This is an IHeart podcast.

I'm Maeve Higgins and this is Solvable, interviews with the world's most innovative thinkers working to solve the world's biggest problems.

My solvable is to address the problems of extreme inequality in the United States.

That's Joseph Stiglitz, economist, public policy analyst and professor at Columbia University.

Oh, and Nobel laureate. Now, even a cursory look at the levels of inequality in the US

can make your head spin. I'm sitting in a studio in Manhattan, which is home to many of this

country's real estate moguls, media empires and hedge fund billionaires. And I'm also just a few

miles away from the South Bronx,

which the 2010 census found to be the poorest district in the nation.

Income disparities have become so pronounced

that America's top 10% now average more than nine times as much income

as the other 90% of us.

It's more than 10 years since the financial crisis that

shook our world and caused enormous suffering, and in that time, the fortunes of the richest

have actually risen dramatically. The number of billionaires have almost doubled, with a new billionaire

created every two days between 2017 and 2018.

Meanwhile, the official poverty rate for all US families has actually barely changed,

with an estimated 140 million people in this country now counted as either poor or low income.

Joseph Stiglitz sees the US as an outlier amongst other wealthy countries,

and he studies why inequality is much more severe here.

He works to understand why it is that we're so far behind other comparable countries,

and really he argues that it's down to our policies,

...