Joseph E Stiglitz, Select pages of “The Great Divide”
With Trump in office I realized that I needed to read this book that has been on my desk for the past year. And lo and behold, I have found someone who has more or less the same read on things that I have been expressing since 2008 in this website.
Here are some pages in the middle of the book that kind of provide a wrap up of his views of what has evolved over the past 35 years. What he says, and I agree with whole heartedly, keeping in mind that this was written in 2014 and published in 2015, is that the conditions that set up the country for a Trump type situation did not emerge out of a vacuum.
Obama was kind of the last straw. He talked about all the hope for equality coming out of the Great Recession and yet he allowed Ivy League Economic Elites and Bankers , namely Bernanke and Geithner, to decimate the whole inequality issue.
So here is “The Great Divide” and the Chapter on The Myth of the Golden Age, pages 143-149:
I apologize for the scanning quality and the fact that I like to underline books when I read them, and realized part way through this chapter that I really needed to underline most of it, so I quit underlining. In this book much of the content comes from Stigliz’s blogs and he does make frequent reference to Gary Indiana and his experience in growing up in a steel and oil refining town. I also maybe relate to the fact that he and I were born in the same year, 1943.