#evonomics

The Pinker-preached faith that markets are in the business of maximizing flourishing often operates as fancy conscience management camouflage. As currently practiced, markets don’t distribute flourishing (or much of anything else) in an ethically sound way. Surely, the right thing to do is to always prevent avoidable suffering, before further enhancing rich lifestyles. By what logic can we square squandering resources on rich toys when so many obvious gains in basic suffering reduction are within relatively easy reach? While this isn’t quite as simple as redirecting financial resources from ice cream and face cream to poverty alleviation, it’s also not that much more difficult. Why are toys and trinkets for the world’s wealthy more important than food to prevent those 150,000,000 kids from being stunted? Surely much less flourishing arises from the incremental last 1% of billionaire bauble buying than would for example by educating the world’s hundreds of millions of kids who aren’t presently schooled. A 1% wealth tax on the $13 trillion of the world’s 3,000 billionaires (meaning they might have to make do with a smaller second superyacht) versus the vastly improved flourishing of 250,000,000 kids. Why is that a hard trade off if you really are interested in maximizing flourishing? By ignoring such noxious nightmares of distributional sins, neoliberalism operates like a nerdier form of imperialism (with extra-advanced emperor’s new-clothes tailoring courtesy of Pinkering pundits, in our era’s version of Kipling’s conscientious conquerors—“The Bright Man’s Burden”—cognitive supremacy (assessed by flimsy tests like SAT scores) grants divine rights to hugely disproportionate share of global resources, and control of how horribly slowly the not-so-bright looser-layers can gain.

In practice, the distribution of wealth has little to do with contribution, and everything to do with politics and power.

The commons is not a winner-takes-all economy, but an all-take-the-winnings economy. Shared ownership encourages shared responsibility, which in turn engenders a longer-term perspective on business practices. Nothing can be externalized to some “other” player, because everyone is part of the same trust, drinking from the same well.

It gets tougher every day to deny the human wreckage wrought by capitalism everywhere it exists — the steaming heap of alienation, market failures, inequalities, and rigged outcomes. Proponents of globalization cheer unfettered capitalism as the vehicle for spreading democratic values, freedom, and reciprocal exchange, but in reality, as Rajan notes, entry and participation are not equally open to all. This reality is currently erupting into worldwide unrest and the rise of right-wing populism. Clearly, the official story and what happens on the ground don’t match: Lots of people work hard but get little benefit, while plenty who do not work at all get rich.

Lobbyists, who engage in “marketing” ideas to policymakers and to the public, are actually influential. They know how to work the system and can dismiss, take out of context, misquote, misuse, or promote research as needed. If policymakers or the public are unable or unwilling to evaluate the claims people make, lobbyists and others can create confusion and promote misleading narratives if it benefits them. In the real political economy, good ideas and worthy research can fail to gain traction while bad ideas and flawed research can succeed and have an impact.