In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• How Inequality Distorts Economics
• Fred Block (bio)

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Satellite view of the Grand Cayman Island. The Cayman Islands have become a major tax haven for wealthy individuals and multinational corporations. (USGS/NASA Land-sat/Getty Images)

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One of the urgent challenges facing the Biden administration is reversing the ever-worsening maldistribution of wealth. The more billionaires we have, and the more zeroes added to the net worth of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, the less there is for everyone else. The only way to lift people out of poverty and economic insecurity is to claw back money from the very wealthy. But there is a political imperative as well. Oligarchic wealth is deeply destructive of democratic governance. Around the globe, most oligarchs have been faithful cheerleaders for autocratic rule. Four years of Donald Trump’s subversion of democracy was not just a bad dream; it will be our future if we fail to rein in excessive wealth.

Oligarchic wealth also poses another, even greater danger: it undermines the stability and health of the global economy.

Not enough attention has been paid to this aspect of the story. In his two brilliant and pioneering volumes on inequality—Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) and Capital and Ideology (2020)—Thomas Piketty mainly focuses on the fundamental injustice of oligarchic capitalism and the falseness of the ideologies that justify it. He devotes relatively few words to the horrendous economic consequences of growing wealth inequality. But new strands of scholarship are showing the profound economic irrationality of concentrating vast wealth in the hands of oligarchs.

Many economists had embraced the idea that a “great moderation,” which lasted from 1980 to 2007, signaled that global capitalism had overcome the boom-and-bust cycles of the past. The unexpected severity of the 2008–2009 global financial crisis has led to a rethinking.

In particular, analysts are starting to recognize that the greed of oligar-chic elites has inadvertently corrupted some of the key economic indicators on which economists rely. The misleading data has, in turn, made it significantly harder to recognize the profound distortions created by the growing concentration of wealth. There are three distortions that are particularly relevant: on household savings, the trade deficit, and overseas assets. [End Page 43]

U.S. Household Saving

U.S. government data shows that through the Great Recession, personal saving in the United States had been trending steadily downward (see chart below). This downturn, which began in the 1970s, was often cited to justify tax cuts for high-income households (I wrote about this trend in the Review of Radical Political Economics in 1995). The argument was that low household saving led to inadequate private-sector investment. In order to stimulate more business investment, it was necessary to lower taxes on the rich.

However, after the Reagan (1981) and Bush (2001 and 2003) tax cuts, the personal saving rate continued to decline. This should have generated serious questions about the data, because it is obvious that rich people are able to save a far larger share of their income than millions of people who live paycheck to paycheck. Moreover, Piketty and Emmanuel Saez have shown that, between 1981 and 2018, the share of income going to the top 1 percent of households in the United States rose from 8 percent to more than 18 percent. It would require unrelenting consumption activity by the 1.3 million households that comprise the top 1 percent to avoid pulling the national saving rate up as they pocketed this vastly increased share of total income.

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NIPA Saving is personal saving as reported in the National Income and Product Accounts. The estimates for share buybacks are derived from the Federal Reserve, Flow of Funds data. They are the negative of the net incurrence of corporate equity liabilities. They have been adjusted downward by 20 percent because some of the buybacks flow abroad or to financial entities.

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Some have argued that the savings of the rich were more than offset by middle-income households that increased their debt by taking on ever larger...

中文翻译：

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不平等如何扭曲经济学

代替摘要，这里是内容的简要摘录：

• 不平等如何扭曲经济学
• 弗雷德·布洛克（生物）

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大开曼岛的卫星视图。开曼群岛已成为富人和跨国公司的主要避税天堂。（USGS / NASA陆地卫星/盖蒂图片社）

[结束第42页]

拜登政府面临的紧迫挑战之一是扭转日益严重的财富分配不均问题。我们拥有的亿万富翁越多，埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk），杰夫·贝索斯（Jeff Bezos）和马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）的资产净值增加的零就越少。使人们摆脱贫困和经济不安全的唯一途径是从富裕者那里收回资金。但是，这也有政治上的必要性。寡头财富严重破坏了民主治理。在全球范围内，大多数寡头都是专制统治的忠实啦啦队。唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）颠覆民主的四年不只是一个噩梦；如果我们不控制过多的财富，那将是我们的未来。

寡头财富还构成了另一个甚至更大的危险：它破坏了全球经济的稳定与健康。

故事的这一方面没有引起足够的重视。托马斯·皮凯蒂（Thomas Piketty）在其关于不平等的两本精彩绝伦的开创性著作中（《二十一世纪的资本》（2014年）和《资本与意识形态》（2020年））主要关注寡头资本主义的根本不公正性以及为其辩解的意识形态的虚假性。他用相对较少的话语来解释日益严重的财富不平等带来的可怕的经济后果。但是，新的学术研究显示出将大量财富集中在寡头手中的深刻的经济不合理性。

许多经济学家接受了这样一种观点，即从1980年持续到2007年的“大幅度节制”标志着全球资本主义已经克服了过去的兴衰周期。2008-2009年全球金融危机的出乎意料的严重性导致了人们的重新思考。

尤其是，分析人士开始意识到，寡头精英的贪婪无意中破坏了经济学家所依赖的一些关键经济指标。反过来，令人误解的数据使人们更加难以认识到财富日益集中所造成的深刻扭曲。存在三种特别相关的扭曲：家庭储蓄，贸易赤字和海外资产。[结束第43页]

美国家庭储蓄

美国政府的数据显示，通过大萧条，美国的个人储蓄一直在稳步下降（见下图）。始于1970年代的低迷时期经常被用来证明对高收入家庭减税的合理性（我在1995年的《激进政治经济学评论》中谈到了这种趋势）。有人认为，低的家庭储蓄导致私人部门投资不足。为了刺激更多的商业投资，有必要降低对富人的税收。

但是，在里根（1981）和布什（2001和2003）减税之后，个人储蓄率继续下降。这应该对数据产生了严重的问题，因为很明显，与数以百万计的薪水活着的人相比，富人能够节省其收入的份额更大。此外，皮克蒂（Piketty）和伊曼纽尔·塞兹（Emmanuel Saez）指出，在1981年至2018年之间，美国收入最高的1％家庭的收入份额从8％上升至18％以上。这将要求130万户收入最高的1％的家庭不懈地进行消费活动，以免拉动国民储蓄率上升，因为他们将总收入的这一大幅增加收入囊中。

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NIPA储蓄是国民收入和产品帐户中报告的个人储蓄。股票回购的估算值来自美联储的资金流量数据。它们是公司股权负债净发生额的负数。由于一些回购流向国外或流向金融实体，因此将它们下调了20％。

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一些人认为，富人的储蓄被中等收入家庭所抵消，这些中等收入家庭通过承担更大的债务而增加了债务...