you everywhere, you don't necessarily want everyone to know your dog's name. so here tuesday, here, tuesday, subway, you know? then he's not helping me, then i fall and, you know, not a happy day, right? which is the reason some of you are wondering why service dogs are really not to be petted in public unless the handler says okay. but tuesday is a great name because i can shorten it to, tu, and people don't -- i'm giving it away on c-span. [laughter] unfortunately, most people don't, well, most people don't pay attention to me. [laughter] and so, two, you know, they think it's a command, nobody will think it's a name. i'll say, two, heel or side. two, i can say, two, and they're thinking, what the heck is two? special -- what is one? i don't want to find out what one is. three, four be.

[laughter] and i can shorten it, and people don't know what i'm doing as i'm talking with my best friend. questions? sir? >> you said you were in the army 17 years. were you able to go back to active duty the injury -- [inaudible] >> that's a great question, sir, thank you. yes, i was in the army for 17 years and, actually, no. i wasn't able to remain on active duty as a -- with my wounds and injuries. i mean, i did. i was wounded, actually, in my first tour in 2003, um, and as the majority of warriors do, unfortunately, the media and others, leaders, etc., would have you think that wounded

warriors are visibly wounded. but you have to be missing an arm or a leg to be wounded. and i'd like to dispel that vehemently, that most warriors, most veterans of our wars, all wars have invisible wounds, invisible wounds. while i have many a friend, we have many a friend who has a missing arm or leg or both, you know, 1900 veterans of iraq and afghanistan have, are amputees. there are 2.2 million or 2.5 million servicemen and women that have served abroad. and one-third to a half of those are injured or wounded in some way. so you do the math. the majority are walking

invisibly wounded. um, and that -- and it's, we need to really dispel that, the media and leaders and you need to do your part because, um, there are many, many sons, daughters, fathers, cousins, wives, sisters who suffer from traumatic brain injuries and posttraumatic stress disorder. some of them have suffered for decades, and i'm sorry to say this statistics, but i'm glad to say it on c-span, that 18 veterans a day commit suicide. eighteen. eighteen of our toughest americans. that's shameful. and they're not dying because of a missing arm of leg. let me say that again. they're not dying because of a missing arm or leg. they're dying because of this

and this. so we need to pay very close attention to the invisible wiewns of war -- wounds of war, and we also to more directly answer your question, sir, is get -- give, give support and assistance to service members, their families and veterans who need it. whether they know it or not. um, i wasn't able to get the help i needed. why? because the military inculcates us with being tough. you know? i'm a sergeant or a captain and i'm a combat leader, it's unprofessional to show weakness. it can curtail your professional development. it can jeopardize your security clearance. it can cause you your career. in many cases, your identity. so while it's changing ever so

slightly, the dod, the va, the government and the private sector need to do a lot more for our nation's finest. next question. before i give over the mic. please. >> what -- [inaudible] >> well, the question is what injury do i have? and, actually, that's a good question, but it's also a bad question. a good question because i'm glad you're asking and you want to know, because you care. it's a bad question because people don't always want to tell people what's wrong with them. you know? if i asked you what's wrong with you, you might not like it. but i'm happy that you asked it because that's why we're up

here, that's why we wrote the book with. because, um, you know, i have a spinal cord injury, some fractured vertebra and post traumatic stress discoard and traumatic -- disorder and traumatic brain injury and some other things, and tuesday helps me with that. so i feel very blessed. thank you for your question. and i really thank you all for being here. again, it's really a pleasure and, you know, it's really -- i was telling the festival founders and the mayor how much of a blessing book festivals are to writers, and i think to all of us. because it's a sign, i think, of hope that the arts, that intellectualism, that reading, a staple of education, is being appreciated.

even in spite of the closure of bookstores like borders and the advent of the e-book and the difficulty with the book industry. we have these splendid celebrations of books and writings. thank you all, god bless you and we wish you well. [applause] >> our live coverage to have gaithersburg book festival continues in a couple of minutes with timothy noah on the current state of the income gap and what can be done reverse it. we just heard from luis carlos manual van. -- montalvan. for more information on booktv's schedule of

programming, visit booktv.org. [inaudible conversations] >> here's a look at some upcoming book fairs and festivals around the country. this weekend booktv is live from gaithersburg, maryland, at the gaithersburg book festival. we bring you live author talks and panels featuring speakers such as kenneth ackerman, gary krist and adam hochschild. also weekend the south carolina book festival is in columbia, south carolina. this festival features over 70 officers, writing classes and book panel discussions. bookexpo america takes place in new york city on june 4th through the 6th. the festival will feature panel discussions, interviews and fall book previews. look for booktv's coverage of bea the weekend of june 16th and

17th. on june 9th and 10th, booktv will be live from chicago at the printers row lit fest, topics ranging from watergate to war crimes tribunals. for continually-updated information on this festival, visit our web site at booktv.org. for a complete list of upcoming book fairs and festivals, visit booktv.org and click on the book fairs tab at the top of the page. also, please, let us know about book fairs and festivals in your area, and we'll add them to our list. e-mail us at booktv@cspan.org. [inaudible conversations] >> okay, everybody. welcome to the third annual

gaithersburg book festival. on a beautiful saturday afternoon. thank you for being here in gorgeous gaithersburg. >> yeah. >> yes, all right. my name's hans roemer, and i am one of the four at-large members of the montgomery county council, so if you live in montgomery county here, i represent you. and i am very appreciative of the chance to introduce our author today and share with you in this great presentation. um, the city of gaithersburg which organizes this event, council member judd ashman had the vision, and the city has gotten behind it in the such a marvelous way. it's really a vibrant, diverse community that celebrates the arts. and if you don't know gaithersburg, you want to get to know it. the event is free thanks to the

sponsors, so, please, explore the offers that they have. of course, if you're here in the audience and you have a cell phone, i ask you to mute it. and there are surveys to allow you to give us feedback to help make a better book festival in the years to come. and we want this book festival to be the best book festival on the eastern seaboard. our author will be signing books afterwards, and i'm going to give him mine to ask him to sign that as well. um, timothy noah, who wrote the book that we're discussing today, "the great divergence: america's growing inequality crisis and what we can do about it." timothy is the trv columnist at the new public. he recently became the trv columnist which, i believe, is the voice of the magazine, is that right? >> well -- [inaudible] >> well, the lead column this the front when you open it right up. he contributes frequently to cbs sunday morning. you might hear him on national

public radio. i first began to read timothy's work when he wrote the chatterbox column at slate, and i read that for many years. and, in fact, i believe it is from a series in slate magazine that -- or in slate that the book is for. but before slate mr. noah served as a reporter at "the wall street journal," the "u.s. news & world report," "the washington monthly." and i know in what must have been a labor of love, he edited two collections of the writings of his late wife, marjorie williams, including "the new york times"' bestseller, "the woman at the washington zoo." for the work that goes into the book today, he won the highest award for public service magazine journalism called the hillman prize. so you know that this is peer-reviewed and celebrated,

um, and and an important accomplishment. i was very nervous to introduce him today, i have to admit, because i have read his work, and, um, i read the book somewhat late, i procrastinated a bit, and in the car on the way up here i said to my wife, you've got to help me. you know, because she thinks she's a professional when it comes to procrastinating, and she said, you are such an amateur. you can't wait until the last minute to procrastinate. [laughter] so i don't even -- i can't win. but it was risky for them to ask a politician to introduce an author. i said to tim, well, i'll just go for about a half an hour, and then you can start -- [laughter] and he kind of gave me a funny look until he realized i was joking. i was reading the book while we were doing the county budget, and that was instructive for me. i have followed this issue very closely and, in fact, one of the books that tim discusses is a

book by mickey couch called -- i forget what the name of -- >> "the end of equality." >> i read that book when i first came to washington in 1994, and it animated a lot of the discussions i had at that time. and we haven't really ever stopped talking about economic inequality. and while we have talked, it has grown worse and worse and worse and worse to the point where i was at this morning my brother graduated from the george washington university masters school, got a master's in education, and the dean of the school of education said that it is the most significant problem of our time. um, as a policymaker, for me what i enjoyed about the book was the method logical way that mr. noah reviews many of the ideas that are thought to contribute to growing economic inequality and puts them in perspective and attempts to rationalize what part of the

overall gap they might create. and what we find is that many of the things that, you know, you or i might have thought would have been a major force behind inequality are actually somewhat marginal contributing factors. this is important because if we as activists, as policymakers are going to really attack this effectively, then we have to really understand what the problems are in order to create the right solution. so this book, "the great divergence," is an important contribution and, i think, well recognized because of that. and so without any further words, mr. timothy noah. thank you for being here today. [applause] >> thank you for that wonderful introduction and timing it perfectly to the --

[laughter] to the tech challenge here. um, well, thank you all for coming. i have to say that i feel like a bit of a fraud addressing a crowd in the james michener tent because my book is only about 200 pages long. [laughter] but i will try to live up to the great man's legacy. my book is "the great divergence," and one of the joys of working on this book was that i learned how to do powerpoint as a result. [laughter] and so i am afraid i have fallen in love with powerpoint about 15 years after the rest of the world. here i'm going to go through this presentation, i hope -- can you all see it? all right. well, um, there it is, "the great divergence." "the great divergence" is a pattern whereby incomes have been growing steadily more

unequal since 1979. and a number of people will say, well, that's just the way capitalism is, but this chart demonstrates it's not the way capitalism is, it's not the way capitalism was from about 1934 to 1979, and this shows the divide more clearly between the great compression which was a period when incomes were growing more equal in the united states and the great divergence which is a period when incomes were growing more unequal. the pattern towards greater income equality from 34 to 79 was so pronounced that a whole economic theory was built around the idea that this is simply what happened in an advanced industrial economy after the disruption of industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th century, this was theorized you would expect to see a steadily,

a move towards tedly more equal -- steadily more equal income. simon -- [inaudible] who formulated this theory essentially said -- he didn't put it quite this way -- but he essentially said it was the mark of a civilized nation that incomes had become more equal. but as you can see, we started becoming uncivilized in 1979. here you see that the trend, the income share of the top 1% which has doubled since 1979 is growing faster the higher up the income scale you go. so it's really being driven by the richest of the rich. when i say income share, i mean the the percentage of the nation's collective income that is going to a particular slice of that income, in this case the top 1% or as the occupy wall street

crowd have taught us to say, simply the 1%. now, during the recession between 2007 and 2009, you heard some commentary and even afterwards from some people saying, well, why is anybody talking about income inequality? the problem is over. we are seeing a reversal of the trend. the top 1% are losing income share. and, um, the answer was that recessions are always bad for the rich e people because they are -- the richest people because they are heavily into the market, but the fact pattern had been that they recovered just fine after recession. here we go. and here you see that you can stop weeping for the 1% because

they did start to increase their income share again in 2010. this statistic came too late for me to include in my book. in my book i said, you know, just wait, you'll see that the 1% will start increasing its income share, and i'm relieved to see that that proved true but also, of course, disstress today see that that proved true. and these findings came from emanuel saez who really invented the whole vocabulary of the 1% versus the 99% with a study they did in 2003 that showed that the top 1%'s income share was much greater than people had previously realized. what emanuel said in a march 2012 paper was that 93% of the

recovery had ended up in the pockets of the 1%. essentially, that means there was no recovery for anybody except the 1% in the year 2010. things probably got a little better in 2011, but the real index of how much better it's likely to have gotten is, um, the unemployment level and, also, the rising corporate profits. so it probably didn't get a lot better in 2011, and 2012 remains to be seen. but i, in describing the statistic, i often say to people what we had in 2010 was a members-only recovery. inequality, income -- the trend towards growing income and equality is an international trend. it's happening around the world. but by most measures, really by all measures the united states

ranks at or near the bottom or top fending on how you want to -- depending on how you want to calculate it. the united states is more unequal than most comparable advanced industrial democracies. and when you measure it according to the top 1% verse is us the bottom 99% -- versus the bottom 99%, we are the champions. it's worse in the united uniteds than anywhere else, and that's what this chart shows. another interesting fact that should be pointed out is while it is an international trend towards greater income inequality, it is not a universal trend. there are countries where incomes are not becoming more unequal. there are even a few countries where incomes have been becoming more equal. and, um, i list them here; mexico, turkey, greece -- i guess i should cross greece off

the list because we don't really want to talk about greece today -- chile, italy and in my book i say -- i included france on that list. more recent data has shown that incomes have grown recently more unequal in france, but that makes the 30-year trend, essentially, flat. latin america traditionally has been known as a place where we had especially egregious income inequality, and the general trend in latin america has been towards greater income equality. well, we're going in the opposite wrong direction. an argument you sometimes hear from people is we don't really need to concern ourselves with income inequality because america is such a mobile country, there's so much opportunity here. we're the envy of the world. anyone can grow up to be president or ceo of a major corporation.

um, and i have two answers to that. one is, it isn't true and, second of all, even if it were true, we would still have to worry about income inequality because there would still be some people left behind. but the conversation almost never gets to number two because it's such a surprise, number one is such a surprise that the u.s. is not especially distinguished by its income ability. in fact, the u.s. lags a number of other countries. and this chart shows that. i have a measure that i call income heritability. what it is, essentially, is the likelihood that my child will have the same income relative to other people in society that i

had. it's actually been founded for men. the likelihood that you will inherit your parents' income is about as great as the likelihood that you will inherit their height or weight. i should remind you that height and weight are literally heritable traits whereas income is not. another finding that came, alas, too late for me to include in my book is the relationship between income inequal thety and mobility. if you think that income inequality doesn't matter and all we need to care about is mobility, you still have to worry about income inequality because there is some growing evidence -- not definitive, but highly suggestive -- that a rising level of income inequality is going to reduce mobility. it's going to increase income

heritability which is a clever way of saying that it's going to reduce mobility. and here is a chart that was put together by alan krueger, chairman of the council of economic advisers, this past winter. where he looked at a number of countries and correlated income heritability with levels of income inequality, and he found that there is a not definitive, but highly suggestive correlation. which has long been suspected. isabelle sawhill of the brookings institution has put it this way: as the rungs of the ladder grow farther apart, the ladder gets harder to climb. which seems logical enough. now, why is income inequality growing? this is really the question, the central question of my book. well, there are two questions. one is why is it worse in the united states than in other

countries? and it is. we have a higher level of income inequality, and income inequality is growing faster here in the u.s. than anywhere else. and then there's the subcategory of question, what in the united states are the causes that are, um, making it accelerate faster and exist at a higher level than in other countries? a, um, when you talk about inequality in the united states, the first two topics likely to come up are race and gender. but race is not a contributor to the trend of growing income inequality since 1979 in any direct way. there are indirect ways, but, um, if you simply look at the income gap between whites and blacks -- oh, i'm sorry, this is gender. if you look at the income gap between men and women, you see that the gap has closed a little bit since 1979. if that gap is closing, it can't

be contributing to the growth of income inequality for the population at large. and here's race. the trends between whites and blacks since 1979 is that the income gap is, essentially, the same as it was in 1979. so it can't be contributing to an expansion of income inequality either. plus, african-americans only represent about 13% of the population. now, full stock here. i don't mean to be too breezy about the fact that the income gap between blacks and whites is unchanged since 1979. looking out, i can see a number of you were around in 1979, and you can well remember that if i had told you in 1979 that the income gap between blacks and whites would be unchanged a third of a century later, um,

you would have been shocked. we expected progress, and economically we didn't get any progress in the aggregate. changes in direct taxation and the giving of government benefits have been, have had less impact than you would think. the changes in the top marginal rates since 1979 have been extremely dramatic. when ronald reagan was elected president, the top marginal rate was about 70%, and today it's a fairly pathetic 35%. so that's a pretty dramatic change. but if you look at -- that's top marginal rates. when you look at effective rates which is how much in entirety people pay in taxes, the change has been less dramatic. and when you combine that with changes in, um, benefits, you

see there really hasn't been much change at all. there's some. overall, the u.s. goth is in its taxation and granting of benefits about 25% less redistrictive than it was in 1979. um, but this is really a trend that you will see turns up very dramatically even before you take taxes and government benefits into consideration. another logical cause is immigration. the timing would seem to be perfect. in 965 we liberalized immigration laws and saw a huge increase in immigration as a result. so that would fit -- we would expect to see some impact by the '70s.

however, economists have done study after study, and they have really not been able to establish much of an impact. george soar has, who's an economist at harvard, fairly conservative, somewhat anti-immigration, has looked at this question in great detail. and if anybody was going to find a correlation, it would have been him. but really he found that the only meaningful correlation occurred for high school dropouts. and that's because the overwhelming majority of immigrants are unskilled and high school dropouts, so they're competing with american high school dropouts. so there has been some impact on that group since 1979. but "the great divergence" is really a trend not so much about what happened to people of lower

income, it's a trend about what happened to people in the middle compared to people at the top. that's the change. the relationship of incomes at the bottom to incomes in the middle hasn't changed very much since 1979. the big change has been the relationship of incomes at the middle compared to income at the top. now, obviously, that also means that incomes at the bottom have changed dramatically with respect to incomes at the top, but that's driven by changes at the top and -- so, really, "the great divergence" is a story that's mostly about the middle class. trade, another very logical cause for "the great divergence." here the story's complicated. trade does not have hutch of an impact -- much of an impact prior to the 21st century, and that was because the u.s. really wasn't trading very much with nations that had dramatically

lower incomes. and that has changed in the 21st century, really started changing in the 1990s, and you all know why. it's because of china which paradoxically manages to be a rich country and a poor country at the same time. it's rich in the sense that its gdp is expanding by unimaginable percentages year after year, um, and it's leading the world in industrial growth. but it's also a poor country in terms of the fact that its wages are very low, and it's a poor country with a lot of people. um, it's a poor country with a billion people. so the natural laws of economics would tell us that those wages will come up and, eventually, they will. but when you're talking about a billion people, they're going to come up a lot more slowly. and it's a similar story with, um, the offshoring of service functions to india, another country that, like china, is rich and poor at the same time.

so what is causing the great divergence? here i'm going to show you what is rachel maddow's favorite chart in the entire world. when i first published this chart in slate magazine, she thought she'd died and went to heaven. um, this shows the partisan difference between income trends under democrats and republican -- democratic presidents and republican presidents going all the way back to 1948. and as you can see very clearly, and i have to praise katherine mullbrand and the artest who did -- the artist who did this drawing. she has a wonderful web site where she takes economic data and presents them in a very kind of vivid way. you see the opposite trends for democrats and republicans. for democrats, the greatest income gains and, again, this is

going all the way back to 1948. the greatest income gains have come at the bottom and have tapered off as you go up the income scale. you'll also notice that the overall economic growth has been greater under democratic presidents than republican presidents. under republican presidents you have less growth, and you have the opposite trend. you have the greatest income gains going to those at the top of the income scale and tapering off as you go down. now, these findings come from a political scientist named larry bartels who in his book "unequal democracy" points out that he does not vote and even though this is a very partisan-looking chart, he does not vote in presidential elections. and the last president he did vote for was ronald reagan. um, the partisan difference, another important point is that the partisan difference starts to break down above the top -- above the five percentile, above

the 95th percentile, rather. so for the richest people in america it doesn't matter whether it's democrat or a republican in office. they're going to do pretty well either way. this is a point so obvious that i won't dwell on it very long which is that the collapse of the labor movement has been devastating for income inequality. in large part, i think, because of the 1937 taft-hartley law, labor has declined much more rapidly in the united states than comparable countries. you actually have strong labor movements still in much of western europe. you do not in the united states except in the public sector. in the private sector, private sector union density right now

is down to 7%. only 7% of the private work force is unionized. that's about where we were when franklin roosevelt got elected president, um, and a sentence that i write in my book here and was tempted to write in several other places of the book as well is it's as if the new deal never happened. another cause is a shortage of skilled labor, and that is caused by the leveling off of the high school graduation rate in the 1970s. this is a hypothesis that was forwarded and, i think, is very persuasive forwarded by harvard economists. as they point out in their book "the race between education and technology," at the start of the 20th century there was something called the high school movement where people were building high schools all around the country.

um, i think a lot of people don't realize that that didn't really start to happen in a meaningful way until the 20th century. around 1900 about 90% of the population can't go to -- didn't go to high school, and within a few decades everybody was going to high school. that movement came at a very opportune time because the united states was experiencing a number, a sequence of remarkable technological revolution. actually, more remarkable at the start of the 20th century than at the end of the 20th century. we're all very proud of our computer revolution, and it certainly is a revolution, but it doesn't really compare to what was happening in the early 1900s when you had the advent of electricity. that's really when electricity started being used around the country to a great with extent. you have the advent of motion pictures, you have the advent of

air travel, you had the advent of radio, um, a number of very important technologies converging at the same time. and all those technologies required a more highly-educated work force. and the united states kept producing, it kept upping the skill level of its work force until the 1970s as measured by the high school graduation rate. and in the 1970s it stopped increasing. now, what was happening this other countries? european countries thought americans were pathetically sentimentsal in wanting to give -- sentimental in wanting to give everybody a high school education. and they didn't realize that their population was going to need this education level in order to keep up with the united states. they made a bad bet, and by the middle of the 20th century, they realized they had made