Politics & Power Quote by Joseph Stiglitz

Stiglitz is doing something economists rarely do in public: grounding a theory of social mobility in a memory that has texture. The line is carefully balanced on a painful American paradox. Gary is “racially segregated,” he concedes plainly, but the “at least” signals a second axis of separation that mattered to him as a future champion of opportunity: class. Even in a city carved up by race, the public school system could still function as a mixing chamber for income, occupation, and aspiration. That’s the quiet claim: institutions can be flawed yet still produce democratic spillovers.

The phrase “socially integrated” is doing heavy lifting. It’s not kumbaya; it’s infrastructure. A “cross section” means your peer group isn’t curated by tuition, ZIP code, or the invisible hand of parental networks. Stiglitz is pointing to the everyday mechanism by which public goods create shared fate: you sit next to the boss’s kid and the janitor’s kid, and you learn, implicitly, what counts as normal, possible, expected. That’s human capital, but also social capital, in the unglamorous sense of having your horizons widened by proximity.

The subtext lands hard in today’s landscape of stratified schooling. By foregrounding a public-school past that was imperfect yet materially more mixed, Stiglitz is indicting the present without sermonizing: we’ve managed to keep segregation’s legacy while privatizing the integrative parts. The nostalgia isn’t sentimental; it’s policy-directed.