Ro Khanna: There is this huge income disparity in my own district. It’s a district where rent in some places, like Sunnyvale, is $3,000 a month. If you’re not working at Apple, if you’re not working at Google, if you’re not at a tech startup… if you’re a teacher, if you’re a nurse, if you’re a firefighter, it’s very hard to live there, very hard to afford any sort of higher education for your kids. Forget it if you want to go to Stanford. If you want to go to San Jose State.

There’s this extraordinary wealth that’s being generated, and yet so many people struggling and feeling like they can’t keep up and be part of the middle class. We have an economy that’s really geared toward rewarding the investor class. What are we doing to make sure that people who want to have a middle-class life are able to keep up? This is not just a problem in my own district. In some sense, the country is divided.

Lowrey: Right. So the idea is to tackle income inequality and stagnation.

Khanna: In part. The country has these—to use [the Berkeley economist] Enrico Moretti’s work—these 300 economic innovation zones. Areas that are creating wealth and jobs. Then, there are these other places where we don’t see this economic opportunity, and people feeling like their middle-class life is slipping away. This is part of Trump saying, “Make America Great Again.” Because for a large number of people in this country, life seemed simpler, easier, and the middle-class dream seemed more accessible years back than it does today. That is surely not the case for Indian Americans or African Americans or women, but for many people it seems that way.

How do we address this? You could provide an incentive to move. But then again, when I was in Appalachia, people don’t want to move. Just like my family and I don’t want to go to live in eastern Kentucky. That’s not because it’s not a beautiful area. It’s because I like my Indian food within two miles of my condo in Fremont. And people in Paintsville, Kentucky, probably have no interest in going and living in Silicon Valley.

Lowrey: It’s funny.You could no more get a senator or member of congress from Kentucky to say, “What we need are credits to get everybody get out of here.” But you hear all the time, “Let’s revitalize this place.” And yet, we don’t really have great place-based revitalization policy.

Khanna: Exactly. It’s politically impossible [to get people to move], and not what people want.

I do think there are things you can do for these areas. One is to create new job opportunities and industries in parts of the country that don’t have them. That is the hardest challenge. Part of it is expanding universities, because we know that there’s a correlation between university location and job creation. Should Michigan create more satellite campuses to create more jobs?