Page 27 - Issue 18

low. The graph of inequality in the United States
resembles the letter V: Today and exactly 100 years ago
the level of inequality was at its highest, while in the 1960s
it was at its lowest point.

With the pandemic hitting not long after the financial
crisis, along with widening inequality, social unrest and
wariness at the rise of rabble-rousing nationalist, racist and
authoritarian leaders, it would seem like an optimal time
for a restart of the economic policy in Western
democracies. But bidding goodbye to the free-market fairy
tale won’t be easy. For when we understand that there is
really no such thing as a free market – that the markets’
and the private sector’s ability to operate rests upon an
enormous, complex system of laws, regulations, public
investment and national infrastructure, we must also
understand that there is no such thing as a science of
“economics.” It’s “political economics,” or as the
economist Abba Lerner said 50 years ago, “Economics has
gained the title Queen of the Social Sciences by choosing
solved political problems as its domain.”
The solution to the economic challenges and social
pressures is not technocratic, and certainly not
technological. The solution is always political: Politics sets
the rules of the game. It determines whether a huge chunk
of all the information and trade in the world will be
controlled by a handful of digital monopolies headed by
people wealthier than nearly the entire population of the
United States put together.

Giving up the fairy tale is hard because many of the
decision-makers are under 50 and were raised in a world