 The current economic framework, which was predicated on the belief that lowering taxes, liberalization, financial liberalization, pre-liberalization would lead to faster economic growth and to everybody's well-being increasing, we now realize that those ideas were wrong. I'm Joe Stiglick, I teach at Columbia University. The world today is facing a confluence of several problems, many of which are interrelated, represent some real challenges that so far our political system has not been able to address effectively because the fruits of what limited economic growth were not widely shared, large fractions of the population seeing their incomes stagnate or even decline, a notion that liberalization would itself lead to the growth of economies and everybody would be better off. Well, economic theory actually was much more qualified in its endorsement of free trade. For instance, I showed many, many years ago, if trade liberalization could and would increase risk, the consequence of that was that everybody, everybody in all the countries could be worse off. What that says is before you liberalize, you ought to think about making sure your markets are working well, particularly in countries like the United States. Those who were pushing for liberalization at the same time opposed assistance that would have helped people make the adjustment. One of the most important contributions in our understanding of trade were a series of theorems by Paul Samuelson, which showed that in advanced countries liberalization would lower the incomes of unskilled workers. No one, when they were pushing for trade liberalization, even mentioned this, markets are not in general efficient. We've known that markets are neither efficient nor stable and yet policymakers and many economists proceeded as if, quote, economics taught us that markets were always efficient and stable. Tell me, if everybody's against it, why, why is it proceeding? Well, this is a very easy answer. It was a corporate agenda. It was an agenda that had the effect of lowering wages driven mainly by the desire to increase profits. You see that vividly and, for instance, the intellectual property agenda increased the profits of big pharma at the expense of access to life-saving medicines all over the world. We didn't provide the social protection that we should have provided. If we're going to really have sustained economic growth based on globalization, we need to rewrite the rules of globalization. We have to have a deeper reform in our economic system, a new social contract that ensures that growth is inclusive, that there is shared prosperity.