Things to Blame Before Capitalism

Why we shouldn't take Piketty literally, but partially.

Among most of the criticisms of capitalism, rising inequality and wealth concentration tend to be the most cited. These forms of criticism are not illegitimate, as some of them are grounded in an existing and substantial body of empirical research. Thomas Piketty has probably made the most significant contribution to raising awareness of income inequality after his work was popularized in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which clearly highlights a consistent trend of rising inequality across the world since 1975. The following question is generally related to the moral aspect of unequal income distribution, where some authors have advanced their views by assembling evidence suggesting that income inequality is significantly associated with a number of undesirable societal outcomes. In The Spirit Level, Richard G. Wilkinson presented his extensive work on the effects of inequality through a large number of correlations showing how the most unequal societies are more likely to have higher levels of crime, poorer health, and other social problems.

The work of Piketty and Wilkinson has probably influenced the way people think critically about capitalism and, by the same token, fueled an existing anti-capitalist sentiment that revolves around a vision of capitalism that fosters income inequality. As Piketty would probably suggest, inequality is not an accident, but rather a feature of capitalism. One of the concerns with these views is that mediation can easily be mistaken for causation, leading to an exaggerated and oversimplified explanation of how capitalism works. The main factor that explains why societies are unequal stems from evolutionary pressures that forced humans to compete for access to resources that were essential for survival. As human tribes had to grow in complexity, the adoption of hierarchical structures was presumably the most efficient way to organize groups. Evolutionary theory provides the strongest explanation for why humans operate within hierarchical structures and have an innate disposition toward rivalry. The way humans compete has also changed to emphasize the pursuit of status rather than the possession of material goods, although materialism is used as a proxy for signaling status.

Because humans have a tendency to seek status, it's inevitable that some forms of inequality will result, regardless of capitalism. Competition itself is sometimes blamed for its built-in unequal outcomes, and is often contrasted with collaboration. In reality, competition and collaboration are intertwined and more difficult to disentangle than we might think. Finding a job involves competing with other candidates, while corporate environments are generally seen as more conducive to collaboration. These examples are not literally true, as some industries are known to be highly competitive internally and even to foster a cutthroat culture among employees. A more serious problem is unhealthy competition, which can lead to toxic environments when selfishness is overly rewarded at the expense of other virtues.

The ruthlessness of competition may be its least attractive aspect, but there are good reasons to believe that it's a net benefit to society overall. First, because people are less prone to suffer the effects of competition, as the ever-growing number of occupations leads to a more diversified labor market that expands the range of competitive career options in both directions. The other and more important benefit of competition is technological progress. Because human nature aspires to recognition, it encourages people to specialize as societies develop and the low-hanging fruit for recognition becomes increasingly scarce. The desire to compete may be a selfish impulse, but it is above all a utility for accelerating progress. For these reasons, anti-competition attitudes are absurd because they deny an inalienable human disposition, and they're delusional from a historical perspective, since societies that have attempted to restrain competition have failed spectacularly.

One of the goals of Marxism was to create classless societies and abolish exploitative capitalist competition by eliminating private ownership of the means of production. Most attempts to implement its tenets have led to more centralized and oppressive regimes. Marx is famous for having predicted the spread of capitalism around the world – or what is now known as globalization – and the intensification of economic crises. On the other hand, he didn't foresee capitalism's potential to drastically reduce extreme poverty, significantly improve living conditions, halve working hours, and greatly increase leisure time.

Perhaps one of Marx's most relevant ideas is the theory of alienation, which essentially embodies the idea that people are prevented from realizing their true potential by the pursuit of meaningless occupations. Marx's theory of alienation may resonate with those who see many jobs as meaningless. Arguably, some occupations are widely regarded as less desirable than others, while the majority of people would agree that emerging jobs are not necessarily more meaningful than previous ones; moderating social media content may not be more meaningful than working on a factory assembly line, and conversely, one survey finds that being a YouTuber is now the most desired career for American and British children before being an astronaut. Ultimately, it's a tedious task to quantify exactly how modern jobs have become more or less meaningful over time. The author David Graeber, who famously coined the now widely used expression “bullshit jobs”, claimed that over 50% of all jobs are useless. This claim was refuted by an empirical study (based on representative data from the EU), which found that only 4.8% of workers in the EU28 considered their jobs to be useless, and that this proportion was declining. On the other hand, another study (based on the American Working Conditions Survey) found a higher proportion of 19% of respondents who perceived their jobs as socially useless. Although both studies fall far behind the original claim, the difference in findings could be explained by different survey methodologies, and by the fact that highly financialized Anglo-Saxon countries might be more in line with the Bullshit Jobs theory.

Admittedly, capitalism certainly has undesirable aspects, such as extreme income inequality, or a lack of alignment with environmental goals, which is probably not great. Although Piketty's work is incredibly robust, it continues to receive valid criticism because there's supposedly no clear consensus on which segment of the population has gotten relatively richer, but it's obvious to everyone that some people are outrageously richer than others. It would also be premature to draw conclusions about whether people's living conditions will be severely affected by the growing number of billionaires, but the housing crisis in most major cities is likely to be a more serious matter. Wealth inequality is sometimes reduced to the class struggle that results from an inevitably violent capitalist world, but this view largely dismisses the importance of genetics as a major influence on the most unjust aspects of human life. Broadly speaking, blaming capitalism is a convenient solution for expressing discontent, but it rarely addresses problems in depth and unfortunately misses things worth criticizing.