The market did not cause inequality, no matter how much the New York Times insists

by
Dean Baker
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from Dean Baker

It is a complete article of faith in intellectual circles that the market is responsible for the rise in inequality that we have seen in the United States and elsewhere over the last half-century. Intellectual types literally cannot even consider the alternative that inequality was the result of government policies, not the natural workings of the market.

The standard line is that technology and globalization were responsible for the increasing gap in income between people with college, especially advanced, degrees and non-college-educated workers. This belief that market forces drove inequality and not policy is apparently central to the identity of its beneficiaries, who determine what appears in major news outlets.

In this way, the belief in the market causes of inequality can be similar to the belief among Trumpers that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. They simply do not even want to see the issue debated.

Spencer Bokat-Lindell: The Latest Perp

My current prompt to make my standard complaint is a column by New York Times columnist Spencer Bokat-Lindell which raises the question, “Is liberal democracy dying?” While the causes of growing inequality are not directly the piece’s topic, the issue comes up at several points.

For example, in discussing the rise of authoritarian sentiments among the masses, he tells readers:

“How does class come into the picture? Some scholars have theorized a link between democratic backsliding and the Great Recession, if not global free-market capitalism itself.”

Later the piece continues with a similar theme:

“Yet there are also those who believe technocratic fixes are unequal to the problem [of rising support for authoritarianism]. In a 2016 essay, the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra presented the declining health of democracy around the world as a crisis for the ideology of modern market-based liberalism itself: A ‘religion of technology and G.D.P. and the crude 19th-century calculus of self-interest,’ it can neither account for nor provide an answer to the anger of those who feel left behind by the disruptions and inequalities wrought by globalized capitalism.”

To be clear, I am not picking on Bokat-Lindell because he is the exception. I am picking on him because he is repeating a dogma that goes almost entirely unquestioned in major media outlets, including the New York Times.

Let’s Say Policy, not the Market, Drove Inequality

I will briefly restate my case for how policy drove inequality (this can be found in Rigged [it’s free]), but first, let’s think about the rise of right-wing populism, assuming it is true. This means that we had government policies that prevented more than half of the workforce from seeing any substantial gains from productivity growth over the last half-century. This is a period in which productivity more than doubled.

While the bottom 60 percent of the workforce saw little gains from productivity growth, the top ten percent were doing great. Those in the 90-95^th percentile of the wage distribution saw gains at least in step with productivity growth. Workers in the 95^th to 99^th percentile had wage gains that far outstripped productivity growth, and those in the top 1 percent were getting wage gains that were close to double the rate of productivity growth.

Now, suppose that that massive upward redistribution was all by design. The government put in place policies designed to take money from the bottom 60 percent of the population and give it to those at the top.

Furthermore, suppose that the mechanisms that caused this upward redistribution were prohibited from being discussed. We instead had people like Bokat-Lindell, and thousands of others, filling news stories, columns, and other ruminations on inequality in major media outlets as simply an unfortunate outcome of natural market processes. The idea that government policies actually caused inequality would virtually never be discussed or even contemplated.

In this scenario, would it be surprising that tens of millions of people would be angry at the government for acting to make them worse off? Is it surprising that they might distrust mainstream news outlets like the New York Times or National Public Radio, which endlessly tell them they are losers, but they feel very badly about that fact?

To my mind, in this scenario, it is not the least bit surprising that tens of millions would turn to a despicable demagogue like Donald Trump, or his foreign equivalents, who tell them it is not their fault. Their explanations might be nonsensical racism and/or nationalism, but he is at least pointing his finger somewhat in the right direction. (Trump’s rich backers of course benefitted hugely from the upward redistribution of the last half century.)

The right-wing populists are blaming the people who have benefitted from upward redistribution along with the targeted minority groups. Howard Jarvis, the originator of California’s anti-tax initiative Proposition 13, laid out the case perfectly. He said that “in the battle of us against them, I’m for us.” Jarvis made it very clear, “them” in this story were welfare cheats (read minorities) and pointy-headed bureaucrats (read professionals). “Us” was good old white guys. This is the theme that Trump and other right-wing populists harp on endlessly.

Against this red meat, mainstream liberals want to have policies that modestly increase the size of the welfare state, subject of course to budget limits. And, we also have to worry about inflation. If that gets too high, well the Fed will just have to raise interest rates and throw millions of working-class people out of work and push down the pay of those able to keep their jobs.

Pretty amazing that the working class isn’t signing up to get Democrats elected, huh?

The Story on Policy and Inequality

I know I give this all the time, but for the folks who have never read my other stuff, and don’t intend to, let me give the super-brief version. Let’s start with intellectual property. This is the clearest case and probably the most important in terms of upward redistribution.

Imagine a world where there are no government-granted patent or copyright monopolies or related protections. This means that anyone who wants to can manufacture any drug they want, without getting the permission of the patent holder. (This has nothing to with safety requirements, which could be left in place.)

Everyone would be able to make copies of software they liked, and even resell them. They could make and sell copies of books, recorded music, movies, and video games and never have to worry about compensating a copyright holder.

Now, I know many people are screaming that in this world no one would ever innovate, develop new drugs, perform music, or make movies. Stop screaming for a moment and think about the issue at hand. We could have a market economy without government-granted patent and copyright monopolies.

These monopolies are government policies to promote innovation and creative work. We can and should argue about whether these government-granted monopolies are the best mechanisms for promoting innovation, but the fact that patents and copyrights are government policy, and are not inherent features of the market is not a debatable point.

This means that the extent to which people are able to benefit from these monopolies is determined by the government, not the market. Bill Gates is one of the richest people in the world because the government will arrest people who make copies of Microsoft’s software without his permission. It was not the market that made Bill Gates insanely rich, it was a government policy.

The same story applies to the idea that technology has benefitted more educated workers at the expense of those without college degrees. There would be much less money to be shared by all those software designers, computer engineers, and biotech inventors in a world without patent and copyright monopolies.

The fact that these people have done very well in the last half-century was due to the decision to not only have these government-granted monopolies, but also policy choices that made them longer and stronger. Just to take the case of prescription drugs, Congress approved the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, which made it much easier for drug companies to get control of government-funded research.

In the last four decades, spending on prescription drugs exploded from 0.4 percent of GDP to 2.2 percent of GDP. The difference comes to $450 billion a year, more than ten times the money at stake in the Inflation Reduction Act.

To be clear, we had other changes to policy beyond Bayh-Dole. Also, there were undoubtedly many important drugs that were incentivized by this and other policy changes that strengthened intellectual property in drugs. But, we are paying a huge amount more for drugs as a result of policy changes, not the natural workings of the market.

There is a similar story with medical equipment, computers, software, and a wide range of other items. To be clear, I don’t dispute that we should provide incentives for innovation and creative work (my preferred route with prescription drugs is more direct public funding, as we do with NIH), but the structure and size of these incentives are a matter of public policy. It is not a market outcome as the New York Times tells us.

There are other areas where policy has quite obviously shaped distribution. We could have structured globalization differently. Instead of focusing on removing barriers to trade in manufactured goods, so that our manufacturing workers had to compete with low-cost labor in the developing world, we could have focused on promoting free trade in professional services.

In this scenario, our trade teams would be working 24-7 to develop mechanisms that would allow smart ambitious kids in India, Mexico, and elsewhere to train to U.S. standards and then practice medicine in the United States, just like a native-born doctor. How much would doctors here earn, if a half million foreign-educated doctors were working here? My guess is that the sum would be substantially less than the $300,000 plus a year that the average doctor makes now. We could tell the same story for other highly-paid professionals.

The fact that globalization, as we pursued it, was designed to lower the pay of less-educated workers and not the most highly educated and highly paid, was a policy choice. It was not a natural outcome of the market.

When the Elite Lie About Taking Money from the Bottom Half, is it a Surprise the Masses are Mad?

I could go on with other economic policies that allowed for the massive upward redistribution of the last half century, those who are interested can look at Rigged, but the basic point should be clear. The upward redistribution of the last half century was the result of policies designed by the sort of people who write for and edit publications like the New York Times. They refuse to acknowledge this fact.

Let me just preempt a silly comment I have heard when raising this point. I AM ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN THAT ALMOST NO WORKING-CLASS PEOPLE VOTE BASED ON PATENT POLICY. (All caps to make it more difficult to ignore.)

The argument is that working-class voters see themselves as being screwed in the economy of the last half century and are convinced that it was something that was done to them by the elites. They are entirely right in this view, even if they (like our public intellectuals) have little understanding of the processes. And, you can’t make this claim in polite circles. And, for that reason, they are very angry.