The Price of Inequality by Joseph E. Stiglitz

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America is one of the world’s largest and prosperous developed countries in the world, but take a closer look and you realize that the great United States of America has an alarmingly large amount of poverty. Where there once used to be an “American Dream” there now lies the cold hard truth, there is less and less opportunity every day and growing inequality every second. Joseph E. Stiglitz how America has turned into a country that would be unrecognizable to any of the founding fathers. In The Price of InequalityStiglitz visits this problem and searches for the source of the economic inequality that the United States is faced with today. Stiglitz came to the conclusion that America is declining and turning into a society like the one depicted in Orwell’s 1984 due to the ever present economic problems around not only the United States but the world as well. George Orwell’s prediction for the society of the world in the year 1984 was one where information was kept from the people and that the people were fed lies by the government that citizens took to be their truths. An Orwellian society is one where the open, free, and democratic, to some extent, society is being threatened or destroyed. Stiglitz recognizes that a lot of critics believe that the society today is one that had a likeness to the one in the Orwell’s cautionary tale, 1984. The United States today is an Orwellian society in the respect that the government and the top 1% of the population shapes the perceptions of the society. Everyone knows that power is in numbers so in order for the top 1% to subdue the power of the majority of the nation is done through propaganda and methods of what is perceived as“brain washing” due to the malleability of the public perception. ... ... middle of paper ... ...is methods then 1984 might just happen just forty years later than when Orwell predicted. The world will be controlled by the government which will be controlled by the rich, and the rest of the population will just be proletarians who are not cared for by anyone but themselves and stuck in an eternal hole of debt and inequality. What does the American economy have to lose? If the solutions proposed by Stiglitz do not work then nothing will change, the country will still be unequal, but if they do actually work then the nation can be raised out of the downward spiral of inequality that it is currently stuck in. Logically it doesn’t make sense not to try and make things better and within The Price of Inequality, there is a detailed plan on how to attack such a problem. Works Cited Stiglitz, Joseph E. The Price of Inequality:. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2012. Print.

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