Small business owners overwhelmingly cite cost as the main barrier to improving job quality, but when we asked workers what they valued most, many of their top answers cost relatively little. That gap between owner perception and worker priorities is one of the most actionable findings from the final evaluation of Shared Success, an initiative by the Aspen Institute's Economic Opportunities Program (with support from the Gates Foundation) that worked with 11 Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) to embed job quality programming into their existing small business support.
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Editors’ Note: Hi, Laura and Jonathan here. A few of the pieces this week come from people who spent years up close with how poor households actually handle money, and keep coming back with something more tangled than the story usually told, and more persistent. Tim will be back for the next edition. - Laura Freschi and Jonathan Morduch
The idea for this conversation was born from alarm. At the news that the US Treasury Secretary and the Chair of the Federal Reserve had called a meeting with the CEOs of the twenty largest banks in America to talk about threats to the financial system from emerging frontier AI models, Tim had questions: what about the community banks, the credit unions, and the CDFIs—the financial institutions that serve low-income communities and small businesses in America? When will they be invited to the meetings on how to defend their systems against AIs that can exploit software vulnerabilities with unprecedented ease and speed? And globally, are the regulators in middle-income and developing countries also holding meetings to discuss how they can defend against these threats? Will those meetings include anyone beyond the largest banks?
Editor's Note:
If you were hoping that the faiV would be a pleasant distraction from the overwhelming flow of AI-related content, sorry. For the record, the faiV had “ai” built in before Anthropic existed. And a housekeeping note: we’ve finally jumped ship from Mailchimp to NYU’s mailing platform—I guess if you’re reading this it’s been a seamless transition and if you’re not, well, you’re not. Feedback on the faiV’s content and format and delivery methods is always welcome, just drop me an email.
- Tim Ogden