"The Economists' Hour." "False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society," - PBS NewsHour

Interesting interview with Binyamin Appelbaum of The New York Times. First, they talked about the lowering of interest rate, but then moved to his book titled as above.

Binyamin Appelbaum:

My book is the story of a revolution that began in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, where economists started playing a much larger role in shaping public policy, and specifically in urging that the government should step back from active management of economic conditions, stop regulating airlines, stop regulating the financial sector, cut back on taxation, and let markets sort things out.

And the real consequence of that has been a tremendous rise in inequality. The government stopped intervening to prevent inequality. It stopped viewing inequality as a public policy problem. And, as a consequence, we have ended up with a lot more inequality.


Judy Woodruff:

And you're saying this was the result of the influence of a number of prominent economists who worked in different places in the federal government?

Binyamin Appelbaum:

That's right.

So as they start to influence policy-makers, they come in, in the late '60s and early '70s and start basically saying to policy-makers, listen, the goal should — the focus should be on growth, and, if you're trying to deal with inequality, it will come at the expense of growth. So instead of redistributing, what you want to do is get out of the way, let businesses concentrate and prosper, reduce taxation, reduce regulation. And the effect of not trying to prevent inequality is that you end up with a lot more of it.

I think our problem is inequality. It has proved to be bad for both people who are suffering from a lack of opportunity and for the economy as a whole, because it prevents them from contributing as much as they could.

And, therefore, the answer is to do something we haven't done in more than a generation, which is to make reducing inequality a specific focus of public policy, to be asking of our public policies, are they leveling the playing field? Are they giving Americans a chance?

One easy example of this is universal pre-kindergarten, an area in which we know that, if you're investing and allowing children to get into the classroom, you improve their prospects in life. That's the kind of policy that we need.

I think there's a growing consensus that we need something different.

But I think we are in a period again, as we were in the 1930s and the 1970s, where it's not clear what comes next, where there's still a profound debate about how we move into the next thing, what types of restraints we should place on markets, what role government should be playing in the market and in society.

And I think this presidential election is going to be substantially about those questions.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/what-feds-2nd-interest-rate-cut-in-3-months-says-about-the-u-s-economy and scroll down

Video starts at the 3:17