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sanity, humanity and science probably the world's most read economics journal real-world economics review Please click here to support this journal and the WEA - Subscribers: 26,271 subscribe RWER Blog ISSN 1755-9472 - A journal of the World Economics Association (WEA) 14,468 members, join - Sister open access journals: Economic Thought and World Social and Economic Review back issues Issue no. 92 - The Inequality Crisis 29 June 2020 The three options: an introduction 2 Edward Fullbrook Rethinking the world economy as a two bloc hierarchy 4 Robert H. Wade Global inequality in a time of pandemic 22 Jayati Ghosh The United States of inequality 33 David F. Ruccio Fixing capitalism: stopping inequality at its source 48 Dean Baker Inequality challenge in pursued economies 61 Richard C. Koo Inequality under globalization: state of knowledge and implications for economics 84 James Galbraith and Jaehee Choi Thomas Piketty’s changing views on inequality 103 Steven Pressman Inequality: what we think, what we don’t think and why we acquiesce 116 Jamie Morgan The art of balance: the search for equaliberty and solidarity 134 Peter Radford Climbing to 1011: globalization, digitization,shareholder capitalism and the summits of 151 contemporary wealth David A. Westbrook Poverty and income inequality: a complex relationship 167 Victor A. Beker The inequalities that could not happen: what the Cold War did to economics 186 Erik S. Reinert I LOVE YOU – investing for intergenerational wellbeing 207 Girol Karacaoglu Inequality in development: the 2030 Agenda, SDG 10 and the role of redistribution 228 Holger Apel Inequality and the case for UBI funded by sovereign money 238 Geoff Crocker Inequality and morbid symptoms of a financialised system 246 Ann Pettifor Why COVID-19 is the great unequalizer 252 Marshall Auerback Board of Editors, past contributors, submissions, etc. 257 support this journal visit the RW ER Blog real-world economics review, issue no. 92 subscribe for free The three options: an introduction Edward Fullbrook [University of the West of England, UK] Copyright: Edward Fullbrook, 2020 You may post comments on this paper at https://rwer.wordpress.com/comments-on-rwer-issue-no-92/ The everyday operations of our economies produce the goods and services that keep us alive and enable us to enjoy life. But that is not the only way that those operations effect our lives; they also effect societies and ecosystems. The Inequality Crisis, which threatens our societies, and the Climate Crisis, which threatens both our societies and our species, are also, no less than production, brought about directly by the everyday operations of our economies.1 But for two hundred years the economics profession has in the main excluded from its study of economies two of their three categories of primary effects. And given the profession’s influence, this exclusion of societal and ecological effects has promoted the intellectual invisibility of these two categories, thereby helping to bring about the two crises. Compared to the Climate Crisis, which, although only recently acknowledged, has been in the making for over a century and a half, the Inequality Crisis is young. The massive redistribution of income and wealth which brought it about began in the 1970s, but until 2014 that redistribution was, except in the RWER and other journals outside the neoclassical mainstream, almost never mentioned. Although there is still a long way to go, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century changed that.2 Many kinds of intellectuals took notice, and literally within months of the book’s publication it became socially acceptable, even among economists, to talk about growing inequality – the by then already long-term upward redistribution of income and wealth. Meanwhile, the effects of that redistribution have become increasingly manifest, so much so that even in time of pandemic they make the daily news. In democracies it seems to be that the more extreme the upward redistribution becomes, the more politically aggressive the ultrarich become. And when they capture political parties and then, as in the United States, rule and reshape their countries’ institutions, a moral vacuum emerges wherein victims of the redistribution look for vulnerable groups to scapegoat, and a populism of the pre-fascist variety takes hold.3 But income and wealth distributions, unlike gravitational forces, result not from the natural order but from human decisions. And the general direction of those decisions now needs to become part of open public discussion. Regarding the distribution of income and wealth, human society now has three basic options: 1 Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan (editors) (2019) Economics and the Ecosystem. World Economics Association BOOKS. 2 Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan (editors) (2014) Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. World Economics Association BOOKS. 3 Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan (editors) (2017) Trumponomics: Causes and Consequence. World Economics Association BOOKS. 2 real-world economics review, issue no. 92 subscribe for free 1. Continue with the upward redistribution, 2. Maintain the current distribution, 3. Reverse the redistribution of recent decades. If you favour Option 1, you may not want to read The Inequality Crisis and you for sure will want to discourage others from reading it. Why? Because all its papers offer insights into how Options 2 and 3 could be realized, and all are ultimately committed to empiricism rather than to axiomatics. It is hoped that this collection will be only part of the beginning of a new focus in economics. On the topic of economic inequality, many papers and books that are both truth-seeking and sincerely in the spirit of goodwill towards humanity are now urgently needed. Author contact: [email protected] SUGGESTED CITATION: Fullbrook, Edward (2020) “The three options: an introduction.” real-world economics review, issue no. 92, 29 June, pp. 2-3, http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue92/Fullbrook92.pdf You may post and read comments on this paper at https://rwer.wordpress.com/comments-on-rwer-issue-no-92/ 3 real-world economics review, issue no. 92 subscribe for free Rethinking the world economy as a two bloc hierarchy 1 Robert H. Wade [London School of Economics, UK] Copyright: Robert H. Wade, 2020 You may post comments on this paper at https://rwer.wordpress.com/comments-on-rwer-issue-no-92/ Abstract It is now widely recognized that the enormous differences in conditions of life between the world’s territories destabilises our globalised existence, making a threat almost as existential as climate change and unsustainable use of resources. In everyday speech we talk of rich and poor countries; but in analytical discussion we generally assume that the distinction between rich and poor, developed and less developed, North and South, core and periphery, is obsolete, too broad to be meaningful. So studies of global income inequality normally use a statistic like the Gini to calculate average inequality across all countries and all households. This essay argues that (1) global income inequality is structured in a two bloc hierarchy of developed and less developed countries (China and the transitional economies taken out); (2) there has been little movement of countries between the blocs; (3) far from being “accidental”, the two bloc structure is the result of specific causes spelt out here – including the ability of the holders of capital to chose among many legal systems where they incorporate their assets to find the one that offers them the best benefits in terms of taxes, regulation, shareholder benefits, profit repatriation, entry and exit – without having to move themselves or their business there. They are analytically like “roving bandits” looking for legal protection from suitable states. The essay also discusses, more briefly, some effects of this inequality structure – including another existential threat for the twenty first century, persistent migration of people from South to North. The conclusion for development studies is that the study of development should retire the long-running metaphor of development as marathon race, and – with a Copernican jump – embed itself in the study of international relations. “Even if economists did not use terms like purchasing power, bargaining power, and monopoly power, it ought to be obvious that the market or price system is a power system” Charles Lindblom, 1966, emphasis added. I begin with a letter to the Financial Times, 2-3 May 2020. The writer, a professor of psychiatry, says: “The early spread of Covid-19 outside China clearly tracked flight paths, chiefly to rich countries. Despite the substantial problems that the virus presents in these settings, rich countries are still better placed to contain it: better sanitation, better nutrition, better healthcare. “The picture will be very different in poor countries where most people who die of the virus will, in truth, die of a combination of poverty and Covid-19” (Kelly, 2020). The writer uses our everyday distinction between “rich” countries and “poor” countries, treating them as roughly homogeneous groupings in terms of characteristics relevant to disease. “Rich and poor” maps to everyday language of developed and less developed countries, core and periphery, and North and South. 1 Robert H. Wade is professor of global political economy at the London School of Economics. He was awarded the Leontief Prize in Economics, 2008, and his Governing the Market, was awarded Best Book or Article in Political Economy by the American Political Science Association. 4 real-world economics review, issue no. 92 subscribe for free What is strange is that our main sources of data about the world economy hardly use this breakdown into two big polarized groupings. 1. Statistical and theoretical occlusion of the north-south dualism In 2010 the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, declared the distinction between developed and developing countries to be obsolete.