“Far from trickling down,” Oxfam concludes, “income and wealth are instead being sucked upwards at an alarming rate.”
At the same time, this has been an era of radical economic inequality, at levels not seen since 1929. Over the last three decades, an unprecedented consolidation and concentration of earning power and wealth has made the top 1 percent of Americans immensely richer while middleclass Americans have been increasingly impoverished.
Norwegian government owns around one-third of the domestic stock market and 70 state-owned enterprises, which were valued at 88 percent of the country’s annual GDP in 2012.
But how can that be, when the market ensures that only the most efficient firms survive? That idea, that the market ensures that only the most efficient prosper, is a central message of neoliberal ideology, and it has held UK and US governments under its sway since the time of Thatcher and Reagan.
Most people would consider radical libertarianism and communism polar opposites: The first glorifies personal freedom. The second would obliterate it. Yet the ideologies are simply mirror images. Both attempt to answer the same questions, and fail to do so in similar ways. Where communism was adopted, the result was misery, poverty and tyranny. If extremist libertarians ever translated their beliefs into policy, it would lead to the same kinds of catastrophe.
Daphne Caruana Galizia, a Maltese journalist, who played a major role in the Panama Papers investigations, was killed by a car bomb on October 16. Caruana Galizia, 53, ran a popular blog in which she highlighted cases of alleged corruption, often involving politicians from the Mediterranean island of Malta.
Úvaha, že nižší daně vedou k vyššímu ekonomickému růstu, spadá pod ekonomiku strany nabídky a politiky pod Novou pravici, jejímiž prominentními představitele byli Thatcherová a Reagan. Empiricky zhodnoceno nejen na příkladech USA či Velké Británie, důkazy toho nikde najít nemůžeme. Kdyby hlavním motorem ekonomického růstu byla sazba daně z příjmu, pak bude nejvyspělejší zemí světa Bangladéš.
The 62 richest people in the world own as much wealth as half of humanity. Such extreme wealth conjures images of both fat cats and deserving entrepreneurs. So where did so much money come from? It turns out, three-fourths of extreme wealth in the US falls on the fat cat side.
The results have been disastrous, in part because Lampert was ideologically committed to the metaphor of the invisible hand and the associated idea that people are purely selfish. Ideology is a lens – it makes some things more visible, others less so. Lampert’s ideology prevented him from seeing that he was destroying the invisible band – the bond that forms around groups that can trust each other and work together toward shared goals.
To the extent that a regulation correcting an externality or other market failure provides total benefit in excess of total cost while particularly helping the disadvantaged subsets of society, the regulation may—and in my view, should—be seen as doubly wise. If, instead, the regulation creates positive net benefit but requires the poor to pay the costs so that the rich can reap health or environmental benefits, it may be neither just nor wise.
Cílem může být prodat dané zboží za cenu, která je pro obchodníka nejvýhodnější, stejně tak se ale může jednat i o cílenou strategii, jak zmást zákazníky natolik, že naprosto ztratí přehled o tom, co je drahé, co je levné a jaká je aktuálně přiměřená cena.
In the wake of the 2008 crisis, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein famously told a reporter that bankers are “doing God’s work.” This is, of course, an important part of the Wall Street mantra: it’s standard operating procedure for bank executives to frequently and loudly proclaim that Wall Street is vital to the nation’s economy and performs socially valuable services by raising capital, providing liquidity to investors, and ensuring that securities are priced accurately so that money flows to where it will be most productive. The mantra is essential, because it allows (non-psychopathic) bankers to look at themselves in the mirror each day, as well as helping them fend off serious attempts at government regulation.
There has been no shortage of big promises since Reagan’s “It’s Morning again in America,” but in the end, they all left the middle class staring into thin wallets while their manipulators were living high on the hog. The failed big ideas began with Reaganomics. The stimulating effect of its tax cuts was supposed to “trickle down” to the masses, but the flow had the viscosity of molasses and stuck with the ultrarich.
Stejný výrobek se stejnými výrobními prostředky vytvoří Němec za stejnou dobu jako Čech; německý kadeřník nestříhá dvakrát rychleji než český, německá obsluha kasy v supermarketu neodpípá za hodinu dvakrát víc zboží než česká. Navíc silně pochybuji, že by neznačková bangladéšská šička značkových triček nalezla sobě rovnou v Německu nebo Norsku.
American inequality didn’t just happen. It was created. Market forces played a role, but it was not market forces alone. In a sense, that should be obvious: economic laws are universal, but our growing inequality— especially the amounts seized by the upper 1 percent—is a distinctly American “achievement.”
Business schools by and large teach an extremely limited notion of “value,” and of who corporate stakeholders are. Many courses offer a pretense of data-driven knowledge without a rigorous understanding and analysis of on-the-ground facts. Students are given little practical experience but lots of high-altitude postulating.
In George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984, a totalitarian state has created a language called Newspeak designed to limit freedom of thought, often by inverting customary meanings. How ironic that Ayn Rand, self-appointed defender of economic freedom, should add the term “Objectivism” to the lexicon of Newspeak.
Some think that human cooperation can develop in a spontaneous way (Hayek comes close to this at times), or because cooperation creates an edge, the forces towards the evolution of a psychology of group cooperation are going to ensure that tribes, villages or even bigger polities can develop a sophisticated order without the state.
How can it be that great wealth is created on Wall Street with products like credit-default swaps that destroyed the wealth of ordinary Americans—and yet we count this activity as growth? Likewise, fortunes are made manufacturing food products that make Americans fatter, sicker, and shorter-lived. And yet we count this as growth too—including the massive extra costs of health care.
Any serious student of economics can’t help but notice that the academic and popular versions are as different from each other as Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. Take Friedrich Hayek, for example. His books could fill a bookshelf and the commentary could fill a small library, but the monstrous version can only speak in two-word sentences. “Government bad! Market good!”
Market interactions, though, are different from “real” human relationships. Efficient markets require trust, fairness, and cooperation among people who don’t know each other and may not see each other again. Without trust, markets break down.
The big idea of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that we haven’t just gone back to 19th-century levels of income inequality, we’re also on a path back to “patrimonial capitalism,” in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties.
Since 1980, the share of national income for the bottom 99 percent of workers has decreased by 15 percent. On top of that, the compensation packages for top executives of large companies is 300 times that of the average worker. Forty years ago, executives were compensated a mere 40 times more than the average American worker.
Prostý, ale spíše hluboký, závěr je, že pokud nejsou trhy (a hlavně ty finanční) řádně regulovány, nemohou konat zázraky pro společnost tím, že budou alokovat zdroje vždy tam, kde jsou nejvíce produktivně využity. Máme dostatek teoretických a empirických důkazů, co se stane, pokud je tato pravda narušena.