Margaret Levi
We are in a community of fate that COVID-19 has created. Our destinies are now clearly entwined as we join together to fight this virus and protect ourselves and our societies. Such a community of fate can cut across polarization and become the basis of mobilization for the policies we need to promote flourishing.
Flourishing
Eric D. Beinhocker
We manage what we measure, and for too long, policymakers have been measuring the wrong things when it comes to assessing what is a good or healthy economy.
Flourishing
Kim Stanley Robinson
The spring of 2020 is suggestive of how much, and how quickly, we can change. It’s like a bell ringing to start a race. Off we go—into a new time.
Flourishing
Diane Coyle
Many countries provide support for families, including generous parental leave and subsidized day care, to ensure that the burden of unpaid work does not fall largely on women. A broader measure of progress could reshape the way we choose to organize society by validating the valuable work that counts for little, or nothing, in our current system.
Flourishing
Nathan Schneider
We will need to remember older forms of community-building, which translate enthusiasm into robust organization.
Flourishing
The New York Times Editorial Board
The United States does not guarantee the availability of affordable housing to its citizens, as do most developed nations. It does not guarantee reliable access to health care, as does virtually every other developed nation.
Flourishing
Heather Boushey
We now see clearly how affordable child care and universal preschool are core to having a strong economy, both for how they make work possible for parents as well as their role in helping children to thrive.
Flourishing
Chris Benner, Manuel Pastor
In the long term, not just in the current emergency, mutuality matters—not only morally but economically. We need a new solidarity economics.
Flourishing
Deva Woodly
Lived-experience matters and the reality of our experiences must be centered in our politics. That means it matters in a way that cannot be dismissed or set aside, when whole populations are hurting from harms inflicted by the ways we have structured society to systematically disadvantage some while systematically advantaging others.
Flourishing
Samuel Bowles
It's time that we dropped the idea that prices can do the work of morals, or that laws can do the job when prices fail. The greatest challenges now facing humanity—including epidemics, climate change, how best to organize the knowledge- and care-based economy—these all arise from interactions that cannot adequately be governed simply by channeling self-interested citizens to do the right thing by means of incentives or sanctions, whether these are provided by private contract or by government fiat.
Flourishing
Wendy Carlin, with contributions by Samuel Bowles
If we embrace the intrusion of moral language into our daily conversations, it will enrich our economic vernacular and aid both private and public decision-making.
Flourishing
Jeremy Adelman
Rather than try to restore the old world, this is a good time to reinvent it.
Flourishing
Lisa Herzog
For too long we have considered work in terms of profit and not in terms of society. We must look again at what we value and why.
Labor
Sharon Block, Suzanne Kahn, Brishen Rogers, Benjamin I. Sachs
Congress should create bodies that bring workers and employers together to meet and confer on recommendations or negotiate binding minimum standards.
Labor
Sarita Gupta, Rachel Korberg
It shouldn’t take a pandemic to make us realize how indispensable low-wage workers are. Fighting coronavirus is a collective act—and so is fighting the inequality that holds millions of people back from their full potential. The costs of both should be shared by all of us.
Labor
Angela Glover Blackwell, Darrick Hamilton
To ensure an inclusive recovery and a more resilient future, Congress needs to enact a federal job guarantee: a public option for a job with living wages and full benefits to work on projects that meet long-neglected community needs.
Labor
John Irons
Congress’s steps to boost unemployment insurance in response to COVID-19 should be expanded and made permanent.
Labor
William H. Janeway
Reducing inequality will increase economic growth and productivity. Most immediately, the US needs more progressive schedules of income and capital gains taxes, as well as stronger tax enforcement. It also needs innovations in labor-market regulation, from raising the minimum wage to ensuring a greater place for collective bargaining, including in the “gig economy.”
Labor
Crystal Yan, Vivian Graubard, Elizabeth Garlow, and Andrew Stettner
Redesign our unemployement insurance systems to be more user friendly, accessible, and able to scale as needs increase.
Labor
Colin Mayer
The contention for re-imagining the corporation is that business should be solving problems: solving problems in a profitable, commercial fashion and not profiting from producing problems for us or the planet. Now that doesn’t obviate in any way the need for regulation but it implies that regulation, and competition policy, and the operation of markets will operate more effectively.
Corporations
Roy Bahat
Profiting during a crisis is okay. Profiting from a crisis is not.
Corporations
Isabelle Ferreras, Julie Battilana, Dominique Méda, et al.
Our governments must make their aid to firms conditional on certain changes to their behaviors.
Corporations
Reed Hundt
Just as Joe Biden has proposed for his step one in his new presidency, we have to spend what it takes to end the pandemic and to take care of the afflicted. This means new money for public health care measures but also money for the unemployed, for children, and other pressing human needs. The second step is to build back better the three major infrastructure platforms that need huge investment: transportation, clean power, and broadband for 100% of the country so that everyone can participate in tele-education and telehealth—period. Now is the time to go big to solve problems long, sadly, left unresolved.
Corporations
Nathan Schneider
Enable employees to co-own their workplaces: a direct public offering enables businesses to sell shares to their customers and local community members who believe in them; it is now possible to do this kind of “equity crowdfunding” on a national scale.
Corporations
Eric D. Beinhocker
There needs to be a reset of our social contract, particularly with our largest corporations, to make it explicit that if governments are going to socialize their risks, corporations have to play their part too.
Corporations
Heather Boushey, Somin Park
We must recognize that markets cannot perform the work of government; address fragilities in our markets themselves; keep income flowing to all the unemployed workers and small businesses now and in future crises; ensure those who are still employed can stay employed; and produce headline economic statistics that represent the well-being of all Americans.
Corporations
Margaret O'Mara
The regulatory and antitrust standards developed for the industrial age are not enough to protect competition and consumer rights in the digital age.
Technology
Anne-Marie Slaughter
We need to invest in more locally based, customized goods and services and supply chains, which are less vulnerable to threats like cyberattacks, natural disasters and disease (not to mention automation).
Technology
John Ahlquist, Margaret Levi
Jurisdictions need to start working on ways to levy a “data tax” on platform and gig economy firms.
Technology
Federica Carugati
We should create external auditing bodies, modeled on the Athenian example of citizen councils, to evaluate the societal impact of algorithm-based decisions.
Technology
Marion Fourcade, Henry Farrell
As we try to protect democracy from coronavirus, we must see technology as a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
Technology
Zia Khan
We need to reimagine an entire new rule-making system that guides AI towards society’s goals instead of our current de facto rule-making system that guides AI towards the market’s goals.
Technology
Team Joe Kennedy
Create a Coding Corps that provides training to give workers from underrepresented groups the skills they need to enter the technology sector.
Technology
Mary L. Gray
Tech needs to prioritize more than efficiency. It must be pressed to think about and build for racial equity, too.
Technology
K. Sabeel Rahman, Dorian T. Warren
This moment calls for a bottom-up deconstruction of our oligarchic racial and gender caste system and a reconstruction of a just and equitable system. Anything less is unacceptable.
Equity
Xavier de Souza Briggs
In a post-COVID economy, we need robust and modernized unemployment insurance that covers more workers. We need federally mandated paid sick days and paid family medical leave. We need to significantly raise the minimum wage and move to one fair wage, meaning: it’s time, at last, to eliminate the sub-minimum tipped wage which dates back to slavery. We need universal family care including affordable, high-quality childcare that actually supports working families in a modern economy. We need a more versatile toolbox for government assistance to business, and especially disadvantaged and underserved, small businesses. These things are key to race and gender equity to serving persons with disabilities to bringing along all parts of the country, including regions that are lagging behind. And finally, we need a stronger set of operating principles for companies that are responsive to the needs of all their stakeholders, and especially workers.
Equity
Danielle Allen
I have become a supporter of mandatory universal voting, the idea that voting should be treated like jury duty...Universal suffrage should be one of our core principles. Voting should be a duty—a national holiday even.
Equity
Rajiv Sethi, Divya Siddarth, Nia Johnson, Brandon Terry, Julie Seager, Mary Travis Bassett, Meredith Rosenthal
Decarceration should be a priority. This is particularly true in the case of ICE detention facilities, where significant scale-down, or, ideally, dissolution, is required.
Equity
K. Sabeel Rahman
Every policy fight is about more than its issues —it's an opportunity to shift power to Black and brown communities and working families.
Equity
William A. Darity Jr., A. Kirsten Mullen
The racial disparities of coronavirus point yet again to the need for reparations. It is as urgent a time as ever to eliminate the racial wealth gulf and bring the case for black reparations back to center stage. The immediate response to the economic crisis produced by the pandemic demonstrates the federal government can fund reparations. The debt finally can and must be paid.
Equity
Nick Hanauer
I would index the minimum wage to the maximum wage, which is to say, I would index the minimum wage to the after-tax income of the top 1%. And that's a really nifty way of tying the fortunes of the entire country together.
Equity
Alondra Nelson
Racial inequality persists because we allow it to, because of a lack of both moral clarity and political will. And any solution will require a real transformation of how we value each other as human beings as much as a change in policy.
Equity
Robb Willer, Jan Voelkel
There is nothing that inherently binds valuing family, security and the American dream to conservative economic policies. Perhaps these values are served just as well—or even better—by progressive economic policies. And if so, Democrats should do more to stress that fact, emphasizing more strongly how their policies can address the concerns of a wider range of Americans.
Equity
Craig Calhoun
We could build public health capacity in recognition that COVID will not be the last threat. We could renew local community. We could renew democracy itself in struggle for a better society. We may even advance the capacity to deal with climate change. I suspect the pandemic has not really obscured that threat. It has made more people realize more viscerally what a serious crisis can mean for them, for the people they care about, and for the world.
Climate
Noah S. Diffenbaugh, Christopher B. Field, Eric A. Appel, et al.
Efforts to support economic recovery could be directed towards electrification of transportation, along with green jobs that rebuild public transit, housing and critical infrastructure in an environmentally sensitive way.
Climate
Olivier Bouin, Marie-Laure Djelic, Marc Fleurbaey, Ravi Kanbur, Elisa Reis
International cooperation across states on equity (and particularly on corporate tax avoidance and mitigating tax competition), on freedom (in limiting the interference of wealth in democratic elections), and on sustainability (in implementing a global carbon tax and associated compensation transfers) is essential if social progress is not to fall into the canyons that lie ahead.
Climate
Rebecca Henderson
We need to invest in resilience: the idea that sometimes it's important to invest now because later we'll be really glad we did. This emergency makes clear that the stability of the entire community is critical to the success of business and that we cannot deal with problems on this scale without a strong, effective federal government. I'm very hopeful that these insights will translate into business pressure for coherent climate policy in ways that could be extremely helpful.
Climate
William H. Janeway
There is a growing chorus calling for a response to climate change that matches the ambition and scale of the mobilization for World War II. Yet the “how” of a mobilization to combat climate change will be as important as the “what." Without a restoration of state intervention on the demand side to support innovation, the US will have no chance to lead the world in responding to climate change.
Climate
Michael Brownstein
A visionary Green New Deal is a way to rekindle American pride, to present a vision of who we want to be.
Climate
Clayborne Carson
I think that this period we’re going through right now is a trauma for a generation and we’ll see over the next decade how deeply felt that trauma is. And a lot of it depends on whether we really recover from the all the shocks of the past year.
Recovery
Paul Collier
We learn not just from accumulating and analyzing codifiable knowledge—the domain of the expert. We learn by doing, or by trying to do things that we can’t do and that force us to experiment.
Recovery
Danielle Allen, Sharon Block, Joshua Cohen, Peter Eckersley, M Eifler, Lawrence Gostin, Darshan Goux, Dakota Gruener, Vi Hart, Zoë Hitzig, Julius Krein, John Langford, Ted Nordhaus, Meredith Rosenthal, Rajiv Sethi, Divya Siddarth, Joshua Simons, Ganesh Sitaraman, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Allison Stanger, Alex Tabarrok, Lila A. Tretikov, Glen Weyl
We need a National Infectious Disease Forecasting Center and an expanded U.S. Public Health Service Corps.
Recovery
Camille Landais, Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman
Create a progressive, time-limited, European-wide progressive wealth tax assessed on the net worth of the top 1% richest individuals. The revenues would be dedicated to the repayment of Eurobond issued during the COVID crisis or to the funding of a common rescue fund.
Recovery
Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman
Introduce a Covidcare for All program. This federal program would guarantee access to COVID-19 care at no cost to all U.S. residents—no matter their employment status, age or immigration status.
Recovery
Tim Besley, Andrés Velasco
The crisis has had one healthy byproduct: restoring a modicum of respect toward technical expertise. Making distributional choices is the job of politics, but that is a job best done taking judicious advantage of what science and expert analysis have to offer.
Recovery
Colleen Barry, Hahrie Han, Beth McGinty
There is an urgent need to effectively communicate public health evidence to Americans who distrust science.
Recovery
Glen Weyl
There are few times in history when we get these shocking generation-defining demonstrations of whether a social system works or it doesn’t. And COVID is one of those.
Recovery
Hilary Cottam
History shows that moments of disruption, painful as they are, provide the context in which we can create. We know what is needed, we know the core principles and we know we cannot wait.
Recovery