The Washington Center for Equitable Growth held a launch event for our book of essays on how to boost U.S. wages in the new economy on January 14, 2021, from 2:30 p.m. – 4 p.m. EST.
The essays—developed in partnership with the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley and with funding from the Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust—guide policymakers on how to deliver broadly shared economic prosperity by making wages a key outcome to structural economic policy at the federal and state levels.
The event included a series of fireside chats to discuss how to reimagine the U.S. economy so that workers are able to share in the value they create, highlighting policy priorities and proposals to balance power and foster an equitable economy. The event began with an introductory keynote from Congressman Bobby Scott, Chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, about labor policy in the new Congress.
Speakers included:
Congressman Bobby Scott, Chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor, U.S. House of Representatives (Keynote)
Ioana Marinescu,Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, on addressing market concentration and employers’ ability to undercut wages.
Jesse Rothstein,Professor of Public Policy and Economics, University of California, Berkeley, and Faculty Director, California Policy Lab, on supporting policies to broadly share economic risks.
Andria Smythe, Assistant Professor of Economics, Howard University, on making higher education more accessible.
Equitable Growth 2021: People and Research Advancing Economic Evidence brought together Washington Center for Equitable Growth grantees and stakeholders to showcase cutting-edge research from our grantees on how economic inequality affects economic growth and stability. Early and mid-career, as well as established, scholars had a chance to give and receive feedback on their research, as well as discuss the relevance of that research in an evidence-backed economic agenda in 2021 and beyond.
Why you should have attended?
Research matters—perhaps now more than ever. Good policies begin with rigorous research such as the kind presented by our grantees at Equitable Growth 2021. Ongoing transformative shifts in economic thinking have brought to light the telling effects of inequality on growth in the United States, and the coronavirus recession has further laid bare structural inequality and racial inequities woven into the U.S. economy. The research presented, and the scholars who produced it, has the power to shape both new bodies of research and the U.S. economic policy agenda in 2021 and beyond.
Who attended?
Equitable Growth grantees, Steering Committee and Research Advisory Board members. Paper sessions were open to philanthropic partners and journalists, and the conference opened and closed with public events.
What was on the agenda?
From paper sessions to trainings, fireside chats, keynotes, and salon conversations, Equitable Growth 2021 focused on the people and research advancing economic evidence right now.
View the opening fireside chat and the keynote:
Equitable Growth 2021 – Welcome and Fireside Chat
Keynote with U.S. Representative Ro Khanna
Paper and panel sessions covered throughout are outlined below, with video for those sessions that were on the record:
New Insights into the Role of the Social Safety Net in Economic Stability and Individual Well-being
Labor Market Regulations and the Outcomes of Vulnerable Workers
Measurement and Dimensions of Inequality
Firms and Wage Inequality
Competition and Market Structure
Markets, Innovation, and Equitable Growth
Labor Market Institutions and Outcomes
Work and Wages
Sessions that were not on the record included:
Policies to Address the Impact of Race and Socioeconomic Status on Economic Outcomes
The Role of Unemployment Insurance in Supporting Workers and the Economy
Climate Change and Environmental Harm
Well-Being and Time at Work
Concentration and Labor Markets
In addition to opportunities to learn about cutting-edge research, grantees also had an exclusive opportunity to learn from peers and experts on the following topics during professional trainings and informal salons:
Navigating the Academic Job Market
Accessing Administrative Data
Working With the Media
How to Mentor Graduate Students and Early Career Professionals
An emerging bipartisan consensus warns that antitrust enforcement has failed to protect the competitiveness of the U.S. economy, as underscored by the October 2020 House Judiciary Committee’s report, “Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets.” Federal antitrust enforcers in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission have been criticized for being too lax, and courts have been criticized for incorrectly limiting the reach of the antitrust laws. Equitable Growth’s transition report is the work of a committee of academics, legal experts, and former government officials who assessed the antitrust landscape and provided their recommendations for the next administration’s antitrust enforcement priorities to correct these failures.
This webinar consisted of a series of panels discussing these recommendations for improving antitrust enforcement. The panels covered a broad range of issues, from political leadership at the agencies to case selection and the need for legislation. This conference featured the following authors of the transition report and commentators:
The public health crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing economic recession are unprecedented in speed and severity. Decades of failed economic policies, based on ideology instead of evidence, and a blind adherence to the idea that markets can solve every problem made our economy and our society especially vulnerable. Today’s crises have exposed and exacerbated many systemic inequalities in our society, and the evidence suggests the economic downturn will be especially harmful to the long-term economic mobility and wealth accumulation of Black and Latinx families.
To have any chance of emerging on a stronger footing as a nation with less economic inequality and more sustainable economic growth, policymakers need to enact a robust set of public policies that ensure high-end inequality is contained, counterweights to concentrated power are built, and economic security for all is achieved now and going forward.
To aid discussion of the bold policy ideas necessary to achieve these goals, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth hosted a webinar with top economic experts on Thursday, June 25 between 2:00 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. ET. The event, titled Vision 2020: Focusing on economic recovery and structural change, tackled how current finance, banking, and labor laws and institutions exacerbate economic and racial inequality, and what we can do to set the stage for strong, stable, and broad-based economic growth now and into the future.
The webinar was a continuation of Equitable Growth’s Vision 2020 project, an effort to ensure the latest research informs critical election-year economic policy debates, and followed the release of the book Vision 2020: Evidence for a Strong Economy and the 2019 conference of the same name. The book is a compilation of 21 essays proposing evidence-backed, concrete, and at-scale policy ideas to reduce economic and racial inequality and boost shared prosperity. Four of the books’ authors were featured at the webinar. For summaries of those highly relevant essays, click here.
The webinar included two panels:
Democratizing the Economy (2:00-2:40p.m. ET): How financial institutions and the Federal Reserve have exacerbated inequality and why we need new institutions, or drastically reformed ones, to ensure broadly shared growth.
Heather Boushey (moderator), Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Building Power for Workers and Families (2:40-3:30p.m. ET): How enhanced collective bargaining rights, public benefit and social insurance programs, anti-discrimination protections, and other power-building policies can help Black, Latinx, and other workers emerge stronger from this crisis.
David Mitchell (moderator), Washington Center for Equitable Growth
The Washington Center for Equitable Growth hosted a virtual lecture on Wednesday, May 13 led by Claudia Sahm, director of macroeconomic policy at Equitable Growth, who discussed promising research ideas that support a robust response to fight the coronavirus recession, as well as longer-term efforts to ensure a more resilient U.S. economy in the years to come. Sahm built upon evidence in Recession Ready, with a focus on policies that stabilize the economy through supporting families, small businesses, and communities. Her presentation was followed by a conversation with Heather Boushey, president & CEO of Equitable Growth, on various themes, including the role of fiscal and monetary policy to protect workers and their families, as well as the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion within the field of macroeconomics.
This event was part of a new series that seeks a deeper understanding of cutting-edge research and analysis on economic inequality and growth. Our lectures will bring together leading scholars to explore how new research is shifting important conversations in academia and economic policy.
Heather Boushey is the president & CEO and co-founder of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, which was launched in 2013. She is one of the nation’s most influential voices on economic policy and a leading economist who focuses on the intersection between economic inequality, growth, and public policy. Her latest book, Unbound: How Economic Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It (Harvard University Press), which was called “outstanding” and “piercing” by reviewers, was on the Financial Times list of best economics books of 2019. She is also the author of Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict and co-edited a volume of 22 essays about how to integrate inequality into economic thinking, titled After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality. The New York Times has called Boushey one of the “most vibrant voices in the field,” and Politico twice named her one of the top 50 “thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics.” Boushey writes regularly for popular media, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Democracy, and she makes frequent television appearances on Bloomberg, MSNBC, CNBC, and PBS. She previously served as chief economist for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential transition team and as an economist for the Center for American Progress, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and the Economic Policy Institute. She sits on the board of the Opportunity Institute and is an associate editor of Feminist Economics and a senior fellow at the Schwartz Center for Economic and Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research.
Claudia Sahm is the director of macroeconomic policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. She has policy and research expertise on consumer spending, fiscal stimulus, and the financial well-being of households. She is the author of the “Sahm Rule,” a reliable early signal of recessions that she developed as a way to automatically trigger stimulus payments to individuals in a recession. Previously, Sahm was a section chief in the Division of Consumer and Community Affairs at the Federal Reserve Board, where she oversaw the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking. Before that, she worked for 10 years in the Division of Research and Statistics on the staff’s macroeconomic forecast. She was a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in 2015–2016. Sahm holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan (2007) and a B.A. in economics, political science, and German from Denison University (1998).
The Washington Center for Equitable Growth announced its new book, Vision 2020: Evidence for a Stronger Economy, at a breakfast event on February 18, 2020. Authored by leading scholars across the country, this compilation of 21 essays highlights a range of new ideas and the research behind them.
We compiled Vision 2020 so the latest research informs critical election-year economic policy debates and to inspire decisionmakers to take action to address inequality’s subversive effect on broadly shared and sustainable economic growth.
Building on many of the key themes and ideas from Equitable Growth’s Vision 2020 conference, this package of policy proposals tackles many of the ways that the increasing concentration of economic resources translates into political and social power.
Panelists:
Heather Boushey (moderator)
President and CEO of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Author of Vision 2020 essay “New measurement for a new economy”
Robynn Cox
Assistant professor of social work at the University of Southern California
Author of Vision 2020 essay “Overcoming social exclusion: Addressing race and criminal justice policy in the United States”
Susan Lambert
Professor of social service and administration at the University of Chicago
Author of Vision 2020 essay “Fair work schedules for the U.S. economy and society: What’s reasonable, feasible, and effective”
Fiona Scott Morton
Professor of economics at Yale University
Author of Vision 2020 essay “Reforming U.S. antitrust enforcement and competition policy”
This event was organized as a widely attended event/gathering under the federal ethics rules. If you have any questions, please contact events@equitablegrowth.org.
Below is the full list of the book’s authors and topics, listed by section:
The reception was a chance to connect with other scholars, Equitable Growth staff, and our academic advisors to learn more about our research, grantmaking, academic programming, and policy engagement. The reception included complimentary hors d’oeuvres and drinks.
Equitable Growth was pleased to welcome Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, who gave brief remarks about the efforts of Economics for Inclusive Prosperity (EfIP).
Vision 2020 brought together leading voices from the policymaking, academic, and advocacy communities to highlight the most pressing economic issues facing Americans today. The daylong conference explored recent transformative shifts in economic thinking that demonstrate how inequality obstructs, subverts, and distorts broadly shared economic growth and what we can do to fix it. The past four decades of economic policy delivered slow growth, record-high income and wealth inequality, and social immobility. At Vision 2020, you heard from some of the most cutting-edge thinkers, researchers, and, dare we say, visionaries on how to reverse these trends and instead advance strong, stable, and broad-based economic growth.
Who attended?
Federal, state, and local policymakers and their staff; leaders from think tanks and advocacy organizations; journalists who cover economic issues.
What was on the agenda?
From panel discussions, fireside chats, keynotes, and storytelling sessions, Vision 2020 focused on what research and history can tell us about how to make the U.S. economy work for everyone, not just those at the top.
9:00 a.m. – 9:45 a.m.
Breakfast and Registration
9:45 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.
Introduction Casey Schoeneberger, Washington Center for Equitable Growth Opening Remarks Heather Boushey, Washington Center for Equitable Growth
10:00 a.m. – 10:45 a.m.
Panel: Toward a New Economy Heather Boushey, Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Dania Francis, University of Massachusetts Boston
Sarah Bloom Raskin, Duke University
Moderator: Jeanna Smialek, The New York Times
11:30 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.
Panel: The Front Line of Structural Change Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, Global Policy Solutions
Bradley Hardy, American University
Cecilia Muñoz, New America
Tom Perriello, Open Society Foundations
Moderator: Anmol Chaddha, Institute for the Future
1:00 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.
Introduction David Mitchell, Washington Center for Equitable Growth Featured speaker:Mary Kay Henry, Service Employees International Union Fighting Power with Power: Unions for All
1:30 p.m. – 2:15 p.m.
Panel: A Conversation about Structural Racism in the Economy Byron Auguste, Opportunity@Work
Camille Busette, The Brookings Institution
Mónica García-Pérez, St. Cloud State University
Moderator: Gillian White, The Atlantic
3:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Fireside Chat: The Rise of Monopsony Power in the Labor Market Arindrajit Dube, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Columbia University
Moderator: Kate Bahn, Washington Center for Equitable Growth
On September 18, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth hosted an installment of our Research on Tap conversation series—a space for drinks, dialogue, and debate—to celebrate the release of Equitable Growth President and CEO Heather Boushey’s book, Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It. Boushey was joined by professors Sandra Black (Columbia University) and Atif Mian (Princeton University) and Angela Hanks (Groundwork Collaborative) for a conversation moderated by Binyamin Appelbaum (The New York Times) about how inequality obstructs, subverts, and distorts our economy and how policymakers can promote economic growth that is strong, stable, and broadly shared.
Featuring:
Sandra Black,Professor of economics and international and public affairs, Columbia University and Former Member, Council of Economic Advisers Heather Boushey,President and CEO, Washington Center for Equitable Growth Angela Hanks,Deputy executive director of Groundwork Collaborative Atif Mian,Professor of economics, public policy, and finance, Princeton University Binyamin Appelbaum (moderator), Editorial Board Member, The New York Times
Discussion highlighted the new consensus emerging in academia, which argues reducing inequality is not only fair but also key to delivering broadly shared economic growth and stability. Discussion points included:
Do we have to choose between equality and prosperity?
What have we learned about the impact of inequality on economic growth?
What does an economy that delivers strong, stable, and broadly shared growth look like, and what can policymakers do to get us there?
What does equitable economic growth mean for the future?
On July 9, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth hosted a conversation on wage gaps for women and people of color, and what we can do about it.
Wage stagnation and falling economic mobility are endemic economic problems in the United States. Their effects fall most severely on communities of color and women, who also face large wage gaps compared with white men. Key to solving wage stagnation and overall income inequality is a recognition that deeply ingrained structural forces keep many Americans from sharing in economic prosperity. This event will feature research and discussion from policy experts on the wage gaps in U.S. society.
Featured: Heather Boushey, Executive Director, Washington Center for Equitable Growth (Welcome Remarks) Alma Adams, Congresswoman, North Carolina’s 12th District, Chairwoman, Workforce Protections Subcommittee (Keynote)
Discussants: Kate Bahn, Director of Labor Market Policy and Economist, Washington Center for Equitable Growth Darrick Hamilton, Executive Director, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity; Associate Professor of Economics and Urban Policy, Ohio State University Marlene Kim, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Boston Maya Raghu, Director of Workplace Equality and Senior Counsel, National Women’s Law Center Carmen Rojas, Co-Founder and CEO, The Workers’ Lab
The conversation examined intersectional wage gaps in the United States for workers of different genders, races, ethnicities, and backgrounds, and covered the following topics:
What are the specific wage gaps experienced by different identity groups, and why is it important to look at them through an intersectional lens?
Why has wage inequality among workers based on their identity been so persistent? How are historically disadvantaged groups of workers held back from sharing in the gains of economic growth?
Are unions equipped to promote inclusive wage increases and strengthen worker bargaining power? What other models of worker collective action are promising for boosting wages for historically disadvantaged groups?
What are appropriate policy responses to protect workers from harmful effects of workplace fissuring and ensure that pathways to the middle class remain accessible in the “future of work”?
