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Do We Have Our Rights All Wrong?
Americans love to remind people of their rights. We have ten of them that we’re especially proud of, and some of us can remember most of them. We like to exercise our rights and we like to be right. Over the last 244 years, there are a number of things we have gotten right and a number of things that we have gotten wrong.
As Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says in People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent. “We thought unfettered markets with a solution to every economic problem; we thought finance and globalization and advances in technology would, on their own, bring prosperity to all. We thought that markets were, on their own, always competitive — and so we didn’t understand the dangers of market power. We thought the blind pursuit of profits would lead to societal well-being. We got our politics wrong: too many thought that just having elections was all that democracy was about… we got our values wrong. We forgot that the economy is supposed to serve our citizens, not the other way around.”
Unfortunately, finance has come to overtake all other industries as the key economic driver in America. Even though it only represents about 7% of our economy and creates only 4% of the jobs, according to Rana Foroohar in Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business, it takes about 25% of…
