Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research, more on research on lifestyle drugs than on life saving drugs, and almost nothing on diseases that affect developing countries only. This is not surprising. Poor people cannot afford drugs, and drug companies make investments that yield the highest returns.
Joseph StiglitzIn the midst of the East Asian crisis, there were choices. One choice would have been to encourage countries to implement a bankruptcy law that could have threatened the interests of the lenders. Workers' rights should be a central focus of development. But nowhere did issues of workers' rights, including the right to participate in the decisions which would affect their lives in so many ways, get raised.
Joseph StiglitzFor the United States, our political system is clearly distorted. We have gerrymandering so that there is a situation where a million more voters who vote for Democrats, yet the House is controlled by the Republicans. So clearly, the way our Congress operates is important. The other big issue is the influence of money in politics. It's not only campaign contributions. People like Trump - either you become very dependent on your benefactors or you are very rich.
Joseph StiglitzWhat Trump has announced - that he is going to not obey rules by which we govern our relations with other countries. He's going to reject the treaties that we have had in the past. He is going to go from what is called a multilateral system, where we all work together, to trying to deal country by country and basically throw out what has been achieved over a 60-year period.
Joseph StiglitzThe IMF is a more complicated issue. I think there is a broad sentiment among both the left and the right that the IMF may be doing more harm than good. On the right, there's the view that it represents a form of corporate welfare that is counter to the IMF's own ideology of markets. But anybody who has watched government from the inside recognizes that governments need institutions, need ways to respond to crises. If the IMF weren't there, it would probably be reinvented. So the issue is fundamentally reform.
Joseph Stiglitz