Policymakers need to rethink the way we measure economic success in America, according to Clinton and Obama's chief economic adviser Gene Sperling

• Gene Sperling served as chief White House economic adviser to President Obama and President Clinton.
• Sperling says policymakers should be aiming to create economic dignity for everyone as opposed to focusing on GDP targets.
• Sperling defines economic dignity using three pillars: the capacity to care for your family and be there for life's precious moments, the right to pursue purpose and potential, and the ability to work with respect as opposed to domination or humiliation.
• "So GDP should be judged, not just on how large it is," he said, "but whether it is part of a policy that raises up everybody's well being."
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Gene Sperling served as the director of the National Economic Council under both President Clinton and President Obama.

Sperling's new book "Economic Dignity" questions the way political leaders in Washington measure the country's economic success and what they consider to be economic issues. Following is a transcript of the video.

Sara Silverstein: Gene, I can't think of a better time for this book to come out than at this inflection point where we're all rethinking what the economy really is. How do you define economic dignity in your book?

Gene Sperling: So I wanted to step back after all the years I've done policymaking and write something not about what our GDP target should be, or even a wage target, but really, why do we want to achieve those metrics? What's the ultimate economic aspiration?

So I set out to define what should our actual North Star be in lifting up people. And I arrived at this definition, economic dignity, that basically rests on three pillars. Your capacity to care for your family and to be there for life's most precious moments — that's the first pillar. The second pillar is can all of us have first and second chances to pursue purpose, potential, and meaning in our life? And three, can people contribute and work economically with respect as opposed to domination and humiliation?

And I want to say that keeping our eye on this North Star for economic policy would lead us to serve people better, to get less distracted by the metrics or the policy fights of the day.

And I think you're absolutely right. This has been kind of a moment of truth on economic dignity. In my book, I mentioned that Martin Luther King at the Memphis sanitation workers strike in 1968, he says his famous line, "All labor has dignity." But the line he says leading up to that is, "Someday our nation will come to realize that the sanitation worker is as essential as the physician for our health and well-being." And Sara, I think probably people would have thought those were beautiful words before, but I think this is that moment where people are seeing, they're taking a second look at farm workers who we couldn't survive without and perhaps asking, "Is it right they only have 50% of them have healthcare?" Or the home health aides and nursing aides who we're applauding as they go to work. And yet they make $12, $14 an hour. And 47% of them couldn't take a day of paid sick leave.

So I think it is forcing us to look at the dissonance between who we value, who we think is essential, and how they're treated economically. And so the temporary moment of truth will be whether we rise to the occasion and make sure people have safety, and are paid with respect, and have paid sick leave. I'd say the bigger moment of truth is, will we just go back to normal? Or will this make us rethink what that compact of economic dignity should be for any American who's putting it on the line, working hard, doing what they can to contribute to their country and their family?

Silverstein: And I've heard you use that word before, compact. What do you mean by that?

Sperling: Well, I think that if you look at FDR's language when he does the New Deal, but I think also just a general feeling in the United States. I think one of the things that unifies us is when people can see each of us as people struggling to do their part. Not everybody can, some people are struggling with disability, addiction, etc. But if we have a compassionate compact — not a punitive one where we're trying to say, "You didn't do everything right, so we're going to deny you food relief" — but one where we say, "We're here with you." And the compact is we want to help every American do their share, carry their load. But with that comes a sense that you can raise your family with a degree of dignity. And again, less than one in 10 people who for a living care for other people's children, could take a day of paid sick leave or day of leave for the birth of their own child. One in eight women are forced economically to come back to work within the first week.

And so, what should that compact be? What should we owe each other? And I think there is a strong sense in America that when you're doing your share, you should be able to live, you should be able to raise your children with a degree of dignity. You should be able to work with a degree of dignity. You should be able to retire with dignity.

Silverstein: And when you look at that from a policy perspective, let's take the meat processing plants — if that was restructured to optimize for economic dignity, as opposed to just economic growth, or unemployment, or things like that, what would that look like?

Sperling: Well, I try to make this more of a policy than a philosophy book, but I do quote Immanuel Kant's definition of dignity. And I'm not trying to go in the weeds here, but it's a simple, powerful notion, which is no human being should be treated as if they were purely a means to another person's end. Everyone should be treated as an end with intrinsic value in themselves.

And I think when you see something like the reopening of the economy or the people on the front lines that becomes very real, because I think both the nurses, the health workers, they're willing to be there essentially as a means to care for our family. But they want people to say, "Yes, we care about your safety too. We want you to have the best PPE." And I think that the same goes with the meat workers.

Now, some of the workers ordered back had been in the poultry industry. This is an industry already where you could say that those workers, and perhaps you could say that about warehouse workers for Amazon, etc. are very much treated as if they are just micro-efficiency components to an end goal. And then poultry, for example, regulations have been relaxed so that they have to do 175 birds a minute, which means they have twice the amount of serious injuries, seven times the amount of carpal tunnel syndrome. And there was already a story that said that many had to wear diapers as they work, because there wasn't enough time for a bathroom break. Now that's not being treated with dignity. And I read many of the interviews of the meat workers going back. And I found most of them were saying, "Yeah, I'm willing to do my part. I can get that what I do is important for the country. But I want to know that we're safe. I want to know people care about me. I want them to recognize we have families too."

So I think that we're going to talk a lot about the guidelines for reopening all of those things, whether customers will trust going back. But I think a pretty important issue is going to be how we treat the workers who are going back. Do we make clear that they're just not a means for us to bop GDP up another point, but that we care about them, and that we're treating them with that degree of dignity.

Silverstein: And If you optimize for economic dignity, do you believe that there will be more of a payoff for traditional economic measures in the long run? Because it seems that a lot of times when we're optimizing for regular economic measures, that there are a lot of unintended consequences, like people feeling humiliated, or like they have no dignity in the workplace.

Sperling: I absolutely believe that a dignified economy can lead to a more growing economy as well. What I just tried to say is that it's not that GDP doesn't matter. It can matter. But if you have 4% growth in a country and it all goes to the royal family, that's hardly your economic goal or the top 1/10 of 1%. So GDP should be judged not just on how large it is, but whether it is part of a policy that raises up everybody's well-being. But to give an example of where they can merge, remember my second pillar says everyone should be able to pursue purpose, potential, and meaning. And one of the things I thought that was excellent about the kind of ideals of our founding, granted completely hypocritical when it came to slaves, African-Americans, and women, but still that ideal was that you could always pursue your potential.

We were the first country that got rid of debt prisons. We were the first country to have a bankruptcy that allowed people to have a fresh start. And if you go back even to the 1820s, they're saying, "Yes, this is about the individual being able to always move forward. But we'll also be a nation that achieves more." So if we reduce the degree of abuse or sexual harassment at the labor force, we should do that just because it's the right thing for dignified economy. But yes, it could lead to more participation.

If we see the laid-off steelworker and the young man who has been suffered from racial discrimination and racial barriers their whole life, instead of seeing them as different constituencies, if we say these are both Americans who right now cannot fully achieve their potential, that's a dignity harm for them, but that is a loss of value for all of us.

So yeah, I strongly believe that a dignity agenda is consistent with an economy at full potential.

Silverstein: And how do you view universal basic income through an economic dignity lens?

Sperling: So I have a lot of respect for the values of people pushing universal basic income. It's not what I push in this book because universal basic income, when it says universal, what it means is every single person in the country, you and I included, is going to get the same amount each year. That's not how we reach universal economic dignity. We need bold measures, but we should do those bold measures to ensure that people who've been doing their part or maybe have suffered a devastating job loss, or injury, or challenge in their life, that we're still helping keep them at a level of economic dignity.

And let me take this back to the current. The $1,200 checks that go out, I've supported those. I think they help a lot of people who fall through the cracks, but they're not really how we keep people whole. The two major options for keeping people whole is to have a really bold unemployment insurance that's near a hundred percent of wages, so people can keep the lights on and support their family. Or the proposals that you've seen from Congresswoman Jayapal, and Warner, and Sanders, where you actually give money to the company if they keep people on the job. Those are big bold proposals, but they're not going to the 70% of us who don't need the help. It's ensuring economic dignity for everybody by saying that if you're one of the people that is a victim or hurting with this pandemic, we're going to speak boldly. That's what I think you need — big, bold things, but they're designed to make sure that at any time in your life, if you take a fall or you're kept from rising, that there's a basic wage. That there's a degree of healthcare, and a degree of paid leave, an ability to collectively stand up for yourself or organize that every person should have it every time.

Silverstein: And how bad you think unemployment is right now beyond just the numbers? And how bad you think it's going to get?

Sperling: Well, I agree with everybody who feels that it is understated right now. I mean, we know it's understated. We know 33 million people have filed claims. We know that the numbers that we saw only covered up to the week of April 12 to the 18th. So it's going to get worse. And when we count underemployment, we already know it's 22.8%. So I think it's going to be very... This is a devastating unprecedented period. And yet it is not as complicated in some ways as the financial crisis we or other countries have had, we kind of know what to do. We're just not doing it well. We know we'd like to preserve any small business that is viable, that could open their doors later. We know that we don't want families who've done nothing wrong, other than be alive in a once in a hundred or two year pandemic to have, after all their life, have this moment mean they lose their house, they lose their healthcare. They tell their kids they can't really provide for them. And we know how to do that.

And the real question is, are we going to step up to the plate for long enough? And I think we have to. I don't think there's a fiscal concern that makes sense with preserving our economy to that degree. And if we don't, we'll have more damage, more harm to people, more small businesses that shut their doors forever when they really were a viable business other than the pandemic.

Silverstein: And are you looking to have the current solutions implemented for a long period of time, or are you proposing that we need different fiscal measures?

Sperling: So I think that one has to look at what we need to do to get through this once-in-a-hundred-years crisis. And what makes sense. Now some of those things also coincide with what I would think would be longterm agenda items, universal paid sick leave makes especially, and universal healthcare makes enormous sense right now, because if people can't get healthcare or if they feel compelled to go to work when they're sick or have symptoms, you're going to have higher community spread, higher hospital surges. So it's kind of the smart thing to do now, and we are doing it to a degree. Will that continue?

On unemployment insurance, I just don't think most people realize it only covered 35% to 50% of your paycheck, that every gig worker, or domestic worker that worked for several different employers was never covered, ever. I don't know — what did they do? And so they are covered now.

These are important things that I think are improvements that hopefully will be part of that new new deal for workers or an economic dignity compact. But policy-wise, it's very clear what you need to do. You've got state relief, you've got relief for small businesses, and you have relief for unemployed workers. And instead of this drama where we're, "What's going to happen with Pelosi and Mnuchin? And every two months ...." You should just say these things for the crisis don't have to go on forever, but we can say until we get back to something more normal, I mean can't we even say till at least unemployment gets under 8% we're going to continue a degree of expanded unemployment insurance, and state relief, and help for small businesses.

And then my hope is when we get past this, we'll say, let's not go backwards. Let's go forward. This isn't radical. This isn't inconsistent with our values. The notion that if you work hard, you do your part, you contribute, you can raise your family with dignity and be treated with dignity at work is a pretty widespread and longterm American value. And I can give you beautiful words that Republican President Teddy Roosevelt said that very similar to almost everything I said 108 years ago.

Silverstein: And one of the things we've heard a lot with dignity is the dignity of work. Can you talk about the difference between the dignity of work and what you're defining here with economic dignity?

Sperling: Yeah, I set out to do something a little broader. When I looked — I spent a lot of time looking at how people use the word dignity, and Joe Biden is very eloquent talking about his father, talking about the, excuse me, a person's paycheck is — a job is more than the paycheck. It's about their dignity. Mario Cuomo at the 1984 convention speech, Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin, Cesar Chavez, so many people taught... And Sherrod Brown recently. So many people talk about that. What the difference with me was I didn't want it to be just that pull, that theme. I wanted to say this should be our economic North Star.

And to me, that meant if I was serious about that, it couldn't even be just a nice phrase or a nice page. I needed to go through and say these are the three components you have to have that I've thought about it for years, that you need to have all three. Here's why you do. Here's why it's rich in our ideals. And now then go from issue to issue and say, what would that make you do? How would that make you look at the minimum wage? How would that make you look at whether we should accept the degree of segmentation of work? Of having people who do data and cleaning, not considered part of our own workforce? There's a lot of issues that when you put a dignity lens, you look differently.

And one thing I've tried to say, because when I've talked to young economist is, I know what it's like in the White House. An issue is often only considered economic when it shows up in an economic metric like labor force participation. And I want to say, if being human is often about your sense of contributing, working, and being able to raise a family and tens of millions of people can't do both, why is that only an economic issue when we can say, "Aha, it's affecting labor force participation among women 25 to 44." That's only if we define economics as controlled by metrics. If it's about do all people have economic dignity, then you would know that was a first-tier economic issue from the start. And that's, I think a bit how this focus helps us keep the eye on the ball and keeps less people and their economic pain from being invisible to the economic policy world.

Silverstein: And before I let you go, is there any economic model that you feel like we need to drastically rethink now that you've looked through everything through this lens of economic dignity?

Sperling: Well, somebody asked me, "As an employer what can you do?" And the one thing I think people do have to step back on is, I think there's people who are good, caring people, beyond the policymaking at jobs where they just accept a kind of micro-efficiency model. If somebody comes in and says, "Sara took an extra minute in the bathroom before she came in. If we could reduce that minute we could increase profits by this or this much." I mean, Matthew Desmond has this article in the 1619 Project where he says that kind of micro-efficiency of people grew out of slavery and cotton producing. It's not human. So when I hear about people sitting and saying, "Aha, we can maximize the efficiency of every single thing a person does." That is treating a person like a means to an end.

Real, live people, when we think of ourselves, the people we love, we know that they come to work and they worry about their kids. And occasionally they're depressed. And occasionally I have to check in on an older parent. That's what being human is, and to build workforces and policy structures that build in that humanity from the start. And don't start with a micro-efficiency model and then say, "Huh, should we give somebody a longer bathroom break?" I think that's something that everybody can address in their thinking.

And again, I go back. I think it's a terrible thing in our country that so many people who work pretty much full time for major companies that have take your daughter to work days, and birthday parties, and great events, then have people who work there cleaning, providing food that are contractors. They not only get paid less. They not only don't get the benefits. They're not even considered part of the team. They don't get invited to the "take your daughter to work" day, the networking. Why should we accept that? Why should we accept that we have second-class citizenship at work when we're a country that is supposed to be based on the notion that all of us, the basic rights have first-class citizenship.