So our next panel is Steve Ratner and Van Jones on Economic Inequality, and Steve Ratner is first and foremost, in our view, a board member of New America. He is also the chairman of Willett Advisors, and was formerly the advisor to the Presidential Task Force on the auto industry in 2009. He is a contributing writer for the New York Times op-ed section. You see his columns regularly. He's also the economic analyst for MSNBC's Morning Joe, and he's the author most recently of Overhaul, an insider's account of the Obama Administration's emergency rescue of the auto industry. So Steve is going to show us some slides, and then he's going to be in conversation with Van Jones, known to all of you, as the host of CNN's Crossfire, president and co-founder of Rebuild the Dream. And last time I saw you actually was at the Democratic Convention in 2008. Van Jones, he's an author, he's written two New York Times bestsellers, and he was also the green jobs advisor to the Obama Administration. So we're going to have a lively conversation on economic inequality. Thanks very much, Ann Marie. I didn't bring any lawyer jokes with me. I'm not a distinguished member of the Senate, a great war hero, a former presidential candidate, but I did bring 30 PowerPoint slides. And so I am going to try to get through these in 20 minutes and leave time to talk with Van and anyone else here who wants to talk. So the first thing probably some of you are wondering is, given my background that Ann Marie went through, and you said I was most recently the author of Overhaul, you implied I wrote other books, which I never did. So I've only got one book. What am I doing up here? And the answer to that is this is an issue that I have cared about for a long time. And just to both establish my, so this is working, my qualifications and also give you a sense of how long ago this all began and in a way how quaint it was that back in 1995, I wrote a piece, my pointer's working. Back in 1995, I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal on this issue. And the one historical footnote I would add to that is that the editor, I was astonished they published it. The editor who published it was a young editor who has now gone on to some other things and his name was David Brooks. So there we are. Now since then a lot has been written on this subject. Since then a lot has been written on this subject and most recently as probably everybody here knows, a book that I think will go on in history as a seminal work in this area was written called Capital. It was published about six weeks ago. It was published by an imprint of the Harvard University Press. It was written in French and then translated into English. It's 700 pages along with footnotes. But it became an instant bestseller and it has been number one and number two on Amazon's bestseller list since it came out. This is number three on the New York Times's list last week. Probably headed higher from there, very hard to get. But the question is how many people have read it because if you read it, you would have learned some important things like this. You would have learned what the equilibrium wealth to annual income ratio is. You would have learned the inherited share of wealth and you would have learned the equilibrium share of income from wealth to total income. So I won't embarrass anyone here by asking how many bought it, how many have read it. But the point is it has made a huge impact and it has really changed the debate in today's Washington Post. Chuck Lane has an interesting column on it pretty much every day. Someone writes something interesting on this subject because of what this book has done. But it touched a nerve obviously and it got people even more focused on an issue that has been something a number of us have been thinking about for a long time. So what I want to do is use some of what Mr. Piketty and his partner Mr. Seyes as well as other economists have done over the years in this area to try to illustrate the problem, the causes, and maybe some of the solutions. So let me start with this slide which may seem familiar, maybe familiar to a lot of you. It's a pretty basic slide that Piketty and Seyes, his partner did some years ago using U.S. income tax data. And so what it shows at the bottom is the famous one percent, the red line. And to be in the one percent in 2012, you needed to have at least $370,000 of income, average income of $441,000. And you can see that if you go all the way back to 1913, and this is as I said based on income tax data, so that's essentially when the income tax started, you can see that the share that this group has is essentially back to where it was during the roaring 20s. Again, probably something many of you have seen before. I'm sorry, that's the green line. If you look at the red line down below, that is the top 0.01%. That is the 16,000 households with the highest income. And to be in that group of 16,000 in 2012, you needed to have a little over $7 million of income and $21 million of average income. And again, you can see that that group as well has gotten back to and even exceeded where it was at any point in our history. So this has been known and talked about for some time this data. But here's something that is new in this book from some of what we saw before. This is wealth. And so wealth is much harder to analyze and there have been questions about exactly how accurate the state is, but I think directionally it shows the point. And so if you look at the U.S., and I am going to turn to Europe and some other parts of the world in a minute, if you look at just the U.S., you can see that in fact wealth is much more unequal than income. The famous 1% has, as we saw a minute ago, 17.4% of the income that was in 2010, and it has about 34% of the wealth, so roughly double. What is sort of interesting to see is that while the income number has gotten back to where it was back in the rowing 20s or the Gilded Age, whatever you want to call it, wealth has not. And that's basically a function of the fact that we have, going back that 100 years, instituted a lot of progressive taxation, state taxes, income taxes and so on, which have reduced the extent of the wealth concentration from what it was back then, so an interesting little detail. Now, if you take the top 1%, I want to just focus for a minute on the top 1%, and I want you to look at the bottom bar here. And so this is a decomposition of the 1%. So this light gray area on the left is the bottom half of the 1%, so from 1% up to .5%. The black part is from .5 to .1%. The green is from .1 to .01, moving up. And the red is just that same .01%, those same 16,000 people that households that we talked about before. And so what's interesting about it is if you look at the light gray line in the middle, you can see that in fact the share of wealth of the top 1% of the people between 1% and .5%. In fact, hasn't really gone up at all since 1960, actually gotten down slightly. If you look at the next group of the black line from .5 to .1, you see essentially the same thing. It's only when you get to the .1 and above that you start to see this acceleration of concentration, and you see it most dramatically at the .01%, which is that red line. So back in 1975, that .01% had a little over 2% of the wealth. Today it has around 11% of the wealth. And so that's an interesting aspect of what is going on out there. Now let me turn a little bit internationally, and I'm going to kind of go back and forth between international comparisons and US data.  And based on this particular type of data, you can see that the US has the highest share of income inequality. The 1% has the highest share of income of any major country in the world, including India and China. For those of you who are devotees of this, I want to make sure that I acknowledge there is other data that shows that China and India may be more unequal than we are by a little bit. But directionally, we are in the same zip code and certainly, for better or worse, a leader in accomplishing income inequality. Now let me take the chart that I showed you at the beginning and superimpose some other countries on it. So the red line is the US. It's the 1%, goes through 2010, gets to the 17.4% figure, and it compares it to three other countries. The UK, the blue line, as well as France and Sweden. And you can see a divergence in what's happened that while all four of these countries had fairly similar levels of income inequality 100 years ago, in recent years the US and the UK have pulled away, France and Sweden are much less so. And if you put a bunch more countries in here, which I didn't do because it would make it very hard to read, you would essentially see the same kind of trend that the English-speaking world, if you want to call it that, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, places like that have moved one way and the non-English-speaking world have had much lesser increases in income inequality. And we can talk about why it is, but it's, I think, heavily a function of tax policies, regulatory policies, and things like that. Now let's talk about wealth inequality, looking again at a few different countries. So starting on, this goes back actually 200 years this data. So how many people here are Jane Austen fans? And how many people are Downton Abbey fans? A lot of Downton Abbey fans.  You can see that about the time that Downton Abbey was set, 1% of the British population controlled nearly 70% of the wealth. If you look at back at the time of Jane Austen, it was sort of in the 55 or 60% range. And oddly enough, it wasn't that different in Sweden of all places. But then you can see what happened. And this was a mix of tax policies and it was also wars and oppressions and a lot of things that destroyed a lot of wealth, as well as wealth getting broken up into more hands as generations passed. But you can see that it came down for all of these countries. But Britain came down, they all crossed the US right here in about 1960. And so today we actually have a higher share of wealth concentration than Britain, then France, then Sweden. Not back to these levels of course, but still we are now the leaders. And one of the ironies of this of course is the US, I think we all think of the US as a country that was founded on this progressive anti-establishment, people can get ahead kind of idea. And we were that way for much of our history. All through the 19th century we did not have this kind of level of wealth concentration. But today we are the country that in a way, and I'll show you some other data in a minute, has the greater concentration of wealth, the greater ability for people to accumulate wealth and to keep it. Now I think that some of what we've all seen happening with the debate about income inequality and the real outrage I guess for lack of a better word about income inequality would probably not exist, probably not exist to the same extent if all the boats were rising. If it weren't just the top that we're doing better, but people across society were doing better, you might be hearing a little bit less about why do the people at the very top have so much. But that's not what's happening. So this slide compares the U.S. to, again, a bunch of countries. If you pick more countries you'd find the same thing. And it looks at what's happened to real meaning after adjustment for inflation median incomes in these various countries. And so you can see that between 2000 and 2010 there was essentially no change in the U.S. median family income. But you can see what was happening in all these other countries, including Canada and Britain, very large changes. Now some of you may say, well, yeah, but they started from much lower base. Their incomes aren't as high as ours. So there was a lot of catching up to do whatever. That is all true. But you will see that they have started to catch up. And in fact, Canada, and this is as of 2010, so I think most of us would guess that if you had data from now you would find that Canada was actually ahead of us, but Canada has caught up to us. And so this is the amount of income after taxes. And I think of it as disposable income that the average person, per capita that the average person has in each of these countries, so $18,700 for the U.S. and Canada, and then the U.K., Germany, and Sweden, not that far behind. So we're really no longer probably the world's richest country on average and certainly people have not been doing better. And as I said, I think that goes a good ways toward explaining what's going on out there. So that's what's happened. Let me talk for a minute. I'm not going to obviously be able to go through all of this in great detail about what I think some of the causes and some of the consequences are of this. I think there are really two things that drive the majority of what's going on out there. And I don't want to oversimplify, but I want to get through this in my lot of time. And those are basically technology and globalization. I'm going to show you a slide or two on each of these to try to illustrate my points.  I'm sure there's more than what I've captured here. We can debate which ones are more important, but things like the winter take all labor markets, tax policy, declining unionization, all those play a role. So let's start with technology. And I'm just going to illustrate that with a simple slide that shows what's happened to people's incomes based on their education level going back to 1979 adjusting for inflation. So if you did not finish high school between 1979 and now, the average person in that cohort, their income would have gone down 24%. If you had high school, 11%, 10%, you can see these numbers and college you would be up. But actually, since 2000, even if you had a college degree, since 2000 your income would have gone down by about 2%. But the point is that education obviously matters. Skills matter. And I think it's a basic supply and demand of labor kind of argument plays a role in what's going on out there. The second major point I want to talk about is globalization. We can talk about free trade. I'm a free trader. We can debate free trade. But I don't think you can escape the fact that global competition has had an adverse impact on wages for many Americans. The country as a whole may well be better off. I would probably argue that it's better off. But there are individual winners and losers. And among the losers are workers who work in sectors that are globally competitive. And I put two of them at the bottom here. Manufacturing and autos, which is near and dear to my heart. And you can see that between a middle of 2009 and this spring that real wages in these sectors have gone down. 2.7% in manufacturing, 10% in autos. And I can tell you lots of auto stories about where and how and why that's happening. But I know it's happening. And so that is something that we all have to live with and recognize. Let me turn to tax policy, which I mentioned before. This is a chart that essentially takes a bunch of different countries and graphs them comparing what has happened to their top tax rates since 1960 and what has happened to the share of income that went to the top 1% since the 1960. So you can see the U.S. and the U.K. all the way around the left, which have had the largest reductions in marginal tax rates, have had the highest increase in inequality. And you can see Spain, Switzerland, Germany, which have had the smallest changes, no changes in these cases in tax policy and marginal tax rates, have had the smallest, in some cases actually less inequality, changes in incomes during the same 54 year, 52 year period. So there's clearly some relationship between taxes and income inequality. Another way to look at the same question is to compare incomes before and after the government gets in the middle of things. So basically before taxes, before social welfare programs, social security, food stamps, all these kind of programs and say, well, what's the impact of the government policy? So the light blue bars, and these are something called the Ginny coefficient for those of you who either know it or want to know it or don't, whatever. But one is the most unequal, zero is the most equal, and basically you then calculate where on a spectrum any country is. The light blue bars are, for each of these four countries, before the government gets in the middle of things, the dark blue bars are after the government gets in the middle of things. And you can see that on a pre-government basis, the U.S. is actually the least unequal of these four countries tied with Sweden and Britain and Germany are more unequal. But then you can see that post transfers, as we call it, the U.S. ends up being the most unequal because all of our policies put together do less to reduce income inequality than all the policies of these other countries put together. And another way to illustrate this is the average tax rate paid by the wealthiest 400 Americans going back to 1992. And you can see on here I've put down the various major tax changes that have occurred, the 1993 Clinton increases, the 1997 Clinton cuts, the Bush cuts, the Bush cuts. But all told, if you go back to the early 90s, these 400 people paid on average 29%. It got as low as 17% in 2007. Then back up to 20%, not really because we changed tax policy because of the recession. I'm almost surely this is the most recent date I have, but almost surely it has come back down a bit since then, although taxes have also gone up a little bit. So it's bumping along somewhere probably between 17% and 19% much lower than it was 20 years ago. So let me turn a little bit to some of the consequences of inequality. One consequence that people believe, and I'm going to show you pros and cons on a couple of these because I do think to be fair and honest, there is uncertainty about exactly what the consequences are and data that points in somewhat different directions. So this is something that Alan Krueger, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors did. He calls it the Great Gatsby Curve. And it essentially plots income inequality across the bottom against intergenerational mobility, against your chances of your kid moving up to the next level of income. And so as you can see, he drew a line through the middle, there appears to be a very close correlation between, in each country, between more unequal countries, less income mobility. And so the U.S. is shown here as having a very low level of income mobility, which is a fact, and it does line up with these other countries. But there was another study done recently about simply mobility within the U.S. And so going back to 1971, what is the chances of somebody who's born into one of the five 20% slices of the pie moving up to the next one? And you can see these lines are all basically flat. And what these researchers found is that while mobility in the U.S. is less than it is in Europe, oddly enough, it hasn't changed much in the last 40 years even though income inequality has gone up. So the next question I want to just talk about for a second is whether some people think more income inequality is bad for growth, some people think it's good for growth, and some people think it doesn't matter. So let me start with the IMF, which somewhat uncharacteristically, usually it sticks to things like budgets and fiscal austerity and whatnot, has weighed in on this subject. And they produced a couple of studies and a couple of charts that suggest that there is a relationship between more income inequality and less growth. So this takes countries and it puts them, the more unequal ones on the right, and these tend to be lesser developed countries in Africa and Latin America and places like that, and it plots it against what it defines as kind of sustainable growth, the periods of time that a country can go before it has some kind of economic or financial crisis, and it does the kind of regression analysis and lo and behold it finds there is a relationship between the two. And another part of the study, it calculated that income distribution does play a major role in, again, how long growth persists, along with trade openness and the quality of political institutions, some of these other things playing less of a role. But here's another study from the OECD, which basically plots a bunch of countries comparing their growth of real GDP between 1994 and 2009 against the amount of income inequality that the country has, and as you can see, there's really no pattern to this. And if you think about it, you can think of lots of examples. You can think of comparing France and Sweden, which both have low levels of income inequality. One of them is growing reasonably fast. One of them isn't. You can compare the U.S. and Sweden. One of them has a lot of income inequality. One of them doesn't. They're both growing at a reasonably fast rate. So it's not completely obvious, much as we might intuitively think so, that there is that effect, but it's a debate that goes on. So let me talk for a second. I'm just really going to tick these off about solutions. And I think, again, for those of you who have paid attention to this issue, these will probably mostly or all seem very familiar. I don't think there's a magic wand. I don't think there's a quick fix. It's not easy. It would take a lot of things, including, as Senator McCain said, a Congress was actually functioning. And so I don't have necessarily a great hope, but at least if I could wave a wand or lay out my agenda, it would include basically this group of five things and probably some others. Education and skills, obviously being at the top. Changes in tax policies, I've shown you the impact of that. Clearly spending on R&D infrastructure. I think we should be thinking more about the ugly word of redistribution and actually recognizing that we're not going to change this overnight and government does have a role to play in taking more from those of us who have been fortunate and giving it to people who've been less fortunate. And then finally, I think we have to have an open conversation about trade and how we have free trade, but also have fair trade. So this is my second to last slide. I want to end on an optimistic note, sort of an optimistic note, and show you one kind of interesting slide that we found, which is that if you basically looked at the whole world as if it were one country, instead of all these different countries one by one, and you plotted it all on a chart, here's what you would see. You would see that you've had an enormous increase in incomes in the sort of rising middle class of the developing world, and that's the sort of optimistic note that I was trying to refer to. But it really is very pervasive, and it spans a vast number of people around the world. You would also see what we talked about before, which is the decline of the middle class in the U.S. particularly, but elsewhere as well. You would see the rise of this global elite. So depending on which side of this chart you look at, you may come away from this feeling better or worse about everything I just said. So I'm going to stop there and let man take over. Well first of all, fascinating stuff. I'm shocked though by what you said near the end. Are you suggesting that income inequality may not in fact hurt economic growth, may not in fact impact economic mobility, in which case why is it a problem? Why isn't the answer just stop being jealous of successful people? That's a good question. I am saying the first thing you said. I think we all want to be whatever our predispositions are, whatever our views of fairness, egalitarianism, the American dream, whatever you want to call it are. I think we want to come at any issue, and I think this is very much in the spirit of New America. We want to come at these issues with an intellectually honest approach, look at all the data, and reach a conclusion. And what I wanted to show you, because I think the jury is out, I think the economist profession is, I don't want to say I have to lunch, is still pondering this. And I don't think it's obvious, I don't think it's obvious that inequality affects growth one way or the other. But the flip side of that is also true, which is if it doesn't affect growth that much, then one of the arguments that you hear a lot, which is, well, we really can't attack income inequality because that will reduce growth, also becomes wrong. It also then means you can, for social reasons, for fairness reasons, say I want to deal with income inequality and not have to deal with the argument of, well, that's going to reduce our growth rate. Let's talk about the mobility question. I think that's the question that middle class folks are most concerned about. Let's talk about something you didn't mention, which is the minimum wage. It just seems to me to be mathematically impossible that if you have an increase in income inequality with the middle class crashing, that wouldn't do something bad to the mobility. I mean, how is it, I mean, explain to me how it's rationally possible to have an increase in income inequality and not have an increase, at least in upward mobility. Well, I should get the two economists to come here and explain it to you because they did the study. But look, a couple of things are true. It is true that we have lower income mobility in this country than in Europe. We have had for a long time, actually, longer than any of us would even guess at. What these guys found was that, going back and looking at 40 years of families and people, that your chances of moving up or down didn't move that much. When you say the middle class is crashing, look, I'm as worried and upset about the middle class as you are, they haven't crashed. They just haven't gone up. And one of the things that I think has come out more and more as you look at this data is what I talked about, that the real beneficiaries are this little sliver all the way up at the top. And so for many of the people around the middle, their relationship to each other hasn't changed that much. And therefore, it is possible that their mobility hasn't changed that much. I'll throw a couple of questions. People want to ask, I think we've got, you have a microphone, so maybe you start signaling. A couple more questions. So today, while we're here, all across the country, the fast food workers are demonstrating, they're striking, apparently one of the biggest strikes in American history. And that's tied to this concern about the minimum wage, which I don't think you mentioned at all. Is the minimum wage just not a big deal just for something for Democrats to beat up on? Well, I probably should have mentioned it somewhere in there because it's not a huge deal, but it's an important deal. Yeah, raising the minimum wage is certainly something we should do. I mean, you know the facts that has been raised since 2009. It's now back at the levels of all terms it was in the 1960s. It's below other countries. I was at a conference recently where someone had sort of dissected what a hotel housekeeper gets paid in a bunch of different countries here. And it was really embarrassing, actually, at how we treat some of these people. So, yeah, it absolutely should be raised. The reason I didn't mention it is that it's not going to, it's going to be something very important to a group of people who are now at the bottom. It's not going to change the middle class. Right? In the minimum wage, we're talking about $10 an hour. That's $22,000 a year. The middle class median family incomes are about $50,000, $55,000. So it's not going to help those people. It's going to help the people at the bottom. Just because in the news today, I thought it would be important to at least mention. Are there questions? Let me just see where the mics are. Do you have a mic? Are there two? Okay, so you have a mic. So we're going to go this way and then this way. We'll just ping-pong. Okay. Thanks. I'm Marco Nunziato, General Electric, and as a disclosure, I am an economist. My concern is we're a bit too quick at pointing the fingers at technology. So the numbers you've shown in terms of the returns to education and skills are important. They have important implications for education. However, you've also shown us numbers on the Gini coefficient, which show that the U.S. is not particularly unequal before taxes and transfers. So before the government gets involved with their distribution policy. And that suggests to me that it's not the impact of technology on wages which creates inequality. Also, you've pointed out that inequality and the rise in the share of wealth and income of the top 1% has been seen in the U.S. in English-speaking countries, U.S., New Zealand, Canada, UK, but not in countries like Germany, France, and Sweden. And I find it hard to believe that over the last 40 years we've seen significantly different technological progress in the U.S. and New Zealand than in Germany. So how do you reconcile this? Good question. Look, on the first question, I think the answer to your first question is the fact is that, first of all, I'm actually probably a little less worried about technology than the average person who looks at this stuff. I think there's a high level of terror on the part of many people about the impact of technology, not just on wages but on jobs, and are we going to be replaced by robots and all that kind of stuff. And I'm actually in a separate discussion. I'm not as worried maybe as some others. But first, to your first point, to your first point, this has happened, yes, technology is affecting all those countries, and that's why you're seeing more inequality. That's why the Gini coefficient is reasonably similar among those four countries because they're all, I think, facing the impact of technology from one form or another. We simply have, as you know, much more flexible labor markets so wages here can move more rapidly and go down. I don't think you're going to find a case in Europe where auto workers have taken 10% pay cuts to remain competitive. They just get government subsidies or whatever, or the companies lose money. And so I think that the impact of technology is not that different on any of these countries. I think what's different is the way companies have organized themselves in terms of the government's involvement in protecting those at the bottom, helping those at the top, or whatever. So that would be, I think that's my basic answer. Great. I'm just going to point to you.  And I promise I'm going to get you in, don't worry. Hi, Doug Olivant with New America Foundation. One thing you didn't discuss, I was surprised not to hear was about the cost and education policy.  It strikes me that if you're 2.3 kids that you need to send, that's going to either put a big dent in the wealth, accumulated wealth at that point to the parents. So essentially you're saving to send the kids to college and when that's done you can start saving for retirement. Or you're just imposing that cost on the 21 to 25 year old. He then, he or she graduates with a $30, $40,000 debt at that point. He's not accumulating wealth then until he pays that back in his 30s. I didn't see that on the slides. Is that something we need to talk about? Well, I only had 20 minutes. And that honestly is the answer to your question. I agree with you completely. Obviously that education is and finding ways for people to pay for education, making it affordable is all at the top. And I will also now venture way out of my comfort zone and expect there are a lot of people who know more about this than I do. But we shouldn't be talking just about how many kids get a four-year college degree, what kind of loans or subsidies or how we help them financially. But we should also be talking about what kind of education they should get. Because it isn't obvious, even for those of us who went to four-year liberal arts colleges and might have studied philosophy, which I didn't, that that is what everybody should do. We have 2,000 new jobs to chat and do good. There are a lot of interesting aspects to how that all happened. But one of the things that happened was even though they had thousands and thousands of applicants, and those jobs paid $14.5 an hour when they started. They were not middle-class jobs, they were lower middle-class jobs. Even though they had all these applicants, they found the applicants really weren't capable of doing the work. And they ended up bringing trainers in from Germany to run German-style training programs for them. So I think there's a lot to talk about in philosophy at Harvard that I think would be part of the conversation. Very good. Carol Heimowitz at Bloomberg. I wonder how much of the solution has to come from the private sector, particularly boards of directors who've been so behind the run-up in executive pay so you don't have a situation where the top executives are getting about 300 times what the bottom, there's been a balloon there. So I'll say something controversial on that. I may not make many friends. I don't think it's the private sector's responsibility. I think we're all sort of we're all set up and motivated by a set of incentives, a set of goals, a set of an assignment. We all have an assignment in life of what we're supposed to do. And people in the private sector, executives are supposed to run their companies and make money for their shareholders. I do think executive pay is out of control. Don't get me wrong. But I showed you there are 16,000 households in that top .01% with 7 million or more of income. There's 500 companies in the Fortune 500. They're certainly part of the problem. I think it's out of control. I'd love to see some stuff done about it. Not probably by the government, but by the boards, as you say. But it's more symbolic than actually going to really change the numbers that I showed you. Well, speaking of inequalities, we figure out... Hang on. Me first. You're in charge. You can have all the questions. Okay. Speaking of out of control, the only people that I saw that should be super happy were the people in the financial sector and the Wall Street folks. And I'm just curious, what's your view about the financialization of the economy?    Is that your... Is that a fear of you? Well, you know, asking me what I think about the financial sector is like asking a shoemaker whether people should have shoes. Made my living in it for 40 years. Look, I think... Look, first of all, I would say in full disclosure, and again, time for everything, that number is a little misleading because it's from a low 0.09 during the recession upsets, but there's no question the financial sector is doing fine. I'll say something else controversial and then I'll temper it a little bit. I think if you say to yourselves, well, how are we going to compete around the world? How are we going to... If we're going to have to cut auto workers' wages and compete, and we have to remember we are very competitive in a bunch of industries, whether it's information technology or health care or education and financial services. If you look around the world, our banks and our financial services firms are the most successful ones in the world and I don't think we want to give that up. I think in Tim Geithner's book is also out this week and it's a great book I would recommend to all of you because I think he lays out how they thought about this and I would say that in the course of saving the country and saving the financial system there were beneficiaries of that, shall we say, that we're unfortunate and I think if we could do it all over again if we could change life you might do it a little differently and I also think that going forward we need a much more vigorous regulatory apparatus and oversight apparatus to keep things under control but I don't think our capital markets the amount of the ability of companies to raise venture capital and things like that, I just don't think we want to I don't think we want to cut off our noses despite our faces honestly. Hi, my name is Sarianne Lee with the U.S. Department of Education and I'm really interested in one of the solutions he suggested which was redistribution but a challenge that we find is that even if you have an educated group that don't know about money they haven't had money introduced into their realm of thinking they don't know how to properly invest they get caught up in wicked, ironic schemes and they can't navigate themselves out of poverty or tricky student loans so how does the redistribution address people who don't know how to manage the money even if they do get it? Well, that's a really good point again a little bit out of my assignment for today but there's no question that the lack of financial literacy on the part of people is a major impediment in all this as I guess a little bit of an aside but it relates to your point change from defined benefit pension programs where the money was invested by big pension funds and you've got a pension to the 401K IRA system which was done for reasons unrelated I think it was a really bad policy decision because it basically told people you've got to now deal with your money and people don't know how to deal with their money they're not professionals, you wouldn't take out your appendix you wouldn't write your own will, you wouldn't fix your own plumbing why would you try to manage your own money so that's one piece of it that I think needs to be fixed but I do I had lunch with somebody the other day who wants to really take a lot of his wealth and make a big push for financial literacy because he agrees with you and I agree with you it's something that should be on the list Well, we only have one more minute but I cannot ignore that hand right there so please give that great leader the microphone Thank you Van, thank you Stephen by the way I did major in philosophy in college I want to drill in on one of your five solution tracks policy it's always troubled me that most American families pay more in payroll taxes than in income taxes and payroll taxes are the most aggressive forms of taxes by definition and could that not be a winning political formula to focus in on lowering payroll taxes because Americans are averse to redistribution that doesn't fly here but the message that working Americans should be able to keep more of the gains of their own work might just resonate and we could fund our social security system through progressive income taxation instead your comments please So I think to those of us in the money business all just money and you can call it what you want and I totally agree with the implication of your question that whatever solution those of us who want to do something come up with should make it as politically palatable as we can because redistribution is an ugly word and it's not a word that has a lot of great political resonance at the moment the country or at the moment the conventional wisdom is still centers around the idea of a social security trust fund and that people pay in and they get out and all that stuff even though the actuarial numbers don't really work and so it would take a big change in our thinking I'd be fine with that another thing that would really also mostly help people at the very bottom but which I think a vast number of economist types believe in is raising the earned income tax credit it's a very progressive very efficient way to help people who are close to the bottom so there's a thousand ideas out there and I'm not in the packaging business but I'm fine with that one I'm fine with pretty much anything I just think we're heading in the wrong direction well listen I think we are out of time is that right so I want to give you a big round of applause for your thinking on this stuff and it does seem like this is an idea because time has come so thanks for seeing us good move


Using the hashtag the Maddie's that's hashtag the Maddie's and for the next set of awards may invite on stage Mr. Avdeesh Chaturvedi director brand and agencies sales. I am I Mobile and mr. Shalab Singh he associate vice president sales and account Management I am I could we please have you on stage So we are going to be acknowledging the best campaigns as far as lead generation are concerned Could we have the shortlisted nominees please? What we chose is those categories which actually are capable of winning not only nationally, but also internationally and those which have actually generated True leads and I have actually gone for getting higher sales for their Brands and their products and that's really the differentiator by let's find out who oh by the way is some alcohol rolling on the floor What is happening here? No alcohol on the floor? I got My wine now. This is unfair.  I hope you're enjoying your evening here tonight. We're moving on to


I think the thing that's amazing about science and about biology for me is that there's always more to be discovered and every time we feel like we've figured something out, it seems to open up several more questions. Scientists have appreciated for a long time that once we understood the DNA sequence in cells, if we had a tool that would allow easy manipulation of that sequence, that would be a very powerful kind of technology. CRISPR is a technology for changing the sequence of DNA in cells in a precise fashion to correct mutations that might otherwise cause disease. It's going to enable a lot of science to be done that was impossible to do in the past. So the way the CRISPR technology works is by the action of a protein called Cas9 that functions like a molecular scalpel for DNA. The CRISPR-Cas9 system has an amazing ability to recognize a particular DNA sequence in a cell that may be malfunctioning and then disable it by cutting the DNA. We call this gene editing and we can use it to disable or repair a mutated part of the gene which may be causing disease. For Cas9 to find the malfunctioning DNA, we attach it to an RNA sequence that matches the DNA sequence we want to edit. When we put this RNA-Cas9 combination into the cell, it finds the mutant DNA and uses a chemical reaction to cut the DNA strand right at the spot where it's malfunctioning. After that, we can sometimes insert the correct version of the gene for the cell to work properly again. It's a very, very exciting technology that's going to do a lot of good in human society and for human health. It stretches from human therapeutics to agricultural applications to thinking about how do we make better biofuels. These would be incredible outcomes, I think, of using this kind of technology in the future.


Okay, so next we have Alelita talking about consider a lot pop-up considerations for your infrastructure cost monitoring All right. Thanks Richard Hi, everyone. I know that I am holding you back between lightning talks and my talk But thank you everyone for your patience I am going to dig into observability considerations for cost cloud cost optimizations today A little bit about myself. I'm Alelita Sharma. I Am a co-chair for the observability group a tag group in the CNCF I also work on open telemetry, and I'm on the governance committee of the open telemetry project that you've been hearing all about and I also lead a IML observability at Apple So with that said, I'd like to ask folks How many of you are users of cloud infrastructure? I'm guessing many folks Alright, so this is this is something that I think is near and dear to many of our hearts both from a using user perspective as well as from a vendor perspective and What I wanted to do today was kind of have a Discussion oriented Talk, I know we ran out of we are short on time a bit But I what I did want to call out is that there is in There've been some talks on FinOps today earlier in the day and as many of you You know work on cloud infrastructure as well as building applications on cloud infrastructure Most enterprises big or small Leverage cloud infrastructure today for running global applications, right? Whether that's services or whether that is you know, middleware services or being able to provide data to your you know applications so Cloud infrastructure kind of forms the baseline for all the scalability Reliability and the performance that we look at from a systems point of view We use observability as many of you are here today to be able to Understand system behavior well and also be able to understand health of the Service end-to-end both of the application as well as the infrastructure layer real time Because there are many things, you know, many implementations that have been done over time which are Not really real time, right? They have the aggregate data. We look at data You know for days we go in often also Go in really analyze post Collection, but in this case I'm talking about real-time observability and as Time goes by we operate, you know, very large services at scale and operational planning as well as running cloud-based applications Cannot be done without real-time observability, right both on the infrastructure as well as the application layer so Observability, you know again helps us build operational resilience many of us, you know, I'm looking at resilience at different layers How do we provide h.a. And high availability across zones across regions across, you know different? configurations Availability as well as performance of applications right so again all of these areas go Lockstep and many of us sitting here, you know are very familiar with the details of how to operate such large-scale systems So enter a new area that is intersecting with the observability space It has been intersecting for a while, but I think that even today it's far more pronounced and has really grown in an Evolved in the space of observability where you see a lot of the financial planning the forecasting the Analysis of understanding public cloud costs has become more and more offense scenario and a use case for Observability right because here. We are we're coming from systems. Well. We think and breathe systems But you know here. We are also now thinking about how does that intersect into cost? Both from an engineering perspective as well as from a financial perspective So today what I want to do is focus this talk on really, you know thinking about how Observability intersects and what are some of the underpinnings that observability is that now providing for financial planning? I do think that in today's world at the scale that which we operate at you know our services globally operational and financial planning needs to happen lock step that is you cannot you know really not think about Financial planning at the same time that you operate your services This also means that public cloud providers who are an integral part of the fabric of the services that are being run are also key stakeholders and need to provide you know cost-effective services which really scale at the You know on demand for the user So I want you to kind of think about the different stakeholders in the in the equation right when you say that you have The operations and the operating of the systems the design of systems We're all familiar with about that was engineers But then you also have the CFO's office the financial teams coming in and knocking on your door and saying that hey you know it's like how much is this stuff costing and Why are we getting all these you know massive bills when we really don't have the kind of breakdown that we should have? Right like you know any cloud provider that you're using Does it do they give you what you need and that's a good question to ask So if you don't have observability data today, right fully instrumented fully collected for all your application application services as well as all your infrastructure Are you first first question to ask is that are you is your cloud cost analysis and financial planning? Really you know being able to leverage the crowd Resource usage data that you're getting from your cloud providers You know and cloud providers can be public cloud You could be running hybrid infrastructure You could be running all different kinds of configurations But you really have to question is the data that you're getting for usage information of resources really adequate Right the other part really is that is your provider providing you enough data granular enough or You know additional Organizational detail that you may need to be able to you know clearly account for that cost Into projects or into different domains or different users or different cost centers again There's a lot of complexity that goes into the financial space so often What you know is What ends up happening is that financial? Planning becomes very much of a guess guesstimate Right because you really don't have the kind of you know detail that you wouldn't need to have you know for Resource usage as well as other you know dimensions and it really becomes an guesstimate analysis which you know leads to Very quickly can lead to unmanaged cloud costs To inefficiency in the way you run your systems in the way you configure your infrastructure waste and hence Organizational over spent because if you don't have visibility Which is what observability is all about then how do you actually get to the next step and often? You know it is actually many teams just getting up and trying to pull data together. You know post occurrence of you know this usage and trying to combine compile that information back together So fast forward to observability and what you know if you do have the data You know in a perfect world where you have all the instrumentation you have the data You have your infrastructure You know being able to emit the kind of detail of granular data and the types of data that you need to have For your infrastructure as well as for your applications observer Observability becomes very useful because you can take your resource data usage data. You can take your Real-time telemetry data collection Apply correlation apply ML trend analysis that's where ML is becoming more and more useful and I'm not talking about buzzwords here. It is actually very useful at scale and the results in you know very accurate very granular Data-driven understanding of resource utilization and spend patterns that your organization may have right so it really is that Adding observability is imperative for getting accurate cost analysis And the continuous pay-off for your organization really is that hey you know you have actionable real-time accurate financial and operational planning which really leads to cost cloud, you know cost optimization for your cloud spend and in the long run really what every business is after is how do you reduce risk on You know financial planning so that you know you don't have to you can sustain any kind of changes in the economy for example So I want to kind of take this, you know in the mode where I said, you know, there are multiple stakeholders in this game It's not really only engineering. It's not only application development and developers but it's also the CFO's office often financial teams that are operating across the company and What does the CFO's office come back and ask you about what do they need as a systems engineering team as a platform engineering team as an You know team that's operating infrastructure or developers who are building applications on the cloud You really need to be very very much, you know lockstep with the CFO's office So if you were to come back to a systems engineering team and said hey, you know, what do I need? I need just these this is the list of items. I need from you at a minimum One is telemetry data Even though we have loads and loads of telemetry data terabytes and perabytes But sometimes it's not enough because it may mean not be the right type of data, right that you need for cost analysis So more granular data more data for that support streaming at scale for real-time collection Correlation and analysis on the fly right because that also gives you a lot of performance to be able to calculate cost and apply models and do a lot more pre-processing on the on on the fly as you are doing collection and What that then does is it also sets up the data to be very easily consumable for intelligent analysis And why do I say intelligent analysis and not just Regular observability analysis, you know where you can do correlation or you can just do Sampling for example is that yeah, that's fine That's at a basic level, but then you actually do want to accelerate the speed of analysis that you want to do at scale at Real-time and for that typically ML is used a lot. I Do introduce a new buzzword here, but it's an old buzzword actually AI ops Also known as ML Ops sometimes For understanding reliability patterns now we do this a fair bit in systems reliability You know where you are actually not only building your observability pipelines But then you also have ML applied at scale to be able to understand reliability patterns, you know errors failures Analysis, you know that really gives you the kind of trends in which your data your applications are not only behaving But also the patterns of usage across regions and different types of metrics that and dimensions that you want to see and That is something which is very useful for you know, again going in supporting financial planning because in you know at observability This is a different area Data analysis also where you are actually working with cloud providers specific, you know requirements And these are again, you know areas that systems engineering is not our only stakeholder on could be capacity Reservations for example, right like one team that is doing reservations for capacity and working with cloud providers May know about that detail, but others others may not Developers may not when you're building an application. So that data along with you know other discount data A cloud provider, you know deals, etc. All needs to factor in into your Into your analysis because you really can apply that at the system scale at the infrastructure scale before it even goes into financial planning and that's something that's super useful and that's something that also needs to be part of the SLOs and SLAs that are committed to by cloud providers Why do I call that out is because alert management again? Which is the next step of observability if you will in an observability life cycle At the systems observability level we often set alerts for understanding behavior of systems, right for applications that we are looking at But they also can be you know a whole range of budget alerts that you can set up for usage And why that matters is because you want to be able to understand, you know, what what is your infrastructure, you know Utilize being utilized for at any given point in time real time You do want to set thresholds and be able to understand, you know How that it triggers in various regions various resource types various Applications, you know in different dimensions and that's something that's super important The other aspect is also for these budget alerts of this category alerts You can actually surface that that information to different stakeholders. So not only, you know systems engineering platform engineering Operations, but also developers, you know development teams, which are actually looking at how performance and application is going to be and also your CFOs team, right? Your financial teams were actually also working with you lock step on supporting your needs for the business and Last but not least, you know having these budgeting alerts will also convert into reporting with detailed Analysis on the different types of trends patterns and the usage not only at an application level, but also Factoring in all these different parameters that you know some of which I called out So it's it's actually complicated because it's you know has its own Data needs if you will and it is more and more intersecting with the same groups Across organizations where it's not only good enough to understand, you know Setting up and designing large-scale infrastructure, but it's equally important to understand what the resource utilization and efficiencies will be So at the end of the day, I just want to call out that you know There are different stakeholders in this whole equation and they have to be at the table Sitting and you know when you're building out your infrastructure They do need to be at the table at the same time, right? There has to be regular conversation regular planning systems, you know all the way from day one when you actually start Building your scalable applications as well as deploying them worldwide So you have the functionality of engineering with the CTO here You have the CFO with the financial offices and you also have the operate operating Teams from the business who are actually looking and working closely with the other teams to be able to do You know analyze and spec out your budgets The other area that I do want to call out Which is actually a very important area and this is kind of one of the takeaways that I'd like to community You know share is that public cloud providers today? Do not provide the kind of detailed information that and the detailed granularity of data that's needed for you know Really highly efficient usage data, right? And public cloud providers need to be able to provide that kind of granularity that kind of customization and the relevant data That is needed for applications and that you know and resource utilization We are going into a very data intensive age with AI and many of you you know who may be looking at AI or You know thinking about applying it are definitely going into an age where we need to be more and more conscious about Every single aspect of optimizing pipelines of infrastructure. It's not only is G CPUs anymore It's not only memory usage. It's not only just storage But it's a lot more than that and that fabric, you know really really has to be optimized Has to have metrics and other data exposed so that you really have visibility From the public cloud providers for starters as well as general system design Planning that needs to happen in order to provide that kind of data that you need For financial forecasting at scale I'd also like to call out that the use of semantic conventions which has been very popular and very well Received in the observability community especially in the open source projects within CNCF Where for example a lot of work on semantic conventions has been done for other kinds of parameters in open telemetry semantic conventions should be actually defined by all the stakeholders at the table for cost observability metrics for cost Observability data because that is a whole layer of data that you need above and beyond what the cloud provider is or cloud Infrastructure is surfacing today That even goes back to you know how we think about Kubernetes and what Kubernetes itself is in orchestration and environment is Exposing from the infrastructure, so using semantic convention for cost observability is an area which it will become more and more important as we go forward and Not only engineers, but product managers, you know operations SRE as well as financial Product managers and analysts need to contribute in that whole process Because once that is standardized I'd really like to see the public cloud providers provide and consistent interoperable way of Being able to surface these metrics so they can be used and Custom you know and don't need the kind of heavy lifting that is needed for cost analysis today The other area that I'd like to see again And this goes back to API's and using standardized API's is for instrumentation and collection of cost Observability data which needs to be first of all defined and I think there's some work that is ongoing But you know, I'd like to see more momentum behind that with Specifically with some of the open source projects which are in the CNCF But also a lot more standardized implementation across the larger projects, right like There's cube cost when you're if you are familiar of an open cost But I think there's a lot more to be done there and last but not least Leveraging, you know, what I described as AI ops. There are many different aspects of that, but standardized Registration or not only when analysis perspective, but using new technologies such as your such as LMS to be able to actually Use this at scale for accurate forecasting And being able to actually have a lot more definition on the kind of real-time analysis you need for Getting back to your cost management and cloud cost management Right. So again, it's super important because we don't have, you know The ability at some point of the other to be able to say, hey, you know We're going to put in all this customized engineering to really get what we need It is very important for the cloud providers actually to be interoperable and to provide the standardized set of Metrics and other data observability data that can be used very easily All right. So with that said, I think We covered a lot, you know, it's a big big area and I know we're at Time almost but I'd like to, you know, ask folks if they have questions I just wanted to reiterate that, you know, this is a very large area But it's also a very fast moving area because the use cases for this need are Now right like as we start building out a whole generation of new Intelligence systems and services. It really is very imperative to, you know, kind of Make progress in this area and it's exciting to see this intersect with observability. I Do think that, you know, also more stakeholders need to be at the table. It's not enough for, you know Us engineers to sit and do this. It's also important for the other stakeholders to actually come to the table and work with us And last but not least, you know, really taking Making these optimizations effective because I think that today there's a lot of Handholding in the way that we do cost management and that can be easily easily, you know improved a lot All right, so that said, I'm done questions Questions two folks have questions one Okay, you're time for one What kind of tools do you use for? getting the cost monitoring data because Some of the tools that we have does not Provide the detail information Do we have to invest in or from CNCF are we trying to invest in a couple of these? Cost monitoring tools. Yeah, I think I think there's some amount of work And again the question is that you know, there's not enough to tooling for cost management today And the tooling that exists today is probably not as well developed as it could be So are there other projects that are you know in the CNCF space that are looking at this? And how can we do more and I would say that I think we don't have enough projects being done But however, I would also say that you know, there are several interesting projects from the cloud providers Which actually can be pulled into the CNCF and would actually help everyone utilize them Carpenter from AWS is one of them There are also other projects Which you know could actually benefit from being integrated into the CNCF Any other questions? I think they're done. Thank you everyone. Have a lovely day