 Let me anticipate my worthy opponent. My worthy opponent is going to talk a lot today about rights, about those things that are near to us that are unalienable, that come to us because of birth, that come to us because of our citizenry, that come to us for whatever reason and about the beauty of the individual against the sometimes very oppressive state, whether that state is a local community or a state itself or a federal government, we'll hear plenty of that. And it is going to be attractive. I mean, after all, asking an individual whether they have enough in the way of individual rights against the state is like asking farmers, at least in Minnesota, where their prices are high enough or interest rates are low enough, right? It can never be enough for you. I want to make sure that in this discussion, this debate, we think about something else that goes with rights, responsibilities, obligations, or to put another way, community. My two favorite books by Adam Smith are The Wealth of Nations that are all about the privacy, the property, the contract that goes with it. But of course, at the same time we wrote another book, We Study Less, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, was about what our obligations are as members of the community, as CEOs, as CFOs, as members of our church, our temple, our mosque, as voters. These are not separate dimensions. They are two sides of the same coin. And so as we hear about rights, as we hear about how the state may step in for inequality and oppose a gun to our head for our choices, think about the other side. Think about the world without it. Think about where we say, you know what? Let's privatize that. Let's have the corporation be the same. Let's have a corporocracy rather than a democracy. You know what? Let's let individuals do it all on their own. Let's have an anarchy. Let's have crowd sourcing on your rights. Now, to the question, right? The question is about whether inequality matters for these outcomes for us. Whether it's a, I should say, not so much a just or fair, but let's say a more efficient, more effective common wheel that we're a part of, more wealth for all of us, more wealth for some of us, but enough wealth for us all, when we reduce some of that inequality. I believe that we serve ourselves when we serve others on this thing. And then I believe in serving those two, it's not a kind of zero sum game. You know what? We all believe, including Yaron who's going to speak in a moment here, in a common defense. That's part of the Constitution just before promoting the social welfare. We promote a common defense and the state defends us. We buy aircraft carriers together. But we also buy interstate highways together. We buy public schools together. We buy infrastructure together. We buy hydroelectric dams. We buy healthcare. We buy all sorts of things. We may not buy it always efficiently. We may not buy it always effectively. It may not always be bought above board. And in there, we need to make sure that people are held accountable. And I'm here to tell you today that the best way for accountability begins and ends with how you act as community members, as members of a polity voting, participating. And if you want to be a part in reducing that inequality and building that public infrastructure and if you're worried about the ineffectiveness that goes with it, be a part of the system. Don't opt out. You know, the one right I strip individuals of right now would be the right to opt out of voting. I want you to show up on election day and be a part of it. You can hand in a blank or you can walk right back out. But I want you to be a part of it. If your voice is heard, then those public figures as well as the private figures that do all the important things for us in this country and across countries to address issues about wealth creation and wealth distribution, we're going to do a better job. Now, this is not just about how democracies work in a place like the United States. And I'll tell you more about that at the next time I speak. Thank you. So is increasing inequality a concern? Should it be in a concern? Well, there's an empirical assumption in there which I will start by being a little skeptical about is I think all of you should be. The empirics about inequality are very, very messy. There's a lot of disagreement about this stuff. This is not clear cut what we even mean by inequality. Inequality of income, inequality of wealth, inequality of standard of living, inequality of consumption depends how you define the terms. What is income? Income per household, income per individual, when, what period. There is a debate out there in academia about how we define these concepts, about what is really going on in the world, around what's really going on in the United States, to what extent we can compare measures of inequality here to there. Ginny coefficients I think pretty uniformly are not the state of the art if you will with regard to this kind of stuff. They're distorted and perverted. But we're not going to get into a huge empirical discussion. I don't think it's that interesting. But I'm just going to say right here and now, I'm skeptical about a lot of this data. Let me also say across nations, across nations that data is unequivocal. Across nations, inequality is shrinking. That's because the rest of the world is getting rich or richer than it used to be. Used to be dirt poor. We used to be way above everybody else. And particularly in Asia, some places now in Africa, you're seeing poor people rise out of poverty. And one of the unbelievable untold stories of the last 30 years that nobody talks about, which to me is horrific, is the fact that close to a billion people, a billion with a B, a billion people have risen out of poverty over the last 30 years. Because particularly in Asia, they have introduced elements of market economies. And wherever you introduce the market economy, guess what happens? People get wealthy. They produce. They create. They make stuff. And that's what's happening in China, happening in India, happening in South Korea, happening in Taiwan, happening in Hong Kong, happening pretty much in most of Southeast Asia. So to the extent that we've introduced market economies in those areas, we've seen poverty diminished dramatically. Dramatically, I don't know how many of you have been to China. It's quite an experience. It's hard to believe unless you actually see it. So inequality across nations has actually shrunk, less of a problem. We slowed our growth to slow dramatically. China is growing at a huge rate. But I want to put the empirics aside. We can have lots of discussions about the empirics. But I want to put them aside. I want to talk about the normative issue. Let's say this was true. I'm willing to go. Let's say inequality in the United States was at an all-time high. Should we care? And my view is unequivocally, no, we should not. I would actually argue the opposite. I celebrate inequality. I think inequality is fantastic. I would be horrified by a world in which we were all equal. How boring would that be? We are all different. We're all unique. We're all unequally in almost every dimension of our lives. All income inequality does is a manifestation in monetary terms of the fact that we have different skills, we have different talents, we have different motivations. There's nothing wrong with that. That's a good thing. We've chosen a career in which we will never fly in private jets. I don't think either of us regrets that. I think we like the career that we have. We chose it not based on just monetary factors. We're pretty smart. We might have been able to do a hedge fund or something. But we chose not to go to Wall Street because money is not what life is all about. There are lots of parameters about life. Some people chose to go to Wall Street or to go to a startup or to do something else. And they made a huge amount of money. Good for them. I celebrate that fact. I also know that in a market economy, the way you make money is by doing what? Creating value. Value that I'm benefiting from. I'm much better. My life is so much better because Steve Jobs chose to do this. And he did it for himself, not for me. Bill Gates, whatever you guys do in your business, I'm better off with that. So I don't resent that and I don't think anybody should resent it. We should celebrate achievement. We should celebrate wealth. Now, there are real problems in the US economy. There are real problems in our society. Inequality is not the problem. It's a diversion. It's a distraction. There are problems. There's problems with education. You guys talked a lot about education. I agree completely. Our educational system is rotten. And for low income people, it is worse than rotten. It's borderline criminal, how bad it is. It's awful. Is that the timer? Oh, we switched, okay. Inequality is an important issue to both be celebrated and, if you will, to be addressed and debated for it. I think it's both a symptom and a cause of issues that we can deal with and deal with in a way that's better for all of us individually and better for us as a community for it. I think it's a symptom because it reflects in many aspects how there are differences, market differences in the opportunities that are forwarded individuals for education, for healthcare, for infrastructure and the like. And they're not just based on, if you will, economicers or wealth considerations. They're geographic. I'm from Minnesota. There are very different issues about how we treat and how we provide opportunity to our rural citizens, our rural brothers and sisters. And it is in an urban area like New York City or Washington DC on these things. That's important. You know, the international aspects of this also are important because we're finding with this great change that there is a variety of different types of capitalism that aren't necessarily like ours that seem to do quite well. Your own's absolutely right. A lot of the developing countries are growing more quickly and they're doing it with their own little form of capitalism. It doesn't always look like ours. That's okay. That's celebrating not just the rights of individuals, but the rights of communities aside, how best for them to organize. As long as they're based on some kind of a public accountability for this. At the end though, I believe also that inequality is a cause. It's a cause when it becomes so disparate that it causes individuals to opt out of the system, to not be part of it, to not vote, to say it's not my system anymore no matter how hard I work, how hard we work as a, and that fractures community. We need to find ways to let individuals see that there are ladders for them for it. Public infrastructure, public health care, public education, other things that are out there that are affordable, are in the interest of bringing those individuals back into that system, making them part of it and addressing inequality. We'll also address all of our needs as well. Thank you. So individuals are opting out of the system, are upset at the system we have today and they should be. But the reason is not inequality. The reason is not that somebody else is making money. The reason is that their opportunities are limited. The reason is that they're being held back. And that's where the debate should be. What is it that is holding back certain people in our economy from being successful? I think that's a worthy debate to have. It's not inequality. I think there's a worthy debate to be had as we said about education, about the fact that some people make money by creating value, and we like that, but then other people make money by gaming the system, through colonialism, through manipulating government, through getting subsidies, through getting tax favors, all kinds of other favors. That's a worthy debate to have. That's a real problem in economy. Has nothing to do with inequality, has to do with cronyism and the structure of our government. And then ultimately, there is a real problem of economic growth. Economy's not growing. It's not growing anywhere near its capacity, capabilities, potential. There's a worthy discussion there. But as we'll discuss in question four, I guess, that has nothing to do with inequality. There's no relationship between inequality and economic growth. The real issues there in all of these are the role of government. As government grows, as government intervenes more, as government taxes and regulates more, economic opportunities decline. The more we redistribute wealth, the more we institutionalize people into poverty. The more we limit economic opportunities for people, but also we're limiting economic growth, and we're limiting the more the government intervenes, the more the government participates. The worse our economy is. Again, nothing to do with inequality has everything to do with the way we perceive government and the way government functions. And lastly, education is a great example of this, in my view, because education is run by whom? By the government. We have a dominant government monopoly in education. Guess what? It sucks.