Bill Black — America Has Become a "Cheater-Take-All" Nation

Why do people like Tyler Cowen still equate wealth with merit? Many rich people are just crooks....

Tyler Cowen’s new book Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation warns that inequality will only get worse as a "hyper-meritocracy" of smart, energetic people at the top commanding machines and data speed ahead and the lazy, not-very-bright folks at the bottom fall further behind.

One thing seems to be left out of the discussion: those hyper-meritocrats are led by criminal morons.

Cowen’s embrace of Social Darwinism assumes that the winners have a selective advantage that arises from “merit” – which Cowen conflates with the ability to create wealth. This is passing strange as we are still suffering from an orgy of wealth destruction led by the “winners.” The people who grew wealthiest were often the people must responsible for the largest destruction of wealth in history. That it is an anti-meritocratic system. We do not live in a “winner-take-all” nation. We increasingly live in a “cheater-take-all” system.

AlterNet
America Has Become a "Cheater-Take-All" Nation
William K Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri – Kansas City