But for the rest of the country， economic reality has been something entirely different. It has meant trying to hold on to a good job in a grim game of musical chairs where every time the music stopped， there were fewer good jobs and more people trying to get and keep one. Over the last decade， we lost more than 5 million manufacturing jobs-a million of them professional and design jobs. We lost 20 percent of our aerospace manufacturing jobs. We’re losing high-tech jobs-the jobs we were supposed to keep.
For most of us， economic reality has meant trying to pay for the ever- more-expensive education needed to pursue a good job-the cost of a college degree has gone up more than 24 percent since 2000 while average wages and salaries have increased less than one percent. It has meant trying to pay for exorbitant health care as employer coverage went away or got hollowed out. It has meant trying to eke out a decent retirement even as the private sector shed real pensions and long-term investment returns evaporated. Meanwhile， Wall Street middlemen raked in the bonuses.
And that was the reality for most Americans before the Great Recession began in 2007. Since then， we have lost 8 million jobs when the economy needed to add nearly three million just to keep up with population growth. That‘s 11 million missing jobs.
President Obama’s economic recovery program has done a lot of good for working people-creating or saving more than 2 million jobs. But the reality is that 2 million jobs is just 18 percent of the hole in our labor market.
The jobs hole and the decades-long stagnation in real wages-are the source of the anger that echoes across our political landscape. People areincensed by the government‘s inability to halt massive job loss and declining living standards， on the one hand， and the comparative ease with which government led by both parties has made the world safe again for JP Morgan， Goldman Sachs and Citigroup， on the other hand.
Rescuing the big banks hasn’t done much for Main Street. The very same financial institutions that got bailed out have not only cut way back on lending to business， they have never stopped foreclosing on American families‘ homes.
The fact is that for a generation we have built our economy on a lie that we can have a low-wage， high-consumption society and paper over the contradiction with cheap credit funded by our foreign trading partners and financial sector profits made by taking a cut of the flow of cheap credit.
So now a lot of Americans are angry. And we should be angry. And just as we have seen throughout history， there are plenty of purveyors of hate and division looking to profit from our hurt and our anger.
I am a student of history， and now is the time to remember our history as a nation. Remember that when President Franklin Roosevelt said， “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
Remember that when President John F. Kennedy stepped off the plane in Dallas on November 22， 1963， radio voices were calling for violence against the President of the United States. And the violence came-and took John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers and so many others.
But in the United States， we chose to turn away from the voices of hatred at those critical moments in the twentieth century. In much of Europe， racial hatred and political violence prevailed in response to the mass unemployment of the Great Depression. And in the end， we had to rescue those countries from fascism-from the horrible consequences of the failure of their societies to speak to the pain and anger bred by mass unemployment.
Why did our democracy endure through the Great Depression？ Because working people discovered it was possible to elect leaders who would fight for them and not for the financial barons who had brought on the catastrophe. Because our politics offered a real choice besides greed and hatred. Because our leaders inspired the confidence to reject hate and charted a path to higher ground through broadly shared prosperity.
This is a similar moment. Our politics have been dominated by greed and the forces of money for a generation. Now， amid the wreckage that came from that experiment， we hear the voices of hatred， of racism and homophobia.
At this moment of economic pain and anger， political intellectuals face a great choice-whether to be servants or critics of economic privilege. And I think this is an important point to make here at Harvard. The economic elites at JP Morgan Chase， Goldman Sachs and the other big Wall Street banks are happy to hire intellectual servants wherever they can find them. But the stronger the alliance between intellectuals and economic elites， the more the forces of hatred-of anti-intellectualism-will grow. If you want to fight the forces of hatred， you have to help empower the forces of righteous anger.
And at this moment， the labor movement is working to give voice to the justified anger of the American people. We need help. We need public intellectuals who will help design the policies that will replace the bubble economy with a real， sustainable economy that works for all of us.
Working people want an American economy that creates good jobs， where wealth is fairly shared， and where the economic life of our nation is about solving big problems like the threat of climate change rather than creating big problems like the foreclosure crisis. We know that growing inequality undermines our ability to grow as a nation by squandering the talents and the contributions of our people and consigning entire communities to stagnation and failure. But despite our best efforts， we have endured ageneration of stagnant wages and collapsing benefits-a generation where the labor movement has been much more about defense than about offense.
