In this post we discuss debt in the current context, and consider where the very high levels of debt will take us. And as importantly, who wins and who loses. Transcript is available for download....Digital Financial Analytics Blog
What has confused economists for centuries is that they’ve focused on what’s inside the fence of property rights, not the fence itself. And who can blame them? Historically, the things that were owned were easy to see. In contrast, the act of ownership — the institutional fence of private property — was abstract. And so economists tied wealth to property, not the property-rights fence.…
In reality, wealth had always been non-material — a social relation of exclusion. The digital revolution just laid this fact bare because it emptied out property, leaving only the fence of property rights. The digital revolution got rid of land. It got rid of physical capital. It got rid of all the physical things on which to pin wealth. All that was left (in digital tech firms) was the fence of property rights. And this fence was put up around the most non-material of things — ideas themselves..…
After decades of rightwing dominance, a transatlantic movement of leftwing economists is building a practical alternative to neoliberalism....
The new leftwing economics wants to see the redistribution of economic power, so that it is held by everyone – just as political power is held by everyone in a healthy democracy…
The new economists’ enormously ambitious project means transforming the relationship between capitalism and the state; between workers and employers; between the local and global economy; and between those with economic assets and those without. “Economic power and control must rest more equally,” declared a report last year by the New Economics Foundation (NEF), a radical London thinktank that has acted as an incubator for many of the new movement’s members and ideas....Addressing asymmetric economic power.
Does the solution to widening economic inequality lie in a wealth tax? We speak to Emmanuel Saez, an adviser to Elizabeth Warren who helped design the “Ultra-Millionaire Tax” plan.Half-hour podcast.
How should we measure inequality? There are two metrics that economists use: relative and absolute. In the past I have argued that the relative metric – which is by far the dominant approach, embodied in the standard Gini index, in the famous “elephant graph”, and inlogarithmic distribution graphs – is problematic in that it is aligned with the interests and perspectives of the rich, and effectively obscures real inequalities in the distribution of new income around the world. From the perspective of justice, and indeed from the perspective of the poor themselves, what really matters is the absolute gap between rich and poor, not relative rates of change.Jason Hickel Blog
But there is another question that we need to consider here, about the relationship between income and power. One of the main reasons we are concerned about inequality in the first place is that it allows rich people to exercise power over the lives of the poor. In political terms, they can use it to lobby policymakers, fund political campaigns, buy media outlets, set up think tanks, or even outright bribe government officials. In economic terms, they can use it to, say, push wages down (by lobbying to restrict labour unions, for example), and push house prices up (because the excess income of rich people ends up flowing to assets).
So which metric gives us more traction in thinking about the power dimension of inequality? Relative or absolute?...
I cannot stress enough that this elitist attitude towards society is a learned mindset, that comes with a sense of extreme entitlement, and not some inherited tendency. As it succeeds it can become contagious among those who are morally weak and easily influenced.Some good quotes.
This is also where the work on inequality parts ways with one of the scourges of modern micro- and macro-economics, the representative agent. The role of the representative agent was to obliterate all meaningful distinctions between large groups of people whose social positions differ, by focusing on the observation that everybody is an “agent” who tries to maximize income under a set of constraints. This is indeed trivially true. And by being trivially true it disregards the multitude of features that make these “agents” truly different: their wealth, background, power, ability to save, gender, race, ownership of capital or the need to sell labor, access to the state etc. I would thus say that any serious work on inequality must reject the use of representative agent as a way to approach reality. I am very optimistic that this will happen because the representative agent itself was the product of two developments, both currently on the wane: an ideological desire, especially strong in the United States because of the McCarthy-like pressures to deny the existence of social classes, and the lack of heterogeneous data. For example, median income or income by decile was hard to calculate but GDP per capita was easy to get hold of.That means the jettisoning of marginalism aka "conventional economics" as it is currently practiced and taught in the academy. It would require revisiting classical economics, institutionalism as a competitor of marginalism, and integrating sociological economics, anthropological economics and political economy. The heterodox have already been engaged in this and much of this work has already been accomplished. What is needed is not so much new knowledge and reframing economics based on priorities. Much of what now passes for economic theory is rather irrelevant for current and future needs, since the scope and scale of the models limits them to the trivial.
Global Inequality
- The most important of Marx’s influences on people working in social sciences is, I think, his economic interpretation of history.…
- The second Marx’s insight which I think is absolutely indispensable in the work on income and wealth inequality is to see that economic forces that influence historical developments do that through “large groups of people who differ in their position in the process of production”, namely through social classes.…
- The third extremely important Marx’s methodological contribution is the realization that economic categories are dependent on social formations.…
- The last among Marx’s contribution that I would like to single out—perhaps the most important and grandiose—is that the succession of socio-economic formations (or more restrictively, of the modes of production) is itself “regulated” by economic forces, including the struggle for the distribution of the economic surplus....
How ideas move through academia may depend on where those ideas come from as much as their quality, a new study suggests.Science Daily
To the early classical economists, this kind of wealth – attained by simply extracting value created by others – was deemed to be unearned, and referred to it as ‘economic rent’. However, ever since neoclassical economics replaced classical economics as the dominant school of thinking in the late 19th century, economic rent has been increasingly marginalised from economic discourse. To the extent that it is acknowledged, it is usually viewed as being peripheral to the story of wealth accumulation, resulting from ‘market frictions’, such as monopsony and asymmetric information, which give rise to certain instances of ‘market power’. For the most part, economists have tended to focus on the acts of saving and investment which drive the real production process. But on closer inspection, it is clear that economic rent is far from peripheral. Indeed, in many countries it has been the main story of changing wealth patterns….Evonomics
All statistics tell a story, but stories can be told from different perspectives. Embedded in the definitions of all economic statistics are value judgements about what is desirable and what is undesirable, which in turn shape the way we think about the economy. At the moment, the way we measure the wealth of nations mainly reflects the fortunes of capitalists and landowners rather than workers and tenants. Britain looks wealthier than Germany on paper, but this does not reflect the lived reality for most people. While it’s important not to overstate the extent to which statistics can influence the real world, this is important for at least three reasons.
Firstly, it illustrates how seemingly objective metrics often have ideological assumptions baked into them. While there is already a well-established literature on alternatives to GDP, many economic metrics are used in economic analysis and policy appraisal without any critical appraisal of their underlying ideological assumptions. This needs to change.
Second, it highlights how paper wealth has in many places become decoupled from productive capacity, and how conflating the two can be highly misleading. This is particularly the case where zero sum rentier activity is widespread, as in the case of Britain. Such discrepancies raise the question of whether the way that we currently measure wealth is really the most sensible.
But most importantly, it illustrates that the distribution of wealth has little to do with contribution or productivity, and everything to do with politics and power. As J.W. Mason states: “It’s bargaining power, it’s politics, all the way down.”
For economists who see their discipline as a ‘value free’ science which is separate from politics, this is uncomfortable territory. But if the aim is to understand the economy as it really exists, then analysing power beyond the narrow concept of ‘market power’ is essential. Among other things, this means grappling with the power dynamics that underpin ownership and property relations, as well as those that that drive inequalities between different social groups and identities....
You want to understand reality? You want to know the truth? Never listen to what anyone who represents power says about what power wants to do. This is always a lie. Look only at what power consistently does. Look at the consistent results of this pattern of action, and then assume those results to be the real goals of the campaign....Volatility
All these studies have one thing in common: they demonstrate that reflection on power relationships and property, which for a moment was thought to have been annihilated after the Soviet disaster, in reality is only beginning. Europe and France must take their rightful place.The magic work — "power."
