the company got us -- the things that we didn't know about like a huge tax case k circulation problems at newsday and circulation fraud, all of these sort of things came back to haunt us and really became, put us into a troubled condition which made us vulnerable to mr. zell. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. ..

>> good evening. we will get started. r m l mike giarratano and the schedule the events here and i welcome you this evening on behalf of our owners, bradley graham and liz musketeer who we are excited to have on board and on behalf of the booksellers. welcome. thank you for being here for supporting this bookstore and supporting our event series. if you are new here to the bookstore outside of august and december we do events every night. you can follow our events which include classes on our weekly

e-mail at politicsandprose.com. probably a good time to tell you to silence your phones and gadgets as we get started this evening. tonight we welcome don peck to politics and prose to discuss his book "pinched". how the great recession has narrowed our futures and what we can do about it. don peck lives in washington d.c. and it is always a pleasure for us at the bookstore to welcome a local doctor here especially for debut. so we welcome don peck. we also welcome c-span booktv audience. thank them for joy in us. the format tonight is don peck will speak at this podium for 20. kissel 25, 30 minutes. he will present the book and tell us why he wrote it and we will open up the second half of the hour to you for questions and what we ask is that the one

microphone we have this evening can be difficult with a crowd this size but since we are taping and it will keep the talk of a bull for those not here we will field questions from that microphone. we do encourage your questions and your input after the q&a. don peck will sign books up here at this table. his books are for sale in front of the store. that is how we will go. we want to thank you for being here and for don peck. don peck is a national award winning writer of features editor at the atlantic where he covers the economy and american society. actually the september issue of the atlantic which is out now and available here for sale features a cover story can the middle class be saved? it is an essay adapted from this

book, "pinched". also i would like to say thank-you to the atlantic for their help promoting this event and supporting don peck and his work and this particular event. don peck's "pinched" is about the impact of the great recession on americans. how economic, societal and cultural norms have been deeply impacted and subsequently are being and continue to be altered and transformed. work environment, family dynamics, and personal identities are turned on their head and will stay that way. the stars of the past several years will remain in the near and distant future. the chasm between the wealthy and the rest widens and concentration of wealth further hollowed out the middle class. cities and communities suffer the same risks. cities have recovered and others remain shuddered. our national identity is once again shifting.

with historical context by comparing this recession with collapses of years past don peck ignites the call for reinvention of civic duty and public action. thank you for joining us and it is a pleasure to welcome to politics and prose to discuss this book don peck. [applause] >> i feel i should just take questions after that. i live ten minutes away from politics and prose and i have been to countless book talks but this is my first book and my first time on this side of the microphone. it is mildly surreal but i will do my best. thank you for coming. i want to talk about how this book came about. i am a features editor at the atlantic and spend a lot of time trying to find big stories, cover stories and if you know the atlantic at all, one feature is we right very long stories

and they take a long time to report. they take a while to incubate. 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 but timely and relevant. when we had the initial financial crash in 2008 it wasn't even possible to predict what the next nine months would look like. we remember things were difficult to predict but by the time 2009, spring of 2009 arrived after the first stimulus the economy stopped its freefall. the market was rebounding. all of us. certainly i breathed a sigh of relief. hy was trying to think ahead to the stories for the fall and winter and so i was talking

quite a lot to labor economists and economic historians and students of other major financial crashes and what i found was really all of them were sounding the same note. they were saying we were prematurely breathing a sigh of relief and they were saying that actually where things had been fluid the next six months or nine months or 12 months or 24 months more were likely to be quite predictable. the labor market would likely recover incredibly slowly. the economy would likely take years to meant. and when i started reading histories of other along slumps, deeper into american history and talking to sociologists about them it became apparent to me that as societies stew in long periods like this one they change in many profound ways.

i decided rather than assigning pieces i want to write about these they struck me as important and struck me as important to try to identify them as quickly as possible for people so we could understand them and think more intelligently about recovery. two years later after two cover stories and a book, i am sorry to say that in my opinion the next year or two or more are still predictable at least if we don't significantly shift our public actions and public policies. we are not in my opinion near the end of this period. and if we stay in such a period of weakness for another two or three years or more 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. what is "pinched"? in part it is a history. i look in some detail at the 1970s and 1930s and 1890s. different periods that in some ways recall our own -- i detail how life changed in them and how we got out of them as well which is an important lesson for us. in part it is quite a lot of reporting from around the country on different people, different places because this recession and recovery has been felt very differently in different parts of the country by different people and that holds important lessons in thinking about how to recover. part of the generational study, one thing that is clear from the past long slumps is up and coming generations change profoundly in periods like this one. i spend a lot of time with the millennial generation and the

people behind them talking to them about how they were changing how they felt their life prospects were changing and their political beliefs were changing and so on. so overall it is an attempt to assess how this period broadly is changing. the places we live. the work we do. our family ties, our marriages, our politics and even who we are. that is what the book sets out to do. in addition and importantly it sets out to try to begin to make recommendations about how we can recover from this period faster and stand the u.s. economy up more strongly for the future. so that is a lot of things and i can't talk about all of them tonight. we can cover some in queue and

day. i would like to distills things down to three main messages from the book with a few illustrations and we will take some questions. so three messages from the book. one is that periods like this one, slumps that are deep and long have enduring consequences. we think of recessions as temporary. jobs go away and come back. housing values go down and come back up the deep recession leave society in some ways permanently changed. not entirely for the worst. they change generations and communities. they change families in ways that are not quickly or easily reversed. because of that. because many of the changes we are beginning to experience will 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 temporarily accelerated some deep economic forces that are already transforming our society. most significantly the whole wing of the middle class. in that sense in some ways it has given us a preview of where our society is heading anyway and who is leaving behind. understanding that it is critical thinking about how not just to bring unemployment down but build a stronger society in decades to come. my final message from the book is we can recover faster. we are seeing a disturbing amount of fatalism right now among many members of the media and members of congress and we should not be fatalistic about this period. we do probably face a long slog but there's a lot weekend due to recover faster. we just are not doing it. let me go back through them and provide some detail.

first on the enduring consequences of periods like this one, life changes in countless and surprising ways during slumps. people sleep more. they date less. they spend more time at home. they drive less and they drive more slowly which tends to reduce traffic fatalities and overall mortality. something that has happened in this recession. skirts famously langton. lady gaga notwithstanding, pop songs become more earnest and complex and romantic and less sexual. in almost every aspect of life people become more personally conservative. many of the things i talked-about are ephemeral. they go away as long as -- as soon as strong growth returns. but deep slumps leave more

enduring marks on families and communities and the places we lived. i talk about all of that in the book. i talked a lot about how suburbs in former middle class meccas of the u.s. las vegas and tampa are changing profoundly and permanently in the wake of this recession. let me focus on how millennials are changing. this is one of the most important enduring changes we're seeing and will continue to see. when i began reporting for the magazine story that led to "pinched" i really expected young people would bear the latest stars from this recession. they are younger in the labour market and don't have a lot of personal responsibilities. a few bad years are a few bad years. but in fact when you look at history, when you look at the ample scholarly research on this

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 young people. and people who struggle, cohorts and generations to struggle because of a bad economy and get stuck in bad jobs or can't find work at all never fully recover. they not only start out behind but according to good research by the yale economist lisa kahn, 10 or 20 or 30 years later they have not 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 cling to more tightly to their jobs. they don't switch jobs as often which is how one increases earnings particularly early in one's career. two thirds of lifetime income

growth after inflation usually occurs in the first ten years of a career. if this recession stretches three or four more years a lot of people are losing that opportunity and acquiring a stigma of underachievement that will be difficult to check. those economic conditions and that kind of lifetime economic problem is made complex particularly when thinking of the millennial generation. on the eve of the recession the millennial generation was the most audacious in american history with the highest self-esteem and higher material expectations than any other generation. they have jet -- told they were special and can do anything they want to. the collision of that attitude

and outlook with this economy has been painful to watch. when the recession began a lot of millennials understandably didn't really realize what was happening to them. many moved back in with their parents after graduation. many had to. many couldn't leave home. many did it because they felt they could wait a recession out. the term funemployment acquired cultural currency among college graduates. as i reported on millennials over the last couple years i found not surprisingly those attitudes are changing. millennials are beginning to profoundly change as a result of this period. economically we're seeing the same career conservatism

described in past generations. job tenure among millennials has spike more than it has for older workers in a recent survey, asked whether they would prefer to switch employers or stay with the same employer through their careers the overwhelming majority wanted to stay with the same employer. more than that, millennials -- they're not beginning. they are seeing their entire lives put on hold. i spoke to a young attorney in d.c. who graduated from law school in 2009 had been able to find work as a lawyer after months working at barnes and noble and finally found a job with the federal government and didn't make use of his law degree and was worried he could never use it. he was living in efficiency with a roommate.

he said his parents were a machinist at a secretary. by the time my dad was 23 years old he had a house, he had a wife and kids. these things have been pushed back so far i can't even see them. that attitude has become more pervasive with 20 somethings. they feel trapped in perpetual adolescents from which they can't escape. interesting when you look at the political beliefs of twentysomethings those are changing radically. they are changing significantly. this was already a liberal generation. we see survey data that 20 somethings are becoming more liberal and more supportive of support for the poor and more cognizant of the will love place in life but also becoming more skeptical that the government

can be trusted to competently carryout good policy. this too is not a surprise. is exactly what happened to prior generations who came out of the slump in the 1970s and before. those characteristics in the past have stayed with those cohorts far for decades afterwards. i write a bit about the millennials who had to move, and spend extended time with their families. there is some good news from this. both parents and adult children have at times said they have grown close friend appreciated spending time together but it has been a complex relationship to say the least.

psychological research. they actually prefer to spend their time with children who are already succeeding. perhaps because it flatters the parents more. when we look at japan which is an interesting case 20 somethings -- just before japan's two decade slump began. at first people were doing that by choice. they have artistic ambitions frequently. it characterized their parents. there was a lot of criticism at the time that in many ways they were glamorized for doing that. what we see is as more 20

somethings had to move home and couldn't move out because the economy remained weak for years and years social attitudes towards 20 somethings change. all traces of glamour went away. one terms that describe twentysomethings living at home is parasite singles. and 20 somethings are blamed widely in japan for everything from low birth rates to low economic growth. it will be interesting to watch how social views of millennials change over the next few years and attitudes change as well if we don't recover more quickly. i want to stress that not all of the changes under way for millennials are bad. some are merely transformation. i don't think the change political views are necessarily

bad for 20 somethings. i certainly sense a return to thrift in this generation. we saw a generation of thrift after the depression that was only undone by the long inflation of the 1970s and the lessons young boomers drew from that. we are likely to see turning towards generational thrift again after this period and that will stand millennials in good stead. it is interesting to look at adolescence. in the depression adolescents were shaped differently than 20 somethings. they couldn't be blamed for the economic struggle their families were having and that the same time they were counted on for more during the depression and pampered less. they became the greatest generation after that. they were renowned by their ability to postpone gratification and their commitment to family and generally for a sort of can do

practical latitudes. the greatest generation in world war ii which was a horrific event but provided an uplift to the economy at the beginning of their careers but if we can get out of this period quickly we may see some sunni a tory benefits for people that are currently in their teens. that is a little taste of how this period will leave enduring marks on how our culture and politics and the character of our society will be changed for decades even after we fully recover. part ii is the way that this period is accelerating deep economic forces that were already underway and changing our classes and changing life in

america anyway. how many people feel personally in your own life, your own career, your own social circle that you are still living in a bad slump? not too many people. less than one in five just raised their hands. that is not surprising because we are in northwest washington d.c.. the places to which the most highly educated highest potential people flocked over the last 20 years have filled this recession much more lightly than most of america. housing values didn't decline as much but rebounded more. growth has been remarkably rapid in the last year or so

particularly in places like manhattan and silicon valley. it is a very different environment than characterizes much of the country and in part it explains why politically we have been less focused on job growth that we really should be today. david on tour, economist at mit look at the structure of job losses in this recession. what he found was overwhelmingly the job loss for read a skilled jobs. these were jobs in manufacturing and non managerial office work like clerks and administrative assistants that have typically been taken by a high school degree but not a four year college degree. 60% of the adult population. it is that group of jobs overwhelmingly that have

disappeared in this recession. jobs throughout the economy should have been growing but if you look at high skilled jobs in management and professional work there was no net job loss. the unemployment rate among people with a professional degree is 2%. if you look at the bottom of the economy job insecurity, food preparation, minimum-wage jobs are a little better. no net loss in those jobs either. all of it has been -- companies as a result of the recession and because the recession gave the license to this have largely pulled forward restructuring of 4 decisions that they otherwise t

much lower wages than in the past. about three quarters of all pink slips delivered during the recession has consequences too. manufacturing decline before the recession was declining by a third in total jobs. the construction bubble hit that for a time but that has gone too and men without a college degree are really really struggling. in fact men have not adapted

well to the industrial economy. college graduation among men have not risen substantially since 1980. men have not successfully transitioned into the services. growing fields like education and health care remain just as lopsided in employment towards women as they were at the beginning of the decade. what men have done is exited the work force. they have been doing it for years and more quickly since the recession. in 1967 among men with high school degree in prime working years 19% were working. today 76% are working. what does that mean? it has -- for consequences are more than one might initially suppose. family life is changing significantly in many parts of the country that are

characterized by a blue collar work and communities where people overwhelmingly do not have college education. women don't mary men who don't have jobs or who are economically insecure but they do have children with them and those children can struggle when as usually happens their parents don't stay together. what are we seeing 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 concentration of wealth among the top 1% or 10% of society. and we are seeing not just following of the non professional middle class but we are seeing changes to family structure and community character that i fear unaddressed will change the future of children in those communities and possibly make class divides harder to bridge in the future.

i have been running on a bit so we will go quickly. i was going to tell a story of one of the many struggling men that i met. i won't. just quickly. i met this guy outside in reading, pennsylvania. he is a great guy. optimistic guy, caring guy. when he and his wife were still together before he lost his job in the recession, he and she had adopted eight children. really the salt of the earth. he lost his job as a construction foreman and started out the factory and was in construction in his mid 40s. italian-american outside reading. he didn't know what to do. he struggled in school. that was 20 years in the past. he new retraining efforts were available to him but he was terrified of the classroom.

he felt he was too old to take these opportunities. his whole manner had been shaved by blue-collar work and a human-resources interviewing coach that was provided by local church group told him with the style of conversation that you are using you won't get a new job outside construction. his response he told me was you can kiss my ass. he felt he was a good worker and that was important. in many ways he does represent -- there are a lot of men, they are good guys, they work hard, their work has been devalued. they are being forced into parts of the economy that require different social skills and skill sets. they don't know how to react to that. this guy who i call frank in the book asked for a pseudonym, got

by by reading through his neighbor's trash about a year and a half. he learned the garbage collection schedule for his neighborhood and his town within 30 miles of his town and he would drive his pickup truck through much of the night looking for appliances he could salvage for scrap with his children. so not an easy problem to fix and one that we're 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 and their families and their communities in blue-collar areas. last thing i want to talk about before taking questions is the third message of the book, we can get out of this period more

quickly and we can build a more robust society but it is going to take a wide array of actions and we need to start now. i will mention three things. the most important problem facing the economy is lack of consumer demand. the housing bubble allowed consumers, middle-class consumers whose wages were not growing for a decade to feel they were getting ahead by taking on more and more debt and expecting the housing bubble to make up the difference. it is going to take at least another couple of years to look at debt levels for consumers to finish the leveraging to get back to the debt levels and be able to spend again. when that happens and 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 binding measures to reduce the debt once the economy is healthy again but it is dead wrong to be moving towards austerity today. and it is something we as citizens need to struggle against. what we should be doing is investing much more in infrastructure for instance which is deteriorating and decaying. it is an investment and we could bring hundreds of thousands of unemployed construction workers, manufacturing workers back into the economy, keep them working. so we need -- are described in the book it is more than simple stimulus, the ways the government can in the short run create jobs, support the economy

and help carry as 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, this is very important and much neglected. in the longer run a lot of the stories about technology and it is not just about the kinds of innovation that have been eliminating work for american workers it has been a slowdown in the rate of break through innovation that creates new products and services and whole new industries. i don't have time to get into why that happened but quite clearly has and it happened at the same time that innovations defused globally more quickly so that the work leaves our borders more quickly. so in "pinched" i call for a

sort of manhattan project to reinvigorate the rate of break through technological innovation. part of that involve more investment in scientific advances and a really different way of thinking about regulation. especially regulation of the gun industries that have real growth potential and can provide products and services. the outset of things i recommend in the book has to do with filling the hole in the middle class. if our government is willing to intelligently and creatively expand its support for the economy today and if we start taking measures some of which cost money and some of which 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 in particular for people with college degrees who are

struggling things will get a lot better. it is not clear that things will get entirely better for people who don't have college degrees. the forces that are all in the middle class appear inexorable. what do we need to do to allow for a good middle-class life for people who don't have a college degree? we should encourage college but only 30% of the population are college graduates. it has been growing very slowly. about 1 percentage point every four years. we need to widen access to college but it is simply not the answer over the next decade or two to problems facing the middle class. in the book i look to different educational models in high school vocational programs,

apprenticeships which do not foreclose secondary opportunities but which do provide young men in particular who might not go to college a better sense of real careers that are available to them and how they can reach them. i think this is going to be critical but the last thing about filling the hole in the middle class and i will stop. i believe the answers to the problem must be political. a lot of formerly middle-class americans will not recover the wages they have. a lot of skilled jobs will not come back. 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 right have advocated a social compact with americans who are working.

overtime the problem in the u.s. is going to shift from an employment itself to the pay that many people are getting. when we are seeing such explosive rates of growth among the wealthy and still good income among the professional middle class i think we'll it to ourselves as a society. we need to think about more aggressively subsidizing low skill low income work that many people need to take. so let me stop there and thank you for your attention for a long presentation. [applause] >> we have 20 minutes for questions. >> that was very interesting and listened to you yesterday on the point. you were talking about the effect of the recession on us.

my question is about the politics that affected the recession and our response to it. i graduated from college in 1969. my parents graduated in 1943. response this time is so different from the kind of response of people to the depression. roosevelt was not afraid to say the problem was the bank and he immediately put in regulation which was popular. in the 60s it was just assumed that 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 when the others get 20?

they should get 20 like the rest of us. why do public employees have good pensions if we don't have good pensions? it was exactly the opposite. i wonder why that happened. >> great question. when you look at the depression, the depression stand out from other long slumps in american and european history. i think in part the depth of that period which was deeper than what we were in today cooled society together. the middle class came to identify with the poor more than with a rich which is unusual in american history. the iconic images of the period included bankers selling apples on street corners so there was a sense that everyone was in it together and needs to get out of it together. that is not the case today. the image of bankers today do not involve apple's. the recession has been felt

differently by different people. i think that has something to do -- as i mentioned in the talk part of what is going on is many of the most influential people in the u.s. and the most influential places in the u.s. feel for recovery is well advanced. in washington d.c. recent gallup poll showed is the most optimistic city in the country as to the future of the economy. we had this kind of geographic separation in the u.s. that has contributed to inattention on the part of many american elites. but something else goes on in periods like this which is bust psychology takes over. 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 zero some thinking politics grow meaner, and support for the poor generally diminishes. a lot who have seen their housing values decline and career prospects decline, to them a lot of the benefits, government programs that they see are benefiting people unlike them. they don't support that. national debt in particular takes on an oversized importance again and again in periods like this. in the 1980s when the debt was smaller than it is today a large majority of americans were intensely concerned that the debt would choke off recovery. reagan did listen. in 1936 as the economy was improving but 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 and raise taxes. stock market crashed. unemployment skyrocketed. it took five years to get out of the depression. in some ways i think the pushed for the austerity, reluctance to do more is actually understandable today. it is a psychological and emotional reaction. it happened before but we really need to struggle against it because it is ultimately an emotional reaction leading toward bad policy. >> thank you very much for compelling discussion. you talked about the lawyer who can't find a job.

we're seeing a shrinkage of options for professionals. not the least of this is the fact that in india there are many college educated people who are assuming jobs in engineering and other fields, even law can be outsourced at certain levels and some law firms are doing that for the more pedestrian kinds of things. i think we are seeing shrinkage of state governments that will continue no matter who the president comes and rick perry will influence that discussion. in new york city teachers are being laid off in huge numbers. these are middle middle class jobs. some of the professional jobs like engineering can be upper-middle-class depending on the income. i think this effect is not so totally focused on blue collar

workers. the globalization. affected engineers in china are turning out in huge numbers so there is an international dimension that won't go away and with cutbacks and support for training and other programs the situation is in some ways kind of dire. interested in your comments. >> you make a lot of good points. it is certainly true especially for college graduates and professionals as well that life is less certain than it used to be. a bachelor's degree is no longer protection against job loss. people still have to retrain later in life. we have seen that in this recession. at the same time the unemployment rate is 2%. for people with a bachelor's degree it is 4-1/2% and 9% overall.

when you talk about high school graduates and dropouts you're into the teens and 20s. is true that life is less certain today and that won't change for every one. but it is also true that people with more education have been much better insulated than everyone else. in the depression people began to question the value of a college degree quite widely and of course they were wrong. i think people doing that today are also wrong. the return on a college degree remains near a historical high and there's more competition from overseas but there's more demand overseas. this is about a rise of the middle class globally. just not our middle class. as for people with strong skills and a good education and some

ability there's more competition but also more opportunity because markets have expanded so much. it is not so much a 1-way street with globalization and particularly people with strong skills. overtime the benefits will outweigh the costs. >> let's hope so. >> there was quite a lot of violent waiver unrest in the nineteenth century. you talk about japan, not any of the unemployed unrest in london. what is your sense of what it will take for there to be blood on the streets in america. >> violence is unpredictable but we do know from history as periods like this have extended we tended to see more incidents of it. more rioting.

the end of the nineteenth century with a violent period in the u.s.. we didn't see anything comparable in the depression but we did see a substantial increase in lynchings and mob violence and to some extent in the 70s. what is interesting is even when we recover the reactionary sentiments once they come out of a bottle are stuffed back in so when you look at the 70s the oklahoma city bombing occurred in the 1994/1995 as the economy was beginning a period of incredible growth but when you look at specific ideology and the origins of the ideology of the bombers they can clearly be traced to the 70s and things that were written in the 70s when the economy was really in

bad shape and a lot of white men were losing faith in the country. i don't know what is going to happen as to violence. japan hasn't had a lot of violence in its culture like the u. s. very hard to predict. i do think we are going to be vulnerable certainly to reaction and extremism much more than we have been in the last decade or two probably for the next decade or two. >> like others an excellent presentation. a lot of times the culture can't see the forest for the trees and you are putting the force out there. but i think possibly we heard earlier questioners there is a bigger forests than you are presenting and what we're going

to experience as you describe make only be a prelude to of greater reconfiguration in human history and i am saying that because we are not geared up institutionally and psychologically. if you put another layer of the environment on top of what you are describing that will make it more complex. i want to hear your response to that. this may be a greater turning point in history than you are describing because we are accelerating and that is the difference. we changed over hundreds and hundreds of years but now we are accelerating towards where we are being compressed into a smaller time period with greater stress. >> there is a law that is changing profoundly in the world

and that is accelerating a lot of change in american life. we have been politically and prepared for many of the changes that have been occurring for 15 or 20 years and have been hidden by credit and by the housing bubble. so that is why in "pinched" i think we need to look broadly at how we need to change our economic and industrial policy and technological policies and our kind of taxation and redistribution systems to accommodate to a new world that will change very quickly. the one source--one source of

hope is the rise of the global middle-class. wages in china and india are raising rapidly and over the course of a couple of decades or more we will begin to see wage disparities being eliminated and more demand globally if the u.s. can get out of its way and continue to increase education, provide a fertile environment for innovation i think the country will be fine in the long run. my worry is what is happening to specific classes. >> the world can't afford the level of pollution you are describing. >> i have a question about job creation. this is partly an outgrowth of what we have seen in the last few weeks with the political polarization. and what your thoughts are on

how we can get a situation where we are creating more jobs for these people you are describing in the face of a very an informed electorate that put in place elected officials that are almost taking position against people of economic interests of we're seeing is impeding job creation. not helping it. one other side bar is you made a comment about northwest d.c. but my guess is most people in northwest d.c. by example would be in favor of some of the governmental programs that would encourage job creation. >> it is an intractable problem and i wish i had a good answer

for you. it is a tough period politically. you are right. the political forces to they are pushing against what we need to do. not towards it. i have two answers. one is ultimately it is incumbent on all of us to be politically active when we believe in things and i kind of feel like to some extent the loudest people are pushing against government support and further stimulus and job creation. all we can do as citizens is talk about these issues and to write and call our elected officials and make us think about it. i don't think that has happened as much on the pro-government

support side. the other thing -- not really another thing. even if that doesn't push the government for the wholesale change in strategy there's a lot we can be doing right now that doesn't actually cost money. we are just not doing it because our elected officials aren't really focused on job growth. let me give you one small example. there is a bill before congress called a startup decent act. it was supported by american venture capitalists and what it would do is more or less automatically grant a visa to any foreign under burn or who wanted to settle in the u. s and already secured american venture capital funding. there are number of highly skilled entrepreneurs who would love to move to the u.s..

they could create jobs immediately and the bill is languishing. it 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 with out any impact on the deficit. collectively add up to something and we are not doing them. >> one last quick question. >> putting bad government policies aside for a moment a lot of people who talk about economics and who write economic books and talk about this problem seem to believe in something i would call the business cycle. the dips and troughs and peaks and stuff like that. i wonder if business cycle is something we are still dealing with. cheaper labor of short is a phenomenon. if you want to get a job go to india or china.

not a problem. that is one solution. we have the internet as a phenomenon that has only existed 10 or 15 years. that certainly makes mincemeat of a lot of brick and mortar jobs. computers, automation, artificial intelligence and robotics are all in the future. what business cycle, what kind of solutions do we have for these things that i don't believe every business cycle has had these kind of things thrown at society? what kind of hope might there be for people given these ugly realities? >> there are two things going on in what is essentially a business cycle although an extended one.