Noam Chomsky spoke at Third Boston Symposium on Economics on February 10th 2014, sponsored by the Northeastern University Economics Society in Boston, MA. Chomsky argued that certain factors, among them cutting federal funding for research and development and the growing gap between the richest 1 percent and everybody else, have led to the country's current economic climate. "The system is so dysfunctional that it cannot put eager hands to needed work using the resources that would be available if the economy were designed for human needs," Chomsky said. "These things didn't just happen like a tornado; they are the results of deliberate policies over roughly the past generation." Chomsky focuses on what economic actions that government, the super rich and corporations are doing that insures the US and other economies fail for the overwhelming majority of people. We're a nation whose leaders are pursuing policies that amount to economic suicide—Leigha Cohen