It’s a very interesting crisis. And it’s important that that things move forward, that markets are continuing to operate. It looks like the economy may go down somewhat, but nothing like a big recession or a depression. And the amount of innovation taking place, the amount of investment is actually greater today than ever, because you not only have more American companies with more scientists and engineers and innovators, but now you have what Friedman calls the "flat world", where you have people from all over the world, including lots of people in India and China, now contributing to new drug design, new software design, new energy generation design.
And so far, even despite this bailout, it doesn’t look like fixing these problems is going to derail the economy in some dramatic way, where, you know, universities aren’t doing research and drug companies aren’t doing research, and software companies aren’t hiring more engineers to sell to a market that, in the long run, is going to be a bigger and bigger market.
But it’s not yet really cutting into the fundamental thing that’s going on in the world today, which is an increase in the scale of the economy, increase in the number of people going to colleges, an increase in scientific understanding, which the Internet has facilitated this great sharing.
So, you know, our foundation has scientists in China and India and the U.K. and the U.S. And during the course of a 24-hour period, they’re sharing results, coming up with new ideas, and it’s almost location-independent.
America stands for a lot of things. It stands for the innovation that a capitalistic society can drive. It stands for political freedom. But it also stands for ending inequity. And over the decades, the inequities against women, or various religions, or races, America’s made a lot of progress. And so, I think we can say today that the global economic inequity is the greatest one left and probably the hardest one to make progress on.
