song from the angry and bitter satire into the national anthem that eventually became an also thank you for coming out and listening tonight. ♪ >> i walked that ravenna's highway ♪ ♪ salles above the endless sky way ♪ ♪ salles below me the golden valley ♪ ♪ singing god bless america for me ♪

♪ i ron and i ramble, follow my own footsteps through the sparkling stand ♪ ♪ of her diamond deserts' and all around me ♪ ♪ that voice kept singing god bless america for me ♪ ♪ the sun came shining while i was strolling through wheatfields leaving and the dust clouds rolling and as the fall was lifting that old lace kept singing god bless america for me. there was a high people and it tried to stop me, had a painted sign saying private property ♪

♪ and on the other side it didn't say anything. ♪ said god bless america for me. ♪ and through the chassis of the steeple ♪ ♪ i saw my people ♪ as they stood a hungry ♪ i stood their wondering god bless america for me ♪ ♪ nobody living who can never stop me as i go walking that freedom high rate ♪ ♪ nobody living can never make me turn back ♪ ♪ because this land was made for you and me ♪ ♪ this land is your land ♪ this land is my land

♪ from california ♪ to the new york island of ♪ and from the redwood forest to the cold stream waters ♪ ♪ this land was made for you and me ♪ [applause]

discusses the long-term social and cultural impact of the current economic recession. it's about an hour. >> good evening. we will get started. welcome to politics and prose bookstore. i'm mike, scheduled defense here and i welcome you this evening

on behalf of the owners, bradley graham and our new owners who are excited to have on board here and on behalf of the booksellers so, welcome to politics and prose, and thank you for being here, for supporting this bookstore and our series. if you are new here to the bookstore outside of august and december we do a fence every night so you can follow us, our defense which include clauses and book groups and you can call us on facebook, twitter, our weekly e-mails or politics.com and it's 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 discuss his new book pinched husbandry recession has narrowed the future and what we can do about it. he lives here in washington,

d.c. and it is always a pleasure for us in the bookstore to welcome the local author here especially for the debut and so we welcome don, we also welcome c-span book tv audience and thank them for joining us. the format tonight is that don will speak to the podium but 25 or 30 minutes and present the book, tell us why he wrote it and then we will open up with a second half of the hour to you for questions, and what we ask is that you get the audience microphone in the center aisle. since we are taping and will keep the talk of a bull for those of us here we will field questions from that microphone but we do encourage your questions and input. after the q&a, don will slingbox up here at this table.

his books are for sale in front of the store, and so that is how it will go. but again, we just want to welcome you and say thank you for being here and for don peck. he's national award winning writer and a features editor at the atlantic where he covers the economy and american society and actually the september issue of the atlantic which result now and also available here for sale features a cover story by can the middle class if be saved it is an essay adopted from this book pinched and also collect a sacred figure to the atlantic for their help promoting the cement on this particular event. pinched is about the enduring impact the great recession will have on american life. how economic, society and cultural norms have been deeply and acted and subsequently

redeemed and will continue to be altered, transformed. work environments, tell the dynamics, the personal identities have been turned on their heads and likely will stay that way. the scars of the past several years and other words will remain in the near and distant future. meanwhile the chasm between the wealthy elites and the rest widens and the concentration of the gulf threatens to halt further hobble the middle class. cities and communities suffer from the same, both of them have recovered while others remain shuttered. our national identity is once again shifting to read it historical context by comparing this recession with collapses of the years passed he reunites the call for the reinvention and renewed civic duty and public auction. thank you again for joining us and it is a pleasure to welcome to politics and prose to discuss this book don peck. [applause] >> that's a great introduction.

we should just take questions after that. i love about ten minutes away from politics and prose and over the years i've been to countless book talks but this is my first book and my first time on this side of the microphone so it is michael placer real but i will do my best. think you all for coming. i want to talk about how the book came about. i am a features editor at the atlantic and i spent a lot of my time trying to find big stories, cover stories come and if you know the atlantic at all, one of the most salient features is we write long stories, and they take -- the take a long time to report, the deeply reported and they take a while to incubates 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 concerned but also timely and relevant. and i cover the economy among other things and so, when the --

when we had the initial financial crash in 2008 it just wasn't even possible to predict what the first nine months what look like as we all remember things were incredibly fluid we couldn't even predict next week. but by the time the spring of 2009 and arrived after t.a.r.p. and after the first stimulus the economy stopped its freefall, the market was rebounding and i think all of us, certainly i did, breathe a sigh of relief to the above i was trying to think ahead of the stories for the fall and 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. they were saying that we were prematurely breathing a sigh of relief, and they were saying that actually where things have been fluid the next six months, nine months, 12 months, 24

months more were likely to be quite predictable. of the labour market was likely to recover incredibly slowly, the economy was likely to take years to amend today than when i started reading histories of other long slump deeper into american history and talking to sociologists about them it became apparent that as the society's stew in long periods like this the change in many profound ways. so i decided rather than as many pieces of want to start writing devotees phenomenon they struck me as important in the industry is important to try to identify them as quickly as possible so that we could understand them and think more intelligently about recovery. two years later after to 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 and public policies we are not in my opinion near the end of this period coming and if we stay in such a program 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? as part as mike said it is a history. i look in some detail at 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 all of them as well which holds important lessons for us. in part it's quite a lot of

reporting from around the country on different people, different places, different class's because this recession and recovery such as it's been has been felt free differently in different parts of the country by different people, and i think that holds important lessons thinking about how to recover and it's a generational study. one thing that's clear from the past slumps, long slump is a band coming generations change profoundly in periods like this one. i spend a lot of time on the millennial generation, and in the people behind them talking to them about how they were changing, how they felt their life prospects for changing and how their 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' and marriages and politics and for some of us even who we are to be a so that's kind of 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 up 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 q&a. what i would like to do is try to distill things on the three main messages from the book with a few illustrations and then we will just take some questions. some kind of tree messages from the book. one is periods like this one come slumps in the deep and long do have enduring consequences. we think of recession as timber,

jobs will become jobs will back, housing john euskadi and go back up, but deep recessions do leave society in some ways permanently changed, not entirely for the worst is substantially for the worse they changed generations from the change communities, the change families in ways that are not quickly or easily reversed. .. i think it's critical to the

think 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. at think we are seeing a disturbing amount of fatalism right now among many members of the media and members of congress. we should not be fatalistic about this. we do face a long slog, but they're is a lot we can do to recover faster, we just aren't doing it. so let me go back through the three main messages to provide a little bit of detail. first, the enduring consequences of times like this. life changes in countless and surprising ways, i think, during slumps. people sleep more accommodate less, spend more time at home. they drive less, and they drive more slowly, which actually

tends to reduce traffic fatalities and overall mortality , something that has happened in this recession. skirts fate -- skirts famously wind and the lady doth not withstanding pop songs become more earnest, complex, romantic, and less sexual and almost every aspect of life. people become more personally conservative. now, many of the things i have just talked about are ephemeral and italy is as strong growth returns. deep slumps leave more enduring marks on our families, communities, the places we lived i talk about all of that in the book. i talk about how suburbs and some of the former middle-class meccas of the u.s., las vegas, tampa, changing profoundly. i think permanently in the wake of this recession. let me focus here on harmelin deals are changing because i think this is one of the most important kind of enduring

changes that we are already seeing from this time and will continue to see. when i began reporting for the magazine story that led to a "pinched" i really expected that young people would bear some of the latest stars from this recession. they don't have a lot of personal responsibility. so a few bad years, a few bad years. but, in fact, when you look at history, when you look at that ample scully research that has been done on this subject, it is just the opposite. the first few years in the job market are crucial to establishing a career track and life's trajectory of young people. and people who struggle, cohorts in generations to struggle early because of a bad economy can get stuck in bad jobs or can't find work at all and never fully recover. they not only start out behind,

but, according to a good research by the yale economist we seconde, ten, 20, 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. they cling more tightly to their jobs. they don't switch jobs as often, which is really how one increases in earnings, particularly in -- early in one's career. about two-thirds of lifetime income growth after you factor out inflation usually occurs in the first ten years of a career. as this recession stretches three, four, more years a lot of people are losing that opportunity and acquiring a stigma and of underachieve meant that will be really difficult ticked shed. now, those economic conditions and that lifetime economic

problem is made complex, particularly when thinking about the millennium generation. on the eve of the recession the millennial generation was arguably the most audacious in american history, the highest self-esteem, higher material expectations than any other generation and a similar age. you know, this is the german -- generation of people who have children and were told they are special and can do anything they want. the collision of that attitude and outlook with this economy has been painful to watch. when the recession began a lot of millennial is quite understandably did not really realize what was happening to them. many moved back in with their parents after graduation, and many had two. many could not leave home. many did it because they thought they could simply way the recession now. the term fine-employment became

-- acquired some cultural currency among particularly 20-something college graduates. as i reported on millennial over the past oliviers, i found, not surprisingly, that those attitudes are changing. they are beginning to profoundly change as a result of this time. economically we are seeing some of the same career conservatism now that lisa described in past generations. job tenure among millenniums has spiked far more than it has for older workers. in know, in a recent survey asked whether they want to -- whether they would prefer to switch employers are stay with the same employer, an overwhelming majority said they wanted to stay with the same employer. and more than that, you know, millennial some are beginning --

well, they're not beginning. they are seeing their entire lives really put on hold. i spoke to a young attorney in d.c. who had graduated from law school in 2009 and has not been ill to find work as a lawyer. after months and months he was working at barnes and noble and finally found a job with the federal government that did not make use of his law degree. he was living in an efficiency with a roommate. you know, his parents were a machinist and the secretary. he said, by the time my dad was 20 years old he had a house, wife, kids. these things have been pushed back so far for me. i can't even see them. that attitude has become more and more pervasive with 20-something. they feel trapped increasingly

in a perpetual adolescents from which they simply can't escape. it is interesting when you look at the political beliefs of 20-somethings today, those are changing radically. i shouldn't say radically. they're changing significantly. already a liberal generation, but we see in survey data now is that they're becoming more liberal and principal and more supportive of support for the poor, more cognizant of the role that look place in life, but at the same time they are becoming more skeptical that the government can actually be trusted to competently carry out a good policy. this, too, is not a surprise. it is exactly what happened to prior generations who came out in deep slump in the 1980's and '70's and before. those characteristics in the past stayed with those coleworts for decades afterwards.

i write a bit above the millennial sue had to move home and spend extended time with their families. there has been some good news from this. i think both parents and their adult children have at times said that they have grown closer and appreciated spending the time together. but it has 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-somethings 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 had artistic ambitions frequently, rejecting the salary lifestyle that had characterized their parents, and i mean there is a lot of criticism at the time, but in many ways they were glamorized for doing that. but what we see is as more and more 20-somethings had to move home, and as they could not move out because the economy remained weak for years and years, social attitudes toward 20-somethings changed markedly. one term that describes them today is parasites singles. and 20-somethings today are blamed widely in japan for everything from low birthrates

to slow economic growth. so, i think it will be interesting to watch how social views of millennial change over the next few years and how are attitudes toward you to change as well. again, if we don't recover more quickly. i do want to stress that not all of the changes under way for millennials are bad. i mean, some are merely transformations. the change in political views are not necessarily bad. i do sense a return to thrift in this generation. you know, we saw that generation of thrift after the depression that was only undone by the long inflation of the 1970's and the lessons that were drawn from that. we are unlikely to see it turning toward generational pressed again after this and i think that will stand millennials in good stead in the

depression adolescence were in a different position. they could not be blamed for the economic troubles, and at the same time they were counted on for more during the depression and pampered less. they became the greatest generation after that. there were renowned for their ability to postpone gratification, firm commitment to family, and generally for a sort of can-do very practical attitude. the greatest generation had world war two which was terrific, but provided an uplift to the economy. if we can get out of this quickly we may see some benefits for people that are currently in their teens. so that is a little taste of one

how this will probably leave in remarks on the u.s., our culture, our politics, the character of our society will likely be changed for decades even after we fully recover. part number two, the way that this is accelerating deep economic forces that were already under way in society and that were kind of changing our class's and life in america anyway. let me just ask a question to everyone. how many people, just raise your hand -- how many people feel personally in your own life, your own career, your own close social circle that you are still living in a bad slump? yak, not too many people. i would say less than one in five people just raised their

hand. that is not surprising because we are in northwest washington d.c. and america power cities and creative enclaves, the places to which the most highly educated, highest potential people flock of 45 over the past 20 years have felt this recession much more lightly than most of america. housing value did not decline as much and have rebounded more. wage growth has been remarkably rapid over the last year or so, particularly in places like manhattan and silicon valley. it is a very different environments then characterizes much of the country now, and i think in part explains why politically we have been less focused on job growth than we really should be today. an economist at mit looks carefully at the structure of

job losses in this recession. what he found was that overwhelmingly the jobs lost were what economists called mid skilled jobs. these were jobs in manufacturing, non-managerial of this work white clerks, administrative assistants that have typically been taken by people with a high-school degree, but not a 4-year college degree. about 60 percent of the adult population. it is that group of jobs overwhelmingly that have disappeared in this recession. tubs should have been growing, but high-school jobs and managet and professional work, no net job loss in employment rate among professionals with a professional degree. if you look at the bottom of the economy, jobs and security, food preparation, minimum-wage jobs were of little better, no net loss in those jobs either.

it has all been in the middle. companies as a result of the recession and because the recession gave them places to do this have largely pulled forward restructuring and offshore in 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 we have had has tended to be toward the bottom of the economy. economic data is great, but it looks like it is jobs that are at the $15 our level or less that have been growing, not jobs in the middle. and i don't think that there is any good reason to believe that many of those middle skilled jobs are likely to come back, unless we do something to change it. and there are no quick fixes in this particular case. i think we are looking at a large chunk of the middle class that is going to be working if they can find work at all at much lower wages than they have

in the past. this has been called the manned session, and it is true. about three-quarters of all peak slips delivered during the recession were to men, and that has consequences. manufacturing declined before the recession. it declined by about one-third in total jobs. the construction bubblehead that for a time, but now that is on. men without a college degree are really, really struggling. in fact, men have not adapted well to the postindustrial economy as a group. college graduation rates 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 toward women today as they were at the beginning of the decade. what men have done is they have

exited the work force. they have been doing it for years and more quickly since the recession. in 1967 among men with a high-school degree 97% working and today it's 76 percent. what does that mean? the consequences are of more than one might initially supposed and they have -- 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 work and communities where people overwhelmingly did not have college education. women don't marry men who don't have jobs or economically insecure. they do have children with them. those children can struggle when, as usually happens, their parents don't stick together. so what are we seeing as far as an acceleration of the trends

that were already existing? well, we are seeing a recovery among the rich, continuing concentration of wealth among the top 1 percent of society, and we are seeing not just the hauling of the nonprofessional 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 much harder to bridge in the future. i've been running on a bit. i was going to tell a story of one of the many struggling man that i met. i won't. so, just quickly, i met this guy outside reading, pennsylvania, a great guy, optimistic, caring.

when he and his wife were still together before he lost his job in the recession he and she had adopted eight children. you know, he really is the salt of the earth. lost his job as a construction foreman and worked most of his life outside. he is in his mid-40s, italian american. he just didn't know what to do. you know, he struggled in school 20 years ago. he new retraining efforts were available, but he was terrified and felt like he was too old to take the opportunities. his whole manner, you know, had been shaped by blue-collar work. you know, a human-resources, and interviewing coach that was provided by local church group told him with the style of conversation that you are using you're not going to get a job outside of construction. his response, he told me was,

you can kiss my. [laughter] he felt like he was a good worker, and that was what was important. in many ways he does represent, though -- there are a lot of men -- there are good guys and work hard. their work has been devalued. being forced into parts of the economy that require very different social skills and skills sets. this guide who i call frank in the book, he got by by reading through his neighbors' trash for about a year-and-a-half. he learned the garbage collection schedule for his neighborhood within about 30 miles of this town and would drive his pickup truck through much of the night looking further 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 and their families and their communities in blue-collar areas. the last thing i want to talk about before taking questions, the third message of the book, and it is important. you know, we can get out of this more quickly, and we can build in more robust society, but it is going to take a wide array of actions, and we need to start now. did for -- 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 bill will allow the

middle-class consumers 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. it is going to take at least another couple of years if you look at debt levels for consumers to finish to leveraging, get back to sustainable 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 to direct job growth. we need to worry about the debt in the long run. pass binding measures today to reduce the debt. once the economy is healthy again. it is dead wrong to be moving toward austerity today. and it is something we, as citizens, i think, 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, you know, hundreds of thousands of unemployed construction workers, manufacturing workers back into the economy and keep them working. we need -- i described in the book, it is more than simple stimulus. i describe the ways that the government can in the short run create jobs, support the economy and help us -- help carry us through this time or 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 really important and much neglected i think, in the long run a lot of this story is about technology, and it is not just about the kinds of innovations that have been eliminating work.

it has been a slowdown in the rate of breakthrough innovations, the sort that create new products, services, new industries. i don't have time to get into why that has happened, but it quite clearly has, and it happened at the same time that innovations defused globally more quickly so that work leaves our borders more quickly. so i call for a sort of manhattan project to try to reinvigorate the rate of breakthrough technological innovations. part of that involves more investment in scientific advance, r&d. part of it involves a very different way of taking about regulation, especially a regulation of young industries that have real growth potential and can provide the next generation of products and services for america. the last thing that i -- set of

things that i recommend in the book having to do with filling the hole in the middle class. if our government is willing to the 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 u.s. economy, a lot will go right over time. jobs will come back. particularly for people with college degrees who are struggling badly today, 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 appear quite a natural. so what do we need to do? people who don't have a college

degree, encourage college. only 30% are college graduates. it has been growing very slowly, one percentage point every year. college, it's simply not the answer over the next decade or two to the problems facing the middle-class. in the book i looked to different educational models and high-school, vocational programs, apprenticeships 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 real careers that are available to them and how they can reach them. i think this will be critical. the last thing within filling the hole in the middle class and i will stop is, to some extent i do believe that the answer to

the problems that we are seeing today must be political. a lot of middle class, formerly middle-class americans will not recover the wages that they had. a lot of 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. you know, economists on the left and right have always advocated the 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 getting. when we are seeing such explosive rates of growth among the wealthy and still good incomes among the professional middle class, i think we owe it to ourselves as a society. i think we need to think about more aggressively subsidizing

the low-skilled-low income work that many people are going to need to take one now falling out of the middle class. so let me stop there and think you very much for your attention. [applause] [applause] >> we have 20 minutes for questions. >> thank you. that was very interesting. you are talking about the effect of the recession on us. my question is about the politics that have affected the recession in our response to it. i graduated from college in 1969. my parents graduated in 1943. the response this time is so different from the kind of response of people during the depression. roosevelt was not afraid to say that the problem was the bankers.

he immediately put in regulation which was popular. in the 60's 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, middle-class workers, why should they get $40 an hour when toyota only pays 20? they should be getting 20 like the rest of us. the response of some people in wisconsin was the same. it was exactly the opposite. i wonder why that has happened. >> it is a great question. when you look at the depression, especially it stands out from other long slumps in american history and in european history as well. i think in part the very depth of that time, which, of course,

was much steeper than but we are in today, did pull society together. the middle class came to identify with the poor more than the rich, which is unusual in american history. the economic in -- iconic image is included bankers selling apples on street corners. there was a sense that everyone was in it together and needed to get out together, but that is not the case today. the images of bankers to did not involve the sale of apples, and the recession has been dealt very differently by different people. and so i think that has something to do with a response. as i mentioned in the talk, you know, 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 like the recovery is well advanced. washington d.c., a recent gallup poll showed is the most optimistic city in the country as to the state in future of the

economy. we have this geographic separation in the u.s. that i think has contributed to and inattention on the part of many american elites. there is also something else that goes on, and that is bust psychology takes over. what we see again and again in times like this is people become much more jealous of their status relative to others. they engage in zero some thinking, politics grows meaner, and support for the poor generally diminishes. a lot of middle-class people who are not employed, but have seen their housing values decline, their career prospects decline, to them all lot of the benefits they see, a lot of the government programs that they seek are benefiting people unlike them,

and they don't support that. national debt in particular takes on an oversized importance again and again in times like this. in the early 1980's a large majority of americans were intensely concerned that the debt was going to choke off the recovery. reagan did not listen. in 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, raise taxes. the stock market crashed and unemployment skyrocketed back up to 19 percent and it took five years and world war ii to fully get us out of the depression. in some ways i think the push toward austerity, the reluctance to do more is actually

understandable today. it is a psychological and emotional reaction, and it has happened before, but we really, really need to struggle against it because it is ultimately an emotional reaction and is leading is toward a very bad policy. >> high and thank you for a most compelling discussion. he talked about the lawyer who could not find a job. we're seeing a shrinking of options, not the least of which is the fact that in india there are many college-educated people who are assuming jobs in it is airing in other fields. even law can be outsourced. i think that we are seeing shrinkage of state governments that are going to continue no matter who the president becomes

of course perry will certainly be influencing that discussion. in new york city teachers are being laid off in huge numbers. it middle class, maybe middle middle class jobs. some of the jobs like engineering can be almost upper middle, depending on the income. is the fact is not totally focused on folks who are blue-collar workers. the height of the blue-collar pay scale. i think, again, the whole polarization and the fact that engineers in china are turning out in huge numbers. these people are learning to speak english. in international dimension that will go away. and with government cutbacks and support for training and other programs, the situation is, in some ways, kind of dyer, i would be interested in your comments. >> you make a lot of good

points. it is certainly true for college graduates and professionals as well, that life is less certain than it used to be. a college degree is no longer protection against job loss. people still have to retrain some times, and we have seen that in this recession. at the same time, the unemployment rate for people with a professional degree is 2%, master's degree for nafta, over 9 percent overall, and when you start talking about high-school graduates and high-school dropouts you're into the teens and twenties. it is true that life is less certain. that is not going to change for just about everyone, but it is also true that people with more education have been much better insulated and everyone else. in the depression people began to question the value of a college degree quite widely. of course they were wrong.

i think people who are doing that today are also wrong. the return on a college degree remains near historical highs, and while there is more competition from overseas, there is also more demand overseas. this is about the rise of the middle-class globally, it is not ours. for people, strawn skills and a good education and some ability, you know, while there will be more competition, there is really more opportunity because markets have expanded so much. so it is not so much kind of a 1-pastry with globalization and particularly with people with strong skills. over time the benefits will have -- out with the costs. >> let's hope so. >> quite a lot of violent labor unrest in the late 19th

centuries. i noticed that you talked about japan, but not any of the unemployed unrest in london. what is your sense of what it will take further to be blood on the streets in america? >> well, violence is very unpredictable, but we know from history that as times like this have extended we tend to see more incidents of it, more rioting and so forth. as you mentioned, 1890's, the end of the 19th century in general was a violent time. we did not see anything comparable in the depression, but we did see a substantial increase in lynchings and in mob violence in that era as well. we sought to some extent in the 70's. what is interesting is even when we recover, reactionary sentiments once they come out of

the bottle are not easily stepped back in. when you look at the 70's, the oklahoma city bombing occurred in 1994-5 as the economy was just beginning a time of incredible growth. when you look at the specific ideology and kind of origins of that ideology of the bomber, you know, they can clearly be traced to the 70's and things that were written in the 70's when the economy was really in bad shape. a lot of, you know, white men were losing faith in the country. so i don't know what is going to happen as to violence. japan has not had a lot of violence. it is very hard to predict, but i do think that we are going to be vulnerable, certainly, to reaction and extremism.

much more than we have been in the last dictators to, probably for the next dictator to. >> i really think this is an excellent presentation. a lot of times people of culture cannot see the forest for the trees, and you are sort of putting a little bit of the forest out there. i think possibly, and we heard what earlier questioners, a bigger forest than even you are presenting. what we are going to experience, as you describe, may only be upgraded to a greater reconfiguration of human existence and human history, and i am saying that because we are not geared up institutionally and politically and psychologically. i mean, if you put another layer, for example, of the environment on top of what you are describing it, that will make it more complex.

i just wanted to hear your response to that, that this maybe even a greater turning point in history than you are describing because we are accelerating, and that is the difference. we have changed over hundreds and hundreds of years, but now we are accelerating to where we are being compressed into a smaller timeframe with greater stress. >> there is a lot that is changing profoundly in the world, and that is accelerating a lot of changes in american life. i think that we have been politically and prepared for many of the changes that have been occurring, actually, for 15 or 20 years and that have been hidden by credit and by the housing bubble.

that is why i think we need to look very, very broadly at how we need to change our economic policy, industrial policy, technological policy, and our taxation and redistribution systems to try to accommodate ourselves to a new world that is likely to continue to change very quickly. the one source of -- it's not the one source, but one source of hope speaking very broadly, i talked about the rises of the global middle-class. wages are rising rapidly in china and over the course of, you know, a couple of decades are more, you know, we will begin to see, you know, wage disparities being eliminated, and we will see a lot more demand globally if the u.s. can get out of its own way and continue to increase education, provide a fertile environment

for innovation. i think the country will be fine. in the long run. mime worry is more what is happening to specific class is within the country. >> the level of pollution you describe? >> i have a question about job creation. this is partly just what we have seen the last few weeks with the political polarization. what your thoughts are on how we can a situation where we really are as a country creating more jobs for these people that you are describing in the face of, it seems, a very an informed electorate that has put in place elected officials who are almost taking positions against people that are -- the people's

economic interest. what we saw last few weeks was in beating job creation, not helping it. and while the side point is -- i know you made a comment about northwest d.c., but my guess is most people in northwest d.c. just by example would be in favor of some of the, you know, governmental programs that would encourage job creation. >> right. it is in the intractable problem and i wish i had a good dancer. this is a tough time politically, and you're right. the political forces today are really pushing against what we need to do, not toward it. i guess i have two answers. one is, ultimately it is incumbent upon all of us to speak with a loud voice, to be politically active when we believe in things. i feel like to some extent the