Americans often think of our country as being one of great opportunity – where anyone can rise from very modest circumstances, if they work hard and make good choices. We believe that often remains true.

But, for children and youth growing up in poverty, such upward mobility in America is too rare. Indeed, just 30 percent of those growing up in poverty make it to middle class or higher as adults. Though we’ve made progress in reducing poverty over the past several decades, our poverty rates are still too high and our rate of economic advancement for poor children has been stuck for decades. That is an embarrassment for a nation that prides itself on everyone having a shot at the American Dream.

What can we do to reduce poverty and increase economic mobility? In our polarized and poisoned political atmosphere, it is hard to reach consensus on policy efforts. Both progressives and conservatives want lower poverty; but progressives want more public spending programs to improve opportunity and security for the poor, while conservatives generally argue for more responsibility from them before providing more help.

Even so, progressives and conservatives might not be as far apart as these stereotypes suggest. The two of us—one a conservative Republican and the other a progressive Democrat—were recently part of an ideologically balanced group of 15 scholars brought together by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution. Our charge was to generate a report with policy proposals to reduce poverty and increase upward mobility. An additional goal was simply to see whether we could arrive at consensus among ourselves, and bridge the ideological divide that has so paralyzed our political leaders.

Together we decided that the most important issues facing poor Americans and their children are family, education and work. We had to listen to each other’s perspectives on these issues, and be open to others’ truths. We also agreed to be mindful of the research evidence on these topics. In the end, we managed to generate a set of policy proposals we all find compelling.

To begin with, the progressives among us had to acknowledge that marriage is a positive family outcome that reduces poverty and raises upward mobility in America. The evidence is clear: stable two-parent families have positive impacts on children’s success, and in America marriage is the strongest predictor of such stability. Therefore marriage should be promoted as the norm in America, along with responsible and delayed child-bearing.

At the same time, the conservatives among us had to acknowledge that investing more resources in the skills and employability of poor adults and children is crucial if we want them to have higher incomes over time. Indeed, stable families are hard to maintain when the parents – including both the custodial mothers and the (often) non-custodial fathers – struggle to maintain employment and earn enough to support their families. Investing in proven, cost-effective, education and training programs such as high-quality preschool and training for jobs in high-growth economic sectors can improve the skills and employability of kids from poor families and lift them out of poverty through work.

Another important compromise was that progressives acknowledged that expecting and even requiring adults on public assistance to work can reduce poverty, as we learned in the 1990s from welfare reform; programs today like Disability Insurance, among others, need reforms to encourage more work. And reforms that encourage innovation and accountability would make our public education programs for the poor more effective at all levels. We need more choice in public K-12 education (through charter schools) and a stronger emphasis on developing and retaining effective teachers, while basing our state subsidies to higher education institutions more heavily on graduation rates, employment, and earnings of their graduates.

Conservatives also had to acknowledge that requiring the poor to work only makes sense when work is available to them. In periods or places with weak labor markets, we might need to create jobs for some by subsidizing their employment in either the private or public sector (as we did during the Great Recession). We agreed that no one should be dropped from the benefit rolls unless they have been offered a suitable work activity and rejected it. And we also need to “make work pay” for those who remain unskilled or can find only low-wage jobs – by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (especially for adults without custody of children) and modestly raising the minimum wage.

We also all agreed on other topics. For instance, work-based learning—in the form of paid apprenticeships and other models of high-quality career and technical education—can play an important role in raising both skills and work experience among poor youth and adults.  And, if we raise public spending for the poor, we need to pay for it—and not increase federal deficits. We all agree that reducing certain tax deductions for high-income families and making our retirement programs more progressive are good ways to finance our proposals.

As our report demonstrates, it is possible for progressives and conservatives to bridge their differences and reach compromises to generate a set of policies that will reduce poverty and improve upward mobility. Can Congress and the President do the same?

Editor's Note: this piece first appeared in Inside Sources.

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Key messages and Policy Pointers

• Given the stalemate in U.N. climate negotiations, the best arena to strike a workable deal is among the members the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF).

• The 13 MEF members—including the EU-27 (but not double-counting the four EU countries that are also individual members of the MEF)—account for 81.3 percent of all global emissions.

• This proposal devises a fair compromise to break the impasse to develop a science-based approach for fairly sharing the carbon budget in order to have a 75 percent chance of avoiding dangerous climate change.

• To increase the likelihood of a future climate agreement, carbon accounting must shift from pro­duction-based inventories to consumption-based ones.

• The shares of a carbon budget to stay below 2 °C through 2050 are calculated by cumulative emis­sions since 1990, i.e. according to a short-horizon polluter pays principle, and national capability (income), and allocated to MEF members through emission rights. This proposed fair compromise addresses key concerns of major emitters.

• According to this accounting, no countries have negative carbon budgets, there is substantial time for greening major developing economies, and some developed countries need to institute very rapid reductions in emissions.

• To provide a ‘green ladder’ to developing countries and to ensure a fair global deal, it will be crucial to agree how to extend sufficient and predictable financial support and the rapid transfer of technology.

The most urgent and complicated ethical issue in addressing climate change is how human society will share the work of reducing greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions. Looking ahead to 2015 when a new international treaty on climate change should be agreed upon, we fear we are headed towards a train wreck.

Key developed countries have made it clear they will not accept any regime excluding emerging economies such as China and Brazil, and the U.S. and other ‘umbrella’ countries are calling for only voluntary, bottom-up com­mitments. Yet the major developing countries have made equity the sine qua non for any kind of agreement: they will not take on mandatory emission reduction targets with perceived implications for their economic growth and social development, unless the wealthier countries commit to deep emissions cuts and act first.

These entrenched positions between the different blocs have led to the current impasse, but as Nobel laureate economist and philosopher, Amaryta Sen pointed out, the perfect agreement that never happens is more unjust than an imperfect one that is obtainable.

What is a fair and feasible way to break the impasse, given that all efforts are faltering? The most difficult task is determining a country’s fair share of the required emissions reductions in a way that is politically feasible. After 20 years of negotiations and gridlock, it is clear that many conflicting principles of equity are brought to the table, so a solution will have to be based on some kind of ‘negotiated justice,’ or a ‘fair compromise,’ which will not be one preferred by just one group of countries.

A few basic requirements must be met. A feasible, fair and effective climate agreement must involve the largest emitters from both the developed and developing countries. Such an agreement must find a way to engage the latter without penalizing them or the former countries too much. In order to secure progress, above all it must be acceptable to the two world superpowers and top carbon emitters, China and the U.S.; with this leadership, in fact, other emitters will likely follow. This agreement could be forged in a ‘plurilateral’ setting where a limited number of countries come together first, and then be brought into the formal U.N. negotiations as the basis for a future deal, perhaps by 2015.

How can future negotiations on emissions reductions overcome such political inertia? We suggest that taking three manageable steps to a fair compromise will unlock progress.

First, negotiate a core agreement between the 13 members in the MEF (including the EU-27), which accounts for 81.3 percent of all global emissions. This makes the negotiations feasible, where deals can be struck that would be impossible in the vast U.N. forum.

Second, use consumption-based emissions accounting, which is much fairer than the cur­rent production/territorial-based accounting that all past agreements and negotiations have been based upon. These are relatively new numbers developed by the Norwegian research center CICERO, and have been vetted by the top scientific journals and increasingly utilized by policymakers.

Third, forge a fair compromise to allocate emissions rights. We propose a compromise based on a short-horizon ‘polluter pays principle’ and an indicator of national capability (income).

This third step in particular is a genuine compromise for both developed and developing countries, but it is re­quired to break the current gridlock. Each MEF member gives and takes something from this simple, workable framework and all gain a liveable planet in the future.

Throughout the paper we first explain why counting carbon emissions by consumption is far better and the im­plications of doing so, and we then introduce the MEF and why it is a promising arena for forging a bold compro­mise like the one so badly needed before 2015. We then calculate what the numbers actually mean for that group of countries and develop a proposal for a fair compromise that embodies a feasible but fair operationalization of the central equity principles of the U.N. climate treaty, i.e. action by countries according to their responsibility and capability. We conclude with a discussion of how a start in the MEF could lead to a new framework being brought into those broader negotiations.

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Americans often think of our country as being one of great opportunity – where anyone can rise from very modest circumstances, if they work hard and make good choices. We believe that often remains true.

But, for children and youth growing up in poverty, such upward mobility in America is too rare. Indeed, just 30 percent of those growing up in poverty make it to middle class or higher as adults. Though we’ve made progress in reducing poverty over the past several decades, our poverty rates are still too high and our rate of economic advancement for poor children has been stuck for decades. That is an embarrassment for a nation that prides itself on everyone having a shot at the American Dream.

What can we do to reduce poverty and increase economic mobility? In our polarized and poisoned political atmosphere, it is hard to reach consensus on policy efforts. Both progressives and conservatives want lower poverty; but progressives want more public spending programs to improve opportunity and security for the poor, while conservatives generally argue for more responsibility from them before providing more help.

Even so, progressives and conservatives might not be as far apart as these stereotypes suggest. The two of us—one a conservative Republican and the other a progressive Democrat—were recently part of an ideologically balanced group of 15 scholars brought together by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution. Our charge was to generate a report with policy proposals to reduce poverty and increase upward mobility. An additional goal was simply to see whether we could arrive at consensus among ourselves, and bridge the ideological divide that has so paralyzed our political leaders.

Together we decided that the most important issues facing poor Americans and their children are family, education and work. We had to listen to each other’s perspectives on these issues, and be open to others’ truths. We also agreed to be mindful of the research evidence on these topics. In the end, we managed to generate a set of policy proposals we all find compelling.

To begin with, the progressives among us had to acknowledge that marriage is a positive family outcome that reduces poverty and raises upward mobility in America. The evidence is clear: stable two-parent families have positive impacts on children’s success, and in America marriage is the strongest predictor of such stability. Therefore marriage should be promoted as the norm in America, along with responsible and delayed child-bearing.

At the same time, the conservatives among us had to acknowledge that investing more resources in the skills and employability of poor adults and children is crucial if we want them to have higher incomes over time. Indeed, stable families are hard to maintain when the parents – including both the custodial mothers and the (often) non-custodial fathers – struggle to maintain employment and earn enough to support their families. Investing in proven, cost-effective, education and training programs such as high-quality preschool and training for jobs in high-growth economic sectors can improve the skills and employability of kids from poor families and lift them out of poverty through work.

Another important compromise was that progressives acknowledged that expecting and even requiring adults on public assistance to work can reduce poverty, as we learned in the 1990s from welfare reform; programs today like Disability Insurance, among others, need reforms to encourage more work. And reforms that encourage innovation and accountability would make our public education programs for the poor more effective at all levels. We need more choice in public K-12 education (through charter schools) and a stronger emphasis on developing and retaining effective teachers, while basing our state subsidies to higher education institutions more heavily on graduation rates, employment, and earnings of their graduates.

Conservatives also had to acknowledge that requiring the poor to work only makes sense when work is available to them. In periods or places with weak labor markets, we might need to create jobs for some by subsidizing their employment in either the private or public sector (as we did during the Great Recession). We agreed that no one should be dropped from the benefit rolls unless they have been offered a suitable work activity and rejected it. And we also need to “make work pay” for those who remain unskilled or can find only low-wage jobs – by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (especially for adults without custody of children) and modestly raising the minimum wage.

We also all agreed on other topics. For instance, work-based learning—in the form of paid apprenticeships and other models of high-quality career and technical education—can play an important role in raising both skills and work experience among poor youth and adults.  And, if we raise public spending for the poor, we need to pay for it—and not increase federal deficits. We all agree that reducing certain tax deductions for high-income families and making our retirement programs more progressive are good ways to finance our proposals.

As our report demonstrates, it is possible for progressives and conservatives to bridge their differences and reach compromises to generate a set of policies that will reduce poverty and improve upward mobility. Can Congress and the President do the same?

Editor's Note: this piece first appeared in Inside Sources.

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• Explore the full report

Next Sunday’s first round of the Tunisian presidential election is unlikely to produce an outright winner but the country can already lay claim to the most democratic success story in the uncertain post-Arab Spring period.

Earlier this year, the Islamist-led National Constituent Assembly in Tunis produced a pluralist constitution that set the stage for a parliamentary contest on October 26 in which the incumbents lost. That simple fact of political alternation is a historic milestone: Ennahda is not the only Islamist party to lose the confidence of its initial protest-vote electorate, but it is the first to live to tell the tale.

Islamist participation in the democratic process

The birthplace of the Arab Spring offers a tantalizing third way toward Islamist participation in the democratic process: a Goldilocks outcome between Turkish majoritarianism and Egyptian militarism. Tunisia is different: it is smaller, lacks a hegemonic army, and Ennahda doesn’t have anywhere near a majority of votes.

The alluring tableau, however, conceals a fragmented elite and a scattered electorate. Twenty-seven parties declared candidates for president, although a handful have dropped out. Last month, more than 15,000 candidates running on over 1,300 party lists vied for 217 parliamentary seats. Only two-fifths of eligible adults registered to vote and less than two-thirds of them actually voted.

The main pattern to emerge from parliamentary elections is the same that has defined the country for decades: an existential battle between Islamists and anti-Islamists with a majority for neither. The Islamists lost six percentage points (32 percent) but the secularists were not exactly embraced. Taking into account non-registration and abstention, the victorious party Nidaa Tounes’s share of the legislative vote (38 percent) corresponds to roughly one out of five eligible voters.

These results accurately reflect a highly polarized society. Nidaa Tounes is led by presidential frontrunner Beji Caïd Essebsi, an 87-year-old who served under every regime since 1956 independence and who stoked voters’ fear of Ennahda’s “seventh century project” during the campaign. Ennahda’s leadership framed the election as a contest “between supporters of the revolution and supporters of the counter-revolution.” It is the only Muslim-majority country where nearly half of the population claims to never step foot in a mosque.

Do Tunisians favor “authoritarian government”?

For the first time since the 2011 revolution, polling this summer showed a majority of Tunisians favoring “authoritarian government” over an “unstable” democratic government. Also for the first time, Ennahda declined to field a presidential candidate to contain apprehensions about them. While Essebsi mostly enjoys an untainted reputation his party, Nidaa Tounes is a loose coalition including many holdovers from the previous regime.

The last time electoral democracies experienced a comparable juncture was not in 2013 Cairo or Gezi Park, but rather Rome during the tense 1970s. In 1976, the Italian Communist Party received one-third of the votes, making it the largest Communist electoral bloc west of the Iron Curtain. Frequent small-scale terrorist attacks took place against the backdrop of global tensions between NATO and Warsaw Pact members.

It is hard to remember a time when the term “socialism” provoked as much angst as “Sharia” does today, but Tunisia stands at a crossroads analogous to the old Cold War alternatives of Washington and Moscow, with Qatar and other Gulf states filling the shoes of the old “evil empire.”

Recognizing that Italy was too divided to govern alone, party leader Enrico Berlinguer proposed a historic compromise (compromesso storico) with the archenemy Christian Democrats to bridge a seemingly impassible cultural-political gap.

Ennahda party faces doubts

Today’s Ennahda party faces the same doubts as Communist leaders in postwar Europe: are they truly pluralist democrats? Do they accept power sharing? The executive director of Nidaa Tounes, Mondher Belhadj Ali, said in an interview in Tunis earlier this year that Ennahda must undergo the equivalent process of the various leftist parties in Europe during the Cold War. The party needs to renounce its “jihadist logic,” Belhadj said, in the same way that the German left distanced itself from international Marxist-Leninist creed at Bad Godesberg in 1959.^[1]

To be considered trustworthy despite its association with a revolutionary ideology, the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, or PCI) underwent key shifts. Its leadership broke with the international Comintern by supporting Italy’s NATO membership. They also refused Moscow’s order of “intransigence” through silent partnership with a Christian Democrat-led government, giving way to the “via Italiana” – an Italian path – to socialism.

Why did the PCI pursue this path at a moment of rising strength, when their share of the vote was peaking at 32 percent? Italian Communists had no doubt noticed that NATO countries were willing to forego democratic outcomes in Chile three years earlier in the name of political stability and anti-communism.

“Alternative to the Islamic State”

It is also apparent that Ennahda’s leadership has correctly interpreted the West’s silence after the arrest of Egypt’s first democratically elected president last year. The party’s agreement to omit the word “Sharia” from the constitution, its decision to ban the extremist group Ansar Echaria and its voluntary departure from political posts in 2013 have been taken as early signs of a willingness to compromise. There is no exact Islamist equivalent to Moscow and the Comintern, but Ennahda has offered itself up as “the alternative to the Islamic State.” Ennahda has also adopted an official party line not to govern alone but only in alliance with other parties. Party leader Rached Ghannouchi said he hopes to avoid “the repetition of the Egyptian bilateral polarizing model.”

Political pressure already forced Ennahda and its partners to wage not merely ideological but also actual military war on violent Islamist extremism. The martyrs of the Tunisian Revolution now include not only the two secular politicians who were assassinated in the first half of 2013 but also the 39 Tunisian soldiers who have been killed since then – including five in an attack earlier this month.

The interim government has not hesitated to combat religious enemies of the state. President Moncef Marzouki, a human rights activist, looked ashen in an interview in his office this summer: “I deeply regret it: it means killing and arresting people but I have to defend this state” – at times leading to the deaths of a dozen combatants per month, including six on election weekend.^[2]

In the years since the revolution, through a mixture of coercion and conviction, the religious affairs ministry whittled down the number of prayer spaces under the control of Salafi extremists from over 1000 in 2011 to under 100 today. This summer, the government fired an imam who refused to say prayers for a soldier who died in a raid on an Islamist cell.”^[3]

Like Berlinguer before him, Ghannouchi has made timely visits to meet with American officials and offer democratic reassurances – but to far greater effect than the Italian Communists ever managed. Washington’s reception of the PCI is captured by the chiaroscuro headshot of Berlinguer on a June 1976 cover of Time declaiming “The Red Threat.” In 2012, the magazine named Ghannouchi one of the “World’s Most Influential People,” someone who offers “a vision of a moderate, modern and inclusive political movement.”

Critics will point out that shortly after the compromesso storico, the Communist Party’s electoral base bottomed out. Left-wing terrorism did taper off but not before the Red Brigades kidnapped and executed the Communists’ main Christian Democratic interlocutor, former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, in 1978.

Compromise may lead to national unity

With counterterrorism support to resist such extremist violence on the fringes and more enthusiastic backing from Western capitals, however, a Tunisian historic compromise may yet deliver the national unity that the country needs to advance to self-confident partisan rule – and mutual faith in political alternation. The recent announcement of joint U.S.-Tunisian counter-terrorism exercises and a gift of $14 million worth of equipment and supplies are small in scale but their timing conveys a broader reassurance.

The lack of a clear political mandate may turn out to be the hidden advantage of this inaugural election season in Tunisia. The country’s political parties can now use the first full presidency and parliamentary session of a democratic Tunisia to blaze a third way between military rule and majoritarian Islamist democracy.

Just as Italian communism was a different animal than the Soviet Communist Party, Tunisian exceptionalism is a real thing. The accelerated modernization period under Independence leader Habib Bourguiba after decolonization left behind the lowest illiteracy rate and lowest birthrate in the neighborhood. Its relatively peaceful democratic revolution has now passed several institutional milestones. As President Moncef Marzouki put it, “if the experiment in Islamic democracy doesn’t work here then it’s unlikely to work anywhere.”^[4]

The Italian Communist Party voted to dissolve itself almost 24 years ago, not long after the Berlin Wall fell and sealed its obsolescence. An equivalent geopolitical shift in Sunni Islam – away from the hegemony of ideologically rigid Gulf States – is as unimaginable now as was the thaw of November 1989. But a great compromise between the region’s modern nemeses – secularist and Islamist – could well dislodge the first brick.