Re-reporting, editing by Carolyn Bennett
Economist and educator Joseph Stiglitz appeared in interview today on the Democracy Now news program. This is some of what he said about America’s BREAKDOWN and requisite collective action.
EDUCATION breakdown
America has become “Old Europe.” Something dramatic has happened over the past 30 to 40 years. “Right now,” Stiglitz said, “we are worse than Old Europe. …
“Old Europe has become more of a land of opportunity.” The people there recognized they had a problem and, after World War II, “they reformed their education systems. They changed.”
The United States, on the other hand, wound up with a society broken up, portioned out, separated — one in which an education system is more private. Those who have money get “a first-class education” but “the average American” cannot. As a result, average Americans, as revealed in recent education studies, “are doing more poorly than countries around the world.”
TAKING, CONTRIBUTING NOTHING breakdown
Speculator income rises. Worker income falls or is lost entirely.
During the financial crisis, we saw “titans of the financial industry get mega-bonuses while their companies took mega-losses.” Their actions sent domestic and global economies into a tailspin from which recovery has not yet arrived. Their salaries have recovered but not the incomes of the rest of us.
Speculators earned more money by speculating than by working hard. Government lowered their tax rates so that they “pay a much lower tax rate than people who work for a living.”
If people get “rewards for contributing to our society… you could say, ‘okay, those who contribute more should get more’” but that’s not what happened. Bonuses rose as companies collapsed, worker income fell or was lost entirely.
“All the growth that has occurred in our country over the last decade or more has gone to the upper one and two percent. … If they were getting richer because they were contributing more to our society and everybody else was doing well, that would be one thing; but actually, they are gaining and everybody else is decreasing.”
HOUSE DIVIDED or collective effort
“There has been this growing inequality not only in income but an even greater inequality of wealth. There is a shrinking of opportunity. Right now, it is not just the bottom, but also the middle, the median income earners (half above, half below) are poorer today than they were more than a decade ago.”
If you are wealthy and you have an electoral system that allows you to use your wealth to influence politics, you say, “‘I’d rather have small government that isn’t able to redistribute money, take money away from me. I have private money; I do not need public schools. I have large private land; I don’t need public parks.’” What results is erosion that makes society less efficient, less productive.
We spend more money than other countries in the advanced industrial world, with poorer health outcomes; and the situation is going to get worse as poor and elderly people cannot get access to healthcare. We have to have infrastructure. We are competing in education with countries in Asia that not very long ago were much poorer than we are. We have to have an educated population.
These phenomena are evident protests in states of the U.S. Midwest and in the current budget wrangle in federal Washington.
In a divided society people become tense, they worry more, and then they “start not paying attention to the things that make us cohesive as a nation,” Stiglitz said. A house divided cannot stand.
Collective action creates efficient, productive society. “A successful economy requires collective action.” Many things we must do together.
Sources and notes
“Nobel Economist Joseph Stiglitz: Assault on Social Spending, Pro-Rich Tax Cuts Turning U.S. into Nation ‘Of the 1 Percent, by the 1 Percent, for the 1 Percent,’” Democracy Now, April 7, 2011,
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/4/7/nobel_economist_joseph_stiglitz_assault_on
Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz teaches at the Columbia University Business School, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (Department of Economics) and the School of International and Public Affairs. He is co-founder and president of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), chair of Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought, chair of the Management Board and Director of Graduate Summer Programs, Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester, and member of the CFTC-SEC Advisory Committee on Emerging Regulatory Issues
Among his books: Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy (January 2010); G20 and Recovery and Beyond (the): An Agenda for Global Governance for the Twenty-First Century (PDF), e-book (2011 by The Paris Group); Debates on the Measurement of Global Poverty, with Sudhir Anand, Paul Segal, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, eds., Initiative for Policy Dialogue Series, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, http://www2.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/
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