“What’s Wrong with Capitalism?” with Chiara Cordelli

So why don't we do a quick lightning round where we go through those three views I mentioned and you just crystallize for us in each case why they don't provide a satisfactory account.

So start with the liberal egalitarians.

The liberal egalitarians feel which hold that capitalism tends to generate very large inequalities over time.

that then solidify in a concentration of economic power in the end of a few and therefore these inequalities not only undermine the realization of principles of justice such as the principle of fair equality of opportunities because of course if some children are born in families which are much richer than others they will likely have better opportunity in society and obstacle the social mobility of other children but also because through the consolidation of economic powers, then you have an undermining also of political equality, the violation of a principle of fair equality, of political opportunities for political influence.

This is all true.

I don't deny that.

We see this in contemporary capitalism.

In contemporary capitalism, if we really want to be fair, we see something even stronger than that.

You don't need lobby.

You don't need... financing a particular political project in order to see political inequality undermined, it's enough that capital threatened to strike sometimes for politics to be kidnapped to some extent by the will of the capitalists.

But these problems, to some extent, you might think, are one not distinctive of capitalism, as I said, because you can have concentration of inequalities in pre-capitalist system as well.

But also it's a problem that to a larger extent might be contingent in the sense we can imagine much more equal pre-distribution of capital assets.

We can imagine stronger campaign finance regulation.

We can imagine just more virtuous citizenship, where I have maybe more economic power than you, but I refrain because I'm virtuous from spending it into, say, supporting certain political campaigns.

So we could then have a capitalism that is just more politically egalitarian.