czech keckly who was an enslay if steam stress to martha -- she said the grieve we sal be permitted to lay our burdens down that world of brightness may open to us, the light that is denied us here should grow into to a flood of --oned the dark, mysterious shadows of death. that it was was a powerful way to think about how enslaved people look at their afterlife, and then finally, i shared this one a few weeks other, a lived named mingo wrote a poem to his wife after they were separated and he says to her: dear wife. they cannot sell the rose of love but in my boss so many gonzalez. remember at your tears may start, they cannot sell by immortal part. thank you.

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon, everyone. i'm carin bowen and a senior here the american enterprise. we'll conclude this series. we are also us a grateful to the bradley foundation of milwaukee wisconsin, supporting this lecture series for more than a

quarter century. when peter schuck -- giving a electric noor washington about hit new book, one nationen decide, clear thinking about five hard issues that divide us, we jumped the chance for peteer is one of the cleese expose thoughtful legal and policy scholars of this and or in the generation, a professor emeritus of law at jail and an aei visiting scholar in 1979, the year i arrived at aei. the author of among many other books, why government fails so often and how it can do better, understanding america, the institutions and policies that shape america in the world, and then co-ed it with our colleague, wilson, and finally, meditations of a militant bloggerrist, cool news on hot

topics. tonight copies of the new book will be available for purchase and he will sign them in this room. join us for a reception after the lecture and questions & answer period. one more house keeping detail. we're taking questions from the audience online. if you want to submit a question for consideration go to slido.com and enter code aei event. it's very simple, enterrure name, nine your question and we may choose to read. testimony peter will discuss three of the five issues that currently divide us, poverty, integration, and religious exemption from secular public policies. he reminds us that we have argued about these for are so long that their contures are well known and will give us a sense of what makes the issues hard, why today's hard issues are almost harder by definition, and explain what clear thinking on each one entails. after last week's debacle on

health care it's clear we need hard thinking on policy issues. ick i can think of no better guide than peter schuck. [applause] >> thank you very much, and to the aei staff, and to folks who have decided to spend a beautiful late afternoon inside with me. it's a brand new book and this is not the first become i've written that aei has been gracious fluff to host a become event for so i'm very grateful for them, to them, for doing that. the title "one nation undecided. clear thinking about five issued that device it" emphasizes three

urgent can bees. first the deep divisions within our society. i don't have to belabor the opinion. i don't know whether we have ever been as polarized as we are now since the civil war, and it is an extraordinary -- extraordinarily difficult time in our political system. the second urgent condition is the need for clear thinking, which is related to the first. by clear thinking i mean five basic elements: first, one's analysis needs to rest on a clear factual record so the factual information on which we make our decisions or think about these issues is accurate, timely, and it's unbiased.

secondly, a clear thinking person analyzes the relevant values and these issues -- one aspect of their hardness is that they implicate a number of values and they're often conflicting values. a third element of clear thinking is that the analysts needs to consider the likely consequences of various policy choices that are under consideration, and that entails a very hard-nosed view of mobile globalizing whatever social science there is to predict the consequences and follow them where they lead. the fourth element of clear thinking in my view, is that it identifies relevant distinctions and tradeoffs, and has those clearly in mind. without blinking the reality of

these tradeoffs but take them serious and i understanding the tradeoffs often reflect conflicting values and conflicts ways of reading the evidence. and then the fifth element of clear thinking is to prefer the policy options which are most cost effective and implementable. i would also add that -- i say this in the book -- that process matters a lot, and by process i refer not only to process of formulating and adopting policy bus also the process for implementing whatever measures are adopted. now, this is a technocratic way of thinking about policy, if you will. i do not find that a problem. i discuss in the book the moral objective to this technocratic way of thinking and i reject the

objection in the q & a i can get into that. now, this is about clear thinking with respect to hard issues, so i explain what i moon by hard issues and i analyze five of them. what is most important about hard issues is that reasonable people can and do differ wife with respect to them though some prefer outcomes that are clearer than others in general is a says the book i don't care where people come out on these issues as long as they have thought them through in the manner that i suggest. the major exception to that, i would say, is affirmative action where i think the evidence is very, very clear that this is a failed policy, very divisive policy, and really helps no one except the relatively few beneficiaries of affirmative action who are already by and large privileged within their group. but i'm not going to discuss affirmative action today.

asked what you would most be interested and she suggested that i focus on poverty, immigration, and religious exemptions to secular policies. so let me begin with poverty. i should say that i had to submit the manuscript before the brookings aei report on poverty came out, but i had access to most of the work that went into that report, and i cite it and use it in my analysis. in the chapter on poverty i also discuss inequality for a couple of reasons. first to distinguish it from poverty. the folks in this audience i suspect understand they're two very different things, one being poverty being an absolute level of deprivation and inequality

being relative concept comparing one group of people to other groups of people. but there is in the public mind, i think, a lot of confusion about the distinction so i an analyze inequality and explain some of its measures and trends, and then i turn to poverty itself. so, poverty involves a wide range of difficult questions, analytical questions. obvious i don't need to say that it involves terrible conditions of life for people who suffer from it, but that only makes the importance more important. they need to define it clearly and rigorously. so the first issue is having to define it. second issue is how to measure it.

and the -- let me pause on that. the measurement of poverty has been a much controverted issue from the very outset of the establishment of the office of economic opportunity in 1964. the official poverty measure, which we still use today, was -- has been based on this measure developed by a woman the social security administration. she recognized at the time that it was very inadequate measure of policy, very actually uninformative in most respects, but since then almost everybody who discusses and analyzes policy agree it's no a good measure. the real question is what adjustments should be made to the official poverty measure. and some of -- i'll just tick off adjustments for which there's a very strong argument

and which have a very profound affect on what the poverty numbers are. the first is whether to include noncash transfers from the government, and the needless to say, food stamps, now under the s.n.a.p. program, and health care entitlements and the earned income tax credit and child welfare -- the child tax credits and so forth. these are important additions to after-taxed income that need to be taken account of. second is the earned income tax credit which is of course a government transfer but extremely important for working families, and makes a big difference in the level of poverty that they endure. if i can put in a personal plug

issue wrote an article with economic friend way back when i was a graduate student, arguing for a -- the precursor of the around income tax credit and its one of the most successful programs if not the most successful program, apart from social security, that affect the lives of poor or near poor people. consumer price index overstates the cost of constant standard of living and that is an adjustment that most analysts believe needs to be made. the census treats cohabiting couples differently than married couples and that also can make a difference in the result of the calculation. it does not take into account regional differences in the standard of living. it doesn't take account of the fact that poverty for many

people, for many poor people, is episodic, doesn't continue throughout the year but they have a certain periods of poverty during the year. doesn't take account of smaller household size, since 1964. it doesn't take can't of part-time workers who receive unemployment insurance for the periods of their unemployment or many period of unemployment. doesn't mention the -- take account of the refundable child tax credit and then very important factor is the reliance of the census bureau, not surprisingly, on the self-reporting of income and other elements of the calculation by the individual inside question. some very important research hat been done about whether those

figures, the self-reporting, are consistent with the actual dispersements the government agencies to make to people who are eligible for these benefits and there's a big, big difference. so, that's a serious of adjustments. then there's a different conception of the appropriate measure of poverty which is based on the consumption of good and services by poor people, and nicholas eversad who may be here has done a lot of work on measuring the consumption changes over time and they're substantial. the standard of poor people today is much better than it was in 1964. needless to say i'm not sawing i

would change places with people who are in this condition, but an objective analysis of how many there are, what the trends are, what their prospects are, needs to be based on this kind of study. so, if you look at housing, food, cars, appliances, health care, crime, and even obesity, the plight of people who are denominated poor in the official calculations is much better than it ever has been. then there's subgroups of americans whose poverty is especially concerning to us and ought to be especially concerning. the children. the child poverty rate is about 20% without the adjustment is mentioned before.

if you add in those adjustments it's down to 15%, which is still a really appalling figure in a country as wealth ya y as ours, the elderly poverty rate is 9.8% without the -- i'm are so dish without the adjustment and 2.6% with the adjustment. so there's a almost a quarter what it would be under the official measure. then very interesting complication in the analysis of poverty is immigrants. immigrants have an enormous increase in their well-being and their income measured in any way by reason of their coming to the united states, and yet many of them remain poor and so one might question whether we should think of them in the same way we think of americans who are poor.

as one analyst put it, it's as if we absorbed a large population of the third world and didn't expect that to affect the poverty rate, but coupled with the realization that they actually have benefited enormously from coming to the united states. so that's a complication. another feature of the poverty analysis has to do with intergenerational mobile on which the u.s. used to be a world leader and now in the middle of the pack, and a very troubling statistic i discuss in the book is that 40% of the grown sons born to fathers who are in the lowest quinn tile remain the lowes quintile.

so democracy is deafening and if you're born to a father who was very poor, there's some very good chance you -- not a overwhelming chance but a very good chance you're going to be poor as well. much of the discussion of poverty relates to black, and i discuss why that's the case and why much of this discussion can be very misleading. actually the poverty rate is slightly lower than that of native americans native americans and alaskan natives, but more important point is that 75% of blacks are not poor. so, the kinds of generalizations immigrations we form are unfortunately quite inaccurate, though it the case that many, too many blacks are born into

mother, well remain in poverty. the most important conclusion that i think analysts analysts y have come to in trying to determine what the trend is, is that today the class gap is even greater than the racial gap. that is to say -- this is a most unfortunate and deplorable condition -- the best predictyear of poverty is being been to unmarried mothers and absent fathers. that's the single best predicter. not race, not where you live. it's the accident of birth. there has summon good news in the poverty picture. the 2015 poverty rate declined sharply for all groups, teenage pregnancy is down by over 50% since 1991. high school completion is up where if with the black-white

gam in graduation closing. it's now 85%. the divorce rates have stabilized, though of course as we all know at a very high level, much too high, i think for the well-being of children. and crime has dropped in all communities over the last 20 years or so. so, having measured -- explained the measures and adjustments and the statistical patterns of poverty, i next turn to the causes of poverty, and there are many, of course. the main proximate cause is, as has been emphasized by brookings and aei scholars, is underemployment and unemployment. by working age, nondisabled family heads. what causes this underemployment and unemployment?

well, i go through a number of causes in some detail. this first is bad luck. now, how we define luck is of course a question that reasonable people can differ about, but some of it is i think bad luck, misfortune by any standards. poor people, -- many poor people are poor because of a health problem that they could not really anticipate. some are especially women are poor often because of divorces. their standard of living declines something like 25% in first year after a divorce whereas men's standard of living increased by 10% the first year after divorce. it's kind of a shocking comparison to me. 72% of babies -- that's the bad

luck. have nor to say about it but i'll move on to family and community breakdown which is the single most important cause of the underand unemployment by working age, nondisabled family heads. 72% of black babies born out of wedlock today -- that's triple the rate in 1965. triple the rate that it was when daniel patrick moynihan famously decried the chaos and crisis of of black families and the white rate of babies born out of wedlock is higher than the black rate when moynihan conducted his analysis in 1965. so an extraordinarily devastating development.

and unfortunately a development that we don't seem to know very much about solving. it's not for want of study and effort. it's a really, really hard problem. a third cause of poverty is disappearing jobs. here i again i have a lot to say itch discussion william julius wilson's analysis and his concerns about disappearing jobs. very interesting finding, kind of shocked me is how low a personal of working age unemployed men cite as the reason for their unemployment lack of jobs. now, some of these people are disabled but when i come to discussion of disability i will have something more to say about that. a fourth of possible causes,

although certain lay accuse, is educational deficits. but here it's important to emphasize what we often forget, which is that while we're blaming poor schools, we really ought to realize that in fact the deficits that exist in children's opportunities and achievement begins well before they start in school. i'll have a bit more to say about that, including something about jim heckman's analysis of the problem. so, i talk about bad luck, family and community breakdown, disappearing jobs, occasional deficit. a fifth is isolation. here the sociology yeases have a lot of teach us. many of you may be familiar with a famous network sociologist whose how written about the strength of weak ties but which

he means the greater opportunities that are available to people who have a large network of weak ties instead of a small network of strong ties. so it's a kind of paradox but easily explained. orlando patterson has written about the misof the -- the mug of the hood and just -- the myth of the mood to summarize what the sociology e reported they black networks are smaller and denser and have the smallest percentage of kinsmen of any other group. also very little outgroup major, especially on the -- for black women. so that isolation which limits opportunities, limits information, limits contacts, is very severe. a sixth possible cause is discrimination.

in here i distinguish between -- month three different typed of discrimination, one is intentional, a second is unintentional and third is statistical. and lawyers in the audience will certainly be very much aware of those -- that distinction which us rye reacted in doctrine under title vii of the civil rights act. >> one complication is discrimination against based on race, religion, national origin and gender but not on the basis poverty. and so poverty is not a protected classification, which means that it can't be attacked with the normal -- to the extent that discrimination is based on poverty, it can't be attacked in

the normal fashion that civil rights will employs. seventh cause of poverty is bad choices. now, here one can easily be accuse ode -- accused of blaming the victim, but there are range of choices that we can reasonably characterize as bad. some are antisocial behaviors and some of them are just short-sighted behaviors. so let me just read one description of this phenomenon. most bad choices are simply shorting are sighted, they sacrifice the real possibility of future, durable gains for more immediate but transitoriy ones. common examples include common truancy, dropping out high

school, holly's, gambling, ignoring school pushing in favor of tv or video games, excessive borrowing and spending, parenting children who do not know how to afford or care for, cull severity little self-destructive hand ands hanging out with antisocial people or quitting jobs or training policemans for which one could acquire useful skills or experience. the next cause is incarceration. and there's a lot of outcry about excessive incarceration in the country, and there should be, but the excess is less substantial than one might think. 62% of prisoners in united states are violent or sex offenders. and the states are by and large primarily i think for fiscal reasons trying to empty the

prisons of minor offenders, but that policy, which is welcome policy, is only going to have a relatively marginal effect on the number of people in our prisons. the last cause that i analyze is the culture of poverty. by which i mean widespread entrenched, self-reinforcing pat torches despair, present orientation or self-destructive conduct. and again, i discuss that a bit but i don't want to say more about that now unless you want to raise it in the q & a. i then discuss our current programs with the explicit focus on low income people and communities. it's not that we haven't spent much money or even more money in recent years on these programs.

in 2008 we spent $161 billion the federal level that was in 2008. only send years later we spent $848 billion on the programs. go through the programs don't want to belabor it because there are other thing tuesday discussion, bus s.n.a.p., earned income tax credit, s.n.a.p. being the food stamp program -- the unearn income credit, social security, medicare, medicaid, all very important and marginalie successful programs, though they have large amounts of fraud, west waste and abuse ask we don't seem to be able to reduce those measures or those amounts very significantly, if at all. these programs -- some programs raise concerns about work incentives, particularly in s.n.a.p., and in medicaid and in

social security disability. i discuss the evidence on that. another very important program is title i, which respect education of the poor. it's been enforce for 15 years now. brookings did a report on the effectiveness of title i a year and a half ago was quite critical of the effectiveness of the program on a variety of grounds. some of which are quite difficult to rectify. head start, a small program, both health and human services and brookings institution have reported a rapid fadeout of the benefits from head start by the third grade or even sooner, sometimes during the summer. jim heckman, nobel prize winner

in economics in chicago is more optimistic about the long-term effects of head start, but when you're talking about the effects 30 years later, there's so many intervening conditions that it's hard to be really confident in that kind of analysis, but if heckman says it, probably lot of truth to it. job training programs. little assessment but the assessments show no effectiveness the job corps today, after 50 years, it costs us $1.8 billion a year, and every study that has been done of which i'm aware shows no effective not whatsoever. ss and i social security disability, nick everstad and others studied this and shown that it contains serious moral hazards, and in reducing work incentives.

the worker to disability insurance recipient, the ratio of workers to disable recipients has declined from 134 to sun to 16 to one. and some say it's actually close to 11 to 1. so that's a shocking development of which we need to -- we need to take seriously. housing. there was a national bureau of economic research comprehensive analysis in 2015, that found little evidence with respect to affects on poor people. rod sety at stanford has done important work showing that the number of years in better neighborhoods does affect long-term outcomes so that's sort of encouraging and does have some policy implications that might be implemented. i then talk about policy

reforms. the first possibility is to encourage macroeconomic growth. problem there is we don't nome how to do it without inflation, without bubbles and without international trade and currency affects. if we did that would be probably the simplest way to do it but macro economists are famed for then accuracy of predictions. second is redistribution to the poor and here he we ever the example -- we don't have evidence hour it's working -- universal basic income plan adopted in finland and proposed by very prominent conservatives, milton freedman, and charles murray. the design of these programs, of course, matters a lot. the political prospects for this were analyzed by henry aaron,

senior fellow at brookings and a leading expert on poverty. he sees most persons as, quote, commodities egalitarians. they will support programs that prevent poor people from going hungry, living in decent hit housing bus only a tiny minority are cash egal tearns where support providing money to those without cash, thus, and i'm quoting aaron, we far more willing livors refundable tax credits to paid for health care than refundable tax redses for low income. beside, troublesome though the administration of the health credits may be, it is childs may next toeses ass assss a admire cashing. the third possibility of wage sumped them earned income tax credit does its'll are and

they're sprayly widespread a. barn support for increasing the earned income tax credit and extending it to group offered people who are not now eligible for it. minimum wage, i think the evidence on the effects of minimum wage on entry level employment and on automation is very -- quite negative. which is one reason why the earned income tax credit is a better way to go to increase effective aftertax wages, and wage insurance proposed bay number of people and has not yet been instituted on a broad scale here but that's a possible remedy. fourth, policy reform is enhancing human capital. that is largely done through the education system, where job training or job retraining. i've already commented a bit on that but have much more to stay

in the book. fifth policy reform would be to try to strengthen family and is this is the most important and the most difficult. brookings scholars have analyzed the success -- what they call the success sequence, which is to -- which is work, children only when they're married, marriage after 21, and finish high school. the same henry aaron, however in the long footnote, is very skeptical these approaches will be effective and he is a strong advocate of remedies for poverty. sixth policy reform is dismantling various opportunity. this refers to some extent to

work that was done in -- done for years and years and most recently done by the obama council on economic advisers which identified all sorts of occupational impediments to occupational mobility, licensing requirements that make no sense at all, and some other barriers of that kind. residential mobile is another approach, and the section 8 program is our major weapon in that particular war. again, the data on the effectiveness is somewhat mixed. a major study was done in chicago, showed that actually the outcomes of people who moved with section 8 vouch tore better neighborhoods were very mixed, and as mentioned earlier, ross sety at a recent analysis

believes that maybe the ones who move younger and, therefore, spend more time in those better neighborhoods, do much better. i better hustle here. the second issue is immigration. i won't say much about that, although i say a hell of a lot in the become about it. one area i've studied for a long time. i preface this by pointing to political urgency of immigration reform. henry olsen of aei -- formerly of aei has written a very important, think, political analysis very recently in which he argues that as a matter of electoral strategy, democrats really have to get immigration policy right and that means changing some time honored positions on immigration.

they can still be, as i certainly am, for expanded immigration, and for honoring, if not cherishing, immigrants who come here and succeed, but it does require a different language and analysis. one thing, for example, there will know legalization unless and until the bill clintons convinced -- the public becomes convinced that the border is control. now in reality the border will never be patrolled but the public needs to believe that that the government is doing whatit can to roll can he bored kerr reduce illegal entry to a minimum. those of us and i suspect many of you join me in being strong advocates of legalization, need to attend to that's and what

partly what henry ol'son was discussing. i discuss the comprehensive immigration reform, high-skilled workers, agricultural workers, the number of green cards we issue each year, the categories of those, mexican quota, and a number of other issues, and now i'm just going to focus on three issues the first being legislation, which i mentioned already. -- legalization. this would be a dreamers of parents and others and there's very strong arguments for this, even trump has seemed to recognize the strong claim that dreamers have to a reasonable policy of -- prospect of legalization. these programs are hard to design, and if the conditions of legalization are to stringent then the undocumented will not participate. they'll take their

chances and continue in the shadows as the cliche has it. and there are a real problems of administration, particularly the weak bureaucracy like i.c.e. and the uimmigration bureaucracies in the health and human services and widespread -- there was widespread fraud in the 1986 legalization, especially with regard to agricultural legalization program. second big issue is enforcement. here there are two venue that are -- that define the problem. the first is border enforce; the second is the interior and most people don't understand that more than 50% of illegal immigrants entered legally. they're not people who crossed the border illegally. they entered legally and then went out of status. and that has very important implications for the way in

which the government can hope to enforce the immigration policies that it adopts. there are issues of detention, of immigration courts. i'm not going to dwell on those now. there are better techniques we could use to improve enforcement there's important issue of employer sanctions which have been kind of a joke up until now, and they could be strengthened, though of course there are pour constraints on that. universal identification card would happen with enforce: still objections to this seem to be quite weak. they strong thing expressed but very weak analytically. then the third aspect of immigration that i discuss is integration and trying continue crease the naturalization rate, especially among mexicans, perhaps through subsidies of

naturalization fees, english language subsidies then government should do much more in assisting immigrants to learn english which is the most important weapon in making it in america -- resource in making it in american society. better english as a second language program. programs, as much of them have been quite -- not only have they failed but some ways have made the matters worse. there's a lot of variation in the esl programs i don't want to overgeneralize. and the third issue, the last issue i will discuss and again very briefly, is religious exemption from secular policies. here's the context is very complex. we have the conjunction of growing religious diversity with the greg second -- greg

secularism. we have cull noor which people are encouraged, i think, and even incentivized to claim a violation of their rights when they feel that their vital interests have been short-changed. and we also have a judicial methodology which is being developed as to how to arbitrate these claims between religious freedom and choice on the one hand and secular policies on the other, and the religious freedom restoration act, which was adopted the federal level in the supreme court held it a very important case it only applied the federal level has led to about 20 or more states adopting state references, they're called, which attempt to establish a legal standard by

which the claims can be adjudicated and puts a strong thumb on the side of religious claimants. there are two key cases that i discuss in the chapter, one is the hobby lobby case in which the rifra was applied in. and -- a family business and also religious business, same company, from the aca requirement concerning contraceptive coverage and the real question is whether the courts will limit hobby lobby to a narrow set of facts and it's too early to tell about that. the second case is the over -- the case recognizing gay marriage as a constitutional right. huge advance in human rights and equality for lgbt but it's got

strong religious based opposition and demands for exemptions. the very complex situations because on the one hand we have state rfras which strengthen the claims of religious minorities and we have a lot of blue localities in red states and vice versa, and antidiscrimination laws cover different activities and different groups. we have economic boycotts which so far have had some in my view, excellent effects on the willingness of state politicians and local politicians to adopt restrictive laws, but that can cut both ways. we have a religious tax exemption issue which is only now beginning to arise as to whether a church can lose their tax exemption if they take a

strong stand against gay marriage. we then of course have the issue of transgender use of facilities. i think bathrooms is relative live tractable facility but locker rooms is much more complicated one and i've argued in op-ed pieces that a lot of flexibility is needed in different communities to kind of grapple with these problems. it's a relatively new conflict. haven't quite figured out how we feel about it in the sophisticated way and we need more information about what the true tradeoffs are in these situations. so i offer some prims principles for resolving the issues. the first to be said is dignity, the claim of offense so dignity is not very helpful cite tieron

for resolving these issues -- criterion for resolving these issues. both sides could claim with equal force the decision against them women merely yalely signature any ties enemy, telling bay coupled that's intimacy is immotorhome what the denying the bake redder claims won't that tell them and traditional muslims orthodox jews and christians that beliefs central to their i'd are bigots. if exemptions from proofing abortions to women who have had them, coercing pro life dock doctors 'n them enemies of women others a quality. each side might be feel anything stigmatized by rival actions or policies. so, having disparate of using t dish spares of uses the claim dignity to resolve disputes is

move on to choice. their more choice we can afford people the less conflicts will fester but the choice strategy often begs questions of coercion, and of harm. so, in school prayer settings or football prayers that football games, the question is to whether young people feel coerced when these invocations are meat and whether they are harmed if they have to or choose to remain silent elm other approach is the distinction between con suspect status. compelling one to act against one's conscious is different than having to accept another's status. think that can resolve some of these disputes. another approach is the one that

is embodied in frar status and that is the least restrictive alternative. whatever restrictions there are on religious exercises in pursuit of secular policies, those restrictions ought to be as unrestrictive as they can be while still accomplishing the secular objective. another approach which i think is very important is to decentralize communication when both sides have rome and disease dip agreements concerning what liberty and dignity and equal respect require. and no principle way to resolve them. another principle is de minimis principle, and an example is the

case which the supreme court has sent back, hoping for informal resolution. the government merely required religious groups to file a form in order to get an exemption, and some complain that is a burden on their exercise of their religious freedom, and i say i would consider that de minimis. a de minimis burden we ought to be able item pose on people in order to further social solidarity in some situations. another approach, had an an advd by a law professor who allow current businesses to publicly state moral objections to a particular practice such as gay marriage, without enduring liability for hostile environment. thing ares this would encourage both separation of people in different -- who have different

feelings and approaches to these issues, and dialogue between them. and finally, most obviously but also most difficult to put together is compromise. the case, as i suggest, the supreme court has recently reimaginedded that case in hope -- remanded the nice hopes of a negotiated compromise. the state of utah expanded civil rights protection for lgbts while protecting religious objectors, allowing refusals by state officials who would otherwise have to perform certain services, ceremonies, rather, and so forth. so, in closing i have a few parting thoughts. i think my analysis of hard issues teaches that reasonable people who care deeply about the public interest as theyed it and can do disagree lieu to define, approach and resolve them and three important implications follow from this.

first is that elements of clear thinking can be apply toed in hard issue, not just the ones i focused on in the book. second, if advocates of one or another position can acknowledge the complexities that make sump issues hard hey may come to see their opponents arguments as at least worthy of respect, which may in concern cool and elevate the debate enough to ebb courage search for common ground. then finally, even when such -- even when this open minded analysis can't resolve hard issues, it can narrow the range of disagreement which in turn can facilitate compromise. the only alternative is some form to coercion that leads the defeated bitter egg venge. and determined to undermine them' and their policies and the question is, choice sound familiar? to me it does.

thank you very much for listening. [applause] peter, thank you for the very thoughtle lecture. an enormous amount of complex material in a short period of time. now it's time to turn to your question if you could identify yourselves and wait for the microphone. i'll start with a question from the front. >> wait for the mirk mic. >> joel, visiting scholar here at aei and a long-term friend of our speaker. peter, you have written the past about american exceptionalism. is there something that you

think that is unique about hard problems to the united states? do we have more of them? maybe more vexing or common? are we more 0 or less likely to engage in clear thinking about them are and they mow intractable here than they are elsewhere? and if so, why? >> i think it is -- i think we are exceptional in this respect. not -- by exceptional i just mean as a matter of degree. we are more polarizes on the issues that in other liberal democracies and there are couple of reasons for this which i alluded to the outset. ones that we live in what's been called properly a right culture. in which people whose interests are being threatened tend to claim those interests not merely as interests but as rights. and we have a juris prudence that invites people to make those sorts of claims and the courts sometimes succumb to the

temptation to recognize strongly felt and substantial interests as rights. so that's one thing. and the nature of our juris prudence, the constitutional structure which we operate, i think tends to encourage that. we also live in a adversarial system, which a sociologist has written a book called "adversaryar justice" in which he explains how so minute disputes which orderly not be accordly in other done would not be adjudicated in the courts come to court. a lot of reasons for this. a lot of -- for one thing, our system of attorneys fees are contingency fee system lead toads a lot more entrepreneurial

lawyering than in other countries the loser of the decision pays the fees. quite a few reason for this. i think we're also -- more difficult society to govern today than the past and that has a number of reasons. one is we're far better educated and no longer admire those who were previously in authority in the same way we did before and that's true in connection with the religious authority and institutional authorities. ...

it spoken a lot about poverty and that there is an old saying in this town show me your budget and i will tell you your values. what about his budget especially as it relates to the poor? >> i don't think that i'm perhaps going -- i'm not a partisan at all but i think trump has proven he is incompetence to be present in any number of ways and i think

the budget is a reflection of the fact. he's making some hard choices to emphasize expenditures that he considers much more important, so i think that is very clear. putting trump aside, and i would love to put trump aside, the issues surrounding poverty are really hard ones, and of the lack of effectiveness demonstrate a strong commitment to eradicating poverty and

though again it is a good program and the social security has eliminated poverty and here we have made some advances. i think it is a copout just to blame it all on trump and his minions. those of us that have a deep commitment to reducing or eliminating poverty have to come up with better solutions. it's very tempting because one virtue is to cash out many of the programs and now purports to help the poor, cash them out and write a check to people and eliminate the bureaucracy that is now in place to draw these distinctions and make this difficult decision. in the passages that i read,

that is very unlikely to happen and it isn't clear to me that it would be a good thing. i don't think that it's a case just because we have a lower unemployment rate today. it's a historically low labor force participation rate which is explicable. one answer is a demographic phenomenon that can't be good to explain what we are observing in the labor force participation and the way that we define unemployment and underemployment obscures a lot of americans and we don't know why.

>> the first question from the online audience what is the universal income, we've answered that and can move on so let's go right here to the question in the front. [inaudible] if you feel the conclusions that you have come to our dramatic and different from those of your peers and secondly, do you believe the two-party system as you refer to as adversarial justice manifesting itself is the best system to achieve the ideals that you've described? >> the first question is fairly easy to answer and the second is almost impossible. basically the advantage is i

read a lot of social science in the areaandthe areas because i t about understanding the basic facts of a situation and i have a genuine commitment to helping more people think about these issues. certainly not the only person in the country in washington, d.c.. there's others as well so no, just going through the trouble to tell complex stories about the policies of the people that have written but they haven't. [laughter] in the political system is an enormously complicated question.

we have an admirable political system all things considered but it does have its disadvantages and it's caused me to rethink some of the confidence i had in our political system but i also think the system has an enormous amount of resilience and will respond to the challenge in a positive way. i don't know how long it will take but i think it is already beginning to happen. in the long-term trajectory of the united states i disparage as much as anybody bu that's what i was thinking about in the political system is the politicians hands grew things up a lot and often do, but our

system compared with other societies on the private sector, the nonprofit and private activity so the government can screw things up pretty badly but not as much as other countries where 65% of the gdp runs through the government. >> my name is carl. your discussion of poverty you mentioned about nine different approaches with varying degrees of effectiveness and that is what the data shows. however, when policymakers consider how to allocate

resources, the distinctions represent their values as opposed to pragmatic decisions about what works. have you considered allowing the states to be laboratories for experimentation and rewarding those with more effect if solutions, for example decreasing the tax rates of individuals that live in states that have demonstrated more progress in terms of reducing poverty? >> i have given this a lot of thought, this is not a novel suggestion and to some extent we tried to do that. no child left behind is an example of that and it had great problems because among other things, the folks on the ground with the educational policy they

tended to overregulate situations and that lead to bad outcomes. i can't really assess this claim but the idea of the laboratories as justice brandeis called them is absolutely crucial. one of the things i argued for in this and other books is more controlled experiments, which the federal system facilitates. so the reform of 96 which i consider a big success though not a complete success was created with a good deal of experimentation by the states with a lot of data suggesting an approach could be adopted.

it ran into trouble during the great recession and even in the early 2000. but the data that i have seen with brookings and also the work here at aei convinces me poor people are better off today as a whole and child poverty has declined compared to what it was in 1996. i'm in favor of that approach, but it has to be done carefully and the data-gathering has to be rigorous. the microphone is coming to. >> i wanted to ask about the birthright citizenship.

in the citizenship without consent you suggested there was a possibility of amending the policy and now that there is a president suggestinprecedent sue do you expect a change? >> that's a very perceptive question but utterly fair. the 99.9% that have read this book, roger smith, a political scientist now and i wrote a book examining the legislative and constitutional history of our tradition of the birthright citizenship and we concluded i think very persuasively it's as says if it is not constitutionally required is constitutionally permitted and if congress can adopt a different rule than the outright birthright citizenship that is automatic across-the-board for

anybody born in the united states regardless how they entered, how long they stayed, whether they remain in the country, tourists, what have you. i think there are strong arguments against that rule but also arguments in favor of the traditional rule. so it is except to argue it is possible congress has constitutional authorittheconsto regulate birthright citizenship in a way that had been previously denied by people that were discussing that matter. as to where it stands now and what the administration will do i've been a little surprised that i haven't heard more about the birthright citizenship from the trump administration.

if it is high on their agenda -- [inaudible] [laughter] i wrote an op-ed in "the new york times" years ago about this controversy and argued there are intermediate solutions that are better serving values and interests. one is to give birthright citizenship to all people who are born in the united states and reside in the united states for a certain period of time and better educated a period of time. i don't know if it would be ten years in five years of schooling or whatever it we might conclude that i think that is a reformer

and i believe in it. >> one question over here then we will go to the back and i'm afraid that will have to be the last question. can you identify yourself please. >> [inaudible] i was noticing -- i wondered if you thought that affirmative action would waste away and disappear. >> no. the proponents i don't think have any intention or incentive to eliminate affirmative action since it will be arguable and to a certain extent it will be true that different groups are not equal in our society so i don't think they will ever willingly

and the president has been opposed to, against it by declared majority for a long time and so including most minority groups so i think it is probably here to stay and it depends more on the policies of the public and private universities that are affected by federal law. >> i will remind you the book is on co and he will be signing copies and for those that didn't have a chance to ask the your questions he will be here to answer. >> you mentioned earned income credit as broad bipartisan

support included in the paul ryan plan and earned income growth for childless adults. what do you think are the obstacles that have kept that functional working program from being extended given the level of bipartisan support but it has? >> there's always political opposition moving too far in the middle class with subsidies of that kind and that's why there is the incentive cliff. they've tried to phase out that trajectory in a gradual way that it has to be phased out at some point so that is one reason.

i don't know. i think that is the main policy concern and there is also fraud in the program but something like 20 or 25% of the applications for the earned income tax credit turn out to be improper. it's because the programs are so very complicated involving so much paperwork is easy to make a mistake so i don't know if it is fraudulent, but that is one of the reasons. >> one more thing about affirmative action, i am very much in favor of socioeconomic affirmative action, and there's a number of people that have written on this possibility and i discuss it in th discussed itd in previous books.

i think it would be better than the racial preferences and a lot of overlap in terms of the beneficiaries so affirmative-action produces the numbers for the groups because a baltimore would qualify for th that. please join me in thanking peter and by the book. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] you are doing great. i would like to spend a week to send a special thank you for hosting us and creating today's conversation. before we begin we are so pleased to share a trailer for the documentary that chronicles ex