a troubling statistic i discussed in the book is 40% of the sons born to fathers in the lowest quintile of income remain in lowest quintile of income and so demography is often destiny.

if you are born to a father who was very polar, there's a very good chance, not overwhelming chance, but a very good chance you're going to be poor as well. to the discussion that poverty relates to blacks and i discuss why that is the case then why much of this discussion can be very misleading. the poverty rate is slightly lower than that of native americans and alaska natives. but more important point is more than 75% of blacks are not poor so the kinds of generalizations and images with warm are unfortunately quite inaccurate, though it is the case that many,

too many blacks are born into poverty and will remain in poverty. the most important conclusion that i think analysts of poverty have come through 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 ms is a most unfortunate deplorable condition. the best predictor of poverty is being born to unmarried mothers and absent fathers. that's the single best predict her. it's not race. it's not where you live. it's not even unemployment. if the action of birth. there has been some good news in the poverty picture. the 2015 rates declined sharply from all groups. teenage pregnancies down by 50% since 1991. high school completion is up to

black-white job in high school completion closing, not enough, but now about 85%. divorce rates have stabilized though of course as we all know a very high level, much too high. i think for the well-being of children. crime has dropped in all communities over the last 20 years or so. so having measured and explain the measures in the adjustment and statistical patterns of poverty, i next turned to the causes of poverty. there are many of course. the main proximate cause has been emphasized by brookings and aei scholars is unemployment and underemployment by working age nondisabled family, what causes

this underemployment and unemployment? well, i go to a number of clauses in some detail. first i would say it's bad luck. how we define block is of course a question that reasonable people can differ about. but some of it is anything but bad luck, misfortune by any standard. many poor people are poor because of a health problem that they could not anticipate. some women are poor often because of divorcees. their standard of living decline 25% in the first year after divorce for men standard of living actually increases by 10% the first year after divorce. kind of a shocking comparison to

me. 72% -- so that is the path. i have more to say about it on the font to family and community break down which i consider the single most cause the under and unemployment by working age nondisabled family had. 72% of black babies born out of wedlock today, that triples the rate in 1965, triple the rate when daniel patrick moynihan famously decried the chaos and craziness of black families in the way for a babies born out of wedlock is now higher than the black rate was when moynihan conducted his analysis in 1965. it's an extraordinarily

devastating development. and of course leads to development that we don't seem to know very much about solving your it's not for want of study and after. it is a really, really hard problem. a third cause of poverty is so-called disappearing jobs. and here again, i have a lot to say and discuss the analysis and some of the response is to concerns about disappearing jobs. very interesting finding how low a percentage of working age unemployed men site is the reason for their unemployment, lack of jobs she had some of these people are disabled but when i come to discussion of disability, i will have some more to say about that.

a fourth possible cause, almost certainly a causes educational deficits. bit here, it is important to emphasize what we often forget, which is while we are 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 hickman's analysis of the problem. so ... but from the finland community break down, education, jobs come if it is isolation. sociologists have a lot tedious. many fema be familiar with the famous mount eric sociologists

whose certain about the strain of weak ties by which he means the greater opportunities available to people who have a large note work of weak ties in saturday night with strong ties. so it's kind of paradox, but it's easily explained. orlando patterson has about the myth of the hood. just to summarize very quickly with the sociologists have reported is that like networks are both smaller and denser and have the smallest percentage of kinsman of any other group. there's also very little marriage, especially for black women. but that isolation limits opportunities, limits information, then this context is very severe.

they fixed possible cause is discrimination. here i distinguish between or among different types of discrimination, what is intentional and the second is unintentional and 30 statistical lawyers in the audience will certainly be very much aware of that distinction, which is reflected in the doctrine under title vii of the civil rights act. one complication is the discrimination prohibited against people of natural origin, gender and soap are, but not on the basis of poverty. poverty is not a protect classification, which means it can't be attacked with normal

come into the thick discrimination is based on poverty, it can't be attacked in the normal fashion that the low rate -- the civil rights law employers. a seventh cause of poverty is bad choices. one can easily be accused of believing that the term -- and it done, but there are a range of choices that we can reasonably care teresa bad that some of them are antisocial behaviors and some of them are just short sighted behaviors. so let me just read one description of this, this phenomenon. most bad choices are in play short dated. the sacrifice of the possibility of future terror ballgames. common example is a dropping out

of high school, alcohol abuse, gambling, discipline and record tv or video games can access environment spending, one cannot afford or do not know how to care for, cultivating habits including jobs or training programs from which one could acquire useful skills or experience. the next cause his incarceration. there's a lot of outcry about excessive incarceration in the country and there should be. the access is less substantial than one night stand. 62% of prisoners in the united state are violent or offenders. the states are by and large a problem, primarily for fiscal

reasons trying to add the present of minor offenders, but that policy, which is a welcomed policy is only going to have a relatively martial effect on the number of people in our prisons. the last cause that he analyzes the culture of poverty. by which i mean widespread entrenched self reinforcing patterns of despair of orientation or self mr. david conn.. again, i discussed that a bit, but i don't want to say more about that now unless you want to raise the q&a. and then discuss current progress of the focus on low income people and communities. it's not that we haven't that much money for more money in

recent years on these recent programs. in 2008, we spent $861 billion at the federal level. that was in 2008. only seven years later we spent $849 on these programs. i go to the programs i don't want to belabor because there are other things to discuss. snap, earned income tax credit for these to be called the food stamp program. the earned income tax credit social security, medicare, largely successful programs although they have large amounts of fraud, waste and abuse we don't seem to be able to reduce those measures were announced very significantly if at all. some of these programs raise concerns about working families,

particularly in snap and medicaid and social security disability. i discussed the evidence on that. another very important program as title i with the polar. it has been enforced for 15 years now. hurricanes did a report on the effectiveness of title i, just 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 a faith. head start, small program, both the health and human services and brooks duchenne has reported a rapid fadeout of the benefits from head start by the third grade or even sooner. sometimes during the summer.

jim hickman, nobel prize winner in economics in chicago is more optimistic about the long-term effects of head start, but when you are talking about the effects 30 years later, there's so many intervening conditions that it is hard to be really confident in that kind of analysis. it probably has a lot of truth to it. job training programs, little assessment, but assessments showed no effect events. the job core today after it years cost us about $1.8 a year and every study that has been done of which i'm aware shows no effect of this whatsoever. socialist security disability, others have studied this and shown that it contains serious moral hazard in reducing work

incentives. the worker to disability recipient, the ratio of workers to disability recipients has declined from 13421216-1. some trends say it's actually a close to 11-1. so that is a shocking development that we need to take very seriously. housing, there's the national bureau of economic research, comprehensive test in 2015 that found little evidence with respect to effect on poor people. rash idea is to write a dense and very important recent work showing the number is better neighborhood does affect outcome -- long-term outcomes. so that is sort of encouraging assassin pilot implication that

might be implemented. i then talk about policy reforms. the first possibility is to encourage macroeconomic growth are the problem is we don't have to do it without inflation, without novels, international trade and current effects. if we did, that would be the simplest way to do it. macroeconomists by contradictions. second is distribution directly in here we have the example that we don't have any evidence to how it's working, universal basic income plan in finland, but it's also been proposed by a very prominent conservative, milton friedman and charles murray. the design of these matters of course matters a lot. political prospects for this

were analyzed by henry aaron who's the senior fellow at hurricanes and and a leading expert on poverty. he sees most americans as quote commodity egalitarians. support programs that prevent poor people from living in decrepit housing are going untreated. only 20 or cash egalitarians to support providing money for those without cash. dust, and i'm quoting, far more willingly vote refundable tax credits to pay for health care them at a refundable tax credits for low incomes. besides travel some administration of the house credit may be, it is child's play next of minutes airing more transfers of cash and i had the past experience support this assessment. their possibilities which supplements and that's a very good ways to do this or the

earned income tax credit does that already. there is widespread bipartisan support for increasing the earned income tax credit and increasing it to groups of people who are not eligible for it. and then wage -- i think the evidence of the effects of minimum wage on entry-level employment and bound automation is very -- is quite negative, which is one of the reasons the new income tax credit is a better way to go to increase affect it after-tax wages and wage insurance which is an proposed by a number of people that has not yet been instituted on a broad scale here. that is a possible remedy. the fourth policy reform is human capital. that is largely done to the education system or a job training or job retraining and

mccarty commented a bit i'm not that much more to say in the book be the fifth policy requirement to strengthen families. this is the most important and also the most difficult. brookings scholars have an alliance what they called a success sequence, which is a word, children only when they are married, and marriage after 21 and finish high school. the same henry aaron however, the long footnote i have is very skeptical that these approaches to the success sequence with the effect did and he's a strong advocate of remedies for poverty. the six policy reform and

discusses opportunity that refers to some extent to work that was done for years and years and most recently done now which identified all sort of occupational -- impediment to occupational mobility is, licensing requirements that make no sense at all another of that kind. residential mobility is another approach in the section eight program is our major weapon in that particular war. again, it is somewhat manic and showed that the people who move to better neighborhood with very mixed.

a very recent analysis believe the ones in the younger and therefore spend more time in as better neighborhoods do much better. let me see how i'm doing on time here. okay, i better hassle. a second issue is immigration. i want a much about that although i say a lot of the book about it. it's one of the areas that i did for a long time. i preface this by pointing to the political urgency of immigration reform. and rick olson, warmly of aei has written a very important political analysis, where he recently in which he argues that as a matter of electoral strategy, democrats really have against immigration policy right and that means changing some

time honored sessions on immigration. they can still be as i certainly for expanded immigration and for honoring if not cherishing immigrants who come here and succeed. but it does require a different language and analysis. for one thing, for example, there would be no legalization unless and until the public becomes convinced that the border is controlled. in reality, the border will never be controlled, but the public needs to believe the government is doing what it can. so those of us and i suspect many of you join me in being strong at a catholic ossetian

need to attend to that. that is partly what ever else unless discussing. i discuss a bit immigration reform, agricultural workers. the number of green cards to be issued each year, the categories of the quota and a number of other issues. for now i'm going to focus on three issues. the first being legalization which i mentioned already. this would be a dreamer's and others and strong arguments for this. even trump has seemed to recognize the strong claims the dreamers have two reasonable policy for prospect of legalization. these programs are hard to design if the conditions on

legalization are too stringent, the undocumented will not participate. they'll take their chances and continuing the shadows as the cliché house. her real problems of administration in a particularly with a week to end the other immigration these of health and human services and there was widespread fraud in the 1986 legalization, especially with regard to be a record to roll legalization program. the second big issue is enforcement. there are two then years that defined the problem versus border enforcement. the second is the interior. most people don't understand within 50% of illegal immigrants enter the legally they entered legally and out of status. and that is very important

implications for the way in which the government can hope to enforce the immigration policies that adopts. the detention of immigration cores. i'm not going to dwell on those now. there are better technique we can use to improve enforcement. there's an important issue of employer sanctions which have been kind of a joke often tall now and they can be strengthened though of course there are constraints i'm not good universal identification card, it is quite weak. it is strongly expressed analytically. the third i discusses integration and try to increase the naturalization rate and perhaps to subsidies of

naturalization ease. english-language subsidies, the government should do much more in assisting and the grand to learn english college after all all is the most important weapon in making it in american society better english as a second language program. much of them not only have they failed, but in some ways have made matters worse. there's a lot of variation in program and i don't want to overgeneralize. the last issue that i will discuss their earthly the executives from secular policies. here the context is very complex. we have the conjunction of

growing religious diversity with a growing secular spirit we have the right culture in which people are encouraged and even in enterprise to claim violation of their right when they feel that their vital interests have been shortchanged we have a judicial enough apology which is being developed as to how to arbitrate these claims between religious freedom and choice on the one hand and the religious freedom operation act which was about it at the federal level and supreme court held and led to 20 or more state adopt a date references they are called,

which attempt to establish for which these claims can be adjudicated and put a strong stand on the side of religious -- the religious claimants. there are two key cases that i disguise in this chapter. one is the hobby lobby case, which was applied to accept families -- a family business and also a religious business, same company from the aca requirement to containing this 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 recognized and gay marriage is a constitutional right. it's a huge advance in human

rights and equality via lgbt, but it's galvanized strong religious-based opposition demand for exemptions. it's a very complex situation because i'm one hand we have the state different, which of course constrained than the claims of religious minorities and we have a lot of localities and read state and vice versa. ..

>> it's a relatively new conflict. we haven't quite figured out how we feel about it in any sophisticated way, and we, we need more information about what the true trade-offs are in these situations. so i offer some principles for resolving these issues. the first thing to be said is that dignity, the claim of offense to dignity is not, it's

really not very helpful criterion for resolving these issues. let me just read quickly, in many instances, both sides could claim that the decision would stigmatize them, grant that exemptions from baking same-sex wedding cakes -- [inaudible] what about denying the bakers' claims? won't that them them that -- tell them that their ideas are bigoted from performing abortions to our women who have had them, coercing pro-life doctors must brand them enemies of women's equality. on most serious issue, both sides might feel deeply stigmatized by rival actions or policies. so having despaired of using claims about dignity as a way of

resolving these disputes, i then move on to choice. and the more choice we can afford people, the less these conflicts are going to fester. but the choice strategy often begs questions of coercion and of harm. so in school prayer settings or football, prayers at football games, there's a question as to whether young people feel coerced when these invocations are made and whether they're harmed if they have to or choose to remain silent during them. a third approach, another approach, the distinction between conduct and status. compelling to act against one's conscience is different than having to accept another's status, and i think that can resolve some of these disputes.

another approach is one that's familiar to constitutional lawyers, and it's embodied in the rfra statute, 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 accommodation when both sides have deep disagreement concerning what liberty, dignity and great respect require and no way to resolve them. another principle is the de minimis principle. this is adopted from the nuisance law, for those of you

who have studied torts, and an example is the, zubik case which the supreme court has sent back hoping for informal resolution. the government required religious groups to file a form in order to get an exemption, and some claim that that's a burden on their exercise of their religious freedom, and i would consider that de minimis. that's a demin misburden that we ought to be able to impose on people. another approach, interesting one advanced by andrew koppelman, a law professor, who would allow businesses to state their moral objections to a particular practice such as gay marriage without uncurring liability for -- incurring liability for a hostile environment. he argues this would encourage both separation of people in different, who have different

feelingsing and approaches no these issues and dialogue between them. and finally, most obviously but also most difficult to put together, is compromise. in the zubik case, the supreme court has recently remanded that case in hopes of a negotiated compromise. the state of utah expanded civil rights protection for lgbts, allowing recusals 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 they understand it and do disagree about how to define, approach and resolve them.

and three important implications follow from this. the first is that elements of clear thinking can be applied to any hard issue, not just the ones that i've focused on in this book. second, the if advocates of one or another condition can acknowledge the normative complexities that make such issues hard, then they may come to see their opponent points' arguments as worthy of respect which may encourage searching for common ground. and finally, even when this openminded 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 of coercion that leaves the defeated bitter, vengeful and determined to undermine them and their policies. and my question is, does this sound familiar? [laughter]

to me, it does. thank you very much for listening. [applause] >> peter, thank you for that very thoughtful talk, walking us through an enormous amount of complex material in a short period of time. now it's time to turn to your questions, and if you could identify yourselves and wait for a microphone, we have people with mics on both sides p we'll start with a question from the front. >> joe -- >> if you could wait for the mic. >> i'm a visiting scholar here at aei and a long-term friend of our speaker. peter, you've written in the past about american

exceptionalism. is there something, do you think, that's unique about hard problems to the united states? do we have or -- do we have more of them, more vexing? is there something unique about the way we approach them? and are they more intractable here than they are elsewhere, and if so, why? >> i -- [laughter] i think, i think we are exceptional in this respect. not -- by exceptional, i just mean as a matter of degree. we are more polarized on these issues, i think, than in ore liberal democracies, and there are a couple of reasons for this which i alluded to at the outset. one is we live in a rights culture. people whose interests are being threatened tend to claim those interests not merely as interests, but as rights. and we have a jurisprudence 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, that's one thing. and the nature of our jurisprudence, the constitutional structure which we operate, i think, tends to encouraging that. we also live in an adversarial system which sociologist bob kagan has written a very good book call add very share y'all justice in which he explains disputes in other countries would not be adjudicated in the courts come to court. there are a lot of reasons for this. for one thing, our system of attorneys' fees, our contingency fee system leads to a lot more

entrepreneurial lawyering than in other countries where the loser of the decision pays the fees. there are quite a few -- >> i think we're also a much more different society to govern than we were in the past. we're far better educated than we were, and we no longer admire those who were previously in authority in quite the same way we did before. institutional authority in universities and elsewhere, and, of course, political authority as well. so we're much more unruly people than we we were in that respect. we're less unruly, i think, in some other respects than we have been at times in the past.

>> question right here in the front, and then we'll move over here. >> thank you. larry -- [inaudible] i think my question might be also on that ipad there. but you've spoken a lot about poverty, and there's an old saying in this town that show me your budget, and i'll tell you your values. what values does mr. trump's proposed budget, especially as they relate to the poor, tell us about our values? >> well, that's a very easy question, i think. i don't think -- i mean, i'm perhaps going to sound unduly partisan. actually, i am a, i call myself a militant moderate and really not a partisan at all, but i think trump is, has proved his incompetence to be president in any number of ways, and i think

this budget certainly reflects the fact that he really doesn't -- i don't think he gives a damn about poor people, and he's making some hard choices as is always made in budgets to emphasize expenditures that he considers much more important. so i think that's very clear. but in a way that's too, it's too easy. because putting trump aside, and i would love to put trump aside -- [laughter] as a never trump person, i think the issues that i've outlined surrounding poverty are really, really hard ones. and the lack of effectiveness of many -- not all, but many of our poverty programs demonstrate that even those who have a strong commitment to eradicating poverty have not been terribly successful. though, again, eitc a very good

program and social security is, essentially, eliminating elder poverty. we've made some real advances. so, you know, i don't want to -- i think it's a copout to just blame it all on trump and his minions. those of us who have a deep commitment to reducing or eliminating poverty have to come up with better solutions, and they're very elusive. the nbi is very tempting because one virtue that it would have is you cash out all or many of the programs that now purport to help the poor, cash them out and write a check to people. and eliminate all the bureaucracy and regulation that is now in place to draw these very fine distinctions and make these very difficult can decisions. difficult decisions. but as henry aaron emphasized in

the passage that i read, that's very unlikely to happen, and it's not clear to me that that would be an altogether good thing. i think one does have to worry about work incentives, and i don't think it's the case that just because we have a low unemployment rate today everybody who could be employed is employed. that's certainly not the case. we have a very, very low, historically low labor force participation rate which is in some ways inexplicable. one answer is that people were aging, there's a demographic phenomenon, but that can't be good to explain what we're observing in the reduced labor force participation. and the way in which we define unemployment and underemployment also, i think, obscures a lot of, a lot of americans who could work and are not working. we don't really know why. >> you anticipated the very

first question from our online audience about what is your opinion of the universal basic income. so we've answered that, and we can move on. let's go right here, i think you had a question in the front? and please identify yourself. >> yes. my name is tom -- [inaudible] resident of the district of columbia. thank you for your presentation. i wanted to ask you if you feel the conclusions you've come to are dramatically different than any of your peers? what is your competitive advantage for this book, so to speak. and then secondly, do you believe our two-party system which instills adversarial justice as we see it man fest itself these days, is it the best system to achieve the ideals that you've described? in well, the first question is fairly easy to answer, and the second is almost impossible to answer in a reasonable period of time. my comparative advantage is

basically that i've made a lot of social science in all of these areas because i care a lot about understanding the facts, the basic facts of the situation. and i am, i think, a clear thinker, and i have a genuine commitment to helping more people to think clearly about these issues. i'm certainly not the only person in the country or even in washington, d.c. who has these attributes. some of them are sitting in the audience. jonathan rausch is a good example, but there are others as well. so, no, i just have gone to the trouble to pull out a complex set of stories about public policies that i think other people could have written, but they haven't. [laughter] as far as the second question, the political system, you know, i don't know. it's, it's enormously complicated question. i think we have an admirable

political system, all things considered, but it does have its disadvantages. ask the election of trump -- and the election of trump, in my view, has caused me to rethink some of the confidence that i had in our political system. but i also think that this is probably pollyannaish on my part, but i also think our system has an enormous amount of resilience and respond to this challenge in a positive way. of course, i don't know how long that will take, but i think it will happen, and i think it's already beginning to happen. and there's some reason to be confident in the long-term trajectory of the united states, though, i despair as much as anybody in this room about the short-term one. one other thing about our political system is that the politicians can screw things up

a lot and often do, but our system depends to an enormous extent compared with other societies on the private sector, the nonprofit sector and private activity. and so although the government can screw things up pretty badly, it can't screw things up as much can happen in other countries where 65% of the gdp runs through, runs through the government. >> a question in the middle right here. >> my name is carl. peter, your discussion of poverty, you mentioned, i think, about nine different approaches which have varying trees of effectiveness -- degrees of effectiveness in terms of producing results. and that's what the data shows. the -- however, when policymakers consider how to allocate resources among those

nine, their decisions frequently represent therapy values as opposed -- their values as opposed to a pragmatic decision about what works. have you considered allowing the states to be laboratories for experimentation and rewarding those states that pick the more effective solutions? for example, by decreasing the tax rate of individuals who live in states which have demonstrated more progress in terms of reducing poverty? >> well, yes, i have given this a lot of thought. this is not a novel suggestion, and to some extent, we've tried to do that. the no child left behind was an example of that. it ran into big problems because, among other things and according to the folks on the ground with educational policy,

the feds tended to overregulate situations in ways that led to bad outcomes. i'm not, i can't really assess that claim. but the idea that states as little laboratories, as justice brandeis called them, is absolutely crucial. and one of the things that i argue for in this and other books is more controlled experiments. which our federal system actually facilitates because there's so much diversity. so welfare reform of 1996 which i consider a big success, although not a, not a complete success, was created after a good deal of experimentation by states which produced a lot of data suggesting that a better approach could be adopted.

now, it ran into trouble during the great recession and even during the recession in the early 2000s, but the data that i've seen, much of which comes from brookings, is -- and also bob do health care -- dohr's work here at aei tells me child poverty has declined compared to what it was in 1996. so, yes, i'm very much in favor of that approach, but it has to be done carefully and the data gathering has to be rigorous. >> there's a question over here on this side of the room. a microphone is coming. right there, thank you. >> hi. ian mason, breitbart news. i wanted to ask you about birthright citizenship. >> yeah.

>> so in citizenship without consent, you had suggested it was a possibility of ending the policy. now that there's the first president suggesting the same, have your views on the subject changed? [laughter] >> that's a very perceptive question. [laughter] but an utterly fair one. in citizens without consent for the 99.9% of you who have never read it, roger smith and i wrote a book examining the legislative and constitutional history of our tradition of birthright citizenship. and we concluded, i think very persuasively, that birthright citizenship is not constitutionally required, though it is constitutionally permitted and that congress, if it wished to, could adopt a different rule than the outright birthright citizenship that's

automatic across the board for anybody who's born in the united states regardless of how they entered, for how long they stay, whether they remain in the country or they don't remain in the country and whether they're tourists or what have you. i think there are strong arguments against that rule, but i think there are also some pretty weighty arguments in favor of the traditional rule. and so we didn't take a position in citizenship without consent except to argue that it was possible that congress has the constitutional authority to regulate birthright citizenship in a way that had been previously denied by most people who discussed the matter. as to where i stand now and as to what the trump administration will do on this, i've been a little surprised that i haven't heard more about birthright citizenship from the trump administration. i would have thought that this would be high on their, high on their agenda. and if that's high on their

agenda, for me, that's a strong, not necessarily dispositive argument that i'm not in favor of it. but -- [laughter] you know, i think, i propose -- i wrote an op-ed in "the new york times" several years ago about this controversy, and i argued that there are intermediate solutions that i think would better serve a competing values and interests in this, on this issue. and 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 are educated in the united states for a certain period of time. i don't know what the number would be, whether it be 10 years old and five years of school, whatever smarter people than i might conclude. but i think that's, that's a

supportable reform. and i believe in that. >> we have one question over here, and then we'll go to the back, and i'm afraid that's going to have to be the last question. >> hi. pat -- [inaudible] >> could you identify yourself? >> oh, pat span. i was noticing one of your items of -- [inaudible] and having spent over 32 years in the federal government on, obviously, the wrong side of affirmative action, i was wondering if you thought that affirmative action was finally going to waste away and disappear. >> no. that's -- i don't think it will. the proponents of affirmative action don't have any intention or incentive to eliminate affirmative action. it will always to a certain extent be true that different groups are not equal in our society s. so i don't think the proponents will ever willingly

give it up, and the american public as i show in the book has been opposed to affirmative action, by which i mean ethnoracial preferences, have been against it by clear majorities for a long time. and so -- including most minority groups. so i think it's probably here to stay. it doesn't depend that much on law, it fends more on the policies of -- it depend more on the policies of public universities and private universities who are only indirectly affected by federal law. so they could end it, but they won't. >> before turning the to our lath questioner in the back -- last questioner in the bark i'll remind you that peter's week is for sale -- book is for sale, and for those of you who didn't have a chance to get your question answered, peter will be signing them. in the back.

>> you mentioned broad bipartisan support for fighting poverty is included in the better way, the brookings report had an expanded earned income credit for childless adults. what do you think are the obstacles that have kept that functional, working program from being expanded given the level of supposed bipartisan support that it has? >> well, i think there's always political opposition to moving too far into the middle class with subsidies of that kind. and that's why there's a phaseout which causes a cliff, an incentive cliff which if you earn another dollar, you're out of the program. they've tried to phase that trajectory in a gradual way, but ultimately, it has to be phased out at some point. so i think that's, i think that's one reason.

i don't know. i think that's the main policy concern about it. there's also a lot of fraud in the program, but i think if something, 20-25% of the applications turn odd out to be improper, it's not all fraudulent. and one of the problems with federal programs is because these are so very complicated, involving so much paperwork that it's fairly easy to make a mistake. so i don't know if it's fraudulent, but that's one of the reasons. just let me say one more thing about affirmative action, very quickly. i am very much in favor of socioeconomic affirmative action, and there are a number of people -- richard call 'em berg, particularly, has written widely on this possibility. i discuss this in the book and i've discussed it in previous books. that's not a, that's not a

terribly easy program to design, but i think it would be better, and this is there'd be a lot of overlaps in terms of the men beneficiaries of the program, but not complete overlap. affirmative action produces more numbers for ethnic, ethnoracial groups than a socioeconomic one would because a lot of poor whites would qualify for that. >> please join me in thank peter for a wonderful lecture. [applause] buy the book. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

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