“There is a lot to like about with this infrastructure plan from what we already know and there seems to be a historical opportunity to get things right. Before answering your question, let me bring us to three trends just for context. Firstly, for decades we’ve had an economic model that benefited a small number of people tremendously and left behind the majority of Americans, resulting in widening inequality and decline in the middle class. The fact that a zip code could predict a lot of things; your health outcome, your lifespan, your success in life is an extremely telling example. Secondly, we’ve had the digital revolution which spanned a good part of the last 15 years that further demonstrated a lot of displacing and polarizing tendencies. If you’re in the wrong parts of the economy so to speak, it really didn’t work that much for you. Thirdly of course, we had the Covid crisis which turbocharged a lot of these trends. A lot of this is to say that sure there’s a lot of roads and bridges to fix and as well as fiscal infrastructure, but how to productively engage more Americans in the economic process through like you said job training and education, through better child care, invest in green recovery, and climate resilience these are paramount tasks.” — Jack Gao, Institute for New Economic Thinking
