[cheers and applause] i will hasten to add, it is a question and a responsibility for all of us. And a hard choice, and a very hard choice. And it is a very hard choice, but i think all of us have some hard choices about what kind of citizens were going to be, what were going to ask of our leaders and also what well ask of ourselves, and what has always made us strong as americans goes back to that incredibly astute observation of detocqueville when he tried to understand what the country was about and looked at our organization and the democracy and the institutions we were building. He said it came down to the habits of our heart. And i think we have to ask yourselves what it means today to be an american in the 21st 21st century and what we expect from each other, what we expect from our government, what we expect from our businesses, our academic institutions, because i am more optimistic and confident about whatunder potential is, but i know we have some hard choices to make to tr
Good evening, and welcome to tos meeting of the Commonwealth Club of california, the place where youre in the know. You can find the Commonwealth Club on the internet at commonwealthclub. Org. Im Andrew Leonard from salon. Com, your moderator for this evenings program. To my left is Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew Mcafee who are researchers at the Mit Sloan School of management. Erik is the directer of the mit center for Digital Business and andrew is the Principal Research scientist. The two men made a name for themselves a couple of years ago with their selfpublished book, race against the machine, which kind of coalesced some emerging nervousness about the fact that automation is really beginning to replace jobs at higher and higher levels. They followed this up with a bigger book, the second machine age work, progress and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies. And its really, i think everybody in this room will understand how timely this is. In the San Francisco and greater b
It is free healt healthcare or subsidized both care or increasing their wages with government minimum wage increases, a whole laundry list of things they are trying to help but most of these folks dont want to be any government program. They want to work and have jobs that are wellpaying jobs. They create an opportunity to support themselves and their families and that sounds like more of a republican voter but unfortunately the republicans the economic message and i think you have seen this over the years we talk about economists. We are sort of wrapped up in the rightness of our position that we talked about balancing the budget and about cutting taxes for high income individuals to create jobs and then cutting the government in particular a lot of benefits. If you are the average american listening to this economic plan you say where am i in that plan and what are you doing for me and the people that are seeing their wages stagnating and increases not seeing the inflation and that i
Guest the thesis of the book as there is a big swath of america that is being ignored, left behind, not included in the discussion i think for either party. Particularly though i would argue the Republican Party and i call it bluecollar conservatives, the folks out there that are working people most of whom dont have College Degrees, folks that really still understand the value of work and the importance of work and responsibility and people who understand the importance of family and faith, believe in freedom and limited government. You say well wow those are conservative or public in voters and in many cases they are not. In fact a lot of them arent voting at all because they dont really see either party talking to them about the concerns they have in trying to create an opportunity for them to live the American Dream. If you look at the democratic party, they talk about these voters a lot and in fact talk about how they can give them certain things whether its Free Health Care for S
Sent the ashes mobilize support for economic reform. And second is the support of the western community. If these two things, one of them does that work, ukraine will really be, a year from now, in a difficult situation. Thank you very much. [applause] thanks for the questions. [applause]. Host senator santorum, thanks for joining us. Some of the thesis of the book if you would. Guest the thesis is theres a whole group of people in america, a big slap swath of america that is being ignored, left behind, not included in the discussion i think for either party. Particularly though i would argue the Republican Party and thats, i call them bluecollar conservatives. Of folks out there that are working people, most of them dont have College Degrees, folks that really still understand the valley of work and the importance of work and the responsibility, and people understand the importance of family and faith believe in freedom and limited government. So you say those are conservative republi