Gene Sperling

Economic Dignity

“Timely and important . . . It should be our North Star for the recovery and beyond.” —Hillary Clinton “Sperling makes a forceful case that only by speaking to matters of the spirit can liberals root their belief in economic justice in people’s deepest aspirations—in their sense of purpose and self-worth.” —The New York Times When Gene Sperling was in charge of coordinating economic policy in the Obama White House, he found himself surprised when serious people in Washington told him that the Obama focus on health care was a distraction because it was “not focused on the economy.” How, he asked, was the fear felt by millions of Americans of being one serious illness away from financial ruin not considered an economic issue? Too often, Sperling found that we measured economic success by metrics like GDP instead of whether the economy was succeeding in lifting up the sense of meaning, purpose, fulfillment, and security of people. In Economic Dignity, Sperling frames the way forward in a time of wrenching change and offers a vision of an economy whose guiding light is the promotion of dignity for all Americans.

President Bill Clinton's National Economic Adviser addresses the main issues that were at the center of debate in Bush's second term: Social security reform, outsourcing, and deficit reduction. After two consecutive elections in which Democratic candidates failed to turn clear economic advantages into electoral victory, a debate is raging over what the Democrats should do now. The narrow, red state-blue state argument between chest-beating populists and soulless centrists offers the answer to neither the country's economic future nor the political future of the Democrats. In The Pro-Growth Progressive,President Clinton's longest-serving national economic advisor, Gene Sperling, argues that the best economic strategy for our nation—and the best strategy for progressives whether they be Democrat, Republican, or Independent—is to pursue policies that are both progressive and pro-growth, that promote progressive values of upward mobility, fair starts, and economic dignity as well as embrace markets and innovation. Sperling describes how both parties offer the American public impoverished choices: Democrats in the-sky-is-falling party too often pretend that the way to promote progressive values and expand the American middle class is to slow the pace of the global economy, stop all outsourcing, and intervene in the market. Republicans of the don't-worry-be-happy party hold fast to the bankrupt vision that the best thing for economic growth is the smallest government possible, and have made the conservative deficit hawks of the 1990s an endangered species. But The Pro-Growth Progressive is neither an all-out assault on the Bush agenda nor a partisan call for Democrats to move further left. Both conservatives and progressives have to accept hard truths about the limitations of their approaches. Drawing on his years of policy experience, Sperling lays out a third way on the issues that are dominating the news and Bush's second term: social security, ownership, globalization, and deficit reduction. He explains the policy alternatives that respect the power of free markets while giving government a role in ensuring that the markets benefit all working families. Focused and timely, The Pro-Growth Progressive offers a realistic vision of free enterprise and economic growth in which government can improve education, reduce poverty, and restore the country to fiscal sanity.

Gene Sperling

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