Many economists claim that America's growing income inequality is "deeply worrying", unjust, a danger to democracy/social stability, or a sign of national decline. Nobelist Robert Shiller after receiving the award stated, "The most important problem that we are facing now today, I think, is rising inequality in the United States and elsewhere in the world." Piketty warned, "The egalitarian pioneer ideal has faded into oblivion, and the New World may be on the verge of becoming the Old Europe of the twenty-first century's globalized economy."