Brad DeLong — Reviewing Lawrence H. Summers’s Review of Piketty II: The Post-1980 Rise of Extreme Inequality in America

As for me? My guess is that the big difference between the First Gilded Age, the Social-Democratic Age, and our Second Gilded Age as far as the distribution of the surplus from sophisticated-technology increasing-returns mass-production value chains lies mostly in union threat: political, organizational, legal, and technological–how easy would it be for the workers to organize and destroy the organization as a profit-generating institution while still leaving it largely-intact as a production organization? And how easy would it be to recruit and keep scabs? Where the first is easy and the second is hard, union threat is mighty and we get the Eastman Kodaks and General Motorses of yore. Where the first is hard and the second is easy, we get Carnegie and Apple. 

Not, mind you, that I think that there was necessarily or clearly a better economic development strategy than the one the Chinese Communist Party as reformed by Deng Xiaoping has followed. But I would like to hear what Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao would say about its historical role as straw boss for America’s plutocratic entrepreneurs and yuppie and non-yuppie consumers…

WCEG — The Equitablog
Reviewing Lawrence H. Summers’s Review of Piketty II: The Post-1980 Rise of Extreme Inequality in America
Brad DeLong