Joseph Stiglitz teach­es at the Colum­bia Busi­ness School and Columbi­a’s Depart­ment of Eco­nom­ics and, of course, won the Nobel Prize in Eco­nom­ics in 2001.

The mon­ey quote from his appear­ance had less to do with eco­nom­ics per se and more with democ­ra­cy: “We have too many reg­u­la­tions stop­ping democ­ra­cy, and not enough reg­u­la­tions stop­ping Wall Street from mis­be­hav­ing.” No bull­horns, are you seri­ous?

You prob­a­bly know Lawrence Lessig because of his work found­ing Cre­ative Com­mons and pro­mot­ing “Free Cul­ture.” (Watch his final speech on Free Cul­ture here.) Sev­er­al years ago, Lessig moved from Stan­ford to Har­vard, where he took up a new focus — gov­ern­ment cor­rup­tion. That’s what he grap­ples with in his new book, Repub­lic, Lost and this relat­ed video. Giv­en Lessig’s focus on how cor­po­rate mon­ey cor­rupts our polit­i­cal sys­tem, it’s not sur­pris­ing that he would have some­thing to say about the poten­tial of the Wall Street protests.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Slavoj Zizek Takes the Stage at Occu­py Wall Street

Al Jazeera forced many West­erns view­ers to take their report­ing seri­ous­ly dur­ing the Egypt­ian upris­ing this spring, and now the Qatar-based news net­work has released a time­ly reportage (Aug. 2) on the fault lines in Amer­i­ca — on the gap between rich and poor that only grew wider this week. Alex­is de Toc­queville they’re not. There’s no sub­tle soci­ol­o­gy here. But, at the same time, I sus­pect that this for­eign per­spec­tive on the U.S. won’t appear unfa­mil­iar to many Amer­i­cans. The pro­gram runs 24 min­utes, and oth­er shows in the Fault Lines series can be viewed on YouTube here. H/T @courosa

Last month, Chi­na hit anoth­er major mile­stone. It passed Japan and became the sec­ond largest econ­o­my in the world, leav­ing only the US in its way. Give Chi­na a decade, maybe a lit­tle more, and it will inevitably surge into the lead. That’s the accept­ed nar­ra­tive.

But then we come across this: the pos­si­bil­i­ty that a mount­ing real estate bub­ble might derail Chi­na’s plans. This report from Aus­tralian pub­lic tele­vi­sion gives you a dis­turb­ing look at how the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment has pumped vast amounts of cap­i­tal into fixed assets, like com­mer­cial and res­i­den­tial real estate, to keep the coun­try’s econ­o­my grow­ing. And what they’re left with is what James Chanos (a hedge fund man­ag­er) has famous­ly described as “Dubai times one thou­sand.” Right now, there are an esti­mat­ed 64 mil­lion emp­ty apart­ments in Chi­na, and approx­i­mate­ly 30 bil­lion square feet of com­mer­cial real estate under con­struc­tion — equiv­a­lent to a five-by-five foot office cubi­cle for every man, woman and child in Chi­na. It’s one thing to read these facts, anoth­er thing to see what it all looks like. And that’s the oppor­tu­ni­ty you get above.

For a more pre­cise roadmap of what a Chi­nese crash might look like, you should spend some time with this piece in Cana­di­an Busi­ness mag­a­zine.