[NYT] Everyone knows that we are again living in a Gilded Age.More controversial is the question of what should be done about it. We seem stuck in the same policy equilibrium we have been in for decades, with conservatives denying that there is a problem and pushing policies that would make it even worse, liberals emphasizing the need for education and skills development, and leftists pushing for a unionized labor market and social-democratic welfare state.
Some of these ideas are good ones, which would make life better for vulnerable people. But they’d do little to directly target inequality in our society or to capture all the benefits that economic fairness brings.
The solution is simpler than it seems. There’s a tried and tested way, within the system we have now, of giving everyone a share in the investment returns now hoarded by the wealthy. It’s called a social wealth fund, a pool of investment assets in some ways like the giant index or mutual funds already popular with retirement savings accounts or pension funds, but one owned collectively by society as a whole. One that paid dividends not to the few, or even just to the shrinking middle class lucky enough to have their savings invested, but to everyone.
It may be our best chance to stop a decades-long trend of rising wealth inequality that has only accelerated since the Great Recession. According to new data released by the Federal Reserve, the collapse of the housing bubble and the ensuing financial crisis caused the net worth of virtually all families, rich and poor, to drop sharply between 2007 and 2010. But during the post-2010 economic recovery, the fortunes of the wealthiest grew rapidly while nearly everyone else’s lagged behind.
The wealth of the top 1 percent increased by an average of $4.9 million over the past decade, while the average holdings of the bottom 99 percent declined by about $4,500. Wealth inequality is now the highest it has been since the Federal Reserve began collecting this kind of data in 1983. A full account of just how bad things have gotten is difficult to wrap one’s mind around. In 2016, according to my calculations, the top 1 percent had an average wealth of $26.6 million, while the net worth of everyone in the bottom third combined was less than zero (because of a mixture of low accumulated savings and high debt).
The stress this puts on our society is hard to overstate, and though recognition of our country’s grossly unequal condition has grown in recent years, few have proposed credible ways of turning things around. That’s where a social wealth fund comes in.