On November 18th, the Center held its 14th annual conference, Agency, Prospering, Progress, and the Working Class, at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. Organized in collaboration with Common Good and the Roosevelt Institute, the first goal of the conference was to begin to understand the frustration and disaffection voiced more and more loudly by lower middle class workers and blue collar workers in recent decades. The second goal was to attempt to determine what policies would help to remedy the symptoms and what policies would not appear to be helpful. Among the participants were J.D. Vance (author of Hillbilly Elegy), Matthew Winkler (Bloomberg News), W. Bowman Cutter (Roosevelt Institute), Philip K. Howard (Common Good), David Weil (US Department of Labor), Edmond Alphandéry (Euro50 Group), Alan Krueger (National Bureau for Economic Research), Charles Kolb (Partners 4 Affordable Excellence), Henry Kressel (Warburg Pincus), Saskia Sassen (Committee on Global Thought), Richard Robb (Christofferson, Robb & Company), Richard Sennett (London School of Economics), Simon Head (New York Review of Books), David S. Rose (Gust), and Daniel Rose (Rose Associates). A full program can be found here.
