(mumbles)

- Good evening and welcome

to the John F. Kennedy Junior Forum.

My name is Remington Hill and I'm a junior,

studying Economics and African American studies

here at the college and I'm also a member

of the JFK Junior Forum Committee here

at the Institute of Politics.

Before we begin, please note the exit doors

which are located on both the park side

and the JFK street sides of the forum.

In the event of an emergency,

walk to the exit closest to you

and congregate in the JFK park.

Please also take a moment now to silence your cell phones.

You can join the conversation tonight online

by tweeting with the hashtag Big Econ Ideas,

which is also listed in your program.

Please take your seats now and join me

in welcoming our guests, Oren Cass, Derrick Hamilton,

Will Wilkinson, Annie Lawrie by video call

and tonight's moderator, Jason Furman.

(applause)

- Thanks to everyone for joining us

and Annie Laurie from the Atlantic.

Thanks to you for being here and you will say something

and hopefully we'll know you're here.

- [Annie] Yeah, can you hear me?

- I can hear you great.

We also have, Derrick Hamilton,

who's currently at the new school.

He's about to be the director

of the Cowen Center for Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State,

Oren Cass who's at the Manhattan Institute,

which is a pro market.

- Free market.

- Free Market think tank and Will Wilkinson

who is from a moderate libertarian leaning think tank,

the Niskanen Center and all four of these people

are big thinkers about big ideas

about how to change our economy.

And I find in universities,

often we're really good at finding the problems

and everything and that leads us to have a harder time

thinking outside of the box about some of the bigger ways

you could have change.

But some of the bigger ways to have change

can also have problems.

The world today works okay.

You try to do something big,

you might mess up and make it much worse.

So what we want to do today

is put some of these ideas down on the table

try to better understand them and also see

what themes come out of them.

And also, I should've done this advertising

when I was telling people.

Annie is on the screen and so it's only fair

that her book is on the screen, Give People Money.

She will do a slightly longer version

of what Give People Money is to lead us off.

And then Oren Cass is the author of the forthcoming,

Once And Future Worker and I should say,

I read both Annie and Oren's books.

I think they're both terrific reads, really provocative

and both of them made me change my mind

on some issues that I'd thought about,

thought I had thought about quite a lot

which is about the best a book can do.

So Annie, why don't you start us off with your big idea.

- Yeah, absolutely.

So the idea of a universal basic income

is a really simple one, which is that

the government gives everybody money

and it's one that has not been undertaken thus far

by at least any big government

but a lot of lower and middle income countries

have sort of related policies.

And so just want to expand on the argument

for doing it here in the United States

because it sounds at first blush kind of crazy, right?

Like, why should the government gives everybody money?

Wouldn't people stop working?

Aren't there more efficient ways of providing support

for low income families?

And so, the argument basically is this one.

One is that the United States tolerates

and in fact structures its safety net

to allow a tremendous amount of poverty.

Part of the reason that we have that

is that many of the support programs that we have

have fairly complicated requirements.

They make you jump through a lot of hoops to get them,

they make sure that you are a very certain type of person

in order to receive aid but even with all that,

some of the people that are deemed

sort of socially important to take care of such as children,

nevertheless have very high poverty rates.

So that's one argument for doing it.

The second is actually kind of a libertarian argument

which is that if you just give people cash,

they tend to spend it pretty well.

They by and large don't actually stop working

or if they do, they tend to do so

for sort of socially beneficial reasons

such as waiting longer for a job match to become employed,

staying in school longer, taking care of a kid.

So we don't worry about that too much

and it's pretty easy for the government

and low overhead for the government to just give out cash.

There's also the argument that the government

should kind of butt out of people's lives

and trust them to do with the money what they would like

versus something like a housing voucher or food stamps

where in some cases, you see people actually trade those in,

in the case of food stamps because what they really need

is gas to put in their car or money to keep the lights on.

And then I think that there's a broader argument to be made

that in an economy as rich as the United States is

that you do just want to have

a universal guarantee for people.

A lot of times, there is no currently

no form of sort of social insurance that helps people

kind of regardless of circumstance, save for income

and this would provide that.

It would arguably encourage things like entrepreneurship.

It would help people and sort of unusual,

but nevertheless quite common circumstances

such as if you needed to leave a bad housing situation

or if you were in an abusive relationship.

So I wrote a whole book on it

but I'll stop there and I'm very interested

to hear all of our other big ideas from our big thinkers.

- Great.

Thank you Annie.

So Derrick is the co developer of the leading

or one of the leading federal jobs guarantee programs.

So tell us about that.

- I guess co-develop with Sandy Darity at Duke University,

Mark Paul, let me give shout out to other people real quick.

Elena Ha, Daniel Bustillo, Kaiser, Ofrono Mobial

and then special shout out Policy Link,

Angel Blackwell and Sarah Trehalf.

So the idea of a federal job guarantee

is not new nodes at radical.

President Roosevelt cold for economic bill of rights

and the first thing that he called for

was the right to guaranteed employment.

Unfortunately, since the Nixon administration,

the political sentiment regarding social mobility

has radically shifted from government mandates

of economic security to a neo liberal approach

that where the market is presumed to be the solution

for all our problems, economic or otherwise.

As a result, the onus of social mobility

has shifted onto the individual.

Pervasive in the implicit on federal markets

is the ideas that the virtue of the free market,

you can turn your proverbial rags into riches.

In other words, the deserving poor who end up poor,

they're stigmatized by the political fodder

of anti-blackness, whether they're black or not.

They receive their just rewards and they simply fade away

or have to do something else over time.

But the private sector alone has never been adequate

to deal with reinforcing inequalities.

Over the last 45 years

all the gains from American's productivity,

have gone to the elite while real worker wages

have remained roughly flat.

Even those that have a job, 44% of them are homeless,

40% of them working contingent jobs,

and 44% have earned below $15 an hour.

Jobs stimulates plans championed on both sides of the aisle,

they use tax incentives and deregulation

to cajole a bribe and already record profit earning

private sector to create more jobs

under the whimsical notion of trickle down economics.

Or if we encourage them to build our infrastructure,

that could lead to a transfer value

of our public infrastructure onto corporate interests.

Instead we favor of federal job guarantee

which is a direct source to deal with unemployment

and it provides a stimulus effect

to stimulate a panopy of activity in the economy.

It would enable all workers,

particularly those at the low end

to bargain for better wages and benefits

without the fear and threat

of destitution from unemployment.

A federal job guarantee would eliminate

working poverty altogether,

it would eliminate involuntary unemployment,

it would address cyclical unemployment

as well as structural unemployment

and it would provide public options of employment

to better enable existing workers

to bargain for decent wages, working conditions,

again, without that fear of being destitute

from unemployment.

Our job creation plan provides direct competition

to the private sector,

particularly at the low end of the market.

It's not an employer of last resort program.

So rather than subsidizing low wage work,

we will raise the floor on wages and benefits

through competitive alternative to precarious work.

We will structurally change the US economy

away from low wage work.

We say that's a feature, not a flaw.

Moreover, it will provide the best buffer

against the threat of oncoming automation

which might lead to employment transitions

due to technical change.

We are not promoting welfare to work

but rather we're talking about an authentic right to work.

The jobs had reigned from construction, education,

health services, supportive housing, libraries,

child and elder care, arts and culture,

projects designed to transform our cities

to green municipalities that are emission free

and sustainable and resilient.

The work could also address disability interest

so that we are able to not only employ people

that are designated as disabled,

but empower them so that they can be more independent

in their living.

The federal government states, Indian nations,

local municipalities, community councils,

they all could conduct inventories of their needs

and develop a job bank of task

in which we will prioritize those communities

that are in the most need,

as well as provide stimulus to those communities

that are in most need.

A job guarantee would mitigate

the personal familiar course demand

from damaged mental health, having workers out of work

does emit damage to the human spirit.

The unemployed themselves, say they would rather work

than receive a subsidy.

Dignity is multifaceted.

One's dignity is not limited to work,

but everyone should have the right to work

with dignity of at least decent wages,

benefits and good working conditions.

- Okay, great.

An alternative also focused on work

is Oren on wage subsidies.

- Yeah, thank you guys very much for coming.

I guess I want to talk about a big economic idea,

bolting conceptual and sort of substantive policy terms