I think we should get started. We are already five minutes over. Welcome. I am david howell. I will be stepping in for janet who could not make it because of family matters. And i will be introducing this conversation between eduardo porter, and exceptional columnist for the New York Times and stephen hill about steves knew brooke. In addition to being an old friend and colleague of janets im going to read this because i have a fiveminute limit. I am going to try to do this quickly. In addition to being an old friend and colleague i am a professor of the new school specializing in labor economics and social policy. This year i have the privilege of being here at the Graduate Center as an art fellow and as a list center visiting scholar. Advance Research Collaborative which eduardo is a board member. So this event is sponsored by the center here at cunys Graduate Center which janet directs. Pioneering the development of consistent Cross National data for the study of Income Distribution in poverty. It is a data center that serves a global community. Now i get to say what janet would not say which is under her leadership liz has taken up tooff to dramatically higher levels of prominence for the study of income inequality which is increasingly recognized as one of the most serious social problems of the modern era. And the reason most of you are here tonight. She has helped enlist the renowned english economist who long ago should have won the nobel prize has the president of the list board and played a central role in bringing paul krugman who did win the nobel prize to listen the Graduate Center is also a hugely influential New York Times columnist and colleague. Without a doubt one of the top researchers in the world on Global Income inequality and according to my students a fabulous teacher. And she helps put on great events like this one. So welcome. Eduardo porter and stephen hill. Ifhill. If you dont read porters New York Times column religiously every wednesday youre making a big mistake. On a variety of topics from income inequality to technological change and jobs to education and wages to the crazy american politics of global warming. If i like him so much perhaps they are not perfectly balanced. I am a new school economists after all. We are very fortunate to have stephen hill here to talk about his new book audio. Stephen is a senior fellow with the new america foundation. He is a veteran journalist and author of five bucks including the internationally praised europes promise comeau why the european ways the best hope in an insecure age. Which is selected as one of the top 15 books of 2010 by the globalist. Well, raw deal is an important and incredibly timely book and happens to be important and timely for me. I am here at the Graduate Center working on what i call a decent wage project funded by the Washington Center for equitable growth which aims to document a great demographic detail the spectacular growth and lost jobs. And consequently the decline in decent ones that we have seen sense in the post 1980 neoliberal policy are up a Big Questions are how to leave the us compared to five other large rich diverse countries in the translation of Economic Growth and decent jobs, what explains our decent Job Performance and what lessons can we learn from the recent experiences of canada, the uk, australia, germany, and france. In the earlier postwar golden age period economists could call for more growth and be competent that it would trickle down throughout the workforce and across the Income Distribution, but since 1980 has1980 has been virtually no sharing of Economic Growth. Has all gone to the top 10 percent and mostly to the top 1 . 1 percent. The republican president ial candidates continue in their kneejerk fancy to call for tax cuts. Whatever you think that the effectiveness of tax cuts we are also experiencing a decline in redistribution through social spending from the top to the middle and bottom. In some there has been a profound underlyinga profound underlying ideological shifts to free market fundamentalism which has led to policy and Corporate Governance choices that have dramatically weakened worker bargaining power. That is the vision that frames our project and what you will be hearing about. So for me, stevens book promises to be a tremendousa tremendous resource detailing at a granular level how this process has worked out while pointing the way to help workers can once again share in our nations productivity growth. Eduardo and stephen will now have a conversation about the book and the issues raised by it. I will join you in the audience. And at 730 sharp if not before i will return appear and help to manage the question and answers. For which we have been allocated 15 minutes until a 7 45 oclock. At that point steve will sign books starting with mine. Thanks. [applause] hello. Good evening. Thank you for the introduction. Steve has written up a really great impassioned book. He is offering us a technological dystopia that pushes hard against the libertarian happy talk that one hears so often from Silicon Valley about how technology will be great for all and deliver this fantastically prosperous world. It has a really strong proposition that i would like to read to you in a nutshell. Whata nutshell. What if smart machines and robots could perform every single job there is to do and sharing economy websites can deliver all the services and goods so thatthe human had to work in a job anymore. Who would reap the benefits of this . This is the question that he sets out to answer and he does so interestingly mixing in enormously detailed accounts of real people, some of which actually has struck very near home. I am a journalist. I make a living out of writing. You have got the story of this pulitzer prizewinning photographer that suddenly loses his job in San Francisco and has to resort to renting out bits of his own on air b b and driving people around via uber and renting out equipment and so if that is happening to journalists the world is going into a bad place. But my question is, here it is hard to tell how significant these different examples or these different dynamics happening in certain markets and with certain services, does this really look like the wave of the future on a massive scale . Maybe this is more of an exception. How do you feel about this becoming the norm . Well, you know, whenever you are trying to sift through huge amounts of data, stories, and project where we are today and where we will be ten years from now, 20 years from now, everyone has there crystal ball out. And no one knows who will be right. What i wanted to do was make it really clear what is at stake. Everyone can agree that we are about to go through a transformation of the economy, society, technology will be used in a way that penetrates into every corner of our lives in a way we never would have conceived. That will be wanting to put things into our bodies that will keep track of health, want to have our cars that drive themselves to my going to want on and on and on. I was looking at all of these different spreads of the dialogue in wanting to put it together into some sort of picture in which it was clear what is at stake. You know, myknow, my fear is that we are going to look back 20 years from now and say wow, we did not get that right. We did not put the right rules and regulations around the technologies that are coming in the companies who are pushing them to make sure that we end up with a society that works for all of us instead of just for a handful. Because you know if we have all of these unimaginable Labor Productivity increases , you know, who will benefit . We look at the last 30 years in fact, i was doing the radio show. A guaranteed minimum livable wage 25 or 30,000 a year, what would be wrong with that . We can all do our art and culture in these kinds of things. They have not even giving you a pay increase the last 25 years. The political system has not managed to harness the Economic System to make that happen. Think of the political system will somehow harness the Economic System in a way a way that will turn over a guaranteed livable wage without more struggle and more people getting involved in saying this is not right. You know, that is, you know, fondled mentally what i wanted to write about. I looked at people stories. Chrisstories. Christiane, and autoworker in tennessee working for Nissan Comeau working doing the exact same job as the nissan worker who has the nissan shirt on but he does not have the nissan shirt because he is working for contractor and doing in the exact same job for half the pay come as no job security. A lot of you have heard about google buses and such out in San Francisco. What you have not heard about is the drivers to drive those buses. A work for a contractor, and that contractor has told them, report to work by 5 30 am and youd it is not end until 9 30 pm. You dont see your kids when you wake up in the morning or come home at night. And so they do not violate this federal wage law about how many hours you can workaday the make and take four hours off in the middle of the day, and they do not live close enough to go home for those four hours. They do not allow them to get a 2nd job during this for hours. They have to hang around the parking lot, basically in endangered servitude. There are lots of stories about people like this as they are grappling with these trends in our economy that are for a lot of people not working. I have a quote from tina brown where she says, you know, a lot of my friends and i started doing the freelance thing, and for the 1st six months it is great. I lovegreat. I love the flexibility. A year later no one writes that story anymore. These are the things that are happening. In fact i just recently heard the craziest job, i dont know if you would talk about it in the book. This Service Called invisible girlfriend where people will be your the service will be your girlfriend and he can be very many people that are just texting you are earning pennies on the text to say, yes, i love you were lets meet up later, something that you can show your friends. I write about this, not that particular business but in this sharing economy, ondemand economy, peertopeer economy, you have gigs. Gig is just you contract with someone through the service whether is uber, lift, task rabbit, and they come up with micro games because the algorithms are getting so good at squishing jobs down into smaller and smaller bits. Now they have nano gigs. You go out into places like mechanical turk on amazon and others that you can do jobs or you identify photographs for 0. 5 per photograph. People doing searches and you type in a keyword to lay the signs that a word to a particular type of shoes. A handbag with brown. A handbag that is black. They are just assigning these different terms to photographs. Here ishere is the beauty, you can do it in your spare time. They call it monetizing your down time. Monetizing your down time. Time. Standing along starbucks, waiting on the bus, waiting at the dr. s office. Who needs that . You can sit there identifying photos. So these are the nano gigs that they have lined up. Here is the other thing to keep in mind. Uber and lift, the thing that they do not want to address is that if you work for a traditional job, go to the job and are paid nine to five and everything you do is paid time which includes meetings with the coworkers, lunch break or a break that you get to my, time talking in the hallway with your coworkers brainstorming ideas. That is all paid time. In time. In this new economy you are not getting paid for any of that. The time youre absolutely productive, producing that report, that image. It would be as if eli manning was paid only when he throws a touchdown pass. This was a profound transformation. This is how we should construct a work goingwork Going Forward because this is what they are saying. It is liberating you to have more flexibility. You get to work when you want. They try to say uber drivers have this flexibility, and there is a certain degree of truth to that. But i have interviewed a lot of drivers for this book. Those drivers who drive at the least are the happiest, the ones who have been doing it for a while and are therefore year, the do not last for a year. After you have gone through a few pay cuts which come on a regular basis you know, after a while you think ii am not making as much money as i did when i started. There are a lot of factors like that. I was interested in identifying the role of the technology. We have had bad jobs and the economy. The retail sector, enormous amounts of bad jobs like the starbucks employee who gets a shift. Shift the next day. I have seen pushback is the notion that the economy is causing a tremendous part of this bad work. The number of workers that are selfemployed have declined somewhat according to government statistics. There is a little bit of the pushback. And then there is the other thing, they are not like the great jobs. Not an ideal job but the job that is sitting is not an ideal job either. It is an economic advisor, the work for uber. I comment. I was not impressed with that report. They made more than hire drivers. Thirteen bucks for a caveat was hired by company. That suggests certainly not a fantastic job but in unraveling of the labor contract. I wasi was surprised he put his name on that. He was in the respected economist. This is a company that plays fast and loose with the facts. When he came up with a how much they get paid they did not take into account how much drivers spend or how much their expenses are to drive. Insurance and all these sorts of things and they did not take that into account at all. The other thing now is problematic is they gather the data struggling. And 50 percent of the drivers drive. If he paid that much more they would be driving a lot more than they are. So then in terms of the data , it is definitely the Us Government 1st of the study back in 2,005 and i feel like the way we are counting this is not capturing what is really going on out there. I will give you one simple example. The Unemployment Rate is coming down. In traditional economic theory and we are living in a time where the Unemployment Rate is coming down the Unemployment Rate has been coming down and holding steady. And so where are these workers going . They have to make money and live. They are becoming discouraged workers and going into the great economy. Even janet yellen testified they are not confident. So the statistics that i put out there, these things like household surveys, job surveys. It depends on people reporting a certain viewa certain view point. There is a sense that maybe they are not reporting accurately as we do see things like 1099 forms also gone way up like 20 percent. The number of people filing schedule c those are up by 20 . We will have have to see how it plays out over time. It might be more hitting certain areas than others. Hitting more than it is, but in San Francisco it is up quite a deal and really impacting the labor force. Some of the statistics we have seen on that, 47 percent of us jobs are replaceable over the next 20 years people have disappeared, but still you cannot just you know the response to that is technological change what other experts are saying, not this time, the ability of these algorithms in the technology to take a job and cut it down and little bites and hand big parts of that job off to different parts of technology in the human part is left to hit the button and they can just hire anyone to do it as a contractor. They do not need to hire a regular w2 because the thing that people dont know , if you hire a contractor versus a regularly employed w2 worker you get out of paying about 30 percent on labor costs because you dont have to pay for Social Security, medicare, healthsecurity, medicare, health care, injured worker compensation, unemployment compensation. Basically, vacation. And we have seen it in the book, i have an example of the Pharmaceutical Company merck had a plan in philadelphia. They sell it to another company. The company lays off all 400 workers, hires back all 400 workers and proceed to make the same drugs for mark that from mark that mark was making for themselves when they had these employees. What is a giga giga economy . It is not a matter of how big it is. It is the technology that is pioneering. If i an employer and you are an employer and diane employer and you are employer and i can hire all 1099 workers it is going to put pressure on you and becomes a race to the bottom. You cant not do it because everyone elses. At the end of the day the underlying story is what is Technology Going to do . The future with lots of uber drivers is not as bad as a future where every car is a google car and some Company Called google rinse out time in the car which seems to be within technological possibility. So the job constrained future which is a term you use in the book of the central theme and as you related, this is a fear we have had for a long time, at least since the industrial revolution. And it is always been to date proven wrong and you are suggesting there is evidence to suggest that this might be different. Had to push back a little bit if you look at Labor Productivity stats technology really increasing a lot you would be seeing Labor Productivity increasing robustly because they would be machines. And in fact that is not happening. That leads me to a little bit of skepticism. Is technology having a big bite . It is a healthy skepticism. We are not sure where we are on this will yet. Labor productivity is