Remarks at the Third Session of the White House Conference on the New Economy - Brief Article

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, April 10, 2000

April 5, 2000

The President. All right. Please be seated, everyone; let's go. The final panel today is one of particular importance--to me at least--and that is, how can the new economy's tools empower civil society and government? And I'm going to call on Esther Dyson first, the founder and chairman of EDventure Holdings, because she has to catch a plane.

Ms. Dyson. I can stay.

The President. But you can go first, anyway--so there. [Laughter]

[Ms. Dyson made brief remarks.]

The President. Thank you. I think it would be good now--I'll just go over to Kaleil Tuzman, the cofounder and CEO of govWorks.com, to talk. The floor is yours.

[Mr. Tuzman made brief remarks.]

The President. Thank you. I'd like to now call on William Julius Wilson, who is now a professor of social policy at Harvard, the JFK School. He's been very generous with his time to me and to this administration over the last 7 years, and who I think, better than anyone else I know, chronicled the disappearance of work for minority males in inner cities as the economy changed and as jobs moved to the suburbs, and the implications that had for economic and social dislocation and racial tensions in our country.

So I would-I think the title of his last book was "When Work Disappears."

The President. Let me say, as you know, we're trying to get another substantial increase in the earned-income tax credit, including one that would help working families with more than two children. The last time we--we nearly doubled the earned-income tax credit in '93, and it took--that helped us to move over 2 million people out of poverty.

[Professor Wilson made brief remarks.]

Most of the people in poverty today, by American definitions, are working people, which would surprise a lot of Americans. It wouldn't surprise anybody from any developing country, where all the people in poverty are working people unless they're disabled. But it's also true in America, and I think it's very important.

And clearly, we ought to raise the minimum wage again. It still hasn't recovered its former levels. And indeed, all we will do if we raise it to my proposal is to basically recover where it was about 20 years ago in real dollar-purchasing-power terms. I hope we can do that.

I'd like to call on Professor Robert Putnam now, who is also at Harvard, and who gave us the concept of social capital, defined as "rules, networks, and trust," and has really, I think, broadened the understanding that we have of civil society and its role in how our economy works and how we all live together. And I also have the galley copy of your latest book, so you can hawk it, too, if you like. [Laughter] I think you should. "Bowling Alone," it's called. Worth it for the title alone. [Laughter] Go ahead.

[Professor Putnam made brief remarks.]

The President, Well, first of all, I thank you all, and I want to give you a chance to comment on what each other said. But let me just observe, every time I hear Bob Putnam speak, I think a Washington, DC, needs more social capital. And I'm not kidding. And I think, also, that there is a deep yearning for this sort of thing among young people.

We have a big increase in enrollment in the Peace Corps. We have a huge increase in AmeriCorps. We've had more people in AmeriCorps in 5 years than the Peace Corps had in 20 years. That shows you there's something to what you're saying, and I think it's very real. And I saw it in very stark ways. I'm thinking of this because we're coming up on the fifth anniversary of the Oklahoma City tragedy, where person after person down there told me they sort of uncritically bought into the anti-government rhetoric, and all of a sudden, there were these people, and their children were in school with their children, and on and on and on, all the obvious things. But there was this instantaneous sense of cohesion. It had nothing to do with Government or the fact that they were Government employees.

And I do--the whole question of whether the Internet will be an atomizing or a unifying, cohesive force in our society is, I think, an open question.

Esther, do you want to talk about it? Bill?

[The discussion continued.]

The President. Anybody out here want to say anything, ask any questions?

[At this point, the question-and-answer portion of the session began.]

The President. Well, when you talked about that--I want to give you an example. When you talked about all these organizations that were created in the aftermath of the industrial revolution in America, arguably, they were filling need for social capital, for networks that didn't exist when people worked in smaller work units and had more kind of comprehensive relationships with a smaller number of people.

When you did your book and you talked about Italy, for example, and how northern Italy had massive amounts of social capital, partly around the economic units that were patterned on the medieval guilds, I got to thinking about this. I'll just give you an example of something that's going on in the Internet economy.