Perfect markets concentrate wealth. It’s their nature. But at some point, market-generated wealth concentration strangles those very markets (compared to markets with broader distributions of wealth). If a handful of people have all the wealth, how many iPhones will Apple sell?
Chudoba není něco, co může člověk s dobrým sociálním zázemím reálně zažít, natož pochopit, během pěti dnů. Chudoba je začarovaný kruh, který kromě materiálního nedostatku skýtá neustálý pocit nejistoty a strachu o budoucnost – strachu z toho, co přijde, pokud onemocníme, rozbije se nám lednice nebo nám majitel domu, ve kterém bydlíme, zvýší nájem.
The central idea that the book follows is that human cultural learning gives rise to a system of cumulative cultural evolution that, over generations, gradually produces increasingly complex tools, technologies, bodies of know-how, communication systems and institutions. This is effectively a second system of inheritance that has been interacting with our genetic inheritance for more than a million years.
According to their research, the vast majority of Americans lack basic levels of financial literacy. For example, a survey of Americans over the age of 50 that asked three basic questions about compound interest, inflation, and risk diversification found that only a third answered all three questions correctly.
Despite the practical failures of free-market economics, too many mainstream economists have continued to embrace simplistic ideas about how the economy works. Such ideas are often rooted more in ideology than in evidence.
Capitalism requires inequality of wealth, runs this right-of-centre argument, to stimulate risk-taking and effort; governments trying to stem it with taxes on wealth, capital, inheritance and property kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
Conservatives confidently predicted economic disaster after Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax hike. What happened instead was a boom that surpassed the Reagan expansion in every dimension: G.D.P., jobs, wages and family incomes.
Policy makers often fret about the pace of worker productivity. But each of us also frets about the pace of our own individual productivity.
