with disabilities educated in public schools, most of whom spend their day learning alongside other students. according to the national center for education statistics, 90% 90% of students with disabilities do not have intellectual or cognitive disabilities that would limit them. so you're talking about 10% of children with disabilities are in the much more severe category. mr. henderson, what's your basic concern about where we are now and where we could be if the draft that's on the table now were to be enacted? >> senator casey thank you for your question. and thank you for putting your question in the broader context of the totality of circumstances, that students in poverty, students with various disabilities will face in states that are making policy choices about where to make investments. so let me say as senator bennett

said, investments in early childhood education pay big dividends but states often don't require that. you also recognize that white there may be a cap on ensuring that only the students with the most severe cognitive disabilities are classified as such schools now will use various methods to allow more students to be classified as having disabilities for purposes of avoiding a kind of rigorous adherence to standards that we would like. 6.4 million kids with disabilities in the country. and what we have found i mean, obviously those living in poverty would have a huge problem. well what we have found from the draft that we have seen. and by the way, i'm drawing this from a council on parent attorneys and advocates representing persons with disabilities and from organizations representing persons with disabilities within the leadership conference.

and they have really stressed the importance of trying to adhere to standards because what they have seen is students with disabilities are often classified as proficient. not having met -- because they have somehow met the alternative achievement standard and somehow been exempted from the more rigorous mainstream standard that would be required under existing law. that for us is a huge problem. and when you add to the fact that states now because of budgets are choosing not to invest in public education in the same way. quite frankly, that's what happened in pennsylvania over the last several years, creating huge problems. particularly for kids with disabilities disabilities. so our view is that states will choose to really make cuts where the voices of the advocacy community are perhaps the weakest.

unfortunately, that sometimes applies to our students with disabilities. they are often in poverty themselves. if they lack the kind of strong advocacy network. aside from the organizations i've identified here. that can really represent their interest. and one last point -- >> we're over time. >> i'm sorry. the new america foundation looked at 16 states -- >> we're running short on -- but conclude -- >> if you want to conclude, go ahead. >> thank you, sir. i appreciate it. and 4,400 schools that have been previously established for purposes of intervention were largely ignored. under those states once the waivers have been given. so that is the reality of what we face. thank you, sir. >> thank you, mr. henderson and senator casey. senator whitehouse. >> thank you chairman. my experience with the education universe is that there are really two worlds in it.

one is a world of contractors and consultants and academics and experts and plenty of officials at the federal, state and local level. and the other is a world of principals and classroom teachers who are actually providing education to students. and what i'm hearing from my principals' and teachers' world is that the footprint of the first world has become way too big in their lives. to the point where it's inhibiting their ability to actually do the jobs that they're entrusted to do. so i understand there are lots of concerns and i share those concerns about making sure the benefit of education is spread evenly across the children of this country and the people who don't have a voice don't also lose out on their chance to join the ranks of economic success where they will have more of a

voice. but i don't -- i went through the park tests a week ago for math mat sxikz for something they call english language arts, which is off to a pretty bad start if that's what you have to call it. and i wasn't all that impressed with those questions and with those tests. i didn't see tests -- questions that couldn't have been integrated into regular tests that were given by regular teachers in the ordinary course of teaching and assessing their students. to me it's pretty clear that these tests are designed to test the school and not the student. when it first started up in rhode island the timing of the reporting of the results that the contractor assumed was such that the teacher in the coming year wouldn't even have the information. so clearly, the next year's teacher was not the focus of this effort.

the scheduling and the preparation for this is important because kids are not stupid and they know the difference between a test that's going to affect their grade and a test that's not going to affect their grade. so the school has to go through huge heroic efforts to try to get them interested and prepared for a test that they know they're not going to be personally graded on or responsible for the outcome of. and then kids have scheduling partners. they can't get them in at once. many schools in rhode island simply don't have the electronic bandwidth for a class to take the test at once. so it's not one test. it's three tests. and you can't teach the other kids while the other kids are in the tests. we have got to solve this problem. and it is an efficiency problem. it is a problem of simply being smart about gathering information. but i'm really concerned about this. and i'm saying this at this point to invite conversation with my colleagues.

as we go forward. the superstructure of education supervision i'm not sure passes the test of being worth all the expense and all the trouble. and it's very discouraging to teachers in rhode island who've talked to me they hear about the race to the top money that comes into the state and the state gets a big grant and everybody does a press conference, and it's like the rain falling over the desert where the rain comes pouring out of the clouds. but by the time you're actually at the desert floor not a raindrop falls. it's all been absorbed in between. i have never had a teacher say know boy race to the top gave me just what i need in terms of books or a whiteboard or something that i can use to teach the kids. so i think we've got to be very careful about distinguishing the importance of the purpose of some of this oversight and not allow the importance of that purpose to allow the oversight to be conducted in such an

inefficient, wasteful clumsy way that the people who we really trust with our students' education, the people in the classroom with them, are looking back at us and saying stop, help, i can't deal with this you are inhibiting my ability to teach. and i think that damage in the classroom falls just as hard on the communities that are having difficulty getting their fair share of education as it does anywhere else. i think we really need to grapple with that in this committee. and i have basically used all my time with that set of remarks. but that was less in the manner of a question than the manner of an invitation to my colleagues to continue this discussion and to let you know what i think is important as we go forward. you have two seconds -- no you don't. one, zero, gone. >> well, but thank you, senator whitehouse. and invitation accepted. i mean, i think we need to have lots of discussions about this. not all these discussions i'm

discovering as i talk, fall down in predictable ways. that was very helpful. thank you. now, our wrap-up hitter senator murphy. >> thank you, mr. chairman. thank you very much for convening a really well-balanced and thoughtful hearing. i got the chance to read almost all of your testimony, though i wasn't here in person. i came to congress as a vocal opponent and critic of no child left behind. for a lot of the reasons that senator whitehouse enunciated. but also because i come from a family of educators and my mother was a wonderful elementary school teacher and then an english as a second language teacher. and she walked away from teaching frankly before she thought she was going to in part because she ended up spending a lot more time on bureaucracy and a lot less time on teaching. and that's not what she went into it for. but one of the first meetings i

had when i got here as a freshman member of congress was with the children's defense fund. and they came in because they had heard that i had been a real active critic of no child left behind. and they wanted to just present the case for me as to what was happening in other parts of the country. maybe not connecticut prior to no child left behind with respect to children with disabilities. to explain to me that there were places in which because largely of the cost pressures on local school districts to provide a full complement of educational services for kids with disabilities that many of them were spending part of their week with the janitor in technical education and were being largely ignored ignored. and that they had critiques of the law as i did. their point was it's important for us not to abandon the gains that we've made with respect to children with learning disabilities who had maybe in

some places not been getting a fair shot before. so i wanted to just build on the questions that -- the question that senator casey raised. and maybe i'll direct it to my friend, dr. west. full disclosure we were college classmates. and i'm pleased he's here today. senator casey referenced some data suggesting the enormity of students with disabilities or in special education programs who do have the ability to take these tests. and yet the fear is that if you move to alternative assessments and give school districts the ability to move broad swaths of children with learning disabilities out from under the test you lose the pressure to provide the appropriate education but you also as you i think caution more generally in your comments, lose the ability for parents of children with disabilities to really figure out where their children are

going to succeed and where they aren't. even if you preserve annual statewide testing to give broad measurements for schools for parents, if you exempt big portions of children who have learning disabilities, those parents aren't helped by the overall assessments of the school. i'd love to hear what the data shows about what happens when we require that the majority of children except for those with severe cognitive disabilities take the test and what that might mean for accountability moving forward. >> as senator casey mentioned, the vast majority of students with disabilities do not have intellectual disabilities. they should be able to reach the same standards with appropriate modifications to the assessments that they're given. the second point i would make is there has to be some form of a cap on the number of students allowed to take those alternative assessments. i'm not sure the 1% cap that was

in the no child left behind legislation is exactly the right number. i'm not an expert in the education of students with disabilities. but one thing we know from the study of accountability policies and how schools respond to them more generally is that some schools will find a way to game the system. and so they might reclassify students as being eligible for special education if that exempts them from the accountable pool of students in order to avoid being sanctioned. so there needs to be some mechanism in an accountability policy to account for that dynamic. one of the concerns -- there also needs to be if there's a cap some degree of flexibility to allow for natural variation in the share of students at a given school or even a given district that might actually be appropriately excluded from the standard assessment. and so i think those policies have been a bit more rigid than they actually should be. but there needs to be some

mechanism, and i'm not the one to tell you the details of how to do it. >> thank you dr. west. eye study would suggest that on average you're talking about half a percentage of kids who don't have the ability to take those tests. but i think you're right. there are going to be variations. i look forward to working with the chairman and the ranking member on this issue moving forward. thank you, mr. chairman. >> thank you senator murphy. i'll ask senator murray if she has any closing remarks. >> i'll just say there's tremendous interest on our side of the aisle in fixing the no child left behind law to really make sure that in this country we really do make sure every child no matter where they live or who their parents are or how much money they have have the tuchbt an american dream of good education. that is the equalizer that i think is so important for our country and will allow all of our young people to be able to grow up and have a job and support all of us and be competitive in a global

marketplace. so it's a huge huge goal. but i think there's tremendous interest here in working on a bipartisan basis to move forward on this bill. and i want to thank everybody who participated before. >> this is a good beginning. i've learned a lot from the witnesses. i like the exceptional variety we half-points of view and i thank the staff for their work on coming up with that. i think senators you could see the large number of senators who came today and who had thoughtful comments. and for those who came and couldn't get in the hearing room we'll do our best to have a larger hearing room for our next hearing which will be next tuesday at 10:00 a.m. and it will be about fixing no child left behind supporting teachers and school leaders. so we look forward to that. i'd like to invite the witnesses, if you've -- if there's something today you that wanted to say that you didn't get to say we'd like to hear

it. so if you could let us hear it especially if you could do it within the next ten days that would be very helpful. we would welcome it. and to the senators i would say if you have additional questions, please ask them. senator baldwin raised the question of how do we put the spotlight on whether it's the states and local governments coming up with all these extra tests, and senator bennett asked the same question. senator murray and i have written to state and local school districts trying to identify the number of tests. but if you have an idea on the number of that. on senator baldwin's effort, we would appreciate it. i would -- i'm going to send you a question and ask the question whether do high stakes discourage multiple assessments? i would ask that question. and then i would like to invite mr. lazar to follow up his suggestion that one area where we might provide more funding is in developing better

assessments. one of the deigns is whenever the federal government does that it likes to put its sticky fingers on exactly what to do and who must do them. your comments on that or from anybody would be helpful. >> yes. >> i'm interested in taking advantage of that opportunity and particularly because none of the witnesses had a chance to comment on what i said. >> so our folks have -- >> what's convenient for you? >> end of the week. >> the sooner we get the question out the sooner we'll get good answers. it may be we have round table discussions at some point and not be limited to five minutes of questions. so there are different ways to go about this. if you could let us know within a week or sooner sheldon, that

would be a big help. and we'll go to work on that. usually we say at close of business this friday. that's what we usually say i'm told. i'm just learning. so fudge do it by the close of business friday that would be helpful. the hearing record will be open for ten days. we thank you for being here today. any other outburst or comment anyone wants to make. thank you to the witnesses. thank you very much for coming. the hearing's adjourned. >> while congress is on its presidents day break this week we're showing american history tv in prime time. tonight japanese interment

during world war ii. that starts at 8:00 eastern with real america and a 1944 documentary on the living conditions in interment camps in arkansas and wyoming. at 8:20 lectures in history and a course on how the press handled the japanese interment. at 9:25 eastern american artifacts takes you through the japanese american national museum, and then at 9:55 eastern oral history with former congressman norman mineta, who was assigned to a japanese interment camp with his family. >> here are some of our featured programs for this weekend on the c-span networks. saturday morning starting at 10:00 a.m. eastern live on c-span, our nation's governors get together to discuss issues affecting their states. guests include danny meyer, ceo of union square hospitality group, and maria bartiromo of fox business news. and sunday morning at 11:00 we continue our live coverage of

the sngs governors association meeting. featured speakers include homeland security secretary jeh johnson sxechltand epa administrator gina mccarthy. on c-span 2 saturday book tv is on the road, experiencing the literary life of greensboro north carolina. part of the 2015 c-span cities tour. and sunday at 9:00 p.m. eastern on "after words," wes moore retraces his career choices from combat veteran to white house fellow, wall street banker to social entrepreneur to find his life's purpose. and on american history tv on c-span 3 saturday night just after 7:00 the 1963 interview of former nation of islam minister malcolm x discussing race relations and opposition to racial integration. and sunday at 6:30 p.m. eastern former cia chief of disguise johna mendez tells the story of a husband and wife kgb spy team that infiltrated the cia through

the use of sex in the 1970s. find our complete television schedule at c-span.org. and let us know what you think about the programs you're watching. call us at 202-626-3400. e-mail us at comments comments @c-span.org. or send us a tweet tweet @cspan #comments. like us on facebook. follow us on twitter. the "atlantic" magazine and the aspen institute co-host the annual washington ideas forum. this event brings together political leaders, administration officials business entrepreneurs, journalists and science and technology experts. coming up next, the editor of the "atlantic" interviews two authors who've written "new york times" best-sellers. this is about 20 minutes. well, thank you, steve, and thank you all for coming. it's a huge honor for me to be up here with joe o'neil and gary

stein gart because they truly two of the best novelists working in english and maybe any other language today. i'm a huge fan of their work. gary, you don't even know this. but i was at the southern festival of the book a couple weeks ago in nashville and i saw you walking through the hotel lobby. and i contemplated going up to you and talking to you but i was a little bit starstruck and shy and i realized -- and i thought maybe you would run away. >> no. i'd run toward you. >> but now i realize you're a captive audience here and if you try to scurry away i've got this whole audience who could tackle you. but i want to get down to serious business. we've got a lot of ground to cover and a very short period of time. but i want to start on a couple of lighter notes. gary, i was reading in "the new yorker" a piece did you in the last couple weeks about your book tour for the paperback of "little failure," which i recommend to everyone. you noted in that you packed 46 ativan tablets for your tour to combat stage fright. which is an anxiety i can relate

to. there you go. i want to know how many of those tablets on your tour did you end up taking? do you have any left? you just answered that. and how many have you taken before today? >> today i just took half a milligram of ativan because i feel comfortable in washington. i think most of you are nice. and i think most of you yourself are on drugs as well. [ laughter ] >> one other note of non-seriousness before we get down to serious business, and i'm cognizant of the fact it's been a long day for a lot of you, you've sat through a lot of heavy-duty stuff and i want to make sure i keep you fully away. but you've written many times both in your memoir and some of your novels about the excessive hairiness of you -- or furriness as you put it of some of your protagonists. this is kind of a self-conscious preoccupation of yours. and i will just say for the record and maybe afterwards we can have a shirtless competition. i'm hairier than you. >> oh my goodness.

>> it's kind of like i have a full body -- like when i shave it's kind of arbitrary where i stop. >> let's get it on in the green room. >> but if we did that probably the national zoo would turn up. >> i can't believe you're having a hair-off and keeping me out of the competition. >> so at the end of this -- >> i'd win. we will have a hair-off and then the national zoo will come collect all three escaped chim sxpz take us back to where we belong. anyway getting down to serious business i would sigh that with regard to your respective writerly styles and similarities you are in many ways extremely dissimilar nflists. if you're looking at analogs from the pantheon of lit rary greats i would put joe more in the tradition of someone you've been compared to particularly with neverland of f. scott fitzgerald, which is heady company to be in. the narrators of both your novels particular neverland have a nick carewayesque voice.

whereas gary i'd put you in the tradition of saul bell lowe and early philip roth. not just because of your preoccupation, let's say with jewish themes but because of the kind of carnivalesque exuberance and wit of your writerly voice. and i guess -- >> thank you. i'll take it. >> if we're going to put it in the russian tradition i would say gary you're probably more in the tradition of like satirical absurdist gogol nabokov, where joe with your restraint and kind of writerly precision it's more chekhov or nabokov. but one place where you do overlap despite these differences in your fiction and non-fiction is writing about immigrants and expatriates and what you might call the immigrant identity crisis. and in your debut novel, "the russian debutante's handbook," you have the character living in new york, the immigrant's immigrant expatriate's expatriate, the enduring victim of every practical joke in the late 20th century.

and the characters in your books are both ex-pats, an american in dubai in your latest book "the dog." and a dutchman in the u.s. in "neverland." i saw you quoted in an interview, joe you that don't have a home turf so you have no choice but to float around on these post-national currents. so i realize you could each spend -- you have spent your entire careers in some sense talking about this but you each talk very briefly about how does being an immigrant or a displaced expatriate inform your writing? i want to stuart with you gary. >> being a russian is all the thing -- red dawn, red gerbil , red hamster. everything was red. i was sentenced to eight years of hebrew school for a crime i did not commit. [ laughter ] when i was sentenced there it was so bad being a russian i

had to be born in east leningrad. i had to convince jewish kids i was actually a german. but you know what ten years i was at a small college, oeber lynn college, a small marxist college in ohio. and being an immigrant was cool. no one wanted to be the dish was russian as could be. i was slopping up borish in the cafeteria. i wore the whole cossack thing with the epiallettes and bullets and all that. i tried to annex another college college. >> you haven't annexed any other colleges like gary has. >> no. >> you came to england from

holland via -- >> i'm a permanent immigrant. i was born in ireland. my mother's turkish. i grew up in africa and holland maybe, and i speak french with my mother. new york was a very good fit for me. and i sort of felt at home there. >> so we're in washington. so it's an appropriate place to ask this question. what is the relationship of the novel to politics? you have both in different novels dabbled in satire, which is sometimes the political genre going back to jonathan swift. in your book "the dog" i actually saw you quoted outside the context of the novel but in an interview that -- and this i think speaks to your own political sensibilities but obama famously bought your first novel i think when he was on martha's vineyard -- >> did he buy it? >> maybe they gave it to him. but you said -- and this is just a couple months ago. someone asked you how did you

feel about that? you said i feel uncomfortable with the whole obama thing i'm sure it sold books but he's now been in office six years and they're still force feeding people in guantanamo bay. so it's kind of problematic to have that name obama's on your book jacket. so for both of you what bearing or relevance do novels have on politics and do you see yourself as political novelists? >> i think novels are inevitably political but the political content of the novel depends on the reader. if you're disposed toward asking political ethical questions then practically any text becomes bloated with political meaning. but i certainly feel like my most recent book for example, this book set in dubai is a kind

of investigates all sorts of political things, how countries are structured and dubai in particular and what that says about for example american society as well. for sure yeah. >> i guess being from the former soviet whatever, you do get political. i just want to capture sort of the feeling of what it's like to be in these two giant countries america and russia. i was privileged to be born in one superpower that collapsed and then move to another superpower that's doing great. so it feels like everywhere i go whenever i land in beijing they're like okay. >> step on back. >> but yeah. it's a very 20th century kind of experience that i've had. but a part of me wishes i was just working in a burger king in denmark like they just had in the "times" and having a decent life instead of this. >> that's a good segue because the prospect of you both maybe -- and all novelists

someday work at a mcdonald's in denmark. what do you think the future of the novel is? >> philip roth a few years ago called the novel "a dying animal," and then he elaborated. he said maybe a small group of people will be reading it. maybe more people will read them than now currently lead latin poetry, but probably in about that range. he kind of elaborated and said it's because of screen time and distraction. and actually as i was preparing i was googling around and i thought that was a great quote by roth but then i found an interview that you did gary and you said "yeah, who knows, maybe literature will come back someday. it just sucks to be in the butthole of it all of a sudden." so what is the future of the novel? does it have one? >> well, look, you have to take everything i say with a grain of salt. in the industry they call me a sap. a soviet ashkenazi pessimist. just nothing to me looks up. but yeah i think we're in the end of it. i think this is coming to an end.

[ laughter ] writing novels, i mean. and long form text in general. i don't think we have -- i know professors of english would tell me i haven't read a book in a while because i don't have time. i just read parts of books or the reviews of books or texts on books but it's very hard to read an entire book. so that's why i think people turn to -- that's why the tv serial like "the sopranos" or "the wire" has caught on so much, because it provides the narrative that we all need. we still are wired for narrative, but we watch it passively now instead of trying to absorb inside a book. because reading a book, i have to enter the consciousness of this guy and he has to do the same with me. and that takes effort. although it's an incredible mind meld technology. it's almost over. >> do you agree? >> i'm still trying to get over the whole entry in gary's consciousness. >> come on. >> i'm going to stay there because it's such fun. i think -- i agree with all that. i think that -- i also think there's questions of money come into it, which is to say that

it's just not lucrative for anybody to read at length or to get people to read at length. not like they used to be. immediate technologies are overtaking that. because everything -- all human activity is so connected to profitability now. in a way that just wasn't the case in my childhood, for example. that it just seems to be kind of strange. there seems to be something invalid about reading a novel or a lengthy text. it's as if everything has to be reduced to sort of bullet points. >> was the novel just a contingent time limited thing from early victorian era to 15 years ago? and what's next? >> i think the novel is contingent with the enlightenment. and i think now it's actually to the end of the enlightenment, or to a new phase of the

enlightenment, where information and the validity of information as i said, depends on its profitability. so for example news information now doesn't depend on its accuracy. it depends on its sellability to the market. and so the great thing that novels have to offer is contract with reality, contract with truth. that's what good novels do. and that's not particularly a valuable commodity anymore. so i think that's where you track it in relation tots enlightenment. >> also it's nice when people major in the humanities every once in a while. that used to be a major part of this country. the liberal arts. after the g.i. bill millions flocked to the universities and there was a real vibrant intellectual culture which meant that a novel could sell millions of copies and still be difficult to read. but that's over with now. we just have to accept that reality. >> if and when the novel dies you have a background as a barrister. you could go back to being a lawyer. you say in "little failure" that you sort of by dint of circumstances what else could you have been but a writer. what do you do next?

>> i like air-conditioning and refrigerator repair. h hvac. with climate change -- hvac is huge. i'm trying to push my kid into nap he's only a year old but i'm trying to develop his love of refrigeration. >> i mean -- sorry. yes. i think i'll join his company. >> schteyngart and o'neill hvac. >> what do you see -- and this relates to the political question. but what is the function of the novel? w.h. auden famously and kind of overquotedly at this point said that poetry makes nothing happen. and the same could be said of the novel. is your name when you're writing to entertain? to enlighten? to -- what's the function of the novel? and what function can it serve that "breaking bad" can't serve?

>> it's tough because "breaking bad" is really good. and it's incredibly novelistic. look the way these things are structured. it's chapters basically of a novel. there's 56 episodes. it corresponds to 56 chapters. a really good show like "the sopranos" lets you delve into a tolstoyan maze of characters. and it has its own elements of war as well as peace. this is really good stuff. but the novel like i said before, when you buy a book from one of us you're entering us for a while. you're living inside here for a while. and that's a whole different technology. to see that completely destroyed is sad. to see it play a minor role, as it has been for the last two decades, is okay with me. we'll all teach in our mfa programs and half of brooklyn will come. so it will be nice. >> i think gary's right. i think the specific technology that is the novel offers insight

into subjecty. we enter people's minds and tv can't do that. i also think the smartest television -- and i watched "the sopranos." i watched "breaking bad." there always comes a moment where you go oh, god, that's just stupid. they have to move -- the plot had to go -- they had to do something stupid otherwise the plot would get boring. and that's sort of -- whereas in a mofl -- i mean in literary novel there's no real payoff for being stupid or pressure for being stupid. and in fact you're penalized for it. form doesn't reward stupidity. whereas even something as smart as "breaking bad" you have all these moments where you just think, yeah. that's kind of entertaining, i suppose, but it's just unfortunately not as -- and then you try to pick up the novel i suppose. >> does holding the ativan make you feel better? >> it does. it really does. and thanks for allowing me to do that. some forums don't allow that. [ laughter ] this is a good year.

2014. so many drugs. >> we're short on time. but people are always interested to know. i'm trying to figure out how to frame this as succinctly as possible. but how do you get your ideas for your novels? how do you develop your characters? what's your writing process? and there's kind of a taxonomy. i have many writer friends, people i work with at "the atlantic," who are ekers. which is to say they write seven words a day but they're all perfect. and blurters, who they just spew out thousands of words and most of it's crap and they have to edit it back. i'm kind of like a constipated blurter, which is the worst of all. how do you guys work? >> just the whole work thing is not my forte. you know i actually think that idleness is what i do best.

and in fact for a while if they looks at my life as a novelist they'd say he spends a lot of time lying around, going to the fridge. not even incidentally -- none of this stuff like on tv. that barely happens. and so i just sit there thinking and mulling and sort of actually not mulling things over for a few years and then i often go away to places. canada usually. and write in two-week bursts. and get most of it done like that. >> and very briefly, you? >> there's an inciting incident that happens. the last book i was in a cab in moscow and the cab driver's drunk out of his mind and we're driving on the sidewalk. and he's crying and saying i can't feed my family i have to move to america. and i said you know what's a country where you can -- much easier immigration policy is canada. you can move to canada. and he goes, ptoo, i can only live in a superpower. [ laughter ] and i thought, there's a book. >> there's a book. thanks to both of you. thanks to all of you. i highly recommend both of these books and all their previous books. thank you all for coming.

[ applause ] >> thank you. our coverage from the annual washington ideas forum continues now with paypal co-founder peter teal. this conversation is about 20 minutes. [ applause ] >> thank you. thank you, peter, for joining us. we are going to move briskly because we have a very fecund mind. we have a lot of ground to cover. let me put it to you directly. you've created -- you've aroused great controversy with your claim that the rate of innovation is slowing down. how do you substantiate that? is this an assertion or is it an assessment? is it based on data or is it based on impressions? >> it's extremely hard to measure how much technological progress we have as a society and there are so many things that go under the rubric of

technology. science and technology. my claim is that over the last 40 years since the 1970s we've continued to have very fast progress in the world of bits, computers, internet, mobile internet, that whole ensemble of things. we've had much less progress i think in just about everything else. so a lot of things people called technology in the '50s and '60s, supersonic aviation, space travel, underwater cities, desalination plants turning deserts into farmland or forests, the green revolution in agriculture, medicine biotech, where there's been some but not as much progress, a lot of these things are not even considered technology today. so i think we've had this narrow cone of progress and it is i think reflected in a general sense of stagnation in our society where median wages have not gone up that much in the last 40 years. so even though -- and i think the people in the tech industry,

in the science and tech industry are always super bullish. they're always pumping their companies, their inventions their research. the venture capitalists are very guilty of this. and so you have to always i think discount a little bit of that skew. >> in your book "zero to one," and in your investing life you're very disdainful of incremental progress. you want -- you urge that people should seek big changes. let me push back on you on that. in the area of transportation, for example, if you look out the window you see technologies that are conceptually identical to those you would have seen 100 years ago. the train, the plane, the truck, the motor car. all there. they're the same. except when you look at the costs, the cost of moving goods has dropped by over 90% in the past 100 years. the safety with which we move people has -- the chances of being killed in a car accident are 1/17 of what they were in the 1920s.

and humble technologies like the container box may have contributed more to globalization than all of the amazing things you do in silicon valley. isn't there -- karl marx said that at a certain point changes in quantity become changes in quality. can you explain to us why you think those things are less important than the kinds of visionary things you talked about a minute ago? >> well, certainly there are many of these that have had a cumulative effect of being incredibly valuable. my approach is in many ways a how-to advice book for people who are going to start companies, who are going to found companies. and i think that if you want to start a successful company you want to do something where you have a monopoly where you're doing something nobody else in the world is doing it, and where there's a significant difference between what you're doing and what everybody else is doing. and i think software has been characterized by these fairly large breakthroughs which is why people in software have made so much money. it's not because it's more

valuable. it's because the microeconomics of software are very monopoly-prone and very lucrative. and i think the very disturbing history of innovation is that most of the inventors and scientists and technologists never made in the money. the wright brothers didn't make money. tesla made no money in the 19th century. even if we go back to the steam engine and the first industrial revolution which represented tremendous progress. it was 5% to 10% efficiency gains every year over the course of seven decades from 1780 to 1850. even in 1850 most of the wealth in britain was still held by the landed aristocracy. the people who started textile factories, it was all competed away. so i think the -- i think the sort of -- i think if you want to start a very successful business that makes a big difference, that's the sort of thing to do. disk drive manufacturing in the 1980s, you could come out with a new disk drive that was better than anybody else's but it would in turn be superseded 1 1/2 or 2

years later. that's over the course of a decade disk drives became dramatically better. everybody who started a disk drive company or invested in them lost all their money. there are these two very different kinds of narratives at work. >> so that -- a wise financial head once said to me there's all the difference in the world between a great investment and a great company. when you talk about these concerns of yours you're talking about them from the point of view of the investor in these technologies, not the point of view of the consumer. >> certainly if more breakthrough technology comes that will also be valuable to society. that's how things -- that's one modality of how things progress. you could make a lot of progress through incremental innovation. i would argue most of that happened in the 19th and first half of the 20th century and it's been slower in the last 40 years, even in these incremental areas. >> when you talk about the slowdown what you're really

lamenting is the fading of what might be called big engineering schemes. super highways. you talk in your book about the project somebody developed to turn san francisco bay into a freshwater lake. i was really startled that that was your point of view because what drove the heyday of big engineering was the heyday of state power. and whether it was the new deal in the united states or the soviet union or mussolini's italy, it was the application of state power on a massive scale that made these things possible. and what brought an end to the era of engineering was a set of ideals i would have thought you would have endorsed. jay jacobs saying your big engineering project only exists because you've overridden property rights, because you haven't done your cost accounting properly and if you actually had to pay every urban resident whose house you just demolished in the name of urban re newal if you had to pay all the farmers and all the

fishermen whose livelihoods are turned away by turning san francisco into a freshwater lake it would make no sense. this project never made any sense except from the point of view of a central governing state entity. >> i'm somewhat partial to robert moses. and i think since jacobs won that battle in the '60s nothing new has been built in new york city. there's three modes of innovation. incremental progress where you keep iterating. i think we do that pretty well although we've done less of that the last 40 years. there are breakthrough point technologies which we still do occasionally, are very valuable. and then there are things which require complex coordination of getting a lot of different pieces to work together in just the right way. and that is a form of progress we used to do that we don't do anymore. part of it, you're right was government. things like the manhattan project or the apollo space program. but i think there was a lot of

it that had more of a private sector feel. the 19th century america, early 20th century america was dominated by these sort of engineer schemer type people these people who had some complex plan to build a transcontinental railroad or a canal through panama or all sorts of things like this. the ford motor company was again a vertically integrated complex monopoly. and there are sort of -- there are interesting companies like that that are being done but they're notable for their rarity. so if you ask what did tesla do that is new? the electric car company. it was not that they invented any single new thing. it was that they combined a whole bunch of different things together in just the right way to create a dramatically better car. i think this was also a big part of what steve jobs did successfully when he repositioned app frl areposition ed app frl a home computer to a consumer electronics company, the original ipod.

it was not an incremental improvement. it was not a point breakthrough but it was a complex coordination. i think it's a modality of progress that is very underexplored. now, i'm politically more libertarian, so i am skeptical of government being able to do these things. but not -- not in an absolute sense. i think our government was able to do them in the '30s and '40s and '50s in a way that it no longer is able to do today. and this is i think a very important policy question we should think about really hard. today a letter from einstein to the white house would get lost in the mailroom. and there is a sense we could not do apollo. and whatever you think of the affordable care act i will maintain that a internet website is a demonstrably inferior and simpler and easier technology than building a rocket to send someone to the moon. so there has been this very strange decline you need to

think about really hard. >> unlike many in silicon valley you are acutely conscious that the pattern of growth in the recent american economy has left many americans behind. there was a survey morning by a very solid polling agency that reported 45% of americans say their personal finances have not recovered to where they were before the financial crisis. this is something that preoccupies you. can you suggest, maybe i'm putting you too much on the spot, one policy change that might make a difference for the 70%, 80%, 90% of americans not experiencing the benefits of economic growth. >> well, it's very three separate debates in the quality debate. one is, is it happening? and is it increasing? and the answer to that is broadly yes. then there's a second question, which is why is this happening which is a very different question much harder to -- but

i think the answer to that is very overdetermined. there are a number of factors, and they need to be sorted through very carefully. and then i think there's a question of what do you do about it. if i had to answer the why question. i think we tend to put too much of the blame on technology that displaces workers and not enough on the challenges from globalization. so i think the competition from people in china and india has been a much greater source of pressure on the middle class than the replacement by computers. and the simple reason for this is that people in chinese and indians are much more like americans than computers. where computers are a complementary and not substitute. so i think we tend to scapegoat technology and down play some of the challenges with globalization. i'm not against globalization, i'm in favor of it. but that's where a lot of the challenges come from. in terms of -- in terms of what

to do about it from a policy perspective, i think that's that's quite challenging. but i would -- >> i'm not asking you to solve the whole problem. just suggest one thing. >> well again, i would say the, you know, i would say the -- i would say the thing that people experience is the stagnation of not getting ahead. and in places like new york or silicon valley one of the main manifestations of this is the incredibly high cost of housing. so if you could -- if we could turn affordable housing back into something that was a real thing rather than just this weird racket that people use to get zoning permits if you turned affordable housing back into a good thing, that would be very good. it's an interesting question, why did housing shift from something that was seen as a consumption good and therefore the cheaper it was the better using your earlier point to something seen as an investment where we're happy if housing prices go up and we're disturbed

if they go down. and i think we should shift our perspective on housing, see it as a consumption good something you want to produce much more cheaply. i'd be much less restrictive on zoning laws. all of these things i would rethink. >> one issue joining the fray in an intense way. your negative feelings about higher education. and you are the holder of a distinguished university degree and legal degree. but, i want to get to the bottom of to make sure i'm understanding the nature of the critique. is your complaint that students are studying the wrong things? or is your complaint that they are getting too little value from money? and if the former because you also are skeptical of the value of humanities is there a risk here that we're being blinded by paying too much attention to elites? i looked it up there, 1.7 million bachelors degrees or four-year degrees conferred in a typical year.

the vast majority are not in liberal arts. single biggest area of degree is a field of business, 365,000 of the 1.7 million are in business or commerce. >> yes, so -- so my focus is mainly on the elite universities because i think that's what sets the tone and template for so much that happens in our society. where people are tracked into these places and townspeople all go to the same short list of schools and end up in the same short list of careers. i was hyper tracked my eighth grade yearbook, my friends wrote, i know you're going to get into stanford. i ended up at a big law firm in new york. from the outside it was a place for everyone to get in on the inside it was for a place for everyone to get out. after i left after seven months and three days, one of the people down the hall from me said i didn't know it was possible to escape. but the reality was all you had to do is go out the front door

and not come back. people could not bring themselves to do that because -- because they were so the identities were so wrapped up in the competitions they had won. and i think what's happened with a lot of higher education is that it's not about learning, it's about a tournament. if you're running one of these top universities. if you want to get fired the next day and get sort of a mob of students, alumni and faculty to run after you with pitch forks the one thing you should propose is to double the enrollment. and why shouldn't harvard double or triple the enrollment? you now have 7 billion people in the world. and they're not doubling enrollment because the model is not to educate people. it's to be a studio 54 where you have a large velvet rope with a preferably really, really long line of people and a tiny number of people who get in. zero sum tournament driven around exclusion. and i don't think that's the right way for us to think about our future. it should not be that you go to yale or you go to jail.

we have to create more alternatives for our society. >> we only have a minute and a half. but i don't want to let you go past that so quickly. many americans remain true, it's the pathway to the middle class. we're talking about the broad middle who have not done so well. one thing they can do that makes a difference, now maybe it won't be true if 100% of americans do it. so long as 35% of americans do it completing that four-year degree for the 1.7 million people that do it a year. that makes a huge difference. are you really telling them don't? are you telling them don't study english? >> well, i don't want to talk -- >> tell them don't borrow. >> well, if they fall through the cracks they're really in trouble. that's why i'm focused on students at elite colleges because it's much less risky for them to try other things. i think we have very tricky questions, why is it that there

is no safety net? why is it you have to get these degrees to get ahead? and i think you have all of these questions about -- i think you have tricky questions about how much of it is causal versus correlated. is the signaling or the selection? so if you're able to get into a four-year college, able to complete it, that signal that selects more talented people and signals to people that you're disciplined enough to sort of plow through this. it doesn't necessarily mean that you've learned something. and so i do think the amount that's being spent on it is very disproportionate and there are many cases where things go wrong. about 40% of the people who start four-year colleges don't finish them. they still end up with lots of student debt. and if you start a four-year college and don't finish it you're probably worse off than if you didn't even start because the enormous student debt problem. it's very different from when i talk to people, they think i'm

really crazy because they went to college at the time it gave you a tremendous advantage, you didn't leave with a lot of debt. i think when you talk to people in their 20s they feel like they have to go to college. they can't imagine doing anything else. it's not a good place -- start your career with $100,000 in debt. the bankruptcy laws in this country will be written in 2005, you cannot get out of college debt even if you go personally bankrupt, it detaches you for the rest of your life. you will garnish your social security checks to pay it off in your 60s and 70s. >> peter thank you all for your invention. thank you. wonderful. and you talk fast. >> thanks. >> the barbed wire and guard towers are gone, but the memories come flooding back for so many people who until today had lost such a big part of their childhood. for many released after the war,

some buried the memories. and with it the history of this camp. now more than 60 years later. >> this sunday on q & a, the only family interment camp during world war ii. and what she says is the real reason for this camp. >> so the government comes to the fathers and said we have a deal for you. we will reunite you with your families in the crystal city internment camp. if you will agree to go voluntarily. and then i discovered what the real secret of the camp was. if you -- they also had to agree to voluntarily repatriate to germany and to japan if it -- if the government decided they needed to be repatriated. so the truth of the matter is that the crystal city camp was humanely administered by the ins. but the special war divisions of

the department of states used it as roosevelt's primary prisoner exchange. it was the center of roosevelt's prisoner exchange program. >> sunday night at 8:00 eastern and pacific on c-span's q & a. time now for "american history tv" prime time. this is a special showing of programs normally seen weekends here on c-span 3. ahead, a look at japanese internment during world war ii. we begin with real america and a 1944 documentary on the living conditions that internment camps. and then lectures in history with a course on how the press handled the japanese internment. that will be followed by an american art factyifacts program. and later, former congressman norman minetta who was in a camp with his family.