The protesters have called into question whether there is a real democracy. Real democracy is more than the right to vote once every two or four years. The choices have to be meaningful. But increasingly, and especially in the US, it seems that the political system is more akin to "one dollar one vote" than to "one person one vote". Rather than correcting the market failures, the political system was reinforcing them.

In 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.

If the President asked you to help, I don't think anybody could refuse, unless one felt that one couldn't be effective.

Trickle-down economics is a myth. Enriching corporations - as the TPP would - will not necessarily help those in the middle, let alone those at the bottom.

In the U.S., you couldn't have job creation with interest rates of 30 or 40 percent. They had a philosophy that said job creation was automatic. I wish it were true. Just a short while after hearing, from the same preachers, sermons about how globalization and opening up capital markets would bring them unprecedented growth, workers were asked to listen to sermons about "bearing pain." Wages began falling 20 to 30 percent, and unemployment went up by a factor of two, three, four, or ten.

I went to Amherst because my brother had gone there before me, and he went there because his guidance counselor thought that we would do better there than at a large university like Harvard.

The country that's been most successful at that is Norway. The more typical countries are those in the Middle East where a small group seizes those resources, uses it to buy arms to make sure that they can oppress the remainder, and you get these great inequalities. So Canada is among the better performing of the natural resource economies, but it's still not up to the best performing.