Book Talk: Natalie Foster — The Guarantee
Opening remarks by Dorian Warren.
The Guarantee asks us to imagine an America where housing, health care, a college education, dignified work, family care, an inheritance, and an income floor are not only attainable by all but guaranteed, by our government, for everyone.
But isn’t this pie-in-the-sky thinking? Not by a long shot, as this provocative new book reveals. As it stands, our current economic system is chock full of government-backed guarantees, from bailouts to bankruptcy protection, to keep the private sector in business. So why can’t the same be true for the rest of us?
Author Natalie Foster, co-founder (with Dorian Warren and Facebook’s Chris Hughes) of the Economic Security Project, has had a front-row seat to the dramatic leaps forward in government guarantees over the past decade, from student debt relief to the child tax credit expansion. Her brilliantly sketched vision for a new American Guarantee is rooted in real life experiences, collaborations with some of today’s most important activists and visionaries, and a concrete sense of the policies that are possible—and ready to implement—in twenty-first-century America.
The Guarantee is the rare book that will shift the terms of debate, moving us from the expired and defunct assumptions of no-guardrails capitalism to a nation that works for all of its people.
Natalie Foster is a leading architect of the movement to build an inclusive and resilient economy. She is the president and co-founder of Economic Security Project and Aspen Institute Fellow, and her work and writing has appeared in the New York Times, USA Today, Time, Business Insider, CNN, and The Guardian. She previously founded the sharing economy community Peers and co-founded Rebuild the Dream with Van Jones, and served as digital director for President Obama’s Organizing for America. A daughter of a preacher from Kansas, Natalie lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and two kids. She is the author of The Guarantee: Inside the Fight for America’s Next Economy (The New Press).
Foster will be in conversation with Anna Sale, the host of Death, Sex & Money, the podcast from Slate about “the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more.” Anna won a Gracie for best podcast host in 2016 and the show won the 2018 Webby and 2021 Ambie for best interview show. Before launching Death, Sex & Money in 2014, Anna covered politics for nearly a decade. She is the author of the book Let’s Talk About Hard Things, which The New Yorker wrote “shows us how supportive listening happens.”
Foster and Sale will be introduced by Dorian T. Warren. Warren is the president of Community Change, co-chair of the Economic Security Project and co-host of System Check. A progressive scholar, organizer, and media personality, Dorian has worked to advance racial, economic, and social justice for over two decades. He previously held the position of vice president at Community Change. He taught for over a decade at the University of Chicago and Columbia University, where he was co-director of the Columbia University Program on Labor Law and Policy. He also worked at MSNBC, where he was a contributor and host, as well as the executive producer of “Nerding Out” on MSNBC’s digital platform. He serves on the boards of Working Partnerships USA, the Leadership Conference Education Fund Board, the National Employment Law Project, and The Nation magazine, among others.
