A Flailing State: Daron Acemoglu and Matt Taibbi on Economic Inequality




Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon show

Summary: We're in the studio with Daron Acemoglu, the MIT economist and the co-author of Why Nations Fail. Well into President Obama’s second term, deep in the doldrums of the status quo, he says the state of the union is "dangerous." Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone joins us on the phone. He is by now a Diogenes on Wall Street. Before that: a ten-year stint in Yeltsin's Russia, when the crony state ran riot. He tells us, "A lot of things that I saw in the former Soviet Union we're starting to see here."