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"People think that the wealthy in our society -- among them the financiers -- have a real and genuine incentive to use devious means to attack and subjugate, economically, the majority of the population." It's "an illusion," he claims."The assumption today often seems to be that businesses have a real incentive to behave in an aggressive and evil manner."
It's not so, says Shiller, despite volumes of indisputable evidence proving otherwise.
Believing it, he says breeds resentment and adversely affects prosperity. Maybe he hasn't noticed how disproportionately wealth is shared among an elite 1%. Most others are entirely left out, and it didn't happen by chance.
Yet Schiller calls finance a force for good, no matter its flaws. Over time, it builds richer, more equitable societies, he claims. Where's the beef!
Since the 1970s, real wages haven't kept up with inflation. Automated plants displaced workers. High-paying production and service jobs went offshore to low-wage countries, and regulatory free finance capital scams investors repeatedly for profits.
Marx was right. He explained capitalism's destructive contradictions, and condemned free market mumbo jumbo as anarchic and ungovernable. It alienates masses, destroys or prevents the creation of humane societies, produces class struggles between "haves" and "have-nots," and reveals what's happening today.
It includes stagnant wages, eroding benefits, high unemployment, low-pay mostly temp or part-time service jobs, unmanageable debt, for students debt entrapment at times for life, and booms followed by busts, followed by heading America and EU countries for third-world status.
Social responsibility lost out to predatory capital. It games the system for maximum profits. It buys politicians like toothpaste to let them. The result is a downward destructive cycle. Financialization replaced industrial America. Speculation replaced producing things. Fraud replaced obeying laws and regulations or get punished.
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