Is capitalism rigged in favor of elites?

Moderator 

Callum Williams, The Economist 

August 7th 2018

There is a growing sense across the rich world that capitalism does not work as it should. In many countries wages have barely grown over the past decade, while the rich seem to be running away with all the gains. Many economists, including those at this newspaper, argue that common factor explaining all of these ills is that firms have too much market power. Monopolies and oligopolies have spread. That allows big business to charge higher prices to consumers for poorer service, and also get away with paying their staff lower wages. But is capitalism really rigged in favor of the elites? To debate this topic we have invited Jason Furman (who argues in favor of the proposition) and Deirdre McCloskey (who argue against). 

Jason Furman, Harvard Kennedy School

August 7th 2018

You walk into a casino and try to figure out whether or not it is rigged. You notice that 1% of the people are winning 20% of all the money. Does this mean that the casino is rigged? It might seem a little suspicious but, then again, talent is not distributed equally, and some people are always luckier than others, so it is not necessarily surprising that a small fraction of the people get most of the winnings. 

While looking at the casino's record books you find that 40 years ago the top 1% were only winning 10% of all the money. This seems more suspicious. Are they that much more talented now or does luck matter that much more? You might also notice that in other casinos in Europe and elsewhere the top 1% is taking more like 9-14% of all the money. 

In an attempt to strain the metaphor of the American economy well beyond where it should go, you come back to the casino a generation later and find that the children of the bottom 20% of winners in the previous generation have only a 7% chance of being in the top 20% today, again suspiciously less than in many other countries. 

If this casino had a roulette wheel and the house was winning more than about 10% of the money you would infer it was rigged even if you could not observe exactly how it was rigged or who was doing the rigging. Similarly, the outcomes in the American economy are prima facie evidence that it is tilted towards societal elites. 

We can, however, observe many of the ways the economy systematically favors the wealthy and powerful. For most people inequality begins at birth. In America one-fifth of four- and five-year-old children do not go to school, putting us 29th in the OECD in this regard - below much poorer countries like Mexico. When the child does eventually enter school, the amount spent per pupil varies from over $28,000 per pupil in rich areas to less than $8,000 per pupil in poorer ones because America has chosen to primarily fund schools at the local level and thus further perpetuate local inequality. A game where the participants have purposefully been given radically different amounts of preparation could be fairly described as rigged. 

Then there is the fact that, as Adam Smith observed nearly 250 years ago, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." The fewer businesses engaged in the same trade, the easier it is to collude, either tacitly or explicitly and illegally. And in most trades there are many fewer businesses today: hospitals, beer, railroads, trucking, retail, technology, airlines, and most other categories of the economy. In certain industries this may have been a natural outgrowth of economies of scale, but it is hard to not also see that increased government-sponsored monopolies, through stronger intellectual-property protections, and reduced antitrust enforcement have also played an important role. 

The result can be higher pries or worse service for consumers. Witness the cases of air travel and broadband internet. Or it can be lower wages for workers. Witness the illegal collusion that has taken place to lower the wages of nurses and software workers or much more extensive but legal practices, such as non-compete agreements, which help to keep those wages down. 

The less cited second half of Smith's quote is no less important: "[the law] ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. A regulation which obliges all those of the same trade in a particular town to enter their names and places of abode in a public register, facilitates such assemblies..." The regulations that facilitate collusion and the perpetuation of economic rents do not just come from nowhere. They come from the beneficiaries of those gains. These regulations manifest themselves as overly strong intellectual-property protections, occupational licensing that requires a florist to undertake extensive certification work, or land-use restrictions that keep housing prices high and make it more difficult for more people to move to areas with better jobs, schools and amenities. 

Capitalism does not exist in a vacuum. It requires laws that establish property rights, adjudicate disputes, fund public infrastructure and finance all of those inputs. If you look at how elites currently shape the operational rules of capitalism, the outcome of these rules in terms of inequality and low levels of intergenerational mobility, or observe the many specific policies that establish and perpetuate inequality. It is clear that capitalism today could fairly be described as rigged in favor of elites. 

Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois at Chicago

August 7th 2018

Monopoly? Its prevalence is greatly exaggerated. It survives chiefly in protection from illiberal governments exercising their own super-monopoly, of violence. Since 1800, or 1900, monopoly has fallen, not risen. The railway, the bicycle, the automobile, the internet have steadily eroded local market power. Liberalization of trade has given us twenty brands of auto to choose from. as against three in the closed economies 1930-1970. Entry rules. Ask your former "monopolist" of a department store in Leeds. 

"Capitalism" encapsulates a scientific mistake. It is not capital accumulation that made the economic world since 1800. It's innovation. What made us astonishingly rich, from ￡4  a day per person rising to over ￡80 in Britain, was an explosion of bright ideas. The source was an entirely novel liberalism of inclusion, 1776 to the present, encouraging ordinary people to have a go. The go-ers were in succession poor men, non-conformists, Catholics, Jews, slaves, women, Irish people, other colonial peoples, women again, immigrants, teenagers, gays, Chinese, Indians, and on and on in a widening gyre. Capital and labor and institutions and the other intermediate factors followed the good ideas, such as railways or containerization or the internet. They did not cause them. 

People caused them. Poor people such as the blacksmith John Harrison (marine chronometer) or the son of a weaver John Dalton (atomic theory, among other ideas) or the seamstress Coco Chanel (business attire for women) were permitted for the first time in history to innovate. Investment followed, yielding a Great Enrichment more important than the somewhat routine event 1760-1820 called the Industrial Revolution. You might better call what happened in the two centuries after 1800 "innovism," or less snappily "commercially tested betterment for all and sundry."

For all and sundry, I say, not merely for an elite. In countries that adopted liberalism the average person's real income per head increased after 1800 by a factor of 30. Not a mere 100%, or 200%, understand, but fully, to be more accurate than such rough truths allow, 2,900%. Or more. Swede, Japan. Now Botswana and India and China and Singapore. 

The poor, the ancestors of us all, benefited the most. True, the elite acquired another diamond bracelet or two. Vulgar, yes. Important for the outcome, no. In its unprecedented magnitude the innovism after 1800 yielded to the poorest among us adequate food, housing, education, health. Not nirvana. We can and should do more. But a Great Enrichment nonetheless. 

Yes, there are still poor people, especially in places like Zimbabwe or Venezuela that have turned against liberal ideas, or among the numerous victims in rich societies of proliferating illiberal policies, such as prohibiting Uber and Lyft, closing occupations, regulating street food. 

But in 1800 practically everyone in the world was poor, at about ￡2 a day. The age of shocking inequality was not 1900 or 2000, but any of the other centuries back to the invention of agriculture. During the Middle Ages a half of national income was paid for land rents to the already rich. Laborers lived in squalid conditions, unimaginable nowadays unless you have seen the favelas and townships. The share of such places in world population diminishes yearly. as governments discover liberalism and let their people go. Admittedly, many populist tyrants have recently re-discovered an illiberalism suited to killing growth, and people. But viewed internationally, as a non-nationalistic ethic would require, individual inequality has fallen in the past forty years like a stone. Innovations did it.

Why have the poor benefited? After all, you might believe that the fat cats get the first bite. The answer in a word is entry. When Sam Walton, running a little faux-Woolworth's in his home town, innovated the use of bar codes to control inventories, revolutionizing US retailing, other retailers were not slow to notice. The economist William Nordhaus reckons that innovators get 2% of the social value of their innovations. It's a good deal. Sam's children became obnoxiously wealthy. But we got by competition the 98%. 

Be of good cheer, then. The poor shall inherit the earth.