{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02053388090349076, 'fraction_numerical': 0.009582477754962354, 'mean_word_length': 4.733333333333333, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Inequality in America

I is a real pleasure for me to accept this award, named in memory of one of America’s great statesmen and thinkers: Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Our intellectual paths crossed in many ways. Some 20 years ago, serving in the Clinton administration as a member and then chairman of the Council of economic Advisers, I became fascinated with the role of secrecy in government. It was natural that I would be interested in the subject: a major focus of my work in economics had been information—including the incentives that market participants had for revealing and not revealing relevant information. Secrecy and transparency were the counterpoints in the political sphere. No one working in government could fail to notice the excessive focus on secrecy, the lack of transparency— even on the part of those who publicly preached transparency. Of course, the defining work in this area was Senator Moynihan’s book Secrecy: The American Experience. At about the same time that he wrote that book, I wrote a paper on secrecy (later given as the Oxford Amnesty Lecture at Oxford in 1999 and subsequently published in Stiglitz [2001] and Stiglitz [2003]). I was more than pleased that he called me in to discuss it, and that he circulated it among his Senate colleagues. he shared with me an abiding concern about the poverty and inequality that afflicted our country. It was this concern about poverty and inequality that led me to shift away from