Liberaltarianism (noun) \li-b(ə-)rəl-ter-ē- ən-i-z-əm\

1. The belief that citizens ought to be free from both government and corporate tyranny
2. A fusion of liberal and libertarian ideals.

Liberaltarian Ideals

1) Government is Prone to Bureaucracy, Waste and Corruption.

The free market is the backbone of American wealth. Handouts promote helplessness and create a culture of poverty. There should never be incentives not to work.

2) Corporations are Prone to the Exploitation of Workers, Consumers, the Environment, and Society.

Without regulation, corporations invariably provide unsafe working conditions, produce unsafe and unhealthy products, fail to pay unskilled workers living wages and pollute the environment with reckless abandon.

3) The Economic Policies of the Right Afford Unnatural, Unearned and Unjust Advantages to the Previously Wealthy.

The particular brand of free market touted by conservatives rewards the mere possession of capital more than actual work, which invariably pools the majority of our country’s wealth into the hands of the few with ruinous effects on the economy. This ironically fosters a market less free than what we could create with sensible regulation.

Introduction

The core belief of Liberaltarianism is quite simple: A strong economy requires a strong middle class of consumers/workers with money in their pockets to spend. As they do spend, money trickles up to business owners. Some of that money trickles back down in the form of wages, but what trickles down is always less then what trickles up, otherwise the businesses would be operating at a loss. This upward movement of money is the engine of the economy. By favoring policies that reward work instead of those that reward wealth, we keep money in the pockets of the middle class and keep the economy strong.

Liberaltarianism promotes workfare instead of welfare, seeks equal opportunity not equal outcomes. At its core, is the belief that the wealthy benefit the most from American workers and thus not only have a moral, practical and philosophical responsibility to keep society running and workers healthy, but it is in their long term self interest to do so. Liberaltarianism is based upon the idea that humans are basically good, and that people don’t mind helping the less fortunate when they know they are not being exploited by lazy freeloaders.

History has shown us that this goal can be fraught with problems. The fact is, whenever the government gives something to someone, it’s taking from someone else. And often the best intentioned “help” can end up create learned helplessness that dooms people to the culture of poverty. Any government interaction in the free market requires a robust philosophical defense, as well as persuasive pragmatic arguments.  This web-site hopes to do both.

A Liberaltarian Manifesto

Preface

Economics and Human Psychology

There’s a reason economics is considered a social science; there are many schools of economic thought that look mathematically sound on paper, but fall apart in real life because they fail to mesh with humans’ psychological motivations. The prime example is Communism. The mantra “From each according to his skill, to each according to his need” might work quite well in computer simulations when humans are represented by binary 1s and 0s, but in real life, we have emotions and we’re unlikely to exert extra effort when we don’t get to enjoy the fruits of our own labor. This is why communism was a miserable failure, and capitalism works so well; humans are motivated by self interest.

But we are not entirely motivated by self interest, and the failure to recognize this one of the failures of conservative economic philosophy.

Just as communism created situations incompatible with our emotional makeup, so too do economic philosophies based completely on greed and profit. For instance, when an uninsured single mother rushes into the hospital with a baby with third degree burns, it is simply not in our human nature to deny her or her child care. Should doctors have to pay theses expenses out of their own pockets? Or should we lay the burden upon the patient, causing them to delay care and forcing them into bankruptcy?

Or consider how the fire fighters of Obion Country, Tennessee must have felt in September of 2010 when they stood outside a home and watched it burn to the ground because the homeowner had not paid the requisite $75 fee for fire protection in advance. If the absurdity of this situation isn’t readily apparent (and offensive) to you, then I suggest you have lost some of your own humanity. You’ve likely embraced a Libertarian or conservative philosophy that works quite well on paper and in computer simulations when humans are represented by binary 1s and 0s, but fails in real life because it neglects the simple fact that humans are human.  We are not ones or zeros, nor are we robots, we are complex emotional beings and the more congruent our economic system is with those emotions, the more successful it will be.

So to truly understand human’s relationship with money, we need to start at the beginning: the very beginning.

Chapter One

Cavemen, Cooperation and Cash

“You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”.

Social scientists tell us this is how morality evolved. It’s called “reciprocal altruism”. Humans that formed friendships were more likely to survive than those who created enemies. Why? Because friends grant favors. Friends cooperate. Some tasks require a helping hand – like building shelters and moving large objects. Other tasks benefit from a division of labor – ‘I’ll hunt the deer if you gather the firewood.’ These win-win relationships provide a distinct advantage over those who live in isolation. It’s the reason we evolved to be “nice”.

We did not, however, evolve to be pushovers. In order for any behavior to evolve it must benefit our own genes. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that our generosity and affection towards any individual is greatly correlated with the likelihood of reciprocation. In close relationships this blossoms into nearly unconditional love. We don’t think twice about helping friends and family move house or plant trees. We’ll even give them kidneys. But evolution makes sure such wide eyed affection dissipates farther away we get from our “inner circle” of confidants and we encounter people we are unlikely to see again. We are more wary when we deal with strangers. Yes, we may offer an initial helping hand, but we are also more likely to keep score of indebtedness lest we be taken advantage of. In fact, that tendency is so strong that virtually every culture in the world has some sort of physical currency that allows us to do exactly that – keep score of our “favors”. We use scribs of paper that act as IOUs for acts of reciprocal altruism, transferable from one relationship to the next.

We’re talking about money. It is the currency of “favors”. Its transferable quality means we no longer need extract a favor from those we help; they can pay us with “coupons” redeemable anywhere.  We help a car company sell cars every day from 9-5, but then we use wages they pay us to buy food from a grocery. Money is the grease that turns the wheels of reciprocal altruism amongst strangers – it makes us considerably more likely to help those we don’t know.

The Beauty of the Free Market

If money did not exist, it’s difficult to imagine a thousand engineers slaving tirelessly to create the perfect iphone, and another army of workers distributing millions of them in our Christmas stockings each year. But money does exist. And thousands of engineers and workers do exactly that, and we have to do favors to other people in order to acquire the funds to purchase those iphones… It ends up being favors all around for everyone.

The laws of supply and demand keep everything running smoothly. Sought after goods and services thrive, undesired products and behavior die out. It’s this tendency for markets to fulfill our desires perfectly that Adam Smith called “the Invisible hand”.   He stated:

If each consumer is allowed to choose freely what to buy and each producer is allowed to choose freely what to sell and how to produce it, the market will settle on a product distribution and prices that are beneficial to all the individual members of a community, and hence to the community as a whole.

Throw a bunch of greedy humans together in a free market and they quickly start cooperating like they’re all on the same team – dividing up tasks; butcher, baker, candlestick maker, until everyone seems to have what they want and need.

It’s not just a beautiful theory, but it works beautifully in practice: The catastrophic failure of the Soviet Union, coupled with the stunning economic expansion of the West has firmly established the superiority of the free market in the minds of virtually every serious thinker in the world.

Barack Obama has described the free market as “the best invention to allocate resources and produce enormous prosperity for America or the world that’s ever been designed.”

In 2009, when Hillary Clinton was asked by Charlie Rose what values she’d like to she intended to promote to other countries during her tenure as Secretary of State she replied with two: Democracy and Free Markets.

“There’s no doubt that we believe eventually free-market economies will prove to be the most effective means of both generating and distributing wealth”

– Hillary Clinton

But, as most conservatives will attest, Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s definition of the free market varies considerably from their own, and this is where the fighting begins.

Liberal and Conservative Free Markets

We can judge the desirability of any economic policy by two criteria:

1)      How it affects the overall economy

2)      How fair and just is it to individuals.

Of course,  the economy is so mind numbingly complex that it is difficult to reach a consensus conclusion regarding either question. In fact, it’s difficult to think of any other field where the so-called experts disagree so vehemently. Virtually every source of information and analysis available comes with its own particular bias, and this web-site is surely no exception. It would be insulting and foolish to pretend otherwise. Liberaltarians have libertarian leanings, but they are also, as the name implies, liberal. This writing hopes not only to extol the virtues of capitalism, but to point out the dangers as well. There is a reason that every economic superpower in the world has put serious restraints on free markets. There is a reason every economic superpower practices some sort of economic redistribution. Most countries have established hundreds, if not thousands of laws that obstruct our economic freedoms.

Given the sheer power of the free market, such restrictions may seem to defy explanation at first blush. But those that study the problem in the greatest detail (economists) tend to support their implementation and favor liberal policies.  You may not agree with them, but to have any sort of serious discussion, we must, at least, learn why they do so.

The Liberal Argument

Liberals believe money trickles up, When the poor and middle class run out of money to spend, the engine of the economy sputters and dies.

Nowhere is this more evident than 1920s: The years immediately preceding the Great Depression (1924-1929) saw low taxes on the wealthy (a top marginal rate of 25 percent), a lack of economic regulations, weak or non-existent unions, no minimum wage and very few laws limiting  environmental pollution or requiring worker safety. It was, in every respect, a conservative utopia. The inevitable result of this utopia was the pooling of the majority of the wealth into the hands of the few, creating some of the richest people the world had ever seen.

Contrary to conservative dogma, this wealth did not trickle down to the workers. In fact, while the wealthy were acquiring unfathomable riches, the common man was watching his personal savings disappear. Without money in their pockets to spend, demand dropped. Without demand, factories closed, and the cycle snowballed and the economy crashed.

Consider the words of Marriner S. Eccles, who served as FDR’s Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1934 to 1948 as he describes what he believed caused the Great Depression:

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth — not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced — to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation’s economic machinery. [Emphasis in original.]

Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.

That is what happened to us in the twenties. We sustained high levels of employment in that period with the aid of an exceptional expansion of debt outside of the banking system. This debt was provided by the large growth of business savings as well as savings by individuals, particularly in the upper-income groups where taxes were relatively low. Private debt outside of the banking system increased about fifty per cent. This debt, which was at high interest rates, largely took the form of mortgage debt on housing, office, and hotel structures, consumer installment debt, brokers’ loans, and foreign debt. The stimulation to spend by debt-creation of this sort was short-lived and could not be counted on to sustain high levels of employment for long periods of time. Had there been a better distribution of the current income from the national product — in other words, had there been less savings by business and the higher-income groups and more income in the lower groups — we should have had far greater stability in our economy. Had the six billion dollars, for instance, that were loaned by corporations and wealthy individuals for stock-market speculation been distributed to the public as lower prices or higher wages and with less profits to the corporations and the well-to-do, it would have prevented or greatly moderated the economic collapse that began at the end of 1929.

This then, was my reading of what brought on the depression.

(From his memoir, Beckoning Frontiers)

The Liberal Revolution

How did we get out of it? We’ve all heard the answer; World War II ended the Great Depression.

But how does manufacturing thousands of goods, shipping them overseas and blowing them up rescue us from a Depression? It’s difficult to think of a more wasteful endeavor. Keynesian economists have suggested that increased spending stimulated demand further along down the supply chain. This may be true, but Liberaltarians have a more nuanced answer: The primary factor that rescued us from the Great Depression was the sudden influx of cash that flowed to the middle class. Not only were there suddenly millions of jobs for to work as soldiers (with solid pay) but there were countless jobs for women in factories. All around the country, no-income households were turning into 2 income households. Who paid these wages? Primarily the wealthy people. The top tax bracket soared to 94% .

Top Marginal Tax Rate

Add to this the fact that families spent very little during the war years as rationing was in effect. By the time the war ended, we had a massive middle class with money in their pockets ready to burn. It was the largest redistribution of wealth from rich to poor the nation had ever seen.

Money had come out of the pockets of the oil, car and railroad barons and into the hands of the common man. The tide had come in. The middle class was flush with money and ready to let it “trickle up” to the business owners again, who in turn, let some of it trickle back down. Contrary to conservative dogma, minimum wage laws, welfare, social security and high taxes on the wealthy did not kill the economy, they created the largest economic boom in not only in our nation’s history, but in the history of the world. These policies also gave birth the world’s first “middle class”, and they did it whilst keeping national debt under control.

Conservatism Strikes Back

All of that changed in 1980 when Reagan came to power. Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy, cut taxes on investments, rolled back financial regulations, cut welfare rolls, eased worker safety and environmental regulations. These policies have continued more or less  for the last 30 years (we saw a slight roll back under Clinton).  As a result, we’ve seen 4 major shifts in our economy over the last 30 years:

1) GDP growth leveled off.

2) Out national debt has ballooned to epidemic proportions.

(source: USgovernmentspending.com)

3) Wages stopped rising, people’s savings evaporated and household debt skyrocketed

4) The rich became richer than they’ve ever been.

There is little doubt we’ve seen remarkable technological advances that have eased our quality of life in the last 30 years (indeed, the last 100 years). This is a testament to the free market. But economically speaking, it’s almost impossible to find a single positive statistic enjoyed by the middle or lower class in the last three decades. They’ve seen their savings evaporate and accrued record personal debt. The same is true for the finances of the government, which teeters on the verge of bankruptcy.  In fact, if we subtract deficit spending from GDP, the true failure of Reaganomics becomes painfully clear)  Where did all the money go? Into the hands of the super rich. The gap between the rich and poor has now become greater than any other time in the history of America.

The Rise of Plutocracy

In 2004, the richest 1% earned 21% of all the income. The wealthiest 10% earned 43% of all the income.  The bottom 50% of all workers earned just 12.8% of all the income.

These differences in income, however, are miniscule compared to the differences in wealth. For the lower and middle class often spend all of their income food, shelter, sending the kids college etc, while the rich can set aside a large percentage of their income for savings. The working poor are likely to let their entire lives pass without ever building a nest egg. A wealthy person’s advantage in income accrues year after year until they pass away. Then the money is passed on to their children, just rendering the gap between rich and poor all the greater.

Consider the net worth of “Household Wealth” in the 5 quintiles of the American public.

Household Wealth in the United States 1998 (source)

To better illustrate these figures, imagine we sat down to play a game of Monopoly with 5 players. Instead of being given $1500 a pieces, our game of “Real Life” Monopoly would divide the cash at the beginning of the game as follows:

Who do you suspect would win?

This is how Americans born today begin their lives. It’s the most important lottery they will ever win or lose. The gap between the rich and poor is much greater today. Consider this direct quote from a 2006 internal Citigroup memo heralding the new age of the super rich:

“The top 1% of households also account for 33% of the net worth, greater than the bottom 90% of households put together. It gets better (or worse, depending on your political stripe) – the top 1% of households account for 40% of the financial net worth, more than the bottom 95% of households put together.”

There is a new class of “super rich”. And in a capitalist economy, the mere possession of capital (or the ability to manipulate it) is a far more effective way to earn money than actually engaging in any kind of work. For instance, in 2010, the top hedge fund manager earned more in one hour than the typical middle class worker earned in their entire career. (Top manager John Paulson earned 2.4 million dollars an hour) And they do this hour after hour, forty hours a week, 2080 hours a year.

The most lucrative jobs in America do not contribute to the economy by producing goods of any kind, they simply siphon money off the top by taking a small percentage of the investments of the wealthy.

The similarities between today’s recession and the Great Depression are staggering. The upper tax brackets are near historic lows (just as they were in 1929). Unions, once strong in the 50s and 60s are in serious decline. CEOs  are pulling in record salaries, but wages for the workers have been stagnant since 1980. In fact, the last time the concentration of wealth in the top one percent was as high as it is now, was 1928. We once again face a “perfect storm” for economic collapse.

(Source: Visualizing Economics)

This is not a theory. It already happened. The economic collapse of 2008 was the biggest since the Great Depression. The only difference is that, this time, our government “patched” things up with a 800 billion dollar band aid. This is temporary fix. Liberaltarians believe in order to truly come out of this recession we must get money back into the pockets of the middle class.

Libertarians often point out (rightly so) that the bailouts were largely supported by the Left (Of those voting in favor of the first Bailout package, 91 were Republicans and 172 were Democrats). They maintain that the market would self-correct if we only allowed these banks to go under. They have an interesting point. However, they are they are overlooking 2 facts.

1) The banks that would go under contained the pensions of school teachers, factory workers, and laborers who would have borne the brunt of the bankruptcies.

2) The executives would have escaped unscathed with golden parachutes. Bankruptcy is a bailout for the top brass. (Consider the 8.3 million in bonuses paid out to executives during the recent bankruptcy of Borders).

This is not to say that liberaltarians wanted to bail out Wall Street either. A far more effective way of saving Wall Street would have been to save Main Street.  This would have watered the roots to the tree of the economy instead of gluing dead leaves back on.  This illustrates the differing philosophies between the left, right and liberaltarians.

Republicans blame the economic collapse on Democrats’ unwillingness to regulate housing loans to low income families.

Democrats blame Republicans’ (and really their own) unwillingness to regulate Wall Street’s “credit default swap” derivatives that allowed traders to bet on those home loans at 20-1 odds. (So for every home loan that went bad, it went bad 20 times over on Wall Street, and unlike the actual loan, these bets were not secured with actual houses).

Liberaltarians understand that home foreclosures were not the cause of the economic collapse, but rather a symptom of it. The more serious problem underneath all the partisan fingerpointing is the fact we increasingly have a middle class that is increasingly unable to make basic house payments. This was not the case in 1950 when one 40 hour a week job could support a family, house and college for the kids.

Present Day

30 years of tax cuts and deregulation bankrupt the government and destroyed the middle class. How do conservatives respond to the failure of Reganonmics? By redoubling their efforts to push the country to the right.

As if tempting the fates, the current Republican budget, offered by Paul Ryan, lowers the top tax bracket to the exact rate it was in the years before the Great Depression: 25%. Why? Because Ryan and every other Republican in Congress ascribe to the myth that “Taxes kill jobs”.

This notion is “demonstrably counterfactual”. If we look at the last 100 years we find that the greatest economic expansion the world had ever seen happened when the rich were taxed at marginal rates in the 90s. If we look at the last 30 years or Reganomics, we find the sole bright spot to occur during the presidency of Bill Clinton.

As Eliot Spitzer points at Slate.com:  Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy, and in turn, created 23 million jobs with strong gains in GDP and balanced the budget. In contrast, Bush lowered taxes on the wealthy to near record lows, and in turn, created fewer jobs than any president in history (one million), generated record debt and sent the economy into the worst crash since the Great Depression.

Clearly the economy is complex and there are other factors in play, but it would be difficult to invent more persuasive facts. It makes one wonder what sort of data it would take to actually convince a conservative that liberals might be on to something. If the debate surrounding human involvement in global warming[4], or even the validity of evolution is any indication, it’s fairly safe to say there is no amount of evidence that could change their minds.

This denial of basic facts is but part of a larger trend in Conservative America. Increasingly, conservatives are constructing an alternate reality unencumbered by mainstream science or academia, which are often regarded as “liberal conspiracies”. Glen Beck has compared American Universities to Nazi Reeducation camps. Rush Limbaugh names academia and science to be among the “four corners of deceit”. As Jacob Weinberg puts it, to conservatives “reality itself comes to be regarded as some kind of elitist plot.”

In fact, data contradictory to conservative ideology seems only to strengthen their resolve. Consider the following: In 2009, Northwestern professor Monica Prasad took a group of 49 conservative voters who believed Saddam Hussein was involved in orchestrating the  9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and presented them with contrary evidence consisting of a detailed review of the 9/11 commission report stating there was no connection, and videotape of President Bush himself asserting, in plain English, that Saddam was not involved with 9/11.

Only one of the 49 changed their mind. Once an idea becomes lodged in the human brain, it’s nearly impossible to remove it, and the idea that totally free markets are superior to regulated free markets is lodged so deeply in the brains of conservatives, there is seemingly no fact that dislodge it.

So, for the last 30 years, we’ve seen Conservatives wage a war on arithmetic. In 1992 Rush Limbaugh offered to bet 2 million dollars that Clinton’s economic package would lead the ruin of our nation. In 2001, the Heritage foundation published a scholarly paper that suggested the Bush tax cuts would balance the budget within the decade. These predictions have not only proved wrong, but perfect reverse barometers of the truth.

No matter how egregious the above examples seem, they absolutely pale in comparison to what we see today. Today’s conservative passion incorporates genuine rage and hatred towards the left. While Rush Limbaugh used to call Clinton “Slick Willy”. Glen Beck routinely compares President Obama to Hitler.

This is the present conservative dogma: Any policy that benefits society as a whole is akin to communism (which is also somehow akin to Nazi Germany).

There’s a certain amount of irony when the super rich complain about the relatively weak social programs in America: Wall Street investors produce no discernable product, instead they earn their living investing in companies that do. They have few problems reaping the rewards the engine of our workforce provides, but they cry foul when attempts are made to oil the machine that generates their wealth with even the most basic of provisions such as healthcare for laborers, affordable education, public transportation, or clean air and water.

They want all of the reward our society provides, but none of the responsibility it entails. This is the Ayn Rand philosophy of selfishness that’s increasingly dominating our politics. I don’t speak metaphorically or in hyperbole. The architect of the 2010 Republican budget proposal, Paul Ryan, reportedly makes gifts of Ayn Rand books to his staffers. This is a philosophy that can be boiled down to 2 words: “Be Selfish”. There is nothing clever or insightful about this idea: It is the working philosophy of every 2 year old on Earth.

There’s obviously something much, much deeper going on in the hearts of conservatives that trumps any data on the economy as a whole. And to examine it, we need only go as far as the second criteria by which one can judge the desirability of any economic system: How fair and just is the policy to individuals?

Fairness and Justice

Any time the government gives something to someone, it’s taking away from someone else.

…. to be continued.

Predictably,  there is seemingly no amount of scientific evidence, data or proof that can sway them. The scientific consensus is overwhelming.   There is currently not a single reputable scientific organization on Earth that does not admit that link between the burning of fossil fuels and the fact that our Earth is getting hotter. Despite this, not a single member of the GOP’s energy task force will publicly admit human activities are linked to global warming. In fact, they emphatically deny it.

I admit to hating Nader when he threw the election to Bush… but now as the blue dog democrats sell out to the insurance and financial industries, I have to admit, he looks a little more appealing. 

Check out his stance on the issues, and imagine if Obama had this sort of backbone.

We only need one thing for 3rd party candidates to start making a difference: Instant Run off voting.

Frontline tells a story like no other show on TV.

Click here to watch “Children of the Taliban” to get an idea why we’re fighting this war (you may have to scroll way down to see the video)

Click here to watch an interview with Elizabeth Rubin to see how futile that fight can be.

There’s simply no substitute for seeing what’s happening up close and personal.

The Taliban blew up another girls’ school in Pakistan this week. One of hundreds in the last 6 months.

If we allow this government  to exist they will not allow females to be educated.

I consider myself something of a lefty peace advocate, but I find the morality of the far left to be lacking when they oppose war in every situation other than self defense.

I suppose the question is, at what point do we defend humanity?

I suppose it’s easy to be an arm chair quarterback, but these authors seem to hit the nail on the head.

Check out this incendiary critique of  8 years of the Bush administration’s pandering to the oligarchs.

Breathe easy for a second, knowing he’s gone, and then read Drew Westin’s scathing critique of Obama’s first year in office.

And just for fun, here’s the definitive critique of Sarah Palin.

If we were to divide all the “Household Wealth” in America and determine what percentage of the whole the poorest 20% owned, the 2nd poorest 20% and so on,  the data would look like this: .

Household Wealth in the United States

(click here for source)

To better illustrate these figures, imagine we sat down to play a game of Monopoly with 5 players. Instead of being given $1500 a pieces, our game of “Real Life” Monopoly would divide the cash at the beginning of the game as follows:

Who do you suspect would win?

PS – These figures are from 1998. The gap between the rich and poor is much larger since the Bush tax cuts for the rich, in fact,  according to an internal Citigroup memo, the top one percent now own more wealth than the bottom 90% combined.

PPS – This article was inspired by an excellent post by Jim Moss, over at the Seminal — but he used Census Bureau data on income, not wealth.

Guess what.  Bush’s tax cuts for rich didn’t help the economy, they killed  it (and put us into massive debt at the same time)

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has the data here.

Even the conservative  Daniel J. Mitchell agrees Obama’s not to blame.

Visualizing stats makes all the difference. Link to original talk.

For more visit www.gapminder.org

It’s worth it just to listen to the passion in her voice.

Click here for photos of NYC.