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The One Percent have found a pressing need for the services of mainstream economists Here he is, my favourite, the lovely Michael Hudson, with a very easy to read article. This is about half of it. Kevin Vincent. To paraphrase Mark Twain, everyone complains about inequality, but nobody does anything about it. What they do is to use “inequality” as a takeoff point to project their own views on how to make society more prosperous and at the same time more equal. These views largely depend on whether they view the One Percent as innovative, smart and creative, making wealth by helping the rest of society – or whether, as the great classical economists wrote, the wealthiest layer of the population consist of rentiers, making their income and wealth off the 99 Percent as idle landlords,
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The One Percent have found a pressing need for the services of mainstream economists Here he is, my favourite, the lovely Michael Hudson, with a very easy to read article. This is about half of it. Kevin Vincent. To paraphrase Mark Twain, everyone complains about inequality, but nobody does anything about it. What they do is to use “inequality” as a takeoff point to project their own views on how to make society more prosperous and at the same time more equal. These views largely depend on whether they view the One Percent as innovative, smart and creative, making wealth by helping the rest of society – or whether, as the great classical economists wrote, the wealthiest layer of the population consist of rentiers, making their income and wealth off the 99 Percent as idle landlords,
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The One Percent have found a pressing need for the services of mainstream economists
Here he is, my favourite, the lovely Michael Hudson, with a very easy to read article. This is about half of it. Kevin Vincent.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, everyone complains about inequality, but nobody does anything about it.
What they do is to use “inequality” as a takeoff point to project their own views on how to make society more prosperous and at the same time more equal. These views largely depend on whether they view the One Percent as innovative, smart and creative, making wealth by helping the rest of society – or whether, as the great classical economists wrote, the wealthiest layer of the population consist of rentiers, making their income and wealth off the 99 Percent as idle landlords, monopolists and predatory bankers.
Economic statistics show fairly worldwide trends in inequality. After peaking in the 1920s, the reforms of the Great Depression helped make income distribution more equitable and stable until 1980.[1] Then, in the wake of Thatcherism in Britain and Reaganomics in the United States, inequality really took off. And it took off largely by the financial sector (especially as interest rates retreated from their high of 20 percent in 1980, creating the greatest bond market boom in history). Real estate and industry were financialized, that is, debt leveraged.
Inequality increased steadily until the global financial crash of 2008. Since then, as bankers and bondholders were saved instead of the economy, the top One Percent have pulled even more sharply ahead of the rest of the economy. Meanwhile, the bottom 25 percent of the economy has seen its net worth and relative income deteriorate.
Needless to say, the wealthy have their own public relations agents, backed by the usual phalange of academic useful idiots. Indeed, mainstream economics has become a celebration of the wealthy rentier class for a century now, and as inequality is sharply widening today, celebrators of the One Percent have found a pressing need for their services.
A case in point is the Scottish economist Angus Deaton, author of The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality. (2013). Elected President of the AEA in 2010, he was given the Nobel Economics Prize in 2015 for analyzing trends in consumption, income distribution, poverty and welfare in ways that cause no offense to the wealthy, and in fact treat the increasingly inequitable status quo as perfectly natural and in its own kind of mathematical equilibrium. (This kind of circular mathematical reasoning is the criterion of good economics today.)
His book treats the movie The Great Escape as a metaphor. He deridingly pointed out that nobody would have called the movie “The prisoners left behind.” Describing the escapers as brilliant innovators, he assumes that the wealthiest One Percent likewise have been smart and imaginative enough to break the bonds of conventional thinking to innovate. The founders of Apple, Microsoft and other IT companies are singled out for making everyone’s life richer. And the economy at large has experienced a more or less steady upward climb, above all in public health extending lifespans, conquering disease and pharmaceutical innovation.
I recently was put on the same stage as Mr. Deaton in Berlin, along with my friend David Graeber. We three each have books translated into German to be published this autumn by the wonderful publisher Klett-Cotta, who organized the event at at the Berlin Literaturfestival in mid-September.
In a certain way I find Deaton’s analogy with the movie The Great Escape appropriate. The wealthy have escaped. But the real issue concerns what have they escaped from. They have escaped from regulation, from taxation (thanks to offshore banking enclaves and a rewriting of the tax laws to shift the fiscal burden onto labor and industry). Most of all, Wall Street banksters have escaped from criminal prosecution. There is no need to escape from jail if you can avoid being captured and sentenced in the first place!
A number of recent books – echoed weekly in the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page – attribute the wealthiest One Percent to the assumption that they must be smarter than most other people. At least, smart enough to get into the major business schools and get MBAs to learn how to financialize corporations with zaitech or other debt leveraging, reaping (indeed, “earning”) huge bonuses
The reality is that you don’t have to be smart to make a lot of money. All you need is greed. And that can’t be taught in business schools. In fact, when I went to work as a balance-of-payments analyst at Chase Manhattan in 1964, I was told that the best currency traders came from the Brooklyn or Hong Kong slums. Their entire life was devoted to making money, to rise into the class of the proverbial Babbitts of our time:nouveau riches lacking in real culture or intellectual curiosity.
Economics