The Myth of Capitalism Quotes

“If we look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, most workers are not asking to find their true calling at their jobs, as Weber suggested, but are simply asking to get paid a living wage and have certainty they'll have a job next week.”
― Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

“All around the world, people have an overwhelming sense that something is broken. This is leading to record levels of populism in the United States and Europe, resurgent intolerance, and a desire to upend the existing order. The left and right cannot agree on what is wrong, but they both know that something is rotten. Capitalism has been the greatest system in history to lift people out of poverty and create wealth, but the “capitalism” we see today in the United States is a far cry from competitive markets. What we have today is a grotesque, deformed version of capitalism. Economists such as Joseph Stiglitz have referred to it as “ersatz capitalism,” where the distorted representation we see is as far away from the real thing as Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean are from real pirates. If what we have is a fake version of capitalism, what does the real thing look like? What should we have? According to the dictionary, the idealized state of capitalism is “an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, characterized by the freedom of capitalists to operate or manage their property for profit in competitive conditions.”
― Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

“The wealth and income levels are so skewed between very top and bottom that “average” indicators are no longer meaningful. As you can see in Figure 10.10, the top 0.1% now own as much of the US wealth as the bottom 90%. The last time that happened was in the 1930s, when populism surged around the world and helped lead to World War II. Today we are seeing similar results.”
― Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

“This brings us to the very ugly truth about regulation: while big businesses often complain about regulation, the truth is that even though it is painful and annoying, they don't mind it and even favor it. Regulations that are burdensome enough to kill small companies but are not strong enough to kill large ones are, in fact, ideal.”
― Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

“As Facebook was growing, he could not believe how stupid his users were in handing over all their personal information, “They trust me – dumb fucks.”25 We could not put it better ourselves.”
― Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

“The economist John Maynard Keynes once said, “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” He should have included defunct law professors. The state we find ourselves in today can be traced back to the economists of the Chicago School. We would not have highly concentrated industries if it were not for Robert Bork and the Chicago School. Like all revolutions, an organized group of ideologues developed the ideas and spread them zealously. The Chicago School, led by Milton Friedman and George Stigler, was the vanguard of attack against antitrust laws. The great irony is that they decried monopolies and concentration of power, but in practice they created all the conditions necessary for them.”
― Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

“Another great mystery for economists and central bankers is why businesses are not investing more. It is a puzzle why they're returning almost all cash to shareholders rather than doing more research and development or spending it on new factories and equipment. Larry Summers, the former Secretary of the Treasury and Harvard economics professor, shares the view with the 1930s economist Alvin Hansen that we're experiencing a “secular stagnation.” Supposedly, the economies of the industrial world suffer from “an imbalance resulting from an increasing propensity to save and a decreasing propensity to invest.”59 This means that the slowdown is structural and not cyclical. He blames inequality and technology. “Greater saving has been driven by increases in inequality and in the share of income going to the wealthy.”
― Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

“Those who oppose reform will do well to remember that ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism.”
― Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

“around the world, people have an overwhelming sense that something is broken. This is leading to record levels of populism in the United States and Europe, resurgent intolerance,”
― Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

“episode became a metaphor for American capitalism in the twenty‐first century. A highly profitable company had bloodied a consumer, and it didn't matter because consumers have no choice.”
― Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

“The minds of the people are where a revolution starts. And as these ideas have been percolating for years now, the policy impacts are starting. And yet there will be a brutal pushback”
― Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

“far too much of the world's corporate leadership is driven by moral midgets who have been educated far beyond their capacities for good judgment.” Queen argues that for”
― Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

“Professor Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematics professor, did a study of bookmarks on Kindle e-books and found that almost no one made it past 26 pages in Piketty's book.”
― Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

“When the left and right speak of capitalism today they are telling stories about an imaginary state. The unbridled competitive free-markets that the right cherishes don't exist today. They are a myth. The left attacks the grotesque capitalism we see today as if that were the true manifestation of the essence of capitalism, rather than the distorted version it has become.”
― Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

“The reason for such concentration is that behind the scenes on the merchant side, payments actually are an infrastructure monopoly. No matter what terminal or processor you use, your core infrastructure is still based on the “pipes” run by the duopoly MasterCard and Visa.”
― Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

“Late capitalism resembles Soviet logic when it comes to consumer options.”
― Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

“The collapse of startups should be no surprise. Ever since antitrust enforcement was changed under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, small was bad and big was considered beautiful. Murray Weidenbaum, the first chair of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors, argued that economic growth, not competition, should be policymakers' primary goal. In his words, “It is not the small businesses that created the jobs,' he concluded, ‘but the economic growth.” And small businesses were sacrificed for the sake of bigger businesses.34 Ryan Decker, an economist at the Federal Reserve, found that the decline is even infecting the high technology sector. Americans look at startups over the years like PayPal and Uber and conclude the tech scene is thriving, but Decker points out that in the post-2000 period, we have seen a decline even in areas of great innovation like technology. Over the past 15 years, there are not only fewer technology startups, but these young firms are slower growing than they were before. Given the importance of technology to growth and productivity, his findings should be extremely troubling. The decline in firm entries is a mystery to many economists, but the cause is clear: greater industrial concentration has been choking the economy, leading to fewer startups. Firms are getting bigger and older. In a comprehensive study, Professor Gustavo Grullon showed that the disappearance of small firms is directly related to increasing industrial concentration. In real terms, the average firm in the economy has become three times larger over the past 20 years. The proportion of people employed by firms with 10,000 employees or more has been growing steadily. The share started to increase in the 1990s, and has recently exceeded previous historical peaks. Grullon concluded that when you look at all the evidence, it points “to a structural change in the US labor market, where most jobs are being created by large and established firms, rather than by entrepreneurial activity.”35 The employment data of small firms supports Grullon's conclusions; from 1978 to 2011, the number of jobs created by new firms fell from 3.4% of total business employment to 2% (Figure 3.2).36”
― Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

“Many economists now openly praise monopolies as a more enlightened form of capitalism. Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind wrote a book titled Big Is Beautiful. They write, “In the abstract universe of Econ 101, monopolies and oligopolies are always bad because they distort prices… . In the real world, things are not so simple.” And to enlighten us, they continue, “Academic economics includes a well-developed literature about imperfect markets. But it is reserved for advanced students,” and these lessons are unavailable to the poor, benighted souls who don't have PhDs.15 It is ironic that the champions of monopolies are essentially aligning themselves with neo-Marxist economists who think that in capitalism the big inevitably eat the small. As the eminent Polish economist Michał Kalecki wrote, “Monopoly appears to be deeply rooted in the nature of the capitalist system: free competition, as an assumption, may be useful in the first stage of certain investigations, but as a description of the normal stage of capitalist economy it is merely a myth.”16 Kalecki would have felt at home in Omaha and Silicon Valley. Buffett and Thiel's views on competition capture the contradictions of capitalism. Thiel's idea that innovation comes only from large monopolies ignores his own personal history at PayPal. He was David creating a startup from nothing and competing against financial Goliaths.”
― Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition