Highlights of the Summit on Inequality and Opportunity

Last week we at the Aspen Institute hosted the Summit on Inequality and Opportunity, and I continue to reflect on the many conversations, at the Summit and leading up to it, that to my ears reflect a marked shift in our understanding of what’s going wrong in today’s economy, and importantly how to fix it. 

As we explored at the Summit, the current crisis of inequality and restricted access to opportunity has causes that run much deeper than individual failings of poor people who need to be better educated and “encouraged to work” or “greedy businesspeople” who are insensitive to the lives of ordinary Americans and are unwilling to share the gains of economic growth. Rather we need to inquire more deeply about how our economic system and structure have changed and to ask hard questions about long-lingering social inequities.  At the same time, we must be inspired to take positive action, and restore our faith in our ability to build the economy and society that is the promise of the American Dream.  I was both inspired and challenged by so many of the speakers at the Summit, and share a few highlights here. 

Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation and Heather Boushey of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, in conversation with Gwen Ifill, set the stage for the day, bringing up the role of race, gender, power dynamics and privilege in the inequality challenge we now face.  Indeed Darren began with the hard questions, calling on everyone including himself to interrogate our privilege and to question the cultural narratives that justify inequality.  Heather Boushey reminded us that we must grapple with not only today’s income inequality, but also an intergenerational and compounding process of income inequality, calcifying into what is now a much greater inequality of wealth and control of resources. She then connected our extraordinary wealth inequality to the substantially uneven access to economic opportunity we now struggle with and noted how this trend ultimately stifles our democracy.

This powerful opening conversation lifted up themes that carried through in many of the subsequent panels.  Baltimore Health Commissioner Dr. Leana Wen’s description of the work of her department movingly illustrated the role of race and class in contributing to disparate health access and outcomes.  Arthur Brooks juxtaposed the amorality of markets with the values and moral ideals of our society, making a compelling case to lift up consideration of values in our economic policy discussions.  And in a day of conversation on economic inequality and opportunity, a poet and a panel of high school students stole the show.  

A personal highlight was that I had the great privilege of facilitating a panel on the changing nature of work that included David Rolf of SEIU, Dorian Warren of the Roosevelt Institute and MSNBC, Lindsey Elin of Uber, and Blair Taylor of Starbucks.  And in a fantastic closing speech—with a great introduction by our longtime colleague and friend Bill Bynum of the HOPE Enterprise Corporation—Vice President Biden touched on an issue that I’ve been writing about lately involving short-term thinking leading to public and private disinvestment in working people. 

There was so much more, and I encourage taking a look at the many sessions and conversations here.  In this season of Thanksgiving, I’m grateful that so many of the speakers as well as the many people in the audience, both live and virtual, are taking an unflinching look at the challenge of inequality and access to economic opportunity and working to create change.