{"id":20615,"date":"2016-05-14T11:34:43","date_gmt":"2016-05-14T16:34:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20615"},"modified":"2016-05-14T11:34:43","modified_gmt":"2016-05-14T16:34:43","slug":"monopolys-new-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20615","title":{"rendered":"Monopoly\u2019s New Era"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Monopoly\u2019s New Era<\/a><\/h3>\n

NEW YORK \u2013 For 200 years, there have been two schools of thought about what determines the distribution of income \u2013 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\u2019s brand of liberalism leads to rapid concentration of wealth and income, takes as its starting point unfettered markets\u2019 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.<\/p>\n<\/header>\n

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For the nineteenth-century liberals and their latter-day acolytes, because markets are competitive, individuals\u2019 returns are related to their social contributions \u2013 their \u201cmarginal product,\u201d in the language of economists. Capitalists are rewarded for saving rather than consuming \u2013 for their\u00a0abstinence<\/i>, 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 \u201cassets\u201d \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

\"minting<\/a><\/p>\n

The second school of thought takes as its starting point \u201cpower,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Monopoly\u2019s New Era NEW YORK \u2013 For 200 years, there have been two schools of thought about what determines the distribution of income \u2013 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\u2019s brand of liberalism leads to rapid concentration […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9157,39,111,13825,10657,13824,460,482,5664,8402,10715],"class_list":["post-20615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-adam-smith","tag-assets","tag-capitalism","tag-competitive-markets","tag-financial-capital","tag-income-distribution","tag-joseph-stiglitz","tag-liberalism","tag-monopoly","tag-project-syndicate","tag-wealth-concentration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20615"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20616,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20615\/revisions\/20616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}