>> so if states were the laboratories of democracy in the 18th century, ngo's are the laboratories of innovation? >> cities are now too. that's the only difference. the cities are just as much laboratories and democracies as the states are. mike bloomberg put up $100 million to build a new laboratory center to develop high-tech jobs. i don't know who gets the contract -- >> as a stanford alumni, i have to -- >> they are in competition for the mu, but the other point is it's a heck of idea and the way the world should work. i think it's wonderful. los angeles just announced its vast new consortium to have major buildings to have greater energy efficiencies and putting up solar power and how they were going to finance it, and it's the biggest commercial project the country has yet undertaken. they figured out how to do it. full disclosure. my foundation's climate change initiative worked with them, but we just provided, you know, technical help and support. they figured out how to finance it, so the city's can do a lot of these things, but the congress, at least, should not make decisions 245 makes those things more difficult. they should be empowering that and rewarding it and insent vising it. >> and it's an election day today, not in new york city, but certainly in many cities across the country, mayors are being elected or reelected in san fransisco, baltimore, philadelphia, houston, phoenix, and yet i don't think questions like this have been very central to the coverage in advance of even those local elections, so all be what you said earlier is credible, having been a governor certainly, that people expect governors and mayors to hustle business. that seems to not be central to the discourse around even local elections. how do we make that more fundamental? i know you're racing around the country to do that, and you're not a scalable resource, and almost an exhaustible one -- [laughter] how do we think about that dynamic? >> first i said i was wrong, and now i get to say i don't know. [laughter] i have ideas about it. when i was a governor, i really worked hard in the national governor's association and all these regional associations and education associations, and there were a lot of things we did when i was governor where arkansas was the first state doing it, first state to require counselors for kids in elementary schools. i was proud of that. i was always more proud when we were the second state to do something because it showed we were not too proud to learn. we were out there on the edge of learning, and one of the real problems is in education and in health care, i'll just use it up because they bear on the economy, is that a lot of the challenges america faces, for example, in providing health care at lower costs and higher qualities so we can afford to be competitive in other areas, a lot of the challenges are met by somebody somewhere, but the ideas don't travel. almost every challenge in american education is met by somebody somewhere, but the ideas don't travel. part of that is the complication when you have, in the public sector, a monopoly on revenues and customers and in the private sector where the status quo has more power, more resources, and more lobbyists than the future does, but one of the big challenges in the book without having an answer to just to do that. how do you make ideas travel? for example, ask yourself how many of you knew this -- what city in america has the highest energy efficiency standards for new buildings? answer -- the oil capital of america, houston, texas. why? >> which is why it's important who is elected mayor there today. >> yeah. because the then mayor who did it, bill white, was the deputy secretary of energy when i was president. he had been my friend a very long time, and i knew he knew a ton about oil and gas, but he also wanted to build a modern energy economy. he gets elected mayor of houston. the first thing he did was retrofit every home of the 20% of houstons who were homeowners who were at the lowest income, and then he had the highest new building standards in terms of energy efficiency of any city in north america other than vancouver, canada, the highest in the united states. he was reelected with over 80 president of the vote, and yet the idea still didn't really travel so well, although, they do travel better than you would think among cities, but we have to think about that in the united states because a lot of this stuff bubbles up from the bottom up. if you look at this book a wrote about in my book, i mentioned the next american economy by william talking about prosperity centers, we have to figure out how to have more of that, and then how people learn from each other on the basis of that. >> one thing i want to ask you about is not in your book, but came out yesterday. the census bureau announced a new draft methodology for how we calculate and assess poverty in the united states, and its early hypothesis from that new paradigm are that we have 49 million americans living in poverty, our highest absolute number ever, and more elderly-americans living in poverty than previously assessed largely because of higher out of pocket health care expenses because although the vast majority of older americans are covered under medicare, medicare only covers 80% of in-hospital expenses. the -- extensively, although still somewhat challenging given the absolute numbers of children living in poverty were lower than had been previously determined, largely because of chip and supplemental nutrition programs, chiefly free school lunches and breakfast. as you think about that new emerging data, how does that impact both what you diagnosed as challenges in the book, chiefly around social security, stainability, and medicare stainability, and also your kind of recommended prescriptions. >> well, first, the childhood poverty numbers are still appalling, but they are smaller. the chirp's health insurance program was -- that's what chip is, was started when i was president, and then expanded beginning, i think, in 2007. we had 5 million kids, i think there's now 10 million kids who can get health insurance under it. they will be main taped, and that number will be expanded assuming the health care reform bill is implemented, and that plus nutritional supplements like the school lunch program does lower the percentage of people who are in poverty in fact. what's happened to the seniors is that even though the social security checks go up more than the real cost of living exclusive of health care goes up for seniors. the cost of health care has gone up so much that it's really affecting older people who are on medicare, but as chelsea pointed out, 20% of their costs are not covered. if you're really poor and old, you get medicaid too, so what happens is especially since the states are busted now and are lobbying against raising the eligibility level for medicaid, what's happening is that this money is going up, the amount of money you have to pay out of pocket, is going up, and the number of older people who qualify for both medicare and medicaid is not going up to make the difference up. what i -- >> the states are not changing their medicaid -- >> yes. >> parameters. >> yes, and because of their budget problems they've got. for example, in 2007, 2009, at the recession, gdp is down 7.5%. people worry about going broke. health insurance profits went up 50%. five million americans lost their health insurance. #.5 million of them went on medicaid, so ironically, the private sector drove 3.5 million people to the public sector all the time bashing the public sector. the states didn't have the money to pay their medicaid mix, and the federal government increased, so what do i draw from that? i draw from that the conclusion that one of the best things about the so-called simpson-bowles commission, the bipartisan budget commission, is it represents not only savings in the social security program, but modest, $200 billion in a decade. that's a lot of money to you and me, but to the government budget, it's not, but they recommended to redesign in a way that channels more income to lower income seniors so that if we don't fix the health care gap problem, at least those people will have enough money to be lifted out of poverty again, and it can be done and still save money. >> one of the things that you say you believe in the book that doesn't go into detail is that the united states could actually move from spending 17.8% of gdp on health care to spending 11.8% of gdp on health care which is what france and switzerland approximately spend on health care. that saves us $187 billion a year. how would we do that? >> it would save the federal budget -- >> federal budget. >> it would save you $850 billion a year. that is, if we -- for every year the pugh charitable trust does a survey of countries, and they generally conclude america is 0th in the over-- 30th in the overall quality of health care. that's not fair. it's too low. what's true is germany and france are ranked at the very top, and it is true they get better health outcomes for spending less money. it's also true that even if you had a -- if you gave us more credit for being, for example, for having the longest breast cancer survivor rates in the world and being great at heart surgery, otherwise somebody else would be giving this talk tonight. >> thank you. [laughter] >> you still have to face the fact that we're not getting what we pay for, and it's being driven primarily by the way we finance health care and fee-for-service. chelsea used to work for mckenzie, so you can discount this, but both three years ago -- >> i didn't get the credit, so i'll take the mckenzie create. >> they issued a three volume study trying to analyze the differences between what we spend for health care in america and what are other rich countries spend, and they essentially concluded that the biggest deal was fee-for-service for medicine rather than an overall service program. dartmouth said that led to 40% of the american people getting health care that's largely more expensive than they should get and not the optimum care. second is the way we finance it with private insurance companies adding to the costs of of not just the insurer, the company, but also the insured, and if you have insurance on the job, then it's more paperwork for the medical providers, for the employers, and for the insurance companies themselves because that adds $200 billion that we wouldn't pay if we had the administrative costs of any other country, and the third thing was we pay more for medicine than anybody else, but if we bargain more, we could do that. that's about 75%-80% of the difference, and then there's the biggest chunk left, about $150 billion is because we have higher rates of diabetes than any other country in the world where there's consequences which is why childhood obesity is the number one health concern in the country in my opinion, and then there's hundreds of other little things that make up about 5%. >> given we're almost out of time, if you wanted to ensure people left here with one clearing call to action or sort of one fact that would help lead to more fact debates as we move tomorrow from the election day towards the next election day and november, what would it be? >> if i can only say one thing, everyone should be involved where they live and try to support that does bring government and ngos together to do what we did at the cgi america meeting. start with where you are. this is still the biggest economy on earth. as much as i worry about the retirement of the baby boomers, and i'm the oldest one of them, i worry about this. feel good about this -- ten years ago when i was about to leave the presidency, my then hometown of little rock, arkansas, had a terrible tornado that ripped up a little community, and an all african-american community was virtually leveled where i worked for 20 years to help. at the end, i have a dinner with 20 people, a barbecue, back when i could do that -- i barbecue with 20 people i went to high school with. besides me, only two others who finished college, besides me, only two made more than $50,000 a year, but their number one goal was their retirement was going to imperil their children's ability to raise their grandchildren. whenever you give up on america, remember that. it's still a good country. people make decisions based on what they know. now, in spite of all of that, our average work force age is still younger than europe and japan. the other long standing wealthy places. canada may be a little younger than us, but not much. it's easy to start a small business here than any other place. we have laboratory supports for research and development that most countries don't have. we have a lot of indigenous strengths here. we have better, sophisticated venture capital networks and other things, so -- and we know what we need to do, and there's plenty of money out there to bring the economy back. we can figure out how to unleash the money in corporate treasuries and in banks, so i'm not pessimistic, but they're doing this dance in washington now over the same old thing we've been debating since we were told in 1981 that government is the problem. it suspect. i mean, it may be, but it's not the only problem, and it's got to be part of the solution, so my view is what -- if i could tell you to do one thing, it would be, you know, bloom where you're planted. start and come up with something to support in your community and the state, and use that as evidence to try to change, to break the log jam in washington because there's not a single -- one of the most important points in this book is i go through all of these other countries that are now the -- are now ahead of us in certain agencies, faster broadband download speeds, more modern infrastructure, higher percentage of young people with college degree, less income inequality, faster job growth, lower unemployment -- there is not a single example on planet earth of a successful country that got there on an anti-government strategy which said the most important thing you can ever do is never tax somebody of bill clinton's income group never, ever again. not one. of the 33 countries, we rank 31st in the percentage of national income going to taxes. mexico and chile are lower than we are. we are ranked 25th in national income going to spending because of all the money we had to come up with to avoid the financial collapse, so i want you to change national policy, but we have to find a way to break the psychology, and i find i'm happier if i have something to look forward to in the morning so i just don't gripe all the time, and so if you asked me one thing you can do, make something good happen. go hire somebody. i have a friend in a company called axium, the largest mass mailing company in the country. if you get sports illustrated every month, you got it from them and most other magazines. on november 1st, they challenged every company in the united states with 50 or more employees to hire one more person. they said if everybody, even wal-mart just hired one more person, everybody with 50 or more people who could afford to do it, there would be another million people working within a month, and it would change the psychology of america. just do something. you will be able to tell the members of congress what you did and ask them to follow suit. >> well, thank you, all, very much. i hope you'll do that, and buy the book, thank you. >> thank you. [applause] [applause] >> for more information on president clinton's book, "back to work" go to knopfdoubleday.com. >> now for the 11th annual national book festival on the national mall here in washington, biographer, justin martin presents his book, "genius of price: the life of frederick olmstead." >> i'm the editor of the "washington post," and we're proud charter sponsors of this festival since the beginning 11 years ago. i'd like to say on behalf of the library of congress, welcome to the festival, and we hope that everyone's having a wonderful day celebrating the joy of reading here in the national mall. before we begin, i want to say that pavilion's presentations are filmed by c-span for airing on booktv, so be mindful of this as you enjoy the presentation. in addition, please do not sit on the camera risers on the back of the pavilion, and please silence your cell phones. thank you. the author with us today is fabulous. his name is justin martin, author of the widely heralded biographies, alan greenspan and ralph nader, both of whom i think would be interesting dinner guests -- [laughter] at the same dinner. [laughter] i couldn't think of better figures, and he said after he wrote the greenspan book, he didn't want to do anymore economists, and his agent said you can carve a career with economists, so he went with raffle nader. he was chosen by the new york times book review is one of the notable books of 2000. nader, icon published in 2002, is the definitive biography of the consumer advocate and paren yell presidential -- perennial presidential candidate who sometimes leaves messages on my voice mail asking the post to cover one thing or the other, and he also played a controversial role in the disputed election of 2000. justin became one of the go-to experts to explain nader appearing on c nan and other -- cnn and other television shows, and also in the 2006 documentary, "an unreasonable man." his latest biography is about a less controversial figure. "yen -- "genius a place" is about an architect who designed central park and 50 other green spaces around the country. he was a sailor, scientific farmer, journalist, abolitionist, and civil war hero, a life worthy of the careful illuminating justin martin treatment. justin is a former staff writer at fortune magazine and wrote widely for such publations like "newsweek" and "money," and he seems so have been destined to write the current book on olmstead like he was the architect, which was olmstead's greatest achievement. with that, i say, please welcome justin martin to the stage. he will be signing books from 4-5 p.m. as well. [applause] >> thank you for the nice introduction. it is nice to here at the national book festival. i'm here as well as being an author, but here as a fan. i had a really great day seeing different speeches. it's been really fun. my book is called "genius of place: the life of frederick law olmsted." first, i'll describe the path he took in becoming a landscape architect, and then i'll describe his greatest designs in the context of how all the various aide dis he traveled down and the career experience, how this informed his most masterful design, and then there's time for questions. he was born in connecticut in 1822, a pretty prosperous family. his father was a dry goods merchant, and as was the hat in that era, olmsted was sent away for schooling. he entered into a series of arrangements with poor country parsons. they were besieged and beset. they had their par soggage duty, many of them running small farms on the side to make extra income leaving little time for their third role as educators. olmsted was mischeefl -- mischievous as a boy. he wandered around setting traps for quail, wandered around in the woods, got very little schooling, but got an perks for landscape, particularly the landscape of connecticut. when olmsted was 14 years old, he got a terrible case of poisen sumac that preed into his eyes. into this point, he contrived to get a letter from the doctor that indicated he no longer needed to go to school. he was delighted, but this meant at a very young age, he needed to find a profession. now, the first thing he lit upon, it kind of made sense, and it was ill ledge call. he wanted to be a surveyor. that's a profession available in this era at least to someone with limited formal schooling, but