The Vanishing American Dream by Gene Ludwig

Author:Gene Ludwig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Disruption Books

Keynote Address

Deval Patrick, Managing Director, Bain Capital,

and Former Governor of Massachusetts

My being here, at least in my role today, may have been oversold. The notion that I might keynote at a gathering of such extraordinary thinking was ridiculous when it was first proposed. As a result, I did not write anything. I thought, We’ll have some conversation, just keep that conversation going, and it will really give me a chance to tell this. It feels a little bit like when I campaigned for governor, the first time, in Cambridge. I know it’s a poor substitute for New Haven. But you go on visits to Cambridge and someone would ask a question during the Q&A, and it was a while before I realized they had already written a book on the subject.

I’m going to make a couple of comments. I’m going to set the stage, building on some of the conversation we had this morning, and then just stop and maybe get some conversation going. I think in addition to being the wiser course, it will probably be more interesting.

I want to talk about our economic growth strategy in Massachusetts when I was in office. I want to explain why we pursued that particular strategy, what some of the results were, and what the lessons from that experience revealed or confirmed about some of the opportunities and constraints of political leadership in the context of economics.

First, I want to give some personal context. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago in the ’50s and ’60s, and I lived there with my grandparents in their two-bedroom tenement. My mother’s sister and I were in one bedroom, and my grandparents and mother and various other relatives had a set of bunk beds. You’d go from the top bunk, to the bottom bunk, to the floor, with every third night on the floor. I went to big, broken, overcrowded, under-resourced, sometimes violent public schools. A lot of the time, my biography when I’m introduced seems to make it sound like my life began at fourteen when I got a scholarship through A Better Chance to go to Milton Academy. This doesn’t do honor to the incredible teachers I had in those big, overcrowded, under-resourced schools on the South Side of Chicago, the most meaningful of whom I kept up a relationship with throughout their lives—and there are a couple whom I’d love to tell you about another time.

For all the things we didn’t have in those days, we had a very strong sense of community, because that was a time when every child was under the jurisdiction of every single adult on the block. If you messed up down the street, in front of Miss Jones, she’d go upside your head as if you were hers, and then she’d call home. Right, you get it two times. And I think what those adults were trying to get across to us was that membership in community is the understanding that you have a stake in your neighbors’ dreams and struggles as well as your own.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.