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Rising-Tide Economics

In my White House days, I was known for tormenting the speechwriters by insisting that we should rip off Ben Franklin’s caution that we “must indeed all hang together, or . . . hang separately” with the economic refrain “we will grow together or grow apart.” My line never made it into a speech, but with the spread of globalization it has never been more apt. Indeed, the question of whether spreading globalization and information technology (IT) is strengthening or hollowing out our middle class may be the most paramount economic issue of our time.

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This article was originally published in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.

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