America is one of the largest and most prosperous developed countries in the world, but look closer and you realize that great United States of America has an alarming size. amount of poverty. Where there was once an “American Dream,” now lies the harsh truth: There are fewer opportunities every day and inequality growing every second. Joseph E. Stiglitz on how America became a country unrecognizable to any of the founding fathers. In The Price of Inequality, Stiglitz addresses this problem and searches for the source of the economic inequality that the United States faces today. Stiglitz came to the conclusion that America is in decline and transforming into a society like the one described in Orwell's 1984 due to the ever-present economic problems not only in the United States but also in the world. George Orwell's prediction for world society in The year 1984 was a year where information was hidden from the people and the government fed the people lies that the citizens took as their truths. An Orwellian society is one in which open, free and democratic society, to some extent, is threatened or destroyed. Stiglitz acknowledges that many critics believe that today's society resembles that of Orwell's cautionary tale from 1984. Today's United States is an Orwellian society in that the government and the 1 percent society's wealthiest population shapes society's perceptions. Everyone knows that there is power in numbers, so for the richest 1% to be able to control the power of the majority of the nation, this is done through propaganda and by methods of what is perceived as a " brainwashing” due to the malleability of public perception. ...... middle of paper ...... is the method, so 1984 may well occur forty years later than Orwell predicted. The world will be controlled by the government which will be controlled by the rich, and the rest of the population will just be proletarians with no one else taking care of themselves and stuck in an eternal pit of debt and inequalities. What does the American economy have to lose? If Stiglitz's proposed solutions don't work, nothing will change, the country will still be unequal, but if they actually work, the nation can break out of the downward spiral of inequality it is currently stuck in. It makes no sense not to try to improve things and in The Price of Inequality there is a detailed plan on how to tackle such a problem. Works Cited Stiglitz, Joseph E. The Price of Inequality:. New York: WW Norton &, 2012. Print.