Mordecai Kurz – författare

Since the 1980s, the United States has regressed to a level of economic inequality not seen since the Gilded Age in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, technological innovation has transformed society, and a core priority of public policy has been promoting innovation. What is the relationship between economic inequality and technological change?Mordecai Kurz develops a comprehensive integrated theory of the dynamics of market power and income inequality. He shows that technological innovations are not simply sources of growth and progress: they sow the seeds of market power. In a free market economy with intellectual property rights, firms’ control over technology enables them to expand, attain monopoly power, and earn exorbitant profits. Competition among innovators does not eliminate market power because technological competition is different from standard competition; it results in only one or two winners. Kurz provides a pioneering analysis grounded on quantifying technological market power and its effects on inequality, innovation, and economic growth. He outlines what causes market power to rise and fall and details its macroeconomic and distributional consequences.Kurz demonstrates that technological market power tends to rise, increasing inequality of income and wealth. Unchecked inequality threatens the foundations of democracy: public policy is the only counterbalancing force that can restrain corporate power, attain more egalitarian distribution of wealth, and make democracy compatible with capitalism. Presenting a new paradigm for understanding today’s vast inequalities, this book offers detailed proposals to redress them by restricting corporate mergers and acquisitions, reforming patent law, improving the balance of power in the labor market, increasing taxation, promoting upward mobility, and stabilizing the middle class.

Since the 1980s, the United States has regressed to a level of economic inequality not seen since the Gilded Age in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, technological innovation has transformed society, and a core priority of public policy has been promoting innovation. What is the relationship between economic inequality and technological change?Mordecai Kurz develops a comprehensive integrated theory of the dynamics of market power and income inequality. He shows that technological innovations are not simply sources of growth and progress: they sow the seeds of market power. In a free market economy with intellectual property rights, firms’ control over technology enables them to expand, attain monopoly power, and earn exorbitant profits. Competition among innovators does not eliminate market power because technological competition is different from standard competition; it results in only one or two winners. Kurz provides a pioneering analysis grounded on quantifying technological market power and its effects on inequality, innovation, and economic growth. He outlines what causes market power to rise and fall and details its macroeconomic and distributional consequences.Kurz demonstrates that technological market power tends to rise, increasing inequality of income and wealth. Unchecked inequality threatens the foundations of democracy: public policy is the only counterbalancing force that can restrain corporate power, attain more egalitarian distribution of wealth, and make democracy compatible with capitalism. Presenting a new paradigm for understanding today’s vast inequalities, this book offers detailed proposals to redress them by restricting corporate mergers and acquisitions, reforming patent law, improving the balance of power in the labor market, increasing taxation, promoting upward mobility, and stabilizing the middle class.

Why unregulated free-market capitalism endangers democracy—and what to do about it.In Private Power and Democracy’s Decline, Mordecai Kurz explores the relationship between free-market capitalism and democracy. He shows that technology has made capitalism different from what was envisioned in the Age of Enlightenment. Technology creates centers of market power and monopoly concentration that result in a society in which some people are enriched immensely while many workers’ livelihoods are often destroyed. Contrary to conventional thinking, technological competition does not remove market power, which becomes a permanent fixture of free-market capitalism. Such private power creates political inequality and generates forces that cause democracy’s decline and possible destruction.Applying these ideas to the US, Kurz shows that today’s problems begin in the 1980s with the policy of unregulated free-market capitalism. Coupled with the information technology revolution, this created a techno-winner-takes-all economy—leading to a second Gilded Age of unsustainable inequality and extreme political polarization. In the last 50 years, the economy “boomed” for some while leaving the majority of America’s workers behind.Kurz concludes that only regulated capitalism can support democracy so that the benefits of technology are more equally shared and no person’s livelihood is destroyed to enable others to be enriched. To save democracy, he proposes a “restoration-of-livelihood” policy, offering firms managerial flexibility to maintain rising productivity while ensuring that technology does not destroy the livelihood of others.

The book presents a new theory of expectations called "rational beliefs". Contrary to the standard theory which views the origin of uncertainty as being exogenous to the economic system, the theory of rational beliefs holds that a crucial component of social risk and economic fluctuations is endogenously propagated by variations in the state of beliefs of market participants. One part of the book provides an exposition of the foundation of the theory of rational beliefs. A second part explores the structure of general equilibrium models in which market participants hold rational beliefs. The "Applications" part of the book studies the behavior of asset prices and rates of return on financial assets. It demonstrates that endogenous uncertainty provides a uniform paradigm for the study of economic fluctuations.