Video: Breaking the Matrix: The U.S. Economy

May 12, 2025

A poster featuring a cage-like tunnel leading to stacks of coins in a depreciation graph formation.

We are embedded in systems that we take for granted as the way things should be. These are the invisible matrices that discipline us because of the fascination of U.S. politics with carcerality. We have an opportunity for expansive imagination and recreation.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, this decade will see the seismic reshaping of our global labor market. As a result of rapid technological development, climate change and its industrial impact, and massive demographic and geographic shifts, WEF predicts the creation of 170 million new jobs and the displacement of 92 million. This emphasizes the need for rigorous and foundational enhancements to economic infrastructures, many of which only work for segments of the workforce while leaving behind countless others.

In this conversation, speakers considered possibilities and challenges in reimagining our economic institutions and realizing opportunities for shared prosperity.

Featuring

Vishal Reddy, Executive Director, WorkFour
Lauren Paul, Senior Director of Strategic Advancement, Institute on Race, Power, & Political Economy
Nati Linares, Co-Founder & Artist Organizer, Art.coop

Moderated by Becca Leviss, MTS '25, CRPL '25

This is the third event of a five-part series of online public conversations with academics, advocates, and activists to imagine the systems that liberatory thought can create and how we can invest in visions of more equitable social structures.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Breaking the matrix, The US economy. April 7, 2025.

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HUSSEIN RASHID: I'm Hussein Rashid, Assistant Dean for Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School. Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusett tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people. Welcome, and thank you for being here.

Religion and Public Life is dedicated to the service of just world at peace. We work with a dynamic method that has religious literacy at its core and brings in critical analysis to understand and challenge systems of inequity. Our focus on just peace building recognizes that a peace without justice is not sustainable. The goal of PL programming is to bring analysis from experts, including academics, practitioners, and those living in inequitable systems, and offer some ways forward to build a more just world.

The program is currently led by Interim Director Dean David Holland and previously by Diane Elmore, Former Associate Dean for PL. This series, like all our programming, would not be possible without the support of our team, including [INAUDIBLE], Hillary, Anna, Natalie, Tammy, Hisham, Rachelle, and Elise. [INAUDIBLE] is a current student who is helping with the various-- who is helping with the series in various capacities. I also want to mention Becca Leviss and Elizabeth [? Weisberger, ?] the students who conceived of the series and have been instrumental in putting it together and who-- and Becca, who will moderating it this evening. Thanks to them.

We are embedded in systems that other people created and which we take for granted as the way things should be. These are the invisible matrices that discipline us. Over time, because of the fascination of US politics with carcerality, these systems mimic official carceral spaces. The events of the past year have highlighted how our past methods of sense and knowledge-making no longer hold. In these moments of breakage, we have the opportunity for expansive imagination and recreation.

We invite you into the process of radical re-imagining with us by bringing together academics, advocates, and activists. We will begin to imagine the systems that laboratory thought can create, and what needs to be done to get us to invest in futurist visions of more equitable social structures. These conversations will engage with elements of our approach to just peace building by exposing power structures, understanding systems of violence, engaging relationally, being creative, and exploring the role of religion.

For this series, we are pleased to be working with UCLA's Prison Education Program and Center for Justice to make this series available to incarcerated people throughout the country. The mission of UCLA's Prison Education Program and Center for Justice is to make higher educational-- to make higher education accessible to those incarcerated, and to bring UCLA students, staff, and faculty together to learn outside them, thereby challenge bias, discrimination, and justice and a collaborative learning community.

Rapid technological development, climate change, and its industrial impact and massive demographic and geographic shifts emphasize the need for rigorous and foundational enhancements to economic infrastructures, many of which only work for certain parts of the workforce while leaving behind countless others. What are the possibilities for reimagining our economic institutions, the work we do, how we do it, and what values it holds? What opportunities does this moment hold for shared prosperity? What challenges does it present?

I'm pleased to be joined by an incredible panel of speakers to start addressing these issues. I would like to begin by introducing our moderator for this evening, Becca Leviss, MTS '25 and CRPL '25. Becca investigates the interplay between faith, community, and identity. She helped build the fundraising team at protect democracy, a leading nonprofit in the US democracy movement, where she managed institutional giving and major gifts. Now, she explores the ongoing relationships between Black and Jewish scholarship and activism and how those insights can inform critical frameworks to envision and build expansive futures for Jewish identity in a pluralistic democracy. And our three amazing speakers this evening are Lauren Paul, Nati Linares, and Vishal Reddy.

Lauren Paul is the Senior Director of Strategic Advancement at the Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy, where she builds support for power shifting ideas like baby bonds and guaranteed income that dismantle structural inequalities and advance economic rights, inclusion, equity, and civic engagement. Prior to the Institute, Lauren served as chief of staff, director of policy, and VP of strategic alliances at Common Future. She serves on the board of Forward Cities and holds a master's degree in public affairs from UC Berkeley, as well as a BA in peace and justice from Tufts University.

Natalia Nati Linares is a cultural organizer and communications strategist who works to expand the horizons for economic fairness and stability to the creative community. She spent more than a decade working in the music industry before joining the New Economy Coalition, a network of over 150 groups focused on building the solidarity economy movement in the United States.

She's the co-founder and artist organizer at Art.coop, an organization that addresses inequality amongst artists and cultural workers where she helps creatives, cultural workers, and wealth stewards change conversations and practices about the role that creativity plays in transforming our social and economic systems. She is a mother of two small children currently based in Salt Lake City, Utah, and the daughter of a musician and an actress who left their art dreams to pursue the American dream as immigrants who came from Colombia and Cuba in the late 1960s to New York City.

Vishal Reddy is the executive director of WorkFour, the National campaign to make the four-day, 32-hour work week the standard for all workers. Vishal is a labor attorney and organizer and works at a union to negotiate collective bargaining agreements for low-wage nursing home workers. Thank you all for being here this evening. Deeply appreciative for you, your knowledge, your time, your expertise that you're sharing with us. And with that, I'll turn it over to Becca to continue the program.

BECCA LEVISS: Thank you so much, Hussein. I'll just echo those. Thanks to everyone for being here and for our unseen audience members who are listening now or sometime in the future, thank you. As I said last week, there are no shortage of demands on your time and energy. So the fact that you're spending anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes with us is really appreciated. So thank you.

I'll just call out that we will have a Q&A session for the last 20 to 30 minutes of our time together, so you can drop questions in the Q&A box and we'll hopefully get to most of them before our time is up. All right. With that, welcome. Super excited for this conversation with the three of you. I want us to take a step back and maybe define some key terms.

We're talking about breaking the matrix, talking about the systems and infrastructure that govern our sense of what is and what is possible. What does it mean, in your own perspective, to break the matrix in our economic systems? How would you define this in your own context of work? Vishal, I might hop to you first and then-- we'll do Vishal, Lauren, and then Nati.

VISHAL REDDY: Yeah Thanks, Becca. And I'm really excited to be here with you all and my fellow co-panelists. And yeah, really excited for this conversation because I think it's now more urgent than ever. So yeah, I think when starting off, when I think about the matrix and I think about carcerality, I think about the structures that limit our imagination about the way that things could be and the way that things should be.

And one very clear example of this is the work week. Where there's an entrenched set of laws, like such as the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set the 40-hour work week standard in 1940 for all workers. So that's just one, but there's a ton of laws that limit our imagination about what the work week could be, and then there's also a strong set of cultural norms. In America, there's a unique connection between people's work and their identity. And that's just one of many cultural norms that serve to limit our imagination.

And so in that-- limitation in imagination is evidenced by the fact that the workweeks remain constant. So since 1940, despite how we work, who works, when we work, what type of work we do, all that changing, the work week has stayed constant. And so something or really odd and peculiar about that.

So there's been all this change in all these other facets of our life, but there's some kind of-- back in maybe the term you use the matrix, there's something sort of limiting our imagination to break out of that. And that's what our job at WorkFour is to do, is to smash the laws, smash the cultural norms that limit our sense of possibility around the workweek. And I think if we smash and break those norms, then people will have more time, and people will have more freedom. So that's what this topic means to me.

BECCA LEVISS: Awesome. And I also just think it's important to call out, given that we're here at the Center for Religion and Public Life, that a lot of the norms you pointed out, Vishal, are actually norms coming from a certain type of--

VISHAL REDDY: Totally.

BECCA LEVISS: [INAUDIBLE] So you think about the cultural norms of our relationship to work. Max Weber would say that comes from the Protestant work ethic, right?

VISHAL REDDY: Totally.

BECCA LEVISS: Even a weekend comes from ideas of the Sabbath in Judeo-Christian imagination.

VISHAL REDDY: 100%. And I think every cultural norm has its place, and I think our work is just informed by how things feel really out of balance right now. And we see that every day, because people are burnt out and overworked and tired. And so Becca, I'll throw it back to you to turn it over to the next person. But yeah, things are really out of balance in terms of cultural norms and those laws, and we have a responsibility to fix them.

BECCA LEVISS: Absolutely. Lauren, I'm going to kick it to you because I think this is a nice intro to how you define and understand the matrices that govern our own economic systems.

LAUREN PAUL: Yeah, I'd be happy to. And, Becca, I know we've talked about this a number of times, so I'm excited for this question. And it's great to be with you all among such fabulous other panelists. And again, our unseen viewers, both now and in the future. I'll pick it up on that values piece, because I think that's really important. So I represent an academic institution where I have the opportunity to work with a number of really brilliant economists. And I think one of the matrices that we all live in is assuming that the field and discipline of economics is purely an empirical science, that it's a science that you can define solely with quantitative metrics.

But the reality of which is that the theories behind neoclassical economics are steeped in values. And so a lot of that protestant ideology that you were just touching on, Becca and Vishal, assumptions about human nature, assumptions that were inherently self-serving are all wrapped up in the matrix of how we see the economy. There were also a lot of assumptions in our development of what you might refer to as the primary economic theory today, neoclassical economics, which is rooted in a way of seeing the world called neoliberalism, which essentially, you can define it in a number of ways. But prioritizes the firm as the primary source of economic growth.

And so we made an assumption a number of years ago, this was back in the '70s and '80s, where we assumed that if we invested in firms, that those profits would trickle down into the hands of real people. And when we actually look at empirical evidence today, we see that that's not exactly true. Massive inequality. We're seeing, of course, we're in an impending recession. Today's news has everyone up in arms for good reason.

But I think it's a really, as you said, an important opportunity to look at our economic systems. What are the assumptions that we now need to question and what are the values that we want to now infuse into a new economic system? One thing I'll just say on a positive note, because I know there's been a lot of doom and gloom in the news, and maybe many of our lives lately, is I think when we look at history, we can gain a lot of perspective around how to situate our cultural, social, and political moment.

If we look at all of the progress that was made in the 1930s in regards to investing in people, establishing social safety net, et cetera through the New Deal, though that progress came out of the crisis of the 1920s and the Great Recession, and it came out of a lot of political crises as well and global threats to fascism. So, yes, we need to imagine a new paradigm and a new matrix, but history has a lot to teach us as well. So I just wanted to throw that in there to get us started.

BECCA LEVISS: So thank you, Lauren. And we will be sure to pick up the thread on history. So I think it's a really important conversation to bring into this as well. Nati, I'll kick it over to you. What does it mean to define breaking the matrix present in our economic systems within the context of your work Art.coop?

NATI LINARES: Yes. Thank you so much. Thank you Dr. Rashid, Becca, Tammy, and my co-panelists. It's really good to share space with folks that are focused on these economic questions. I'm coming to this work as a cultural organizer. It's not often it can be rare sometimes that artists are included in these conversations around economic systems. And so for me, that's what breaking the matrix initially is. I thought about the question, is that artists don't have a role in helping us reimagine some of these systems. Or even that capitalism, or as we think of neoliberal capitalism, as Lauren pointed out, is the only way that we can distribute our labor and distribute resources.

And even these ideas of winners taking all or even winners and losers that we hear this regime talk about so often. And so we see that a lot in arts and culture. Art.coop is an organization that I helped co-found in 2021. We really were challenging the arts funder community around how you can actually invest in solutions. Not just funding the symphony, but actually helping fund what artists have always been a part of creating solutions.

So I come from the music industry, and I used to help book bans and do festivals, and it really-- I worked in also the solidarity economy world, working with the New Economy Coalition for six years after that. And it really occurred to me that sometimes these economic justice worlds did not include artists and culture workers as protagonists. Maybe they included them in the important work of creating beauty and making meaning and creating songs and art, but we didn't talk about artists as the original gig workers, for example.

And so I think a lot of our work at always is, how do we change that narrative? How do we invest in artists that are solving for some of these issues at the root, whether it's forming their own cooperatives or collectives or being involved in different land efforts to take land off the speculative market through community land trusts and really normalize this framework around the solidarity economy, which does challenge this matrix of capitalism equals everything?

And that we can't actually create these new systems that we don't have solidarity economy practices in our legacies, especially as people that are immigrants, people that are coming from the Black radical tradition, Indigenous communities. Solidarity economy isn't this kind of new framework. It's something very rooted in practices that we've always had, but maybe we've forgotten, because of a lot of what Lauren and Michelle talked about. And so I think yeah, that can get me started a little bit around the really important role that artists and culture workers have in breaking this matrix, in challenging that capitalism-- neoliberal capitalism is the only way that we can run this planet.

BECCA LEVISS: Yeah. Thank you for that. I just want to pull out that all three of you have really talked about stories and narratives when you're talking about breaking the matrix. So, Vishal, this idea of cultural norms, which are stories we tell about ourselves and about each other and about what is of value. And I say stories not to be like semantic or pedantic, but actually like stories of incredible amounts of power.

Lauren, you're talking about the stories we have that if we base our economy on the firm or the corporation as the unit of change making, that that will lead to success for the people and not your powerful idea of storytelling and actually, who is telling the stories and how do we uplift some of the folks who are most capable of telling stories and most skilled, who are artists? So on that note, what are the stories you are all encountering? You touched on some of these, but I really want to tease out what the stories are, but also, what are the new stories you're trying to tell with your work now?

LAUREN PAUL: I love this question. I'm excited, so I can jump in first. But I'm sure my panelists will have even more interesting things to say. Yeah. So I love a number of folks do this, but Mariana Mazzucato is a wonderful economist. If you're familiar with her work, I would encourage you to look her up. A European economist who does a lot of work in the US and had a big role in the Green New Deal, et cetera, et cetera.

But she likes to frame economic narratives around myths and myth busting. And so we've taken that at my organization at the Institute based out of the new school as well. And so there are 10 myths that we focus on at the Institute. I just want to name three really quickly, because I think they're really important. And then we try to organize our storytelling around breaking these myths.

So one of them is around the unfortunate notion that the market is the center of economic growth. Fortunately, unfortunately, that's simply not true, but that's how we've designed our metrics that assess academic value. We think about GDP and the stock market crashing. That's taking up so much of our news cycle right now. But most people aren't invested in the stock market. So we need to just gain some perspective around what metrics do we care about? Why are we focused on the firm? Who does that or why do we focus on the market? Who does that benefit, et cetera?

So that's one myth, is decentering the firm, or decentering the market rather. The other myth is that identity-neutral or race-neutral policies and narratives will somehow be inclusive. So unfortunately, throughout history, whenever we've seen folks try to be race or identity neutral, what we've noticed is that there is systemic disinvestment in certain identity groups, certain population groups that have intentionally left those groups behind.

So I was just speaking highly around the New Deal in my last comments. But we also know that in order to get a lot of the policies passed in the New Deal, policy had to be intentionally exclusive of certain population groups, from Black population to immigrant farm workers. And so massive amounts of wealth transfers did not go to those populations at this time, which is another compounding factor for the race-based inequality we see today. So when advocating for new work, we need to be intentionally inclusive of all identity groups.

And then the last piece I just want to say is the role of the administrative state, the role of our democratic institutions. There have been, from all sides of political parties, systemic disinvestment in the function of government. So it's really interesting to see Elon Musk and this DOGE quest gain so much attention like this is the first time government efficiency has been on the table. It's been a bipartisan priority for a really long time. Clinton administration, et cetera, has been disinvesting in the power of government.

Our nonprofit industrial complex is out of control. And I say this as someone who came up in the nonprofit industrial complex. There's great people and really good work happening, but the lens to then transfer that work into democratized, universal policies is so lacking because of these systemic barriers that keep 501C3's et cetera, from lobbying. So there's all of these different factors, but we need to be investing in the power of public institutions to secure what we like to call the Institute of Economic Rights.

So that was a lot. But stories that challenge those fundamental assumptions around the role of government, the role of race and identity, and the role of the market, I feel like, are our absolutely fundamental. But I'm curious what's coming up from our other panelists.

VISHAL REDDY: Yeah, I love that framing of thinking about, what are the myths? And therefore, what are the stories that we need to tell to not just dispel that myth, but to functionally create a new myth that we're all aligned with? Because collective myths become collective realities. And I think that's part of what we've been combating for the last 80 years.

And so on that note, one myth that we are often combating in our work in our advocacy for shortened work weeks is just this idea that the workweek is this immutable law of nature. And we're now at a weird point in history where the workweek has been this way for 80 years. Which means that some of our oldest members of society have only seen one kind of workweek. But that's a historical aberration that we talk about all the time.

Like, this period of history where American workers are working about the same as their great grandparents is odd. Historically, there's been this trend towards lowering work time. But it's also interesting when people are telling the story of how we-- the fact that this is a historical aberration. There's another myth in there. So people often talk about, well, the reason we have a five-day, 40 hour work week is because Henry Ford shifted the Ford factory to a five-day, 40-hour work week, and FDR-- President Roosevelt signed this Bill in 1940 to make the 40-hour workweek the standard.

And I think what's-- that myth actually removes a lot of the ways in which ordinary people, for 20 to 30 years, were agitating in their workplaces and their communities to work less. And so I think at every level, there's new myths that emerge, and it's important that we dispel them in a way that empowers ordinary people to be agents of their change as it relates to work time.

And one other big myth that we often encounter and one story that is predominant also in-- I think, Lauren, to speak to your-- this idea of neoliberalism, there's so many assumptions there, but it also-- it centers the firm. And in doing so, anything that benefits workers is seen as something that doesn't benefit the firm. And so there's this zero sum myth that we're often trying to break. And I think the four-day 35-hour work week is a really clear example of something that is just not zero sum.

And it's research-backed, it's evidence-backed. So 91% of companies that have shifted to a four-day, 32-hour work week have stayed with it. Not because it's just good for workers, but because it's good for their revenue, good for their bottom line. And so I think what is really cool about the four-day work week is, more and more companies and workplaces and communities are adopting this is that these companies are-- in aggregate, they are the story, but also the people, once they experience the counterintuitive nature of how you can work less but work-- get more done, people are ready to be storytellers in their own right. So I think that's what's really cool about building this movement. So yeah.

Yeah, I love that. I think another myth that I remember when I was at the New Economy Coalition, we had a poster that was like, there is no alternative. The Thatcher era Tina [INAUDIBLE], and we responded to that with there are so many alternatives. And that was always my work in communications and culture. Was like, how do we make visible, these very real examples on the ground when people think there aren't alternatives, that there are? And that was always really inspiring, was to learn about whether that was-- I mean, it's also so hard to talk about this word and tell as opposed to show, and that's also the role of artists in this, of just actually being able to visualize some of this as opposed to just using words.

But when you think about land and food in the solidarity economy, there's food and farming cooperatives. There's a rich history there in this country that comes out of the Civil Rights movement up until today. If you think about money and finance, we have participatory budgeting, housing and energy, and all of these areas of the economy, which can be so daunting, there are stories, both in history and today, all across this country where people are working on alternatives.

So I think that is really connected to the work of why we saw this gap at Art.coop of artists being included in this economic conversation, that artists have such a large role to play in demystifying these systems. There's an artist music streaming cooperative called Subvert that is growing. It's the cooperative answer to bandcamp that says, we can't change systems if we don't demystify them. And that's the role or, I think, artists, cultural workers, folks, that are using the word, et cetera. So there are many alternatives.

And then also, I think a slogan that I came up with during my time at New Economy Coalition, again, because I'm constantly trying to think of, how do I break this into the everyday layman's terms? You all, both of you, are more in academic. Like, you're an attorney, you're working with economists. But I'm always in pop culture brain of, how are we actually getting this across to everyday people? And obviously, I think COVID helped bust a lot of these myths to where there are no alternatives, all of a sudden, OK, people were starting to see how they were having to rely on their local community.

But one slogan I can test with you all and you tell me, it's for solidarity economy. It's fire the bosses, free the land, elect ourselves, and build a new economy. And within that, there's so much to talk about within each of those. But that's how I'm always constantly trying to translate for people-- thousands of people that are waking up every day.

BECCA LEVISS: That's fantastic. Thank you all. I think another thing I'll just say is really interesting about what you all shared is the ways in which these stories are deeply multifaceted. It's not just artists. It's artists and farmers and producers and community members and people who do labor that we don't think of labor, like being a mother, being a parent, caring for family. This is what the complex economy looks like.

And all three of you, when you do your work, do it in deep coalition and partnership across all of these different sectors. So I would love for you to talk a little bit about the partnerships and coalitions that are guiding your work. I know, Laura, and maybe I'll kick it to you to start because I know the Institute does a bunch of stuff with artists and producers, as well as academics and policy makers.

LAUREN PAUL: Yeah, thank you for that. And, Nati, I love your slogan. So just to share. Yeah, I think we're getting better at breaking down what we talk about at my organization with a larger population, and it's absolutely essential. I'll just share my personal story. So when I first learned about the study of political economy, it blew my mind. I wasn't aware that there was another way to study the economy outside of micro and macro economics that you're exposed to in your undergraduate education.

And so that was really cool for me. So I've been on this personal quest for the past probably six years on how to bring political economy teachings to the masses. And so I have some side projects. If we have time, I can talk about them a little bit. But that is super exciting to me. And so figuring out how to actually provide content that would be useful for so many different population groups is super important, to me personally and to the Institute.

So I'll name, from a partnership's perspective, the big partnership that we're super excited about these days at the Institute is our principal lead investigator, the person who founded our Institute, is Professor Darrick Hamilton. If folks are interested, he's a-- Google his name. He's known for many things. But one of our more exciting partnerships is he was recently elected to be the Chief Economist for the AFL-CIO, so the largest conglomerate of unions in the country representing about 10% of all workers.

So what we're really excited about is that the AFL-CIO has drawn to Professor Hamilton the Institute's ideas. And I don't know if it's become clear yet, but we're a pretty radical group. We go for federal jobs guarantee, guaranteed income, this policy called baby bonds, which is a publicly funded, trusted account for all children. And so the fact that the AFL-CIO, especially the AFL, is embracing this level of what one may have called previously a radical vision as essential economic truth is super exciting.

And that partnership has helped us push forward a lot of our materials to make sure that they're accessible and meeting union leaders where they're at. So that's something we're really excited about. The other piece I wanted to mention is that we're all getting better right now on how to frame this work. So I just want to just name how powerful, Nati, I think your framing around freedom is. If there's anyone listening who's a message testing nerd, because I feel like there's a lot of them, especially in the potential demographic group that might be listening today, there's been a lot of tests around that word "freedom."

And apparently, it's the most popular cultural normative value, regardless of political affiliation. And so a lot of what we advocate for at the Institute are the types of policies that facilitate freedom. We believe that we should be investing in people directly, because the purpose of an economy and the purpose of a government is to facilitate your economic freedom.

We talk about how you-- we talk about how freedom isn't a value in America, but how could you really be free if you have the right to vote but you can't afford your groceries? That's not true freedom. So we sometimes say it's a co-optation, which it probably is too academic of a language. So Nati or someone can help you with this. It's a co-optation of saying human rights if you don't include economic rights. So that's what we're trying to organize people around. So folks have ideas on how to expand our reach with the labor movement or otherwise. I would love folks opinions, because the Institute is really interested in partnerships right now.

VISHAL REDDY: That's really exciting. Lauren and Becca, if you want to-- I'm going to just-- I think one thing that's really cool about workforce is how our partnerships and coalitions have changed over time since our inception. And when Workforce first started, a lot of the work was focused on engaging employers. And so a lot of our partnerships and coalition building in a sense was very executive heavy. So executives who were courageous enough to pilot this in their own workplace.

And there's something really powerful about that. But at the same time, what was missing was the perspective of workers, or the perspective of care economy advocates. And so one thing that we've deepened over the last few years is, we partner with United Auto Workers, UAW. And so now in their last contract fight with the big three automakers, they tried to bargain for the four-day, 32-hour work week because they heard it firsthand from their workers.

That when they had worked for 40, 50 years at an auto plant, when they look back on their life, they didn't wish necessarily that they had more wages, although those were always great. But the number one thing that they wish they had was more time. And so I think one thing that's been really powerful is as we've been expanding our partnerships and our coalitions and similar to Lauren and the work that you're building, trying to be-- we want to build a worker-centered movement from the jump. And unions, I also work at a union, and so I'm biased in this sense. But it's really important to be working with institutions that are democratic and represented by workers.

And I think the last thing I'll say is in terms of where we go next too is, I think when we think about the work that we're doing to reduce work time, we think a lot about freedom. And I think, Lauren, to your point, that freedom is this value that has this uniquely broad resonance with a lot of people and people intuitively grasp what things make their life better and fundamentally believe that.

And so I think one thing that we've seen is the momentum for the four-day work week has skyrocketed, and it's supported by people of all party affiliations, men and women, people of different races, ethnicities, different classes. Maybe not the 1%, but maybe across the 99%. But there's a ton of resonance. But in part because people-- what we're trying to do also is create a--

So there's a ton of resonance. But I guess, yeah, as far as where we go next, we want to make sure that we're also thinking like, who are the-- getting conservatives on board with this in a public and outspoken way. And I think they're-- because conservative people are in support of a four-day work week, but the institutions and policy makers that are conservative aren't publicly on board with this. Yeah. So we're not only thinking about the-- I guess we're proud of the coalitions that we have built so far, but we're also thinking in terms of building a broad-based movement, how we can expand our coalition work going forward.

NATI LINARES: I love that, how you all are in conversation already. I think the work of Art.coop, we come out of coalitions. It was the network for arts funders in 2020. A lot of institutions for a short three-months that summer of the George Floyd uprisings were really being honest about racial capitalism, why we were where we were. And that's how we came about that we were-- an RFP was put out where our funders wanted to learn, how do we not just, again, fund the symphony, fund these traditional arts from things that funders have traditionally funded?

How do we actually get to the root of why there's a riot in the streets right now, why people are in the streets, why-- what are some of these alternatives? And so Art-coop was born out of already that coalition of arts funders who was flirting with kind of economic-- regenerative economic practices. And so it can be a little daunting sometimes, because we exist in the space of the arts funder world. We exist in the space of for profit arts world trying to [INAUDIBLE] it's this whole other infrastructure.

While also engaging with the economics world as well. We have a program called EAT, Economics Arts Transformation. I'd love to talk to you more about it, Lauren, where we work with economists out of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Union for Radical Political Economy in bringing together progressive economists that have an understanding of popular education methodology and who have an interest in reaching everyday folk, in this case, cultural workers.

And we have a six-month program in person and online? We just piloted it last year. And we took 30 artists on this journey of understanding capitalism for real, understanding, what are different things that people have called alternatives, whether it's the New Deal, whether it's different things that people have called more communistic practices, socialistic practices, and then what are examples on the ground today that artists and grassroots orgs-- and then how can you as an artist dedicate your gifts, your practices to that movement?

And there was such a hunger for this kind of education on such-- our group is still active on our WhatsApp chat four months later. So speaking about really changing culture, really building relational cultures, cultures of care amongst us. And again, it's small batch. It's like 30. But how can we think-- Art.coop, we also have-- we've done coalition building with online learning platforms.

Because we're at there's a moment of deep education that needs to happen where people are frustrated with what they're seeing. I think we're seeing that with the protests this weekend. I think we see a lot more, excuse my French, but shitposting capitalist accounts on Instagram who are getting hundreds of thousands of people frustrated with the current political economic paradigm, but not necessarily-- we don't have coordinated efforts that actually show examples of how people are empowered right now working on these solutions, no less how people can get resources to try to experiment where they are.

So I think inherently, Art.coop's work is coalitional in that we're dealing with funders, we're dealing with for profit world, nonprofit world, and just the vast world of the solidarity economy project in every sector, whether it's housing, labor, land, cetera. So that's a hard question to answer, but some different programs that we do. And we're also a member of the New economy coalition, which is a 150 groups working across the country on building this post-capitalist practice.

VISHAL REDDY: And can I ask you a follow up question on that? I guess that's--

NATI LINARES: Sure.

VISHAL REDDY: --OK if I can--

NATI LINARES: Yeah.

VISHAL REDDY: Well, I'm just curious, when you bring in that many artists for this kind of-- over a six month period workshop or education, have there been instances where artists start partnering on art? I guess I'm asking this question in the most lawyerly way possible, but just curious, in that sort of coop, obviously, there's artists doing all sorts of their own art. But how does the structures or programs that you create result in collective-- are people partnering and collaborating in that?

NATI LINARES: Well, that brings another program that I helped found at the New Economy Coalition called Creative Wildfire. This will be the third year that it's happening. It's carried on since I left where there's a good amount of funding for an artist, I'd say $8,000 is a good amount. And they're led through a process with NEC members where the artists work with these grassroots orgs and also climate groups. So we did this in coalition with the Climate Justice Alliance, New Economy Coalition, and some just transition groups as well.

And the idea-- it's all still, I think, in experimental pilot phase. But a lot was learned from that when you put artists and you fund them. I mean, not to mention in New York City, there was a whole effort, which maybe we can get into soon, around basic income for artists that also included a guaranteed job program for a few hundred artists where artists were paired with a community organization, and they were supplement-- the community organizations were also supplemented to be able to bring on these artists.

And there's a whole body of learnings of what happened from that pilot. But in the case of EAT, I think one example that came up was there was a comedian, for example, and they were just so juiced on what they were learning. And I wouldn't say that it was a systematic, they're going to go work with a grassroots org all of a sudden. But it was as simple as, I'm going to create a comedy show at a local space in Brooklyn that's like, we're going to roast capitalism, and we're going to do some jokes about alternatives. And they were able to bring in eight other comedians, mostly working class Black and Brown comedians, and just create these spaces.

And it's not a one time thing. If we're talking about a culture shift that has to take place, these things have to happen over and over again. How people are getting inspired, and then how they're getting engaged, and then how they're being educated, and how they're participating, and then how they become mentors, then to inspire the next-- so we think of it as this cycle of influence, education, engagement.

And alongside it, that work has to be funded. And so that's why a little bit of our work still is within our philanthropy and other forms of philanthropy saying, you all need to change the culture of philanthropy as well. If you really are working to fund different civic experiments, and these kinds of things, let's also bring in groups that are on the ground doing this work. And fund it in a multi-year way, for example. So the report that I wrote kind of goes into all of that. So I don't know if that answers your question, but we're working on how to connect those dots more so those connections are more long lasting.

VISHAL REDDY: It definitely does, and that's so cool. And I will definitely read that report. [LAUGHS]

NATI LINARES: Yeah. And at creativewildfire.com or .org, you can see some of the examples of what the artist produced with the organizations. It could be everything from it was an art show to literally a Pacific Islander textile artist work with a local climate justice group in Oceania on creating a symbol textile. There's so many inspiring projects I can share that it's hard to tell. I'd rather just show you all, but I'll put some links for you all to dig deep into. Thank you.

BECCA LEVISS: I'm just thinking a lot about, all of you have really described what in many ways I would call strange bedfellows in building coalitions and partnerships for this work. And I come from the democracy space. So you are far more experts on this than I am. But something we're talking about a lot, and we talked about this last week in our panel on US democracy futures, is the ways in which this moment is significant political realignment. And our old ways of thinking about political coalitions, right versus left, Republican, Democrat, demographic voting blocs really don't hold. And so what we actually need to do is radically reimagine who our partners can be and what our coalitions can look like.

And what I'm hearing from you all is that actually requires doing some of that. But in many ways, it's actually not necessarily just looking forward. It's also looking back. Some of the most tremendous changes in labor movements came from farmers, came from a home workers and care workers. Now that you talked about philanthropy, and I about this a lot, Lila Corwin Berman's a fantastic academic who wrote this really interesting book about the history of Jewish philanthropy in the US.

And when big Jewish philanthropies started, they essentially were like mutual aid networks. They were people who had the first generation who came from outside the US who came to the US and set up schools and neighborhoods and put kosher butchers and bakeries who are kosher for Passover. And then when the next wave of immigrants came, you had this support system. And that's really where a lot of the Jewish federations came out of. I would call them mutual aid network solidarity economies. They probably didn't call them that. But definitionally, I think they could function as that.

And then it was really in the 1940s and '50s that Jewish federations and big Jewish philanthropies really shifted to have these massive endowments and really thinking about how they were spending money and holding money differently. I'll spare you all the summary of the entire book, but I would definitely go read it. But I'm just-- I'm pulling it out as an example to name that, in many ways, this is looking forward, but it's also looking back. And Lauren, you and Nati have already pulled this out a little bit about the role of history. So would love to focus on that and pull that thread a little bit because I think it's really relevant here when we think about partnerships and realignments.

LAUREN PAUL: Love this. And you took this conversation in a place to go, which is criticizing endowments. I'm actually doing some research about this right now. So great. I'm happy about the segue. Yeah, no. I mean, it's no secret that philanthropy essentially PR cover for the ultra wealthy to get away with what they do with most of their money invested in oil, et cetera. We exist in a system where philanthropy is incredibly necessary because we have a very broken administrative state, and government does not represent people's interests at all levels in ways that are particularly meaningful. So we now need philanthropy and nonprofits. But this is very much by design.

Robert Reich, another leader in this imagining economic space, has written a number of books and papers and has a great Substack where he criticizes philanthropy often. So if you're interested in that, I think Robert Reich is my favorite principle in critiquing philanthropy. But I wanted to just pick up on that notion around endowments because we have not updated our laws around what super rich people, academic institutions, and philanthropy included, can do with endowments in a really long time. Those laws have not been touched.

Just for folks knowledge, because it blew my mind when I learned this, for philanthropic institutions, we only require that institutions spend 5% of their net wealth year over year in order to qualify for these massive tax breaks. So that 95% of the rest of their money can go anywhere they want. If you haven't heard that before, it's mind blowing, because you see all this money go to good causes, but where is the rest of that money going?

And one foil that I like to share when thinking about these massive endowments is, we're OK with endowing these institutions where most of the money is going to support private market entities and firms, but we are so averse to endowing individuals. And what I mean by that is, if you're someone out here talking about wealth and not just income, you're viewed as so radical.

A lot of folks in my space will talk about things like the racial wealth gap. That can sometimes get the side eye as being a radical fringe issue. But we know that in order to do anything, you can't live paycheck to paycheck. You can't go to get higher education. You can't afford medical bills. You certainly can't invest in an asset like a house that would appreciate over time.

The middle class was built off of investments into a white population that invested in homeownership, and that is the quote, unquote, "middle class" that we see today. That was a government-facilitated endeavor. One of the biggest policies that was related to that was the GI Bill, so that's a really interesting part of history if you're interested in the way that GI Bill invested in the asset development potential of white veterans, white only veterans.

And so one thing I like to think about is if we disinvested in the endowment of the institutions that isn't using that money well, what have we invested in the potential of people? And so maybe one way that I make that point more concrete is expanding on that policy that I mentioned a couple of comments ago around baby bonds, just in case folks aren't familiar.

So baby bonds is a policy that has been actually around in Native communities for a really long time, but was put into policy by a number of economists, including Professor Darrick Hamilton, who I work for. And baby bonds essentially is-- Professor Hamilton and others were essentially looking to facilitate wealth transfers. And so they were actually thinking about, OK, what's a politically feasible way to facilitate wealth transfers?

We're supposed to all like babies in this country. So they got clever with it. And they thought about, what if we gave every baby a guaranteed amount of investment that was facilitated by public entities? And so the way that it's been going, and I'll get to this in a moment, is through Treasury. So most people don't really know what the Treasury does in their locality, but the Treasury does a lot. So Treasury invests in these public trust accounts. That money accrues in the market over time in very conservative accounts. You can also make sure that those go to not terrible causes. And then when a baby grows up and ages into benefits, they can use that money potentially with some restrictions depending on how someone wants to define a policy. So maybe you can only spend that money on going to school, medical debt, or going to college.

But what's been really cool is that there's now 25 states and localities that are actively pursuing baby bonds legislation. Three localities have already passed baby bonds legislation, Connecticut being the first. And there's dozens of similar pilots experimenting with different ways that baby bonds can be combined with other programs, such as guaranteed income, to facilitate benefits.

And so that's a great example, I think, of what an endowment looks like in an individual. And it's been super interesting to see, in the Trump administration, how much more state and local groups are interested in baby bonds, because it's something you can get done at the state and local level. We advocate for a federal baby bonds one day, but these example and points of success around the country are doing a lot to show why that would be so effective. So happy to speak more about that, but love the idea of endowments and just questioning who they're for.

NATI LINARES: I love that, just rethinking who the-- what's the real endowment, who we're really investing in. This question brings up so much. I mean, at Art.coop, we have a fellowship called Remember the Future, and as well as a podcast. It's the energy we're trying to put out into the world when we're talking about solidarity economy, which can seem so difficult to achieve.

And it's actually-- I think for me personally, when I came into this work, I would hear a grocery cooperative and think, oh, that's some Park Slope thing. And it's like, I don't have anything to do with that. That's not a my people thing at all, these practices. What is this? But it was when I started to understand the Zapatista movement of the world within many worlds, or even some of the practices that the Black Panthers invoked or on different mutual aid and cooperative economies.

Then I started to imagine, OK, I might be disconnected from my ancestral roots because of hashtag America, but I could imagine my great grandparents practicing some of these things, or I could even imagine the ways in which I operated when I worked in the music business. I knew how to create an informal network of couches that I could that groups that I worked with would be taken care of whenever we were in a city that we weren't from. For example, we know how to practice this.

And especially arts and culture workers. So I think it was once I would read more and more about different Black jazz musicians were forming-- they would call them musician mutuals, especially when the musicians unions were segregated, for example. Or I would learn-- I would pick up little tidbits across history-- across cultural worker history where I was like, wait, solidarity economy isn't so separate from the ways in which artists have always had to survive.

I'm wearing earrings with Lorraine Hansberry on it. He's like my North star of someone who was extremely economically engaged. Wrote for W.E.B Bois newspaper, had such a perspective on politics and economics, and was a very successful artist. And so I don't know, I'm going all over the place, but I think what was empowering for me was understanding that this was not just some detached framework that someone just invented, but that these are practices that go way further back.

And we're just trying to remix them, re-indigenizing-- my partner likes to say, re-indigenizing economies remixed for the 21st century. So it's a little bit of the older stuff, but it's a lot of the taking into account the technologies as well. And so yes, I think the history is empowering when we remember that it wasn't always like this.

BECCA LEVISS: Fantastic. Thank you. Vishal, anything to add?

VISHAL REDDY: I just love that last point [INAUDIBLE] in terms of, we're taking things that people have done in the past and repurposing them for the 21st century. And when I think of that-- when I hear that, I think about the labor movement. And I think part of what our goal at work was to reawaken the labor movement as it relates to work time. And we have a five-day, 40-hour work week. We got rid of child labor protections. We have all these things because workers all across the country, through unions or in their own workplaces, we're pushing for it 100 years ago.

And I think one thing we're really doing is trying to get the labor movement to think more ambitiously about what workers in this country deserve. We want to raise workers' expectations of how much time they should have spent at work and how much time they should be allowed to spend with their families, in their communities, working on their hobbies. And so I think when I think about-- we want to remix that history with today to push for a 32-hour workweek, and I think the United Auto Workers are leading the way on that.

And so it's really exciting to-- there are already parts of the labor movement that are doing this, and we want to work in coalition with them to bring other parts of the labor movement with us. Because the labor movement's been on defense in a lot of ways. Ever since neoliberalism became really, really popular, labor is on the back foot. But we can always play defense, or now is the time when there's mass worker anxiety, mass dissatisfaction with our systems, institutions. There is this political realignment happening, and now is the time to go on offense on workers' rights.

BECCA LEVISS: Yeah. I'm thinking a lot just based on where this conversation is going on barriers and opportunities for transformation and change and how we talked about COVID and how COVID has helped us rethink what labor looks like and where you do work from and what you expect out of your government? We had, in many ways, pretty direct funding from the government for whatever the two to three years of COVID, which has gone down the drain after. I'd hoped it would stick around for a little more, it did not.

But thinking about how moments of crisis are also opportunities for change. And how that isn't really a binary in a sense, unless you get to the question of, well, who can you utilize this as an opportunity and for whom? Is it a barrier? And that's where actually there there comes to be differentiation around power and access and agency.

So as we are staring down the barrel of a gun for crisis for democracy, climate change, LA fires, which in many ways was an incredible opportunity for the Arts community to come together and invest in reimagining artists economies, what are you all seeing as barriers and opportunities to transformation and change? And how can we make sure that all barriers are opportunities to as many people as possible?

VISHAL REDDY: That's a great question, Becca. And I think, Lauren, I think you made this point earlier. When there's crisis, there's also this profound opportunity to change. And that happened a ton in the 1930s with this kind of refashioning of government, lowering work time, et cetera. And even in our movement, the pandemic ushered in this real changing of norms in terms of work, and that's when the work time reduction movement really saw a ton of momentum.

And so I think one unique thing about work time too is that part of what we're trying to build is a care economy so that we have this-- we are on a one way ticket to climate change, things like that. And so crises in a sense are also going to become more and more part of our world. And so how do we build an economy so that people have more time and resources to deal with crises? In LA fire, is I remember talking to a friend and they're like, yeah, for one day, everybody agreed that work was going to be weird. But I guess we just turned to work on Thursday and just keep doing our thing.

It's like there's this work in a lot of ways is not-- doesn't let folks confront the reality of what's happening in their world. And there's a real dissonance that people feel because of that and a real distress because of that dissonance. And so I think we see-- it's not a good thing for there to be a recession or any sort of economic crisis, but I think history shows us also that when there are strong movements to support in that time of crisis, then that barrier can really be turned into an opportunity.

But I think the pandemic is also instructive in that way, because it was a huge crisis, but I don't think the movement around work time reduction was really ready for that moment. And so already, it didn't-- it blew up in certain respects, but it didn't get amplified to the extent that it could have been. And so we're really doing that kind of foundational movement building work now. And hopefully there isn't a next crisis. But if there is, then we're positioned to make sure that coming out of that crisis, workers aren't the ones that are left behind.

LAUREN PAUL: Yeah, it's a really good question. Vishal, I plus one everything you shared. I'm really nervous about the current impending recession, because the left, if you will, is not even close to united around what is good recessionary policy. So if you look at the 2008 recession, we chose firms over people hardcore, and it was a terrible recession. Like we really saw that that didn't work if you're actually looking at the economy, even by traditional metrics. And yet so many of those in power on the left are not willing to criticize that.

Obama has not publicly shared all that much that I'm aware in terms of regret for the ways that he handled that recession. And he holds a lot of weight in the party. He sometimes says really great things, like he was criticizing endowments in a speech that was covered by the New York Times this weekend. Or on Friday or whatever that was. So I'm nervous that we're not looking at the data, and we're not going to say what worked.

Because actually, some of what happened in the Trump administration in the COVID recession, that was in some ways continued by the Biden-Harris administration. But then, to your point, Becca, was dropped off like rent forgiveness, child tax credits were really, really exciting, the stimulus checks. All of those things contributed to this being the shortest recession ever on record.

So it would be great if we could do that stuff again, but it's going to be really weird politically because Trump's in office, and I don't know what the left is prepared to say. So that's just bringing me some anxiety right now, I will say. I also want to just name that who's going to get harmed by this are the poorest folks among us. This is just-- we can't Zoom past that, and know no one here is. It's just, it's heartbreaking how this is going to unfold.

And continues to be the case that those folks that are left behind are the ones that have to tend to do most of the organizing and push us forward. So I'm really interested in what some folks may refer to the silenced and sidelined, all the people that didn't vote in the last election. There are so many folks who didn't vote in the last election that there's really good reason to believe would be motivated by a populist agenda. So good moves to take advantage of the opportunity from this crisis would be to focus on those groups.

VISHAL REDDY: Yes, plus 1, as I sign up, because Bernie is going to be in Salt Lake City next week, and thousands of people are really excited about that here. Yeah. When I thought about this question, the barriers are huge, especially in arts and culture. I mean, Trump, as just like entertaining as a popular culture figure. Maybe not now when people are going to be feeling the pain, but I feel-- I would sometimes look to him as, he's so entertaining. We don't have that kind of charismatic, kind of funny equal on the left, I would say. But that just came to me now.

But to write what I wrote down was more that people just don't value art. I mean, it's all over our lives, and both conservative, progressive radicals, I will say, are not always willing to support that art. And so it kind of reinforces that if your art is not profitable, it doesn't have value, and that's what we're really trying to challenge at Art.coop.

I'd also say a huge challenge that to Lauren's point of just the worship of the firm, we have an entire business community that doesn't want to let go of their money. And that we still have this assumption that there are no alternatives to that. And then I also think a little bit to what Lauren's talking about, we don't have a lot of unity on the left. Or even if you do challenge what is going on, you're seen as this authoritarian, Marxist person as opposed to actually, we're talking about deeper democracy in our economic. And so that, to me, seems like a huge barrier.

But on the other side of that, which both of you pointed out, it does seem more and more people are willing to break out of that. I'm seeing a lot more nontraditional content creators-- I would say mass reach content creators, like I mentioned earlier, who are, I feel, galvanizing hundreds of thousands of people, but we're not necessarily aligned on what we're for. And to Lauren's point of what we're actually-- what is actually acceptable as a platform of what a big tent, a broad tent could be pushing for.

And so yeah, just the point that some resources. We have a directory on Art.coop website. When you have that friend who's like, there's no alternatives. We're never going to win. There's so many inspiring examples. Every day, I'm just awakened to some new example. Even here locally in Salt Lake, I'm a member of my local herbal farm cooperative that does incredible events. They just launched a gear library where I can rent outdoor equipment for free. There's all these examples locally where we are, but I think it's a really ripe time to plug-in to where we are. Wherever it is that you are locally, something is going on. And if you want to reach out to me and ask me, I'm in this city, I will help you find where those places are.

The New Economy Coalition puts out a roundup every two weeks that is really inspiring of news across the solidarity economy, progressive economics world that also takes into account arts and culture, policy, a lot of different realms of this work. And yeah. And I just came across a pop star yesterday who called herself like a radical pop star. I think we're going to see more of that, artists and culture workers that do really are taking this moment really seriously. Aren't prioritizing being Beyoncé, but are prioritizing, doing work that really represents this moment, and I'm just seeing more of that as well. And I'm seeing those audiences grow for-- and the appetite is growing a lot for these kinds of solutions and culture.

BECCA LEVISS: I love that. And I'll close this all by saying, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] may it be God's will or may it be our will, the will of the people for, making it happen. Thank you Vishal, Nati, Lauren for joining me this evening. Thank you all for listening, both now and in the future. We will be right here next week at 6:00 PM, Eastern time, to think about re-imagining US school systems for the future. Thank you, again. Looking forward to seeing you all or as many as possible here next week.

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