Giving Compass' Take:

• Brian Anderson and Oren Cass discuss The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America and how America can move toward a better workforce. 

• How can philanthropists help to close training gaps for the workforce? How do solutions like wage subsidies and universal basic income compare? 

• Read a funder's guide to workforce development. 

Brian Anderson: Now what, to start off, what exactly is the government's role in labor markets? This is a crucial theme of your book. There are laws about the right to organize unions, unemployment benefits, but what's the range of it and what is our current approach, compared with that of say, other developed countries?

Oren Cass: Well, the primary role that we really have the government playing today is essentially to order the market around to say, "We don't like low wages, so we're going to have a minimum wage. We don't like certain workplace conditions, so we're going to outlaw them." And then as you mentioned, to create the infrastructure to have organized labor as well. One place that the government is surprisingly absent is on the workforce preparedness and training side where our education system is really overwhelmingly focused on college attainment. And for people who aren't going to make it through college, which is still the majority of Americans, we really offer little to nothing and declining support over time, and so that contrasts a lot with other countries that certainly they have a lot of regulatory policies as well, but they tend to take a much greater interest in the other conditions of the labor market and what they're doing to lay the groundwork for successful outcomes for workers.

Read the full conversation with Brian Anderson and Oren Cass about The Once and Future Worker at City Journal.