In Foreign Affairs, Branko Milanovic discusses the U.S. and China’s competing brands of capitalism and what it means for future inequality.

Excerpt:

Political capitalism needs to sell itself on the grounds of providing better societal management, higher rates of growth, and more efficient administration (including the administration of justice). Unlike liberal capitalism, which can take a more relaxed attitude toward temporary problems, political capitalism must be permanently on its toes. This may, however, be seen as an advantage from a social Darwinist point of view: because of the constant pressure to deliver more to its constituents, political capitalism might hone its ability to manage the economic sphere and to keep on delivering, year in, year out, more goods and services than its liberal counterpart. What appears at first as a defect may prove to be an advantage.

But will China’s new capitalists forever acquiesce to a status quo in which their formal rights can be limited or revoked at any moment and in which they are under the constant tutelage of the state? Or, as they become stronger and more numerous, will they organize, influence the state, and, finally, take it over, as happened in the United States and Europe? The Western path as sketched by Karl Marx seems to have an ironclad logic: economic power tends to emancipate itself and to look after, or impose, its own interests. But the track record of nearly 2,000 years of an unequal partnership between the Chinese state and Chinese business presents a major obstacle to China’s following the same path as the West.

The key question is whether China’s capitalists will come to control the state and if, in order to do so, they will use representative democracy. In the United States and Europe, capitalists used that cure very carefully, administering it in homeopathic doses as the franchise slowly expanded and withholding it whenever there was a potential threat to the property-owning classes (as in Great Britain after the French Revolution, when the right to vote became even more tightly restricted). Chinese democracy, if it comes, will likely resemble democracy in the rest of the world today, in the legal sense of mandating one vote per person. Yet given the weight of history and the precarious nature and still limited size of China’s propertied classes, it is not certain that rule by the middle class could be maintained in China. It failed in the first part of the twentieth century under the Republic of China (which held sway over much of the mainland from 1912 to 1949); only with great difficulty will it be reestablished with greater success 100 years later.

PLUTOCRATIC CONVERGENCE?

What does the future hold for Western capitalist societies? The answer hinges on whether liberal meritocratic capitalism will be able to move toward a more advanced stage, what might be called “people’s capitalism,” in which income from both factors of production, capital and labor, would be more equally distributed. This would require broadening meaningful capital ownership way beyond the current top ten percent of the population and making access to the top schools and the best-paying jobs independent of one’s family background.

To achieve greater equality, countries should develop tax incentives to encourage the middle class to hold more financial assets, implement higher inheritance taxes for the very rich, improve free public education, and establish publicly funded electoral campaigns. The cumulative effect of these measures would be to make more diffuse the ownership of capital and skills in society. People’s capitalism would be similar to social democratic capitalism in its concern with inequality, but it would aspire to a different kind of equality; instead of focusing on redistributing income, this model would seek greater equality in assets, both financial and in terms of skills. Unlike social democratic capitalism, it would require only modest redistributive policies (such as food stamps and housing benefits) because it would have already achieved a greater baseline of equality.

If they fail to address the problem of growing inequality, liberal meritocratic capitalist systems risk journeying down another path—not toward socialism but toward a convergence with political capitalism.

Read the entire article by Branko Milanovic in Foreign Affairs.

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