An economic agenda for a divided nation, with Isabel Sawhill

The Vital Center

Many Americans whose beliefs are somewhere in the great political middle are tired of the false dichotomies of left and right. What would a radical centrist agenda — a purple-state alternative to the ideologies forced upon populations in deep-red and deep-blue states — look like? Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, took on this assignment with her 2018 book The Forgotten Americans: An Economic Agenda for a Divided Nation. Her agenda includes "policies that are better aligned with American values and responsive to people's actual day-to-day needs," with a focus on "the value of work and the importance of jobs and wages." She attempts to thread the divide between a Democratic Party that has "dozens of good policy ideas but a values framework that is sometimes out of step with the country's" and a Republican Party that emphasizes widely shared values (such as personal responsibility) but has abandoned its former commitment to pragmatism and limited but effective government. In this podcast conversation, Isabel Sawhill discusses her experiences in "growing up in a time when there weren't a lot of opportunities for women," and how she came to work on policy with Brookings and other think tanks as well as in government; during the Clinton administration, she served as an associate director at the Office of Management and Budget, responsible for the oversight of nearly all of the federal government's social programs. She describes her relations with eminent policy-world figures such as Alice Rivlin and Richard Reeves, with whom she co-authored the 2020 study A New Contract with the Middle Class. She also talks about her work with Bush White House veteran Ron Haskins to identify the key correlates of upward mobility, which they famously popularized as "the success sequence," in which about three-quarters of Americans reach the middle class provided that they: 1. Graduate from high school; 2. Maintain a full-time job or have a partner who does; and 3. Have children (if they choose to become parents) after age 21 and while married or in a committed partnership. She analyzes the factors that have made many Americans feel "left behind" and discouraged about the country's future. According to Sawhill, possible policy remedies include an expansion of vocational education, opportunities for workers adversely impacted by new developments in technology and trade to retrain or relocate, a social insurance system focused on lifelong education and family care in addition to retirement, and ways to repair the culture through national service. She also discusses her recent analysis of emerging threats to democracy and her reasons for remaining optimistic about the fate of the American experiment.