Localism in America: Remarks from Stephen Goldsmith, Former Mayor of Indianapolis and Deputy Mayor of New York City

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

LOCALISM IN AMERICA: REMARKS FROM STEPHEN GOLDSMITH, FORMER MAYOR OF INDIANAPOLIS AND DEPUTY MAYOR OF NEW YORK CITY

OPENING REMARKS: STEPHEN GOLDSMITH, HARVARD KENNEDY SCHOOL

PANEL DISCUSSION PARTICIPANTS: NATALIE GOCHNOUR, UNIVERSITY OF UTAH; HOWARD HUSOCK, MANHATTAN INSTITUTE; DOUG ROSS, NEW URBAN LEARNING; ANNE SNYDER, CENTER FOR OPPORTUNITY URBANISM

MODERATOR: JOEL KOTKIN, CENTER FOR OPPORTUNITY URBANISM

5:00–7:00 PM THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2018

EVENT PAGE: http://www.aei.org/events/localism-in-america-opportunities-closer- to-communities/

TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY DC TRANSCRIPTION — WWW.DCTMR.COM

RYAN STREETER: Hello, everyone. Welcome to AEI and to today’s event and seminar on localism in America. I’m looking forward to the discussion and remarks from our speakers and panelists.

Before I introduce our speaker this evening, I’d like to draw your attention to the “Localism in America” visual that you see up there. It is actually the cover of a new collection of essays produced by both AEI scholars and scholars outside of AEI about how we can tackle kind of big-scale national problems at the local level with some similarly thoughtful essays. And you’ll be hearing from some of the authors and contributors to the volume a little bit later on.

I would like to say for those AEI scholars who are not up on the dais — we have about seven of us who’ve contributed to the volume. A couple are here, Robert Doar and Karlyn Bowman, Sam Abrams, Rick Hess, Tom Miller, Eleanor O’Neil, and Andy Smarick. For you AEI groupies, there’s quite a bit of AEI contribution to the volume as well.

Before we hear from some of the contributors to the volume, now I’d like to introduce our speaker, Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, someone I’m really pleased to have here at AEI. Steve is the Daniel Paul Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and he’s also the director of the Innovations in American Government program there. And he also directs the Data- Smart City Solutions, a project that highlights local government efforts to use data analytics and community input to reshape the relationship between government and citizens. He’s previously served as a deputy mayor of New York City under Michael Bloomberg when he was mayor, and before that he was well-known as the mayor of Indianapolis. And I’d also like you to check out his new book, “A New City O/S.” We have some bookmarks out at the table on the way out. If you haven’t seen that, it’s really worth your while to read.

And it’s a real pleasure for me to be able to introduce Steve because 20 years ago, he actually took a gamble and hired me when he was the mayor of Indianapolis — 20 years ago? Did I just say 20 years ago? It’s hard to believe — when I was getting my start in public policy work, so I’m grateful to him for helping me get me on a path to a place like this.

So without any further ado, I’d like to ask you to join me in welcoming Steve Goldsmith to AEI. (Applause.)

STEPHEN GOLDSMITH: Thank you, Ryan. It’s an interesting moment for me because I spent, you know, a decade with Streeter telling me what to do, and then I went to New York City, where Doar told me what to do. And the only person who actually I totally think has perfect judgment is Howard Husock, who wrote the Harvard Kennedy School case study about Steve Goldsmith and Indianapolis. When I read it, I went, man, am I good. I had no idea I did that stuff. So I thought it was really — thank you — a bestseller case study. So probably you should read it. You’re probably in it.

So, anyhow, I also have a cold so if I sniffle a little bit, I apologize. I’m pleased to be here and just make a few comments about the papers, which I read this weekend and they were interesting. And I’ve been — I’ve got 30 years of a few successes and mostly failures in localism, right? Not in running a city, but just in trying to think about subsidiarity and what it means at the local level and how the various aspects of subsidiary and subsidiarity work. And let me just give you — occasionally I get it right, but mostly I got it wrong.

So I got elected mayor of Indianapolis, and I thought that, well, cities are too big and bureaucratic as well, at least large cities are. So I wanted to have municipal federalism, and so I created this path to municipal federalism where we’d recognize communities and give them more authority over the money we spent there and we tried to have their voice be stronger and I got into this. And then the city council and I think in close to unanimous vote took the — reprimanded me, saying that they were elected to represent these districts and how could I actually reach out to people who live there and ask them what they thought when their view as the elected official was to tell me what their communities think, right?

So on one level, that seemed to me terribly arrogant, and on another it’s a kind of interesting issue, right, if you’re thinking about where does the expression of community come from, who’s the legitimate representative of that community. And so if we — I know the conversations here are how localism is the unit through which much should be done, but, you know, I’m not even sure what that meant.

So then I decided just to kind of show total inconsistency in my philosophical approach, that I would take on a lower-level unit of government than my own, which was the school board, right, because the school board, individually elected, had been totally coopted by the vested interest. And I don’t mean just the union. I mean the union and the bureaucrats and the bus drivers and the cafeteria workers and everybody except the teachers and students kind of ran the shop, and it was having — (inaudible).

So this is — I saw Rick Hess’ reference to the blob in the book. And at the height of my mayoral popularity, I ran against the blob candidates and lost. I won just enough seats for people to get mad at me and not enough to actually take control of the school board, right? So it was kind of the worst of all worlds, but then, after that, I became an advocate for parental choice, helping raise vouchers for poor kids in the community and charter schools.

And I just use that, as we get started in this conversation, because it represents yet another complexity of this issue of localism, right? Because we’re not trying to define government, even at the lowest possible level, as the ultimate expression of civility and community because there are parents, right? And the parents should have choices over where their kids go to school. And so if we think about this mix, it’s like a different level and a different set of circumstances for each. And that’s why I thought the totality of the papers were pretty interesting, right, because you have various perspectives in the papers as well.

So let me just make two other critical comments about things I’ve been involved with and then make a couple of more broad comments. So I think the third area that makes this conversation very difficult, and it’s suggested in part by my school example, is the bureaucratic definition of professionalism. So the definition of professionalism, which is that you get carefully trained in an area and then you know the answers, right? So that if you’re a planner, you know how to make plans for other people, and if you’re a transportation engineer, you know how to make transportation plans for other people.

And so then you get to this point that even at the local level and as you go up in the hierarchy to the federal level, you’re sure because you’ve been freshly trained that you know what’s in everybody else’s best interest, right? And I ran into this in New York City when I got summoned by the Columbus Circle Chamber of Commerce or some such thing. And we had a meeting and there’s like 200 people there and they were telling me why the bike lanes on Columbus were in the wrong place. They shouldn’t be here and if they were here, they should be here and our delivery trucks can’t get in, and our customers are confused.

And so I called the hiring person in the Transportation Department when I got back to my office as deputy mayor and said, “You know, here’s what I was told, and don’t you think we should do something about it?” And the person on the other end of the phone said, “No. We have a professional study that tells us that the bike lanes are in the right place.” I said, “OK. Let’s do this as a hypothetical. If I met every single person” — this is an actual conversation — “I met every single person on that five-block strip and every single one of the people lived there said the bike lanes are in the wrong place, would you agree they’re in the wrong place?” And the person on the end of the phone said, “Of course not. We have a professional study that tells us where the bike lanes should be.” So these kind of expressions of localism and how they mix with professional talents I think is particularly interesting and is a thread through the papers that are here.

And then my last kind of comment is the following. I run programs for mayors and mayors’ chiefs of staff at Harvard. And mayors of large cities are — you know, they’re disproportionately Democrat, but they’re very pragmatic. And if you ask them about this question of subsidiarity with whatever word you’d want to say, they would say, the state house is our enemy, right, because there is an effort, right, on the part of states to preempt local control of issues that state legislature or governor think are things that they’re against, right? And this is kind of the flip for those of us who are Republicans, right, because, basically, in this situation, the Republican legislature is saying, we don’t want you to have local control over Uber pricing. We don’t want you to have local control over minimum wages. We don’t want you to have control over guns.

And I’m not saying which side of that issue is right or wrong for purposes of today’s presentation. I’m just saying if we think about subsidiarity, it’s really cool so long as we’re the ones that get the authority. But if we think that the junior level of government is making really bad decisions, then how do we think then about the preemption issues and the mandate issues? So I think these things get stirred together in a pretty interesting way. So let me just make a few kind of comments about how one might weave through this complexity.

First, I noticed in the introduction — you probably wrote this, Ryan — but in the introduction — I think I saw this in the introduction, that the purpose of this localism discussion is not to suggest that government is inherently evil or the enemy, right? It’s to say that there is a role for government, and that role for government is best executed at the local level. And for those of us who are, you know, small-government conservatives, then it’s very important that we underscore that, right, because the issue is how best to deliver value in a way that complements civil society and the activities of individuals in their own neighborhoods and their own communities. It’s not to say that government has no role. So I thought that that kind of statement — I did read that in the introduction, didn’t I? Right? And so it’s a really important point to begin because sometimes these conversations kind of get sideways on the part of that.

Secondly, I think if we’re going to look at what the goals are of the conversation, then the — you know, I’ve been in local government for 30 years. I think that as you go up levels of government, the government is less engaged and less knowledgeable about what’s happening in people’s lives, right? And if we think about even from a communitarian — you know, that’s the only communitarian point of view, right? We want to be able to support civil society and families. And so there’s a lot to be said by the fact that the closer you are to folks, the more engaged you are and the more you know their problems.

I think that if you’re not in the retail delivery of government, right, you’re in an office where you don’t actually ever see your customers, right, you can’t understand their day-to-day problems. The best thing that ever happened to me — where’s Doar? Is he here? The best thing that ever happened to me in my whole public service life was as a prosecutor in Indianapolis, Indiana, I represented every AFDC mom, right, in child support, right? And so the ability to understand how complex and difficult their lives were and — I still remember one session where I went to them, just kind of in the stereotypical welfare mother language and said, you know, if you can have help getting to work in a job or just a welfare payment, which would you prefer? And everybody, of course, I want a job, right? So the point here is that if you’re making policy away from kind of the retail experiences, it’s less apt to be accurate.

The third issue I think is a little more complicated, and probably Arthur is an expert in this and I’m not. I’ll be careful about this. But I do feel like that the nationalization of everything aggravates the polarization of everything, right? And so the more we nationalize every single discussion, the more we’re bound to have this angry debate. And if we would just take a position that, look, you know, we ought to have a right to have our own set of values, our own set of issues, our own set of communities, assuming that they know they don’t have huge negative externalities on the state next door or the city next door, but the more we recognize that, the more we can have a tolerant society that recognizes that there’s differences between the individuals that live on the coast and the people who live in Indiana, for example.

And so I really think one reason that this is a particularly important set of papers is because it’s a path back from kind of this angry “we’re going to nationalize everything and then we’re going to really argue about it.” And if we would just respect kind of the original concepts of federalism, then I think it would make a big difference.

I also think probably that, you know — when Ryan asked me to make comments, I began by trying to figure out how localism, federalism, and subsidiarity relate to each other. And I decided that that was way too complex, and I moved on to kind of my own set of anecdotes. But if we think about this polarization in the federalism level, I mean, folks who have experiences and live next door to the people know what’s — know more about what’s going on.

Another way to think about this is — in terms of the kind of the reason that this debate is important — is along the lines of effectiveness, right, because there was — I think it was Henninger in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, right, a great article about why the federal government is making mistakes. And, basically, it was because they’re trying to do everything, and if you try to do everything you can’t do anything particularly well, right?

And so one reason to argue for localism is the things that — the more things that can be done at the local level, the more the federal government can concentrate on the really big things it needs to do. So I think this localism argument is a really big argument for that reason as well. And then, if nothing else, the local government may be a little slow and cumbersome, but at least it’s more agile than the federal government in responding to problems as well.

Two other kind of points, it seems to me, about why this set of papers is particularly important and particularly timely. One is that you’re just not the same when you’re spending other people’s money, right? You just — you don’t make the same set of actions.

Now, I remember when I first read one of the — I don’t remember which public choice author wrote this but, you know, the exercise, if you sit down at the dinner table and you’re going to share the check equally, do you really order exactly the same as you would if you were paying for your own check, even if you’re kind of a well-intentioned person? Well, you know, to have our mayors and governors spend their time begging Washington for money is just not a — it’s just a counterproductive activity. And so I think the more we’d have localism, the better off we are.

And I found the same thing as deputy mayor of New York. I mean, the state legislature, right, would order us to do things that they want to take political credit for, but the money — the cost of it was at the local level, and it just — any time those things get out of line, those things happen as well, those negative results happen as well.

So how would one think about a formula? One would be why don’t we just agree that there are a lot of trade-offs, but why don’t we just have a default that the local level of government is the best level for those things that make sense, right? Why don’t we just default to the local level as a beginning concept? The second thing, you would recognize that there are legitimate issues of commerce and equal protection, right, and should overlay that. But that means that we can also compromise on some of those.

And just one really kind of current hyper-technical issue, but it’s a nice one to illustrate it, as you know, there’s a whole new world out here of 5G cells to make your cell phones get data faster, right? There’s a pretty big argument between mayors and folks at Capitol Hill and industry about who should have the right to decide design and zoning and placement and the end-cost of those cells. And you can understand there’s a commerce interest, right, so that, you know, we’re going to be able to use the same phone from state to state, so there’s some minimal standards that need to be set, but do we really need to jump from that to total preemption of the local solution? And so there are ways I think to balance these issues that come out in these papers, but I think it’s worth mentioning that as well.

And then, you know, as we think about effectiveness, so — I think this is my last anecdote, but — maybe not. I’ve been at this 30 years. I have a story about a lot of things. I testified as a young mayor, I think, probably after three or four years in front of a housing subcommittee — which way is Congress? Is this way Congress? This way? That way. All right. This is the most — one of the most vivid moments in my career.

And I said — it was a HUD housing committee — if you give me 80 — if you just give me 80 percent of the money you’re now distributing in Indianapolis and you tell me the number of units of housing you want and you get out of my way, you can keep the other 20 percent, and I’ll do more housing than you’ve ever seen. And the — I can’t remember — it was the chairman of the committee or the minority leader who said — raised his hand and said, “How could we ever trust mayors with something as important as housing, right?” And, basically, the concept was, we’re going to make social policy and we’re going to give you money, but we’re not going to give you the authority actually to implement it in a way that makes sense for your community.

So that story seems to me to represent a number of the papers in the series, which suggest the following. I think it’s silly to take a position the federal government should give money to city or state and not hold them accountable. That doesn’t make any sense to me as a kind of a good government person. But I also think it’s silly for the mandates and the prescriptions and the results to be so heavily set at the national level they don’t make any sense at the local level.

So why can’t we come up with localism that suggests where there’s a role for the federal government, and that role involves resources? Why can’t we distribute those resources, and why there are — where the local and state governments are held responsible for outcomes and are not held responsible for all of the details? Because when I went to look for a housing administrator — I have one other story.

So I wanted to take over public housing because it was a mess. And the way you hired a good public housing director — it’s probably different in New York — and the rest of the country it was — you’d hire somebody who — not because they were good at housing but because they were good at negotiating report writing and compliance to HUD, right? So the profile was find a person who can manage the compliance because the housing is really not nearly as important as the compliance.

So I’ve got — Dick Lugar passed a law that said that only in Indianapolis — he tried it for everybody, but it only worked for Indianapolis — could take control of its public housing. And the day after it passed, I got a call from one of the top two people at HUD, who said to me, “If you utilize the authority, you’re never going to get another federal grant from HUD,” right? So the point was “We don’t really trust locals to implement housing in a way that is appropriate for their community.”

So I just use these examples because I think they begin to show us that — not that everything needs to be done at the local level, not that everything needs to be done at the state level, but that we can calibrate these correctly so that we can have the benefit of retail knowledge and at the same time there are issues that only can be addressed at the federal level.

And I thought the whole kind of Medicaid block grant discussion in your papers was particularly interesting in suggesting that because one principle to think of, as I kind of close here, is that the more disruptive the process is to market-based choices and family- based choices, the less likely it is to work, right? So to the extent that we preempted the bureaucracy into school boards to decide what’s in parents’ and kids best interests or that bureaucrats decide what’s in the patients’ best interest, the more complicated and difficult it will be.

And the last two points as we think about this, that at least to me are important: One is — and this is a little bit more technically abstract, but it’s also a way for me to plug my book before I finish the discussion — is that, look, we have a hierarchical command and control system that was designed in the Progressive Era, coming out of Tammany Hall. And we have a world of distributive learning, right? And it’s a platform where knowledge is created through a series of kind of messy discussions among folks and the new public leadership as a public leadership that needs to curate that information and learn from that information and so the professionals and the community iterate their ideas.

So any system that says that the higher up you are in the hierarchy, the more knowledgeable you are and the more right you have to tell other people what to do is absolutely inconsistent with the way we learn and the way we harvest knowledge today, right? So the distributed networks that we have from which we can learn should change entirely the way we do business. And that means that we have to kind of flatten the hierarchies and do things closer to home and listen more.

And then, when we do that, in conclusion — look, when we were in Indianapolis and in New York, right, those cities were safe, not just because they had good police departments, right? There’s no amount of physical force that will make a community virtuous, safe, strong, or vibrant. It’s necessary, but it doesn’t do it in and of itself. That comes from a community that acts together according to a certain set of rules and where the legitimacy of government is so clear that it sends signals to people that they respond to. And legitimacy comes from responsiveness. Legitimacy comes from listening. Legitimacy comes from your neighbor helping you do something. Legitimacy comes when government responds in a way that it can that’s effective and responsive and creates trust.

So, for me, the whole conversation about localism is one that says the coarseness of our current language of polarization in Washington, they’re making everything a big federal national level. The idea that people in Washington are better off to kind of mandate what happens at the local level misses the point that knowledge is distributed, that folks have — everybody knows more about their own lives than somebody else knows about them and that the legitimacy that comes from democratic government and civil society is based on respectfulness, and respectfulness takes us to the set of local papers.

I’m delighted to be here, and I enjoyed reading them. Thank you very much. (Applause.) Any questions? Yes.

Q: (inaudible)

MR. GOLDSMITH: Thanks. It’s a great and important question. Did I read — (inaudible) — reading yesterday. Howard probably can cite this. The percentage of people who voted in New York City for mayor 50 years ago contrasted to the turnout now. It’s like it went from like 75 percent to 20 percent. I mean, it was like 12 percent. Right. Yeah. So your point is clearly accurate. Look, I think that’s an important point, but I don’t think it actually rebuts my points, right? But it complements it in the following way.

So, A, I think the way we engage the community is outdated, right? I’ve been through these. You go back to your planning department, you forgot what you want to do, you call community town hall meeting, 300 people come up, show up, they yell at you for three hours, and you leave. You check the box, you engaged the community, you go back and do what you’re going to do anyway, right? So that’s a definition of community participation, which is not a very — right now, we have tools to listen to the community, right? We have tools to kind of reach out to the community. We can — you know, we can text, we can create social networks, we can talk to folks.

You know, in Indianapolis, when we’re trying to create a vibrant civil society, we actually got foundation money to train neighborhood leaders. I thought the best thing I could do is if I could get the foundation to train leaders on how to march on city hall and complain to me that I actually would have accomplished something.

So how do we create neighborhood capacity? How do we bring people the means? How do we structure the conversations — just really quickly? So when I — right after I got elected mayor, I went out to cut the ribbon in a park, and it had actually been totally built by my predecessor, Bill Hudnut, but I went out to cut the ribbon anyway, thinking that it would be a great way to kind of start. And the neighbors were really angry. And I said, “Why are you really angry?” And they said, “Because the basketball court is on the senior citizens’ side of the park and should have been on the other side, and the kids play basketball late at night and they keep us awake.”

So when I went and I raised money to rebuild the rest of the Indianapolis parks from — (inaudible) — and I held another meeting, and I said to everybody in the room, “What do you want in your park?” And this guy stands up and he goes, “We’re not park planners. How would we have any idea how to plan the park?”

So I use that example because what we need to do is have a structured conversation where we reach out to people, we can iterate with people. There’s some — in fact, there’s some really good tools — that’s not the purpose of this conversation — but there’s really 3D and AI tools you can use to kind of visualize this and bring people in.

So, yes, it’s not perfect at the local level. But if you ask me, would I rather have a local conversation that’s even a little bit thin on representation about the design of housing in my community or somebody at HUD telling me what it should look like, I’ll take the local level.

Yes, ma’am.

Q: (inaudible) — advocate. The — (inaudible) — in particular have issues with integration, desegregation. How did you address that when you were there?

MR. GOLDSMITH: Why did you ask that question? That’s such a difficult question.

Q: (inaudible) — desegregation of schools. And I worked on Capitol Hill in the ’70s, and I was assigned to work with Detroit, OK? I thought we had made progress and that we had moved some steps forward until I saw recent data. And we are still as segregated as we were when I started working on it.

MR. GOLDSMITH: Well, let me try to answer the question in the context of today, and then I’ll — then Ryan can provide the rest of the answer when he comes up. So the reason I asked — responded to your question that way is because there’s just no good answer to that question. Indianapolis public schools, for example, had a history of explicit discrimination, right, segregation. If you’re black, you went to one school, and if you’re white, you went to another school. And that continued forever, and they were under a court order, as they should have been. They really were very discriminatory.

But then the result of the court order was it just — it actually accelerated the segregation because by scrambling every neighborhood — so you never knew when you moved in the neighborhood where your kid was going to go to school because the kids were bused, it accelerated the white flight out of the — so if you’re trying to mix, right, and you have fewer of the majority, which were whites in my case, and they’re moving to the suburbs, then you’re just concentrating poverty.

So actually the — I opposed the — at the same time I was raising money for urban education, I opposed — I asked for the forced busing case to be closed because I thought it was reaching counterproductive results. And if I went to community meetings, neighborhood meetings and asked folks, they really wanted their kids to go to their neighborhood school. That was their goal.

Look, I don’t — the thing I took away from these papers is that the issue is enormously complex, and there are lots of trade-offs. But in the end, if we could have — if we could think about subsidiarity in the following way — if the federal government would have more respect for the state governments, the state government would have more respect for local government, if the local government actually had more respect for the people who live in their communities, we would have a more vibrant and successful place, more effective government, and more trust as well.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)

DR. STREETER: Thank you, Mayor. Thanks for being here with us today. Great comments.

I’d like to ask our panel to come up now, and I’ll let Joel Kotkin do the introductions of the panel. Joel is my coeditor on the volume. He’s the executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, our partner in this project, and a professor of urbanism at Chapman University and a prolific author known to many of you in this room.

So, Joel, I hand it over to you to take on the panel. Thanks.

JOEL KOTKIN: I really enjoyed those comments and when he particularly was talking about the preemption by the state. Because I live in the People’s Republic of California, and there probably is almost no place in the country where the state government has preempted almost everything that could be done on the local level. And we could certainly talk about that later.

But you’re here to hear some of the other perspectives. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to just give a little bit of background on everyone. I’m sure that, you know, you have the bios. And just so you have some idea of the diversity of the project, one of the things that Ryan and I really worked on was to make sure that this was not a conservative statement. Conservatives have owned in some senses the issue of localism, but actually many people who are very much on the Democratic side — and I spent most of my life as a Democrat — you know, are also having the same issues. And probably if there’s any good thing to say about President Trump, it’s that he’s turned Democrats into localists. So I think that’s a good fact because, you know, we really should stop having elections where — you know, as if we elect a dictator every four years. And, you know, once somebody’s in, it’s all over on one side or the other.

So, anyway, I think you’ll get some very good different perspectives from the people here. I’ll start on my right, appropriately, with Howard Husock, who is at the Manhattan Institute. And I know you worked with Wendell on the paper. One of the things that’s really interesting is about how actually bigger government is not as effective as people think it is.

HOWARD HUSOCK: Thanks, Joel, and thanks to Doug Lewis, wherever he is, for helping to organize this. And thanks to AEI for hosting it. You know, just the fact that AEI has convened an event entitled “Localism in America” itself tells us something.

For much of our history, most, localism was not something you would go out of your way to comment on. Even Woodrow Wilson in his role as a political scientist observed that American cities and towns are not governed, but rather govern themselves. Localism was a fact of life, kind of a healthy hum in the background, if you will. We’re here because that has changed. Localism has been and remains under some assault or at least challenge, and it deserves — to get this started — a defense.

The paper that Wendell Cox and I have authored is entitled “The Enduring Virtues of Localism,” and I try to offer several. And at the end, I’ll get around a couple specific public policies that we may want to reference in this regard.

First, what’s the challenge bit? Well, for over a century, certainly since the consolidation of the boroughs of New York City, the progressive idea has been afloat that government consolidation, regionalism, should be preferred to localism. We have too many small local municipalities, and they’re inefficient. Economies of scale, just like industry — that’s the ticket. Larger school districts, police departments, parks departments would get us more for our money. It sounds commonsensical, and it’s an idea that keeps coming up.

Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York, who thinks he’s running for president, by the way, is currently pushing his own version of it. In the 1990s, former Albuquerque Mayor David Rusk wrote an influential book entitled “Cities Without Suburbs.” Its title speaks for itself.

Well, what’s wrong with their logic? Well, first, the facts get in its way. Research by my coauthor of municipalities in five states in Metropolitan Chicago found that spending per capita was lower in smaller jurisdictions — not higher in smaller jurisdictions, lower in small jurisdictions. And not just Wendell Cox. The US National Research Council has found that, quote, “there’s general agreement that consolidation has not reduced costs and may in fact have even increased total expenditures.”

A 2011 review of peer-reviewed literature by researchers at the University of Central Florida led the authors to conclude similarly that overall the research provides little support for the efficiency argument. Well, understanding why this is actually true leads directly to the virtues of localism, which is why we’re here.

One must start, whenever you talk about localism I guess, with subsidiarity. Steve mentioned it so much — well, it must be where you start. But then you go quickly to a 1956 paper by the economist Charles Tiebout, whose theory of local expenditures looked at municipalities as sort of buffet from which potential residents choose. Some emphasize subservices — perhaps residents wanted large parks with tennis courts or basketball court not on the senior citizens’ side, while others emphasized perhaps, well, twice a week trash pickup or big-time high school football. When consolidation occurs, no one wants to give up a favorite service. Instead, the larger jurisdiction falls under pressure to provide all the services to everyone. That’s called leveling up.

Then enter the matter of interest group politics. In larger jurisdictions, public-sector labor unions have more members and proportionately more influence. It’s one thing to shut down a small local bus service with a strike. It’s quite another to shut down the Washington Metro. In contrast — well, the New York City Transit Authority, where that has actually happened several times.

In contrast, as our paper shows empirically, in smaller jurisdictions, individual voters, not interest groups, hold more power. A city council member in Los Angeles, if you do the long division, represents 265,000 people. In contrast, in nearby Santa Monica, an independent jurisdiction, a lone councilmember represents just 13,000 people. He may take their phone calls. In smaller jurisdictions, one’s vote simply counts more.

And in a not unrelated way, localism can be a powerful antidote to something we’re all worried about: not-in-my-backyard-ism. In cities where one’s vote is diluted, well, there’s no reason to be confident that new taxes that flow from new development will help my own neighborhood. Decisions are made far from the voter by those city councilmen who have 265,000 constituents.

One could be sure, however, that the noise and traffic will be coming your way. Smaller jurisdictions could weigh the trade-offs knowing that taxes will make possible maybe that new science lab in the local school and that might make the traffic worth bearing, not that there won’t be a fight.

Which brings us to a significant but underappreciated aspect of local government: its effect in encouraging civil society out of government stuff, in other words. Well, just as local controversy sparked groups pro and con, so did the ongoing needs of government, planning, zoning, finance, call on local volunteers in smaller jurisdictions.

As one who has served in positions in two local governments, I can confidently say that I’ve had few more gratifying experiences in contrast to Steve Goldsmith — he had his gratifying experiences — by making modest contributions to public service and forging friendship and bonds that lead to unexpected community benefits apart from government itself. Americans seem to get this. Even as the progressive push for consolidation has continued, the number of US municipalities, local governments, has continued to increase from 16,000 in 1942 to more than 19,000 today.

There would be even more if some were freer to choose. The borough of Staten Island, for instance, has voted to secede from New York City but was prevented from doing so by state law. There is, however, one important counterexample. In 1942, there were 108,000 local school districts in the United States. This is one area where consolidation has been triumphant. Today, there are but 12,000. If the goal were to get better results at lower cost, well, how’s that working out for you?

And let’s turn to a couple of things that are in the news in my final comments here: the president’s infrastructure plan and the tax reform plan. The president’s infrastructure plan is being hammered because the federal government’s not spending enough money. It’s looking to states and localities to provide 80 percent match. Well, maybe that’s the way you get localities’ attention to have their own skin in the game, to decide, well, actually this is the project we want.

Now, that doesn’t mean we can’t go ahead and free them from the bonds that we put them in. For instance, the EPA — we have a wonderful paper at the Manhattan Institute by our fellow Aaron Renn — mandates tertiary treatment for every municipality in the United States. It’s really, really expensive. It doesn’t make your water — your waste water all that much cleaner. And if you’re Akron or you’re Cleveland or you’re Detroit, well, you may have a hard time just getting the street lights on. But that comes right off the top of your budget because Washington tells you, you must spend on that. Giving, as the president’s infrastructure plan hints at, more flexibility to the localities is a good idea.

Finally, tax reform has become controversial especially in the blue states because it’s reduced the deduction for state and local taxes. Well, another way to look at that is to say that, well, actually, among many other things, it’s maintained that deduction. It’s continued to realize that local spending should have some special place in America. And, by the way, it’s only a thin sliver of very wealthy people, very wealthy people who pay more than $10,000 for state and local taxes. So this is not the calamitous change that it’s being portrayed, except in a few very wealthy enclaves. Now, maybe if they ever do tax reform again — don’t hold your breath — they should reserve that deduction just for local taxes. So I thus conclude my remarks.

MR. KOTKIN: Just one quick comment when you talk about localities. I spent 40 years in the city of Los Angeles, where — I mean, literally, you got to a point where you literally could expect nothing from your city councilperson who was, you know, basically a front for the public employee unions and big developers. That was just — you just gave up. I now live in a small city in Orange County with about 2,600 people. And every time we have a problem, I just walk the dog to the mayor’s house and complain. So there’s a great advantage. And I think as was put, the turnouts in big cities are just pathetic. I think Mayor Garcetti was elected with about 200,000 votes, 80 percent victory in a city of four million people. So that’s obviously not working out.

But the important thing is that the issue really is subsidiarity and having a responsiveness. And Doug Ross is — well, like me, but I think he’s still a Democrat. I’m now an independent. But Doug and Morley Winograd, Mike Hais, who have been very active in the Democratic Party for a long time, are advancing ideas that are — that they’re trying to sell also to Democrats and progressives.

So, Doug.

DOUG ROSS: All right. Well, if the three Democrats who wrote this paper declared that the New Deal framework of moving all the important problems to the federal level is obsolete, that we should move as much democratic governing authority as possible out of Washington and the imperative for doing it would be as great if Hillary Clinton had been elected president, you can assume we think that something’s amiss in American life.

Now, we come at it really differently somewhat than the mayor, who talked about effectiveness, although we think that’s a valid issue here, and differently even from Joel, who really has focused so much on the economic reality of localism as the cities being the engines of innovation. We’ve really come out at it out of a political concern. And that is the growing evidence that large numbers of Americans are losing confidence in democratic processes generally.

A disturbing amount of polling before and after the ’16 election is showing people willing to say that they would — that we, in fact — because we’ve gotten so far off track, we need a strong leader who’s willing to break the rules. And also surveys of millennials, not showing so much an authoritarian strain, but ranking the importance of living in a democracy is significantly lower than that of their parents and grandparents.

So we come at this really as not so much reflecting an economic reality or even government effectiveness, but really more as a political imperative. Our argument is essentially this: that the debate, particularly since the election, has focused so much on the divisiveness, the polarization, differences that are pulling America apart and making it nearly impossible for any kind of agreement in Washington on anything important.

And the call has been for leadership that can bring us together. And to the degree that that means trying to find again some broad national consensus around these basic kinds of lifestyle differences and economic interests and so forth, we think that we respectfully disagree. We don’t think that’s the way to go. We think all of this diversity of values and culture and lifestyles is a sign of freedom and choice in the country and in and of itself is a healthy thing.

So the challenge really becomes how do we rebuild public confidence in American democracy, not by insisting on singular national answers to each problem, but by celebrating the ability of America’s varied communities to find solutions that work best for them. And so the challenge is how do you allow all of these different views and opinions to flourish while at the same time restoring a shared faith in common democratic values and processes. In other words, how do we — if we’re going to allow people to play different games, if we’re going to cohere some way as a national community, we have to get strong agreement around the rules of the game.

Now, not surprisingly, because you invited us to this panel, our prescription is localism, although specifically what we call constitutional localism. We really believe that to the maximum extent possible decisions ought to be moved to the local level, and even if we have time, we think that issues like immigration even lend themselves to a local dimension. But albeit within a clear constitutional framework to protect the individual freedoms and rights that have been won over the past 250 years.

We think that if we can empower local communities in this way, it not only gets us past sort of this immediate frustration and deadlock in Washington, but in the near term moves decisions to venues where there’s a better chance to actually find answers to real problems, what you were talking about — Howard was talking about and the mayor. But it creates successful democratic experiences for more citizens, which is one of the ways we can help restore belief that these kinds of processes can actually result in good decisions for people in their lives. And in the longer run, we think it’s a way to adapt American democracy to a country that we think now for the foreseeable future is going to have this tremendous diversity of views in how people want to live.

The constitutional part of constitutional localism for us is critical. We can’t overstate our conviction that this empowerment can’t risk all of these historical agreements now on individual civil rights. So a bias toward local action, which is what we bring to this, can’t be seen as an invitation to individual communities to selectively secede from the Constitution. That’s we think not an insignificant issue.

The reason we think the New Deal civic ethos doesn’t work anymore is when Franklin Roosevelt and everybody from Truman through Obama, particularly Franklin Roosevelt, was able to mobilize these large national majorities around a particular course of action. Just remember that in the 1930s, 90 percent of the country was white Christian with the other 10 percent being pretty marginalized and that 90 percent of immigrants and their children who constituted about the same percentage of the population that immigrants and their children do now, were 90 percent of European descent. Right now it’s 12 percent European descent. So the fact that we can’t put together national majorities easily in such a world shouldn’t be particularly surprising.

So, finally, we think that from a political point of view, localism’s time has come. Americans by substantial majority — Democrats, Republicans, Trump voters, Clinton voters — believe that their local communities offer the best opportunities to find real answers to important problems. As Joel and Bruce Katz and others have written, it’s becoming an economic reality of an important sort. This is where innovation and energy is coming economically. And as you poll millennials and some others on this panel know something about millennials, they tend to believe direct level at the communities is the best way to get not only local things done but global things.

Those on the left will fear constitutional localism as a return to states’ rights and separate but equal. Those on the right will suspect it’s an effort to neutralize the Trump presidency and Republican control of Congress. So to make it happen, it’s going to have to be broadly bipartisan.

Last thing I’d say is we think this is a uniquely historic challenge — that just as the Founding Fathers had to wrestle with the skepticism as to whether you could really create democracy in what ultimately would be a continental size country, something that mainly only flourished in city-states, we’re now trying to determine whether liberal democracy can succeed in a place with such an array of economic arrangements, lifestyle preference, and cultural beliefs.

Unless we can find ways to ensure that constitutional democracy serves the needs of Americans, we think we run the risk of losing that idea of democracy to forces of autocracy and of losing our inclusive national identity based on shared ideals to one that excludes many of us based on race, religion, and national origin. So we believe constitutional localism offers a powerful answer to this challenge.

MR. KOTKIN: Thanks. That was very good. Of course, we’re talking about who’s going to inherit this mess, so that’s the millennials. And I have to say even though I have, well, one millennial and one borderline millennial, I clearly don’t understand them.

But, you know, we hear different things like Howard has seen and Doug has seen, where they’ve very negative about democracy and some of whom are actually in favor of some sort of authoritarian rule. But Anne Snyder, who is a fellow at the Center for Opportunity Urbanism and works here in Washington at the Philanthropy Roundtable, is somebody who’s really studied the issues of millennials. And I think she’s probably got better insights than we do.

So, Anne.

MR. ROSS: Although I don’t think they’re authoritarian. Yes.

ANNE SNYDER: Definitely not. Thank you.

About a year ago, when Joel and I were in the board room with several of the board members at the Center for Opportunity Urbanism planning out our reports for the year, I was the youngest in the room. And they said, “We want to do a lot on millennials.” And they just all looked at me. And I said, “I’m very old-fashioned. I’m not particularly representative. But, OK. Just so you know, we should complete these in the next year because I’m almost 33 at the time. I’m only going to be a millennial for one more year.” And I meant that very sincerely. And I noticed they sort of kicked each other under the table. And then, afterward, Joel took me aside and was like, “Anne, I hate to break it to you, but once a millennial, always a millennial.” (Laughter.) And there are many disorienting things about 2017, but that was up there for me.

So I’m actually going to depart just slightly from the essay I wrote in part because, hopefully, you’ll just read it along with all the other interesting and timely contributions in this report, but also because I think there are some deeper themes that ground this particular ism, localism, in more of a spiritual, lower-case S, reality than necessarily a political one, although the two can cooperate and have in the past.

So what I’m about to lay out may sound really obvious, but I think it’s important to flesh out exactly why a localist way of life, a localist frame is so appealing today and perhaps even necessary in the context of today’s modern marriage of, on the other hand, constant connection and kind of an existential disconnection. And why millennials are in a unique position to prove it worthy and to actualize it, even if by nature localism can’t serve as a be all and end all when it comes to healing the country’s current wounds and moving forward in a healthier way.

If you will allow me a borrowed metaphor, I think there’s still a need for a national fireplace with localism as the fire. But maybe the fire has to leave what seems to be a pretty crusty and dysfunctional structure at present and find through trial and error a new national frame that will allow it to thrive. And that national frame will have some political currency I think.

So let’s just first talk about generational hunger and aspiration. If you go to a range of college campuses today or talk to anyone between ages 22 and 25, people tend to be struck by a really dramatic loss of faith in institutions, a loss of any belief that institutions have the right, let alone the capacity, to be authoritative over you as an individual.

There’s disillusion that millennials have been betrayed by anything that exists on a large scale — the Iraq War, the financial crisis, two elections in which the person who won the most votes lost, evangelicalism, elites and the disproven assumption that they know best, and now, pretty fiercely, this is more recent, there’s actually just a huge decline in any belief in technology or any gratefulness for it and the founding ideals of democracy itself. And many millennials see democracy, as you said, as nothing more than a meaningless procedure, and they certainly don’t want to vouch for America as the Promised Land. They can’t name their heroes off the cuff, and there just aren’t many obvious things they can say they believe in.

There is, of course, fire and moments of fleeting unity around what we’re against, but not a lot of peer celebration about what we’re for. I think we’ve become quite well-known for all the institutions we’ve abandoned, but we’re not really well-known for what we’re building.

My own cohort, which is the upper tier of millennials, between ages 26 and 34, and I do think there’s a pretty thick divide between that tier and all the digital natives, we graduated to the tune of save the world, find your passion, only to find ourselves without directional handholds, starved for a sense of tangible impact in the spheres we can more immediately see and touch. We tweet our way to a personal brand or a cultural position only to watch our contributions dissolve, escaping into the ether of a billion other quips.

We spend our 20s trying to get closer to a vocation we can throw ourselves into for a long haul only to feel like the whole process is an endless game of hopscotch. Marriage has become something, as one college student told me, to expect in the mail at about age 35. And the other two areas of life besides work and marriage — namely, religion and community, which make together — are those lanes that AEI’s own Charles Murray identified as being the most important for human happiness — seem either irrelevant, untrustworthy, or just plain unattainable.

But contrary to these now familiar trends, millennials taken one by one consistently express a longing for a sense of empowered contribution, meaningful community, and yes, sacrifice too. They’re just looking for fresh spaces to experience it and to create it. These spaces typically involve a kind of radical hospitality and inclusion, a pathway to living out healthy relationship, a clear why, shared stories and songs and experiences and authenticity, however messy. We don’t like masks, even if we wear plenty of them online.

As one of Joel’s friends and colleagues Morley Winograd says, millennials are pragmatic idealists who believe deeply in causes that can be addressed with concrete entrepreneurial action, leveraging hard data and a globalized sophistication, but local, local, local in audience and language. And the neat thing is these spaces and opportunities are unfurling in areas as different as Durham and Shreveport, Louisiana; Houston and Portland; Kansas City; and even DC.

So I’m just going to give you a few examples, and some of these are highlighted in the essay. The Anselm Society is a collaborative, artistic, and entrepreneurial community that’s exploding currently in Colorado. It started — it happened to be a friend of mine named Brian Brown. He told me as I was thinking through the themes of this paper, he said, “I think localism is the religion for millennials today.” And here is — there’s like historically talk about three different types of localism — cultural, political and ethical — and I think I — more in the cultural space in this whole paper, so I just want to acknowledge my emphasis there. He said, “I think localism is the religion for millennials today.” It’s fundamentally a religious impulse. It’s either tapping into a religion you already belong to or it’s taking the place of a religion that you don’t have. Localism offers a way for people to orient their entire lives around a place, its liturgies and routines and relationships and so on.

Another millennial I spoke with, Brit, moved from a fancy pedigree from Stanford University and an early career here in DC to Sarasota, Florida, her hometown. She, like many millennials these days, wanted to go home, attention-laden upswell, articulated beautifully in an op-end by J. D. Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” last year. Somebody may have read it. She told me, “We really needed a break from the organization kid way of doing life. Leaving the East Coast felt like we were heading off the grid. I didn’t feel the same pressure to run the rat race that everyone else was running. I was able to go a bit slower, push myself to go farther. It wasn’t easy,” she said. People did not understand her fancy background that she had gained since leaving. So she joined the local Junior League. “Here in Sarasota,” she said, “they may not know what a product manager is, but they sure do know what a Junior League president is.” The Sarasota Chapter welcomed her with open arms. They connected her with opportunities to serve the city, educated her on the key issues facing Sarasota, and coached her in motherhood as she had her first child. They recommended a doctor to her, who helped her with her — give birth to her first child and then she also knew through a local crisis pregnancy center. And she just said, “I can assure you that in DC I’ve never experienced that kind of interconnectivity between sort of the personal and her causal work.”

For a generation whose moral instincts revolve around notions of impact, the tangibility of localism, of seeing your fingerprints and the ripple effects, is really appealing. Big is bad; small is beautiful. And even though millennials helped create our hyper-connected age, they may be hitting a tipping point where weaning off virtual reality presents itself as the only way to find fulfillment, to regain some control over one’s own life.

There’s been growing evidence that social media and that ever-present screen is making all of us feel like we’re losing agency — that while AI’s algorithms are driven to produce a quantity of high numbers of clicks, we as human beings really do care and are motivated by quality. It may be that localism has a far more honest view of human nature than a virtual reality we’ve all embraced. There is a growing craving for life to be lived offline, for human contact to be enjoyed with real handshakes, real meals around real tables, and real care for a neighbor, knowing that in a pinch that neighbor will watch out for you in turn.

And more and more millennials, especially the older tier, are not just expressing aspiration there but are actively initiating this counterculture in their communities. They start coffee shops, nonprofits, hyper-local journalism companies, artistic communities, and just the old-fashioned block potluck is actually coming back into style in a lot of places. “Place-based” as a phrase is very in, whether that’s in business or theories of development or philanthropy or even trends in entrepreneurship.

In all of this, civil society is in; politics is out. Millennials are more suspicious of politics than any preceding generation, believing firmly that the imaginations of both parties are bankrupt and that our worst problems as a society are beyond political solution. Insofar as politics does maintain some credibility, it tends to be local, where pragmatic deals are possible and there’s a shared, tangible context to serve, no matter the prudential differences in judgment that may come to the problem-solving table.

There’s a lot more to say, and I do look forward to our discussion. But I just want to offer a few parting, if seemingly random, observations about this notion of localism generally and then millennials’ attraction to it specifically.

So is localism — this is a question that came up as I — I was kind of traveling around and talking to a lot of people, particularly about cultural localism. Is it a concept that white educated millennials in particular feel a need to return to? How does it apply to the ones suffering from opioid addiction, to communities where the social fabric is so torn and thin that the only hope is to leave? Put more positively, could the conversation around localism be a prompt to look at the strong bonds within immigrant, older African American communities and thick, healthy, religious cultures and be inspired by what they have that some of us have lost?

I actually wasn’t sure if this would be well received, but I’m so pleased by the even balance of this panel that I’m sure it will be fine. I do think women actually have a unique insight into this whole conversation. They were, after all, the original creators and sustainers of the village. And if we want to re-villagize our cities and suburbs, as one of my favorite community healers in the country, a guy by name of Mack McCarter, who founded an organization 30 years ago called Community Renewal in Shreveport, Louisiana, says, we might turn to some feminine genius in understanding what habits and physical spaces lead to healthy relationships and which ones harm them.

Third, I think this intentional conversation around localism presents a cool opportunity to rethink where true influence lies. Are we influenced by hashtags, talking heads, by elites far away and only by intellectuals? Yes, they fill the air, and they provide an important context within which we all breathe and make decisions and think. But I don’t think they fundamentally motivate us, not even now. I think fundamentally we’re still wired to respond to our local teachers, counselors, neighbors, pastors, piano teachers, coaches, local business owners, artists.

As there’s a lot of talk around the crisis of authority in the country, the crisis of having nothing unifying to believe in and no one ideology that seems to ring comprehensively true, it might be wise to honor and usher forward the local heroes in most citizens’ midst, what I like to call the shepherds — those who actually hold far more moral authority over the day-to-day decisions of our lives than any, frankly, panel discussion or cable news show will.

And fourth, and finally, as stated at the outset in that rather silly and faulty metaphor about the national fireplace and the local fire, I do think that if it’s true what Brian Brown said, that localism is fundamentally a religious impulse, then there is a need to frame the boundaries and be clear on — (inaudible) — the why, the what, the for what. Millennials tend to see just in front a product of youth, I’m sure, and a checklist that raised many of us.

But insofar as we can locate our starvation for belonging, direction, and a tangible sense of contribution as arrows pointing toward the need to rebuild not just place, but a covenantal sense toward country, history, and creed, localism could become the spark for a revived communitarianism and a much healthier citizenry as well as the flesh of a redeemed and hopefully redeeming national narrative. That’s the hope and the need.

Thanks.

MR. KOTKIN: That was terrific.

You know, a lot of what we talk about has kind of been somewhat on the negative side. But I brought Natalie Gochnour, who is also affiliated with the Gardner Institute in Salt Lake City. I think if there is a place where localism really does work, I think it’s in Utah. You know, Wallace Stegner wrote that if there was a national disaster, you want to be in Utah because they’re anticipating it and they’re preparing for it and they take care of each other. So this is why I made a special point of having Natalie both write an essay and also to speak today.

NATALIE GOCHNOUR: Great. Thank you, Joel. And thanks for the invitation to be here. I really enjoyed hearing from the other panelists. And I have two millennial children, and everything you said rang very true for me. Since I’ve been here in Washington, I had a text from my son that said, “Mom, I think we need to trade in our gas-powered lawnmower for an electric one. They have an exchange going on this weekend.” You know, like why is he thinking of — there’s a foot of snow on the ground in Utah right now. But there you go.

I’m in a little bit of a different situation here because I’m going to talk to you about, in my brief remarks, about basically a case study of where localism has worked. So where the other panelists have talked about some of the ideas behind localism, I want you to just go with me for a minute and get your head around the difficult challenge of poverty and the human tragedy that poverty is.

And in Utah, we’ve done something very unique. And the question is: Can it be replicable in other communities? Because we’re unique and have a lot of social capital and all these things. But let me share it with you and see what you think, and maybe it will inspire some questions.

There’s a journalist named Megan McArdle, and she studies Utah a little bit, comes and visits us a bit. And she observed recently that Utah has this interesting characteristic of being between the much-celebrated welfare states of Scandinavia and conservative business- oriented places like Houston. She says Salt Lake City is a bit like Sweden, but run by the Chamber of Commerce. So, OK. Think about that. I see some people nodding.

This statement captures what I wanted to share with you today, and that is that there’s an opportunity in states to have this innovative locally conceived and driven effort to combat intergenerational poverty. And it’s actually localism as its best because in our state it brings together this penchant for data-driven, self-reliant, fiscally prudent public policies that can solve something very difficult, like poverty.

We had a state senator in our state who had been an LDS bishop, a Mormon bishop, and he had observed in his congregation — this is a lay ministry, so he’s not a professional, you know, ministry guy. And he observed that poverty can be broken down into two general categories: situational poverty, which would be like a divorce, a major health event, losing a job, so it’s temporary in nature, and then intergenerational poverty, where it’s actually passed down from parent to child to grandchild. And he also observed that most of our, you know, federal policy innovations were directed toward situational poverty and not intergenerational.

So this state senator with the help of our local Utah Department of Workforce Services and the state legislature passed an Intergenerational Poverty Act that required our state to study intergenerational poverty. And what we did is put together all of the administrative data sets that allowed us to put together and study a cohort of people in poverty and watch them over time.

Now, this experiment is still playing out. But it’s a really big deal to now understand intergenerational poverty. The act has done a lot of interesting things. And one of the things that we’ve learned is that intergenerational poverty, it’s really important that you focus on the children. That’s the main policy innovation that’s come out of it.

So we know that a two-generation model that addresses both parent and child is — addressed both of those simultaneously is better than just looking at one. We know that connecting low-skill workers with educational resources and short-term job training programs in high-demand fields yields higher earnings. We know that access to high-quality child care while parents are pursuing education or employment better prepares children for kindergarten. And, again, mostly that we have a steely eyed focus on the children.

These policy interventions that we are implementing are helping us to help our people help themselves. And with this data in hand — so now that we’ve studies the data, we’re now focusing on a policy vision to fix intergenerational poverty. And in 2015, our legislature’s now put together an Intergenerational Welfare Reform Commission.

These commission members are now pursuing specific strategies to get after this. They’re establishing career pathways not just for adults, but for children, so you see that emphasis on children. They’re connecting students to employment, not just adults to employment but students to employment. They’re promoting access to postsecondary education, including trade certificates, and then they’re recognizing — and this is a really important point — that job skill development activities are as important in satisfying safety-net requirements as actual employment. So if you’re in training, that should qualify you for welfare, not just being employed. So these are just some of the remedies that we’re doing.

So Senator Mike Lee has spoken in this room about localism, and one of his most senior policy analysts told me this one time. He said the easiest answer to every problem in Washington is to keep everything the same and spend more money. So the easiest answer is keep everything the same, spend more money. And then he said, “We will get it wrong by doing the easy solution.” In my home state, we have tackled — well, we started the really long battle, but I’m having considerable success in tackling intergenerational poverty. The state of Washington has now explored legislation to do the same. Other states have contacted us.

We have a bill by Susan Collins and Martin Heinrich, who have introduced federal legislation that’s modeled after Utah’s efforts. And if I look into my crystal ball, it tells me that more states will adopt an intergenerational approach to alleviating poverty based on the Utah model. That’s localism at its best. It’s when you can solve something as difficult as poverty at the local level and then have it be replicable in other places. So it turns out that Sweden and the Chamber of Commerce is a pretty good recipe.

With that, I’ll turn it back to Joel.

MR. KOTKIN: OK. Thank you. And just so you know, I probably haven’t told you. In our work in Orange County, on the long-term strategic plan we’re talking on homelessness that this is something we also are going to look at the Utah model for as well. It really shows what you can do when you have committed people and you’re willing to go down to the local level to solve things. Believe it or not, within the shadow of Disneyland, there’s now a large community of homeless people. So that’s showing something isn’t working very well.

In the little bit of time we have left, I’d love to get some questions. You can direct them at the whole panel. You could direct them at individuals.

Q: Good afternoon. Todd Wiggins. I just wanted to ask you, Ms. Snyder, this is a very passionate presentation, but I do take issue with one thing that you said, one small thing. And that is you suggested that we — that your generation is more suspicious of politics than any prior generation. And so I would say that I don’t necessarily agree with that because if you take into consideration the antiwar movement starting in the late ’60s and leading up to — and culminating with the removal of Richard Nixon, I think that was a period of enlightenment for many young people growing up during that period. And they were highly suspicious and opposed to some of the policies of the war. So I would only mention that as —

MS. SNYDER: No. I appreciate that point. I think the only difference I would note between say the Vietnam era and now is that there was great passion even if it was against political activity. There was great animated and became sort of a united movement. And whereas now, I think you just see so much been there, done that, just apathy as it pertains to the political process having any — being any vehicle for good. And you may have surveys.

MR. HUSOCK: As a ’60s veteran, I’ll tell you this. The original Port Huron statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, the premier left-wing group of the ’60s, was based around the idea of what it called participatory democracy. They meant different things by it, but they wanted to get involved.

MR. KOTKIN: I’m just another, you know, pathetic boomer, but —

MR. HUSOCK: Wait a minute.

MR. KOTKIN: But — well, I was including myself, too. But, you know, there was some real difference in that I was — one of my mentors was Allard Lowenstein, who started the Dump Johnson movement. I was involved in that from the very beginning, as a very young man. And it was very directed to a political solution. It wasn’t nihilistic, and it wasn’t rejection. We thought that going — by getting rid of President Johnson, we would actually do something. And we ran candidates. And Al ran in our congressional district and won. So I think there was more of an engagement.

Now, it will be interesting to see whether young people engage in the same way, but I think what Anne’s talking about is more kind of alienation from the system as opposed to what we had, which was we were alienated but we also believed the system was — could be salvaged.

MS. GOCHNOUR: Joel, I want to make a point on that as well, just because of my two millennial children, but I think there’s, in addition to that alienation point, but there’s a lot of confusion. So in the last presidential election, I noticed my daughter and her husband, living in Massachusetts at the time, they were all about Senator Paul for president. Then, when he dropped out, they jumped to Bernie Sanders. So you just think of that. They went from the libertarian to the socialist. I thought it was rather interesting, and I think it speaks to the — maybe “confusion” is not the right word, but maybe it’s more just they don’t understand how to have at a federal level the kind of support they need.

MR. KOTKIN: Please.

Q: Hi. Nick Saffran from AEI. So a lot of people on the panel talked about kind of some of the effects of localism — cultural, social benefits localism might have. But the question I found myself wondering throughout a number of the talks was: What are, if any, the cultural or social preconditions for localism? Are there necessary things that you need to have beforehand?

So just to give an idea of what I mean, one of the questions for the mayor earlier was: Why do people not really participate in a lot of these kind of local level things? And I found myself thinking, you know, if you think about the bow ideal of American localism is for hometown meetings, that takes work, and it takes a certain kind of civic culture. It might require very high civic trust to begin with. It might require that I know my neighbors. It might require that I’m willing to commit a lot of time to this. And so if you move to a world where, maybe — you know, I just moved here, a lot of my neighbors just moved here, there’s more dynamism or maybe, you know, I don’t know any of my neighbors because I spend all my time watching TV or on my phone or something, or, to be frank, maybe we don’t speak the same language me and my neighbors, just something like that.

And so is it the case that there could be, you know, technological, demographic, cultural changes that have taken place already that have led to a decline in localism rather than — you know, that would sort of make it impossible to say, well, if we just bring back the localism, we’ll bring back the culture that we, you know, kind of associate with that.

MR. ROSS: I don’t think you can cheat the work of actual democratic participation no matter where you move things on the federalist ladder. I think the hope is that as people see more decisions that impact them fairly directly, they will find ways or the community will find ways to allow them to engage. If ultimately people don’t want — and, I don’t know, I look — it’s from great distance, but I look at Russia, it looks like people are willing to trade off all those opportunities for engagement in return for either security or prestige or whatever they need in return. So at some level, we still have to do the hard work, getting people engaged. So I think we just have to do it.

MR. HUSOCK: I think in terms of the question about preconditions, I would be open to preconditions of having a sense of what you do makes a difference is the key precondition, right? And it’s very hard if you live in New York City to feel like what you’re going to do is going to make a difference in the polity — community boards that don’t really have a lot of power. I wrote an article many, many years ago called “Let’s Break Up the Big Cities.” And I think it’s a good idea still. You know, we’re — why should, you know — just take New York. Why not have 52 school districts rather than one school district? Los Angeles has one school district. That’s crazy. So I think bringing government closer to the people would be a structural precondition that might help. Preconditions is a really good question.

MS. GOCHNOUR: I’ll make one other precondition point, and that is the whole point I think of including the Utah essay in this is to say that if you see a local success story, maybe that is a precondition for you to have that local success story. So one of the biggest things in our success story, and this is in the weeds, a wonky thing, but is the data agreements that allowed us to share all the administrative data. You know how data becomes so important to progress. And you have to have a place like Utah where people get along really well and there’s a lot of social capital and trust to make those data agreements happen. But now we’re having success, so maybe a state like Washington will have more incentive to get those data agreements done.

MS. SNYDER: I’m just going to add one. I’m going to be both more pessimistic than everyone here but hopefully also go to the fundamental level. I think you’re right. It is neighbor knowing neighbor first. And I do, again, speaking as a millennial, all those other — I mean, unless you — I mean, I think the more you’re sort of creating in your life webs of enduring commitment-making, which then give you sort of webs of care for, I want to get involved in the school board. I want to — I probably should be — (inaudible) — maybe be part of a religious institution, we should volunteer here, get involved in all those — unless there are reasons outside yourself to do that, I’m seeing a world that people email each other halfway across the world, and they don’t know who’s living and dying right next to them. And I think unless you start there, I think that atomized level is really broken. I think it can be healed, but I think that has to be the first step.

MR. KOTKIN: One more question. Yes, please.

Q: I guess I’d like your perspective on the Flint water situation as a localism problem and a solution —

MR. KOTKIN: Doug’s from Michigan so it’s — but we lost him.

Q: But both, you know, how the problem arose as well as solving the problem in a localism and perhaps expanding into infrastructural issues as a whole.

MR. HUSOCK: Well, incompetent localism is always a problem, right? And so this was not an attack on minority people by a conspiracy in Washington. It was an incompetent local government that had a source of clean water. It made a budget decision to not take Detroit’s water anymore, and it was pennywise and extremely pound foolish. And, you know, one thing about local government: You can vote the rascals out, and that’s what should have happened there and I’m sure probably has happened there. But I don’t think it tells us anything except that that was an incompetent local government.

MS. GOCHNOUR: I don’t know how Howard would feel about this, but in the state — in Salt Lake City, we have a real air-quality problem, and it’s all related to topography because we’re in a mountain valley and we get inversions and we can never change the inversions, but we can change what we put into them. But it’s really hard to do that at the city level. It’s much easier to do that at the regional level because of negative externalities and whatnot. So, you know, I don’t think this is localism always the best. It’s where can localism contribute and make things better. And I think we lean toward saying, there’s a lot of places where that can happen.

You can disagree with me if you’d like, Howard.

MR. HUSOCK: No, no. I think — I think —

MS. GOCHNOUR: Obviously there’s regional issues.

MR. HUSOCK: We’ve talked about immigration. There are certain national policies. There’s an interstate commerce clause for a reason. And, you know, not everything is done at the local level. But more things should be. They used to be.

MR. KOTKIN: OK. Thank you.

DR. STREETER: Thank you all for coming, and please join me in thanking the panel. (Applause.)

(END)