The utopian manifesto.
Kleptocratic or deeply corrupt regimes aren’t really the problem, because you don’t necessarily want to do business or stash your wealth in a place where you can’t rely on the rule of law to protect your investment. The issue is competition between developed countries to attract business or capital investment through lower regulation or lower tax, resulting in a race to the bottom.
I found an academic paper online that tries to identify the effects of the post-1980 phenomenon of financialization.
“Financialization of the non-finance sector has led to lower employment, income transfers to executives and capital owners, and increased inequality among workers.”
Elsewhere, the same authors ask:
What if that financialization had never happened?
“Our counterfactual analysis suggests that financialization could account for more than half of the decline in labor’s share of income, 9.6% of the growth in officers’ share of compensation, and 10.2% of the growth in earnings dispersion between 1970 and 2008.”
Which blows my mind, really. Let’s have a race to the bottom! It will be great!