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Finding Solutions
We put a man on the moon. This chapter asks what it would take to build an economy that actually works for the people who show up to it every day.
From Idea to Action
The chapter opens with America’s biggest shared achievements — ending slavery, defeating fascism, the moon landing — as proof the country solves “impossible” problems when it stops treating fellow citizens as the enemy. Then it gets concrete: what would an economy that keeps that promise actually look like?
The Gap, in Real Numbers
Since 1979, wages for the top 1% grew 138% — the bottom 90% grew just 15%. Had 1979-level income equality held, the average middle-class household would have earned about $94,310 in 2007; the real number was $76,443. Nearly 34% of Americans have no savings at all. For children born in 1940, 90% out-earned their parents by the same age — for those born in the 1980s, only 50% do.
History Already Ran This Experiment
In 1914, Henry Ford raised his workers’ pay to $5/day while cutting the workday from nine hours to eight — in 2015 dollars, that’s about $14.92/hour, almost exactly today’s $15 minimum wage debate, over a century ago. The reaction at the time wasn’t celebration: the New York Times called it “distinctly utopian” and warned it ran “dead against all experience”; the Wall Street Journal accused Ford of committing “economic blunders, if not crimes.” Ford’s own defense: “We increased the buying power of our own people, and they increased the buying power of other people, and so on.”
Sources & Further Reading
The Ford wage-history figures in this chapter are traceable to real sources: the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own inflation calculator, a preserved Ford Motor Company press release archive on the original 1914 announcement, and two books: Drawing Conclusions on Henry Ford (Alvarado & Alvarado, University of Michigan Press, 2001) and Ford’s own The Great To-Day and Greater Future (reprinted by Cosimo, 2006).
One Idea Worth Sitting With: Citizens' Assemblies
The chapter’s proposed starting point isn’t a policy — it’s a process: Citizens’ Assemblies, groups of everyday people selected the way jury duty works, brought together to study an issue and recommend real solutions. Not a new idea, and not partisan — just a bet that ordinary people, given real information and enough time, make better decisions than the loudest voices in the room.