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Open Access
상품에서 자산으로: 권력으로서의 자본과 금융의 존재론 (From Commodities to Assets: Capital as Power and the Ontology of Finance)
(2023) Suaste Cherizola, Jesús
자산은 자본가 계급의 실천 및 사고방식을 형성하는 데 결정적인 개념이다. 하지만 자본 주의에 관한 비판적 분석은 상품교환을 자본주의 분석의 초석이라 승인하는 경향이 있다. 이 논문은 다른 접근법을 취한다. 나는 자산이 자본주의에 대한 과학적 연구를 위한 견고한 출발점을 제공한다고 주장한다. 자산에 대한 분석은 경제적 거래에 대한 일반적 서술을 정 교화할 수 있도록 해주고, 그런 한에서, 자산 분석은 금융 분야를 재개념화하기 위한 기틀 을 마련해줄 수 있다. 이 두 가지 쟁점은 밀접히 연관된다. ‘자산이란 무엇인가’라는 질 문에 대한 답은 ‘금융이란 무엇인가’라는 질문을 해결할 수 있는 좌표를 제공해줄 것이 다. 저자 제수스 수아스테 체리졸라(JesÚs Suaste Cherizola)는 멕시코 푸에블라 오토노마 대학교(Universidad Autónoma de Puebla)에서 박사학위를 받았고, 권력자본 이론을 전공하는 사회학자이다. 저자는 이 논문을 통해 경제학과 사회과학에 새로운 아이디어를 제공한 기여로 2021 CASP Essay Prize를 수상했다. 따라서 제도주의 경제학 현장에서 이 논문이 지니는 학술적 가치가 높은 평가를 받았다고 볼 수 있다. In this paper, the author analyzes the concept of 'assets', a crucial concept in the practice and mindset of today's capitalist class. In particular, it emphasizes the emerging importance of assets in financialized capitalism by contrasting them with the concept of commodities, which have enjoyed an important place in the analysis of conventional capitalism. Recently, in the critical academia of finance and money in the West, especially in the sociology of finance, the concepts of capitalization and assetization are emerging as a powerful analytical framework that reveals the characteristics of modern capitalism by replacing the existing commercialization and financialization. The paper provides a clear explanation of the concept of asset, capitalization, and capitalization from the perspective of power capital theory. In addition, by emphasizing the difference between commodity exchange and asset trading, which has been presented centering on the existing Marxism, it explains well why the asset type and the process of assetization can be an important analytical framework for studying today's financial capitalism. Therefore, this paper in domestic academia, it can provide impetus to advance the discussion of financialization in terms of capitalization and assetization, and it can also serve as a useful reference point for understanding recent academic discussions on the changes and core of modern capitalism. Author Jesús Suaste Cherizola is a sociologist who received her Ph.D. from Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico, and specializes in power capital theory. The author won the 2021 CASP Essay Prize for his contributions to new ideas in economics and social sciences with this paper. Therefore, it can be said that the academic value of this thesis has been highly evaluated in the field of institutional economics.
Open Access
Estudiar el precio, olvidar el valor. Una alternativa al pensamiento económico tradicional
(2023) Suaste Cherizola, Jesús
RESUMEN. Este artículo intenta sentar las bases para una comprensión de los precios radicalmente diferente a como los entiende el pensamiento económico tradicional. Tras revisar algunos aspectos relevantes de la crítica a la teoría del dinero como mercancía, se muestra que el pensamiento tradicional es incapaz de captar las propiedades irreductibles de los precios y la complejidad de los procesos que determinan las magnitudes monetarias. La crítica del pensamiento tradicional desemboca en un llamado a olvidar el concepto de valor y, en su lugar, elaborar estrategias para entender el funcionamiento de los precios. Siguiendo el trabajo de los economistas Jonathan Nitzan y Shimshon Bichler (2002, 2008), se propone que los cambios en la capacidad de control de los grupos sociales resultan en (y se expresan como) cambios en los niveles relativos de precios. Este desplazamiento permite construir una ontología del orden capitalista que no está fundada en las nociones de equivalencia y valor, sino en las diferencias de poder. Y hace posible reconocer al plano monetario como un fenómeno complejo e irreductible. ABSTRACT. This article aims to lay the foundations for an understanding of prices radically different from the way they are understood by traditional economic thought. After reviewing some relevant aspects of the critique of the commodity theory of money, it is shown that traditional thought is incapable of grasping the irreducible properties of prices and the complexity of the processes that determine monetary magnitudes. The critique of traditional thinking leads to a call to forget the concept of value and, instead, to develop strategies to understand how prices work in reality. Following the work of economists Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, it is proposed that changes in the level of control of social groups result in (and are expressed as) changes in relative price levels. This shift makes it possible to build an ontology of the capitalist order that is not founded on notions of equivalence and value but on power differentials. And it makes it possible to recognize the monetary plane as a complex and irreducible phenomenon.
Open Access
Differential Harm: Patterns of Uneven Destruction
(2023) Di Liberto, Yuri
This essay opposes the idea that contemporary critical events like pandemics, global warming, environmental deterioration, et cetera, are to be considered as affecting humanity in a uniform way. Instead of seeing these phenomena like abstract universal threats, I propose to look at them through the lens of my concept of differential harm. By drawing on interdisciplinary sources, this concept aims at covering a series of processes that are best described in differential, rather than absolute, terms. By the same token, differential harm is a matter of scale. Moreover, this essay also suggests that macroscopic critical processes are better understood as instances of harm, rather than violence. Instead of framing macroscopic disruptive phenomena as simple calamities or crises, my approach also aims at acknowledging their social, political, and psychological dimensions.
Open Access
Mapping the Ownership Network of Canada’s Billionaire Families
(2023) Fix, Blair; Cochrane, D. T.
The planet has a billionaire problem. According to Oxfam, the world’s billionaires have more combined wealth than the bottom 60% of humanity — some 4.6 billion people. Given this obscene situation, calls are growing to rid the world of the billionaire class. But how do we make that happen? We think that part of the answer is to understand billionaire’s network of control. Many billionaires are happy to have their net worth tracked by Forbes — they treat it as an accumulation horse race.1 But what billionaires don’t like is for people to understand how they wield power. On that front, behind ever billionaire is a complicated network of corporate control — a network that is seldom made public. We’d like to change that. In this post, we’ll map the ownership network of ten billionaire families in Canada. Why Canada? Well, because we’re Canadian researchers. But more importantly, because the statistics arm of the Canadian government has done the heavy lifting for us. For the last decade, Statistics Canada has maintained a database on the inter-corporate ownership of Canadian corporations — a database that it bills as a “unique directory of ‘who owns what’ in Canada”. This corporate-ownership database contains a trove of information about how the rich wield power. In this post, we’ll begin to explore the data by mapping the ownership network of the following billionaire families: The McCain Family The Katz Family The Fidani Family The Richardson Family The Saputo Family The Rogers Family The Pattison Family The Irving Family The Weston Family The Thomson Family
Open Access
Environmental Conflict, Capital as Power . . . and a Nice Trip to London
(2023) Marshall, Adam
FROM THE ARTICLE: In my PhD thesis, which I am currently in the process of writing up, I explore the UK fracking conflict as a means of elucidating its political economic drivers and dynamics. In the process, I hope to also shed light on the political economic drivers of socio-ecological conflict and crises more broadly. To achieve these aims, my research combines a novel theory of capitalism – the capital as power (CasP) approach to political economy – with a unique mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods. While my thesis contributes primarily to debates at the intersection of ecological economics and political ecology, it also aims to extend the frontiers of research on CasP.
Open Access
Capitalizing a Cure. How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines
(2023) Roy, Victor
Capitalizing a Cure takes readers into the struggle over a medical breakthrough to investigate the power of finance over business, biomedicine, and public health. When curative treatments for hepatitis C launched in 2013, sticker shock over their prices intensified the global debate over access to new medicines. Weaving historical research with insights from political economy and science and technology studies, Victor Roy demystifies an oft-missed dynamic in this debate: the reach of financialized capitalism into how medicines are made, priced, and valued. Roy’s account moves between public and private labs, Wall Street and corporate board rooms, and public health meetings and health centers to trace the ways in which curative medicines became financial assets dominated by strategies of speculation and extraction at the expense of access and care. Provocative and sobering, this book illuminates the harmful impact of allowing financial markets to determine who heals and who suffers and points to the necessary work of building more equitable futures.
Open Access
Kapitał, by rządzić, musi sabotować postęp
(2023) Pietryka, Mateusz
Od głodu i biedy po zwykłe marnotrawstwo i nawracające fale przeróżnych kryzysów – to nie niepożądane skutki uboczne kapitalizmu, ale przejawy sabotażu. Bo nic nie utrwala władzy kapitału skuteczniej niż istnienie szerokiej rzeszy ludzi, którzy ani na chwilę nie mogą przestać pracować, by przeżyć.
Open Access
Why Are Not-For-Profit Hospitals in the US So Much More Profitable Than For-Profit Hospitals?
(2023) Mouré, Christopher; Gorsky, Shai
FROM THE ARTICLE: When it comes to social institutions, not-for-profit organizations (NFPs) allegedly strike a balance between the private and public realm. While privately owned and operated, not-for-profits are distinguished by their ostensibly public purpose – in eschewing private profits, they claim to make the pursuit of some social benefit their primary objective. However, not all not-for-profits are equal. While most make little or no revenue, let alone net income, some NFPs collect billions in revenue and hundreds of millions in net income.
Open Access
Technological Change and Strategic Sabotage: A Capital as Power Analysis of the US Semiconductor Business
(2023) Mouré, Christopher
Rapid technological change is often touted as a fundamental reality of capitalist societies. It is also presented as concrete evidence for the supposed progressive improvement of material well-being that characterises the capitalist system of social order. Since its emergence in the mid-20th century, semiconductor technology in many ways exemplifies this view. Yet the rapid advancement of semiconductor technology has also been accompanied by social conflict. The history of the technology is as much a story of frequent global chip ‘shortages’ and geopolitical disputes as it is one of exponentially growing computational power. The purpose of this study is to examine how the two sides of this story—progress and conflict—are linked. Starting from the theoretical political economic framework of capital as power, I put organized social power at the centre of this inquiry. I examine the behaviour of large semiconductor manufacturing firms in an attempt to uncover empirical relationships between capital investment, chip ‘shortages’, prices, and profits. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis, I find evidence that dominant semiconductor firms have engaged in systematic underinvestment in order to control chip prices for differential gain.
Open Access
The Church of Economics: 'Capital and its Crisis', a Book by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan (כנסיית בתי הספר לכלכלה: בעקבות הספר 'ההון ושברו' מאת שמשון ביכלר ויהונתן ניצן)
(2023) Hever, Shir
FROM THE REVIEW: שמשון ביכלר ויהונתן ניצן פרסמו באחרונה את ספרם "ההון ושברו" (פרדס, 2022, 602 עמ'), בו הם דנים במשותף בתהפוכות כלכליות ותיאורטיות עדכניות. הספר ראה אור כעשרים שנה לאחר שספרם "מרווחי מלחמה לדיווידנדים של שלום" הכה גלים בחוגים הביקורתיים בישראל. בעשרים השנים האחרונות פרסמו ביכלר וניצן כמה ספרים ועשרות מאמרים באנגלית. בין השאר, ייסדו באוניברסיטת יורק בטורונטו אסכולה כלכלית חדשה, אשר עוררה דיונים סוערים בקרב כלכלנים ברחבי העולם. למרות ששורשי המחקר האמפירי של ביכלר וניצן נטועים בכלכלה הישראלית , בישראל דווקא לא שמעו על מחקרם. הספר החדש בעברית הוא אפוא קריאת חובה עבור כלכלנים ביקורתיים. מדובר בספר מאתגר לקריאה. סגנון הכתיבה הציני ואף הלעגני של ביכלר וניצן לא מתחנף לקוראים. כדי להבין את הספר נדרשת מידה ניכרת של צניעות וסבלנות, וגם גישה נכונה – יש לקרוא אותו כרומן בלשי .הספר אינו מספק תשובה לתעלומה, אלא מלמד את מלאכת הבילוש. באמצעות 82 תרשימים המבטאים מחקר אמפירי בן עשורים, מזמין הספר את הקורא לפענח את נתוני הכלכלה ולהסיק מסקנות בעצמו. מחציתו הראשונה של הספר היא ביקורת נוקבת על תיאוריות כלכליות קיימות. קריאת 300 העמודים הראשונים תבטיח לכל סטודנט לכלכלה בישראל ציון 100 בכל קורס מבוא (את המתמטיקה והסטטיסטיקה עליו ללמוד בכל זאת). זאת בתנאי שיצליח להתגבר על תחושת הקבס העולה כאשר מורדת המסיכה מפניה של הכלכלה הניאו-קלסית השמרנית. קוראים שמאליים ייהנו מאוד מהביקורת על הכלכלה השמרנית, אך גם להם צפויה הפתעה לא נעימה: הספר מפנה ביקורת גם כלפי הכלכלה המרקסיסטית, ומנסה להפריך ביסודיות את עיקריה. גם כאן משתמש הספר באותה דקדקנות מדעית, אך גם צינית ולעגנית, שבעזרתה הוא מבקר את הכלכלה הניאו-קלאסית. חלקו השני של הספר מציג תיאוריה כלכלית מורכבת, הבנויה על כלכלה פוליטית מוסדית מבית מדרשו של תורסטין ובלן. נוסף לכך, שזורים בו ניתוחים מרקסיסטים של סוויזי, קלצקי, ברן ועוד רבים. התיאוריה נבנית בהדרגה בעזרת ניתוח כלכלי-פוליטי של נתונים אמפיריים. בדרך מוצעים כלים לניתוח ואף חיזוי מגמות כלכליות. ביכלר וניצן חוקרים את ההון ככוח. הם מנתחים את המבנה והתפקוד של תאגידי הענק, הממשלות וציבור המשקיעים העשירים. הספר חושף את האסטרטגיות של השחקנים הגדולים והחזקים ביותר בכלכלה העולמית – הם מתחרים זה בזה, אך גם משתפים פעולה; הם מייצרים ציות וכניעות בקרב הציבור הרחב, אך מוכנים להסתכן בהתרת הרסן כדי להתמודד עם משברים.
Open Access
Unemployment and the Maturity of Capitalism
(2023) Fix, Blair
In my last post, I discussed the underwhelming relation between interest rates and unemployment. In this post, I’ll look at a better way to connect unemployment to interest income. It turns out that if you take US net interest and divide it by corporate profit, you get a ratio that closely tracks unemployment. It’s a measure that Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler call the ‘maturity of capitalism’. If this language sounds odd, that’s because Nitzan and Bichler see capitalism differently than your average economists. So before we get to the data, let’s review some of their thinking.
Open Access
The Key to Managing Inflation? Higher Wages
(2023) Fix, Blair
For the last few months, I’ve been diving into the economics of inflation. In this post, I’m excited to review some forgotten history. Our journey starts with a basic question: what is the key policy tool for managing the rate of inflation? According to mainstream economics, the key tool is the rate of interest. Hike this rate, economists argue, and you will cool an overheated economy, solving the problem of inflation. As you probably know, I don’t think much of this idea. (Criticism here and here.) And so I’ve been looking for alternative theories of inflation management. After months spent in the library stacks, I’m happy to report that I’ve discovered some lost theory. During the mid-20th century, it seems that while most economists were jumping on the interest-rate bandwagon, a few researchers went in the opposite direction. They proposed that inflation could be treated with a dose of wage hikes. Needless to say, this alternative theory remains virtually unknown. And on its face, it seems absurd. But as I’ll show, the wage-hike approach is strongly supported by evidence. Using standard economic tools, I find that rapid wage growth tends to be followed by a drop in inflation. The message? Policy makers should reverse course. Instead of greeting inflation with a dose of interest-rate hikes, governments should reach for the wage-rate lever. Hike wages as fast as possible, and you will surely reduce inflation.
Open Access
The Cause of Stagflation
(2023) Fix, Blair
In my last post, I looked at the relation between economic growth and inflation. As per usual, the evidence didn’t sit well with mainstream economics. According to standard theory, there is a trade off between low inflation and high economic growth. The idea is that you can have one or the other, but not both. So if you want to keep inflation low, you have to ‘cool off’ the economy by slowing economic growth. (Like many things in economics, this idea comes from the totem of supply and demand.) The trouble is, the empirical evidence shows that the opposite is true. Rather than being driven by ‘excessive’ economic growth, inflation tends to come during periods of stagnation. So despite what mainstream economists proclaim, there is little evidence for a ‘growth-inflation trade off’. Instead, ‘stagflation’ seems to be the norm. Now, the question is why? Soon after I published ‘Is Stagflation the Norm?’ several readers pointed out that I should take a look at causation. The idea is that we want to know what drives what. Does (low) inflation drive (high) economic growth? Or does (low) economic growth drive (high) inflation? Well, I’ve done the math, and the results may surprise you. But before we get there, let’s take a look at what the theory of capital as power has to say about the causes of inflation.
Open Access
Masochistic Fun with Plutocratic Murder
(2023) Fix, Blair
There’s nothing like waking up to a boatload of Twitter scorn. It’s refreshing, in a masochistic sort of way. Some backstory. After most of my blog posts, I put the charts on Twitter, usually with a provocative caption. (It’s more fun that way.) So after last week’s review of Cory Doctorow’s book Red Team Blues, I tweeted the relation between income inequality and the rate of murder. The next morning my Twitter feed was … interesting. The tweet apparently went viral, helped along by a nice little insult from Nassim Nicholas Taleb: 'No. The statement by that fettuccinibrain is contradicted by his own graph. #fooledbyrandomness'. Apart from him calling me a fettuccini brain, I have a lot of respect for Taleb, who’s famous for (among other things) his excellent book Fooled By Randomness. It’s an engaging romp through the many ways that human’s get duped by random patterns. Back to the tweet. Taleb is implying that the relation between inequality and murder is essentially a random blob of data, and that I’m a fool to plot a trend line through it. I disagree.
Open Access
Is Stagflation the Norm?
(2023) Fix, Blair
As much of the world grapples with post-Covid price gouging, it seems like a good time to revisit our understanding of inflation. In this post, I’m going to test Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s ‘stagflation thesis’. The idea is that ‘stagflation’ — economic stagnation combined with high inflation — is not some exogenous ‘market shock’. According to Nitzan and Bichler, stagflation is a business strategy — one of two main routes to profit. The first route to profit is for businesses to hold prices steady while they try to sell more stuff. The second route is to jack up prices. Since this latter option requires restricting the flow of resources (stuff that flows freely cannot be dear), Nitzan and Bichler reason that when inflation rears its head, it ought to come with economic stagnation. In other words, stagflation is the norm. If this stagflation thesis is correct, then inflation ought to correlate negatively with economic growth. Looking at the United States, Nitzan and Bichler find evidence that it does. Here, I broaden their stagflation research by looking at all countries in the World Bank’s global development database. I find that both within and across countries, economic growth (measured in terms of energy use) tends to decline as inflation increases. So Nitzan and Bichler appear to be onto something. Over the last half century, stagflation is the general rule.
Open Access
Interest Rates and Unemployment: An Underwhelming Relation
(2023) Fix, Blair
For the last few months, I’ve been studying the distributional effects of interest-rate hikes. There’s been no shortage of surprising results. In this post, I’ll discuss an effect that is surprising because it’s underwhelming. Many economist claim that when interest rates rise, unemployment will increase. The idea is that higher rates make businesses tighten their belts, leading to less hiring and greater unemployment. Looking at the evidence, I find that this claim is not particularly compelling.
Open Access
Interest Rates and Inflation: Knives Out
(2023) Fix, Blair
If you’re just tuning in, I’ve spent the last few months debunking some common misconceptions about inflation: Is inflation a uniform increase in prices? No. Inflation is wildly differential. Is inflation driven by an ‘over-heated’ economy? No. Inflation tends to come with economic stagnation. Do higher interest rates reduce inflation? No. Higher interest rates are associated with higher inflation. As expected, the last claim put mainstream economists into war mode. You see, the belief that interest rates down-regulate inflation has come to be sacred. So by scrutinizing this idea with evidence, I was effectively torching an effigy of the pope. (Novelist Cory Doctorow helped fan the flames by writing an incendiary essay about my research.) And so I spent a ‘fun’ week on Twitter being bombarded by econo-scorn. Now back to science. When I published ‘A Test of Monetary Faith’, I had more evidence in the pipelines — evidence that debunks the idea that interest rates down-regulate inflation. In this post, I’ll wade through the data. The take-home message is clear: when we look at the World Bank database, there is no evidence that higher interest rates down-regulate inflation. If anything, the evidence suggests that rate hikes make inflation worse. But before we get to the data, I’ll respond to some of the more cogent criticisms that economist hurled my way.
Open Access
Inflation! The Battle Between Creditors and Workers
(2023) Fix, Blair
I’ve been writing about inflation for the better part of three months. It’s been exhausting. Most of my time has been spent debunking misconceptions promoted by mainstream economists. Fortunately, I’m ready to move on. What’s interesting about inflation is not the fact that prices rise. What matters is that prices rise at different rates. In other words, inflation creates winners and losers — it redistributes income. In this post, I’ll dive into the redistribution dynamics between wage workers and creditors.1 When inflation rears its head, both groups try to bolster their income. But they rarely have equal success. Looking at over two centuries of US price history, I find (perhaps surprisingly) that inflation tended to benefit workers at the expense of creditors. Since the 1970s, however, the reverse has been true; inflation has systematically benefited creditors at the expense of workers. So what changed? Two things. First, the US labor movement was crushed. Second (and far less discussed), US policy makers adopted a new way to ‘fight’ rising prices. When inflation reared its head, central banks attempted to quell it by aggressively hiking interest rates. Today, it’s received wisdom that this policy ‘works’. Of course, the policy does work — but not for its stated goal. Never mind ‘fighting inflation’. When you raise interest rates, you give creditors a raise. Framed in this light, it’s unsurprising that inflation has recently become a boon for US creditors. Backed by monetarist ideology, the government is now dedicated to preserving the return on credit. When it comes to class struggle, there’s nothing like having the sledgehammer of the state to back you up. With credit returns in mind, here’s the road ahead. Before diving into the dynamics of class struggle, I’ll take a quick look at the language used to describe rising prices. Next, I’ll quantify the price struggle between creditors and workers. Finally, I’ll measure how this struggle has changed over time, and how it relates to the ideological currents of the period.
Open Access
How to Make the Oil Industry Go Bust
(2023) Fix, Blair
Can the oil industry afford to clean up its mess? If by ‘mess’ we mean fossil-fuel-induced climate change, the answer is almost certainly ‘no’. But what if we look at a more limited cleanup scenario, restricted to the remediation of conventional oil and gas wells? Even then, it seems that the oil industry may already be bankrupt. As a case study, this paper estimates the solvency of the (conventional) oilpatch in the Canadian province of Alberta. By law, Albertan oil companies are required to pay for well remediation. To date, however, the oil industry has saved little for this expense. Instead, it has assumed that future oil production will pay for existing cleanup liabilities. But will it? Using cleanup estimates from the Alberta Liabilities Disclosure Project, I estimate the past, present and future solvency of the (conventional) Alberta oil industry. I find that at present, the oilpatch sits on the precipice of insolvency.
Open Access
How Interest Rates Redistribute Income
(2023) Fix, Blair
When I read about monetary policy, I have a rule of thumb. Every time I see the phrase interest rate, I replace it with the term wage rate. Then I ask myself whether the discussion still makes sense. Often, it does not. The reason I make this substitution is that in conceptual terms, the interest rate and the wage rate are similar: they are both rates of return. Wages are the return on employment. Interest rates are the return on credit. Now, the important thing about rates of return is that when we change them, we are toying with the distribution of income. Hike wages and we send more income to workers. Hike the rate of interest and we send more income to creditors. Sure, the specifics of this redistribution are open for inquiry. But by definition, rates of return are ‘distributional variables’ — they determine how the income pie gets divvied up. Back to my word substitution. When it comes to wages, the issue of distribution is typically front and center. That’s why talk of a minimum-wage hike prompts businesses (and many economists) to complain about reduced profits. But when creditors hike the rate of interest, talk of income distribution is curiously absent. Instead, we get a barrage of macroeconomic jargon — terms like the ‘natural rate of interest’ and the ‘non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment’. Why the discrepancy? One possibility is that economists know something that we don’t. Perhaps they’ve looked at the evidence and concluded that interest rates have a ‘neutral’ effect on the distribution of income. Another possibility is that the macroeconomic jargon is mostly a distraction. In other words, like wages, the rate of interest is a ‘distributional variable’. But it’s one that mainstream economists prefer to ignore. So which option is true? In this post, I let the evidence speak for itself. Looking at cross-country evidence, I find that interest rates are decidedly non-neutral. As interest rates rise, three things happen: -- the interest share of income increases; -- the labor share of income decreases; -- income inequality increases. In short, the evidence suggests that interest rates play a key role in the game of class warfare. And that makes sense. Interest, after all, is a rate of return. And when it comes to divvying up the income pie, rates of return are always zero sum.