Sustainability Essentials | Futurs.org

Extracts from Interview Robert Shiller
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10526

• « Moving ahead to a better capitalism will take 5 or 10 years. If you look at what happened after the great depression, the goverment and private businesses were innovating for a decade long period. When you have a crisis like this it’s an opportunity for innovation, and that’s the way we should view it. »
• « This crisis was caused by a failure in risk management. »
• « This an opportunity to develop a better capitalism. »
• « We exagerated the truth and we went to an era, from the seventies to the present, of almost a new religion - we worship the market. We went too far with that idea, and that’s part of our problem. »
• « Economic profesion has gotten too hung up to rationality. People have a rational side, but they also have an animal spirit side, and it’s really important to understand that side if you want to understand economic fluctuations like the one we’re in now. »
• « There is a problem, that people in the financial sector may not show enough concern for people lower on the economic ladder. And I think actually one of the big problems that we are not confronting well is the rising economic inequality. That’s part of the reason why anger is developing at this stage. Inequality has been getting worse. […] People are losing their sense that America is for us together as the people, and that is so precious, that’s why I support the efforts that Obama has made, but I wish they were stronger. The real mistake that has been made is that forclosure are at a still too higher rate, and unemployment is at a higher rate. I think we should have moved faster and more directly to protect all these people, because now we have a damaged animal spirit. »
• « Unfair behavior tends to grow during a boom’s period, so business ethic do swap somehow, in a growth period. »
• « The biggest problem in this country is not the crisis. It’s the growing inequality. […] I think we should manage inequality in a scientific way. We have to have a plan so that inequality doesn’t get worse. I don’t think we have any reason to want it to get worse. »
• « The idea is to design financial and economic contract around people. […] Sunstein is now part of the Obama administration. It’s very inspiring. I see people like this involved at the highest level of our government. This is new. This is like a new deal. We are thinking at a better level, a more enlightened level about how to change our economic policies. »