On Monday, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz told a packed crowd at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, D.C., that the United States is paying a high price for the growing inequality facing the country. But, despite the long-thought idea that we have to choose between growth and equality, he said that the two are complements and that we can have both a strong, growing economy and equality.

The statistics Stiglitz ran down paint a grim picture:

• Inequality in the United States has grown over the past 30 years.
• We have the highest level of inequality of any of the advanced industrial countries.
• The United States is now one of the worst of the advanced industrial countries in terms of equality of opportunity, not just equality of outcomes.
• The top 1% takes 20% of the nation's income and holds one-third of the country's wealth.
• The Walton family (owners of the Walmart fortune) has as much wealth as the bottom 30% to 40% of Americans combined.
• While income is difficult to measure, a better measure of how well people are doing is how healthy they are, particularly those who are at the lower end of the spectrum. In the United States, health statistics for Americans with no high school diploma, particularly women, have plummeted so that we're worse off than the poorest citizens of the Soviet Union before it fell.

Stiglitz noted that the recession has only made all of these problems worse. In 2011, 121% of the increase in the country's GDP went to the upper 1%, meaning that the other 99% were worse off. Median income for workers is the same as it was in 1996, and for male workers, it's the same as it was 40 years ago. 

This isn't the way things have to be, he argued, and a number of other countries, such as Brazil, have recently reduced inequality. The real difference between the countries whose inequality is growing and those where it is declining, Stiglitz said, is policy. "Every aspect of our economic policy affects inequality," he said.

He was cautiously optimistic, noting that America has had similar levels of inequality in the past and that policies were implemented to pull us back from the brink of economic catastrophe and that that could happen again, maybe soon. In both the Gilded Age and the Roaring 20s, we faced high levels of inequality before reforms were put in place that improved the situation and gave us fast, and shared, economic growth. He offered many possible solutions, all of which, he argues, would reduce inequality:

• Examine all of our institutions and laws.
• Increase access to high-quality education, health care and finance.
• Fix the deficiencies in our system of corporate governance, which is now frequently abused, and expand financial sector regulation.
• Crack down on predatory lending, market manipulation, abusive credit card practices, monopolistic behavior and similar problems.
• Stop selling natural resources to private interests at below market costs.
• Stop taxing working-class income at a higher rate than speculation.
• Reverse recent changes in bankruptcy laws, which make it harder for Americans to get a fresh start.
• Provide relief for a crippling level of student loan debt.
• Invest in infrastructure—something that is very possible because our decades of underinvestment in this area has left us with many high-yield investment opportunities.