With 23 million people unemployed, underemployed, or discouraged from looking for work, our nation desperately needs a new strategy to for building an inclusive economy. The new report from Yale University's Jacob Hacker and Nate Loewentheil, Prosperity Economics: Building an Economy for All, is a welcome antidote to today's all-too-prevalent austerity economics. And to achieve the shared prosperity this paper challenges us to pursue, our policies must ensure that the nation's coming majority can participate in the economy and lead us into a new era of equitable growth.
Hacker and Loewentheil rightly put people-power at the center of the prosperity economics they advocate, explaining that prosperity "does not just drip down from current economic winners, but flows from all of us who work hard to gain skills and climb the economic ladder." After describing the current economic crisis of slow growth, skyrocketing inequality, a shrinking middle class, and stunted democracy -- and dispelling widely-believed myths like spending and deficits are America's biggest economic issues -- they lay out a policy agenda that is at once bold and completely sensible. Their policy recommendations are spot on: rebuild our nation's crumbling infrastructure, restore our manufacturing base, expand job training programs, revitalize distressed communities through comprehensive place-based strategies, provide universal pre-K, ensure every student who wants to can attend and graduate from college, create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, end discrimination and disenfranchisement, and more.
For this policy agenda to be effective, it must create real pathways for people of color to shape the new economy, enter the middle class, and contribute to growth and democracy. Our nation is undergoing an unprecedented demographic shift. More than half the babies born in this country are now people of color. Demographers predict that the majority of youth will be people of color by the end of this decade and by 2042 we will be a majority people-of-color nation. The workforce will diversify even faster than the overall population, and as the baby boomer generation enters retirement, it is this cadre of diverse young workers who will take their place.
To build a prosperity economy, leaders in the public and private sector must recognize our demographic moment, embrace diversity as an economic asset, and prepare today's diverse workforce -- and tomorrow's -- for the jobs of the future. Our policy proposals must be grounded in an awareness of the barriers that hold communities of color back, and create specific pathways to greater economic opportunity for workers and entrepreneurs of color.
There are several ways in which a stronger focus on racial and economic inclusion could strengthen a prosperity economics policy agenda.
Take infrastructure, for example. Rebuilding the nation's bridges, roads, transit systems, and other public infrastructure, is essential for our global competitiveness and productivity in the long-term and can create millions of jobs in the short-term. But to get triple bottom-line returns from these investments, policymakers and communities need to ensure they connect vulnerable communities to their regional economies. By choosing projects that maximize job opportunities, targeting jobs and projects to the people and communities who need them most, and creating opportunities for local and minority-owned businesses, communities can achieve equity and growth at the same time. Federal policy can learn from localities like Portland, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and many others, that have implemented "community workforce agreements" on public works projects that include targeted hiring and job training strategies to ensure communities benefit from public spending.
Entrepreneurship is another important policy arena. Because entrepreneurs of color are more likely to hire people of color and locate their firms in communities of color than other firms, their growth leads directly to more local job opportunities. These entrepreneurs are a potent market force with huge untapped potential to drive innovation and growth--between 2002 and 2007, the number of minority-owned businesses grew three times as fast as white-owned businesses. But these entrepreneurs face significant barriers to accessing the capital, information, and training needed to launch and sustain successful enterprises. To maximize inclusive job creation, efforts to foster innovation and business development need to provide supports to help entrepreneurs of color succeed in high-growth areas of the economy and connect to larger-scale market opportunities. Business support organizations like Jumpstart, Inc. in Northeast Ohio (and expanding nationwide) are helping entrepreneurs of color succeed in developing high-growth, high-technology knowledge-economy businesses. Others like the Neighborhood Development Center in St. Paul are helping budding entrepreneurs of color develop business plans and launch enterprises. Federal policy should support these and other programs as a part of its innovation agenda.
And finally: To truly put people with employment barriers on track to move up in the world of work, we need to build a much more coordinated education and workforce development system that provides a pipeline of supports from "cradle to career." Comprehensive community-based child development approaches like the Harlem Children's Zone need to become the rule rather than the exception, and federal policy needs to support career technical high schools that prepare underserved youth for college and careers in high-growth industry sectors with good wages, such as Chicago's Austin Polytechnical Academy. Policymakers must also put an end to the "cradle to prison" pipeline that locks up one in every twelve black men and one in every 36 Latino men (compared to one in 87 white men). Necessary steps include reforming the criminal and juvenile justice systems (including approaches to school discipline), removing the legal barriers that prevent ex-offenders from gaining access to housing, services, and employment, and providing targeted training and employment supports to formerly incarcerated individuals.
Prosperity Economics provides an excellent policy platform for building an equitable and sustainable economy that matches America's hopes and aspirations. Across the country, communities have developed programs and policies to connect communities of color to economic opportunities. The nation is now undergoing an unprecedented demographic transition, and it is time for policymakers to incorporate these solutions into national policy.
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It is my opinion that astute businessmen and businesswomen do well when they accept and embrace this truth. To further make this point clear I offer the cutting-edge research of Scott E. Page author of the text, "The Difference, How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups". Page proves "that Diversity yields superior outcomes and he reveals how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Moving beyond the politics that often clouds standard debates about diversity, Page explains why difference beats out homogeneity".
"The Difference is about how we think in groups...and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. In his research Page seeks to answer, "Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone?"
US Justice Department lawsuit filed against New York fire department. In 2009 Federal Judge Garaufis ruled the city failed to show that the exams "actually tested the abilities it intended to test."
A more inclusive workforce creates a strength of ideas that is lacking when diversity is absent or "affirmative-actioned i.e. window dressed" in the form of employing persons of color or women irrespective of qualifications (comprehensive not solely test scores) just to "satsify" the law.
You don't buy into the concept that you are your brother's keeper? Cool - I don't really care. This is a perfect example of how a rising tide DOES lift all boats - our nation's economy and long term outlook will optimally improve if addressed in the manner the authors and Ms. Glover Blackwell propose.
To further make this point clear I offer the cutting-edge research of Scott E. Page author of the text, "The Difference, How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups". Page proves "that Diversity yields superior outcomes and he reveals how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Moving beyond the politics that often clouds standard debates about diversity, Page explains why difference beats out homogeneity".
"The Difference is about how we think in groups...and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. In his research Page seeks to answer, "Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone?"
A more inclusive workforce creates a strength of ideas that is lacking when diversity is absent or "affirmative-actioned i.e. window dressed" in the form of employing persons of color or women irrespective of comprehensive qualifications with the sole purpose of "satsifying" the law.
Sadly there are many examples of the dearth of diversity in the American workfore. One example is United States v. City of New York, 683 F. Supp. 2d 225, 273 (E.D.N.Y. 2010).
Once again look at what they do and not what they say.
This is a New America Foundation knock off, same old stuff, more DEBT and Spending.
FY 2013 is the DEBT BOMB, whoever gets elected will have to reduce Government dramatically.
Promises, Promises, Promises..................no Tax Revenue to pay for them !
Just like the case in which, if taxes are cut and the government does not get the revenue, it is available to be pledged to the banks and capitalized on the debt.
So the planning process passes to the banks, and they claim that they are the brains of society. They say, there is no alternative. But they are not the brain; they are something alien to industrial capitalism. This is what the Saint-Simon and his followers discussed in the 19th century. It was discussed in every country. The financial strategy now is to prevent people from studying what this body of classical economics was. It sought to free society from interest. Today’s banks are playing upon anxiety and fear, like a high-pressure salesman threatening to bring on a collapse if industrial economies try to protect themselves. They say: “You have to make up your decision in a hurry, if you don’t do this, you are going to lose your money, you are going to lose this opportunity.” They try to make it appear that this not only is the only alternative, but that it will make you rich.
http://michael-hudson.com/2012/08/fireside-on-the-great-theft/
Why? Don't we have enough roads to transport all the goods imported from China, Japan, Germany, etc. that we consume, now that we don't make many consumer goods ourselves (or to export) anymore?
If we want ROI from infrastructure investment it has to be TRANSFORMATIVE infrastructure - like more efficient energy, above all, which will reduce the cost of everything and increase our competitiveness. For example, trading in a decent used 35mph car for a brand new 40mph car is not a great investment - trading in a decent used 35mph car for a decent used 60mph car IS a great investment. Spend less, get more.
Same thing for education: we need TRANSFORMATION not just reform. We have a cookie-cutter system that aims for conformity, not the creativity and innovation that will drive future growth. Yes, , our nation desperately needs new strategies - REALLY new ones, not just juiced-up versions of assorted old ones. For that to come about, they will have to work from the bottom up, because the federal bureaucracy is too cumbersome and entrenched in the status quo to make any radical changes.