new owners who we are excited to have on board here and on behalf of the booksellers. so welcome to politics & prose in thank you for being here for supporting this bookstore, supporting our event series. if you are new here to the bookstore, outside of august and december we do events every night. see you can follow us. ..

he will present the book, tell us why he wrote it and then we will open it up the second half of the hour to you for questions what we ask as we get the audience microphone here in the center aisle is the one microphone we have this evening i know it can be difficult getting there with a crowd of this size since we are taping and keep the talks audibles for those of us here and questions of the microphone but we do encourage your questions and input. after the q&a, who will sign books appear at this table. his books are for sale in the store and so but again, we just

want to welcome you and say thank you for being here and for done peck. he's a national award winning writer and a features editor at the atlantic and she covers the economy and american society. and actually the september issue of the atlantic, which is out now and also available here for sale features a cover story by don can the middle class be saved it's an essay adapted from this book and also i'd like to say a quick thank you for your the atlantic further help promoting the season for supporting bonn and his work and in this particular event. so, pension is about the enduring impact the the great recession will have on american life they've been deeply impacted and subsequently are being and will continue to be altered, transformed those

working dynamics, personal identities have been turned on their heads and likely will stay that way in the past several years in other words will remain in the near and distant future. the elite and the rest widens and the concentration of the wealth her further hall of the middle class and they suffer from the same raft and they have recovered and have always remained shuttered. our national identity is once again shifting. with historical contexts by comparing this recession with collapses of the years passed he reunites the call for the reinvention for the new civic duty and public action. so thanks again for joining us and it is a pleasure to welcome to politics and prose to discuss this book don peck. [applause] thanks, mike, there was a great introduction. i feel like i should just take questions right after that. i live about ten minutes away

from politics and prose and after the years i've been to countless the talks but this is my first book on this side of the microphone, so it's likely some real for me, but i will do my best. thank you all for coming. i want to talk about how this book came about. so as mike said i'm the features editor of the atlantic, and i spent a lot of my time trying to find big stories or cover stories, and if you know the atlantic at all, one of the features of it is that we write a very long series and they take a long time to report their deeply reported, they take a while to incubate so one of the pleasures and challenges of the job is trying to look for pieces that won't appear for six or nine months that will feel deeply considered also timely and relevant. and i covered the economy among other things, and so when we have the initial financial crash in 2008, you know, it just

wasn't even possible to predict what the next nine months what look like. as we all remember things fluid we couldn't even predict next week. by the time the spring of 2009 and arrived after t.a.r.p. and the first stimulus, the economy stopped its free fall, the market was rebounding and i feel all of us certainly i did brief a kind of sigh of relief. but i was trying to think ahead to stories for the fall and the winter and so i was talking quite a lot to the labor economists and economic historians and students of other major financial crashes, and what i found is that really all of them were sounding the same note. we were prematurely breathing a sigh of relief. and they were saying that actually where things had been fluid, the next six months, nine months, 12 months, 24 months more were likely to be quite

predictable. the labor are it was likely to recover incredibly slowly. the economy was likely to take years to mend. and then when i started reading history of other long slumps deeper into american history and talking to sociologists about them, it became apparent to me that as the society's stewing long periods like this one, the change in many profound ways. and so i decided rather of an assigning pieces of wanted to start writing about this phenomenon, they struck me as important, and it struck me as important to try to identify them as quickly as possible for people so that we could understand them and think more intelligently about recovering. well, two years later after the two cover stories and now a book, i'm sorry to say that in my opinion the next year or two or more are still quite

predictable, at least if we don't significantly shift our public actions, our public policies. we are not, in my opinion, yet near the end of this period, and if we stay in such a period of weakness for another two or three years or more, i think we will begin to see many of the social changes that we can see now we will see them begin to become much more pronounced so what is "pinched"? it is part of a history, i look in some detail in the 1970's, the 1930's, the 1890's, different periods that in some ways recall our own, and i detail how the life changed within them, and how we got out of them as well which is the important lesson for us. in part it's quite a lot of reporting from around the country on different people,

different places, different class is because this recession and the recovery such as it has been has been felt very differently in different parts of the country by different people, and i think that holds again important lessons in thinking about how to recover. in part of the generational study, you know, one thing that's clear from the past slumps is up and coming generations change profoundly in the periods like this one. i spend a lot of time among the the millennials generation and the people behind them talking to them about how they were changing, how they felt their life prospects for changing, how the political beliefs were changing and so on. so overall, it's kind of an attempt to assess how this period very broadly is changing the places we lived, the work we do, our family ties, our marriages, our politics and for some of us even who we are.

so that's kind of what the book sets out to do. in addition and importantly, it sets out to try to begin to make some recommendations about how we can recover from this period faster and stay in the u.s. economy more strongly for the future. so that's a lot of things, and i can't talk about all of them tonight. we can cover some in the q&a. but i would like to do is try to distill things down to three main messages from the book with a few illustrations and then take some questions. as a kind of three messages from the book. one is the periods like this one, slumps that are deep and long have enduring consequences. we think recessions as timber, jobs go away and come back, they go back up, but deep recessions

to lead society some ways permanent so substantially for the worst a change generations and communities, the change family's in ways that are not quickly or easily reversed. so, because of that, because many of the changes we are now beginning to experience in the last decades, many of the most significant consequences of the great recession are still ahead of us. the second main message from the book is this recession has also kind of tumbler early accelerated some very deep economic forces that were already transforming our society. most significantly the hauling of the middle class. and in that sense in some ways it has given us a preview of where our society is heading any way and who is leaving behind, understanding that i think it is critical to thinking about not just how we can bring unemployment down but how we can

build a stronger society in the decades to come. my final message from the book is that we can recover faster. i think we are seeing a disturbing amount of fatalism right now among many members of media and many members of congress, and we should not be fatalistic about this period. we do probably face a long slog but there's a lot we can do to recover faster. we just are not doing it said the three main messages with me go back through them and provide a little bit of detail. first come on the enduring consequences in the periods like this one. life changes in countless and surprising ways i think during the slump. people sleep more, the date less, they spend more time at home, the drive less and more slowly which tends to reduce the birth devotees and overall

mortality. something that has happened in this recession. skirts famously lengthen come and lady gaga notwithstanding pop songs become more earnest, complex, romantic and less sexual in almost every aspect of life people become more personally conservative. now many of the things i talk about our ephemeral. they go away as soon as the strong growth returns and recovers but the deep slumps lead more enduring marks on the families and the communities in places we lived. i talk about all of that in the book. i talked about how suburbs and the excerpts in some of the former middle class meccas of the loss vegas and phoenix, tampa are changing profoundly, and i think permanently in the week of this recession. let me focus here on how the millennials are changing because this is one of the most important kind of enduring changes that we are already

seeing from this program and are going to continue to see. when i began reporting for the magazine story that led to "pinched," i really expected that a young people would bear some of the latest scars from this recession. they are younger and they don't have a lot of personal responsibilities so there are a few bad years. but in fact when you look at history and when you look at the ample scholarly research that's been done on the subject, it is just the opposite. the first few years in the job market are crucial to establishing the career tracks and life trajectories of the young people coming and people who struggle, coleworts and generations who struggled early because the bad economy to get stuck in bad jobs or can't find work at all never fully recover. they not only start out behind, but according to a good research

by the yale economist, lisa,, ten, 20, 30 years later they haven't caught up to where they would have been if they came out in more bountiful times. they get stuck in low prestige jobs and professions and claim more tightly to their jobs. they don't switch jobs as often which is really how one increases earnings particular clearly in one's career. about two-thirds of the lifetime income growth after the inflation usually occurs in the first ten years of the career. so this recession stretches you know, three, four more years, a lot of people are losing the opportunity, and acquiring a stigma of under achievement that's going to be really difficult to shed. now, those economic conditions, and that kind of lifetime economic problem is a complex

particularly when thinking about the millennials generation. on the eve of the recession, the millennial generation was arguably the most audacious in american history of the highest self-esteem, higher material expectations than any other generation of similar age. and, you know, this is a generation of people who as children were told they are special, they can do anything they want to commend the collision of that attitude and outlook with this economy has been painful to watch. when the recession began, a lot of millennials quite understandably didn't really realize what was happening to them. many moved back in with their parents after graduation, many of them had to do that, they couldn't leave home but many did it because they thought they could simply wait the recession now. the term for unemployment became rather, it acquired some cultural currency among

particularly 20 something college graduates, but as i reported on the millennial over the past couple of years, i found not surprisingly that those attitudes, you know, are changing, millennials are beginning to probably change as a result of this period. economically we are seeing some of the same carrier conservatism now that visas describes in the past generations, job tenure among the millennials spiked far more than it has for older workers. in a recent survey asked what did they want to, whether they would prefer to switch employers throughout their career or stay for the entire and the overwhelming majority said they want to stay with the year to the to their employer the majority of their career. and more important than that, the millennials are beginning to, well, they are not beginning

to feel, they are -- they are seeing their entire lives to on hold. i spoke to a young attorney in d.c. who graduated from law school in 2009 and had been able to find work as a lawyer after months and months he was working at barnes and noble and finally found a job in the federal government didn't make use of his degree and was worried he would never be able to use it. he was living in an efficiency with a roommate. his parents were in machinist and a secretary and he said by the time my dad was 23-years-old, she had a house, he has a wife, he had kids. these things have been pushed back so far i can't even see them coming and that attitude i think it's become more and more pervasive with the 20 something. they feel trapped increasingly in a perpetual adolescents from which they simply cannot

seascape. it's interesting when you look at the political beliefs of the 20 something today, those, too, are changing radically. it shouldn't say radically, they are changing significantly. this was already a liberal generation that we see in the survey data now is the 20 some things are becoming more liberal in principle, becoming more supportive of the support for the poor, more cognizant of the world to is in life but at the same time they are becoming more skeptical that the government can actually be trusted to competently carry out good policy. this, too, is not a surprise. it's exactly what happened to the prior generations who came out in deep slumps in the 70's and 80's and before, and those characteristics in the past have been stayed with those courts to the cocoa ports for decades afterwards -- cohorts for

decades after. i read the millennials to have to move, and stay with their families. good news for the site and both parents and their adult children have at times said that they've grown closer, they appreciated spending time together. but it's been a pretty complex relationship to say the least. you know, psychological research shows that while parents are more than willing to give financial support to struggling adult children, they actually prefer to spend their time with children who are already succeeding perhaps because it flatters the parents more. when we look -- when we look at japan, which is a very interesting case, 20 some things began to live at home quite a lot more than they used to beginning in the late 80's and

early 90's. just before japan's to decade-long slump began. and at first, people were doing that by choice. they were doing it because they have artistic ambitions frequently, they were rejecting the kind of salary lifestyle that characterized their parents come and in many ways -- i mean, there was a lot of criticism at the time but they were glamorized for doing that. but what we see is as more and more 20 some things had to move home and that they couldn't move out because the economy remained weak for years and years, social attitudes towards the 20 some things changed remarkably. all traces of a clamor went away. one term that describes the 20's and things living at home to the is parasite singles, and 20 some things today are blamed widely in japan for everything from low birth rates to lower economic

growth. so, i think you will be interesting to watch how social views of the millennials change over the next few years, and how our hawken attitudes change as well. again, if we don't recover more quickly. i do want to stress that not all the changes underway for the millennials are bad. some are merely transformations. i don't think the political change and political views are necessarily bad for the 20 some things. i do cents a return to thrift in this generation. you know, we saw a generation of thrift after the depression that was only on done by the long inflation of the 1970's and the lessons the young boomers drew from that. i think we are likely to see the turning towards the generational thrift again after this period and i think that will stand millennials in good standing. i think it's also interesting to

look at adolescence. in the depression adolescence worshiped very differently than than twenty-somethings. they couldn't be blamed for the economic struggles that their families were having come and at the same time, they were counted on for more during the depression and pampered less and they became the greatest generation after that. and they were renowned for their ability to postpone the gratification, for their firm commitment to family, and generally for a sort of can do very practical latitude. now, the greatest generation had world war ii which was a terrific event that provided an uplift to the economy at the beginning of their career but if we can get out of this period quickly we can seize and sell leal three benefits for people currently in their teens. so that is a little taste one, how this period will probably

leave marks on the culture, politics, the character of our society will likely be changed for decades even after we fully recover. part two is the way that this period is accelerating in these economic forces that were already under way in society and were kind of changing our class's and life in america anyway. let me ask a question, how many people feel personally in your own life, in your own career, you're own clothes social circles that you are still living in a bad slump? >> not too many people. i would say less than one in five people just raised their hands.

and that's not surprising because we are in northwest d.c. and the creative enclaves, the places to which the most highly educated, highest potential people flocked before the past 20 years old this recession much more lightly than most of america. housing values didn't decline as much and rebounded more. growth has been remarkably rapid in the last year or so particularly in places like manhattan and silicon valley. it's a very different environment than that characterized as much of the country now and in part explains why we've been less focused on the job growth than why we should be today. david, an economist at mit, looked carefully at the structure of the job losses in this recession. and what he found was that

overwhelmingly the jobs lost on that are what economists call mid skilled jobs. these were jobs in manufacturing cannot manage real office work like clerks, like administrative assistance that have typically been taken by people with the high school degree but not a four year college degree. about 60% of the adult population. it's that group of jobs overwhelmingly that have disappeared in this recession. jobs throughout the economy should have been growing, but if you look if a high skilled jobs in the management and professional work, there was no net job loss. the rate among the professionals, people with professional degrees 2% today. if you look at the bottom of the economy, jobs and security, food preparation, minimum-wage jobs were just a little bit better there has been no loss in those jobs either. all of it has been in the middle, and companies as a

result of the recession, and because the recession gives them a license to do this have largely pulled forward restructuring and offshore decisions that they otherwise would have taken years to do and an enormous number of people are falling out of the middle class as a result the job growth of that we have had such as it is this tended to be towards the bottom of the economy. economic data are not great here what it looks like it is jobs that are at the $15 our level and less that have been growing not jobs in the middle. and i don't think that there is no good reason to believe that many of those middle skilled jobs are likely to come back unless we do something to change and there are no quick fixes in this particular case. i think we are looking at a large chunk of the middle class that's going to be working if they can find work at all at much lower wages than they had in the past.

this has been called the man session, and it's true about three-quarters of all pinks lips delivered during the recession were to the men and that has consequences, too. manufacturing declined before the recession was declined by about one third in total jobs. the construction bubblehead that for a time, but now that's gone, too, and the man without a college degree are really, really struggling. in fact men have not adapted well to the post industrial economy as a group. a college graduation rates among them have not risen substantially since 1980. men have not successfully transitioned into the surface is either. a growing fields like education and health care remain just as lopsided in employment towards women today as they were at the beginning of the decade. what men have done is they've exited the work force. they've been doing it for years,

they've been giving it more quickly since the recession. in 1967 and with a high school degree and their working years 90% were working, to a 70% are working. now, what does that mean? it has more -- the consequences are more than one might initially suppose, and they have more -- it's not just about paychecks and bank accounts. family life is changing really significantly in many parts of the country that are characterized by blue-collar workers and communities where people overwhelmingly do not have a college education. women don't marry men who don't have jobs or who are economically insecure but they do have children with them, and those children tend to struggle when as it usually happens their parents don't stay together. so, what are we seeing kind of as far as an acceleration of the trends that were already existing in the u.s.?

we are seeing a recovery among the rich, continuing the concentration of wealth among the top 1% cut in present society, and we are seeing not just the hollowing of the nonprofessional middle class, but we are seeing changes to family structure and the community character that i fear will change the future of children in those communities and possibly make the class to fight harder to bridge in the future fourth. i've been running on a bit so more quickly. i was going to tell the story of one of the many struggling men that i met -- i won't. [laughter] so, how do we -- well, just quickly. [laughter] i met this guy outside of redding pennsylvania, and he's a great guy. optimistic, caring, when he and

his wife were still together before they lost the job in the recession, he had adopted eight children. you know, really sold to the earth. he lost his job in construction and lift most of his life outside during construction in his mid-40s, italian-american outside of redding. he didn't know what to do. he struggled in school. that was 20 years in the past, so he knew the training efforts were available to him that he was terrified of the classroom, he felt like he was too old to take these opportunities. his whole manner had been shaped by a blue-collar work and a human resources interviewing coach the was provided by a local church group told them with of the style of the conversation that you are used to you are not going to get a job outside of the construction his response he told me is you can kiss my ass.

[laughter] he felt like he was a good worker and that is what was important. but in many ways he does represent -- there are a lot of men -- there are good guys, they were car, their work has been devalued, they are being forced now into parts of the economy that require very different social skills and skill sets they just don't know how to react to that. this guy glycol frank in the book, he asked for a pseudonym come he got by by rooting for his neighbors' trash for about a year and a half. he learned of the garbage collection schedule for his neighborhood and his town, then towns with about 30 miles of his town and he would drive his pickup truck through much of the night looking for appliances that he could salvage for scrap, sometimes with his children in the cab.

so, not an easy problem to fix, and one that i think we are going to see more and more in society. even as the economy recovers, it is a fundamental change in the nature of work that is really harming men, their families and their communities in the blue-collar areas. the last thing that i want to talk about before taking questions, the third, the third message of the book is, and it's important, you know, we can get out of this period more quickly, and we can build a more robust society. but it's going to take a lie wire every factions, and we need to start now. and i will mention three things. in the short run, the most important problem facing the economy is fundamentally a lack of consumer demand. the housing bubble has a lot of problems and allows consumers, middle class consumers whose wages were not going for a

decade to feel like they were getting ahead by taking on more and more debt and expecting the housing to make up the difference. that they believe has blown away, and it is going to get fleeced third couple of years if you just kind of look at the debt levels for consumers to finish to get back to the sustainable debt levels and to be able to spend again. now, when that happens and the unemployment is high, it is appropriate and necessary for the government to step in and provide support for the economy and direct job growth. we need to worry about the debt in the long run and pass measures today to reduce the debt. once the economy is healthy again. but it is dead wrong to be moving toward austerity today and it is something that as citizens i think we need to struggle against. what we should be doing is investing much more in infrastructure for instance

which is deteriorating and decaying and it is an investment, and we could bring, you know, hundreds of thousands of unemployed construction workers, manufacturing workers back into the economy, keep them working. so we need -- i described in the book it's more than simple stimulus. i describe the ways the government can in the short run and create jobs, support the economy, and kind of help us help carry us through this period where consumer demand is still recovering. but that is the most important thing in the short-run, and we are just not doing it today. the second thing, and this is important and much neglected in the longer run a lot of the story is about technology, and it's not just about the kind of innovations that have been eliminating work for american

workers. it's been a slowdown throughout the odds in the rate of breakthrough innovations create new products and services and industries. i don't have time to get into the kind of why that happened, but it quite clearly has come and it's happened at the same time that innovation is diffused globally and more quickly so that the work leads the borders more quickly. so in "pinched" i call for a sort of manhattan project to try to reinvigorate the rate of the breakthrough technological innovations. part of that involves more investment in scientific evidence and r&d. part of it involves a really different way of thinking about regulation especially regulation of young industries that have a real growth potential and can provide the next generation of products and services for america. the last set of things that i recommended the book have to do

with dillinger colin a little class. if the government is willing to intelligently and creatively expand its support for the economy to become and if we start taking measures some of which cost money and some don't to raise the rate of innovation in the u.s. economy, a lot will go right over time, and jobs will come back and particularly with people with college degrees who are struggling today, things will get a lot better. but it is not clear that things will get an entirely better for people who don't have college degrees. the force is the hollow ring the middle class appear quite an extra ball. so, what do we need to do to mitigate the trends for people who don't have a college degree, we should encourage college, but

only 30% of the population even among adults are college graduates. it's been growing very slowly. about one percentage point every four years. college, while we need to widen the access to it is simply not the answer over the next decade or two to the problems facing the middle class. in the book, i look to the different education models in high school, vocational programs, apprentice ships which research has shown do not foreclose post secondary opportunities but which to provide young men in particular who might not go to college a better sense of the real careers available to them and how they can reach them. i think this is going to be critical for the u.s.. the last thing within kind of filling the hole in the middle class and then i will stop, is to some extent i do believe that the answer to the problem we are seeing today must be political.

a lot of formerly middle class americans will not recover the wages that they had paid a lot of middle skilled jobs that were available will not come back, and i think we really need to think about more aggressive subsidization of work for people at the bottom end of the economy. economists on the left and the right have always advocated a social compact with americans who are working. over time the problem in the u.s. is going to shift from unemployment itself to the pay that many people are getting and when we are seeing such an explosive rates of growth among the wealthy, and still good incomes among the professional middle class, i feel we owe it to ourselves as a society i think we need to think about more aggressively subsidizing the low-skilled and low-income work that many people are going

to need to take who are falling out of the middle class. so let me stop there and think you very much for your attention. [applause] >> we have 20 minutes for questions. >> thank you. there was interesting and i listened to you yesterday. you're talking about the recession on us. my question is about the politics that have affected the recession and the response to. i graduated from college and 69. my parents graduated in 1943. so, the response this time is so different from the kind of response of people to the depression. roosevelt was not afraid to say that the problem was the bankers and he immediately put regulation in which was popular.

in the 60's it was just assume social security and the progressive income tax and labor unions were the source of our prosperity. this time when the government went to bailout gm and chrysler the response of people like frank, middle class workers, was why should they get $40 an hour went leota only pays 20? they should be getting 20 like the rest of us. the response in wisconsin was the same white people have good pensions if we don't have good pensions? it was exactly the opposite. and i wonder why that's happened. >> it's a great question and when you look at the depression, the depression especially stands out from other long slump in history and european history as well. and i think in part the very depth of that period which of course was much deeper than what

we are in today did pull society together. the middle class can to identify with the poor more than the rich which is unusual in american history, and the laconic images of the period included bankers selling apples on street corners so there was the sense of devotee was in the together and that is not the case today. the image of bankers do not involve the sale of apples. [laughter] and the recession has been felt very differently by different people and something for the response as i mentioned in the talk part of what's going on is many of the most influential people in the u.s. and the most influential places in the u.s. feel like the recovery is well let fans to the recent gallup poll showed is the most optimistic city in the country as to the state and future of the economy. we've had this kind of

geographic separation in the u.s. that i think has contributed to and attention on the part of many american eletes but there's also something else that goes on in the periods like this, typically, and that is you know, bust psychology takes over, and what we see again and again in periods like this is people become much more jealous of their status relative to others. they engage in the a zero sum politics wrote meaner and support for the poor generally diminishes. so a lot of middle class people who are unemployed but have seen their housing values decline, the prospects declined, you know, to them a lot of the benefits they see, a lot of the government programs are benefiting people and like them and they don't support that.

national debt in particular takes on an oversized importance again and again in the periods like this. in the early 1990's when the debt was much smaller than it is to become a large majority of americans were intensely concerned that the debt was going to choke off the recovery but regan didn't listen, and an 1936, as the economy was improving but still very, very bad, a majority of americans came to believe that the federal budget absolutely had to be balanced that year and in 1937 the government tried to do that. it cut spending radically and raise taxes, the stock market crashed, unemployment skyrocketed back to 19% and world war ii to fully get us out of the depression. so, in some ways the push toward austerity, the reluctance to do more is sexually understandable

today. it's a psychological and emotional reaction, and it's happened before. but we really, really need to struggle against it because it is an emotional reaction and it is leading a store is very bad policies. >> thank you. >> thank you very much for the fifth compelling discussion. you talk about the lawyer who can't find a job. what we are seeing is a shrinkage of option for professionals, not the least of this of course is the fact that in india there are many college-educated people who are assuming jobs in engineering and other fields, even oh-la-la can be outsourced it is certain level and some law firms are doing that for the more pedestrian kind of things. i think that we are seeing shrinkage of state governments that are going to continue the matter who the president becomes, and of course perry will certainly be influencing the discussion.

and new york city teachers are being laid off in huge numbers. these are good middle class maybe you could call them middle class jobs, some of the professional jobs such as engineering can be upper-middle-class depending on the income. so i think this effect is not so totally focused on folks who are blue-collar workers and heights of the blue-collar pay scale and i think again the whole globalization, the fact that engineers and china are turning out in huge numbers so there is an international dimension that isn't going to go away and the government cut back and support for training and other programs the situation is in some ways kind of dire i would think and i would be interested in your comments. >> sure. you make a lot of good points, and it's certainly true, especially of college graduates

that come and professionals as well, that people that life is less certain, college degree, it is no longer a protection against job loss. people still have to train later in life, and we've seen that in this recession. at the same time, the unemployment rate for people of the professional degree is 2% and a bachelor's is 40%, over 9% over all and when you start talking about high school graduates and high school dropouts you are in the teens and 20s, so it's true life is less certain today, and that is not going to change for just as everyone. but it is also true that people with more education have been much better insulated than everyone else. it's funny in the depression people began to question the value of a college degree quite rightly and they were wrong.

i people who were doing that today are also wrong. the return on a college degree remains near historically and while there is more competition from overseas there's also more demand overseas now. this period is about the rise of the middle class, and for people with strong skills, strong general skills and a good education and some ability, you know, while there's going to be more competition there is also more opportunity because the markets have expanded so much. so, it's not so much a kind of one-way street with the globalization and particularly people with squall skills. i think over time the benefits are going to outweigh the cost. >> let's hope so. >> yes. >> there was quite a lot of violent labor unrest in the late 19th century, and i noticed that

you talked about japan, but not any of the unemployed in london, so what is your sense of what it's going to take to be blood on the streets in america? >> violence is very unpredictable, but we do know from history that as the periods like this have extended we have tended to see more incidents of it and so forth. as you mentioned the 1890's, the end of the 19th century in general was a violent, violent period in the u.s., and we didn't see anything comparable in the depression, but we did see a substantial increase in whinging and mob violence in that era as well. we saw it to some extent in the 70's. but what is interesting is even when we recover, the reactionary sentiment once they come out of the bottler easily stuffed back

in so when you look at this devotees for instance, the oklahoma city bombing occurred in 1994, 1995 as the economy was just beginning a period of incredible growth. but when you actually look at the specific ideology and kind of the origins of that ideology of the bomber, they can clearly be traced to the 70's and things that were written in the 70's. you know, when the economy was really in bad shape and a lot of white men were losing faith in the country, so i don't know what's going to happen as to violence. japan hasn't had a lot of violence. it's very hard to predict, but i do think that we are going to be vulnerable to the action and extremism much more than we have

been in the last decade or two probably for the next decade or two. >> i think this is an excellent presentation. a lot of times people of culture can't see the forest through the trees and you are sort of putting a little bit of the forest out there. but i think possibly come and we heard of the earlier questioners to as a bigger forest and even you are presenting. and what we are going to experience as you describe may only be a prelude to the greater reach continuation of the history, and i'm saying that because we are not in europe institutionally and politically and psychologically. i mean, if you put another layer for the environment on top of what you are describing that is going to make it even more

complex. so i just wanted to hear your response to this that this maybe even a greater turning point in history than you are describing because we are accelerating and that is the difference. we've changed over, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years, but now we are accelerating to where we will be compressed to a smaller time period with greater stress. >> there is a lot that is changing profoundly in the world. and that is kind of accelerating a lot, a lot of changes in american life. and i think that we've been kind of politically unprepared for many of the changes that have been occurring naturally for 15 or 20 years and that have been hidden by credit and by the housing bubble. so that is why in "pinched" i think we really need to look very broadly at how we need to

change our economic policy, our industrial policy, technological policies, and our kind of taxation and redistribution system to try to accommodate ourselves to a new world that is likely to continue to change very quickly. the 1s worse of, it's not the one source but the one source of hope i have speaking very broadly and i talked about the rise of the global middle class the wages in china, they are rising rapidly, and over the course of, you know, a couple of decades or more, we will begin to see the wage disparity is being eliminated, and a lot more demand globally if the u.s. can get out of its way to increase education and provide a fertile environment for innovation.

i think the country will be fine. in the long run. my worry is more what's happening to the specific plusses within the country. >> we can't afford the level of pollution that you're describing >> time for two more. >> i have a question about job creation, and this is partly just what we've seen the last few weeks with the political polarization, and what your thoughts are on how we can get the situation where we are as a country creating more jobs for these people that you are describing in the face of an uninformed electorate that has put in place elected officials who are almost taking positions against people's better economic interest. so what we saw the last few

weeks was impeding job creation, not helping at. one other side point i know that you made a comment about northwest d.c., but my guess is that most people in northwest d.c. just by example would be in favor of some of the government programs that would encourage job creation. >> right. i wish -- it is an intractable problem and i wish i had a good answer for you. this is a tough period politically and you are right. political forces today are pushing against what we need to do. i guess i have to the answers. one is ultimately it is incumbent upon all of us to speak with a loud voice to be politically active when we are able to even things and i kind of feel like to some extent the people who have been the loudest and most active are the people

that are pushing against the government support and further stimulus and job creation so i think all we can do as citizens is talk about these issues and write and call our elected officials and make us think about, and i don't think that's happened as much actually on kind of the pro-government support site as it has on the anti-- the other thing, let's not really another thing i guess, even if that doesn't push the government towards a whole changing strategy, there's a lot we can be doing right now that doesn't actually cost money. we are just not doing it because frankly every elected officials aren't really focused on job growth. let me give you one small example of that. there is a bill before congress

now called the startup visa act, and it was supported by american venture capitalists come and what it would do is it would more or less automatically grant a visa to any foreign entrepreneur who wanted to settle in the u.s. and could and had already secured american venture capital funding. there are a large number of highly skilled entrepreneurs who would love to move to the u.s.. they could create jobs immediately. and the bill is languishing. wouldn't cost any money. we are not doing it. i describe that and other tactics. there are a host of measures that we could be pursuing without any impact on the deficit. collecting collectively they add up to something and we are not doing them. >> we have one more question. >> putting bad government

policies as high for a moment, a lot of people to talk about economics and right economic books and talk about this problem seem to believe in something i guess i could call the business cycle that, you know, there is the dips and the troughs and pekes and stuff like that. and i'm wondering whether business cycles is really something that we are still dealing with. i mean we get cheaper labor offshore is a phenomenon. i mean come if you want to get a job goes to india or go to china, not a problem. that's certainly one solution. but we have the internet is a phenomenon that has only existed ten or 15 years. that certainly makes a lot of brick and mortar jobs. computer automation, artificial the intelligence, robotics, they are all future. what business cycle -- i mean, what kind of solutions do we

have for these things i personally don't believe our, you know, every business cycle has had these kind of things thrown at society? i mean, what kind of hope might there actually be for people given these ugly realities? >> there are two things going on in the economy, and one is essentially a business cycle. although an extended one. i mean, we have spent years of overspending. consumers were taking on debt more and more, and what we are seeing is a kind of hang over now from that period. the fallout from the financial crisis, the big ones, is almost always very slow, and recovery usually does to a number of years. so i mean, part of what's happening today is kind of cyclical and they will mitigate and go away once consumers the

leverage and can spend again but that is a very long process and will be all the longer if the government hinders rather than helps. but you're right, the other been that is going on that i tried to describe in this talk is much more than business cycles. it's an acceleration of the hauling of middle class driven by technology and offshore. that may slow down a little bit once we come out of this period for a time but it's certainly going to continue and that is why i think that in addition to the short term measures to stimulate the economy we really need to think broadly as a nation about how for the next generation and for people currently falling out of the middle class how we can build a broad and sustainable middle class country again, because the one we have is falling apart. [applause] ..