think about putting people first and empowering to solve problems, i think do so much to help so many of the legitimacy issues that were facing together as a society. Thank you. Is is yuval online. Should i go next . Yep. Well, thank you very much, philip thank you for the opportunity to participate. Thank you for bringing together this extraordinary gathering. Id very much hope to be there in person and plan to and couldnt in the end. And philip gave me the chance to do this and im grateful for that. The subject were taking up is really enormously important. And i think the way that its been up, these two opening remarks is powerfully and valuable in brief comments of my own, i to propose just one more factor for thinking about why human Agency Responsibility have become such a challenge and how that relates to dysfunction of some of our governing institutes, prisons and other key institutions in society. And that factor is trust and a central facilitator. Every social interaction, every of formal and informal power, a free society. Our kind of requires enormous amounts of trust. And i wouldnt want to suggest that weve lost it all. We have a lot of trust in our fellow americans. We exhibited day in everything we do, but we have seen our supply of it diminish in recent decades in some dangerous ways. And want to offer just a few thoughts about why i think has happened, how it affects capacity for agency and ultimately for living together as a free people trust. In one sense, simply put, is a sense that another person or group of people or institution wont let us down, that it will meet our expectations that it live up to its commitments. That seems on the one hand simple we take it for granted. But its not simple because expectations are and commitments are no simple matter in a free Society Expectations and commitments are often unstated, informal. We talk a lot about freedoms and choices and rights and even agency, but those all assume very high level of confidence in other people. A free society is one where people dont have to be forced to do the right things becaus