No one in Washington seems to know what the story is, or even where to set the dateline. Is it the culture war over masks, in the Florida sunshine? Is it the crisis along the southern border? (Is there a crisis along the southern border?) CNN’s prime-time viewership is down thirty-seven per cent, MSNBC’s numbers are not much better, and even Fox’s are in decline. The morning political-newsletter writers, and many of the rest of us, have been reduced to replaying the dramas of the Trump Administration (Why is John Boehner backing an Ohio congressman whom Trump opposes?) or even the Obama years (How much hold does Larry Summers have on the Democratic Party?). For a moment this week the story was whether one of the Bidens’ German shepherds, Major, has a biting problem. (Probably so.) The President rises in the morning, takes his intelligence briefing, holds detailed meetings on the economy, consults historians about the meaning of it all, boards Air Force One, deplanes Air Force One, and yet the entire operation is muffled, perhaps because there are no new or interesting conflicts. The saying is that two people matter in Washington at any given time: the President and whoever the President is arguing with. But what if the President isn’t arguing with anyone at all?
The White House has a policy plan—a two-part, roughly four-trillion-dollar program to rebuild the economy—but it also seems to have a narrative plan. Biden rolled out both on Wednesday afternoon, in a speech at a union carpenters’ training facility outside Pittsburgh, in support of the American Jobs Plan, the first and larger of the two components of his economic program. Biden spoke about its specifics: the twenty thousand miles of roads and “ten most economically significant bridges” he wants to repair, the five hundred thousand electric-car-charging stations he intends to build. He mentioned the massive investments in research and development that his plan calls for, but only briefly; his emphasis was on the millions of jobs he said it would create and its sheer size. “It’s not a plan that tinkers around the edges,” he said. “It’s big? Yes. It’s bold? Yes. And we can get it done.” On a partisan level, it operated as a response to all the heavy breathing about a working-class conservatism emanating from Fox News. We see your Infrastructure Week bid and raise you, by four trillion dollars.
Four trillion dollars is an incredible amount of money, roughly a fifth of U.S. G.D.P. It is the kind of spending that carries transformational possibilities. Ever since he delivered a campaign speech, last October, near Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, Biden has made F.D.R.’s late urgency and warmth his personal touchstone, just as Obama had once shaded toward Lincoln’s singular moral depth and emotional remove. The political reference point for Biden’s plan is the New Deal. But the New Deal operated in a different economic universe: unemployment was at around twenty-five per cent, and working hours were so sharply reduced that approximately half the country’s human capital was going unused. The public-works program accounted for two-thirds of the New Deal’s budget; it was designed to supply the spending that the market economy couldn’t, and to put that human capital to use. As Biden spoke in Pennsylvania, unemployment was around six per cent, and the recovery was well under way; economists at Goldman Sachs had issued a giddy forecast of the kind of growth that hasn’t been seen since the early eighties. The plan may be intended to recall the New Deal, but it’s set in very different scenery.
The speech that President Biden gave on Wednesday described a straightforward infrastructure program, involving charging stations and bridges and airports. The second part of his economic plan will be introduced sometime this month and will be devoted to what is being called “human infrastructure.” The White House has suggested that this package will include funding for universal pre-kindergarten, free community college, and more expansive family leave. The prospects for this proposal are less certain; a longtime aide to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said that there is already “spending fatigue” in Washington. But the human-infrastructure part of the program is the more novel and telling one, and not just because it would expand the role of the state in everyday life. It is an expression of the same twenty-first-century liberalism that animated Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign—the belief that the way to fix what ails America is to unleash its talent, by making opportunity more available and equitable. Human infrastructure, in other words, is the kind of thing a country could spend four years arguing about.
On Tuesday evening, I spoke by phone with the renowned Harvard economist Claudia Goldin, whose work has often engaged gendered themes but who especially interested me because of her research on human capital—on the stock of skills that the labor force possesses. Goldin seemed to have been a direct influence on the ideas about human infrastructure coming from the Biden economic team, some of whose members she had trained. In 2000, Goldin co-authored a paper with the economist Cecilia Rouse that showed that orchestras were more likely to hire women when they used blind auditions to evaluate prospective musicians than when they didn’t—a neat demonstration of discrimination that also made clear the impact of gender bias on human utility. Not incidentally, Rouse, for whom Goldin has long been a mentor, is now the chair of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers.
I was curious about how Goldin saw the pandemic’s effect on women: there has been much talk about a “she-cession.” Goldin was skeptical of reporting on the issue. The stories about women leaving the workforce tended to be written “in big, bold, seventy-two-point type,” she said. The numbers, Goldin went on, told a subtler story. The pressures of the pandemic were more intense for less educated women than for more educated ones, and more difficult for women with children between the ages of five and thirteen than those without. She gave examples of two cohorts, one of women with college degrees between the ages of thirty-five and forty-four, whose children were between five and thirteen. In a comparison of data for a span of months in 2019-20 with the same months in 2020-21, one in seventeen women in this cohort had left the workforce. The other cohort was composed of women without a college degree between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four—women in this group tended to have children earlier. Here, too, there was a discernible but not overwhelming effect: about one in fifteen women in this group had left the workforce. Goldin said, “A lot of the data is not going to be pretty, but it’s not as disgustingly ugly as some headlines made it out to be.”
Like many other economists, Goldin had been reading the reports about Biden’s human-infrastructure plans carefully, and, although details were scant, she seemed to see it less as a response to the pandemic-related slowdown than to a long-term pattern of neglect. “If we look over our shoulder, as we often do, we see what some other countries have done for a very long time: they have programs that proclaim that we are one country, we are a community, our children are one another’s children,” Goldin said. “And America, honestly, for a country that pioneered free mass education, we haven’t done that for a long time. We’ve really split on who determines what happens to the kids, and your kids are your kids, and my kids are my kids.” Goldin’s work has emphasized a general finding that the American educational advantage over other countries had eroded in the last part of the twentieth century and in some cases had been eclipsed.
That meant that more supportive education policies were central to the success of the American economy. “It used to be thought that there was amazing talent under every rock in the United States, and if we just took those talented eighteen-year-olds and got them a free ride at their state university, or got them to an élite university with a good endowment, that we could close a lot of those gaps,” she said. “And now we see with a lot of great research that this just isn’t the case.” To talk about human capital in research pointed you directly to the matter of the meritocracy and its failures; I asked Goldin whether the policies proposed by the Biden Administration suggested a similarly fundamental reckoning, or whether they amounted to nibbling around the edges. It depended which policy you were talking about, she said. Those that centered on the mother rather than the child could be a little indirect: extending paid leave, for instance, had good human and economic effects but didn’t really enhance human capital. Others, like affordable community college, are already broadly available “except in the crazy state of Vermont and a couple of other states.” But universal pre-K in particular seemed more direct. The talented eighteen-year-olds who were meant to catch up with a scholarship at an élite college were already “mega SAT points behind,” she said. “Maybe that’s where the three-year-olds come in.”
The Democratic Party is close enough to the academy that its Presidential Administrations tend to inherit cutting-edge ideas, simply through the act of staffing. Why was it, Goldin asked, that the issues she studies, at the intersection of family and labor, which had long been set at the bottom of the Democratic priority list, suddenly appeared at the top? Part of the answer had to do with her former students, including Cecilia Rouse, she thought, but only part. Problems that concerned people at the bottom of society, where talent was being misused or suppressed, had been elevated by politics. Goldin said, “Universal means that the Black child in Cambridge would be going to the same school as the white child in Cambridge.” I asked Goldin how these proposals struck her, taken all together. She said the same thing that everyone else seemed to be saying: “This is a Biden New Deal.”
How much of this future does Biden see? Watching his speech on Wednesday, I noticed that he often turned to the past. If fiscal conservatives raised concerns about the cost of his programs, he said, Americans should remember that “they said the same thing when we flew into space for the first time.” For proof that, “in America, anything’s possible,” he turned first to the development of the vaccine but then to the Interstate Highway System. Climate activists, who might have hoped for an emphasis on the green transformation that the bill will spur, heard very little of that. The economists and activists in Biden’s party have spent most of the twenty-first century noticing the flaws and inequities of the twentieth. Biden acknowledged them, but he also seemed to want to elevate the twentieth century to a permanent American state. One paragraph in the official White House fact sheet for the American Jobs Plan begins, “Like great projects of the past . . .”
The theory of Biden has always been a little complicated. By the end of the Trump years, the liberal intelligentsia had been persuaded that the country had reached a point of structural crisis and that big and urgent action—to reduce economic inequality and repair the meritocracy, to address the climate emergency and to rectify racial injustice—was needed. But, because the country as a whole did not obviously believe that, the Democrats chose the candidate who was the most adept at making big changes seem like part of the familiar political past—to talk about generational environmental change while tiptoeing around the matter of fracking, and to cloak ambitious new ideas about human infrastructure in the trappings of the New Deal, like a sugar coating applied to a medication. Biden’s ability to make new ideas seem familiar is why he is President, but it also makes progressives doubt his commitment, and leaves conservatives convinced that he is keeping his true agenda hidden.
There is always the same question about Biden, whether it concerns the scale of his climate or human-infrastructure proposals, or how much he will back them, or what “Build Back Better” really means: Is this transformative, or not? Talking about transformation in terms designed to make it familiar—that we are going back to big, somehow—is a complicated way to communicate. No wonder it hasn’t been clear what story the Biden Administration wants to tell.
