Speaker 1: Pushkin, I may have Higgins and this is solvable Interviews
Speaker 1: with the world's most innovative thinkers working to solve the
Speaker 1: world's biggest problems. My solvable he is to address the
Speaker 1: problems of extreme inequality in the United States. That's Joseph Stiglitz, economist,
Speaker 1: public policy analyst, and professor at Columbia University, oh and
Speaker 1: Nobel Laureate. Now even a cursory look at the levels
Speaker 1: of inequality in the US can make your head spin.
Speaker 1: I'm sitting in a studio in Manhattan, which is home
Speaker 1: to many of the country's real estate moguls, media empires,
Speaker 1: and hedge fund billionaires. And I'm also just a few
Speaker 1: miles away from the South Bronx, which the two ten
Speaker 1: Census found to be the poorest district in the nation.
Speaker 1: Income disparities have become so pronounced that America's top ten
Speaker 1: percent now average more than nine times as much income
Speaker 1: as the other ninety percent of US. It's more than
Speaker 1: ten years since the financial crisis that shook our world
Speaker 1: and caused enormous suffering, and in that time, the fortunes
Speaker 1: of the richest have actually risen dramatically. The number of
Speaker 1: billionaires have almost doubled, with a new billionaire created every
Speaker 1: two days between twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen. Meanwhile, the
Speaker 1: official poverty rate for all US families has actually barely changed,
Speaker 1: with an estimated one hundred and forty million people in
Speaker 1: this country now counted as either poor or low income.
Speaker 1: Joseph Stiglett seized the US as an outlier amongst other
Speaker 1: wealthy countries, and he studies why inequality is much more severe.
Speaker 1: Here he works to understand why it is we're so
Speaker 1: far behind other comparable countries. And really he argues that
Speaker 1: it's down to our policies, that the exercise of power
Speaker 1: in the pursuit of profit has left people behind, and
Speaker 1: he offers up as solvable for that. Here he is
Speaker 1: getting into us with Jacob Weisberg, Joe, inequality is one
Speaker 1: of the most complicated and interesting problems in the world
Speaker 1: and economics, and you've just written a book about it.
Speaker 1: But I wonder if you could describe what you think
Speaker 1: the problem of inequality is in a nutshell. The problem
Speaker 1: of inequality differs, of course, in different countries, in developed
Speaker 1: countries and in developing countries. The problem in a rich
Speaker 1: country like the United States is that such a large
Speaker 1: fraction of the wealth of the country goes to so few,
Speaker 1: And that wouldn't be by itself, you might say a
Speaker 1: problem if it weren't for the fact that the people
Speaker 1: at the bottom really aren't don't receive a you might
Speaker 1: call a bare necessity of living. So it's not only
Speaker 1: that those at the top have luxuries beyond anybody's dream,
Speaker 1: but those at the bottom are not getting the necessities
Speaker 1: of life. Their children are not getting the education, the
Speaker 1: health that would lead them to live up to their potential.
Speaker 1: Why is this your problem? Just when you talk about it,
Speaker 1: it doesn't sound like you're just thinking about this as
Speaker 1: an economist. Do you think of this as a as
Speaker 1: a social justice issue and a basic justice issue. It
Speaker 1: is a moral issue, a social justice issue. It's also
Speaker 1: an economic issue, because I believe that it actually weakens
Speaker 1: our overall economy. But it's a particularly moral issue in
Speaker 1: two dimensions. There shouldn't be this kind of extremes of
Speaker 1: inequality in a rich country like the United States. There
Speaker 1: shouldn't be people. Almost one out of seven Americans go
Speaker 1: to bed hungry once a month, not because they're on
Speaker 1: the diet, but because they don't have enough money to
Speaker 1: stretch to the end of the month by the food.
Speaker 1: There shouldn't be that extreme deprivation. United States is a
Speaker 1: rich country, yet life expectancy is in decline. And it's
Speaker 1: not because we aren't doing the most advanced research that
Speaker 1: has taught us how to extend life. It's not because
Speaker 1: there's an epidemic going on. It's because our economic and
Speaker 1: our social system is depriving large fractions of America are
Speaker 1: the basic necessities of life, including healthcare, but also adequate nutrition.
Speaker 1: It's also, to me a moral issue because of the
Speaker 1: extremes of wealth. Not all, but some of the extremes
Speaker 1: of wealth originate from exploiting others. At the other extreme,
Speaker 1: some of the extremes of wealth come from exploiting people
Speaker 1: in other countries. The arms trade, where many Americans are
Speaker 1: becoming wealthy at the expense of the death of people
Speaker 1: in other countries. The drug trade, and I'm not talking
Speaker 1: about the illicit drugs, but the prescription drugs, where you
Speaker 1: have families to become wealthy beyond anybody's dream, billions of
Speaker 1: dollars giving way money to charities like art, but causing
Speaker 1: an epidemic of drug overdoses. In the United States by
Speaker 1: getting people addicted cigarette companies who develop cigarettes that are
Speaker 1: more addictive even than the natural addiction associated with tobacco nicotine,
Speaker 1: and becoming wealthy at the expense of suffering of other people.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not that this is new. We had
Speaker 1: the opium trade, and Western countries went to war twice
Speaker 1: with China to keep the market for opium open so
Speaker 1: that more Chinese would become addicted to our destructive products.
Speaker 1: And we call that free trade in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: But what has happened is that what was you might say,
Speaker 1: an unusual thing in the nineteenth century has become a
Speaker 1: major source of income and wealth and inequality in the
Speaker 1: United States. So those forms of exploitative enrichment are a
Speaker 1: kind of exceptions to maybe what you said a minute
Speaker 1: ago when we were getting started, which is, if people
Speaker 1: on the bottom were getting richer and doing better, we
Speaker 1: wouldn't need to worry so much about how rich the
Speaker 1: rich people are. But it's not really the case. Is
Speaker 1: inequality not a problem per se. If the tide is
Speaker 1: rising on the bottom, we don't need to worry about
Speaker 1: it rising faster or even more at the top. We
Speaker 1: do have to worry about it. A society that is
Speaker 1: more polarized, more divided, is a different kind of society.
Speaker 1: And there's been a lot of interesting social science research
Speaker 1: about the ways in which it differs. That people at
Speaker 1: the top feel entitled. They'll go through stoplights, they'll act
Speaker 1: in other ways that are abusive of other people because
Speaker 1: they feel entitled. People at the bottom also feel that
Speaker 1: on the one end, they're being taken advantage of, and
Speaker 1: that makes them angry, and that makes them leads to
Speaker 1: social dysfunction. But others feel giving up that the system
Speaker 1: is rigged and and they drop out. Either way, it's
Speaker 1: a socially dysfunctional outcome. So it seems to me that
Speaker 1: these extremes of inequality are destructive no matter how they originate.
Speaker 1: But I think that natural order of the economy would
Speaker 1: be that it would limit the extremes of inequality if
Speaker 1: it weren't for these abusive practices. That there is no
Speaker 1: inherent reason why you would have the magnitude of inequality
Speaker 1: that we see in the United States or we see
Speaker 1: around the world, were it not for the extent of
Speaker 1: exploitation that we see. And I always say exploitation, I
Speaker 1: mean exploitation of market power, exploitation of the vulnerable. You know,
Speaker 1: when I look at the people at the top, it
Speaker 1: is really shocking the fraction of them who have gotten
Speaker 1: a substantial fraction of their income from exploitation. Not that
Speaker 1: some of them may have made important contributions somewhere along
Speaker 1: the way of making wealth, but then they've taken that
Speaker 1: wealth and multiplied it through some process of exploitation. You
Speaker 1: and I are a few years apart, but we both
Speaker 1: grew up in America that was much more of a
Speaker 1: middle class society, and it had a few features which
Speaker 1: we sort of took for granted. One of them was
Speaker 1: that you could earn a decent middle class living without
Speaker 1: college education or without higher education. Another was that the
Speaker 1: wealth gap was just much less than it is now.
Speaker 1: People who work in working class jobs, fundamentally unskilled jobs,
Speaker 1: their salary was a larger fraction of the CEO of
Speaker 1: the company they worked for. So, looking at this first
Speaker 1: as an economist, what do you think the key drivers
Speaker 1: of that change? The key drivers of inequality have been
Speaker 1: There are many, many drivers of the growth of inequality,
Speaker 1: but the ones that I focus on a great deal
Speaker 1: are precisely this increase in exploitation, including exploitation of market power.
Speaker 1: Included in that description of market power is the fact
Speaker 1: that we have weaker unions. We've gone through a period
Speaker 1: where government has not played the role that's played in
Speaker 1: the past in curbing market power. Our corporate CEOs have
Speaker 1: learned how to exploit the weaknesses in our corporate governance.
Speaker 1: There's been a systematic attempt to weaken the systems of
Speaker 1: checks and balances, including labor unions, which are important ways
Speaker 1: of making sure that ordinary workers get a voice and
Speaker 1: economic relationships. So let me just illustrated by a couple
Speaker 1: of examples. If we look at the concentration of market power,
Speaker 1: evidence is overwhelming that it's increased enormously in the last
Speaker 1: twenty years. The antitrust laws that were absolutely essential one
Speaker 1: hundred and some years ago, incurbing the market power of
Speaker 1: standard oil and tobacco monopoly and a whole set of monopolies,
Speaker 1: they've been eviscerated by fifty years, especially since the so
Speaker 1: called Reagan Revolution, well with Robert Bork, who came up
Speaker 1: with the theory of antitrust that we basically still live with,
Speaker 1: which it's very narrow definition, and the irony of that
Speaker 1: was that came up exactly at the time where economists
Speaker 1: were beginning to understand the nature of market powers, and
Speaker 1: so he was putting forward an idea. A lot of
Speaker 1: people in Chicago put forward this idea that markets are
Speaker 1: naturally competitive, and the economics profession was showing that that
Speaker 1: was wrong. And my own work was on imperfect information
Speaker 1: and showing how imperfections of information are a real barrier
Speaker 1: to the operation of the so called ideal of perfect
Speaker 1: markets that Bork and a lot of the Chicago economists
Speaker 1: focused on. Another example, though, is what's happened to CEO pay.
Speaker 1: Ceo pay has increased like a thousand percent in the
Speaker 1: last forty years, not because they've become that much more productive,
Speaker 1: and it really is undermined the underlying theory that neoliberalism
Speaker 1: and standard economics, which is based on pay being related
Speaker 1: to productivity. It really shows its power that determines productivity.
Speaker 1: And the CEOs had the power to raise their own
Speaker 1: compensation and they've taken advantage of that and they realize
Speaker 1: that the constraints aren't there. And a third example that
Speaker 1: brings out the visration of the role of government in
Speaker 1: this area is that the minimum wages wages at the bottom,
Speaker 1: adjusted for inflation, are today the same as they were
Speaker 1: sixty years ago. Now can you imagine getting no pay
Speaker 1: race for sixty years in what is allegedly one of
Speaker 1: the most prosperous countries in the world, where the one
Speaker 1: percent see their income soaring. You look at the TV set,
Speaker 1: you see how others are living doing well. Today. You
Speaker 1: work full time at the minimum wage and it's not livable.
Speaker 1: You can't even pay your rent on what you get
Speaker 1: paid as a minimum wage. Some economists look at inequality
Speaker 1: and think technology and trade and returns to education are
Speaker 1: at the center of the phenomenon, and that policy is
Speaker 1: at the margin for good or for ill. You tend
Speaker 1: to see policy as at the center rather than these
Speaker 1: tectonic factors. Is that right. That's right, and those factors
Speaker 1: are relevant. I'm not denying their relevance. Those factors themselves,
Speaker 1: of course, are a part of our political process, and
Speaker 1: politics reflects the inequality in economics. So when you have
Speaker 1: the extremes of inequality economic inequality, you're going to get
Speaker 1: a political inequality. So the way we've governed globalization where
Speaker 1: we've left the results of which have been to put
Speaker 1: downward pressure on especially on skilled wages resultant, and these
Speaker 1: large parts of America that have become de industrialized, with
Speaker 1: the deaths of despair that are leading to our skyrocketing
Speaker 1: incidents of suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism. All those are
Speaker 1: political nature. But the reason that I emphasize that it's
Speaker 1: policy more than these exogen factors, more than technological change,
Speaker 1: is that you look around the world and the United
Speaker 1: States is an outlider among advanced countries that we have
Speaker 1: more inequality and less equality of opportunity than other countries.
Speaker 1: Those other countries have the same technology. I mean, we're
Speaker 1: part of advanced countries. They have even more open markets,
Speaker 1: so even more exposed to globalization. Why is it the
Speaker 1: United States is so much worse than these other countries.
Speaker 1: And it's our policies, and our policies are driven by
Speaker 1: our politics, which is this vicious circle that I describe before.
Speaker 1: And you know, this has been really one of the
Speaker 1: th ust of my recent book People, Power and Profits,
Speaker 1: Progressive Capitalism and Age of Discontents. It's precisely that it's
Speaker 1: the exercise of power in the pursuit of profits that
Speaker 1: has left our people behind. So we're dealing with the
Speaker 1: consequence of at least forty years of policy fanning the
Speaker 1: flames of inequality. Do you think now reversal in some
Speaker 1: of those fundamental policies around taxation, around regulation, around investment
Speaker 1: can actually reverse this trend and produce not only diminishing
Speaker 1: rate of increase of inequality, but less inequality more equality.
Speaker 1: Very much so. And I put at the flip side
Speaker 1: that if we don't do those things, things are going
Speaker 1: to get worse and worse that we have not seen
Speaker 1: the end of this increase inequality if we don't do
Speaker 1: something about it. Next. One of the reasons why I
Speaker 1: think this is a solvable problem. We know what we
Speaker 1: need to do to bend the curve to reduce inequality.
Speaker 1: And if we begin with something that I think almost
Speaker 1: all Americans would agree with is, you know, every American
Speaker 1: child should be able to live up to their potential.
Speaker 1: You should get an education and health that is not
Speaker 1: a hindrance to them. But the reality is that one
Speaker 1: in five American children are growing up in poverty, and
Speaker 1: part of that poverty is they're not getting adequate nutrition.
Speaker 1: And we live in a more economically segregated society than
Speaker 1: we were thirty years ago. And with our local education system,
Speaker 1: it means that if you are living in a poor community,
Speaker 1: you're going to get a poor education, not always, but
Speaker 1: on average, and that means your life prospects are going
Speaker 1: to be diminished. And that's one of the reasons why
Speaker 1: you know the marriage. I've said in some of my
Speaker 1: books that the American dream is a myth that the
Speaker 1: look at the numbers. The numbers tell you that the
Speaker 1: life prospects of a young American are more dependent on
Speaker 1: the income and education of experience than in almost any
Speaker 1: other advanced countries. You might say, that's an American but
Speaker 1: that's where we are. But we could reverse that. We
Speaker 1: are the only country among the advanced countries that doesn't
Speaker 1: recognize the right to access to healthcare as a basic
Speaker 1: human right. And that's solvable. There are so many other
Speaker 1: aspects of our economic and social organization that have led
Speaker 1: to this perpetuation of inequality. Is limited equality of opportunity
Speaker 1: that is leading to the kind of despair and large
Speaker 1: fractions of a country. So you talked about healthcare, Let's
Speaker 1: talk about education from anute, particularly higher education. One of
Speaker 1: the interesting debates, say inside the Democratic Party, although not
Speaker 1: always articulation it is, first of all, whether the goal
Speaker 1: should be for everyone to get some higher education, which
Speaker 1: I think Barack Obama stated as a goal at one
Speaker 1: point in his presidency, although it's not one he made
Speaker 1: a lot of progress towards, especially given how much more
Speaker 1: expensive college has been getting or as opposed to that
Speaker 1: make everything better for people who are never going to
Speaker 1: college and accept that reality. Do you think the goal
Speaker 1: should be for all Americans to have higher education of
Speaker 1: some kind? Well, my view is one wants to have
Speaker 1: the education that allows everybody to live up to their
Speaker 1: potential and that leaks to a more efficient economy. The
Speaker 1: fact is that we are so far from that goal
Speaker 1: that that's what we should be focusing our attention on.
Speaker 1: You talked about the expense at the end of World
Speaker 1: War Two, when we had a debt GDP ratio that
Speaker 1: was much higher because we have borrowed money to fight
Speaker 1: the ward. We didn't say would we afford we fought
Speaker 1: the war. We wound up with a duck GDP ratio
Speaker 1: of one hundred and thirty percent, and we said, at
Speaker 1: that point, everybody who fought in the ward, which was
Speaker 1: at virtually every man a lot of women, you could
Speaker 1: get as much education at the most expensive school for
Speaker 1: which you are qualified, we could afford it then, I
Speaker 1: think we can afford it now. It's a matter of choice,
Speaker 1: and we chose to say this is your return for
Speaker 1: having fought for your country. But it also facilitated the
Speaker 1: transition from a rural agriculture economy to a manufacturing what
Speaker 1: made us dynamic in the second half of the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: and we're not doing that now. And what is very
Speaker 1: clear is that we have now fallen behind other advanced
Speaker 1: countries who have made one form or another of opportunity available,
Speaker 1: you know, some day, whether it's technical education or college education,
Speaker 1: you know, trying to design a system that's appropriate to
Speaker 1: their economy and to their circumstances. European countries, particularly the
Speaker 1: Northern European countries, are far more equal, and they have
Speaker 1: higher rates of happiness that seem to reflect simply, among
Speaker 1: other things, that they are more equal societies. People sometimes
Speaker 1: make the argument, well, those are homogeneous societies. They have
Speaker 1: maybe higher rates of immigration now, but there are people
Speaker 1: their countries that haven't had the range of life experiences
Speaker 1: and types of people that we have in the United States.
Speaker 1: You don't buy that I don't buy that at all.
Speaker 1: I mean, first of all, they have more diversity than
Speaker 1: we often give them credit. For seventeen percent of the
Speaker 1: people in Sweden our immigrants, so they've they've actually opened
Speaker 1: up their doors, brings things to Iraqi refugees. We cause
Speaker 1: the war in Iraq, they picked up the pieces when
Speaker 1: we refuse to do that. But the question of homogeneity
Speaker 1: may affect the design of the system. You have to
Speaker 1: have a system that's maybe somewhat more complex if you
Speaker 1: have a very heterogeneous population. But I'm absolutely convinced that
Speaker 1: we can have a system that provides more opportunity within
Speaker 1: a very diverse society. There's absolutely no reason why you
Speaker 1: can't have access to healthcare for all, Why a rich
Speaker 1: country can't provide nutrition, adequate nutrition for all, Why we
Speaker 1: can't have adequate housing for all. If it goes to
Speaker 1: the extremes of inequality that we have in the United
Speaker 1: States and the forms in which inequality arises. When I
Speaker 1: say that is the extremes of the wealthy United States
Speaker 1: is held by the top one percent. That's twice the
Speaker 1: number as in other advanced countries, including countries that are
Speaker 1: growing just as fast or fast in the United States,
Speaker 1: and obviously you have a higher sense of well being
Speaker 1: than in the United States. So in my mind, I
Speaker 1: don't see any reason why diversity is any reason for
Speaker 1: an impediment for providing an embeddiment. If we were very poor,
Speaker 1: that would be another argument. But there the argument would be, well,
Speaker 1: if you're a poor country, you provide housing for everybody,
Speaker 1: but a lower standard than you are when you're rich.
Speaker 1: But what is remarkable by the United States. We're a
Speaker 1: rich country, and we really don't provide even a lower
Speaker 1: standard of housing and food and education than countries that
Speaker 1: are much poorer than US can provide. So maybe it's
Speaker 1: not homogeneity in an ethnic sense or even social cohesion,
Speaker 1: but what does countries have at least one point a
Speaker 1: political consensus that those things should be run. And even
Speaker 1: as political conflict and polarization the same phenomenon that we've
Speaker 1: experienced have increased there, they've maintained that consensus. I mean,
Speaker 1: in Great Britain, the consensus that the national health service
Speaker 1: is something that kind of everyone supports at some level,
Speaker 1: or that the vast majority of the country does. That's
Speaker 1: been maintained in the United States. You know, it's it's
Speaker 1: been a fight for seventy years, and we've never had
Speaker 1: an overwhelming majority in favor of the right to healthcare. Well,
Speaker 1: some of those things are changing now. But part of
Speaker 1: the problem in the United States is this disconnect between
Speaker 1: what people want and our political system, and that comes
Speaker 1: I attributed that partly to the way we have extremes
Speaker 1: of economic inequality and we have a political system that
Speaker 1: helps translate those extremes of economic inequality into political inequality.
Speaker 1: So if you look at some of the major issues
Speaker 1: that our country faces, gun control, vast majority believe there
Speaker 1: ought to be gun controlled. You talk about bank regulation,
Speaker 1: some seventy five percent of the people thought we needed
Speaker 1: stronger bank regulation than we got out of the crisis
Speaker 1: when we passed what was called the doct Frank bell
Speaker 1: Ink twenty and ten. Minimum wage seventy five percent or so.
Speaker 1: I think we ought to have higher levels of minimum wage.
Speaker 1: We can't get it through Congress. It's only through rass
Speaker 1: roots movements in Seattle and San Francisco and New York
Speaker 1: that we're getting getting it. But if you ask what
Speaker 1: do people think, there's rocking census on non unanimity, but
Speaker 1: a brock in census on a lot of these issues,
Speaker 1: I could go down a long list. I don't think
Speaker 1: we have as polarized society. I don't want to say
Speaker 1: that we have a unanimity, but we have two thirds
Speaker 1: three four people. And if you focus then on the
Speaker 1: young people whose country this will be in the future,
Speaker 1: you know, overwhelmed homingle. They think we ought to be
Speaker 1: doing something about climate change, which is a real threat
Speaker 1: to their future, and yet we can't get climate change
Speaker 1: of legislation through What country has the optimal system of
Speaker 1: taxation or level of taxation from the point of view
Speaker 1: of solving inequality or preventing the growth of inequality. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know the optimum, but I think the Scandinavian
Speaker 1: countries overall have figured out systems that are working better
Speaker 1: for their people. Their tax rates are much higher, but
Speaker 1: they get a lot for it. So you know, we
Speaker 1: often say, well, look at their tax rates so much
Speaker 1: higher than the United States, but we forget privately, we
Speaker 1: have to pay for healthcare twenty percent of GDP they
Speaker 1: put it, that's part of the government pensions. They get
Speaker 1: a lot larger fraction of their old age pension out
Speaker 1: of the government. People in the middle class and upper
Speaker 1: middle class, say privately education. When you start putting all
Speaker 1: that together, you realize that they're getting a good deal
Speaker 1: in Scandinavia. And one of the reasons why they're happier.
Speaker 1: They don't have to worry about if their kid gets sick,
Speaker 1: are they going to be able to afford the doctor.
Speaker 1: They know it will be taken care of. They know
Speaker 1: if the husband gets sick and isn't able to say
Speaker 1: to send their kid to college, he'll be taken care of.
Speaker 1: Their children don't depend on how well their parents are
Speaker 1: doing in order to get an education to live up
Speaker 1: to their potential. It really takes a huge burden off
Speaker 1: of them. And you know, in economics we talk about
Speaker 1: today the consequences of cognitive burdens and impairing ability to
Speaker 1: make good decisions and being productive. One of the reasons
Speaker 1: why some of these countries are actually turning out to
Speaker 1: be more innovative and more productive across the board is
Speaker 1: because they don't have to worry about the silly things
Speaker 1: that we have to worry about just to survive. Joe,
Speaker 1: I love that you're hopeful about this, because so many
Speaker 1: people are despairing about this problem. Thinking as a kind
Speaker 1: of inevitability about it, and also that the political system
Speaker 1: seems totally incapable of addressing it. I'm very hopeful, partly
Speaker 1: because of the young people I see every day at
Speaker 1: Columbia University, you know, and I see around the country.
Speaker 1: Overwhelmingly they believe in what I call the progressive agenda.
Speaker 1: Overwhelmingly they think we've lost our way and they think
Speaker 1: that we ought to be trying something different. So they
Speaker 1: know something's not working for them. They know that their
Speaker 1: opportunities are constrained. And since we still have a democratic
Speaker 1: political system, it's been you might say warped, it's been undermined,
Speaker 1: but still has the potential of restoring power to ordinary individuals.
Speaker 1: And that's why the political system getting out the vote,
Speaker 1: making people realize there is an alternative. We don't have
Speaker 1: to be the way we've been. This problem is solvable.
Speaker 1: And when I don't know, Columbia undergraduates come to you
Speaker 1: and ask what kind of career they can have that
Speaker 1: will help solve that problem. I know what you probably
Speaker 1: tell them not to do, which is maybe good at
Speaker 1: work on Wall Street, But what are some of the
Speaker 1: things people can do to try to support It's obviously
Speaker 1: such a huge topic. But to try to create a
Speaker 1: less unequal society, well, I think, as you say, you
Speaker 1: partly begin by thinking about what not to do. And
Speaker 1: it is still you know, the inequality the ability to
Speaker 1: get a high paying job and whilst rate is very
Speaker 1: hard for many to resist, but I think a lot
Speaker 1: of them become more aware that that's not going to
Speaker 1: lead to their long term fulfillment, their long term happiness.
Speaker 1: The way one needs to think about it is this
Speaker 1: is a multi dimensional problem, and that's a good thing
Speaker 1: because there are many different ways that people can contribute,
Speaker 1: both individually and through society. So when I say individually,
Speaker 1: you know when somebody goes into teaching and a poor
Speaker 1: community or even an ordinary community, you know they're addressing
Speaker 1: the problem of inequality in our society. When they go
Speaker 1: into become into medicine and they decide to practice in
Speaker 1: a place where there is a shortage of doctors, they're
Speaker 1: contributing individually to addressing the problem of inequality in our society.
Speaker 1: In the end, public service is the only way is
Speaker 1: actually a central piece of solving the problem of our
Speaker 1: growing inequality. Joe, thanks for joining us Unsolvable. Thank you,
Speaker 1: Joseph Stiglitz's final words in that interview about finding an
Speaker 1: alternative and the energy that he feels today about that possibility. Well,
Speaker 1: that made me think about the Poor People's Campaign. Maybe
Speaker 1: you know about it already, but in nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: there was this effort, this march led by doctor Martin
Speaker 1: Luther King, to gain economic justice for poor people in
Speaker 1: the United States. It was a fight by capable hard
Speaker 1: workers against dehumanization, against discrimination and poverty wages here in
Speaker 1: the richest country in the world. Now, the past couple
Speaker 1: of years has seen this Poor People's Campaign back on
Speaker 1: the road again. They're gaining momentum with the exact same
Speaker 1: spirit the Professor Stiglitz is calling for. Solvable is a
Speaker 1: collaboration between Pushkin Industries and the Rockefeller Foundation, with production
Speaker 1: by Laura Hyde, Hester Kant, Laura Sheeter, and Ruth Barnes
Speaker 1: from Chalk and Blade. Pushkin's executive producer is Neil LaBelle.
Speaker 1: Researched by sher Vincent, Engineering by Jason Gambrel and the
Speaker 1: Great Folks at GSI Studios. Original music composed by Pascal
Speaker 1: Wise and special thanks to Maggie Taylor, Heather Fine, Julia Barton,
Speaker 1: Carli mcgliori, Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Gladwell. You can learn
Speaker 1: more about solving today's biggest problems at Rockefeller Foundation dot
Speaker 1: org slash solvable. I'm Mave Higgins. Now got solvas Turn