watch live on c-span, listen on the c-span radio app or the video on demand at c-span.org. you have a front-row seat to every minute of both conventions on c-span beginning monday jul july 18. >> economist and author edward glaeser talked about the state of employment in the u.s. looking at labor market trends and government policy. he spoke about the impact of the plan was that about suicide, divorce rates and drug abuse. from the manhattan institute, this is one hour. >> as you note, the use of economics as a tool to try to understand the world and figure ways to improve the human condition. one of the great public intellectuals of our time, he is quite prolific, always provocative and very perceptive. nobel laureate gary becker

remarked before edward glaeser burst on the scene in the early 1990s urban economics was dried up. noted come up with some new ways to look at the cities. ed continue to redefine the economics particularly urban economics from his perch at hardware has taught since 1992. he has published dozens of papers on why cities rise and fall, and original book "triumph of the city" became a new times bestseller. he served as director of the center for state and local government and director of the rappaport institute or greater boston. the manhattan institute is -- as well as competing editor to see the joker one of the first talks he gave back in 2006 was titled what our skilled city getting more skilled? today he is revisiting the human capital theme with a discussion of whether 12 years later we have reached quote the end of work because someone who just sent in his final college

tuition bill, let me say i hope the answer to that question is a solid not. please join me in welcoming ed glaeser. [applause] >> thank you. thank you, larry. i am so thrilled to the opportunity to give this lecture. i'm deeply honored that you've given me your time. this is a somewhat unusual lecture in that it's not about the things that are at the core of my research. instead it's about a social problem i think is america's largest. you may think it's odd an academic person thinks of what he thinks i is that the most important thing. that's quite unusual, but this is something that has disturbed me and i think they should distribute as well. my objective in the next 20 minutes is not to convince you that i think another right answers for dealing with this

but convince you this is the great social problem facing america today. what you are looking at is the unemployment rate, not unemployment rate, not the labor force participation rate. roughly the late 1950s to this day. where i was born in 1967, 5% of prime aged males were jobless. that is more or less been true for 20 years before the. today more than 15% of prime aged males are jobless. this is an enormous change and you can see from the data what happened is during every crisis, to unemployment rate drops and he comes back maybe half as much. i think that's what we're seeing again in this crisis. when you parse together what's happening lately, i'm putting this up so you don't feel too good about the slight decline at the end although much of this crowd is likely to feel too good about that. when you look at the data cutting it apart you see in fact 25-30, 40 year old employment

has been coming back. the people were 172007, they are reentering the labor force, working. when you turn to the 35-44 year olds, or the 45-54-year-olds, the air out. those drops but now than they appear to be permanent. that's what you are seeing. howard pointed out report that came out this month on this issue. on by the force participation, never should employment of prime aged males. needless to say i don't agree with all the recommendations in the report bottom glad they're casting a light on this. what this shows you is the triangle shows where we were in 1990. if you look at 1990, the u.s. was 10% for non-employment, which was less than journey to understand -- less than germany,

less than away. today we are at 17% and we are in the territory of belgium and the slovak republic. we are not quite greece yet butt we are in a different place, profoundly moving in the wrong direction. one thing i want you to take away from this is not an execrable that you go in the wrong direction. look at germany. germany was significantly higher in 1990 that it is today. this reflects our changes of germany to its labor market practices over the past 15 years. i think it is a minimum of what we will be required to do in this country. a series of facts that relates to this. there's a tripling of the show non-employment prime aged males in 1976. in may 1996 there were 73 to 8 million americans who are not employed. and may 2016, 112 million. a huge increase. the employment population ratio differs by education.

72.5% of college graduates are employed, 41.3% of high school dropouts are employed. massive gaps with education. the background of this is a combination, and not come back to this again, a combination of trends in the labor market the government is not responsible for and policies which interact with them in an absolutely poisonous manner. manufacturing employment has fallen. there's been of course a massive rise in the number of disability recipients. this is a boring craft but it makes the point. disability 4 million people, we are up to 9 million today. massive change in disability. it's not because americans have gotten sick. this is a choice about a public policy program that very strongly discourages people from working. if there's a scene it is not there's anything wrong with the well-meaning impose what people have been hurt.

i understand that the i believe in that either something wrong with policies put strong disincentives to people working. we all get upset when we think about high skilled people who face marginal tax rates of 50%. it's bad. but those high skilled people have relative jobs. they have a tradition of work. how about we have effective tax rates of 70, 80, 90% of people at the other end of the scale of distribution? people is 30 cents on the dollar, another sense because the housing voucher. it is a bit more because of the earned income tax credit an in e benefits they lose. we have tax rates for the poor that we close to 100%. we don't need to look farther to that to see why work look so unappealing to so many americans. this is an important point. in some since there were not government policies to discourage work. every unemployed person is a

field of entrepreneurial imagination. the recipe, the thing that needs to come out against underemployment is we need new startups, new ideas, new firms will come up with new things or people to do and yet we are at a point at which have a crisis of entrepreneurship. these are the number of jobs in the mid '90s we are over 4.5 million a year. now under 3 million. very large difference, very large decline. this is the backdrop. let's look at the public policy response. the focus is on income and wages, not on underemployment. let me give you a couple of quotes from our political leaders on the 2016 state of the union, third paragraph. equal pay for equal work. paid leave, raising the minimum wage, all these things matter to hard-working families. i agree, but, of course, they

will probably not be working at all those things are done. bernie sanders leading the fight for $15 an hour minimum wage at a union for fast food workers. all the focus is on the wages. not focus at all on the unemployment problem. a deaf ear to this massive wave that is troubling america. unemployment insurance extension, doubling the amount of time you can get unemployment insurance. for each month you on unemployment insurance to face a major disincentive against many different working. the unemployment insurance extension would make a difference of 6000 jobs. i think i agree on that. i think she has the sign wrong. i think it's far more likely to eliminate 600,000 jobs and to create. idq that non-employment, unemployment is a far worse social problem than stagnant wages.

there's a fair amount of data to support this. making sure some and wages are going up by 4% rather than 2% is a very, very small potatoes relative to making sure more americans have jobs, a meaningful connection, the electrolytes have a purpose. let me summarize a set of facts. very strong data on the happiness. the unemployed are deeply unhappy. suicide is higher for unemployed. divorce rates go up substantially, doubling the rate. drug abuse, much higher for the unemployed. unemployment the non-employment has a pervasive and painful things the to become permanent. that's the last point i will make. this comes from my own work on unhappy cities look at the reduction in happiness relative to employed earnings over $75,000. if you earn $60,000, one is

measurable, number four is gleeful. you lose maybe we won six of a point. if you go down to 35, 50k unique users point to five of a point. if you lose your job, unemployed for more than a year it is a reduction of one on this scale. if the distance five times as large. how the world could look at this date -- [inaudible] an awful category with their miserable. economist have has had finished understate the cost of unemployment. after all, they giunta plan is voluntary, maybe people are having a great time being unemployed. i think if anything have taken away from economics is this is the wrong way to think about unemployment. this is not some happy state of leisure. this is a state that trap shoot and make you miserable and

people are unable to muster the way to change things. one of the tables is helpful because it's showing us what time is used. uses nonparticipating prime aged men. i had a graph previous which included all participating people, men and women. women do useful things. they take care of their families, they do whole bunch of nice stuff. what do boys do? mostly it's tv. there's a lot of television. the number of minutes spent the day socializing is 472 minutes. i don't think i've done that in the last year in terms of number of minutes socializing. 335 minutes a day watching television. so maybe if you start with a hypothesis the watching tv major happy you would be surprised but i think in fact this is not a recipe for feelings of life

satisfaction, spending five hours a day watching television. they do sleep a little bit more. they spend more time caring for household members. there's a new work, this is from a paper last year that came out, showing what should not surprise you, unemployed is associate with massively more suicide and slow downs or economic growth. suicide is tightly tied to the disruptions in the labor force, being alone, socially disconnected. this is a very wilsonian the point. it's why city are so successful. the bond people around us keep us healthy and all, make a smarter, make a stronger. a terrible thing is you break those bonds. you are a weight in your home watching television. you lose all the support networks all of us have around us. this is catastrophic impact on life satisfaction. it also is catastrophic impact on divorce rates.

this was the most legible version. this is from finland i think. divorces per thousand marriages. if you're employed, on the point, divorce rate goes up about 80%. a massive increase. if you look across income, between one and five, there's almost no difference. income isn't causing this difference. it's undergone, social. very large effects of being nondeployed. about 18% of the unemployed have used an illegal substance in the last month as opposed to about 8%. massive difference. this is for my own work on opener at depths. what we've done is look at the relationship, and the share of

the population on disability 1991. as you can see it's the variable in our data set that has the strongest coalition with the rise of opa death is what share of the population. it's about joblessness, hopelessness but it's also about things that happen with disabilities as well. this is one of the many papers showing the ethics of unemployment. what they should is what happens when you get laid off, get back to your job eventually. you have a permanent impact of about 5% on your wages going forward. early unemployment spells are not free, not a temporary blip. this is the i apologize, this is a 15 year old graph from a really, really great paper. it's just that the graphics are awful. what this is showing is a

cluster of unemployment rate in european countries over 1960-2000. the point of this paper is that it was the combination in europe of their labor market policies and the adverse economic shock. you start having social democracy in the '60s and '70s. very little effect because when the economy is coming along the safeguards didn't come into play and start working. by the 1980s when you the destruction in the oil, you have people laid off and the system takes over. all of a sudden they are in a system which they no longer have incentives to go to work. they have incentives to stay home. they are connected to people at work rather than being in work. in some sense there's a difference between europe, northern europe and southern europe. this isn't the germany, the

sweden point. variety of northern social democracies 15, 20 years ago saw this and responded. they understood they could not go on with this system. they changed things. they listened of the labor market, moved in with more sensible policies to provide social insurance, whereas southern europe, italy, greece, spain, did nothing. those problems are still very much with us. they are unable to make the changes. ask yourself, are we norway, germany, or are we greece? we are at the threshold right as a country whether not we will go one way or the other. i'm just going to go through a few of the policies that i think make up the war on work. they are motivated by very understandable reasons. they are motivated by desire to make the lives of people who do work better but they are not motivated with any attempt to try to solve the unemployment problem.

extending ui is one example. these drastic extensions of unemployment interest in the face of a recession work i believe the wrong direction because it eliminated incentives to go back to work. housing vouchers, poses 30% tax on earnings the disability must, permanent discouragement to work. today we're in the midst of a $15 minimum wage craze. i will go back to this in terms of the new evidence but because american minimum wage have stayed so low for so long we were at a position where we forget minimum wages can have major effects. we compared new jersey and pennsylvania with these tiny differences. that let us conclude even if huge minimum wages cote de bourmont matter. that's the wrong conclusion. a paper shows just how costly higher minimum wages were in the

tooth of the recession to low skilled workers. at me show you all of it of the data. this is a classic paper. the our debates about this but the basic fact is along the x. factor, a week until the your ui payments by now. there's a 5% chance of getting a job all the time you're getting ui and it suddenly sparks just as ui payments are running out. i think it's a telling fact that when the cash runs out you suddenly start looking for work, which means of a double the number of weeks you're getting ui, i will keep the number of weeks you don't work there. this is a paper, what it looks at is the extension of disability compensation for veterans, and this was particularly for type two diabetes and motivated by agent orange during the vietnam war. what this meant was those people that boots on the ground in

vietnam have access to this, and the people who serve at exactly the same pot country to do. they're able to compare these groups which looked relatively similar both before and afterwards. after 2001 when the change happens there's a huge gap between the boots on the ground people versus the non-boots on the ground people. 20% of them leave the labor force. guaranteed basic income, this is actually, an idea, let me remind you the differences between guaranteed basic and guaranteed minimum. this is the alternative to how we want to think that ui and disability insurance. when people talk about guaranteed minimum income they mean a means tested thing or if you earn more that gets passed away. guaranteed basic and the economics of that, totally

feasible for the economics are much better but you're just giving people catch and that's it. no strings attached. if you had an infinite amount of cash, the absence of infinite amount does pose a slight problem. the idea of guaranteed income is wrong or does the insurance and unemployment interest. the pernicious effects of these are because they discourage work or because they're tied to networking. the government, i cannot tell you what an awful thing i think this is. stop you from going to work. something this is when you get unemployed you just get a check based on your expected duration. maybe we require you to look for work but we don't stop the payments when you go back to work. a smaller check overall the same thing with disabilities we give them a check, there's a proven medical condition. we don't reduce. in some sense this puts of the normal fears about this build on

its head. often for fear of a disability, it's terrible, he's working with these getting disability. we should worry less about fraud and worry more about the fact over stopping people from using their talents to make the world a better. that is a more important problem. the government needs to stop bribing people to the idle. this is the fundamental point. the minimum wage, we have a new resurgence of work on the minimum wage. a former student from harvard has a terrific new paper that looks at the impact of minimum wage during the peaks of the great recession. 20 years ago, papers around new jersey and pennsylvania defined not affect. what happened after 2007 was those a series of bomb office in the federal minimum wage that had poor parts of america. not new jersey, not

pennsylvania. it mattered and particularly matter for low skilled people. this is, this shows you the unemployed a young high school dropouts in states bound by the federal minimum wage increase and states not down. the states that were bound, that means that lower minimum wage, they started out with a lot more employment. they start out with more young high school dropouts working because they didn't have a minimum wage. that it starts falling as the minimum wage comes in the it falls against the by the end of it, once the minimum wage is all lower and they converge on each other. there's a 5.6 but decrease in employment for this group due to the minimum wage which represents about 43% of the overall decline in the unemployment rate for this group. minimum wage is not a free lunch. moving wages to $15 an hour will be a recipe for disaster for the less skilled workers.

there's a nice paper 20 years ago now which came out during this earlier space which said new jersey and pennsylvania state was too small to they urged us to look at puerto rico which had much higher unemployment rates. you've got the unemployment rate. it's close to one over there. it gets quite high over there on the other side the unemployment rate when it comes up the unemployment rate goes down. you get a substantial plasticity of employment when they are imposing a much more stringent minimum-wage than we did in the continental 50, continental 48. when i think about this boom to the minimum which i think the thing that upsets me most is the morale the other. it's not the economics are bad but it's perverse notion that we are going to a redistribution in this country.

do knodo not who will pay for i? not taxpayers, not people who have means. we will get the customers of wal-mart to pay for the minimum wage. we look at the people who are buying hamburgers at mcdonald's in high poverty areas. they are the people we're going to pay minimum wage because when you employees higher wages in the service industry is going to be passed along to customers. that means we are trying to do with this division on the backs of the poor. that's what this is all about. it's an absolutely daunting thing. on top of the fact to the extent to which the only groups in this world that i think in the country that are fighting to solve th the unemployment problm that people are employing less skilled workers. they should be held up as he heroes, not seen as villains to be penalized. malcolm is there a better path? sure. cannot promise to solve this whole thing? not. but there obviously is to move to the right direction rather than in the wrong direction.

one of the bright lights that we had in this country over the last 25 years in terms of getting people to work was the earned income tax credit. it has a positive effect on people working but it's deeply complicated. it's a recipe for fraud in lots of ways. make it more simple. make it, push the wage up for low skilled workers but do it through the tax code, to extend web imposing it on workers. eliminate the payroll tax for lower earning workers. make work pay as much as you can. it will be costly. it's not free but it makes a lot more sense than trying to impose by raising the minimum wage for service industry. eliminate all joblessness requirements of federal program. get rid of any part of this about insurance or transit payment contingent upon not working. this is the thing that could be done.

we have to reduce the amount in some cases but there's a reason why you need to make these things contingent upon not worthy. making means tested but i never want to see another government program that pays people not to work, discourages people from going to work. reduce payroll taxes low income workers, deregulate out of a new ship. i'll talk about innovation. and expendable skill program. so does this work? we have a great example from norway which experiment with a program and the way the experiment was doctor threshold, things you could keep a buck for every two that you make. instead of what you go the income it's all gone, you losing your di in this case you get to keep 50 cents on the dollar. this red line shows effective action. it's 50 cents on the dollar and keeps on going. this is the income you're allowed to earn. the gap between this one and this line shows you the extra

people working. ithese are the people who did nt pitch a program, these are the ones you did pick the reason why there was a difference once it was a hard date or if you got to disability payments before, january 1, you get this program and not afterwards. we had a clear cut off. very dramatic differences between these two groups. the number is like 8% increase in the plan for the people who had the elimination of the disincentive not to work. there's a reason why we couldn't do this. there's a reason why norway should be capable of serious reform and we should not be able to. the possible project skills so again we've got reform argument programs that we've got to think about how to provide tray for people in a way that makes a difference. just mentioned, train kids in public schools to be entrepreneurs. it doesn't in a way that starts off by having them sell things

on ebay, pretty much the simplest form of august ownership and walk up. they are moving into madison park high school, a vocational school, a deeply troublesome location school. i don't know whether this works. what we need in this country is not to think we know the answer. what we need is a flourishing all the innovative ideas people in this room at the we need a flourishing of private sector initiatives to bring skills to teach people how to find promise ithe places they didn't think there was one. the possible project may work. this is how things should work in this world. innovation centers, so this is, last year i was talking about, two years ago talk about trying to create enterprise zones within high poverty areas. let me be highly clear.

the arduous to think about days of the one of which is a subsidies own. bribe people to locate which is what empowerment zones are. i think this is almost surely not the right way to go to the other is for reform zone, place where you can try things that you couldn't get throughout the city as a whole. for example, one stop permitting. once he became a commission. you go to one person. the beauty is one person is in charge of making sure the business gets through. imagine how awful local regulation our terms of making things hard for business. if i can get one stop permitting as a whole, i would take a. i can. we do for small park, but for the most attractive every. we see whether or not it works. unsurprisingly the city of

boston has proven much more enthusiastic about doing things that look like fun rather than deregulating. i will take what i can get. this involves creating some degree of training and social connection in these areas but we need to continue pushing on this. entrepreneurs are our answer. things need to be held together. every summer put a barrier, we are say no to a poor kid who could have a better future. who might not sitting on the couch but instead might be doing something productive. might be fulfilling their dream. i want to start, to check whether the i've told the store a not but it's one of my favorite stories of local entrepreneurship and regulation. it's a story about detroit. maybe about five years ago, this poor woman who runs a food truck, the pink flamingo, she wants to start her food truck in detroit.

food trucks are a pet cause of mind. i eat out their trucks for five times today. i think they're fantastic form of urban innovation. they're fantastic for this particular area to enable people to get started, to do something and creative but there's often not backed by rules. as this poor woman was. the idea that detroit would say no to any entrepreneur seems like madness, right? [laughter] particularly for this very appealing -- local restauranteurs, this is a lasting to one. i was on the npr show maybe five years ago with this woman and with the city of detroit. this poor nice a guy who was getting pummeled. finally after an hour of being exhausted he says, lady, just go ahead and start your food truck. we will never catch you your. [laughter] so i guess i wanted to end on that story because it does give

me hope. america is a country full of entrepreneurial people, people of vision and people who, for centuries, have been coming up with the jobs and ideas that not just make them rich but also employ thousands of others. we can do that again but we need tof a change the policies that both improve skills through vocational training, entrepreneur training. figure how to do this. we need to reduce regulation, make sure easy to start food trucks, not hard and we need to stop paying people not to work. those changes are the fight ahead. i hope you will join me in this fight because i think there's no more important one for our country. thank you. [applause] >> yes, sir.

>> wait for the mic or phone spent on michael myers. i have a question about the other side -- >> which? >> the other side, your topic in the work. what about the work ethic? what are the trends and the data with respect to retirement? people retire after a long time because they worked too hard and, therefore, they retired and looking forward to leisure, or do they stop working and then get bored by networking and go into leisure? what about the issue of work ethic by those who are employed? how do we know people are employed with respect to unions are actually working as opposed to using social media all day? >> so the are two questions, one of which is about retirement, and retirement is a mixed bag.

a lot of people have significant issues at retirement who find it deeply jolting and a source of misery. some people are able to find tremendous value. it's making sure your life has purpose. if you retirement is something they are doing things, i think of my 90 year old grandmother who is doing literacy training for people in her town. she never ran out of stuff, whereas it seems like every cab driver i have in boston is a guy who retired two years ago in kurdistan and is now driving a car because they were so miserable being alone or their wife was so miserable to have them home that they had to send them back. the second is about work ethic. i think the governments job is not to work against the. i am worried about trusting the federal government certainly with being in charge of providing any ethical training for anyone. i do think as a parent that's about as important a job as i have.

i do think as members of social groups, as members of our community, as neighbors, people go to our churches, synagogues, whatever, that's where the training communal as well. i think it's hard to think that it's a public role although certainly i like a mayor who will speak for the hard work rather than the opposite. [inaudible] >> unionization, it depends a lot on what type of unions and worker i would just tell a story on this, that my experience on unions, a personal story. two years ago i did a town hall with mayor walsh when he was just elected a booth at 6:30 a.m. this idea, we had to partners. we have members of mayor walsh his team.

remember, he comes out of the construction worker 6 a.m., his guys were there. every single one of them were there and working like dogs. other partners, the teaching staff of the community college. they were less present. i think when we think about unions, we need to recognize there are lots of -- [inaudible] some of them can work quite well. [inaudible] >> thank you very much. if i interpreted the chart correctly, i'm curious why it seems that both the unemployed

and the employed are sleeping more than 12 hours a day? that is not actually my question. it's well-established that throughout history, technology and innovation created more jobs than they destroyed. >> its other including sleeper it's all of the other categories, including sleep. it's not just sleep. spent if i interpreted the chart correctly. so to technology innovation, these days were a more economists are saying that this time it's different come including economists on the right. what is your view on what technology and innovation are doing now and what will they do over the next generation, independent of government regulatory things, what's happening? is there a new trend or not? >> when you think about the difference between a bill gates and henry ford, henry ford

innovated ways and deployed hundreds of thousands of less skilled americans. the innovators of the computer age have done much less than that. many other innovations have particularly employed -- it's hard to think of really great examples. that's what i will come to but it's hard to think of that many really great examples of tech entrepreneurs to move towards employing lots of less skilled workers. it's not whether in actively. i blame maybe perhaps the spatial isolation of silicon valley. they don't see poor people around them so it's not natural for them to employ them perhaps. whatever it is the bulk of the technology has moved in the wrong direction from point of view of employing less skilled americans. we have a glaring counterexample, which is uber. over is the opposite. it's an example of a company that employs them provides employment for lots of less skilled people.

if you did not face major distortions from it's hard not to think in the longer run more entrepreneurs will see that can see that people would like connection with labor force, would like to find some work and yet they are not able to. that's an opportunity. my point, every unemployed person is a family of entrepreneurial imagination. i don't take the view at all, it is unquestioned to a matter-of-fact that the last four years have skewed highly towards highly skilled workers. there's nothing written in stone about that. technology is an exogenous force which fits the. we and our opportunities, wind or underemployed workers, smart people will think and come up with an answer for that.

as long as we don't regulate them. >> i am totally amazed by your data and i think it's fantastic. because we work with disadvantaged people getting their jobs all the time and silva disincentives. one of the things you have not addressed which we see everyday is how much work socializes people. if you think of inner-city young people are people coming out of prison, minorities have never worked, when you give him a job they suddenly talk differently, they wanted to fully, they dress differently. they engage in the broader world. that's so valuable comments on the other people on the far left who think that income support is just the best thing, don't see. they have never talked to these people. so the last vestige of the socialization is actually work

in our society because commits have broken down, the church breaks down, schools break down. employment still provides that. so i just wanted to ask you if you've looked at that? because to us that's what of the most valuable things. >> i think you are so right. we do not, the only thing i know, there's so much capital attenuation occurs on the job. some of that is congress that but almost the more important skills our social, how to get along. wanting a want to push you on is it's true for the population but i think it's true from a own nephew as well. i think it's not just an issue of people from broken homes. if any 21 year old in modern society has typically been told they are brilliant for far too long, allowed to get away with stuff by loving parents of the bride a different forms, and the

job is the first place they learned that's not a way to function in the world. that you need to be more focus on delivering service to people around them. it's not just about the bottom end of the scale distribution. it's all of them. >> we have an event coming up in november, and to the extent you could discern your policies, would you care to comment on how do two presumed presidential candidates might influence that speaks i'm going to keep on burying my head in the sand and hope it goes away. [laughter] >> i mean, i, i --

[laughter] this, you know, this election reminds us why so important we've institutions like the manhattan institute that stand for reason and evidence, and which is needed be talking about the problems that matter and the right way to evidence-based policy respond to those problems. i'm amazed by how often there are lots of the greatest but once you people simply evidence makes policy, like you do so that is very far away from either candidate very quickly. the important thing is to keep on saving up for the importance of knowledge, focusing on the problems that matter and providing for an america that is about being, you know, being great, but also focus on delivering skills and uplifting everyone.

i promised sandra. >> thank you very much. i was wondering -- spinning got to wait for the mic macdowell, sorry. >> -- [inaudible] how roxboro encourages entrepreneurship. number two, president of the new city department of commerce and i was unaware the department of commerce supports entrepreneurship. i would like you to talk about that. number three, new jersey does not give social welfare and lets you work. what are your thoughts on that? >> it happens i will take the last one first but it happens a specified in jersey this year. it happens, my first new york ancestry came from the isle of jersey in 1825 family roots of

there. just a huge amount i think, i think, obviously i think of right of these programs are sensible but they are in a world in which they are so privileged in so many ways in jersey. the weather is fantastic. they have a set of rules that make it very easy to be the financial. it's hard to think that there's going to be a great example, not taking many sensible things. the other thing to worry about in terms of jersey is they are very dominated by a few large firms and they are not great on the entrepreneurship front at all. i remember having this conversation with a reporter in i think guernsey who said why would anybody be an entrepreneur? why wouldn't they want to work for pricewaterhousecoopers for the next 20 years? dark people who graduate from stanford today who if you told them they would be a fairly, that would be vast that offended

a partner at pricewaterhousecoopers. completely implausible. let me say, the first one was -- roxbury. okay, it starts with a social space and a source with programming. there's a person who tries to make sure there are programs to bring people in. the project is a well-designed program that works people through steps. begiagain and start something ts like selling things on ebay and moves them into making things. it's a more poorly thought-out program. rock star is just in the process of being worked out and based on the model on the waterfront which was successful but not at all targeted towards -- very much towards -- your middle one was? >> had to do with -- >> okay.

yes. new york over the past 15 years has to a number things to encourage entrepreneurship. many of them i support her one of my favorite things when has this great map of all permits you need to go through to get them to start a restaurant or your shop which was fabulous. you could learn what you need to do. the problem is the resilient team thing you need to go through. at least they did show youth union those 17 permits. that was a step in the right direction but we hope for more going forward. >> choose someone in the back. >> the problem is i agree with everything you say, but what really upsets me is that we are preaching to the choir. i want to focus you on the union thing. use it sometimes unions play a

good role. i have a problem with that. [laughter] unions are basically a restraint of trade. basically it's contrary to competition. i mean, i happen to live in a co-op, and you can't into the union 30 to be which is a non-skilled job where you opened the door, press the button for the elevator, and these guys, some of them are working two shifts and there's a lot of, you know, people who can't even make the minimum wage would love those jobs. how do you justify any union if you believe in free competition in the free market? >> wait a minute. what i justify, i just like any free association for almost any free association of adults.

the extent to which your form and social group of some form, i think i should be legal in this country. do i think unions in force increasing employment? not. the event a force for raising wages. i don't disagree but there are also things against into a long socializing people are not always terrible. i just gave that example that, of those construction workers. there are times when effect having these social connections are not the worst thing in the world. i'm not saying, deeply unfunny to what you are saying but -- [inaudible] >> and the trainin veteran and o the occasional training that goes on but yes, i think it can be -- okay. >> there was an article in the times, if i can mention that name come this week by neil

irwin. and he said that actually the countries in western europe that have more regulation than we do and higher minimum wages have less unemployment. number one, is that correct? and number two, what did you make of it? >> you can look at it, right, so that we are. we are looking pretty bad. it's certainly true. it is certainly true that sweden and germany are not completely free of regulation, but we think they may the more sensible. i think the right of if are going to have a two factor model of it, it would be about regulations that stymie a governorship, and that's bad. that's bad in europe. and it's badly. on the other side, it's skills. there's a question you look at the german educational system

and you think does a much better job at delivering skills. the right answer is not the german has a better labor force. it's that they have done a thousand better job of providing vocational training, getting less skilled people into the workforce. that's the right lesson to take away, not that we should be imposed more arbitrary regulations on the american workforce. >> if you think about what the trends are in innovation got it seems like robotics as well as artificial intelligence are clear trends. may be exacerbated by minimum wage on the robotics side but eventually a lot of the low labor jobs will be taken over by machines of potential even services and jobs. what are the implications for that and have you thought about that? >> again, this is related to the greatest thing. i don't think any of this is an avid up. it is true the long run role of

human production is unlikely to be in manufacturing. there's a small amount of stuff around the edges. it's service employment. there are lots of reasons why, if raised i use my cities are not going away, in the same since there's no way have an electronic delivered stuff can compare with having a really good service. if you have interaction with someone in a store, in a car, anywhere else who is charming and pleasant in its at the light. the question is whether or not the people are out of the labor force can deliver this. is why these social skills are so important. if you don't have people with a social skills to function well in the surf industry it's a big problem and you will replace them all with machines. there is a world again that i view of technological determination is wrong. it is these two technologies create challenges, but they can

be met with some combination of skills and having sensible regulation, sensible benefit programs that don't discourage people from working. i can imagine a world in which whether very heavy service sector, combines with people of less skilled. i don't see any reason why that can't happen. >> final question, great. i could go all night. i really don't want to end. >> i want to come back to technology side. uk specific example to the question earlier about the tech guys to ebay is the consequence the course of a microsoft has done in creating the enterprise software that permits such things that we're using in roxbury and that's what automation brings. >> you are right.

it has some of the same structures as uber. you are right. spent there's a new book coming out, the uber of everything. >> with the that it's the reason why made the mistake, i didn't think of the employees. >> which they are not employers per se. our youth among with the boston study? they did come last year on the correlation of the five country study on the correlation of authorship and java ridgewood axis of mobile technology, specifically cell phones and smartphones. it was extraordinarily interesting of you get more job information, faster job growth, faster creation of small jobs when you look at the penetration of smartphones. extraordinary positive correlation. very encouraging. >> i haven't seen you it sounds plausible and i think it sort of makes the point that technology

isn't doing anything. it's the question of how it is used. again, i just want to end on this point. i am not, this is not a rosy speech, not a happy speech. it's a profoundly upsetting speech and a deeply disturbed about the policy debates around this problem. we are not having the right debates which is about how to perform these programs -- reform. despite that, all the gloom, i remain fundamentally optimistic about this country, about the city. i remain optimistic because there is so much entrepreneurial talent because there's so much energy and there is so much just in this room of people who are smart and thoughtful and care about making america and do a better place. i thank you for all you do for this country and the city, and thank you very much for your time here today.

[applause] >> this month watch c-span's coverage of the 2016 republican and democratic national conventions, and every saturday night at eight eastern we will look back at past conventions and the presidential candidates who went on to win their parties nomination. this saturday we'll focus on incumbent president who ran for reelection. dwight eisenhower in 1956 republican convention in san francisco. the 1964 democratic convention in atlantic city with lyndon johnson. richard nixon at the 1972 republican convention at miami beach. the 1980 democratic convention with jimmy carter in new york city. george h. w. bush at the 1992 republican convention in houston. bill clinton in chicago for the 1996 democratic convention, and