Can We Talk about Solutions?

Be part of the conversation driving economic policy.

Heather McGhee ’97 argues from a national pulpit for an authentic conversation about shaping economic policy. She is talking about policy that will yield deep, comprehensive economic growth and strengthen every sector of the population. Heather urges everyone to move past ideological standoffs and to face the fact that underlying policy does affect who the winners and losers are, over time. Determination and hard work alone aren’t sufficient. She argues that the exponential expansion of lobbyists, and the dollars they contribute, means that most of us are not part of the crucial conversations, and that we need to be.

Heather is vice president for policy and outreach of Demos. Demos defines itself as “a non-partisan public policy center,” that “combines research, policy and advocacy to influence public debate and to catalyze change.” Demos is the Greek word for the people of a nation and the root of the word “democracy”; the organization works on issues of political and economic equality.

After Milton, Heather earned a B.A. in American studies from Yale University and a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. She began working on economic policy during summer internships while at Milton. She has worked her way up from an entry-level position at Demos in 2002 to vice president of the organization today.

Heather’s writing on economic matters has appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, among other media outlets. She co-authored a chapter on retirement insecurity in the book Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide in America and Its Poisonous Consequences (New Press, 2005). She is a frequent guest on cable news shows across the political spectrum, from MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and PBS’ Bill Moyers to Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly.

Heather called her visit to campus as the 2012 Martin Luther King Day Speaker “the highlight of [her] career.” She shared her vision with students, particularly the urgent need for their generation, the Millennials, to address economic inequality.

“The full name of the march where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech was the ‘March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.’ Jobs, even before freedom,” she reminded students. “Today, Dr. King would be calling our generation to action because economic inequality and insecurity has risen sharply during our lifetimes to the point that we are the first in American history poised to be worse-off economically than the previous one.”

Highlighted by the following excerpts, Heather frames her case with key perspectives, her analysis of the history of U.S. economic policy, and the impact of our growing diversity:

• “The economy is not like the weather; it is not a natural force that people and governments can’t control.
• “[It’s like] a massive, multiplayer game where the most powerful gamers, whether it’s business executives or government officials, are constantly tweaking the rules that make it easier or harder for some players and some teams to score points. And just like in a game, individual talent and determination matter in the economy—of course they do—but the rules of the game guide the outcome.… It often matters most what team you start out on.
• “In Dr. King’s time, the goal of economic policy was full employment and higher wages. Consider Robert Kennedy in 1963: ‘It is the essence of responsibility to put the public good ahead of personal gain.’
• “Fast-forward to 1982, when President Reagan boasted about wanting ‘to see an America in which people can still get rich.’ Leaders and economists in both parties began to believe that the best way for everyone to succeed was if the rules were written to ensure the greatest possible accumulation of wealth at the top and the biggest profits at the biggest corporations. And then money would trickle down to the rest of America.” Drafting volunteers, Heather set up a human graph that allowed the audience to watch how income growth was more evenly shared between 1947 and 1979, and became highly unequal after 1980.
• “A low minimum wage and weak unions became a goal of organized business in the 1970s. The minimum wage has lost nearly half of its purchasing power since its peak in 1968, and fewer than 1 in 10 workers is now in a union. The rules of the economic game were also changed to make it easier for businesses to ship jobs to places with cheaper, more easily exploitable workers, to avoid paying their taxes, and to infl uence our elected leaders.
• “In 1955, corporations contributed nearly 30 percent of the federal taxes collected; today it’s nine percent, and dozens of the most successful U.S. businesses pay their CEOs more every year than they contribute to their country in taxes.
• “The rules didn’t change in ways that would have given more families a leg up—like responding to the premium on education with more college grants, not fewer; or responding to the necessity of both parents working, or the rise of single parents, with financial help for child care; or by providing universal health care, portable pensions, or a more generous unemployment insurance system in the era of easy layoffs and downsizing.
• “How is it that life has gotten harder financially for the vast majority of Americans over the past 40 years, yet we have had so few public solutions?
• “Big-money campaign contributions increased by over 600 percent just since I turned 18, to over $2 billion a year.
• “Business cash and lobbying in Washington honestly drowns out the voices of regular families on a day-to-day basis. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels found that ‘the preferences of people at the bottom third of the income distribution appear to have no apparent impact on the behavior of their elected officials.’ None.
• “Something else happened in our culture. Why did it somehow become publicly acceptable to evade taxes as if companies and people owe nothing to their neighbors or to the country in which they live? Completely okay to assert that any kind of public help—from health care to unemployment insurance—is unfair redistribution from worthy job creators to undeserving freeloaders? To demonize the class of people who in different eras were known as ‘the little guy,’ the little guy you root for?
• “Ironically, America became more diverse after the Civil Rights Movement subsided, taking with it the moral voice calling for solidarity and brotherhood across racial lines.
• “Why does this new diversity affect Americans’ feelings about public solutions to common problems, about economic fairness and taxes and jobs? 16 Milton Magazine “Business cash and lobbying in Washington honestly drowns out the voices of regular families on a day-to-day basis.”
• “This, I believe, is where the increasingly unexamined role of unconscious bias comes in to our public culture in ways that are eroding opportunity for all of us. Since Dr. King’s time, we have had a deep and growing anxiety in this country about who is American. It’s that anxiety that is allowing these more selfish values to take root—even among people who are suffering economically under the new economic rules.
• “Harvard research on implicit bias helps explain how racial anxieties affect our brains. Our brain categorizes people by their physical characteristics—and it finds shortcuts to give attributes to those categories. Most of these shortcuts are happening subconsciously, without our conscious awareness.
• “The problem is that our society has been so hierarchical along these lines—race, gender, age, sexuality—that the shortcuts we are constantly primed to make have unequal consequences.
• “Prejudice and stereotyping [are] normal. That doesn’t make it acceptable, but it does make it understandable and it certainly means we can’t keep pretending it’s not still with us. No other wealthy country tries to create a democracy from such diversity—to assert that we all are supposed to feel like a community. We must see that as part of our exceptionalism; acknowledge the challenges and take a bit of American pride in working at it every day. We must not wish it away under a myth that we can be colorblind.
• “We are the children of Dr. King’s dream because we are the most diverse generation in American history. But fundamentally, we are the children of his dream because we are the generation that is left to fulfill that dream.
• “Fortunately for the future, our generation, having grown up hearing that you’re on your own, has decided that in fact, no, we’re in this together. According to public polling, more than any other generation since the Depression-era generation, we believe in individuals sacrificing for the common good, not just seeking out private gain.
• “That’s why I believe that it will be us, the children of the Dream, who finally achieve a sustainable, fair economy, where everyone, regardless of what zip code or school district they were born into, can meet their basic needs and have a shot at fulfilling their dreams.
• “Although these questions are seldom at the forefront of your lives as Milton students, I don’t want you to forget that they are the great questions of our time. The relative privilege of all of us in this room, compared to the vast majority of Americans, is not a reason to avoid questions of economic inequality, not at all. Our relative privilege is an opportunity, for it gives us power. And what is power but the ability to make change?”

Heather later published a version of her Milton speech in the Huffington Post: “Message to Millennials: We Are the Children of Dr. King’s Dream” and at http://www.demos.org.