Income Inequality and The Land of Lost Opportunity

Vanity Fair has a video with Joseph Stiglitz that’s worth spending a few minutes taking in.

“Inequality in economics gets translated to inequality in politics….

“People at the top always worry that a strong government will use its powers to take some of their income away from them, to restrict monopoly power, so they try to weaken government…

“Mobility,  opportunity, in the US today is lower than it is in any of the advanced industrial countries.  This notion of America as the land of opportunity has vanished.

[Produced by the Institute for New Economic Thinking.– take a look]

There is also an adapted excerpt from his forthcoming book, The Price of Inquality,

  Consider the Walton family: the six heirs to the Walmart empire possess a combined wealth of some $90 billion, which is equivalent to the wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent of U.S. society.