Joseph Stiglitz — The 1 Percent’s Problem

There are good reasons why plutocrats should care about inequality anyway—even if they’re thinking only about themselves. The rich do not exist in a vacuum. They need a functioning society around them to sustain their position. Widely unequal societies do not function efficiently and their economies are neither stable nor sustainable. The evidence from history and from around the modern world is unequivocal: there comes a point when inequality spirals into economic dysfunction for the whole society, and when it does, even the rich pay a steep price.

Let me run through a few reasons why.

Read it all at Vanity Fair

The 1 Percent’s Problem

by Joseph Stiglitz | Professor of Economics, Columbia University

The good old fallacy of composition again — pursuing individual or class gain irrespective of the whole affects the whole adversely.