When the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business starts talking about the world being in a vicious cycle of inequality, you know we’re well into the end game. From this blog post:
Earlier this year, a Stigler Center paper by Luigi Zingales [Faculty Director of the Stigler Center] argued that market concentration can lead to a vicious circle, in which companies use market power to gain political power that in turn allows them to gain more market power, and vice versa. Zingales called this the “Medici vicious circle”: “Money is used to gain political power and political power is then used to make more money.”
That is just the opening of the article. The rest is a lot more scary than my pictures from Lima, Peru from a few months ago, where I could see and touch the steel bars that separated the lower and upper classes in that country.
The “Rentier Capitalism” talked about by Zingales and by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development are just as real, but a lot less visible.
