Big Money in Politics Makes U.S. Economy “Fundamentally Unsound”

The International Monetary Fund’s former chief economist recently described one of the world’s leading economies as fundamentally unsound because the political process is captured by financial firms. But he wasn’t talking about just any banana republic. He was talking about the U.S.A.

In the article “Why Some Countries Go Bust”, Adam Davidson discusses a new book in which economist Daron Acemoglu argues that “the wealth of a country is most closely correlated with the degree to which the average person shares in the overall growth of its economy”. In other words, economic inequality is itself predictive of economic decline. The book includes historical studies showing how “fairly open and prosperous societies can revert to closed and impoverished autocracies.” Davidson writes:

It’s hard to read these sections without thinking about the present-day United States, where economic inequality has grown substantially over the past few decades. Is the 1 percent emerging as a wealth-stripping, poverty-inducing elite?Well, maybe. . . .Simon Johnson, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, told me that financial firms have so thoroughly co-opted the political proc­ess that the American economy has become fundamentally unsound.“It’s bad and getting worse,” he told me. Barring some major shift in our political system, he suggested, the United States could be on its way to serious economic failure.

The book’s authors, too, expressed pessimism about the future of the United States, reportedly saying that Congress is too heavily influenced by the wealthy, and the advent of super PACs has only given elites more power.