Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

power. They also helped transform the conventional wisdom about antitrust, to make people think setting and enforcing limits on such power was outmoded, too cumbersome for the age of Google and Facebook, and even to recast monopolistic domination of an industry as the unabashed corporate goal, the dream, a measure of ultimate success.

Even Richard Posner, the pioneering conservative scholar and senior federal judge who we last saw celebrating the right’s economic victory with some of his fellow masterminds just before the turn of the century, admitted in 2017 that it has all gone too far. During a conference on corporate concentration at the University of Chicago, he was his bracingly candid self. As a member of Congress, he said, “you are a slave to the donors. They own you. That’s [the] real corruption, the ownership of Congress by the rich.” And the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, the conservative majority’s view that “there’s no such thing as spending too much money to support a political candidate, because your money is actually speech—that’s all nonsense,” but as a result, apart from passing a constitutional amendment, “there isn’t anything the government can do [about regulating campaign finance] now.”

In a U.S. society of perfect economic equality, all the money would instead be divided equally among Americans—the total income of $19 trillion (according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis) and the U.S. personal wealth of about $100 trillion (according to the Federal Reserve), all parceled out equally to each of the 129 million U.S. households. In this imaginary America 2, every household has a net worth of $800,000 and an annual income from all sources of $140,000.

So imagine that thought experiment applied here. Veiled in ignorance, you have the option of signing either of two social contracts. You can accept the revamped version, America 2, with the clause guaranteeing your household a six-figure income and nearly a million dollars in wealth. Or you can sign our actual current circa-1980 social contract, obliging you to be a random American with a one-in-five chance of making out financially as well or better as you would in America 2 but with a four-in-five chance of doing worse, including a serious possibility of being impoverished forever—but in real America you would get to keep your lottery ticket that gives you a 1-in-100,000 shot at becoming a billionaire or a member of his family.

Denmark and Sweden and Norway are all thriving free-market capitalist economies.*1

American exceptionalism is an idea usually used by Americans to congratulate ourselves for a history that makes us special, better than anyone.

A study from 2010 of social mobility, using as a metric sons’ incomes compared to their fathers’ in eight western European countries and Australia and North America, found that Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Canada are the most mobile by a lot; the United States was third from the bottom. A 2018 World Bank study ranked each of the world’s countries by its fraction of younger citizens who are Ragged Dicks—that is, Horatio Alger types born into the economic lower half who made it to the top quarter before they’re old. Among the fifty countries at the bottom of the two hundred, those with the least economic mobility, are forty-six developing countries and, between Indonesia and Brazil, the United States. American society has half the economic mobility of the countries near the top.

In every international ranking of healthcare quality, the United States is low, from twenty-eighth to thirty-seventh place. Until the 1980s too, life expectancies for people in all the rich countries were increasing right in line, but now people in the other countries live three to five years longer on average than Americans.*2 According to the health-efficiency index compiled by Bloomberg News, which combines longevity and healthcare spending into a single metric for almost every country, the United States is second from the bottom, better only than Bulgaria.

The United States spends less on ourselves through government at all levels than do 90 percent of the most developed countries—only Chile, Mexico, and Ireland spend less than we do.

Every developed country but one also requires employers to give new parents paid leave that ranges from a few months to a year or more, an essential adaptation to the modern era of working women that America hasn’t made.

In any event, what we know is that going forward, “the choice isn’t between automation and non-automation,” says Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the MIT economists focused on digital technology and work. “It’s between whether you use the technology in a way that creates shared prosperity, or more concentration of wealth.” We will presumably have an economy that keeps growing overall—that could start growing faster, maybe much faster—with people doing less and less of the necessary work. If and when “machines make human labor superfluous, we would have vast aggregate wealth,” the MIT economist David Autor has written, “but a serious challenge in determining who owns it and how to share it. Our chief economic problem will be one of distribution, not scarcity.”

The number of workers on disability tripled in just two decades, from the early 1990s to the early 2010s, especially among the middle-aged, not as a result of looser eligibility rules but simply, it seems, because there are so few jobs for people who have neither youth nor education nor any other way to make ends meet until they hit sixty-six and can collect regular Social Security.

We have been expressly evolved…for the purpose of solving the economic problem. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose….Thus for the first time since his creation, man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, to live wisely and agreeably and well….[T]here is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person…to occupy himself.

The axioms adopted around 1980—market value is the only value, keep democracy out of economics, government is useless or worse, nothing but thoughts and prayers for the victims—can and must be undone, the political economy renovated, new technologies properly embraced in order to start solving the economic problem for everybody.