trickle-down economics

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Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess by Robert H. Frank

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Such a tax might also stimulate growth by lessening the disparities in consumption that have been growing in recent decades, thus enabling poorer families to better educate and care for their children; or by enabling these families to enjoy more robust physical and psychological health; or by making it less likely that they would commit crimes. Whatever combination of these theoretical possibilities might actually be at work, this much is clear: The observed patterns in the data are flatly inconsistent with the fundamental premise of trickle-down theory. In both cross-national data and time-series data, greater inequality of reward is associated with lower, not higher, rates of economic growth. The fundamental premise of trickle-down economics simply provides no intelligible basis for rejecting the progressive consumption tax. Nor, as we have seen, does the claim that private consumption decisions are not a legitimate concern of public policy.

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As one corporation after another has moved its headquarters from New York to some other jurisdiction with lower tax rates, the state’s per capita income has continued a pattern of long decline in relative terms. All the while, Southern states with low tax rates have enjoyed a sustained economic boom. At the local and even state levels, at any rate, the fundamental premise of trickle-down economics appears largely confirmed. Higher tax rates seem to translate into lower rates of economic growth. And this, we may suspect, is an important reason for the widespread support that the fundamental premise of trickle-down theory currently enjoys. Yet the observed responses to state and local tax changes tell us only that people are willing to substitute one location for another in response to tax incentives.

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In fact, however, the length of the workweek is significantly lower now than in 1900.3 As noted earlier, the downward trend in hours worked leveled out shortly after World War II in the United States and has actually turned slightly upwards over the last two decades. This observation also casts doubt on the fundamental premise of trickle-down economics. After all, the wage of the median earner has declined slightly during the last 20 years—which, according to trickle-down theory, ought to have caused a reduction in work hours instead of an increase. By many accounts, the recent increase in hours worked is an attempt to recoup the loss of purchasing power that stems from lower wage rates. Although comparisons across countries are inherently difficult to interpret, on balance we would also expect to see more effort supplied in countries with higher real after-tax wage rates if the fundamental premise of trickle-down economics were correct.

The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deliberate practice, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, smart grid, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy

If economic theory provides no justification for the trickle-down doctrine, what do the numbers say? Here as well, the doctrine finds little support. One test is suggested by the observation that if lower real wages induce people to work shorter hours, then the opposite should be true when real wages increase. Since 1900, average hourly wages in the United States have risen more than fivefold in inflation-adjusted terms. According to trickledown theory, then, Americans should be working significantly longer hours now. Yet the current American workweek is only about half what it was in 1900. Trickle-down theory also predicts shorter workweeks in countries with lower real after-tax pay rates.

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See sports utility vehicles Sweden, lack of corruption in, 56 Switzerland, lack of corruption in, 56 talent, in success, 143–48 task specialization, 43, 203–4 tax(es): as inhibitor of economic growth, 13, 157–58; libertarian objections to, 6, 119–21; 239 need for mandatory, 6, 168–69, 202; slogans opposing, 168–71, 194–95; as social engineering, 13–14, 122–23; as theft, 6, 119, 154, 168–69, 202; trickle-down theory of, 157–62. See also specific types tax(es), on harmful activities, 13–15, 172–93; alcohol taxes as, 185–87; causing indirect harm, 187; economic growth caused by, 158; and helmet rules, 187–92; and Mill’s harm principle, 187, 188, 189, 190, 213; versus regulations, 13–14, 79–80, 123, 172–74, 213; slippery slope argument against, 193; soda taxes as, 192–93; tax on vehicle weight as, 183–84; tobacco taxes as, 184–85; versus useful activities, 13–15, 122. See also consumption tax, progressive; pollution taxes tax cuts: payroll tax, 13, 14, 112; trickle-down theory of, 157–62.

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Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who describes himself as a libertarian, echoed this view when he wrote that “All taxes are a drag on economic growth. It’s only a matter of degree.”2 But it’s not just libertarians who believe taxes inhibit economic growth. Variations of that view, often called trickle-down theory, have been repeated so often by so many people across the political spectrum that it has acquired an air of settled truth. 157 158 CHAPTER TEN It cannot literally be true, of course, that all taxes are a drag on economic growth. As noted earlier, unless we tax something, we can’t organize and maintain a civil society and defend ourselves from foreign invaders, much less enjoy robust economic growth.

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

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Trickle Down was a minor deity in the pantheon of the Capitalist religion. There were many who doubted she really existed, even at the height of her popularity in the early 1980s. Profit was the dominant male god of Capitalism. See Michael Wright and Carolin Herron, “Trickle-Down Theory Revisited and Explained,” New York Times, 8 May 1983, https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/08/weekinreview/the-nation-trickle-down-theory-revisited-and-explained.html. CHAPTER 10 Geopolitics Epigraph: E. M. Forster, “The Machine Stops,” Oxford and Cambridge Review, November 1909, http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html. 1. The dates are arbitrary: 1837 was when several patents by rival inventors of the telegraph were filed and the first working system was used, but forms of it had been created earlier, and 1974 is when the word Internet was first used in documents on networking protocols.

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Bill Gates promptly declared it his “new favorite book of all time.”14 It is not hard to see how Pinker’s story is wrong. Today many people other than Pinker know that we are consuming too much. They know that only the rich will benefit from Pinker’s ideas, such as pretending (or even actually believing) that trickle-down economics works. Pinker has a particular liking for the old-fashioned economic measurement of GDP, but as Jeremy Lent made clear in his critique of Pinker’s suggestions, various measures of the world’s genuine progress rate (GPR) peaked around the year 1976 and “they have been steadily falling ever since.”

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Other people, all of them unknown to you, had simultaneously become much poorer. You had no idea that they became poorer as a direct result of your trading actions. Of course the money you made had to actually come at the expense of others, you were not doing anything of such great actual value; but you believed the market was efficient and that the “trickle-down effect” would sort out the poor.44 Later, of course, disaster will strike. But you have long since diversified. You purchased some properties with your winnings, a few in 1997 and more in both 1998 and 1999. The rental income was good, the capital appreciation even better. You survived the dot.com crash of 2000 and 2001, although your salary and bonuses would never rise as fast again.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

Last but not least, we need to look at history because we have the moral duty to avoid ‘live experiments’ with people as much as possible. From the central planning in the former socialist bloc (and their ‘Big Bang’ transition back to capitalism), through to the disasters of ‘austerity’ policies in most European countries following the Great Depression, down to the failures of ‘trickle-down economics’ in the US and the UK during the 1980s and the 1990s, history is littered with radical policy experiments that have destroyed the lives of millions, or even tens of millions, of people. Studying history won’t allow us to completely avoid mistakes in the present, but we should do our best to extract lessons from history before we formulate a policy that will affect lives.

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The Reagan government aggressively cut the higher income tax rates, explaining that these cuts would give the rich greater incentives to invest and create wealth, as they could keep more of the fruits of their investments. Once they created more wealth, it was argued, the rich would spend more, creating more jobs and incomes for everyone else; this is known as the trickle-down theory. At the same time, subsidies to the poor (especially in housing) were cut and the minimum wage frozen so that they had a greater incentive to work harder. When you think about it, this was a curious logic – why do we need to make the rich richer to make them work harder but make the poor poorer for the same purpose?

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Even though the shares that poorer people get in the national income may be smaller, they will be better off in absolute terms. This is what Milton Friedman, the guru of free-market economics, meant when he said: ‘Most economic fallacies derive from … the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.’1 The belief in the trickle-down effect has prompted many governments to employ – or at least has provided them with the political cover for – pro-rich policies in the last three decades. Regulations on product, labour and financial markets were relaxed, making it easier for the rich to make money. Taxes on corporations and high-income earners were cut, making it easier for them to keep the money they thus make.

The Rich and the Rest of Us by Tavis Smiley

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, ending welfare as we know it, F. W. de Klerk, fixed income, full employment, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, job automation, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traffic fines, trickle-down economics, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor

It is to chart the War on Poverty’s timeline and pinpoint the myopic moment when anti-poor rhetoric and subsequent legislation turned stereotypical, vicious, and punitive. Reagan was more than the general who waved the white flag of surrender in the War on Poverty; he actually initiated the “War on Welfare.” He was also the architect of “trickle-down” economics—a theory based on the false notion that tax policies that benefit the wealthy will magically lift the poor. Some of the most devastating conditions that the poor face today are legacies of the Reagan era. Reagan slashed the budgets for so-called entitlement programs such as Medicaid, food stamps, the Environmental Protection Agency, Community Development Block Grants, and federal education programs by 60 percent.

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It concludes that the “well-being of low-income Americans, particularly the working poor, the near poor, and the new poor, are at substantial risk,” despite politicians’ and Wall Street’s declarations of an economic recovery.37 With the economic reality that real wages for the American working class have not increased for the past four decades, it is past time to challenge the distorted language and accompanying political rhetoric about the poor. We must move past Republican and Democratic versions of trickle-down economics—the belief that helping the rich and middle classes will magically improve the lot of the poor and working poor. Job growth has stalled so badly that several economists predict that, even if the economy rebounds, unemployment levels by the end of 2013 may return only to 2007 levels—around 4.6 percent, or almost 14 million people.

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They knew how to manipulate this group.” As the polls and surveys we mentioned earlier indicate, prior to the recession, most of the middle class were ambivalent about the rich/poor divide and thoroughly convinced they, too, could be rich. Conservative politicians played on these unreal expectations and got voters to support trickle-down theories and to resist tax hikes on the rich. But, as Moore asserted, Wall Street bankers and lenders overplayed their hand: “The huge catastrophic tactical mistake they made—because of their incredible greed—was, after they soaked the poor … they thought: ‘Geez, we’re just not making enough money.

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy by Linsey McGoey

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Like Carnegie before him and Fries today, Mellon was a firm believer in the credo that wealth concentration will inevitably foster collective benefits. The idea that we should augment the wealth of the richest 1 per cent so they have more to spend on charity is trickle-down theory in its baldest form. Bishop and Green have made this clear: ‘Today’, they write approvingly in Philanthrocapitalism, ‘Carnegie would be called a believer in trickle-down economics. As he argued, it is “much better this great irregularity than universal squalor”’.40 Their praise for Carnegie’s ideas about wealth is not surprising in itself. Carnegie’s writing has many fans, including Bill Gates, who reportedly consulted the Gospel of Wealth when establishing his own foundation.

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But what is surprising about Bishop and Green’s praise for Carnegie is their openly approving use of the phrase ‘trickle-down economics’. And not in an ironic manner. The economist J. Kenneth Galbraith used to scornfully liken trickle-down policies to what he described as the ‘horse and sparrow’ theory of economic growth: the idea that ‘if you feed the horses enough oats, something will pass through to the road for the sparrows’.41 Jabs from left-leaning economists such as Galbraith have long struck a sensitive chord with those on the right. Long deployed by most commentators in a pejorative manner, no political party has ever openly advocated trickle-down economics – not even those assumed to have most embraced its spirit: the Republicans under Reagan or the Conservatives under Thatcher.

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While Thatcher once famously proclaimed ‘it is our job to glory in inequality and see that talents and abilities are given vent and expression for the benefit of all’ – even she stopped short of using the phrase. It’s true that many on the right explicitly align themselves with supply-side economics, a tradition in macroeconomics that suggests low taxes and reduced regulation will foster more production, consumption and economic growth. But ‘trickle-down’ economics has never been explicit, publicly vocalized party policy, perhaps because many on the right are canny enough to realize that making it an official doctrine would expose political incumbents to accusations of failure whenever the reality of how rarely wealth actually does trickle to the poorest members of society becomes obvious.

Tyler Cowen - Stubborn Attachments A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals by Meg Patrick

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, Peter Singer: altruism, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, social discount rate, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, zero-sum game

We can try to equalize all wealth today, but we would not be able to draw on comparable resources for the next generation. Such a widespread collective redistribution would lead rapidly to negative economic growth. In contrast the benefits of economic growth will compound over time. It is common to scorn the phrase “trickle-down economics,” but a steady and ongoing flow of benefits is exactly what we are looking to achieve. A flood is better than a trickle, but a lasting trickle is better than eating our cake today and cashing in our chips. These stipulated individual obligations are not so far from common-sense morality.

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There has been a squeezing of the middle class in the wealthier nations, in part because of increasing global competition. Still, we have seen economic growth, aggregate wealth, and global income equality all rising together over the last twenty-five years. Most citizens in East Asia, South Asia, and Latin America have seen significant gains in their living standards, and much of this has been a trickle-down effect from the earlier growth of the wealthier countries. Much of Africa is now following suit as well, in part boosted by China’s demand for raw materials and also by the spread of modern technologies such as affordable cell phones.13 Sometimes extended periods of growth do not bring full or fair benefits for the poor or lower classes, for instance during the early phase of the British industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century.

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Indeed it is a common complaint in the literature on inequality that “the rich get richer,” while the “poor get poorer,” or at least more or less stay put. If this portrait is to be believed, it implies that the rich earn higher returns on their accumulated wealth, as indeed has been stressed by the French economist Thomas Piketty. If there is a trickle-down effect from the wealth of the wealthy, combined with a zero rate of discount, it is easy to generate scenarios where utilitarianism recommends redistribution to the wealthy. For instance let’s say – for purposes of argument – that the wealthy earn eight percent on their holdings, annually and on average, and the poor earn one percent.

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals by Tyler Cowen

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, butterfly effect, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Fall of the Berlin Wall, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, Peter Singer: altruism, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, social discount rate, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, zero-sum game

This too should limit our attachment to social welfare programs.3 So rather than redistributing most wealth, we can do better for the world by investing in high-return activities like supporting immigration and producing new technologies with global reach, such as cell phones and new methods for boosting agricultural productivity. Many people mock the term “trickle-down economics,” but most social benefits do take a trickle-down form. We should of course prefer a flood to a trickle, which brings us back to wishing to boost the sustainable growth rate as much as possible. These stipulated individual obligations are not so far from common sense morality. To be sure, we have not yet bridged the gap between utilitarian reasoning and common sense morality.

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There has been a squeezing of the middle class in the wealthier nations, in part because of increasing global competition. Still, we have seen economic growth, aggregate wealth, and global income equality all rising together over the last twenty-five years. Many citizens in East Asia, South Asia, and Latin America have seen significant gains in their standard of living, and much of this has been a trickle-down effect from the earlier growth of the wealthier countries. Much of Africa is now following suit, bolstered in part by China’s demand for raw materials, and also by the spread of modern technologies such as affordable cell phones.13 Sometimes extended periods of growth do not confer full or fair benefits to the poor or lower classes, for instance during the early phase of the British Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century.

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Indeed, a common complaint in the literature on inequality is that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer, or at least more or less stay put. If this portrait is to be believed, then the rich earn higher returns on their accumulated wealth, as has been argued by the French economist Thomas Piketty. If we combine the trickle-down effect from the wealth of the wealthy with a zero rate of discount, it is easy to generate scenarios in which utilitarianism would recommend the redistribution of wealth to the wealthy. For instance, let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the wealthy earn eight percent on their holdings, annually and on average, while the poor earn one percent.

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle, Andrew Simms

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Crossrail, delayed gratification, deskilling, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, financial deregulation, financial exclusion, financial innovation, full employment, garden city movement, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, light touch regulation, loss aversion, mega-rich, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working-age population

If you helped some people get rich, then they would spend more and it would trickle down through the economy to the poorest. It survives to this day in most of the assumptions of mainstream regeneration and economic development, though it is even more obvious now than it was to Carville that wealth doesn’t trickle down, it floods up. In fact, of course, the great days of trickle down economics were still to come. Every government conditioned by the so-called Washington Consensus, as well as the all-powerful International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, believed that cutting taxes would in the end stimulate the economy, and – to start with – it did. But in the constant failure of regeneration, redistribution and community revitalization, it was increasingly obvious to most people outside that consensus that trickle down simply did not work.

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This was an era dominated by the set of policies that became known as ‘neoliberal’, though they bore no relation to any liberalism worthy of the name. The heart of this consensus was a redoubled reliance on money as the only measurement tool, 28 THE NEW ECONOMICS and a major commitment to trickle down economics via private corporations. It was more accurately an application of Darwin’s evolutionary theories to economics: a kind of survival of the economically fittest. But their interpretation of the ‘fit’ – the marketable, the profitable, the global – was not only a misreading of Darwin, but deeply inadequate.

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Despite this definitive statement, most economic policy is based on this flawed old economic dictum that helping the wealth-creators will automatically help everybody else. If that wealth is not productive, or if the bargain driven with the producers is manifestly unfair, then the wealth will not trickle. Even so, the complete failure of so-called ‘trickle down economics’ seems to require some other explanations. Why, despite the apparent success of recent decades, has that not benefited the poorest? Some possible explanations are covered in the previous chapter, but a glimpse at some of the workshops that manufacture clothes for the big brand names is enough to see that there is a problem.

Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities by Alain Bertaud

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However, if the same 10 percent increase in new housing units is built for households with incomes around 36,000 yuan (or about 10,000 new units), the increase in number of housing units will also trickle down toward lower-income groups but will soon have an insignificant impact because of the much larger number of households among the lower-income group. The trickle-down effect does occur in every case, but its effect will be completely diluted if the increase in dwelling units is targeted to households whose income is much to the right of the distribution mode (in the case of Shanghai shown in figure 6.8, the mode corresponds to households with incomes of about 22,000 yuan). If the number of households in each income interval were equal (if the bars were all of the same height), then the trickle down would work perfectly. Of course, the trickle-down effect could also become a trickle up. Imagine that a government constrains the housing supply of higher-income groups and favors exclusively the building of lower-cost housing units (say, for incomes of about 12,000 yuan in figure 6.8).

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A city’s income distribution curve is an indispensable tool for analyzing and quantifying housing affordability issues. Figure 6.8 Shanghai household income distribution, 1998. Source: Jie Chen, Qianjin Hao, and Mark Stephens, Assessing Housing Affordability in Post-Reform China: A Case Study of Shanghai (London: Routledge, 2010). Housing Stock and Flow, and the Trickle-Down Theory The shape of the income distribution curve may also help anticipate the policy impact of affordability. The graph enables testing of whether the “trickle-down” affordability theory10 is likely to be relevant. For instance, imagine that developers increase by 10 percent the number of new housing units affordable to households with an income of about 14,000 yuan (or about 24,000 new units).

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Adequate housing, 269–270 Affordability in China, 230–231, 230f, 293–300, 297f demand side subsidies in, 260–263, 262f, 267–268 Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey for, 224–225, 225f for developing countries, 372–373 economics of, 341–342 in Gauteng (South Africa), 268–271, 270f, 272f, 273–275, 275f government for, 220–221, 231–235, 232f–233f, 301–302, 304–306 household income in, 219–220, 222–224, 239, 240f, 242–244, 243f, 247, 248f, 249–251, 251f, 254–256, 255f housing policy and, 249–250, 252 housing typology in, 244–247, 245f, 302–303 incentives in, 283–284 in Indonesia, 288–292, 291f informal housing for, 256–260, 258f in land use, 334 minimum standards for, 235–236 in New York, 275–281, 278f, 280f–281f PIR in, 224–230, 225f, 227f–228f, 231 policy for, 267–268, 300–301, 328–329, 356–357, 357f poverty and, 236–239, 238f, 287–288 in South Africa, 366–367, 388n26 subletting in, 282–283 subsidies in, 303–304 supply side subsidies in, 264–267, 265f tax incentives in, 284–285 technology and, 345–346, 346f theory of, 49, 219, 301 trickle-down theory for, 240–241, 391n10 urban land supply in, 252–254, 253f zoning in, 281–282, 285–287 Affordable housing, 276–277, 281–282, 285–287 Agricultural land in Hanoi (Vietnam), 135–136 land price and, 135–136 land readjustment for, 385n7 spatial distribution of, 114–116, 115t, 118, 119f, 120–122, 121f–122f in urban economics, 122–124, 125f urban land compared to, 115–118, 117f, 119f, 122f Algeria, 4–6 Alonso, William, 95 Alterman, Rachelle, 367–368 Alternative urban shapes containment policy in, 334–335, 340–341 demographic projection in, 341–344 density and, 339–340, 340f economics of, 329–330, 330f government and, 332–333 markets and, 335–337 New York as, 317–326 Paris as, 310–317, 311f, 316f politics of, 337–339, 346–347 theory of, 307–310, 329–330, 333, 346–347 zoning for, 326–332, 328f, 330f Amsterdam, 338–339 Anas, Alex, 95 Angel, Shlomo, 21–22, 110, 116, 147–148, 339–340 Antifragile (Taleb), 308–309 Apple (company), 308, 351 Art Deco building (New York), 326 Asia.

Are Chief Executives Overpaid? by Deborah Hargreaves

banking crisis, benefit corporation, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bonus culture, business climate, corporate governance, Donald Trump, G4S, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, loadsamoney, long term incentive plan, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, performance metric, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Snapchat, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, wealth creators

In one memorable exchange before the Brexit vote, a journalist quoted a woman in the north-east heckling a visiting professor who encouraged his audience to imagine the plunge in GDP if Britain left the EU. ‘That’s your bloody GDP, not ours’, the woman said.2 The woman was right in that the enrichment of those at the top has failed to spread beyond that small group in the way that was envisaged in the 1980s. The trickle-down theory of economics assumed that boosting rewards for people at the top of the income chain would stimulate economic growth as they employed more people and spent their increased income on goods and services. However, the theory has been thoroughly debunked in recent years and disowned by the very institutions that promoted it in the first place, who now say that it has created greater inequality.

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Similarly, Ronald Reagan came to power during a period of deep recession and stagflation – characterized as double digit economic downturn accompanied by double digit rate of inflation – in 1981. He was convinced that tax cuts for the rich, deregulation of markets and business, and control of the money supply to counter inflation, would improve the economy for all through the so-called ‘trickle-down effect’. President Reagan gave his name to the branch of monetarist economics he popularized – Reaganomics – but much of his legacy has since been called into question. Time men of the year The concentration of wealth among top businessmen has a long legacy in America but a look at the choices made by Time magazine for its person of the year illustrates a flood of value to the top in recent years.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

We were promised economic dynamism in exchange for inequality. We got the inequality, but dynamism is actually declining. Call it stagnequality—lower growth combined with rising inequality rather than inflation. It is no surprise, then, that the public has rejected conventional economic wisdom. Conflict Given that leftists have long criticized “trickle-down economics,” it would be natural to expect a leftist populist backlash to stagnequality and a subsequent move to redistribute income. To some extent this prediction has been confirmed by recent events, as summarized in table I.1. Bernie Sanders nearly won the US Democratic primary despite identifying as a socialist earlier in his life and running for president as a social democrat.

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., 78 Cabral, Luís, 202 Cadappster app, 31 Caesar, Julius, 84 Canada, 10, 13, 159, 182 capitalism, xvi; basic structure of, 24–25; competition and, 17 (see also competition); corporate planning and, 39–40; cultural consequences of, 270, 273; Engels on, 239–40; freedom and, 34–39; George on, 36–37; growth and, 3 (see also growth, economic); industrial revolution, 36, 255; inequality and, 3 (see also inequality); labor and, 136–37, 143, 159, 165, 211, 224, 231, 239–40, 316n4; laissez-faire, 45; liberalism and, 3, 17, 22–27; markets and, 278, 288, 304n36; Marx on, 239–40; monopolies and, 22–23, 34–39, 44, 46–49, 132, 136, 173, 177, 179, 199, 258, 262; monopsony and, 190, 199–201, 223, 234, 238–41, 255; ownership and, 34–36, 39, 45–49, 75, 78–79; property and, 34–36, 39, 45–49, 75, 78–79; Radical Markets and, 169, 180–85, 203, 273; regulations and, 262; Schumpeter on, 47; shareholders and, 118, 170, 178–84, 189, 193–95; technology and, 34, 203, 316n4; wealth and, 45, 75, 78–79, 136, 143, 239, 273 Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman), xiii Capitalism for the People, A (Luigi), 203 Capra, Frank, 17 Carroll, Lewis, 176 central planning: computers and, 277–85, 288–93; consumers and, 19; democracy and, 89; governance and, 19–20, 39–42, 46–48, 62, 89, 277–85, 288–90, 293; healthcare and, 290–91; liberalism and, 19–20; markets and, 277–85, 288–93; property and, 39–42, 46–48, 62; recommendation systems and, 289–90; socialism and, 39–42, 47, 277, 281 Chetty, Raj, 11 Chiang Kai-shek, 46 China, 15, 46, 56, 133–34, 138 Christensen, Clayton, 202 Chrysler, 193 Citigroup, 183, 184, 191 Clarke, Edward, 99, 102, 105 Clayton Act, 176–77, 197, 311n25 Clemens, Michael, 162 Coase, Ronald, 40, 48–51, 299n26 Cold War, xix, 25, 288 collective bargaining, 240–41 collective decisions: democracy and, 97–105, 110–11, 118–20, 122, 124, 273, 303n17, 304n36; manipulation of, 99; markets for, 97–105; public goods and, 98; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 110–11, 118–20, 122, 124, 273, 303n17, 304n36; Vickrey and, 99, 102, 105 colonialism, 8, 131 Coming of the Third Reich, The (Evans), 93 common ownership self-assessed tax (COST): broader application of, 273–76; cybersquatters and, 72; education and, 258–59; efficiency and, 256, 261; equality and, 258; globalization and, 269–70; growth and, 73, 256; human capital and, 258–61; immigrants and, 261, 269, 273; inequality and, 256–59; international trade and, 270; investment and, 258–59, 270; legal issues and, 275; markets and, 286; methodology of, 63–66; monopolies and, 256–61, 270, 300n43; objections to, 300n43; optimality and, 61, 73, 75–79, 317n18; personal possessions and, 301n47, 317n18; political effects of, 261–64; predatory outsiders and, 300n43; prices and, 62–63, 67–77, 256, 258, 263, 275, 300n43, 317n18; property and, 31, 61–79, 271–74, 300n43, 301n47; public goods and, 256; public leases and, 69–72; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 123–25, 194, 261–63, 273, 275, 286; Radical Markets and, 79, 123–26, 257–58, 271–72, 286; taxes and, 61–69, 73–76, 258–61, 275, 317n18; technology and, 71–72, 257–59; true market economy and, 72–75; voting and, 263; wealth and, 256–57, 261–64, 269–70, 275, 286 communism, 19–20, 46–47, 93–94, 125, 278 competition: antitrust policies and, 23, 48, 174–77, 180, 184–86, 191, 197–203, 242, 255, 262, 286; auctions and, xv–xix, 49–51, 70–71, 97, 99, 147–49, 156–57; bargaining and, 240–41, 299n26; democracy and, 109, 119–20; by design, 49–55; elitism and, 25–28; equilibrium and, 305n40; eternal vigilance and, 204; horizontal concentration and, 175; imperfect, 304n36; indexing and, 185–91, 302n63; innovation and, 202–3; investment and, 196–97; labor and, 145, 158, 162–63, 220, 234, 236, 239, 243, 245, 256, 266; laissez-faire and, 253; liberalism and, 6, 17, 20–28; lobbyists and, 262; monopolies and, 174; monopsony and, 190, 199–201, 223, 234, 238–41, 255; ownership and, 20–21, 41, 49–55, 79; perfect, 6, 25–28, 109; prices and, 20–22, 25, 173, 175, 180, 185–90, 193, 200–201, 204, 244; property and, 41, 49–55, 79; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 304n36; regulations and, 262; resale price maintenance and, 200–201; restoring, 191–92; Section 7 and, 196–97, 311n25; selfishness and, 109, 270–71; Smith on, 17; tragedy of the commons and, 44 complexity, 218–20, 226–28, 274–75, 279, 281, 284, 287, 313n15 “Computer and the Market, The” (Lange), 277 computers: algorithms and, 208, 214, 219, 221, 281–82, 289–93; automation of labor and, 222–23, 251, 254; central planning and, 277–85, 288–93; data and, 213–14, 218, 222, 233, 244, 260; Deep Blue, 213; distributed computing and, 282–86, 293; growth in poor countries and, 255; as intermediaries, 274; machine learning (ML) and, 214 (see also machine learning [ML]); markets and, 277, 280–93; Mises and, 281; Moore’s Law and, 286–87; Open-Trac and, 31–32; parallel processing and, 282–86; prices of, 21; recommendation systems and, 289–90 Condorcet, Marquis de, 4, 90–93, 303n15, 306n51 conspicuous consumption, 78 Consumer Reports magazine, 291 consumers: antitrust suits and, 175, 197–98; central planning and, 19; data from, 47, 220, 238, 242–44, 248, 289; drone delivery to, 220; as entrepreneurs, 256; goods and services for, 27, 92, 123, 130, 175, 280, 292; institutional investment and, 190–91; international culture for, 270; lobbyists and, 262; machine learning (ML) and, 238; monopolies and, 175, 186, 197–98; preferences of, 280, 288–93; prices and, 172 (see also prices); recommendation systems and, 289–90; robots and, 287; sharing economy and, 117; Soviet collapse and, 289; technology and, 287 cooperatives, 118, 126, 261, 267, 299n24 Corbyn, Jeremy, 12, 13 corruption, 3, 23, 27, 57, 93, 122, 126, 157, 262 Cortana, 219 cost-benefit analysis, 2, 244 “Counterspeculation, Auctions and Competitive Sealed Tenders” (Vickrey), xx–xxi Cramton, Peter, 52, 54–55, 57 crowdsourcing, 235 crytocurrencies, 117–18 cybersquatters, 72 data: algorithms and, 208, 214, 219, 221, 281–82, 289–93; big, 213, 226, 293; computers and, 213–14, 218, 222, 233, 244, 260; consumer, 47, 220, 238, 242–44, 248, 289; diamond-water paradox and, 224–25; diminishing returns and, 226, 229–30; distribution of complexity and, 228; as entertainment, 233–39, 248–49; Facebook and, 28, 205–9, 212–13, 220–21, 231–48; feedback and, 114, 117, 233, 238, 245; free, 209, 211, 220, 224, 231–35, 239; Google and, 28, 202, 207–13, 219–20, 224, 231–36, 241–42, 246; investment in, 212, 224, 232, 244; labeled, 217–21, 227, 228, 230, 232, 234, 237; labor movement for, 241–43; Lanier and, 208, 220–24, 233, 237, 313n2, 315n48; marginal value and, 224–28, 247; network effects and, 211, 236, 238, 243; neural networks and, 214–19; online services and, 211, 235; overfitting and, 217–18; payment systems for, 210–13, 224–30; photographs and, 64, 214–15, 217, 219–21, 227–28, 291; programmers and, 163, 208–9, 214, 217, 219, 224; Radical Markets for, 246–49; reCAPTCHA and, 235–36; recommendation systems and, 289–90; rise of data work and, 209–13; sample complexity and, 217–18; siren servers and, 220–24, 230–41, 243; social networks and, 202, 212, 231, 233–36; technofeudalism and, 230–33; under-employment and, 256; value of, 243–45; venture capital and, 211, 224; virtual reality and, 206, 208, 229, 251, 253; women’s work and, 209, 313n4 Declaration of Independence, 86 Deep Blue, 213 DeFoe, Daniel, 132 Demanding Work (Gray and Suri), 233 democracy: 1p1v system and, 82–84, 94, 109, 119, 122–24, 304n36, 306n51; artificial intelligence (AI) and, 219; Athenians and, 55, 83–84, 131; auctions and, 97, 99; basic structure of, 24–25; central planning and, 89; check and balance systems and, 23, 25, 87, 92; collective decisions and, 97–105, 110–11, 118–20, 122, 124, 273, 303n17, 304n36; collective mediocrity and, 96; competition and, 109, 119–20; Declaration of Independence and, 86; efficiency and, 92, 110, 126; elections and, 22, 80, 93, 100, 115, 119–21, 124, 217–18, 296n20; elitism and, 89–91, 96, 124; Enlightenment and, 86, 95; Europe and, 90–96; France and, 90–95; governance and, 84, 117; gridlock and, 84, 88, 122–24, 261, 267; Hitler and, 93–94; House of Commons and, 84–85; House of Lords and, 85; impossibility theorem and, 92; inequality and, 123; Jury Theorem and, 90–92; liberalism and, 3–4, 25, 80, 86, 90; limits of, 85–86; majority rule and, 27, 83–89, 92–97, 100–101, 121, 306n51; markets and, 97–105, 262, 276; minorities and, 85–90, 93–97, 101, 106, 110; mixed constitution and, 84–85; multi-candidate, single-winner elections and, 119–20; origins of, 83–85; ownership and, 81–82, 89, 101, 105, 118, 124; public goods and, 28, 97–100, 107, 110, 120, 123, 126; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 105–22; Radical Markets and, 82, 106, 123–26, 203; supermajorities and, 84–85, 88, 92; tyrannies and, 23, 25, 88, 96–100, 106, 108; United Kingdom and, 95–96; United States and, 86–90, 93, 95; voting and, 80–82, 85–93, 96, 99, 105, 108, 115–16, 119–20, 123–24, 303n14, 303n17, 303n20, 304n36, 305n39; wealth and, 83–84, 87, 95, 116 Demosthenes, 55 Denmark, 182 Department of Justice (DOJ), 176, 186, 191 deregulation, 3, 9, 24 Desmond, Matthew, 201–2 Dewey, John, 43 Dickens, Charles, 36 digital economy: data producers and, 208–9, 230–31; diamond-water paradox and, 224–25; as entertainment, 233–39; facial recognition and, 208, 216, 218–19; free access and, 211; Lanier and, 208, 220–24, 233, 237, 313n2, 315n48; machine learning (ML) and, 208–9, 213–14, 217–21, 226–31, 234–35, 238, 247, 289, 291, 315n48; payment systems for, 210–13, 221–30, 243–45; programmers and, 163, 208–9, 214, 217, 219, 224; rise of data work and, 209–13; siren servers and, 220–24, 230–41, 243; spam and, 210, 245; technofeudalism and, 230–33; virtual reality and, 206, 208, 229, 251, 253 diversification, 171–72, 180–81, 185, 191–92, 194–96, 310n22, 310n24 dot-com bubble, 211 double taxation, 65 Dupuit, Jules, 173 Durkheim, Émile, 297n23 Dworkin, Ronald, 305n40 dystopia, 18, 191, 273, 293 education, 114; common ownership self-assessed tax (COST) and, 258; data and, 229, 232, 248; elitism and, 260; equality in, 89; financing, 276; free compulsory, 23; immigrants and, 14, 143–44, 148; labor and, 140, 143–44, 148, 150, 158, 170–71, 232, 248, 258–60; Mill on, 96; populist movements and, 14; Stolper-Samuelson Theorem and, 143 efficient capital markets hypothesis, 180 elections, 80; data and, 217–18; democracy and, 22, 93, 100, 115, 119–21, 124, 217–18, 296n20; gridlock and, 124; Hitler and, 93; multi-candidate, single-winner, 119–20; polls and, 13, 111; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 115, 119–21, 268, 306n52; U.S. 2016, 93, 296n20 Elhauge, Einer, 176, 197 elitism: aristocracy and, 16–17, 22–23, 36–38, 84–85, 87, 90, 135–36; bourgeoisie and, 36; bureaucrats and, 267; democracy and, 89–91, 96, 124; education and, 260; feudalism and, 16, 34–35, 37, 41, 61, 68, 136, 230–33, 239; financial deregulation and, 3; immigrants and, 146, 166; liberalism and, 3, 15–16, 25–28; minorities and, 12, 14–15, 19, 23–27, 85–90, 93–97, 101, 106, 110, 181, 194, 273, 303n14, 304n36; monarchies and, 85–86, 91, 95, 160 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, 121 eminent domain, 33, 62, 89 Empire State Building, 45 Engels, Friedrich, 78, 240 Enlightenment, 86, 95 entrepreneurs, xiv; immigrants and, 144–45, 159, 256; labor and, 129, 144–45, 159, 173, 177, 203, 209–12, 224, 226, 256; ownership and, 35, 39 equality: common ownership self-assessed tax (COST) and, 258; education and, 89; immigrants and, 257; labor and, 147, 166, 239, 257; liberalism and, 4, 8, 24, 29; living standards and, 3, 11, 13, 133, 135, 148, 153, 254, 257; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 264; Radical Markets and, 262, 276; trickle down theories and, 9, 12 Espinosa, Alejandro, 30–32 Ethereum, 117 Europe, 177, 201; democracy and, 88, 90–95; European Union and, 15; fiefdoms in, 34; government utilities and, 48; income patterns in, 5; instability in, 88; labor and, 11, 130–31, 136–47, 165, 245; social democrats and, 24; unemployment rates in, 11 Evans, Richard, 93 Evicted (Desmond), 201–2 Ex Machina (film), 208 Facebook, xxi; advertising and, 50, 202; data and, 28, 205–9, 212–13, 220–21, 231–48; monetization by, 28; news service of, 289; Vickrey Commons and, 50 facial recognition, 208, 216–19 family reunification programs, 150, 152 farms, 17, 34–35, 37–38, 61, 72, 135, 142, 179, 283–85 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 50, 71 Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 176, 186 feedback, 114, 117, 233, 238, 245 feudalism, 16, 34–35, 37, 41, 61, 68, 136, 230–33, 239 Fidelity, 171, 181–82, 184 financial crisis of 2008, 3, 121 Fitzgerald, F.

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European systems of, 143–44 Taylor, Fred, 280 Tea Party, 3 “Technique for the Measurement of Attitudes” (Likert), 111 technofeudalism, 230–33 technology, 2; artificial intelligence (AI), 202, 208–9, 213, 219–24, 226, 228, 230, 234, 236, 241, 246, 248, 254, 257, 287, 292; automated video editing and, 208; biotechnology, 254; capitalism and, 34, 203, 316n4; climate treaties and, 265; common ownership self-assessed tax (COST) and, 71–72, 257–59; computers, 21 (see also computers); consumers and, 287; cybersquatters and, 72; data and, 210–13, 219, 222–23, 236–41, 244; diminishing returns and, 226, 229–30; distribution of complexity and, 228; facial recognition and, 208, 216–19; growth and, 255; human capital and, 293; hyperlinks and, 210; Hyperloop and, 30–33; immigrants and, 256–57; income distribution of companies in, 223; information, 139, 210; innovation and, 30–32, 34, 71, 172, 187, 189, 202, 258; intellectual property and, 26, 38, 48, 72, 210, 212, 239; Internet and, 21, 27, 51, 71, 210–12, 224, 232, 235, 238–39, 242, 246–48; job displacement and, 222, 253, 316n4; labor and, 210–13, 219, 222–23, 236–41, 244, 251, 253–59, 265, 274, 293, 316n4; machine learning (ML) and, 208–9, 213–14, 217–21, 226–31, 234–35, 238, 247, 289, 291, 315n48; marginal value and, 224–28, 247; markets and, 203, 286–87, 292; medical, 291; Moore’s Law and, 286–87; network effects and, 211, 236, 238, 243; neural nets and, 214–19; overfitting and, 217–18; pencils and, 278–79; programmers and, 163, 208–9, 214, 217, 219, 224; property and, 34, 66, 70–71; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 264; Radical Markets and, 277, 285–86; rapid advances in, 4, 173; recommendation systems and, 289–90; robots and, 222, 248, 251, 254, 287; sea power and, 131; self-driving cars and, 230; server farms and, 217; siren servers and, 220–24, 230–41, 243; social media and, 231, 236, 251; spam and, 210, 245; surveillance and, 237, 293; thinking machines and, 213–20; wealth and, 254; websites, 151, 155, 221; World Wide Web and, 210 techno-optimists, 254–55, 316n1 techno-pessimists, 254–55, 316n2 TEDz talk, 169 tenant farmers, 37–38, 41 Thaler, Richard, 67 Thales of Miletus, 172 Theory of Price, The (Stigler), 49 Theory of the Leisure Class (Veblen), 78 Three Principles of the People (Sun), 46 Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll), 176 Tirole, Jean, 236–37 Tom Sawyer (Twain), 233, 237 trade barriers, 14 tragedy of the commons, 44 transportation, 136, 139, 141, 174, 207, 288, 291 trickle down theories, 9, 12 Trump, Donald, 12–14, 120, 169, 296n20 Turkey, 15 turnover rate, 58–61, 64, 76 Twain, Mark, 233, 237 Twitter, 117, 221 Uber, xxi, 70, 77, 117, 288 unemployment, 9–11, 190, 200, 209, 223, 239, 255–56 unions, 23, 94, 118, 200, 240–45, 316n4 United Airlines, 171, 191 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 151–52, 158–59 United Kingdom: British East India Company and, 21, 173; Corbyn and, 12, 13; democracy and, 95–96; House of Commons and, 84–85; House of Lords and, 85; labor and, 133, 139, 144; Labor Party and, 45; national health system of, 290–91; Philosophical Radicals and, 95; rationing in, 20; voting and, 96 United States: American Constitution and, 86–87; American Independence and, 95; Articles of Confederation and, 88; checks and balances system of, 87; Civil War and, 88; Cold War and, xix, 25, 288; common ownership self-assessed tax (COST) and, 71–76; democracy and, 86–90, 93, 95; Gilded Age and, 174, 262; gun rights and, 15, 90; H1–B program and, 149, 154, 162–63; income distribution in, 4–6; Jackson and, 14; labor and, 9–10, 130, 135–54, 157–61, 164–65, 210, 222; liberalism and, 24 (see also liberalism); lobbyists and, 262; Long Depression of, 36; markets and, 272, 288, 290; monopolies and, 21; New Deal and, 176, 200; Nixon and, 288; Occupy Wall Street and, 3; political campaign contributions and, 15; political corruption and, 27; populist tradition of, 12; primary system and, 93; Progressive movement in, 45; property and, 36, 38, 45, 47–48, 51, 71–76; Radical Markets and, 177, 182–83, 196, 201; religious liberty and, 15; Revolutionary War and, 88; stop-and-frisk law and, 89; technology and, 71–72; Trump and, 12–14, 120, 169, 296n20 United States v.

Inequality and the 1% by Danny Dorling

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, David Attenborough, David Graeber, delayed gratification, Dominic Cummings, double helix, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, family office, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, land value tax, Leo Hollis, Londongrad, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, mega-rich, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor

Horsey, ‘Obscenely high CEO salaries are stark marker of U.S. wealth gap’, Los Angeles Times, 16 April 2014. 13. World Bank, ‘Ending poverty requires more than growth, says WBG’, World Bank Group (WBG) press release, 11 April 2014, at worldbank.org. 14. Z. Goldfarb and M. Boorstein, ‘Pope Francis Denounces “Trickle-Down” Economic Theories in Critique of Inequality’, Washington Post, 26 November 2013. 15. M. Haddad, ‘The Perfect Storm: Economic Stagnation, the Rising Cost of Living, Public Spending Cuts, and the Impact on UK Poverty’, Oxfam, 2012, at policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk. 16. B. Milanovic, The Haves and the Have Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality, (New York: Basic Books, 2012). 17.

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In 2013 Daniel Boffey in the Observer reported how the incomes of the 1 per cent were moving away from the rest of the 10 per cent and how ‘a financial adviser and private wealth manager … was photographed last week spending £330,000 on a 30l bottle of champagne at the Monaco grand prix’.11 In 2014 David Horsey in the Los Angeles Times explained how wrong it was that a school teacher in California makes almost the same working for a year as the CEO of Oracle Corporation makes in an hour.12 A week before David’s article the World Bank had issued guidance stating that without a great reduction in inequality no amount of economic growth would reduce poverty.13 Source: Emmanuel Saez, 2013 Figure 3.1 Top incomes in the USA, 1913–2013: 1 per cent, next 4 per cent, and rest of the 10 per cent The Making of a Perfect Storm Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream by Arianna Huffington

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 13, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, call centre, carried interest, citizen journalism, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, do what you love, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, invisible hand, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, smart grid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The rate for those in the middle income range was 9 percent—not far off the national average. The rate for those in the bottom 10 percent of income was a staggering 31 percent. These numbers, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Robert Frank, “raise questions about the theory behind what is informally known as ‘trickle down’ economics, since full employment at the top doesn’t seem to be translating into more jobs below.”18 In fact, these numbers do more than raise questions—they also supply the answers. Does anyone believe that the sense of urgency coming out of Washington wouldn’t be wildly different if the unemployment rate for the top 10 percent of income earners was 31 percent?

…

Along the way, the social contract—especially the subsections protecting workers, poor people, and our air, water, and oceans—was fed into a shredder. Starting with the New Deal, we began constructing a social safety net to help the most vulnerable among us. But who needed a safety net when the laws of supply and demand were there to protect us, when the trickle-down theory would provide sustenance for us all? The missing tenet in this new free-market fundamentalism was the recognition, central to capitalism, that businessmen have responsibilities above and beyond the bottom line. Alfred Marshall, one of the founding fathers of modern capitalism, in an address to the British Economics Association in 1890, called it “economic chivalry.”15 He explained that “the desire of men for approval of their own conscience and for the esteem of others is an economic force of the first order of importance.”

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

Instead, the practice is being sold to executives as a way to de-stress, improve productivity and focus, and bounce back from working eighty-hour weeks. They may well be “meditating,” but it works like taking an aspirin for a headache. Once the pain goes away, it is business as usual. Even if individuals become nicer people, the corporate agenda of maximizing profits does not change. Trickle-down mindfulness, like trickle-down economics, is a cover for the maintenance of power. Mindfulness is hostage to the neoliberal mindset: it must be put to use, it must be proved that it “works,” it must deliver the desired results. This prevents it being offered as a tool of resistance, restricting it instead to a technique for “selfcare.”

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And that’s the crux of the supposed revolution: the world is slowly changed — one mindful individual at a time. This political philosophy is oddly reminiscent of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” With the retreat to the private sphere, mindfulness becomes a religion of the self. The idea of a public sphere is being eroded, and any trickle-down effect of compassion is by chance. As a result, notes the political theorist Wendy Brown, “the body politic ceases to be a body, but is, rather, a group of individual entrepreneurs and consumers.”7 Mindfulness, like positive psychology and the broader happiness industry, has depoliticized and privatized stress.

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

The ideology crystallized in the 1990s, and by the dawn of the twenty-first century it had become a fait accompli of globalized life, largely unquestioned, barely visible, and resistant to critique. It has become the air we breathe. Both Democrat and Republican, neoliberals believe in the unfettered free market, deregulation, privatization, reduction in government, and trickle-down economics. They often deny that this powerful system even exists. As Naomi Klein points out in The Shock Doctrine, “the ideology is a shape-shifter, forever changing its name and switching identities.” Call it free-market fundamentalism, globalization, free trade, laissez-faire, it’s all neoliberalism.

…

The Post called the choice “a strong message of class consciousness that many listeners took to be a slap at the current billionaire mayor, if not all wealthy New Yorkers.” The slapping continued into Inauguration Day. In his address at City Hall, de Blasio spoke critically of the luxury city, the 1 percent, and trickle-down economics, saying, “We are called to put an end to economic and social inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love. And so today, we commit to a new progressive direction in New York.” He invoked the names of Al Smith, Fiorello La Guardia, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Public Advocate Letitia James, the first woman of color elected to citywide office, put a sharper point on it, saying, “We live in a gilded age of inequality where decrepit homeless shelters and housing developments stand in the neglected shadow of gleaming multimillion-dollar condos.”

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And again, in another radio interview, “If we could get every billionaire around the world to move here it would be a godsend that would create a much bigger income gap.” For the economic elite, billionaires are the saviors of the city. They consume goods and pay high taxes, the reasoning goes, and that trickles down to everyone. During the Reagan years, when trickle-down theory took hold, economist John Kenneth Galbraith likened it to the horse-and-sparrow theory of the first Gilded Age, explaining, “If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.” At least old Marie Antoinette offered cake. Attracted by generous tax breaks and other incentives, the oligarchs heeded Bloomberg’s call.

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, manufacturing employment, moral hazard, oil shock, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, positional goods, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, rent control, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, upwardly mobile, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

There can be no question that Reagan and his Republican White House successors, in attempting to reduce government’s size, made it less beneficial to people at lower income levels and more accommodating to people at higher income levels. When Reagan publicly embraced supply-side theory (a since-discredited1 notion that lowering marginal income-tax rates would stimulate sufficient economic growth that the tax cut would pay for itself), his critics characterized it as “trickle-down economics,” a Marie Antoinetteish fantasy that tax cuts for the rich would somehow benefit everybody else. Reagan’s budget chief, David Stockman, later conceded the point when he stated, in a controversial 1981 Atlantic Monthly profile by William Greider, that the president’s bill phasing in across-the-board cuts in income tax rates was really “a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate.”

…

Reagan’s budget chief, David Stockman, later conceded the point when he stated, in a controversial 1981 Atlantic Monthly profile by William Greider, that the president’s bill phasing in across-the-board cuts in income tax rates was really “a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate.” Stockman elaborated: “It’s kind of hard to sell ‘trickle down,’ so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really ‘trickle down.’ Supply-side is ‘trickle-down’ theory.”2 That same year, when congressional leaders asked President Reagan how he intended to make good on his promise to cut federal spending, he repeated a cherished, highly exaggerated, and racially inflammatory campaign chestnut about a “Chicago welfare queen” with “eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards,” and “four nonexisting deceased husbands” (on whom she collected veterans benefits) who amassed a tax-free income of more than $150,000.

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

With lack of oversight and transparency the cause of the current problem, how could they make a proposal so short in both? If a quick consensus is required, why not include provisions to stop the source of bleeding, to aid the millions of Americans that are losing their homes? Why not spend as much on them as on Wall Street? Do they still believe in trickle-down economics, when for the past eight years money has been trickling up to the wizards of Wall Street? Why not enact bankruptcy reform, to help Americans write down the value of the mortgage on their overvalued home? No one benefits from these costly foreclosures. The administration is once again holding a gun at our head, saying, “My way or the highway.”

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I imagined yet another financial bubble floating down from Wall Street, filled with the gelatinous slime of adjustable interest rates; one that would inevitably pop somewhere over Poor People, U.S.A., blanketing the unsuspecting citizens below. I knew the country’s economic situation was bad, and as usual, the poor would suffer the most. However, I did not foresee the trickle-down effect of the subprime fiasco where even my peers—recent college graduates and first time homeowners—would feel the sting from predatory lenders. “They go after young adults because they know we have to start building our credit and that we need money,” says 25-year-old Vanessa Valenzuela from Norwalk, California.

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

Today, inequality is growing dramatically again, and the past three decades or so have proved conclusively that one of the major culprits is trickle-down economics—the idea that the government can just step back and if the rich get richer and use their talents and resources to create jobs, everyone will benefit. It just doesn’t work; the historical data now prove that. But it has taken us far too long as a country to understand this danger. Changes in the distribution of income and wealth occur slowly, which is why it requires a grand historical perspective of the kind that Piketty provides to get a feel for what is happening. Ironically enough, the final proof debunking this very Republican idea of trickle-down economics has come from a Democratic administration.

…

It is an interview conducted by Cullen Murphy, my editor at Vanity Fair, in which I respond to one of the claims made by conservatives, that the rich are net job creators. Taking money away from the rich—or even forcing the rich to pay their fair share of taxes—would, in this view, be counterproductive. Ordinary Americans would suffer. This is just a 21st-century version of the old trickle-down economics, attempting to defend societal inequalities. My view was that trickle-down economics was totally wrong. Around the world there is a wealth of creativity, an abundance of entrepreneurship, if there is adequate demand (and if certain other preconditions are satisfied, such as access to capital and adequate infrastructure). In this view, the real “job creators” are consumers; and the reason that the American and European economies have not been creating jobs is that stagnant incomes mean stagnant demand.

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Had the banks been charged what they should have been, our national debt would be lower and we would have more money to invest in education, technology, infrastructure—investments that would have led to a stronger economy with more shared prosperity. Like so many of the economic policies designed by the 1 percent and for the 1 percent, it relied on trickle-down economics: throw enough money at the banks, and everyone will benefit. It didn’t work out that way, and predictably so.15 I had argued, by contrast, that we should have tried a bit of trickle-up economics—help those in the middle and the bottom, and the entire economy will benefit. The crisis had begun in housing, and so it was natural to suggest that a robust recovery would require stemming the tide of foreclosures.

Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism by Richard D. Wolff

asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, feminist movement, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Howard Zinn, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, wage slave, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

This program seeks to save and bolster the largest businesses (both financial and nonfinancial), the stock markets, and the richest 5 percent of individuals who depend on those businesses and markets. These beneficiaries of public policy are also the key financiers for US political parties, candidates, and officials. The latter devise and execute this rather classic example of a “trickle-down economics” program. Large and direct government assistance for business and the rich is supposed to “trickle down” and provide a recovery for the mass of people, too. However, the trickle-down economics program hasn’t worked—and for reasons that are not hard to discern. The government-enhanced wealth at the top does not “trickle down” in the real world. Instead, boards of directors continue to see their self-interest in not sharing the recovery funds poured into their hands.

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The purpose of these purchases was to enlarge the capital reserves of these corporations so that they would be more creditworthy and thus better able to obtain loans. A very small portion of funds went to the Making Home Affordable Program, which was introduced by the Obama administration in 2009 to assist homeowners facing foreclosures. However, this program was never well-funded or successful. TARP was a classic example of trickle-down economics: priming the pump mostly at the top of the economic pyramid in the hope that the resulting flow might trickle down to everyone else and thereby overcome the economic downturn. But the expected trickle failed to materialize. Calls for banks to use their government assistance to renew lending to small and medium-sized businesses and to individuals went unheeded.

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This helped to finance the fiscal stimulus for the bottom—a kind of trickle-up economics—without exclusive dependence on fast-rising government debt. The strengths and weaknesses of FDR’s response to capitalist crisis and the strengths and weaknesses of the crisis responses deployed since 2007 have led many to prefer trickle-up to trickle-down economic policies. However, whatever a reasonable person’s preference, the tried-and-tested alternative program to debt and austerity certainly merited discussion and debate by policy makers in the United States after the crisis broke in 2007. Yet that never happened. Republicans and Democrats together repressed the few moves in that direction by various social groups and a handful of dissidents in Congress.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

During my years in the Clinton administration—one seemingly concerned about the plight of blue-collar workers—it was hard, nonetheless, to find an economist who was worried about the impact of globalization on unskilled real wages. (Labor Secretary Robert Reich was a notable exception.) Seemingly, even good economists wanted to believe globalization was good for all—even if we didn’t introduce compensatory policies. Trickle-down economics, even by then, had become deeply ingrained. 40.That is, whether it was a delusion with trickle-down economics referred to in the previous note, or a delusion that, while recognizing that workers were actually worse off, the setback was only temporary. 41.An argument often put forward for regressive tax measures (which benefit the rich more than the poor), is that such measures give money to the rich, who are the job creators, and their job creation benefits all.

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The benefits of reducing inequality are especially large when inequality reaches the extremes that it has in America and when it is created in the ways that it is, for instance, through exploitation of market power or discrimination. Thus, the goal of increased income equality does not come with a bill attached. We also need to abandon the mistaken faith in trickle-down economics, the notion that if the economy grows, everyone will benefit. This notion underpinned the supply-side economics policies of Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan on. The record is clear that the benefits of growth simply do not trickle down. Look at the broad swath of the population in America and elsewhere in the advanced world living in anger and despair after decades of the near stagnation in their incomes produced by supply-side policies, even as GDP has increased.

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We have gone too far down the wrong road for that to be possible. We have to construct a new social contract that enables everyone in our rich country to live a decent, middle-class life. This book then is about this alternative way forward. Another world is possible—based not on the market fundamentalist belief in markets and trickle-down economics that got us into this mess; nor on the nativist, populist Trumpian economics, which repudiates the international rule of law, substituting “globalization with a club,” an approach which will actually make America worse off. I am hopeful that in the long run truth will win out: Trump’s policies will fail, and Trump’s supporters, both the corporates at the top and the workers whose interests he claims to be advancing, will begin to see it.

Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made by Tom Wilkinson

Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, double helix, experimental subject, false memory syndrome, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Google Glasses, housing crisis, Kitchen Debate, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, megacity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, nudge theory, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, starchitect, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration

This bit of scaremongering was, characteristically, a sales pitch – he meant that unless governments levelled the playing field by improving the housing of their citizens, they’d have an insurrection on their hands. In the eighteenth century British philosopher Bernard Mandeville challenged such views with his Fable of the Bees, which championed the consumerist, trickle-down doctrine of Private Vices, Publick Benefits, as the subtitle of his poem puts it. He im­­­agines human society as an enormous hive held together by the satisfaction of greed, pride and luxury: ‘Thus every part was full of vice / Yet the whole mass a paradise.’ And what would happen if society were to turn over a new leaf?

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

It is thus not surprising that our growth has been stronger in periods in which inequality has been lower and in which we have been growing together.19 This was true not only in the decades after World War II but, even in more recent times, in the 1990s.20 Trickle-down economics Inequality’s apologists—and they are many—argue to the contrary that giving more money to the top will benefit everyone, partly because it would lead to more growth. This is an idea called trickle-down economics. It has a long pedigree—and has long been discredited. As we’ve seen, higher inequality has not led to more growth, and most Americans have actually seen their incomes sink or stagnate. What America has been experiencing in recent years is the opposite of trickle-down economics: the riches accruing to the top have come at the expense of those down below.21 One can think of what’s been happening in terms of slices of a pie.

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What America has been experiencing in recent years is the opposite of trickle-down economics: the riches accruing to the top have come at the expense of those down below.21 One can think of what’s been happening in terms of slices of a pie. If the pie were equally divided, everyone would get a slice of the same size, so the top 1 percent would get 1 percent of the pie. In fact, they get a very big slice, about a fifth of the entire pie. But that means everyone else gets a smaller slice. Now, those who believe in trickle-down economics call this the politics of envy. One should look not at the relative size of the slices but at the absolute size. Giving more to the rich leads to a larger pie, so though the poor and middle get a smaller share of the pie, the piece of pie they get is enlarged. I wish that were so, but it’s not.

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In fact, it’s the opposite: as we noted, in the period of increasing inequality, growth has been slower—and the size of the slice given to most Americans has been diminishing.22 Young men (aged twenty-five to thirty-four) who are less educated have an even harder time; those who have only graduated from high school have seen their real incomes decline by more than a quarter in the last twenty-five years.23 But even households of individuals with a bachelor’s degree or higher have not done well—their median income (adjusted for inflation) fell by a tenth from 2000 to 2010.24 (Median income is the income such that half have an income greater than that number, half less.) We’ll show later that whereas trickle-down economics doesn’t work, trickle-up economics may: all—even those at the top—could benefit by giving more to those at the bottom and the middle. A snapshot of America’s inequality The simple story of America is this: the rich are getting richer, the richest of the rich are getting still richer, 25 the poor are becoming poorer and more numerous, and the middle class is being hollowed out.

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood

carbon footprint, delayed gratification, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, financial independence, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, trickle-down economics, wage slave

In general, the plots go in for overkill — quite literally — since one revenge leads to another, and the bodies pile up at an almost industrial rate. It’s not just tit for tat, it’s tit-for-tat for tit-for-tat for rat-a-tat-tat, as in the early crime stories of Dashiell Hammett. In previous chapters, I mentioned the trickle-down theory of wealth and the trickle-down theory of debt, but the Revenge Tragedy illustrates the trickle-down theory of revenge: relatively innocent bystanders get the stuff splashed all over them. Hamlet is among other things a Revenge Tragedy, but as usual Shakespeare takes something from elsewhere and redoes it in a surprising way: it’s the slowness of the revenge, not its rapidity, that results in the deadbody pyramid at play’s end.

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When the great house tumbles down, these miserable wretches fall under it unnoticed: as they say in the old legends, before a man goes to the devil himself, he sends plenty of other souls thither. The trickle-down theory of economics has it that it’s good for rich people to get even richer because some of their wealth will trickle down, through their no doubt lavish spending, upon those who stand below them on the economic ladder. Notice that the metaphor is not that of a gushing waterfall but of a leaking tap: even the most optimistic endorsers of this concept do not picture very much real flow, as their language reveals. But everything in the human imagination and consequently in human life has both a positive and a negative version, and if the trickle-down theory of wealth is the positive, the negative is the trickle-down theory of debt.

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But everything in the human imagination and consequently in human life has both a positive and a negative version, and if the trickle-down theory of wealth is the positive, the negative is the trickle-down theory of debt. The debts that trickle down from large debtors may not in themselves be large, but they are large for those upon whom they trickle. Poor Mr. Raggles, from whom the Crawleys rent their house without ever paying for it, is utterly and completely ruined when the Crawley household falls apart and its members decamp. Vanity Fair is named after the city of that same name in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, where it stands not only for the “vanity of vanities, all is vanity” of the Book of Ecclesiastes, but especially for the realm of worldly goods, both material and spiritual, as well as for the state of mind in which absolutely everything is for sale.

How to Fix Copyright by William Patry

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, barriers to entry, big-box store, borderless world, bread and circuses, business cycle, business intelligence, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lone genius, means of production, moral panic, new economy, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, search costs, semantic web, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

109 performers sculptors, illustrators—shows that individuals engaged in these activities have lower incomes than others with similar training and education, have episodic employment, and fewer benefits such as health care.112 Trickle-down economics works just as poorly in the copyright market as it does in the general economy. The term “trickle-down” has been attributed to humorist Will Rogers, who said during the Great Depression of the late 1920s to 1930s that the “money was all appropriated for the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hand.”113 Trickle-down economics is based on an ideology that reducing taxes on the already wealthy will cause them to re-invest the saved amount in new productive endeavors, especially hiring new workers, leading in turn to long-term higher economic growth for everyone.

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Figure 3.1 sets out (1) the actual 110 HOW TO FIX COPYRIGHT distribution of wealth in the United States; (2) what Americans think the actual distribution is; and (3) what Americans say they would like the distribution to be. top 20% second 20% third 20% fourth 20% bottom 20% ACTUAL DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH WHAT AMERICANS THINK IT IS WHAT THEY WOULD LIKE IT TO BE 0 FIGURE 3.1 20 40 60 80 100 Actual Distribution of Wealth in the United States Source: Michael I. Norton, Harvard Business School; Dan Ariely, Duke University Here are a few facts about how the income gap came about and how trickle-down economics is simply redistribution of wealth upwards.When Ronald Reagan began his Presidency in January 1981, the top marginal tax rate was dramatically reduced from 69.125 percent to 39.1 percent.115 The effective tax rate for a head of household earning the equivalent of $1 million on non-investment income in 2010 dollars is now 32.4 percent.116 Where did the money saved from lower taxes go?

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After decades of studying authors’ and artists’ actual living conditions, economist Ruth Towse concluded that “strengthening copyright has not apparently resulted in boosting royalty payments.”123 Copyright is a trickle-up system in which increasing rights results in more money flowing up, away from creators. 114 HOW TO FIX COPYRIGHT Trickle-down Economics and Restoration of Cultural Works One justification for the current, almost perpetual, term of copyright concentrated in large corporations is that longer rights will cause them to invest in restoring cultural works. Here is a version of the argument given by Jack Valenti before the U.S. House of Representatives in 1995, in advocating for extending the term of copyright for twenty more years for existing motion pictures.

Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, book value, collective bargaining, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate personhood, corporate raider, COVID-19, disintermediation, distributed generation, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Firefox, forensic accounting, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, George Floyd, gig economy, Golden age of television, Google bus, greed is good, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, index fund, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, passive income, peak TV, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, time value of money, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, WeWork

That would facilitate a rich range of public interest activities that wouldn’t otherwise be possible, while simultaneously opening up a vast number of new paid uses. Big copyright buyers will tell you that, if rights reverted after twenty-five years, the system of cultural production would collapse because they could no longer reinvest their windfall profits into producing more works. But that’s just the same debunked trickle-down economics that oligarchs always insist really is true … this time. In the model we’ve sketched, the money would still be there—just allocated a bit differently from how it is now. So long as they have access to cash or capital markets, copyright buyers will continue funding the investments they think will make a profit and continue rejecting those they think will flop.

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Monopolies bear much of the blame for this, too, especially when it comes to education, healthcare, and housing, which have all outpaced wages over the last half century. Over the last forty years, college tuition in the US has risen four times faster than inflation, and eight times faster than household income, leaving forty-five million Americans with $1.5 trillion in debt.13 This has trickle-down effects: “Balances carried further into mid-life, or taken on later in life to finance further education or a family member’s education, impairing economic wellbeing for a widening and diversifying swathe of the population, inhibiting savings, increasing precarity, and draining the very incomes the student debt was supposed to increase.”14 In health, monopolies are everywhere: emergency care, ambulance rides, kidney dialysis, nursing homes, and even saline bags.15 Health insurance is particularly concentrated, and, for families, premiums average over $20,000 a year—often with high deductibles if they actually have to use it.16 Employers pick up much of that cost for those in jobs with benefits, but that too is a form of lock-in: leaving an abusive job doesn’t just mean losing pay but potentially risks everything if someone in your family lives with a chronic illness, falls ill, or has an accident before you find a replacement.

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

air freight, banking crisis, big-box store, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, dematerialisation, employer provided health coverage, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, Firefox, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, liberation theology, McMansion, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Wall-E, Whole Earth Review, Zipcar

The economy functions as a system, too, which is why there can be a domino effect inside it, as when people lose their jobs and then reduce their spending, which means that factories can’t sell as much Stuff, which means that more people get laid off... which is exactly what happened in 2008 and 2009. Systems thinking as related to the economy also explains a theory like “trickle-down” economics, in which benefits like tax cuts are given to the wealthy so that they’ll invest more in businesses, which would hypothetically in turn create more jobs for the middle and lower classes. If you didn’t believe these parts (money, jobs, people across classes) operated within a system, there’d be no basis for the trickle-down theory, or for beliefs about the interplay between supply and demand. All these examples assume interrelated parts within a larger system.

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, borderless world, business logic, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent control, Robert Solow, shareholder value, short selling, Skype, structural adjustment programs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

When you learn that large and active governments can promote, rather than dampen, economic dynamism, you will see that the widespread distrust of government is unwarranted (see Things 12 and 21). Knowing that we do not live in a post-industrial knowledge economy will make you question the wisdom of neglecting, or even implicitly welcoming, industrial decline of a country, as some governments have done (see Things 9 and 17). Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rich for what they are – a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told (see Things 13 and 20). What has happened to the world economy was no accident or the outcome of an irresistible force of history.

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It may sound harsh, but in the long run poor people can become richer only by making the rich even richer. When you give the rich a bigger slice of the pie, the slices of the others may become smaller in the short run, but the poor will enjoy bigger slices in absolute terms in the long run, because the pie will get bigger. What they don’t tell you The above idea, known as ‘trickle-down economics’, stumbles on its first hurdle. Despite the usual dichotomy of ‘growth-enhancing pro-rich policy’ and ‘growth-reducing pro-poor policy’, pro-rich policies have failed to accelerate growth in the last three decades. So the first step in this argument – that is, the view that giving a bigger slice of pie to the rich will make the pie bigger – does not hold.

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Index active economic citizenship xvi, xvii Administrative Behaviour (Simon) 173–4 Africa see Sub-Saharan Africa AIG 172–3 Air France 131 AOL 132–3 apartheid 214–16 Argentina education and growth 181 growth 73 hyperinflation 53–4 Austria geography 121 government direction 132 protectionism 70 balance of payments 97–100, 101 Baldursson, Fridrik 235 Bangladesh entrepreneurship 159–60 and microfinance 161–2, 163, 164 Bank of England 252 (second) Bank of the USA 68 Bank for International Settlements (BIS) 262 bankruptcy law 227–8 Barad, Jill 154 Bard College 172 Bateman, Milford 162 Baugur 233 Baumol, William 250 Bebchuk, Lucian 154 behaviouralist school 173–4 Belgium ethnic division 122 income inequality 144, 146 manufacturing 70, 91 R&D funding 206 standard of living 109 Benin, entrepreneurship 159 Bennett, Alan 214 Besley, Tim 246 big government 221–2, 260–61 and growth 228–30 see also government direction; industrial policy BIS (Bank for International Settlements) 262 Black, Eugene 126 Blair, Tony 82, 143, 179 borderless world 39–40 bounded rationality theory 168, 170, 173–7, 250, 254 Brazilian inflation 55 Britain industrial dominance/decline 89–91 protectionism 69–70 British Academy 246–7 British Airways 131 brownfield investment 84 Brunei 258 Buffet, Warren 30, 239 Bukharin, Nikolai 139 Bunning, Senator Jim 8 Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) 121, 200 Bush, George W. 8, 158, 159, 174 Bush Sr, George 207 business sector see corporate sector Cameroon 116 capital mobility 59–60 nationality 74–5, 76–7 capitalism Golden Age of 142, 147, 243 models 253–4 capitalists, vs. workers 140–42 captains of industry 16 Carnegie, Andrew 15 Case, Steve 132–3 Cassano, Joe 172–3 CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) 238 CDSs (credit default swaps) 238 CEO compensation see executive pay, in US Cerberus 77–8 Chavez, Hugo 68 chess, complexity of 175–6 child-labour regulation 2–3, 197 China business regulation 196 communes 216 economic officials 244 industrial predominance 89, 91, 93, 96 as planned economy 203–4 PPP income 107 protectionism and growth 63–4, 65 Chocolate mobile phone 129 Chrysler 77–8, 191 Chung, Ju-Yung 129 Churchill, Winston 253 climate factors 120–21 Clinton, Bill 143 cognitive psychology 173–4 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) 238 collective entrepreneurship 165 communist system 200–204 Concorde project 130–31 conditions of trade 5 Confucianism 212–13 Congo (Democratic Republic) 116, 121 consumption smoothing 163 cooperatives 166 corporate sector importance 190–91 planning in 207–9 regulation effect 196–8 suspicion of 192–3 see also regulation; transnational corporations Cotton Factories Regulation Act 1819 2 credit default swaps (CDSs) 238 Crotty, Jim 236–8 culture issues 123, 212–13 Daimler-Benz 77–8 Darling, Alistair 172 de-industrialization 91 balance of payments 97–100, 101 causes 91–6 concerns 96–9 deflation, Japan 54 deliberation councils 134 Denmark cooperatives 166 protectionism 69 standard of living 104, 106, 232–3 deregulation see under regulation derivatives 239 Detroit car-makers 191–2 developing countries entrepreneurship and poverty 158–60 and free market policies 62–3, 71–3, 118–19, 261–2 policy space 262–3 digital divide 39 dishwashers 34 distribution of income see downward redistribution of income; income irregularity; upward redistribution of income domestic service 32–3 double-dip recession xiii downward redistribution of income 142–3, 146–7 Dubai 235 Duménil, Gérard 236 East Asia economic officials 249–50 educational achievements 180–81 ethnic divisions 122–3 government direction 131–2 growth 42, 56, 243–4 industrial policy 125–36, 205 École Nationale d’Administration (ENA) 133 economic crises 247 Economic Policy Institute (EPI) 144, 150 economists alternative schools 248–51 as bureaucrats 242–3 collective imagination 247 and economic growth 243–5 role in economic crises 247–8 Ecuador 73 Edgerton, David 37 Edison, Thomas 15, 165, 166 education and enterprise 188–9 higher education effect 185–8 importance 178–9 knowledge economy 183–5 mechanization effect 184–5 outcome equality 217–18 and productivity 179–81 relevance 182–3 Elizabeth II, Queen 245–7 ENA (École Nationale d’Administration) 133 enlightened self-interest 255–6 entrepreneurship, and poverty 157–8 and collective institutions 165–7 as developing country feature 158–60 finance see microfinance environmental regulations 3 EPI (Economic Policy Institute) 144, 150 equality of opportunity 210–11, 256–7 and equality of outcome 217–20, 257 and markets 213–15 socio-economic environment 215–17 equality of outcome 217–20 ethnic divisions 122–3 executive pay and non-market forces 153–6 international comparisons 152–3 relative to workers’ pay 149–53, 257 US 148–9 fair trade, vs. free trade 6–7 Fannie Mae 8 Far Eastern Economic Review 196 Federal Reserve Board (US) 171, 172, 246 female occupational structure 35–6 Fiat 78 financial crisis (2008) xiii, 155–6, 171–2, 233–4, 254 financial derivatives 239, 254–5 financial markets deregulation 234–8, 259–60 effects 239–41 efficiency 231–2, 240–41 sector growth 237–9 Finland government direction 133 income inequality 144 industrial production 100 protectionism 69, 70 R&D funding 206 welfare state and growth 229 Fischer, Stanley 54 Ford cars 191, 237 Ford, Henry 15, 200 foreign direct investment (FDI) 83–5 France and entrepreneurship 158 financial deregulation 236 government direction 132, 133–4, 135 indicative planning 204–5 protectionism 70 Frank, Robert H 151 Franklin, Benjamin 65–6, 67 Freddie Mac 8 free market boundaries 8–10 and developing countries 62–3, 71–3, 118–19, 261–2 labour see under labour nineteenth-century rhetoric 140–43 as political definition 1–2 rationale xiii–xiv, 169–70 results xiv–xv, xvi–xvii system redesign 252, 263 see also markets; neo-liberalism free trade, vs. fair trade 6–7 Fried, Jesse 154 Friedman, Milton 1, 169, 214 Galbraith, John Kenneth 16, 245 Garicano, Luis 245 Gates, Bill 165, 166, 200 General Electric (GE) 17, 45, 86, 237 General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) 194, 237 General Motors (GM) 20, 22, 45, 80, 86, 154, 190–98 decline 193–6 financialization 237 pre-eminence 191–2 geographical factors 121 Germany blitzkrieg mobility 191 CEO remuneration 152–3 cooperatives 166 emigration 69 hyperinflation 52–4 industrial policy 205 manufacturing 90 R&D funding 206 welfare state and growth 228–9 Ghana, entrepreneurship 159 Ghosn, Carlos 75–6, 78 globalization of management 75–6 and technological change 40 GM see General Motors GMAC (General Motors Acceptance Corporation) 194, 237 Golden Age of Capitalism 142, 147, 243 Goldilocks economy 246 Goodwin, Sir Fred 156 Gosplan 145 government direction balance of results 134–6 and business information 132–4 failure examples 130–31 and market discipline 44–5, 129–30, 134 share ownership 21 success examples 125–6, 131–4 see also big government; industrial policy Grameen Bank 161–4 Grant, Ulysses 67 Great Depression 1929 24, 192, 236, 249, 252 greenfield investment 84 Greenspan, Alan 172, 246 Hamilton, Alexander 66–7, 69 Hayami, Masaru 54 Hennessy, Peter 246–7 higher education 185–8 Hirschman, Albert 249 History Boys (Bennett) 214 Hitler, Adolf 54 home country bias 78–82, 83, 86–7 Honda 135 Hong Kong 71 household appliances 34–6, 37 HSBC 172 Human relations school 47 Hungary, hyperinflation 53–4 hyperinflation 52–4 see also inflation Hyundai Group 129, 244 Iceland financial crisis 232–4, 235 foreign debt 234 standard of living 104–5 ICT (Information and Communication Technology) 39 ILO (International Labour Organization) 32, 143–4 IMF see International Monetary Fund immigration control 5, 23, 26–8, 30 income per capita income 104–11 see also downward redistribution of income; income inequality; upward redistribution of income income inequality 18, 72–3, 102, 104–5, 108, 110, 143–5, 147, 247–8, 253, 262 India 99, 121 indicative planning 205 indicative planning 204–6 Indonesia 234 industrial policy 84, 125–36, 199, 205, 242, 259, 261 see also government direction Industrial Revolution 70, 90, 243 infant industry argument 66–8, 69–70, 71–2 inflation control 51–2 and growth 54–6, 60–61 hyperinflation 52–4 and stability 56–61 Information and Communication Technology (ICT) 39 institutional quality 29–30, 112–13, 115, 117, 123–4, 165–7 interest rate control 5–6 international dollar 106–7 International Labour Organization (ILO) 32, 143–4 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 54–5, 57, 66, 72, 244, 262 SAPs 118 International Year of Microcredit 162 internet revolution 31–2 impact 36–7, 38, 39 and rationality 174 investment brownfield/greenfield 84 foreign direct investment 83–5 share 18–19 invisible reward/sanction mechanisms 48–50 Ireland financial crisis 234–5 Italy cooperatives 166 emigrants to US 103 Jackson, Andrew 68 Japan business regulation 196 CEO remuneration 152–3 deflation 54 deliberation councils 134 government direction 133–4, 135, 259 indicative planning 205 industrial policy 131, 135, 242–5 industrial production 100 production system 47, 167 protectionism 62, 70 R&D funding 206 Jefferson, Thomas 67–8, 239 job security/insecurity 20, 58–61, 108–9, 111, 225–8, 247, 253, 259 Journal of Political Economy 34 Kaldor, Nicolas 249 Keynes, John Maynard 249 Kindleberger, Charles 249 knowledge economy 183–5 Kobe Steel 42–3, 46 Kong Tze (Confucius) 212 Korea traditional 211–13 see also North Korea; South Korea Koufax, Sandy 172 Kuwait 258 labour free market rewards 23–30 job security 58–60 in manufacturing 91–2 market flexibility 52 regulation 2–3 relative price 33, 34 Latin America 32–3, 55, 73, 112, 122, 140, 196–7, 211, 245, 262 Latvia 235 Lazonick, William 20 Lenin, Vladimir 138 Levin, Jerry 133 Lévy, Dominique 236 LG Group 129, 134 liberals neo-liberalism xv, 60, 73 nineteenth-century 140–42 limited liability 12–15, 21, 228, 239, 257 Lincoln, Abraham 37, 67 List, Friedrich 249 London School of Economics 245–6 LTCM (Long-Term Capital Management) 170–71 Luxemburg, standard of living 102, 104–5, 107, 109, 232–3, 258 macro-economic stability 51–61, 240, 259, 261 Madoff, Bernie 172 Malthus, Thomas 141 managerial capitalism 14–17 Mandelson, Lord (Peter) 82–3, 87 manufacturing industry comparative dynamism 96 employment changes 91–2 importance 88–101, 257–9 productivity rise 91–6, 184–5 relative prices 94–5 statistical changes 92–3 Mao Zedong 215–16 Marchionne, Sergio 78 markets and bounded rationality theory 168, 173–6, 177, 254 conditions of trade 5 and equality of opportunity 213–15 failure theories 250 financial see financial markets government direction 44–5, 125–36 government regulation 4–6, 168–9, 176–7 participation restrictions 4 price regulations 5–6 and self-interest 44–5 see also free market Marx, Karl 14, 198, 201, 208, 249 Marxism 80, 185, 201–3 mathematics 180, 182–3 MBSs (mortgage-backed securities) 238 medicine’s popularity 222–4 Merriwether, John 171 Merton, Robert 170–71 Michelin 75–6 microfinance critique 162 and development 160–62 Microsoft 135 Minsky, Hyman 249 Monaco 258 morality, as optical illusion 48–50 Morduch, Jonathan 162 mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) 238 motivation complexity 46–7 Mugabe, Robert 54 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) 67 National Health Service (UK) 261 nationality of capital 74–87 natural resources 69, 115–16, 119–20, 121–2 neo-liberalism xv, 60, 73, 145 neo-classical school 250 see also free market Nestlé 76–7, 79 Netherlands CEO remuneration 152–3 cooperatives 166 intellectual property rights 71 protectionism 71 welfare state and growth 228–9 New Public Management School 45 New York Times 37, 151 New York University 172 Nissan 75–6, 84, 135, 214 Nobel Peace Prize 162 Prize in economics 170, 171–2, 173, 208, 246 Nobel, Alfred 170 Nokia 135, 259–60 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 67 North Korea 211 Norway government direction 132, 133, 205 standard of living 104 welfare state and growth 222, 229 Obama, Barack 149 OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) 57, 159, 229 Oh, Won-Chul 244 Ohmae, Kenichi 39 Opel 191 Opium War 9 opportunities see equality of opportunity Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 57, 159, 229 organizational economy 208–9 outcomes equality 217–20 Palin, Sarah 113 Palma, Gabriel 237 Park, Chung-Hee 129 Park, Tae-Joon 127–8 participation restrictions 4 Perot, Ross 67 Peru 219 PGAM (Platinum Grove Asset Management) 171 Philippines, education and growth 180, 181 Phoenix Venture Holdings 86 Pigou, Arthur 250 Pinochet, Augusto 245 PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) 180 Plain English Campaign 175 planned economies communist system 200–204 indicative systems 204–6 survival 199–200, 208–9 Platinum Grove Asset Management (PGAM) 171 Pohang Iron and Steel Company (POSCO) 127–8 pollution 3, 9, 169 poor individuals 28–30, 140–42, 216–18 Portes, Richard 235 Portman, Natalie 162 POSCO (Pohang Iron and Steel Company) 127–8 post-industrial society 39, 88–9, 91–2, 96, 98, 101, 257–8 Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) 118 see also SAPs PPP (purchasing power parity) 106–9 Preobrazhensky, Yevgeni 138–40, 141 price regulations 5–6 stability 51–61 Pritchett, Lant 181 private equity funds 85–6, 87 professional managers 14–22, 44–5, 166, 200 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 180 protectionism and growth 62–3, 72–3 infant industry argument 66–8, 69–70, 71–2 positive examples 63–5, 69 PRSPs see Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers purchasing power parity (PPP) 106–9 R&D see research and development (R&D) Rai, Aishwarya 162 Rania, Queen 162 rationality see bounded rationality theory RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland) 156 real demand effect 94 regulation business/corporate 196–8 child labour 2–3, 197 deregulation 234–8, 259–60 legitimacy 4–6 markets 4–6, 168–9, 176–7 price 5–6 Reinhart, Carmen 57, 59 Renault 21, 75–6 Report on the Subject of Manufactures (Hamilton) 66 The Rescuers (Disney animation) 113–14 research and development (R&D) 78–9, 87, 132, 166 funding 206 reward/sanction mechanisms 48–50 Ricardo, David 141 rich individuals 28–30, 140–42 river transport 121 Rogoff, Kenneth 57, 59 Roodman, David 162 Roosevelt, Franklin 191 Rover 86 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) 156 Rubinow, I.M. 34 Ruhr occupation 52 Rumsfeld, Donald 174–5 Rwanda 123 Santander 172 SAPs (Structural Adjustment Programs) 118, 124 Sarkozy, Nicolas 90 Scholes, Myron 170–71 Schumpeter, Joseph 16, 165–7, 249 Second World War planning 204 (second) Bank of the USA 68 self-interest 41–2, 45 critique 42–3 enlightened 255–6 invisible reward/sanction mechanisms 48–50 and market discipline 44–5 and motivation complexity 46–7 Sen, Amartya 250 Senegal 118 service industries 92–3 balance of payments 97–100, 101 comparative dynamism 94–5, 96–7 knowledge-based 98, 99 Seychelles 100 share buybacks 19–20 shareholder value maximisation 17–22 shareholders government 21 ownership of companies 11 short-term interests 11–12, 19–20 shipbuilders 219 Simon, Herbert 173–6, 208–9, 250 Singapore government direction 133 industrial production 100 PPP income 107 protectionism 70 SOEs 205 Sloan Jr, Alfred 191–2 Smith, Adam 13, 14, 15, 41, 43, 169, 239 social dumping 67 social mobility 103–4, 220 socio-economic environment 215–17 SOEs (state-owned enterprises) 127, 132, 133, 205–6 South Africa 55, 121 and apartheid 213–16 South Korea bank loans 81 economic officials 244 education and growth 181 ethnic divisions 123 financial drive 235 foreign debt 234 government direction 126–9, 133–4, 135, 136 indicative planning 205 industrial policy 125–36, 205, 242–5 inflation 55, 56 job insecurity effect 222–4, 226, 227 post-war 212–14 protectionism 62, 69, 70 R&D funding 206 regulation 196–7 Soviet Union 200–204 Spain 122 Spielberg, Steven 172 Sri Lanka 121 Stalin, Josef 139–40, 145 standard of living comparisons 105–7 US 102–11 Stanford, Alan 172 state owned enterprises (SOEs) 127, 132, 133, 205–6 steel mill subsidies 126–8 workers 219 Stiglitz, Joseph 250 Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) 118, 124 Sub-Saharan Africa 73, 112–24 culture issues 123 education and growth 181 ethnic divisions 122–3 free market policies 118–19, 262 geographical factors 121 growth rates 73, 112, 116–19 institutional quality 123 natural resources 119–20, 121–2 structural conditions 114–16, 119–24 underdevelopment 112–13, 124 Sutton, Willie 52 Sweden 15, 21–2 CEO remuneration 152 income inequality 144 industrial policy 205 industrial production 100 per capita income 104 R&D funding 206 welfare state and growth 229 Switzerland CEO remuneration 152–3 ethnic divisions 122 geography 121 higher education 185–6, 188 intellectual property rights 71 manufacturing 100, 258 protectionism 69, 71 standard of living 104–6, 232–3 Taiwan business regulation 196 economic officials 244 education and growth 180 government direction 136 indicative planning 205 protectionism 69, 70 Tanzania 116 TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) 8 tax havens 258 technological revolution 31–2, 38–40 telegraph 37–8 Telenor 164 Thatcher, Margaret 50, 225–6, 261 Time-Warner group 132–3 TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) 180, 183 Toledo, Alejandro 219 Toyota and apartheid 214 production system 47 public money bail-out 80 trade restrictions 4 transnational corporations historical debts 80 home country bias 78–82, 83, 86–7 nationality of capital 74–5, 76–7 production movement 79, 81–2 see also corporate sector Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 180, 183 trickle-down economics 137–8 and upward distribution of income 144–7 Trotsky, Leon 138 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) 8 2008 financial crisis xiii, 144, 155–6, 171–2, 197–8, 233–4, 236, , 238–9, 245–7, 249, 254 Uganda 115–16 uncertainty 174–5 unemployment 218–19 United Kingdom CEO remuneration 153, 155–6 financial deregulation 235–6, 237 NHS 261 shipbuilders 219 see also Britain United Nations 162 United States economic model 104 Federal Reserve Board 171, 172, 246 financial deregulation 235–8 immigrant expectations 103–4 income inequality 144 inequalities 107–11 protectionism and growth 64–8, 69 R&D funding 206 standard of living 102–11 steel workers 219 welfare state and growth 228–30 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 136 university education effect 185–8 Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) 200 upward redistribution of income 143–4 and trickle-down economics 144–7 Uruguay growth 73 income inequality 144 USAID (United States Agency for International Development) 136 vacuum cleaners 34 Venezuela 144 Versailles Treaty 52 Vietnam 203–4 Volkswagen government share ownership 21 public money bail-out 80 wage gaps political determination 23–8 and protectionism 23–6, 67 wage legislation 5 Wagoner, Rick 45 Wall Street Journal 68, 83 Walpole, Robert 69–70 washing machines 31–2, 34–6 Washington, George 65, 66–7 Welch, Jack 17, 22, 45 welfare economics 250 welfare states 59, 110–43, 146–7, 215, 220, 221–30 and growth 228–30 Wilson, Charlie 192, 193 Windows Vista system 135 woollen manufacturing industry 70 work to rule 46–7 working hours 2, 7, 109–10 World Bank and free market 262 and free trade 72 and POSCO 126–8 government intervention 42, 44, 66 macro-economic stability 56 SAPs 118 WTO (World Trade Organization) 66, 262 Yes, Minister/Prime Minister (comedy series) 44 Yunus, Muhammad 161–2 Zimbabwe, hyperinflation 53–4

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

These influencer girlboss women seemed to be a new outcropping of the “feminist fallacy” where “images of powerful women in the media” imply empowerment of all women, as Andi Zeisler writes. The notion of the “trickle-down” corporate feminist can be a rich fiction all its own, even though it was an archetype whose logic seemed more fictive than usual during the pandemic. As the scholar Tressie McMillan Cottom puts it, “Trickle-down economics wasn’t the best experience for people like me. You will have to forgive me, then, if I have similar doubts about trickle-down feminism.” In other words, some women in America—maybe, sometimes—got to participate in the bootstrapping story: most working women did not. Cottom and other feminists, among them Black feminists who fought upstream for their place in the firmament and had to sacrifice to do so, didn’t relate to the girlboss story line or even the idea of female workers “having it all,” which Cottom observes “is not a feminist theory of change.”

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This was a flashpoint, he said, for rejecting both that kind of racism and the illusion of merited White wealth. At college he further departed “from traditional Southern morals and values” and soon felt like “a weird bird” to be living there at all. Another defining period, Prince said, was the 1980s, when he “saw the inequality that was developing and knew that trickle-down economics were a lie. I know how rich guys are. They say, ‘I am going to make a whole bunch of money.’ They don’t say, ‘I am going to pay lots of people well because it’s the right thing to do.’” “My generation has screwed us up,” Prince told me. “Americans are a good people, but Reagan kicked something up in 1982, gave us all a pass to be selfish assholes; I don’t think that’s who we really are.”

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See inequality income tax, xi, 10, 104, 146 on excess profit, 159, 220, 255n in Participatory Budgeting (PB), 210–15 as wealth tax, 54–56, 69, 76, 156–58, 160–63, 237n independence, 19–21, 30–32, 119–20, 125, 223, 230 See also individualism independent contractors, 146–50, 253n indigence, vii, x, 39, 166, 192, 219, 240n, 253n Indigenous people, 19, 25–26, 29–33, 171–72, 239n individualism, xii, 3–8, 13–20, 92–94, 172–74, 257n affluence and, 4, 48–50, 230 independent contractors and, 146–50, 253n libertarianism and, 46–47, 83, 243n limits of, 183–85, 188, 193, 215, 218 rugged, 14, 27–29, 32, 36, 238n inequality, 44, 54–59, 154–56, 181, 199, 254n as bootstrapping, 5–8, 217 as gender inequity, 4, 11, 22, 69, 123, 126, 145, 172, 252n in gig work, 138–43, 145–50, 179 in health care, 205–8 as product of trickle-down economics, 62–63, 68, 231 Inequality.org, 154 inherited wealth, 18, 56–57, 76, 153–57, 163, 218, 242n, 245n heiresses, 61–62 injustice, 21, 97, 115, 156 as administrative burden, 108–11 instability, financial, 7, 143, 147 and employment instability, 126, 132, 144, 181 student debt and, ix, 7, 11, 104, 163, 246n, 251n Instacart, 138, 140–41, 146–49, 253–54n Institute for Family Studies, 134 interdependence, art of, 8–10, 22–23, 219–23, 227–31 in health care, 206–9 in Kropotkin, 170–74 in local governance, 210–15 in mutual aid, 165–77 in worker cooperatives, 180–90 intersectionality, 195, 201, 218, 252n, 258n invisible labor, ix, 10, 18, 77, 201, 218, 238n, 247n Jane Eyre (Brontë), 20 Jenner, Kylie, 40 Jobs, Steve, 46, 58, 242n Johnson, Eric Michael, 173–74, 257n judgment, 7, 35, 55, 67–68, 125, 162, 171, 209 on laziness, 19, 78, 81–82 as moral injury, xi, 15, 59, 85, 104–5, 223, 238n, 260n justice, 65, 96–97, 149, 182, 211, 222 Workers for Justice, 162 “just-world” hypothesis, 65–67, 244n Kabat-Zinn, Jon, 91, 249n Kahneman, Daniel, 79, 199 Kalanick, Travis, 46 Karol, David, 74 Kawano, Emily, 181 KC Tenants (Kansas City), 224 Keeping Up with the Kardashians, 63 Kemper, Bob, 78–80 Kendall, Mikki, 188 Kerr, Camille, 180–81 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Williams), 147–48 Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (Leary), 141, 147–48 Kiatpongsan, Sorapop, 57 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 9–11, 237n Koch brothers (Charles and David), 243n Kolokotronis, Alexander, 214, 260n Kropotkin, Peter, 170–74, 188–89 Krugman, Paul, 55 Kucinskas, Jaime, 92 labor market, 9–10, 78–79, 95, 120 and invisible labor, 117–20, 124–26, 129–31, 228, 238n Laird, Pamela Walker, 7–9, 236n landlessness, 33–34, 37, 239n landlords, 8, 153–54, 224 Landon, Michael, 35, 240n Lane, Rose Wilder, 27–28, 238n Langone, Ken, 161 Lapham, Mike, 75 Latino Exit from the Democratic Party (LEXIT), 82–83 Law for Black Lives, 162 laziness, 19, 78, 81–82 Lean In (Sandberg), 46, 61, 127–28, 245 Leary, John Patrick, 141, 144, 147, 253n Lerner, Joshua, 211–12 Lerner, Melvin, 65–67, 244n A Fundamental Delusion, 65 liberation in child tax credit, 219–20 as community-mindedness, xi, 5, 9, 21, 167–70, 174, 228–30, 257n in counternarratives, 65, 133, 141, 218, 224–25, 231, 260–61n from disease, 205, 207 from fear, 193–96 in free community college, 11–12, 258n as freedom from, 47–49, 72, 239n and freelance gigs, 140–41, 145 and free lunch, 111, 123 and freethinking, 17–21, 230, 237n as medical insurance, 47, 112, 223–24 in mindfulness, 93–95 in mutual aid, 165–70, 176, 185, 215, 218, 220–21, 225–31 libertarianism, 27–28, 46–47, 59–60, 83, 238n, 240n, 243n The Limits of Self-Reliance (Read), 19 Linnemann, Esma, 93 Little House on the Prairie (Wilder), 25–37 log cabins, 25, 27, 29–30 Loper, Nick, 142 Loy, David, 93 Lululemon, 46–47 lunch program, 23, 78, 108–9, 114–15, 224 Mackey, John, 46, 241n Magee, Rhonda, 96–97 Making Volunteers: Civic Life at Welfare’s End (Eliasoph), 209, 259n Manchin, Joe, 69, 114, 134, 251n Manklang, Mo, 180, 184 market worship, 45, 50, 83, 90, 198, 239–40n, 248n, 259n Martel, James, 42, 50, 240n Marx, Leo, 19, 238n masks.

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Over the course of the next decade, Ronald Reagan’s severe tax cuts and George H. W. Bush’s “trickle-down” economics promoted the idea that Americans should nurture and cultivate “job creators,” the wealthiest Americans, who, it was assumed, would reinvest in the economy and cause growth that would benefit all. The shift of much of the country’s industrial base to the southern tier of states, where unions had always been weak or nonexistent, led to the emergence of a united call for deregulation of the economy.1 However, not only did “trickle-down” economics fail to trickle down, but also many industrial jobs disappeared entirely, replaced by low-paid service jobs that relegated high-school graduates to poverty.2 Free trade continued to be an article of faith, and American manufacturers claimed that the only way to remain competitive in globalized markets was to move their manufacturing to countries like Mexico where labor commanded a lower wage.

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Stagflation, the oil shocks of the 1970s, and deindustrialization brought malaise to the United States. These conditions enabled widespread acceptance of an alternative theory of prosperity, discussed in Chapter 7. Divorced from both equality of condition and equality of opportunity, Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts, military spending, safety-net slashing, and “trickle-down” economics promoted the idea that the freest markets were most efficient, and the most efficient markets produced the most prosperity. Although direct subsidies to income only represented a very small percentage of the annual U.S. budget, welfare programs and the people who used them came under attack.

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Lower tax rates, Laffer claimed, would reduce tax avoidance.5 Tax cuts would energize the wealthiest, who were the most likely to invest in an expansion of productive capacity, thus increasing private employment.6 The notion that tax cuts for the wealthiest would hasten economic growth was called “supply side” or “trickle-down” economics. The 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act slashed the top income tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent. A second piece of Reagan-era legislation in 1987 capped the top rate at 28 percent.7 With the advocacy of groups like Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, cutting taxes, or at the very least never raising taxes, became an article of Republican Party faith.

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander

Alistair Cooke, commoditize, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, full employment, Future Shock, Herbert Marcuse, invention of agriculture, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, placebo effect, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics

A few vears later at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, I learned how and why this com- modity life and the economic growth it produces was sup- posed to be so good for absolutely everyone. I learned what they had been talking about in those boardrooms and at the Department of Commerce. It was called the "trickle-down theory. " The Trickle-Down Theory It goes more or less like this: Industrial expansion, rapid economic growth and the con- sumption economy benefit everyone. The theory-which is the basis of Keynesian American economics-has it that when people buy more and more commodities, they produce more 138 THE CENTRALIZATION OF CONTROL profits for industry, enabling it to expand.

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. , . . ) INTRODUCTION I THE BELLY OF THE BEAST 13 Adman Manque - Engulfed by the Six- ties - The Replacement of Experience The Unification of Experience II WAR TO CONTROL THE UNITY MACHINE 29 Advancing from the Sixties to the Fifties Style Supersedes Content - Television at Black Mesa - The Illusion of Neutral Tech- nology - Before the Arguments: A Comment on Style FOUR ARGUMENTS FOR THE ELIMINATION OF TELEVISION Argument One THE MEDIATION OF EXPERIENCE III THE WALLING OF AWARENESS 53 Me{/iated Environments - Sensory-Depriva- tion Environments - Rooms inside Rooms IV EXPROPRIA TION OF KNOWLEDGE 69 Direct Education - Motel Education 7 CONTENTS V ADRIFT IN MENTAL SPACE 86 Science Fiction and A rbitrary Reality Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy - Popular Philosophy and Arbi- trary Reality - Schizophrenia and the Influ- encing Machine Argument Two THE COLONIZATION OF EXPERIENCE VI ADVERTISING: THE STANDARD-GAUGE RAILWAY 115 The Creation of "Value" - Redeveloping the Human Being - Commodity People - Breaking the Skin Barrier - The Inherent Need to Create Need - Buying Ourselves Back The Delivery System's Delivery System VII THE CENTRALIZATION OF CONTROL 134 Economic Growth and Patriotic Consumption - The Trickle-Down Theory - Benefici- aries of the Advertising Fantasy - The Ef- fect on Individuals - Flaws in the Fantasy - The Depression Never Ended - Domi- nation of the Influencing Machine Argument Three EFFECTS OF TELEVISION ON THE HUMAN BEING VIII ANECDOTAL REPORTS: SICK, CRAZY, MESMERIZED 157 8 CONTENTS Invisible Phenomenon - Dimming Out the Human Artificial Touch and Hyperac- tivity - Television Is Sensory Deprivation IX THE INGESTION OF ARTIFICIAL LIGHT 170 Health and Light Outdoors to Indoors Seeking the Light - Serious Research X How TELEVISION DIMS THE MIND 192 Hypnosis - Television Bypasses Conscious- ness Television Is Sleep Teaching Television Is Not Relaxing XI How WE TURN INTO OUR IMAGES 216 Humans Are Image Factories - The Con- crete Power of Images Metaphysics to Physics - Image Emulation: Are We All Taped Replays?

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Jobs, money, prosperity, happiness, security, democracy, equality were an lumped together as inevitable results of this cycle. I believed in it. Wean believed in it. Most people believe in it sti11. Presidents get elected based on whether they can convince the public that they win stimulate the beautiful cycle. Jimmy Carter was elected for saying he knew how to do it. The trickle-down theory is the nice simple kind of economic model that can be sold to a mass population removed from any deeper understanding of how things real1y work. Trying to come to grips with economic nuance is for most of us no easier than trying to understand how much nuclear radiation is "safe." Who knows?

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Seifert, “From Creative Economy to Creative Society,” Creativity & Change (The Reinvestment Fund and the Social Impact of the Arts Project), January 2008, http://www.trfund.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Economy.pdf; “Jamie Peck on Struggling With the Creative Class,” interview, ScienceWatch, November 2010, http://archive.sciencewatch.com/dr/fmf/2010/10novfmf/10novfmfPeck; Jamie Peck, “Struggling with the Creative Class,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 29, no. 4 (December 2005): 740–70. 41. Aaron M. Renn, “Is Urbanism the New Trickle-Down Economics?” New Geography, February 7, 2013, http://www.newgeography.com/content/003470-is-urbanism-new-trickle-down-economics; Richard Florida, “More Losers Than Winners in America’s New Economic Geography,” CityLab, January 30, 2013, http://www.citylab.com/work/2013/01/more-losers-winners-americas-new-economic-geography/4465. 42. Joel Kotkin, “The Geography of Aging: Why Millennials Are Headed to the Suburbs,” New Geography, December 9, 2013, http://www.newgeography.com/content/004084-the-geography-of-aging-why-millennials-are-headed-to-the-suburbs. 43.

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University of British Columbia’s Jamie Peck has described the current fashion of focusing on hipsters and the affluent as a “biscotti and circuses” approach that exacerbates poverty and inequality in urban centers.40 “To put it in political speak,” notes urban thinker Aaron Renn, “the creative class doesn’t have much in the way of coattails.” The new urbanism is a new, and equally ineffective, form of “trickle-down economics.” Even Florida, the guru of the “creative class,” admits that the benefits of the urban strategies he advocates “flow disproportionately to more highly-skilled knowledge, professional, and creative workers.” Yet many cities, including some unlikely cultural centers such as Detroit or Cleveland, have adopted the idea that sponsoring artists and “hip” urbanism are the keys to civic success.41 It seems clear that the current recipe for urban growth is destined to preserve and expand inequality, largely ignoring the needs of the lower and working classes.

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

But when people deal with one another as traders, on mutually beneficial terms or not at all, they enjoy a harmony of interests. And this is true regardless of their level of income or ability. In fact, it is those with less ability who benefit the most from this arrangement: the productive efforts of those at the top raise everyone else’s standard of living. This isn’t what is sometimes disparagingly called “trickle-down economics,” the theory that wealth will magically trickle down from rich people to poor people in a free market. What actually happens when trade is voluntary is that those with greater ability radically magnify the productivity of everyone, especially those with less ability. This is what Ayn Rand calls the Pyramid of Ability.

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., 59 Fanjul family, 150 finance, 36–8, 93–4, 153–7 Fleming, Alexander, 89 Folsom, Burton, 148–9 Ford, Henry, 89, 90, 106–7 Frank, Barney, 159–60, 163–4 Frank, Mark, 52 Frank, Robert, 9, 161–2, 179 Frank, Thomas, 32 free market capitalism, 61, 173, 190 and CEO pay, 163 and corporate welfare, 224 and education, 133 and finance, 156–7 free market myth, 31–8 and health care, 134 and trickle-down economics, 95 and unions, 128 and value creation, 156 freedom of contract, 103, 112 freedom of thought and speech, 103, 112 Fulton, Robert, 148–9 Galbraith, James, 47, 153, 167–9 Gates, Bill, 60, 66–7, 91, 131, 146–7, 151, 195 General Electric (GE), 151 Germany, 108–10, 161 Ghate, Onkar, 228 Gibbons v.

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., 45–6 Singer, Peter, 201, 205 Smith, Adam, 160 Smith, Hedrick, 32, 181–2 Smith International, 158 social justice, 185–90 Social Security, 31, 35, 41, 69–70, 127, 138, 170, 181–3, 225 Solyndra, 150 Soviet Union, 51–2, 108 Sowell, Thomas, 29–30, 119 stagflation, 32 stagnation, 32, 38–48 standard of living, 39–41, 43, 45, 64, 84–5 and collectivism, 182, 216 and egalitarianism, 201 and finance, 155 and inequality, 175 and innovation, 102 and life expectancy, 24 and productivity, 95 and progress, 24, 26–8 and regulation, 126 and retirement, 181 and unions, 128 and the welfare state, 141 Stiglitz, Joseph, 4, 6, 8, 20, 38, 81, 117 Summers, Lawrence, 166 Sunstein, Cass, 183–4 tall poppy syndrome, 213–18 Tanner, Michael, 142 taxes and taxation and health care, 135–6 and income data, 44–5 in the inequality narrative, 20, 23, 27, 30–3 inheritance taxes, 79, 165–9 and mobility, 120–1 policy, 6–7, 20, 120, 138, 142–4 and poverty, 126–7, 143–4 and Scandinavian countries, 112–13 and stagnation, 44–7 and wealth, 169–73, 212 Temkin, Larry, 194, 206 Tesla, 150 Tesla, Nikola, 89 Thiel, Peter, 60, 130 Thompson, Don, 124 “too big to fail,” 157 Tooley, James, 133 trickle-down economics, 95 Uber, 101–2, 107, 155 Ubl, Stephen, 136 unions. See labor unions Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 148–9 Virgin Group, 198–9 voluntary trade, 12, 59–66, 186 wages, 23–4, 44, 46–7, 99–100, 106, 113 maximum wage, 52, 178, 212 minimum wage, 5, 7, 20, 24, 52, 62, 68–9, 114, 124–9, 139–42, 178, 180, 211, 213, 222, 224 and post-war era, 27–30 “slave” wages, 62–5 and stagnation, 38, 222 Wagner Act (National Labor Relations Act of 1935), 29 Warren, Elizabeth, 182, 188, 196, 210 Washington, George, 96–7 Watkins, Don, 66, 101, 219, 225 wealth and collectivism, 167–8 defined, 57 fixed pie assumption, 8–9, 87 group pie assumption, 9 redistribution of, 51, 108, 114, 144 and “the rich” as a label, 173–5 and taxation, 169–73, 212 Welfare Reform Act (1996), 35 welfare state, 68–9, 170, 174, 181, 189, 224–5 and the middle class, 30–1 and mobility, 120–1 vs. opportunity, 138–44 and Scandinavian countries, 111–13 See also entitlement programs Westinghouse, George, 105 Whitworth, Joseph, 107 Wilkinson, Richard, 7, 79, 118, 121, 123, 211–12 Winship, Scott, 46–7, 237n53 Wooldridge, Adrian, 32 Wozniak, Steve, 87–9, 91, 191, 193 Wright, Carroll D., 26 Yergin, Daniel, 11 Yglesias, Matthew, 212 “you didn’t build that,” 190–9, 213 Zingales, Luigi, 155 About the Authors © Amanda Patrice DON WATKINS, one of today’s most vocal opponents of the welfare state, is coauthor, with Yaron Brook, of the national bestseller, Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, gentrification, George Santayana, glass ceiling, income inequality, independent contractor, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, payday loans, pink-collar, post-work, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

They want to move into a memory they have already made. Impoverished Suburbs In a sweeping analysis of displacement in San Francisco and its increasingly impoverished suburbs, journalist Adam Hudson notes that “gentrification is trickle-down economics applied to urban development: the idea being that as long as a neighborhood is made suitable for rich and predominantly white people, the benefits will trickle down to everyone else.” Like trickle-down economics itself, this theory does not play out in practice. Rich cities such as New York and San Francisco have become what journalist Simon Kuper calls gated citadels, “vast gated communities where the one percent reproduces itself.”

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth by Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato

Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, collaborative economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Detroit bankruptcy, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, facts on the ground, fiat currency, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systems thinking, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, vertical integration, very high income

In the ensuing economic and political debate, this ‘rising-tide hypothesis’ evolved into a much more specific idea, according to which regressive economic policies—policies that favour the richer classes—would end up benefiting everyone. Resources given to the rich would inevitably ‘trickle down’ to the rest. It is important to clarify that this version of old-fashioned ‘trickle-down economics’ did not follow from the postwar evidence. The ‘rising-tide hypothesis’ was equally consistent with a ‘trickle-up’ theory—give more money to those at the bottom and everyone will benefit; or with a ‘build-out from the middle’ theory—help those at the centre, and both those above and below will benefit.

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The US Treasury typically demands that when money is given to developing countries, conditions be imposed on them to ensure not only that the money is used well, but also that the country adopts economic policies that (according to the Treasury’s economic theories) will lead to growth. But no conditions were imposed on the banks—not even, for example, requirements that they lend more or stop abusive practices. The rescue worked in enriching those at the top; but the benefits did not trickle down to the rest of the economy. The Federal Reserve, too, tried trickle-down economics. One of the main channels by which quantitative easing was supposed to rekindle growth was by leading to higher stock market prices, which would generate higher wealth for the very rich, who would then spend some of that, which in turn would benefit the rest. As Yeva Nersisyan and Randall Wray argue in their chapter in this volume, both the Fed and the Administration could have tried policies that more directly benefited the rest of the economy: helping homeowners, lending to small and medium-sized enterprises and fixing the broken credit channel.

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The role of institutions and politics The large influence of rent-seeking in the rise of top incomes undermines the marginal productivity theory of income distribution. The income and wealth of those at the top comes at least partly at the expense of others—just the opposite conclusion from that which emerges from trickle-down economics. When, for instance, a monopoly succeeds in raising the price of the goods which it sells, it lowers the real income of everyone else. This suggests that institutional and political factors play an important role in influencing the relative shares of capital and labour. As we noted earlier, in the past three decades wages have grown much less than productivity (Figure 1)—a fact which is hard to reconcile with marginal productivity theory39 but is consistent with increased exploitation.

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

Since growth had stopped in 1973, the natural reaction was to turn to the critics of the Keynesian macroeconomic policies of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the (right-leaning) Chicago school of economics professors and Nobel Prize–winners Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas. Reaganomics, as the dominant economics of this period came to be called, was quite open about the fact that the benefits of growth would come at the cost of some inequality. The idea was that the rich would benefit first but the poor would eventually benefit. This is the famous trickle-down theory, never better described than by Harvard professor John Kenneth Galbraith, who claimed this was what used to be called the “horse and sparrow” theory in the 1890s: “If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”28 Indeed, the 1980s ushered a dramatic change in the social contract in the US and the UK.

…

Over the same period (from 1979 to today), the real wages of the least educated workers actually fell. Among high school dropouts, high school graduates, and those with some college, real weekly earnings among full-time male workers in 2018 were 10 to 20 percent below their real levels in 1980.33 If there had been any trickle-down effect of lower taxes, as its advocates claimed, one would expect wage growth to have accelerated in the Reagan-Bush years. But the opposite happened. The labor share (the share of revenues used to pay wages) has continuously declined since the 1980s. In manufacturing, almost 50 percent of sales were used to pay workers in 1982; it had fallen to about 10 percent in 2012.34 The fact that this great reversal takes place during the Reagan and Thatcher years is probably not coincidental, but there is no reason to assume Reagan and Thatcher were the reason it happened.

The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay by Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cross-border payments, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, government statistician, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, labor-force participation, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, patent troll, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Steve Jobs, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, very high income, We are the 99%

We can’t, alas, time-travel back to 1980 and run an experiment where tax rates would remain at their 1980 level to see what would have happened. But a comparison with income growth in the post–World War II decades does not vindicate the trickle-down theory, to say the least. WORKING-CLASS INCOME GROWTH: A TALE OF TWO COUNTRIES Comparing US results with countries that have implemented other policies since 1980 does not vindicate trickle-down theory either. Let’s look at France, a country that is broadly representative of continental Europe. Average national income per adult is higher in the United States than in France: today, about 30% higher.

…

Maybe we all benefit from Bill Gates earning billions today and would all be worse off if these billions were taxed away—for instance because it would mean less funding for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which according to some observers spends its funds better than the government. This is a variation on the famous trickle-down theory, according to which the fortunes of the rich ultimately trickle down to the rest of society. To think more deeply about whether the theoretical case for going beyond Laffer has empirical merit today, we need one thing that’s too often missing from this debate: data. THE BENEFITS OF EXTREME WEALTH: A DEBATE WITHOUT DATA A scientific perspective on these questions requires a great deal of data.

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis by David Boyle

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Goodhart's law, housing crisis, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mega-rich, Money creation, mortgage debt, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Ocado, Occupy movement, off grid, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pensions crisis, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, precariat, quantitative easing, school choice, scientific management, Slavoj Žižek, social intelligence, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, work culture , working poor

So it is not primarily our current economic difficulties that are causing the problem — the share of wealth of the middle 60 per cent of the population has been falling steadily everywhere except Denmark.[9] But they may be advancing a process that was already under way. The clues are all there, but the blame still has to be shared between the policymakers and the middle classes themselves. They made a disastrous political mistake over the past generation. They backed the idea of trickle-down economics that failed to trickle. They cheered the corrosive growth of financial services in the City of London and ignored their excesses. They believed those in charge of their financial institutions had their class interests at heart, when they had nothing of the kind. They did not understand where Big Bang would lead — and where it would inevitably lead: if the middle classes had been allowed to share in the new wealth, it would have caused rampant inflation.

…

It is now clear that neither Right nor Left in conventional politics represent the interests of either. The political parties in Westminster are to that extent the ‘slaves of some defunct economist’, as Keynes put it long ago.[12] They are trapped in a world of policy-making that still believes in trickle-down economics, unable to grasp any other way, and which continues to funnel wealth and power ever upwards. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair rose to power with the support of the middle classes. But the middle classes are at the very beginning of being able to articulate a challenge to that status quo, and to the way they have been treated by the financial forces — handing over the best years of their lives in indentured servitude to pay off the vast mortgage required to live a middle-class life, then finding that up to a third of their pension has been siphoned off in fees.

…

., 37 property, investing in, 57, 168–71 public sector salaries, 268–9, 291 Public Service Agreement (PSA) targets, 264 public services, centralization of, 263–7 pubs, closure of, 252 Q ‘quangocracy’, 291 quant funds, 129 Quattrone, Frank, 114–15 Quilter Goodison, 134, 147 R Radley College, 59 railways, coming of, 35, 282 Raphael, Adam, 33 Rawnsley, Andrew, 225 Ray, Paul, 49 Raynsford, Nick, 265 Read, Peter, 217–19 remortgaging, 9–10 rents, 21, 68–9, 306 restrictive covenants, 302 retirement age, 180, 203, 302 Reynolds, Christina, 10–11 RIBA, 77–8 Richardson, Gordon, 62, 72 Richmond, 287 Riddell, Fred, 225 Ridley, Adam, 58–60, 63 Ritalin, 229 Roddick, Anita, 301 Rogers, Richard, 78 Roman Catholics, 39 Romania, 3, 68 Rothschild, Jacob, 146 Rowe & Pitman, 138, 146 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), 119, 122, 193 Royal Mail, 194 Royal Navy, 143, 264 Rutlish School, 213–14 S Sainsbury’s, 244, 246, 250 St Francis of Assisi, 59 St Paul’s Cathedral, 289 ‘salariat’, 17 Salomon Brothers, 149, 153 Samuel Montagu, 135, 146 Santander, 118, 122 Saratoga, New York, 253–4 Savage, Mike, 40, 44, 53 Scarborough, 265 Schiff, Andrew, 20 school catchment areas, 212–13 and house prices, 20, 210–11, 221 school fees, 19–20, 204, 212, 239 School for Social Entrepreneurs, 296 school meals, 294–5 school playing fields, 238 schools choice of, 230–4, 288 church schools, 211, 214, 216, 239–40 free schools, 216, 240–1 grammar schools, 36–7, 216–17, 219 grant-maintained schools, 221 investment in, 211–12 and league tables, 224–9, 231–3 237–8, 285, 302 Literacy Hour in, 265 nursery schools, 268–9 rural, 252 secondary moderns, 229, 237 size of, 234–8, 303, 328 special school units, 218 ‘super-selective’, 216 see also education Schwed, Fred, 186 SEAC (Stock Exchange Automated Quotations), 147 Seldon, Anthony, 232 self-employment, 5, 45, 184, 249, 292 self-help, 49 Shaw, George Bernard, 290 Shearlock, Peter, 150 Sheffield, 162 Shepherd, Gillian, 228 Shrewsbury, 252 Sibary, Shona, 9–11, 16 Sieff, Marcus, 243 silver, 278–9 Simmonds, Jane, 271 Sizer, Ted, 237 Skegness, 221 Skidelsky, Lord, 227 skiing, 169 Skinners’ School, 217 Smith, John, 225, 263 social care, 21, 85, 201, 296 software ERP and CRM, 256, 261 report-writing, 231 Somerset Food Links, 296 Sorbonne, 157 Soros, George, 131, 157 South London, 43 Southwark, 225 Spain, 56, 97, 294 Golden Age, 277–81 ‘squeezed middle’ (the term), 22 stamp duty, 149 Standard & Poor’s index, 198 Standard Life, 172 Standing, Guy, 17 Stewart, James, 255 Stiperstones Primary School, 252 Stock Market Crash (1987), 61 stockbrokers, 134, 136–40, 145–8, 150, 162, 247 Stockton, Earl of (Harold Macmillan), 288 Stockwell, Christopher, 27–34, 50 Stott, Martin, 44 student loans, 19, 300 subprime mortgage crisis, 140, 155 suicides, 32 Sunday Telegraph, 36, 60 Sunday Times, 33, 150 Surbiton, 73–4 Sure Start centres, 76 sustainable living, 78–9 Sutton Coldfield, 180 Swiss Cottage, 287 Switzerland, 97, 116, 180, 183 T Tasker, Mary, 234–5, 237 Tatler, 284 tax avoidance, 300 tax credits, 5, 164, 270–1 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 248, 253–7, 261–3 Tea Party, 273 teaching unions, 224, 227–8 Tebbit, Norman, 149, 181 Tennant, Julian, 34 Tesco, 47, 243, 246, 250–1, 300 Thames Water, 202 Thatcher, Margaret, 1, 3, 36, 67, 70, 99, 109, 176–7, 221–2, 290 and City deregulation, 137–8 and financial reforms, 57–9, 63–4, 72–3 and pension reforms, 180, 183, 190 theatres, 126 Thornton, Clive, 71 ‘Tiger Parents’, 215 time banks, 299 Time Warner, 133 Times, The, 65, 67, 135, 147, 177, 226 Times Educational Supplement, 237, 269 Tokyo, 75, 78, 149 Tough, Paul, 234 Toulouse University, 127, 141 Tower Hamlets, 61 trade unions, 160, 255 transport costs, 18 Travelex, 126 trickle-down economics, 124, 157, 161, 286, 289–91 Trollope, Joanna, 79, 245 Truro, 18, 102 Tufnell Park, 80–1 Tunbridge Wells, 216–17 Turner, Adair, 152, 202 tutoring, 219 Tyco, 117 U UKIP, 273 unemployment, 271–2 Unilever, 194 United States of America and auditing culture, 261 banking, 92, 95–7 education, 215–16, 236, 238 housing developments, 85 inequalities of wealth, 23–4 influence of financial sector, 152 job creation, 249 middle classes, 22–3, 272, 282, 286 New Deal, 153 small-town life, 122–3 subprime lending, 75 universities, 212, 215, 242, 248–9 university fees, 18–19, 270 UnLtd, 296 utility bills, rising, 10–11 see also fuel bills V Valladolid, 277, 280–1 Van Reenen, John, 248 Vickers da Costa, 146 Vinson, Nigel, 179 voluntary organizations, 253, 260 W Waitrose, 242–4, 302, 306 Wakeham, John, 181 Walker, David, 137 Wall Street, deregulation of, 135 Wall Street Crash, 186 Warburg’s, 146 Wass, Sir Douglas, 62 Watt, James, 152 Wellington College, 232, 239 Wells, H.

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

Logically, there must be some tax rate between these two extremes which would maximize tax revenue. Although Laffer does not remember doing so, he apparently grabbed a napkin and drew a curve on it, representing the relationship between tax rates and revenues.fn2 The ‘Laffer curve’ was born and, with it, the idea of ‘trickle down economics’. The key implication which impressed Rumsfeld and Cheney was that, just in the way that tax rates lower than 100 per cent must raise more revenue, cuts in income tax rates more generally could raise revenue. In other words, there could be winners, and no losers, from tax cuts. But could does not mean will.

…

The resulting increase in GDP and income may be enough to generate higher tax revenues, even though the tax rate itself has fallen. Although the effects of the big Reagan tax cuts are still disputed (mainly because of disagreement over how the US economy would have performed without the cuts), even those sympathetic to trickle-down economics conceded that the cuts had negligible impact on GDP – and certainly not enough to outweigh the negative effect of the cuts on tax revenues. But the Laffer curve did remind economists that a ‘revenue-maximizing top tax rate’ somewhere between 0 per cent and 100 per cent must exist. Finding the magic number is another matter: the search continues today.

…

objection, 107, 119–20 Friedman, Milton, 4–5, 56, 69, 84, 88, 126, 189 awarded Nobel Prize, 132 and business responsibility, 2, 152 debate with Coase at Director’s house, 50, 132 as dominant Chicago thinker, 50, 132 on fairness and justice, 60 flawed arguments of, 132–3 influence on modern economics, 131–2 and monetarism, 87, 132, 232 at Mont Pèlerin, 5, 132 rejects need for realistic assumptions, 132–3 Sheraton Hall address (December 1967), 132 ‘The Methodology of Positive Economics’ (essay, 1953), 132–3 ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits’ (article, 1970), 2, 152 Frost, Gerald, Antony Fisher: Champion of Liberty (2002), 7* Galbraith, John Kenneth, 242–3 game theory assumptions of ‘rational behaviour’, 18, 28, 29–32, 35–8, 41–3, 70, 124 Axelrod’s law of the instrument, 41 backward induction procedure, 36–7, 38 and Cold War nuclear strategy, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 35, 70, 73, 198 focus on consequences alone, 43 as form of zombie science, 41 and human awareness, 21–3, 24–32 and interdependence, 23 limitations of, 32, 33–4, 37–40, 41–3 minimax solution, 22 multiplicity problem, 33–4, 35–7, 38 Nash equilibrium, 22–3, 24, 25, 27–8, 33–4, 41–2 the Nash program, 25 and nature of trust, 28–31, 41 the Prisoner’s Dilemma, 26–8, 29–32, 42–3 real world as problem for, 21–2, 24–5, 29, 31–2, 37–8, 39–40, 41–3 rise of in economics, 40–41 and Russell’s Chicken, 33–4 and Schelling, 138–9 and spectrum auctions, 39–40 theory of repeated games, 29–30, 35 tit-for-tat, 30–31 and trust, 29, 30–31, 32, 41 uses of, 23–4, 34, 38–9 view of humanity as non-cooperative/distrustful, 18, 21–2, 25–32, 36–8, 41–3 Von Neumann as father of, 18, 19, 20–22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 34, 41 zero-sum games, 21–2 Gates, Bill, 221–2 Geithner, Tim, 105 gender, 127–8, 130–31, 133, 156 General Electric, 159 General Motors (GM), 215–16 George, Prince of Cambridge, 98 Glass–Steagall Act, repeal of, 194 globalization, 215, 220 Goldman Sachs, 182, 184, 192 Google, 105 Gore, Al, 39 Great Reform Act (1832), 120 greed, 1–2, 196, 197, 204, 229, 238 Greenspan, Alan, 57, 203 Gruber, Jonathan, 245 Haifa, Israel, 158, 161 Harper, ‘Baldy’, 7 Harsanyi, John, 34–5, 40 Harvard Business Review, 153 Hayek, Friedrich and Arrow’s framework, 78–9 economics as all of life, 8 and Antony Fisher, 6–7 influence on Thatcher, 6, 7 and Keynesian economics, 5–6 and legal frameworks, 7* at LSE, 4 at Mont Pèlerin, 4, 5, 6, 15 and Olson’s analysis, 104 and public choice theory, 89 rejection of incentive schemes, 156 ‘spontaneous order’ idea, 30 The Road to Serfdom (1944), 4, 5, 6, 78–9, 94 healthcare, 91–2, 93, 178, 230, 236 hedge funds, 201, 219, 243–4 Heilbroner, Robert, The Worldly Philosophers, 252 Heller, Joseph, Catch-22, 98, 107, 243–4 Helmsley, Leona, 105 hero myths, 221–3, 224 Hewlett-Packard, 159 hippie countercultural, 100 Hoffman, Abbie, Steal This Book, 100 Holmström, Bengt, 229–30 homo economicus, 9, 10, 12, 140, 156–7 and Gary Becker, 126, 129, 133, 136 and behaviour of real people, 15, 136, 144–5, 171, 172, 173, 250–51 and behavioural economics, 170, 171, 172, 255 long shadow cast by, 248 and Nudge economists, 13, 172, 173, 174–5, 177 Hooke, Robert, 223 housing market, 128–9, 196, 240–41 separate doors for poor people, 243 Hume, David, 111 Huxley, Thomas, 114 IBM, 181, 222 identity, 32, 165–6, 168, 180 Illinois, state of, 46–7 immigration, 125, 146 Impossibility Theorem, 72, 73–4, 75, 89, 97 Arrow’s assumptions, 80, 81, 82 and Duncan Black, 77–8 and free marketeers, 78–9, 82 as misunderstood and misrepresented, 76–7, 79–82 ‘paradox of voting’, 75–7 as readily solved, 76–7, 79–80 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 incentives adverse effect on autonomy, 164, 165–6, 168, 169–70, 180 authority figure–autonomy contradiction, 180 and behavioural economics, 171, 175, 176–7 cash and non-cash gifts, 161–2 context and culture, 175–6 contrast with rewards and punishments, 176–7 ‘crowding in’, 176 crowding out of prior motives, 160–61, 162–3, 164, 165–6, 171, 176 impact of economists’ ideas, 156–7, 178–80 and intrinsic motivations, 158–60, 161–3, 164, 165–6, 176 and moral disengagement, 162, 163, 164, 166 morally wrong/corrupting, 168–9 origins in behaviourism, 154 and orthodox theory of motivation, 157–8, 164, 166–7, 168–70, 178–9 payments to blood donors, 162–3, 164, 169, 176 as pervasive in modern era, 155–6 respectful use of, 175, 177–8 successful, 159–60 as tools of control/power, 155–7, 158–60, 161, 164, 167, 178 Indecent Proposal (film, 1993), 168 India, 123, 175 individualism, 82, 117 and Becker, 134, 135–8 see also freedom, individual Industrial Revolution, 223 inequality and access to lifeboats, 150–51 and climate change, 207–9 correlation with low social mobility, 227–8, 243 and demand for positional goods, 239–41 and economic imperialism, 145–7, 148, 151, 207 and efficiency wages, 237–8 entrenched self-deluding justifications for, 242–3 and executive pay, 215–16, 219, 224, 228–30, 234, 238 as falling in 1940–80 period, 215, 216 Great Gatsby Curve, 227–8, 243 hero myths, 221–3, 224 increases in as self-perpetuating, 227–8, 230–31, 243 as increasing since 1970s, 2–3, 215–16, 220–21 and lower growth levels, 239 mainstream political consensus on, 216, 217, 218, 219–21 marginal productivity theory, 223–4, 228 new doctrine on taxation since 1970s, 232–5 and Pareto, 217, 218–19, 220 poverty as waste of productive capacity, 238–9 public attitudes to, 221, 226–8 rises in as not inevitable, 220, 221, 242 role of luck downplayed, 222, 224–6, 243 scale-invariant nature of, 219, 220 ‘socialism for the rich’, 230 Thatcher’s praise of, 216 and top-rate tax cuts, 231, 233–5, 239 trickle-down economics, 232–3 US and European attitudes to, 226–7 ‘you deserve what you get’ belief, 223–6, 227–8, 236, 243 innovation, 222–3, 242 Inside Job (documentary, 2010), 88 Institute of Economic Affairs, 7–8, 15, 162–3 intellectual property law, 57, 68, 236 Ishiguro, Kazuo, Never Let Me Go, 148 Jensen, Michael, 229 Journal of Law and Economics, 49 justice, 1, 55, 57–62, 125, 137 Kahn, Herman, 18, 33 Kahneman, Daniel, 170–72, 173, 179, 202–3, 212, 226 Kennedy, President John, 139–40 Keynes, John Maynard, 11, 21, 162, 186, 204 and Buchanan’s ideology, 87 dentistry comparison, 258–9, 261 on economics as moral science, 252–3 Friedman’s challenge to orthodoxy of, 132 Hayek’s view of, 5–6 massive influence of, 3–4, 5–6 on power of economic ideas, 15 and probability, 185, 186–7, 188–9, 190, 210 vision of the ideal economist, 20 General Theory (1936), 15, 188–9 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 128 Khrushchev, Nikita, 139–40, 181 Kilburn Grammar School, 48 Kildall, Gary, 222 Kissinger, Henry, 184 Knight, Frank, 185–6, 212 Krugman, Paul, 248 Kubrick, Stanley, 35*, 139 labour child labour, 124, 146 and efficiency wages, 237–8 labour-intensive services, 90, 92–3 lumpenproletariat, 237 Olson’s hostility to unions, 104 Adam Smith’s ‘division of labour’ concept, 128 Laffer, Arthur, 232–3, 234 Lancet (medical journal), 257 Larkin, Philip, 67 law and economics movement, 40, 55, 56–63, 64–7 Lazear, Edward, ‘Economic Imperialism’, 246 legal system, 7* and blame for accidents, 55, 60–61 and Chicago School, 49, 50–52, 55 and Coase Theorem, 47, 49, 50–55, 63–6 criminal responsibility, 111, 137, 152 economic imperialist view of, 137 law and economics movement, 40, 55, 56–63, 64–7 ‘mimic the market’ approach, 61–3, 65 Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 57–63, 64–7, 137 precautionary principle, 211–12, 214 transaction costs, 51–3, 54–5, 61, 62, 63–4, 68 Lehmann Brothers, 194 Lexecon, 58, 68 Linda Problem, 202–3 LineStanding.com, 123 Little Zheng, 123, 124 Lloyd Webber, Andrew, 234–5, 236 lobbying, 7, 8, 88, 115, 123, 125, 146, 230, 231, 238 loft-insulation schemes, 172–3 logic, mathematical, 74–5 The Logic of Life (Tim Harford, 2008), 130 London School of Economics (LSE), 4, 48 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), 201, 257 Machiavelli, Niccoló, 89, 94 Mafia, 30 malaria treatments, 125, 149 management science, 153–4, 155 Mandelbrot, Benoît, 195, 196, 201 Mankiw, Greg, 11 marginal productivity theory, 223–4 Markowitz, Harry, 196–7, 201, 213 Marx, Karl, 11, 101, 102, 104, 111, 223 lumpenproletariat, 237 mathematics, 9–10, 17–18, 19, 21–4, 26, 247, 248, 255, 259 of 2007 financial crash, 194, 195–6 and Ken Arrow, 71, 72, 73–5, 76–7, 82–3, 97 axioms (abstract assumptions), 198 fractals (scale-invariance), 194, 195–6, 201, 219 and orthodox decision theory, 190–91, 214 Ramsey Rule on discounting, 208–9, 212 and Savage, 189–90, 193, 197, 198, 199, 205 and Schelling, 139 Sen’s framework on voting systems, 80–81 standard deviation, 182, 192, 194 and stock market statistics, 190–91, 195–6 use of for military ends, 71–2 maximizing behaviour and Becker, 129–31, 133–4, 147 and catastrophe, 211 and Coase, 47, 55, 59, 61, 63–9 economic imperialism, 124–5, 129–31, 133–4, 147, 148–9 Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 57–63, 64–7, 137 profit-maximizing firms, 228 see also wealth-maximization principle; welfare maximization McCluskey, Kirsty, 194 McNamara, Robert, 138 median voter theorem, 77, 95–6 Merton, Robert, 201 Meucci, Antonio, 222 microeconomics, 9, 232, 259 Microsoft, 222 Miles, David, 258 Mill, John Stuart, 102, 111, 243 minimum wage, national, 96 mobility, economic and social correlation with inequality, 226–8, 243 as low in UK, 227 as low in USA, 226–7 US–Europe comparisons, 226–7 Modern Times (Chaplin film, 1936), 154 modernism, 67 Moivre, Abraham de, 193 monetarism, 87, 89, 132, 232 monopolies and cartels, 101, 102, 103–4 public sector, 48–9, 50–51, 93–4 Mont Pèlerin Society, 3–9, 13, 15, 132 Morgenstern, Oskar, 20–22, 24–5, 28, 35, 124, 129, 189, 190 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 91, 92–3 Murphy, Kevin, 229 Mussolini, Benito, 216, 219 Nash equilibrium, 22–3, 24, 25, 27–8, 33–4, 41–2 Nash, John, 17–18, 22–3, 24, 25–6, 27–8, 33–4, 41–2 awarded Nobel Prize, 34–5, 38, 39, 40 mental health problems, 25, 26, 34 National Health Service, 106, 162 ‘neoliberalism’, avoidance of term, 3* Neumann, John von ambition to make economics a science, 20–21, 24–5, 26, 35, 125, 151, 189 as Cold War warrior, 20, 26, 138 and expansion of scope of economics, 124–5 as father of game theory, 18, 19, 20–22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 34, 41 final illness and death of, 19, 34, 35, 43–4 genius of, 19–20 as inspiration for Dr Strangelove, 19 and Nash’s equilibrium, 22–3, 25, 38* simplistic view of humanity, 28 theory of decision-making, 189, 190, 203 neuroscience, 14 New Deal, US, 4, 194, 231 Newton, Isaac, 223 Newtonian mechanics, 21, 24–5 Nixon, Richard, 56, 184, 200 NORAD, Colorado Springs, 181 nuclear weapons, 18–19, 20, 22, 27, 181 and Ellsberg, 200 and game theory, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 35, 70, 73, 198 MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), 35, 138 and Russell’s Chicken, 33–4 and Schelling, 138, 139 Nudge economists, 13, 171–5, 177–8, 179, 180, 251 Oaten, Mark, 121 Obama, Barack, 110, 121, 157, 172, 180 Olson, Mancur, 103, 108, 109, 119–20, 122 The Logic of Collective Action (1965), 103–4 On the Waterfront (Kazan film, 1954), 165 online invisibility, 100* organs, human, trade in, 65, 123, 124, 145, 147–8 Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 42–3 Osborne, George, 233–4 Packard, David, 159 Paine, Tom, 243 Pareto, Vilfredo 80/20 rule’ 218 and inequality, 217, 218–19, 220 life and background of, 216–17 Pareto efficiency, 217–18, 256* Paul the octopus (World Cup predictor, 2010), 133 pensions, workplace, 172, 174 physics envy, 9, 20–21, 41, 116, 175–6, 212, 247 Piketty, Thomas, 234, 235 plastic shopping bag tax, 159–60 Plato’s Republic, 100–101, 122 political scientists and Duncan Black, 78, 95–6 Black’s median voter theorem, 95–6 Buchanan’s ideology, 84–5 crises of the 1970s, 85–6 influence of Arrow, 72, 81–2, 83 see also public choice theory; social choice theory Posner, Richard, 54, 56–63, 137 ‘mimic the market’ approach, 61–3, 65 ‘The Economics of the Baby Shortage’ (1978), 61 precautionary principle, 211–12, 214 price-fixing, 101, 102, 103–4 Princeton University, 17, 19–20 Prisoner’s Dilemma, 26–8, 29–32, 42–3 prisons, cell upgrades in, 123 privatization, 50, 54, 88, 93–4 probability, 182–4 and Keynes, 185, 186–7, 188–9, 210 Linda Problem, 202–3 modern ideas of, 184–5 Ramsey’s personal probabilities (beliefs as probabilities), 187–8, 190, 197, 198, 199, 204–5 and Savage, 190, 193, 197, 198, 199, 203, 205 ‘Truth and Probability’ (Ramsey paper), 186–8, 189, 190 see also risk and uncertainty Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 22 productivity Baumol’s cost disease, 90–92, 93, 94 and efficiency wages, 237–8 improvement in labour-intensive services, 92–3 labour input, 92 protectionism, 246, 255 psychology availability heuristic, 226 behaviourism, 154–8, 237 and behavioural economics, 12, 170–71 cognitive dissonance, 113–14 and financial incentives, 156–7, 158–60, 163–4, 171 framing effects, 170–71, 259 of free-riding, 113–14, 115 intrinsic motivations, 158–60, 161–3, 164, 165–6, 176 irrational behaviour, 12, 15, 171 learning of social behaviour, 163–4 moral disengagement, 162, 163, 164, 166 motivated beliefs, 227 ‘self-command’ strategies, 140 view of in game theory, 26–31 view of in public choice theory, 85–6 and welfare maximization, 149 ‘you deserve what you get’ belief, 223–6, 227–8, 236, 243 public choice theory as consensus view, 84–5 and crises of the 1970s, 85–6 foolish voter assumption, 86–8 ‘paradox of voter turnout’, 88–9, 95–6, 115–16 partial/self-contradictory application of, 86, 87–9 ‘political overload’ argument, 85, 86–7 ‘public bad, private good’ mantra, 93–4, 97 and resistance to tax rises, 94, 241 self-fulfilling prophecies, 95–7 and selfishness, 85–6, 87–8, 89, 94, 95–7 as time-bomb waiting to explode, 85 public expenditure in 1970s and ’80s, 89 Baumol’s cost disease, 90–92, 93, 94 and Keynesian economics, 4 and public choice theory, 85–8, 89, 241 and tax rises, 241–2 public-sector monopolies, 48–9, 50–51, 93–4 Puzzle of the Harmless Torturers, 118–19 queue-jumping, 123, 124 QWERTY layout, 42 racial discrimination, 126–7, 133, 136, 140 Ramsey, Frank, 186–8, 189, 190, 205, 208 Ramsey Rule, 208–9, 212 RAND Corporation, 17, 41, 103, 138, 139 and Ken Arrow, 70–71, 72–3, 74, 75–6, 77, 78 and behaviourism, 154 and Cold War military strategy, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 70, 73, 75–6, 141, 200, 213 and Ellsberg, 182–4, 187, 197–8, 200 and Russell’s Chicken, 33 Santa Monica offices of, 18 self-image as defender of freedom, 78 rational behaviour assumptions in game theory, 18, 28, 29–32, 35–8, 41–3, 70, 124 axioms (abstract mathematical assumptions), 198 Becker’s version of, 128–9, 135, 140, 151 behavioural economics/Nudge view of, 173, 174–5 distinction between values and tastes, 136–8 economic imperialist view of, 135, 136–8, 140, 151 and free-riding theory, 100–101, 102, 103–4, 107–8, 109–10, 115–16 and orthodox decision theory, 198, 199 public choice theory relates selfishness to, 86 term as scientific-sounding cover, 12 see also homo economicus Reader’s Digest, 5, 6 Reagan, Ronald, 2, 87–8, 89, 104, 132 election of as turning point, 6, 216, 220–21 and top-rate tax cuts, 231, 233 regulators, 1–2 Chicago view of, 40 Reinhart, Carmen, 258 religion, decline of in modern societies, 15, 185 renewable energy, 116 rent-seeking, 230, 238 ‘right to recline’, 63–4 risk and uncertainty bell curve distribution, 191–4, 195, 196–7, 201, 203–4, 257 catastrophes, 181–2, 191, 192, 201, 203–4, 211–12 delusions of quantitative ‘risk management’, 196, 213 Ellsberg’s experiment (1961), 182–4, 187, 197, 198–200 errors in conventional thinking about, 191–2, 193–4, 195–7, 204–5, 213 financial orthodoxy on risk, 196–7, 201–2 and First World War, 185 and fractals (scale-invariance), 194, 195–6, 201 hasard and fortuit, 185* ‘making sense’ of through stories, 202–3 ‘measurable’ and ‘unmeasurable’ distinction, 185–6, 187–9, 190, 210–11, 212–13 measurement in numerical terms, 181–4, 187, 189, 190–94, 196–7, 201–2, 203–5, 212–13 orthodox decision theory, 183–4, 185–6, 189–91, 193–4, 201–2, 203–5, 211, 212–14 our contemporary orthodoxy, 189–91 personal probabilities (beliefs as probabilities), 187–8, 190, 197, 198, 199, 204–5 precautionary principle, 211–12, 214 pure uncertainty, 182–3, 185–6, 187–9, 190, 197, 198–9, 210, 211, 212, 214, 251 redefined as ‘volatility’, 197, 213 the Savage orthodoxy, 190–91, 197, 198–200, 203, 205 scenario planning as crucial, 251 Taleb’s black swans, 192, 194, 201, 203–4 ‘Truth and Probability’ (Ramsey paper), 186–8, 189, 190 urge to actuarial alchemy, 190–91, 197, 201 value of human life (‘statistical lives’), 141–5, 207 see also probability Robertson, Dennis, 13–14 Robinson, Joan, 260 Rodrik, Dani, 255, 260–61 Rogoff, Ken, 258 Rothko, Mark, 4–5 Rumsfeld, Donald, 232–3 Russell, Bertrand, 33–4, 74, 97, 186, 188 Ryanair, 106 Sachs, Jeffrey, 257 Santa Monica, California, 18 Sargent, Tom, 257–8 Savage, Leonard ‘Jimmie’, 189–90, 193, 203, 205scale-invariance, 194, 195–6, 201, 219 Scandinavian countries, 103, 149 Schelling, Thomas, 35* on access to lifeboats, 150–51 awarded Nobel Prize, 138–9 and Cold War nuclear strategy, 138, 139–40 and economic imperialism, 141–5 and game theory, 138–9 and Washington–Moscow hotline, 139–40 work on value of human life, 141–5, 207 ‘The Intimate Contest for Self-command’ (essay, 1980), 140, 145 ‘The Life You Save May be Your Own’ (essay, 1968), 142–5, 207 Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, 172 Schmidt, Eric, 105 Scholes, Myron, 201 Schwarzman, Stephen, 235 Second World War, 3, 189, 210 selfishness, 41–3, 178–9 and Becker, 129–30 and defence of inequality, 242–3 as free marketeers’ starting point, 10–12, 13–14, 41, 86, 178–9 and game theory, 18 and public choice theory, 85–6, 87–8, 89, 94, 95–7 Selten, Reinhard, 34–5, 36, 38, 40 Sen, Amartya, 29, 80–81 service sector, 90–93, 94 Shakespeare, William, Measure for Measure, 169 Shaw, George Bernard, 101 Shiller, Robert, 247 Simon, Herbert, 223 Skinner, Burrhus, 154–5, 158 Smith, Adam, 101, 111, 122 The Wealth of Nations (1776), 10–11, 188–9 snowflakes, 195 social choice theory, 72 and Ken Arrow, 71–83, 89, 95, 97, 124–5, 129 and Duncan Black, 78, 95 and free marketeers, 79, 82 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 social media, 100* solar panels, 116 Solow, Bob, 163, 223 Sorites paradox, 117–18, 119 sovereign fantasy, 116–17 Soviet Union, 20, 22, 70, 73, 82, 101, 104, 167, 237 spectrum auctions, 39–40, 47, 49 Stalin, Joseph, 70, 73, 101 the state anti-government attitudes in USA, 83–5 antitrust regulation, 56–8 dismissal of almost any role for, 94, 135, 235–6, 241 duty over full employment, 5 economic imperialist arguments for ‘small government’, 135 increased economic role from 1940s, 3–4, 5 interventions over ‘inefficient’ outcomes, 53 and monetarism, 87, 89 and Mont Pèlerin Society, 3, 4, 5 and privatization, 50, 54, 88, 93–4 public-sector monopolies, 48–50, 93–4 replacing of with markets, 79 vital role of, 236 statistical lives, 141–5, 207 Stern, Nick, 206, 209–10 Stigler, George, 50, 51, 56, 69, 88 De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum (with Becker, 1977), 135–6 Stiglitz, Joseph, 237 stock markets ‘Black Monday’ (1987), 192 and fractals (scale-invariance), 194, 195–6, 201 orthodox decision theory, 190–91, 193–4, 201 Strittmatter, Father, 43–4 Summers, Larry, 10, 14 Sunstein, Cass, 173 Nudge (with Richard Thaler, 2008), 171–2, 175 Taleb, Nassim, 192 Tarski, Alfred, 74–5 taxation and Baumol’s cost disease, 94 and demand for positional goods, 239–41 as good thing, 231, 241–2, 243 Laffer curve, 232–3, 234 new doctrine of since 1970s, 232–4 property rights as interdependent with, 235–6 public resistance to tax rises, 94, 239, 241–2 and public spending, 241–2 revenue-maximizing top tax rate, 233–4, 235 tax avoidance and evasion, 99, 105–6, 112–13, 175, 215 ‘tax revolt’ campaigns (1970s USA), 87 ‘tax as theft’ culture, 235–6 top-rate cuts and inequality, 231, 233–5, 239 whines from the super-rich, 234–5, 243 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 153–4, 155, 167, 178, 237 Thaler, Richard, 13 Nudge (with Cass Sunstein, 2008), 171–2, 175 Thatcher, Margaret, 2, 88, 89, 104, 132 election of as turning point, 6, 216, 220–21 and Hayek, 6, 7 and inequality, 216, 227 privatization programme, 93–4 and top-rate tax cuts, 231 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1944), 20, 21, 25, 189 Titanic, sinking of (1912), 150 Titmuss, Richard, The Gift Relationship, 162–3 tobacco-industry lobbyists, 8 totalitarian regimes, 4, 82, 167–8, 216, 219 see also Soviet Union trade union movement, 104 Tragedy of the Commons, 27 Truman, Harry, 20, 237 Trump, Donald, 233 Tucker, Albert, 26–7 Tversky, Amos, 170–72, 173, 202–3, 212, 226 Twitter, 100* Uber, 257 uncertainty see risk and uncertainty The Undercover Economist (Tim Harford, 2005), 130 unemployment and Coase Theorem, 45–7, 64 during Great Depression, 3–4 and Keynesian economics, 4, 5 United Nations, 96 universities auctioning of places, 124, 149–50 incentivization as pervasive, 156 Vietnam War, 56, 198, 200, 249 Villari, Pasquale, 30 Vinci, Leonardo da, 186 Viniar, David, 182, 192 Volkswagen scandal (2016), 2, 151–2 Vonnegut, Kurt, 243–4 voting systems, 72–4, 77, 80, 97 Arrow’s ‘Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives’, 81, 82 Arrow’s ‘Universal Domain’, 81, 82 and free marketeers, 79 ‘hanging chads’ in Florida (2000), 121 recount process in UK, 121 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 Waldfogel, Joel, 161* Wanniski, Jude, 232 Watertown Arsenal, Massachusetts, 153–4 Watson Jr, Thomas J., 181 wealth-maximization principle, 57–63 and Coase, 47, 55, 59, 63–9 as core principle of current economics, 253 created markets, 65–7 extension of scope of, 124–5 and justice, 55, 57–62, 137 and knee space on planes, 63–4 practical problems with negotiations, 62–3 and values more important than efficiency, 64–5, 66–7 welfare maximization, 124–5, 129–31, 133–4, 148–9, 176 behavioural economics/Nudge view of, 173 and vulnerable/powerless people, 146–7, 150 welfare state, 4, 162 Wilson, Charlie, 215 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 186, 188 Wolfenschiessen (Swiss village), 158, 166–7 Woolf, Virginia, 67 World Bank, 96 World Cup football tournament (2010), 133 World Health Organization, 207 Yale Saturday Evening Pest, 4–5 Yellen, Janet, 237 THE BEGINNING Let the conversation begin … Follow the Penguin twitter.com/penguinukbooks Keep up-to-date with all our stories youtube.com/penguinbooks Pin ‘Penguin Books’ to your pinterest.com/penguinukbooks Like ‘Penguin Books’ on facebook.com/penguinbooks Listen to Penguin at soundcloud.com/penguin-books Find out more about the author and discover more stories like this at penguin.co.uk ALLEN LANE UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia India | New Zealand | South Africa Allen Lane is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com First published 2019 Copyright © Jonathan Aldred, 2019 The moral right of the author has been asserted Jacket photograph © Getty Images ISBN: 978-0-241-32544-5 This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law.

The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World by Michael Marmot

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, cakes and ale, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Doha Development Round, epigenetics, financial independence, future of work, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Kenneth Rogoff, Kibera, labour market flexibility, longitudinal study, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, New Urbanism, obamacare, paradox of thrift, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, structural adjustment programs, the built environment, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, twin studies, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working poor

Going back at least to Adam Smith, economists have argued that allowing some people to have a larger slice of the economic cake may lead to the whole cake enlarging. In other words, set the wealth producers free and, although they will benefit the most, people at the bottom will be somewhat better off – trickle-down economics. I hear the distant rumble of self-interest promoting this view. What does Rawls say, given that his difference principle states that greater inequalities are fairer provided that the worst off are better off than they could be under any alternative arrangement? Does that mean that greater health inequalities might be fairer provided those at the bottom have improved more than they could have under alternative arrangements?

…

Joseph Stiglitz, who I quoted on inequality, is concerned that increasing economic inequality in the US poses all sorts of burdens. No other country should be complacent that it has it right. The problem is, says Stiglitz, that we have been pursuing economic policy that benefits the 1 per cent. Trickle-down economics is defunct and does not work. Time is running out, but there are solutions. He lays out an economic reform agenda that curbs excesses at the top and invests in the rest of the population.9 While I have not addressed economic policy directly, many of his suggestions for social protection and investing in the population are entirely consistent with my recommendations in earlier chapters in this book.

…

., here Lewis, Michael, here Lexington, Kentucky, here libertarians, here, here life expectancy, here, here, here, here among Australian aboriginals, here disability-free, here, here and education, here, here, here, here in former communist states, here and mental health, here and national income, here US compared with Cuba, here Lithuania, here, here, here Liverpool, here, here, here ‘living wage’, here loans, low-interest, here lobbying, here Los Angeles, here ‘lump of labour’ hypothesis, here Lundberg, Ole, here lung cancer, here, here lung disease, here, here, here, here luxury travel, here Macao, here, here McDonald’s, here McMunn, Anne, here Macoumbi, Pascoual, here Madrid, indignados protests, here, here Maimonides, here malaria, here, here, here, here, here Malawi, here male adult mortality, here, here Mali, here, here Malmö, here, here Malta, here Manchester, here, here, here Maoris, here, here, here, here Marmot Review, see Fair Society, Healthy Lives marriage, here Marx, Karl, here maternal mortality, here, here, here maternity leave, paid, here Matsumoto, Scott, here Meaney, Michael, here Medicaid, here Mediterranean diet, here Mengele, Joseph, here mental health, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and access to green space, here and adverse childhood experience, here and austerity, here and fear of crime, here and job insecurity, here and unemployment, here meritocracy, here Mexico, here, here, here, here, here education and cash transfers, here, here Millennium Birth Cohort Study, here, here Minimum Income for Healthy Living, here, here, here Mitchell, Richard, here Modern Times, here Morris, Jerry, here, here Moser, Kath, here Mozambique, infant mortality, here Mullainathan, Sendhil, here Murphy, Kevin, here, here Muscatelli, Anton, here Mustard, Fraser, here Mwana Mwende project, here Nathanson, Vivienne, here Native Americans, here Navarro, Vicente, here NEETs, here, here neoliberalism, here, here, here, here, here Nepal, here, here Neruda, Pablo, here Netherlands, here, here New Guinea, here, here NEWS group, here, here Nietzsche, Friedrich, here, here Niger, here nitrogen dioxide, here, here non-human primates, here Nordic countries and commission report, here and social protection, here, here, here, here, here see also individual countries Norway, here, here, here, here, here, here life expectancy and education, here, here Nottingham, here Nozick, Robert, here obesity, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here in children, here, here and diabetes, here and disincentives, here food corporations and, here genetic and environmental factors in, here and migrant studies, here and rational choice theory, here social gradient in, here, here, here, here in women, here, here Office of Budget Responsibility, here Olympic Games, here opera, here Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), here, here, here, here, here, here, here organisational justice, here Orwell, George, here Osler, Sir William, here Panorama, here Papua New Guinea, here ‘paradox of thrift’, here Paraguay, here, here, here parenting, here, here, here, here and work–life balance, here pay, low, here pensions, here, here, here, here Perkins, Charlie, here Peru, here, here, here physical activity and cognitive function, here green space and, here Pickett, Kate, here Pierson, Paul, here, here Piketty, Thomas, here, here, here, here Pinker, Steven, here Pinochet, General Augusto, here PISA scores, here, here, here, here, here Poland, here, here, here, here Popham, Frank, here Porgy and Bess, here poverty, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and aboriginal populations, here, here absolute and relative, here, here child poverty, here, here, here, here, here and choice, here and early childhood development, here, here effect on cognitive function, here and urban unrest, here and work, here Power, Chris, here pregnancy, here preventive health care, here ‘proportionate universalism’, here puberty, and smoking here public transport, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Ramazzini, Bernardino, here RAND Corporation, here, here, here rational choice theory, here, here, here rats, and brain development, here Rawls, John, here, here Reid, Donald, here Reinhart, Carmen, here, here reproduction, control over, here retirement, here reverse causation, here Reykjavik Zoo, here Rio de Janeiro, here, here Rogoff, Kenneth, here, here Rolling Stones, here Romania, here Romney, Mitt, here Rose, Geoffrey, here Roth, Philip, here Royal College of Physicians, here Royal Swedish Academy of Science, here Russia, here, here, here and alcohol use, here life expectancy, here, here, here, here Sachs, Jeffrey, here, here St Andrews, here San Diego, here Sandel, Michael, here, here Sapolsky, Robert, here Scottish Health Survey, here Seattle, here Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), here, here, here, here Sen, Amartya, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and Jean Drèze, here, here, here, here serotonin, here sexuality, here, here see also reproduction, control over sexually transmitted infections, here, here Shafir, Eldar, here Shakespeare, William, here, here, here, here Shanghai, here Shaw, George Bernard, here, here Shepherd, Jonathan, here shootings, here Siegrist, Johannes, here Sierra Leone, here, here, here Singapore, here, here Slovakia, here Slovenia, here, here smallpox vaccinations, here Smith, Adam, here Smith, Jim, here smoking, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here declining rates of, here, here and education, here and public policy, here social gradient in, here, here and tobacco companies, here and unemployment, here Snowdon, Christopher, here social cohesion, here, here, here, here, here, here, here social mobility, here, here social protection, here ‘social rights’, here Social Science and Medicine, here Soundarya Cleaning Cooperative, here South Korea, here, here, here, here Spain, here, here, here Spectator, here sports sponsorship, here Sri Lanka, here Stafford, Mai, here Steptoe, Andrew, here Stiglitz, Joseph, here, here, here, here, here stroke, here, here, here structural adjustments, here, here Stuckler, David, here suicide, here, here, here, here, here and aboriginal populations, here, here and Indian cotton farmers, here and unemployment, here, here suicide, attempted, here Sulabh International, here Sun, here Sure Start programme, here Surinam, here Sutton, Willie, here Swansea, here Sweden, here, here, here, here, here, here, here life expectancy and education, here, here male adult mortality, here, here Swedish Commission on Equity in Health, here Syme, Leonard, here, here, here Taiwan, here, here Tanzania, here taxation, here Thailand, here Thatcher, Margaret, here Theorell, Tores, here tobacco companies, here Topel Robert, here Tottenham riots, here Tower Hamlets, here, here Townsend, Peter, here trade unions, here, here, here, here traffic calming measures, here Tressell, Robert, here ‘Triangle that Moves the Mountain’, here, here trickle-down economics, here, here Truman, Harry S., here tuberculosis, here, here, here, here Tunisia, here Turandot, here, here Turkey, here, here Uganda, here, here unemployment, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and mental health, here and suicide, here, here youth unemployment, here, here, here, here UNICEF, here, here United Kingdom alcohol consumption, here capital:income ratio, here and child well-being, here cost of childcare, here and economic recovery, here, here education system, here, here disability-free life expectancy, here founding of welfare state, here health-care system, here income inequalities, here, here literacy levels, here male adult mortality, here PISA score, here politics and economics, here and poverty in work, here, here poverty levels, here, here prison population, here social attitudes, here and social interventions, here social mobility, here ‘strivers and scroungers’ rhetoric, here, here and taxation, here unemployment, here use of tables for meals, here United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), here, here, here, here United States of America air pollution, here, here alcohol consumption, here capital:income ratio, here child poverty, here and child well-being, here cotton subsidies, here and economic recovery, here education system, here, here, here female life expectancy, here and gang violence, here health-care system, here, here income inequalities, here, here, here, here international comparisons, here, here, here lack of paid maternity leave, here life expectancy and education, here male adult mortality, here, here, here maternal mortality, here, here obesity levels, here, here, here, here PISA score, here politics and economics, here and poverty in work, here poverty levels, here prison population, here race and disadvantage, here, here, here, here, here social disadvantage and health, here social mobility, here suicide rate, here and taxation, here US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, here US Department of Justice, here US Federal Reserve Bank, here US National Academy of Science (NAS), here, here, here, here University of Sydney, here urban planning, here Uruguay, here, here, here, here utilitarianism, here, here, here Vågerö, Denny, here valuation of life, here Victoria Longitudinal Study, here Vietnam, here, here violence, here domestic (intimate partner), here, here, here Virchow, Rudolf, here vulture funds, here, here Wales, youth unemployment in, here walking speed, here Washington Consensus, here, here, here welfare spending, here West Arnhem College, here Westminster, life expectancy in, here Whitehall Studies, here, here, here, here, here, here, here wife-beating, here Wilde, Oscar, here, here Wilkinson, Richard, here willingness-to-pay methodology, here, here Wolfe, Tom, here, here women and alcohol use, here and cash-transfer schemes, here A Note on the Author Born in England and educated in Australia, Sir Michael Marmot is Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at UCL.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

Couple this proximity of city dwellers with worldwide communications transmitting news and views, data and ads, and what emerges is a dynamic global network-of-networks of human beings.33 For Veblen, one of the most pernicious effects of such social influence was the rise of what he called ‘conspicuous consumption’: the appeal of buying luxury products and services to signal our status to others in the hope of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. Joseph Stiglitz points out that this effect is particularly concerning today in the context of high inequality, both within and between countries. There is a ‘well-documented lifestyle effect’, he notes, in which ‘people outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviourism is very real.’34 What is the implication for economic policy aiming to influence how we behave? Economists have traditionally sought to change people’s behaviour by changing the relative price of things, be it through a tax on sugar or a discount on solar panels.

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Kuznets’s first intuition had in fact been right: when wealth is concentrated in few hands – and when the returns to capital are growing faster than the economy itself – inequality does indeed tend to rise. Success to the Successful rules after all, unless governments take action to offset it. The Kuznets Curve may have been debunked, along with the claim that inequality is necessary for progress. But, like all powerful pictures, its memory lingers on, lending credence to the myth of trickle-down economics. In 2014 even economists at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) noted with frustration that, despite evidence to the contrary, ‘the notion of tradeoff between redistribution and growth seems deeply embedded in policymakers’ consciousness’.12 Perhaps that is why, in the midst of severe recession following the 2008 financial crash, the vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs, Lord Griffiths, felt he could justify a return to lavish bonuses for his city traders with the claim that, ‘We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all.’13 Why inequality matters Inequality may not be inevitable but, in line with the neoliberal script, it was until recently seen as no cause for alarm, and certainly not as an appropriate target for policy.

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., 6 micro-businesses, 9, 173, 178 microeconomics, 132–4 microgrids, 187–8 Micronesia, 153 Microsoft, 231 middle class, 6, 46, 58 middle-income countries, 90, 164, 168, 173, 180, 226, 254 migration, 82, 89–90, 166, 195, 199, 236, 266, 286 Milanovic, Branko, 171 Mill, John Stuart, 33–4, 73, 97, 250, 251, 283, 284, 288 Millo, Yuval, 101 minimum wage, 82, 88, 176 Minsky, Hyman, 87, 146 Mises, Ludwig von, 66 mission zero, 217 mobile banking, 199–200 mobile phones, 222 Model T revolution, 277–8 Moldova, 199 Mombasa, Kenya, 185–6 Mona Lisa (da Vinci), 94 money creation, 87, 164, 177, 182–8, 205 MONIAC (Monetary National Income Analogue Computer), 64–5, 75, 142, 262 Monoculture (Michaels), 6 Monopoly, 149 Mont Pelerin Society, 67, 93 Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, The (Friedman), 258 moral vacancy, 41 Morgan, Mary, 99 Morogoro, Tanzania, 121 Moyo, Dambisa, 258 Muirhead, Sam, 230, 231 MultiCapital Scorecard, 241 Murphy, David, 264 Murphy, Richard, 185 musical tastes, 110 Myriad Genetics, 196 N national basic income, 177 Native Americans, 115, 116, 282 natural capital, 7, 116, 269 Natural Economic Order, The (Gessel), 274 Nedbank, 216 negative externalities, 213 negative interest rates, 275–6 neoclassical economics, 134, 135 neoliberalism, 7, 62–3, 67–70, 81, 83, 84, 88, 93, 143, 170, 176 Nepal, 181, 199 Nestlé, 217 Netherlands, 211, 235, 224, 226, 238, 277 networks, 110–11, 117, 118, 123, 124–6, 174–6 neuroscience, 12–13 New Deal, 37 New Economics Foundation, 278, 283 New Year’s Day, 124 New York, United States, 9, 41, 55 Newlight Technologies, 224, 226, 293 Newton, Isaac, 13, 15–17, 32–3, 95, 97, 129, 131, 135–7, 142, 145, 162 Nicaragua, 196 Nigeria, 164 nitrogen, 49, 52, 212–13, 216, 218, 221, 226, 298 ‘no pain, no gain’, 163, 167, 173, 204, 209 Nobel Prize, 6–7, 43, 83, 101, 167 Norway, 281 nudging, 112, 113, 114, 123–6 O Obama, Barack, 41, 92 Oberlin, Ohio, 239, 240–41 Occupy movement, 40, 91 ocean acidification, 45, 46, 52, 155, 242, 298 Ohio, United States, 190, 239 Okun, Arthur, 37 onwards and upwards, 53 Open Building Institute, 196 Open Source Circular Economy (OSCE), 229–32 open systems, 74 open-source design, 158, 196–8, 265 open-source licensing, 204 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 38, 210, 255–6, 258 Origin of Species, The (Darwin), 14 Ormerod, Paul, 110, 111 Orr, David, 239 Ostrom, Elinor, 83, 84, 158, 160, 181–2 Ostry, Jonathan, 173 OSVehicle, 231 overseas development assistance (ODA), 198–200 ownership of wealth, 177–82 Oxfam, 9, 44 Oxford University, 1, 36 ozone layer, 9, 50, 115 P Pachamama, 54, 55 Pakistan, 124 Pareto, Vilfredo, 165–6, 175 Paris, France, 290 Park 20|20, Netherlands, 224, 226 Parker Brothers, 149 Patagonia, 56 patents, 195–6, 197, 204 patient capital, 235 Paypal, 192 Pearce, Joshua, 197, 203–4 peer-to-peer networks, 187, 192, 198, 203, 292 People’s QE, 184–5 Perseus, 244 Persia, 13 Peru, 2, 105–6 Phillips, Adam, 283 Phillips, William ‘Bill’, 64–6, 75, 142, 262 phosphorus, 49, 52, 212–13, 218, 298 Physiocrats, 73 Pickett, Kate, 171 pictures, 12–25 Piketty, Thomas, 169 Playfair, William, 16 Poincaré, Henri, 109, 127–8 Polanyi, Karl, 82, 272 political economy, 33–4, 42 political funding, 91–2, 171–2 political voice, 43, 45, 51–2, 77, 117 pollution, 29, 45, 52, 85, 143, 155, 206–17, 226, 238, 242, 254, 298 population, 5, 46, 57, 155, 199, 250, 252, 254 Portugal, 211 post-growth society, 250 poverty, 5, 9, 37, 41, 50, 88, 118, 148, 151 emotional, 283 and inequality, 164–5, 168–9, 178 and overseas development assistance (ODA), 198–200 and taxation, 277 power, 91–92 pre-analytic vision, 21–2 prescription medicines, 123 price-takers, 132 prices, 81, 118–23, 131, 160 Principles of Economics (Mankiw), 34 Principles of Economics (Marshall), 17, 98 Principles of Political Economy (Mill), 288 ProComposto, 226 Propaganda (Bernays), 107 public relations, 107, 281 public spending v. investment, 276 public–private patents, 195 Putnam, Robert, 76–7 Q quantitative easing (QE), 184–5 Quebec, 281 Quesnay, François, 16, 73 R Rabot, Ghent, 236 Rancière, Romain, 172 rating and review systems, 105 rational economic man, 94–103, 109, 111, 112, 126, 282 Reagan, Ronald, 67 reciprocity, 103–6, 117, 118, 123 reflexivity of markets, 144 reinforcing feedback loops, 138–41, 148, 250, 271 relative decoupling, 259 renewable energy biomass energy, 118, 221 and circular economy, 221, 224, 226, 235, 238–9, 274 and commons, 83, 85, 185, 187–8, 192, 203, 264 geothermal energy, 221 and green growth, 257, 260, 263, 264, 267 hydropower, 118, 260, 263 pricing, 118 solar energy, see solar energy wave energy, 221 wind energy, 75, 118, 196, 202–3, 221, 233, 239, 260, 263 rentier sector, 180, 183, 184 reregulation, 82, 87, 269 resource flows, 175 resource-intensive lifestyles, 46 Rethinking Economics, 289 Reynebeau, Guy, 237 Ricardo, David, 67, 68, 73, 89, 250 Richardson, Katherine, 53 Rifkin, Jeremy, 83, 264–5 Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, The (Kennedy), 279 risk, 112, 113–14 Robbins, Lionel, 34 Robinson, James, 86 Robinson, Joan, 142 robots, 191–5, 237, 258, 278 Rockefeller Foundation, 135 Rockford, Illinois, 179–80 Rockström, Johan, 48, 55 Roddick, Anita, 232–4 Rogoff, Kenneth, 271, 280 Roman Catholic Church, 15, 19 Rombo, Tanzania, 190 Rome, Ancient, 13, 48, 154 Romney, Mitt, 92 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 37 rooted membership, 190 Rostow, Walt, 248–50, 254, 257, 267–70, 284 Ruddick, Will, 185 rule of thumb, 113–14 Ruskin, John, 42, 223 Russia, 200 rust belt, 90, 239 S S curve, 251–6 Sainsbury’s, 56 Samuelson, Paul, 17–21, 24–5, 38, 62–7, 70, 74, 84, 91, 92, 93, 262, 290–91 Sandel, Michael, 41, 120–21 Sanergy, 226 sanitation, 5, 51, 59 Santa Fe, California, 213 Santinagar, West Bengal, 178 São Paolo, Brazil, 281 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 43 Saumweder, Philipp, 226 Scharmer, Otto, 115 Scholes, Myron, 100–101 Schumacher, Ernst Friedrich, 42, 142 Schumpeter, Joseph, 21 Schwartz, Shalom, 107–9 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 163, 167, 204 ‘Science and Complexity’ (Weaver), 136 Scotland, 57 Seaman, David, 187 Seattle, Washington, 217 second machine age, 258 Second World War (1939–45), 18, 37, 70, 170 secular stagnation, 256 self-interest, 28, 68, 96–7, 99–100, 102–3 Selfish Society, The (Gerhardt), 283 Sen, Amartya, 43 Shakespeare, William, 61–3, 67, 93 shale gas, 264, 269 Shang Dynasty, 48 shareholders, 82, 88, 189, 191, 227, 234, 273, 292 sharing economy, 264 Sheraton Hotel, Boston, 3 Siegen, Germany, 290 Silicon Valley, 231 Simon, Julian, 70 Sinclair, Upton, 255 Sismondi, Jean, 42 slavery, 33, 77, 161 Slovenia, 177 Small Is Beautiful (Schumacher), 42 smart phones, 85 Smith, Adam, 33, 57, 67, 68, 73, 78–9, 81, 96–7, 103–4, 128, 133, 160, 181, 250 social capital, 76–7, 122, 125, 172 social contract, 120, 125 social foundation, 10, 11, 44, 45, 49, 51, 58, 77, 174, 200, 254, 295–6 social media, 83, 281 Social Progress Index, 280 social pyramid, 166 society, 76–7 solar energy, 59, 75, 111, 118, 187–8, 190 circular economy, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226–7, 239 commons, 203 zero-energy buildings, 217 zero-marginal-cost revolution, 84 Solow, Robert, 135, 150, 262–3 Soros, George, 144 South Africa, 56, 177, 214, 216 South Korea, 90, 168 South Sea Bubble (1720), 145 Soviet Union (1922–91), 37, 67, 161, 279 Spain, 211, 238, 256 Spirit Level, The (Wilkinson & Pickett), 171 Sraffa, Piero, 148 St Gallen, Switzerland, 186 Stages of Economic Growth, The (Rostow), 248–50, 254 stakeholder finance, 190 Standish, Russell, 147 state, 28, 33, 69–70, 78, 82, 160, 176, 180, 182–4, 188 and commons, 85, 93, 197, 237 and market, 84–6, 200, 281 partner state, 197, 237–9 and robots, 195 stationary state, 250 Steffen, Will, 46, 48 Sterman, John, 66, 143, 152–4 Steuart, James, 33 Stiglitz, Joseph, 43, 111, 196 stocks and flows, 138–41, 143, 144, 152 sub-prime mortgages, 141 Success to the Successful, 148, 149, 151, 166 Sugarscape, 150–51 Summers, Larry, 256 Sumner, Andy, 165 Sundrop Farms, 224–6 Sunstein, Cass, 112 supply and demand, 28, 132–6, 143, 253 supply chains, 10 Sweden, 6, 255, 275, 281 swishing, 264 Switzerland, 42, 66, 80, 131, 186–7, 275 T Tableau économique (Quesnay), 16 tabula rasa, 20, 25, 63, 291 takarangi, 54 Tanzania, 121, 190, 202 tar sands, 264, 269 taxation, 78, 111, 165, 170, 176, 177, 237–8, 276–9 annual wealth tax, 200 environment, 213–14, 215 global carbon tax, 201 global financial transactions tax, 201, 235 land-value tax, 73, 149, 180 non-renewable resources, 193, 237–8, 278–9 People’s QE, 185 tax relief v. tax justice, 23, 276–7 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), 202, 258 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 61, 63, 93 Texas, United States, 120 Thailand, 90, 200 Thaler, Richard, 112 Thatcher, Margaret, 67, 69, 76 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 96 Thompson, Edward Palmer, 180 3D printing, 83–4, 192, 198, 231, 264 thriving-in-balance, 54–7, 62 tiered pricing, 213–14 Tigray, Ethiopia, 226 time banking, 186 Titmuss, Richard, 118–19 Toffler, Alvin, 12, 80 Togo, 231, 292 Torekes, 236–7 Torras, Mariano, 209 Torvalds, Linus, 231 trade, 62, 68–9, 70, 89–90 trade unions, 82, 176, 189 trademarks, 195, 204 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), 92 transport, 59 trickle-down economics, 111, 170 Triodos, 235 Turkey, 200 Tversky, Amos, 111 Twain, Mark, 178–9 U Uganda, 118, 125 Ulanowicz, Robert, 175 Ultimatum Game, 105, 117 unemployment, 36, 37, 276, 277–9 United Kingdom Big Bang (1986), 87 blood donation, 118 carbon dioxide emissions, 260 free trade, 90 global material footprints, 211 money creation, 182 MONIAC (Monetary National Income Analogue Computer), 64–5, 75, 142, 262 New Economics Foundation, 278, 283 poverty, 165, 166 prescription medicines, 123 wages, 188 United Nations, 55, 198, 204, 255, 258, 279 G77 bloc, 55 Human Development Index, 9, 279 Sustainable Development Goals, 24, 45 United States American Economic Association meeting (2015), 3 blood donation, 118 carbon dioxide emissions, 260 Congress, 36 Council of Economic Advisers, 6, 37 Earning by Learning, 120 Econ 101 course, 8, 77 Exxon Valdez oil spill (1989), 9 Federal Reserve, 87, 145, 146, 271, 282 free trade, 90 Glass–Steagall Act (1933), 87 greenhouse gas emissions, 153 global material footprint, 211 gross national product (GNP), 36–40 inequality, 170, 171 land-value tax, 73, 149, 180 political funding, 91–2, 171 poverty, 165, 166 productivity and employment, 193 rust belt, 90, 239 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), 92 wages, 188 universal basic income, 200 University of Berkeley, 116 University of Denver, 160 urbanisation, 58–9 utility, 35, 98, 133 V values, 6, 23, 34, 35, 42, 117, 118, 121, 123–6 altruism, 100, 104 anthropocentric, 115 extrinsic, 115 fluid, 28, 102, 106–9 and networks, 110–11, 117, 118, 123, 124–6 and nudging, 112, 113, 114, 123–6 and pricing, 81, 120–23 Veblen, Thorstein, 82, 109, 111, 142 Venice, 195 verbal framing, 23 Verhulst, Pierre, 252 Victor, Peter, 270 Viner, Jacob, 34 virtuous cycles, 138, 148 visual framing, 23 Vitruvian Man, 13–14 Volkswagen, 215–16 W Wacharia, John, 186 Wall Street, 149, 234, 273 Wallich, Henry, 282 Walras, Léon, 131, 132, 133–4, 137 Ward, Barbara, 53 Warr, Benjamin, 263 water, 5, 9, 45, 46, 51, 54, 59, 79, 213–14 wave energy, 221 Ways of Seeing (Berger), 12, 281 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 74, 78, 96, 104 wealth ownership, 177–82 Weaver, Warren, 135–6 weightless economy, 261–2 WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic), 103–5, 110, 112, 115, 117, 282 West Bengal, India, 124, 178 West, Darrell, 171–2 wetlands, 7 whale hunting, 106 Wiedmann, Tommy, 210 Wikipedia, 82, 223 Wilkinson, Richard, 171 win–win trade, 62, 68, 89 wind energy, 75, 118, 196, 202–3, 221, 233, 239, 260, 263 Wizard of Oz, The, 241 Woelab, 231, 293 Wolf, Martin, 183, 266 women’s rights, 33, 57, 107, 160, 201 and core economy, 69, 79–81 education, 57, 124, 178, 198 and land ownership, 178 see also gender equality workers’ rights, 88, 91, 269 World 3 model, 154–5 World Bank, 6, 41, 119, 164, 168, 171, 206, 255, 258 World No Tobacco Day, 124 World Trade Organization, 6, 89 worldview, 22, 54, 115 X xenophobia, 266, 277, 286 Xenophon, 4, 32, 56–7, 160 Y Yandle, Bruce, 208 Yang, Yuan, 1–3, 289–90 yin yang, 54 Yousafzai, Malala, 124 YouTube, 192 Yunnan, China, 56 Z Zambia, 10 Zanzibar, 9 Zara, 276 Zeitvorsoge, 186–7 zero environmental impact, 217–18, 238, 241 zero-hour contracts, 88 zero-humans-required production, 192 zero-interest loans, 183 zero-marginal-cost revolution, 84, 191, 264 zero-waste manufacturing, 227 Zinn, Howard, 77 PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Illustrations are reproduced by kind permission of: archive.org

The Limits of the Market: The Pendulum Between Government and Market by Paul de Grauwe, Anna Asbury

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit motive, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Simon Kuznets, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, very high income

In countries such as the UK and US the income of top earners was almost completely siphoned off, with tax rates of ninety per cent or more on the highest incomes, reflecting a widespread view that the rich do not really contribute to economic prosperity. This flew in the face of the fundamentals of market thinking, namely that successful people contribute a great deal to material prosperity. According to this view (the ‘trickle-down theory’) the poor in a country benefit from the initiatives of the few who amass large fortunes. The rich should be pampered and protected, to everyone’s benefit. This theory was thrown out after the Great Depression. For many people in the post-war period the rise of governments as the controllers of economies seemed an inevitable and permanent  % 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1900 1903 1906 1909 1912 1915 1918 1921 1924 1927 1930 1933 1936 1939 1942 1945 1948 1951 1954 1957 1960 1963 1966 1969 1972 1975 1978 MARGINAL TAX RATES IN HIGHEST INCOME BRACKETS T HE GREAT ECONOM IC P ENDULUM US UK Germany France Figure ..

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.  South Korea liberalization and material prosperity  real GDP per capita , f Soviet Union see Russia Spain eurozone and weakening of government – eurozone government bond spreads, ten-year f global financial crisis ()  government debt f,  gross domestic product (GDP) per capita f interest rate on ten-year government bonds f labour costs, gross hourly f liquidity crisis  Spartacus movement – specialization – stagnation ,  structural problems in currency union  supply and demand , f Sweden employer contribution and labour costs   INDEX labour costs, gross hourly f productivity, labour costs and public sector  total income, share of received by top % f, f system I intuitive, emotional behaviour –, b, , –b,  system II individuals’ rational, calculating capacities –, b, , b,  taxation  and environment , – external limits of governments  increase  progressive wealth tax  see also income tax technological optimism ,  technological pessimism  technological progress , –, – tipping points , ,  Tocqueville, A. de  too big to fail banks  top-down control mechanisms  top managers/CEOs and winner-takesall – transaction costs  trickle-down theory  Tuymans, L.  ultimatum game  unemployment , , , , – United Kingdom ,  Bank of England , , ,  capital, share of belonging to top % and top % t debt issuance in own currency  government control over currency  government debt f,  gross domestic product (GDP) in constant prices , f gross domestic product (GDP) per capita f income taxes f, , f,  interest rate on ten-year government bonds f labour costs, gross hourly f social security spending as percentage of government spending f total income received by top % f, f United States , ,  capital, share of belonging to top % and top % t consumption per capita  Federal Reserve (Fed) , , , n gross domestic product (GDP) in constant prices , f income, share of total received by top % f, f income taxes f, , f,  New Deal  productivity, annual growth in f,  social security spending as percentage of government spending f taxation policies capping top incomes  value added tax (VAT) –,  virtuous circle  wages –, ,  wealth inequalities ,  well-being ,  collective , , , ,  consumer ,  economic  individual , , ,  Western Europe ,  gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, average annual economic growth of , f, f,  growth  growth production per capita since industrial revolution , f labour costs, high and prosperity  social security  willingness to pay , , b, b winner-takes-all phenomenon – World Bank  World Economic Forum – world inequality, development of –b 

The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy by Dr. Jim Taylor

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, Donald Trump, estate planning, full employment, glass ceiling, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, passive income, performance metric, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ronald Reagan, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Kennedy popularized in responding to criticism that his tax cuts would mainly benefit the wealthy), and the gains of the wealthy elite are symptoms of overall economic growth that results in broad-based gains among all elements of the population. Certainly the economic expansion of the past several decades has been fueled in part by employment growth and technological innovation driven largely by entrepreneurial companies. Somewhere between these two scenarios is the trickle-down effect, a mildly derisive phrase used to describe the supply-side economic theories generally associated with Ronald Reagan. These theories postulate that the financial gains of the wealthy get spent largely on investments and services that, in turn, create jobs and support small businesses. In New York City, for example, it has been estimated that $200,000 spent on services—everything from drivers and decorators to personal trainers and psychologists—creates roughly five jobs, and that the top 1 percent of earners create over 150,000 service jobs by virtue of their spending.2 Assessing which of these scenarios best characterizes the current U.S. plutonomy is a complex economic task.

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Even the esteemed biographer of the American spirit, Alexis de Tocqueville, who marveled at so many aspects of the American passion for equality and democracy, also marveled at American materialism and the resulting tolerance for inequality: ‘‘I know of no other country where love of money has such a grip on men’s hearts or where stronger scorn is expressed for the theory of permanent equality of property.’’5 Inequality in the United States has also tended to result from innovations that did have trickle-down effects, even if the financial gain from those innovations was concentrated at the top. The average American in 1920 didn’t see his income rise with that of John Rockefeller or Cornelius Vanderbilt, but he certainly saw tangible changes in his own life and that of his family as a result of railroads, electricity, telephones, radio, automobiles, and the like.

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Ajay Kapur, Niall Macleod, and Narendra Singh, ‘‘Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances,’’ research report, Citigroup Global Markets, http://www.billcara.com/archives/ Citi%20Oct%2016,%202005%20Plutonomy.pdf (accessed April 14, 2008). 2. Daniel Gross, ‘‘Don’t Hate Them Because They’re Rich: The Trickle-Down Effect of Ridiculous, Ostentatious Wealth,’’ New York magazine, April 11, 2005, http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/ culture/features/11721 (accessed April 14, 2008). 3. For example, see the Index of Social Health, published by the Institute for Innovation in Social Policy, http://iisp.vassar.edu/ index.html (accessed April 14, 2008).

Wealth, Poverty and Politics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, European colonialism, full employment, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herman Kahn, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty

Moreover, my happiness as I sat in that little eatery on the Lower East Side was not spoiled for a moment by thoughts that somebody else, somewhere else, in far more elegant surroundings, was probably enjoying a multi-course meal of the most exquisite food. b It is not that money income “trickles down” to the poor— a proposition advocated by no one, but used as a straw man by many. See my monograph, “Trickle-Down” Theory and “Tax Cuts for the Rich”. c If the twenty-year-old worker does not enter the workforce until after additional years spent completing college and postgraduate education, the disparities in years of experience would be even greater— and the annual income required to financially compensate such workers for the additional time, expense and delay of earnings, due to these extra years would increase the inequalities of annual incomes.

…

Michael Cox and Richard Alm, Myths of Rich & Poor: Why We’re Better Off Than We Think (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 16. 27. See, for example, Chapter 19 (“Government Finance”) in the 5th edition of my Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy (New York: Basic Books, 2015) or my monograph “Trickle Down” Theory and “Tax Cuts for the Rich” (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2012), pp. 1–5. 28. Adrian Dungan and Michael Parisi, “Individual Income Tax Rates and Shares, 2011,” Statistics of Income Bulletin, Spring 2014, p. 43. 29. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p. 252. 30. Frank Bruni, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2015), p. 105. 31.

…

Wolfgang Benz, A Concise History of the Third Reich, translated by Thomas Dunlap (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 30–31. 20. Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, p. 122. 21. Ibid., pp. 113–114. 22. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Modern Library, no date), Volume III, p. 105. 23. See my monograph “Trickle Down” Theory and “Tax Cuts for the Rich” (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2012), pp. 1–5. 24. Theodore Caplow, Louis Hicks and Ben J. Wattenberg, The First Measured Century: An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America, 1900–2000 (Washington: The AEI Press, 2001), p. 99. 25. Stanley Lebergott, Pursuing Happiness: American Consumers in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 120. 26.

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America by Tamara Draut

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, American ideology, antiwork, battle of ideas, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, ending welfare as we know it, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, payday loans, pink-collar, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

In 1970 more than 70 percent of black workers held blue-collar jobs; by 1987 only 27 percent were employed in industrial jobs.45 Unemployment among black men soared, while black women did somewhat better in securing jobs in the exploding new service sector. As companies shipped entire industries overseas and the central cities lost white middle-class residents to the job-exploding suburbs, urban black people found little support or sympathy from our political elites. Laissez-faire, trickle-down economics was gaining prominence and power just as globalization tore through American manufacturing. After the widespread shedding of factories in the urban core, Ronald Reagan made it to the White House, in no small part thanks to his astute use of racial anxiety to win over white working-class voters.

…

The political hostility toward people who are down on their luck and need help buying food is delivered by the same politicians who drastically cut higher-education funding. The three biggest threats to the middle class are the same culprits behind the degradation of the working class: Wall Street, “trickle-down” economics, and antigovernment activism. These forces hit the working class first and hardest, but they inflict plenty of damage on the middle class too. So if we want to save the middle class, we’ve got to start from the bottom up. That means that the new working class, which will be primarily Latino and black in less than a generation if current trends hold, must be at the center of our public debate.

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany

Jane Jacobs, Network effects, rent stabilization, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban renewal

In 1992 we emerged from twelve years of a national Republican administration that favored big business—with the result that we now have some very strong big businesses indeed. The argument the Reagan/Bush leaders used to convince the public that this was a Good Thing was the promise of tax cuts and the “trickle-down” economic theory. The “trickle-down” economic theory, you may recall, was the notion that somehow big business would be helpful and supportive to small businesses. 171 . . . T H R E E , T W O , O N E , C O N TA C T : T I M E S S Q U A R E R E D permanently closed Biltmore Theater on Forty-seventh Street, beside the metal gate the bottom of which has been eaten away with uric acid, and chat with one of the homeless men who regularly sleep on a piece of cardboard under the dark marquee during the summer.

Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jones Act, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, microcredit, moral hazard, negative emissions, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, open borders, open economy, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, statistical model, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Even the advanced industrial countries are beginning to question globalization, as it brings with it economic insecurity and inequality; as economic materialism trumps other values; as countries realize that their well-being, even their survival, depends on others that they may not trust, such as the unstable oil regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere. There may be growth, but most of the people may be worse off. Trickle-down economics, which holds that so long as the economy as a whole grows everyone benefits, has been repeatedly shown to be wrong. Some say globalization is inevitable, that one has to simply accept it with its flaws. But as most of the world has come to live in democracies, if globalization does not benefit most of the people they will eventually react.

…

There was a large set of dos and don’ts: do privatize everything, from factories to social security; don’t have the government involved in promoting particular industries; do strengthen property rights; don’t be corrupt. Minimizing government meant lowering taxes—but keeping budgets in balance. In practice, the Washington Consensus put little emphasis on equity. Some of its advocates believed in trickle-down economics, that somehow all would benefit—though there was little evidence to support such a conclusion. Others believed that equity was the province of politics, not economics: economists should focus on efficiency, and the Washington Consensus policies, they believed, would deliver on that. The alternative view, which I hold, sees government having a more active role, in both promoting development and protecting the poor.2 Economic theory and historical experience provide guidance on what government needs to do.

…

Responding to the Challenges of Globalization There are three ways in which the advanced industrial countries can respond to these challenges. One is to ignore the problem and accept the growing inequality. Those who take this position (many of them proponents of the now-discredited theory of trickle-down economics, which holds that so long as there is growth, all will benefit) emphasize the underlying strengths of a market economy and its ability to respond to change: we may not know where the new jobs will be created, they say, but so long as we allow markets to work their magic, new jobs will be created.

Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity Into Prosperity by Bernard Lietaer, Jacqui Dunne

3D printing, 90 percent rule, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clockwork universe, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, conceptual framework, credit crunch, different worldview, discounted cash flows, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, liberation theology, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, Occupy movement, price stability, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban decay, War on Poverty, working poor

Policy making, whether in business or in politics, based on forecasts distorted by the conventional money system is at best shortsighted, if not outright erroneous. Classic economic solutions tend to fall into one of two categories: to depend on the vicissitudes of the free market and rely on trickle-down economics or to implement strategies that attempt to redistribute wealth. As long as conventional money retains its monopoly, there will always be insufficiency and untended needs. Indeed, this monopoly fuels both rampant fear of scarcity and its partner, greed. The traditional hyperrational explanations offered up for this ongoing universal suffering, disenfranchisement, and injustice fail to address the real issues.

…

See TimeBank Time Dollar Youth Court, 83 Time horizon, 44 Time-slot exchange, 195–197 Titus, 197–198 Token Exchange System, 193 Too big to fail, 96 Torekes, 74–75, 151, 151–153 Total system throughput (TST), 33 Totnes, 75 Trade reference currency. See Terra Trade Reference Currency Transmutation. See Alchemy Transportation, 126–128, 201, 218–219 Trash, 141–142, 143, 145, 165–166 Treaty of Maastricht, 231n14 Triangle, 171 Trickle-down economics, 217 Trueque club, 182–184, 183 Trust, 19–20, 46; creating community, 171–172; in Friendly Favors, 132; WIR and, 100 Tutoring, 82 Twister, 156–157 Two-body problem, 30– 31 Uang kepeng, 189, 237n4, 237n5 Underclass, 216 Unemployment, 15–18; college and, 226–227n13; JAK bank and, 113; LETS and, 76; Nazi Party fueled by, 180; Patch Adams Free Clinic and, 164; in Rabot, 151; in Weimar Republic, 236n10; Wörgl and, 175–178 UN Happiness Resolution, 131 Union, 16, 119 United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), 144 260 INDEX Unit of account, 58; money defined as, 28; professionals describing, 1–2; time as, 80– 81.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

affirmative action, cognitive bias, Columbine, Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, deindustrialization, desegregation, different worldview, ending welfare as we know it, friendly fire, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, land reform, large denomination, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, power law, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The claim is that racial justice advocates should reconsider the traditional approach to affirmative action because (a) it has helped to render a new caste system largely invisible; (b) it has helped to perpetuate the myth that anyone can make it if they try; (c) it has encouraged the embrace of a “trickle down theory of racial justice”; (d) it has greatly facilitated the divide-and-conquer tactics that gave rise to mass incarceration; and (e) it has inspired such polarization and media attention that the general public now (wrongly) assumes that affirmative action is the main battlefront in U.S. race relations.

…

People like Barack Obama who are truly exceptional by any standards, along with others who have been granted exceptional opportunities, legitimate a system that remains fraught with racial bias—especially when they fail to challenge, or even acknowledge, the prevailing racial order. In the current era, white Americans are often eager to embrace token or exceptional African Americans, particularly when they go out of their way not to talk about race or racial inequality. Affirmative action may be counterproductive in yet another sense: it lends credence to a trickle-down theory of racial justice. The notion that giving a relatively small number of people of color access to key positions or institutions will inevitably redound to the benefit of the larger group is belied by the evidence. It also seems to disregard Martin Luther King Jr.’s stern warnings that racial justice requires the complete transformation of social institutions and a dramatic restructuring of our economy, not superficial changes that can purchased on the cheap.

…

Acevedo California’s Proposition California’s Proposition Campbell, Richard Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin) Carroll, David Carrollton bus disaster (1988) Cato Institute Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Chain Reaction (Edsall and Edsall) Chemerinsky, Erwin Cheney, Dick Chicago, Illinois: ex-offenders; police presence in ghetto communities; re-entry programs child-support debts chokeholds, lethal Chunn, Gwendolyn Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act (2000) Civil Rights Act (1866) Civil Rights Act (1964); Title VI civil rights advocacy, future of; changing the culture of law enforcement; collective denial by civil rights advocates; dismantling the mass incarceration system; and flawed public consensus; grassroots activism by formerly incarcerated men and women; human rights paradigm/ approach; Obama presidency; poor and working-class whites; and problem of colorblind advocacy; reconsidering affirmative action; reform work and movement building; reluctance to advocate on behalf of criminals; and sentencing; and trickle-down theories of racial justice Civil Rights Movement; backlash against; and black people who defied racial stereotypes; desegregation protests; and economic justice; and end of Jim Crow system; and federal legislation; and human rights approach; initial resistance from some African Americans; and King’s call for complete restructuring of society; Poor People’s Movement civil rights organizations/community; collective denial by; professionalization and conversion of grassroots movement into legal crusade; reluctance to advocate on behalf of criminals.

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, call centre, crack epidemic, credit crunch, deindustrialization, East Village, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, race to the bottom, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, white picket fence, World Values Survey, young professional

So it was out-of-town development, as much as decline in industry, which contributed to the perception of a rotting inner city. What really happened is far more complex than the appealing message that, following years of urban decay, the ‘urban renaissance’ transformed city life. The decline of the inner city and the ‘renaissance’, which is based on discredited ‘trickle-down’ economics, were not so straightforward, because trickle-down produces a very uneven pattern of growth, even when the boom and bust cycle is in an upswing. ECONOMICALLY VIABLE? Part of the ‘decay to renaissance’ story of the city is that during the 1970s, as the post-war industrial economy faltered, there simply wasn’t the money to allow local government to invest properly in cities.

…

‘Defensible space’ determines the look and feel of privatized streets and plazas, and homes are built according to strict Secured by Design principles. Side by side with privately owned places devoted to shopping and city-centre apartment living are enclaves of poverty, giving the lie to the promise of ‘trickle-down’ economics. The really appalling pockets of poverty are in the minority. What are far more common are the social housing estates of relative deprivation which are also designed with fear and security just as much in mind. The aim of all this security is to make people feel safer, but fear of crime is soaring.

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society by Binyamin Appelbaum

90 percent rule, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, greed is good, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now

When Rousselot, the congressman from southern California who had questioned Rivlin, rose on the House floor during the final debate, Democrats expected an argument against profligacy. Instead, Rousselot proposed to replace the Democratic plan with a supply-side stimulus: a uniform 5 percent reduction in personal income tax rates. Astonished Democrats dismissed the idea as “trickle-down economic theory,” and the amendment was easily voted down, but the supply-siders were just getting started. Kemp, seeking to upstage Rousselot, introduced legislation with Senator William Roth a few months later to reduce tax rates by 10 percent a year for three years: “10-10-10.”47 In September 1977, the Republican National Committee endorsed the bill despite the discomfort of fiscal conservatives.

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He warned spending would work only if the government devoted the money to investment rather than consumption. See James Tobin, “Growth Through Taxation,” New Republic, July 25, 1960. 28. Many traditional Keynesians, by contrast, hated Heller’s plan. Leon Keyserling, Harry Truman’s chief economic adviser, said Kennedy had embraced “trickle down” economics, invoking imagery that has a long history in American politics. William Safire, in his Political Dictionary, credits William Jennings Bryan, who blasted Republicans in his famous 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech for serving the rich and promising that “their prosperity will leak through on those below.”

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., ref1 technology sector, ref1 Teichman, Judith, ref1 telecommunications industry, ref1, ref2 Thailand, ref1, ref2 Thaler, Richard, ref1, ref2 Thatcher, Margaret: on deregulation, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; economic policy of, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11; and elimination of capital controls, ref12; and Alan Greenspan, ref13; and monetarism, ref14, ref15 Thiessen, Gordon, ref1 Thorbjornsdottir, Sandra, ref2 Tobin, James, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Tozzi, Jim, ref1, ref2, ref3 trade: balance of, ref1; and Chile, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; and China, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9; and common interests, ref10, ref11; daily currency trading, ref12, ref13; economists on, ref14, ref15, ref16; and fixed exchange rates, ref17, ref18, ref19; and floating rates, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26; and Iceland, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30; and Japan, ref31, ref32, ref33, ref34, ref35, ref36; and Richard Nixon, ref37, ref38; and Ronald Reagan, ref39; David Ricardo on, ref40, ref41; and Taiwan, ref42, ref43, ref44; and U.S. foreign exchange policy, ref45; U.S. promotion of, ref46, ref47, ref48, ref49; value of, ref50, ref51; and West Germany, ref52, ref53, ref54, ref55 trickle-down economics, ref1, ref2, ref3 trucking industry, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Truman, Harry S., ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Trump, Donald, ref1, ref2 Tsiang, S. C., ref1, ref2 Ture, Norman B., ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Turner, Donald, ref1 Turner, Grace-Marie Arnett, ref1 unemployment: average rate of, ref1, ref2, ref3; and Jimmy Carter, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8; causes of, ref9; and Bill Clinton, ref10; effects of, ref11; and Federal Reserve Bank, ref12, ref13; and Milton Friedman, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19; and Great Depression, ref20, ref21; and Great Recession, ref22; and Lyndon Johnson, ref23; and John F.

The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Mason

active measures, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Easter island, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, planetary scale, post-oil, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, systematic trading, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

When dissident voices pointed out that tax cuts favoured the rich (especially when combined with cuts in social provisions for the poor), the standard reply came in the form of the so-called trickle-down effect: as the rich enrich themselves further (the theory went), their spending and investment will trickle down to the less privileged more effectively than it would through transfers financed by taxing the rich. Box 5.4 The trickle-up effect The trickle-down effect was meant to legitimize reductions in tax rates for the rich, by suggesting that their extra cash would eventually trickle down to the poor. All empirical evidence conspires against this hypothesis.

…

A new phase thus began. The United States could now run an increasing trade deficit with impunity, while the new Reagan administration could also finance its hugely expanded defence budget and its gigantic tax cuts for the richest Americans. The 1980s ideology of supply-side economics, the fabled trickle-down effect, the reckless tax cuts, the dominance of greed as a form of virtue, etc. – all these were just manifestations of America’s new ‘exorbitant privilege’: the opportunity to expand its twin deficits almost without limit, courtesy of the capital inflows from the rest of the world. American hegemony had taken a new turn.

Trixie and Katya's Guide to Modern Womanhood by Trixie Mattel, Katya

Lyft, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, trickle-down economics, uber lyft

Just like hookers would do in the olden days, all you need in lieu of an actual bath or shower is eighteen to twenty generous spritzes of a very strong and penetrating high-quality eau de parfum to mask the stench of your nasty ass. WASH YOUR LEGS! You wouldn’t believe how many people do not bother to wash their legs while in the shower. History has proven that trickle-down economics didn’t pan out for the working class, and the same applies here: Trickle-down soap and shampoo will not clean those gams, so do yourself a favor and give your soiled stems the due diligence they deserve. YOU CAN LEAD A HORSE TO WATER, BUT YOU CAN’T MAKE IT BRUSH ITS TEETH.

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, deindustrialization, discovery of DNA, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, mini-job, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paris climate accords, patent troll, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, zero-sum game

This is especially true as Europe has expanded trade with countries where wages are much lower and from whom it imports labor-intensive goods. The resulting decrease in demand for labor, and especially unskilled labor, inevitably drives down wages and increases unemployment unless government takes counteracting measures. Too often governments do nothing, guided by mistaken notions of trickle-down economics. A rising tide does not necessarily lift all boats. Taken together, theoretical advances have undermined the notion that markets are efficient and stable on their own so long as the government keeps out of the way and keeps its own house in order. They have also helped us understand why, even as GDP increased, so many people were worse off.

…

Three propositions are at its core: the economy is not an end in itself but a means; a country’s economic growth, on its own, will not necessarily translate into the well-being of all (or even most) of its citizens; and finally, the government can make a difference both in enhancing sustainable growth and ensuring that the fruits of that growth are equitably shared. A variant of the theory of trickle-down economics holds that high growth will redound to the benefit of all and therefore that economic policy should be directed at maximizing growth. The evidence of the past 40 years has thoroughly discredited this idea. A high rate of GDP growth does not necessarily mean that most within the country see an increase in their living standards.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Ford argued that paying people more would enable workers to afford the cars that they were producing. The U.S. auto industry pioneered the basic wage in 1948. Harley Shaiken, a labor economist at the University of California at Berkeley, observed: “The most important model that rolled off the Detroit assembly lines in the 20th century was the middle class for blue-collar workers.”5 In trickle-down economics, benefits flow down from the top to the bottom. During the Great Depression, Will Rogers, the humorist, defined it as: “Money was all appropriated for the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy.” In the 1970s, the process went into reverse. The auto industry and heavy industries in the United States and developed countries declined.

…

A buoyant global economy ensured a growing market for China’s exports. Deng represented a change in philosophy: “Poverty is not socialism. To be rich is glorious.” The strategy proved startlingly effective, bringing about profound change. By 2011, Colonel Sanders and KFC were better recognized than Chairman Mao in China. The strategy was decidedly trickle-down economics, as Deng himself acknowledged: “Let some people get rich first.” Later, Deng would grouse: “Young leading cadres have risen up by helicopter. They should really rise step by step.” Foreign Treasure China exported more than it imported, creating large foreign reserves that by 2011 totaled over $2.7 trillion.

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See also mortgages shorting (2005/2006), 256 subsidies, 334, 348 Suma Oriental, 82 Sumitomo, 227 Summers, Lawrence, 116, 129, 214, 300, 304, 315 Sunday Times, 364 super jumbo loans, 182 Super Return annual industry conference, 162 super senior tranches, 175 supply of assets, 267 survivorship bias, 243 suspension of deep-water drilling, 362 Suze Orman Show, The, 93 Suze Orman’s Financial Freedom, 93 swaps correlation, 255 credit default swaps (CDS), 232, 237 dispersion, 255 Fiat, 222-223 first-to-default (FtD), 220-221 gamma, 255 total return swap (TRS), 209 Swensen, David, 124 Swift, Jonathon, 130 Sydney Airport, 159 synchronous lateral excitation, 273 synthetic securitization, 173, 176 systematic risk, 118 T TAC (target amortization class) bonds, 178 TAF (term auction facility), 340 tail risk, 246 Tainter, Joseph, 349 takeovers (risk arb), 242 Taleb, Nicholas Nassim, 126, 246 Talking Heads, The, 46 taming risk, 120-122 Tang dynasty, 351 tansu savings, 39 Tao Jones Averages, The, 96 TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension(s) In Space) trades, 217-218 target redemption forwards, 217 Tavakoli, Janet, 177 taxes avoidance, 48-49 cuts, 348 Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), 82-83 favorable regimes, 41 leveraged buyouts (LBOs), 138 VAT (value added tax), 262 tchotchkes, 162 Teenage Cancer Trust, 262 Teledyn, 60 television, financial news, 91-99 Templars, 32 temporary suspension of deep-water drilling, 362 Terra Firma Capital Partners, 154, 157, 162, 165 terrorism, 44 Texas Instruments (TI), 122 Texas International, 146 Texas Pacific Group, 154 Textron, 60 Thain, John, 291, 319, 330 Thaler, Richard, 126 Thatcher, Margaret, 66, 81, 158 the Government National Mortgage Association (GNMA or Ginnie Mae), 179 theoretical profits, 231 theories, bubbles, 277-278 Theory of the Leisure Class, The, 41 This American Life, 185 Thompson, Todd, 93 Thoreau, Henry David, 359 Thornton, John, 76 Thorp, Edward, 121 thought leaders, 90 thundering herd, the, 66 TICKETs (tradable interest bearing convertible to equity trust securities), 160 Tierney, John, 98 Tiger Fund, 243 Time, 45, 129 Time Warner, 58 Tobias, Seth, 322 TOBs (tender option bonds), 222 toggle loans, 154 toilets, Japanese, 38 Tokyo as a financial center, 78 tools, six sigma, 60 Torii, Mayumi, 43 Toscanini, Arturo, 157 total return swap (TRS), 209 Tourre, Fabrice, 199 toxic currency structures, 218-219 toxic waste, 172 Toynbee, Arnold, 354 Toys R Us, 155 TPG, 156 trade protectionism, 334, 349 trading, 23-24 alleys, 92 banks, 73 proprietary, 352 securities, 66 stabilization of global trade, 349 traditional banking models, 68 tranches, 169 AAA, 203 equity, 192 innovation of, 178 super senior, 175 synthetic CDOs, 174 Z, 170, 178 transfers risk, central banks, 281-282 systems, money, 22 Transformers, 278 Travelers, merger of with Citicorp, 75 Treynor, Jack, 117 trickle-down economics, 42-43 Triffin dilemma, 31 Triffin, Robert, 31 Trollope, Anthony, 173 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), 340 troy ounce bars, 25. See also gold TSLP (term securities lending facility), 340 tunnels, 158 turn-of-the-year effect, 126 Turner Broadcasting, 146 Turner, Lord Adair, 236, 280, 298 Tversky, Amos, 125-126 Twain, Mark, 123 Tweedie, David, 289 Twilight, 327 Tyco, 154 types of money, 21-23 U U.S.

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making by David Rothkopf

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, carried interest, clean water, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, fake news, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global village, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Elkington, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Skype, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, William Langewiesche

But the message that he and many others in the Chilean business establishment offer in conversation, directly or by implication, is a particularly distilled version of the economic prescriptions from the 1980s: “Leave it to the markets. Be patient. Keep taxes low for those who create the jobs.” They adhere to the axiom of trickle-down, twenty-five years after the term was coined, even as compelling evidence has built up that, as Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank has written, trickle-down theory is “supported neither by economic theory nor by empirical evidence.” NOT JUST A CHILEAN PARADOX Our taxi finally arrived at our destination, a modern white stone apartment building. From the front door, a maid ushered us across a pristine marble lobby and into a tiny elevator, which took us up to the apartment of the chairman of Chilectra (one of two major electric utilities in Chile).

…

Saunders, “Why ‘Globalization’ Didn’t Rescue Russia,” Policy Review, February 1, 2001. 54 The top 20 percent of Chileans “Economic Indicators: Chile,” World Resources Institute, earthtrends.wri.org/pdf_library/country_proflles/eco_cou_152.pdf, 2003. 54 the worst inequality indicators on the planet World Bank, “Table 2.7: Distribution of Income or Consumption,” World Development Indicators 2005. 56 His perspective was clear Andrónico Luksic, interview with the author, 2006. 56 “We cannot be complacent” Alvaro Saieh, interview with the author, 2006. 58 Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank Robert H. Frank, “In the Real World of Work and Wages, Trickle-Down Theories Don’t Hold Up,” New York Times, April 12, 2007. 59 It obviously troubled him Andrés Velasco, interview with the author, 2006. 59 “the group that has the most power” Jorge Rosenblut, interview with the author, 2006. 61 Marshall tackled the issue another way Jorge Marshall, interview with the author, 2006. 63 Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 1997. 63 As Harvard’s Dani Rodrik has written Dani Rodrik, “The Cheerleaders’ Threat to Global Trade,” Financial Times, March 27, 2007. 63 Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz Joseph E.

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Croix, Geoffrey de Stein, Rob Stelzer, Irwin Stevens, Robert Stewart, Jon Stiglitz, Joseph Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI); Stone, Oliver Straw, Jack Sugar, Ronald Sultan, Prince Bandar bin Summers, Lawrence superclass access and exclusivity concerns agenda-setting and backlash against, potential for balance issues “class” issue, compounding impact of elite interaction conspiracy theories about plotting elites the disenfranchised and as elite within the elite emerging superclass existence of fluidity among ranks of global government and global institutions/governance and how to become a member inequitable distributions of wealth and power, attitudes toward influence of informal institutions and international character internationalism-nationalism conflict and members of networks and order and organizations of personal characteristics of members philanthropy by political potency on cross-border basis positive global developments attributable to private aviation and psychopathology of the supersuccessful Rothkopf’s familiarity with size of watchdog for global public interests, unreliability as women and see also corporate elites; information elites; military-industrial elites; political elites; power of the superclass Sutherland, Peter Sutton, Michael Syriana (film) Taft, William Howard Talbott, Strobe Tata, Ratan Teets, Peter Tenet, George terrorism information flows and terrorist leaders as military elites threat to United States war on terror Thain, John Thani, Sheikh Hamad bin Thamer Al- Thatcher, Margaret think tanks Thomas-Graham, Pamela Thucydides Tillerson, Rex W. trade liberalization Trichet, Jean-Claude trickle-down theory Trilateral Commission Trump, Donald Tsouli, Younis Tucker, James Turner, Mike Twilight of Sovereignty, The (Wriston) Tymoshenko, Yuliya Tyson, Laura Unger, Craig United Defense company United Nations (UN) Uribe, Alvaro U.S. Chamber of Commerce U.S. Information Services (USIS) Veblen, Thorstein Velasco, Andrés Venter, Craig Villemarest, Pierre and Danièle de Vinnell Corporation Vinson & Elkins law firm Viola, Roberto Eduardo Volcker, Paul voters’ disengagement from politics Wales, Jimmy Walker, George Herbert, Jr.

Beyond Outrage: Expanded Edition: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It by Robert B. Reich

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, benefit corporation, business cycle, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, electricity market, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, job automation, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The rich are “job creators,” so tax cuts for the rich trickle down to everyone else while higher taxes on the rich hurt the economy and slow job growth. Untrue. Look at recent history. George W. Bush cut taxes on the rich, and what happened? A fraction of the number of jobs were created under Bush than had been created under Bill Clinton, and the median wage dropped, adjusted for inflation. Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke. As I’ve said, from the end of World War II until 1981, the richest Americans faced a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent or above. Under Dwight Eisenhower it was 91 percent. Even after all deductions and credits, the top taxes on the very rich were more than 52 percent—far higher than they’ve been since.

On the Road: Adventures From Nixon to Trump by James Naughtie

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Julian Assange, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, plutocrats, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

One reason for that suspicion was that one of my editors at the Post, William Greider, pulled off a journalistic coup by winning the trust of David Stockman, whom Reagan had appointed his budget director, and who was a fervent evangelist for supply-side economics based on a formula of tax cuts and huge reductions in government spending. But, as he acknowledged to Bill Greider in a series of long private conversations over many months, the policy was far less coherent than he (and Reagan) liked to make it appear. Supply-side policies were, he said, a Trojan horse for ‘trickle-down economics’ in which those at the bottom of the heap had to hope some benefits would eventually come their way, on a wing and a prayer. It was precisely what Bush, now vice president, had meant in the primaries with his jibe about ‘voodoo economics’. When Bill’s long article appeared in The Atlantic in late 1981 – running to nearly 20,000 words – it was called ‘The Education of David Stockman’, and the subtitle quoted him saying, ‘None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers.’

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., 52 Stephanopoulos, George, 103 Stern, Larry, 78–9 Stevenson, Coke, 270 Stewart, Sir Iain Maxwell, 49 Stockman, David, 81, 82 Stone, Roger, 182–4, 289 Stovall, Dwayne, 271, 277–9 Straw, Jack, 143, 149 Streisand, Barbra, 16, 121 Sunday Telegraph, 50 Sunday Times, 37, 76 supply-side economics, 81–2 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, 153 ‘taking a knee’ protest, 268 Talese, Gay, 42 Talmadge, Herman, 42 taxation, 81, 104, 114, 119, 146, 182, 183, 200, 202, 218, 290 Tea Party movement, 146, 170, 175, 176 Texas Tribune, 273 Thanksgiving, 47, 133–41 Thatcher, Margaret, 81, 83–5, 90, 92, 93, 117, 175, 274 Thomson Regional Newspapers, 37 Thorpe, Jeremy, 50 Times, The, 37, 93 Times-Picayune, 56 Today, 5, 95, 113, 116, 117, 122, 125, 191 Toledo Blade, 56 trickle-down economics, 81–2 Tripp, Linda, 119 Truman, Harry S., 40, 126 Trump, Donald, 1, 31, 51, 88, 120, 127, 143, 144, 146, 160, 167, 170, 171, 175, 176–92 Achilles’ heel of, 213 becomes POTUS, 157, 158, 192, 193–6, 262, 267 ‘currency of contempt’ of, 220 ‘draining the swamp’ rhetoric, 230–1 federal regulations despised by, 245–6 foreign policy of, 217, 255, 294 and government shutdown, 230, 232 Huntington rally of, 211 impeachment trial of, 5, 218, 266, 282–3, 291–3, 294 inauguration of, 193–7, 202, 203, 221 lack of knowledge of, 4–5 McCain opposes, 200–1 MAGA slogan of, 180, 211–12 Mexican border wall promise of, 188, 200, 206, 211, 244, 250, 267, 287 moral compass of, 274–7 presidency of ‘self’ created by, 218 presidential power excesses of, 284 stream-of-consciousness style of, 187 tweets of, 4, 161, 189–90, 193, 199–200, 205, 208, 217, 251 unorthodox approach of, 197–206, 213–16, 250–1, 287 Trump, Fred, 211 Tsongas, Paul, 104 Ukraine, 183, 217, 283, 289, 291 ‘Unite the Right’ rally, 216–17, 250 United Automobile Workers (UAW), 88–9 United Nations (UN), 112, 131, 133, 141–2, 144, 147–51, 203, 220, 262 United States (US): ‘blue wall’, 190, 192 Charlottesville rally, 216–17, 250 Civil War, 3, 6, 40, 41, 134, 172, 202, 207, 212, 231, 260, 278 coal-mining, 209–10 constitution, 40, 51–2, 55–6, 99, 193, 206, 212, 218, 260, 263–4, 266, 271, 272, 277–9, 283–5 counting regime discredited in, 126–7 culture war within, 104, 119, 176, 262, 271, 276, 280 Declaration of Independence, 64, 263 ‘Dreamers’ 287–8 Founding Fathers, 27, 193, 263, 284, 285, 293 Gettysburg Address, 2–3 Green Deal, 197 labour relations in, 88–9 middle-income, 114, 159, 222–3 midterm elections, 116, 122, 175, 205, 208–10, 253–4, 261, 266–7, 280, 283, 286, 289 Naughtie first arrives in, 7, 9–33 New Deal, 145, 258, 264 New Frontier, 71, 75 opioid addiction in, 209, 230, 244–5 ‘pathway to citizenship’, 200 post-Reagan, 104 President of (POTUS), see by name rainbow coalition, 91 religion within, 118–19 Russian interference in, 184, 188–9, 197, 201, 205, 217, 221, 247, 254, 255, 279, 284, 286, 289–90 sanctuary cities, 207, 250 Second Amendment, 271, 272 Supreme Court, 39, 58, 117, 120, 127, 178, 270, 278–9, 285 TV culture informs, 100, 110, 111, 241–2, 243, 265 ‘white flight’, 249 ‘United States v.

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market by Nicholas Wapshott

2021 United States Capitol attack, Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, lockdown, low interest rates, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market bubble, market clearing, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

If it is, that is a failure of monetary policy, not of fiscal policy.41 In the event, the Reagan tax cuts—making income tax lower than at any time since the 1920s—were not matched by cuts in spending: on the contrary. Above all, his ambition to bring the Cold War to an end by outspending the Soviet Union on defense made balancing the budget impossible. Therefore, despite the promise of the Laffer Curve and “trickle-down economics,” in which the taxes saved by the rich were claimed to eventually benefit those further down the economic food chain, Reagan’s tax cuts did not increase revenue but led to a ballooning of the federal deficit—funded by borrowing, or printing money. Before long, with federal tax revenues slumping by 6 percent in real terms—a reduction of at least $200 billion in 2012 dollars over the first four years—Reagan agreed that taxes should be slyly increased.

…

., 209–10, 215 black market, 219 collapse, 214–15, 252 economy of, 218–21 unreliable government data, 218, 334 Spencer, Herbert, 222, 335 Sraffa, Piero, 41, 102, 320 stagflation Friedman and, 119, 170–71, 207, 289, 322 Samuelson on, 118–20, 152, 282, 322 term origins, 322 Volcker and, 186, 202 see also inflation Stein, Herbert, 144, 157, 205–6, 325 sterling M3 (£M3), 231, 240, 244, 246, 247 Sternlight, Peter, 187–88 Stevenson, Adlai, 21, 306 Stigler, George Joseph Chicago School, 28, 82, 303, 304 Friedman and, 9, 34, 36, 171 Samuelson and, 20, 84 stimulus money, effects of, 100, 319 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn), 94, 319 subprime loans, 273 Summers, Anita, 294, 343 Summers, Lawrence, 24, 267–68, 273–74, 294, 306–7, 340 Summers, Robert, 294, 306–7, 343 supply-side economics, 204–6, 207–8, 259, 332 Tarshis, Lorie, 19–20 Taussig, Frank, 29, 308 taxes cuts recommended by Keynes, 23 cuts recommended by Samuelson, 23 Friedman on, 32, 79, 85, 155–56, 208, 290 Friedman on tax cuts, 44, 155–56, 208, 209, 211, 252 inflation as hidden tax, 77–78 Laffer Curve and, 205, 206, 208, 209, 332 negative income tax plan, 143, 173, 292 payroll withholding tax, 32–33 progressive income tax, 47 Samuelson on, 85–86 Value Added Tax, 239 in wartime, 32, 309 Taxing to Prevent Inflation, 32 Tax Reform Act of 1986, 333 Tea Party, 288, 291, 293 Teller, Edward, 265, 339, 340 Thatcher, Margaret Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), 233 Conservative Party leadership, 216, 235–36 elected as prime minister in 1979, 227, 239 esteem for Friedman, 216, 240, 337, 338 firing of the “wets,” 244–45 interest in ideas for their own sake, 238–39 monetarism, 216, 237–39, 240, 243–44, 246, 247 see also British monetarism Theory and Measurement of Demand, The (Schultz), 28 Theory of the Consumption Function, A (Friedman), 29, 44, 100, 103 Thorneycroft, Peter, 237, 336 Thurow, Lester, 226, 335 Time magazine, 3–4, 74–76 Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Fogel and Engerman), 224 Titanic sinking, 2 Tobin, James, 102, 320, 323 Tract on Monetary Reform, A (Keynes), 78, 94–97, 106, 109, 129 traffic lights, 81, 87 trickle-down economics, 210 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), 276, 278 Truman, Harry S., 5, 306 Trump, Donald J., 291–92, 333, 342 unemployment after financial freeze, 278–79 in Britain after World War I, 40, 63, 234 COVID-19 pandemic, 342 Federal Reserve mandate, 108, 178 financial freeze of 2007–8, 278–79 Friedman on, 110–11, 304–5 Hayek on, 199 Joseph on, 234–35 Keynes on, 15, 64, 234–35 “natural rate” of, 110–11, 114–15 rates in U.S., 1975–1980, 175 Samuelson on, 15, 20, 23, 88, 120, 264 universal basic income, 292 Value Added Tax, 239 Veblen, Thorstein, 164, 328 velocity of money Friedman on, 61, 93–94, 106, 109 Keynes on, 63, 94, 97, 98 Samuelson on, 172 Volcker on, 185, 212 Vietnam War draft dodgers, 49 Galbraith and, 7, 312 and inflation, 121, 145 Johnson and, 7, 52 Vincent Astor Foundation, 3, 4 Viner, Jacob, 14, 28, 33, 99, 304 Volcker, Paul about, 177, 329 AEA address, 181 appointment as Fed chairman, 177–78, 186 at Camp David summit, 148 Carter’s reaction to Fed policies, 191 consumer credit controls, 192 on Friedman’s computer algorithm idea, 200 interest rates under, 181, 186–87, 188, 190–92, 194–95, 199, 212 monetarism abandoned by, 212, 246 monetary policy to fight inflation, 186–92, 194–95, 202–4 monetary targets, 181, 182–83, 184–86, 188–89, 192–93, 195–96 Reagan support for, 202, 212 recession provoked by, 191–92, 193, 194, 195–96, 202, 211–12 skepticism about monetarism, 178–80, 181–85, 189, 235 stagflation and, 186, 202 on velocity of money, 185, 212 wage and price controls, 149 Volker Foundation, 45, 66 von Mises, Ludwig, 36, 37, 62, 73–74, 163, 172, 309 wage and price controls controls in U.S., 149–51, 152, 154–55, 156–57, 326 incomes and pay policies in U.K., 228, 229, 232–33, 235 Wald, George, 169 Wałęsa, Lech, 215, 334 Wallace, George, 142 Wallich, Henry, 5, 7, 54, 302 Wallis, W.

The Extreme Centre: A Warning by Tariq Ali

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, deindustrialization, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Great Leap Forward, labour market flexibility, land reform, light touch regulation, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, obamacare, offshore financial centre, popular capitalism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck

The value of stocks tripled in real terms between 1990 and 1998, an extraordinary windfall for those who were already rich. By 2000 the top 1 per cent netted 42.5 per cent and the richest 10 per cent netted 85.8 per cent of the national wealth, leaving the bottom 80 per cent with peanuts. This is the famous trickle-down economics of neoliberal fantasists. When we are told the US economy is flourishing, this is true, but only for the well-off. In the United States, 25 per cent of all children live in poverty. This number is double that of any other advanced capitalist economy, except one – Britain. Where elderly poverty is concerned, the United States scores 20 per cent, but in this field, at least, it has been overtaken by its British emulators: in England, 24 per cent of old people now live in poverty.

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, Carl Icahn, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job automation, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, stock buybacks, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

In 2019, Trump-appointed regulators gave JPMorgan the go-ahead to open branches in additional states as part of the bank’s ambitious national expansion, and to acquire InstaMed—a medical payments technology firm—JPMorgan’s biggest purchase since the financial crisis. Other big banks have joined the acquisitions race. In the first five months of 2019, they announced more mergers and acquisitions than during any full-year period since 2008. Deregulation is another form of trickle-down economics in which gains go upward and losses trickle downward. It frees businesses to be more profitable but increases the risk the public will be harmed, fleeced, shafted, injured, or sickened by corporate products and services. After heavy lobbying by the chemical industry, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency scaled back the way the government decides whether some of the most dangerous chemicals on the market pose health and safety risks.

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back by Guy Shrubsole

Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, congestion charging, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital map, do-ocracy, Downton Abbey, false flag, financial deregulation, fixed income, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Global Witness, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, housing crisis, housing justice, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, linked data, loadsamoney, Londongrad, machine readable, mega-rich, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, sceptred isle, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, web of trust, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

By the time of the Victorian Return of Owners of Land, the landed aristocracy was at the peak of its political power. A mere 4,217 peers, great landowners and squires owned 18 million acres of land – half of England and Wales, possessed by 0.01 per cent of the population. In a triumph for trickle-down economics, it had taken eight centuries for England’s landowning elite to broaden out from around 200 Norman barons to 4,200 Victorian nobles and gentry. ‘In terms of territory, it seems likely that the notables owned a greater proportion of the British Isles than almost any other elite owned of almost any other country,’ writes the historian David Cannadine.

…

Or we can point to the fact that just thirty landowners own nearly half of West Berkshire (Chapter 1), or that fifteen landowners own almost all the moorland in the North York Moors (Chapter 9). Land ownership in England is astonishingly unequal, heavily concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite. Perhaps worse is how little has changed over the centuries. At the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, some 200 Norman barons owned half of England. Thanks to the miracle of trickle-down economics, that elite expanded over time – so that a mere eight centuries later, half of England lay in the hands of 4,000 aristocrats and members of the gentry. It’s certainly the case that the aristocracy subsequently declined from their late-Victorian heyday. For a while, between the 1920s and the 1970s, there was greater equality of land ownership in England as some of the old estates were broken up and a new generation of tenant farmers were able to buy their own farms.

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Alex Hyde-White

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, pensions crisis, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, working-age population

Though central banks are only supposed to lend to solvent but illiquid institutions, necessarily, in doing so, they are putting their judgment against that of the market. 27 In the United States, almost all of the hundreds of billions of bailout dollars went to help the banks and their bondholders and shareholders. A negligible amount went to help homeowners, even though the crisis had begun as a housing crisis. The administration and the Fed believed in trickle-down economics: throw enough money at the banks, and the whole economy will benefit. It would have been far better for the economy had they tried a larger dose of trickle-up economics: help the homeowners, and everyone will benefit. 28 The Troika, in effect, threatened to bankrupt Ireland if the government tried to make bondholders bear some of the costs of bank restructuring.

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., 393 in US, 35, 36, 88, 89–92 see also euro single-market principle, 125–26, 231 skilled workers, 134–35 skills, 77 Slovakia, 331 Slovenia, 331 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), 127, 138, 171, 229 small and medium-size lending facility, 246–47, 300, 301, 382 Small Business Administration, 246 small businesses, 153 Smith, Adam, xviii, 24, 39–40, 41 social cohesion, 22 Social Democratic Party, Portugal, 392 social program, 196 Social Security, 90, 91 social solidarity, xix societal capital, 77–78 solar energy, 193, 229 solidarity fund, 373 solidarity fund for stabilization, 244, 254, 264, 301 Soros, George, 390 South Dakota, 90, 346 South Korea, 55 bailout of, 113 sovereign risk, 14, 353 sovereign spreads, 200 sovereign wealth funds, 258 Soviet Union, 10 Spain, 14, 16, 114, 177, 178, 278, 331, 335, 343 austerity opposed by, 59, 207–8, 315 bank bailout of, 179, 199–200, 206 banks in, 23, 186, 199, 200, 242, 270, 354 debt of, 196 debt-to-GDP ratio of, 231 deficits of, 109 economic growth in, 215, 231, 247 gold supply in, 277 independence movement in, xi inequality in, 72, 212, 225–26 inherited debt in, 134 labor reforms proposed for, 155 loans in, 127 low debt in, 87 poverty in, 261 real estate bubble in, 25, 108, 109, 114–15, 126, 198, 301, 302 regional independence demanded in, 307 renewable energy in, 229 sovereign spread of, 200 spread in, 332 structural reform in, 70 surplus in, 17, 88 threat of breakup of, 270 trade deficits in, 81, 119 unemployment in, 63, 161, 231, 235, 332, 338 Spanish bonds, 114, 199, 200 spending, cutting, 196–98 spread, 332 stability, 147, 172, 261, 301, 364 automatic, 244 bubble and, 264 central banks and, 8 as collective action problem, 246 solidarity fund for, 54, 244, 264 Stability and Growth Pact, 245 standard models, 211–13 state development banks, 138 steel companies, 55 stock market, 151 stock market bubble, 200–201 stock market crash (1929), 18, 95 stock options, 259, 359 structural deficit, 245 Structural Funds, 243 structural impediments, 215 structural realignment, 252–56 structural reforms, 9, 18, 19–20, 26–27, 214–36, 239–71, 307 from austerity to growth, 263–65 banking union, 241–44 and climate change, 229–30 common framework for stability, 244–52 counterproductive, 222–23 debt restructuring and, 265–67 of finance, 228–29 full employment and growth, 256–57 in Greece, 20, 70, 188, 191, 214–36 growth and, 232–35 shared prosperity and, 260–61 and structural realignment, 252–56 of trade deficits, 216–17 trauma of, 224 as trivial, 214–15, 217–20, 233 subsidiarity, 8, 41–42, 263 subsidies: agricultural, 45, 197 energy, 197 sudden stops, 111 Suharto, 314 suicide, 82, 344 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), 91 supply-side effects: in Greece, 191, 215–16 of investments, 367 surpluses, fiscal, 17, 96, 312, 379 primary, 187–88 surpluses, trade, see trade surpluses “Swabian housewife,” 186, 245 Sweden, 12, 46, 307, 313, 331, 335, 339 euro referendum of, 58 refugees into, 320 Switzerland, 44, 307 Syria, 321, 342 Syriza party, 309, 311, 312–13, 315, 377 Taiwan, 55 tariffs, 40 tax avoiders, 74, 142–43, 227–28, 261 taxes, 142, 290, 315 in Canada, 191 on capital, 356 on carbon, 230, 260, 265, 368 consumption, 193–94 corporate, 189–90, 227, 251 cross-border, 319, 384 and distortions, 191 in EU, 8, 261 and fiat currency, 284 and free mobility of goods and capital, 260–61 in Greece, 16, 142, 192, 193–94, 227, 367–68 ideal system for, 191 IMF’s warning about high, 190 income, 45 increase in, 190–94 inequality and, 191 inheritance, 368 land, 191 on luxury cars, 265 progressive, 248 property, 192–93, 227 Reagan cuts to, 168, 210 shipping, 227, 228 as stimulative, 368 on trade surpluses, 254 value-added, 190, 192 tax evasion, in Greece, 190–91 tax laws, 75 tax revenue, 190–96 Taylor, John, 169 Taylor rule, 169 tech bubble, 250 technology, 137, 138–39, 186, 211, 217, 251, 258, 265, 300 and new financial system, 274–76, 283–84 telecoms, 55 Telmex, 369 terrorism, 319 Thailand, 113 theory of the second best, 27–28, 48 “there is no alternative” (TINA), 306, 311–12 Tocqueville, Alexis de, xiii too-big-to-fail banks, 360 tourism, 192, 286 trade: and contractionary expansion, 209 US push for, 323 trade agreements, xiv–xvi, 357 trade balance, 81, 93, 100, 109 as allegedly self-correcting, 98–99, 101–3 and wage flexibility, 104–5 trade barriers, 40 trade deficits, 89, 139 aggregate demand weakened by, 111 chit solution to, 287–88, 290, 299–300, 387, 388–89 control of, 109–10, 122 with currency pegs, 110 and fixed exchange rates, 107–8, 118 and government spending, 107–8, 108 of Greece, 81, 194, 215–16, 222, 285–86 structural reform of, 216–17 traded goods, 102, 103, 216 trade integration, 393 trade surpluses, 88, 118–21, 139–40, 350–52 discouragement of, 282–84, 299–300 of Germany, 118–19, 120, 139, 253, 293, 299, 350–52, 381–82, 391 tax on, 254, 351, 381–82 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, xv, 323 transfer price system, 376 Trans-Pacific Partnership, xv, 323 Treasury bills, US, 204 Trichet, Jean-Claude, 100–101, 155, 156, 164–65, 251 trickle-down economics, 362 Troika, 19, 20, 26, 55, 56, 58, 60, 69, 99, 101–3, 117, 119, 135, 140–42, 178, 179, 184, 195, 274, 294, 317, 362, 370–71, 373, 376, 377, 386 banks weakened by, 229 conditions of, 201 discretion of, 262 failure to learn, 312 Greek incomes lowered by, 80 Greek loan set up by, 202 inequality created by, 225–26 poor forecasting of, 307 predictions by, 249 primary surpluses and, 187–88 privatization avoided by, 194 programs of, 17–18, 21, 155–57, 179–80, 181, 182–83, 184–85, 187–93, 196, 197–98, 202, 204, 205, 207, 208, 214–16, 217, 218–23, 225–28, 229, 231, 233–34, 273, 278, 308, 309–11, 312, 313, 314, 315–16, 323–24, 348, 366, 379, 392 social contract torn up by, 78 structural reforms imposed by, 214–16, 217, 218–23, 225–38 tax demand of, 192 and tax evasion, 367 see also European Central Bank (ECB); European Commission; International Monetary Fund (IMF) trust, xix, 280 Tsipras, Alexis, 61–62, 221, 273, 314 Turkey, 321 UBS, 355 Ukraine, 36 unemployment, 3, 64, 68, 71–72, 110, 111, 122, 323, 336, 342 as allegedly self-correcting, 98–101 in Argentina, 267 austerity and, 209 central banks and, 8, 94, 97, 106, 147 ECB and, 163 in eurozone, 71, 135, 163, 177–78, 181, 331 and financing investments, 186 in Finland, 296 and future income, 77 in Greece, xi, 71, 236, 267, 331, 338, 342 increased by capital, 264 interest rates and, 43–44 and internal devaluation, 98–101, 104–6 migration and, 69, 90, 135, 140 natural rate of, 172–73 present-day, in Europe, 210 and rise of Hitler, 338, 358 and single currency, 88 in Spain, 63, 161, 231, 235, 332, 338 and structural reforms, 19 and trade deficits, 108 in US, 3 youth, 3, 64, 71 unemployment insurance, 91, 186, 246, 247–48 UNICEF, 72–73 unions, 101, 254, 335 United Kingdom, 14, 44, 46, 131, 307, 331, 332, 340 colonies of, 36 debt of, 202 inflation target set in, 157 in Iraq War, 37 light regulations in, 131 proposed exit from EU by, 4, 270 United Nations, 337, 350, 384–85 creation of, 38 and lower rates of war, 196 United States: banking system in, 91 budget of, 8, 45 and Canada’s 1990 expansion, 209 Canada’s free trade with, 45–46, 47 central bank governance in, 161 debt-to-GDP of, 202, 210–11 financial crisis originating in, 65, 68, 79–80, 128, 296, 302 financial system in, 228 founding of, 319 GDP of, xiii Germany’s borrowing from, 187 growing working-age population of, 70 growth in, 68 housing bubble in, 108 immigration into, 320 migration in, 90, 136, 346 monetary policy in financial crisis of, 151 in NAFTA, xiv 1980–1981 recessions in, 76 predatory lending in, 310 productivity in, 71 recovery of, xiii, 12 rising inequality in, xvii, 333 shareholder capitalism of, 21 Small Business Administration in, 246 structural reforms needed in, 20 surpluses in, 96, 187 trade agenda of, 323 unemployment in, 3, 178 united currency in, 35, 36, 88, 89–92 United States bonds, 350 unskilled workers, 134–35 value-added tax, 190, 192 values, 57–58 Varoufakis, Yanis, 61, 221, 309 velocity of circulation, 167 Venezuela, 371 Versaille, Treaty of, 187 victim blaming, 9, 15–17, 177–78, 309–11 volatility: and capital market integration, 28 in exchange rates, 48–49 Volcker, Paul, 157, 168 wage adjustments, 100–101, 103, 104–5, 155, 216–17, 220–22, 338, 361 wages, 19, 348 expansionary policies on, 284–85 Germany’s constraining of, 41, 42–43 lowered in Germany, 105, 333 wage stagnation, in Germany, 13 war, change in attitude to, 38, 196 Washington Consensus, xvi Washington Mutual, 91 wealth, divergence in, 139–40 Weil, Jonathan, 360 welfare, 196 West Germany, 6 Whitney, Meredith, 360 wind energy, 193, 229 Wolf, Martin, 385 worker protection, 56 workers’ bargaining rights, 19, 221, 255 World Bank, xv, xvii, 10, 61, 337, 357, 371 World Trade Organization, xiv youth: future of, xx–xxi unemployment of, 3, 64, 71 Zapatero, José Luis Rodríguez, xiv, 155, 362 zero lower bound, 106 ALSO BY JOSEPH E.

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Obviously, to fund the government, it is better to apply the lower of the two tax rates, not the higher. The notion that taxes might reduce the incentive to earn income and create jobs was hardly new. Adam Smith expressed the idea in the eighteenth century.6 Andrew Mellon, US treasury secretary from 1921 to 1932, was famous for his “trickle-down” economics, and, along with US president Calvin Coolidge (1923–29), successfully argued for reduction of income taxes that had remained high for a while after World War I. But then the Mellon name began to fade (outside of Carnegie-Mellon University), and the narrative lost its momentum. The story of the Laffer curve did not go viral in 1974, the reputed year that Laffer first introduced it.

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See also databases for studying narratives; searching digitized data Thaler, Richard, 277–78 Thatcher, Margaret, 42, 51 Theobald, Robert, 210 theory of mind, 63–64 The Theory of the Leisure Class (Veblen), 310n1 “They say that …,” 92 Think and Grow Rich (Hill), 122 Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life (Trump with Zanker), 150 Thompson, Anne Kinsella, 226, 285 ticker projector, 228–29 time and motion studies, 184 Tmall Genie (Alibaba), 8, 207 Tobias, Ronald B., 16 Tracy, Spencer, 201 traffic light, replacing policemen, 182–83 Trans-Lux Movie Ticker, 228–29 “trending now,” x trickle-down economics, 44 Triumph of the Will (film), 122 Trohan, Walter, 51 Trulia, 218 Trump, Donald J.: bigly and yuge coined by, 244; downplaying modesty and compassion, 150; gold standard and, 156, 173; modeling ostentatious living, 272; narrative of, xii, 225–26 Trump administration, less generosity toward the poor during, 272 Trump supporters, resembling Silverites, 162–63 Trump University, 226 trust, in business dealings, 101 trusts, public anger about, 181 tulip mania in 1630s, 4, 5 Tversky, Amos, 66 Twain, Mark, 124 Twitter: meme quickly going viral on, 88; retweeting of mostly false stories on, 96–97 Typhoid Mary, 20 tyranny of metrics, 75, 306n5 Uchitelle, Louis, 150 Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture (Aiden and Michel), 24 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 33 underconsumption theory, 187–92 Understanding the Process of Economic Change (North), 14 unemployment: artificial intelligence narrative and, 273; automation and, 199–200, 204; constant reminders of possibility of, 89; crime and, 141, 142; in depression during 1890s, 111; employee morale and, 147; gold standard and, 172; in Great Depression of 1930s, xiv, 111, 132, 141, 142, 143, 146–47, 172, 187, 189–91, 193; Kiplinger’s 1930 list of causes of, 130, 132; labor-saving machinery narrative and, xiv, 9, 130, 177–81, 187–88, 191–92; narratives focused on massive occurrence of, 129–31; Nazi Party’s rise in Germany and, 195; robotics and, 209; technology raising specter of, 8–9, 130; underconsumption theory and, 187–91.

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation by Chris Nodder

4chan, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, drop ship, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, game design, gamification, haute couture, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, late fees, lolcat, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Monty Hall problem, Netflix Prize, Nick Leeson, Occupy movement, Paradox of Choice, pets.com, price anchoring, recommendation engine, Rory Sutherland, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile

What’s interesting is that like the findings about wine appreciation, the average cyclist would probably actually be happier and more comfortable on a lower-end bike that was more forgiving in the corners and more compliant in its frame. So why does Specialized produce this model? The company has several reasons. First, there are people out there who’ll buy the bike just for its exclusivity. Second, there is a technological trickle-down effect that sees all the manufacturer’s other bikes benefitting from the research done on this one. Third is the psychological trickle-down effect on the bike-buying public’s perception of other models from the same company. Advertising the superbike brings brand awareness and knowledge that similar engineering is used to build the other bikes in the line, including the ones that cost only $1,800.

Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapshott

airport security, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, collective bargaining, complexity theory, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, if you build it, they will come, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, means of production, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, public intellectual, pushing on a string, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Yom Kippur War

He illustrated his reasoning by drawing a bell curve on a napkin, showing where the sweet spot might lie. The “Laffer curve” instantly became the hastily drawn device used by economists around Reagan to convince others that tax cuts would boost revenues. Sharply cutting income taxes, the Reaganites argued, would increase personal spending, which would in turn increase demand through a “trickle-down” effect on the whole economy. A third key element to Reaganomics, also promoted by Laffer, was “supply-side economics,” the notion that a booming economy could best be achieved by encouraging producers to supply more and cheaper goods by cutting industry regulations and corporate taxes rather than relying on “demand-led” growth spurred by Keynesian public spending.

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“Nor should the argument seem strange that taxation may be so high as to defeat its object,” Keynes had written in 1933, “and that, given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance than an increase of balancing the budget.” Keynes likened those who kept raising taxes to a manufacturer who, “wrapping himself in the rectitude of plain arithmetic,” kept raising his prices, even though no one was buying because prices were too high.61 The “trickle-down effect” had a Keynesian derivation too, drawing on the logic of Richard Kahn’s multiplier, that those who bought goods created jobs and more spending down the line. However, Reagan’s tax cuts made Hayek distinctly nervous. “On the scale on which it is being tried, I’m a little apprehensive,” he said in 1982.

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., 140 Tooke, Thomas, 74 “total effective circulation,” velocity as, 104–5 totalitarianism, xiii, 87, 91, 144–45, 150–51, 193–205, 218–19, 221, 241, 266, 287, 288–90 Tract on Monetary Reform, A (Keynes), 23, 24, 32, 41, 53, 115, 286 trade: —balance of, 32, 144, 245 —cycles of, 110–11, 112 —exports vs. imports in, 32, 131, 245 —free, 35–36, 61–62, 82–83, 144, 243, 267, 272 —global, 4 —Keynes’s views on, 61–64, 82–83, 86, 131 —money supply and, 73 —prices and, 23, 24 —tariffs on, 61–64, 82–83, 86, 247 trade unions, 33, 38, 39–40, 60, 187, 247, 268 Treasury, British, xii, 7–11, 24, 32, 57–58, 60–61, 62, 72, 82–83, 85–87, 129, 149–50, 191, 193 Treasury, U.S., 163, 236, 242–43, 280, 281 Treatise on Money, A (Keynes), 31, 53–57, 59, 66, 67, 70, 71, 75, 87–122, 123, 127–28, 132, 139, 146, 168, 172, 174, 317n trench warfare, 4, 6–7 “trickle-down” effect, 262–63 Trinity College, 5, 67 Truman, Harry S., 229, 230, 231, 274 trust funds, 52, 57–58 trusts, 166, 222, 244 Turati, Filippo, 114 unemployment: —benefits paid for (“dole”), 57–58, 60, 61, 134, 199–200, 237, 253, 283–84, 291 —consumer spending and, 81–82 —currency rates and, 31–32, 38–40, 56, 85–87 —economic impact of, 81–82, 85, 131, 133 —in Great Britain, 38, 56, 57–58, 81–82, 85–87, 128, 134, 178–79, 189, 191, 203, 260 —Hayek’s views on, xiii, 2, 70–71, 77–78, 108, 110, 143–44, 178, 184–85, 187, 194–95, 198–99, 257 —inflation and, 131, 159, 232, 238–39, 244, 263, 271 —job creation programs for, 49, 52, 57–58, 70–71, 129–30, 133, 134, 150–51, 163, 184–85, 187, 189, 228–30, 241–42, 272, 280 —Keynes’s views on, 2, 31–32, 52, 55, 56, 57–58, 70–71, 77–78, 81–82, 85, 94, 110, 123–24, 125, 127, 128, 129–37, 143–46, 148, 149–51, 153, 154–64, 170, 184–85, 187, 194–95, 198, 226, 296 —natural level of, 249 —prices and, 26, 41, 229–30 —public spending and, 26, 33–34, 49, 50, 77–78, 85, 260 —taxation and, 130, 163, 191 —in U.S., 128, 157, 170, 178–79, 199, 228–30, 232, 236–46, 251, 253, 261, 277, 282, 283 —wage levels and, 148 United Nations, 228, 229 United States: —banking system of, 28, 41, 84–85 —capitalism in, 46, 144–46 —domestic programs of, 157–70, 202, 205, 228, 231–32, 240, 248, 253, 256, 320n —economy of, 46, 52–53, 62, 106, 111, 141–42, 188–90, 228–46, 253–55, 261–65, 269–72 —foreign aid of, 136, 228 —Hayek’s influence in, xiii–xiv, 201–11, 234, 246, 247–65, 267–74 —inflation rate of, 230, 232, 236, 238–39, 242–46, 248, 251, 255, 261–62, 263, 267, 271 —infrastructure of, 159, 163, 189, 281 —interest rates in, 232, 235, 236, 246, 277, 280, 282, 284 —Keynesianism in, 146–47, 154–70, 188–90, 228–46, 276–84 —military spending of, 190, 231–34, 237, 241, 261, 264, 274, 276–78 —national security of, 233–34, 237, 276–77 —space program of, 234, 237 taxation in, 231, 262–63 —unemployment rate in, 128, 157, 170, 178–79, 199, 228–30, 232, 236–46, 251, 253, 261, 277, 282, 283 —Versailles Treaty and, 4–5, 155–57 —welfare programs in, 240, 264 —in World War II, 189–90, 229, 234 University of Chicago Press, 194, 201–2, 212, 216, 247 utilities, 291 utopias, 290–91, 292 value: —of currency, 22–23 —determination of, 5, 22–23 —of equipment (depreciation), 105–6, 118–19 —of goods, 74–75, 101, 117 —monetary, 22–23, 74–75, 120–21, 161 Vanity Fair, 157 “velocity of circulation,” 26, 33, 104, 136 Versailles Treaty, xii, xiii, 3, 4–5, 8–14, 17, 28, 56, 68, 84, 136, 137, 155–57, 158, 189 Vienna, xi–xiii, 1–3, 15–16, 17, 18–21, 27, 29–30, 40, 44, 111, 145, 214–15 Vienna, University of, 3, 15, 19, 20–22, 140 Vietnam War, 241 Viner, Jacob, 216, 221–22, 329n Volcker, Paul, 246, 261, 263, 286 voluntary savings, 104, 107 von Szeliski, Victor, 164 voting rights, 140 wages, 32, 38–39, 60, 63, 118, 119–20, 134, 135, 148, 188, 241 —controls on, 243–44 —increases in, 118, 119–20, 134 —production costs and, 119–20 Walras, Léon, 74 war debt, 4–5, 8–14, 21–22, 31–32, 84, 155–57, 206 warfare, 4, 137, 138, 190–92, 194, 229, 231–34 war on poverty, 240 war on terror, 276–78 “War Potential and War Finance” (Keynes), 191–92 Watergate scandal, 244 wealth accumulation, 56–57, 117–20, 127, 143–44, 149–50, 222, 241, 279, 287 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 218 Webb, Beatrice, 24, 64 Webb, Sidney, 24 Weber, Max, 21, 304n Wedgwood, Veronica, 212, 329n weights and measures, 201 Weimar Republic, 9 welfare state, 199–200, 201, 222, 227, 233, 234–35, 240, 249–50, 253, 258–61, 264, 267, 288–89, 295 Westminster Abbey, 226 wholesale prices, 62 “Why I Am Not a Conservative” (Hayek), 220 Wicksell, Knut, 42, 43, 48, 55, 74, 91, 100, 103, 120 “widow’s cruse,” 127 Wieser, Friedrich von, 20, 21–22 Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, 9 William Volcker Charities Fund, 211, 216, 218 Wilson, Woodrow, 4–5, 11, 28, 155–57, 161 Winant, John, 226 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3, 114, 300n Wolfson, Adam, 288–89, 292 Woolf, Leonard, 53, 226 Woolf, Virginia, 5, 53, 301n Wootton, Barbara, 202–3, 320n, 326n “Working of the Price Mechanism in the Course of the Credit Cycle, The” (Hayek), 76–78 World Bank, 136, 193 WorldCom, 278 World War I, 3–5, 16, 19–20, 22, 55–56, 68, 69, 72, 84, 155–57, 189 World War II, 136, 189–92, 229, 234 Wright, Quincy, 85 Yale University, 271 Yom Kippur War, 244 Yugoslavia, 16, 17 Zionism, 158 More praise for KEYNES HAYEK “An essential primer on the two men who shaped modern finance.”

Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn by Chris Hughes

"World Economic Forum" Davos, basic income, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, end world poverty, full employment, future of journalism, gig economy, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, new economy, oil rush, payday loans, Peter Singer: altruism, Potemkin village, precariat, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

But in the late 1970s, that pivotal moment when we changed some of the fundamental structures of our economy, the wealth share of the richest families in the United States began to grow, and the trend has not abated. Today, the top one percent of Americans controls nearly 40 percent of the wealth in our country—one and a half times more wealth than the entire bottom 90 percent own. The debunked “trickle-down economics” of the 1980s created the most unequal economy in over a century. We now know that prosperity in America does not flow from low taxes on the ultra-wealthy, but mostly from growth in consumer spending. When middle-class families make money, they spend money, fueling economic growth and improving the lives of everyone—the poor and the wealthy alike.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

A 35 percent tax on $2 million in income generates the same amount as a 70 percent tax on $1 million. Everybody wins! Theoretically. Because only the rich would definitely and immediately win. Wanniski made up a legitimate-sounding name—supply-side economics. For anyone else to benefit, what Democrats since the Depression had called trickle-down economics also had to operate—that is, the supply-side tax cuts (and deregulation) would have to make businesses boom and rich people profit so gloriously that some of that money trickled down to produce jobs and better paychecks for the little people. During the 1970s Bartley, Wanniski, and Laffer had regular dinners, often weekly, sometimes with Kristol, near the Journal’s offices in Manhattan’s financial district.

…

Focusing only on our American experience, when you compare what happened after federal taxes on the well-to-do were raised (by Clinton and Obama in their first terms) or cut (by George W. Bush), the result seems to have been the opposite—more overall growth and jobs after taxes went up, no trickle-down benefits after they went down. We’ve now had four decades to judge the failure of laissez-faire supply-side trickle-down economics for most Americans, yet the right sticks to its story, unrevised. As Republicans rewrote the tax code in 2017—cutting the tax rate on all income above half a million dollars significantly, cutting the effective tax rate on corporations by half—they insisted, just as they had all the previous times, that despite appearances, the rewrite was really all about helping ordinary people, creating jobs, and raising the incomes of the majority of Americans who, as even the Republican Speaker of the House admitted then, “live paycheck to paycheck” with “a lot of economic anxiety.”

SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

agricultural Revolution, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, call centre, clean water, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, Did the Death of Australian Inheritance Taxes Affect Deaths, disintermediation, endowment effect, experimental economics, food miles, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, market design, microcredit, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, power law, presumed consent, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, selection bias, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, urban planning, William Langewiesche, women in the workforce, young professional

In which we discuss compelling aspects of birth and death, though primarily death. The worst month to have a baby…The natal roulette affects horses too…Why Albert Aab will outshine Albert Zyzmor…The birthdate bulge…Where does talent come from?…Some families produce baseball players; others produce terrorists…Why terrorism is so cheap and easy…The trickle-down effects of September 11…The man who fixes hospitals…Why the newest ERs are already obsolete…How can you tell a good doctor from a bad one?…“Bitten by a client at work”…Why you want your ER doc to be a woman…A variety of ways to postpone death…Why is chemotherapy so widely used when it so rarely works?

…

Furthermore, these fatalities were more likely than usual to involve drunken and reckless driving. These facts, along with myriad psychological studies of terrorism’s aftereffects, suggest that the September 11 attacks led to a spike in alcohol abuse and post-traumatic stress that translated into, among other things, extra driving deaths. Such trickle-down effects are nearly endless. Thousands of foreign-born university students and professors were kept out of the United States because of new visa restrictions after the September 11 attacks. At least 140 U.S. corporations exploited the ensuing stock-market decline by illegally backdating stock options.

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

The worst consequences for the less advantaged occur not in gentrifying neighborhoods per se but in the far more disadvantaged neighborhoods where the great majority of the poor actually live. The way gentrification hurts the poor in these less advantaged places is through its trickle-down or ripple effects on housing prices. A 2015 study using detailed credit-score data to trace the impact of gentrification in Philadelphia between 2002 and 2014 showed how these trickle-down effects work.26 Overall, just 15 percent of the city’s census tracts experienced gentrification over that period. Like Lance Freeman, the researchers in this study found little evidence that direct displacement was a significant problem. The economic conditions of Philadelphia’s gentrifying neighborhoods improved substantially, with household incomes growing by 42 percent over the study period, compared to a 20 percent decline in non-gentrifying neighborhoods.

…

In New York City, for example, the share of rent-burdened households spending 30 percent or more of their pretax income on rent rose from 41 percent in 2000 to 52 percent in 2014. The share of rent-burdened households in gentrifying neighborhoods increased from 42 percent to 53 percent over the same period. It grew even more, from 46 percent to nearly 60 percent of households, in non-gentrifying neighborhoods, another indication of gentrification’s trickle-down effect. And the increase in housing prices hits hardest at the least advantaged households, more than three-quarters of which were rent burdened by 2014.27 The threat of displacement itself may be growing in some rapidly gentrifying cities as well. Over a quarter of neighborhoods in San Francisco are at risk for substantial displacement, according to a 2015 study.28 By 2030, the study predicts, displacement is likely to increase substantially more as the competition for scarce and ever more expensive space continues to accelerate.

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky

affirmative action, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, call centre, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, European colonialism, export processing zone, full employment, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, invisible hand, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, mass incarceration, new economy, open immigration, out of africa, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

In other words, the role of governments in the Third World should be to create optimum conditions for foreign investors, in hopes that investment will bring economic development that will eventually benefit the poor. In the United States these kinds of policies are often called “Reaganomics,” after Ronald Reagan, or “trickle-down economics”: by offering the rich greater ability to increase their wealth, benefits will eventually trickle down to the poor. Prior to the 1970s, most Latin American countries had followed a very different economic path, one that looked a bit more like the New Deal. The mid-century policies were different from the New Deal because Latin American countries in general had a low level of industrialization, and a lot of emphasis was placed on state-sponsored industrialization.

Having and Being Had by Eula Biss

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, Landlord’s Game, means of production, moral hazard, new economy, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, precariat, Robert Shiller, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, wages for housework

Looking at the map this morning, John noticed that affluence is the French word for the tributaries of a river. He wonders if the word once suggested a great river of wealth flowing into smaller affluences. Was it comforting for people to think of money replenishing itself in a regenerative cycle with the rains? Along with affluence, there are liquid assets, and trickle-down economics, and the rising tides that float all boats. Why is water so often a metaphor for money? Perhaps because we like to believe that our economic system is naturally occurring, not man-made. Maybe the movement of money feels inevitable if you imagine it as water, with only blameless gravity participating in the accumulation of wealth.

The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism by Steve Kornacki

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, computer age, David Brooks, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Future Shock, illegal immigration, immigration reform, junk bonds, low interest rates, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, power law, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

Tsongas, he charged, was protecting Wall Street and the wealthy at the expense of the middle class—just as Reagan and the Republicans had in the eighties. “We cannot put off fairness under the guise of promoting growth,” he said. Clinton had a big edge in campaign cash and now he put it to work, bombarding the airwaves with attack ads. The Tsongas plan, one of them declared, “smacks of trickle-down economics.” This was the language liberals had been using to attack Reagan Republicans for more than a decade. It was also the language liberals had been using to attack the DLC—and the language that Clinton had once assumed would be used against him in this campaign. But now he was the one running from the left, and it became his weapon as he rallied the old guard to thwart a hostile takeover of their party.

…

Could the Democratic Party as it had long been constituted continue to exist in a country like this? Was this what extinction looked like? It sounded too dramatic, perhaps, but in the midst of such devastation, who could really say? Crisscrossing the country just before the vote, Clinton had argued the GOP contract would return the country to the “trickle-down economics” of the Reagan years. Now the eighty-four-year-old Gipper, less than a week after revealing his diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease in an open letter to the public, spoke up one final time. “The American people have sent an unmistakable message about the direction they want our country to take,” he said in a statement.

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age by Virginia Eubanks

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, call centre, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, desegregation, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, game design, global village, index card, informal economy, invisible hand, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, microcredit, new economy, post-industrial society, race to the bottom, rent control, rent stabilization, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social contagion, South of Market, San Francisco, tech worker, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban planning, web application, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

What might a more just minimum wage and public assistance program take into account? Conversation (20 minutes) Myths of the minimum wage: Myth 1: Working steadily at a job is enough to stay out of poverty. Myth 2: Voodoo economics: the poor will get richer if the rich get richer, through the trickle-down effect. Myth 3: Poor folks in the United States are better off than pretty much everyone else in the world. Myth 4: Only the poor get public assistance. Break for Ice Cream (15 minutes) Play the Oprah Winfrey interview with Ben Cohen. (5 minutes) Myth 5: Good wages are bad business. What might be some of the benefits for businesses of paying good wages?

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But now, a household’s Appendix C 199 heaviest financial burden is housing. . . . The minimum wage doesn’t bring one worker with one child above that the poverty line line. The minimum wage is now a poverty wage. Myth 2: Voodoo economics: the poor will get richer if the rich get richer, through the trickle-down effect. Actually, the United States has one of the most extreme inequalities in wealth of the industrialized countries, and it’s getting worse, not better. Inequality is bad for your health. The United States is the richest nation on earth, but it is the only major industrialized nation not to assure health care for all its citizens, whether through a public, private, or mixed system.

The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street by Robert Scheer

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, business cycle, California energy crisis, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, do well by doing good, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mega-rich, mortgage debt, new economy, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics

The bulk of the benefits of these expansions go to the workers that receive them, not to the corporations that employ them. This may be an ingenious argument in defense of Wal-Mart’s profits abetted by Clinton’s economic policy, but it should have been a clue to Obama’s own views that the community organizer would pick the author of that rationalization to run the economic side of his campaign. It is trickle-down economics of the sort that would guide the banking bailout: Serve Wall Street a banquet, and hope the crumbs fall to distressed homeowners and the jobless. The die was cast in the weeks after his election, when Obama made it clear that he would not only appoint others from Robert Rubin’s team but also endorse an expansion of the enormously costly bailout of Citigroup.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

In a video series, Ryan said, “Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism, and this, to me, is what matters most.” But as Paul Krugman has written, the Republican elite is “too committed to an Ayn Rand story line about heroic job creators versus moochers to admit either that trickle-down economics can fail to deliver good jobs, or that sometimes government aid is a crucial lifeline.” The notion of altruism and cooperation is not something that Peter Thiel believes in. He is as confident as an Ayn Rand hero that “achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life.”

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

The casualties of this war are counted in lost jobs and lost dreams.”14 Perot’s self-assigned mission was to awaken his fellow citizens to the way that ill-conceived policies formulated by “out of touch” officials beholden to special interests were gutting the American economy. The rich were getting richer while the wages of ordinary people were stagnating. “That’s not fair,” he contended. Under President Bush and his predecessor, “we got into trickle down economics and it didn’t trickle down.” “Millions of jobs” were being shipped overseas, replaced, if at all, by minimum-wage work in the service sector. If the United States was to remain a great nation, Perot insisted, “we’ve got to go back to building and making things.”15 Perot’s participation alongside Bush and Clinton in three presidential debates in October 1992 offered him an opportunity to expound at length on his message.

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Pattern Language, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-fragile, bank run, big-box store, Black Swan, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, housing crisis, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

Francis Catholic Church (Brainerd, Minnesota), 212–213 Sales tax, 49–50 Samuelson, Paul, 91 San Diego, California, 164–167 San Francisco, California, xi Santa Ana, California, ix–xii “Second ring” suburbs, 94 Sedlacek, Tomas, 104 Shovel-ready building sites, 32 Shreveport, Louisiana, 219–221 Sidewalk maintenance, 183, 203 Silos, in local government, 174–176 Simply Complexity (Johnson), 12 Sinclair, Upton, 50 Single-family housing, 144–145 Site-specific infrastructure, 130 Small businesses: importance of, in wealth creation, 162–163 productivity of, 133–134 Social return on investment, 78–79 Speck, Jeff, 206 Spooky wisdom: defining, 4 of farmers, 85 in human habitats, 5–10 in incremental growth of cities, 26 “Sprawl Repair,” 168 Stagflation, 94 State government: debt taken on by, 113–114 funding of local government by, 95 impact of infrastructure on, 79 limiting of municipal debt by, 191 relationship of local and, 197–198 Stewart, Paul, 152 Strategic retreats, 108–109 Strongest Town competition, 161 Strong Towns (organization), 226 Strong Towns movement, 225–226 Strong Towns Podcast, 152, 214–215 Subsidiarity principle, 195–198 Suburban development, 27–30 as growth, 100 urban infrastructure supporting, 114–115 Suburban Retrofit, 168–169 Summers, Lawrence, 63, 78 Sussman, Ann, 8, 9 Symmetry, 9 Systems: anti-fragile, 4, 6 cities as complicated, 11–14 complex, adaptive, see Complex, adaptive systems critical, 182–183 fragile, 4 maintenance-free, 112–113 maintenance required to continue, 115 noncritical, 182 redundant, 182 T Taco John's, 132–134 Tactical Urbanism, 158–159 Tactical Urbanism (Lydon and Garcia), 158 Taleb, Nassim, 4, 59, 120–121, 193 Taxation, 46–50 Tax subsidies, for redevelopment, 133–134 Team approach, in local governments, 175–176, 179–180 Temporal discounting, 57 Tents, 160–161 Thigmotaxis, 8 “Tiny homes,” 163 Traditional city development: as lead by private investment, 34 as low-risk investments, 149 productivity of, 131–134, 140–141 as series of little bets, 16–18 Transit coordinator, 178t–179t Transit projects, 73–74 Transportation: human habitats build around, 1–3 in Santa Ana, California, xi–xii Triage, 119–120 Tribe (Junger), 216 Trickle-down economics, 101 Trump, Donald, 63, 207 U United States: development pattern in Costa Rica vs., 126–127 Urban3, 138, 140, 142, 161 U.S.dollar, as basis for trade, 90–91 Use-based codes, 193–194 V Value: of infrastructure, 70 Value capture approach, 76–77 Value per acre analysis, 135, 138–144 determining productivity with, 138–142 of high-productivity neighborhoods, 150–151 for Lafayette, Louisiana, 141–144 and personal preferences, 144–145 of small businesses, 162 W Walkability: “General Theory of Walkability,” 206 improving, in Shreveport, 220 Walkable City, How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time (Speck), 206 Walking: in communities, 203–206 finding gaps in cities by, 160 human habitats build around, 1, 2 in suburbs, 111–112 Walmart, financial productivity of, 139–140, 139t Walt Disney Corporation, 151 Washington, George, 108 Watches, 11 Wealth: growth vs., 102–104 illusion of, 57–60 Wealth creation, in place-oriented government, 176–180, 177t–179t White flight, 111 Why Liberalism Failed (Deneen), 211 Whyte, William “Holly,” 158 Wikipedia, 196 Women, in workplace, 95–96 The World Until Yesterday (Diamond), 58, 84 World War I, 86–87 World War II: confirmation bias of Pacific Islanders after, 183–185 economic stability following, 89–91 Z Zoning: and changes in building use, 137 as constraint on growth, 167–168 and neighborhoods, 21 neighborhoods atrophied by, 163 and urban renewal, 117 WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT Go to www.wiley.com/go/eula to access Wiley’s ebook EULA.

Affluenza: When Too Much Is Never Enough by Clive Hamilton, Richard Denniss

call centre, death from overwork, delayed gratification, experimental subject, full employment, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mega-rich, Naomi Klein, Own Your Own Home, post-materialism, post-work, purchasing power parity, retail therapy, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, wage slave, work culture

CHAPTER 11 1 Lambesis Agency 2004, L Style Report, 9th edn, <http://www.lstylereport.com> [11 January 2005]. 209 INDEX Abbott, Tony, 133 advertising, 4, 28, 36–40, 41, 43, 55, 61, 101, 109, 120, 126,172, 187 and neuroscience, 41–2 fake memories in, 46 children and, 47, 50–51 of breakfast cereals, 48–50, 150–1 of cars, 10, 45 of junk food, 51 of margarine, 43 of tobacco, 51–2, 125 of vitamins, 94 restrictions on, 188 use of nagging, 53–4 affluenza, defined, 3, 7 alcohol, 115–17, 180 annual leave see holiday leave anorexia, 16 appliances, 22–3, 37, 38 attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, 55 Aussie battler, 3, 133–4, 136, 139, 151, 180, see also politics Australian Labor Party, 3, 137–9, 151, 191 bankruptcy, 72–3, 175 banks, 12, 75–6, 77–80 barbecues, 23–4 210 INDEX Blair, Tony, 191 botox, 37, 128 brands, 23, 34, 38–40, 41–33, 45, 53, 55, 56, 110, 187 brand loyalty, 39, 55, 189 brand disloyalty, 190 see also advertising; marketing Bray, Robert, 66 Buddhism, 17 caesareans, 34 Calvinism, 16, 17 cars, 10, 13, 45 4WDs, 44–5, 188 see also advertising celebrity, need for, 56–7 children, 21 advertising and, 47–57, 150 and clothes, 33–4 as fashion accessories, 33 behavioural problems of, 55 financial calculus of having, 34–5, 142–5, impact of materialism on, 149–50 sexualisation of, 57 tinys, 52–3 tweens, 55–7 see also downshifting choice, alleged benefits of, 40–1 clothes, 13, 45, 166 see also children Coalition Government, 136–9 see also Liberal Party community, 95, 119, 146, 148, 183 compulsive shopping, 15, 61 see also oniomania conscious consumption, 166, 186–90 conspicuous consumption, 8, 88, 96 cosmetic surgery, 10, 57, 127–9, see also botox cosmetics, 37 Costello, Peter, 35, 141 credit cards, 10–2, 19, 72–81, 102, 103 see also debt debt, 71 passim, 137, 179 attitudes to, 74, 75 Debtors Anonymous, 61, 80–1 foreign debt truck, 82 home equity loans, 79–80 marketing of, 71, 75–7 national debt, 81–4 211 AFFLUENZA deferred happiness syndrome, 89–2, 98, 169 deferrers, 175–6 see also deferred happiness syndrome democratisation of luxury, 26 depression, 16, 38, 93, 114 deprivation, 3, 66, 192, see also poverty, hardship disease-mongering, 120–7 doorbuster sales, 78 downshifters characteristics of, 154–6 motivations of, 156–7, 158 passim new lifestyle of, 165–7 regrets of, 173 downshifting, 17, 152, 153 passim, 180 children and, 156, 159, 160, 166–7 defined, 153 for dogs, 33 politics of, 175, 183–6 reactions to, 176–70 drugs, 114–16, 118 Easterlin, Richard, 6 Eckersley, Richard, 148 economic growth, 3, 4–5, 62–3, 114, 118, 136, 141, 159, 185, 190, 193 environment, 111, 112, 157, 179, 190, 193, 194 evangelical Christianity, 182–3 family size, 20–1 federal election 2004, 3, 136–8 female sexual dysfunction, 121–3 feminism, 27 flexible work hours see work hours Frank, Robert, 9 Frey, Bruno, 63 full employment, 192 gratifiers, 175 growth fetishism, viii, 18, 142, 193 Guevara, Che, 28 happiness, 58, 63–4, 113, 118, 127, 146, 152, 175–6 hardship imagined, 64 genuine, 66 212 INDEX Hayek, Friedrich, 186 health, 113, 156, 157, 164, 166, 179, 193 see also work hours hedonic treadmill, 6, 58, 184 holiday leave, 87, 88, 93 Hood, Robin, 190 houses, 13, 20, 60, 101 size of, 20, 21–2, 37 prices of, 20, 21–2, 134, 137, 179 Howard, John, 82, 138, 141, 142 Idell, Cheryl, 53 identity, 13–4, 45 imports, 73, 83–4 incomes, 4, 58–9, 112 Indigenous Australians, 113 intermittent husband syndrome, 91 karoshi, 92 Kasser, Tim, 14 Klein, Naomi, 38 Latham, Mark, 137, 138 Liberal Party, 136, 138, 139, 151 Luis Vuitton, 9, 28 luxury fever, 8–10, 12, 19, 135, 143, 178 luxury goods, 9–10, 13, 16, 19, 21, 26, 127, 170 Mandelson, Peter, 191 marketing, 13, 28, 37–8, 42, 45, 47, 53, 104, 110–1, 118, 120, 126, 179 see also advertising materialism, 14–5, 17, 47, 55, 89, 119, 154, 184 and values, 146–52 meningococcal disease, 120 middle class, 8–9, 59, 74, 136 middle-class welfare, 139-42, 180 Mill, John Stuart, 138, 186 money, 5, 7, 11, 16–7, 19, 58, 63, 67–8, 80, 97, 98–9, 103, 107, 112, 120, 139, 143–4, 148, 152, 159, 166, 171, 175–7, 178, 187 hunger for, 6, 17, 18, 137, 146, 180, 183–4 see also debt money coma, 80 Moynihan, Ray, 121, 123 213 AFFLUENZA needs, 4, 7, 29, 59–63, 65, 66, 100, 147, 148 neoliberalism, 7, 17, 36, 39–40, 79, 138 as new form of oppression, 186 of relationships, 182 of tax cuts, 136, 139 of the Aussie battler, 133–5, 151 of welfare, 139, 140, 141, 180 of wellbeing, 193–4 progressive, 181, 182 pornography, 151 post-materialism, 4, 155, 157, 184 poverty, 18, 181, 190–2 poverty line, 66–7 presenteeism, 94 privatisation, 40 psychology, role in marketing, 36–41, 46, 51, 53–4, 61 obesity, 118 obsolescence, 110 oniomania, 15–6 see also compulsive shopping Olsen twins, 57 O’Neill, Jessie, 7 ovens, 22–3 overconsumption, 7, 19 passim, 72, 96, 122, 178 overwork see work hours Pavlov, Ivan, 41, 47 plastic bag levy, 103 pets, 28–33 humanisation of, 30, 33 pharmaceutical companies, 120–1, 126 Pocock, Barbara, 98 politics, 60–1, 66, 119, 183 conservative, 144, 181, 190 of choice, 168, 172 relationships, 14, 81, 97, 179, 193, 194 relationship debts, 175 see also work hours retail therapy, 16, 100–1 retirement anxiety, 92, 173–4 right-hand ring, 27 Ritalin, 118 Roberts, Kevin, 39 saving, 71, 82 see also debt 214 INDEX Schor, Juliet, 48 sea change, 153, 155 see also downshifting self-storage industry, 25, 102 social anxiety disorder, 124–6 status, 170 Stutzer, Alois, 63 suffering rich, 63 sunglasses, 25–6 television, 9, 21, 22, 60, 183, 188 lifestyle programs, 37 sales, 24–5 Trapaga, Monica, 49–50 trickle down theory, 191 twin deficits theory, 83 values, 180–3 see also materialism Veblen, Thorstein, 8 Vidal, Gore, 6 voluntary simplicity, 154, 187 see also downshifting wasteful consumption, 100 passim, 179, 190, 194 and guilt, 106–8, 112 wealth, 81–2 whitegoods, 23 see also appliances wellbeing, 14, 40, 54, 58, 113, 115, 118, 142, 163, 190 wellbeing manifesto, 193, 217–24 work hours, 81, 91, 95–6, 158, 161, 163, 174, 179 and children, 90–1 excessive, 85–9, 158 impact on communities, 95–7 impact on health, 90–4, 122 impact on relationships, 85, 90, 91, 97–9, 122, 149 working class, 8–9 workophiles, 87 215 A political manifesto for wellbeing Preamble Australians are three times richer than their parents and grandparents were in the 1950s, but they are not happier.

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

One migrant returning from Shanghai wrote, “It was a leap from post- to pre-modernism, from the 21st century back into the medieval world.”1 Statistics actually matter little amid such volatility. As Mark Twain said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Touting economic growth percentages, for example, without taking into account population growth and resource consumption, makes a mockery of any meaning numbers might have. Trickle-down economics doesn’t work in third world–sized populations. Ethiopia has eighty-five million people today but is growing by almost two million per year. Many Arab and African states have little idea how to manage populations that are so much larger than only several decades ago, so they barely even try.

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

He addressed the questions of social justice that arose from this—questions of what he called “the fair distribution of brains”—given that those in a position to afford enhanced brains were likely to be those people already occupying an elite position within society. His suggestion, though, was that less intelligent people would wind up benefiting more from enhancement technologies than those who were already very intelligent, and that the overall effects of increased general intelligence would inevitably benefit society as a whole—a kind of trickle-down economics of intelligence. All of this—the setup, the situation—was utterly familiar to me, and yet utterly strange. I had lately abandoned the sinking ship of an academic career for the hardly less precarious vessel of freelance writing. I had used up several years of my unextended life span getting a PhD in English literature, only to confirm my suspicion that a PhD in English literature was never going to lead me to the promised land of actual employment.

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, off grid, old-boy network, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, performance metric, pez dispenser, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, science of happiness, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

By 2016 India was vying with China as the fastest-growing large economy on earth.7 In a 2010 speech to the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of parliament, Jagdish Bhagwati, a prominent and rambunctious Indian economist with a twinkle of mischief in his eye, praised the impact of growth on the life of ordinary Indians, some 200 million of whom he said had been lifted out of poverty. The architects of liberal reform, he said, had never intended to create growth for growth’s sake. Rather growth was viewed as an enabler, a means of attacking poverty. He denied that such policies had anything to do with the discredited trickle-down economics popularized by Ronald Reagan with his aggressive tax cuts for the rich. Instead, he told parliament, growth was “a strategy for pulling the poor out of poverty through gainful employment, not as an end in itself.” Bhagwati’s position was different from that of another prominent Indian economist, Amartya Sen, recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize for economics and a contemporary of Bhagwati’s at Cambridge back in the 1950s.

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton

active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game

See also BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) nations rust belt, 99 property rights, 68 prosperity, 2–4, 16, 26–27, 64, 132–33, 146, 152, 154–58, 164, 185n4 protectionism, 13, 149–52 public sector workforce, 17–18, 115, 127 salaries, 55, 59, 71, 78, 85, 114, 117, 118, 118–19, 120, 123, 176n9 Salzman, Harold, 37 Samsung, 95 Samuelson, Paul, 152 Index Saez, Emmanuel, 116, 125 safety net, 12, 24 Saudi Arabia, 30 Savery, Thomas, 66 Saxenian, Anna Lee, 38 STEM (science, technology, engineering, or math) subjects, 36–40, 39, 45, 153, 155 Stembridge, Bob, 45 Schneider, Craig, 79 Schultz, Theodore, 16–17, 166n8 Schumpeter, Joseph, 113 scientific management, 8, 65–66, 69, 71–72, 76, 80–81, 160 Stimpson, Herbert, 69–71 stock options, 159, 162 Summers, Lawrence, 115, 126 supply chains, 40, 77, 104–5 supply side economics, 17 Scientific Office Management, 72 Scott, Robert, 108–9, 112 self-interest, 4, 24, 26, 40, 156 self-regulation, 13 surveillance, 74, 174n33 Sweden, 124–25 symbolic-analytic services, 15 self-reliance, 19 Sennett, Richard, 142 talented workers, 25–26 Tate, Jay, 65–66 Serco, 115 service industries, 50, 73–80, 109, 152, 170–71n2 tax policies, 125, 162 Taylor, Fredrick Winslow, 8, 65–66, 68–69, 71–72 Shanghai Nanotechnology Promotion Center, 44 technology, 166n3 technology transfer, 41 shareholders, 67, 98, 104, 106, 124–25, 159, 162 Shierholz, Heidi, 122, 180n25 shipping containers, 57–58 telecommunications industry, 53–54, 61–62, 107 Temesek Holdings, 42 Shukla, Rajesh, 130 Silicon Valley, 39, 163 Thatcher, Margaret, 4, 24, 125 time and motion studies, 69, 71 Simmel, Georg, 137 Singapore, 38, 42, 158 Singh, Manmohan, 33–34 Time magazine, 145 Times newspaper group, 95 trade barriers, 99 skilled workforce, 25, 47–50, 84–87, 90–92, 127, 166n3, 170n44. See also high-skill, trade unions, 110, 125, 160 transaction costs, 107 low-wage workforce Smith, Adam, 16, 67, 76, 81–82, 166n3 social amnesia, 163 transnational companies, 3, 36, 40–41, 49–50, 52, 87, 98–100, 107, 112 trickle down economics, 24 social capital, 134–35 social conflict, 146 trust relations, 107 Tulgan, Bruce, 177n25 social congestion, 135–36, 139, 146 social inequalities, 148, 162 social justice, 3, 17, 27, 64, 146, 148, 150, unemployment, 24, 31, 41, 47, 92, 114, 118, 119, 136–37, 163 152, 154, 160–64, 185n4 social mobility, 12, 17, 34 socialism, 187n31 soft currencies, 140 software, 72, 74, 77, 79–80, 100, 114–15, 175n38.

Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Atul Gawande, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, estate planning, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, gamification, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, hive mind, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Lyft, new economy, Parkinson's law, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, women in the workforce, work culture

During the Reagan/Thatcher era, the working world was transformed once more, not as extensively as was seen during the Industrial Revolution, but through an aggressive heightening of the attitudes toward labor that had been evolving for more than a hundred years. The United States began to follow policies based on so-called trickle-down economics: the idea that growth in income and wealth for the highest earners in a society will also help the poor and middle class because the money will “trickle down” from the top. This was also the era during which the belief in constant growth really took hold. The health of national economies was measured in terms of GDP (gross domestic product), and the value of a stock was often heavily based on forecasts of profit growth instead of stability or resilience.

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency by Roger L. Martin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, cloud computing, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, High speed trading, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Phillips curve, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The future is already here, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, uber lyft, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

See educators teaching See also educators certainty, 170–173, 181, 185 integrative approach to, 174 reductionism, 173–178 technology, 65, 66, 88–89 tenure-based voting rights, 157–159 theorizing, 178–179 Third Congressional District of Maryland, 202, 203 third-party candidates, 201–202 3G Capital, 123–124, 126, 187 tightly coupled systems, 106–107 Tilly, Charles, 192, 194 time-and-motion studies, 42 time horizons, 155–159 Tobin, James, 92 Tobin tax, 92, 103 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 198–199 Ton, Zeynep, 124–126 total quality management, 43 Toyota Production System, 43 Toys “R” Us, 97–98, 99, 101 trade free, 41–42, 56, 63, 66, 150–152 productive friction in, 150–152 trade barriers, 150 trade policy, 56, 150, 151 Trader Joe’s, 125 trade wars, 41 trading technology, 88–91 training, 125 transaction costs, 106 trickle-down economics, 161 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), 138, 144 two-sided markets, 152–153 Uber, 192 unemployment, 24 United States, metaphor for, 26 University of Chicago, 24 US Census Bureau, 4 US Constitution, 40 US economy achieving balance in, 97–114 efficiency in, 63 as efficient machine, 21–44, 94, 100, 210 gaming the system and, 84–94 growth of, 33–38 imbalances in, 1–17 models of, 22–25 as natural system, 77–94 of 1970s, 5–12, 24 proxies in, 45–57 sectors, 22 user-experience (UX) design, 180 value creation, 130 Verizon, 53–54 voter registration, 205–206, 207 voters, 201–206 Voters Not Politicians, 204 wage growth, 9, 10, 68 wages, 67–70, 125, 150 Wagner School, 180 Wallace, George, 201 Wallenstein Feed & Supply (WFS), 133–134 Washington Mutual, 137 Waste Management Inc.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Third, some might argue that this skewed allocation of the gains from growth is temporary. The major principle of Reaganomics is that by freeing up business to maximize profitability, wealth will be created, which—ultimately—will benefit all. If you are old enough to remember the beginning of the Reagan era, you’ll recall that this was once called “trickle-down economics.” Well, thirty years on, most families are still waiting for trickle down to deliver. It’s Not Reaganomics, It’s Globalization Another argument is that globalization and outsourcing of jobs, not Reaganomics, are responsible for weak wages. But as I noted previously, this argument is belied by the experience of the family capitalism countries.

…

about, 25, 35–37, 65, 105, 146, 149 Adam Smith was the antithesis of, 111 Alan Greenspan and, 36, 81–82, 85, 119, 219, 387 Atlas Shrugged, 35 The Fountainhead, 35 Milton Friedman and 102–4, 205 Pearlstein, Steven (Washington Post journalist) on, 36 Phillips-Fein, Kim on, 35 philosophy of narcissism, self-absorption and pseudoscientific social Darwinism, 37, 40, 102, 104, 111 Reagan and Rand’s philosophy, 35–36, 66 Reaganomics and, 35–37, 65, 104–5, 149 Rappaport, Alfred (professor), 101 Rauner, Felix (University of Bremen), 334 Rawls, John, 267, 289, 401 Rayment, Paul, 64 Reagan, Ronald (President) 33, 37 big government threatening, 181–84 budget spending and deficits, 185, 204, 207–8 deregulation and donations from executives, 32 Greenspan, Alan, 35, 81 national debt, tripled the, 42, 207, 211 savings and Loan crisis, 29 wildcat banker as, 200, 212 Reagan era Adam Smith’s capitalism, rejection of, 64, 104, 149 attitudes towards employees and investors, 115–21 Australia, rejection of, 58 borrowing and spending during, 184–6, 201–06 class warfare, 272–73 corporate philanthropy rejected by, 105 corporate pay-for-performance, collapse of, 135–37 credit bubble, leverage during, 41, 42, 105, 210–211, 215, 217–9 greatest credit bubble in history, 201 debt crisis created by, 210–11 deferred prosecution of, 88–89 deindustrialization, 347, 381–400 deregulation of electricity generation and Enron, 72 dysfunctional corporate governance, 27–28, 127–32, 398–400 economic mobility decline, 291–96 employee protection against arbitrary dismissal, 419 financialization of America, 77, 383–86 low-wage model in America fails in Europe, 246–50 manufacturing jobs and lost multiplier impacts, 389–92 monetary policy manipulated for political gain, 219–21 myths of Reaganomics, 225–42, 288–91 pseudoscientific rationale, 126 subprime home mortgages, 68–69 supply-side economics, 225–26 taxes alternative minimum tax, 194 lower on corporations, 276 payroll tax, 195–96 relaxed enforcement of, 275–76 tax structure, flat, 190–4 trickle-down economics, 10 Wall Street fraud, failure to punish, 87–88 Reaganomics. See also corporate governance; family capitalism; Friedman, Milton; Greenspan, Alan; Reagan era; Red Queens; shareholder capitalism antigrowth, 163, 373, 398, 428 growth ceiling, 400 management behavior is anti-growth, 373 big government spending, 41, 65, 184–87 borrowing and spending, 201–4 Cold War, exploited the, 32 corporate governance is America’s Achilles’ Heel, 40, 393, 441–2 credit crises of 2007/2008 and, 242 culture of self-absorption, 37, 46, 48 “deficits don’t matter,” 41–42 economic growth slowed by, 213 eleven characteristics of, 37–45 Feldstein, Martin, 34, 123, 178 globalization is blamed for the sins of, 230–32 Hubbard, Glen, 34, 460 impact of, 4–7 industrial performance, erosion in relative, 177, 398 infrastructure investment has been starved, government, 396 Jensen, Michael C.

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification by Peter Moskowitz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, do well by doing good, drive until you qualify, East Village, Edward Glaeser, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land bank, late capitalism, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, private military company, profit motive, public intellectual, Quicken Loans, RAND corporation, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Dan Gilbert’s favorite business phrase—“Do well by doing good”—seems to be the official slogan of the new Detroit, embraced by hundreds of young white entrepreneurs who believe they’re not only making money but helping rescue an entire city. That’s why speaking with Midtown Inc.’s Sue Mosey was refreshing. She can talk about the profit motive of the new Detroit without resorting to euphemisms for trickle-down economics. The biggest problem, Mosey told me, is that there is practically no city government left in Detroit. Midtown Inc., which has no accountability to anyone except those who fund it (developers and nonprofits such as the Kresge Foundation), has become the de facto department of planning for its section of the city.

China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle by Dinny McMahon

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, crony capitalism, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, industrial robot, invisible hand, low interest rates, megacity, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban planning, working-age population, zero-sum game

., 35 rules, relationship to, 23–24, 103, 109 S salt market, 144–47, 151–52, 157–61 savings, 123, 176–77 Schultz, Howard, 197 shadow banking, 105–12, 135–36 Shandong Province, 37, 138 Shandong Ruyi Science and Technology Group, 138 Shang Fulin, 130 Sharma, Ruchir, xiii Shenfu, 72 Shenyang, 125–26 Shenzhen,180 Shi Changxu, 27–28, 31–32 Shiyan, 39–40 short selling, of Chinese companies, 4 Sichuan Province, 25, 45, 150–51 silver mining, corruption in, 1–6, 15–18 Silvercorp Metals, 3–6, 15–18 Sinomach, 33–35 skyscrapers, 125–28 smartphones, 67 social stability, 12, 36, 208–11 commitment to, 137 corruption, 150 land expropriations, 76 threats to, 153–54, 155 Soros, George, xv South Carolina, 168 South Korea, 47 Springs, Leroy, 166 Stahl, Lesley, 66 Starbucks, 197 state vs. private interests blurring of, 11–13 police and, 5, 6–7 state-owned firms, 6–7 China vs. elsewhere, 30–35 debt held by, 31–32 housing for, 84–86 lending and, 130 purpose of, 28 steel industry, 43, 183–86 stimulus, xiii-xiv stimulus (economic), 80, 108, 124 subprime mortgage crisis, 69–73, 86–87, 108, 111, 194 subsidies, 38 land, 41–42 paper, 184 steel industry, 184 Subsidies to Chinese Industry (Haley), 184 Sun Liping, 150, 155–56 supply-side structural reform, 175–78 Switzerland, pen industry, 179–80 T Taobao, 206 Tasmania, 191–93, 204 taxes, 19–21 construction, 65–66 incentives, 67 infrastructure, 73 land development, 92 Liaoning Province, 21–24 salt and, 144–45 urbanization and, 54–56 zombie companies, 36–37 teddy bears, lavender, 191–93 Tencent, 180 textiles manufacturing, 166–70, 173–75, 188–90 threats. See enforcers and enforcement Three Gorges Dam, 77, 128 Tieling, 49–51, 54–56, 61–65, 68–69, 71–72 tourism, 72 transportation growth of, 52–53 as obstacle, 45, 170 salt, 145 trickle-down economics, 175–76 Trump, Donald, 185–86 trust companies, 108–9 U Under the Dome (documentary), 154, 156–57 Unirule, 38 United States challenges working in, 173–75 Chinese protectionism, 185–87 cotton, 174 exports to China, 196 global economic activity, 195 infrastructure, 70 iodine deficiency, 146 job loss to China, 167, 185 land prices, 169–70 shadow banking, 135–36 steel industry, 184 subprime mortgage crisis, 93, 111 textiles manufacturing, 166–67 vested interests, 156 unregulated lending, 100, 105–12, 132 urbanization, 53–54 ambitions, 58 consumerism, 193–97 housing stock, 90 view of, 59–68 See also ghost cities V vested interests, 149–51, 154–55, 161–62, 211 Volvo, 40 voodoo economics, 175–76 W wages.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

All told, they contribute the vast majority of the labour and resources that go into the global economy.35 And yet in return for this they receive literally pennies. The poorest 60% of humanity receives only about 5% of total global income.36 Over the course of the past four decades since 1980, their daily incomes have increased by an average of about 2 cents per year.37 Forget ‘trickle-down’ economics – this is barely even a vapour. By contrast, the vast majority of new income from global growth has gone to the world’s rich. The richest 1% alone capture $19 trillion in income every year, which represents nearly a quarter of global GDP.38 That adds up to more than the GDP of the ‘poorest’ 169 countries combined – a list that includes Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Argentina, all of the Middle East and the entire continent of Africa.

Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen by James Suzman

access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, clean water, discovery of the americas, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, full employment, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, means of production, Occupy movement, open borders, out of africa, post-work, quantitative easing, rewilding, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, We are the 99%

Smith believed that trade and enterprise in pursuit of personal enrichment and unburdened by regulatory interference ensured the fairest and most effective “distribution of the necessaries of life” and so advanced the interests of society. As much as the inequality associated with unfettered capital growth suggests that the reason Smith’s hand is invisible is because it isn’t there, the metaphor continues to be invoked by enthusiastic advocates of the free market and repackaged as trickle-down economics. Yet, ironically, hunter-gatherer egalitarianism suggests that even if Smith’s hidden hand is nonsense, his belief that the sum of individual self-interests can ensure the fairest distribution of the “necessaries of life” was right, albeit in a very different way from how he imagined it.

The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job by John Tamny

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, cloud computing, commoditize, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Downton Abbey, future of work, George Gilder, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Palm Treo, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

With the purses growing and sponsorships from name-brand companies like Geico, Red Bull, and HTC, budgets for the major North American teams are in the three-to-five-million-dollar range.9 At this point, you’ve probably already guessed that the surging interest of fans and corporate sponsors in video gaming is having a “trickle down” effect. “Video game coach” is now a career for some. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2015, “Some e-sports coaches make between $30,000 and $50,000 a year.” John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s official historian, acknowledged that compensation for video game coaches is in line with that of minor league baseball coaches.10 Imagine where compensation will head if the phenomenon grows.

All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work by Joanna Biggs

Anton Chekhov, bank run, banking crisis, Bullingdon Club, call centre, Chelsea Manning, credit crunch, David Graeber, Desert Island Discs, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial independence, future of work, G4S, glass ceiling, industrial robot, job automation, land reform, low skilled workers, mittelstand, Northern Rock, payday loans, Right to Buy, scientific management, Second Machine Age, Sheryl Sandberg, six sigma, Steve Jobs, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, wages for housework, Wall-E

They’ve given us all this money and we’re doing great,” but that hides the overall picture’ of what’s happening across the country. He paused. ‘The government’s taken a stance where they’re making cuts to areas that are already hurting, and protecting all the people who already have enough money. That’s the Conservative way of doing things. Trickle-down economics, which we know doesn’t work.’ If politics runs on a five-year electoral cycle, science runs on a twenty-year cycle. ‘Nobody really thinks that far ahead any more,’ Vijayaraghavan said. In the twentieth century, industry developed new technologies in basic labs such as Bell Labs in the USA and the IG Farben in Germany, but as companies looked to increase profit in an increasingly global marketplace in the 1970s, they began to rely on publicly funded universities for research.

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, interest rate swap, laissez-faire capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Even after the rich almost destroyed the entire global economy through their sheer unrestrained greed and stupidity, we can’t shake the peasant mentality that says we should go easy on them, because the best hope for our collective prosperity is in them creating wealth for us all. That’s the idea at the core of trickle-down economics and the basis for American economic policy for a generation. The entire premise—that the way society works is for the productive rich to feed the needy poor and that any attempt by the latter to punish the former for their excesses might inspire Atlas to shrug his way out of town and leave the rest of us on our own to starve—should be insulting to people so proud to call themselves the “water carriers.”

Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Food sovereignty, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, late capitalism, means of production, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, Philip Mirowski, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, shareholder value, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, young professional, zero-sum game

Thus, while neoliberalism formally promises to liberate the citizen from the state, from politics, and even from concern with the social, practically, it integrates both state and citizenship into serving the economy and morally fuses hyperbolic self-reliance with readiness to be sacrificed. 212 u n d o in g t h e d e m o s The “shared sacrifice” discourse of neoliberalism’s austerity epoch differs sharply from that accompanying the “trickle-down” economics of the 1980s. The Reagan-Thatcher era promised that wealth generated by the giants would benefit the small; today’s sacrificial citizen receives no such promise. Economic ends are delinked from the general welfare of the population but, in addition, as citizens are integrated into these ends via governance, they may be sacrificed to its needs, vicissitudes, and contingencies in a nation, just as they are in a firm.

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh

call centre, financial independence, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, late fees, Mason jar, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor

Once they paid off the wholesale supplier, the county permit, and the family help, they had a fortune of a few thousand dollars. It would come in handy, as Mom’s belly was large with a baby that would be born in the fall. Mom and Dad had their first fireworks stand the year Reagan was reelected—selling American pride in a field next to a two-lane blacktop while think tanks sold “trickle-down” economics. It’s funny that both of their children were born weeks before an election that Reagan won. We would be able to map our lives against the destruction of the working class: the demise of the family farm, the dismantling of public health care, the defunding of public schools, wages so stagnant that full-time workers could no longer pay the bills.

There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years by Mike Berners-Lee

air freight, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cloud computing, dematerialisation, disinformation, driverless car, Easter island, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, fake news, food miles, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jevons paradox, land reform, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, neoliberal agenda, off grid, performance metric, post-truth, profit motive, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, urban planning

The metric incorporates four core principles: wellbeing, inequality, happiness and sustainability. http://happyplanetindex.org/ Bioregional’s One Planet Living on the other hand encompasses ten principles, with a greater breadth of environmental issues, including: health and happiness; equity and local economy; culture and community; land and nature; sustainable water; local and sustainable food; materials and products; travel and transport; zero waste; zero carbon. https://www.bioregional.com 6 For a powerful and entertaining illustration of the failings of the planned economy, try Francis Spufford’s novel Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties Soviet Dream. 7 Common Cause: The Case for Working with our Cultural Values, Tom Crompton, 2010: https://tinyurl.com/ccTomCromp 8 See, for example, this piece by Max Lawson, Head of Advocacy and Public Policy, Oxfam Great Britain, on the World Economic Forum website http://tinyurl.com/gsmfx6x. See also Wikipedia’s posts on supply side economics and trickle-down economics. 9 Credit Suisse 2017 Global Wealth Report https://tinyurl.com/globalhwealth By wealth, we mean the sum of all assets; house, money, pension fund, clothes, toothbrush – the lot. 10 See endnote 9 above. 11 Using data compiled by on Giving What We Can from https://tinyurl.com/meanmedianwealth as well as Credit Suisse.

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement by David Graeber

Bretton Woods, British Empire, company town, corporate personhood, David Graeber, deindustrialization, dumpster diving, East Village, feminist movement, financial innovation, George Gilder, John Markoff, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, Lao Tzu, late fees, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, planetary scale, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, working poor

I still remember during Ronald Reagan’s administration being startled by exchanges like this one on TV: ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Our main priority is to enact cuts in the capital gains tax to stimulate the economy. INTERVIEWER: But how would you respond to a host of recent economic studies that show this kind of “trickle-down” economics doesn’t really work? That it doesn’t stimulate further hiring on the part of the wealthy? OFFICIAL: Well, it’s true, the real reasons for the economic benefits of tax cuts remain to be fully understood. In other words, the discipline of economics does not exist to determine what is the best policy.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Trump was introduced into the corrupt world he now inhabits and developed the tactics he now employs to evade consequences, just as the world itself was changing to reward white-collar criminals like himself. In the 1980s, he became symbolic of this era and its rapacious greed, but the extent to which he showcases wealth as raw power is distressingly literal. He was not merely an outcome of the economic restructuring ushered in by Reagan’s union-busting and trickle-down economics, and he was not merely a brazen player in the corporate raiding and glitzy rebuilding of New York City. Trump may have been involved in an unparalleled and inexplicable pact with the US government to remain above the law, one that was likely buffered by criminal actors and hostile foreign states.

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

“There are PLENTY of these opportunities to come in the future, just pay attention, be patient and be even more retarded,” wrote another. “Exactly! Like next week’s big opportunity: GME,” responded another poster, using GameStop’s ticker symbol. He had no idea how right he was. Chapter 13 Rise of the Apes Who said trickle-down economics is dead? Two months after the meme-stock squeeze, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund received news that a member of the WallStreetBets subreddit had symbolically adopted a baby gorilla, Urungano. In the next six days, there was a torrent of thirty-five hundred further adoptions from the group raising $377,000.

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game