Income inequality in the United States and elsewhere has been worsening since the 1970s. The most striking aspect has been the widening gap between the rich and the rest. This ominous anti-democratic trend has finally found its way into public consciousness and political rhetoric. A rational and effective policy for dealing with it—if there is to be one—will have to rest on an understanding of the causes of increasing inequality. The discussion so far has turned up a number of causal factors: the erosion of the real minimum wage; the decay of labor unions and collective bargaining; globalization and intensified competition from low-wage workers in poor countries; technological changes and shifts in demand that eliminate mid-level jobs and leave the labor market polarized between the highly educated and skilled at the top and the mass of poorly educated and unskilled at the bottom.
Vor sechs Wochen wurde Thomas Piketty vom Fachmann zum globalen Intellektuellen promoviert. Da erschien die amerikanische Ausgabe seines im französischen Original bereits im vergangenen Herbst veröffentlichten tausendseitigen Buches über das „Kapital im 21. Jahrhundert“. Das dicke Fachbuch wurde ein Bestseller, der „New Yorker“, die „New York Times“ sowie alle anderen relevanten englischsprachigen Publikationen widmeten den Thesen des Buches breiten Raum, deutsche Medien zogen nach. So deutlich und in Echtzeit kann man solch einen Aufstieg sonst nie beobachten. Nun beginnt etwas Neues.
The economist Albert O. Hirschman, who died last December, loved paradoxes like this. He was a “planner,” the kind of economist who conceives of grand infrastructure projects and bold schemes. But his eye was drawn to the many ways in which plans did not turn out the way they were supposed to—to unintended consequences and perverse outcomes and the puzzling fact that the shortest line between two points is often a dead end.
Many economists are advocating for regulation that would make banking "boring" and uncompetitive once again. After a crisis, it is not uncommon to hear calls to limit competition. During the Great Depression, the head of the United States National Recovery Administration argued that employers were being forced to lay off workers as a result of "the murderous doctrine of savage and wolfish competition, [of] dog-eat-dog and devil take the hindmost." He appealed for a more collusive business environment, with the profits made from consumers to be shared between employers and workers.
Why Nations Fail should be required reading for politicians and anyone concerned with economic development. The authors’ discussions of what can and can’t be done today to improve conditions in poor countries are thought-provoking and will stimulate debate. Donors and international agencies try to “engineer prosperity” either by foreign aid or by urging poor countries to adopt good economic policies. But there is widespread disappointment with the results of these well-intentioned efforts. Acemoglu and Robinson pithily diagnose the cause of these disappointing outcomes in their final chapter: “Attempting to engineer prosperity without confronting the root cause of the problems—extractive institutions and the politics that keeps them in place—is unlikely to bear fruit.”
