Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing.
Speaker 1: I don't know about you, but I never read the
Speaker 1: business pages of a newspaper before I was forty five.
Speaker 1: Then something changed My interest in banking, financial markets, technology
Speaker 1: and its effects on our lives. My whole view of
Speaker 1: the role of economics shifted. Today it's the first section
Speaker 1: I go to in my own case, It's the New
Speaker 1: York Times because I have questions, lots of questions. Roughly
Speaker 1: three years along from the economic meltdown that still affects
Speaker 1: us all, I made a call to Dr Joseph Stiglitz
Speaker 1: at Columbia University. Dr stiglets is a rare contradiction, a
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize winning economist who speaks in plain English. He's
Speaker 1: a renowned expert on taxation, trade, and development who would
Speaker 1: also be good company at a ballgame. Presidents continually turned
Speaker 1: to him for guidance. Under Clinton, he chaired the Council
Speaker 1: of Economic Advisors from five but he shows no restraint
Speaker 1: when unleashing criticism of their policies. Of President Obama's financial
Speaker 1: rescue plan, Stigletz said that whomever designed it was quote
Speaker 1: either in the pocket of the banks or incompetent unquote.
Speaker 1: Stiglets was the chief economist at the World Bank for
Speaker 1: three years until January two thousand, when he resigned in
Speaker 1: protest over the bank's policies. He wanted more transparency at
Speaker 1: the Bank and felt that the money doled out shouldn't
Speaker 1: have so many strings attached. Joseph Stigletz gets around. He's
Speaker 1: lectured all over the world and taught at Yale, Stanford, Duke, Oxford,
Speaker 1: and Princeton. I met him at his office at Columbia University,
Speaker 1: where he's taught since two thousand and coming here today,
Speaker 1: I was reminded of why they have orientation weeks at colleges,
Speaker 1: where you spend the first week just finding where all
Speaker 1: your classes are. It was like an assure print getting
Speaker 1: here to your office today. With Stiglets, you're in no
Speaker 1: need of an orientation, even if you're talking about the
Speaker 1: financial crisis. Joseph Stiglitz calls them like he sees them.
Speaker 1: Where both Bush and Obama made a fundamental mistake is
Speaker 1: they didn't distinguish between saving the banks and saving the
Speaker 1: bankers and the bank's shareholders and bondholders. It was both
Speaker 1: an economic and I think a political mistake, because what
Speaker 1: Americans saw was that hundreds of billions of dollars were
Speaker 1: going into save the bankers, their shareholders, and their bondholders
Speaker 1: without any constraint on how that money was going to
Speaker 1: be used, paid out in dividends, paid out in bonuses.
Speaker 1: Do you think that because of the urgency, do you
Speaker 1: forgive them and say there wasn't time where they should
Speaker 1: have known that there should be less discretion for the
Speaker 1: banks to distribute the money as they saw fit. I
Speaker 1: think there was no excuse for what they did. The
Speaker 1: UK did a much better job in terms of playing
Speaker 1: by the rules of the game after we did. They
Speaker 1: did it roughly at the same time, and either there's
Speaker 1: a fundamentally different mindset about investment banking over there. What
Speaker 1: was quite remarkable is that in the UK banking was
Speaker 1: even more important than it was in the United States,
Speaker 1: but the government there had a greater sensitivity about what
Speaker 1: needed to be done, so their view was just like
Speaker 1: in the United States. The argument was we needed to
Speaker 1: keep the flow of money lending going if we're going
Speaker 1: to keep the economy. And that was what was so
Speaker 1: absurd about what both the Bush and Obroma administrations did.
Speaker 1: They gave money to the banks to recapitalized, to lend,
Speaker 1: but then they said, by the way, you don't have
Speaker 1: to use that money to recapitalize and land. You can
Speaker 1: use that money to pay dividends or to pay bonuses.
Speaker 1: The question is was there something else they could have done?
Speaker 1: There were many other things they could have done. One
Speaker 1: of the things they could have done is in giving
Speaker 1: money to the banks, they could have said, you have
Speaker 1: to continue lending, especially to small and medium sized enterprises,
Speaker 1: and not use the money to pay out bonuses or
Speaker 1: to pay dividings. The second thing they could have done,
Speaker 1: the banks would have done a response to that, what
Speaker 1: would they have said? I think the banks had no choices.
Speaker 1: What prevented them from going to the banks and saying,
Speaker 1: we're going to give you seven hundred billion dollars or
Speaker 1: whatever the figure was initially, and we're gonna give you
Speaker 1: this money and you are forbidden from using more than
Speaker 1: a certain percentage of it for distribution in bonuses and
Speaker 1: in shareholder dividends. Why don't you think they did that?
Speaker 1: Very simple politics? Uh, they got a lot of money,
Speaker 1: and who do you think was the person that was
Speaker 1: was it Paulson? Was the one who was telling when
Speaker 1: your estimation, well, I unrestricted money. I think it was
Speaker 1: a broad consensus between Paulson, Bernanke, and Geitner, who was
Speaker 1: the head of the New York fat which was playing
Speaker 1: a pivotal role because it was the big banks in
Speaker 1: New York were still in Bush's term and it's the
Speaker 1: first bailout, and Bernanke and Geitner are predisposed to this
Speaker 1: as well. Exactly why do you think why? I think
Speaker 1: they panicked, and I think they brought into the mindset
Speaker 1: and the arguments of the banks. Not a surprise that
Speaker 1: the bankers tried to instill fear. But how does someone
Speaker 1: instill fear? How do bankers to say, if you don't
Speaker 1: give us this money unrestricted, this is what's going to happen.
Speaker 1: What's going to happen? The fear, I think was that
Speaker 1: the banks would never be able to get private money,
Speaker 1: people would leave banking. Now, to me, it was pretty
Speaker 1: clear where the bankers going to go, especially as the
Speaker 1: economy goes into a downturn. It wasn't as if there
Speaker 1: was a lot of offers for these guys who have
Speaker 1: brought the economy to the brink of room it didn't
Speaker 1: look good. And you're talking about private money, so you're saying,
Speaker 1: if you don't give us this money unrestricted, so for
Speaker 1: that shareholders can be rewarded. Shareholders will view this as
Speaker 1: a very very bear market in a bare environment, and
Speaker 1: you won't be able to raise additional money, and to
Speaker 1: keep the banking system going, you'll need more public money
Speaker 1: and that's going to be very difficult. Do you find
Speaker 1: that on Wall Street? Because what this sounds to me
Speaker 1: like that there really is just this kind of generic
Speaker 1: sense of an administration, of an sec of a white
Speaker 1: house in a treasury department that are Wall Street friendly
Speaker 1: and those that are not Wall Street friendly. And what
Speaker 1: defines Wall Street friendly is you just don't tell us
Speaker 1: what to do. We completely run our own shop, and
Speaker 1: you just stay out of it. That's right. We're the experts.
Speaker 1: Don't mess with us because we're vital to the economy.
Speaker 1: If you get us upset, they're like a terrorist with
Speaker 1: a bomb strapped around their body. If I go down,
Speaker 1: your all going down. You see it in in so
Speaker 1: many different contexts, for instincts. When A I G was
Speaker 1: bailed out to the tune of a hundred and fifty billion, dollars.
Speaker 1: A critical point in that bailout was that a I g.
Speaker 1: The government brought back the derivatives and they paid for
Speaker 1: those derivatives on the dollar. They didn't want to say
Speaker 1: where the money was going. Eventually pressure was put on
Speaker 1: the Fed to tell where the money went. The largest
Speaker 1: recipient was Goldman Sacks. There are other instincts is with
Speaker 1: the banks did in the process of foreclosure, the robo
Speaker 1: signing where they were signing ALFI David's that they had
Speaker 1: inspected the records and that these people deserved to be
Speaker 1: thrown out of their houses because they owed money they
Speaker 1: had not. We basically had a banking system where writing mortgages,
Speaker 1: the banks and the lenders didn't care whether you could
Speaker 1: pay or not. But because once they made those loans
Speaker 1: and those loans crapped out, they believed what the government
Speaker 1: was going to step in email m What was actually
Speaker 1: worse than that because they were engaged in predatory lending
Speaker 1: and discriminatory lending. So it wasn't just that they didn't care.
Speaker 1: They went after the poorest, at least financially sophisticated Americans,
Speaker 1: and they tried to move the money from the bottom
Speaker 1: of the pyramid to the top in a way that
Speaker 1: was unconscionable. When the bank shift to, as you said,
Speaker 1: both predatory and discriminatory lending, having a market which a
Speaker 1: wholesale number of people default on their mortgages. What were
Speaker 1: the banks hoping for in that market that they created,
Speaker 1: which was that the god from what would swoop in
Speaker 1: and bail them out? A couple of interesting aspects of
Speaker 1: their strategy. One was this financial development called securitization. So
Speaker 1: it used to be there. When banks wrote a mortgage,
Speaker 1: they hold onto it, and because they hold onto it,
Speaker 1: they wanted to make sure it worked well. But once
Speaker 1: they started selling them, once they started securitizing, selling them
Speaker 1: to others, their object was simply to write a product
Speaker 1: that others would buy. So when the sale by the banks,
Speaker 1: by the mortgage lending institution, by the securitization of those things,
Speaker 1: when did that start? Well, the process really began in
Speaker 1: the early nineties. I wrote an article in around anticipating
Speaker 1: that this whole securitization was going to end in disaster
Speaker 1: and saying that they were going to underestimate the probabilities.
Speaker 1: Is the thing You've won your greatest number of awards
Speaker 1: for but it was it was interesting to see the
Speaker 1: extent that I had to anticipated what what had actually happened. Namely,
Speaker 1: they underestimated the likelihood the prices will go down. The
Speaker 1: models they rating agencies were using assume that prices never
Speaker 1: go down, when in fact you look around the world
Speaker 1: you see they often do go down. Let's stop there
Speaker 1: to about the rating agencies, you must be a profound
Speaker 1: critic of the ranging the rating agencies believed. You might say,
Speaker 1: in financial alchemy, you take a bundle of mortgages that
Speaker 1: should have been F rated, and you put them together,
Speaker 1: and you convert bad mortgages into an A rating security,
Speaker 1: but you dilute them. That that was I can't have
Speaker 1: a whole bundle of all f and coll and A
Speaker 1: can you. Well that's what they did. So they took
Speaker 1: what was homogeneously bad bundle, well not all bad, but
Speaker 1: there were a very large fraction of bad and and
Speaker 1: what happened was that these bundles collapsed. The rating agencies
Speaker 1: are they serve at the behest of who The rating
Speaker 1: agencies are paid by the investment banks. So it's like
Speaker 1: playing in the NFL and the ref won't throw the
Speaker 1: flag because the ref isn't working for the league. The
Speaker 1: ref is working for some ref work for each team.
Speaker 1: For each team, they had incentives that we now know
Speaker 1: Districkler to distort the facts to give a ratings. Uh.
Speaker 1: They helped the banks design products that met the minimal
Speaker 1: standards that were Where do people turn for an unbiased
Speaker 1: rating of a securities? Though? Where do they go? That's
Speaker 1: the fundamental problem that information on the kinds of securities
Speaker 1: that arise out of the securitization process is very difficult
Speaker 1: to get unbiased information, And there's a quandary. If the
Speaker 1: producer of the securities the investment banks pay, you can't
Speaker 1: trust the rating agencies. But it's very hard to get
Speaker 1: the consumer to pay because one investor might pay, but
Speaker 1: then that information can spread to others, and it's hard
Speaker 1: to create a viable business model that will provide the
Speaker 1: finance for the supply of information. Does any arm of
Speaker 1: the government have any legal authority over the rating agencies
Speaker 1: to force them to adjust their standards and to adjust
Speaker 1: their methodology. The answer is no. UH. They've tried to
Speaker 1: claim that it's just a matter of free speech. My
Speaker 1: own view is that there needs to be more accountability
Speaker 1: than that this is Alec Baldwin. You're listening to Here's
Speaker 1: the thing more in a minute. This is Alec Baldwin,
Speaker 1: and I'm talking with Joseph Stigletz, Nobel Prize winning economist, professor,
Speaker 1: and author. We met in his office at Columbia University.
Speaker 1: He spent a good part of his career advising world
Speaker 1: leaders on economic issues. But Joseph Stigletz is no stranger
Speaker 1: to the world of academia. I went to MS colleague
Speaker 1: as an undergraduate. I began studying physics. I just love
Speaker 1: the elegants the mathematics, but sometimes in my junior year
Speaker 1: I decided that my real passion was economics. I had
Speaker 1: grown up in Gary, Indiana, which was in some ways
Speaker 1: an amazing industrial town in the southern shores of Lake Michigan.
Speaker 1: It was founded by U. S. Steel as the largest
Speaker 1: integrated steel mill in the world in nineteen o six,
Speaker 1: and it typified in many ways America of the twentieth
Speaker 1: centiartland America, and you saw both the strengths but also
Speaker 1: some of the weaknesses. So as I was growing up
Speaker 1: very aware of very serious poverty, the economic system didn't
Speaker 1: always work well. We had episodic and appointment business cycles.
Speaker 1: You could see around you lots of crimination, and it
Speaker 1: just didn't seem like a system that was working. Um,
Speaker 1: it was working for some, but not working for an
Speaker 1: awful lot of people. So in my junior year in college,
Speaker 1: I decided I wasn't going to become a physicist. I
Speaker 1: was going to be an economist. I went to my advisors.
Speaker 1: They said, you should go to M I T. And
Speaker 1: so I went to M I T. And began doing
Speaker 1: work trying to understand why markets often didn't work as
Speaker 1: well as those people who said the markets were working perfectly. Uh,
Speaker 1: free free markets, people like the University of Chicago economists
Speaker 1: who talk about Freedman. Freedman. I grown up and I
Speaker 1: had seen the markets were not perfect, But I want
Speaker 1: to know why they weren't, what was wrong with our
Speaker 1: analysis with their arguments. But then I very quickly started
Speaker 1: working into one specific issue that turned out to be
Speaker 1: very important. What are the consequences of imperfect information and
Speaker 1: so obvious ones related to what happened in the recent crisis.
Speaker 1: It was the presence of imperfect information that allowed the
Speaker 1: banks to take advantage of others. No, no, when you
Speaker 1: say this idea of imperfect information. Do you think that
Speaker 1: the system has grown and has evolved so quickly over
Speaker 1: the last let's say, twenty years, that the government can't
Speaker 1: keep up to the Goldman's sexes of the world and
Speaker 1: do all the most I don't want to say predatory,
Speaker 1: but the most veloci raptor esque investment banking houses who
Speaker 1: just are devouring profits and just devouring equity. Is it
Speaker 1: because the government just can't keep up with them. No,
Speaker 1: I could have done a much much better job. So
Speaker 1: you believe that's a profound statement. You believe the government
Speaker 1: could have prevented much of what happened. It could have
Speaker 1: prevented much of what happened, saying that in hindsight, at
Speaker 1: the time, they knew there were steps they could have taken.
Speaker 1: In particularly, there were people even on the FED that
Speaker 1: warned them. Ned Gramlick, he was on the board of
Speaker 1: the FED, and he said, something wrong is going on
Speaker 1: in the mortgage market in terms of the securitization problem.
Speaker 1: The problem was that you had that they had fed
Speaker 1: some people who believe that markets always worked, that there
Speaker 1: weren't such things as bubbles. The most people in your field,
Speaker 1: the most sophisticated, most knowledgeable minds and economics today. Do
Speaker 1: you find many of them view these bubbles like people
Speaker 1: in California view the San Francisco earthquake. That's a total anomaly.
Speaker 1: What happened in the twenties would never happen again. As
Speaker 1: we get towards oh seven away, no matter how the
Speaker 1: the house was shaking, they said, it's not going to
Speaker 1: be like again. If you look at the history of capitalism,
Speaker 1: there have been bubbles, panics, and bubbles that broke repeatedly.
Speaker 1: With each bubble, they look at the past and say, oh,
Speaker 1: those guys were very stupid. We're smarter, And of course
Speaker 1: that was true. In the last bubble, they believed that
Speaker 1: it was not a bubble because bubbles were a thing
Speaker 1: of the past. We are smart people, we don't have bubbles.
Speaker 1: But in fact, the telltale signs that there was a
Speaker 1: bubble were there for anybody who wanted to look at them,
Speaker 1: and there were instruments that were there to anyone who
Speaker 1: wanted us to tame the bubble, like raising the down payments.
Speaker 1: What does Vulcan saying that you agree with or not.
Speaker 1: I think Bolger is one of the heroes of this story.
Speaker 1: Um Vulgar realized that financial markets needed to be regulated,
Speaker 1: and that was one of the reasons that Reagan looked
Speaker 1: for somebody to replace him. After all, in terms of
Speaker 1: what central bankers normally are graded on, he had brought
Speaker 1: down double digit inflation down to very low levels, and
Speaker 1: that would normally have been rewarded by a reappointment, but
Speaker 1: he was dismissed. When Reagan comes in, people view this
Speaker 1: as this watershed in that area, that about smashing government regulation.
Speaker 1: What did reagonomics mean to people? Throw that word around
Speaker 1: like it's this magic dust. You know, what did Reagonomics
Speaker 1: mean to you then? And what does Reaganomics mean to
Speaker 1: you now? Is a Reagonomics as perhaps another act in
Speaker 1: a long standing battle about the appropriate balance between markets
Speaker 1: and government. And Reagan came in and try to put
Speaker 1: his hand on one side of that balance and say,
Speaker 1: let's get rid of government, let's just let markets rip.
Speaker 1: Why do you think I think it was just ordinary greed,
Speaker 1: the belief that we got rid of the regulations and
Speaker 1: all the cree could make more money. There was one
Speaker 1: other argument that in a way shows the naivety of
Speaker 1: their reasoning. In the decades after Glass Steagle, which was
Speaker 1: this law that separated investment banking from commercial banking, that
Speaker 1: had tried to put restraints that avoiding some of the
Speaker 1: conflicts of interest that had marked the past. In those
Speaker 1: decades after the passage of these whole series of laws
Speaker 1: and the Great Depression, the country had been remarkably stable.
Speaker 1: There had not been a financial crisis. And because there
Speaker 1: had not made a financial crisis, they made the wrong inference.
Speaker 1: They said, financial crisis are a thing of the past.
Speaker 1: But they were a thing of the past only because
Speaker 1: we had the regulators. So once you repealed Glass Eagle,
Speaker 1: once you got rid of the regulations, once you started
Speaker 1: going into deregulation, you started having crisis after crisis. Do
Speaker 1: you think we should be institute class to Eagle or
Speaker 1: a modification thereof something new. What is clear is that
Speaker 1: we need to have stronger regulation. The vocal rule is
Speaker 1: one way of doing it. How would you characterize the
Speaker 1: vocal rule for people who don't know what happens. The
Speaker 1: vulgar rule is a restriction that says banks are supposed
Speaker 1: to be serving their customers, not making money for their
Speaker 1: own portfolio. So it's an attempt to say you can't
Speaker 1: engage in what are called proprietary trading, trading on your
Speaker 1: own behalf gambling against your customers in the way that
Speaker 1: Goldman Sachs did. It just opens up such a can
Speaker 1: of worms that it's very difficult for government to stop
Speaker 1: it once you open up that possibility. Barney Frank, what
Speaker 1: did you make of what happened with him, with Freddie
Speaker 1: Mack and Fannie man With what the issues were that
Speaker 1: people were contending about Frank and what he did? A
Speaker 1: couple of points. One, He and the Democrats more generally
Speaker 1: were very instrumental in ninety four giving the FED scope
Speaker 1: for regulating better. They were more pro regulations, and had
Speaker 1: they had the Fed implemented the regulations that they had
Speaker 1: the authority to implement, we would have avoided the crisis,
Speaker 1: at least the worst parts of it. There's a very
Speaker 1: large controversy over the rule of Fannie Mae and Freddie
Speaker 1: mac in the current crisis. In my own mind, there
Speaker 1: shouldn't be any controversy. The evidence is overwhelming that they
Speaker 1: were a late comer to the problems and basically a
Speaker 1: side show. The fundamental problems were created by the private
Speaker 1: banks in their subprime fraudulent predatory practices. The if you
Speaker 1: go in your mind, they don't deserve to be lumped
Speaker 1: into the same categories. Definitely, if you look at their
Speaker 1: default rakes, their problem rakes, they performed far better than
Speaker 1: the private sector. Now, after they collapsed, the government began
Speaker 1: to use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack in part to
Speaker 1: bail out the private banks and to buy bad portfolios
Speaker 1: and so forth, and they became part of the resolution
Speaker 1: mechanism trans fery money from the public sector to the
Speaker 1: private sector. So you can't look at some of the
Speaker 1: things that have happened after the government took them over
Speaker 1: and the collapse of two thousand and eight to make
Speaker 1: inferences about the kinds of lending they were doing before.
Speaker 1: Now you have been out of the government since two
Speaker 1: thousand correct, I've actually been out of government six I
Speaker 1: was in the World Bank from do you miss that world?
Speaker 1: Think about going back to where it's been a long
Speaker 1: time now. It's very exciting. It's both frustrating and satisfying.
Speaker 1: Really difficult problems shaping public policy, figuring out what to do,
Speaker 1: then persuading others. Because we live in a democratic society,
Speaker 1: I can't just decide what I think is the right thing.
Speaker 1: I have to persuade others. This idea that government officials
Speaker 1: work nine to five is absurd. We had our first
Speaker 1: meeting at seven am, and I had to prepare all
Speaker 1: kinds of work before that, So that meant you had
Speaker 1: to get up at five am, and we had meetings
Speaker 1: that would go on to midnight. If you went back
Speaker 1: into the political sphere, would you do things differently? Do
Speaker 1: you think you would have approached your work differently? In hindsight, Actually,
Speaker 1: I feel reasonably satisfied about what I did with the
Speaker 1: battles I fought, uh I thought against the deregulation of
Speaker 1: the financial sector, and when I was there, we did
Speaker 1: not repealed Glass Steagle. I guess I would have hoped
Speaker 1: I would have been more successful, and some of the
Speaker 1: battles you always wish you could have done more. So
Speaker 1: you you come back into academia and have students changed.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I think that has changed
Speaker 1: certainly since I was a gradual student is that there
Speaker 1: are overall fewer of the very best students to go
Speaker 1: into academia into public service. One of the major miss
Speaker 1: allocations of the financial sector is the misallocation of our
Speaker 1: scarcest resource our young people, and many of them could
Speaker 1: not resist the temptation of these outsized bonuses. Many of
Speaker 1: them went in thinking that they would work for a
Speaker 1: few years, make their fortune, and then do what they want.
Speaker 1: So they'd rather be Lloyd blank find than Joseph Stickles,
Speaker 1: many of them, and in terms of in terms of
Speaker 1: the career path, unfortunately, I think a disproportionate number. I
Speaker 1: don't think they think of it as Lloyd blank blank find.
Speaker 1: But I think the thractions of the lure of money
Speaker 1: was irresistible and still today but more guarded because more
Speaker 1: of them see the problems of the financial sector, more
Speaker 1: are aware that money doesn't buy happiness, and they want
Speaker 1: to feel good about their lives and what they do.
Speaker 1: Do you see yourself in that room? Sometimes? Um, I
Speaker 1: find that there are a few students who have that
Speaker 1: kind of deep curiosity, a few that have a real
Speaker 1: commitment to help our society, help developing countries. Would I
Speaker 1: find also extraordinary disturbing is the kind of you might
Speaker 1: call I don't want to say fear, but the worry
Speaker 1: are they going to get good jobs? Are they going
Speaker 1: to get promotions? Does the economics profession care about the
Speaker 1: things they care about. So when you draw that line
Speaker 1: from the young men and in Gary, Indiana, who was
Speaker 1: fascinated by whole quilted nature of the economy in his
Speaker 1: own hometown and then went to Amherst, I thought he
Speaker 1: wanted to go into physics, went to m I t
Speaker 1: went into economics. When that man wins the Nobel Prize
Speaker 1: for economics for that very thinking, how did you feel? Well,
Speaker 1: obviously I felt very very pleased. I think one of
Speaker 1: the things though, that as you study things, you understand
Speaker 1: how complex things are, how much more there is to understand.
Speaker 1: The other thing, I guess which has been might say
Speaker 1: the frustration is well, I think there's been these enormous
Speaker 1: advances in economic science, in our understanding of the ways
Speaker 1: markets don't work, our public policy, our ability to persuade
Speaker 1: the population in general to move policies, and persistent with
Speaker 1: these four implement and four in some ways we've been
Speaker 1: moving to disconnect. There's a disconnect. The period in which
Speaker 1: the free market ideas gained the upper hand in the
Speaker 1: United States, beginning in Reagan, was exactly the period when
Speaker 1: economic science was explaining why free markets didn't work, just
Speaker 1: as we were making real strikes forward and understanding the
Speaker 1: limitations of markets were the boat in the opposite direction exactly,
Speaker 1: and and the increasing difficulty of getting the politics to
Speaker 1: move in that. But as you said, the great challenge
Speaker 1: for you have the work you did, was you said
Speaker 1: to sell these ideas to people and the democracy. You
Speaker 1: have to do that. I mean, I can know the answer,
Speaker 1: but unless I can persuade others, it doesn't do any good.
Speaker 1: I believe very strongly that that if we're going to
Speaker 1: win in this battle that I had begun when I
Speaker 1: was a young person at Amherst, one has to persuade
Speaker 1: others that these are real problems the way of market,
Speaker 1: they are urgent, and that we have answers, maybe not
Speaker 1: perfect answers, but answers, but things that we could do
Speaker 1: to make things a lot better. M. Joseph Stiglitz has
Speaker 1: written more than twenty books, including the forthcoming The Price
Speaker 1: of Inequality, How today's divided society endangers our future. You
Speaker 1: can find more information on our website. Here's the thing
Speaker 1: dot org you're listening to. Here's the thing. I'm Alec
Speaker 1: Baldwin