Rethinking Wealth and Inequality in America

Gar Alperovitz, Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy, University of Maryland; Co-author, Unjust Deserts: How the Rich are Taking our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back
Lew Daly, Senior Fellow, Demos; Co-author, Unjust Deserts: How the Rich are Taking our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back

Alperovitz and Daly argue that the most important factor in economic growth is our expanding knowledge, which is a social inheritance nurtured by governments, institutions and culture across many generations. And yet even as our wealth creation has become highly socialized through the impact of accumulating knowledge, they say the fruits of knowledge – the wealth being generated – are flowing increasingly to the top. They discuss implications of what they see as a new aristocracy reaping huge unearned gains from our collective intellectual wealth and then recall Theodore Roosevelt’s admonition that recapturing such gains for society is the “central condition of progress.”

This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California on January 22, 2010.