 Another great hero of mine and of the country is Joseph Stiglitz. You know, Harry Truman said, somewhat crudely but famously, that he was always looking for a one-armed economist. He said, the economist I talked to say on the one hand and then on the other hand, well, he'd be awfully proud to know Joseph Stiglitz. Dr. Stiglitz is an economist and university professor at Columbia University, co-chair of the high-level expert group on the measurement of economic performance and social progress at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and chief economist at the Roosevelt Institute. He was a recipient, as you know, of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He is the former senior vice president and chief economist at the World Bank and during the administration of President Bill Clinton was a member and chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. Based on economic or based on academic citations, he is the fourth most influential economist in the world. Well, I think that's out of date. I think he's the number one influential economist and I'm proud of it. Dr. Joseph Stiglitz. Well, that was a very powerful speech by Reverend Barber and it was a speech probably to end this conference with but they were worried about technology and I would have to fill in for him if they couldn't get him through with technology. So I'm here at the end of the after, as I say, as you all felt, a very moving talk. And let me say, I talked to Reverend Barber more than a year ago and he had talked about how powerful he thought the Kerner Commission was and how it was an occasion that we ought to be reflecting on what had happened and we ought to take advantage of this to, he knew what had happened and to use this as an occasion to renew our commitment to do something to fill in what we hadn't done over the last 50 years. Well, 50 years ago, the Kerner Report on the Civil Orders that had broken out over the previous year provided a stark description of the conditions in America that had led to the disorders. Their basic conclusion still rings true and I find it striking, we haven't repeated the words that many students learned as they studied the Kerner Commission 30 years ago. Our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal. It featured a country in which African-Americans faced systematic discrimination with inadequate education and housing and totally lacking economic opportunities. For them, there was no American dream. Underlying all of this was a diagnosis of, again, something that has probably not gotten as much discussion as it should have, a racial attitude and behavior of white Americans towards black Americans as the cause. Racial prejudice has shaped our history decisively and now threatens to affect our future. It was also striking that was brought up in the very beginning talk that in the beginning of the Kerner Report, they talk about the discussion of Dr. Clark who talks about having looked at these problems 50 years, almost 50 years earlier and how little progress had been made. The Kerner Commission was prescient in many ways in setting out an agenda for the country on how to achieve a more equal society free from the racism that played such an important role in the riots, the cause of which had led to the commission's creation. A recent report of the Roosevelt Institute as well as a multitude of other studies shows the glass, at least in my view, far less than half full. There are inequalities of income, wealth, opportunity, talked about justice and wrapping it all together, inequalities of power. While many of the reforms the Kerner Commission called for require significant increases in spending, the last 50 years has seen a squeezing of the overall budget of the federal government for expenditures other than the military and programs like Social Security and Medicare. And the argument that we don't have the money rings hollow today after we've had a tax cut for the billionaires and the corporations of somewhere between two and three trillion dollars over the next 10 years. So the argument that we don't have the resources is just wrong. It's not that the country cannot afford these expenditures it can and as I suggest there are ways of raising revenue that would actually enhance economic performance. In the few remaining minutes and not wanting to let the moment of Reverend Barber's tremendous speech go by, I want to sort of summarize five ideas from economics. I'm an economist and so I should talk about that from that perspective. I should perhaps mention a little bit of a personal note. I was one of the young Americans in the 60s who went down to the south and tried to integrate, who marched with, who was here in D.C. with at the famous march in Washington and heard this, I have a dream speech. I had switched from doing theoretical physics to doing economics. I'd grown up in Gary, Indiana, which those of you who know is one of the cities today which is marked by such a divide. But even as I was growing up I could see the racial discrimination, the economic divide the fact that our economic system wasn't working. What I didn't know was that this was the golden age of capitalism, that this was as good as it ever got. But as a young person strongly influenced by what I've seen I felt that I had to do what I could to use what gifts I have been given to see what can be done to make a different country. And so over the last 50-some years I've been trying to understand these issues. And the first point I wanted to raise is that it was really the point that Martin Luther King said he didn't have to get a Ph.D. to figure this out. But it is something that the economics profession probably doesn't fully understand and certainly people in the White House don't, that you cannot separate the issues of racial justice and economic justice more broadly. They are so integrated and they can only be addressed together. The second thing is something that has really changed in our perspective over the last 50 years. When I was studying we thought that there was a trade-off. If you wanted more equality you would have to give up on economic growth. Today we see the two as complementary. That you can have a better economy if you have a fairer economy, if you have more social economic justice. I wrote a book about this called The Price of Inequality and the title suggests the main theme that we are paying in our society today a very high price for the high level of inequality. Somebody mentioned that America is number one in many dimensions. One of the dimensions is the highest rate of incarceration and another dimension is the highest level of inequality among the advanced countries. And by long measure and not only the highest level of economic inequality we have among the advanced countries one of the lowest levels of equality of opportunity. So the idea that America is the American dream that everybody can make it from the bottom to the top it's a myth. It's a myth like a lot of other myths that we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better but in fact it impedes our being able to address the real problems ensuring that everybody does have opportunity. The third is something that again has been emphasized over and over again today is that the nexus of all the issues that we've been talking about housing, education, jobs, health, criminal justice you cannot address any one of these issues without addressing the others. You have to have an economic infrastructure that allows people to get from their homes to their jobs that exist and if there are no jobs that exist what good is training. So we have to solve all of these. There used to be a joke about one of our presidents who had a hard time chewing gum and walking at the same time. You have to be able to solve all of these problems, address all of these problems at the same time. The fourth is the intersection, the interaction of economics and politics. Many, it's not most of the issues that we've talked about, government is at the center. Government is setting the rules of the game. It's deciding what monetary policy is going to be and therefore whether we're going to be at full employment. It's determining how we're spending our money whether we're giving tax cuts for the billionaires or for ordinary Americans. It's setting a framework for our health care systems, for our housing, for our zoning. So every part of our society, government is there and that's the way it should be. As somebody mentioned, the Constitution begins we the people and it's we, it's not we the stakes, it's we and that means from a point of view of economics we say collective action is necessary for solving our problems. That even in the world, our mythical world of 19th century where people were living in the homesteads they got together to raise barrings because they couldn't do it on their own. But in the 21st century, our whole society, our whole economy has become interdependent. Most of us today living in cities and can you imagine living in a city without simple regulations like stop lights? New York would be in a total gridlock. But every other, if we had pollution, the kinds of cities that we had in the 19th century that Dickens described were polluted cities where people lived lives that were short and brutish. Basic research that has led us to live the lives that we have, the longer lives, the healthier lives that most of us live, but some of us are not, are all based on research. I should have mentioned something that has not come out. You know, America is now the only advanced country where life expectancy is in decline. And this is not, one of the interesting divides is African American lives are actually increasing. Longevity is increasing. It's white Americans whose life's expectancies are in decline. And they're in decline in part because of despair. The, what are called diseases of despair that Ankees and Angus Deaton have talked about alcoholism, suicide, drug overdose. Let alone the lifestyles of obesity that are so influenced by corporations that have tried to create addictive foods that induce people to face these health problems. So the point I want to make though is that all of this, we live in a world today that we cannot get away from the government having a key role in the way our society functions. So that means that the rules set by the government are going to be pivotal. There's no such thing as unfettered markets. Markets don't exist in the vacuum. They have to be structured. And how we structure it determines the kind of inequality that we have and how people, opportunities people face. And that's where the critical issue that Reverend Barber talked, the issue that Reverend Barber talked about becomes so critical. It requires us to try to change that direction to politics. There has been for the last 35 years a force going the other way that economic inequality has led to increasing political inequality. We've moved from a society in which we talked about one person, one vote to a society which is more better described by one dollar, one vote. And there is a process of making that worse and worse. It's a vicious circle where the more economic inequality there is, there's more political inequality. They then use that political power to set the rules of the game described about the process of disenfranchisement that is going on. And that then gives them more power to reset the rules of both the economic and political game in ways to favor themselves. And the final thing is there are global consequences. Just as we are embedded in our American society, the world has also become more interconnected. We can't separate ourselves from what happens in the rest of the world. And the notion that one country could write the rules for the whole world is absurd. That we are interdependent. We trade. The molecules, our carbon molecules, our greenhouse gases, don't carry passports and there's no visas when they go to another country. And so we have a common atmosphere. And if we don't address the problems of climate change, everybody will suffer. And we are, even in America, are already suffering in climate events that have cost this country alone some hundred, more than a hundred billion dollars this year, last year alone. So these are just, you know, and the threat of nuclear catastrophes, the importance of nuclear disarmament. Again, are things that we can't isolate ourselves from. If one of those disasters happen, we know we will be affected. But the power of America doesn't come from our military power. We weren't able to do anything about our small countries. We've been fighting a war in Afghanistan for 17 years. We couldn't win against a small country, Iraq, after, you know, a long, long war. The real strength of America has never been our military power. It's really been our soft power. But our soft power is based on our moral leadership. And our moral leadership, we can't have moral leadership if our country is wracked by racism. If it's wracked by leadership and having the most unequal society and a society without a lack of opportunity. So if we are going to play the role in the world that we can and we should and we need to, we will have to address the problems within our country, the problems that we've all been talking about today. Just a few more remarks. First, I mentioned before the cost. Some people have talked about the cost of doing some things about the problems we've talked about. But I would emphasize the cost of not doing things about the inequality in any of the dimensions. That what this inequality, both our racial inequality and our economic inequality, is a matter of choice. And we've been making the wrong choices. And that's why there's been so little progress over the last 50 years. There are these economic consequences. And once we realize that these things have been a matter of choice, that means it's imperative that we ought to be making different choices. And I think the discussion today has highlighted that there are actually a rich set of choices that we can make. We can change in every area that we've talked about today. People have presented alternatives and I hope all of you will read the book because there will be a richer set of alternatives discussed there. I think it's been clear that for those choices to occur, there will need to be political action. And that action has to be based on this kind of broad coalition that I think the Reverend Barber talked about so strongly. In a way, the discussion of class as it used to be separated out either the poor or the middle class, but you might say the wonderful aspect of inequality in America today is it's 99% versus the 1%. And it's probably 99.9%. And even among that 1%, there are a lot of people who understand, who have an enlightened self-interest and realize that the direction in which our country is going is the wrong direction. And so in that sense, I think we may be at a good time that there is an opportunity that the Reverend pointed out so forcefully that there is this coalition of people beginning to realize the consequences of directions that we are going and that need to bring us all together. Just two more points. The first is to reiterate what Reverend Barber said, and I had planned to say it anyway, which is the moral language is an important language to use. He gave a list of all the things that are right and wrong. And that's not a question of religious. He comes to it from a religious background. But I think those of us who were engaged in the civil rights movement 50 years ago, many of us did not come from a religious background. It was a question of just right and wrong of what it meant to be an American. And so this moral language, I think, is an important way to speaking across our entire country because it is in the end a moral issue. There are technocratic aspects that I've talked about, issues of trade-offs, issues of complementarities, issues of economics that we can talk about, issues of policy. But in the end, these are fundamentally moral issues of our values and what kind of people we want to be and what kind of society do we want to be. And finally, I want to end on a note of hope. I do believe, as many people have said today, that there is an alternative way of running our society and running our economy. I actually think it's a way that would lead to more prosperity and a more dynamic economy. So I think the way we have run our economy and the way we have run our society has not been good for us. I think that it's not been good for our economy. I think it is also the case that our economic system has contributed to the moral problems. I think our economic system has contributed to the moral depravity that we've seen in our bankers and the people in the auto industry that have tried to cheat on the emissions and industry after industry. And so you can't separate out economics from the deeper nature of our society. So the reason for changing this is not just economics. The moral issue is what kind of society and what kind of people do we want to be? But I want to end, as I say, on a note of hope. And that is what gives me hope today is the enthusiasm that you see among the young people, how they've turned out and so many protest movements. It is their country, after all. It is their future. And so the fact that they've understood this and that they've taken it to heart and the students that I teach at Columbia really does give me a great deal of hope. And so in concluding, I just want to mention two phrases that stood out from those days more than 50 years ago. One was what Martin Luther King said, I have a dream. And we all have the dream that what he said would eventually be realized, taken longer than I think we had hoped, but it still should be our dream. And the final thing is to remember the words of the hymn that was sung as part of the Civil Rights Movement 50 years ago. We shall overcome. Thank you. Well, this has been a wonderful day. It's been a pivotal day, I think. We all leave here with the inspired, as Cory Booker says, to do something. We can all do something. And also, I think as John Lewis says, get in the way. Get in the way. And we can take heart to, I think as we spread the message that Dolores Huerta originated when she was a partner in agitation with Cesar Chavez. Yes, we can. Yes, we can.