David F. Ruccio — What’s class got to do with it?

The other day, I recommended the first two installments in the TPM series on “the road to inequality”—albeit with the caution that there was too little discussion of capitalism as a system.

Now, the third installment is in. Jared Bernstein’s “digging around in the data weeds” yields a first-rate introduction to the various measures of inequality in the United States (with which regular readers of this blog will be familiar), all of which point in the same direction: “toward greater economic distance between people and households in their economic outcomes.”

Unfortunately, Bernstein—by his own admission—focuses on the size (individual or household) distribution but shies away from any kind of extended discussion of the class distribution of income….

Here’s the problem: it’s not just that wages are more equally distributed than profits, thus leading to more inequality. As I see it, the opposing movements of the wage and profit shares signal a fundamental change within capitalism that puts more and more value in the hands of capitalists—to do with it what they will—and less in the pockets of workers. 

It thus makes workers (and society as a whole) even more dependent on capitalists, who are able to not only capture the surplus created by those workers, but also to use the surplus to rig the system to get even more of the surplus now and for the foreseeable future.… 

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What’s class got to do with it?
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame