And thus, in the revolutionary year of 1968, when young demonstrators the world over were taking to the streets, five famous economists–John Kenneth Galbraith, Harold Watts, James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, and Robert Lampman–wrote an open letter to Congress. “The country will not have met its responsibility until everyone in the nation is assured an income no less than the officially recognized definition of poverty,” they said in an article published on the front page of the New York Times. According to the economists, the costs would be “substantial, but well within the nation’s economic and
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