Going back to the point that Mr. Lee Kuan Yew made, that you cited, he said that, “the test of a system is whether or not it improves the livelihood of the majority of people”. But that hasn’t happened.
And another writer, Anand Giridharadas, a former New York Times columnist, said, and these are his figures, the average pretax income of the top 10% of Americans has doubled since 1980, that of the top 1% has tripled, and that of the top 0.001% has risen more than 7 fold. And at the same time, the bottom 50% have not seen any improvement in their standard of living. So if you go by what Mr. Lee Kuan Yew said, if the test of a democracy is whether or not it improve the livelihood of the majority of the people, there is overwhelming data that shows that the livelihood of more than 50 % of Americans have stagnated over 30 years, and the top 0.001% have taken everything. The net result of this, therefore, is that the United States, which used to be, I would argue, a strong. healthy, functioning democracy has functionally become a plutocracy. And really, we need to understand what has gone wrong there, because if this is going to be the model for the rest of the world, then we have a problem. I want to thank you very much for inviting me to make this contribution.
（翻译：李泽西、许馨匀）