Joseph Stiglitz : Most Americans are worse off than say a decade ago

Joseph Stiglitz : Most Americans are worse off than say a decade ago



Joseph Stiglitz : The point I increased the increase of concentration of income and wealth in the United States has been enormous , it is like looking at the grass growing it happens very slowly but it happens over time and before you know it the lawn is over grown and things have changed , what happened in the last couple of decades is almost a quarter of all the income goes to the upper one percent around 40 percent depends how you measure it of the wealth goes to the upper one percent , Americans used to think of themselves as the land of opportunity , the data do not show that , the data shows that the chance of somebody moving from the lower class to the middle class or from the middle class to the upper class these chances are now much lower than they used to be 20 years ago and lower than in Europe , they start to realize that Most Americans are worse off than say a decade ago

Joseph Stiglitz : The GDP not a good measure of economic performance

Joseph Stiglitz : The GDP not a good measure of economic performance



Joseph Stiglitz : ...what we measure reflects what we do , if we measure the wrong things we'll do the wrong thing , if what we measure does not reflect our values what we think it is important we're doing the wrong things , so there've been a lot , a recognition that our system of GDP does not really reflect in many ways , is not a good measure of economic performance , let me just give you a couple of examples that were brought up by the crisis , GDP in the years before the crisis looked i the US like we are doing very well 46% of the profits were in the financial sector but those profits were just a made up number , a large fraction of the investment was in the real estate all based in public prices again not an accurate reflection what we were doing was not sustainable , that was not captured in the statistics while GDP per capita was going up most Americans were getting worse off , is that a good system ? if most people are worse off year after year even if GDP per capita was going up ? so what we thought it's important is at least to open up the discussion on say are our statistics really capturing what we think is important ....