the futuren of free-speech max. a and look at how technological advances affect the middle class. about incomealks inequality and the wealthy. >> now first amendment authors and scholars debate the nature of free speech in america. this event, hosted by the national constitution center in philadelphia, is just over an hour. >> ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the national constitution center. i am jeffrey rosen, the

president of this wonderful institution. the national constitution center is the only institution in torica chartered by congress disseminate information about the u.s. constitution on a nonpartisan basis. we take our role very seriously and we are grateful for it. and the program tonight is part of our role as america's town hall. this is the one place in the country where citizens of diverse constitutional perspectives can hear the best arguments on the constitutional questions that transfixed news, fusee in the our history, and help you make up your own mind. we are talking about free speech in america. just this morning, the supreme court heard arguments on a case that will decide whether corporations have the same religious liberties under the first amendment as natural persons. we will discuss that and many other questions.

want toou to ask -- i ask you to look at our website for upcoming programs. on thursday, calendars with will discuss his life in the law. dershwitz will discuss his life in the law. especially delighted that tonight we are sharing this partnership with the foundation for educational rights in education, or fire. fire's mission is to sustain and defend individual rights, including free speech, due process, or the just liberty, and the sanctity of conscience at america's colleges and universities. it was during the first week of my job that greg from fire came to me and said we should present a panel on free speech. and we really have assembled the dream team of free speech, commentators and freethinkers alike.

it is a panel with a lot of diversity. i think you may find that some of our panelists are more ardent in their positions defending free speech than others. i will not tell you which ones. maybe we will change our minds after listening to each other. let me briefly introduce them to you and then we will get right to it. dr. stanley fish is a florsheim or distinguished visiting professor at cardoza law school. he is well known to all of us as a contributor to the opinion editor of the "new york times." greg is a member of the bar of the u.s. supreme court and :uthor of "unlearning liberty campus censorship and the end of ," which has debate recently come out in paperback. it is great.

these, get it at the end of the show. universitynguished of law solo at the academy of arts and sciences, and a prolific commentator on constitutional law and comparisons about american attitudes toward free speech. and finally, my old friend. it is such a joy to local mu, jonathan, to the national constitution center. we go way back in washington, d.c. he is the most prominent defender of gay marriage in this country, as well as one of the most persuasive and eloquent defenders of free speech and his asoned andcalm -- re calm voice is recently expressed in paperback as well as many articles you have greatly enriched public debate. i will begin with you, jonathan. yesterday, the supreme court delayed a decision about whether

to hear a very important case that raises the question of whether a photographer can refuse to photograph gay weddings because of her religious objections and claims that religiously motivated individuals can refuse to serve arepeople as gay marriages popping up with greater frequency. your work has been that the first amendment is good for gay people, but a regime that allows hate speech is good for minorities in general. do these recent cases cause you to re-examine that thesis? >> no, they don't. i'm not the best person to comment on the legalities of these cases. i don't know the case law. but let me give you a personal perspective on how i think about these cases. there are a bunch of these cases. they all involve in one way or another the class of religious

conscience with antidiscrimination law, which often means homosexuality, gay marriage, in the case of the obamacare law, it means contraception. and there are a lot of these. there was a case in colorado that is not a legal case because the suit has not been filed, but a christian dog walking company fired a customer because they agreed with legalized marijuana. they said, get your docs and get them out of here. we are not going to walk them anymore. i regret this. this is not the kind of society that i want to live in, where people are taking the side. i urge the gay community publicly and privately that the right answer is sensible accommodation worked out legally through the process. i worry that first amendment jurisprudence, which locks in one answer for ever. we lose the flexibility to negotiate. there is no reason we need to have one national rule. different cities and states are striking different valances.

and gay people, for example, or abortion rights activists, for example, and people of religious faith should be forced to sit down at the table and negotiate over statutes and strike a balance. >> wonderful. greg, you have spent the last 13 years defending free speech on campus. how do the battles today look different than they did when you started? and what are the most important battles today? you recently noted that you have a growing list of 120 speaker controversies in recent years to my including high-profile dissident cetaceans -- deuce invitations.-- dis what is the state of free-speech battles on campuses today? schoolthe one weird law student that went to law school to do first amendment law.

my passion was free-speech. i don't know why i came to that, but that is why i went to law school. i specialized in it. i took every class at stanford offered on free speech. i even did six extra credits on free speech during the tudor dynasty because i loved it so much. and even with all that preparation, when i showed up and became the first legal director of fire in 2001, i was stunned by the kinds of things that can get you in trouble on a college campus. and 13 years later, i'm still stunned on a daily basis. that is the only reason i wrote the book, because i got tired of people saying, ok, that is one example. . talk about dozens of examples there are a lot of trends, but trends isof a lot of that it felt like when i first heard in 2002, diversity students would at least make some kind of bow to some kind of

higher purpose to what they were doing, even if it was entirely disingenuous. they would say, and don't make fun of tuition prices or don't make fun of the dean in the name of tolerance and diversity. they would invoke these sometimes sincerely, sometimes for the greater good, but sometimes only half sincerely. in the past two years, i have seen more cases where they are not even bothering with that. it seems there have been a lot of these very old-fashioned examples of, just don't criticize the university. i don't have to justify it. just do as i say. which i think is the result of a lot of bureaucratization and just giving power for a long time. every time around this time of year, a lot of speakers get or theyed from campus, are forced to withdraw their names. invitation season happens every year. that is not so much a first

amendment problem as it is a cultural problem. we are teaching students to think if you don't like the opinion of someone speaking there, you don't challenge them, you chase them off and get them disinvited. i think that is the wrong way to think about this. >> great. not long ago, the president of the united states and the president of egypt disagreed about how to treat a free-speech issue. this was the video of the muslims that was to have led to the benghazi attacks. under pressure, the president said it needs to be removed because it shows a group of leaders in an entire religion, which is illegal in egypt. and the president of the united states was defending google and youtube's right to post the --eo, but caused momentarily but caused momentarily on that because it incited violence.

but google and youtube refused because they said it is not criticizing a religion, but a religious leader. our non-american free-speech traditions, they are obviously very different. america is more protective of free-speech. is that the right thing? and did google do the right thing? >> it is a bad thing. andach international law one thing i instruct about again and again is between american norms and norms in other countries. put under themes rubric of american exceptionalism. one way that the united states is quite different from other countries is in its commitment to free speech. you can make three distinctions. there are countries like egypt -- and you know, authoritarian countries obviously do not like free-speech and there is no reason to want to be like them. but european countries have a different attitude toward free-speech from that of the

united states. europeans tend not to be as absolutist. they take seriously the fact that people can be offended by speech, that it can cause turmoil, as illustrated by this video. and what is striking is that these human rights treaties, which have provisions about freedom of expression, but the provisions are much narrower than what you find in the united states. the provisions will say free-speech is a right, subject to various constraints, such as public morality and public order. i think president obama did a reasonable thing. this video is causing foreign-policy problems for the united states. the united states is trying to improve relations with muslim countries and he wanted to at least show people in these countries who don't share our views about freedom of speech that we respect their views. orderldn't, obviously,

google to take on the video. if he had that power, it would have been an interesting question whether he should use that. tohink people are wrong criticize president obama in this case on the grounds that, basically the rest of the world doesn't share our views and they just have to get with the program. they've got to be like what? like us? us,if they are not like then new cares about them. that is not a practical way to run foreign-policy. and we love our first amendment so much and we think very proudly of american traditions about freedom of speech, which actually only go back a few decades, not to the beginning. but this is such a part of the american self-identity that it very hard to make compromises even when they are warranted, and that is a problem. >> great. professor fish, you have written a book on free-speech called "there is no such thing as free

speech, and it's a good thing, too" in case that tells you where he falls on this spectrum that i suggested. and now you have written about academic freedom. what is your view of the relationship between these two concepts? x before i answer -- >> before i answer, i want to say how much i agree with what eric just said. if you recall salman rushdie and the fact that there was an order issued against him for the writing of the satanic verses. i was at a conference, a humanistic conference -- don't go to human is to conferences. [laughter] but i was at one, nevertheless. i used to be in that game and this topic came up and someone stood up in the audience -- and they meant it, this was not a joke -- and they said, what is the matter with those iranians? haven't they ever heard of the first amendment? [laughter]

the relationship between academia and the first amendment can be simply described. free-speech as established by the first amendment is an inclusive, democratic idea. notionc freedom is a that only lives coherently within an academic structure, which is determinedly exclusive. -- our trades do is to make judgments on each other. fostert we do is not speech or to ensure that it will flourish, but rather it is the case that we devise mechanisms by which we give ourselves the right, at least those of us that have tenured positions, to say who can and who cannot speak freely. another way of looking at the

difference between academic freedom and free speech is to think of the topic of holocaust denial, which has been with us for quite a while and will be with us, i predict, for a very long time. denial in our society under the strong absolutist first amendment abuse that eric referenced is something that cannot be stigmatized or oppressed. holocaust denial can be promoted on websites, radio programs, videos, and so forth. but in the academy, holocaust -- i'll is intricate holocaust denial is intraday did -- interdicted. it is not that it never rises, but when it does arise, it never arrives as an option. it is not regarded as an alternative vision that one might sincerely have.

rather holocaust denial is regarded as one might view "elvis is dead" denial. -- so it is therefore the property of kooks and crazies. you can get promoted in a history department for writing about it, but if you advocate it, you will neither get hired or promoted. -- neither get hired, nor promoted. there is the structure of inclusion and a structure of exclusion. but this goes again to eric's point. the first amendment that we now have, which i would call not in a friendly tone a libertarian first amendment. the first amendment we now have is a recent development. and i would say it only emerged

fully in 1964 with the famous case "new york times" versus sullivan, which is a case that is dear to the heart of all free-speech ideologue. "new york times" versus sullivan, it was possible, and in fact it was done by the withdrawourt to protection of the constitution from speech either because of what it did, the effects it had, or because of what it said. test and a content then the effects test. called ats test was bad tendency test. at the beginning of the 20th century, the idea that some forms of free-speech have a bad effect and do not deserve protection. clearas followed by the

and present danger test that said, well, yes, the effects may be bad, but we should wait to see how bad they may be, to see when the danger is imminent and then stepped in. but it is still an effects test. the content test was a said that's -- it was a test that said, look, there are some forms of speech that are worse and they do not deserve constitutional protection. i have one of my favorite notes from a 1942 case. value andid social any benefit derived by them is outweighed by the social interest in order and morality. all that changed in 1964 when the "new york times" versus sullivan court said that all speech must be protected independently of either its content or its effects. and independently of whether he was defamatory or it causes stress of a variety of kind,

because the important thing in the case was to keep the conversation going in a wide open, robust, and uninhibited way. >> [indiscernible] right, which i sometimes call the john wayne theory of the constitution. and that was the beginning of the end of everything. [laughter] world that part of the ended in 1964. >> actually, it was the beginning of the beginning of everything. let me remind you what the world was actually like in 1954 when the magazine you've never heard of -- because i hadn't until "one"yesterday -- called publishing l.a. -- >> oh, yeah. >> good for you. >> it was the first openly gay

intellectual magazine. sex ads orpublishing anything like that. it had articles and short stories and it was openly gay, and the united states post office shut it down because the content was unacceptable to society. they took it off the stand and said you cannot mail it, and just for good measure, the specific issue that they had as a cover story "you can't say " about the censorship policies of the government. that is what they were doing. there was no reasoning at all and the supreme court struck down with the postmaster general had done, creating a wide-open field for debate of gay rights in this country, a position considered obscene and dangerous to children in my lifetime, and allowing the field open for people like me to make our arguments and eventually to windows arguments. >> i think you can win the arguments by gaining control of

the political process, with since that is the way the arguments are always one anyway. won the arguments. we had no political power. >> you did not win anything. >> i'm delighted that this first panel does not, first of all, need a moderator. >> go away. [laughter] >> and that the debate has been joined so fiercely and that, in fact, we had fighting words. now we know where everyone stands. moderating panels are so much easier to preside over. we have on my left the two first amendment libertarians, as professor fish put it, who defend the american free-speech tradition, which holds generally that speech can only be bad if it threatens and is likely to cause imminent harmful action. and on the right, and we actually did not plan this, i will call them the first amendment dignitary in. you can correct me.

who are defending speech that blasphemes groups or defends their dignity may be banned. and i want to ask greg as a libertarian to respond to the dignitary and argument that the responses from the muslim video should have come down. the google people were not convinced there was evidence of imminent threat. in retrospect, it turned out they were right. the video did not cause action. 22-year-olds in full clubs were basically making a decision in the mill of the night. -- in flip-flops were basically making a decision in the middle of the night. did they make a better decision than the president? >> almost as soon as the videos went up -- i mean, people who are contrarians on free-speech on campus are actually am i in my experience, in the mainstream. 59% are those that would be

laughable if challenged in a court of law. they have been defeated every time. the extent to which free-speech has been appreciated on campus has taken a long decline in my own career. advantage to the tutor censorship. one of them is the idea of where we came from, and the idea of the spectacle of academics arguing essentially for blasphemy laws, saying we should be banning speech because it offends someone religious faith -- and i remember someone challenged me on this. and i said, you are not actually free unless you can question ideas. else's and that was so established that by the time you get to the establishment of the first amendment, it is relatively taken for granted. now, to the argument of whether or not we recently -- only recently started taking

free-speech seriously, i also dismissed that argument. milton was writing about free-speech in 1644. i would like to point out that almost as soon as the map has had the power to communicate ideas, a were arguing for free speech. even long before milton. free-speech was a powerful weapon and a powerful goal throughout intellectual history, starting as soon as people were allowed to speak it out loud. what stanley is conflating is that the first amendment is not found to apply to the mistakes until 1925, and that is because of something called the slaughterhouse decision. they could not have actually applied it before. the 14 commitment came out during the civil war, and unfortunately there was a stupid decision by the supreme court that prevented that from having full force until 1925 when it started to be incorporated through the duke -- due process clause of the united states

constitution. but there were better and better protections of free speech, with a little bit during the red scare of the 1950's. but of course, i see 1964, new york times versus sullivan as a wonderful time. a rand paul or sarah palin being able to sue a journalist because they said something that might be vaguely critical of them? that is what they are arguing for. they are arguing for the right of politicians to scare journalists for the rights of -- through the rights of defamation. do we want our politicians to be able to sue us for saying mean things about them? >> it's the same thing as lying about them. >> you have to make reference to the very opinion you are

decrying. because that is for the actual malice came from. but there is this flourishing political culture in europe where they had strong defamation flaws -- loss and it is way -- strong defamation laws, and it is way less democratic than it is in the united states. people can go into politics with this system that we have and not have to worry about inge feigned or humiliated -- being defamed or humiliated. dad grew up in yugoslavia. my mother is british. i spent a lot of time over there. and it's funny how much it mystifies brits and my friend ,bout how much you will hear wow, europe has such great laws with regard to speech. we would never tolerate their national security laws. these are laws that are in canada, australia, britain, and

the recent -- state.e are not police canada is not a police state. what is the harm that is taking , the concrete harm that is taking place -- there's a whole lot of chilling going on over there. it is getting hard, people say, to criticize the united muslim states to my by the way. there is a lot of chilling effect going on. i happen to have some in my pocket. [laughter] law justas passed a the other day against advocating sexism. act, theses of this concepts of sexism will be understood to mean any gesture or act that is evidently intended to express contempt for a person because of his gender

or regards him as inferior, or reduces him to his sexual dimension, which has the effect of violating someone's dignity to my either in public meetings or in the presence of several people, or in documents made public. >> was the law passed? >> yes. >> i take your point that these are not police states and europe is a wonderful place. there is a lot you can do before you run into serious trouble. but as a member of a national minority group, i would rather be here right to not have to worry about some prosecutor coming after me because he doesn't like what i said. >> let me take up something greg said about milton. his 1644ferring to track, where there were extraordinarily powerful celebrations of free-speech full stop in fact, some of them are chiseled on the wall of the new york library. through heof the way

said, of course, i didn't mean catholic. then, we burned. --them, we burned. [laughter] i want to say that everybody has a kicker of his sleeve. if it's not catholics, it's something. talk for aree-speech long time until the disciples affair condo went to -- of f were walking around saying things and they said, we can have that. structurally that and philosophically, it is, in fact, the decision that everyone has, even if they are denying it. -- we're going to take a vote on this at the end -- [laughter] and you will have to decide whether you are libertarians or dignitary and, so listen closely. and the audience can ask questions.

debate between libertarians and unitarians and whose law is going to prevail being made obsolete by technology echo we are not the president of egypt and we are not president obama stop we are these 20 -- made obsolete by technology? we are not the president of egypt and we are not president obama. we are these 22-year-olds in flip-flops. buyfor those who do not facebook, then the decision will not be made in the courts, but by young lawyers with internet service providers. >> for me, what is most interesting about that -- and i'm starting to see a lot of these hackneyed arguments for or against rim of speech. -- freedom of speech. the one thing that this twitter and facebook people get probably better than anyone is that the value of speech is not because

discussion will actually let us understand what the form of truth is. it is the fact that i now know .hat you are angry at me i now know what the price of rice is over there. all of these little truths that can be revealed. haveu look at twitter, you an unparalleled chance to see something as close as we are ever going to get to the collective unconsciousness of the species. >> it is very discouraging. [laughter] come up but is important to know what we are like, for good or for bad. forke fun of my own people having the british side, for having what i call, oh, we are taking the dinnertime response to unpleasant talk. we are just not going to talk about it. meanwhile knowing that people have bad opinions, and how people respond to them, or that they have strange ideas is incredibly valuable. the ostrich approach does not work and it cannot work. >> i don't know that technology

will change anything because you made the case that government can bring lawsuits against internet service providers. it can bring lawsuits against google and require google to take things down. stuffis a huge amount of that is said on the internet by anonymous people that nobody pays any attention to, so there is no need to sue them. nobody cares what they say. if it is somebody like a personian or a prominent , than ever but he knows who he is and where you can soon. -- sue. back in the early stages of the internet, the trend was actually the opposite. there was a famous case involving yahoo! and friends. yahoo! had memorabilia on their website and the french government sued them. that if thisas website appears everywhere, then

french defamation law would apply in the united states. that turned out not to be the case, because these companies can control what appears on their websites in different countries. i think it is a bit of a red herring. gete google guys, they can sued just like anybody else. they can get fired just like anybody else. i don't think it will change much. we have seen turkey shut down twitter. that thele forget is internet actually operates because the government allows it to operate. it owns a lot of the infrastructure. the nsa can tap into it and figure out what people are thinking and saying. we are not going to live in a libertarian society. downic said turkey shut footer. what happened then is that great -- greek football fans had a habit of saying that ataturk, the founder of turkey was gay. true, but itt was

was illegal to say that in turkey. google was asked to take it down. they initially refused. the turkish prosecutor said, take it down all over the world. instead, google just blocked access to turkish users using their internet protocol. and as a result come at google was turkey -- as a result, google was banned from turkey for a couple of years. and she had to decide whether this video is blasphemous, in which case she will take it down. and then it is free-speech. and by the way, she doesn't understand turkish. these lawyers are making these decisions. are you confident that they will make the right one tackle >> i -- the right ones? >> no, i'm not confident that they will make the right ones anymore then the laws like jonathan rehearsed will no

longer be passed. what i am confident in, however is that the strong free-speech doctrine has no reality in fact. i would go back to a formula that the great judge learned and i'm sure everybody will know. a cost analysis. he said, you have to calculate the harm that will be produced i allowing the free-speech to flourish, and then balance that against the harm that will be produced by trying to regulate it. and that suggests it is a case-by-case analysis and that you have to take account of the harms without completely surrendering to them, but not ignore them and therefore surrender to some extraction -- abstraction. and there is a book that made many inar better than

many years. and aa professor at nyu native new zealander. there are some international flavor to the defense of his work. realistic, in terms of taking into account who is making the decisions? waldron is forcing european regulators into their roles in court and so forth, but really, it is the terms of the service providers that are deciding things. is it the ability of european regulators to enforce their will, overtaken by this new technological world, even if you're persuaded by a? -- persuaded by it? i'm saying, are the libertarians just missing the point? >> i agree with eric on this. i think that although there are a lot more tools for freedom of expression popping up, as no one in this room needs to be

reminded, there are also a lot more tools for monitoring expression popping up. one reason you always want to be on a panel with stanley fish, if you can, is that within five minutes he will go to the fundamental issues, and the technology does not begin to address the fundamental issues and that is still very relevant. what kind of society do we want to have? and what will the race it -- the basic ground rules be? >> you talked about twitter. what was the collective voice? candle --a twitter's scandal recently, one every week. was firedpr executive from a company and she tweeted " i'm going to africa, i hope i don't get aids.

just kidding, i'm white." and she was called a racist. and one mother was calling for her to be fired. would you defend her right to say that? and how could you defend it? >> is a crazy unsympathetic case. if you are a pr person and you make a statement that stupid, you will get fired for it. what was amazing to me was the extent to which it turned into an out for blood cause for the people. she was on a flight and by the time she got off the flight, she was an international villain. i said this in a lot of the way we debate with each other. social media has sped up the way we argue, but has also sped up polarization and this sense of tribalism. i think the ability to argue this quickly -- i am optimistic on this. some lessons about what it means to live in a

tolerant society, but i think right now we are going through some ridiculous growing pains. ryan holiday wrote a good article about this recently porn" about how we are addicted to outrage. it really gets our juices going. and in the anti-bullying movement, i sometimes you see people harnessing aggressive action to target what they are wanting to go after. it is great conversation that we are having that is teaching us a lot about our nature. and i would not want to stop it necessarily, for the idea that maybe we can make ourselves different, but take a long, hard look at who we are. definition of the study is that it has to appeal to the

senses, but also turn you on an gross you out at the same time. >> i agree. [laughter] >> we all of us would want to distinguish between the pressures that can be brought against free-speech for my which can be the social and cultural and illegal pressures, which can be even criminalization. thatess said recently nothing would be lost to the world if the entire national basketball association would be shut down. the only result would be an increase in street crime. when that congressman said that, within 20 minutes he had to -- this is my new favorite phrase in society -- walked it back. i hope nothing -- none of your having to walk anything back. but he is paying a price. it is not a price exacted by any legal regime, but a price

exacted by the cultural nuances. >> i think we all agree on that. where you and i probably disagree is that i think those cultural means are by far the best mechanism to discipline hateful speech. whenct, in official means, you get authorities criticizing, that is counterproductive. >> and i would say in response to that brand eyes like a brandeis -- justice like statement. that that speech is only more speech. and he also said that sunshine is the best disinfectant. and my only response to that is that it is the only counter argument in all of recorded history. something it like that into the general atmosphere -- if you allow something i call it costs denial into the general atmosphere, then you will have a growing and growing.

>> my father studied 12 century russian history very seriously. is such anry argument for freedom of speech. when you start looking at the blossoming of -- there is a great book about it that talks about liberal science and the rise of an intellectual system in which there is questioning. >> we are going to have a book signing after the show. >> it gets into the idea that if you disagree with someone about fundamental issues, you better chase them off, behead them, set them on fire, ostracize them, get rid of them. next that is good. -- >> sounds good. >> wow. that is human nature. the idea of hearing out people that you disagree with is innovation. the theory is going much more in the direction of sophisticated believe in free

speech. or when you let pilots talk back to their copilots or you have an astitution that you have healthy conversation, the evidence is getting better and better for free speech. but we are losing faith in it. >> [indiscernible] i'm sure if they did, they would be fired. feedback they would get -- >> not all information. that is the difference between us and you. time and again, there is an in." question of whether -- there is and in." impirical question of whether you want speech. --re is another example rwanda is another example where

freedom of expression led to a holocaust. like the other places, united states now, where free speech is not as harmful, and protections are necessary -- are less necessary as in these other places. but it always requires a pragmatic judgment. you takental approach based on some reading of history is not appropriate under any circumstance. >> i would argue that, in practice, the balancing test that we do so from the very quickly ends with shutting down governments and people using their political power against those without political power. but can you have these very fine tune attests that you talk about? i would argue him. clean that history is absolutely on my side -- i would argue absolutely that history is on my side. i would argue that hate speech

has been a resource for gay people in this country. a man died the other day named fred cell. a crazy person. what he did was illegal in any country in europe. he picketed with signs that said gs." hates fa and that is pushing it even for me. but the thing is, he did so much to expose the hate on the other side that it helps us. when they are out there front and center, we have 20 years of an extraordinarily successful minority rights movement in this country to prove it. >> it can work that way sometimes, as in the example you've just given. but it can work at other ways at what aires, which is just said. i think in this context of anti-semitism. there is a general feeling in this country that anti-semitism, at least in the united states,

is a phenomenon of the past. or at least the kind that was very active in the 1930's and 1940's in this country. and i happen to believe that that kind of violence -- a virulent anti-semitism could happen tomorrow. this may simply be a feature of an unfortunate fact of that i'm older than you are. >> i have to ask both the dignitary and and libertarians thet this morning's news, most important free-speech case of the year, the hobby lobby case involving the question of whether a religious motivated refuse to cover contraception under the formal care act as a visit religious motivations. -- under the affordable care act because of his religious motivations.

and the question comes to whether corporations have the same rights as individuals. you are skeptical of libertarianism in our earlier discussion. did i the court go too far in citizens united and should it not have gone this far with hobby lobby apoplexy i think -- with hobby lobby? >> i think it did. the united states doesn't always protect unpopular people or weak groups. once it is in play, it can be used by anyone am including our full corporations and powerful groups. from the 1970's to the 1980's, first amendment absolutism went from a liberal position to a conservative decision and it is now applied to property rights and the rights of corporations. really, instead of

a religious freedom case, it is in the same ballpark. my view is to let the political process work out these compromises. and another thing from what jonathan said earlier, which i think is intentional first amendment absolutism. if you think people can look at these things as religious conscience or rights of women or other beliefs and concerns, then you don't want the supreme court and the other courts applying this doctrine in order to defeat these compromises. >> i want a libertarian response to this. shouldn'tnk it enforce the first women to struggling in this context? there are so many liberals that defended citizens united. are you barking up the wrong tree in embracing the first

amendment, which has been used to strike down many laws of the regular tri-state? >> -- the regulatory state? >> i would not say that it wasn't until the 1970's and 1980's that free-speech became less of a liberal issue. campuses, i end up writing a lot of people that come from the left side -- the left side of the spectrum, who think that free-speech should be limited for any number of reasons, sometimes noble and sometimes not so much. but i think the tactic, i actually agree with the supreme court for the most part on freedom of speech issues. now liberals, oh, don't believe in free speech because conservatives can use it? that is a startling argument to me. it is a negative -- is it a negative thing that it is available to everybody? >> do you think hobby lobby should be protected?

>> i don't know enough about hobby lobby. i do think citizens united was correct. >> jonathan? >> hobby lobby is not freedom of speech. think that corporations are not people and the first amendment should not be applied to them as they are people -- as if they are people. but it is not an area in which i specialize. indicate myn, i agreement with eric. as far as citizens united goes, the topic that was discussed in stevens 90 page dissent and dismissed in the majority opinion was the topic of corruption. that is, is it a matter of irical coal fact -- imp spent in great sen amounts is the corrupter of the political system or is the system corrupt?

one of the reasons why i make the point that we are not -- that it is not complete free-speech absolutism is that even the base end of the law that i find academics being so dismissive of when it comes to freedom of speech, there is something called strict scrutiny. in constitutional classes you always come up with a scenario , and that ist case how you end up with the and those doctrine cases that we agree upon. but when it is this highly subjective standard that gives also flawed people the power to decide what they like and amazing howt is quickly administrators and students learn the code words. >> you cannot ignore subjective

standards in the law. they are all over the place. , whichre restrictions gives the government the authority to say proto--- protesters can be over here, but not over there. or you need a white flag before you can march. those race, getting questions and the judges have to decide somehow, using very subjective standards. the issue is not whether the standards are subjective or not. the issue is how much the democratic process will determine the extent to which people are permitted or not permitted to say whatever they feel. >> but an essential part of the analysis in time, place, and manner law is the viewpoint of neutrality. the closer you get to the expression of pure opinion, that is when you are on the clearest ground with the law. that is a pragmatic standard. it works very well impirically

and it makes the point that my opinion is something that i should be entitled to and can be very well-maintained, while at the same time trying to limit the influence of bias of power. even in defamation lies is still possible to defame someone to my specially a private person rather than a public person. if you defame someone, you are simply expressing your opinion. that means a court or judge will have to decide whether your opinion has enough evidence. but that is not entirely right, though. law,it comes to defamation one of the central questions is whether or not this is a false assertion of fact. and that also makes perfect common sense. am i saying i hate this person? that is not defamation. if i'm saying i know for a fact this person is a pedophile, that could be defamation, particularly if you knew it was lying. a lot of these situations are less of a problem that i think you are making them out to be. what we've had with

defamation law is the rise of public insistence. it is not that they cannot be defame, but the standard is much higher to defame them. who have dealings with public officials are now grouped with those public officials. and the effect was to weaken the possibility of destination -- of defamation. month, theier this new york times celebrated its 150th anniversary. happy birthday. have a series of audience questions. i will jump right in. what assurance do we have that gay rights advocates will not trample on the first amendment rights of those of us who have the nerve to disagree? jonathan. >> there are a lot more of you than there are of us. and that is the assurance you have. it still has to be worked out in the political process. and there are tons of cushions out there and they will stand up

for the rights and they will be heard -- of christians out there and they will stand up for their rights and they will be heard. i'm confident that we can and will get to a point where in 10 years we will have a pretty good, well agreed upon set of rules that we will have worked out for where these boundaries will be. to hateere a limit speech? echo >>hat where is he i don't believe in a limit to hate speech. -- where is it? >> i don't believe in a limit to hate speech. we have very well outlined what harassment looks like. law, it sounds like what it is in the english language. if it is severe, targeted, harassing someone. that is a good guideline for what you are not allowed to do. merely having an extremely noxious opinion, i think that should be protected. and i would go farther to say that it is one of the aspects that truly reflects the realism. it is good to understand people

from different classes, age groups, backgrounds. they may have an opinion that you right now consider obnoxious. there is a great example of bertrand russell being kicked out of cooney when he had a job there in the 1940's before academic became straw -- strong in the law. he was kicked out because he thought that masturbation was ok and he was tolerant of homosexuality. he was kicked out because these ideas were considered moral -- immoral. ideas that we now take for granted have been affected in the fairly recent past. that is crucial to remember. >> i think that is wrong. that is, i think it was wrong for the city to kick out bertrand russell. but what makes it wrong is the ity, and the court allowed -- how should i put this?

what was happening was that hounded outbeing because of his political views, not because of any expertise that he might have had in philosophy or mathematics. can that general principle, which was introduced in 1915 by the association of university professors in his general statement on academic freedom u.s.enure far predates the -- the new york times versus -- versus sullivan, which i strongly support. but when academic becomes political action, professors should neither perform political action the classrooms, nor whatd they be shut out for

they do outside the classroom. but new york times versus sullivan has given us holocaust denial. >> do we all agree that holocaust denial is a terrible thing and should never be allowed? recs i think that is a different question. >> i think that banning holocaust denial is like global warning -- is like fixing global warming by breaking your thumb on her. [laughter] >> we have a society that is generally tolerant and people are making all kinds of arguments about all kinds of things and these are -- this is one of the crazy arguments people are making. it is probably not a good deal -- big deal. but if you have a country with a small number of jews and people don't like them and this idea is beginning to develop and has not quite yet amended the society, i think you could make a pretty good argument for a law against holocaust denial.

germany has and kind of penance for what happened in that country. they have laws against holocaust denial and laws against espousing not see is a problem with that view is that in situations that are actually like the ones you describe where there is a small amount of nine -- of minorities, you're not going to pass laws that are going to protect the small minority. you are going to have the majority of passing laws to oppress the homosexuals and using speech laws to oppress the homosexuals. >> speech laws were used in order to allow the ragtag nazi band headed by someone called illinois.arch in

it never occurred for other reasons but if it had occurred, it would've occurred because of a strong first amendment opinion written by a judge who practiced what i call the rhetoric of regret. he kept saying, i hate it. it is going to do a lot of harm. i regret the fact that we have to allow these horrible things that happen but that is a first amendment. >> i would get this when i speak at universities and i agree with stanley when it comes to someone cola cost is -- holocaust views. that it's one of the reasons why a lot of the times when you pass laws that ban it, you are going to encourage it. if someone has to say, i believe the holocaust did not happen. prove it. defend that position. i can't.

here are the 10,000 pictures. >> have you ever gone on the website? they defend it. i have read it. fanaticu are a paranoid and you're all idea is to say the holocaust never happened but i am not allowed to say because there was a conspiracy. that is a formula for the society. i would say the holocaust denial is more successful in countries that have these kinds of speech laws. >> it is interesting to remember the public had robust laws and tried to shut down the not sees. -- nazis. hitler use those laws to make himself a national symbol of resistance. you don't want to give these haters the platform.

>> i love when people bring up nazism as an argument for speech hate laws. the nazis did not have concern for individual rights. [laughter] >> this self moderating panel -- [laughter] >> are you still here? we haven't heard from you in a while. >> i didn't realize a topic like the first amendment which everyone in the country agree s on could have such a provocative disagreement. we are going to reduce this debate to yes or no. >> can we have predictions from the panel? >> are you going to win? >> no, not on the vote. >> i don't want to influence the vote. >> john are you going to win? >> i'm going to say yes. by professorsuaded

fish that the european dignitary in position on free speech is significant? by the american libertarian position is more persuasive? >> i have a question. wait. raise your hands if you changed your mind. >> thank you. >> which way did you switch? [laughter] >> [indiscernible] >> what beautiful summary of the spectacular panel. klees join me in thanking them -- please join me in thanking them. [applause] great job. wonderful. please come and join us downstairs.

[captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] >> coming up next, a look at how technological advances are affecting the middle class. venture capitalist tom perkins talks about income inequality and the wealthy. later, look at health care companies are responding to the health care law. >> on the next washington journal, committee for responsible federal budget president will talk about deficits and federal spending.

followed by irs national taxpayer advocate nina olson with a look under annual report to congress. league of young voters executive director robert baker looks at the role of younger voters in the political process in 2014 elections. your calls, tweets, and facebook comments. live every morning beginning at 7 a.m. eastern on c-span. >> tuesday, a discussion on challenges faced by national security whistleblowers. speakers including daniel ellsberg. here is part of what he said. snowden look at these examples, look to chelsea manning, looked at julian assange and realize he had to be out of the country if he was

going to put up this amount of information to be able to tell why he had done and to comment as he has been doing. i was personally, 40 years ago, i was out on bond and throughout my trial i was able to speak at demonstrations. there isn't a chance in the world that snowden would've been allowed to do that and he knew looking at chelsea manning. day, 3.5,ist to this almost four years now, no journalist has spoken to tell cementing. note -- chelsea manning. not in four years. no interviews, no nothing. they won't either. you cannot speak to him in prison. snowden more or less had to be out of the country. toalso learned that you need put out other documents, current

documents and all the more reason he had to be out. one reason -- what makes a whistleblower? it is pretty hard to do, it turns out. dozens, hundreds, thousands in some cases of people knew the secrets, the truths. many of those, perhaps most of them, knew that these involved a life or death matters on which major lies were being told. where the truth can make a big difference and yet they did not speak out. i think we have to change the culture of secrecy. benefit of the doubt that is given quite wrongly to that -- to politicians and the president in terms of what the public should know and should not know to allow, to even rhinking for example clappe or keith alexander or the president should be the last word on what the public should know about what they are doing in our name.

it represents a culpable ignorance unless you are 16 years old or something like that. if you live through any of these things -- these people do not deserve the benefit of the doubt at this point. behind the veil of secrecy, extremely bad, disastrous policymaking goes on without accountability as we learned from the pentagon papers. we learned from snowden. we learned if we got the iraq papers which we still don't have but there have been a number of leaks. the decision-making is actually very bad. it is not only the middle -- criminal, stupid. it is also stupid and ignorant. it is not subjected to a larger debate even within the government or the congress, let alone within the public. constitutionat the

is not indeed obsolete. it was a good idea then and it is still a good idea. it has to be defended against the people starting with two presidents and their minions and many people in the press, after 9/11, we have a new kind of frontier. we really need a different form of government in which it is true as nixon said. if the president does it, it is not illegal. we have no choice but to leave it up to him to decide what to tell us. >> you can see this discussion on national security whistleblowers tuesday starting at 8 p.m. eastern here on c-span. >> i want to thank our distinguished ranking member sprawled the work they have done.

a lot of us have lost a lot of sleep. when secretary paulson came to us about a week ago, he gave us a three-page bill that said give me a blank checkbook and put $700 billion into it. i was offended at that time. what happened since then? we added 107 pages of taxpayer protection to that bill. we understand the gravity of the situation and we work with our colleagues on the other side to make his bill a better bill. we made sure that there is upside for the taxpayer so that when this happens, when profits come to these companies, we get this stock warrants so the first person to get the profits are the american taxpayers. we make sure that there is an insurance program that make sure wall street shares in the cost of this recovery plan. we also made sure that the executives of these companies that made these bad bets do not profit from this rescue recovery

plan. we cut the initial cost in half of this bill. congress will have to approve the second half next year. why did we do all of this? because this wall street crisis is quickly becoming a main street crisis. it is quickly becoming a banking crisis. what does that mean? why does that matter to us? why does that matter to wisconsin? if it goes the way it could go, that means credit shuts down. businesses can not get money to pay their payroll, to pay their employees. students cannot get student loans for next semester. people cannot get car loans. seniors may not have access to their savings. are we standing at the edge of this of this? -- abyss? nobody knows. but maybe. it is very probable. madam speaker, this bill offends

my principles. i am going to vote for this bill in order to preserve my principles. in order to preserve this free enterprise system. this is a herbert hoover moment. he made some big mistakes after the great depression and we lifted those consequences for decades. let's not make that mistake. and there was a lot of beer and a lot of panic out there. a lot of what this is about is getting that fear and panic out of the market. i think the white house fumbled this thing. they have brought this issue into a crescendo, to a crisis so that all eyes of the world markets are here on congress. it is a heavy load to bury -- to bear. we have to deal with this panic. we have to deal with this fear.

colleagues, we are in the moment. this bill doesn't have everything i want in it. it has a lot of good things in it, but we are here, we are in this moment. if we fail to do the right thing, heaven help us. if we fail to pass it, i fear the worst is yet to come. the problem we have here is we are one month away from an election. we are worried about losing our jobs. all of us, most of us say this thing needs to pass but i want you to vote for it, not me. unfortunately, a majority of us are going to have to vote for this. we are going to have to do that because we have a chance of arresting that crash. just maybe this will work. conscious,for my own so i look at myself in the mirror tonight, so i can go to sleep with a clear conscience, i want to know i did everything i

could to stop it from getting worse, to stop this wall street problem room infecting mainstreet. i want to get on my airplane and go home and see my three kids and wife that i haven't seen in a week and look them in the eye and no i did what i thought was right for them and their future. aselieve with all my heart bad as this is, if you get a whole lot worse and that is why we have to pass this bill. i yield. >> find more highlights from 35 years of house for coverage on our facebook page. c-span created 35 years ago and brought you today as a public service by your local cable or satellite provider. >> it discussion of middle-class jobs and the digital revolution. this event was hosted by the group forward u.s. and hosted by founder van jones.

from aol headquarters in new york city, this is an hour and 20 minutes. is van jones, the president of rebuild the dream which is a platform for innovations to help fix the u.s. economy. he the cohost of crossfire on cnn with his old friend newt gingrich. he was formally the green jobs adviser in the obama white house and he is waiting -- he has written two new york times bestsellers. next is -- next is andrew mcafee. eric are co-authors of a new book called "the second machine age." get a book ando he is happy to sign them for you. it is really an interesting book. scott murphy, the former

u.s. representative for new york's 20th congressional district and a venture capitalist. is the president of the board of the directors of the upstate ventures association. finally in the empty chair who is on his way from the airport, there was some wind apparently. i lost my one and only scarf. is the chairman of the new york mia. he will be rushing in soon. so, now on to the panel. you were really talking about this question of what is the future of the middle class and the american dream? we have to look a little bit and see where we got to where we are. i will start with andy. give us some data on what is actually happening and then

moved to other panelists. if you look at the last 50 years, rising inequality and lowering ability, there are three main factors you can talk about -- globalization, the technological progress, and then there is public policy. the different opinions and the relative way of things. >> thank you for coming out tonight. what? i think i am on? am i on? i have a little red light on my microphone. mic.e going to pass the thank you for having us tonight. there is always a lot of things to do in new york city. on any given evening. want to kick off by sharing a bunch of data about the u.s. economy and the workforce over the past chunk of time. the reason to do this is not

because i think all of us are dated geeks as i am, but because there is a huge amount of rhetoric owing on. -- going on. way too much of it and not enough evidence and facts. i want to ground our discussion into some of the recent evidence and the story i want to try to tell is of charles dickens moment in our economic history where it is simultaneously the best of times and the worst of times in some ways. that may make that case with data. click. all right. that big slow-moving line in the middle is u.s. gdp and the reason it doesn't move around a lot because it is a big number. it takes those shallow divots and you can see the most recent divot with the great recession. it was still pretty darn bad. bothee it really tanked the green and the blue lines.

both the green and the blue lines rebounded very quickly in a very healthy way. the blue lines are u.s. corporate profits which we will see again in a minute. they are at an all-time high. whether the meds them -- whether you measure them an absolute or the percentage of gdp. the green line is u.s. investment in equipment and software. and rebounded very quickly in a very healthy way. foru.s. corporate appetite the stuff that the industry represented by forward.us made for tech is bottomless and it keeps on growing. we like investment as well. click. what we don't like is the redline which is the employment to population ratio. the percentage of working age americans who have worked. during theratered great recession and it had flatlined ever since. there was no rebound visible at

all. the bureau ofen labor statistics put out the numbers, this is the one i look at and it is like the ekg of a dead person. is not going anywhere. is at a level lower than it has been for 30 years before women entered the u.s. workforce. that is the bad news. i cannot tell a happy story about that red line. i promised you a good news, bad news about the economy. click. i cannot tell a good story. this is job growth in the country decade by decade for the entire post-world war ii history. you noticed that one of these lines is not like the other. the one at the bottom is the decade we have just lived through, the 2000s. -- even before their great recession, job growth was pretty anemic compared to other decades. there were fewer americans

working at the end of the decade than the beginning of the decade. yuck. i cannot tell a happy story about that. i need to make one thing really clear to everybody -- i am a capitalist. i like our system of private enterprise and entrepreneurship. is reason i need to say that because i am out to put up a slide of capital versus labor and when i do that, everybody expects me to wear a t-shirt even though i am not. click. maybe i can borrow one of joe's t-shirts. the blue line is corporate profits expressed as a percent of gdp. higher than it's ever been on a really healthy all portrait x-ray. you noticed that that david is very short. look up quickly the profits came back.

is theline there total amount of gdp they get paid out in wages to all americans every year. you notice of those blue and red lines are doing a dance just back and forth for most of the postwar history. since the turn-of-the-century, that red line has been cratering, heading south. what is amazing to me is that red line includes the wages paid to some categories of superstars like ceos and other top managers and professional athletes. if you took their wages out of that red line, it would be heading south even more quickly. a very clear, good news, bad news picture of the economy. click. this is a story of what has been happening throughout different levels of education over the past several decades. if you have a college education or above, your real wages have been on an upward trajectory and

classically, the more education, the more training, the better your wage trajectory is. the bottom three lines represent all workers with less than a college degree. those real wages are lower than they were more than 30 years ago. that is not good. the bigger problem is those bottom lines represent 60% or more of the american workforce. fewer than 40% of american workers have a college degree. majority -- you see them slowly losing ground here. click. this is what the superstar economies yielding us. the onenot the graft of percent, this is one percent of the one percent. 01%. is the top . of relative period

equality in the economy and in recent decades, that has been going upwards. there was no are growing we are heading into more of a winner take all economy. do i have one more click? yes, i do. this is a line my co-author and i great -- call the great decoupling. it used to be the case that for things we cared a great deal about were all going up. before things are output, gdp per capita, productivity, job growth, and wages. all four of those are great. news is for several decades after the war, we had exactly that. the four of them were going up. in recent years, you see this best of times, worst of times pattern where the two lines related to productivity and output have essentially continued their nice upward

trajectory. hasline of a job growth leveled off and in some cases even changed direction. the average median american household now takes home less than they did in the 1990's. simultaneously really encouraged by some economic statistics, those related to output. and finding some real challenges in the ones related to jobs and wages. thank you for bearing with me. when you think about these three factors, globalization, policy, where do you rate those things? >> my answer is going to be unsurprising. the smoking gun is technological progress. globalization has been the prime culprit in a lot of ways. the most careful research that is coming out says that is not

what is going on. there has been some great work published over the past year by people who are not technology geeks like me. they have come to the same conclusion. when you look at the patterns over the past 30, 30 five years, and you look at capital versus labor or you look at the polarization and the problems of the middle class, the prime culprit is a technological ogress. computers can do stuff now that we use a needle made your -- mandalay before. -- manual labor for. the least skilled things like goodg your lawn, they are at complex repeatable tasks like accounting and bank telling. it's not're a busboy, that you have a very prestigious job. you have a job that is safe from

technology for the foreseeable future. there is no robot anywhere in the world that can do this, let alone walk across a room without breaking everything and terrifying restaurant patrons. those restaurant involved, low-level, poorly payed -- dog groomer, busboy, and gardner. ener. jobs, ceos, stuff like that, also appear to be safe from automation. it is that big chunk in the middleware technology has been having its greatest effect and what i believe is that technology is about to get bigger both low and high in that midrange. is your sense that is what is going on -- going on around the world or to speaking about america? >> i see we're about out of time. [laughter]

it is awake question. -- great question. it is pointing the finger pretty clearly at tech progress. lifted that labor versus capital graph. a lot of countries around the world -- he came to the very clear conclusion that it was tech progress. that redline has been going down along the world. in countries including china, india, and mexico. the amount going to wages is going up dramatically but gdp is going up even faster? the growth of the middle class that is very different in china. you are saying it is still not get -- gaining as a share in losing ground to the other outlets? >> the altar wealthy and china -- the altar wealthy in china are getting more money. >> how does not look compared to what you call the first machine revolution?

do we see the same trends? >> guest and no -- yes and no. we have the first industrial revolution when steam power came on. had nls a vacation -- we electrification. that can be a transition period that can be kind of long but then those waves of progress give good news for the average worker. the optimistic view is wait a little while and we are going to see healthy job growth. i kind of said you had 3.5 decades. we are saying the opposite of that's why think -- i don't take that much comfort from the historic will pattern. -- historical pattern. >> i find that really helpful. i just want to add a few things. i think it is a murder mystery.

who killed the middle class? who killed the american dream? >> it would be handy. andy. >> it could be the case that technology is the culprit but i think there are some combos is -- accomplices. markets work really well. we are all for markets but what would that markets work according to rules and right now the rules are pretty wacky if you are middle-class working family. they had an wacky for a while. whatever damage is being done by technology, i think there are some of congresses -- accomplices. about the minimum wage -- it is a completely arbitrary decision that the minimum wage should be tagged to something called -- whenever congress gets around to raising it.

it could be pegged to cost of living. the minimum wage would be not seven dollars an hour but $19 and our. hour. that is a policy, political decision. is a purely policy question whether or not you have corporate charter reform. they have to take those quarterly or even paid through the nose for ceo salaries. you can have a different court -- corporate trotter -- charter that allows stakeholders have some influence. there are some actual decisions that get made. part of the reason i think this whole conversation is important the united states of amnesia. that is where we live. there is no history beyond the ofus thinkingst

about anything. it is almost like the middle class fell out of the constitution. [laughter] the have america, middle-class. the greatest invention in the world is the middle class and it was invented here. it was created and built here not only by the employers, but by labor unions which you don't even think about anymore. labor unions used to be a huge, huge deal and trying to get employers to behave in a particular way. the way we got a middle class, the way we had the american dream, we put employers epicenter. -- at the center. employers had a contrast with the west of us, they were going keeping usgoing by

investing in roads and education. they would pay fair wages. that was the deal. we build the whole economy around you but you keep the game going by paying taxes. employers decided they want going to do that anymore and now you have employers and corporations sitting on big piles of cash, but they are not investing it. corporations pay taxes and then they live in bermuda. it is a weird thing. you don't see anybody going to jail. agree want to say that i technology is doing something really terrible. wait.ght -- >> it feels terrible for a lot of people but i think there are accomplices that need to be called out. >> i am the guy that thinks technology is a good thing. >> i will stand up with you on

that. >> i am a very big fan. >> so am i. >> i don't believe it solves things all by itself. i was reading andy's book and that's also really interesting parallels. van touches on some of this. when we lived through the industrial revolution, we saw the gilded age. we saw the stories of rockefellers and carnegie and the era we were living through and this real stratification. we also saw public policy come together to rectify some of that or change that direction. it was very bipartisan. and you see what the progressive republican aero was about -- era was about. >> when was the last time you heard those words side-by-side? >> how long is the work week? how long is the labor force?

when can children go to work? pushing education, we kept pushing it. democratsway for the to take over which pushed labor unions, social insurance, massively progressive taxation. you had a whole slew of public policy that was directed to rein in what they saw as excesses. part of that require there to be a consensus. you had to have a political consensus. we are going through something similar. adept technology driving for this incredible opportunity. you can replicate things cheaply for a lot of reasons. you get a lot of mass creation. we haven't figured out the public policy terrain that in and share it more broadly. figured it out and we don't have any consensus around solving the problem which is part of what makes a tricky.

that me give you my one epiphany from reading this. if we lived through that last year and we drove education from something that wasn't even accessible if you were rich or yearsnd required for 10 -- what have we done for 70 years? we haven't move that forward. maybe the answer is two years before -- universal pre-k or universal pre-pre-k. at 16.e you can't quit when you see the chart that says of the get through college you're going to make so much more wealth, we have to figure out how to motivate ourselves to drive people through that. andid this to joe earlier he said people are not made to go to college, some of them. 50, 60 years ago, how many people sitting in this room were not made to go to college because of their at the carriage, the religious heritage, because of their gender? there are a lot more people we can push a lot more further.

we have the right policy and the right support. people knew this is what the community expects. you have to do this to be part of where we are going and we have to get out there and motivate and work to make that happen. maybe we need to require people to get more education and see where that takes us. >> that sounds like a democrat. >> i want to jump in. on my technology rant, my fellow policies -- my fellow people told me technology must be bad. no. the old joke among economists is that technological process is the only free lunch we believe in. trying to stop the flow of technology were stop this era makes less sense to me then had locking the schools. is the worst possible move we can make. technology is growing the pie. question is about the

distribution of the pot because there is no economic law that says that everybody has to benefit equally from the benefit -- from the bounty of technology. was mya i was showing attempt to get across the fact the distribution has becoming -- is becoming a thornier issue. this is not written in stone. when i show my data, you can walk away a little fatalistic. we are absolutely not screwed. thatldn't agree more technology is not destiny. we get to shape our destiny. there are policy changes and choices we can make that will be effective at reversing the course and bringing back some of the stuff. a large stable of prosperous middle class is just one of the jewels of what america has created. -- us policy that jewel polish that jewel. >> what i want to point out is

-- we talked a little bit about inequality in pure numbers. the african-american middle class in particular is in real peril. that is why i am interested in this conversation. i want to point out -- we talk about african-americans as of the proxy for the poor. there is an african-american middle class, some of which are living in the white house right now. [laughter] junk of the middle-class -- chunk of the middle-class, i want to point out that african-americans had a tragedy -- had a strategy after dr. king to get into the middle class and stay there. all three pillars of that strategy had been knocked over. employmentcation,

mainly in the public sector -- you talk to most african-american middle class, their dad was a teacher or firefighter and homeownership. that was it. the homeownership piece of it was huge. so huge you never heard a single african-american athlete when they get their big contracts say , i am going to buy my mom stocks and bonds. [laughter] once. a house. that is a huge deal. you are allowed to own property for a very long time and the middle-class folks said stocks and bonds are like gambling. we are not going to be a responsible. -- he responsible -- irresponsible. college's unaffordable, the public sector is shrinking.

we lost 70% of our wealth. we are back to the same wealth that we had back when dr. king was killed in three years because of that strategy. important now, it is as we are thinking about where the middle class goes. you have some parts struggling. what some of you guys were saying about -- as we see this so-called superstar fact where there was a return. you have this different think in a knowledge-based economy where there are so many more wages and our you can make. you can be 10,000 times as productive as a software engineer. is there something inherent to that as we see individual productivity? how we sort of catch up to that? >> this is a great question because there are two very

different views on what is going on with that super star chart. one is a little bit what joan just said which you are seeing a meritocracy in action. every guy or woman running a high-tech company that i talk to says, i cannot place a high enough premium on really good engineers. a good one is worth, not 10 or a hundred times worse than an average one, it is like thousands of times better and i will pay them ridiculous premiums to come work with me. the poaching that goes on is crazily. zuckerberg andk some of the superstars of silicon valley have created ridiculous amount of value. andother point of view is -- it is kind of like up at the top of the chain. i pay you a lot, and you pay me a lot. the debate rages about which of

those two is going on. the clearest answer is both are pretty clearly going on. i have also seen some work that most at the top of the one --cent are basically people they are not innovators, they are the people running very large organizations. how much is that meritocracy? they are clearly both of those effects going on at the very high-end. .> yes welcome. >> sorry i was late. i couldn't get here any faster. >> i work as a venture capitalist and there is no doubt that we pay people to run big companies too much because of they are running them. one of the things that is interesting is that we are

continuing to see small businesses, when you have private equity ownership, the men and women who own the company are on the board and are very involved day-to-day, we are continuing to see that. we are pushing ceo pay up dramatically. its base of the fact that we think there is a meritocracy. people are not just lost in the public and nobody knows he has a sweetheart deal -- >> you are saying paying the people that are involved. because the talent is so severe? back to the meritocracy you are seeing -- the company is worth so much more than somebody else. maybe it is a rebel down of -- ripple down of winner take all. we are willing to pay up a lot there that even at the early stages of the company.

i know this stuff makes a lot of sense if you think about it real hard. thisu are regular person, is just horrible. we have to be honest. normal people are not sitting here trying to figure out, why is this great even if it is great. i live in california. we have this thing called the flash. essentially, in northern california, there was a town called oakland. it is easy driving distance to silicon valley, about half an hour. people are making so much money in silicon valley that it feels purchasedon valley oakland to be a community for itself.

we have seen that before but this is weird. inally when some group comes and they have some income, they start doing things to make things better for everyone. on the contrary. public transportation is not that good in oakland so google bot buses. you are waiting for a bus in oakland. no city bus comes. withoogle bus comes by wi-fi for the people. cousin.that is weird . privatized a set of games. there is going to be situation at some point where my fear is that silicon valley is like the new wall street. it used to be that silicon valley was the proof of the

american dream. it was the proof that you or anybody could go into your garage and you can work hard and you could succeed. proof,her it being the in some places it looks like the killer of the american dream. in this winner take all economy, these are the people that are going to disrupt everybody. disruptbe happy if they the music industry because i'm not in the music industry. i thought they were going to stop there. i wasn't a communist. they are coming for me to. o. i want to turn the heat up a little bit because i think for ordinary people that are trying to understand, all they know

this new technological elite that have been able to disrupt -- i didn't vote for these guys. they disrupt everything they can get their hands on, then make a ton of money. they are paying their ceos more than some countries got. how is that cool? >> i want to bring andrew in. -- he is than long involved in new york politics. vancurious how you see how it's playing out or not playing out in new york? >> i want to apologize for not being a woman. we should have a woman on this panel. [applause] want to make sure everybody understands is that silicon valley does not represent the entire tech community. there is a lot more going on in new york where there is a tech renaissance happening.

it is a very different culture than one you would see in silicon valley where the businesses are built on hardware. companies like apple and intel and google, and basically the infrastructure of the internet. in new york, we're living in the application where the resource is human talent. there is no city in the world that has a higher density of human talent the new york. you will see some sort of tech renaissance happening in cities where people are thinking about starting their own companies, try to figure out some way to take advantage of these technologies which are disrupted but also create a lot of opportunities. the problem i see in a lot of parts of the country and around theworld is that legislative and regulatory environment is not able to keep up with the speed of technology.

van is right. there is a vixen happening in oakland -- eviction happening in oakland. google figure -- figures a workaround and if we allow all these workarounds to continue, we are going to have more disruption. i had a chance to read the review. there was a fascinating book . >> when you are done reading our book, read this one. >> there are two big points to be made in that book. the title of it is capital in the 21st century. economict separate thinking from political thinking because economists for decades our scientist basically looking at data associated with economics and not how political

theory would affect those economic determinations. the second big point is that when you have -- when capital grows faster than gdp, you will start seeing a big separation between richer and poorer. >> guess what is going on these days? >> that is what is going on right now. there are all kinds of arguments to be made that there will be a blip on the screen. in countries where gdp is growing, we are lifting up lots of people into the middle class. 70% of the world population is living in a much higher standard of living than 10 or 15 years ago. the increase of people used to live on one dollar a day to two dollars a day which sounds like a ridiculous amount of money. that is a 100% increase in your income in bangladesh or some poor part of the world. the point is that there is an argument made that humanity as a

whole is much better off now than it is ever been. i think we need to be really careful not to look at this issue through a straw and wind to start thinking about this more holistically. >> it doesn't matter if what is going on these days is economically rational if it is perceived as unfair. and economist will look at the google bus and say this is awesome. it is not preventing anyone else from hopping on a bus. it is reducing carbon emissions. this is awesome news if it is perceived that this is bending the rules. of with you, there is a real danger that silicon valley is going to be perceived as the new wall street or engine of evil. that will be a dire outcome.

it is incumbent on the tech engage in the conversation and make sure the perception doesn't head in that direction. to underscore something and you just said -- i think one of the most challenging elements of what we are going through is that the technology is changing so quickly that it is really hard for our institutions, our political decision-making processes to keep up. it is not the fastest moving part of the world but when things are changing this quickly, it is really hard for a lot of our existing organizations and institutions to keep up. the only thing we can do as members of our organizations and society is advocate for the right kinds of changes. if we wait for washington to lead, they are going to follow what we want them to do. >> that is a great transition towards the solutions. >> a couple of things -- one is we have -- i think

why we have been telling ourselves and the public which is that we are the agents of change. there is campaign about hope and -- you got a problem? don't worry, we are going to change it. come to our protest or whatever. i think we have to stop saying that. these guys are driving change. of the valley and all metaphorical splendor, the technology guys in austin and boston and new york city and elsewhere, chicago, that is what is driving the change. politics needs this are saying we are not going to make change, someone else is doing that. we are going to make change your

friend. the changes coming. to 3-d printers are coming, the robots are coming, the smart coming.oare you would drive up to mcdonald's, there will be a flatscreen annual order and there will not be human being touching her order. that is coming. you didn't vote for that. changes company -- change is coming. how do you may change your friend? at the same time, two things i think are important -- number one, i was just in silicon valley yesterday. non-diversity, you mentioned this panel not being diverse, the level of non-diversity -- i don't know if that is even a word -- the level of diversity -- the level of diversity was bad. [laughter]

not to be too technical. see,s really shocking to first of all, you go on this campuses. amazing stuff. the energy and creativity, but you just see -- tha very badt is. we are wasting genius. there is genius in african-american communities, andno communities, genius housing projects, genius in tech centers and we are wasting it even know we are building an industry built on genius. somebody is losing out on money and market share. it also means there are people that are missing out on opportunities to be part of this economy. i think we have to focus in on that. steme all this talk about and all the stuff.

>> technology, engineering. >> if you know the people who came up with this, tell them not to do that. is new york better? >> i digress. stem by itself -- i get the rose, you get the -- it's better than thorns. i am better for -- i'm all for science and math but that is not a job training strategy. that is a long-term play to try to raise that. there was a man that i love to death named hank williams. he is one of the great godfathers of technology in the black community who is here. hank williams has a plan to

spend $1 billion getting 100,000 low opportunity young people trained to have a jobs. , 10,000 kids a year for 10 years, $10,000 a kid. that gives $1 trillion to the economy. why don't we go ahead and do that? the public sector cannot move fast enough. a $1 billion is not that big a deal in the overall economy. the first thing we have to do it technology is going to the leader, let's make sure technology includes everybody. [applause] >> one question is that what does andy's chart show that greater amount of education leads to more income. there was very little

correlation between education and income. there was an argument to be made that education which we think of as equalizers become the great unequal as are. equalizer. education is highly hereditary. you look at silicon valley and they don't look very diverse. back they have got east asians and south asians. what are you talking about? that is pretty diverse. >> everybody is passionate about education.