I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in LA TONIGHT (Feb 19) for an event with WIL WHEATON in LA, and in SEATTLE TOMORROW (Feb 19) for with DAN SAVAGE. More tour dates here.
Thomas Piketty's 2013 unexpected bestseller (a 750 page economics book translated from French!) Capital in the 21st Century, offers a very convincing explanation of our political decay, and it continues to serve this purpose as the decay undergoes alarming acceleration:
Let me sketch out that argument really briefly for you here. Absent any kind of government intervention, markets make investors richer than workers (AKA "the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of return from growth" or "r > g"). This is true even for extremely powerful workers who get very, very rich indeed. Piketty illustrates this in many ways, but my favorite is the Parable of Bill Gates, Liliane Bettencourt and Bill Gates (again).
Bill Gates founded Microsoft in 1975 and he stepped down as CEO in 2000. In the intervening 25 years, he built the company into the most profitable firm in human history and grew very, very rich. This is Market Lore Canon: found a successful company, grow rich.
Now, Bill Gates started with a bunch of money – he comes from a wealthy family – but he grew his personal fortune over those years in extraordinary ways, and not by investing it, but rather, by founding a company and working at it.
Now consider Liliane Bettencourt, who, during Bill Gates period as Microsoft CEO, was the richest woman in Europe. Bettencourt was born very, very rich, heiress to the L'Oreal fortune. Unlike Gates, Bettencourt didn't have a job. She just sat around, while financial planners invested her family money. Over the 25 years when Bill Gates was growing Microsoft from zero to the most successful company in planetary history, Bettencourt made more money than Gates. Gates made his money by doing something. Bettencourt made her money by emerging from a very lucky orifice and just hanging around.
But here's the kicker: after Bill Gates quit Microsoft, he became a professional investor. He stopped doing a job and started investing in companies where other people were working. Over the next 13 years, Bill Gates (investor) made more money than Bill Gates (Microsoft CEO) made in his 25 years of doing a job. He also made more than Liliane Bettencourt.
That's what r > g means: that even the most successful worker in human history can't make as much as a person who merely has a lot of money, and the more money you have, the more money you make.
If you think about this for a second, you can see how it'll play out: in economies both good and bad, the people who emerge from lucky orifices will get wealthier than anyone else, wealthier than the people who do things that grow the economy. And because they're getting wealthier faster than the economy grows, they come to command ever-larger shares of the economy, so that even when the pie gets bigger, their slices gets bigger still, and the remainder that we all share isn't just proportionally smaller – it's actually smaller. We don't just have less relative to the rich – we have less relative to our parents.
For Piketty, this is an iron law of markets, born out by analysis of hundreds of years' worth of capital flows. He devotes many of those 750 pages showing how even the most profitable sectors of the economy at any given time are disproportionately benefiting investors, even relative to the most successful managers and workers at any given time. This is where oligarchy comes from: it is the natural end-state of a market economy.
But (Piketty continues), oligarchy is intrinsically destabilizing. For one thing, once the fortunes of Bill Gates' or Liliane Bettencourt's are large enough, growing them by even, say 1% requires that some capital come from other rich people, because 1% of Bill Gates's holdings will eventually exceed 100% of the holdings of everyone who isn't insanely rich. So, over time, rich people eventually have to fight with each other in order to keep getting richer – see, for example, World War I.
That's not the only way extreme wealth inequality creates political instability. Once the 1% are sufficiently wealthy, they capture government, and the only policies that can be enacted are those that don't gore some aristocrat's ox, and once the rich become super rich, they own all the oxen. So sensible policies that are needed to ensure an orderly, stable society (for example, limiting war bond repayments to a sustainable level that won't bankrupt the economy to make wealthy bondholders even richer) become impossible, and then you get societal collapse (see, for example, World War II).
The backbone of C21 is a time-series of 300 years' worth of global capital flows, painstakingly assembled by Piketty and his grad students. This time series shows the same pattern emerging over and over: as the rich get richer, they capture more and more of the state's policy-making apparatus, triggering more wealth-friendly policies, which make them even richer, and makes their grip on policy stronger. This continues until inequality reaches a tipping point, and then you get a rupture, like the French Revolution, or the World Wars. These are orgies of capital destruction, and because nearly all the capital is in the hands of the rich, when the dust settles, they emerge with much less capital and much less power. Society is shattered, but it is more equal, and this means that we can once again make good policies that help us rebuild a society that benefits everyone, not just the rich (the French call the 30 years following WWII "the 30 glorious years").
But, if this society doesn't include some kind of mechanism to address the fact that capital is still growing faster than the economy – even a post-war boom economy – then eventually the share of wealth held by the rich will reach a tipping point, and we'll see policies that benefit the wealthy crowding out policies that support human thriving, and the rich will get richer, and they will feud with each other, and society will destabilize, and we will face collapse.
So, let's talk about Ronald Reagan! By the late 1970s, the share of wealth held by the top 10% had grown significantly from its post-war low point. With all that excess capital, the rich started spending money to promote candidates and policies that would make them richer. At a certain point, they have enough money to buy Reagan's presidency, and we get a deregulatory bonfire: lower taxes for the rich, looser rules for finance, fewer protections for workers, less spending on social programs.
This makes the rich richer, even as wages stagnate. The next 40 years are a procession of ever-more-wealth-friendly policies and politicians – not just the Bush years, but also Bill Clinton's welfare bill and Obama's foreclosure crisis – and the rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer. Monopolies consume the American economy. GDP goes up, because the corporate sector is super consolidated and it's jacking up prices and slashing wages, leaving more for profits and dividends.
Society grows progressively less stable. Policies that benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else – ignoring the climate emergency, slashing the safety net, starving infrastructure, etc – dominate. Inequality worsens. No one can afford a house, health care, or university. Your life's savings are stolen by a subprime mortgage, or a pension-fund raid, or bitcoin grift. Instability worsens. Policies that benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else – endless imperialist wars, noncompete agreements, private equity rollups – multiply. Wages stagnate. Inequality increases. The rich get richer. One political party is captured by finance ghouls. The other one is also captured by finance ghouls, but welds them into a coalition that includes virulent, apocalyptic racists.
Which brings us to today, and Trump, and imminent collapse, and Elon Musk and his child soldiers, and JD Vance, and the whole fucking thing.
Today, Piketty posted some pointed thoughts on the situation in Europe in the face of rising American fascism and belligerence:
It's common for Americans to write off Europe because its "economy isn't growing" the way the US economy is. Piketty points out that this is a mirage: American economic growth is due to rising prices and plummeting wages, which is great for the share price of giant American companies whose cartels and monopolies make everyone except the tiny number of Americans with substantial stock market portfolios much poorer: "When measured in terms of purchasing power parity, the reality is very different: the productivity gap with Europe disappears entirely."
Once you adjust US economic figures to account for this, it's clear that America truly is in decline – the real US GDP has lagged China's since 2016. China now has an adjusted GDP that 30% higher than America's, and it's on track to double US GDP by 2035.
The US is losing control of the rest of the world, and Trump is accelerating this phenomenon. Take de-dollarization: the US (and only the US) can make as many US dollars as it wants, so for so long as things around the world (oil, say) are available for sale in USD, the US can buy them on better terms than any other country in the world:
What's more, the fact that dollar-clearing takes place at the Federal Reserve gives the US the ability to spy on and control other countries around the world (think of US SWIFT sanctions on Russia after the Ukraine invasion, or the vulture capitalists who forced Argentina to pay up even after it defaulted on its debts). Trump's pro-bitcoin policies are intrinsically anti-dollar policies. The rest of the world was already increasingly nervous about the way that the US dollar is a vehicle for soft power around the world, we're already seeing a lot of oil denominated in rubles, and now Trump is encouraging the growth of a shadow currency that will make it even easier for transactions to take place without dollars (notably, cryptocurrency will help America's ultra-rich evade even more taxes, and commit even more bribery):
Trump is also waging war on the CIA and NSA. Good riddance, sure – but these are also major sources for projecting US power around the world – think of the NSA's mass surveillance program, in alliance with the "5 Eyes" countries whom Trump is setting out to alienate.
Then there's trade. The US has pushed pro-oligarchic policies on the world through its trade deals. To access US markets, foreign governments must enact punitive laws that make it easier for US giants to loot their economy, like IP laws:
Not all the profits of giant US companies arise from ripping off 99% of Americans. Some of those profits come from ripping off foreigners, but that's only possible because foreign governments have passed looter-friendly policies in exchange for tariff-free access to US markets. Now that the US is shutting that down, there's no reason to allow America to continue stealing from your citizens.
As Piketty says, Trump dreams of a "national capitalism." National capitalism is a disaster, even compared to global capitalism:
the strength of national capitalism lies in glorifying power and national identity while denouncing the illusions of carefree rhetoric about universal harmony and class equality. Its weakness is that it clashes with power struggles and forgets that sustainable prosperity requires an educational, social and environmental investment that benefits all.
National capitalism walls its oligarchs off from the possibility of draining the riches of other countries, limiting them to domestic looting. Eventually, all the wealth in the country is held by its looter class, and the only way they can grow is by attacking each other. No one has more direct, recent experience with this phenomenon than Europe, a wealthy trading bloc of 500m. Trump has demanded that the EU commit 5% of its GDP to building up arms and its standing armies.
Piketty says this is a dead end. As the US is abandoning its role as global rule-of-law haven and transaction clearing house, the EU has an opportunity to become a very different kind of world power:
Europe must heed the calls from the Global South for economic, fiscal and climate justice. It must renew its commitment to social investment and definitively overtake the US in terms of training and productivity, just as it has already done in terms of health and life expectancy. After 1945, Europe rebuilt itself through the welfare state and the social-democratic revolution. This project remains unfinished: on the contrary, it must be seen as the beginning of a model of democratic and ecological socialism that must now be thought through on a global scale.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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Robert Solow on powerful families’ threat to democratic institutions.
Money quote:
A concentration of wealth leads to a concentration of power, which in turn protects the concentration of power. That our political system is incapable of tempering Piketty's dynamic is not a bizarre coincidence but a direct result.
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The fear of coming to resemble Old Europe was no doubt part of the reason for the American interest in progressive taxes [in the early 1900's]
Thomas Piketty, Capital, pg 506
And yet we Americans are now more like Old Europe than actual Europe is! We have incredible economic inequality, with a huge concentration of wealth at the top. And the push for progressive taxation is no longer to differ us from Europe, but to help us catch up!
[Background info: US had really high taxes on the wealthy in the mid-1900s, even more so than in Europe, which also drastically increased taxes during this time. But, as you probably know, US taxes on the rich are now significantly lower than in Europe.]
@gininthecampari my issue with piketty (and i only read a few chapters, so maybe i just missed this) was that he didn't say much about how the excess income was being spent -- on luxury goods? is it saved? reinvested? marx, who piketty claims to never have read, takes surplus-value as the starting point, and then some of it is given out as income, some of it is invested in expanding production, some goes to the banks the state and so on. there's room for variation in how it actually gets split up, but many of these different arrangements can work to perpetuate the class relation. (like, the state could end income inequality by taxing the shit out of high incomes, but if it's spending all that new revenue on prisons, police, and corporate subsidies, you'd clearly have just moved the problem around.) i'd love to hear what you think, though, and let me know when you get to friedman
The entrepreneur tends inevitably to transform him or herself into a rentier, and to dominate more and more completely those who possess nothing but their labour. Once established, capital reproduces itself, more rapidly than the growth of production. The past devours the future.
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014)
