Governance After Neoliberalism

Thanks, Samantha.

Thanks for having me on.

So, uh, let's start with an easy one.

What's the Good Life Agenda?

I love the easy ones first.

Um, well, I think as you described, we are thinking at Roosevelt intently about how we can move forward in any governing agenda that comes forward.

Uh, again, this isn't an agenda designed for one particular moment.

We're thinking about generational shifts in the ways we think about government, how government serves us, how government shows up in our daily lives.

So the Good Life Agenda is an attempt by the Roosevelt Institute to lay a marker and a forward-looking vision, one that says, "Hey, government is designed to act for people.

It's designed to act to build a better life." And in a democracy, part of this is about accountability, part of this is about trust.

And so we layer that into the agenda.

But really, what we are trying to do is identify, you know, beyond an affordability crisis, beyond abundance politics, beyond some of these pieces, what is the synthesis that really talks to what's happening right now in people's lives? And that's why we talk about affordability.

And we-- but we know that affordability alone is not the answer.

I mean, government has a role to play in lowering costs and ensuring that everyday essentials are affordable, um, like healthcare, childcare, housing.

But we also wanna raise incomes.

We wanna build power in the workplace, and we want to help people reclaim time.

Time is an incredibly valuable component of our agenda, where we're talking about the loss of time that people feel is real.

And I think we had an economist at one of our kickoff events where she was discussing, you know, what is actually valuable, um, to families.

And money is valuable, but time with their families is a huge component, and that's where we wanna get at some of those pieces.

And so we think about this holistically.

How can government show up? And that's why we list out, you know, a series of tools.

We can get down into some of the, the details, but a series of public tools the government can start using after we've rebuilt capacity and designed government to work better for people.

How can we then use the tools of government to show up in, in people's everyday lives? And I think that's what the Good Life Agenda is intended to do, which is to show that forward vision.