Raising All Boats

The 2013 appearance of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century consolidated over a decade’s work arguing that economic growth does not reliably raise all boats, and that a vast share of new growth in recent decades has gone to a tiny upper echelon of high-earners and to the already wealthy. The French economist’s data-driven argument was an expert technocrat’s repudiation of the premise of American technocratic expertise. It is simply not intellectually creditable anymore to ignore distributive questions. Even the economist and former Harvard president Larry Summers, adviser to both Bill Clinton and the Obama administration, has been arguing for much more aggressive intervention into the economy to break up the power of concentrated capital.

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Yes. We can’t rely on the market to raise the boat for everyone. And, we should not f–k with the tide either because it does not raise all the boats. We need that tide.