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Before he accepted Barack Obama's offer to join his presidential ticket, Joe Biden got a promise from Obama: that he would be there for "every critical decision," Biden said in an interview broadcast Sunday.

Speaking to ABC's "This Week," Biden said he believes the vice president's role is to provide "the best, sagest, most accurate, most insightful advice and recommendations he or she can make to a president to help them make some of the very, very important decisions that have to be made."

When Obama talked to him about the vice-presidential slot, Biden recalled, "I said, 'I don't want to be picked unless you're picking me for my judgment. I don't want to be the guy that goes out and has a specific assignment. ... I want a commitment from you that in every important decision you'll make, every critical decision, economic and political, as well as foreign policy, I'll get to be in the room.'"

Biden said President-elect Obama has kept the promise, having Biden in the room for all of his decisions about who will fill key posts in the administration.

Biden will have a specific assignment as the new administration gets under way, however. Come Inauguration Day, he will be the working families czar, so to speak.

On Sunday, Obama's transition team announced the new "White House Task Force on Working Families" -- a major initiative targeted at "raising the living standards of middle-class, working families in America."

The initiative will be chaired by Biden.

Other members of the task force will include the secretaries of labor, health and human services, and commerce, as well as the directors of the National Economic Council, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Domestic Policy Counsel, and the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors.

In an interview with ABC's "This Week," Biden said it's a "discrete job that's going to last only for a certain period of time."

"The one thing that we use as a yardstick of economic success of our administration: Is the middle class growing? Is the middle class getting better? Is the middle class no longer being left behind? And we'll look at everything from college affordability to after-school programs, the things that affect people's daily lives. I will be the guy honchoing that policy," he said.

Biden said he will have the authority to get a consensus among the task force -- but will use his relationship with the president if a consensus isn't reached.

"If in fact there is no consensus, [I'd] go to the president of the United States and say, 'Mr. President, I think we should be doing this, cabinet member so-and-so thinks that. You're going to have to resolve what it is we think we should do.' "

Obama has set up several key goals for the task force, including expanding education and training; improving work and family balance; a focus on labor standards, including workplace safety; and protecting working-family incomes and retirement security.

So what power will the new task force have in shaping policy?

According to the transition team, Biden and other members "will expedite administrative reforms, propose Executive orders, and develop legislative and public policy proposals that can be of special importance to working families."

"My administration will be absolutely committed to the future of America's middle-class and working families. They will be front and center every day in our work in the White House," said Obama in a statement. "And this Task Force will be one vehicle we will use to ensure that we never forget that commitment."

And in line with the Obama team's pledge of full transparency, the task force will issue annual reports, available online to the public.

Anna Burger, chairwoman of Change To Win -- a group made up of seven unions -- hailed the announcement.

"[It] shows that President-elect Obama is committed to middle class families and change truly is coming to Washington. Working people finally have an administration that is willing and eager to take action to address their needs," she said in a statement. "The White House Task Force on Working Families is a vital first step toward restoring our economy and making government work for working people again."

In what ABC billed as Biden's first interview as vice president-elect, Biden also discussed the role he played in helping Sen. Hillary Clinton decide to accept Obama's offer to serve as his secretary of state.

"She's one of my close friends. And when this came forward, I did talk to her. She sought me out. I sought her out as well, to assure her that this was real," he said, adding that "there was a lot swirling around" at the time.

Biden said he does not know whether he played a "key" role in helping Clinton make her decision. "It wasn't so much convincing, but I -- they wanted to know my perspective, and I gave my perspective."

Biden also said that the nation's economy "is in much worse shape than we thought it was in," and the immediate goal is to pass another stimulus package to prevent it from "absolutely tanking."

"There is going to be real significant investment," Biden said. "Whether it's $600 billion or more, or $700 billion, the clear notion is, it's a number no one thought about a year ago.

"... The single most important thing we have to do as a new administration -- to be able to have impact on all of the other things we want to do, from foreign policy to domestic policy -- is we've got to begin to stem this bleeding here and begin to stop the loss of jobs in the creation of jobs," said Biden, who also said he had spoken with members of Congress from both parties about a new stimulus.

Obama, meanwhile, has decided to increase his goal for creating new jobs after receiving economic forecasts that suggest the economy is in worse shape than had been predicted, two Democratic officials told CNN Saturday. Watch what Obama has to say about the economy »

The officials said Obama is increasing his goal from 2.5 million to 3 million jobs over the next two years after receiving projections early this week that suggest the recession will be deeper than expected.

A bit of unsolicited advice to business executives trying to explain why their company or their industry is suddenly in the soup:

Please spare us the "perfect storm" metaphor.

It's hackneyed, for starters. It doesn't square with the facts. And for people who fancy themselves leaders, it's downright unbecoming.

The reason the perfect storm is such an appealing metaphor for these shipwrecked captains of industry is that it appears to let them off the hook. After all, who can blame you if the ship goes down in one of those freak, once-in-a-century storms that result when three weather systems collide? It's an act of nature that nobody could have predicted -- or so the story goes.

The latest victim to offer the "perfect storm" defense is Sam Zell, the real estate tycoon who was smart enough to sell out at the top of the commercial real estate cycle, only to dive into the newspaper and broadcast business of the Tribune Co. just as circulation and advertising revenue were about to collapse.

Three weeks ago, it was the auto executives on their first visit to Washington who tried to convince us that the only reason they were running out of cash was a sharp drop in vehicle sales brought on by sky-high gas prices, a credit crunch and rising unemployment.

And in several recent interviews, Robert Rubin, the Treasury secretary turned boardroom consigliere, conjured up the perfect storm to explain how Citigroup and the rest of Wall Street nearly brought the global financial system to a grinding halt, vaporizing trillions of dollars in wealth and putting large swaths of the economy on government life support.

The first thing to understand about the perfect-storm defense is that these guys actually buy into this nonsense. The rest of us want desperately to believe that what brought us this economic crisis was some combination of greed, fraud and negligence -- and, no doubt, there was quite a bit of that. What the populist critique ignores, however, is that at the heart of any economic or financial mania is an epidemic of self-delusion that infects not only large numbers of unsophisticated investors but also many of the smartest, most experienced and sophisticated executives and bankers.

It's not that they don't see the excesses and dangers in front of them -- how could they not? But somehow they convince themselves that the world has changed, that the old rules no longer apply or that, because of competitive pressure, they had no choice but to run with the herd.

In recent months, I've had a chance to talk with half a dozen top business leaders whose companies have fallen into the soup and read published interviews with many more. And almost to a person, they say that they've been replaying the tape over and over in their minds and, even now, they still can't figure out what they might have done differently, given what they knew at the time and the various pressures they were under. Or put another way, they continue to think of themselves as victims of a perfect storm.

The second thing to understand is that, fundamentally, they're wrong.

It is useful to remember that in Sebastian Junger's gripping account of a shipwreck that popularized the notion of the perfect storm, Billy Tyne, the skipper of the Andrea Gail, received urgent and repeated warnings that he was heading into what could be a monster storm off the Grand Banks -- warnings that Tyne and his crew chose to ignore. After all, the weather immediately around them had been relatively calm, and the swordfish had been tantalizingly plentiful. And there were always worrywarts warning not to do this and not to do that. If Tyne had listened to them, the Andrea Gail would never have left port, let alone become one of the most successful sword boats in Gloucester, Mass.

As of Oct. 7 retirement plans had lost as much as $2 trillion over 15 months, or some 20% of their value, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That has many workers wondering how they'll be able to retire and whether everything they thought they knew about investing has been turned on its head. Diversification across sectors and countries, for example, was supposed to protect investments, but few areas of the market have been spared. And what future returns can be expected from stocks and bonds? Have all of our rules of thumb gone out the window? We asked Jack Bogle, founder of fund giant Vanguard Group and a pioneer in the investment indexing business; and Zvi Bodie, a finance professor at Boston University School of Management, co-author of the leading finance textbook Investments and an expert on retirement security, to discuss issues facing savers and investors today. Christopher Farrell launched a discussion between the market veterans by asking if diversification remains a bedrock strategy. The conversation has been edited and condensed.

Jack Bogle: I am a believer in diversification. You buy index funds for stocks, and your bond portion should equal your age. This is how I invest, so I know how little it's hurt me to have a substantial position in U.S. bonds. I'm in half Treasuries, half corporates.

The most common diversification talked about is international. What's wrong is that as soon as people start really talking about it and believing in it, international stocks are overpriced. About 80% of money going into equity funds last year was going into international. If that isn't a warning sign! Here we are: The U.S. is one of the better-performing world markets. From the market peak in 2007, the S&P 500 is off 42.5%, international [measured by the MSCI EAFE Index of developed countries] is down 49.4%, and emerging markets [measured by the MSCI Emerging Markets Index] by 55.8%.

In recent years, international investing has had a higher correlation with the U.S. market than was traditional. If you invest internationally, you have to invest in foreign companies not as diversifiers but wealth producers. If you like international, get in gradually, maybe with 20% of your portfolio, half in developing markets and half in emerging markets. Europe looks a lot like us, so it's at least possible you might get a better return out of emerging markets. I don't invest internationally myself.

Zvi Bodie: I want to add something that strengthens your case. In markets like China, retail investors can invest only in the tiny fraction of equity investments traded on a stock exchange. So compared with the equity investments there that aren't traded on the exchange, those investments are way overpriced. A much better way to invest is to buy U.S. companies doing direct foreign investment in China.

I distinguish between diversification and hedging or insuring. When I use the term diversification, I use it in the sense that you have a bunch of risky assets, and instead of putting your money in one of them, you spread it across them by paying attention to whether those assets move in lockstep. Because if two risky assets are perfectly correlated, you're kidding yourself if you think you're diversifying.

And then there is insuring or hedging. That's when you've got a safe asset and to my mind that is Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, or TIPS. One way to protect yourself is to combine a diversified portfolio of risky assets with the safe asset. We teach students that you only need two mutual funds—the risky assets and the safe asset—to generate the entire set of risk-and-reward trade-offs.

Bogle: Amen.

Bodie: And that could be provided at minimal cost. But then a lot of smart people working on Wall Street would be deprived of their high income. So they put all sorts of bells and whistles on these things, none of which has to do with improving the welfare of clients.

Bogle: If people would look at not just a percentage point in costs, but what 1% to 2% in lower returns costs you over a lifetime.