for release on delivery 6 : 55 p. m. edt october 18, 2023 the evolution of the federal reserve ’ s employment mandate remarks by lisa d. cook member board of governors of the federal reserve system at the louis e. martin awards ceremony at the 2023 future of black communities summit joint center for political and economic studies washington, d. c. october 18, 2023 thank you. i am rarely at a loss for words, as my friends, family, and colleagues know all too well. 1 but i do find it a little hard to express everything i am feeling, to be given the louis e. martin great american award in honor of a truly great american who did so much to make ours a more perfect union. tough to find the words, but i will try. louis martin did not lack for words. he was prolific, writing and publishing millions of words in newspapers as a key figure in the heyday of black publishing in the 1950s and 1960s. there were also the words, and i would love to know what they were, that he spoke to the advisers of presidential candidate john f. kennedy, who helped free the rev. dr. martin luther king from a georgia prison and arguably changed political history. 2 and there were those words he whispered, in the ears of presidents and politicos, that moved the nation forward on civil rights. when i think about everything louis martin accomplished, including the creation of the joint center for political and economic studies, and i consider the distinguished men and women who have earned this award before me, i am humbled and very grateful. one way i hope i can show my gratitude is by using this occasion to tell the wider world a story about the civil rights movement that should be better known and that is additionally meaningful to me for two reasons. the first reason is that this is a story about how the federal reserve, where i am a policymaker, came to be the first central bank in the world to make maximum employment a primary and explicit goal, coequal with its goal of price stability. and the second reason is that i had the memorable the views expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of my colleagues on the federal reserve board or the federal open market committee. louis martin was among the civil rights leaders who sought help from the republican and democratic presidential campaigns in 1960 when king was sentenced in dekalb county to 30 days of hard labor on trumped - up charges. - 2experience, as

our lives. 1984, the year, as well as the book made famous by george orwell in 1949, have come and gone. the outreach of government, if anything, has receded, especially with respect to the issues of personal liberty, and its concomitant, personal privacy. i suspect that the fear of “ big technology ” when it arrives will travel the less threatening route of “ big brother ” before it. in preparation for addressing that issue, i believe it would be useful to examine some of the interesting dimensions of the concept of privacy and its application to how human society arranges itself. indeed, when it comes to the issue of privacy, humans are distinctly ambivalent. greta garbo made an institution of wanting to be alone. yet, at the same time, human beings have always sought and presumably needed the presence of others in organizing their societies, even before we economists came on the scene to inform them about the benefits of the division of labor. but the various paradigms by which we have chosen to organize ourselves were closely tied to how we viewed the relative value of individualism and its precondition, the implicit need for privacy. in recent generations, the major competing forms of government, of course, have been ( 1 ) a system based on individual rights with the role of the state largely directed at protecting those rights ( the united states being the most prominent example of that form of government ) and ( 2 ) the now defunct soviet union, and its eastern european satellites, which were the model of communist collectivization. in the latter, the individual was theoretically subject to the will of the collective but, in reality, subjugated by an elite autocratic hierarchy. in the soviet system, rights inhered in the collective, which immediately dismisses by definition any right to privacy. state intrusiveness in the form of the kgb or the stasi eviscerated any wall of personal separation that citizens may have sought. but, in the end, that form of government did not, probably could not, succeed. the human need for personal expression, property, and privacy, doubtless were significant in undermining those collectivist states. indeed, since the end of world war ii, we have had as close as one can come to a controlled experiment in the comparative effectiveness of alternate forms of government organization. i refer to the extraordinary divergence in post - war recovery patterns observed between west and east germany. both were rooted in the same