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by John Bellamy Foster and Michael D. Yates
topics: Economic Theory, Marxism, Political Economy places: Americas, Europe, France, United States
John Bellamy Foster is the editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. Michael D. Yates is associate editor of Monthly Review and editorial director of Monthly Review Press.
Not since the Great Depression of the 1930s has it been so apparent that the core capitalist economies are experiencing secular stagnation, characterized by slow growth, rising unemployment and underemployment, and idle productive capacity. Consequently, mainstream economics is finally beginning to recognize the economic stagnation tendency that has long been a focus in these pages, although it has yet to develop a coherent analysis of the phenomenon.1Accompanying the long-term decline in the growth trend has been an extraordinary increase in economic inequality, which one of us labeled “The Great Inequality,” and which has recently been dramatized by the publication of French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.2 Taken together, these two realities of deepening stagnation and growing inequality have created a severe crisis for orthodox (or neoclassical) economics.
To understand the nature of this crisis of received economics it is necessary to look at the two principal bulwarks of neoclassical theory, which were originally erected in response to socialist critics. The first is the notion that a freely competitive capitalist economy left to itself generates full employment, indicating that unemployment is the product of various frictions, imperfections, or government interference. The second is the related proposition that income and wealth inequality are determined by the “marginal productivity” (or relative contributions to output) of the various factors of production, chiefly capital and labor—a logic that is extended to the contributions of individuals themselves. The renowned post-Second World War national income statistician, Simon Kuznets, in his famous Kuznets Curve, even argued that there was a tendency in developed capitalist economies towards a decrease in inequality, due to the effects of modernization, including enhanced educational opportunities.3
Contrast these propositions to the reality of the mature capitalist economies today. Far from a full-employment equilibrium, what we see rather is a long-term tendency to economic stagnation. Moreover, this reality describes all of the developed capitalist economies and can be seen in a trend going back forty years, or indeed longer.4 Over roughly the same period, income and wealth levels, rather than converging, have diverged sharply—a divergence that cannot be attributed to differences in education and skill, nor to the contributions of capital relative to labor.5 In short, both of the principal justifications for the system provided by neoclassical economics have collapsed before our eyes.6
The first of these fissures in the outlook of neoclassical economics is long-standing and well known. During the Great Depression, unemployment in the United States rose at its height in 1933 to 25 percent. It was in this context that John Maynard Keynes, the intellectual heir to Alfred Marshall at Cambridge University, and hence one of the principal figures in neoclassical economics, broke partially with the economic orthodoxy with the publication of his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936. Keynes sent mainstream economics into a tailspin by attacking (as had Marx earlier) the notion of Say’s Law of classical economics, which postulated that supply creates its own demand.7 He thus engaged in a frontal assault on the notion that full-employment equilibrium was an inherent tendency of the system. Instead Keynes contended, “When effective demand is deficient there is under-employment of labour in the sense that there are men who are unemployed who would be willing to work at less than the existing real wage.”8 Nor was this an unusual circumstance under capitalism; mass underemployment in this sense was the normal condition in rich capitalist economies. As John Kenneth Galbraith summed up Keynes’s heresy in The Age of Uncertainty:
Keynes’s basic conclusion can…be put very directly. Previously it had been held that the economic system, any capitalist system, found its equilibrium at full employment. Left to itself, it was thus that it came to rest. Idle men and idle plant were an aberration, a wholly temporary failing. Keynes showed that the modern economy could as well find its equilibrium with continuing, serious underemployment. Its perfectly normal tendency was to what economists have since come to call an underemployment equilibrium.9
Keynes was convinced that the capitalist economy tended towards stagnation, a phenomenon that he explained in terms of a decline in the marginal efficiency of capital (expected profits on new investment). He did not, however, present a coherent explanation of stagnation in The General Theory but contented himself with pointing to a waning in “the growth of population and of invention, the opening-up of new lands, the state of confidence and the frequency of war”—all of which had constituted historical factors stimulating capitalism in the past.10 These were the factors that Alvin Hansen, Keynes’s leading early follower in the United States, primarily focused on in his Full Recovery or Stagnation? and other works, delineating a theory of “secular stagnation.”11
Later, a more developed analysis of stagnation, focusing in particular on the growth of monopoly capital (but also taking into account other conditions of capitalist maturity) was to emerge in the work of Michał Kalecki, and, in particular, in Josef Steindl’s Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism (1952), which built on Kalecki. Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital (1966) constituted an attempt to extend this analysis to the entire social and economic system of capitalism and to bring out its connection to the Marxian critique. Later Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy were to connect stagnation to financialization, most notably in Stagnation and the Financial Explosion (1987).12
Today we see a reemergence of notions of secular stagnation in neoclassical economics, beginning with Lawrence Summers’s resurrection of the idea in a 2013 speech to an IMF forum.13 But it remains divorced from the rich historical tradition that emerged within Marxian theory (and even from Hansen’s historically based analysis, rooted in Keynes)—thus offering little in the way of a real explanation.14 Nevertheless, the notion that the capitalist economy tends towards full employment—or that macroeconomic techniques inherited from Keynes effectively produce the same result, as Paul Samuelson (Summers’s uncle) famously argued in the so-called “neoclassical synthesis”—has no legs left to stand on, owing its continuing presence entirely to the ideological function of neoclassical economics.
The second main justification of the system provided by neoclassical economics—the notion that capitalism promotes a kind of equality, at least in terms of the determination of earnings by the marginal productivity of factors (and individuals)—has shown itself to be just as false. As this has become more apparent neoclassical economists have sought to declare the whole issue out of bounds. Martin Feldstein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Reagan, replied to critics of the Robin Hood-in-reverse policies of Reaganomics by stating, “Why there has been increasing inequality in this country is one of the big puzzles in our field and has absorbed a lot of intellectual effort. But if you ask me whether we should worry about the fact that some people on Wall Street and basketball players are making a lot of money, I say no.”15 Likewise Robert Lucas, Jr. of the University of Chicago, the most influential macroeconomist of his day, was merely stating the dominant view of the profession and of the establishment as a whole when he opined in 2004, “Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of [income] distribution.”16
Feldstein’s and Lucas’s sharp dismissals of any concern over income and wealth distribution reflected the mainstream economic view that inequality is benign precisely because it can be attributed to different levels of marginal productivity and the corresponding different education and skill sets. In this accounting, a person’s income is simply a function of his or her productivity and willingness to work. People are poor because they are not very productive or because they have a weak attachment to the labor force as a result of their own choices. Productivity is driven in the main by the willingness of individuals to invest in their “human capital,” and the most important type of such investment is education. Attachment to the labor force depends on “leisure preferences” of individuals. This refers to the relative weight potential workers place upon the utility they will gain by buying the goods and services that an increase in income makes possible—while factoring in, through a benefit and cost calculus, the happiness they could have by not working, by choosing more free time. Thus those with high incomes are presumed to have invested in their human capital and have low leisure preferences, while for the poor the opposite is true.
Modern technology, in this view, has only made human capital more important. Many people have been left behind in the race to the top of the income distribution because they do not possess the knowledge that modern technology requires. Most mainstream economists do say that appropriate public policies could help reduce inequality, by, for example, making it easier for those without means to attend college. However, it would be dangerous, we are told, to reduce inequality too much—for example, through free higher education for all—because then individuals would not have an incentive to work hard and be productive. This would be to the detriment of the capacity of the economy to grow and thus to provide the extra income needed to distribute to those at the bottom. Equality is therefore self-defeating.
The Mad Hatter logic of neoclassical economics can actually be used to demonstrate that in perfectly competitive markets there can be no wage and salary inequality at all!17 Consider a woman making a career decision. Assume, as does the neoclassical economist, that she has complete knowledge of the wages and benefits associated with every occupation she is considering entering. She also knows the costs of the education and training necessary for employment in each occupation, as well as the income she will lose by not working while she is getting this schooling and training. Any particular negative aspects of an occupation, such as physical danger, are also known, as are their costs. What should she do? She will weigh the benefits against the costs of each occupation and pick the one for which the net benefits are highest.
Implicit in this scenario is a wage for each occupation that at least covers the cost of entering it. Competition in the marketplace will, in fact, make the wage just equal to the entry cost. An occupation with a wage higher than the entry cost will attract new applicants; this will put downward pressure on the wage and upward pressure on the costs (as more people demand schooling and training); and eventually, the above average wage-cost difference will disappear. Remarkably, this theory shows that, while some workers earn higher wages than others, these higher wages simply reflect higher entry costs. A doctor is therefore not really better off than a motel room cleaner; in terms of wages minus costs, they are in exactly the same position. Voilà! At least as far as labor income is concerned, there can be no inequality.
Enter the real world. The Great Financial Crisis of 2007–2009 and the Occupy Wall Street uprising punctured this neoclassical fairy tale. The Occupy movement pinpointed the growing division between the 1% and the 99%—achieving in a very short time a transformation in public consciousness on inequality that radical political economists had sought to effect for decades. The press began to draw more frequently on data showing skyrocketing income and wealth inequality that had long been available but had been relegated to the status of a dirty little secret of the capitalist economy.18 For decades researchers had been compiling sophisticated statistical portraits in this area. Now due to Occupy and the sheer outrage of the population, it all began to come out into the open. Especially notable in this respect were the contributions of New York University economist Edward N. Wolff, a leading authority on wealth distribution; the Economic Policy Institute, which publishes The State of Working America; Branko Milanovic, a heterodox economist employed by the World Bank’s research division; and James K. Galbraith, a prominent institutionalist economist and analyst of inequality in pay.19
Yet, the big change on the data front, making it impossible to deny any longer the extent of the growth of inequality in all of the mature economies was the development, over the last decade and a half, beginning with the early work of Piketty, of the World Top Incomes Database (commonly referred to as the Top Incomes Database). The result of a major international project, involving some thirty researchers, this database primarily uses income tax data, focusing on most of the mature capitalist economies.20 The leading researchers for the U.S. case were Piketty himself, located at the Paris School of Economics, and Emmanuel Saez, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. The Top Incomes Database is the single largest historical database on long-term inequality currently in existence, covering countries in Europe and North America, but also a sampling of countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
The publication by Harvard University Press in 2014 of Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Piketty, using the Top Incomes Database to explain the dynamics of growing inequality at the center of the capitalist world, was therefore bound to draw extraordinary attention in the economic world. For Piketty is no ordinary economist. He is at one and the same time a dissenter and a representative of the higher circle of the economics establishment. Although he served for a few months in 2007 as the economic adviser to Ségolène Royal in her campaign as the Socialist Party nominee for president of France—she lost to Nicolas Sarkozy—Piketty is no Marxist, or even an institutionalist or post-Keynesian political economist, in whose work one could expect to find an analysis centering on inequality. Rather, he is a highly credentialed member of the neoclassical economics elite. Thus, when he presented a theoretical perspective that challenged the primary approach to questions of income and wealth distribution previously held to by almost all neoclassical economists, the result was explosive. Suddenly there was a work on growing inequality that had the imprimatur of the establishment (backed by prestigious publications in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review and the Journal of Economics Literature), and could not be easily dismissed ad hominem as the work of a “non-scientific” heterodox economist. If not exactly a revolution against neoclassical economics, the contents of his book had all the looks of a palace coup. And remarkably too, Piketty had a gift of expression and breadth of knowledge unusual in economists, allowing him to draw on Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac as much as Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Within a short time the book reached number one on Amazon, surely an unprecedented achievement for the author of a data-filled economics book of 685 pages.
For most readers it was not the fine details of Piketty’s analysis that were so interesting but rather the overall conclusions dramatically highlighted in the very beginning of the book.21Here he made it clear he was challenging head-on some of the core assumptions of orthodox economics—though from inside rather than outside of the neoclassical perspective. It was this divorce of his analysis from the main ideological propositions of received economics—the sense of letting the numbers speak for themselves—that gave Piketty’s work the feeling of a disinterested inquiry after the truth rather than what Marx called “the bad conscience and evil intent of apologetics” that has so long dominated orthodox economics.22
Most importantly, Piketty concluded in what will undoubtedly be his single most enduring contribution, that “There is no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing, inegalitarian forces from prevailing permanently” in a capitalist economy. This can be seen as the critical counterpart (within the realm of distribution) to Keynes’s break with Say’s Law, or the notion of a natural tendency in capitalism to a full-employment equilibrium. Not only does Piketty point out that Kuznets’s assumption of growing equality in developed capitalist economies is wrong, but he argues that the standard neoclassical human-capital argument of equality-cum-meritocracy—wherein deviations from equality are simply due to attributes such as greater skill, knowledge, or productivity—is equally false in the real-world economy.23
This is shown by his now famous formula r > g, where r stands for the annual rate of return to wealth—referred to by Piketty as capital—and g for the growth rate of the economy (the rate of increase in national income). Wealth in slow-growing capitalist economies (below 1.5 percent per capita), which Piketty takes as the normal case, expands more rapidly than income—a phenomenon no doubt heightened in our financialized age.24 He argues that the higher rate of per capita growth in the first quarter century after the Second World War, when the per-capita growth rate in the United States was about 1.9 percent, was exceptional, and that we are seeing—for one reason or another—a return to the norm of much lower growth (1.2 percent or even 1 percent per capita), which he calls at one point a “low-growth regime.” (This applies to all of the mature economies on the “technological frontier”—but not to economies now experiencing catch up such as China.)25
Relatively slow growth—what we would term stagnation—thus provides the background condition for Piketty’s r > g, practically ensuring that wealth at the top of society will become ever more concentrated, while the main wealth-holders accrue their wealth not so much because of what they do but because of where they are placed in the social-class hierarchy. Indeed, capitalism in its normal case, Piketty tells us, promotes patrimonial dynasties. “Liliane Bettencourt,” the heiress to the French cosmetic giant L’Oréal, “who never worked a day in her life, saw her fortune grow exactly as fast as that of Bill Gates, the high-tech pioneer, whose wealth has incidentally continued to grow just as rapidly since he stopped working.”26
Piketty thus drives a critical wedge into the traditional justification of the system, according to which income and wealth shares are determined by the marginal productivity of the various factors of production (thought to be applicable to individual contributions as well). To understand the full significance of this, it is useful to quote from the 2012 book The Price of Inequality by economist Joseph Stiglitz. According to Stiglitz, with the rise of capitalism,
it became imperative to find new justifications for inequality, especially as critics of the system, like Marx, talked about exploitation.
The theory that came to dominate, beginning in the second half the nineteenth century—and still does—was called “marginal productivity theory”; those with higher productivities earned higher incomes that reflected their greater contributions to society. Competitive markets, working through the laws of supply and demand, determine the value of each individual’s contributions.27
Piketty’s argument and his data make a mockery of this core neoclassical economic thesis. But Piketty advances such an argument without breaking completely with the architecture of neoclassical economics. His theory thus suffers from the same kind of internal incoherence and incompleteness as that of Keynes, whose break with neoclassical economics was also partial. Deeply concerned with issues of inequality, just as Keynes was with unemployment, Piketty demonstrates the empirical inapplicability over the course of capitalist development of the main conclusions of neoclassical marginal productivity theory. His work has thus served to highlight the near-complete unraveling of orthodox economics—even while staying analytically within the fold.28
This overall incoherence, as we shall see, ultimately overwhelms Piketty’s argument. He is unable to explain why capitalist economies tend to grow so slowly as to generate such a divergence between wealth and income (and between capital and labor). Hence, while his analysis sees slow growth or relative stagnation as endemic to this system, he neither explains this nor is concerned directly with it. Significantly, he replaces more traditional notions of capital as a social and physical phenomenon with one that equates it with all wealth.29 As a result the accumulation of capital in his analysis means no more than the amassing of wealth of whatever kind, from plant and machinery to financial assets to jewelry, thereby confusing the whole issue of capital accumulation.30 Nor does he address the relations of power—principally class power—that lie behind the inequality that he delineates. His analysis is confined largely to distribution rather than production. He neither follows nor (by his own admission) understands Marx, though at times clearly draws inspiration from him.31 The question of monopoly capital is entirely missing from his study, which, as he says, does not include imperfect competition as a factor in generating inequality.32
But even with these and other deficiencies, Piketty, nevertheless, brings a certain degree of reality—even a sense of “class warfare” (if only implicitly)—back to bourgeois economics. The result is to heighten the crisis of neoclassical theory. Moreover, he argues—even though he dismisses the idea as “utopian”—for the imposition of a tax on wealth.33 Piketty thus represents a partial revolt within the inner chambers of the economics establishment.
Not surprisingly, given the extraordinary attention given to Capital in the Twenty-First Centuryand the breech in the wall of the neoclassical orthodoxy it represents, the Wall Street Journalsought to counterattack in May 2014, with an op-ed by none other than Feldstein. Reagan’s former economic advisor predictably condemned “the confiscatory taxes on income and wealth that Mr. Piketty recommends,” declaring that “the problem with the distribution of income in this country is not that some people earn high incomes because of skill, training or luck” but rather that a small minority has fallen below the poverty line.34 However, Feldstein misses the mark completely. Piketty’s point is that skill and training cannot explain the gross inequality that has arisen in U.S. society, which is disproportionately weighted toward inherited wealth and CEO mega-salaries, and that while some do get vastly higher incomes by the “luck” of having been born with silver spoons in their mouths, they can hardly be said to have “earned” them.
Increasing Inequality: A Law of Capitalism
Further Reading: http://monthlyreview.org/2014/11/01/piketty-and-the-crisis-of-neoclassical-economics/
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