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The Guarantee
Inside the Fight for America’s Next Economy
The New Press, 2024
The Guarantee asks us to imagine the economy we deserve.
Isn’t this pie-in-the-sky thinking? Not by a long shot, as this paradigm-shifting new book reveals. A full range of government-backed guarantees, from bailouts to bankruptcy protection, keep the private sector in business. So why can’t the same be true for the rest of us?
Author Natalie Foster, co-founder of the Economic Security Project, has had a front-row seat to the dramatic leaps forward in government guarantees over the past decade, from student debt relief to the child tax credit expansion. In The Guarantee, she reveals with compelling evidence how a new economic foundation is already being constructed by some of today’s most important activists and visionaries. She leaves readers with a concrete sense of the policies that are possible—and ready to implement—in twenty-first-century America.
Foster roots the Guarantee framework in 2011, a flashpoint year when the implications of 2008 and the Great Recession had finally sunk in. Occupy Wall Street was just one facet of what felt like a global primal scream, saying enough already, calling for an end to neoliberalism’s cruel and dehumanizing reign. She traces the development of the book’s seven guarantees across the next decade, when they eventually culminated and came to fruition during the pandemic: we had monthly cash infusions, a moratorium on evictions and student debt, and the development and distribution of a free vaccine.
The Guarantee is the rare book that will shift the terms of debate, moving us from the expired and defunct assumptions of no-guardrails capitalism to a nation that works for all of its people.
What they’re saying about The Guarantee
The Guarantee chronicles how radical, righteous ideas move into the mainstream; it reminds us that we have the power to transform our political and lived reality.Mia Birdsong, author of How We Show Up and founder of Next River
The Guarantee inspires us to think about our political economy in a fundamentally moral way. In a time of profound anxiety and confusion, Natalie tells the inspiring, human stories of the people on the front lines fighting for a society where everyone has enough to thrive and flourish.Chris Hughes, Facebook co-founder and author of Fair Shot
Natalie Foster takes you on a journey that will forever change the way you view our country. With a bold vision, she intertwines the economy, business, public policy, social justice, and advocacy. A must-read for all.Van Jones, CNN correspondent and New York Times bestselling author of The Green Collar Economy
The Guarantee helps those of us outside the political melee make sense of where we go from here. She's exactly the kind of person I want articulating a bold economic vision for all of us — here in the present, and the future.Jane McGonigal, game designer and New York Times bestselling author of Imaginable
This book’s meticulous history of progress in human rights made over the last decade is inspirational. As Natalie Foster makes clear, heroic work by people all over this country has combined to set the stage for establishing a decent society at last. if we push hard now, a much more just and productive society is within our grasp. It can’t come soon enough; and this book shows how we’ll get there.Kim Stanley Robinson, Hugo award-winning author of The Ministry of the Future
The Guarantee is an important work - not only for how it advances care as an economic right, but for how clearly it articulates the solutions in our midst.Ai-jen Poo, president of National Domestic Workers Alliance and author of The Age of Dignity
The Guarantee shows us the way forward for America. With a birds-eye-view, and the unique ability to see into the future, Natalie Foster brings to the fore the ideas we need most right now.Dorian Warren, co-President of Community Change
Like all good ideas, the guarantees need a good hypewoman and you will find none better than Natalie Foster. Her enthusiasm is contagious in the best possible way. Read this book and you’ll find yourself believing whole new ways of being and doing are possible for American people and politics.Michael Tubbs, author of The Deeper the Roots and former mayor of Stockton, CA
The Guarantee is a must read for anyone who cares about tackling economic inequality in America, and helping our country once again become the land of opportunity. Natalie Foster’s quick-moving, big-vision book shows how quickly bold solutions can go from idea to reality, and move from the frontiers of policy to the center. It's also an important reminder that America's future lies in the hands of its people–who have both the ingenuity and the power to help our nation tackle the inequalities that are dividing us.Sameera Fazili, Former Deputy Director of the National Economic Council of the United States in the Biden Administration
Sometimes an idea whose time has come needs an author whose journey illustrates the way for all of us. By shining a light on her own engagement with new thinkers, creative campaigns, narrative shifts, and rigorous experiments, Natalie Foster is sketching for us the economy we deserve and the economy we can realistically achieve. The Guarantee is a timely treatise on policy – and it is a timeless call to action in the name of justice and solidarity.Manuel Pastor, Director of USC Equity Research Institute & co-author of Solidarity Economics
Reading The Guarantee makes a new economic paradigm feel not only possible, but real.Ilyse Hogue, author of The Lie That Binds and former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America
Given the grip of free-market fundamentalism, it’s easy to believe that a good job, a dependable income, decent housing, high-quality healthcare, the opportunity to graduate from college, and the chance to build wealth will forever be out of reach for all too many Americans. Natalie Foster’s The Guarantee—written by not only a keen observer of our country’s economy, politics, and culture, but a key player in the fight to make things better—has caused me to reassess my own doubts. I’ve long been inspired by Foster’s work. Now her words have given me something else: more hope than I had.Rick Wartzman, author of Still Broke: Walmart’s Remarkable Transformation
Natalie Foster's The Guarantee brings forward a narrative we deeply need - a story of how change happens. Across these pages, she celebrates how far we've come and points to how we can accelerate the shift to an economy that truly works for all of us.Saikat Chakrabarti, former Chief of Staff to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and president of New Consensus
Natalie Foster tells the story of advocates pushing to expand access to housing, health care, and other social policies. The Guarantee illuminates how policy change happens -- and how guarantees for essential services can improve people's lives.Ganesh Sitaraman, legal scholar and founder of Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator
A well-reasoned call… a cogent argument for an economy benefiting working people.Kirkus Reviews
Natalie Foster provides an up-close view of people who are challenging today’s economic orthodoxies and are actively working to change the status quo towards greater equity and justice. These are practical visionaries who are putting their dreams into action to guarantee access to affordable housing, education, care, and other key assets for everyone. By propelling their ideas into reality—creating movements, designing new laws and policies, building new organizations—they are writing new narratives of what is possible and desirable while simultaneously accumulating new evidence of what works. The breadth of their accomplishments documented in Foster’s book is a source of inspiration and hope for our collective future.Marina Gorbis, Executive Director, Institute for the Future
Natalie Foster offers us an encyclopedia of real world demonstrations of how—through good thinking and collective effort—we can improve well-being for the vast majority of Americans. Homes and housing, healthcare and family care, improved incomes and opportunities, are among the issues she tackles with hard-headed realism and heart-felt solutions. This optimistic book inspires us to act to secure its realizable proposals.Margaret Levi, Professor of Political Science at Stanford
Pay attention to The Guarantee.Eli Pariser, co-Director, New Public and author of The Filter Bubble