Progress is a Long Game

Fixable. We've helped leaders at some of the world's most competitive companies solve all kinds

“of problems. On our show we'll pull back the curtain and give you the type of honest, unfiltered”

advice we usually reserve for top executives. Maybe you have a co-worker with boundary issues. Or you want to know how to inspire and motivate your team. No problem is too big or too small. Give us a call and we'll help you solve the problems you're stuck on. Find fixable wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello and welcome to Optimistic Economy. I'm a economist, Katherine Ann Edwards. I'm editor Robin Rousy. On this show we believe the U.S. economy can be better and we talked about how

to get there one problem in solution at a time. This week on Optimistic Economy we're going to

rerun an episode that we first aired a year ago called Progress is a longer. It is about the defeat

of child labor and we asked our audio engineer Sophie in our video producer Andy what were some of

“their favorite episodes and Sophie picked this one in her words "not because she likes child labor"”

but because it gets at so much of what we're trying to do on the show which is to help Optimists understand that the struggle is long and the progress is possible. Progress is a long game. Progress is a long game. Hello and welcome to Optimistic Economy. I'm Katherine. I'm Robin. I'm this show we believe the U.S. economy can be better and we talk about how to get there one problem in solution at a time. Well we are going to start with a quick announcement. Our show now has an official website

optimisticonemy.com in which you can subscribe to the show when which you can donate to the show. You can donate through our sub-stack. You can donate through by Mia Coffee and we've decided that we'd love money. We'd love to have it to support the production of the show and in fact it would be pretty useful in maintaining the show to have money for it all true. Thank you for your time there. Now we can go straight to RedCon. For our new listeners because I'm sure we're getting them every day.

RedCon stands for retroactive continuity and this is where we talk about things that we actually talk about in her last episode and offer any updates or things that we thought about since that. Katherine what's on your RedCon list this week? So it mines actually from a few episodes back but in the social security episode I said that I was commissioned to write an explainer about social security when I was 22. I was 24. I'm glad to run the record about that. I thought about it

and I you know the four years between college and grad school. I just kind of collapse everything to age 22. Not just for like when did I write this thing about social security like everything that happens happens at age 22 and then I go to grad school and I'm like 30 for like another 15 years. We call that at our house we call that the collapsing 90s like they just tell the scope down. It's later but you know everything was 22 and then it was like a whole bunch of

happen when I was 30 probably about 10 15 years worth of stuff and I'm about to turn another age soon. So that'll be really big deal for me but yeah that was my my redCon. Great great. I was thinking

about paid league paid sick leave which is always a real red is your yours is a real redcon. Yeah it

is a real redcon because I was curious I knew that in California where I live we have paid sick leave and in fact California updated its law and it's pretty remarkable we the update started this year I believe and basically temp workers seasonal workers if you work more than 30 days for any employer you get paid sick leave in California California wasn't the first state to implement this

“Connecticut I believe was but California came on shortly thereafter but anyway 21 states and”

the District of Columbia actually already have paid sick leave for employees in the United States and it's so surprising that that many people could be covered by this already and that there are be resistance at the federal level. It's through their state and then city actions that we have so much good evidence about why paid sick leaves are so beneficial to the economy and to workers. And I put that study up on the show notes the one and so about Seattle. Okay terms and conditions

do you have any TMI fun ones this week? I don't know if this is fun or not but we can cut it in post if it's not. I looked up animal spirits which you know is a term that apparently comes from

John Maynard Keynes. Keynes. Keynes. Oh be your first year grad students say Keynes

I'm not coming from like a place of judgment from a place of experience. This old Hick from Texas doesn't

of his books about that overarching macroeconomics but he basically says that markets are

perfectly mathematical that there is this human element to decisions about how markets move particularly in moments of stress and panic and he calls this animal spirits which I thought was pretty great term. There's a book called Animal Spirits which I would actually really recommend called how human psychology drives the economy and it's fascinating but it's all about essentially making bad decisions like if you were just to lay out like the economic path of

like make it a strict numbers decision and this is how economists build our understanding of the

“economy and people are really like well I picked the wrong thing every time and I think it's also”

taken on a broader meaning of animal spirits of a two-way street of not just how people act in the economy but also how people react to the economy and so I've been using animal spirits interchangeably with vibes lately you have this notion updated for the nomenclature of the day that there's more to the economy than just the data and the numbers and the cold calculating decisions I think he brought it up a lot more for things like panics and how situations get worse

for no economic reason but for psychological reasons right the fundamentals may still be there but people freak out yeah but and the book you're talking about is not by canes it's not by keen mr. keenes um it is by George acrolof in Robert Schiller acrolof has won the Nobel Prize I don't think his Schiller is in the case of the rising index that's Schiller yes that's Schiller and pretty sure it's that's Schiller acrolof has won the Nobel Prize and he's probably one of

few Nobel Prize winning economists who has a more famous economist wife in Janet Yellen oh so he like I've I've heard him give speeches where he's like this Nobel Prize winner and he's like oh yeah nobody knows which one I am because his wife is Janet Yellen he's like I'm I'm kind of the

lagger in the couple which is amazing excellent did you have anything to add on the terms and

conditions front I'm in vibes yeah so today speaking of our tens of listeners and there are more than tens of you we know now because I answered a lot of your email when I answered email I told people I've added your questions your worries your your things you'd like us to talk about

“on his list and this list is I think it's nine pages long of copied text from emails”

but one that kind of stood out to me right now came in two different letters should I read these letters yeah okay so one is from Ben who lives in Richmond Virginia and I wanted to say again I contacted these people they said I could read these he said what political conditions beside broadly's gesture at the great depression existed to pass so much of the social welfare programs that we have today why it was it easy then but so hard now or was it hard and politically

dangerous and the history books just don't cover that way and then Sharon who lives in Washington DC also sent in a question that was similarly about the new deal she says related to this can you talk about the social pressures that contributed to the very wealthy being willing to relinquish control with FDR's new deal I don't see any reason why the wealthy would accept a higher tax rate today it doesn't benefit them and since they seem to hold the keys of power it seems unlikely to

happen however historically it has happened and I would love to hear why so we thought that this would be a good jumping off point for a conversation today and see where it takes us these are great questions thank you so much for writing them in then and Sharon yeah I thought they were two

“and I guess what I'm going to start is I think that we're always living through history but”

there are moments that it feels very acute to us and this is probably one of those moments and at least for me and I think like Ben and Sharon makes you think is there a parallel moment in history and and if so what is it and what do we have to learn from it so I put these to Katherine and I was she said you know it's the long game like this stuff did not happen quickly Robin's got that shirt not an economist I have I have another shirt that says not a historian

right this is coming from the lens of someone who looks at policy in order to understand how to design it and implement it but I am not a historian that's fair so acknowledging that we don't know what we're talking about should we dive right in so when Robin showed me these questions and we were

thinking about what we wanted to talk about my my first thought was social policy is a long game and

both of these questions would be that the new deal for being as formative as we think about it

in our economy in society it was not like the like the high water mark of liberalism if anything it was a compromise and it was not the most radical proposal by far and it was in some ways watered down especially at passage and then it's really it's legacy comes from what was added after the fact it's less of a crucible moment on the front end because there were decades of social fighting in progress and in lawsuits and supreme court cases that were cruel that proceeded

the new deal on that afterwards I mean it was corrected and improved upon for decades after it

“had passed and so we think about this moment which is important but it was not it's not it didn't”

all happen in three years it didn't even all happen in the Great Depression I mean we're talking

about you could probably squeeze 100 years of social and economic policy history in which the new deal was a big turning point but it wasn't I don't even say it was a high water mark and they do think we're taught the Great Depression again and talk about the telescoping 90s it's like telescoping 30s they just you know and then there was the depression and then there was the war and that's sort of how we how we learned it I mean you said what did you tell me the other day like we think

that like FDR came into office with all this policy in his back pocket and that they just rolled them out in response to the depression but it took I mean years right even after he was elected

“it took years to get his agenda passed and the social security act passed in 35 after he had had”

I mean just crushed some midterms but he didn't get the fairly reverse centers act till 38 until

he had been reelected he had a historic hundred days of a bunch of stuff that was eventually all ended by the Supreme Court I wanted to think of an example to explain what I mean about the front end and the back end to the new deal and how it was more of a conservative compromise and so I think noting of course the theme of the show is optimism yeah I want to talk about child labor and dwell on just how hard it was to ban child labor in the US which we actually still have

kind of and whether or not we even did it to protect children all right so the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 sets out some pretty strict rules of the labor of children you know you they can't work under 14 unless they're a paper boy or a babysit this is like a thing the even if I talk about child labor researching today and you know the horrific cases of child labor we were found in the US I will get someone responding like but what about my paper boy but I had a paper

right job I have to be like your paper route is protected and also we don't have those anymore but I understand it's because your paper is coming by fax machine but it comes into law on 1938 this is the foundation for prohibiting child labor you can't work under certain age your hours are limited when you're in the school year you can't work too late and there are certain jobs that you simply cannot do anything too high anything too sharp you're not supposed to have kids there that's fair

yeah so even like a deli you're not supposed to have someone under 18 in a deli so that law was really a weak compromise even though we see it now like oh in the new deal they banned child labor I think it was a victory for sure and one that we look back on and built a very liberal foundation for prohibiting child labor in the United States but it was not the victory they wanted and it didn't come quickly so I mean the earliest movements for child labor

in the US go back to the 1830s in Massachusetts the earliest to ban child labor or restricted yeah because what has to happen in the United States for child labor to be banned is that we have to go from the paper boy it's good for them it prevents idleness you know we need to send these kids to work

“so that they'll be industrious and learn things and be responsible and that's what they need as”

children and like that is the accepted norm to child labor is the result of the exploitation of capitalism it's destructive to children and families and we need to send them to school and protect them from working and in between is this kind of background argument of like their unskilled and cheap and competing with adults and there's lots of I mean there's instances of child labor like in the 1870s that are horrifying and like it's going to be another 60 years before it's banned

well like well known at the time cases of child labor in the 1870s there's actually an article

adentured service that brings children from Italy to quote unquote go to music school but then

“forces them into busking on the street as street performers and musicians it's run by a group of”

Italian men called the Pedro Nes and the New York Times says why would we need to get slaves from Africa we get children from Italy and that's like a direct quote from the article in the 1870s so it's not as if we didn't like we decided in 18 in 1937 child labor was wrong and then in 1938 like we did it they were ramblings for a really long time what pushed child labor to the forefront is so many more children started working and by the early 1900s like one in five kids under 15

are working and is that due to the kind of urbanization and moving off of farms or immigration or what's that it's urbanization immigration and industrialization and you just you had a lot of jobs that children would do in coal mine there are biggest employers were cotton mills great oh yeah fantastic stuff coal mines and industrial occupations and then they were on the street they were delivering things they were like newsies selling things on street they were forced buskers as

in this case the the Italians even as early as like 1880 the American Federation of Labor is saying we need to ban child labor because it's going to undercut the wages and opportunities for adult workers because they'll just they'll continue to get undercut I'll continue to get undercut

“I say all this I mean I think the fast forwarded version would be think of how early that is relative”

to the first federal child labor law that is upheld by the Supreme Court I mean you're talking

about like 70 years between ramblings of child labor being a problem between workers saying that might not be good to have child labor to a multi decade child labor campaign being successful on the federal level so there's some real like it's not like they weren't organized and they didn't fight so I think the movement itself despite ramblings the movement against child labor and the idea that child labor needs to be prohibited really takes off around 1900 and you have

labor organizers you have members of the clergy you have people who are social workers and work in settlement houses and they kind of band together to say we need to stop child labor and they had a multi-fronted campaign to do this they had a PR campaign so they hired a photographer named Lewis Hein and he spent a decade going around the United States taking photographs of children working and that was his one mandate just photographed them on the job he had to sneak into places he had to

be very seraptitious in his photo taking and every picture you see that's like a grainy black and white photo of a kid in a factory it was probably taken by this guy who they had hired and told him you know go out and take photos of of children working well they started consumer leagues the national consumer league and they started this campaign called the white label campaign which would products that weren't made with child labor were given a special white label so

that you would know you were supporting producers that weren't relying on child labor I'm like this is the social media campaign and you know environmental cotton campaign of its day and a lot of it starts around child labor of you these are we do not want to support businesses that use this

“labor or factories that use this labor and they they organize the whole idea of you need to be a”

responsible consumer comes from child labor really and then the other thing they do is they set up kind of permanent facts finding campaigns because they want data and they want evidence so the first time they do it they commission the Bureau of Labor Statistics in conjunction with Roosevelt our Teddy Roosevelt as president to do a like a facts finding mission of what is the actual state of children working and almost taking it from a perspective of like is it even that bad

do they really need the money are there conditions so terrible I mean they do a two-year study I could talk about I just want you to know first I am grateful that I get to go back to the 1830s me 1870s and this one but but the drama caused by the Bureau of Labor Statistics trying to find out

if working children had good labor conditions is so high stakes and incredible the commissioner

does this report when he goes up to be reconfirmed and is reappointed the Southern Democrats are still so upset that he said that child labor is worse in the south and there aren't good conditions there that they try to block his nomination they come up with a pressure campaign where they come up with all these lies and have people come forward to say like the commissioner is not a good administrator and he steals money and he goes on really long vacations and like he's biased against

that's really interesting I think you should hire an outside law firm to independently investigate

“my performance on the job for the past six years they hire the law firm the law firm holds all these”

hearings the law firm comes back and says we think he's clear he's really going to just job this was just a smear campaign then he gets reappointed in two weeks later he resigns and he's like yeah I wasn't ever going to do another term it's just that I didn't want to not have a term and have you think that that campaign was going to be successful so once I cleared my name and showed you that you want to be for the job he quit two weeks later it was like a four month battle

and he was like okay I'm out and now all it all came down to the fact that Democrats in the south were cotton mills were did not like that he had you know essentially found out so much about child labor in cotton mills in the south they had the highest share of children working yeah they had the little good little fingers right the good little fingers in the spinners yeah like yeah you use your tiny little fingers and you're spinning and you're making cotton and they were

not necessarily the largest employer of child labor but they had the highest share of children of their total workforce so they were deeply opposed to any child labor legislation right and anyone who was trying to convince them otherwise so like the next big story in the

child labor fight is in 1906 the first child labor law is introduced into Congress for a federal

legislation again this is 32 years before the Fair Labor Standards Act the law is defeated by Southern Democrats but it's 10 years later they are successful in Congress in passing a child labor law and it's struck down by the Supreme court as unconstitutional really yes so it's called the Keating Owen Act it passed in 1916 it prohibited I mean really it's it's even less prohibited so much as deeply regulating child labor and the Supreme Court overturned it and says it's not

constitutional so then they passed what basis so okay parents because it's decided if you're gonna work or not yes it's under parental rights I was like I mean if I'm wearing not a not a historian on the front I have to have an all caps on the back not a lawyer but you know there's a parental rights case like you you are telling a parent whether not their kid is allowed

to work and that violates parental rights and so they overturned the first federal child labor law

because parents own their children because parents own their children then Congress is like okay

“well you know what we're gonna pass a tax that if you employ children as a business you have to”

pay more in taxes and the Supreme Court overthrows that too where they're trying to level it out like you can use children but but you're gonna have to spend as much as you're gonna spend on adults yes basically what if you make up for in wages because you're employing children we're gonna we're gonna hit you with taxes and even though pretty sure article one says taxes in spending lies with Congress from courts like actually that's unconstitutional too so I feel like

there should be some parallels now to feeling like the Supreme Court is standing in the way of progress that people want right and that people want to have certain things in the Supreme Court is just like gladiator style saying thumbs down and they're standing in the way of where people want to go where law has already gone and it feels almost you know like dictatorial that they get to come in and do this that child labor activist I mean this was this was such a blow so then

they decided that they because they couldn't get past the constitutionality according to the Supreme Court they passed a constitutional amendment this was going to be the 20th amendment

“to the constitution it passed in 1924 I think was called the child amendment or the child labor”

amendment and they this is comes here is in Congress passed this and Congress passed a constitutional amendment and they even got 28 states to ratify it they weren't that far away I think they were 10 states off and this was their answer like okay well if we change the constitution the Supreme Court court constitutional and the campaign against this amendment and where ratification

failed I mean y'all there's just so many echoes right like its parental rights they basically

turned it into a cultural roar that they're not trying to regulate businesses they're trying to regulate families you know when that this is what you can do with your children and businesses should have the freedom to make decisions and not have the government get in a way in the way in squash enterprise yikes yikes and they they were successful so we should know that there are people who think that children should work now yes they just passed past some liberalization of

child labor and was it Florida Florida Arkansas a couple other states then Florida and Arkansas

you're now we're getting into the 1930s right then the Great Depression hits in this cultural argument

“doesn't have as much sway for the number of adults out of work the labor argument the economic”

argument it becomes much more we need the adults to be able to make a living we need the adults be able to make a living and it's not good for children anyway and I mean of course going on the whole time is the move to increase compulsory education which also gets a lot more support during the depression of like we should not have these kids competing for jobs and we prohibit child labor in the Fair Labor Standards Act which I mean really people were not convinced that the

Supreme Court was going to uphold it they did but the FLSA when it was passed in relation to child

labor I mean it was estimated that it was you know 10% of actual children working we're going to be

immediately affected by I mean the vast majority of occupations in which they were children were not under the legislation it was focused on a specific set of occupations so they passed this federal

“law but it's not like the law is really simple like no children can work right he was very specific”

about certain industries in like ages of the kid in times of day and and things like that and it didn't and because of the way it was written it didn't cover actually that many child workers really so so when you were saying it's 10% it was like only about 10% of children who are in the worst one assumes worst conditions would be covered by this law if you took all kids who are working in 38 no it was really just a fraction of them that were protected by the Fair Labor

Standards Act right so it's it's a conservative compromise water down from what they had wanted but it ends up being the basis for the continued child labor movement like we we got this marker federal law prohibiting and regulating child labor but that wasn't the end of the fight there wasn't any of the fight it was like because we relaxed it in World War II but then we got up strong again and we did relax it we did relax it in World War II I mean it only just passed

I mean come on I got some ships to build we got a build stuff so we need a little bit of fingers I mean we were already putting women to work and he believed it I mean so it's the fight continues and you see that same cultural arguments somewhere else and so I I take a lot of comfort in kind of the history of the child advocate movement and the trying to ban child labor movement because it just cements like these things don't happen overnight you become aware and upset about a problem

and it can feel like overnight right but that's these fights are much longer and if anything what is going on in the current administration is proof of that just having a limited mandate to follow through with radical action is drawing on so many levels and then the kind of this need to relish the people who were wrong you know like oh they voted for them and their tariffs are going to crush him of like well you know it doesn't this is why social movements

tend to be long because you get people on board with the solutions so that it's accepted and it's permanent and we don't have whipsaw policy changes in our economy there's a trade off to going slow which I recognize but there are some benefits for being deliberate right and child labor

gods did get stronger and what did they get stronger they got stronger you know basically all the way

up until like three years ago they were mainly just one a story of one direction of getting stronger and the federal government sets the floor and most state governments go above the floor there's lots of provisions that could be stronger but I mean for you know there was a resurgence of child labor recently there's really only three types of child labor violations either the kids too young they're working too long or they're in a place they're not supposed to be the vast majority of

child labor violations in the US are kids working too long the two young one doesn't happen too often you can work when you're 14 in certain jobs for a limited number of hours then when you turn 16 you can work for more hours and then when you work turn 18 you can work in more occupations most of the time it's kids in retail sectors who are working too long or like you it's a school night or like it's it's during the week you can't work kids more than three hours but like

“they'll be at McDonald's and stay for seven those are the typical violations and I think”

would characterize the vast majority of child labor in the United States what came up in the Biden administration this this like flourishing of child labor was a bunch of kids who were in places they weren't supposed to be which we had not seen especially to that degree for a

poultry factory your poultry factory your slaughterhouse and the cleaner is like okay

we have a staff that's gonna come do it and the staff has children on it and then they all claim that none of the new that they were children and one of the violations the reason why they were

“found is that there was another labor regulatory agency there I think it was OSHA the inspector looked”

over and like someone walked in with a pink sparkly backpack and they were like well I think you have children working here it was a function of the fact that most of those kids were kids who came across the border as asylum seekers and they were unaccompanied and they were taking advantage of in the United States in an absolutely disgusting way it was not like the law on Arkansas I've

like we need to give parents more rights over kids work schedules was not it was a development

that was not in response to what was the crisis the crisis was you had a lot of kids who didn't speak English who didn't have family in this country who were being employed in places the law says they weren't supposed to be and then they're kind of going back and under business pressure saying like actually kids can work six hours on a weekday or like actually you don't need your parents permission to work when you're 15 because that's a parent's right you know it's just it's

like stuff like that so you know the fight continues yeah yeah can you talk at all about

“what was going on though during the actual new deal about you know I mean I think both of these”

questions that we got really have to do with conditions of the moment and I and what you're

telling me what you're talking about is that things that we might see happen now or things that maybe started long ago right but did you when you were doing your reading you're not not a historian reading on this like was it the economic conditions though that led laborers to say hey me we need to get we need to stop having competition from 12 year olds who will be get paid pennies on the dollar right also when we passed some of our strictest immigration law and most racist

immigration law was around the same time so you know the other thing and I think this gets more to the to Sharon's question about like why were the wealthy even willing to give up taxes like what was in it for them I would hazard a guess that you know for example like the social security act was by far the least crazy radical proposal that was around at the time I mean that with this economic distress came a blossoming of policy proposals some of them who came from like a guy who

had a radio show who was kind of crazy so like look at us Robin look at us you know one like like a guy who was like a lot of failed professions but who was a doctor who wrote like an editorial and like I want to say it was like the Long Beach city newspaper or some southern California newspaper wrote an editorial that was like all people over 60 should get $500 in months and it's like tens of millions of people joined clubs to promote this plan that was the towns in planned you had

Huey P. Long every mannequin yeah you know his proposal was share our wealth something like you can already tell that rich people aren't gonna like that one but you mean you know he was he was incredibly popular and share our wealth was like every family gets money you had people who were

“trying to nationalize banks who thought that the best way to get out of the depression was to”

deliberately inflate the currency updance and clear around for a governor of California under the epic plan and poverty in California and his 12-point plan included all kinds of like very radical proposals I mean most of them they weren't all radical but they felt radical at the time and so I think the new deal we see it as like the evolution we don't see what it beat out on the policy side like we see what it moved past right like we now have social security we now have an unemployment

program you know in the Fair Labor Standards Act was quick on its heels and the National Labor Relations Act was quick on its heels and so we see all of these things has like the bad guy was yeah it's a big jump like the bad guy that we defeated was lack of movement in the before and then what we won was the new deal and I think at the time it was like man there's a lot of crazy and this rich cat from New York it's kind of got some reasonable stuff to say you know

like we we don't see the fight as they experienced it which was so much outpouring for so many things that were more radical I mean the towns in plan the towns in plan stayed popular like through the 50s people love a simple some people love a simple plan yeah it's you know flat tax and flat tax and we all get money people loved it yeah people still love flat tax and we all get money yeah

that's fair it's the new deal is special but our view of it isn't complete our view of it is is very

low resolution I don't know if it was next necessarily this moment of like you know oh well let's get ready for terms and conditions next week is it like light okay lightning in a bottle flash in a pan I'm thinking of like that like special moment maybe flash in the pan

“no well lightning in a bottle is something yeah that just yeah I think that's what you're getting”

toward I'm not sure yet how you can finish your sentence well Robin sometimes you're such an editor about this sorry I can't actually tell what you're saying if you don't ever finish well you're trying to say more words need more context it's as we think of this as this like historically special moment

the depression was bad the politician was amazing and we get all these things and that we we

confine it we can press it to age 22 but really you know there was a lifetime there more than it was yeah a lot of lifetimes and I you take that as a very inspiring lesson for the current moment frankly because this is the process this is the process for American social policy we take a really long time we're very deliberate we do a lot of stuff in states first we have state campaigns we have federal campaigns it comes down to how good your PR guy is you know and how good of a story you

can tell and then sometimes the economy tips in your favorite you take advantage of the moment

“and there's big change but I I think people might be more domeristic about where we are now when”

I'm of the mind like we are closer than we've ever been and I can I for a lot of the stuff I'm like

it's in reach yeah we just have to keep fighting because we've never been closer yeah yeah

that sounds optimistic to me yes so let's not talking we should stop or hold on counterpoint can I keep going I know we're laughing but I do actually want to keep going alright so the undercurrent to a lot of things that happened in the new deal was an economy turned on its head and I think that that teaches us in some ways the wrong lesson that we're like oh when the economy's bad we should be able to accomplish things right yeah

that we're and I never let a crisis go never let a crisis go to waste yeah yeah and that we've like oh because good stuff happened right after the depression every time there's a recession something good should happen for us y'all there have been 13 recessions since World War II and you do not associate them with this advance in policy yeah you're not like oh yeah and then after the 73 recession then we got then we got crickets long sights remember the double recession at the start of the 80s

“and then we got not gonna say anything else um and then we do just cut to dead air um I think”

of that Simpson's cut away like technical difficulties but it but the this like great depression air go social policy is also for me it's not the right lesson I mean the great depression was a pressure point that kind of in some ways in like it lots of things happen at the same time but I don't think that it has to come from the economy I think where it's gonna come from now is demographics so the baby boomers it's as it's officially defined as individuals born between 1946

in 1964 that is the census definition of the baby boom in the United States based on birth rates and other countries it's different the youngest baby boomer is 61 and they are mostly retired now we're not getting smaller there was just a lot of them as long as the baby boomers were in their prime working years we had a ton of people willing to work in the United States and it was a numbers game and the numbers game was I don't have to do anything to increase labor force

participation I don't need to make sure that that will pay like I've got this I've got this massive tailwind which is huge population that wants to be working as they get smaller they are leaving in their wake all of the decisions that we didn't have to make before and you're not saying the generation is getting smaller saying as they make up a smaller part of the workforce right so the fact that they're leaving exposes the labor markets weaknesses especially when it comes

to policy and so I don't think the undercurrent or the ticking clock is a great depression or an economic upheaval we've gotten better at managing them we've had more of them we we understand how they work and how to get past them and we have experience getting past even horrible recessions what we do not have experience getting past is a demographic shift of this nature especially

Congress doesn't like children or child care they need more warm bodies in child care is a

really effective way to get more well the work could just put the seven year olds back in the factories yeah that's for me no me I'm kind of like this is death throw like I mean the idea that they're like hey we can't have child care but we can get more 14 year olds in the labor force is like yall are desperate and you're claiming it grasping at straws grasping at straws well I learned so much um that grasping at straws and so I'm like I'm like incredibly optimistic like

10 years the child care industry will probably collect four then and we we're going to have to get more people yeah even if we weren't taking a radical term on immigration immigration would not be

“enough but we need to we need to have policies that make it easier to work so I think this won't”

this will affect huge change and like that will be our great depression the cataclysmic not

before seen not really sure how to understand but exposes so much that's wrong with our economy it is coming from these demographic shifts yeah we should do a whole whole whole show on on the demographic shifts I think that's really fascinating topic I say that is if I as if I decide well we're going to talk about it well yeah well Catherine I'll let you talk about that honestly this works really great for me you just I'm the top on the table it's been the

I'm like okay child they were um I mean there's there's so much more to say on these topics and these problems that are still ongoing but I think you can't be depressed that the problems are still ongoing you just have to see like where the progress we've made and the the fight beat in front of us should not be depressing when you see how much fight we've already had maybe that is depressing to people actually it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't really send it out loud and I'm

like isn't it good to know we've been doing this for a long time and I'm like maybe that actually doesn't make people feel better you know what I'm the activist you'll just get you can just do thumbs up every episode we ought to do a little poll are you more optimistic do you know this or not yeah well I'm thriving oh my god oh then I empathize so much with these questions too because I know so it's so tough it's so frustrating we have these just such massive problems in our economy and

you're like oh okay let's do tariffs cool cool because that's gonna help me before child care or a house or hell a car hell you know what mess with mortgage rates that's really that's really

“helping the problems of the present moment can seem overwhelming but I think they aren't a problem”

of a day and they aren't fixed in a day and we're so much closer than our current state reveals okay let's let's do executive orders just do executive orders here's looks really serious mine looks

really silly okay oh no mine's mine's pretty silly okay can I go first yeah so this is really on

behalf of my spouse we believe that there should be if you're gonna put cinnamon anything you need to label it you need it needs to be called cinnamon granola because you know what cinnamon is not a neutral flavor you can't just slide it into things and people aren't gonna notice just be honest with us about where the cinnamon is I think cinnamon is such a neutral flavor it's awful you don't like cinnamon I like cinnamon in certain things but I don't like it to surprise me and things

that we're not like ice cream that we're supposed to be like fudge swirl okay you don't you're not approve of the cinnamon hedge money that's sick it over it's like the sweet business course corn syrup business just putting it in everything I just think whenever I have a recipe that calls for cinnamon like especially in a bath good it would be like a news a teaspoon of cinnamon and I'm like or three tablespoons that's like a lot of it I feel like when you bake it it loses

a lot of it's punch yeah okay well that's fine which apparently is okay mine mine is more petty I don't know I'm sorry more petty than I'm sorry I don't mean that you're petty I mean mine is like of the petty variety I feel like yours is of the like exacting of like come on too much cinnamon thanks this is a standard in this standard needs to be met I appreciate that mine is like you know what would be kind of fun okay if you let sea span have creative control over

“it's programming so I don't know if any of you remember this but the Republicans have a very hard”

time electing a leader and they couldn't take majority control of Congress until they had elected a leader well that is when a lot of us learned that the majority in Congress dictates to see

telling them what they could do it was like high stakes drama and they would like zoom in on people talking and they would like you know the camera would like move across the floor and you would see people talking and they're like no don't show me talking to him and they would like move away I loved it and I mean like I want sea span to have a little bit more creative control over how they depict Congress because the reason why sea span especially when it's coming

covering congressional events they're they're regulated by the majority of how they are allowed

to do that like it's a fixed point of view you never move off the speaker or you can use these

three angles but apparently when you let them have fun with it it's kind of wild.

“So I'm starting for sure who's the reading's for sure and then I think within 10 years this”

will devolve into some kind of like reality show type situation where sea span has like no fewer than 50 cameras going at any time and like any hearing room has got like the over-the-shoulder camera where you're like Jesus sees pan give me some privacy. I'm sure I mean I don't think it's gonna stay and go. I think it'll start fun and then it might just devolve like so many other things related to media however I mean let's have some fun with it that is my executive order

sea span should have more fun. Here we are again at the end of an episode where we thank our spiritual sponsors who are what we have in the meantime before we have our financial sponsors.

But we we should clarify we did get actually a lot of questions about this we will always have

spiritual sponsors even if we get actual non-spiritual money. I had several comments on social media

“that was like please don't get on that. Don't ever get rid of spiritual sponsors like no I”

I'm going to need them forever so the show will always have them. Robin who is your spiritual sponsor this week. My spiritual sponsor is Griffith Park which is one of the largest parks in the country 4,000 plus acres Griffith Park first of all is everything like it has the observatory. It has the Hollywood sign it has a zoo it has tennis courts it has I would future executive order gear rid of them golf courses but what it has one of their anything else is it has 53 miles of

hiking trails and I walked every mile of them I got poisoned IV on one last week and I forgive you Griffith Park because you are the best. I love it I've only been once but it was stunning.

Love it. It helps that LA always has like pretty good pretty good weather all right my spiritual

sponsor for the week is Abby one box header goal against Brazil in the 2011 World Cup quarter finals it was after 30 minutes of overtime in the 122 minute it was the equalizer that sent them into penalty shootouts that they won you know riding high on the moment I think I've watched it I mean it has to be more than a hundred times it's great and Megan repeat those kick into the box is it also fantastic I mean it come and she's like what like three miles away like

it's such this amazing cross if you haven't watched it it aired live and it was when the World Cup was in Germany so it actually aired like on Sunday afternoon in the U.S. and so a lot of people ended up watching and it was a completely thrilling ending to level it right at that minute but when I was taking my qualifying exams during my PhD in them like minutes before

“the test when you have to put everything away you know it's just pencil you have some sheets of paper”

I just sat there watching the goal and I went back to the beginning and I watched again and I went back to the winning and I watched again and I like at one point I was when I was going to test if I'm in front of Congress I was on the metro on the way there and I was trying to listen to pump-up music as I was like frantically reading about obscure tax a lot and I was like no we know what we need to do here I just like I pulled it up and I could I mean I could hear it of like

chance of USA is ringing around the arena and dressed in and I you know the US has to get numbers forward there's no point to bend we should build any more we should build it where you just like keep it on your home screen just plan whenever you need it oh my god I it's those moments those like exhilarating sports moments right so thank you Abby Wombock for that amazing goal and obviously Megan Rpino for the assist back when her hair was still blonde

well that's it for us as we close out our episode we of course want to thank the two people who make this show possible our producer and audio engineer Sophie thank you very much and our video editor and producer Andy thank you very much