Lori Walsh: All eyes are on the US economy and the national death toll as states navigate various stages of returning to commerce. The pandemic has laid bare problems with the economy many didn't realize existed. Others have been warning about those problems for decades. As we watch the unemployment numbers rise, we also wonder what those numbers mean for South Dakotans, from farmers to factory workers to families. It's this focus on how the national economic numbers are playing out in the lives of everyday Americans that makes a new book by Gene Sperling stand out. Economic Dignity has been released in a time of massive upheaval, and it asks us not how we can get back to normal, but rather how we can imagine an economy that works for human beings in a way that hasn't always seemed like a priority or even measurable.
Gene Sperling was director of the National Economic Council under both president Obama and president Clinton. He's the author of The Progressive... I'm sorry, The Pro-Growth Progressive and What Works in Girls' Education: Evidence for the World's Best Investment. He's founder of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution and he has been a senior economic advisor on multiple presidential campaigns and also a consultant on NBC's The West Wing for four seasons. Gene Sperling, welcome to In the Moment. Thanks for being here.
Gene Sperling: Well, thanks for having me.
Lori Walsh: We've had a few authors on the show and it's been a difficult time to release a book, and it seems like this might be the exception, in that it is landing at a time when many people are paying attention to an accessible economic book like never before. What's your experience been as an author with this release and a craving for information and new ways of thinking about the economy?
Gene Sperling: Well, look, I'm not going to pretend that any author's dream is to release their book when most bookstores in the country are closed. That said, it is more timely than perhaps I could have imagined. I mean, my goal was more, after being so involved in economic policy and 12 years in the West Wing, was to say that I felt we needed to change our economic discussion, that if you watch the news, most discussion people tune out because they think that the ultimate goal of economics is GDP or the stock market value. And I wanted to remind people that no, the ultimate economic aspiration for democracy is how it lifts up our people. That's not a fuzzy aspiration. That is the only logical goal. And I wanted to try to define that in an accessible way for citizens, for policy staffers, not just economists. So that North star that I was putting forward was economic dignity.
And I didn't want it to just be using the word. I want it to define that. What does that mean? What to achieve this North star? And my view was it meant three things. It meant one that you have the capacity to not only care for your family, but to be there for life's most meaningful and joyful and even sad moments. That that is what caring for family really means. That number two, that that's not enough, that you have to have the capacity to pursue potential and purpose and meaning, and you should have second chances to do so as well. And that third, none of that really holds up for dignity unless you have protections to ensure you can work and contribute with respect and not domination and humiliation. So I wanted that reflection, but yes, this moment is bringing it front and center. You know, Martin Luther King's famous line about all labor as dignity was was preceded by the sentence, "Someday our nation will realize that the sanitation worker is as essential as the physician."
Well that day is today. We are being forced to recognize that the farm worker, the home health aid, the nursing assistant, the delivery worker, these are essential jobs in our life. They have value right now. We even see them rightly as putting their lives on the line for the rest of us. So, yes, this moment is forcing us to deal with the dissonance of how can we say we rely on the nursing aid, but we won't give them PPE? Half of them couldn't take a day of paid sick leave to care for their family. Some make only $12 an hour. So we're making some progress in some of the recovery acts. Not enough, but there's really two tasks. Will we really honor that dignity of work now for the essential workers in this crisis, and more in longterm, will it change our view of what our compact in our country should be. That everyone who contributes, works puts their heart and soul on the line, should be able to raise their family with dignity, work with dignity, and retire with dignity.
Lori Walsh: I want to ask you a question and set it up with something that's been happening in South Dakota, and one of the challenges for this state for our governor Kristi Noem has been the stimulus money from the CARES act that's coming from the federal government does not have the flexibility she would like it to have to handle a loss in state revenue, and some of the language that she has used during press conferences about that has been, "I don't want new programs. I don't want to grow government. We've been responsible with our budget." And the question I want to put to you is this idea of... She said these are not conservative principles, and it's the idea of conservative versus liberal or progressive, or what have you. Can we have a conversation, Gene, about the economy that gets beyond ideology, about whether this is more government or less government? Is that possible?
Gene Sperling: Well, in doing this book, what I wanted to do was say so many people write books and have views that are like, "I'm for this amount of free market. I'm for this level of government." I don't think that's how most people necessarily think. They think, I think, like I'm trying to speak. They think about what degree of respect and dignity and wages and security should I have, does every person deserve? And I think if you start with those end goals, you unify people. I mean, when I talk about a living wage, that's something Adam Smith talked about. That's something Republican president Teddy Roosevelt spoke eloquently about. Those are basic American values. And I do think that if we can have more of that discussion, we will have more... We'll treat each other with economic dignity.
I also think we'll have more practical responses. Like for right now in terms of if you're a governor. I mean, no governor could possibly have prepared for a once in 102 year pandemic. It's impossible. It's not their fault. Of course we've shut down the economy. Of course there's not sales revenue. Of course there's not income revenue. So it shouldn't be ideological that we don't want to force people to lay off teachers and state troopers and first responders and healthcare workers. So when people say, "Well, that's a big government, small government," that's just common sense. We're going through a pandemic and we have the economic power to help keep us whole until we get through it. And to not use that because we're having an ideological discussion is really... It's just a shame and I just hope more and more our country can get by this. And I think Republican and Democratic governors coming back together and say, "Hey, we all have had our revenue dry up. It's no one's fault. Please don't make us fire a generation of teachers because there's an ideological battle going on in Washington."
Lori Walsh: It goes back to the goal. The goal is not growing or shrinking government. The goal is keeping those government services like teachers and the Department of Labor, which is doing remarkable work right now. Sometimes it's just about how we talk about... The questions we ask as journalists and what policy leaders lead with as well. I want to ask you about... Because so much of this book is about how things play out in real people's lives and how that can be difficult to figure out when you just look at the numbers, when you look at growth, or when you look at GDP. We're looking at this $700 billion nearly paid out by the federal government for payroll protection plan. But then also nationwide, we're looking at another number, which says 14%... more than 14% of Americans are unemployed. Some people are saying, if you dig into that, it's closer to 23%, which is Great Depression levels. How are these reconciling in people's real lives that we have so much money that is spent by the federal government to keep people on the payroll, and yet we have so many people who are unemployed? What's happening there?
Gene Sperling: Well, first of all, let me answer your larger question, because it's related. One of the things with metrics is that if I tell you what GDP is, or even if I tell you what your median wage, what your wage average would be over 20 or 30 years, it doesn't actually necessarily speak to the level of economic dignity you've had in your life. Because if you had, and this happens often, one period of massive dislocation, whether it was during the financial crisis or now, it's too devastating. Why should people who work hard, go through one period, lose their house, lose their health security, lose their capacity to care for their family? So the larger goal for us should be that if we think about economic dignity and people's wellbeing, we realize it's not just about your yearly or living wage. It's about whether we ensure you don't have devastation when you have job loss often at no fault of your own.
And of course, this is the height of people losing jobs at no fault of their own, a pandemic. So the goal should have been to say to small businesses, that was the goal of the PPP, the program you're talking about, was to say, "Hey, if you're a small business, you've worked hard. You've spent your whole life. You're viable. You haven't done anything wrong. We'll give you money if you've been hurt to keep the lights on and to keep your workers on the payroll so we don't have this huge high unemployment rate." And it was just terribly administered. Big banks were able to pick their favorite clients over the people who really needed it, who needed it to save jobs. And we're going to have a higher unemployment rate and we're going to lose jobs forever and small businesses forever. That was totally unnecessary.
So you're right. We're going to have over 20% unemployment. And what our goal should be is to prevent as much of that unemployment as possible until we have treatment and testing and ultimately a cure. But then in the meantime, when people do lose their job, let's make sure they can keep the lights on, they can still provide for their families, they don't lose their homes. So having one place we've made progress is we are providing unemployment assistance to gig workers, nontraditional workers. That's a bit of progress in our country. When people lose their job during a pandemic at no fault of their own, you're just going to keep them whole until they have a chance to get back to work, which is more of an issue of our health response than it is about their individual effort.
Lori Walsh: What does history tell us happens next? And I'm specifically wondering, and you kind of address it at the end of your book actually, but do we see a surge and a call for people demanding a better economic system or do we see further division and economic despair? What do we know from looking back and looking around the world at what's happening to us now and what might happen in the days ahead?
Gene Sperling: Well my hope is that this is this moment of realization, that this is this moment of realizing the basic dignity and value of all work and that it does lead to a rethinking of our economic compact, that... I do see more people saying to themselves, "Wow, it never occurred to me that somebody at a hospital caring for me might not be able to take a day off to care for their own family." So the question is, will we seize that moment and rise to that occasion to build a stronger social compact? And again, I don't think that's a radical type of view or... I think the notion that if you are working hard and doing your part, that you have a certain level of dignity in how you raise your family is a deep and widespread American value.
And I think that people also start to recognize that as touched as they might be that people are saying, applauding healthcare workers as they go to work, that Martin Luther King said, "What good is it to win the right to sit at an integrated lunch counter if you can't afford to buy your family a meal?" I think there'll be a feeling of "thank you for the applause, but I can't support my own family." I believe that that is not creating something brand new. That's just making us realize where there's a gap between very basic American values and the reality of which tens of millions of people live their lives.
Lori Walsh: I want to close with this idea of freedom from domination and humiliation, because not all of this is about what kind of programs we fund. They are about how seriously we take things like workplace quotas and meatpacking or sexual harassment for domestic workers, and in our remaining minute, Gene, I'm wondering if you could just tell us why is that important when we think about the economy to think about things like how human beings are treated, when they report to work every day?
Gene Sperling: It may not show up in an economic metric, but if you're a country and you're looking for what your economic values are, really, it was the turn of the century where people said... Where Teddy Roosevelt said if our country is based on a certain degree of shield of dignity that the government can't take away from you, does that have less meaning if for 10, 12 hours a day, most of your working hours, your employer can deny you that dignity, those rights, that government could never take away from you? That led to our protections of basic wages and taking away child labor. But it's not just a turn of the century issue. We see it right now.
Look at the poultry workers ordered back to work. They were already, as you mentioned, often supposed to do 175 birds per minute, seven times the degree of carpal tunnel syndrome. Some had to work diapers because they couldn't afford a bathroom break. We've seen the focus on how many people suffer sexual harassment at work. Part of the reason for writing this book is, this is economic pain that is so real in people's lives. Does it have to fit into a GDP metric for us to put it at the front of the line? These are the things people talk about at home with their spouse. These are the things that matter deeply to people, and just because it doesn't fit into an economic metric, doesn't mean it's not essential. And you see this now-
With how people feel when they're being pulled back to work. They're willing to sacrifice, they're willing to give for their country, but they want to be treated with a level of respect and safety.