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Monopoly’s New Era
Monopoly’s New Era
NEW YORK – For 200 years, there have been two schools of thought about what determines the distribution of income – and how the economy functions. One, emanating from Adam Smith and nineteenth-century liberal economists, focuses on competitive markets. The other, cognizant of how Smith’s brand of liberalism leads to rapid concentration of wealth and income, takes as its starting point unfettered markets’ tendency toward monopoly. It is important to understand both, because our views about government policies and existing inequalities are shaped by which of the two schools of thought one believes provides a better description of reality.
For the nineteenth-century liberals and their latter-day acolytes, because markets are competitive, individuals’ returns are related to their social contributions – their “marginal product,” in the language of economists. Capitalists are rewarded for saving rather than consuming – for their abstinence, in the words of Nassau Senior, one of my predecessors in the Drummond Professorship of Political Economy at Oxford. Differences in income were then related to their ownership of “assets” – human and financial capital. Scholars of inequality thus focused on the determinants of the distribution of assets, including how they are passed on across generations.
The second school of thought takes as its starting point “power,” including the ability to exercise monopoly control or, in labor markets, to assert authority over workers. Scholars in this area have focused on what gives rise to power, how it is maintained and strengthened, and other features that may prevent markets from being competitive. Work on exploitation arising from asymmetries of information is an important example.
In the West in the post-World War II era, the liberal school of thought has dominated. Yet, as inequality has widened and concerns about it have grown, the competitive school, viewing individual returns in terms of marginal product, has become increasingly unable to explain how the economy works. So, today, the second school of thought is ascendant.
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What Money Means
What Money Means
But there’s much about money that is misunderstood.
Many among the masses don’t realize the intense and coordinated efforts currently being waged by central planners to trap and devalue our savings through financial repression. They’re being fleeced without being aware of it — working harder and harder for less and less.
Many others overvalue the impact money has on our happiness. They make all sorts of sacrifices in pursuit of money, but remain poor in the things that truly matter.
In our new book Prosper!: How to Prepare for the Future and Create a World Worth Inheriting, we examine closely what true wealth is. Yes, money absolutely plays a critical part in it; but it is only one of several pillars — one of 8 Forms of Capital — that we identify as required for a rich life. Good health, purposeful work, meaningful relationships, a resilient lifestyle, self-worth, a supportive community — all of these ingredients are as important as money for overall happiness.
We wrote Prosper! as a resource that those already “awake” to these insights can use to share with family and friends who aren’t yet aware of them.
And since money is a universal attention-grabber as a topic, we’re making our chapter on Financial Capital available here for free — as a means of engaging someone you care about in the discussion. We think it’s one of the best digests of what happening right now with our money system:
