Steve Roth | March 10, 2014 9:57 am



Thomas Piketty’s important new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, predicts a bleak future of increasing concentrations of financial assets in few hands, stagnant wages and labor share of income, and declining returns to capital — secular stagnation. He enunciates and demonstrates the part of Marx that Marx got exactly right.

But Dean Baker points out where Marx got it wrong, and where an optimist can hope that Piketty’s got it wrong. By changing our institutions, laws, and regulations — the rules of the capitalist game — we can head off that seemingly inevitable downward spiral. Dean gives several examples of institutional changes that could prevent or even reverse it, from patent laws to cable monopolies to financial-transaction taxes.

Which prompts me to finish this post, started long ago, and to point to Steve Randy Waldman’s eloquent rejoinder to the pessimistic view. Steve ingested this contrary view with his mother’s milk:

I remember pride in my businessman father’s voice when he explained to me that this [pessimistic view] was wrong. Marx had underestimated the ingenuity and flexibility of capitalist societies, and particularly of the United States during the New Deal. Government intervened to solve Marx’s collective action problem, enabling capitalists secure their enlightened self-interest by keeping a distribution of prosperity sufficiently broad that the predicted collapse could be avoided. … To my father, American capitalism’s adaptability and ingenuity had proved Marx definitively wrong, in the best possible way — by producing a stable society that served the vast majority of its citizens, while countries whose politicians had followed Marx’s prescriptions grew into monsters.

So Marx was wrong both ways — economically and politically — even while he was right. The capitalist tendency to concentrate financial assets at everyone’s expense is inevitable — unless we as a society decide to do something(s) about it.

You’ll find this very same thinking elsewhere, for instance in this line from Joseph Stiglitz’s review of Robert Skidelsky’s Keynes: The Return of the Master.

Keynes’s great contribution was to save capitalism from the capitalists

And in this 2001 article from The Hoover Digest:

How FDR Saved Capitalism

This is a clear, cogent, and coherent story, but one I rarely hear from the left. I’d like to suggest that progressives should be moving this rather moving narrative to the front of the rhetorical bookshelf.

Now if someone could just convince Obama to go all FDR on us…

Cross-posted at Asymptosis.