united states. we have had terrible times. -- brawl one for all in 1858 that had 80 members rolling on the floor. [laughter] wigof the members who had a -- one of the members told his -- pulled his wig off. that was enough to stop the fight. ,> congressional historians sunday night at 8:00 eastern on "q&a." seniorren cass is a fellow at the manhattan institute and author of the book hee once and future worker." joins us a day after president trump signed a new technical education bill into law and

after president trump signed an executive order last week on workforce education. the focus on the trump administration when it comes to preparing american workers for the jobs tomorrow -- the jobs of tomorrow. there's a lot of focus on career and technical education, which we used to call vocational idea wen, which is the cannot just be trying to do high school, college, four year degree for everybody. when you do have a lot of other options that help while you're in high school and certainly after you leave high school to give you the kinds of skills you need to get drops -- to get jobs in the modern economy. the trump administration has been doing a lot of work focusing on how we develop those alternatives. what are some of the best ways to do that and house the trump administration focusing their efforts? guest: first of all, doing more cte type work in high school. our high schools are college prep schools.

we say the goal is to have througho to college, up 11th and 12th grade all of curriculum is focused on preparing you for more study. if you are not likely to and up with a college degree that is not the best used of 11th and 12th grade. technical education into high schools, connecting people with employers sooner is one powerful route. the other one is what gets called apprenticeships. differentean a lot of things but ultimately it means creating a program that connects people who are still students with jobs and on-the-job training. you actually need to bring the employer into the education process in partnership with the school in a way that has the student in class part of the time but also on the job for part of the time as well. that is obviously a different model for running education, and for the trump administration and the federal government, it means we have to change the rules for

how we test, what our standards are, what certification teachers have to have and where all of the funding goes. all of the funding goes to college. we spend about a hundred $50 billion a year trying to support students in college. $1 billion aram is year supporting cte. host: we will be talking about the future of the american workforce and american workers for about the next 40 minutes on the washington journal. oren cass is with us for that discussion. eastern and central time zones can call in at (202) 748-8000, mountain pacific time zones, , a special line for displaced workers, i want to hear your stories, (202) 748-8002 is that number. you can start calling you now. the book is not out yet. when is it coming out? guest: it will come out the week after the midterms.

host: "the once and future worker." why do we need to have this discussion now? guest: in the aftermath of the 2016 election a lot of folks who are real policy experts did not take the lesson that we had gotten anything wrong, they thought it was a marketing problem. they said people do not understand how great the economy is, maybe they do not like the way trump sounds, but the model that we will keep doing globalization and keep expanding the safety net and somehow get people more skills, that has to be the recipe. i think what that missed is that at the end of the day that treated everybody like a consumer. if we grow the pie big and up and give everybody a slice they will be happy. i think we have learned that it is wrong. youle do not care how much give them to consume, they care about their own ability to

produce and contribute to society and be included in the economy. if that is correct, then our policy cannot just be grow the economy as fast as possible and give everybody a slice. it has to be go back and look at how our labor market works, what kind of jobs are available, how much do they pay and how we -- and how can we change those conditions in ways that make sure a majority of people who are not going to earn a college degree still have good work opportunities that allow them to support a family. host: what is your vision for the future of the american workforce? what kind of jobs will be going away in the decades to come? guest: obviously the workforce will change. the idea that manufacturing is going to go away or that robots will take all of the jobs is severely overstated. the reality is that we still consume an enormous amount of stuff that has to get made. as people get richer,

what to they consume more of? they consume more of stuff that has to get made. it is not like they consume services and digital downloads. they consume houses, bigger cars, more electronics. the future potential of the economy looks just as things intensive as the past has. are we going to use more automation and more robots to produce those things? absolutely. that is the same as it has always been. we have always been introducing new processes city can make more things with fewer people. the question of what everyone is going to do is how are we going to find more things that need to be made to ensure there is more demand for not just high end knowledge work but also for building things, for making things, for providing the kinds of services that someone with a

high school education or a little bit more than a high school education can perform. that can happen. the idea of capitalism is you have people with capital and you want them to try to earn money by finding productive ways to employ workers. if we keep that structure in money can find ways to employ people productively. host: i've have seen projections of very large percentages of this country's job that might be impacted by robots. what study do believe? guest: there is an important distinction that sometimes get lost. are we talking about jobs that can be replaced entirely or jobs that can be augmented or helped by automation? there are bad studies that will say -- the most famous study is from oxford university that says

50% of jobs will be replaced by robots. some of the jobs they say are most likely to be replaced are things like fashion models, real estate agents, school bus drivers, as if we would just walk kids in a metal box with robot driving them around. that is not going to happen. what has historically happened and what studies find is going to continue to happen is a lot of jobs will have some of their tasks automated. if it instead of thinking of the job as a thing, automated or no, look at the job and see what are the tasks in this job and which of those tasks do you automate. when you look at it that way you find maybe half of the tasks could be automated but you will still need a person involved in that. that is the secret sauce for prosperity and rising wages. the person still has to be there to do the job but now he will do it twice as much as he could before. that is the way to think about it. host: what about the other

people who are not needed to do those jobs? they're still be a job for a few people. how willing are they to retrain and how much should we invest in that retraining or how much support should we give those folks during the retraining process? guest: a lot of them do not necessarily have to go anywhere because there are two things that happen when you make twice as much stuff as you did before. one is you make twice as much , the other is you make twice as much stuff. let's say you could get 5% more productive every year which would be astronomically high. historically we rarely get above 2%. let's say you get 5% more productive every year. a business that is successful and growing is growing their sales at least 5% per year. this means that in theory you still want all the workers you have and you need to use this

automation and these productivity gains not to get rid of your workers but to meet the growing demand for your product. historically, if you look at what happened in the heyday of the 1950's or 1960's, productivity growth was much faster than it is now. we would call automation destroying jobs used to happen a lot faster. back then, demand also grew. as the automation occurred and people can make more stuff, they need more stuff. we do not use fewer people. the question is, is that what is going to happen in the future? can we make sure we use automation to allow us to make more stuff, or is it going to be a situation where we make the same amount of stuff and do not use a lot of the people? host: the future of the american workforce is the topic of our conversation. we want you to join into that conversation as well. a special line for displaced

workers, (202) 748-8002. i want to hear your stories and what happened in your industry. eastern and central time zones, (202) 748-8000. mehlman specific -- mountain and pacific, (202) 748-8001. you are on with oren cass. caller: my question is about how we have a five-day work week. are we going to do any adjustments on the working conditions because studies have been saying the american worker is more productive but it seems to me that the gulf we have is our productivity has risen but that has noton for come back to us. for instance, i'm getting more work done working the same hours, but my wages are not rising. you see that all over.

weekhould i work a 40 hour when the reality of it is we could probably get this work done in 25 hours but people are not going to adjust that 40 hour week. that seems to be impacted in our mind that you have to work 40 hours to get full-time. guest: the structure of work, like the work week is definitely one of the things we could see you've all over time. -- we could see the ball -- we could see evolve over time. productivity is not going up right now and one of the region -- one of the reasons wages are stagnant is if you look back over the last 15 years we have stalled on productivity growth. we might feel like we are busier, but the economy is not making a lot more per hour than we used to. that is something that has to

change. as it does change, one option is to say we could work less. that is something that ideally you would want to leave up to people. , therethink historically was a time when people have to work all day every day just to grow enough food. you could say now you could work a few hours a week and earn enough money for your food. obviously you work a lot more than that because everything else we have around us that we also value and want to be able to afford as well. going forward, if you take $40,000 a year someone might are , theorking full-time question is fast-forward. with a rather earn $40,000 a year working part-time or with a rather earn $60,000 a year and then $80,000 a year still working full-time as they become more productive? the ideal answer is to say you want have flexibility. we want to have structures in place and employers who say both

of those r.o.k. answers. if your sump -- both of those are ok answers. if you have someone who says i'm happy with 40,000 year, let me work less. we see lots of people who work part-time. what we have seen his people will want to work full-time because as society grows richer they will want to participate in that and be able to afford the new things we might be developing and producing host:. larry in unionville, tennessee, good morning. is whatmy question happens to the vocational programs we had when i was in school? i grew up in the 1960's and 1970's. ,e had metal shop, woodshop auto shop, drafting, all of these programs that were in the high schools all of the time.

you had opportunities for whatever you wanted to do. that does not occur anymore. you go to a mcdonald's and these becausenot make change the education system we have is so unused. thank you. guest: that is an important point, larry. thinking back to the 1960's and 1970's is exactly when this change, that we went from a model that had a lot of vocational training to a mindset that said because we want more economic opportunity we want everybody to go to college. this idea that some people should be on a vocational track and preparing for the workforce is somehow un-american. instead we are going to lift everybody up by sending everyone through college. that was a real mistake. there are two things to say about it. no one else in the world has tried to do that. if you look in europe in the

most advanced economies, most of their high school students still go down a vocational track and prepare for the workforce and moving into apprenticeships or more concrete job training by the end of high school. so dramatic and different that the oecd, which is the big organization of developed and -- developed economies, put out a report looking at the structure of high schools. they showed how much was vocational in each country. they had to put a footnote for theunited states, saying united states is too different from everybody else and we cannot put them on the chart. we are in extreme outlier in our refusal to invest in that kind of training. the other thing to say is it has not worked. we have the idea we have doubled what we spend per student, we have massively expanded our higher education system and the money we put into that, and yet test scores do not look any different than they did in the 1970's.

the share of students going into butege is much higher, graduating from college the rate has not gone up that much, especially for men. if you look across what is , the share of our population that actually goes successfully completes high school, completes college, it gets a job that uses the degree they are, it is -- the degree many -- is mainly a fifth of our students. host: if you suddenly doubled the vocational programs, with the demand be there to fill the spots? guest: i think it depends on the quality. it depends on employer engagement. one thing we have learned a lot from job training and in the education system is that if you want to do concrete skills training, you have to have employers involved. that means a culture shift in

schools, which would think it was weird to have employers involved and it is a culture shift for employers who do not think it is their job to be involved. they expect the school system to provide workers for them. the last reason is is it a culture shift for families. we have moved away from this idea that everyone should go to college, but now the idea that not everyone should go to college -- people will say i agree someone over there should not go to college but you better believe my kid will go to college. what we have to help people understand is that if you're are someone who is going to succeed in college, then absolutely, college is the right choice. if you are someone who is not likely to succeed in college, and most americans don't not even achieve a community college going to college cannot successfully complete college is not a good choice. you will end up with a lot of debt, you'll waste years you

could be gaining skills and you will end up better if you are on a track with investment from society in you to get you into a good job sooner. host: when you say we visit the government's job to make that pitched people? guest: i think government has a role in it. some to making the pitch, but more in constructing a viable alternative track. one of the things, if you step back and think about who are the winners and losers in our economy, people who complete a college degree are those with a golden ticket. those are the ones we put all of the investment into in terms of taxpayer money. the message we sent to somebody in high school right now is you may as well go as far down the college track as you can because if you do there is so much money for you. if you're somebody who thinks maybe i should get into the workforce, there is no money, there is no support.

that is what sends a message and it creates a practical choice. weould like to see us say are going to invest at least as much in somebody who is trying to go -- trying to get a high school job as somebody who is going to college and if we have to choose between them i would rather invest more in the person who is headed for a slightly lower wage job or a much lower but is going to get out there and the workforce sooner and invest less in the person who may need to borrow to complete their college degree but they are going to be the ones with the higher earnings of the room down the road. host: to clinton, maryland. munro is waiting. caller: i was reading a book all the end of average and he talks about the father of industrial engineering and it had me do more reading as to when did we get to the dawn of the employee

versus mastering apprentice and i read more about why we have an eight hour workday and i kept doing more and more reading. the situation we have in america is not something that happened overnight and it is not going to get undone overnight. as you were just talking about the college students, we have plenty of studies that show having that degree is going to help, but you have more college graduating than you have job which causes me to go back to a few callers ago. why doesn't america relook at the eight hour workday? we have more than enough people graduating to where we can go part-time. you made a statement about how people might want to work for $60,000 or 80,000, i would say they need to work that job because of things costing so much great if we could look at insurance costs and what is considered full-time versus part-time benefits, if we could look at credit rating and credit able to workmebody

part-time and so get approved for that house or auto loan, i believe we have more than enough people in america that can work part-time. it would lower poverty, it would lower unemployment rates and so many other things would benefit if we could take a good look at the eight hour workday. host: thanks for the call. guest: the question with something like that is how much is the government's responsibility versus how much it would be leaving up to people's own arrangements? there are some places in public the eightt codify hour workday, for instance the treatment of full-time under obama care for health insurance where the definition of how we calculate overtime. by and large the choice of how many hours you work a week is one made by the employer and the employee. there are many eight hour day, five days a week jobs.

across the economy there are a tremendous number of jobs that are much more than that, either because you are not an hourly employee, you're on sourly and working all hours of the day, and part-time >> we go live to capitol hill as environmental protection agency administrator an andrew wheeler will be testifying for the first time after scott pruitt last month. live coverage on c-span. i would encourage president trump to nominate andrew wheeler to the administrator of the. mr. wheeler is qualified for the position. he spent 25 years working in environmental policy and served as a career employee of the agency, a staffer on capitol hill, a consultant in the private sector, and now in a leadership role at the epa. i believe andrew wheeler would make an excellent administrator of the envirnt