The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America

By: Oren Cass

Narrated by: Tom Parks

“[Cass’s] core principle - a culture of respect for work of all kinds - can help close the gap dividing the two Americas….” -William A. Galston, The Brookings Institution

The American worker is in crisis. Wages have stagnated for more than a generation. Reliance on welfare programs has surged. Life expectancy is falling as substance abuse and obesity rates climb.

These woes are not the inevitable result of irresistible global and technological forces. They are the direct consequence of a decades-long economic consensus that prioritized increasing consumption - regardless of the costs to American workers, their families, and their communities. Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency focused attention on the depth of the nation’s challenges, yet while everyone agrees something must change, the Left’s insistence on still more government spending and the Right’s faith in still more economic growth are recipes for repeating the mistakes of the past.

In this groundbreaking re-evaluation of American society, economics, and public policy, Oren Cass challenges our basic assumptions about what prosperity means and where it comes from to reveal how we lost our way. The good news is that we can still turn things around - if the nation’s proverbial elites are willing to put the American worker’s interests first.

Which is more important, pristine air quality, or well-paying jobs that support families? Unfettered access to the cheapest labor in the world, or renewed investment in the employment of Americans? Smoothing the path through college for the best students, or ensuring that every student acquires the skills to succeed in the modern economy? Cutting taxes, expanding the safety net, or adding money to low-wage paychecks?

The renewal of work in America demands new answers to these questions. If we reinforce their vital role, workers supporting strong families and communities can provide the foundation for a thriving, self-sufficient society that offers opportunity to all.

©2018 Oren Cass (P)2018 Black Hills Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"Oren Cass has accomplished the rare feat of not only saying something truly new and innovative about our society, but also doing it in a readable, engrossing way. The Once and Future Worker is a wake-up call to our political class, and indeed the whole country, that rising consumption can't replace that most basic of goods―a job. A brilliant book. And among the most important I've ever read." (J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy)

"No one has better articulated the conservative argument for why work matters to America's long-term prosperity than Oren Cass. Oren's insightful prescription for what ails us should be required reading for those who endeavor to create a labor market in which workers can create and support strong families and communities." (Mitt Romney)

"Through an unflinching indictment of the mistakes that Washington has made for a generation and continues to make today, Oren Cass forcefully draws out the contradictions of a consensus that has actively displaced Americans from their national inheritance of good jobs and thriving hometowns. The Once and Future Worker offers much-needed clarity for how to make the American Dream possible for the many." (Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL)

A Refreshingly different approach

Looking through the “other end of the telescope” from Consumption to Production certainly gives a whole new insight to WORK!

Great book. Better policy recommendations

I have read a number of books in this category: “here’s the state of the world and what we’re doing wrong and how we could do better.” None have summarized as many critical issues as thoughtfully or made better recommendations than this book. Unless you are stubbornly and robotically entrenched in your views, you will come away hoping that leaders will consider Oren’s ideas on such issues as refocusing education for job training and subsidizing wages. The latter is the highlight recommendation. Wage subsidies as he describes them would provide more immediate and direct benefit to workers with more limited negative externalities than alternatives (EITC or minimum wage mandates) that discourage or limit work or hiring. Read this book. Discuss it with others.

Contrarian view on what it means to be proworker

You might not be in agreement with some of the arguments, but it is a thoughtful well reasoned articulation of why some of the progressive and conservative orthodoxies might be hurting working class families

Excellent analysis

This book provides a plausible alternative to the disastrous social and economic policies that have governed our nation for the last 100 years.

scathing critique of federal government and societal values

better at critiquing current structures than fleshing out how his ideas could be developed.

Strawmen everywhere

This book deserves a great amount of credit for proposing solutions to the nations problems that cut against the grain of many conventional ideas currently permeating. But too often the description of the problem or the merits of opposing solutions are reduced to mere strawman arguments, not approaching anywhere beat the nuance and depth used to discuss his own ideas.

Worth a read for the chapters on wage supports and organized labor reform alone, but for all his dismissal of economic piety, much of what he offers is fairly rote conservative economic tenets.

conservative scree explained

a cogent explanation of a very biased view. but the best rationalization of conservatism that I've seen

Mostly political, cherry picks old data, not reliable

After hearing the author speak, I wanted to learn about the basis for his assertions and promising ideas, to see under the hood. I appreciated what the author is trying to do, I agree with some of his points about where our economy and society are going wrong, but I was largely disappointed. What little data is presented is a decade old and cherry-picked. The author takes many assumptions as truths, and says things that flatly don’t resemble the world I see (for instance, that workers are valued and respected by our society as a universal reality…it’s idealistic at best).

My big fear with this book is that people will un-critically read the book and believe the author is authoritative. I do appreciate the author’s alternative ideas to the mainstream - we need more critical thought put into ideas on how to improve the lives people.