Vision 2020 Webinar: Focusing on Economic Recovery and Structural Change

When: June 25, 2020 2:00PM - 3:30PM

Where: Event was virtual and not held in person The Washington Center for Equitable Growth, 15th Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USA

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
- Mehrsa Baradaran, University of California, Irvine
- Emma Coleman Jordan, Georgetown University
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
- Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Columbia University
- Taryn Morrissey, American University
- Naomi Zewde, City University of New York